📺 SotN #51: Pioneering Crypto Culture

welcome bankless nation to a very unique episode of state of the nation i am joined by my buddy michael wong while ryan sean adams takes a very well deserved vacation so we got chief culturist over at bankless llc michael wong taking the shoes of ryan while he is taking that well-deserved vacation we are happy you are joining us uh we are joined by you michael wong and again we are very happy that the bankless nation is once again watching the state of the nation michael wong how are you doing

today what's up banquets nation i'm doing good um this is my first time using a mic like this so i'm gonna try not to talk like this into it but uh nice to be here thanks for having me if this is your first state of the nation we are coming at you live on the youtube every tuesday at 11 a.m pst 2 p.m est and then it goes out on the podcast wednesday morning we are talking about what's going on in the world of crypto talking about what's going on in the news cycle and what's going on in current events except this week is a little bit different because

we have two surprise announcements one of them is why michael wong is here in the first place and another announcement out of a designer from the bankless dao and so our announcement with michael wong here is going to come in the second half of the show in the first half of the show we're going to talk about how bankless dow is propagating cryptoculture with apparel uh and really changing what it means to uh participate and proliferate cryptoculture michael wong what do you uh tease the first half of the show for us a little bit listen guys um this dude's engine we got

on here for you uh you've never met someone like this before by the way his name is sinjin if you're in the dao you know the boy i'm about to bring on here um and you guys are about to hear from the horse's mouth what culture sounds like and going to look like uh in crypto moving forward we're all part of it right if you're listening to this to your part of making crypto happen or excuse me cryptoculture happen um we're just putting it into threads and and pixels and stuff you know what i'm saying so i'm excited to show you guys who shinjin is and his background um this is how we bridge

the real world with our crypto world right until until they're all one cope aesthetic world so yeah excited to bring shenzhen on excited to talk about what's going on in the second half as well yeah the second half of the show i think is going to uh really change the game with regards to a crypto content but i won't tease it too much here uh before we get into it we want to let you know about ledger has recently integrated a paraswap it through the ledger live app and so ledger is continuously uh equipping the bankless nation with financial tools it it kind of feels like

a tesla where where tesla's they they uh get software updates and the car actually gets better well ledger's the ledger hardware wallet allows you to be self-sovereign about your money and finance allows you to live a banquet bankless life and now has the power of paraswap which is a defy aggregator at its at your fingertips and so not only do you keep custody of your money but you also get the best rates in d5 so if you don't know about paraswap it's a dexter aggregator that allows you to exchange all the ethereum native tokens

at the best rates and compares rates across all decentralized exchanges your private keys never leave your hands when you exchange your crypto assets self-sovereign financial assets with defy power tools at your fingertips check it out if you have not used the ledger live app before it is continuously becoming more and more powerful as defy becomes more and more powerful uh michael since i am in ryan's shoes and you're in my shoes i'm going to ask you a question my old apartment

if your watchers hadn't had include into that yet uh i'm going to ask you the question that ryan asks me every single episode michael wong what is the state of the nation today sir oh guys we are we are coping right now i'm just joking the state of the nation is propagating folks the state of the nation is propagating it's spreading if you can feel the culture right now it is changing under our feet in the best ways people are asking you about crypto your uber driver is talking about crypto um

and they're excited about it too they're not they're not as destitute as some of us so it's propagating guys and we're going to talk to you about the different ways we're helping make it propagate and permeate into this world all right guys we are going to get right into what is coming out of xinjian and bankless dao just after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible balancer is defy's most powerful automated market maker typical amms just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in devi with balancer you can access the full

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borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral here you can see me getting a 200 usdc loan against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens and eth i'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option but i could choose the stable interest rate option if i wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently one of ave's v2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets trade them on unit swap and then deposit them back into ave ave does all of this for you all in one seamless

transaction so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them check out the power of ave at ave dot com that's aave dot com all right bank list nation we are back with michael wong and sinjin who we are going to get to in a second just for those who are a little bit confused in the youtube chats no ryan sean adams did not go anywhere he is taking a well-deserved week off uh for what is worth oh yeah doing family stuff for what it's worth the bankless world has never missed a

podcast or state of the nation and so ryan gets to go on vacation and we do not miss in the world of bank list and so the show must go on uh michael wong is filling in for ryan's in for this week but next week ryan will be right back at it he's not going anywhere um but also michael wong isn't going anywhere either and so we will that is for the second half of the show but for the first half of the show we have shinjin here um michael wong t up sinjin uh who who is this guy you know what i was wondering the same

thing about two months ago and if it looks like we got him from the forest is and it's not it's not it's not it's not a coincidence sinjin um awesome name mr sinjin wesson we are so grateful to have him here and working for the dao um this he was uh connected to david and i before the dow existed and i'm gonna let him give his own uh background here for a moment but the things that this gentleman can do and the way he thinks totally aligns with i think the way you listener are thinking about how we need

to be perpetuating cryptoculture beyond crypto twitter beyond crypto youtube um sinjin is the guy david knew it as soon as he saw his application in the email he's like we got to get this guy on video now we're giving you guys the video of xinjin i'm happy to have you here sinjin and off at discord i'm happy to be chatting with you today man thank you so much for that intro and and all the love and thank you for having me on the show it's been a pleasure working with you guys working with the dao working with the culture building it and you mentioned propagating earlier

man yeah we're growing you know i'm out here with the trees we got that everything is growing but it's springtime it's summertime it's lush it's you know people are popping off on all these new ideas all this crypto that's growing around us so uh it's good to be here thank you oh we're happy you're here man um you have quite the background um and that's kind of my first intro to you is hearing like hey first and foremost you guys should take me seriously because i i am these things and i have done these things and

now i'm trying to deal with crypto so why don't you give us a little bit of that background and give the bank station uh some color into your life yeah sure uh yeah so i started in design when i was really young i actually wanted to grow up and be a cartoonist i like garfield he was more edgy than snoopy ended up making my own clothing line while i was in high school and in a small town in missouri and i kind of like had a mid-life crisis when i was 20. you know i realized like if i stay here i'm not going to be able to do the dreams that i want to do and so that actually ended up leading me all the way

out to los angeles where the fashion institute of design and merchandising and there i mailed majored in apparel manufacturing management ended up getting student of the year for that work and while there researched fashion and technology and like you know at the time there was this really cool project by phillips called luma live and they were doing leds on uh on clothing so if you could imagine our clothing evolving to having like you know wearable

art that moves around it's programmable and like i i saw this uh in like 2007 and it's still coming guys like i i don't i don't think people know like like this it's it's still just getting started in this world so uh and and it's great to have like like there's so much resonance with bankless and this uh merging of creativity technology and and creative expression and culture so um finding lots of resonance here and uh yeah if you'd like here i'll uh i'll do

a screen share some of the works yeah and talk about like what you did right after fit them yeah that'd be dope yeah and uh just for for context for the bankless listeners we are talking all about culture today and so sinjin he's a designer uh and while we typically talk about crypto assets uh you know decentralized money internet money capital assets uh defy tokens you know exchanges all these financial terms what we want to do ultimately with crypto as an industry and as a technology is

change the world we want to change the world and it starts with technology and it starts with money but if crypto doesn't change culture and it doesn't change how we act uh amongst ourselves and literally at some point in time the clothes that we wear then we have then we won't actually change anything and so the the bullish case for crypto is that a new financial paradigm exists but the really the the the the end result that i'm focused on is how do we change how do we change the people in the way that we engage with each other uh and so that's why we've brought on uh sinjin out of the bankless

dow to to you know just tackle the apparel side of things and the design side of things and so uh sinjin before we go into what you are equipping us out of the bankless style talk us a little bit more about your work history and what you have designed in the past yeah so i want to share this with you when i was at fitm we did uh some some research into this uh this philips luma live technology and so this is kind of what it is you can see this on youtube and like imagine this evolved with

you know much more modern technology and soft fabrics and it's totally washable and um so yeah so that that's kind of like that's what i've been playing around with uh you know and and we've uh we're going to be doing some really cool stuff so i also started working with a screen printer to understand like how uh graphics work on clothing how to how does you know what what are all the things that we can do what are the limitations i worked for this awesome company for many years called life clothing in los angeles and you know we

did we did all kinds of things uh sublimations uh collections and lots of work for uh buckle topshop you know christmas all your all your like you know halloween costumes all the time thankless christmas sweater that's dope um yeah so logos you know all kinds of graphics and uh women's men's uh you know really paying attention to what's the pulse of the culture as large and how do we make

uh meme-worthy t-shirt graphics apparel clothing that speaks to what is resonating with people and this one right here i want to highlight this one space flag this is what i did for urban outfitters and this was a top seller for a couple summers and even at one point we had like uh dj tiesto was like wearing that one and i would go out on the streets and i could see random people wearing it you know that i didn't even know um so yeah there he is

he's like djing with it um and so so like this is what i'm thinking too you know for for bankless you know what what can we do that is this like you know next level uh designs that you can wear that you that resonate with the culture you know so this is this is what we're thinking about and and what's great too working with bankless is like it's not only myself we have you know a mind and hearts of so many people that are on the same and ready to create ready to collaborate

and uh this this was also another one here that i did for uh a company called beta brand so the idea here was to do a uh uh it's called chalkboard genius and i took like the ten formulations the most popular formulations of science and put them on a repeating pattern and we made a button-up print with this and i actually seriously got out a chalkboard and i literally you know did every one of those in a chalkboard so this is like the level i just want to show like the level

of quality of what we're trying to do here we're not just trying to like open up canva and take an icon and you know throw it on there and that's the end of the day that's what i did for the bangla shirt bro don't hate the bakeless box love is sick though yeah i appreciate that sinjin thank you so much man yeah i'll tell you what back here yeah i'll tell you what guys when i saw sinjin's work for the first time um and what he's doing for urban outfitters tilly's buckle um i was like hey this is the bridge we need to cross right now he was talking about can we throw an nft on the like inside

the jeans and stuff like that and i was like hey let's get this guy in the freaking discord right now um he's talking about the right stuff so when i when i hear sinjin talking about culture in general um i like the idea that he's just using apparel as a vector as a vehicle to kind of propagate the cultures that he's working with so him jumping into the bankless cohort um that's where you guys are that are in the dow that have seen the designs that sinjin is working on and that we're releasing today by the way um

they're different they're huge they're pushing the boundaries they're helping people understand crypto in a different way um so thank you for that sinjin i think is dave what do you think about showing the uh the shirt that we're dropping today uh first let's get into a conversation around the intersection of crypto values and crypto tools and uh apparel in the the you know trad fi apparel if you will or legacy apparel um i think both of you are pretty privy to um some of the problems i would say about the legacy apparel world which we

are now trying to infiltrate as a community um and so michael maybe maybe you could tease engine up as to what we are trying to fix in the world of apparel yeah good question or a good point so um we hate h m we hate forever 21. uh fast fashion is is clothes that are ruining the environment this does not go with our eth2 uh clean um you know philosophy in in work in the world so you know as far as people aligning ourselves with that vision trying to do apparel that's why syngen's helping us figure

out okay what's the most sustainable way to make this stuff happen um in ways that aren't creating a lot of waste right so first and foremost i'll let sinjin talk to some of this he's helping articulate some of our ethos around you know printing on demand um people are talking about the quality of the bankless box logo that they're just receiving now listen you're he's about to talk to you guys this is not the guy putting guildens on your back right now okay we are working hard to try and find the the best quality stuff um and we're scaling up put it that way and so

for for our listeners can you define fast fashion as well because i think that does a really good job of illustrating what the problem really is i'll i'll let the fitting guy do that go ahead cindy yeah thank you uh and i'm really glad that you're speaking to this i read your first post about uh bankless apparel and uh this was i think it was around the time i sent my first video over to you and i was really impressed by your your articulation of this issue and you know even even noticing it because a lot of people don't you know a lot of people are just trying to make a

much you know items and money as fast as possible without really thinking of the the long-term consequences and we uh you know we're actually trying to do something next level that is sustainable that is long-term and um so with fast fashion yeah fast fashion you could call it uh the race to the bottom it's really like the cheapest price and like the lowest quality you can get away with and charge the most for and this has been an ongoing thing like there's also like been the people are owning and purchasing a higher number of

clothing items per year than ever if you go back to like the 1920s 30s 40s people bought less clothing items but they actually spent more money on them compared to their overall budget because they lasted longer you know it's fine to wear that same awesome winter coat for six years uh because it's quality and that's like things were made to last and we've gotten away from that because it's all about it's called neomania this this like oh it's new so it's better that's not always the case like new isn't always

better and um so so we're we're trying to actually speak to that and and like one thing that can be sustainable is making something really high quality you know regardless of whether it's like organic or polyester or recycled polyester whatever like if you take that same item you care for it and you treasure it and you know you wear it multiple times over years that is like that's way more sustainable than buying you know a new organic shirt every time you put one on you know what i mean like so

um i i really you know like a lot of people don't catch that that that sustainability is also like the quality it's not even sometimes it's not even about the organic or you know what it's made of but it's like you know or it's like taking your jeans and you don't have to wash them every time you know so uh but but we're trying to create something that's quality long-lasting long-term and fast fashion is like it's really the opposite of that and how how do you think that um of all of which you just mentioned about fast fashion how does that go along with your

ethos as a designer um and i think we got a little bit of when i first met you with david um just speaking about your ethos as a designer to produce unique quality peril that is not wasteful yeah and i think that comes to really making something that resonates that hits that you treasure and that you want to keep and you know rep and wear many times um you know that's and and that's like kind of the north star that i try to aim for um and and yeah this this is a very important point there's much to to evolve on this topic um i used to also volunteer with a

company uh organization beyond the label and if you guys ever if you're interested in this topic watch the documentary true cost and they'd spell all this out and it's like a whole world in front of your eyes that you don't even know exists with fashion but you never see it the same after that so um you know we're trying to solve a lot of things with crypto and and it's dna and and like it should be part of everything that we do and so that's why it's in you know the apparel that we're doing that's awesome yeah let's talk

about the the overlap between crypto scarcity and the apparel that we're producing bitcoiners are actually uh i gotta give credit where credit do is credit is due bitcoiners are really tapped into this conversation uh they talk about uh long-term time horizons um having low time preference and and as in it's basically another way of saying delayed gratification right but uh they they also talk about the way that bitcoin dematerializes a lot of the value in the world because when you have scarce

scarcity when you have hard money that's hard to print all of a sudden you have a lot more of incentive to hold on to your money which means that you are it's it's more difficult to you know part with your money because you have harder money which means that if you are buying something you are buying something that you definitely absolutely want because you are partying with your bitcoins to get it and it's not the same as partying with your dollars because a dollar today is not the same thing as a dollar tomorrow uh and so the the very cerebral the very brainy uh

type of of thought or or you know any of the bitcoiners are really good at this they will they will connect the money printer the printing of 29 of all us dollars came out in 2020 and they will connect that to um fast food fast fashion just what they call fiat goods like goods that you know you uh that was made in china and it breaks after three uses um the the jury you know this is a very like hard thing to to prove is there an actual connection here but i'm 100 like uh behind this idea that like

poor quality money generates poor quality goods in a society and that's how cryptoculture and the value of and of just appreciating scarcity as a part of your life can actually change the way that you live um sinjin anything you want to add to that yeah that's a great point um and i think that goes back to to how fashion before it was fast fashion it was more scarce there were less items made but they were higher quality um and and you know

just having having a closet with more items but lower quality you know it creates more more trash to create you're spending more money um and you're getting less in the end you know because you can't wear that item multiple times you can't pass it on you can't recycle it the same way um yeah and i and i think that's a point in the uh apparel sustainability that doesn't get a lot of focus but it's it's really vital and i think it's it's growing we're figuring it out more so

um thanks for bringing that up it reminds me of you know this intersection excuse me reminds me of unisocks yeah like this is this is um crypto users native crypto users clueing into the idea that they're scared there's apparel uh obviously drawn in by the fact that there's a token behind it and a bonding curve but similar ideas right where i'm trying to tap in me singing david here we're trying to tap in to what's going on there like people want to wrap this stuff

i mean think about like supreme if you're listening right now you understand the street where streetwear world sneakers supreme um that's artificial scarcity right like they only want to release so many so that the resale price goes up so that you know um so that they have a brand around scarcity right that's not necessarily what we're trying to do right we're you know by you'll see when we talk about the droplet today we don't want everything to be super available because you know we're all on this philosophy this ethos of valuing scarcity but also we want to

like we said we want to propagate culture right so there's a lever to pull where maybe some of the shirts that we release are um open to everybody but some of them are a little bit more um scarce and then people will seek those out that are uh interested in those so i think there's a if you're thinking about your stocks if you think about the bitcoin hackie sack even crypto punks cross over with some of the merch that they have or wearing your own board ape on your chest that stuff is right here where we're talking about we're just getting started on the bank list out of it too and as somebody who saw multiple people wearing uniswap socks at bitcoin miami uh it was

it was hot like everyone knew who was wearing the uni-swap socks right and so if you actually add scarcity into your apparel you actually open up a complete design space of just to some degree like gossip or just like chit chat or just open conversation about like yo that person's wearing uni socks like those those are 60 000 socks right there like what the hell's going on [Laughter] yes it's pretty it's it's a flex too right if and also if you see me wearing my bankless shirt outside you're you're like

bro right and then we want more of that as we get to the 10th 12th 20th drop there's gonna be a lot of that going on right or oh he's wearing the defiant shirt even just give a shout out to whoever it is it doesn't even need to just be bankless right like i want to see more of that on the street just like people who wear supreme or sneakers they do that with each other like oh yeah or even a rolex or you got a rolex same vibe let's put that into the stuff that we're putting on our backs which is also scarce real estate itself right absolutely all right so should we actually go right into exactly what we

are dropping today because if we haven't said this enough we are actually dropping apparel today and so there is a drop of three units going out uh i've already bought mine because the bankless dow gets early access to this michael can you uh share with us a little bit about these sale details oh dude i'd like to do that right now let me share my screen stand by take a look guys paying homage to cypherfunk history um

off the bat i if you're thinking right now about the box logo t-shirt that you saw saw me wear bought saw somebody else buy that's fire that's iconic right we did no cap release on that we sold hundreds of units of it um and i'm happy about that i want people to be able to have that if you're wondering first and foremost yo mike why was that ninety dollars like i got the shirt it's it's a great shirt but why did you i don't know if it's ninety dollars with the shirt hey it's not about ninety dollars with the shirt it's about the fact that you

want that you are now part of that iconic piece of history that we have and only a couple hundred people a few hundred people have that with them think about that as i show you what we're doing here i'm not asking every single person to buy these things but if it's interesting interesting to you you better do it because there's only a few of them so first and foremost we have the cypher funk shirt i'm gonna let sinjan give some color here but i'm gonna quickly show you the three things we're dropping and we're gonna do this once a month if you remember last month we did the box logo shirt thank you for everybody who got one and i'm sure you're stoked

about it this time we're doing three completely different things two of them are capped one of them's open so everybody will have a chance to get one of them but the other one you better act fast i'm about to press publish on this thing during this during this live stream right so first and foremost is this uh cypher funk shirt which pays homage to all of our um founding fathers and and folks for those of us that listen to the uh before bitcoin podcast that we did about two months ago uh where i read the before bitcoin series from peter pan

this was largely inspiration out of uh that series from uh from peter pan who i also considered this is a sinjin original sorry original sinjin um i'll let him give some color there you're going to get a floppy disk with this thing what you're going to get a floppy disk with this thing i'm not going to tell you what's on that thing let's engine do it all right so cypher funk shirt cyber punk shirt with the with the floppy disk bruh check check this check this tapestry i wish i could zoom

this this is a velvet tapestry i have a picture of the actual thing but just imagine this being a velvet feeling tapestry can go in your wall it can go on your couch your body wherever you're feeling like you need to put this tapestry it's very soft okay so this tape is going out very limited and then the t-shirt i'm wearing right now this bankless tattoo that's look at the look at that design dude pretty fire with the with the lightning bolt the little bang situation hit the back hit the front long sleeve

so year round especially if you live in socal and want to wear the oakley's with it all right sinjin why don't you tell us a little bit about the the cypherpuncture yeah the cypherpunks like david said totally uh inspired by the people who created the technology that's at the foundation of blockchain that we use every single day and this is uh this is our our call our our kind of like flag that we're planning saying like look we're about culture like we are doing bankless uh logos you

know bankless inspired designs but we're also doing designs for the whole culture and uh this this drop right here this design cypherpunks these guys helmet diffie merkel finney cohen gilmore chomp uh i highly recommend to listen to that podcast day where david read the peter pan article read the peter pan article we've got a link to it there um i mean that could be like an entire hollywood movie right there just the story of how this stuff is made and you

know these cypherpunks like they went up against the us government to really stand and say look we want the public have access to these encryption technologies and the you know the public key encryptions that we use today at the root of all blockchains is is made possible by these guys so we can't pay enough respect you know they and they always say like you know we stand on the shoulders of giants and like these are the giants that that we're standing on um and tell