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🌶️ Abstract is NOT for Streamers? on Coffee with Captain #1,120
Recorded: March 19, 2026 Duration: 2:58:13Space Recording
Full Transcription
Starting off with a bitch. Now I got two. I was living a dream on web three.
And it is what it seems.
Talking to pirate machines, I'm telling you.
I'll sell you a percentage on Nebula.
Shout out to Vince, yo, set it up.
Surfing on the web and I'm sleeping at three.
I've been golden when I got my G.
I'm an alien boy from a different planet, yeah.
So I got my drink, I'm riding in 1920s, Model T.
Ford, car, carol, Lord. Ford. Call her, Carol, Lord.
Call me Levi playing on the keys, boy.
And I'm about to put my gloves on.
If I said it, then I meant that.
Yeah, I like that one, I'm about to get that.
Crash that whip with a drumstick, whip blast.
I'm about to get them all.
Are you with that?
In a white boat surrounded by blue.
I want one, but I got a cop too.
I want to fly high in the sky, arms out wide,
trying to swim with my birds I feel.
I'm on fire, Nicky Bobby.
Cracking the pavement, Whitney Bobby.
I'm a Saki bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
Bruce Wayne been a dog, and I keep a 101,
because I'm feeling kind of spotty.
Sipping on some rock, and I'm slipping out octane.
The only thing around my neck is rock jam.
K-pop,. I got coin.
I see where y'all going.
Poppa since web one.
Hello, I'm going to.
I was living a dream.
I'm on web three CFL.
And it is what it seems.
I'm telling you, I'll sell you a percentage on nebula.
Shout out to Vince.
Yo, set it up.
NFT Twitter.
I can see him with the ghost and we balling up.
Rondi.
Credo, credo.
We can make a trade, get the members.
Feels not fallin' for the FOMO.
Listenin' to coffee with Captain.
You know we were a wide day local.
I ain't never gon' stop rappin'.
Orlando, yeah, we workin' magic.
We workin' Ethereum entities.
I just went and caught me a habit.
Man, I gotta shut up.
Spinin' off with a big kick-b. Man, I got a shout out to .
Now I got coin.
I see where y'all going.
And poppa since web one.
Hello, ho.
On web two.
I was living the dream.
Now I'm on web three.
TFL.
And then here's what it seems.
Popping the pyramid chains, I'm telling you.
I'll sell you a percentage on Nebula.
Shout out to Vince.
Yo, set it up.
We can't move to choose one.
But they got knowledge to move, son, set it up. a mask that wanted to have a face off. I had to bring my chainsaw full ticket cast in the pride when my breaks off. I'm a one, but a different kind of steak sauce.
GMGM, welcome to Coffee with Captain. Happy Thursday, everyone. Hope you're all having a
great day. Great start to the day. We are live over on YouTube, as well as Abstract,
at least for the rest of this week. And then we'll see how next Tuesday treats us on the XP
front and determine where to go from there. But I'm Cap on Coffee with Captain, episode 1120.
Appreciate y'all being here.
Shout out to the early GMers, Web3 Warhead Thomas over there in the YouTube chat.
That is the chat, without a doubt.
And we'll see.
We might get a little spicy this morning.
We'll see how—I'm going to see how spicy cheese this gets before I determine how spicy I'll get.
But spiciness across the board from the abstract community following the XP changes this week.
While that XP dropped on Tuesday, I don't know if I missed anything or was just a little bit of a lag,
but I really saw the timeline up in a roar yesterday.
And then not just the abstract community, the artist community,
specifically the 3D artist, pretty fired up over Doodle's AI, which I don't know if ironic is the
right word, but it flipped me from, I'll just say I went from, I don't really, I wasn't really
bearish Doodle's AI, but it was more of like a, more of like a nothing burger for me, or near nothing burger, I should say, to bullish.
I am bullish Doodles AI, primarily based on the response from those traditional 3D artists.
And they're kind of up in arms over it,
which to me is, it's definitely not a nothing burger,
whether it's a bullish sign or bearish sign, I don't know.
But it's definitely not a nothing burger
if it's catching such blowback and vitriol
from the traditional 3D artists of the world.
GM Block Mage, as well as the rest of everyone
helping us get warmed up here in the chat,
both on X.
We are also live on X Video.
If you prefer to watch the X Video feed,
we're live both from my account
as well as the Coffee with Captain account.
Just joined us here on stage.
Mike, pleasure hearing from you
more frequently here on stage.
Greatly appreciate your voice.
And Dobbins, a legend in the chat.
I'm curious, Dobbins, what model did you use to make this 3D mutant looking good?
About as good as a mutant could look.
I don't mean any offense by that.
It's a good-looking mutant.
But the 3D body, the full
body 3D is hitting. Getting some legends on the stage here. So excited to get into this. We're
just going to jump into this abstract conversation. I'm not fighting abstract. It's fine. I'm sure
they're going to remain a fine L2. They're still a top 10 chain in terms of daily revenue.
I don't know what's driving that,
quite frankly. I don't know where the revenue is coming from. I need to double tap and do a
little deeper dive. I will say, once again, crypto native teams continue to struggle with
comms and PR. And it's not just them. It's easy. It's, it's, it's relevant. It's top of mind. But I will say
once again, that discord mods on power trips, it's like, it's comical to me. And while it's
comical when a discord mod gets on a power trip or ego, I don't know what it is. It does have an impact, a very negative impact.
And like, I'm not like, I saw some people like calling for Discord mods to be fired or team
members to be fired. I'm not calling for anyone's job, but teams need to get like, understand the
impact it has. And I don't think you want a Discord mod
who's, for all intents and purposes,
an entry-level employee.
I mean, this isn't a me thing.
I don't care.
But I've connected with most people
in this crypto industry two ways.
Not that I just follow them.
We've not only follow each other,
we've engaged with each other. I'm not deep in the abstract streets. I'm not, I'm in,
I think I'm in that discord. I'm definitely not active in that discord, but I went, like,
I've never even connected with this person on X. Again, maybe I'm nothing here. And, and
like, I just, I'm not dialed in. I'm not connected to the movers and shakers.
Like, if you think, if you look at like Kaido or Zed or any of the other platforms that
talk about your smart followers and the, not even reach.
Like I know I'm not, like I don't have the biggest reach on this app.
Would never claim to even have remotely close to the biggest reach on this app.
But I'm like a top 0, 1% of a CT account when it talks like who I'm connected with and who I engage with.
It's not me saying this.
It's the Kaidos, the Zs of the world.
And yeah, we've not only connected with, we've had, you know, Tuesday, we had Adam on the show, the C on Monday, Tuesday was, I mean, for some, on some accounts, like the biggest news of crypto in Q1 thus far.
I'm very grateful for those opportunities.
Again, I'm not, this isn't like a me thing.
It's just like my point driving home is you've got a entry-level Discord mod who is disenfranchising, alienating, I don't know, fill in the blank, a lot of the core community and
brand ambassadors and supporters, and it's just such like an unforced era. That to me
is bigger than the XP haircut. Like, I don't like, it's not that deep for me.
I got, if you missed it, I got 32 XP this week. 32, not 3,200. Like pain, we were even talking about yesterday after the show was
the first time I saw it. And I say it's like 3,200. I'm like, no, 32. 32 XP down from the prior week of
5,600. Now, to be fair and to be fully transparent, I did, if you remember, I did have a dip in, like, we didn't stream every day
because they changed how you, like, technically not getting into all the details, but previously
you had, we had like RMTP in streamer keys and we basically went live from StreamYard and that pushed it out
to Abstract automatically. Now I have to capture the X video feed link, post that into Abstract,
and then it broadcasts from there. Whatever. It's just a change. But because of that, I didn't have
five days of streaming last week. That said, I still hold Pingu. Not a ton, but I hold Pingu. I hold some MNFTs,
some ZNFTs. Again, I've not been farming. I've just been using the chain as I naturally would.
Hola Diego. I've been talking about abstract, promoting abstract, not just streaming on abstract.
I've talked about abstract pretty, not pretty much, I think every single day, every single
weekday on this show to hundreds, if not thousands of people for over a year plus.
Maybe they don't value that.
Maybe they don't value that. I don't know. I've definitely not been fudding abstract.
I don't know.
I've definitely not been fudding abstract.
And I understand why they're making changes.
But from a business decision, attempting to remove my bias, I don't think they want to
be turning their, who have been some of their core supporters and have promoted their platform.
I've said, I thought streaming was one of the differentiating factors.
That portal was good.
It's one of the things
they had differentiated.
In a very competitive blockchain space,
they were different
when it came to their portal,
when it came to streaming.
And I thought it was,
they had something good going for it.
And it seems as if
they've completely nerfed
any sort of bonus or XP from streamers.
And to me, again, it's not an XP thing.
I know it is for some.
But for me, it's...
Maybe I'm being harsh when I say gaslighting,
but the gaslighting coming from Discord mods is gross.
That said, let's get some hands in here.
I saw Shaylin threw the hand up first,
and then we'll get Cheesus in.
We also got Bandit and Anthony on stage.
A few legends to kick things off in this cold open.
I will do some screen shares as well.
Mayhem went and found the OG Shoots clip
where Luca says, this was, again, back a year ago,
January of last year, actually. He says, the number again back a year ago, January of last year actually,
he says the number one streamer on Abstract will make millions of dollars,
not aging very well. Shaolin, GM, what brought you up this morning?
So, hey, thank you for having me. What's super interesting though is actually I think you kind
of nailed it just now in a lot of different ways, right?
One, I think when it was more community focused, when you had Luca talking about abstract, you saw a wave and support from the NFT community.
It makes sense. It's natural. He's the leader.
And then when he took a couple of steps back, it became more of a product related, product driven product, right?
It became more of a product-related, product-driven product, right?
The platform, the spotlight, they took a lot of the things that had gotten a lot of traction and edge,
which is streaming the portal, as you said.
But I think what happened is that it became more of a business.
And that meant serving and looking at the bottom line.
It looked at optimizations.
You started seeing more gambling on the chain with regards to the apps.
And, you know, it really kind of shifted the narrative of how they actually optimize and built with developers.
I have some experience. I don't want to name names just to kind of keep this as neutral as possible.
I've worked with them and part of the gaming community as a publisher.
And what I noticed is that when we were talking about the games itself and in terms of development,
the focus was on how to monetize, not necessarily the user, but how do you optimize towards the platform itself?
So as you can imagine, if you're on the portal, uh, it's important if you're in the spotlight,
it's even more important.
Um, and more importantly than that, you have to stay on that every single week.
Otherwise your utility, your value, the attention, the retention of your app drops, drops dramatically 30 to 40% if you're not on Spotlight.
Oh, wow.
So how do we do this, right?
You have to gamify all of your interactions within the community because you're basically
cannibalizing against each and every other app on the platform.
And so now you're competing.
Like if you're a game, you're competing with the other games.
If you're iGaming, you're competing with other kind of iGaming sort of situations, right?
And to be clear for the people who don't aren't on abstract, they call them game of skill and game
of chance. They actually had to create this, right? When they had the meta of, you know,
meme coins, when they had the current meta of Z. So to answer your question the major reason for the shift in uh volume has been zeet
zeet cards have been blowing up all over abstract but what's odd is i was actually on another
spaces the other day where one of the founders of bearish who manages zeet was like you we we
programmed for all of this right we were really ahead of the game. But just yesterday, it's like
I did $20,000 in Z and I got five, like they only got 20,000. No, they did 20,000 volume in trading.
And they only got like a couple thousand in XP goes, this makes zero sense. I don't know what's
going on. We might be moving and telling people to port over. Now, again, I can't
verify this 100% who the person is, but I do know that that was the sentiment, which is like,
maybe we should just move off of abstract altogether. And I was just like, wow, you went
from like everyone loving it because ZEAT created all this volume to even the people from ZEAT or
working with the team or maybe a community member
wanting to move off of it so you just see this narrative shift and change so uh just to recap
real quick it's like you went from community focus to like transaction based uh revenue based
total volume based and it became more of a product play in terms of validation for whatever reason i
don't know what their inner goals are in terms of of KPIs and why they're trying to do things.
And you're seeing everyone have to play the game, who's a builder and as part of the community.
And then the real question is, is who really wins from that situation?
Now, again, I'm not trying to FUD it.
I'm just trying to drive some perspective and some value thinking about some of these
things that are going on.
But I do realize that there's really smart people in the community who aren't abstract
who understand that.
But I guess the real question is, is how does this benefit the people who are outside of
that?
And that's the real question.
Yeah, great question.
And to your point, I get it from a business standpoint.
I get the desire to drive vanity metrics.
Actually, I had some really smart people, some people who
really understand tokenomics, who really understand crypto from a funding, from an
investable standpoint. And they were critical, bearish on abstract early on because they
weren't catering to DeFi. They weren't catering to whales who would move capital in TVL on-chain.
And they were bearish that they weren't rewarding farming that works in terms of transactions, in terms of TVL and thought they over-indexed too far to the NFT enjoyers,
to the NFT holders, to the community, to streamers. And I don't know, it seems to me,
and I don't understand, I mean, I get it, but I'm also not like a tokenomics expert. I'm not a
DeFi expert. I've never launched a blockchain and raised millions of dollars.
But it seems to me as if almost they've over-indexed now the other direction
and are rewarding agents, bots, volume.
Like they went from, hey, we're going to streamers are going to make
millions of dollars. The hold your NFTs to nerfing all that. And now it's just about,
do you have a gambling app that is going to drive a lot of volume? Do you have something like,
I understand it from a business standpoint and I understand the vanity metrics. I understand it from a business standpoint. And I understand the vanity metrics.
I understand why they might do this.
I think how they've done it
and how they've communicated it or not communicated it.
And then most of the communication
you're seeing from an entry-level Discord mod
who is gaslighting their core community,
who have been their most vocal supporters over the last year.
That's just really poorly done.
And I think that's what's leading to
the backlash on the timeline. Like, hey, we've all known that XP is a moving target. We've known that
it is dynamic and would change. And I have no issues with changing it. It's how they've done it,
how they've communicated it. And I mean, I had shared here some of the posts, like, again, just to be clear, I'm not calling for anyone to get fired.
I don't know.
And I shouldn't call him a kid.
I don't know.
For all I know, the guy's abschud is, you know, a 60-year-old that's really passionate about modding discords.
The screenshot you can see here from Joxy Coxy, who said,
how to kill your chain 101, shit on your NFT community. This was screenshotting
Abschudd's post yesterday in the discord that says, GM to everyone except people holding NFTs
only for XP. Murdoch quote tweeted that and said, this is an example of a discord mod abusing their
power. I've, I've reported from trusted sources that the mod is awful with people, no idea how
to treat another human. If you're hiring mods for Discord, make sure they're decent people and know how to treat people.
Abstract Chain needs a few new mods.
Being respectful to people, especially people who are typically, who typically are angry all the time, is not an easy thing.
I will, I will double tap on that.
Like, I, you couldn't pay me enough to be a Discord mod.
I'm not looking for a job right now, but there's not like, actually, I take that back.
There's a number for everything, but it's just not something I would enjoy doing.
It had to be like, it had to be a lot of money.
I'm just going to leave it at that.
It's not something I would enjoy whatsoever because you're trying to say this without
you're trying to say this without also upsetting people. You're just, you're dealing with a lot of
also upsetting people.
people. Very rarely are you going to make all of them happy. And oftentimes, whatever you do,
you're going to have 10, 20% who are just going to be angry. They're going to be disrespectful.
And you got to kill them with kindness. You can't, you got to be respectful to people,
especially those who are typically are angry, as they say. I've got back to the quote here, back to Murdoch's post.
Language is super important.
Tone is super important.
If you had bad mods, it can easily kill a community.
I will say I have close friends, have said at least two mods in abstract or overzealous mods.
I have zero idea how to treat people and go crazy with power.
Fake internet authority has gone to their head.
I hope Axtrap fixes this.
If they need help finding good mods with a proven track record, I'm more than happy to connect them with five to ten good
applicants that can easily replace them. I will add to that, and then we'll go back to Shallowen
for a response, and then I do want to get Cheezus in here. I know the stage is popping off on this
one this morning. As much as I said, like, I don't want to be a Discord mod. Actually, I don't know.
From problems as a person, I kind of am a Discord mod with our War Room. Now, it's, like, I don't want to be a Discord mod. Actually, I don't know. From problems as a person,
I kind of am a Discord mod with our War Room.
Now, it's not like, it doesn't feel like that
because we've curated a really amazing community
over the last four years that, you know,
your vibe attracts your tribe.
It's not, it is gated.
So maybe that helps.
But, and people do get like, not everyone
is friends in there. Like there's people that have muted or blocked each other in discord.
It is a, we have a wide range of people, wide range of black backgrounds. Not everyone gets
along. There is like some back and forth at times, but it's, we also have no expectations.
Like people aren't in there for an airdrop.
They're not in there for a TGE. It's just a gated community. It's a, it's a gated,
it's a group chat essentially. And I think it's also like, there's, you know, a couple
hundred people in there. It's not tens of thousands of people like you might have in
some of these bigger ones, but I can, I can appreciate the challenge that these discord
mods have because in a small community of a couple
hundred people while it's very active it's also even despite it being small you also still have
people that go at each other every once in a while like so imagine that now scale that by a hundred
by a thousand and inevitably you're going to have tensions at times. It's just
very challenging, but I think also drives home how valuable, if you have a good mod,
if you have good community managers, you have people that can handle those dynamics that aren't
easy, but do so with tact, in proper language, proper tone. It's also very challenging to convey tone in text.
It's much easier with things like voice inflection
to drive home how I'm attempting to say something
when I'm talking as opposed to text.
So again, salute to all the good Discord mods out there.
I don't envy your role, but I do appreciate.
And it's unfortunate that it's times like this
where it's kind of like they're almost like
an offensive lineman in football
or like a referee.
They're underappreciated,
not really spoken about until there's an issue.
And then it gets brought to light.
So while we're talking
about, you know, maybe some of the challenges abstracts having in the Discord sentiment right
now, which isn't positive, I at least want to take an opportunity to salute those because there are
really good Discord mods out there. And it's a very challenging role. And I would say the good,
the great Discord mods are probably some of the most underrated people in crypto.
Like a lot of people give a lot of love to like the social media interns and the good shit posters,
while also valuable for a crypto native brand. That's a lot more fun without much of the
downside. The Discord mods have to just take eggs to the face sometimes for nothing they've done.
They're not making decisions on what's how the company's driving or what decisions they're
making. They're not setting the XP, but they got to deal with it. And very, very, very challenging
role that I do believe is underappreciated. That said, let's go back to Shallowin. And then we've
got an idiot coming up who I pinned one of his posts. We also have Mike coming up again. Shallowen, thoughts?
Oh, man. I've been working on creating articles lately, and I've been learning the art of like
persuasion and building an argument. But man, I just realized that sitting on the stage today,
that this is literally what you do every day. You just build up and drive a lot of value just
with your insight to a point.
But that being said, enough glazing.
I've been a community.
You can glaze me all you want.
I appreciate it.
I'm kidding.
But no, thank you.
Thank you for the kind words.
Only after a couple of pounds of beefers, my friend.
It's all time.
So it's one of those things that I've been in the community management moderation space,
probably since the five years that I've been here and I've actually ran teams of moderators. And so
I completely agree with you. So what's super interesting again, is the community approach
versus like the chain approach, right? If this was, you know, some of the people you met, I've,
you know, we've mutually met, whether it's like PP or Burko, who are like, you know, some of the longest, you know, outstanding
community, um, managers, or I don't know exactly their names or titles. Uh, but you know, they,
they meme it, they make it, they lean into the culture. They don't let it, uh, get funded because
it's impossible when you laugh at the situation. Right. I take a completely different approach.
I look at the people who fed hardest and I become friends with them.
My goal when I was the community manager- Can I interject real quick?
Because you want to talk about, sorry for the interjection.
You just like what you just said there, I want to double tap on.
Because this held true far beyond Web3.
I'm going to date myself real quick.
And I know he's not probably a good person to quote in today's world.
For many reasons, I'm not going to go there.
But the quote that I originally remembered,
and the company has done well, so remove the individual.
But at the time when he was the CEO of Microsoft,
Bill Gates said,
your best customer can become your most challenging customer.
I'm butchering the quote.
But basically, the person who's fighting you,
the person who's most upset with you and what you're doing,
if you reach out to them and you fix their issue, they will be,
if you can turn a detractor, someone who scores you a one or two on an NPS score and you reach
out to them, you follow up with that customer and they, then they call back and they change
their, their NPS score to a nine or a 10. Those are now your real promoters. Those,
because think about yourself, your experiences in retail or
e-commerce or anywhere you've ever purchased something or anywhere you've ever had a bad
experience, you're going to tell far more people about that bad experience than you tell about the
good experience. Oftentimes you have an experience that goes exactly as planned. You don't talk about
it. You're not an ambassador. You're not referring friends and family there. However, if you've ever
had a bad experience and then they make it right, now all of a sudden you're telling everyone about that
because that's memorable. You stick in their memory. They're telling their friends and families
because it's very uncommon to have a one out of 10 experience with anything. They reach out,
go above and beyond and flip you to a nine a 10 out of 10. It's very uncommon.
It doesn't happen that frequently.
And when it does, it sticks, you remember it, and you'd become a true brand ambassador more often than not.
Again, not thinking I was going to quote Bill Gates this morning.
I didn't even actually quote him.
But this stuff actually holds true.
I see Poppy's coming up.
I know he's going to double tap on this with his background.
Like, if you're able to flip those detractors into promoters, they will become your biggest fan.
Sorry. Back to you, Shaolin.
Now you're good. I mean, you pretty much hit it. I just created a post.
I don't know if you want me, if I can have the privilege to adding it to the top.
Absolutely. Go for it.
Yeah. So it's pretty much the same concept, right? This actually worked for me.
So I was running, you know, a Web3 gaming community.
And as you can imagine, the shift in narrative when it went from everyone loves it for two to
three months to everyone hates it for like I don't know till now right and so
literally it was my job as community manager to risk mitigate a lot of these
things I literally made the best of friends with some of the largest
futters and the largest holders and the most known people in the space where after having spent the time in discord uh and then going to a dm and then having a 90
minute phone conversation i met him in ira uh an irl in at nft paris he introduced me to grail
some of the again some of the larger investors in both nfts as well as um the gaming space and he
i had the pleasure of meeting five or six of them.
They all gave me the peace of mind.
And it was one of those things that I took that opportunity
and transformed myself from just a community manager
to an advisor to a relationship retention specialist.
I mean, there's so many different names you can go with.
But the reality was it changed the entire landscape
because then they became positive on the time.
They became positive in the chats and you know they were a bit reluctant because they would almost get funded
in a sense but the reality was the damage was reduced the sentiment changed i couldn't do this
forever by the way because you know again i'm not the product manager and there's you know web3
sentiment for game i mean the sentiment for Web3 games also died down too,
but I didn't have those people in my air anymore.
And the other thing to just account for is, again, to your point,
the reason why most people are here is because they're super fans.
They're highly engaged.
They're maxis.
They're bag holders.
People want to do the things that they want to do.
And then the things that they don't like, they want to, you know,
fun hard as possible.
But they're just the same person depending on the light they decide to choose, right?
Whether you want to use that as a Star Wars reference or whatever, it's just what it is.
And I think that's the biggest thing when you talk to founders and you talk to projects
and people building, how do you manage?
...of where community management really takes full ownership in the age of AI because a chatbot can't
do this. It doesn't understand the dynamic. It doesn't understand the shift and the paradigm
of human interest, of the ability to kind of go back and forth because I think it would drive an
AI nuts. It's not rational. But nonetheless, these are the people who are stewarding brands.
They're stewarding sentiment. they're stewarding vibes.
And I think that's the biggest impact when you get for opportunities that come to the timeline
like this is to really, like, if you're a community builder, like if you're a community
manager or moderator, this is where you get to come into the flow, add your thoughts, right?
Change the timeline in some instances, and then create more argument and debate.
Because I think this is one of the topics that's super necessary
as you start to see the differentiation of these things happening in this space,
especially in the age of Cloud Code, Cloud Bot, I forget the name, OpenClaw.
And it really helps push why Web3, the narrative of community-driven user acquisition,
community-driven sentiment and vibes.
If you're doing IP, like there's just so many different ways to shift the narrative in this direction based off of this one negative experience.
Well said.
We're going to go to an idiot next because I had invoked one of his posts and then we will get through all these hands.
Appreciate everyone's patience.
Clearly, we've struck a nerve. We haven't went spicy cap for a while. I don't know if I've ever
even thrown the spicy emoji in the title before. It's not even engagement bait. It was my read on
the sentiment on the timeline. I felt a certain way. It's not even really that deep for me,
but I do hope, again, similar to my take on Monday about yoga and the Bordea Piat Club
and communications and frequent communications are good. Once again, comms, your community,
it can be a superpower here, having a team behind you. It also can lead to some of your more challenging days if they turn against you. And often it's not just what you say, but when and how you say things
has a huge impact in this space. But I do, it also, what Shallon said where
like the debate, like the pushback, that's important. Like you don't just want a discord
full of people who
are glazing and just bag pumping your, whatever you're building all the time. You need the candid
feedback. Like you should have that conflict from time to time. It's not a bad thing, but you can't
get defensive. You can't start taking shots at people or gaslighting people when they're unhappy
with something like listen to what they're saying. Like. Like, use that to your benefit. Don't dig your feet in and start taking shots at them. That's
just not the way. And, Eddie, I'm going to pull up your post here in a second. But, GM, I will,
I'll show this on stage, but feel free to take it whichever direction you like. Appreciate you
joining the stage today. Hey, skip me real quick. I'll be right back.
I'm at work.
I'm dealing with something right now.
You got it.
Just throw your hand back up when you're ready
and we will go back to you.
I think we had, well, you know what?
Cheesus, you want to get in here?
I don't see the hand, but I invoked you yesterday.
As soon as I said we'd be talking about this.
I know you have some thoughts on this.
I know you've been streaming on Abstract
and you've been an Abstract supporter
from the jump as far as I know
and deep in many of the ecosystems.
We'll go to Cheesus and I'll get to the rest of these hands.
Cheese this GM.
Pleasure.
Appreciate you joining us.
What's up, bro?
Yeah, man.
It's like, it's definitely something I'm like very passionate about because we've invested
so much time on Abstract.
As you said, I was there in Testnet.
So like being able to stream on day one and hearing the excitement
from luca's voice uh which you have that i think that video pinned at the top um obviously you know
if you thought you were going to be streaming on abstract and making a million dollars
like i think you're a little bit delusional, but at the same time, it's like,
there's very,
I'm sorry,
but didn't he say he was going to get like all the biggest streamers and it
was going to be like,
it was going to be the hottest place to stream.
Like,
isn't that like,
cause of his connections.
Didn't he say that?
Well,
I mean,
he said a lot of things and you know uh most founders do say a lot
of things and they don't end up coming to fruition so you know i've learned in the five years to take
a lot of things founders say with you know with a with a fucking truckload of salt yeah and i would
i just add that he said the top streamers will make millions of dollars. I respect that.
I didn't have any delusions of making millions of dollars.
But where that put me is like streaming is going to be a big priority, a big focus for Abstract.
They were going to not only bring in big streamers, but also help with distribution, help with awareness, help with discoverability.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Well, I mean, I've had endless amounts of conversations, even when Finn was there.
I've had, you know, had a great relationship with him and a lot of people on the team.
The team is great.
Like I've had calls with Raj.
You know, I was, I talked in the AMA.
I highlighted this in the AMA a few weeks ago that streamers aren't getting the
attention the the upgrade that they just recently did yeah it's cool but they're just basically you
know saved themselves a lot of money and they're just piggybacking off of twitch and and x you know
can you can you explain that i didn't where's the cost savings on how they're doing it this way
well because i now somebody can correct me if I'm wrong,
but, you know, they were streaming and running the services themselves.
So based on the amount of, you know, viewers,
I think is the weight of how the streaming was priced in maybe
on what they were doing prior.
But now they're just basically grabbing,
I can't remember the exact term, now they're just basically grabbing i can't remember the exact
term but they're just basically they're basically mirroring your stream which is not against twitch
policies we had this debate on myspace um it's not against any any terms of service
and you're just basically mirroring it just like you use StreamYard. I mean, they're just mirroring it to their platform.
So they saved a lot of money there.
And I appreciate that.
It makes our streams look like there's a lot more people watching.
That's everything they're doing from the outside
is, to me, preparing everything for the eventual TGE.
They're trying to create more demand on the chain. They're trying to create more demand on the chain.
They're trying to create more transactions.
They're trying to show more viewers on the streams
because I would go in there and the top streamer
would have like 40, 50 people viewing them.
Then it would quickly just go down to two or three people
watching streams.
Then you'd have the rare occurrence where people had 20 or 30
and whether they were verified or not. people watching streams, then you'd have the rare occurrence where people had 20 or 30 and
whether they were verified or not. But now all the numbers are much bigger. And if anybody knows
in the space, if you can go to a VC or some type of investor and you're like, oh, look at all these
transactions and look at all this volume and look at all these wallets and all this stuff,
like it looks better. So you know for me they're
just they're kind of pumping these numbers and it's it's not a bad thing because we all want
our bags to you know to be worth a lot but i've i've dude i have i've suggested making a creator
corner in the discord a streamer corner i've i've requested a tiered badge system for streamers
guys that have been streaming since day one.
If you've streamed more than 500 times or 300 times,
you get like a, you know, they have GigaChat,
which, you know, that's another fucking conversation.
But like have a GigaStreamer where they get a big giant XP boost.
You know, there's so many things that they can do
and they're just ignoring the
creators that are advertising all the games,
all the brands,
all the stuff on abstract for free for the most part,
unless you have a rare,
you know,
unless you're a big enough creator to get a deal,
they're not going to help you with deal flow.
I even mentioned that like have the creator corner in there
where teams can come in there and reach out
and have access to creators to, you know, get creators deals.
Have the creator corner in the Discord
to where bigger creators can help smaller creators
grow on the platform.
Like, I've asked for so many fucking things.
Nothing's been done.
I'm not bearish on Abstract.
I continue to stream there every day.
Kyle streams with me when he's off work.
And I have been, and I won't stop.
Don't be using my government name up here in front of these people like that.
I got to say, an idiot is a much cooler name than Kyle.
No offense, but an idiot is-
Kyle makes me feel like I just crashed through the drywall with a flat brim monster cap on.
Yeah, I just, you know, I think it's...
Who's the biggest streamer right now in Abstract?
And how many viewers do they get?
I have the slightest clue.
It's probably Captain.
To be honest, it's probably this show.
If you don't mind, I'll jump in here real quick.
Yeah, do me a favor.
Like, I don't mind at all.
We're going to go right to you next.
I will say this, two things real quick. Is I saw Crypto Grit was trying to get up out here. I think
stage is full at the moment. And I feel bad because we have engaged a few times in the chat.
I think he just bounced. I attempted to add, Joe, just having some issues. X has been a little
finicky, but we'll appreciate everyone's patience. We will get to all the hands. This is a community
show. We'll get through everyone. Just need some patience as we have. A lot of people are passionate about this topic. So
bear with us as we get through the hands. We'll rotate the stage if we need to here in a bit,
but appreciate all the patience. Also, and at CryptoGrid, I see you back there.
Bear with me. I will get you up here. I've tried to add you. I just, I don't know if it's a full
stage or having some X issues, but we will get you up here. I'm curious to hear your thoughts
on this as well. I've enjoyed the back and forth in the DMs or the comments over the last few days. I will ask this of everyone.
I don't want to make this just a bitch session or event session about Abstract.
I understand we're all passionate. We care. I do think that some of the how they've said things,
how the Discord mod has gaslit some of the core community members is not great.
But I would, just as Cheesus gave some potential solutions,
some suggestions, some ways forward,
how if you're Saigar,
if you're on the abstract team,
feel free to share whatever you'd like.
But I would ask all of you to,
let's attempt to think critically.
So if anyone from the team does listen in,
let's give them some actionable advice,
not saying they're going to take all our advice
or they should take our advice,
but just as Cheez is here,
I have his suggestions.
Special giga streamer rule with percentage boosted,
higher XP, tiered badge system for OG and new streamers,
more stream tools and chat replies.
They may enact none of those.
They may enact all those.
I just, I think it's often
when we have these sort of conversations,
it gets a little spicy.
We always so pride ourselves here
on being able to disagree
without being disagreeable.
I think most people are on the kind of
the same side of the fence on this one,
but I would just like to challenge everyone.
What would you do if you're in Saigar or Lucas shoes?
Like, how would you make abstract better
for those that do care?
And how might I move this forward. But yeah,
an idiot go right ahead. I'll, I'll shift over to the, your post. I thought you had a good one
on this as well. Appreciate you getting up here. Yeah. And I'm always going to try to balance the
conversation, even if I'm going to play devil's advocate, but in this case, I actually kind of
changed my tune after I posted that earlier.
I see, you know, there's a lot of posts pinned to the top right now that are kind of negative, including my own being critical.
I don't see Sygar's response to all this.
Do you mind if I pin that just so people can reference it if they want?
Perfect. Please do. I was going to go find it next.
So if you got it, go ahead and throw it up there. Yeah, I'll just pin it. And I mean, he just basically addresses some of this.
It's long form. I won't read it, but you guys can read it if you want. Um, okay. So let
me just start with the ad shut thing. I don't know the guy. I I'm not the type that hangs out
in discords, but I will say this. I'm not particularly a big fan of, uh, you know,
tightly cropped text screenshots, uh, that are out of context.
I don't know what exactly the conversation was,
but I do know that he was, so, okay.
One of the problems that they were having with XP on NFTs
is that there was a lot of people that were buying
hundreds and hundreds of NFTs from dead collections
and getting a ton of XP by buying, you know,
NFTs at like $1 or something, right? So when, look, I'm a big fan of giving people the benefit
of the doubt. I'm going to assume that what he meant by that was those people, people buying
NFTs and holding them, like he said, only for XP that aren't holding NFTs because they're a fan
of the ecosystem itself, because it's a vibrant community or whatever.
They believe in the founders, whatever the case may be.
I'm going to assume that that statement was addressing people who were, you know, trying to game the system by buying hundreds upon hundreds of dead NFTs.
You know, that's an assumption too, right?
I don't know.
I don't know. Maybe it was being a bit of a dick to people. Maybe, you know, I's an assumption too, right? I don't know. I don't know.
Maybe it was being a bit of a dick to people.
Maybe, you know, I don't know.
Fair benefit of the doubt.
I would say what you say,
the words you type,
how you say things.
I know tone is very tough to convey
in text or in Discord.
But yeah, fair benefit of the doubt.
That change should have been made.
Logically, rationally, again,
makes sense for the business. But how and when they communicate this stuff, I do think matters.
And what I do have Sygar's post pulled up here. Thanks again for pinning that. And he quote tweeted
because he was getting a lot of flat because they said, since the people have asked, the calculation
for holding on-chain assets, tokens and NFTs will not change too much. So I think that's part of it.
And then they did change a lot, which led to some of this pushback. But go ahead, go ahead, an idiot, continue.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's just, it's a, again, text is difficult, like you just said. I promise,
I promise that you could screenshot all kinds of stuff while shit that I've said in group chats
and out of context, closely cropped, you know, you guys would burn me at the stake, I promise.
So, you know, benefit of the doubt on that one. And then, you know, you guys would burn me at the stake, I promise. So, you know,
benefit of the doubt on that one. And then, you know, look, when it comes to the XP,
yeah, I was very disappointed yesterday, right? It does feel like, it did initially feel like
a middle finger to everybody that was, I mean, look, I think the majority of people on Abstract
are there because they're a part of NFT communities and because they're kind of a fan of like the old
ethos of Web3, which was a little bit more about community and things like that.
And Abstract seems to be the only place where anything like that is happening anymore.
There's a few exceptions on ETH mainnet, right?
But there's a lot of...
I would add ApeChain.
I think ApeChain has a very similar, very passionate community.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe both are kind of walled off in their own gardens.
But yeah, like having... Like I'm not credibly deep in either. Like I'm not in other
side every day, but there's people that that are like hundreds of people every single day they're
in there. And there's a very passionate community. And like, that is a differentiating factor in
crypto in a world of insanely competitive blockchains and insanely most L2s aren't going
to make it. A lot of these L2s, I'm not going to name names, but a lot of these L2s
that raised hundreds of millions of dollars would kill to have the passionate community that
Abstract and ApeChain has. Go ahead. Absolutely. Absolutely. And look, I think at the end of the
day, it's just, it's a matter of they've tried to adjust the sliders of how XP
gets delved out to promote the on-chain behavior that they want to see, which is going to change
at any given moment. You know, I just think it was an overcorrection. And based on Saigar's
response, which was a good response, which I appreciated that, it made me feel better yesterday.
I think we'll see some very different outcomes next week.
And the only other thing I was going to say something about,
Joey brought up what Luca had said about, you know,
having big-time, big-name streamers and all this.
I think sometimes, you know, it's sort of like the OpenCTG thing.
When you're focused in on OpenC's TG not happening when they said it
would or whatever, you know, when I'm focused in on, you know, the Creeps team and they didn't do
what they said they were going to do, when I'm focused in on Luka and they didn't do what they
said they were going to do, if you zoom out and you take a broader look at the entire landscape,
last year did not go the way that any of our favorite teams thought it was going to go.
They all kind of made the mistake of promising things of our favorite teams thought it was going to go. They all kind
of made the mistake of promising things based on what we all thought was going to happen too,
right? Because if I didn't buy the same narrative that they were selling, you know, as the broader
markets, I wouldn't have held all of this stuff too, right? They thought what I thought, we all
thought, that's why we all, that's why they said what they said. That's why I bought what I bought, right?
So I just think, you know, it will hit a point where things are looking better.
They are approaching an abstract TG or an open CTG.
The markets are doing better.
Luca will start to fire up the marketing dollar spend.
You probably will see big name streamers coming on to abstract and streaming
right now. Granted, again, I'm given the benefit of the doubt here, but you know, I mean, these
are guys that I have chosen to believe in because of the execution that they've shown they are
capable of in the past. And I'm going to choose to believe that under the right conditions,
they're going to knock it right the fuck out of the park again. Um, you know, so I guess that's
all I've got to say is just zoom out a little bit,
realize that the landscape is the same for everybody.
Everybody's kind of guilty of the similar sins
as far as all these founders and team leaders go.
And, you know, I think it's just a waiting game.
And when, you know, when things are looking better broadly,
when, you know, we don't feel like we're on the cusp
of World War III or whatever, you know, is going on feel like we're on the cusp of World War III or whatever,
you know, is going on. I think you will see marketing spend. You'll see big name streamers
on Abstract. I got to admit, I'm shocked to see your XP tapped it. I mean, that does actually
imply that there's like zero XP going to streamers, which I think is probably the next thing that they
could use some pushback on. But look, Saigar proved yesterday
that with the right amount of pushback, they're willing to adjust, right? I said this yesterday
in our space, you know, conversation shapes the culture. We're all having a conversation about
this. They're absorbing the feedback. And I think they'll make adjustments as necessary. Anyway,
that's all I got. No, good take. I got one question back to you, and then we'll go Joey,
Poppy, and then I'll go Joey, Poppy,
and then I will get through the rest of the hands here.
Really appreciate everyone's patience as we work through this.
Appreciate everyone's interest in adding to the conversation today.
Love, these are some of my favorite spaces. Not that we're spicy or being critical of Abstract or their XP system,
but rather I love when we get dozens of people on stage
there in their thoughts. It really makes the show from my perspective also makes my job a little bit
easier. So thank you all. This was the post that an idiot was referencing. I'd went from 56,
53 XP the week prior down to 32 last week. And again, this is not a me thing. Like I really
don't care. Like I'm in gold. I thought I was going to get gold tier two, something like 10,000 away. I may never get there if it's going to be 32 a
week. But I do expect them fully to make some changes. Maybe they say, hey, streamers aren't
important and you're not going to get those. Whatever it is, fine, we move on. My question
for an idiot, though, do you have, like like you mentioned execution and all that they've done
in the past. Do you have concern over, I mean, some of the other comments in those screen grabs
were that from the Discord mod was that Luca's not really involved anymore. I had sensed this
just based on things that he had said publicly and hadn't really heard him talking much about
it recently and mostly been Igloo, Pudgy, Pudgy World, etc. Do you have concern?
How, let me ask you this, how important is Luka's day-to-day involvement
to the execution and the success of Abstract, in your opinion?
I mean, look, I'm not worried about that.
I think Luka's as involved as he needs to be.
I think he knows how to manage businesses and put people in positions that,
you know, are capable of doing the job.
I think Saigar does a phenomenal job.
You know, I think Luca oversees everything, but overall he's, he's, you know,
got Saigar taking care of that side of things that, you know,
I think it's good,
good for punching penguins that Luca is not dividing his attention more than
necessary. Right. I think that's good business management personally.
Agreed. Agreed. I think some would probably disagree and they're going to say, oh, our faith and hope was in Luca.
From my viewpoint, it's more bullish to me that Luca is not in the weeds, not in the day-to-day,
but he's running or he's involved at more of an executive level, not a general manager level.
Because at that case, that would put, I think, to be bad for abstract and Puchy Penguin. Like you just, we only, even with AI, even with improved efficiencies,
we only have so much time in the day. And when you're responsible for as many things that Igloo
and Luca is, you need good generals, you need good leaders, and you need to be able to empower
them and trust them to run the day-to-day of the different divisions. Otherwise, everything's going to suffer. So I agree with you. I think
that we might be in the minority. I think there might be- Probably, probably. The cult of Luca
is real. Like I think a lot of people were bullish abstract, not because of Pudgy Penguins or Saigar
or Abstract or Streaming or any of their portal. I think they were bullish Abstract
because they're bullish Luca.
Sorry, I almost said Freudian slip there.
Like I'm old enough to remember,
like Never Fade Yuga was a rallying cry of all of crypto.
And I just, I do, I think that a lot of people,
probably their feelings towards Abstract
are tied to their belief in bullishness in Luka.
Yeah, I agree.
Look, I'm sure that Luka is as involved as he needs to be.
And to be honest, like, you know, I've seen how micromanaging the people underneath you
can actually be a huge detractor.
So like, you know, whatever he's doing, you know, I'm going to just choose to believe
that, you know, he's doing what's necessary and what's in the best interest of everybody. It's not like he sold Abstract to Saigar and
washed his hands of it and, you know, rode off into the sunset. I'm sure he's as involved as
he feels he needs to be. So, yeah. And by the way, one more thing real quick. I will say that,
like, you know, despite what anybody's opinions of, like, a Discord mod or whatever it might be,
there are a lot of great people involved in,
in abstract on the community side.
You guys see you've got GMB up here.
I'm a big fan of this guy.
GMB is by the way,
also is not just some like moon boy,
you know,
badged affiliate.
That's just going to give you positive takes all the time.
Toxic positivity.
GMB has been constructively critical in conversations with me.
You know,
I'm a big fan of this guy,
a big fan of Marianne, a big fan of Saucy.
There's a lot of really great people
on the community side of abstract.
I had a Dahlia.
Dahlia, big fan of Dahlia.
Probably one of the, actually,
actually one of the funniest people I know
that's working in a high position for one of these teams.
I'm a big fan of Dahlia.
Dahlia.
Dahlia, Dahlia, Dahlia, excuse me.
Dahlia, Dahlia.
This is very, if you're new here, it's very on brand for me.
It is a sign of affection and endearment if I mispronounce your name.
That is, I mean, I mispronounced Joey for like the first 17 times we had him on stage.
I say that all the time, bro.
And I get, I get shit on for, you know.
I do, uh, Bacchavelli and, uh, Kaido Dan Reels.
I see you all out there.
We will get you up,
I think just full stage.
I'm done.
I'll rotate.
I'll rotate down
so you can bring someone else up.
But thanks for having me.
No, great takes this morning.
Really appreciate you sharing.
I won't repeat the government name,
but it's good to make
that connection today.
And I've enjoyed getting
to know you a little better.
And I thought great,
great take yesterday.
Very, I think,
measured response today.
And yeah, appreciate always adding to the conversation.
By the way, I did put on an abstract PFP
because it is like, it's meant as constructive criticism.
I'm not, I'm never going to dunk on abstract
and try to be one.
That's why I put on an abstract PFP.
It's like, I'm being critical,
but I'm being critical as part of the fam here.
You know, anyway.
It's very important.
No, thanks for joining us.
I do think that good constructive feedback, being critical anyway it's very important no thanks for joining us i do think that
good constructive feedback being critical when it's necessary is important otherwise
they're just they're not going to improve they're not going to get better um let's do this let's go i said joey then poppy and then i do want to get gmb in here uh who was just invoked we will get
everyone else's hands greatly appreciate your patience both those on stage as well as those
trying to get up uh jo, GM, thoughts on this?
And then Poppy's on deck.
Yeah.
I don't want to jump in front of other people because I know Mike was up here before me.
So is that...
Go ahead.
Just go ahead and take it.
And then we'll go Mike after GMB.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, I've been in Discord, just I'll touch on this quickly, since way before NFTs.
Like I started using Discord as a member of like video game communities and help, you know, mod and build them.
And now with Beasy, to your point, being running a Discord is really difficult.
is really difficult. Dealing with all the different personalities is difficult. Dealing
Dealing with all the different personalities is difficult.
with all the different languages is difficult because sometimes when people that speak another
language try to type in English, it doesn't come across correctly. Like I get, I still get in
trouble sometimes in tickets and busy because, you know, like someone will ask how to do something
and I'm like, here's a link to our Git book. It's really simple. And they're like, if it was really
simple, I wouldn't be asking you.
And I have to remember, like, I can't assume that everybody just knows how to do things,
right?
So I even get in trouble sometimes because I tend to text the way I talk, which is very
direct.
So it's not easy being a mod.
And especially if you're not an English speaking mod or you're dealing with people that don't
especially if you're not an English speaking mod or you're dealing with people that don't speak
speak English.
English. In regards to like what's going on with abstract and many other projects that we see in
this space, because there could be a whole list of them. I really do believe that many of these
projects just took on too much too fast. They wanted to be, you know, they wanted to be a gaming,
then they wanted to be plushies, and then they wanted to launch a token, and then they wanted to launch a chain, and then they wanted to do, like, I mean, we've seen so many pivots. for Cool Cats, they launched a gambling game on MegaEth that was like the same as Death.Fun
on Abstract, right? Like you click a little, like Minesweeper style, right? Like whoever thought
two, three years ago, Cool Cats was going to launch a gambling game, right? So like,
I understand they're trying to stay alive and create revenue.
And, but at some point, and we've said this about Yuga, right. And you, and you've been very,
and other Yuga holders or ape holders have been very like excited about the fact that they're
unloading things, right. They sold heavy metal. They've, they've unloaded like, and they're
supposed to be refocused on the club and
only other side and so from like abs from anybody's perspective that's building in this space
like taking the idea of like we have to do all of this stuff to be successful versus being really
good at one thing can sometimes cause you to be really bad at everything. And maybe that's the case,
what's going on with Igloo, right? Because they've got pudgy world, they've got abstract,
they've got the toys, they've got so much going on and maybe their attention got too fragmented.
And that's what's caused all of this to happen maybe.
I don't know.
I'm not in that room,
but it does feel like there's just a whole lot going on sometimes
from these individual projects.
And I'll stop.
No, fair.
I would just add that easier said than done.
Like, it's very tough.
Crypto's in a tough spot.
We were talking OpenSea the other day.
While I can understand both sides,
like double down and just be the best in the world of NFTs,
at the same time, there's not a real road.
There's not a real path for them to only doing NFTs
and growing into the size of the company that they are,
that they need to be.
Like, they need to capture revenue from other sources.
They need to add some divisions.
And I get why and think
it's wise and prudent to do that. I think I would just go back to when you do expand, when you do,
you know, think about like, maybe not the best analogy because they're probably not fishing with
pools, but even like a fishing boat that's out there in the ocean, they don't have just one
pool in the water. They got a lot. And the best way to catch one
is to be taking multiple shots.
That said, you got to have...
But they're not fishing for different fish though, Cap, right?
They're not deep sea fishing.
Well, it's important to have someone good
on each fishing pool.
You got to have a great team in place
when you do expand.
And I'm not knocking the team members.
I really don't know any of them personally,
but I do have to share.
We're going to go to Poppy
and then GMB is on deck.
I just have to share
because Riz Bryant wins the chat today.
Joey was talking about the BZ Discord
and Riz says,
it's not easy being BZ.
I don't know how you make that a tagline,
but I'm kind of shocked
that it took us this long
to get that one, uh, as a fan of alliterations and, um, in good taglines, it's not easy being
busy is, uh, I think that that needs to stick somewhere. I'm not sure how or where, but Joey,
I'll leave that one with you. Um, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll put that one in the bank. And lastly,
I'll say about expanding though, like as busy an example, we get requests all the time for magic, the gathering,
Yu-Gi-Oh, more watches, whatever. Right. And would it be easy to add all of those things? Yes.
But does it make sense from a business perspective? If the market isn't there,
the users aren't there, the liquidity isn't there. We're not. So I hear what you're saying about like you know the the fishing pole example but at the
same time like if it's it has to be the audience the consumers the people have to be there right
just doing it for the sake of doing it i think and we saw that and again this we're not going
back on yuga but yuga did a whole lot of stuff that they've now pushed off, right? Moonburns, heavy metal.
So I think sometimes you just got to be careful with how often and how willing you are to do more things, which could potentially take you away from your number one revenue generator
or focus.
Very fair.
And it's very hard.
As I get ready to hand it to Poppy here, I'll share two books.
This is two like real pieces of alpha.
I know not everyone's a reader. Download Audible, crank it up to one and a half X.
These are two oldie book goodies that I think should be required reading for all.
On the topic of not spreading yourself too thin, a good book to read, a great book to read is Good
to Great by Jim Collins. One of the takeaways in there is like, focus on what you can be the
best in the world at. This is a book, I actually may go back and read this. I haven't probably
read it. It's maybe been two decades, but it was one as I was building businesses, it really was
a hit for me in my entrepreneurial career on not chasing every new shiny toy and just doubling down
on what I felt we could become the best in the world at. And in my retail career,
it was, we focused on just delivering
the best customer experience.
We wanted to wow every customer.
That was our core value, number one.
Wow our customers every single time.
Like open the doors for them,
thank them for their business,
make eye contact, shake their hands.
A lot of those principles to do that,
we picked right out of
How to Win Friends and Influence People from Dale Carnegie. There's a new one. shake their hands. A lot of those principles to do that, we picked right out of how to win
friends and influence people from Dale Carnegie. There's a new one. There's a revised one in the
digital age. The original is still a good read, but some of the stories are a little dated. It
probably won't hit with a lot of like the Gen Z. The new one in the digital age is a kind of an
update, a revision on the original topic.
But it's the things I just said.
It's like the importance of remembering
and using people's names and shaking hands.
Like, so for like, if you've got a young Discord mod
that you'd like to them to understand
how to talk to people a little better,
this is probably the number one book I would recommend.
The title doesn't sound the greatest,
like win friends and influence people.
It's a home run with actual tactical advice that I think would benefit a lot of these.
And I'm not, I know it's not just age thing. It's not just younger kids. I had to learn this stuff
too. And I'm not better than anyone else. I've just, you know, I'm twice the age of some of
these kids. So I've made a lot of mistakes and then got turned on to success principles and advice like the two books I just shared that I think are
valuable. Poppy, I'm guessing you've probably read How to Win Friends and Influence People
once or twice. Do you have people waiting to come up? I can go down.
Ooh. Yeah, there's a couple. Okay, I'll go down.
Appreciate you jumping up. Poppy, GM. Yeah. Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes.
That book is probably one of the biggest catalysts for me personally back 10 plus years ago.
And recently somebody asked me about mentorship.
somebody asked me like about mentorship or it was another founder just asking how I deal with
how I deal with people and all the different personalities in a community and like keeping
everybody balanced and respectful and I was like look there's really two books uh how to win friends
and influence people I would say is number one even if you're not a reader um that book has so
many principles about just being a good,
trustworthy, reliable person that I think it's kind of a must. And then Emotional Intelligence
2.0 is a great book because it's very easy to read. It's basically one thought per page.
And it's taught me a lot about how to deal with people and how to keep,
you have to keep emotions out of business.
It's very important.
So anyway, yes, absolutely.
I have not read Emotional Intelligence 2.0,
so I just added to my wishlist.
It'll be the next one.
I'm debating whether I share the one I read
or listened to most recently.
I'm not going to right now.
I might come back to it.
It is not related to today's conversation, although it was a tough read. It was good,
but it was a tough read for me. It shook me. I'll just say that. Poppy, go ahead.
Thanks for the share. Yeah, you're good. To be honest, I think that may be the number one book
for someone who's trying to be an entrepreneur, business owner, just deal with people better.
Marriage, relationships, you know, friendships.
It's a great emotional intelligence 2.0.
It's a great, great, great book.
It's very practical.
It's an easy read.
So, look, you know, when at the time I'm in a different position now, obviously, you know, being an owner now for over six months, a lot of learning, a lot of adjusting.
But to be honest, I think I think a lot of it is about setting proper expectations and proper communication.
And proper communication.
I'll get to that in a second because I definitely don't want to compare myself to any other founder, including Luca.
So I just want to unpack this from a different perspective to make sure it comes off correctly.
At the time when Pengu came, I was probably 150 ETH to, yeah, about 150 ETH.
100 to 150 ETH in the Pudgy ecosystem with all different types of grails I was holding and trading.
And the Pengu drop was exciting.
We were leading into it but after after the pengu drop um there were some people that you know were pretty close to luca that
were you know in this specific group it was pretty much all the pudgy whales were in the same group
and you know this one particular person was really pumping us up. You know, Abstract is coming in a month, two months.
It's going to be a bigger airdrop than Pengu.
You know, so when the Pengu claim happened, Pudgies dropped immediately down to, like, single digits.
I think they were, like, five.
Some of the blurbids were hitting in the fives, if I remember.
And this individual pretty much, you know, rallied all of us with this information,
which it is what it is, right?
It's like, bro, do it.
We were all fired up, and a lot of us deployed liquidity
and were excited about Abstract and that airdrop and all this stuff.
Am I upset at Abstract or Luca forirdrop and all this stuff. Am I upset at, you know, Abstract or Luca for that?
No, absolutely not.
Like this is an individual in the ecosystem that, you know,
did have relationships and was trusted,
literally dumped on all our heads the next two weeks,
dumped like a hundred penguins and disappeared from the space.
So basically just rallied us to be his big fat exit liquidity,
which perpetually has
hurt the pudgy floor for sure.
Anyway, the point being is, number one, I think expectation is really important, right?
And communication, clear communication, even if you want to stay vague, even if you don't
want to give delivery dates, those things are extremely important as well.
And I think, you know,
I have friends that build on abstract. I've, you know, bought their projects. And
the one thing that has been a common theme in conversations, because I keep relationships with
a lot of those founders, is the lack of support. And this is not a yesterday. I saw a lot of the,
I honestly saw a lot of that on the timeline
yesterday i wasn't looking for it it found me with uh the way the someone in the discord i forget
his name might even be pinned up top i'm not sure but um this individual was basically just you know
putting nfts down and then they i guess they took xp away and just said, abstract isn't for NFTs. And I'm like,
you know,
to me,
that's,
it's,
you know, it doesn't hurt.
My life changed my life.
Really.
You know,
I've,
I've bought some NFTs.
If they go to zero,
it's cool.
I supported some good people,
but like there are some pretty passionate people building NFT projects on
abstract and their consistent communication to me and, and the streamers too, like we've talked
about it, has just been, you know, a lack of overall support. And I feel like that is an easy
fix. If you're going to, if you're going to have an environment where you're encouraging people to
build, you know, I remember when we go back maybe a year, whatever it was,
everybody on Twitter had the green background, right?
Everybody was basically abstracting their PFP.
There was a huge rally
and there was pretty big expectations
and things do change, obviously,
but at the end of the day,
the one common principle that I think is so important, because nobody's perfect, we'll all make mistakes, is you just have to try to under-promise and over-deliver.
I think the space had this expectation that like the meta, what the meta was at that moment mattered.
And I've actually never cared about these stupid metas. Like I remember there was a period of time where everybody on the timeline
was like, it's airdrop season. Like if your project isn't airdropping you money, what are
you doing there? And like, it got really aggressive, but like, I didn't really see any projects get
airdrops besides like one, I remember there was one really big one to pudgy holders, maybe two.
Like, did anybody really get life-changing airdrops?
Or was it just this projection from influential people in the space?
So I think the problem really ultimately is that you just have to find your North Star,
stick to it.
Growth and evolution is great,
but pivoting to these metas to try to drive volume
leaves a lot of people hurt in the end, you know?
Yep.
Appreciate the takes.
And I am excited for Emotional Intelligence 2.0.
I will say this, you mentioned airdrops.
So I got to share my post from this morning
because I'm, you know, I met Victory Lap when I'm right.
I also admit when I'm wrong.
Q1 has not been what I anticipated, not from any particular project, but I did think the market was going to be quite a bit different.
My post this morning was, remember the people who thought TGss from Abstract, OpenSea, and MegaEth
would jumpstart Q1 2026?
Me, me, I'm those people.
And then other people added to it,
like MetaMask, like there's some like,
we had all these lists like December, January,
like, oh, these are 40 airdrops coming in in 2026.
These are 50 TGEs hitting in 2026.
I think we've gotten like two of them.
And the ones, and for those that are delaying, I don't blame it. Like look at,GEs hitting in 2026. I think we've gotten like two of them. And the ones,
and for those that are delaying, I don't blame it. Like look at, and this is not taking shots.
I haven't even looked at the price, but I saw based on anecdotally some timeline comments that Katana did TGE yesterday and did not go well. So for those that are delaying,
seems like a wise decision. GMBmb really appreciate your patience uh thank you
for the comments thank you for passing along my um you know my post i did this isn't like i didn't
want to make this about me it was just it was it was somewhat shocking and i appreciate you passing
along with the team and i don't doubt that the changes will be made and uh i'm here for it but
thanks so much for joining us today thoughts ons on all this? Feel free to take it whichever direction you'd like.
Hey, Captain.
Thanks for having me, man.
I appreciate it. There's a lot to comment on, so I'll try and get through everything.
One thing that I think Poppy was saying,
also a good book for you guys that haven't read it,
I recommend The Almanac of Naval Rivikant.
almanac of naval rivikon if you guys haven't read that that one is 10 out of 10 um also atomic
If you guys haven't read that, that one is 10 out of 10.
habits atomic habits by james clear is really good as well yep um yeah but you got so poppy
was saying how the chain is uh not for nfts i would have to disagree um i think appstrad was
as he said in a space where you have have these NFT communities, they're not aligning with, oh, AppShud's here.
They're not aligning with the chain.
If people are going to exploit XP, it doesn't make sense for them to have XP.
So I think that's what he was trying to say.
I think people are misconstruing what's being said on the timeline.
And then also, Poppy was saying how...
GMB, real quick.
Did you see the Discord comments, though, from whoever that mod was?
I didn't see Saigar's thing, so I have no idea what was on the timeline.
I'm just talking about the comments from a Discord mod that I read yesterday.
A couple things, and I think an idiot hit it up well, that often it's hard.
Like, screenshots can be taken out of context without
context. When it's just one comment,
it can be taken out of context. I see actually
Abschud joined us on stage. Excited to get
Abschud into the conversation. I appreciate you jumping up here.
I would love to hear directly from
you.
Conversation's been...
Obviously, some people feel a way. I think
my biggest takeaway from all this
is the passion for abstract remains, which is a good thing. But let's, GMB, go ahead and get back
in here, finish your thoughts. I did say Mike was on deck a while ago, has been super patient. So
we'll let Mike get in here after GMB. And then I'd like to let Abschud cut the line as the topic
of some of this conversation this morning. I want to get the mic to him as, you know, as cool as soon as we can.
Not sure if he's got any time constraints this morning, but GMB,
go ahead and finish and then we'll go mic and then apps, Judd.
Yeah, you guys are all good.
And I also wanna say, I talked with Dyla for very long.
We had a very long call yesterday and I was bringing up some of the things that I,
like all these, all the feedback that I i wanted to um you know tell her about
streaming because i saw your post captain i was like there's no way like you had adam the cmo of
open sea on your stream and i'm like how is how on earth did this guy get 35 xp in one week and i
just thought i i put that to dial up right when i saw it and um yeah that pretty sure that like
got sent up but i yeah i agree like
that's definitely not i wouldn't say that because it makes no sense for you right and just just on
that one i i do acknowledge that that was tuesday this week coincidentally the same day that the
the 32 xp hit but i know there's a lag there so like i will that that any any xp that would
have resulted from that stream with
adam would be next tuesday if i'm not mistaken but i thought i was down bad bro you were cooked
well still like you stream don't you stream like every day yeah every day from eight to ten
however after the change there was a few days we missed i just i want to be fair i want to make
sure i'm being completely you know like i 32 was still shocking but i get that there was a couple like normally it's five
days every week for a couple hours and last week after the change and how we streamed or to to
abstract uh missed missed a day or two but uh appreciate you sharing along and i will uh i'll
share dial his post here as well yeah even even with that like even if you missed a couple days
like 32 is i mean i definitely i was like that doesn't make any sense to me. So I sent that to the team.
Also regarding streaming, I feel like the same way.
I know like what Luke was saying.
And I think we also have to give some grace where the market is completely changed from what we thought.
I think we thought Q4 was going to be up only.
we thought q4 was going to be up only q1 would be a lot different than we thought and but i i think
Q1 would be a lot different than we thought.
communication i i uh in my post i i pretty much said communication is i think the one thing that
would have changed the whole everything we wouldn't be having you know this conversation if there was
you know a post by you know sygar or the, I think that would have been a complete game changer
if we were like, oh, there's going to be a huge change in XP,
this, that, that.
Pretty much what Saigar said in the pinned post here,
if we got that a day before, an hour before,
I think that would have been,
that would have gave us so much more clarity
where people aren't crashing out
and people understand, okay, well, you have these NFT projects
that are pretty
much exploiting leveraging xp not really doing anything and now xp is more aligned with you know
the the you know the abstracts basically course correcting their xp system and now it makes more
sense that's fine for the xp side but the streaming side has nothing to do with bitcoin being at 60k or any of those type
of rewards and more attention needs to be paid to that because how else are how else is abstract
going to get attention it's either negative stuff about xp that overtakes the timeline or now you
have streamers that are upset and have been upset or just feeling like
they're not that no attention is paid to them.
I understand they just did their, their upgrade, but you know,
I think there's a big,
there needs to be a change there because you want to attract as many streamers
as possible. And I've seen so many people, like I said,
from day one that were really good creators that have left because
there's just, there's, you know,
there's no push there by
the team or help with growth
on the stream inside. And
then there's frankly no rewards. It's like,
why should I get my audience to abstract
and talk about abstract games,
play these games and do these things
when I could be talking
about something else, you know,
on another platform or just streaming on kick or Twitch or just on X.
yeah,
you know,
even though I have the badge,
I'm not going to be like glazing abstract,
but like the one thing I will say is that I agree with you.
Like I,
I agree with you to be honest.
Like if someone's to ask me like,
why were you going to stream on abstract?
I'd be like,
well, the community, like I'll be honest. if someone's to ask me like oh why were you gonna stream on abstract i'd be like well the community like i'll be honest the community is insane like i grew my entire
community from streaming alone um but i there definitely is some things and i um i feel like
there is it can only go up from here for streaming but i completely agree with you jesus i completely
agree and i love abstract i we talk about, like I said,
my spaces I guarantee has fallen off by 50%, 60%
because we talk about abstract so much.
My one co-host doesn't even engage for 85% of the space
because he doesn't like abstract,
but he still shows up and listens to us
talk about fucking everything on abstract.
So I'm still an advocate i
still support it i like the team is great um so yeah i'm sure there's some people in here it's
gonna clip some shit and captain get ready to get famous um you're gonna have you're gonna have
clips all day long probably from this so well uh i'll just double down on context is important.
Context matters.
And whether it's a screen grab or a clip,
often it can be out of context
and, you know,
fully understand that.
But yeah, clip away.
Feel free to clip away
and share that on the timeline.
Appreciate everyone's patience.
Once again,
we will get to all these hands.
As always,
open stage here on Coffee with Captain.
If you're new,
if you just came in for this conversation,
we do go live every Monday through Friday
at 8 a.m. Eastern time.
Typically, the first hour of the show
is news of the day turning topics.
Then often we're fortunate to have a special guest
around the nine o'clock hour.
Today's, you know, we're just gonna,
I've got a few other things.
We'll, they're kind of evergreen.
So if we don't get into the other topics today,
we can put them to tomorrow and have a,
you know, a catch all Friday.
But enjoying this conversation and clearly a lot-all Friday, but enjoying this conversation.
And clearly, a lot of passionate individuals want to get in on it as well.
Mike, you've been on ice probably for about an hour now.
So I want to get you in here.
Always some great takes, some sage advice.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
And then we've got Abschud.
We're going to cut the line and hear directly from Abschud. But Mike, go ahead. GM, in in here directly from from abschud but mike go ahead
gm appreciate you joining us well good morning um thank you yeah i i was gonna speak on the
perspective of being a mod i was a a paid mod for over a year in a discord for a brand new project that was a DGEN project specifically. And I'm not a DGEN,
so to speak. I guess by default, I could be in here. So, you know, perspectives were different
between me and other people. And there's, man, there's so much to say. The things that have
been brought up so far, like communication, is absolutely critical.
The problem that we had was the team, the founders, were undoxed publicly and they wouldn't even tell us who they are.
So there were four of us that were the constant ones and running the whole Discord essentially as mods.
And people would come in and, you know, I do remember specifically sometimes when people would come in and say, well, you know, they should be doing this, they should be doing that. And
I would just respond by saying, okay, it sounds like, you know, more than I do. And,
and I want to learn things. So tell me, have you seen this work before? And, you know, what,
what can I tell them to, to possibly help them do this if they want to and you know what what can I tell them to to possibly help them do this
if they want to you know I would treat things like that because you have to meet people where
they are one thing about your show which I love too is that you guys always met people where they
are and you never talk down to anybody and I really appreciate that too, because you get more out of people that way.
Emotional intelligence is critical. I really appreciate the, um, the book that Poppy recommended.
Um, I think raising kids helped me a lot too, because you, you allow them to have emotions
and just say, it's okay to be emotional. And everybody is allowed to have emotions and just say it's okay to be emotional and everybody is allowed to have
their emotions. They can think the way they want. Having a discussion about something is great,
which is where the communication comes in. I feel like I'm rambling a lot here, but
there's so many different topics to touch on. And one of the problems that we had with the project that
I was the mod in is that eventually it got to the point where it just wasn't sustainable for us
to keep doing this without the information that we needed to pass along to the community.
And I think it's incumbent on founders to be able to empower people to have the knowledge to actually answer the questions.
Or if a question comes to the founders from the mods, which came from the community, they need to get back to people in a shorter time period than a week, which is something that we had.
And it just, it can be very frustrating when somebody comes in and starts criticizing or starts being personal or something like that.
But you have to breathe for a minute before you respond and just say, okay.
Like Joey said, maybe it's not their first language.
That's a miscommunication that could happen.
Maybe they're upset because, you know, they dropped to 35. That's a communication
that can happen as long as you take a step back and say, okay, here's the changes. I'm sorry we
didn't communicate it better. This is what we were thinking and this is why we did what we did.
And I'm sure if you had that information, it either would have helped you adjust beforehand or would have at least said, OK, I understand now.
Now I can adjust moving forward and get my stuff back or get better at what I'm doing in your world so that I earn more.
It comes down to communication. But, you know, I always treated everybody
as people who had opinions and emotions, and they were allowed to have them.
And I think that's really important. That's, I guess, that's the main point.
Yeah, no, I agree. And having those, sharing those opinions, taking the opinions.
Now, with that being said, not all opinions,
not all feedback should be enacted upon or is valuable.
And at the end of the day, they are running a business.
And we'll get Abschut in here next.
I just say that I understand the logic and ration behind my read is there is a business shift from NFTs and maybe streaming the community centric approach to shifting hard into AI agents.
I've seen I've not I've not been in any of these discords, but I've seen, you know, this is for Marcello here.
The Claw Council is popping dozens of chads in the abstract chain discord tapped in to
learn more about AI agents.
And I, I get that.
It makes sense both from a, it's, it's not a meta it's here.
It's not going anywhere.
I think it was a abs chad post.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, abs chad, but I think he said 1% of the AI industry is more
than all of the NFT and meme coin industry combined.
You know, I agree.
Like, it's massive, and it's only going to get bigger from here.
So I fully get that.
I think where I net out is a lot of these, being able to make that transition while still
keeping the support of the early supporters, the brand ambassadors, those that were deep
in abstract NFTs or abstract bean coins,
I think there's really value in bringing that group of people with you on the new journey.
I think it's valuable.
I think it's, I said it earlier, there's a lot of chains that have raised hundreds of
millions of dollars, far more than abstract or ape chain or any of these quote unquote
community-based chains that would love to have, that would do anything to get the community,
the diehard community that exists in the abstract streets.
And I think that is a real key differentiator.
It's a real value add for anything
they want to attempt to build.
And so I get it all.
I also understand how challenging it can be
and things can be taken out of context.
All that said, AbsChud,
really appreciate you joining us today.
I'm not sure how much of the conversation you caught,
but feel free to take it whichever direction you'd like.
Respect for joining us and taking, you know,
the title is, I don't want to say it's clickbaity
or engagementbaity.
There was, I feel, the sentiment of the timeline
over the last 24, 48 hours.
And I also said that, much respect,
I would not want to be a Discord mod. I don't know if
there's a number. If so, it's a very big number because maybe one of the most challenging,
underappreciated roles in all of crypto, they take on a lot of the heat that the interns,
the shit posters on the timeline, the CT leads get a lot of love and all this is a great role.
I think the Discord mod is equally, if not more important, and doesn't get a lot of the credit
or only gets talked about when things go sideways,
to which it's often nothing that the Discord mod
had to say in the decision that was made,
but yet deals with the blowback from time to time.
So Abchud, GM, thanks for joining us.
Good to connect.
GM, GM, thank you for having me on.
So can you guys hear me okay?
All good?
Perfect. Thank you.
And I wanted to give a shout out to GMB first because GMB, along with some of our other ecosystem affiliates, we're constantly in touch with them and we get this feedback all the time.
And I just want to say I appreciate you all for being so passionate about abstract.
Now, obviously, the topic of discussion
today, I've been tuned in for about 30 minutes now. And of course, the last two days, especially
now with sort of what happened this week, we had a massive change in like, sort of the way people
interacted with abstract because of the NF2 changes and then of course there's you
know the uh infamous screenshot going around so i would love to like sort of just talk about that
for a little bit yeah please do now with the screenshot uh i guess i'll start with the screenshot
so with the screenshot it's like i'm probably one of the people that is in the abstract discord the most, I can probably only name two or three other people that are in there more than me.
Saucy being one of them, and then a couple of community members that I'd rather not name drop right now.
But we have like, a lot of active people in the discord. And there's this sort of unspoken rule about like you know banter and you know shit
posting that goes on in there and ultimately what happened on you know that fateful day
was we had a lot of people come in that you know and we have this data of people that hadn't been
in the discord in like a year or like six months and And I wasn't able to identify that quick enough.
And so going from banter mode,
which is like everyday to empathetic mode,
when there's like a real problem
is a really tough challenge.
Especially, you know,
I've heard the term discord mod thrown around.
My role is, it's a lot of different directions.
I am, well, I'll tell you this,
I'm the discord admin, not the mod, but definitely I do a bunch of different directions i am well i'll tell you this i'm the discord admin not the
mod but definitely i do a bunch of different stuff as well so a lot of the portal updates that
everyone has seen over the last few months uh that people mostly enjoyed i've been helping the
eng team spearhead that to provide a better experience for the community some of the uh
streaming updates,
like everyone has mentioned,
there has been a little bit of a business shift.
I've been helping GMB and some of our other streamers
are beta testing that.
So it's far more than a Discord module.
And I think the mistake with the,
not just the screenshot,
but the way I approached it is,
a hundred people popped in all
at once and I didn't have enough context to be empathetic right away. So I, you know,
apologize for that on my end and I will strive to be better in that regard. Now we do have a level
of banter in the abstract discord on a day-to-day basis where people talk to each
other and it's a really close-knit community and when you have people that haven't been there for
a really long time uh it it just like it's a different dynamic and we need to be able to
identify when that's the case if you guys are familiar after six months after mainnet launched, we had a sidelined activation, which is basically
we gave out elite chad to a bunch of top NFT communities, board apes, penguins, Suzuki,
all that. We had like 20 communities in the mix. And we noticed like a bunch of people were not
really using their AGWs. They got their pengu airdrop, which not an abstract thing, by the way,
it's just offered to abstract elite chads. And then they ended up never connecting their X to their AGW.
And so we told everyone like, hey, you're sidelined, you know, now's your time to come
back. And this is the way we've communicated. And it's been a huge net positive. But obviously,
we all know the market has shifted since then and people are down bad across crypto.
And so in regards to the communication style, like what I want to say is this, like we know people are not making money in crypto right now.
And gambling isn't really fun if you've already lost your money.
There hasn't really been any successful TGEs for a while, right?
There hasn't really been any successful TGEs for a while.
And one thing our community members said is that XP is the only thing putting a smile on people's faces week to week.
And that's a really tough position for us to be in, right?
Because you have the weight of the whole world on your shoulders, where people are coming in every week and they're super happy with XP, I would urge you guys to check the X radar stats.
We're up there above every other chain besides Solana and BNB chain.
So it's like people are tuning in more than any other chain.
And there's this expectation that people are always going to be happy.
And for us on the incentives engineering side, on every side,
we have to balance that to make sure that it aligns with both the community and the company objectives.
And it's almost an impossible task. And so when people come in hot to the Discord saying whoever designed this should be fired or whatever they're saying, it's very hard to it's very hard because, you know, who designed it, you know, who's on the team that did that.
hard to it's very hard because you know who designed it you know who's on the team that did
that and it's very hard to not like stand up for your teammate and uh simultaneously also be
empathetic so that's sort of my piece on the on the discord stuff happy to discuss any other things
that you guys would like to discuss oh i really appreciate you sharing i am glad you joined us
today i i get it in what you said it like, not only is it if you just joined
the discard and you're not there every day and you don't understand the dynamic and the back and
forth, especially if you just see one screenshot taken out, you know, posted on X, it absolutely
can be taken out of context. And I'm sure there's things I've said in closed group chats or discords
that was just a good fun. But if you see it on the timeline out of context,
it looks like a really bad take or,
or mean or lacks,
lacks empathy.
the,
and,
and especially when,
when people are taking shots at your work or your teammates work,
like,
yeah,
that that's,
that all,
it hurts,
it stings and,
and changes while business is evolving. I mean, to your point, you mentioned that's, that all, it hurts, it stings and, and changes while business is
evolving. I mean, to your point, you mentioned it hasn't really been a great TG for a while.
I fully agree. I said earlier, like the teams that have, whether from OpenSea to Magic ETH or
Magic Mega ETH to Abstract and MetaMask and all like Katana launched yesterday. They're trading at,
they're down 25% since launch and they're trading at a 24, $23 million market cap.
Not great. Again, not taking shots at Katana. I just, that you're going to see a very similar
chart, any team that TGs into this environment. It's just, it's not great. And it's not even just
a crypto thing. It's, it's, you got Kraken is, is delaying their IPO. It's across the board.
It's just not a good market to be launching a, launching a token to go into IPO. It's, it's,
yes, like it's tough to time a market perfectly, but it's not that hard to time really poor market conditions. And right now
it's mostly poor market conditions. It would be, I think, either out of touch or overly arrogant
to launch into this market. And if people really want to see the success of the brand, of the
protocol long-term, you should give some grace and understand that. I think part of what we were saying earlier is oftentimes not just
what is communicated, how it's communicated, when it's communicated, and kind of getting
in front of some of this, some of like the changes or what might lead to blowback,
getting in front of it can sometimes help soften the blow a little bit as opposed to
having to put out fires and deal with backlash after the
fact where people are kind of shocked. But I think the one question that just popped up,
and I understand if you can't answer this, I also, I appreciate that Abstract XP is somewhat opaque
and it's not fully transparent. It's been, it is variable and a moving target. Like you don't want
people solely doing things just to farm. I get that. You don't want people that are buying,
someone earlier said buying $1 NFTs
and sitting on a bunch of them and just,
like that's doing the real users,
the real ambassadors and then justice
if people are gaming the system.
So I fully understand that.
J81 in the abstract chat does ask,
and if you can't answer this directly
or even directionally, fully understand,
but he asks, what are the best activities to earn XP based on time or money spent? does ask, and if you can't answer this directly or even directionally, fully understand. But he
asks, what are the best activities to earn XP based on time or money spent? Is there any
directional advice that you say, hey, this is important to Abstract. This is where we're
heading. And while there's no promises or guarantees, this might be something to spend.
If you're wanting to support Abstract and by result, earn some XP, this might be something worth checking out.
Are you able to answer that in any way, shape or form, Abstract?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, I've worked with the ecosystem team and shout out to the ecosystem team, by the way.
They have like one of the hardest jobs on this planet, right?
Especially with, you know, the headwinds of building in crypto in the last year and talking to all these apps
and NFTs and coins as well.
Now, I can't recommend one thing and I'll tell you why.
Because if I go on here and tell people
this activity will be the best XP for you,
it's gonna lead to a lot of behavior
that's in the direction of, you know,
I'm gonna to do this
one thing, this one thing only for XP. And that's not the direction that we've taken it for a long
time. And I'll expand a little bit. We've expanded sort of the way that we see the abstract profile
system to be a lot more all-encompassing than just earning XP. So you've seen, if you've been tuned into the abstract community,
you've seen that we've had things like perks and certain communities
airdropping certain stuff to certain tier holders or elite chads
or people with a certain badge.
So if you have gold tier and the certain badge,
a certain project might want to give you a perk in their game that gives you a head start or like an airdrop in their token, their eco token.
And so when I if I were to recommend like one specific activity, do this for XP, what would then happen is like you'd have an influx of people that would be sort of expressing all of their crypto cynicism
to that project so it wouldn't be a net positive for me to like tell people yeah go play this for
xp what i would recommend is sticking by the principle that is right now we are focused on
bringing more on-chain activity to the chain. And what does that mean?
Well, I'll tell you this.
What used to be crypto Twitter is a lot smaller than it was.
We're tracking all these metrics and especially post-1010.
I'm sure you guys remember what happened on 1010.
So what happened then was more or less that a lot of crypto native capital evaporated,
right?
Like you've seen all these funds getting shut down you've seen all this stuff happening and that really changed the landscape
of crypto you know investing trading whatever you want to call it it changed the complete market
structure and so while before things like uh things like barachain and no shade to any of
these teams by the way but but even like Katana,
you mentioned Katana as an example, it's backed by Polygon, right? And Polygon is one of the
fastest growing chains in the world with Polymarket building on them. And it's like,
if you only have this CT audience where things like Barachain used to be worth a ton of money.
And once again, no shade on Barachain because of solely the community aspect.
After 1010, the whole market structure changed to where like now you need to be some sort
of like critical infrastructure for building.
And you're seeing this with Hyperliquid where why is Hyperliquid worth what it is? Because they've onboarded the S&P 500
onto their actual chain, because they've onboarded all of these massive institutional
cases onto their chain. And so what we would like to see on the crypto native side,
and this is answering the XP question, is we would like to see people vibe coding new apps.
We'd like to see people participating in new apps. We'd like to see people
participating in things that bring innovative use cases on chain. And there are a ton of things you
can do in this direction. But the reason why we had to, you know, sort of make those like NFT
changes is because we had the data and you guys saw the tweet a month ago. It was like, we're not
going to make changes to NFTs.
But the incentives team looked into it and it's like, we got like a 3,000 word report
from like various people, especially the Chinese community, which you do not see on CT as much,
the Chinese and the Korean communities.
We have a massive Chinese and Korean community.
They see things a lot differently than some of us do on CT.
And it's like, well,
hey, guys, look, we found that some people are holding these $2 NFTs that, you know,
might have been building something at one point, but are no longer. And so it's like,
does that help us bring innovative new use cases on chain, to which you could extrapolate that in
a year or two from now, we also have the, you know, S&P 500 on our chain.
And so that's really the direction that we're going in. Is the activity that we're promoting going to lead to more use cases coming on chain such that eventually we will also have these like
massive institutional enterprise use cases that are on chain. And we think that the crypto native
community can play a massive role and a
massive innovation role, both in terms of using and building and helping us accomplish that.
So that's sort of, you know, I've touched a little bit on the communication issues,
which I will own fully. And, you know, Saigar has seen the sentiment as well. And he's also,
the whole team is aligned, right?
And so we will own that fully.
I do apologize for that.
Now, on the direction side,
I think I'm being pretty clear without being explicit on what apps he use
or like what to build or whatever.
I think that answers it.
It does.
Can I ask, where does streaming fall into this?
How at one point it was,
it seemed to be a big focus.
I mentioned I'm biased.
And I will say, while I was a little disappointed to only see 32 XP this past week,
I'm forever grateful for abstract streaming because it got us streaming.
Previously, we were just an AudioX show for, I don't know, 800, 900 shows.
And it was abstract.
And quite frankly, Luca's push and his statement on the importance and prioritization of streaming.
And I did.
I truly, I still believe it is a key differentiating factor for a blockchain to have this streaming platform and the portal at large.
If it wasn't for abstract, we may still not be on video.
And that's opened up so many from, obviously, we stream on X, we stream on YouTube.
And I don't know if we ever get here if it wasn't for that push from abstract and that prioritization.
So for that, I'm grateful.
If I ever get not another single XP and if I get zero from TGE, I'll still remain grateful
for the shove and the motivation to turn on the video.
And I also am really grateful it's connected us with
new people. People like Hans, who's over there and Be Epic. And while they may have tuned into
the show before, I'm not sure. But now not only do they tune in, I've been able to build some
friendships and very grateful for the generous tips over there. Is it life-changing money? No, but the intent,
it matters more than any dollar amount. The fact that they're taking their Pingu or their ABX and
sharing, it's greatly appreciated. It goes a long way. And that sign of support, it's much more than
the dollars, if that makes any sense at all.
But I guess that would be my question is where does streaming fit in in the future in terms of is it a priority?
I know there was some changes recently.
I understand maybe why some of those changes.
But can you speak to just specifically streaming in terms of abstract and not even asking for like a direct XP, but maybe like, is it important?
Is there a world where streaming just doesn't become
a thing anymore, it's just too expensive,
doesn't make sense, the business is going
a different direction or is it still
an important part of abstract for the go forward?
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. Thank you.
So in regards to streaming,
I'll give you guys some more context. Myself and, you know, our team on the community side, we have, we spearheaded, we started the customer support department.
We have processed like 30,000 tickets over the last year, something like that, an average of like 100 plus a day on some days.
something like that, an average of like 100 plus a day on some days. And like a lot of those are
about streaming. We had the previous provider before Mux, and I don't want to like throw them
under the bus because they were pleasant to work with, but it had like 98% uptime, which, you know,
it might seem like, oh, 98% is good, but no, these things have to be basically close to a hundred. You almost never hear Twitch going down or whatever, or X going down.
And so we couldn't compete with that system.
Like just being real.
It's just, if you don't have a hundred percent uptime, uh, and the things that
were needed to make a hundred percent uptime happen were almost impossible,
uh, on, on a scale like ours, you, you need mega scale to accomplish that.
So like we, after we saw like
the biggest complaints about, you know, the biggest complaints being one, the uptime, two,
the connectivity, three, the echo chamber effect where you have like, because crypto obviously
shrank in the last year, you have less creators and the same amount or even less listeners, right?
So we had to pivot to that.
And I say pivot strongly here because pivot is like we want people to grow their audience, right?
We want them to get recognized in the X algorithm.
X algorithm. We want them to get recognized in the Twitch algorithm. And although crypto isn't
We want them to get recognized in the Twitch algorithm.
necessarily like what these platforms are focused on, because we know gamers don't exactly like
crypto and X is explicitly cracking down on crypto. It's still a way bigger audience than,
you know, what the abstract portal can get you. So that was like the first direction of streaming.
And the second one is this, it's like on a, on a chain level, now not on a portal product level, but on a chain level, it's a lot better for us to be critical infrastructure for streamers.
Like basically that financialized layer on top of streaming. When any streamer on any platform can connect their streaming platform to AGW, whether it be Twitch or X or Kik or any of that.
And they would be able to then get tipped in crypto in any meme coin, which, by the way, we are exploring like more or less connecting abstract with the rest of the chains that everyone knows and loves.
that everyone knows and loves.
So you'd be able to tip in like any meme coin from any chain.
from any chain.
And by doing that,
it's like you're basically opening up the gates
for all these people to come and use Abstract
as a financialized layer on top of streaming,
which allows you to then get your foot in the door
and onboard these very large creators.
Like, you know, Kai Sinat would never, like, use abstract unless he can
keep his existing infrastructure, right? Like, he wouldn't switch over, but he would gladly
add it if it was a value add. And so that's kind of how we shifted to stream, how to thinking about
streaming. Now, how does it apply to existing streamers? I think probably we might have
overcorrected a little bit on the XP front.
And by the way, if you got 32 XP, you should make a ticket. Like it's very possible that
something went wrong. And I do apologize if that is the case. Our customer support team can help
you out there. But in regards to XP, like it, streaming has always been like one of the top things that we've encouraged on the platform
but the issue was like it just wasn't immediately obvious how it benefited the network in terms of
like bringing more use cases on chain right and so when you look at it holistically it's like
okay it might not bring new use cases on chain but it brings new people on chain and those people
bring use cases on chain so it actually does make people on chain and those people bring use cases on chain.
So it actually does make sense to reward streamers.
And where we are now is like basically in the adjustment period.
So what I would ask is for you guys to just continue to pay attention to us for the next few weeks as we sort of readjust these things.
According to Cygars post yesterday, like readjust these things in terms ofigars post yesterday like readjust these things uh in
terms of nfts and and streamers and all this stuff because it's it's important to not ignore
uh the second order effects right like obviously an app that's building on chain and has like a
you know i spent a year building and has like some totally crazy new mechanics, something like an OCH or like a Moody Madness
or a Gigaverse and a ton of others.
Like they've spent a lot of time building
for this specific purpose.
Yeah, they should be given XP.
Now, second order effects are really important too
because streamers have spent a long time
building an audience and they bring people onto the chain
and they keep people excited.
So I do agree with you
i like we are we are reevaluating all this stuff and it is dynamic so thank you very much for your
for your comments on and like being passionate about streaming and nfts and all this stuff
because like we truly are thinking of like how do first order effects impact our chain and our users
how do second order effects impact our chain and our users? How do second order effects impact our chain and our users?
Sometimes we over index on one, under index on the other,
and we'll always strive to get better at it.
Awesome. My pleasure.
I truly appreciate you joining us today and taking this stuff head on.
It makes sense.
Like it does.
I feel a lot better now about abstract streaming than I did an hour and 51 minutes ago, without a doubt.
I do have one quick question for you, and then I want to hand it to CryptoGrit next, who's got a question.
CryptoGrit Elite chat over there and a streamer himself.
My quick question for you, though, as Chad, is it on the roadmap at all?
Would streamers ever be able to tip the chat,
ever be able to tip listeners?
Can I reverse tip?
I gave B Epic a shout out and Hans.
I'd love to return the favor.
By the way, True Crypto King coming over the top
with a big 500 Pingu tip over there.
Is that something that I might be able to do someday?
Is that on the roadmap?
Has it been discussed at all?
Yeah, so thank you for asking that i we are actually like internally
we have looked at a bunch of different things to think about so and i will just give these
ideas to you guys right now if anyone wants to vibe code this stuff like feel free we will
rally behind it so with the way we have streaming set up now and the reason why it's able to work
so well we have this like internal
database basically more or less of like hey this this is your agw and this is your x and this is
your twitch so that connection is very easily made right and that also means that you can enable
things to be peer-to-peer so like when when you tip when i tip you or anybody in the audience
tips you it's purely peer-to-peer.
It goes directly from their wallet to your wallet.
It never touches abstract, right?
And we don't take a cut, and there's also a reason for that, which I will get into very shortly.
So the reason why we're going and have gone in this direction is because money transmission laws are extremely complex, okay?
And you need to get licenses in practically every jurisdiction that you're in.
And when you introduce a smart contract into the mix of like,
well, the money goes here and then it goes to this person
and then it goes to that person.
It's like you add a custodial layer and I get it in crypto and Web3.
I've been in this space for almost 10 years. Like technically, if it's a smart contract that's non-custodial layer and I get it in crypto and Web3. I've been in this space for almost 10 years.
Like technically, if it's a smart contract, it's non-custodial. But to the legal system,
you know, the way boomers do things, it is technically custodial. And so there's a bunch
of features that are limited by that because you need, you know, a license in whatever state and
whatever country and whatever. And on the crypto native side, like all these features are super exciting,
but I can't promise that that's something that we'd be able to deliver without significant lift on our end.
Now, if it's like on a smaller scale, like that is something which, you know,
I've explored vibe coding extensively.
I can tell you that is something you can create in an hour
and put on top of an abstract stream
with something like a Chrome extension
or something along those lines.
And so I would really encourage you guys
to do some R&D, DYOR on how that can be done.
And if that's something that's like a huge net positive
and everyone loves, we'd be happy to rally behind it. We are huge fans of these things. Now, the way
we've opted to do things, which is, you know, the long term way and, you know, as you guys know,
most of the abstract team is US based and the corporate structure is US based and all that
stuff. Like it does mean that we can't operate the same way that some of these other
chains have operated by building out of, you know, other jurisdictions and other
entities.
So that's sort of how I'll answer that.
If that makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Awesome.
And, and fitting glad I asked because to exactly what you said, DGTL trophies
in the chat says I did that.
Build a portal.
Streamers can tip in the chat.
It's a Chrome extension.
So awesome.
DGTL just gave you a follow and I will connect with you after the show.
And hey, maybe tomorrow with any luck, we'll be able to give some of this love back.
Now we've created a tipping war between Beepic and True Crypto King over there.
They keep coming over the top. I
salute you both. Appreciate it. I appreciate your time to do as well, Abschad. We're probably going
to run a little long. Everyone on stage, we will get through all the hands. I know some of you
probably have questions for Abschad. I could do one more question, but I do have a hard out in
five minutes. Okay. So let me do this. I've got a question in the chat from JoxyCoxy, and then I'm
going to hand it right to CryptoGrit, because I think his question is similar in nature.
And this, understand this might be a challenge when you may not know the answer as well,
but I did say I would ask, and then CryptoGrit will hand it right to you.
Jaxi Coxie acts, did you get permission from Twitch to shadow viewership?
And then if you want to answer that or either if you can
and then crypto grit, go ahead and get in here
because I think yours is similar in nature.
Yeah, so with Twitch integration, like it's just basically
for the technically minded, it's basically just an iframe.
So it's embedding the stream from your Twitch
onto the abstract portal.
So it's like using their more or less like official iFraming tool.
Okay, awesome.
Yeah, we talked about that in MySpace with Joxy, and it's not against Twitch terms of service.
Awesome.
Crypto, great.
I'm not sure if that answers your question entirely.
If so, great.
If not, feel free to expand on it and take it wherever you'd like.
You've got the last question for HabsChad before he's got to get out of here but appreciate your patience you've
been here uh maybe maybe almost the full two hours with your hand up so hope your arm's not tired but
gm great to connect uh gm gm thanks for having me yeah like my question goes in a similar direction
because i know i was like trying to get some uh some games listed on twitch you know and what i realized is they're
heavily against everything that is crypto related so i'm not sure you know like if this goes like
bigger will they keep all of in like embedding the videos on on the streams on abstract and like
doing donations because it actually directly cuts their potential revenue
right because people can donate on twitch just not in crypto so that's pretty much the question
thank you yeah thank you very much for raising that i actually i actually don't think that's an
issue at all at all and i'll give you some reasons why because if you look at it through that frame
of mind then abstract more or less just becomes, through Twitch's frame of mind, then abstract just becomes another sort of stream labs, stream elements, Patreon.
It just becomes another source that people can, you know, send their audience to.
And it doesn't necessarily compete with Twitch because it's totally something that they don't offer.
compete with twitch because it's totally something that they don't offer and like no one really has
problems with taking donations from any of these platforms so i don't see why it'd be any different
yeah yeah that makes sense actually i i haven't thought in the direction you know i just know in
the past that for example kick is very open for anything twitch is like super close you know and in order
to get approved for multiple games we kind of had to remove everything that mentions crypto everything
that mentions wagering you know and and stuff like that so yeah i just wanted to say that uh
i just want to go like regarding the previous conversation right you have adam from open c i
think you mentioned at one point that it's not good market conditions.
And when you had Adam, he mentioned the trading volume and this stuff.
And it's kind of obvious when you go to the OpenSea and when you see during the wave, the volume is much higher than when there is no waves at the moment.
You can also see that some collections that are traded is kind of insane
you know chinsanity also did the podcast with brian and in the end of the podcast brian
also implied like it's not good market conditions for a lot of stuff so i think you know like abstract
is doing a great job at like keeping the the mind share high and the traction you know and a lot of
these things you know as you said at the start of, you know, and a lot of these things, you know,
as you said at the start of this space, you know, like a lot of other chains would like
love to have community like Abstract has, right? So I think they're doing great, great jobs in terms of that, right?
Like in terms of XP, I think, you know, like in every scenario, like people won't be satisfied.
Either like people will be like, oh, you value people that were there early, but you don't value people that are here now.
Either it will be like, it's always some problem and people will never be happy.
I just feel it's like that.
And I feel, you know, I agree, for example, with many things that Jesus said.
I just think it's a problem that there's a lot of manual stuff that has to be done, right?
It's already like manual thing to promote people.
It's like manual thing to approve streamers, you know?
Then it's manual thing that adds one more complexity.
And that makes people to feel, feel you know one of the largest creators
on abstract when i spoke with him he told me you know like it took him like six months to get
like promoted to to graduated elite chat then one month to get giga chat and like that
and that oscillates for different people and some people will always feel like oh it's kind
unfair for me right and like nobody will say it's unfair you promoted me too fast but people will
always be like oh it took you so long to promote me or do anything you know so so i'm not sure you
know like it requires a lot of manpower to do this stuff and i believe this is like one of the biggest things you know one of the questions that didn't went through in the last abstract like q a that i wanted to ask you know i really
have to hop do you mind if i just answer what you've said so far yeah yeah sure sure okay so
let me answer that rapid fire because i really do have to hop so first of all with the manual stuff
yeah i do agree uh we have historically done things manually, but as of six months ago, we started.
So this is a little bit of alpha for anyone that wants to become a lead chat.
We actually now have a lot of like automated tools that will track things like your on-chain activity.
So that means things like how much XP you get per per week how many transactions uh we have x tools we
have discord tools so a lot of the decisions that we make in that regard are like automated in some
sense now we do do a sanity check first before like in case so that you know somebody you know
for example with the nft stuff like if somebody that had like $300 NFTs and somehow was getting a ton of XP, like that person would not get promoted.
But like that stuff is largely not nearly as manual as it used to be.
Now, with the manual stuff, that's GigaChad.
GigaChad is very sensitive because everyone believes that they should be a GigaChad.
very sensitive because everyone believes that they should be a giga chad uh but we have 800 000
like users that are constantly coming in and there's about 200 giga chads and we we're very
aware that like people are connected to each other right so it's like somebody doesn't show up and
you know we derank somebody like their friends will be like oh you shouldn't have deranked this
guy because it's like well dude, dude, look at his profile.
Look at his discord.
Look at his ex hasn't been on abstract in three months, six months.
And so it's very sensitive.
And it's like it's I don't want to like, you know, sound like a complainer, but it'll never make everyone happy.
We try our best.
We use a lot of heuristics. And so for the last like five to six months, we've tried to whenever we promote new people, we also get rid of anyone that's inactive.
We use a lot of heuristics.
And we know that that's probably the best way to do it. It's like we want to bring more people in, but we also can't allow people that have, you know, either taken it for granted or, you know they have personal stuff if they've chosen to move on to
away from crypto or whatever that's their choice we will never hate on somebody for that and they
can always earn it back and so I hope that answers most of it I I'm already late so I do have to hop
thank you everyone for tuning in I do apologize for the miscommunication and the uh you know more
or less being in banter mode and not in empathetic mode.
So thank you for your time.
Hey, really appreciate you joining us.
Great respect and good to connect today.
Thanks so much for taking this stuff head on.
And you can blame me for the tardiness to the meeting, but hope to connect again soon.
Welcome anytime.
You guys want to do a deeper dive, more of a formal scheduled interview.
Let me know.
Happy to make that, set that up as well.
The chat obviously enjoyed and appreciated your time today as well.
So thanks again.
And we'll talk soon.
Next, I want to go to Bosu Kev, one of the builders on Abstract, one of the leading NFT projects over there.
Kev, I really appreciate your patience.
Sorry we didn't get you in here earlier.
You probably had some questions for AbsChad or Chud, but feel free to take it whichever direction you like.
And as always, appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah, no worries.
What's up, guys? Nice to see you all.
Yeah, it's been interesting.
I think it's very difficult,
the situation they're in with XP.
It's like the classic monkey story
that if you give a monkey three apples for many months
and then take the apple away,
you know, they're going to get pissed at you.
I think it's a really difficult thing to balance out,
but I wanted to kind of stick up for all the, you know, building NFT founders and make sure that, yeah, that we get this heard
because even though maybe, you know, know on chain activity what what can be
very transactional I think the perspective from a founder building
every day you know the brand on abstract like there's a lot of things that we're
actually doing in order to promote abstract like I personally have a lot of
conversations with collectors that usually collect on eats and then I jump
on a call with them and then I always have to pitch them two things.
I pitch them final Basu and I have to also convince them on Abstract.
But this is value that's going to Abstract that I think is generally not being seen.
And so, yeah, I'm happy he came on stage and he gave some comments on the messages
because when I first wrote it as well, like personally, I felt like a shift that has happened over these last months.
The first couple of months, they were very like promoting about, yeah, promoting NFTs.
There was a lot of support as well from Luca directly and it kind of faded away over time.
And then like NFTs in a way became less important.
And yeah, I'm happy that he definitely clarified that um
but i think yeah there's there's there's so much that we're doing as a brand to actually promote
abstract like consistently towards people right and so um i think it's a lot of culture all of
our holders just by wearing their pfp abstract is in their minds every single day. And I think that alone
holds a lot of brand value
to abstract that
I definitely want to make sure
that the teams see that, right?
Because it's not transactional,
but it's, you know, mindshare.
It's people actively pushing.
And so I'd love to promote
that culture more together, right?
All the abstract NFT projects
standing together to push that
because, yeah, I think it's something that can be missed really fast
if you only look at the actual on-chain data.
I wholeheartedly agree.
And that's my biggest hope for, candidly,
while biasly I would love them to overcorrect on streamers
and give us all tons of XP, sure.
I mean, I'd be lying if I said I didn't.
I'd love more XP just for streaming. However, I know, and I also think that's important for the
chain for similar reasons you just mentioned. You know, we're talking about abstract. Every day,
whether someone goes to the abstract chat or not, one of the first comments in this space
every day that hundreds, if not thousands of people see is, here's the abstract chat. Here's
the length of the abstract chat.
You know, I don't, there's no other chains I'm doing that for.
And again, this isn't about me, but there's hundreds of me.
There's a lot of other streamers.
I think that adds value.
In your case, same with the NFT front.
It's, when I see a Bosu, I think abstract.
When I see a bearish, I think abstract.
Like, you're exactly right.
And I also can acknowledge how, like, what they're saying at face value, the changes of there were people abusing the NFT XP because they were going and buying a bunch of dead projects for a dollar.
I can see how that is actually hurting projects like yourself that are still active, still building.
You know, Gigaverse, OCH Genesis, Bearish, FinalBosu, Royu, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong.
You know, like, these are valuable NFT collections, valuable communities to the abstract chain.
FUGS, you know, is another one that I think abstract.
I don't think they want to lose those communities.
I think it would hurt abstract if all those communities I just rattled off decide to go to another chain.
Z, big fan of.
I don't think they want to lose those communities.
So finding a way to, and how you measure this, I don't know.
It's not just holding an NFT. I get it's not
just holding an NFT because that would be abused and that could, you know, you're going to have
people go buy a bunch of, I don't know, I'm just picking it purely off Ford Price. I know nothing
about this, but you have a bunch of people go buy a bunch of abstract hot dogs and sit on a hundred
of those and I don't know the project. So maybe maybe it's thriving but let's just say it's a dead project i should name any names it's actually trending so bad bad choice
um you gotta have to go and go buy a bunch of abstract universe and dead project again i don't
know if it's dead but let's assume it's a dead project and they're sitting on thousands of those
and they're earning far more xp than people who are actually active and rocking a final Bosu or rocking a bearish and by extension supporting the abstract chain. So do you have any
ideas, Kev, how they might identify or differentiate the active NFT communities, the real
communities, as opposed to someone who's just trying to game the XP system?
Yeah, I think definitely staying close to the teams and keep having conversations.
I think that's definitely important and generally trying to understand.
I can imagine that there's so much going on as well.
And so I don't have like the perfect answer because yeah, I can understand they're trying to
track games. This is something that I've been thinking about as well, because when we launched
our NFT collection, initially I've thought a lot about, should we actually build a game or an app
on abstract? And when we decided what direction, what's best for us as a brand, how can we actually
build this? The number one thing for us is expand the brands, turning this into, we're going hard
on Instagram, onboarding people for the brand,
introducing them to the characters, like people liberation, right? That's like our number one thing.
And I think that's something that is not trackable on abstract, but ultimately is also value.
So I don't have a perfect answer, but I think, yeah, definitely keeping close to the team, doing research.
I do think there's some unchained volume, right?
Like there's literally like one of our holders
spent at least $15,000 last month on NFTs with us.
I think those things are definitely tracked
and are signals of, okay,
people are actually spending high amounts of money
on these collections, right?
And they're consistently buying and buying more.
And yeah, it's tough because on ETH,
I feel like it's kind of Wild West. Like if you buy Final Basu and it will be on ETH, you're just buying Final buying more. Yeah, it's tough because on ETH I feel like it's kind of Wild West.
Like if you buy Final Basu and it will be on ETH, you're just buying Final Basu.
On Abstract it's like you're buying Final Basu and at the same time you're betting on the chain, right?
And so there's always that double judgment that is there.
And so the closer you can be with each other, yeah, I think the better.
And there's not that many NFT projects on Abstract, right? Like that are actively building. There's like literally a handful.
And so I think it will benefit.
That was the first impression that I had as well,
the first couple of months of Luca like, you know,
jumping literally on calls with us every couple of weeks,
helping us like making connections, things like that.
I hope someday, you know, I respect how busy they are, right?
But I hope some type of connection there
would benefit all of us.
Like, we're going for consumer.
Like, FinalBust was full on building for consumer.
And the bigger our audience becomes,
the more it makes sense for us to drive that audience
towards our collection, but maybe as well
an app that we're building at some point,
maybe on AppStrike, right?
So, yeah, don't have the answer, but yeah.
I think you did have it in there, though.
And easier said than done.
But while I fully appreciate this world of AI and how we can be hyper-efficient and we can leverage AI to do a lot of things,
and yeah, you could track volume, but I think that can be gamed.
I think this is a scenario where it's a manual process.
The team, and I think the team probably knows, like they know the ones I just rattled off.
Like I'm not on the team, I'm not that deep.
And I know who are like the real NFT communities on Abstract, at least some of them.
I don't know all, but I can, you know, the top five or six are pretty evident to me.
but I can, you know, the top five or six are pretty evident to me. And I think that this is
a scenario where whether it's a singular individual or, you know, collective, or maybe
it's a sub-community made up of abstract community members that identify, help them identify the top
NFT collections. And I don't know if this even has to be five or six or 10. I don't know if
there's a finite number, but delineating who are the real communities versus what is just
an NFT collection that's being farmed and wash traded so they can farm XP. I think manual is
probably better than any reporting, any data, anything AI could do. I think this is just,
you've got to old school it, roll up the sleeves. And hey, there's also other good that can come from that.
There's other good relationships if you have that constant communication with your leading teams.
You're going to find out a lot more than just who are the real active NFT communities.
Again, appreciate everyone being here.
Quick reset.
We're running a little long today, but I'll stick around as long as we've got hands that want to get in on this conversation.
I will say we won't go till 11, but if you're looking to continue this conversation, I'll shield Jesus' space for him.
He won't do it, but I pinned it up top. It has a great show. You get to hear from an idiot on
there as well. That's at 11 o'clock Eastern here on X and on Abstract, assuming they're still
streaming over there. I think they will be. But let me do this real quick. I need to get a market
update in here. And then when we come back, we'll go. I saw Jesus' hand up. We'll go to
Jesus. And then Quirky Quirk's been patient. And then we'll get any back in here and anyone else
that wants to continue the conversation. But let me do a quick daily market update, just a quick
flyer. It would take me a few seconds. This is brought to you by Awaken Tax. Head to awaken.tax
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Let's break it down. Daily update right now.
This is our Daily Market Update brought to you by Awaken Tax.
Before I go to the market update, I got to shout out the founder, Duca.
Duca had his first big cook, his first post with over 25,000 likes, over half a million views.
He says, and I don't usually say the R word. I know it's,
call me a boomer if you will. It's just, it was ingrained in my head as a younger kid. Anyways,
I'm going to quote it maybe with one slight adjustment. He says, dude, did you just,
he's in quotes, dude, did you vibe code this slop? This feature sucks. Unquote. He says,
been getting more of this recently and no, I didn't vibe it. Did you ever
consider for one single second that I might just be R-word? And I wrote this organic slot myself,
question mark. The timeline loved it. But in all seriousness, go check out Awaken. Not only do you
get $50 off using code COFFEE50 or RETURNCOFFEE50, they have this 1099DA,
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return COFFEE50. Check it out. I don't think you'll be disappointed. We have dozens of members
in our Coffee with Captain community, the DGEN War Room, are big fans of Awaken and happy,
honored to be able to extend that discount to y'all. Reach out to Duca as well. He's very
accessible if you have any questions. Extremely helpful team. Looking at the market, not a great one. We did have the Fed meeting
yesterday. I'm not saying that's why it's down. Probably more geopolitical, Middle East crisis,
oil, etc. That said, Bitcoin did drop below 70k, down 3.39% on the day. ETH down to 21.26. My long
did get stopped out yesterday. My first L since we started that daily% on the day. ETH down to 21.26. My long did get stopped out yesterday.
My first L since we started that daily trade of the day.
First, we were running pretty pure there.
Gave up most of the gains yesterday as the ETH long got stopped out.
I was bullish on the prior day's news from the SEC and the CFTC,
but it wasn't enough to overcome the global market conditions.
ETH now 21.25. XRP down a percent.
We might touch on them if we hear in a bit as well, just on the RWA front. B&B down 2%. Solana
down 2% to $88. Doge down 2% to $0.09. Hyperliquid down 5% on the day, but yet still, despite that
dip, still up 5.71% on the week. Heading over real quickly to look at some NFTs.
We do have a Zuki gate.
This is a free mint.
Go check that out from OpenSea.
It's an open edition celebrating their,
they kicked off anime chain on OpenSea.
And they also have,
actually might've went live 17 minutes ago.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this.
The anime TCG mint does go live today.
I'm not certain the time.
I'll see if I can find it after I hand it off here in a sec.
But I'm pretty sure that goes live today.
May have just went live.
But at minimum, it's a free mint to go get Izuka Gate.
You can see there's already been 344,000 of those minted.
And I'm a fan of OpenSea doing this, these additions,
working with these NFT collections. I'm a fan of OpenSea doing this, these additions, working with some of these NFT collections.
I'm here for it.
More of it.
Not expecting any financial reward,
but who knows?
They're not saying this.
I am.
There could be some C allocation for that
when we do get that TGE.
Also, while I'm here,
REC Drinks,
they did sell out their Burr Bubbly collaboration
with the Moonbirds brand yesterday.
Not only did they sell out, there's already been 32 ETH.
They sold out within an hour.
There's also been 32 ETH of secondary trading as well.
So if you're looking to get a physical with your NFT purchase, you can still get on that.
I'm not sure.
Double check.
Make sure like redemption times, redemption dates.
I don't know all the details off the top of my head, but congrats to the team.
I mentioned Squiggles yesterday.
I should have bought.
They're up 20% of the day.
The big winner. I'm not sure if there's a sweep or what drove it,
but big winner in NFT land.
Punks are flat at 29.98.
Hypers, rather, are up 3%, 448 hype.
Pudgies down 1.9% to 4.15.
Apes are basically flat at 5.21.
Little Pudgies down 2.7% to 0.44.
Mutants down almost 2% to 0.76.
Moonbirds flat at 0.97. Miladies up 2.8% to 1.21. Little Pudgies down 2.7 to 0.44. Mutants down almost 2% to 0.76. Moonbirds flat at 0.97.
Milady's up 2.8% to 1.34. Quirkies, not sure Poppy's still up here, but continue in their surge up another 3.8% to 1.14. Azuki down a percent to 0.71. That again is our daily market
update. Doodles at 0.48, 2.9, probably not going to get into that conversation today, but we'll save it
for tomorrow. They made some digital creators big mad with their AI studios, which to me,
I think that is actually bullish. And part of what flipped me on my doodle studio take is it's,
it's definitely ruffled some feathers in the, in the, in the, in the art, the 3D artists,
digital artists land. Also, I didn't, I just already stopped the screen share,
but Del Mundo's, I said Squiggle's the big winner.
Del Mundo's actually up 24% of the day,
back up to 0.08.
So seeing some movement there,
death and taxes also up 54% to 0.03 ETH,
both new mints.
Good Vibes Club, 0.66, up 3% of the day.
I was going to ask the question earlier,
probably not going to get into it,
at least not in detail, but I will say the flyover, I think I mentioned yesterday on a
comment just about a year ago, Good Vibes Club was deciding, I think they originally planned to
mint on abstract. They pivoted and ultimately minted on ETH Mainnet and has benefited them
well. And I still think they get some
support from that abstract community, but
again, congrats to the Good Vibes
team. Jesus, I said I'd go to you next.
I see an idiot's back up on stage as
well as Shallowen, and we got Quirky Quirky's been patient.
Jesus, did you want to get in here?
Yeah.
It was a good conversation with
Abstract. I'm glad he kind of
apologized to the community,
corrected a few things.
Yeah, I mean, you know, like Hans came up on our space yesterday
and was like, hey, it's one week.
Let's see what happens next week.
Like a lot of the, you know, the aggravation, I think,
comes from them playing with the system so much.
The frustration is that TGE was probably already supposed to happen.
So now they're trying to balance XP and, you know, they're running out of tiers to build
and new different, you know, levels of XP and how diluted is this getting, you know,
already.
And then speaking of Bosu Kev yesterday i seen i would say i think i seen
three different nft accounts that i haven't seen tweet or be really active in a long time
one of them got rid of all creator fees on openc they're like actively rewarding the community to
start trading now because they're trying to they're trying to boost volume so they can remain relevant uh on the chain so now you're going to start seeing i
think some of this stuff and i hope it i hope it doesn't happen where you start you know there's
the one thing on uh base was like dxt or dxr i can't remember what it was uh it's one of the
the one frog on us on salon. Yeah.
It's just, you're going to start seeing NFT collections, you know, and holders farming and
selling back to one another and creating fake volume. And so there's the, it doesn't matter.
Abstract has always been in the beginning. Like, Oh, this, you know, we're not a farming chain.
If your farmers are going to get cooked here, like, I'm sorry.
Everybody's going to figure out a way to farm shit
and figure out how to game the system.
A lot of people have been doing it.
And they're obviously cracking down,
but I also think they're hurting a lot of their, you know,
their loyal users.
Sygar and them are very fast to adjust.
So, you know, I do like the direction that they're always going.
But I really do hope they put some effort into improving rewards for streamers.
You know, because yesterday I got the least amount of XP I've ever gotten
since I've been on chain, since I've been on chain.
Since I've been on here.
And I went from like 58,000 to 4,000.
And I was like, whoa, shit.
That's a miss.
I mean, this isn't even like self-serving for me as a fellow streamer.
Like, I know you're far deeper in the abstract ecosystem than me.
You've been passionate about it.
You talk about it like every day on your space.
You're like, that's like, just as I was actually almost identical take on what I was saying with,
with, with Bosu Kev, like you're the type of people, like I get, it's hard. They don't want
to reward just every NFT collection or holding every NFT, just like they don't want to reward
every streamer. Cause that also can be bought it. Like you, like we've never bought it a space.
Have there been bots in our chat? Sometimes they pop in there.
It's nothing we've ever done.
I just, it's not a game I play.
Yeah.
It can be gamed, but identifying who, I just, I think it's probably a manual process.
And at this point, they likely know,
at least have a good idea.
Might they miss some?
Might they be perfect?
But I think this is an area,
both for the streamers and the NFT brands, that they just, they need, I would suggest reaching out, kind of vetting who those, and maybe they do start with a number.
Maybe it is, to make it easier, maybe it is the top 10 NFT brands.
Maybe it is the top 10, top 50 streamers.
I don't know the number, but I think this is something where simply on-chain data or viewership or comments or on-chain transactions, I just,
I don't think it's not, it's definitely flawed. It's far from perfect. And I think, I think,
like I said, they don't want to lose you. They don't want to lose Bosu. Like it's, this is where
being nimble and making some changes to capture that I think would benefit them greatly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's a lot of different, like when he was talking about the different roles,
like in order to get GigaChad, you're supposed to be active in the Discord.
I'm not heavily in Discord.
I'm in Telegram.
I have a job.
I have brands that I have to work for.
I run my spaces.
I do my streams.
We talk about Abstract daily well over, like I said, well over a year.
I haven't, me or Kyle, never been given GigaChad.
And then when you see other people come in and you get it and they get it within like, you know, a couple of months, it's like, well, hold the fuck on.
But we're not in the normal abstract circles, which is a good thing. To be completely honest, we have had GigaChad sort of dangled in front of our faces for like six months, but I don't even care, man. I'm clicking the
buttons because I want to. Yeah, but my point is, though, you don't want people that are all within
the same circle talking about abstract. You want people outside of the abstract circle talking
about abstract, and that's how you grow the ecosystem. Then you support those people that are doing that.
You know what I mean?
By elevating their content.
I've mentioned that there should be like an app.
There is the abstract ecosystems X account.
Then you have the abstract X account.
And I've even mentioned maybe they should do an abstract community account and they're
highlighting different communities and they're putting another whoop campaign out there to go
hey go go clip capstream go clip uh you know monic our crypto grids go crip what whoever
like candidly speaking for myself while the clips help do the added does the added distribution the
added eyes help yeah but something like more so than any extra views or eyeballs or who follows
just the fact that they're signaling showing me that we're valued we're appreciated it's important
that means more than the xp that means more than than the added eyeballs on some clips. Little things like that
go a very long way. Again, speaking for myself, there's alignment. I talk about NFT brands,
NFT communities being aligned with their holder base. Same thing on a chain base. Do you care
about the people who are authentically and genuinely talking about and supporting what
you're doing. And I think
little things like that do go a very long way. Yeah, 100%.
And idiot, I saw your hand fly back up. Go ahead and get back in here.
And yeah, real quick. I actually think Corkly was before me, but I'm about to get busy again
here at work. I just came back up to address the XP thing. The way that they were, and I wish I
could remember exactly who, but one of the team members in the earliest days was pretty transparent about the fact that XP for NFTs was based
off of volume.
The NFT collections that were at the top of the volume would get a bigger piece of the
overall XP pie, as it were, for NFTs.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that as long as you do have, like you said,
you can game that, right?
You can wash trade a collection to the number one spot if you want to.
So, you know, you just leave the option for manual adjustments in there.
You know, I mean, it's pretty obvious.
It's not like there's, you know, a thousand collections on Abstract that have vibrant communities, right?
I mean, that's not even true on mainnet anymore, you know?
So, yeah, I just, I think that's, I think I'd like to see it get back to that.
Just, you know, reward, you know,
based on volume and leave the option
to manually adjust whenever there's
some clear fuckery afoot.
And then the only other thing,
and Kev, I was going to ask you the other day,
you and Yacht actually both were on Loki's space.
I had requested, I got brought up,
but I got kicked down pretty immediately
i think sometimes a m'lady derivative pfp that i had on at the time makes people nervous if they
don't know you um but i yeah just exactly what you were talking you were kind of saying you guys
had considered making a game i was just gonna ask exactly that what you know to both of you but
since you're here i mean you know i know you guys have been working on your collector's profile for a while. I mean, do you, do you see the opportunity to maybe,
you know, give out like an on-chain badge type of a thing, uh, or something to, you know, various,
uh, traits or whatever, whatever you're highlighting in your collector's profile,
actually giving out something on chain that just, you know, generates a claim and a transaction
just to, you know, kind of benefit the, benefit the number of transactions going on in your community?
Yeah, that's a good question.
We're getting close to wrapping it up.
And so I've actually had this conversation with the team the other day and I'm looking into it on how we can play in on that.
I think it's the right move, definitely.
Especially with the way we have set up the collector profile,
because there's a lot of gamification towards it.
And so, yeah, there's definitely an option for that.
Yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Awesome.
Well, yeah, I mean, I just, it seemed like I know FUGS has the collector's profile.
I know that you guys have been working on that for a while.
It just seems like, you know, some sort of, you know, badging system, maybe weekly badges
or something, depending on what your thing looks like.
It seems like an easier way than like building out a whole game that people may or may not
be interested in.
You know, I mean, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of games that are already pretty good right on abstract so i i don't
know if the game thing is the way to go unless you unless you're confident that you can make a
really good game right uh but but the collector's profile is very interesting i agree quickness
profile good move and then the other thing i would add to that is like it doesn't also doesn't have
to be a full-on forever game uh Shout out to Thomas, who's reminding everyone,
you've got about an hour left or about 30 minutes left
to get your March Madness brackets in for Abstract Bearish.
Same thing with Cool Chicks Mint, which is a simple one.
You just mint, you get a team,
and if that team gets to the Final Four, you're in the cash.
Some of these Abstract Bearish March Madness brackets,
they're free to enter.
You can get help with AI.
Hey, did you see the cease and desist they got? Because they used March Madness. You've got to call it Abstract Madness. Abstract Madness brackets, they're free to enter. You can get help with AI. Hey, did you see the cease and desist they got?
Because they used March Madness.
You got to call it Abstract Madness.
Abstract Madness.
Excuse me.
Same thing, you can't say the Super Bowl without getting the NFL after.
You got to call it the big game.
Yeah.
But I guess my point, and not saying like Final Boses,
you should do an Abstract Madness tournament at this point.
But my overarching point there is like, sometimes like just simple mini games,
like anytime you can do a community event,
is there a way that you can bring that on chain?
And I'm not one just to put something on chain,
just to put it on chain.
But in this case,
the enhancement is you're helping your community
and your brand garner more XP
and more attention from, you know,
the parent brand at this point.
So I could be persuaded either way, the parent brand at this point. So I could
be persuaded either way, but I do think this might be a scenario where like short-term mini games,
ways to just drive activity for your community specifically on Abstract might be better than
going in and trying to build a full-out game, which is tough, expensive, and most of them,
most of them don't stick. One more quick segment, and then I will get, we got Quirky Quirk,
appreciate your patience. I saw Shailoen's hand fly up. I'm not seeing any other hands. We have
had some challenges with X this morning. It's just been a little finicky, but we will get through
everyone before we close it down. At least I'll do my best. Abstract Mania, also good idea there,
DGLT trophies. Here is, man, things have been, it's not just me saying
this because it's a, a, one of our favorite sponsors. The RWA industry is booming and it's
not just me. It's not just people. It's, it's now starting to take off on X. People are noticing
RWA growth is parabolic. Here's the chart I got from Graham Ferguson. It's just starting to take off on X. People are noticing RWA growth is parabolic.
Here's a chart I got from Graham Ferguson.
It's just, you know, it really started.
I mean, it existed.
Those of us that have been here,
we've been talking RWA since I can remember.
I mean, since, like, quite literally since 2021.
And it just really didn't take off until about September of last year.
We saw a little bit.
It grew through November, December,
and then all of a sudden, January hit,
and it has just went boom,
like hockey stick in February, March.
I don't think it slows down.
I think it continues to grow from here.
And with that, I do want to play in our quick
keeping it real segment intro.
This is brought to you by Powered by Doma.
I'll be right back, and we'll do a quick live live read and then we'll go to Quirky Quirk and
then we'll probably work on getting out of here.
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You go buy the domain, you register the .com, the .xyz, the .info, et cetera.
And then a year later, it comes
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idea. Although I will say with AI now, it's a lot easier to take an idea and turn it into a,
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We're going to do that every couple of weeks. But before I forget, DOMA, they have their big
dominion conference coming to Vegas. It piggybacks off of Bitcoin Vegas.
I just saw Julie and Joxie.
Joxie was in the chat earlier.
Great to connect with you.
I think that we just first connected.
A longtime fan of Julie.
And Julie does put out some great content.
One of the underrated streamers
and content creators in the space, in my opinion.
She says they're going to take the city by storm.
Can't wait to take you all for the ride.
Want to team up?
DMs are open.
See you in Vegas for the Bitcoin conference. Again, DOMA and Dominion that same week. It's April 29th
through 30th at Resorts World. Stick around. We're not going to do it today, but we have some,
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Over 300 million, 90 domains out there.
They're the world's first blockchain to tokenize and unlock that liquidity. And that's our Keeping It Real segment brought to you by DOMA. More on that soon. That said,
Quirky Quirk, appreciate your patience. Thanks so much for keeping that hand up. GM,
take it whichever direction you'd like. Sounds good. GM, Cap. GM, everybody. Yeah,
been a great chat so far. So many threads, obviously, to discuss, especially as I got my
hand up patiently. But yeah, I think that between your epic market readouts and commercials these
days, you got definitely got a future in those pharma side effect readouts, I think cap,
maybe auctioneering or something because you've got it down. But um, but yeah, so first of all,
like abstract hot dogs, is it like Chicago style, new york style what are we talking about here do you know good question i i am not a hot dog fan um
if i am i would do a ballpark i would do a ballpark i think i'm gonna go to a spring training
game this saturday oh yeah i will probably eat a hot dog at the ballpark it's for some reason i
can't explain it it actually doesn't even matter which which ballpark which brand of hot dog they
just taste significantly different.
Like, I'm kind of grossed out by a hot dog if I'm eating it at home.
But for some reason, at a ballpark, it's delicious.
100%.
Yeah, good question.
Hopefully, they're ballpark hot dogs.
I don't know, though.
Sometimes those kosher ballpark, Franks, man, those hit differently.
And you know, it's like real meat, not this fake stuff.
But anyway, I think I might maybe spin up like an abstract glizzy's project after this. So if you want a whitelist, put that in the up. But yeah, I think I might, I might maybe spin up like an abstract glizzies project after this.
So if you want a whitelist, but yeah, no.
But anyway, back to the topic.
So yeah, I've been, I've got an elite chat role, I think in, in abs abstract community,
thanks to like quirkies and poppy, but like admittedly been a bit outside of it and haven't
really been paying as much attention to it as I probably should be.
But like this conversation has been really interesting and should definitely, I'm going to definitely dig back into it now that I've heard
what I've heard and, you know, been doing a lot of vibe coding myself. So, you know, abs chat,
it was, it was good to see him and listen to that. That just gives me a better feel for what's going
on there. And I feel like it was very pertinent and relevant to what was going on earlier and
how to communicate. Cause that felt like a pretty, you know, emotionally intelligent and communicative
clinic on like how to handle stress and address it right on. So definitely appreciate that.
And then earlier, like a lot of what you said earlier about like how to win friends and
influence people, honestly, that book was like straight up changed my life. I think
it's been one of those books that, you know, when I read it, I was definitely much more in
that sort of like chill mode always. And this was like, obviously way pre NFT world, but where you
sort of get in this place of only talking about yourself and like what you're up to and not really
listening to people. So I think that was a great reframe for me.
That and also the one that Poppy mentioned,
the Emotional Intelligence 2.0.
One other book I wanted to throw out there,
which I found really good, is called The Go-Giver.
Have you heard of that one, Kep?
I've done it. Can you spell it for me?
Yeah, it's just G-O-G-I-V-E-R.
Go-Giver, got it. No, check it out.
Yeah, it's really good.
But it's like same along the lines of that. It's like, okay. And it's kind of interesting and probably super actually is
really applicable for the space that we're in because, you know, everyone here, I feel like,
you know, you get up, you shill a lot of times. Right. But it's all about kind of flipping that
script and like being like, okay, what can you do for other people? Knowing that like the more
that you help others, the more that it comes back around. And I think a lot of us have come around to that.
But I think the initial instinct in this space is just like get up here and show your project,
show your space, show your whatever.
Right.
So it's been really interesting.
And one of the things that's that definitely resonates with me on that is like, you know,
I'm in health care and like health tech.
And I'm part of this pretty like high level life sciences networking group with like, you know, some major VCs and big banks and operators. And
there's this group that I'm a part of, and their whole motto is to like, quote, find someone help
and repeat. And, you know, it really kind of resonates with all of those things. And I think
we could definitely use a lot more of that in this space. So yeah,
I just wanted to throw that out there. But also too, like, I think it's funny, like Jesus,
I always think of like, what would Jesus do? So maybe like a WWCD might be his next thing.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. But, and then a couple last things here. So like I said,
mentioned earlier, I've been digging into the vibe coding rabbit hole. And like and like you know I was building an AI motion analysis platform for some medical providers and
like have really really gone down the rabbit hole in some ways that I as an html only knowledge
base like should have no reason to be able to build the kind of things I'm building so
it was cool to listen to um abstract talk about like building on the abstract chain and kind of the things that he was thinking about.
So I actually might take a stab at that because it's really fun to be building.
And along those lines, there's like a pretty awesome group of people.
A lot of people are actually here in the community right now, like Jeremy Knows and Mike Rowe and Pyro from Bad Bad, Mason and all like, but we've had this awesome like group text thread recently
where all of us have been building our like open claw setups for the last month now or
a little more.
And like daily, we're just like sharing things back and forth on best practices and different
skills, sharing back and forth.
It's been absolutely wild to see the kind of things that we've been able to do and kind
of relevant to the next hour and a half.
I actually just had my bot do like a super deep dive analysis on like historical trends and analytics to make me an epic bracket. So I'm
trying to see where this thing might take me, but I'm hoping it takes me to the, the Calci billion
dollars, but you know, we'll see. Hey, good luck. Another, another bracket plug there. Calci has a,
if you get a perfect bracket, you win a billion dollars, extremely unlikely. No one's ever done
Berkshire Hathaway or Warren Buffett did it prior to Kalshi. But it's not just the billion dollar for the perfect bracket. I think the top bracket, the winner actually gets a million dollars. And
I think it's free to enter. So go get your brackets filled out. I said an hour. I think
actually it's, you got about, it's till noon. So you got an hour and 20 minutes to get your
brackets. And I pinned both the bearish link up top, as well as Cool Chicks Mint. Cool Chicks is minting right on
OpenSea. Really easy to go do. You get your March Boundness bracket. This will reveal,
this will turn into a team. And if the team makes it to the final four, you're in the cash.
If it wins, you win, obviously, first place. Bearish, if you're not familiar, it's just
mania.bearish.af. You can
also get that from their official account, which is also pinned up top. And they've got a few
different options with, again, AI-assisted to fill out those pools. But if you're in Z, again,
all these are free entries. So may as well go support our girl, Cool Chick. Long-time fan of
the show, just one of the great ones, very active and supports so many others in the space. Would love to see anyone who's got it.
It's about $20 to mint that ticket and get you a little sweat for the bracket.
And then go check out Bearish.
You got an hour and 17 minutes remains until the first game tips.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn't give the Miami of Ohio team a shout-out.
I know our guy, Be Epic, a big fan there.
They won last night despite being the six and a half point underdogs.
I actually said on this show that I would bet Miami because I felt it and I did not take action.
So I left some free money on the table there.
I hope someone else tailed my paper trading.
But good luck to everyone.
I hope someone hits a perfect bracket there.
That would be amazing.
Even going perfect the first round is a pretty big accomplishment.
I think my boss got it.
What do you think, Cap?
I mean, I would say it does other than I think there's probably thousands of other people this year filling out brackets that are doing so with the hope of having a perfect bracket.
So you're probably competing with a lot of,
I would say this, if you have a bracket that's filling out, or you have AI filling out a bracket
for you, I would at least make a change or two, like manually change one thing, because there's
likely someone else ran the same prompt in the same LLM, and it spit out the exact same bracket,
and you want to be unique in these things. So yeah, pick one thing to differentiate from your
AI output. I definitely, I don't want to split, i don't want to split a billion i that'd be that'd be too little you
know i'm not splitting a billion good yeah i mean i i would if i'm going to split any price pools
that would be the one to split um i did pick up that braggart madness though nft that was a good
a good shout out um so thanks for thanks for all you cap and then um yeah one last thing we've been
like if anybody else is building open cost stuff, would love to connect with people because
it's absolutely wild. And like, we've been actually starting a, like a quick, like change
on the fly space. We're calling it where we're just going to get together and talk about it.
And you know, kind of live, live talk through all the building we're doing, like what's working,
what's breaking. So if that's your vibe, literally come and hang with us. Happy to have people.
Awesome. Great guy.
Go connect for Quirk and Quirk if you're on the vibe coding.
Be epic.
Safe travels on your way to Philly.
Shalowen, get in here.
Last thoughts, comments.
I saw Anthony jumped up.
If you want to get in here before we close down, throw up a hand.
I'll get to you as well.
And apologize for anyone that we weren't able to get up on stage today or had to bounce
before we got to you.
But Shalowen, GM.
GM, glad to get back into this.
I thought that was really interesting points that you made.
And I wish I had a chance to listen to AppJad
to hear their comments.
I think the general idea, though,
that is probably shared is that, you know,
they've gone really from consumer app to DeFi, right?
Or at least transactions and transaction-based activity. I think, you know,
when listening to Kevin, too, from Bosu, you know, the difficulty really is having to, again,
really pivot and understand, like, the validity of what they're trying to do and actually be
relevant. I think the thing that takes me back, though, it's kind of like, do we do this thing so that we're just utilizing the same pool of people when it comes to the space?
Right. And that's just do all these transactions, because, you know, for the most part, even upvoting is a transaction.
Logging into the DApp is a transaction. All these different things are trying to drive all of these different interactions, engagement.
And it is simple in the sense that you don't have to use your direct wallet
and then go through the process, but just use abstract.
I think my problem, though, is as a builder in this space, too,
it's one of those difficult things that you have to juggle.
You almost have to have a separate gaming team
to dominate the timeline in how it works
in addition to building to a wider audience.
And I think there's the conundrum, right?
That's the intersection of the ones that are going to do it best.
But I feel like the more they get into the transaction game,
the less people who are non-native to the space are going to be turned off.
And I feel like that has to be the thing that everyone works on.
Because again, I talk to different builders within Abstract.
It seems to be the case where you have to build that with that in mind,
but I feel like it's a huge pivot because ideally it's supposed to be one of those things that you're
just able to have value when you just interact with a chain in an organic native way versus like,
oh, I seem to have to interact every single time I want to do anything. And I think that's the one
of the problems that we have. So from a super tension and a community perspective, yeah, that's
part of the game, but I feel like there's got to be a balance. And if that's the case, then why not
just bring on more DeFi? Maybe that's a problem. Maybe that there's not enough DeFi players who
want to participate in it because they feel like it's just a consumer chain. So we're going to
continue to see like the Zs try to influence and impact. You're going to start seeing NFTs changing
the way they already have in terms of creating gamification of the transaction themselves. I just don't know how it really moves the space forward.
I feel like if they were able to onboard partners that were more on that side of it and then to
carry and focus and go back to what was the original concept of abstract as a consumer chain,
we would have a better feel for the direction where it's headed. At least I'd be a lot more
optimistic in terms of the direction of where it's headed.
When it comes to games, honestly, you're right.
Whether it's seasonal to a March Madness, whether it's seasonal to a holiday,
there's lots of ways you can vibe code.
The real reality is how do you do that in a way that's user acquisition based?
And just to kind of give a nod to your conversation at RWA,
I think that's actually something that we're doing
as a publisher at Warp is really focusing on
that user acquisition funding
to really help support a lot of this
and using organic communities to really drive
the vibe and the feel of what the expectation is
in terms of how consumers come on chain
and actually interact in this space
in a way that's native, right?
And then the last point too is,
it's really good to hear
a lot of different community members
because in the end, I think you're right.
We're trying to have constructive conversations
that push the needle,
that create elevated conversation
and not just shitposting.
Not to say that shitposting isn't great,
but the reality is abstract really,
I think even though they're headed towards a shift,
it would be a good course correction to kind of have a two-prong approach,
which still leans into streamers, still leans into distribution,
but also still focuses on ways to encourage developers and founders
to add that extra gamification layer to it without having to cannibalize
all of their other efforts and creating something that's more meaningful, you know, in terms
of retention.
Because I feel like the more you lean into the gambling side and transaction side, you
just lose a lot of people because it's just a huge turnoff.
Anytime I have a conversation with friends, family, people who are learning about the
space, I feel like the more times you have to touch a wallet and do it, again, although
it's important, it just leans
away from it. So if there's better ways
to go about it, it'd be ideal. Even when I
onboard money,
I find a lot of dApps do it better
than even abstract themselves. Whether it's using
Dilley, whether it's using other
dApps on their chain,
it's a lot less friction.
But it's just one of those
things I'm just like, there's got to be a better moat. Really tough dynamic. It's like it's a lot less friction. But, you know, it's just one of those things I'm just like, there's got to be a better moat.
I mean, really tough dynamic.
It's like, it's...
I mean, you basically have conflicting goals, right?
Like, you want to drive the transactions,
the vanity metrics for funding,
for TGE.
At the same time, most of that stuff
is kind of a turnoff to
not even just, like, the consumer, the non-crypto
natives, but a lot of people like the NFT communities.
You don't want to force a community to transact, like to do a bunch of pointless transactions.
I mean, that's not much different than bots.
It's just, it's really tough, tough needle to thread.
And I also am glad AbsChad was able to join us today.
I do, I meant what I said.
I feel a lot better about streaming and abstract.
I also meant what I said about like,
how you say things is important
and acknowledge how he owned it and respect.
I just, the same thing with,
very similar with Adam coming on
the day after OpenSea's announcement,
like own this stuff.
You get a lot more,
are you gonna make everyone happy? No. Is everyone gonna leave here like an abstract bull? No.
But at least, at least they're not hiding from it. At least they're not disappearing and not,
not, you know, yeah, I guess, at a loss for an analogy this morning. But yeah, I thought it was
a good conversation. I hope. I mean, I think there were some good suggestions that came out of the show today.
I also found that, hey, we can.
I'm going to work on,
see if I get that extension turned on
so I can give back some of the tip love
that I've been very fortunate.
So many generous viewers over there on Abstract,
I'd love to be able to give some of that back.
And now there's a third-party solution.
That was the one thing I was going to say too.
I forgot about that.
I know you can't directly tip back in the chat,
but you can see their profile.
And their profile, I believe,
has their wallet address and everything.
So with some extra clicks,
you could do as you please.
I mean, obvious, makes sense.
Just hadn't, I don't know.
I don't know why I haven't thought of that.
But yeah, great call on that one.
And also shout out to DGTL. I'm probably getting the
accurate acronym wrong, but, um, that's the sort of stuff like maybe not, not to take it from DGTL,
but like whether it's mini games, mini apps, things like that, you know, I think what abstract
has been clear on while they XP may be somewhat opaque, we know what's important to them.
And they want to see these transactions. They want to see the DeFi-esque activity,
the AI agent activity. So is there something in that world that makes sense for what you're
building? At least be thinking that way. Is there something that you can add to your project,
add to your NFT community, add to your streaming that may help?
Like in my case,
I know I would have got more XP last week
had I tipped.
You know, Steve and I used to alternate.
We do my abstract stream one day,
his the next and vice versa.
And every day, like the first thing I would do
when it was Steve's, I would send a tip.
It was a transaction.
It was a light lift, low effort, low cost transaction.
And I haven't been jumping into other streams.
I haven't been doing that.
And so like even something as simple as that,
to your point, yes, I can do that today.
Just got to remember, got to take a few extra steps.
I do think it'd be cool to be able to see,
you know, just to drive that back and forth.
Just like how Beepic and Crypto King were like going, Crypto King
tipped 500 and Beepic came over the top with 700 and then Crypto King came back with another 201
to make it a total of 701. Like it just, it's like fun little mini games inside a chat. Like
to be able to participate in that as a streamer would, would, is it going to change the world?
No, but would be nice, nice little ads, nice, nice to haves.
But all that being said, uh, well, I saw Anthony, Anthony, did you want to get in here real quick
before we shut things down? No, I don't want to hold you guys up. I didn't realize I was jumping
back in at the end. That's quite all right. Oh, good, man. Good. We'll get you. Appreciate you
joining us. Appreciate you coming up. And, uh, uh, one of these days, happy to get you into the
conversation.
I will say, appreciate everyone here. I mean, I truly want to, this is my favorite shows where even though we stuck on one topic, pretty much for the most part, the majority of the day,
I really do enjoy these very interactive participatory shows where you get to hear
from so many people, not just hear from, helps me make connections. I know a lot of you,
you know a lot more about me than I know about you. You get to hear me every day. I really do enjoy hearing from all of you. I feel it helps
deepen those relationships. And, uh, I do like we'll, we'll all, we will remain a community,
uh, community show. And it is the shows were, you know, it's a better show because of the support
and, and so many of you that add to the show, whether it's comments in the chat, whether it's a better show because of the support and, and so many of you that add to the show, whether it's comments in the chat,
whether it's jumping on stage,
oftentimes it's,
you know,
I'm guessing someone probably pinged Abschud today,
said,
Hey,
they're talking about you.
They're talking about,
you know,
the,
the,
you know,
the,
the XP and,
and as a result,
he ended up here in the,
in the,
in the show.
Whoever did that.
Appreciate it.
Thanks to GMB who jumped up on stage
and helped with that conversation.
Thanks to Lakey,
who I just saw posted out a clip.
Hadn't yet connected.
Just gave you a follow back.
One of those elite chads over there.
Like all this stuff really does,
it is greatly appreciated,
really does help.
And great, great to connect with all of you.
Appreciate everyone on the team,
those in the community,
found NFT founders and leaders like Kev,
who jumped up on stage,
Cheezus and Edity, as always,
bringing the fire.
Again, go hit their show up here in about five minutes.
They kick off on X as well as Abstract.
And in closing,
we probably will dig into a little bit of this tomorrow.
It was on my docket today. Somewhat evergreen.
I mentioned in passing that Doodle's AI studio
had ruffled some feathers in the creator world.
Michael, a 3D traditional artist,
says abolish Gen AI, calls it slop.
Roman Revert, a little more direct and aggressive,
says go F yourself, and this went viral
17,000 likes
400,000 views
I know the 3D
artists apparently don't like this stuff
this is, per
his profile, was with Illumination
Lorax, Despicable Me, Minions
so, I don't know
Roman, apparently
probably a very talented 3D artist and director.
I don't think this is the way forward. Like AI is not going anywhere. It's, you're going to see
more and more and more of this. Like, how can you use it to enhance what you're doing? How can you
like, you know, I'm sure like it went viral. So peer probably resonated with a lot of people,
but yeah, look, he says, good dude yourself.
It doesn't ruffle feathers if it's a nothing burger.
I'll just say that.
So kind of changed my thoughts on dudes.
And then last little nugget.
We'll probably talk about that a little more tomorrow.
At least I just wanted to share the tweets if you missed them.
Last little nugget, big news, breaking news. The CFTC in Major League Baseball just signed the first ever MOU between a sports league
and a federal agency. This is from Mike Seeley, the chairman of the CFTC, who's very pro, very
bullish prediction markets. He says, we've committed to work together to protect the integrity and
resilience of prediction markets relating to professional baseball. Through this partnership,
the CFTC is well positioned to add additional tools to protect the markets from fraud,
manipulation, and other abuses. Thanks to MLB and Commissioner Manfred for working with us to protect the integrity of these growing markets. Read the
full thing here. I'm not going to read the full thing, but I will probably punt that to tomorrow.
I just, it's good. It's a good, like the reality is sports betting, player props, prediction markets,
it does open up opportunity for
insider trading. And I'm not talking insider trading like, oh, you got wind of something,
but like baseball players throwing games. Like there's a known issue. Like going like a manual
class A for the closer for the Guardians is, I think, lifetime suspension. Because he would bet
or tell people to bet on the first pitch is going to be a ball and he'd throw a ball.
It may seem small in that example, but several thousands of dollars were traded.
Anything like that impacts the integrity of any game, baseball, football, sports, other stuff.
I think especially sports, though, it is important that they maintain integrity.
They can't have players throwing games or throwing pitches or impacting the outcome because they're standing to personally benefit on the financial side because they're betting on a prediction market or player props or whatever.
So I think this is a good step.
I just saw that headline.
I have no idea what it actually entails, but I think it's a positive sign that MLB is working with the CFTC to protect the integrity. All that being said, we got to get you out of here. Go check out
Cheezus and Idiot Show here at 11. We'll be back tomorrow. If you're new here, we go live every
Monday through Friday at 8 a.m. Eastern time. And I hope you all have a wonderful, wonderful Thursday, everyone. you .
