Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Between 2 Hoodies - Why aren't we pumping? w/ Dragos
Recorded: March 20, 2025 Duration: 1:15:15Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the current trends in the market, emphasizing the volatility of Bitcoin, the impact of global economic factors, and the evolving landscape of NFT investments. The conversation also highlighted the importance of due diligence in angel investing and the nostalgic bonds formed within the crypto community.
Full Transcription
you What's going on, Barat?
Hey, sir.
Good man.
Oh no, you're coming out of the wrong sound.
Shit.
Give me a second.
Okay, we should be good now. Would you put some voice filter on me or something?
No, you're coming out of my computer screen.
And I'm like, oh God, this is gonna create a delay and shit.
I was gonna screw everything up and I didn't want that. So. Ah,'m like, Oh, God is gonna like create a delayed shit. I was gonna like screw everything up. And I didn't
want that. So I gotcha gotcha. How's it going? Pretty good,
man. Just you know, another day and chaos, I would say I'm I can
appreciate the calmness right now of the space, even though
it's a little bearish. And sometimes I like, I know I sound, it sounds bad because like most people are here to make
money, but like, I like the bear market.
Sometimes it just kind of lets you breathe a little bit.
I feel like there's too much chaos in the, in the full on bull.
Man, I tell you that Bitcoin price action.
I've never seen anything like it. I mean
It is absolutely
it's like, you know
unreal up and down right like
If you watch the shorter timeframes, it's
Incredibly volatile which usually pretends a big move in some direction
Who knows which way.
But it is incredibly volatile right now.
Yeah, I mean, how long have we been in this range, right?
And how long has Bitcoin been fighting for everything else?
It's just such a weird one.
It is weird, especially when you see what happened to gold.
I mean, it's like, you've got to think that we are, you know, we're kind of a, you know,
gold being a leading indicator at this stage is something that we've never seen before.
Yeah, it's gonna be super interesting, like hard assets.
I mean, obviously, you got to be able long term.
Yeah.
Isn't that kind of the same thesis?
Like, what's cool?
I mean, God, we're going to go off the rails
maybe a little bit, but the whole, you got tariffs and tariffs are like this huge challenge
right now for the global economy. But there's this thing called Bitcoin where you have the
freedom to transact and there's no taxes on it. right? I mean, like in theory, right?
There's no tariffs on it, right?
It is the way to get around this stuff.
It is the way philosophically that we can continue
to ignore like modern, like government rules in a lot of ways.
I'm not suggesting it, what does that be?
You know what I'm saying?
Like you have a centralized entity
that's charging 25% on all the things,
but there's this way to send each other money.
You would think that would be extremely bullish, not just for gold, but for this thing that
you can use to transfer money without ever paying for those things.
Oh, 100%.
I think none of us would be here if not for that hard asset, transparent know, sort of transparent sort of money thesis, right?
It is incredibly sort of powerful. It's, I mean, it's why we do what we do.
It's why, like, ethics matter. It's why, you know, crypto Twitter is such a cool community.
If you can sort of see out the malicious actors. I wouldn't say bad actors.
I think bad actors kind of have two
faces sometimes. You can easily spot a good person having a bad day, you know, perhaps
doing bad things. But like, you know, obviously, bad actors who have malicious intent, it's
a completely different thing, right? They're trying to rug or scam or do something stupid,
extractive.
Yeah, it all comes back home to roost.
Totally. What are you trading these days? Have you actually like made a trade in
the last five days or 10 days?
No, I've, I've, you know, just some minor shit here and there, but nothing major.
You know, tinkering on the edges, I kind of I like, I like the double touch of the high 70s for Bitcoin. But I have this
like sense that there is one more scam wick view. And, but I, I really like the fact that
we've had that double touch. and that's out of the way.
I want to see us kind of repair kind of the daily weekly charts
now and then start to look at redeploying more, if you will.
But it's too volatile right now.
You get whipsawed.
Yeah, totally.
And anything on chain or anything that like
interested you NFT wise or like, are you bought? I mean, that
you bought something a couple weeks ago, right? You had a
pretty big auction buy on like a bottle.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I bought I bought the giraffe. Yeah, I got
Yeah, so much black. I mean, it's funny. You know that, you
know, you know that something's mimetic when everybody is
screaming at you on the timeline, right?
So I did buy, so it was Bado's first generative
P5.js output.
So Bado's always used the text to image models,
community aligned AI, if you will,
in terms of deploying new outputs and new works.
And I've been a one-of-one collector
for Boto for a while.
But this was a brand new model that they have been developing
for the last year.
And it's a P5.js model.
And it's funny.
So they had several generative outputs that they created.
But since the DAO and the community
gets to vote on outputs, they kind of had
this really janky, funny, you know, kind of giraffe hopping around, like a pinwheel giraffe
almost hopping around.
And with this elephant kind of following it in the safari kind of mode, right?
And it was, it just grabbed me and slapped me, right?
It was like, oh, this is kind of interesting.
You know, this is mimetic in many ways.
And, you know, so I was like, yeah, okay,
I'm gonna go after it because I always think
when you have artists, whether they are, you know,
just individual artists, or if it's, you know,
a community aligned AI artist like Botto is that,
you know, hopefully over time becomes
increasingly autonomous.
It is super interesting when they launch
either their Genesis work or a Genesis of a new, you know,
LLM derivative model, right?
I think it's like a first of a kind, right?
So that was kind of my impetus behind it.
And, you know, I haven't really spent a lot
on art in a long time.
I mean, it's been, it's been at least a year and a half.
I think I bought a ACK one of one maybe 12 months ago
for about 38.
So this was my biggest buy since then.
I'm watching it now.
It's so funny.
It's so good.
It pisses so many people off.
It's not even funny.
And I feel bad, right?
I do feel bad.
But then you have to study Boto and you have to dig into these things more than at a superficial
level, right?
A lot of people look at it and say, oh, my four year old could have done that.
Well, your four year old didn't do that.
And you know, the whole point is that did you dig into, understand the algorithm,
understand the collaborative approach that Bado takes in terms of community curation,
linked to new models, linked to new sort of approaches with P5.js. And I think that's
where people kind of just, you know, it all kind of goes back to this discussion that
we have. Like when you say stuff on on Twitter,
you're very reflexive, you're very reactive, you have no idea behind the context, but you make a statement. And then people hang on that statement, right? Good, bad or indifferent. And in many cases,
they don't actually dive any deeper than, you know, like a centimeter. And I think that's where
you have this very interesting kind of how do you look at
things mid to long term and how do you evaluate, you know, perspectives, I guess.
Totally. I love it. Hey, Dragos. Welcome, sir.
Sup. Long time. It's been a long time. Someone last
night was talking about us being on spaces forever ago and how they remember that. And
I'm like, that's pretty cool.
Now we're back.
Yeah, those were good times.
And never really felt like those.
Yo, good to have the gang reunited.
Um, yeah, thanks for coming up.
It's, it's funny.
I was thinking about, so last night I wrote a, a negative review on ethos. I was actually going to slash him, which sounds
kind of grim. But remember our buddy Root?
Oh, I just I literally just logged into ethos and it's the
first thing that popped up right now.
It's like the one thing that I feel like, like everyone that
was in that space at the time came together around was this
guy like coming in and in like the
space is still there. You can still go listen to like the recorded space where he came up
and convinced us all he was like gonna be here for the long term and how much he believed
in friend tech and yeah anyways I wrote a negative review for him and it reminded me
of the old I like actually opened front tech up I can't believe it's so I don't know who
the hell's hosting it.
And I went and looked and you can see the logs
of exactly when he did it all.
But yeah, that was a throwback.
And it definitely felt like the good old days
for a second there with FrontTech.
They were onto something and I missed it a little bit.
I don't know if you guys feel the same way or not.
or not. Man, Root was like, he was perhaps the most, the single biggest reason why, you know,
Man, Root was like, he was perhaps the most,
ethos made sense, right? Because like, I remember him on that space with you. And I listened for the
full hour and I was captivated because he's a smart guy. Obviously a dev, right? He's a developer.
And here he is talking about like the positive value of friend tech and the
3.3 model and you know how it creates like this real sort of cohesion in terms of people building
powerful networks together blah blah blah blah blah right and I remember him hitting me up on
dms and he's like hey I just bought your I just bought your your key and it was after the it was
after your space with him.
And I was like, you know, this guy sounded
like a really good person, right?
Like an upstanding individual.
And he was going around buying people's keys
and he's like, you know, let's do the three-three bond.
And for those of you in the audience,
the three-three bond is effectively, you know,
you buy somebody's key in Frentech, they buy your key
and it's kind of that unspoken rule
that you never sell, right?
In other words, you kind of ride or die
with that individual in a three comma three, right?
It's the old old protocol model.
But anyway, so you go do this,
and then like, it was like almost like three days later,
maybe it's a week later, Serp, remind me,
and he just like dumps everybody's keys, right? Yeah. And it was just like- Yeah, it was like three days later, maybe it's a week later, Serp, remind me. And he just like dumps everybody's keys. Right.
Yeah.
And it was just like, yeah, it was like three days later.
Yeah.
It was like three days later.
I mean, it's like, how do you go from being here?
And then he says, he makes up some cockamamie story that, you know,
Hey, market suck, we're going down.
Everything is going to zero.
And it was just like this, you know, what?
And that was like in November 23 and then everything pumped after.
It was hilarious.
The ultimate bottom call.
He came on my space.
I just didn't know who he was.
I can't even remember how we put him as a speaker, but he was so good.
It felt like, wow, this guy is...
I didn't know about him, but he had quite a few followers.
So like, oh, wow, this guy's amazing.
Let me buy his key.
And then everyone else did the same thing on the space.
And it wasn't only that he was like very eloquent and stuff.
He was literally saying, as he was literally saying, like, yeah,
I'm never selling or whatever.
I don't know if he said that exactly,
but he was like giving long-term vibes,
and then he just rugged everyone.
The problem was he rugged.
He had bought a lot of his own keys, right?
And he sold those as well, I think.
Yeah, he had bought his own.
Yeah, I think people...
I don't remember exactly,
but I think people believe that he had bought on his alt too,
and then dumped them.
Oh, wow.
And so yeah, I mean, like it was just a disaster basically.
And yeah, I just remember that so vividly.
And like, if you were an investor in ethos,
you would remember too that like root was in the pitch deck.
Like that example was the genesis in a lot of ways
of what we created was like, it wasn't about root.
It was this instance where someone came on,
they use their own credibility to deflect who they were.
They convinced people to do something
and then they dumped on them.
And we had this like objective way
to basically measure that now.
And that was like when I was like,
we need like TrustPilot for Front Tech, basically.
And then it just like kind of exploded into like this whole other thing. So I think Root for being
the inspo. But it really was a big part of the early days of how we were thinking about ethos.
And I think Bharat, like you were one of the first people I talked to about of like,
should we go build something here?
I feel like I should go build something
that like solves this problem.
Yeah, man.
And it was, if you remember, there was a kind
of a more systemic, you know, I shouldn't say it's systemic
but there was a period where all the board apes
were kind of doing the same thing.
It was kind of a, it was weird, right?
Maybe we were, it was guilt by association or something,
but yeah, no, I totally agree.
But we started to see patterns emerge
and the patterns were, it was weird
because I remember for a while,
if people had a board a PSP and there were three threeing
with you, it was like, yeah, run, don't do it, right?
And I remember punks who did the same thing.
They dumped on people and they kind of exited, Don't do it, right? And I remember punks who did the same thing.
They dumped on people and they kind of exited.
But your point is bang on.
And I remember there were enough of these patterns
that where it made sense for you to kind of look at
is there something that we needed
that was a more foundational layer
that allowed you to sort of look at the integrity
of the process and actually reward or slash people
on the basis of how they behave, right?
In terms of their social sort of engagement.
Yeah, because like now that we have ethos,
I could imagine someone would have slashed him after that.
Right?
And then that's the whole kind of point
is you have that accountability of like, oh, now
like now we have a way to look back and say, the whole kind of point is you have that accountability of like, oh, now, like, now,
now we have a way to look back and say, oh, this guy was not trustworthy. And going forward,
maybe we shouldn't trust him. And, and it felt sort of like the one like, just if
justification last night of writing that it felt kind of like full circle to be able to write that
review last night of like, damn, this is what we created
to solve this exact problem.
But yeah, did you guys happen to see the,
have you guys interacted with slashing at all
or seen any of the slashing so far?
Any thoughts on what you've seen?
So far it's only been, well, there's
like a few interesting ones.
It's only been like the obvious ones where you're like,
yeah, for sure, slash him.
I mean, that's helpful.
But I think what I really like is
that it kind of brings that feeling when you're
going on governance forums.
Not that I go on them too often, but some of the ones that I've seen,
there's like some really heated debate about protocols and how people should address changes
and everyone has their own argumentation. And I was looking at a few of these, like maybe that,
I don't know, was it Elena? Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of, it's quite intensely debated and it's not like a 100% slash.
Right now it's like 60% to like 34%. But there's arguments on both sides and it's very nuanced.
And I really like that. And I think that's like the point of slashing, obviously, slash the bad
actors as well, dump their credibility score. But these kinds of things are,
because it also requires more courage, right?
Because you're putting your credibility at stake
for something that might not end up happening.
And I'm curious when we will get some sort of example,
where to some people,
because with this Eleanor, like, okay, I get what she did.
It doesn't seem that egregious to me.
Not saying that she shouldn't be slashed.
I don't really know.
I didn't participate in the voting.
Maybe I'll read up.
But I think there are some cases where there's like egregious, like really, really big grifters.
But as you know, in crypto, a lot of the biggest grifters also have the biggest audiences because
they also happen to share stuff that pumps and then people forget.
And, and, and, and ironically, they might actually for like a small period of time when
everything is pumping, they might actually be good follows.
And I suspect that that's when they actually get most of their followers,
who have like no context of their previous rugs or grifts or whatever dodgy stuff they've done.
That's always the risk.
And like Spider, for example, right? Like Spider, I followed him for like four years.
I don't really read his channel that much. He said some epic calls
He's also rugged including in like group chats that I'm in like outright just like shelled something that rug ten minutes later
Yeah, if you track it wallets, you know, he like shills and dumps on his followers
Yet because he had like two winning trades in the past three months, like huge, huge wins, like eight figure
wins on like peanut and I forget what else it was. The other one
people, it's like human nature to get instantly drawn to that.
So I'm curious if someone were to slash him on ethos when ethos
has like way more users. And it also has the users that are,
like let's say part of the cult or that are admiring him.
I really wonder what would happen.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, Spider's an interesting one
where I've seen plenty of people have opinions,
but he hasn't really shown up on ethos yet.
And I do think if you take Spider out of the equation and to say, if
there's a general person who has a history of like, rugged people continuously,
they are, they are probably a net negative for the space and should be identified as
such, um, and ethos isn't actually solving that for, for someone like spider right
now in theory, because no one has really like voiced their opinion yet.
The crazy part is we're at 30, let me see, we're like 37,000 reviews.
I'm like, I keep saying that like the data is not quite there yet.
We're at 33,000 reviews.
It's 500 reviews a day right now.
The data is not perfect yet, but we're starting to get there. I think the biggest
thing is getting into spaces that we weren't in for people like, God, I really don't want to pick
on Spider, but someone like Spider who obviously isn't attracting the core people on Ethos yet,
or maybe hasn't done anything yet to get people's attraction to go share their opinion on him.
that to get people's attraction to go, you know,
share their opinion on him.
I think the amazing thing is gonna be
when we have prolonged bear market
and we see a heightened amount of activity
and right now it's kind of,
people are still kind of in that honeymoon period, right?
Of like, you know, the last throws of a bull.
So there's still optimism.
There's still kind of this perspective of, you know,
hey, we're gonna have this one final hurrah, all it's we're gonna run blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, we're all going to be fine. But after that shoe drops, right. And the beauty of,
you know, ethics, like, you know, everything else is that it's recession proof, right? It's like,
you are going to write an inordinate number of negative reviews when shit's bad, you know, just as you're going to write good reviews when shit's
good. And I think the normalization is what's going to be awesome about ethos.
I think a point in time snapshot is interesting. Yeah. To Dragos's point, I think
it's, it's, it's really cool to have that view and people may react to some
individuals, you know, bad deed, if you will, in a very negative way in the short term.
But if that person is net good for the space,
we're gonna see that kind of even out, right?
It's like a stock doing a blip or a token,
you know, doing something bad, right?
Like the CEO dumps the token and it falls off for a bit,
but really, you know, the long-term vision
still continues unabated.
I think that's what you're gonna see
with individuals as well, right?
So I think it's amazing to have a point-in-time snapshot of these things because then you can go back and look over
Amid to long enough arc and then say oh, okay. Yeah, you know, we reacted very negatively to this one
You know incident but like look at this individual's trend over time, right?
And that's
going to be interesting. That's where I think super interesting. I think it's really easy as like
individual person to be like, oh, like, my reputation is up into the right and forever.
And you have this expectation that like, oh, I'm reputable, like people will like everything that
I do. And I mean, like, if you ever run a business, you know, that'm reputable. Like people will like everything that I do. And I mean, like if you ever run a business, you know that's not true.
Like people are going to have opinions about you
that like you don't agree with.
And like one or 3% of people
are going to disagree with you.
And I think that everyone kind of expects
their reputation score to just continue
to go up and up and up and up.
Or they think about it and they're like,
oh my God, this guy's way overvalued. Like, how could it be overvalued? And it's like, well, the data just hasn't caught up
with them in terms of like people reviewing them or people who are currently on the platform. And
I think it's better to expect volatility with stuff like your reputation than to be like,
oh, I'm just like, I'm perfectly reputable and I will always be reputable. So
it will be I agree, it's going to be really interesting to see like, we're basically playing catch up right now, which kind of sucks, I think, like, we're just going back and like, you know,
bringing up all the old things that have happened before and making those people like, think about
those things again. And I think that sucks for those people for sure. But like, that's just kind
of like the the world that we're in right
now is like, you got to play catch up and make sure that we
actually document all this stuff.
Yeah, I think I told you, I forget what it was, or when it
happened. But whenever there's like a big scandal on CT is like
the perfect time for ethos. Like, I cannot wait for that
moment when something will happen that everyone gets outraged about. And the battleground is basically ethos. Like I cannot wait for that moment when something will happen that everyone gets
outraged about and the battleground is basically ethos because you can talk on Twitter that gets
lost but then you can now you can instantly go and review that person or like slash them and have an
entire debate and like document everything in real time because right now you're right like I'm just
like I wrote a ton of reviews like I don't know like 60 or 70 and I'm just like, I wrote a ton of reviews, like, I don't know, like 60 or 70.
And I'm trying to go through the challenge every day
to write reviews on people.
But I think in real time, as things are happening,
is even more accurate and relevant.
No, I think so too.
I think that would be the most interesting part is actually,
now that Ditha has kind of established itself
to some extent,
like when bad things happen in real life, I want to see those things play out in real
time on ethos. And we now have all of the mechanisms to facilitate that. Like when someone's
getting slashing, slashed now and you're looking on Twitter, you can see that they're getting
slashed on Twitter. Like it will be very interesting to see how that plays out.
But it's been quiet, which is a good thing,
on the scam and the grift front for a while.
But I mean, if you even go look at this slash that's
live right now, it is fascinating to see people
on both sides of the equation.
And I don't know if you guys know this,
but in the bottom right, there's a little circle there
that shows like, it's like an agreement monitor
in each of the comments.
And there are people that are like,
it's got nine up votes, six down votes,
11 up votes, six down votes, eight up votes, four down votes.
Like it could not be more controversial
of a thread right now.
And yeah, I just think, I think being able, the last part I would say here is like, people are now documenting who they trust without having direct signals by just leaving comments and adding support and in defense. this really complex and fascinating way to observe who supports who, not just because of ethos as
like a reviewing mechanism, but like we'll have basically a social graph of all of that.
Um, but yeah, okay. So let's, let's shift gears a little bit and it's about the bottom of the hour.
So if anyone wants to come up and chat with us today, um, one of the other
things, like, feel free to request.
One of the other things I was going to talk to you guys about, so shifting away
from ethos a little bit is like the thing I see on the timeline all day is like.
How do I get a refund on my angel investment?
And I didn't share my opinion because I'm in both camps of having made angel investments and building something right now
Like I'm curious. Oh, we lost our ghost
But I'm curious brought you write a lot of angel checks and I know you have pretty good expectations
When it comes to angel investing like what what are your thoughts on the lake? Oh, should I get my money back?
Okay, can you you hear me now?
I hear you, Drago. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I just want to go back because I had one question about the slashing and then we can
go to the angel investing stuff. So first of all, this thing, I never saw this like this, like
life slashing on Twitter is really cool. Yeah. And then, so basically if she gets,
it has to be over 60% or under 40% for it to go through right it has to yeah
That's right. If it's a half an impact. Yeah, if it goes in the middle then nothing happens, basically
And what happens?
To the people who vouched for her if she gets last now. Yeah, nothing right now
I like we just we didn't want to add like secondary blowback to it. So
Right now it's just like, oh, well,
they support someone who has been slashed. You can make your own judgment about that basically.
Okay. It'll be an interesting one to consider if we should add that or not some someday. But I mean,
yeah, she's got 22 vouchers that are notable people in the space, I would say. So it is very,
I mean, now they are all down for the holy shit. I never noticed that. Almost all in the space, I would say. So it is very, I mean, now they are all downvoted.
Holy shit, I never noticed that.
Almost all of the vouchers that she has are downvoted.
Really?
Yeah.
Like negative reviews?
No, like people downvoting the vouch itself
because they disagree with it, basically.
So in other words, they're doubling down on the fact that she is or she doesn't have the
support that she thinks she does. Right yeah and it's interesting those people are actually losing
credibility because whenever you vouch for someone if if it ends up that you're net negative on that
vouch and most people down vote you then you will lose a tiny little bit of credibility
because you left something that people didn't agree with.
This is fascinating
because I would assume there's a lot of,
you know how it's like really,
it's kind of hard to like speak out
and a lot of people at a high level
or who are well known, who all know each other,
would not speak out about the other person,
or they would support each other,
but the people from outside would
want to slash a certain bad actor.
I would assume that happens more than you'd think.
Yeah, I agree.
I think this is where I don't have enough data yet to make an informed decision
about like removing someone else's like score because they supported someone who vouched
for someone like it is a little bit too complex for us to have made a decision early on with
that.
And this is this is very much why I've always wanted to learn by shipping and get this thing out there.
We don't really know how humans are going to use this product and what culture does or doesn't map to this.
And so it's really important for us to get real data out there.
It needs real solid interactions. And then we can make tweaks.
Okay, these people did like this,
it didn't like that or felt this way
or didn't feel that way.
Like you need the real data and like,
you just can't fake this.
And if you had to scale up to 10,000 people,
this could really get ugly really quickly.
And this is all part of the learning process.
Nice. All right, wait.
So I want to know, Bharat, at least what you have to say about the angel investing thing,
because I feel like you can help set the precedent straight.
I was reading some crazy thoughts I felt like on the timeline yesterday about angel investing.
I think it's a crap shoot in the traditional world, you know, doing any kind
of venture style investing.
And I think it's five and 100 men.
Yeah, it's 10x more.
Exactly.
It's like so much worse in crypto, right?
So if you're going in expecting, you know, that people are going to, you know, you're
going to invest in that you're going to get something back in return, it people are going to, you know, you're going to invest in that you're going
to get something back in return, it's always going to be up and to the right. That is an
expectation that we've got to like dispense with very quickly. Right. And that's why you
have to be very selective about who you bring into your rounds. Right. Because you have
to have people who are aligned with your vision, who trust in where you're going to spend your
dollars in terms of allocation, in terms're going to spend your dollars in terms
of allocation, in terms of bringing devs on, in terms of bringing go-to-market on, in terms
of being personally committed as a founder.
And if you write somebody a check and it's not kind of playing out the way you expect
it or in a timely manner in which you expected that return, that's on you, right?
That's really on you.
I mean, like you should be looking at a three
to five year time horizon at the least, right?
And I think it's crypto.
It's crazy.
That's like seven to 10, right?
Seven to 10 and in crypto three to five
is what you should be looking at.
But you have people who are expecting a TGE
within like six months, right?
And because they wanna get their capital out and they wanna be able to go deploy it into the next six months, right? And because they want to get their capital out
and they want to be able to go deploy it
into the next Ponzi, right?
I mean, that's the unfortunate nature
of how investing in crypto has become, right?
And I think until we blow all those people out,
and by the way, I don't mean this in a negative way,
I just mean that there's a lot of excess, right?
There's a lot of people who are gambling on founders they probably shouldn't be gambling on. Yeah. And angel
investing investing here. It's like, it's like, it's worse than a meme coin, right?
Because like a meme token, you have liquidity in, in illiquid venture investing, you have
no rights. You have zero rights, right? You're signing your rights away.
So you gotta think about that.
It's like meme coin investing, except less liquid.
I mean, that's like the worst possible combination
of things that you could possibly do
if you're not capable of doing some due diligence, right?
So that's the way I feel.
No, I totally agree.
I felt like what I was reading was crazy
on the timeline yesterday.
People asking for refunds and angel investments, like, dude, I'm sorry, but you fucked up.
Like you shouldn't have it. That's on you. Right? This is why, this is why there are
regulations around how who can invest in things. And they try to put like a barrier of entry
to do that. Because like, I think what it speaks to is it can be really easy when
it's hot to get a lot of people to invest in something when you don't deserve it. And you
have this idea and you're going to go build it and like, you don't, maybe you've never built
anything before. Maybe you don't have a really good idea. Maybe you actually are screwing people over.
Like it, I felt like it was easy exactly like a year ago from right now, where
people were raising and they were like, yeah, TG in a year and blah, blah, blah. And you're
like, you can't make a successful business that has a token in eight months. That's not
a thing, right? And so anyways, I thought it was really interesting. And I think Ben,
my co-founder, like there was a tweet
actually from Jay Ruggs that was like a couple of weeks ago.
And he was like, here's like my angel investing portfolio.
And he's like, I 10 X on one thing and everything else went to zero.
And I only made 20 investments.
And he was like, upset about it kind of thing.
I can't believe 19 teams let me down.
And Ben was like, that is like an extraordinary success rate
in Web2, right?
Like hitting one out of 20 is crazy.
But sorry for being cynical, but like it's
the state of crypto, right?
Like it's not like we have too many use cases or like revenue
aside from the speculation part.
It's not like we have like revenue generating apps that actually have any usefulness, right?
It's mostly still speculation, which is fine.
But yeah, personally, I haven't really invested in stuff this cycle because I feel like a lot of people are still stuck in the mindset
from 2017, 2018, when it was all about private sale investing,
because that's just how the market was going.
And then it carried on in 2020 and 21,
because we had that entire mania.
And even then, it wasn't like you could get burned, um, if you invested too
late and I just personally navigated towards a more, like, I just want
liquidity, um, point of view.
So this cycle, I kind of stayed away from it.
Luckily I invested in some stuff that did really well.
I also invested in some stuff where I just lost everything,
but that's just the nature of it. But you can, yeah. You kiss goodbye. I can't write that name. You should
be kissing goodbye. Yeah, and also you're investing in crypto. It's not regulated. Not everyone's like,
I don't mean to publicly glaze you, but you're actually building something. You know what I mean?
It makes sense. You're a professional. You've built stuff before, you know how to build product,
you know how to like, as you say,
like figure out how to scale it
once you get a reaction from the market,
it's actually something useful.
There's very little products that are like that.
People just mostly build something because they have faster,
they can exit faster in crypto, right?
Versus the traditional space, you just need like a narrative and something somewhat promising. And then, you know, in one year, you can become liquid, and then just half-ass it and make some money. It's a sad reality, but it's the state of the industry.
I mean, it doesn't matter if you're a traditional investor, if you're a purely crypto investor,
you have to have a strategy.
You have to have different buckets, and it depends again on your risk tolerance.
And if you put, let's say 15% of your whatever you have in terms of assets into venture investing,
that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
But you have to, there are a few rules that you kind of have to watch out for, right?
If it was a heavily initial venture capital raise, and now they're going for their second
or third community round, and they're trying to give you a discount on what the VCs bought
for, that should be red flag number one, right?
In other words, they're probably having a problem, right? Either
spent too much, you know, on go to market or spent too much,
you know, getting fat, not really delivering product. And
now they're coming for the final like, you know, you know, round
of exit liquidity.
Yeah, of extraction, right? So you just gotta really think
about, you got to really think about what the motivations
are. And you got to press people on what their KPIs are right?
Like, show me what success you had to date, right? Have you
really been able to launch a product? You have a prototype
that you can show me, you know, who's using the product, right?
What are your DAUs? What you know, what's your revenue? And if
they're it's crickets, and it's like, hey, we're probably going
to have a product in like eight months, nine months, you got to
like red flag that right and say, okay, you know, it's crickets and it's like, hey, we're probably going to have a product in like eight months, nine months. You got to like red flag that, right? And say, okay, you know, it's not a clear,
you know, use case, first and foremost, you have no timeline on delivering a real product,
but yet you have a TGE date, right? I mean, WTF, right? Why would you have a TGE date if
you don't have PMF and you don't have a product, right? So I think there's some basic due diligence elements that people can do.
And it doesn't involve just kind of chasing the fact that paradigm invested in X or A16Z
invested in Y. That should be the least important metric for how you sort of decide whether
or not you're investing in something. So again, back to your X5S question,
I think you really got to think about,
due diligence and really digging in
if you are going to spend even 10% of your capital
into something that's as illiquid as venture investing.
And I heard someone for a second that sounded like it was me.
It like muted me automatically.
I was going to say to his point is like,
you even see in regards to due diligence,
like some of the even smaller funds,
like tier 3s, like their AUM might be super small,
like 10 mil or 15 mil.
Sometimes they even have better success rate
just because of the amount of DDE that they do with
all the projects that are coming in because of the
capital amount they have to deploy?
Yeah.
Interesting take.
Yeah.
I think, I think that is like the DDE part is like the thing that I feel like
has been missing in a lot of cases recently where like people just don't care
to put time in to research something.
And it's like, you don't, you can't make your own investment thesis. If you can't make your own investment thesis about why you should or shouldn't buy something, then like, maybe don't put the money in. I mean'd say on that is like, you should not expect
anything better than like, one to 30 or one to 50 success rate on angels. And, and that
timeframe doesn't look like a year, it looks like three to five years. And I think the
reason I bring it up to broad is like, I actually feel like it can be pretty grifty on the founder side, if you're
someone who, like, maybe you're very motivated and want to raise money and want to build something.
But like, I've known plenty of people that raised money, and I don't think they actually
did anything with the money other than paid themselves. And I think that's the worst.
Yeah, that is that like that clear grift is the worst possible.
I mean, that's fraud, just to be super clear.
It is fraud, right?
And you know, because there are certain people
who will raise and they will have an initial sort of amount
of timeline engagement and they'll be kind of preaching
the good gospel, if you will will and then they go completely silent but then you
start seeing these individuals buy NFTs or you know buying other stuff that
you're like wait I thought you guys were building a product but yet you're
spending time going out and I know people like this by the way I won't call
them out on this call but I know founders who do shit like this, right? Who have basically collected money and taken
that money and gone and invested in other stuff rather than investing in their own business,
right? I'm telling you, this is, this is where you got to be super careful. It is the worst.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, it's like SPF to some extent, right? But like, there are tons of individuals who do shit like this, right? And there are grift maximalists
and you know, you just kind of have to watch out for them and put like a, you know, a little
black mark next to them. And I'll, I'll probably write up some ethos.
Yeah, it's not a black mark. It's just a, it's a red circle that goes under Twitter.
It's a red circle. It's a red dot. It's like, yeah, good luck.
Papi's going to get us confused.
Hey, I got a red circle right now, bro.
Yeah.
Dude, you have a real red circle, man.
Papi.
You know what I need to do that I realize in the Chrome app
is we need to show the scores in Twitter spaces.
I only see it when I go to the requested thing
to see who to bring up.
And it's helpful then. But I think we need the circles in the Twitter
space UI too, it would be helpful.
Yeah, true, true.
Very true.
Um, Hey, DATPunk, we brought you up too.
I'm curious, did you have anything that you wanted to bring up with us today?
Maybe.
Hey guys, no, I actually was going to say something about like a topic, probably like
three topics ago, and then I just got lost writing an ethos review here.
So that's okay.
We can change the subject.
What were you, what did you want to bring up?
I already forgot what it was.
Okay.
Deep into the research here.
But yeah, man, I guess one of the things was
I just started playing with the platform
a little bit more now and wondering if like the,
you know, there's all these breakdowns
of the scores underneath, right?
And I know you mentioned you're still looking at
a lot of the data and trying to understand what works best.
But I was wondering if you have any thoughts
on kind of creating other dimensions of scores for people.
So for example, you know, your reputation as a person
might be very different than your reputation
as your ability to correctly assess other people's
reputation, if you will.
So somebody getting slashed or getting losing points
or reputation for basically say inviting someone
that turned out not to be so great.
You know, it's a different way of judging someone, right?
It's like one is a good guy,
but he actually has poor judgment
on inviting people or whatever.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Like when you said that, like we we kind of have that right now,
where like, if you get more up votes in your contributions to ethos than down votes,
then you build credibility. And I actually am thinking about we should probably get rid of that,
because I don't really think it's that helpful. You shouldn't build credibility just because
you shouldn't build credibility because you can write better reviews for people.
But what you were saying when I thought about it is what if they're, what if
it didn't go into your credibility score?
What if this was like a evaluator score or something?
Like we have contributor XP, but what if it was a, like how good is, how, how
like based is this contributor kind of thing?
Um, and I like that idea. I hadn't really thought too
much about it. Do you think that's going to the score or do you think it should be separate?
Yeah, I think it might, you know, just give an example from the arts, right? It's like you can
be a great artist and a terrible curator, right? Or you could be a great actor, but then pick the
shittiest movies to work with or whatever, or at least have a really bad person
in reviewing movies, right?
Whatever.
So that's what I'm trying to say.
Like you should be probably,
you could have potentially a separate dimension
on your ability to assess.
Yeah, the way that I look at that is like,
I don't want to, I want it to be very,
it should never be prescriptive.
You should never have a field that's like, Hey, I'm going to evaluate
this person as an artist because I just don't think that helps anyone.
It makes for a shitty UI and UX too.
But what I believe we could do is take what people are saying
and aggregate that information.
And so if people are saying, yeah, this guy's really good at being an artist,
or I really love his art, or I look, I love all the events that he puts on or
like, Oh, like this
guy's a top buyer, he buys all of my art for really expensive prices.
Or I don't know, like whatever you want to say about them.
One of the things that we've looked at doing is how do we actually take that
data and, um, categorize it, you know, we could just basically throw it
to open AI and say, okay, like categorize this into these 12 buckets that we've
identified that matter in the space. throw it to open AI and say, okay, categorize this into these 12 buckets that we've identified
that matter in the space. And then we could actually add labels dynamically just based
on what people are writing as opposed to having people... I feel like if you had people review
people in terms of specific things, then you kind of dilute the overall quality. But that's
just my opinion right now.
Yeah, actually, I wasn't thinking of changing the review quality. But that's just my opinion right now.
Yeah, actually, I wasn't thinking
of changing the review mechanism.
I was thinking more of applying those.
Because those scores are not based only on reviews, right?
They're based on all of these other things.
So maybe some of those could be broken up.
But I mean, you bring a point.
I do sit in front of the reviews,
and I'm sort of like, well, I'm reviewing someone about what?
I mean, a person is not one thing, right?
Like, it's a dimension of different things, right?
I want people to think about it as one thing, I guess.
Like, I know what you're saying, but I think when you...
It's the same shit as, like, you have upvotes and downvotes.
You don't give people, like, I think this is funny.
I think this is, like, lovely.
I think this is whatever, right?
Like, you kind of want to be less prescriptive. But I... No, no. So I guess what I'm saying is, lovely. I think this is whatever, right? Like you kind of want to be less less prescriptive
But I know so I get I guess what I'm saying is like, you know, yes, you're totally right
Yeah, so I don't think you should have like ten dimensions
But maybe like as a UX for me, like I'm a little bit lost sometimes think what to write
So maybe like you should just pick one the one that you think has the most signal, right?
What's the most signal for your platform for which you're trying to achieve?
Don't do 10 things.
I mean, it doesn't matter if like the person I'm reviewing
is a great chef, right?
Or is a great artist.
Because you see these things like,
oh, he's a great collector, you know, yeah, who cares?
I mean, I don't know, maybe that's what it's about,
but that's not what it's about, right?
Right.
So yeah.
But I think this could be like a pivot on top, right?
I mean, in other words, you get all of this good information
across multimodal set of perspectives on individuals.
And if you're able to do a search on top, and it's a slice,
and you say, OG artist, right?
Or artists interested in this particular sort of genre.
And then it brings up all of these reviews,
at least you're able to kind of go through
and comb through and actually filter and find individuals.
And then you could also put a filter on there
for scores greater than, I don't know, right?
1500.
And then all of a sudden your filtering
becomes even less, right?
And then you can kind of get down to some net flows
on what people think about a certain subject.
So I think there are kind of ways to do the pivot tables,
if you will, that link back into all of this data
that gives you some of that information, it seems like.
Versus like, yeah, versus I think going too prescriptive into the
data bin early on and then having to like continue to filter in right yeah
yeah absolutely and then LLMs I say yeah I could potentially help with that but
then you probably want to have a slightly longer review as well so that
you get more data I think one thing that came to my head sir in regards to
because we were speaking about
yesterday on the town hall on Discord, regards to slashing is that I think there shouldn't be the
ability to slash someone that's not on the platform because if it becomes like a sense of like where
it gives them the ability to like defend themselves but they're not on the platform, I get like I could
see it like oh it's like you missed your due date at court. So like, you're just
guilty for not showing up. But like, if they haven't been invited onto the
platform, then it's not like they didn't miss their due date. It's just they
haven't, they weren't even, they didn't receive the letter in the mail.
Yeah, that's how the way I see it.
I think like it's, it's interesting because it's not court, right? Like I get
what you're saying, but like, this isn't like, this doesn't mean that they're
canceled.
This doesn't mean it's over.
Like they lost some of their credibility score.
You could actually remove more credibility score just by having 10 people negatively
review them if they were like significantly higher score.
And so like, I get what you're saying.
It's not like we're saying it's over and you're going to prison, right?
Like, I think that is the extreme way to look at slashing and I think it can feel like that
and I get that.
And I do want to make it such that the person that's getting slashed has a way to like clearly
present their defense.
But like, it's not court.
It's not like, hey, you're going to prison now.
And I hope that makes sense because I see what you're saying, but, uh, you know,
if it's meant to measure public opinion about the consensus that people have for
someone as opposed to like convict someone of a crime.
Yeah.
I think, I think it also defeats the purpose of ethos.
A lot of bad actors are not going to ever join the platform.
So if we can't slash them are not gonna ever join the platform.
So if we can't slash them because they're not on the platform, then I think that eliminates
a lot of people that we could slash.
Yeah, I mean, I actually think Elena is one of the first people that's on ethos that got
slashed actually. Yeah, because yeah, I think if it was when the whole controversial thing
was going on, she probably would have not joined, but she probably thought that was
behind a lot of people's minds, but as we've seen, it's just a trickling effect.
It just takes one person to do a review, reminding people,
and then people remember.
Everyone kind of jumps on.
Yeah.
Man, I tell you, that's a really positive thing, though,
in my mind, right?
Like, in the short term, if you're the individual,
you feel like shit, right?
But if you think about it, it's super important for people to know, right,
in the future, because, you know, if there's a pattern, and I remember there was this other
individual too, during that period, and I forget, I forget her, I forget her name. But she basically,
she said something like, you know, it became a meme at that point.
Not responsible for something my wallet did or something. I forget what the exact quote was.
But you know, like, buy a wallet.
Mistakes were made by a wallet I controlled.
And I'm trying to remember who that was,
but that individual, right?
Oh, it was in the nurse from Austin.
I forgot her name. The blonde girl, right? Yeah, the white girl was under that nurse from Austin. I forgot her name. The bunker, right?
Yeah, the white girl the nurse. What's her fucking Morgan? Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember but I remember
Morgan right there was cuz she she basically rubbed a bunch of people right like she was like, you know
Gal she was like supporting a product a product or a project and then all of a sudden she like dumped everything that was
In her wallet, right?
Like after getting, you know, just basically
creating exit liquidity of all these people.
And it's like stuff like that, like, look,
you have established a on-chain pattern of abuse, right?
You can't expect it to go away.
And the fact that people memorialize the stuff,
it's actually a good thing, right?
It is a good thing.
And maybe you will do enough good over time
to salvage your name and your reputation,
but like it's on you to do 10 good things
to erase that one bad thing you did,
because look, that is how you're defined now, right?
So I think this is, I think that's the system working
like it's intended in my mind, right?
If people forgot about that stuff and just moved on
and just gave
everybody happy, slappy reviews, what's the point?
Yeah, it is funny. We get so much feedback that like, oh, ethos is a circle jerk. And
then you like log in and like all the top things are negative. And people are getting
slashed and stuff. And like, like someone I showed yesterday, they did logged in for
the first time, like, dude, they're just like fucking each other over on ethos right now. What is going on? And it's like the amount
of like, it feels so two sided, like people are either like, oh, it's a circle joke and
everyone's just reviewing each other positively or oh no, like everyone hates each other on
ethos. And it is very interesting to see play out again, but it's because we're kind of
going back in history and rewriting a lot of stuff and our attention team is to focus on the same things.
It's also quite herd driven.
It's quite herd driven, like nothing happens and then someone does something negative or
like slashes someone and then it pops on your newsfeed
and everyone just jumps on it.
But like, to Barat's point, like it memorializes it and that's helpful still.
Like you know, Elena or anyone else getting slashed aside, like it still helps people
understand that.
And it sucks to bring it up again, but it's still helpful that people should understand
that context before understanding who they're working with, in my opinion.
Yeah.
Do you have any examples of people making a decision based on ethos already?
Like some anecdotal evidence, for example, somebody wanted to invest in a project and
they read their ethos review and didn't do it or something like that.
Have you been in crypto in the last 60 days?
I don't know who's buying anything.
That's the problem.
Uh, not yet on that front.
I would say it's mostly in like good vibes, man.
Everybody's buying good vibes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Fair.
That's just good vibes about it.
Right.
I haven't seen anyone negatively reviewing that.
Um, I would say people are though.
Right.
I mean, like, I can't think of somebody not going into ethos and looking at an individual
or a project if there is a ranking there and not using that as like the first level of
due diligence. Right? Like, I mean, it is silly for me, for people not to do that. There
are probably multiple places that they have to triangulate this information. Right? But
like, it seems like the clearest, most transparent first step
that somebody would leverage.
No, I think people use it.
Yeah, I've heard it on time.fun.
So time.fun, someone was looking at it.
There's a few tweets that I've passed by.
People have been like, oh, I was evaluating this guy,
and I should buy his time on time.fun.
And I went and looked, and people were like, no, stay away from this person.
And so I think that will become more clear, especially because now we have
33,000 reviews, the data gets even better. I think those are the use cases that will
start to emerge and people will really start to see the value.
Yeah, I think people will definitely use it, but I'm just wondering if there's been a use
case that has emerged already or it's too early probably.
There is a product that I retweeted yesterday or two days ago that was helping people understand as like a marketing or a marketing person or marketing team, which influencers to work with.
put the ethos score of the influencer next to that to help people understand and qualify
like is this a reputable influencer that you're going to pay to market something or not. I
think we'll see more stuff like that but that he actually integrated 100% into his product.
Yeah, Kabal right?
Yeah, Kabal I think is what it was called. Ironically, maybe it's cable or something. I don't know is KK.
Yes, to be cable.
Yeah, I've also been using it for trading, like I trade on
vector mean coins and stuff. So people get to broadcast their
trade. So I've been referencing back and forth who are the
people are doing the broadcast. And down the road, I wouldn't be
surprised if Ethos and Bekter do some type of collaboration that they built that into the app
or the extension. Yeah, I mean, we've tried to go harder on a little bit of the like,
DevRel stuff so that people can easily access the API. The API is very easy to access and use.
I think people are starting to see the value in that data.
We try to make it as easy as possible
for people to go connect that API.
And if you're a dev and you go look at our developer docs,
like the developer docs are shit,
but like you could very easily be like,
oh yeah, just call this API
and I have the score for anyone.
And I want to see more of that because that obviously helps everyone with ethos.
Everyone has better understanding of who's trustworthy in other products, but also that
helps increase the value of the ethos score overall.
So I'm excited to see more of that.
I think Vector is a really good example. And Vector kind of aligns well with the like, oh, I'm going to publish that I bought this thing. And you're like, okay, well,
who the hell is that person? Is this someone I can trust? Or is this someone that like has a really
bad history of like, you know, dumping on followers or something. And there are just so many use cases
of ethos when it comes to whether it be trading or or hiring someone or evaluating someone for your community or whatever it might be.
And I think we're just starting to see the benefit and the value of that.
We're at the top of the hour.
Anyone have any last last thoughts, questions, concerns?
We kind of talked maybe to the little too much about ethos.
I tried to bring it back to Angel Investing and stuff.
We have a separate space for that.
But anyone have anything else that they wanted to bring up today?
Quiet audience, quite sick speakers.
Well, thanks, Dragos, for joining us.
Now, Emil, you came off mute.
You were going to say something.
You're committed now.
Yeah, no, we got regarding the angel investing, if you want to go back to that, a friend of
mine was telling me that on an echo, it's pretty easy to get onto. So and a lot of people
are seeing a lot of opportunities there. So that might be something that people might
want to look into.
I think it's definitely set up to be a little bit safer
on Echo.
You kind of have a good idea of what
you're getting yourself into.
And in theory, better than just sending USTC
to a random address.
So if you are interested in Angel Investing,
which is a cautionary tale, and everyone should understand
that before getting into it, I think
Echo and Legion also are pretty good options there.
Yeah, but you still got to do your own due diligence though, right?
Exactly.
It's like you cannot outsource your due diligence to anybody, right?
Just because it's on Echo doesn't mean it's a, you know, it's a sure thing investment.
Yeah. Just make sure you guys know that you have, you know, you're not going to have liquidity
for a while and that you understand kind of what the founders are about,
and that they have a track record of actually delivering
real product.
And it is actually something differentiated, right?
Not the 50th copypasta version of Aave, right?
And with something you slapped on,
and now extracting even more E-Plates.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of Echo deals that I was like, Oh, I don't know about that one.
And I feel like it always comes down to like actually doing some research.
I think it everything that we do in crypto outside of angel investing is very herd mentality.
Like, Oh, there's other people who are in the trade.
I'll do be in the trade too.
But like you can own it because you have the liquidity to get out of it.
Like angel angel is just a different world. And it's not because it's not for everyone. It's just like the expectations are 100% the
opposite of a liquid shit coin. So yeah, if you're asking for refunds on angel investments,
I think you're doing something wrong is my like long stated takeaway. That is the wrong way to
think about things. And it's probably because you're down bed too, and you want some money.
You were just trying to get some money back.
There is a lot of parallels that are really interesting that we could go into
one day of like, well, what's the difference between that and the NFT
project that raises money upfront and then like doesn't deliver on something
over time, like, or, you know, builds a bunch of hype and then doesn't
actually build a vision.
It gets really tricky.
At least you get a pretty JPEG to look at.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I'm sure you look at that all the time.
I'm never, you got it.
That punch to the gut.
I swear.
I will never ever get over that one.
Well, you can look at the picture, right? You got the frame.
It is a pretty, it's a reminder to me that I can be the ultimate idiot.
It's a great sort of, it brings me down whenever I feel like I've had a good trade.
I just look at that and I'm like, yes, you're an idiot.
Every time I freak it up, I feel bad.
But like this is the meat.
That's just me being friendly is calling you out on stuff.
In my like, like not friendly way of doing it.
No, I love it.
You got to hold everybody accountable, right?
It's somebody should write a review about that.
Somebody should write a review about that.
Say, you know, he's an idiot.
That's why, that's why you may you don't talk blast
You're not just like
Yeah, I think I don't know I think barrage spent over a hundred years on that moon bird if I remember correctly
You wrote one on Kevin Rose, right?
Yeah, that one hurts a little bit.
But, you know, let me learn.
Hey, like I'll own one before we break.
I was really into the historical NFTs.
I got sucked into this bullshit on Namecoin,
which I don't know if anyone even remembers Namecoin.
It was like original ENS. And there were some like, what I would argue not legitimate artifacts that historical
people came out and said, you should buy these things. They're original NFTs, they're from
2016, everyone will want the originals. And I got pulled into it and I lost quite a bit
of money on those. And they turned out not to be an elaborate
grift because I still have some and you know maybe they'll come back one day but like
it was an operation that went by and over time became very obvious that no one actually gave
a shit about the historical fake NFTs. And so I got burned pretty hard on plenty of stuff in the
NFT market too. That's how it goes. If don't, then I don't think you're trading.
Exactly.
You were never alive.
You were never truly alive.
Yeah.
What are you gonna say, Poppy?
Yeah, since you're bringing up the historical aspect of it
and you guys are both punks,
I have a question to both of you,
which might be a long topic, but we could keep it short.
Oh God, yeah.
What is your opinion in regards to V1 punks and the provenance of them?
And I ask because my friend Tony Herrera is a punk too, and we always have like a discussion about it.
But I want to see what your guys' thoughts is on that.
I let you go first, Brad.
Man, I mean it's look.
There is definitely some value there, but you know you know it's you know there's there's always
value in mistakes that are made on chain in my mind right so i think the v1 punks will always
have a place because of that you know and you know obviously they've got kind of a longer slower
kind of boil in terms of just you know value but value. But, you know, it is like a OG niche collection
and I think people will always collect it
and it will probably accrue value, right,
in a longer timeframe.
But, you know, it's pretty clear where the ultimate value
and trade has been happening in terms of, you know,
the punks collection itself, right? So, I
mean, I, yeah, I agree. I mean, I did a punk punk thing, the interview podcaster this week
and I talked about it. And I think the biggest thing was, I love punks. I think punks are
the best collection by far, they have the most potential. But the problem with collectibles in general,
and art to be honest too, is that most of it is very fleeting. Most of it can,
or mimetic honestly, like if you look at art, the artists that are popular in the 90s,
are not popular in the 2000s, and people forget about in the 2010s.
And it's because, in my opinion, a lot of the art world became very like, basically
like it just turned into capitalism, right?
People were taking money and flipping it and there was still plenty of good art and people
still appreciated that art.
But I think without something driving punks, which I know is a very controversial
opinion, I think if you don't have someone that is driving the brand, then the next wave
of people that want NFTs, they're not going to care about punks.
And the reason that collectibles like sports cards and Pokemon do well is because they have brands behind them because everyone knows who
You know Wayne Gretzky is everyone knows like the new Michael Jordan is and like but what's gonna happen is
Like our kids well, I don't know I made you myself like our kids
Are you guys you kids like people that are younger than us don't give a fuck about Michael Jordan?
I'm sorry people that are younger even younger than I't give a fuck about Michael Jordan, I'm sorry. People that are younger, even younger, they're not gonna give a shit about LeBron James. Like,
it sucks. But that's just the reality of it. And, and I think it's going to be hard. This is always
my biggest concern with collectibles in general is like, they are a fleeting asset, usually. And,
like, it is a miraculous thing for them to turn into art that people care about 500 years later
um and so like that like that's the bare case for punks is like it is more fleeting than some like
if no one is working on it there's no brand behind it like pokemon puts out five games every 10 years
like that's why they keep getting interest they've gotten every generation to pay attention to them. That's why Pokemon is doing well right now.
That's my bare case for punks.
Yet the name of the space is between two hoodies.
That's right.
Yeah, I mean I can I can I can feel both ways about punks.
I can still be bullish on them generally in the short term.
Do you guys have your view ones by the way?
No, I don't.
I don't. I don't.
Yeah.
I've never cared for the V1 stuff,
but then you go down the whole rabbit hole
for provenance means.
Provenance means everything.
Yeah, so you know, like I got mine
because I was like, you know, it was just a hedge
because I thought, you know,
I just don't want somebody out there to be using my punk.
As if they have a V1 and start using it.
So I just went and I got it. Because's like, if you're going to make the
investment on the, on the V2, it might as well, you know, spend whatever,
the five, 10% on the V1.
Um, but, but I mean, just, it's probably a whole other spaces to discuss that
topic, you know, I would say like, there's an asterisk next to pranks in my mind,
Poppy as a way to answer that.
I think it's a good investment in the short term.
I think thinking that you are going to die and pass your punk to someone else and that
person will value it is a very big question mark for me.
It is.
And like, if you think like the V1, if you're going to go to the V1 rabbit hole, right,
then you need to go to the ordinal rabbit hole and buy a Bitcoin punk.
You need to go to say hole and buy a Bitcoin punk. You need to go to a safe chain and buy a safe punk.
It just gets completely out of control.
I just think that you buy the OG asset.
My personal investing approach has always been buy the OG asset.
Don't buy the 1A or the 1B because the power laws accrue to the the one asset, right? The OG asset itself.
Everything else has a fraction, a fractional percentage
of value unlock over time versus the OG.
Yeah, I've always thought like,
there'll be like this timeline where one of these bull markets,
like this whole new generation of people will be onboarded and we'll have this random cult leader like Frank
that will be like, well, let's ride a thing with the V1 punks and they'll just pump because
of that and there'll be this whole new generation that will culturally adopt them because of
provenance and that's what's always been in the back of my head.
That feels like such a crazy stretch to me.
Just being honest personally, as both a trader and someone who thinks about things
long-term, that is my personal opinion,
is that it feels like a really tough stretch.
Yeah, I totally agree, dude.
And look at the distribution of the OG punks, right?
I mean, look at the people who own that collection.
It is like very spread, right?
The diamond hands in that collection are something else,
which means they're not gonna turn over over time.
If somebody buys something
because some figurehead comes on and pumps it,
it's gonna end badly in time.
Because once they go to jail or there's an SEC enforcement,
then everybody's gonna be like,
wait, what was my thesis behind this again?
I mean, it's just like what happened with the meme tokens.
I think those short-term value,
catalysts will fade in the midterm.
Yeah, that already happened.
When they launched the V1s wrapper and try to pump it.
I think that's one of the problems with the V1s
was the way it was done in the community that was behind it
was probably did it in a pregnancy way
and in a sort of a pumpy way as opposed to kind of,
oh, here's a mistake if you will,
and it's part of the history or,
like there was a nice way to do it with the entire community and the way it was done, it wasn't great. I think over time that's been gradually,
you know, some bridges have been built there and it's become a little bit better and there's more
collegial approach between the V1s and V2s and there's a lot of overlap as well. But I think
that initial approach put a lot of people off and left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
Yeah, I wouldn't suggest ever going and digging on the original punk thesis and where that came from.
I mean, I know you know this, but I think you could almost say that about every project,
which is the kind of thing that sucks sometimes is like anything can look like an organized pump or anything can look
like a bunch of people got together to kind of like do something for the greater good of everyone
or for the greater good of themselves and I think there are a lot of projects that we look back on
with rose-tinted glasses and I'm not saying that I think punks is definitely one of those but like
I think punks is definitely one of those, but like some people view it that way for
sure too.
And, um, damn, like we went from like happy cheery talking about ethos and stuff to like
me sharing a bear case on punks.
What's going on?
I shouldn't be doing this.
I have bags to protect.
I haven't fiduciary duty duty.
I don't know, Brian, if you have any closing statements on like, how do we get out of this
hole of like talking negative, me talking negatively about punks?
Well, you know, that's, that's kind of the beauty of the show, right? And this is what
you guys should, you should, you should all hop in on a weekly basis, because we're gonna
call out our own bags, right? And we have big bags of a lot of a lot of stuff, right?
Good and bad. But, you long enough time frame, things that are
grails will accrue power law effects and things that are not are going to die. And that's the
bottom line, right? And it's always been this way. And I don't think that's going to change anytime
soon. So that's the happy sort of cloud you know, Claude, I'll put around, around Serp's statement.
It's that you can't be all in on one asset.
I think that's the biggest thing.
Like there are things that are going to make it.
And the last happy thing that I'll say here with regard to NFT is I do believe that the
NFT phase is going similarly and will play out similarly to the original Bitcoin cycle, where I felt like
in 2011, 2012, everyone was crazy on Bitcoin. It was super interesting and it just went dead
for years. I mean, it was like no one paid attention for four or five years. There was
no cycle. That's bullshit. How could there be a cycle? And what I think will happen is
it will take another cycle actually for people to care about NFTs because there's so much expectation that people want it to pump so bad that it just
can't. And so that that is my current belief on the NFT market is that not a lot of stuff's
going to make it to the other side, but I don't know that it's actually going to be
this cycle at all. But we'll see. Slow cook. Slow cook. Yeah, slow cook. It took 2011 to 2016 was a long time
in Bitcoin years, man. And it accrued a lot of value, but it wasn't, no one was like,
I'm expecting to get 1000X out of this thing. And yeah, we got to get back to that. You
got to like shake out all the like pure speculators in the short term to get to the long term objective.
All right, we went way over.
Thanks everyone for coming up.
Thanks to our guests for joining us today.
Appreciate you all.
Thanks Barat for co-hosting this with me.
I promise we'll start with some good stuff on,
maybe we should go back and talk about really positive things
about punks again.
Cause it feels grim to end it this way. and then I'm going to jump into a fun show
where people are just going to rip on me in an hour or so.
Have a great day, everyone.
We'll see you guys later.
Thank you, guys.
Bye.
Cheers, guys. .
