It all comes down to this the final in coinages crypto project of the year
GM everybody super excited to have you back on with us as we the community-owned award-winning media Dao steered by our NFT holders and
backed by the co-founder of Netflix coinage are prepared to crown a champion
holders and community we worked our way all the way down to just two projects in the running to be crowned coinages crypto project of
The year and the vote will open right after this
So if you're watching live or listening live with us and you don't yet have a coinage NFT
It is not too late because the votes not open yet
So go to coinage media to mint a pass or scoop one up on the secondary market ladies and gents
If you own got one because of one of these projects will be crowned champion and representing our two semi-finalists today
Thor chain and the combined social team of lens and favor is Thor chain tech lead Chad bear for back on with us as well as
We spent all our budget on that one chat
But I appreciate you guys hopping back on everyone's super stoked
Congratulations to you guys for being the final two projects. There were a lot of upsets in this
I don't know. We had the bracket to show kind of how far we've come but this is what it looks like ladies and gents
I mean we had avalanche go down
We had Solana go down a big upset there in terms of what some people had filled out brackets for this and and Chad
I guess you know, you've been on technically more. So I will say hi to you first
Thank you again for coming back on and congrats on making it this far
I don't know if you thought you'd be here today in the in the semi-final or the final
Well, I certainly hoped obviously it had no idea but certainly hope for and it's been fun to you to educate people who maybe never even
Knew that Thor chain was out. There's a project that has continued to explode on the scene
So we're gonna get into why it makes you know Thor chain
So special to see kind of that adoption on the other side Yonatan you were out here in New York
It was good to see you in person and since then I think favors continued to do great things
Along with lens and onboarding the masses to decentralized social congrats to you. I will ask you the same question
I don't know if you thought you'd be here, but I'll tell you what your guys's community is rallied around this
Yeah, I think like every round we've been getting more and more
Confident seeing how many of our community members are actually joining and voting and obviously that's been something we've been
Like impressed by so many times before like how many people actually come and vote for us whenever there is anything
Ongoing and I think that's one of the good measures of like are we doing the right thing?
So do people actually bother and go out and do stuff for us?
So very happy to see that and I'll be super thankful to the community
Yeah, it's been really cool to see and you know
You guys were on earlier with pudgy penguins and Luca nets who came on and kind of you know
That was a an interesting partnership there because they're one of the communities pudgy penguins was that you guys teamed up with to launch your guys's
Own tooling around communities on favor which I think is really cool
That we were able to have that chat and a lot of our members have plugged into favor as well to earn credit on your
Platform so we're gonna get into that too
In a little bit but Chad I guess, you know
Maybe we just start with you because I think you know
It's it's really cool to see that these two projects are the ones that are here because I think there is a common theme
When it comes to decentralization and what that actually means whether it's on the
Decentralized social front with favor and lens or if it's on a decentralized exchange and decentralized finance front with what you guys have done
it at Thor chain, so why don't we just start there because
Right now before we came on air we were talking about discussions happening right now within your own community as you guys have exploded from 3 billion
A month or whatever we talked about last time to 7 billion a month in terms of swaps
And your guys's community is out there having a discussion about what do we want Thor chain to be?
So maybe we just start there in terms of is decentralization. Maybe the reason why these are the two projects who are on in the final
Maybe there's been a kind of a debate in the community about like how far we want to take the DeFi
We want to keep it kind of vanilla to the original concepts of just doing the AMM, you know between across chain swaps
or do we want to take it to
more advanced kind of DeFi features like savers and lending and like other things we have kind of
Perpetuals, I don't know lots of things that we have had in mind and so there's been a debate in a conversation
I think that's pretty good and pretty healthy in some sense for the community to kind of like
Find out how we feel about things and because it's because it's not run by me or anybody else like obviously
It's up to the community to decide with which direction you want to go. Yeah, and similarly on this one
I mean, you know, I I did not have any say in
Who would win this? Of course, I'm able to vote just as all of our NFT holders are able to vote
But it has been pretty pretty interesting to see kind of the way that this whole thing shook out and and Yonatan on your side
I feel like you know again
That's kind of how we've been handling this
I feel like that's what your guys's last product rollout was all about is figuring out a way to let these community members in all these
Dows in all these NFT communities figure out a way to communicate with each other
I mean, how core has that been to your guys's rise as well?
This is again an amazing kind of sort of proof of use cases for a nifty slight beyond like pure financial
Speculation for example, so just looking at the latest stats
We have over 1,300 coinage NFTs connected on favor and we're able to kind of tell that because of NFTs and format
Being kind of very easy for us to verify so we know those are all the genuine holders
Nobody's impersonating a holder and all that tweeting it to a complex API or make an official partnership
It's very easy for us to do and then for the voting we can now also see who are the ones who have been voting
So we can actually reward them with a special badge as we promised like if we win
We'll give people some special commemorative batches that we can now easily drop into people's wallets
So there's so many cool things that come into a like community and social aspect
from NFTs and obviously for us kind of
Like social media is all about community whether it's one big community or smaller communities
so been very happy to see what's kind of
Like been cooking on the community side on our side where you can now build for example on the coinage NFT
We can build a special gated community for the holders or like behind the scenes content or whatever else you want to be sharing
Yeah, I think I mean, I don't know
I don't know technically if that's a bribe for our community in terms of in trying to sway the vote
But you know, I'll look the other way
Look the other way because Chad is also one of our NFT holders. So like I don't know
It's kind of like you're bribing him technically is what you're doing here. So who knows?
It's unclear it's unclear but
But yeah, I mean, I think you know one of the pieces again
This is a competition where you know
If you have a coinage NFT you can co-own our outlet the way that we've set up our model is you know
More around a co-op Dow model so you can unlock dividends if you join as a member
It's been fun to grow, you know everything we've been doing here
But I also think that that's you know a learning curve that has been there as we've grown this out and shed you and I have
Known each other for years talking about poor chain and kind of where we are now
So much has been talked about with the Bitcoin ETFs and like this enthusiasm coming back into the space
Now, I mean, I'm curious to kind of get your take in terms of
Where we are in the adoption cycle for a lot of people who have been in the space and people who are new
It's always interesting to kind of pair
Those worlds right like favors a project helping people on board and web 3 and maybe you're not familiar
Maybe don't have wall maybe not a lens profile yet. But for you guys, I mean like I think about the journey, right?
And people maybe getting Bitcoin through Bitcoin ETF not realizing that I don't have any custody
They don't actually control it and then maybe takes months
But then eventually they do and then they want to trade on Thor's chain
So how do you kind of see the the momentum cycle shaping up?
I mean, I think this bull market's gonna be pretty
pretty epic to be honest with you like that you have this combination of
Despite yet, we're just gonna pull in probably billions of dollars into the into the into the network over the next
year or two and then you combine that with
In the havening and I think it's in March or April
And so you have a kind of a supply shock and then you also have this demand shock with the spot ETF
And those two things together are gonna be quite, you know
Quite intense and you have to imagine that like people when people start when Bitcoin starts pumping
And it gets to you know, new all-time highs and whatnot
You're gonna get emails from Fidelity and Charles Schwaff and people's email. It is like hey come by this stuff
Like a bitcoins like everybody's talking about again. We're like that's kind of that that
But it's frothing at the mouth in some sense
So I'm the adoption is gonna be pretty pretty insane and you will combine that with something called the s curve of technology
logical adopter on if you know this concept but
there's this idea that like the amount of time that takes to get the first 10 or 13 percent of adoption is
You know the amount of time it takes to get the rest of it
so like it's you see this kind of s curve where you have this kind of
Slow growth over a long over a long period of time and then you get this kind of inflection point which surrounds well with 13% of
People who use it and you see this massive like climb to about 90% and that last 10% takes forever to get
It's like a very slow adoption of that last 10%
But you just have this massive adopters kind of inflection point and maybe this see this year
2024 or maybe 2025 depending upon how fast the adoption of this by TF is but will be kind of that
inflection point but the negative is the negative here though is that our
Industry is probably going to get replaced in terms of like the mentality of such as a persistence and permissionlessness
Right a lot of other reasons why the limit like libertarians for example the earlier doctors of Bitcoin
The reasons why we were there the 2014 people right who are holding Bitcoin
The reason why they were holding it is very different than the reason why the people
now and into the future are gonna hold it and so that's can become more of like a niche idea of like
Sensorship and permissionlessness, which is really kind of sad in some ways. That's just the natural. Yeah
Well, I think that's I think it is a natural way of things and I think all this stuff evolves to like y'all it's in
There are so many different pieces to highlight from the web 3 social like kind of lens. No pun intended
But I mean if you look through it
It's like what what have you seen matter as that narrative shifted because you know
even Twitter X has changed in terms of allowing NFTs on the platform and
You know censorship resistance like Chad was just saying like the idea of not having that point of failure
Like what have you seen? I think as that narrative has changed over the years
Sort of lucky for us like X or Twitter keeps going back and forth. So they first
Enabled NFTs and then now they disabled NFT so you can no longer have that very by profile picture
Which actually was pretty much the final thing that wasn't broken in their verification system
so we can all see the amount of fake yellow tick accounts trying to drain your wallet and
fake blue tick accounts doing this and that because it's costing you $8 and even those like if you have that
$1,300 or whatnot per month yellow tick
You can still buy that and go and try to drain some wallets
You'll all you have to do is get one crypto punk or one board ape and you've already made a handsome profit
Even if you get disabled the day after
So I think they're just kind of just taking again steps to the wrong direction
And what we're actually seeing is that one of the biggest things that blockchain can bring into social is actually the credibility and verifiability
Of people and that's something that like clearly
Elon and nobody else has been really figuring out at scale
Obviously now Instagram also allowing you to do a blue tick if you do some KYC setups and stuff like that
kyc is also problematic because a lot of people don't actually have
Identifications and it's pretty creepy if you have to show your ID to all kinds of places
Yeah, and actually pretty dangerous if you're in a country where what you say doesn't actually agree with the government too
Well, so there is kind of a huge opportunity
And also a huge need to figure out how do we verify who are the genuine people and genuine users?
In social media space because otherwise we're gonna have check GDP pushing out propaganda
For all kinds of different purposes and nobody can actually differentiate anymore
What's real human generated content? What's real content in the first place?
So there's something that blockchain can really solve that
The mainstream web 2 apps haven't really been
Figuring out in any meaningful way and they're actually just getting worse and worse about kind of the genuinity of content
Yeah, so there's a lot of other upsides as well. But I think that's the one that has sort of
Probably the most profound sort of impact on
Humanity to even put it that way. Yeah, because said more propaganda and more fake news
Like we've seen elections overturned by the amount of propaganda and fake news on social media is true
Government in countries. Yeah, and I mean back even back here in the US
Obviously, it's an election year now and I think you know deep fakes if you're in crypto
You've been getting hit on whatever platform it is whether it's X or YouTube right now. It's insane in terms of all the things
I mean you got a fake Brad Garlinghouse. You got a fakes Anatoly. Yeah, there's so many fake people now on all these platforms
But I do think you know when you step back and look at how we arrived here
We chatted with all these founders
So again, if you're just catching up and you haven't listened to any of these interviews before I do encourage you to go to coinage
John me to check them out because it's rare that you have
16 of the top projects coming together to discuss some bigger questions in crypto and guys you guys were on with us last year
And when you think about crypto project the year in 2023, it was mostly looking back at everything you guys did
In that year and obviously I think it's not surprising to have you guys in the finals because you guys did so much in 2023
Whether it was your guys's raise at favor Yannatan or just sheer explosion of volumes you guys had a Thor chain Chad
But I mean when you look now ahead
Now we're in 2024. So actually I think it's kind of funny to think about which which year is it that these crypto projects are
But in our in 2024, so it's 2024
And so let's look ahead because Chad this is your chance to really pitch
I think what's on the roadmap and I think that's so funny that you can't really say because
It's gonna be up to your community to decide
But it seems like you've got some momentum. And so what do you see coming up with our chain in 2024?
Yeah, I mean for I mean we're focused on the current quarter of course first and foremost
And so I think the kind of big things we're looking forward to in in this quarter is
What we call memoist transactions, which basically allows you to swap and trade on Thor chain from any wallet in the world doesn't matter it could be
Anything in the world is only met it's arbitrarily any wallet
You can swap you can have a whole Bitcoin or ether from or doge or whatever you can swap with that
I think that's one feature we're really excited about for this quarter
And the other one really excited about is is order books and the ability to do limit orders on for chain
And that's just gonna create a more professional tool, right?
So we're kind of creating a new series of tools and for our traders that are that are less for kind of your your kind of
Seldom swapper and now towards like professional traders and that's going to expand our user base
Hopefully quite significantly and in addition it actually makes our arbitrage actually much more efficient and actually make you better price execution
We need to a trader as well. So that's something that I'm super excited about
It's been I mean all this stuff's been blown up and last time you're only we're talking about kind of more efficient trades
Then even on centralized exchanges and the fact that just because you have the option of using a decentralized exchange is not good enough
It needs to be better than what you can do on a coin base or the like and it's been
Exciting to see you guys actually deliver on that and get there and got it in on your side last time
We had you on obviously you're obviously always pelted with win token questions
And we asked you last time you answered that but I'm curious what you guys got on the roadmap now that you've landed out
As you said on the way to a billion dollars worth of value connected to earn credit on favor
I mean, what's what are you looking ahead to in 2024?
Yeah, I think kind of the first hundred million is always the hardest so hopefully reaching a billion of connected value from here
It's gonna be much faster to guess I guess six months from the launch of credit to get the first
Hundred million so let's hope it accelerates and obviously in general like social media is all about that kind of virality hockey stick
Which is completely impossible to forecast or manufacture
So it's just about trying to play all your cards right and hope that eventually that virality hits
And I think looking at 2024 there's obviously a lot of the market also on our side in the sense that
Especially for those early adopters who are still in the crypto and web3 space
The more the market picks up the more people are getting interested in potentially making money out of
Tokens again, and obviously that makes it more possible for us to answer that when token question in a satisfactory way in the near future and
That kind of financial incentive hopefully also boosts the actual
kind of attendance where airdrops have been proven to be
Sometimes an amazing tool to really boost your early audience and measure that you reward those people who are with you in the beginning
But then we're trying to take that step further
So for the last two years we've been trying to iterate and build on the system where it's not just a one-time airdrop
Or even a two-time airdrop
But rather building something that every month will keep rewarding the most active and the most value generating genuine users
Because it doesn't really add value to give tons of airdrop money to somebody who's been farming your protocol with 1000 accounts
That's great for the numbers, but it's not actually real users
It's not really usage and it doesn't validate anything except that there's a way to farm
Yeah, whereas if we're able to get to a point where the gamification mechanism in favor is
Hard enough to farm that the people who are getting rewarded are the ones who are genuinely creating high quality content and being appreciated
When I say we are like 80% there. So the metrics look very good right now
We've been basically banning over 30,000 accounts that were flagged by our but detection. That's good
Yeah, so you are monitoring all that and I think that's a pretty important piece of it as you get it, right?
And Chad maybe this is the part where I love doing this because our community actually
Nominated you to be a host of coinage when I'm on vacation and or dead
And so you got to be ready to jump in here, but I do think it is kind of
No one murder me by the way
But no, I mean on the front of you know as a project that's preparing to drop a token and kind of set up these
Incentives and one that already has one
Maybe I would step back and just ask you to jump in here and maybe opine on some of this stuff as you've seen other
Projects try and roll out tokens too because the way that yours works rune kind of powers these swaps between chains and you know
Getting tokenomics right is not easy as a project ourselves and trying to figure out like the tiered membership model for okay
You can unlock content if you're a subscriber
But if you're a caucus or network holder you can actually cone the outlet like figuring that out and price points everything else
So I don't know if there's like a takeaway from from you guys at Thor chain when you were kind of thinking about ruin
And how this works perhaps warnings perhaps lessons learned for Yonatan as well as we approached this big drop
I mean, this is a huge topic we could cook plague talk for an hour on it and obviously don't the time for that
but yeah, talking about much is very difficult and the
Do it well as difficult to do it poorly is easy
Telling me like it's it's pretty easy to do it in a way. That's that that's lazy. That's not well thought through
But still can potentially pump just by speculation and whatnot
But to get the economics correct and that it's that it's it supports itself in some ways
It's actually quite difficult to do and so when we talked about I can hook an animal token economics for Thor chain
We wanted the asset rune, which is its primary base asset
to get value from the actual activity of the protocol so when you trade when you swap when you
Open alone when you you know, take an LP position when you open something run savers
Like when you run a node like anything you do
With the protocol to to inter interact with it. You're inherently driving value into its into its asset by design
Just to follow or dig deeper on that one too because I do feel like that's something that's maybe overlooked by a lot of
People sometimes when they're looking at rune is is how exactly does that accrual happen or their tokens burn?
No, like the tokens being burned but like it depends on the thing
So if you're running a node use a choir rune to bond and then run a note
So that's by pressure on the root answer directly from that when you swap you're actually
Depositing value into the protocol in terms of like the fee that you're paying whatever fee amount you're paying
You're leaving that behind the protocol which creates by pressure inherently on on the rune assets of like a little tiny bit
Revenue generated for that particular pool and so when there's more revenue
Well, there's more, you know opportunity for more LPs that come in and then when you're an LP or whatever
You have to acquire a rune to do so, right?
So so as more swaps go through the network yield goes up and as the yield goes up
There's more interest to become an LP or a saver and by doing so you were inherently creating by pressure on the rune asset
Yeah, I think that's always the interesting piece. So I mean Jonathan we talked about the tokenomics for favor
Social sense because like you said, it's all about rewarding behavior
I was also looking at cyber connect, of course, you know
One of your guys's partners and they had their own token drop and things by all, you know
Estimates seem to be you know, one of the projects that's held up
Since they've dropped it. But I mean what is kind of like the tokenomics built around it from a from a higher level?
There's a lot of wood to chop still on that front
But overall social media actually provides one of the very
Interesting and rare opportunities where there actually is kind of a double-sided value exchange happening
So there's already in web 2 there's a proven audience who are occasionally willing to pay for
Certain content they are willing to at least pay for it by watching advertising to make it free for them
And then if there is an ethical value split then actually the creators will also be rewarded by some of that advertising revenue
So kind of somebody creating quality content will be
Rewarded for that because there's people willing to pay for that either directly or indirectly
So what we're trying to do is make sure our tokenomics are built around this value range where it's not just printing money without any
interest for that but rather always balancing the amount of
Essentially airdrop rewards that we're giving to the community by the demand that comes from for example those who want to be getting additional visibility
Stacking up their point amounts when they're just getting started
So the idea is that favorite tokens will be the cheapest way to acquire favorite points that are the currency
At the same time if you don't know what a token is you can just buy them with your in-app purchases soon
So for the web two folks don't want to over complicated
You can always go and get the token and save that 30%
Yeah, that's always the tricky part is over complicating
I think when we're pairing these worlds of web 2 and web 3 and that that was kind of at my earlier question around like
Okay, how deep do we need to go here to kind of pair those audiences in chat?
You kind of answered that around, you know
Just takes time to figure out what people are gonna want from from these projects and how they experiment with it
But but for this in general
I just want to thank you guys for coming back on in the crypto project of the year piece of all of all this and a
Big shout out to the Thor Chad's that have been you know voting and a big shout out to the favor friends
I should say that have been voting here, too
And everyone who filled out a bracket including you Chad is an NFT holder here
You know, we got a lot of submissions and someone will win a quarter of an ETH
We will give that to them once we have all the points tallied
But I will say again, the vote will be at coinage.media. I will let you guys chat
I'm gonna give you the floor. I'm gonna give you the mic, man
Just don't kill me again. Don't take my job yet
But I'll give you one chance the hard sell on on the vote here man, why Thor change should be quite a description project here
Well, I'll give you a very good reason. Why why we should win this why we why we've earned this
Yes, and that is and that is
At the top of the bull market last cycle, right the amount of swaps trade volume
Whatever on Thor change was remarkably less than what it is today, right? So so
Trade volume is about 20 times higher today than it was the week of when the way at the top of the bull
I can ever that's an area, right?
Number of swaps also up around 20x a number of a BDC number of ETH also up about 7x, right even
Dex trading in it like across all Dex is like how much of the total Dex traded?
I think on 14 versus everybody else is up 40 X from where it was at the top of the bull market
Like we are absolutely killing it from the fundamentals perspective perspective. This is an hoping I'm talking about
This is like actual data actual numbers. This is the real deal
We are absolutely nailing it as a project and we've worked so hard to get here to ship new features to improve
Liability improve security blah blah blah all these things and we've done so much over the last
Year to to get us there and I'm really proud of myself and my work and do it and the work that the nine
ROMs has been doing the work of the community's been doing just on this next an excellent job and just put so much time
And energy into this thing. I just feel we just we just deserve
Agree, I mean like, you know, everyone can go check out these stats
They're chain org is where I normally go to check this out, Texas
I don't know you have this on my screen, but the network stats are there
It's been fun to watch all this stuff on chain just in terms of everything
You just spoke to around volumes and swaps and again all the people now using Thor chain behind the scenes
You might not see it on the front end trust. Well, it is one that we've talked about quite a bit
Eric where he's been on the show talked about shape-shift
I mean, it's been wild to watch and so yeah, that's and it's a tough
It's a tough act to follow there
Of course, you got a lot of community members who are excited about whatever freebies you're talking about here
And the last time we have lens on we gave away lens profiles to the people who were also attached to coinage
So I'm not making any promises
But if you don't have a coinage Ft now would be the time to scoop one up
But on your side y'all it's in why should lens favor be coinages crypto project of the year
Yeah, I guess it started with the lens profiles
So if you connect your coinage NFTs on favor
You will pretty quickly reach the level to required to claim your freelance profile on favor
So that's one of the perks another perk is that we'll still continue giving the additional points for all of the coinage holders
Let's say I'm making this up now as a perk
But we can give an additional two weeks of boosting points for every holder if we win
Listen this was always the dream chat
These are perks going straight to you man as an entity holder
This is literally how it's supposed to work is no longer. Will it just be the influencers getting this for shilling things?
I'm not showing anything. No, it's showing anything
We're just talking about projects and I think it's really cool to have the ability to like plug into these but but y'all it's in
Specifically outside of bribes. I mean you guys are crushing it too in terms of your metric song
I'll give you a chance to highlight those to you
Yeah, and I think obviously our favor point bribes will only matter if they're worth something
So it requires people to believe that favor points will become worth it in the future and looking at recently we've been
Okay, quite stably over 50% around like 65% or so of all of the lens posting volume
More than that on the lens reaction volume
So majority of the activities on lens happening right now good partners like the budget penguins as part of our
New communities launch over 100 million of NFT value and other ERC value in the wallets
So as far as we can tell we are kind of the biggest web-free social app right now out there based on activity
And hopefully will only be going up from here. Well, I'll say this again
I do appreciate both you guys coming on and in your communities as well and wish you the best luck in this vote as it opens
Up, it'll be opening up and I'm gonna say the next hour
So if you're watching this, you know, I'm going to have to you
We'll give you another hour to kind of mint and scoop one up and participate in this vote
But thank you again for coming on Chad Barrow Ford from Thor chain
Yonatan lintola from favor representing both paper and lens here guys congrats out of all the projects
It's really cool to have you guys on and congrats on everything you guys have built last year
And now as we look ahead to you crypto project in 2024, good luck on everything else
Chad thanks again for Chad for Yonatan and for everybody here at coinage
Thanks everybody for listening and go vote coinage dot media is where you can go to learn from war and watch all of our
Interviews in this 16 project competition congrats at Thor chain congrats to lens in favor making it all the way to the final round
That'll do it for us here on the final edition of crypto project of the year until we see you in the end of the year
For everybody else I'm Zach signing off. Thanks again