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Dear Bankless Nation,

Today, we are launching a new campaign of the Bankless revolution.

Bankless Apparel Seasons

aka… SWAG

If there is one thing that is lacking in the crypto-world (after on-ramps, UX, off-chain assets), it is ways to express yourself as a member of the Digital Revolution. This new world is incredibly rich in culture, community, expression and opportunity, but we have extremely limited ways to actually expressing these things!

This is why we are launching Bankless Apparel Seasons!

Season 0 just went live…check it out here!

Bankless Apparel Seasons combine crypto-economic digital scarcity with extremely unique and limited releases of high-quality clothing items. Owners of a Bankless Apparel Season have the benefit of knowing that the clothing item they purchased is extremely scarce and unique to them, and that they are one of a very small group of people that owns one of the items.

The ‘Seasons’ are regularly occurring releases of new unique items, which will never ever be released ever again. If you miss one Season, that's okay! More Seasons are coming. BUT, if you see something you like, you better snag it before the Season ends!

Fixing Fast Fashing

Fast Fashion is a genre of fashion that aims to quickly and cost-effectively generate massive amounts of identical clothing items that quickly answers to the current demands from the trends in the spotlight. It uses cheap labor and cheap materials to quickly produce clothing that resembles what is currently ‘in’. This type of fashion is met with controversy and criticism, as it requires slave-wage labor, as well as producing low-quality clothing that inevitably falls apart after a few washes. Fast fashion focuses on minimizing production costs in order to produce mass quantities of the same items under significant time constraints. The Fast Fashion industry only produces clothing that is designed to meet the fleeting demand from consumers who quickly move on to new trends, to which Fast Fashion also then works to keep up with.

While it may be nice to be able to keep up with current trends in a low-cost way, ultimately the costs upon the planet is significant. The fast-fashion industry produces incredible amounts of waste, as well as significant human-rights violations. It can also be argued that the consumer doesn’t save much money in the long run, as the clothing quickly decays and must be replaced by something new.

Saifedean Ammous,  a highly controversial figure for his aggressiveness and toxicity, in his book ‘The Bitcoin Standard’ dedicates a chapter to this phenomenon where he links the existence of Fiat money to the generation of empty, hollow, low-quality products. He claims that the existence of cheap money with no real scarcity impacts the products that the world produces, and in turn makes them also cheap and low quality. According to Saifedean, this same phenomenon emerges in our food, entertainment, news… the whole world produces low-quality results based on low-quality money.

While this is an extremely nebulous concept, and a difficult thesis to prove, I believe that in this specific instance, digital scarcity and digital scarcity tools can help produce products that have opposing characteristics to those produced by fast-fashion, and we’re going to run that experiment with the Bankless Apparel Seasons.

Bankless Apparel Seasons are about generating a constant flow of unique, scare, and high-quality clothing. Ethereum democratizes the ability to produce scarcity, as well as provides financial infrastructure to help manage that scarcity. We will leverage Ethereum’s digital scarcity tools to produce a new genre of apparel that hopefully generates more excitement and alignment between an individual and the clothing that they use to express themselves!

Bankless Apparel Season launches will be a regular, metered series of unique garments that will only ever be produced once. This campaign will be a continually rolling release of new, limited series of apparel. Over time, there will be many different shirts and styles, but no season will ever be produced twice, and no series will repurpose old designs. The garments produced will offer unique designs that would never be able to be found in a store, or through a drop-shipping company. Each garment from the Bankless Apparel Campaign will be

• Unique
• Scarce
• High-Quality
• Community-produced
• Virtual

Unique

Each Bankless Apparel Season will feature a unique graphic that will stand out from the rest of the apparel in your wardrobe!

The last iterations of social video games have illustrated the desire for people to express themselves with scarce skins. Items that impact how one’s character is represented in the video-game are sought-after commodities in virtual worlds, as they allow someone to be visually unique in ways that they enjoy.

The Bankless Apparel Campaign is about enabling that uniqueness, in both the real world! Real-world Legendary Skins, with provable scarcity!

Scarce

The apparel in each Bankless Apparel Season will be represented by Redeemable ERC20 tokens. Anyone may purchase a redeemable token from its Balancer Exchange. These tokens can be redeemed for a physical good.

Some apparel items will be rarer than others. Below are the apparel item tiers:

Every new series of Bankless Apparel will offer a fixed, low number of tokens available to purchase from its Balancer Market. These tokens are only ever minted once, and can never be minted again. Each token will have its own unique ticker, BAP0, BAP1 etc.

High-Quality

Bankless Apparel runs on digital scarcity, which means that they will fetch a higher price than your typical cotton tee shirt from the GAP. This means that we can afford to pay for higher-quality merchandise to produce these items.

The opposite of apparel from the Fast Fashion industry is high-quality clothing that lasts the rest of your life; you should never have to replace the garment due to decay. The Bankless Apparel Campaign will focus on apparel that will stand the test of time, and never need to be replaced either from going ‘out of style’ or from the garment falling apart.

To me, this is how Ethereum and digital scarcity can impact seemingly distant issues like excess waste and climate change. If we are able to produce goods that don’t need to be replaced, as a planet we will consume less overall. High-quality products mean you buy something once, and it’s with you for the rest of your life. It becomes a part of your identity and not some means to an end.

This is also how we move away from sweat-shops and slave-wage labor. High-quality products require high-quality labor. If the scarce clothing movement gains traction, it will defund companies that support sweatshops, and instead, fund companies that produce clothing that stands the test of time. The companies that pay for more skilled labor will survive, creating high-paying jobs that demand more skills.

Community-Produced

The best designs for Bankless Apparel Seasons aren’t going to come from one or a few artists. They’re going to come from the entire Bankless Nation. No one knows what the Nation wants more than the Nation itself, and the Bankless Nation is a nation that builds itself!

Future apparel designs will be sourced from the community via community-determined contests! The Bankless Nation will govern over what designs comes next to the Bankless Apparel Campaign.

To participate, artists can submit designs to apparel@bankless.com. Artists that have their design chosen by the community will receive a percentage of the BAP tokens for their season!

Virtual Future

We expect Bankless Apparel to find a place in emerging virtual worlds like CryptoVoxels, Decentraland, and eventually Twitter and Discord. Wear your apparel on your digital avatar! Sell it in a virtual marketplace! Once you own the item represented by a BAP token you own it forever, both physically if you choose to redeem it and also digitally.

This world is not yet ready; currently under construction. However, when the world of digital skin NFTs is born, the real-world products from Bankless Apparel Seasons will be given their virtual correlates. Owners of BAPs will be able to redeem for the physical good, as well as the virtual skin, in whatever form that may be!

Season 0

Season 0 is launching with the release of this post!

You can find the details about Season 0 here.

- David

Action steps:

• Purchase a cover for a protocol you actively use on Nexus Mutual
• Read Hugh’s previous tactic: How to assess the risk of lending to a protocol
• Research Nexus Mutual’s native token—NXM (it has some interesting mechanics!)

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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.