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Fireside Chat ft. @LtLollipop9
Recorded: Jan. 27, 2023 Duration: 1:34:39Space Recording
Full Transcription
We'll be right back.
Welcome.
Thanks for having me.
For sure, man.
Maybe I'll give a little bit of an intro.
Does that sound good?
And got some questions lined up and we'll jump right into it.
So yeah, first of all, big shout out to Lieutenant Lollipop, the man that needs no introduction.
And we're excited to have this going today.
When I was thinking about spaces, spaces I wanted to do, the idea came to me that, you know, a lot of people, you know, see tweets and see people, you know, that have big followings, whether they're influencers or shit posters or both in this case, most likely.
And we don't often get a chance to actually chat with them, talk to them, understand what they're about, right?
And so tweets can be taken, you know, just in that general space where, you know, we don't know much behind about the person behind the tweet.
So I thought Lieutenant Lollipop being the person he is, being somewhat controversial in the spaces and, you know, being someone that likes to break things, I think, in the hopes of actually building stuff that's even bigger and stronger.
So that was what kind of pushed me to get this going.
I think I'm going to have a bunch of questions that I'm going to throw out to the Lieutenant and, you know, we'll open it up to people, too, that want to ask some questions or put things out there.
But right now, I think, Lieutenant, if you're good with it, I'm going to probably throw some softball questions that ease you into it and then we'll go from there.
Sounds good.
Sure.
And one of the things I'm always, like, interested about are people's origin stories when it comes to how they got into the crypto.
So I'd be excited to hear about, like, how that happened for you.
How did you stumble into the space?
Well, so I got involved back in about 2013.
I was actually, it was, I had heard about the Dogecoin's Genesis minting and I heard about crypto just kind of a bit before that.
So I actually jumped into that because my brother was looking into it as well.
But honestly, I got involved in crypto because I knew there was opportunities there and I had a ton of student loan debt.
So I actually pushed off paying student loan debt to throw money into crypto back around that timeline.
I've been involved then with Ethereum for a while and then I moved over to Solana a bit more consistently, probably about 2020 or so.
So when I got used to Ethereum's where it would take about a half hour to an hour for a transaction to confirm and trying to do something on a DEX on Ethereum, like EtherDelta, if anyone recalls that, it would take like three hours to be able to do a simple transaction on a DEX.
Because you had to first deposit the money, you had to submit the transaction, hope it doesn't fail, and then withdraw everything.
And it took almost three hours by that time.
So when I first tried Solana, I sent a transaction, I loaded up the next page and it was there.
I'm like, holy shit, you got my attention.
So I just then had been in Solana for pretty much since then.
I did a bit with NFTs on Ethereum, but the gas prices and just the mint wars just were not very appealing to me.
And so I really stayed focused on the NFT space in Solana, moved over to near about January of last year, spent a couple months there before, I mean, with the crashes and everything kind of coming back here a little bit more specifically.
Nice.
That's interesting.
You were earlier into crypto than I was, but we, yeah, I was in the same place when I jumped in, right?
I was trying to pay off my degrees and was in a lot of debt and lucked out, was able to pay off my PhD in about six months from something that would have probably taken me like three years.
So I got crypto to thank for that too.
I still actually have six figures in student loan debt.
I was going to be paying it off just after COVID had started and that, but they went 0% interest.
So I'm just waiting until that's done.
No reason to give them money now.
Nice.
That's the way to go.
So, I mean, interesting how you got here.
What keeps you sticking around?
I think it comes, it's, are you talking about crypto or specifically Solana or?
Let's, let's, let's keep it to Solana because yeah, a lot could be said for crypto.
Yeah.
Well, what I found, what really interested me was once like NFT started and we started seeing the formation of communities that were much different than communities I've seen in Ethereum.
What I realized is back prior to NFTs on Solana, people really were just kind of users of platforms.
They might collaborate a bit here and there, but it was really users using tools or using projects for really their own personal gain or their, whatever they were trying to achieve.
What was interesting though is over on Solana when NFTs kind of started, you started seeing the formation of these groups and communities like the monkey DAO and that where people were coming together and it was no longer necessarily about just serving your own personal interests.
You were working kind of collaboratively to build something.
It was still kind of unclear what you were doing other than building like a community.
But what was so fascinating was people were doing so many things without financial incentives.
I mean, like a good example, going back to monkey DAO, there are people that have worked on the board since really the start of it and they're putting in 30, 40 hours a week supporting that project when they're not getting any compensation for it.
And so it really came down to really understanding what's going on here.
There's something different.
And I realized these communities and how we socially identify with them were very unique and very powerful.
And so what's really keeping me around is to really understand what is going on in this space with communities, with groups, what can we do differently than we did in Web 2 and before when everyone was kind of more users working as individuals.
Now we're working almost as cohesive entities or units without formal structure like a business or project necessarily.
And so I'm just really fascinated and intrigued and trying to figure out what can we do here.
And that goes back to a lot of the shit I do, goes back to just testing different ideas, different thoughts and seeing how things play out.
Nice.
I think, you know, one of the first places I saw you was in Moncadel a while back.
That community has had its ups and downs, right?
Like there's been a lot of drama here and there for different reasons, which, I mean, only stands to reason given that it's, you know, one of the first established and probably the strongest DAOs that's around.
How are you feeling about MonkeyDow these days?
How's the fam doing over there?
I think they're doing pretty well.
Well, I think it's, so I always kind of highlight crypto as if you've seen the Squid Games, the Glass Bridge game or thing where to move forward, we have to take steps.
But we know that there's going to be pitfalls and things we're going to stumble on.
But we don't have a choice to advance.
We kind of have to.
So I see a lot of projects and a lot of communities really doing that.
It's they're trying to advance things where we don't necessarily know where we're going, what we're doing.
We're trying to do things that we think are best.
But then they don't work out the same way as we expect, because maybe we're using Web 2 models and Web 3 has some fundamental differences.
So I think MonkeyDow is really innovative in the fact that they're pushing forward.
They're trying a lot of different things.
But, you know, like you said, they have their ups and downs.
There's a lot of stumbling points.
I think what I've learned over time is the most important thing about working in these decentralized groups and entities is really working as a cohesive group, as a cohesive unit, where the biggest issue or the biggest barriers are when we just sit in discords arguing or complaining or just not taking steps forward.
Everyone wants to have an idea on what the next best step is, but no one just wants to take that step because they're afraid of what might happen if they fail.
So I've found that having smaller groups where you're able to build stronger relationships and support systems with different people tends to be a little bit easier to navigate and a bit more flexible because you're not, if you're aligned behind a common culture and you're, I mean, and usually these groups are 10, 20, 30 people.
You're usually aligned for the same values, the same vision, you're, first, when you're looking at these larger groups that are like 2,000 people, it's almost impossible to get everyone on the same page in a 2,000 person group versus a 20, 30 person group where people can come and go as they, as they please.
And really, it's just the people that are culturally aligned that stick around.
I mean, and that's why I spent a lot of time with BanditoDAO, and that is because what is so fascinating is the fact that anytime we have governance votes or we need to make decisions, it's almost always unanimous.
And you just never get that in any of these larger groups.
Actually, that's a great place for me to throw a follow-up question because a lot of people don't know about BanditoDAO.
Well, I think some people do, some people don't.
Can you give a quick summary of what they're all about?
Yeah, so BanditoDAO is a completely separate from MonkeyDAO.
It was started by Milst and Panchito back in, I believe it was end of August, 2021.
And it was honestly came about because Milst had bought several Sombrero Monkeys back when they were only a few sold each.
And he just thought it was fun to basically make up a small narrative behind that they're Bandito's.
And then he just created a Discord with Panchito, and they just started inviting anyone who had a SMB with a Sombrero was able to join the BanditoDAO.
And I ended up joining only a few weeks after that.
I joined in early October 2021.
And I joined and I paid premium over the floor price to get in because I saw a very unique narrative.
At the time, they were just kind of going around rating different projects because this was like in the peak of mint season, early mint season and everything.
And so they'd go around, rate different projects that were minting, demand sombreros be added, and just kind of have fun.
And I saw just like a great brand, a great narrative.
It was something fun to be a part of.
And it just felt like it had so much more to it than just, hey, we're just monkeys.
It's you had like a full narrative.
So I had joined and I had a pretty, I have a pretty strong background in organizational governance.
I worked in global pharma for about 10 plus years now, just recently quit.
But what I started doing is I saw this great group and I just started pulling together different governance models and just started drafting things.
Even though I knew they may not be really executable or they may be way too restrictive.
What it did, though, was it kind of pulled everyone together and everyone was kind of aligned behind a general vision of, you know, we want to push the sombrero.
We want to include them in every, in all, make sure that they're included in all collections.
But most of all, we just want to have fun.
We want to hang out.
We want to really build a name for the banditos and make it kind of a force that's recognized in that when you see the sombrero, that's what you think of.
It's make it something that was iconic.
So we've been, I mean, we've been a really solid group even through all these beer season in that we just are right now about to set up a, our own validator.
I believe we're the first sub-DAO or subgroup that's establishing a full validator.
But we're really building out the banditos as a, really a organization within Web3, an entity in Web3.
And I'm starting to push us more into getting involved in governance.
We recently made a announcement about partnering with BlazeStake, a liquid staking platform.
And what I want to do is start getting us to operate as this kind of cohesive unit, but start doing that in governance protocols within DeFi.
I believe because, like I said, a lot of legacy systems were really user-focused.
Everyone acted individually.
I feel like if we can collaborate and coordinate and operate cohesively as one unit, there's no difference between us and a whale in terms of as long as we have equivalent assets and everything.
Because really, at the end of the day, anything in Web3 that operates under cohesively and has assets to deploy and uses those strategically, it doesn't matter if you're one person or a group of people.
You're still going to have the same impact and results.
So that's really, I want to really scale some of the things I've been working on through the banditos as a cohesive group to really show what a collaborative, socially aligned group can really achieve and do.
Nice.
And, yeah, I keep waiting for my next big win so I can pick up one because the floor price on those are typically insane and, what, about double what most of the SMBs would be going for, give or take, if not more.
It's 4X now.
I think the lowest is 1,000.
Yeah, it'll have to be a real big win before I can get in.
But kind of attached to that, will it be another point of entry for people that don't necessarily have that big stack of cash to throw in but really want to be part of the bandito dough?
Well, so that's actually really interesting because yesterday Solana Bonk Business minted and they had the Sombrero trade as well.
Well, without any of us saying anything, all of a sudden a Twitter account popped up where they parodied or they used some of the banners and stuff that we've been using as the Bonkito DOW.
And it was for the Solana Bonk Business banditos.
They created a Discord.
They invited us to it.
Sorry, excuse me.
And it's great to see all of a sudden now they're trying to organize, inspired by our group, and trying to really do something similar, build that type of community.
And I'm very – so we've had different models where we're looking to see how can we grow, how can we expand.
But what I've learned over the past couple of years is any type of model where we want to retain ownership and oversight, it's not going to be very scalable because, quite honestly, in a decentralized system, it's very hard to get consistent operations, to get people to put in and contribute consistently.
Shit comes up and guess what?
Your family life, your work life tends to be a little bit higher priority than what you're doing in Web3.
And so we've struggled a bit with those models.
I've seen a lot of DOWs struggle.
And what I've realized is what is really the need to have any type of like creating a subgroup within our DOW or anything like that.
As long as the group is aligned behind the same kind of mission, the same type of values, they're trying to do the same thing, why not let other groups build up their own Bandito DOW?
So there's no way we would be able to scale or grow multiple of those groups with us having oversight or trying to support it.
We just turn into trying to facilitate discords and other things and admin basically tasks for other groups.
Let them empower them to kind of take the reins and build up their own Bandito DOW.
And I mean, you saw, I don't know if you've seen, but they went from, I think the floor price was about one sole or so for the basic Solana Bonk, Solana Bonk business NFT.
And the Banditos in there were going for 20 sole at one point.
I think they're down now to like 12, 13, 15.
I haven't checked recently, but it's very interesting to see the dynamics.
And my view is how do we empower that?
How do we let people kind of step up instead of people looking at me going, hey, we want you to join us.
We want you to lead us.
I told them, no, I told them, you know what?
I don't want to take a spot away from someone else who's engaged and motivated and wants to join.
I know exactly how quickly floor prices can run up.
We're seeing it in ours.
And I mean, in addition, I'm doing a lot of other things.
I can't have people just relying on me to looking to me to grow.
It's you guys are all capable, competent.
You want to pull this together, run with it.
I don't know anything more than they do.
We're all figuring this out as we go.
And so I just want to empower people to just, if they are aligned behind that, they want to build something, have at it.
Nice.
I mean, that's a reasonable position, too.
You don't want to necessarily dilute your own DAO if you've got a great crew of really hardworking folks, too, that are in our community.
Yeah, I was looking at that Solana Bonk business, too.
So right now it's still, the Severo's still 9.5 sold.
Yeah, well, and that's the other thing is, I mean, we could have done things like a mint or something like that.
But I personally want to avoid minting or having my own project because the moment you take money from people, now there's expectations.
And now people can demand things from you.
I don't want that.
I want to be here to hang out.
I want to be able to say whatever the fuck I want.
I want to just do whatever I want and not have someone saying, hey, I expect you to do this or, hey, why aren't you doing this?
If someone says that to me, I can tell them to go fuck off.
That's what I value about this space and being in a space.
And I don't want to take money, mint projects or things like that where then I won't be able to.
For sure, I hear that.
That freedom is part of what kind of pulls me in the crypto as well, right?
It's really my time to do whatever the fuck I want, to have fun, vibe with people and projects that I care about, contribute what I want to contribute when I can.
So I totally feel you on that front for sure.
I'm going to move on from Bandudos in a second.
But how many somberos were there in SMBs?
I can't remember the total trade.
I believe there was 98.
However, one of them was part of the Ori hack that happened.
And so those got frozen.
So there's 97 that are in circulation, I believe.
There's some that have been that were minted and just have never moved from their wallets.
I would say in like actual circulation, probably maybe 70 or so.
Maybe about that.
The Bandudos, we probably have about 50 people that are verified with somberos or so in the DAO.
We've tried to get everyone.
It's just we can't find who everyone is.
For sure.
And you know, there's some that are probably like hitting on ledgers and people died and they're sticking around somewhere.
Exactly.
Yeah, people would know.
So on that note, though, before we move on away from Bandudos, as you know, we have our upcoming Mint.
So, you know, if there's anyone in Bandudos that wants spots, I'll send you a link so a bunch of them can get in.
I'd love to have them in our project, too.
Not here at the show, Max, though.
But I would like, you know, we're trying to get the good players in our project, too.
So one of the questions I want to ask you, I mean, you know, like you, you know, I jump around on different chains.
I think my home is really Aptos.
Seoul is kind of where I originated from and still dabble in heavily.
I think in Seoul, you know, one of the biggest things lately was the whole FTX and Sam's involvement.
So I'm wondering how that hit you and what you think the impact or is there going to be an ongoing impact from that?
So I think I was lucky enough to not be hit too badly other than the fact that, I mean, I really hadn't been tracking a lot of my portfolio value.
So I wasn't looking at it at U.S. dollars.
I know the sole amount stayed roughly the same.
I did get very lucky, however, because I actually cashed out a large portion of my 401k and I threw it at Solana at $30.
But what I did is actually moved about a third of that into Marinade at $0.04.
Well, Solana tanked down to about $0.10 while Marinade jumped up.
And I was able to actually sell the majority of that Marinade at about $0.10 to $0.11.
So that basically made me break fairly even from that $0.30 crash down to $0.10.
So I was hit overall just portfolio value, but it was never money that I couldn't lose.
So I didn't really mind too much.
And I got really lucky just with that recent crash down from $0.30 to $0.10.
But honestly, what I found is that crash really consolidated the community.
And you kind of cut out a lot of the noise that was going on.
And so I don't think I would be as popular as I am today had that not happened.
Because I'm not saying very many things different on Twitter anymore.
It's just that I was able to make a loud noise with burning ice knives SMB.
And then I had eyes on me that weren't getting pulled away from someone else or somewhere else.
So it allowed people to kind of see what I was posting all of a sudden now.
And then that kind of just snowballed.
So what I realized is we cut a ton of noise out.
It really consolidated just to people that are focused on building.
And you could really then tell who was here just for a quick flip, who's here for the long term.
So I've never seen the core community decrease or get really hit social activity-wise.
And that made me more bullish than ever because the price tanked like crazy.
But there was still just as much building as there was before.
The only difference is there's not VC money going around anymore.
So now groups and projects are trying to get creative.
You're starting to see a lot more projects being funded by individuals.
And whales that had gotten lucky or that had sizable assets versus VC backing all of them.
And so I think it just changed the landscape to be a lot more community-focused that I think is a very solid foundation comparatively to where we were in the last bull run.
I think it's a much more solid foundation for us to build off of.
Fair enough.
And I guess, you know, the remaining worry is, you know, the Solana that's locked up with FTX and whatever Sam and his buddies have stashed away on their ledgers that they potentially could dump, you know, at some point in the future and all that.
But, you know, not much more than that.
Well, yeah, but that's actually why I support Bonk so much.
And I hate to show Bonk on here, but the whole focus and the whole point of what Bonk is trying to establish is during these core time when everything was, you really, you had the core community still there.
I mean, Bonk was airdropped around Christmas time.
You had most of the people that were here for flipping or VCs or these other groups, they had pretty much left by now.
And really what the intent and goal of Bonk is, is to shift the risk from the community and retail back onto the institutions and the VC.
Like you said with Solana, Solana got built because they gave out Solana-like candy to VCs and to institutions.
And because of that, they were able to build a ton of infrastructure by investing that soul into different projects and different groups.
But likewise, they were able to manipulate it like crazy.
And you saw with the FTX fallout, everything came crashing down.
Well, the people who were buying at less than $0.25 or $0.05 weren't getting hurt really when it was $10 versus the majority of people that had joined and built up on the community, the retail side.
They all bought in well above $0.25, well above $10, likely well above even $30.
And so what happened is that the dynamic for the game was all these VCs, all these institutions have so much soul that they could play high-risk games and not give a fuck.
And guess who gets hurt by it?
All of us.
Well, what Bonk is trying to do is flip that script.
And what it's really trying to do is it's trying to, as it distributed to the community first, under the guise of a meme coin, if we are able to kind of establish it as a means of exchange as opposed to Sol, which honestly, the point, the utility of Sol is to secure the network.
There's no need that we have to actually be buying and selling in Sol other than the fact that it's easy and everyone else uses their L1 token.
But if we are able to transition to a model where we're using another token like Bonk, then what's going to happen is anyone who wants to participate in that ecosystem, in that economy, is going to have to buy into it.
Well, as it's kind of a meme coin, it's very easy to brush off.
And everyone just goes, oh, yeah.
Now try to get an institution or VC to invest heavily into a coin that they think is just a complete joke and meme.
It's not going to be very easy.
So they're using almost the meme coin status as a tool to be able to distribute it broader among the community.
And then if we can align and try to push Bonk to be the means of exchange, now what's going to happen is we're going to build Solana and the general L1 using that token.
And for VC and institutions to be able to access our economy to try to gain revenue out of us.
Now they're going to have to buy in, but now they're going to be the ones at risk.
They're going to be the ones that are going to be buying in at the higher price while the community was the one that got in at the lower price.
So now they're going to have to be a little bit more careful how they play these games, because ultimately it's their asses that are going to get burned before us.
Yeah, interesting.
And for sure, I don't feel bad about showing Bonk.
Whatever you want, you're our guest and I happen to be a big fan of Bonk myself.
You know, I'm not entirely sure I agree with how it was distributed among some of the founders or whatever.
But overall, I like the idea of it.
And I think it's, yeah, it's something high on the back.
And I know there's a lot of strong feelings about how it was distributed and everything.
And just usually the comment I say about that is, the reality is, is there's no perfect model.
And if we look at what's around us to achieve that goal, it's the best thing that's out there right now.
So we can either sit around bitching about some of the things that happened in the past, knowing that, you know, some people might be getting rich that may not deserve it, that's a subjective view.
But you know what?
Every token, every project, every model has that happening.
If we just focus on what we can do moving forward, and I'll tell you, I'm not an early contributor.
I'm not part of the team.
I have no, everything I have, I bought on the open market.
So I'm not getting any benefits by saying that.
For sure.
Yeah, valid points.
I've seen a lot of surprising stuff since I got in crypto.
I'm certain you have too.
I think one of the most surprising, unexpected things that I've seen was actually you burning Ice Nice PFP.
So that created kind of a big wave all across Twitter, not just Solana.
There's a lot of people from other chains that are like, what the fuck?
And how could you do that?
So, you know, can you give us the rationale where that came from, and how do you feel about it now?
Yes.
Okay.
So that's actually, it builds up a lot from even before I was in NFTs.
So one of the first communities I got involved with was Coop here in Solana.
That was probably early 2021.
Before NFTs and all that were really popular.
And they instituted a way to burn Coop within their Discord channel.
It was the strongest kind of community that I had seen in any crypto group out there.
It was pretty large, and it was all just kind of a line behind Siri, the founder there.
And when they instituted a bot in the Discord that you can tip people, they also allowed
you to burn stuff, burn tokens.
And they had a leaderboard and everything.
Well, I started burning.
I was a bit newer, but I made a pretty large burn right off the bat.
And it was really interesting because I went from being basically no one trying to cut through
the noise to all of a sudden people started loving me and giving me shout outs and saying
how much of a chat I was.
I'm like, this is interesting.
And so I ended up burning over 5,000 Coop, which is probably about five grand worth at that
time.
And people thought I was crazy, but all of a sudden I started getting invited into, I got
basically a social status there.
And I started getting invited into private groups and other things.
I'm like, wait a second.
This was, I didn't, I may have burned some cash, but it got me opportunities I wouldn't
have been able to achieve otherwise.
And I didn't necessarily expect that.
So I, that got me more access to other groups and to network and meet other people.
And I've kind of just made my way through the ecosystem.
And similarly, when I joined the antisocial apes, I minted and I was between them and the
Koku Kongs just kind of jumping between their discords just to fuck around.
And if you're, you probably recall, I ended up buying a one for one on the Koku Kongs and
a bunch of their rares.
And I set a governance proposal that they made me a, a governance chair before they even
established the governance model.
And because of that, I ran with it.
I set up a governance vote to basically form a partnership between ASAC and the Koku Kongs
where I'm the only one that's enabled to partner the relationship or handle the relationship.
And it passed in the discord with just a ton of yes votes.
So I'm like, Hey guys, this is what the group agreed to.
And they just kind of ignored me.
So I'm like, okay, that's fine.
And because ASAC had the, the meme of we're going to 0.1, I just started selling those Koku
Kongs, the rare one, the one for ones for 0.1 near.
I mean, it's basically the equivalent of burning it.
Um, and all of a sudden I get back to the ASAC channel and people are just going apeshit
about it.
And I realized it was the exact same thing.
I was able to really create, um, instill kind of a reputation from just burning again.
And that was probably two to $3,000 worth of NFTs.
And that got me a little bit, again, more surprised about what was going on.
It worked out well.
Um, I then, it was before even doing ice knives, I ended up burning a Howdy Dow, a cowboy SMB.
And I did that one with a little bit more, I was trying to figure out a few things because
I I've been working through a lot of social models and recognizing that we put social identity
in these NFTs.
But what I was trying to figure out more was, are we putting our social identity in the
individual NFTs or into the broader kind of collection?
And so with being Manditos and being able to kind of have a brand and a narrative that,
uh, of what we were doing, I took, I bought a cowboy SMB.
I then told, uh, basically made a post.
I, uh, had it hostage and then I murdered it.
I burned it and I started asking people how that impacted them.
And every person I talked to said, it felt like a gut hit, even fellow Banditos that they
owned.
Uh, we, we were Banditos.
They were our, our arch enemy and we, and one of them was burned, but they still kind
of felt that gut check because it was still a monkey.
It was still one of our own that kind of got hit.
And I was trying to figure out what exactly about it is making that so powerful.
We're burning an asset.
That's not even something that they own.
They still feel that connection to it in that hit.
Well, ice and ice all of a sudden, I'm like, you know, how can I up this?
What can I do?
So first I actually ended up burning a Roman Dow SMB, but that, that had kind of a similar
impact of the initial one.
And people just told me, stop, stop burning monkeys.
Um, but then all of a sudden I saw ice had posted his for, uh, what was it like 2000 soul
or so?
And that got me thinking because I had just sold at a profit, the marinade.
Like I was saying earlier, I had jumped into marinade.
I had just gotten out of a selling marinade and started sitting on a little extra liquid
cash.
And I was like, okay, the other monkeys I bought, they were never tied to anyone, but
it still felt that kind of gut check to amp it up a bit more.
What if I tried to murder an influencer?
He got, I had it put, he had it posted.
So I grabbed it and I burned it.
I knew worst case I would get, again, people would be going, oh shit.
And how crazy it was.
I thought I gained some followers.
I never expected it to have the impact that it did.
And it really kind of, I think solidified in my mind about how we put our social identity
into these NFTs, because all of a sudden I snipe, if you saw him, he didn't know what
to, what to do.
He was like, wait, what?
And I don't think anyone, he ever expected something like that to happen.
And so it really created an interesting dynamic that I was just wanting to test things.
I was sitting on a bit of extra liquidity.
And I just kind of want to take things a step further because understanding how we apply
social identity to these NFTs really goes to the foundation of how we collaborate within
these communities and these groups.
And by testing that, I mean, if you try to do anything in the scientific method in crypto,
it's going to take a year or two to do a study.
And guess what?
It's already going to be long gone.
We don't have that luxury.
So really, the way to learn things is just to do them and try out something and make
your best guess on why you think it, why it worked out.
And if you can keep repeating it and it does show to be true, then chances are you might
be right.
And so it really came down to, I think, those elements.
Wow, that's a really, really interesting kind of path.
I got you there.
And for sure, as I said, caused ways all over the place.
It makes a lot more sense now that I've heard you kind of spell out your thinking behind
And, you know, it's actually one of the reasons I wanted you as our first guest on this
show, too, is because I really admire people that are willing to take those risks and, you
know, break molds and create new things or just see how things will work in
terms of that experiment perspective.
So to me, yeah, that's awesome.
And I admire it.
Risky as hell.
And I'll be honest, even when I saw him, I was like, holy shit, you know, that's a lot
of money.
And but, you know, things aren't free.
And the impact is massive, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It was a big impact.
And honestly, people spend money on things that look like you're burning or throwing away.
It's I mean, marketing budgets are inflated for so many different companies in that where
this was 20 grand to get that type of impact across that number of people for 20 grand on
a personal level as having a portfolio is like, yeah, that's a lot.
That's not worth it.
But if you're looking at a macro level, honestly, I think most companies would probably spend
20 grand to impact that many people that severely if they had the option.
Yeah, no, for sure.
I mean, you know, it was a brilliant move in particular because it was like for the first
time I think that I'm aware of that something that significant of that much value was burned.
I mean, other than, you know, token burns and all of that, but something that had dollar
value, but also a lot of value in terms of, you know, I just like connection to that.
Right.
So, yeah, no, it's interesting.
Let me just give people a little bit of context.
You had mentioned Kokomo Cons, you know, which was a Nier project.
And you mentioned ASAC or ASACs, which is kind of some of the founders that are funding
MAX that the spaces is under.
I remember that episode distinctly.
That's hilarious that that was some of the, you know, the groundwork for what was to come
a year later, right?
Because it was about a year old, exactly, because ASACs turned a year or a couple of days ago.
So that's hilarious.
And, yeah, it reminded me, too, I'll have to send a DM to Solstice and see if he's got
the balls to come up for a one-on-one chat on here, too, sometime.
I don't think that'll happen, but it'd be pretty funny.
Okay, let me get back.
And so there's a couple of people in the audience that I'll put you up in a few minutes.
I want to just go through a couple more questions.
I also want to be respectful of your time, so we're not going to go too long.
But what would you say, for me, as I said, you're burning ASACs PFP is one of the most
surprising things I've seen in crypto.
What's the most surprising thing that you've seen in crypto or the NFT space or something
memorable?
You know, I think it's really just seeing how people came together behind things like
monkey doubt and then and how much time and effort you're willing to put in without any
compensation.
I mean, you've got people that have been on the board working 20, 30, 40 hours a week for
over a year plus with zero compensation.
And just like burning a strong money away, that's throwing away their time.
If we're looking at in the same context of it just is gone and there was no economic value
gained.
But there was gain and a lot of it looks to be reputational gain and self-satisfaction.
A lot of other elements that I think can really produce incentive models over trying just to
get using ROI or return on investment as an incentive model.
And so I think that's the most interesting and unexpected.
And I'm interested to kind of I've been trying to work through a lot of my work is trying to
work through more models in that because ultimately, if return on investment or profit is your focus
to incentivize people, then the people you're going to incentivize are those that are chasing
profit.
And the issue with NFTs in general is hype never lives up to reality.
So the moment you mint out in the moment the work actually starts happening, even if you
could provide a decent payment to someone to do work, the hype of new mints and other
opportunities that are 100x, that may not be actual, that may not actually happen, but
the potential is going to pull people away.
So I think there's a lot we have to look at and work on to figure out how do we incentivize
people to do work that is beyond just profit driven because you're never going to keep up
or compete with new mints, new potential 100xs and things like that.
But when you build culture, when you build reputation, when you build things that you can't just
necessarily buy, you then create incentive models or opportunities for people that they
can't necessarily get elsewhere.
Building up reputation in a reputable DAO is not very, you can't offer the same thing to
a newly minted project because they're just immature at that time.
They're trying to build up.
Maybe they will get there one day, but it's understanding those things and figure out how
to better incentivize those areas, I think will, is very interesting and unexpected.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Great answer on that.
Royalties.
What are your thoughts on that?
That's been another thing that is special in the Salina space, Magic in particular, but
in general as being a big issue.
It's an interesting topic to me.
I think there's a lot of different angles that can be handled from it.
I know you've made a couple of posts.
So what are your thoughts on royalties and where are they going?
So my general view is this ecosystem is a permissionless system.
And so you can't enforce necessarily royalties.
As you can see, we were able to bypass them.
So it comes down to a situation of, if you want me to do it, you got to force me to.
And so in general, I actually don't tend to pay royalties if I don't have to, unless
I have a lot of respect for the project or if it's something that's a completed product.
And so this is an area like getting into one-on-one, one-for-one art in that where what you're buying
is the final product of someone that, you know, that going from hand to hand, I can understand
the need for royalties for that because especially artists, it's not like these are selling every
day.
But I think that's very different than royalties on a generative collection when you have
a just a mint out and then all this volume happens with royalties because the team is
usually minting based on hype and potential, but it's never actually reality or what they've
actually delivered.
And so unless the project has really delivered on what they have outlined and I don't necessarily
think that they deserve royalties, they already got a shit ton of mint funds.
And so I think it comes down to how, I think it's subjective and I think individuals need
to take a look because if we, if it's socially, I think most people want to help good projects,
good people.
And if that's the expectation that we hold each other to, then I think it's something where
we can self-police each other for the most part.
And especially if you're building reputation, building relationships, no one's going to care
if you don't pay royalties to a shit coin project that mints out some, but then they never deliver
on their roadmap.
But if you're working with a, someone that appear that has a project that is delivering
on their roadmap, then, I mean, you're really taking money directly away from someone that
you care about.
And especially if they rely on that.
So I think it's highly subjective.
I don't think it's something that's should necessarily be required.
And in a permissionless system, there's always going to be ways to bypass it.
I do not agree with like what the open creator protocol that Magic Eden's doing, where you're
giving full authority to sign off on transactions to Magic Eden.
I don't care if it's behind a multi-sig or not.
But I think that that's putting basically the entire NFT ecosystem under the thumb of one
private entity and completely counter to what we're doing.
I think that's why I go back to social policing or self-policing through social norms and expectations
is if we can build up relationships in this ecosystem and communities in this ecosystem,
then I think we can kind of set the precedent that, you know, good projects working together
within these groups.
If you don't pay royalties, then you're really hurting this community.
It's not that you're hurting Magic Eden or some shitcoin rug pull.
You're hurting the people that you're working with.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
You know, once again, good points.
And I agree.
For a large extent, like there's different reasons to pay, not pay.
I probably follow the same, right?
Projects that I think really have been hustling and putting together.
There are things like, what it was, Galactic Geckos, right?
I'm a big fan of theirs just because I love their redemption story.
I had them on a while ago.
And so that's one that I'll probably always pay royalties on because I just admire how much,
how far they've come, given that they had such a rough start.
So I think there's a case for it here and there.
Well, exactly to the point, instead of trying to create a technical solution to force people
to do it, you should be trying to instill the same impact that you feel for the geckos
into your community.
Because then they're going to feel they should pay.
They want to pay.
They want to help because they feel part of it.
For sure.
And yeah, there's going to be a, it'll be interesting to see how that evolves, right?
There's going to be a whole bunch of different solutions.
I, the first time that I used Magic Eden to, what turned me off of, well, I mean, there's
a lot of things.
Over time, like, you know, I use Magic Eden, but there's ups and downs and I don't agree
with laws or decisions they made.
But when I minted Bonks, I think that was, for me, the fact that I couldn't just switch
it from my minting wallet to the other one without going through them, you know, I was
just like, what the fuck?
It's so against kind of everything I know about crypto and why I'm interested in it.
But, you know, they'd have to do that.
So anyways, Bonks made a good shift, right?
And they're out of that.
So it's no longer an issue.
But I think that was a, I think it was good that that happened, quite honestly, because
the, I mean, that wasn't the first project to launch with OpenCreator Protocol, but that
was the first one that was able to bring mass attention to the restrictions and the issues
with it.
Had Bonks not done that and then shifted to a more open model, we may not have had the
same discussions and shaped kind of the minds on what the issues with OpenCreator Protocol
really are.
So I think that was actually a good thing that that ended up happening.
And I, I've talked to Hex a lot personally, and I think he, it was never his intention
to do that.
And that's why he right away wanted to fix any someone that's always really listening
community and trying to do what's right.
But you know what, we move fast, we break shit.
It's more about how we respond, how we act, because no one, nothing's ever going to go
perfectly.
Ain't that the truth.
I'm going to open up for a couple of questions.
But I guess the one kind of question that I have is, you know, I think you're a man of
vision.
And I'm curious what your perspective is on how NFTs will evolve in the next coming years.
So, I mean, in so many ways, right?
Like there's a lot of different things that are coming right now.
Composability is kind of a big thing that's coming up.
There's so many other things that are out there.
So I'm curious, what do you think are going to be the major changes and advances that we're
going to see in the near future?
I think we're going to be moving to a model where NFTs are providing more specific utility,
whereas we've been, I think we've been kind of kneecapped by the tech not being too advanced.
We need to innovate more to really get more technical capabilities out of Web3.
And I don't think that the community type focus will necessarily stay as a strong meta.
The reason being is token gating your community is a really shit way to grow a community and
grow a culture.
I keep saying to people that I think the D-Gods are pretty much wrapping a noose around
their neck right now by focusing and proclaiming how good they are because of their floor price
increases and how Frank's made the money, because ultimately we're going to hit a bull run soon
enough.
And when that happens, there's going to be a large influx of people.
And what's going to happen is, is those people are going to be looking at where, what are
opportunities available to them?
And by having very high floor prices, you're basically gating those people out, which could
be very strong individuals that would benefit your community.
But ultimately people are going to look at that and go, you know, maybe they'll first start
by going, wow, that's really cool, I want to aspire to that, but I can't do it today,
so I need to focus elsewhere.
Well, you know, by the time people are focusing elsewhere and doing work, they're going to
build relationships with other people, they're going to identify with other projects, and
they may never, when they get enough money, they may never even decide to go over to D-Gods.
And so I think they're going to, I think they're really hindering themselves.
And I think any community that's really focused on the floor price is only looking at the
short-term self-interest of getting that increased price, but what you're doing is you're limiting
the amount of people that you can bring in.
And especially in decentralized models where you really are trying to incentivize people,
when you token gate people out, what you're saying is, is these are the only people I choose
to incentivize.
These are the only people that are able to even apply for some of this work or activities.
And when you have really specialized stuff that needs to be done, or you need a certain type
of talent, if that's not in your pool of your community, you're SOL.
So I think we're going to move to a more open model where I think communities and groups
are going to get smaller, and they're going to be ones that people can form closer relationships.
They can get to know who is who, build reputations.
And then I think we're going to start seeing more communities build things collectively as
everyone starts, as the reputation starts to get kind of known and people kind of filter their way
to cultures that they identify with or other people they want to collaborate with.
So I think we are just, we started in this big amorphous blob of NFTs and communities,
and I think we're going to kind of loosen the restrictions, and then people are going to
naturally, frictionlessly flow to the areas that interest them the most, so they align with the
most. That's a big reason why I like, why I do the approach I do on social media, and that is,
I think being broadly appealing is not very beneficial in the long term. Because being broadly
appealing, like being a politician in the legacy world, is trying to be broadly appealing is not
how people are. People are not professional always. I think professionalism, it was a needed
construct for us to be able to collaborate with other people around us. Work and businesses were
not always interconnected with the internet. Your limit, your opportunities of where you could work
was limited. You couldn't just easily jump to another job. So you know what, you got stuck with a lot of
people that you may not like very much. Professionalism allows us to suck it up and do the best we can
just to make it work. But I don't see that in web three at all. If you don't like what someone has to
say, no one's forcing you to be there. It's as easy as clicking on a different community in discord or
hitting mute button on Twitter. I think people need to start being more authentic in who they are. That means
making mistakes, being emotional, speaking what they think, and knowing you're going to be pissing
people off. And I think that divide actually unifies people because it puts us into different groups that
we identify closer with. And by dividing the ecosystem into different types of cultures,
people are going to, I think, kind of move to the ones that they align with most. And you're going to see
closer relationships and relationships building much easier. And from that, you'll then, I think, build a lot more
trust, because these people are all kind of aligned for the same goals, same values, the same missions, and things
like that.
Yeah, and a lot of that makes sense. And also, you know, especially the professionals and actually resonates a lot.
But with me, I have to be exceptionally professional in my job. And what brought me more so than NFTs, but also crypto in
general, is it was a place where I could tell people to go fuck themselves and, you know, just be who I wanted to be
without having to have those reservations that we often have to have. And as you put it, the legacy world, which is a great
I'm going to write that down as a quote.
You can see a very clear difference in when I'm being a little bit more toxic and childish, and then it's followed up with a
like 12 long or 12 tweet long explanation on governance or some high level systems and things. It's you, there's nothing
requiring you to be professional and still be to have competency in what you're doing.
Yeah, for sure. You know, again, I want to be respectful of your time. Can you stick around for a bit
longer? Maybe take some questions from people that are around? Awesome. So anyone that wants to speak, put
your hand up and I'll pull you up in a second. Probably should do a mini show, at least for Macs, though. You
know, if there's anyone listening, I had mentioned to some people at different times, I'll drop some spots of, you
know, your want a Mac list spot. You don't have one yet. Just jump in our discord. The next 10 people
that post in our general chat, I'll throw some spots out too. So we've got one person that's brave enough
to come up and the rest of you DGens, you know, jump into. We love questions. We love hearing from
people. So let me put up some of these requests. So we've got Cactus, Cactus Gang. How's it going, fam?
Hey, Cactus. Welcome. Hey, guys. What's up? So Loli, well, I guess I got priced out of a
sombrero and you said you would like to grow the community. Have you considered and thought about
tokenizing sombrero and maybe, you know, spreading the sombrero love around?
We actually had did that back about a year ago and back when Fract actually was focused on
fractionalization of tokens specifically. We fractionalized, had one of his fractionalized
and we ended up allowing different levels of access to the discord based on the amount that you had at
the time. But then all of a sudden it got pulled one day and bought out and we were left with these
tokens that no longer were backed by that NFT anymore. So we've not gone that model. And
because of recently what's happening with a Bonkito DAO forming under the Solana Bonk business
NFT, I think the approach is going to be more empowering groups to really build their own
Bandito DAO groups. And then I think it's possible to collaborate at the community level rather than as
like our group trying to scale and grow our own community. Because then it just comes down to,
I mean, it really turns our group into being community management of multiple different groups
or of a large community when that's not what we're about. We're about hanging out, being a social
group and doing our own things under that aligned mission and aligned brand. And so I think we want
to empower more groups that if they're aligned to that, if they have a collection where there's several
Sombreros and all of them want to come together and build their own Bandito DAO,
more power to them. We support it. We want everyone to try to build that up.
Yeah, thanks for that question, Kansas. My man, Paul. Paul, do you want to throw out a question?
Anything on your mind?
No, I'm sorry. I'm in the middle of another call and I'd love to jump in. I just can't right now.
Yeah, no worries.
Let me see. We got Fed. He jumped up. What's up, my man?
Good afternoon, guys. You can hear me all right, right?
Crystal clear, actually.
Perfect. Congratulations, Lolly, on the social experiment. It's been a pleasure since Christmas
just watching this play out. Just kind of off of a point that you made, like token gating
versus sub DAOs. How do you feel like there is like a difference with collaboration in that?
Because you brought a point in bringing in, like, just connecting the community.
And I feel like sub DAOs, from what I've seen, have sometimes, like, divided communities inside each other.
So I just kind of want to hear your take on that.
So I think it's a little, it's, humans are naturally going to collaborate with groups that they identify with more.
And so you see this normally within communities where there's different channels and different people go to different channels.
I know in MonkeyDAO, there's DegenMints, which has a popular following.
There's Monkey Gaming, Monkey Country Club, Monkey Ventures.
It's different, basically, special interest groups.
But the thing is, is when you do a trait-based subgroup,
what you're doing is you're not basing it on common culture and common interest.
You're doing it on having a common logical asset, a NFT with the same trait.
I think the most beneficial thing is people are going to collaborate together regardless.
And it's about allowing people to naturally collaborate in whatever context they want.
If it happens to be everyone aligned behind a culture and a trait, great.
If it happens to be behind gaming, behind other special interests, great.
That's however they want to form is fine.
And I think you don't necessarily, I don't think it will necessarily divide the group
if you empower them as part of the group.
I think the issue is, is when you put strong restrictions in place that don't allow people
to collaborate in that way, then you're going to get some, people are not going to identify
with the overall broad, the higher level DAO, and they'll be more identified with their group.
Um, it's like banditos being separate from monkey DAO.
It was, they never really, everyone was focused on the larger group and we just wanted to do
our own thing.
And had that been, had it been easier to do that more fluidity within monkey DAO, maybe
we would have built more in there.
Maybe not.
Um, but ultimately we all still align under that same monkey culture and we still identify
with it and we want to build with it.
I think it's when we lose that breakdown of a social identity placed within that bigger
organization that there tends to be issue.
And that tends to happen usually due to politics and, uh, from people not identifying or agreeing
with certain decisions that leadership had made.
I personally have the opinion to have less, uh, formal governance, less structure, uh, and
have culture more, uh, and social norms, more guide the larger group and try to empower and
push people into more of these subgroups.
So then what you do is you create a governance layer where no individual is operating as a
leader.
What you're doing is you're creating governance layer where it's different communities are
all competing to be, uh, to have influence and help shape the organization.
Because what you then do is you allow people to contribute within their subgroup.
So let's say bandito DAO, and they want to advance the overall monkey DAO, for example, that
maybe they'll take on a project or something, trying to, uh, help build up the brand or the
image.
And in turn, it's going to build the overall organization, but also it's going to build
their reputation against the other different groups.
And others are going to see that and go, hang on, we want to build up our group.
We want to, we want to collaborate and, uh, have a similar reputation be viewed very, uh,
as like the upper echelon of monkey DAO.
So we're going to, uh, organize and we're going to collaborate and we're going to try to do
this other activity.
That's going to build it up.
I think where we get bogged down is we think there needs to be a board and someone needs
to globally manage everything because it doesn't, when you have 2000 people, it doesn't matter
what the vote is.
People are always going to have dissenting opinions.
What's unique with bandito DAO is in the year plus that we've been together, I can name
on less than one hand.
It's only one hand.
The number of times we haven't voted unanimously.
I mean, it's when you have socially cohesive groups of people that are there because they
want to be there, they tend to align to the same decisions because that's why they're
there.
It's when you have differing opinions and that I think you start to see some of those
issues.
So I'm working on a lot more trying to figure out how we can establish models where these
DAOs and these larger groups are not made up of individuals in positions of power, but
these different subgroups and almost clicks are the ones that are helping shape the overall
brand and image.
I appreciate that thorough response.
And I guess like just the one like follow-up quick question would be like confirmation bias
that's going to exist inside of these sub-dowsing groups.
Do you think that is in the best interest to progress like Web3 as a space?
Or do you think having like that contrarian devil's advocate kind of, you know, still
be prevalent in our conversations?
So I think this comes back to having the fluidity between different groups.
I think everyone likes to view echo chambers as bad because in the traditional world, people
like to isolate themselves into areas where they can have echo chambers and just reinforce
negative views.
But you don't tend to see that as much within Web3 because people are not usually part of
one community only.
And I advocate people should be part of many different communities.
And by, I think, supporting and identifying across multiple different groups, most people
are not wanting to do something harmful to their overall group or Web3.
And when you're able to have open conversations and free-flowing information between groups, I think
you're able to socially police those issues.
I've had people come up to me with some of the shit I've done and say, hey, dude, you
may want to rethink that.
Sometimes I go, OK, sometimes I don't.
But I think with the way that we're collaborating, we're able to self-police it more because of
that free-flowing information and the stronger relationships with different people that are able to almost
provide a reconciliation of what's going on.
Ninety-nine percent of people in echo chambers online, it's individuals as users going to these communities
where the only other people they're around have the exact same type of view reinforcing it.
And I'm in a lot of different groups and there are a lot of different cultures, a lot of different types of people,
and I have strong relationships with a lot of different people.
So if I start leaning one way, there tends to be some type of social checks and balances almost
because people don't want to lose my relationship with them.
Great response.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and just clarify such a massive social experiment
that you've created.
This is why I joke around about being a cult leader and dictator because I genuinely do not think in Web3
that that's possible.
It's a concept called ergodicity.
If you have one investment in $100 and it goes south, you're dead.
It's gone.
If you have a hundred investments of $1 and one goes south, you're fine.
It's the same thing in the physical world.
Just like I was saying with professionalism, you're only able to usually be in one place at one time.
And so social groups, it's usually wherever you choose, whatever friend group or that,
it's not easy to jump between multiple different ones.
And so it's so much easier to have these echo chambers in the legacy world,
but I don't think it's necessarily a concern or issue here because of the ability for us to move
between different social groups, channels, social groups of information and things like that.
Cheers again for another great perspective.
I'm going to hop down just so other people could have questions.
Cheers, man.
Thanks.
That was a great question to get some good discussion on.
It really is interesting.
I mean, the whole social identity thing, Lolly, which you talk about a lot, is huge, right?
And that was something, again, that surprised me about how far NFTs have taken that and how close it is, right?
I mean, people do adopt these digital identities, and if you ever had a high-value NFT that you sold for profit
that you are really attached to in the community, you know that there is a real sense of loss to that, right?
And can happen.
So we kind of fuse ourselves with our PFPs as ridiculous as that may sound, at least the ones we really care about.
So there's so much that can come out of that.
We had another speaker come up.
It was CryptoFly, my man.
Rocking the Thugbirds PFP.
Much respect.
I love Thugs.
I had them on a couple weeks ago, too.
How's it going, my man?
Good, brother.
How you doing, Toby?
Yeah, chillin', chillin'.
Do you have a question for Lolly?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Lollipop, thank you, bro, for everything you do for the space.
Big fan of yours.
Kind of wanted to pick your thoughts on Bonk, just in general, as an ecosystem, as a token.
I'm a big fan of it.
I feel like it's the first one that really caught some legs in this ecosystem.
I know there's been some other, you know, dog coins, like Samoy, Samo, whatever it is, previously.
But Bonk definitely took, you know, created a new, you know, lane of shit coins to come in, if you want to call them that.
Yeah, just kind of wanted your thoughts on the token itself and kind of where you kind of see this going.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
So I'm a huge Bonk fan.
I know I spoke a bit about it earlier.
It is, so what I see Bonk as, is it's, again, the ability for the retail investor to shift risk back onto the VCs if we can socially align behind it.
And because of how it was distributed, I see that potential.
I personally, even if it has a low chance of success, I'm throwing a lot behind.
I'm currently sitting in LP pools with almost, I think, 300K to support Bonk.
And so I want, I see this as the first opportunity to really change that narrative, especially in a post-FDX type world.
I'm highly supportive of it.
I was actually giving a talk on Bonk earlier today on an exchanges AMA that they invited me on.
I'm really supportive.
I really want more people to fall behind the culture.
I see it as a meme coin simply as a mechanism to really get past the current institutions and have them let their guard down.
Most people don't want to invest large portions of money into something they think is a meme.
You know, you can exploit that because if you put something of true value under the concept of a meme and the people that are looking at it don't look close enough to understand what's going on, they're not going to be putting money into it.
And by the time they realize it's going to be too late, they're going to have to be buying it at a higher rate.
So I see it as a, I don't see it as a dog coin or a meme coin in the same context of Samo or Wolf or those.
I see those really, they were a meme coin to be a meme coin.
This is a meme coin for a very strategic reason.
And once people realize that there's a lot more layers to it, it's no longer going to be viewed as a meme coin.
Great response.
Love your insight on that.
I feel like Bonk already has more utility than Shib does.
In my personal opinion, but what are your thoughts?
I mean, well, honestly, it's just like Solana.
Really, what is the utility of Solana?
It's to secure the network.
That's it.
We use Solana as a means of exchange just because it's convenient.
And that's what everyone socially agreed to use as our standard currency.
There's nothing actually holding us to doing.
There's no advantage that Solana actually gives us other than infrastructure has integrated it.
And we've been using it since it started.
We can change that narrative.
And that's what I think you're seeing with Bonk is really the focus is integration of it.
That's why I'm providing liquidity pools.
And that is you need liquidity for DeFi protocols to actually be able to use it.
And we need to incentivize that.
And only by seeding those types of infrastructure will it actually be capable of reaching the utility or the adoption that you're seeing Solana currently being used as.
That's awesome, bro.
Yeah, thank you so much for your input.
I'm going to step down.
I just wanted to ask you one more thing.
Do you have like a set time or anything that you do any kind of spaces yourself?
I know I usually see you just kind of hopping in.
But I love picking your brain and just was curious about that.
So I have one goal with my entire Web3 situation is I do not want to do anything that's going to require me to have like a assistant or have support.
I need to be able to do everything myself and be able to still focus time with my family.
So I don't have any standard space for that because I don't want any expectations of, oh, I need to do this weekly.
People reach out to me and I've gone on spaces usually once a week, maybe twice a week, starting to pick up a bit more now.
I'm always open to jumping on spaces because I also think that it gets me exposure to a different audience, each group I kind of go to.
And I'm able to then get different perspectives and talk to different people.
But I don't want any structure in my day where I feel obligated to do things.
I don't even keep a schedule or I am lucky if I even remember to mark down when I have a spaces coming up.
Usually I rely on someone pinging me and telling me, hey, are we good for the call in the next hour?
I'm like, oh, shit. Yeah, I had that happen actually yesterday, literally.
Exactly. So and that's, you know, if people and my viewpoint is, is, yeah, that's going to probably piss off some people who do like to have schedules and be very specific.
But if people want me on enough, they'll they'll adapt to my working style.
And if not, then I don't have to work with them. That's fine.
No, definitely. I'm actually more like you.
I'm very, like, go with the flow type of, you know, throughout my day.
Very intuitive, just kind of go off of my intuition with stuff in life and something, you know, it's a blessing and a curse.
But but props for for killing it and being super financially, you know, affluent and being able to live like that and just crush it.
So more power to you, bro. And it was a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you. Yep.
For sure. And Cactus, you got your hand up. Do you have a follow up question you want to throw out?
I have a quick question for the Max team. I'm a Sombrero. Max and myself, I collect Sombrero wearing NFTs.
Will the Max have a Sombrero trade?
Hmm. I don't directly have that answer, to be honest.
Let me ask. I don't know if the Max host is still there.
How many hits are you if you guys don't?
Well, I mean, I'm pretty sure you there's been a one to one that was delivered to you at some point for Max.
Am I correct on that, Lolly?
Yeah, we will. We will.
I was going to say, if I did, I might have lost it.
Did I burn it?
There you go. It'll be the first thing you do is burn it.
You know, but so I don't know.
There'll be at least one. I guess I can say that.
But it is, you know, favorite trade.
Well, you know, we'll see. We'll see.
And, you know, the thing with Max, too, and again, I don't want to give too much alpha,
but I think everyone saw that the Metaplex announcement went out.
And in our last space is one of the founders dropped that composability will be one of the major assets that Max will have or one of the differentiators.
And that's part of that Metaplex partnership that was announced, I believe.
So I'm dropping a little alpha there.
But let's get back to the man.
I think in order, Fed, I had you up.
Then, Jared, I'll throw you up for a question right after.
First, the Fed, go ahead, my man.
Wally brought up a good point about, like, the perception of meme dynamics and how that word kind of pushes away sometimes, quote unquote, smart money.
And that's something I noticed, like, because I've been heavily invested in the GameStop movement prior to 2020.
I've just I saw a positive EV play before cycle, like a new cycle coming out.
And I've just watched the general media blast it with it's a meme stock, meme stock.
And, yeah, it's hard to attract new liquidity.
So I was just like wondering if like how to get rid of that perception across currencies that have utility.
Is it just deliver more and then eventually it has to be accepted by smart money?
No, I think it's you're not going to change people's opinion.
And this is one thing I've learned, especially being in so many different communities and Dallas is people are not rational.
People are not logical.
And you can be as logical as you want in an explanation.
But people, again, are going to hold to what they what gives them the most comfort, especially if they're insecure about something.
If they put a very big financial investment into something, they're going to lie to themselves to tell them how good it is, even in the face of information telling you otherwise.
I've learned the number one way to unify a community is to divide it and push out the community that doesn't agree with you and pull in people that do agree with you because you're not going to change certain people's minds regardless.
So to that question, what I'd say is you should just be focusing on building up your community, your group and ignoring smart money, because eventually, if they're interested, they're going to look at it.
If they're not interested, it doesn't matter what you say to them.
It doesn't matter what you show them.
They're not going to.
And if you come at them directly, chances are they're going to get defensive.
Your best option is build up your small economy, your small ecosystem, and just focus on scaling that.
As it grows, it will start attracting more attention, and maybe you'll get lucky and someone with smart money is going to get attracted to it and jump in.
If not, maybe not.
You know, I can't really say, but it's more about scaling your group and people that are aligned versus changing other people's minds.
Thank you for that answer.
I think that is, like, exactly what I was looking for in just scaling the product that is being, you know, accepted by the like-minded folks.
And this is a very unique feature of Web3.
When we look at an economy, we look at, like, the global economy where there's just one and everything feeds up into it.
That's not how Web3 works.
We've got different microcosms, different ecosystems.
You see that because every layer one is technically a different ecosystem and economy, but we can go cross-chain and we can bridge those things and we can support multiple things, but we don't have to operate that way.
You can have competing economies that function off of different fundamental systems, and they can both coexist.
You couldn't do that pragmatically in the traditional world.
And it's these fundamental differences that I think skew people's minds, and this is why I push back against things like legal entities and that, because people are coming into Web3 thinking they know what it is, and they're taking these models that work in an ecosystem where there is strong regulation with authority and legal systems that don't necessarily apply here.
This is why I like people to just try things and see what works, because ultimately no one has built an economy in a system that is as freeform as this.
There's never been really a way to have a global large-scale economy with multiple of them coexisting.
And really, the divide just comes down to social factors, what people choose to support.
I had a very long conversation on governance with a guy that has written some really strong theses on liquid governance and some other stuff that it's interesting because any system you build of governance, it still relies people to work in it.
And you can always take a step back and define what that full system is, and you can always exploit it by trying to just lure people away from operating within it.
And I think that's the big difference with Web3 is people can shift their choice on what they want to support, what they agree with.
Logical consensus doesn't work here like it does in the regular world.
If I have a car, I can't tell you it's a dog and convince you.
Maybe I do.
Maybe you do agree that that's a dog, but at the end of the day, the utility of it is still going to be a car.
And our legal systems are based off of those premises of there are things that are fundamentally fact.
Tokens, on the other hand, are not like that.
Tokens, you can launch a token.
Let's say you have a project and you launch a token.
Well, it's a permissionless system.
I can accept your token in my own platform, and I can give it even strong utility in my system.
And let's say I grow my system bigger than yours where I'm the predominant factor.
You know, I just took something that you made, but now I've adopted it as my own, and the entire ecosystem agrees with me.
Guess what?
It's mine now, even though it was something, like, to begin with, it might have been a car, and I said it's a giraffe.
Guess what?
Or a dog.
Now it's a dog.
We're able to change things just through social consensus.
And this is why I think narrative is so strong, why I supported the Banditos and like to build up that brand, that image, because objective fact doesn't have the same weight here as it does in the traditional world.
Wow.
Great answer, too.
I think what I'll do is I see Jared from Ready Layer 1.
Jared, I'm going to make your question the last one, just so we can wrap up on the half hour.
Welcome, Will.
Hey, how's it going?
I jumped in on the last half of this, so if you already answered this question, I'll just be quiet and sit down.
My question is about, like, the narrative of account abstraction right now.
So, currently, there's an ecosystem that seems to be built that we're all on this call in, the NFT sort of, I don't like to use the word degen, but let's say crypto native community.
And a lot of the stuff you're doing in that is really impressive, like, super cool.
So, now you've got this other world of, like, account abstraction where people who are not crypto natives leverage use cases that sit within blockchain, the security of blockchain.
I don't know what those are, but you're starting to see that sort of narrative built.
So, how do you think those two systems work together, or do they not, or do they clash in their fundamental, like, philosophies, if that makes sense?
So, I, yes, I have actually very strong opinions on this because I think too many projects try to bridge between the traditional world and Web3.
And you see this, like, USDC, U.S. dollars is not a native thing in Web3.
We didn't need it.
We bridged it over and we created a token that we said, this is what fiat currency, a U.S. dollar is.
It didn't exist over here.
But with that, because now we have U.S. dollars, what we did is we now created the regulatory oversight of U.S. dollars and are trying to apply it to Web3, which may not work very well.
And so, I think there are a lot of use cases where people want to secure things or use the utility of crypto or Web3 in the real world.
But I think that those models and those systems are going to have difficulty scaling because ultimately most of our traditional world systems were built around the traditional models, usually with legal systems in place.
And those legal systems are only as good as their authority is.
I work, like I think I've said before, I work in pharma and global pharma and specifically with regulators.
I handle regulatory inspections.
I've spoken to the FDA, PMDA, EMA, a bunch of face-to-face and inspections.
What happens, and most people don't understand this, that we don't actually even use legal governance in the real world for large-scale organizations.
The fact is, is the legal system has so many issues that what most regulators do to actually be pragmatic and impact the industry is they do inspections.
They go around and they try to find a bad actor or the worst actor they can find on a specific topic.
They then take them, they nail their dick to a wall and look back at everyone else and says, unless you want this to be you, shape up.
And guess what?
Everyone does.
That's not legal governance.
They might have used legal governance on the one person that they cited and then they gave a fuck ton of fines to.
But all of that authority is actually coming from social governance.
It's that fear that is being instilled of, we don't want that to be us.
But the problem is, is that breaks down and is ineffective when your legal system underlying it doesn't work.
If you tell a DAO that they need to respond to a subpoena or issue funds and the DAO doesn't vote to do so, there's not a damn thing that they can do about it.
And so your legal system loses the authority to enforce its requirements.
And when you do that, it basically crumbles the entire system.
It just becomes ineffective.
And so I personally think that we need to, if we are wanting to look at Web3 as a scaling society, keep it fully separate from any of the traditional systems.
I've already posted and drafted a regulated model that I think we can establish.
The example I use is actually with news, the ability to create a regulatory body over news systems using social communities and self-policing.
And this goes back to some of the earlier things I highlighted about people not operating.
If we can create systems where communities operate at the governance layer instead of individuals, because then you're able to bypass a lot of the issues like with governance.
Because creating proposals is usually a very difficult thing or you need to have a defined process.
If you have 10 different communities and they're all with different, very different cultures, some more DGEN than others, having one process to establish votes and get people to align is just going to be an absolute shit show.
I've seen it multiple times.
If you follow me, especially with Marinade, you'll see some of the shit I did to prove their governance system doesn't work well.
But what happens is if you're able to bypass that and have, let's say, 10 different communities all operating at the governance layer of a DeFi protocol, you don't need the DeFi protocol to have processes for how to establish and submit a proposal.
They just need to know how to accept it and facilitate the vote.
The reason being is if you have 10 communities all that care about them, their image, their reputation, so like Monkey Dao, DGEN Dao, the Geckos, Max, all these different groups, you know, they're not going to want to look, they're not going to want to hurt their reputation.
So they're going to self-police their own community to make sure their community isn't pulling bullshit stuff and submitting it.
So likely they'll produce different processes internally at each community having a different process for how they come about submitting a proposal for a vote from their community.
And that way, the DeFi protocol doesn't have to even worry about setting a process for how to do it.
They empower the individual communities.
And then you're able to have a DeFi protocol where there might be 10 different ways to come about and decide how you want to submit a proposal.
And all of them will work because really the only thing the DeFi protocol cares about is does a proposal that actually gets submitted to be voted on and does it not bog down the system?
Because the way you bog down a governance system without strong oversight of proposals is you simply just hit them with every proposal you can make.
And if you start doing tons of proposals, the response is going to be putting some type of restriction in place to limit that.
If you have it as a technical limitation, then what you're doing is you're instilling a centralized point of failure where someone can exploit that to then limit the proposals of everyone else.
Versus if you do it all socially, then there is no centralized exploit possible.
Rather, it's all being done through self-policing and reputation.
Wow.
Thank you, man.
Well, it's unpacked.
Thanks for the response.
Great.
Yeah.
Thank you, Jared, for popping up.
Appreciate it.
That was a great question to get things rolling.
You know, I think I am going to wrap it up now.
I'd actually love to keep this piece that's going for a little bit longer.
But the truth is I've actually got to interview someone for a job.
So I got to – they're actually waiting right now.
So I got to run myself.
Let me just put it out there, though.
You know, there's a lot of amazing people in this audience.
So, you know, for those of you, you know, if you're in DAOs, if you want to get in on Macs, just hit me up in DMs.
I'm the cloud manager for them, as well as AptoMingos, the top project on Aptos.
So hit me up if there's anything I can do for you, if you need anything.
But, of course, the big thanks goes to Lollyman.
I can't thank you enough for coming up, giving us your time around these issues.
And it actually, you know, better than I thought.
I expected it would be good.
But just in terms of the level of depth that you got into these really complicated topics that need to be sorted out, that need to be thought about.
And so a big thank you for you, not just for joining the spaces, but for bringing these hard issues up and for kind of breaking the rules, breaking the molds, you know, in the service of helping the space improve or change.
Well, what you're saying is you had low expectations for me.
I had high expectations.
You needed them.
And I was actually, you know, 50-50, but I was just going to make this a D-Gen series.
But actually, I thought there were some good things that you said.
So I'm happy that we kind of kept it all this year.
But again, man, really appreciate it.
One of these days, if we're over in the same area, I'll take you out for tacos and tequila.
That's a problem.
Thank you again for having me.
For sure, man.
And thanks to all the speakers.
You know, appreciate, or for all the people that came up and spoke, appreciate all those questions.
They were awesome.
Yeah.
So everyone have an awesome day, night, morning, wherever you're at in the world.
I'm going to try to do these spaces a couple more times.
If you know a speaker that you think would be good to come on, you know, ideally someone controversial, someone different, someone with some, you know, good insights, put them in touch.
Probably do this every couple of weeks if there's some good enough characters to come on.
So on that note, let's wrap it up there.
Again, Molly, big thanks.
Big thanks to everyone.
Peace and have a great day, evening, and morning.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
Peace and have a great day.
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Peace and have a great day.
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Peace and have a great day.
