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Dear Bankless Nation,

What a year.

There are now 20,000 of us on the journey.

We released over 150 articles, published 53 tactics, compiled a Starter Guide that’s reached over 1.2m views and bankless turned into a global movement this year.

In March we launched a podcast. I had no idea what I was doing but David helped. We put out the first 9 episodes to explain DeFi and ppl still recommend these as a first stop for newbies. The podcast is now downloaded 200k times per month—100 episodes so far.

This summer we launched a YouTube channel which is funny cause we suck at YouTube. But people resonated with the message in our weekly State of the Nation and Weekly Rollup shows and somehow we now have almost 14,000 subscribers.

I first started this thing with the mission to onboard a billion people to crypto this decade—an impossible mission that became a bit more possible this year.

And it was all thanks to you.

Thank you for believing. For spreading the world. For subscribing.

Today we decided to riff through all the articles, podcasts, videos and shows to present you the best stuff we produced this year.

Here’s the Best of Bankless 2020 edition.

- RSA

🙏 Sponsor: Argent – DeFi in a tap (👈 go download this wallet now - RSA)

WRITER WEDNESDAY

Best of Bankless 2020

MOST POPULAR

Top content of 2020 year sorted by popularity.

Newsletter

🥇 1. Ethereum will eat Wall Street’s Settlement Layer

Author: Josh Johnson, Machine Learning Engineer & Crypto Aficionado

Look at the bottom right of the picture. It’s an Ethereum address on the Bloomberg terminal. Wait…what?

Yeah. This year FAT Brands, a publicly traded company, issued a $39M bond on Ethereum. They’re using Ethereum and crypto dollars as the settlement layer and MoE for their financial activities. And it’s just getting started. Ethereum is coming to eat Wall Street’s lunch as “Ethereum will eat Wall Street’s Settlement Layer” took the cake for the #1 spot in this years article. Read why.

🥈 2. How to leverage yEarn to maximize yield

Author: Darren Lau, Senior Analyst at The Spartan Group.

The yield farming mania this summer brought astronomic yields to the Ethereum ecosystem. But following every new food farm during the frenzy, ensuring that it’s secure, and claiming those rewards while dealing with the gas fees was just too annoying. We needed something simpler.

That’s why yEarn made it into the spotlight this year (YFI mooning also helped). They automated the whole process with Vaults, making it one of the best “set it and forget it” yield farming strategies this year.

Learn how you can leverage yEarn to get the best yields in DeFi.

🥉 3. ETH: The Internet Bond

Author: Collin Myers of ConsenSys & Mara Schmiedt of Bison Trails

The launch of Eth2 birthed the internet bond. Anyone can deposit ETH, run a validator, and receive coupons in perpetuity for their work. This is the future of digital finance and the foundation for the decentralized economy. As a result, Collin Myers and Mara Schmiedt took it into their own hands, spent countless hours in spreadsheets, and modeled out the returns for this new internet bond.

This model helps investors understand ETH as a revolutionary new internet native asset type through the lens of assets they already know—perpetual bonds.

As we’ve preached before, the most crucial part to the success of crypto assets is to be understood. This is how you understand Ethereum and ETH.

🏅 4. Running an ETH validator for the barely motivated

Author: Justin Leroux, Business Development & Marketing at GridPlus

Even though the returns can be lucrative, running an ETH validator can be complicated. Having the proper hardware, getting set up, ensuring you have a strong internet connection, it can all be a pain. And if you make any mistakes, you could get slashed. Yikes. That’s why we have to make running an ETH validator as easy as possible.

Coming in at the #4 spot, this is how you can run an Eth2 validator in a self-sovereign way, even if you’re barely motivated.

🏅 5. Are DeFi tokens worth buying?

Author: Lucas Campbell, Editor & Analyst for Bankless

The short answer: Yes, they were. But we didn’t tell you which tokens to buy. Lucas taught you how to think about these tokens—how to identify that ones that could be worth buying. This was the emergence of crypto capital assets and the start of us building a framework for understanding this new asset class.

Crypto capital assets (i.e. DeFi tokens) hold similar attributes to traditional capital assets like stocks. You can use cash flows and the Price-to-Earning (PE) ratio to value them and understand how they stack up relative to their peers.

Read it and level up your knowledge on crypto capital assets.

🏆 Honorable Mentions

• The trillion dollar case for ETH - Lucas Campbell

• Why Pomp is wrong about ETH - Lucas Campbell

• How to Make Money with Balancer - Fernando Martinelli

• When Bitcoin Moon - Benjamin Cowen

Podcasts

🥇 1. Designing Ethereum | Vitalik Buterin

Who doesn’t love listening to Vitalik? As the founder of Ethereum, when he speaks, everyone listens. And we have the stats to prove it. This podcast dives into the original design decisions behind Ethereum like why sharding? Why proof of stake? What does the future of Ethereum look like?

We explore all of this and more as “Designing Ethereum” takes the poll position for the most popular podcast this year.

🥈 2. The Bull Case for DeFi | Vance Spencer

DeFi got wild this summer, and Vance Spencer put Framework Ventures as one of the premier DeFi venture capital studios. He was in Synthetix before it popular. He invested in Aave early. He understood where DeFi was headed before anyone else.

We haven’t met anyone else as bullish on DeFi as Vance. And he drops some serious knowledge in this podcast. That’s why it reached #2 on the charts this year. Listen to it for some good alpha leaks and where the future of DeFi is headed.

$100B in value locked soon?

🥉 3. The World is Waking up to Crypto | Raoul Pal

Raoul Pal is one of the most renown macro investors in the world. He founded Real Vision, one of the leading content production studios in traditional finance. But this year, Raoul became irresponsibly bullish on crypto.

Before, he was mostly in BTC. But I think we convinced him, at least a little bit, on the overwhelming potential for Ethereum and ETH. The world is waking up to crypto, and he breaks down why.

🏅 4. Welcome to Bankless

The podcast episode that started it all!

This is the beginning of our Bankless journey into the frontier. It is the foundation for all other podcast. We highly recommend listening to episodes #1 - #8 as they break down our fundamental theses and mental models for approaching the wild west of crypto finance. Here are some of our favorites within that mini-series:

• Episode #2: The evolution of monetary policy

• Episode #3: Economic Bandwidth

• Episode #4: ETH: The triple point asset

• Episode #7: Ether’s value mechanisms

🏅 5. YFI: Farming the Farmers | Andre Cronje

The mad scientist behind yEarn and the man that “tests in prod” had a meteoric rise into DeFi this summer. He just doesn’t stop building. This podcast was crucial for understand yEarn and the vision when literally no one understood exactly what it was. I mean, we had trouble understanding it before this podcast. That’s why we brought him on. And the people loved it.

If you want to know how yEarn and YFI came to be, Andre breaks it down with us to give you the right framework to understanding this emerging ecosystem.

🏆 Honorable Mentions

• Crypto Civilization with Balaji Srinivasan

• WTF Happened in 2020? with Meltem Demirors

• Ethereum: Past, Present, Future with Vitalik Buterin

• Aave to Billions with Stani Kulechov

EDITORS CHOICE

Best content of the year according to the Bankless Editors

RSA

I like the ones that stick in my head afterwards.

🏆 Favorite Articles

• DeFi in Eth2 - Haseeb Qureshi

• A Framework for Token Value Flows - Jon Itzler

• Ethereum: Slayer of Moloch 🔪 - David Hoffman

🏆 Favorite Podcasts

• The People’s Narrative with Ben Hunt

• The Ethereum Opportunity with Chris Burniske

• Slaying Moloch with Ameen Soleimani & Kevin Owocki

David

My attention in 2020 has been around the emergence and growth of culture out of public blockchains. Here are some of my favorite pieces of that theme!

🏆 Favorite Articles

• Ethereum will fix enterprise tech - Paul Brody

• Find your squad - A written interview with the Other Internet Squad

• On Coordination vs. Defection - Me (self shill!)

🏆 Favorite Podcasts

• The Evolution of Monetary Policy

• Slaying Moloch with Ameen Solemani & Kevin Owocki

• Designing Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin

Lucas

Don’t tell David I put one of his articles in here…we don’t need to blow up his ego

🏆 Favorite Articles

• Aquaponic Yield Farming - Dan Elitzer

• Bitcoin’s Scarcity Game - David Hoffman

• 8 Things Stopping CeFi from Integrating DeFi - Calvin Liu

🏆 Favorite Podcasts

• Exploring the Frontier with Erik Voorhees

• The DeFi Exchange with Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss

• Investing in DeFi Paradigms with Charlie Noyes

What was the best content in 2020 for you? Leave your favorites in the comments.

Action steps

• Catch up on the Best Bankless Content you missed in 2020

• Tell us your favorite content in the comments

Subscribe to Bankless. $12 per mo. Includes archive access, Inner Circle & Badge.

🙏Thanks to our sponsor

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- RSA

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. I’ll always disclose when this is the case.