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🎙️ Orochi x Nansen x Kuru | Memecoin & NFT Landscape in 2025
Recorded: April 11, 2025 Duration: 0:59:10Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Sean from Nansen and Kozy from Career Exchange explored the evolving landscape of meme coins and NFTs, emphasizing the importance of community engagement, innovative project launches, and the shifting dynamics of liquidity in the crypto market. They highlighted strategies for growth and the need for organic community building to ensure long-term success.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. so
jim jim can you hear me?
Yep, I can hear you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's test our microphones real quick.
Kozy, Sean, are you guys there?
Doing well, man.
Doing well.
Awesome, awesome.
All right. Welcome, everyone. Great to. Awesome, awesome. All right.
Welcome, everyone.
Great to have you all here.
I'm Martin, and I'll be your host today.
We've got an exciting session lined up.
So, yeah, let's get into it.
Joining us today is Sean, Community Manager at Nansen,
with Cozy, Director of Growth at Career Exchange.
And both of them are deep in the space, seeing things unfold in real time.
So I think we are in for a pretty insightful discussion
about meme coins and NFTs.
So before we get into it, quick reminder,
like, retweet and share this AMA to the community
and all the folks out there to join. Sean,
Kozy, appreciate you guys being here. Let's start with something simple. Can you introduce
yourselves to the community and what do you guys do at Nansen and Kuro Exchange and what is it that
excites you the most about it? Let's start with Sean.
GM, GM, thanks so much for having me as well.
So very nice to meet everyone.
My name is Sean.
I'm a Nansen Community Manager.
I've been with Nansen for the past one year or so.
My main focus is overseeing the discords.
We do have two discords, our Alpha Discord as well as our main Discord.
Pretty recently, I took over the main Discord management of that.
So our Alpha Discord is made up of our professional subscribers, made up of VCs, high net worth individuals, market makers, family funds.
And the main Discord is for the general community.
What excites me on a daily basis?
I think it's pretty interesting because I am extremely plugged into the space.
So it's amazing that I'm able to say
that I'm being paid to be plugged into the space
when I do see quite a lot of folks out there
who's doing crypto as a hobby
and they struggle to keep up with the space.
But it's amazing that it's part of my job
to constantly be plugged in
and be aware of what's going on on a daily basis.
Awesome, awesome. Thank you for that. And Kozy, how about you?
Yeah, 100%. And yeah, no, just will say great to meet you, Sean.
And we're big fans of Nansen and everything. So it's great to connect.
And I love the little pudgy. So that's big time.
Yeah, no, I'm Kozy. I'm the director of growth with Kuru.
You know, it's a startup, so we wear a lot of hats.
We have a very small team.
We've built Kuru to what it is today with only seven people, which is a real credit
to our founders and this culture that we've built.
Yeah, so myself, I mainly oversee marketing, business development, work on some strategy and all of that good stuff.
A lot of my day-to-day is interning on the Twitter, just ship posting, doing all the things to try to just make the content that we put out funny and engaging and then interfacing with different projects.
And yeah, just thinking about the long-term vision and strategy of how we continue to grow Kuru as the number one DEX on MONAD.
So excited to dive into some of the specifics.
What's exciting to me, I think it's really just the innovation in a lot of ways that's
unlocked by scaling the EVM on MONAD.
And I think that Kuru is one of the best examples of taking advantage of that scalability and bringing it to traders with
a lot of features or improvements on UI, UX, and the experience overall that I think is really just
going to revolutionize the trading game and raise people's expectations in the space. I'm sure we'll
talk about that more later, but that's what's exciting to me. Cool, cool. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the introduction.
I can hear a lot of dedication for both of you for your respective projects.
So, Core Exchange, you guys position yourselves as a fully on-chain audiobook exchange, but
on Monad.
So, for someone who isn't deep into blockchain, what does that actually mean?
Yeah, 100%. So being a fully on-chain
clob, you'll hear the word clob thrown around a lot for us, right? We meme that word, but it's
also central to what we do. That means that we're a central limit order book, right? So that
essentially differs from kind of the norm that people have with regard to how they go and interact with decentralized
exchanges. The big unlock that Vitalik brought to Ethereum and then to Solana primarily is the
AMM, right? The automated market maker. It uses a very basic formula to have kind of the standing
liquidity. But at the end of the day, it's a great unlock for being able to position liquidity
for short and long tail assets. So like your memes along with your majors. But at the end of
the day, it's not super efficient, right? It's not super capital efficient. We just come to expect
in crypto paying slippage anywhere from, you know, quarter, half percent all the way up to like
sometimes two or three percent.
If you guys are anything like me, you've been trying to get a meme trade through or whatever
it is, and you just crank the slippage way up and you're like, hey, I just need to get
this trade to land.
And so what CLOBS do, Central Limit Order Books, is they essentially enable market makers
to be able to come into those really large assets.
So for Monad, that'll be things like,
you know, MonUSDC or maybe RAPD if that's ported over just large liquid pairs and have super tight
spreads and liquidity. So what that means for users is that you'll be able to experience slippage
that should be on the order of five to 10 times lower than what you've come to expect with your traditional AMMs.
But also one of the things that we bring is this pairing of swap capability with discoverability,
right? So we have kind of like a trading terminal similar to like a Photon or a Bull X,
if you're familiar with those from Solana. And you'll be able to go in and look and find
all the different coins that you want to look at, have charts available to you, see the
order book and how deep it is, and just be able to make informed trades.
So the big unlock is to be able to have this really efficient club working on the back
end that brings discoverability.
We have a light mode that kind of
looks like your typical Uniswap swap feature, and then a pro mode where you can find and trade all
of the coins that you're looking for with just a ton of information all in one place. The last
thing I'll say is you can even launch coins too, which has been really fun on Testnet to just be
able to go in, have like a few forms to fill out and then launch a coin on Testnet.
And we'll have that live on mainnet as well.
So there's more that I could go into,
but that's kind of what from the user perspective,
you'll be able to see this real unlock and bringing,
yeah, just kind of the experience
that you've come to expect on a centralized exchange
on a decentralized platform.
Super, super, makes sense.
So you guys are essentially,
the platform is polished enough
for the newbies in crypto to use it,
but also it has a mode that is advanced enough
for the web free natives to use it.
I like that.
And how long have you guys been at this?
Any major milestones or challenges that stand out?
Yeah, so our founders, their names are by Bob and Rohan. I encourage you to go follow them. It's 0xFravashi and 0xTrojan on Twitter.
They've been working on this for the last two, two and a half years or so, just thinking about order book designs. It started at hackathons and they decided to build this and
then found Monad is like kind of the perfect home to be able to bring this into reality.
And I've been with the team since last June. So coming up on a year here, just building,
we went live on testnet concurrently with Monad in February when that
launched, which is super exciting. And yeah, the big unlocks for us, there's been a lot of things
that, you know, challenges we've experienced or things that we've had to do. One of the big ones,
I'm not the most technical guy, so I couldn't go super in depth on this, but our CTO, Rohan,
go super in depth on this, but our CTO Rohan basically brought a formula for gas constancy
to basically make it where when market makers are placing orders and creating liquidity,
deep liquidity in the market, that they can execute those with constant gas rather than
it kind of like flowing up or flowing down with activity and stuff like that.
So that's been a huge unlock for us. I would need one of our devs to be able to explain it
better than I could. But I think that the really exciting thing is even as I say that we're
a CLOB or central limit order book decks, we've also brought on essentially a new,
kind of a new primitive where we have this AMM backstop that's built on top of the order book.
So users will be able to deploy liquidity in what we call vaults, and it'll interact with
the central limit order book as a backstop so that users that want to trade long tail assets
like means or under established assets can go in and still have liquidity that's provided by users in the
traditional way that we've come to expect with assets on other chains that are on AMMs.
So you'll basically be able to trade anything that you would be able to find, even assets that
are too small for it to make sense for a market maker to be actively trading on it. And then when
it graduates to that point where market makers come in, you're going to have even deeper liquidity than you've ever been able to come to expect. So we've
got some really exciting things with that vault capability coming down the line here, but can't
say too much, but some exciting stuff coming down the pike. Nice, nice. And I'm sure that the
community looks forward to what comes next from Crew exchange now Sean curious to hear from you as well same questions nonsense positions itself as a
multi-chain AI analytics platform can you explain what this means for someone
a new with blockchain technology and what is the journey been like for nonsense
so far yeah for sure thanks so far? Yeah, for sure.
Thanks so much for sharing those very insightful things about our career exchange.
But yeah, over to about Nansen.
To oversimplify, really, I think Nansen is a data and analytics platform.
Think of it as the Bloomberg, but for Web3.
So if you were to look in traditional finance,
if you were to make a trade or something,
it's not exactly the most transparent.
But whereas with blockchain technology,
as we know, people use blockchain for the transparency of it.
But if we see a transaction hash,
we see a wallet performing a certain action,
we might not necessarily know what it means.
And this is where a tool like nonsense
comes into play uh one thing that we do amazingly well is to label wallets of all the wallets out
there we label every single one with our ai tools as well proprietary just to make sure that it is
ahead of the game in that sense and one thing that nansen does exceptionally well is to come out with
this term called smart money.
I think over the past couple of years,
if we are on CT,
we see people throwing this term very casually
or smart money is entering this token,
smart money is sweeping this NFT.
But what does it actually mean?
So many years ago,
we came out with this term smart money
to actually identify the top of the top,
the best traders on chain.
And because everything is transparent, you can't exactly fake a P&L.
On CT, you have your influencers saying that, oh, they flex their P&L here and there, but
how many of that is actually that accurate?
And with blockchain data, with Nansen, you are actually able to cut through the noise
and we identify the most profitable traders out there.
And if you were to use Nansen, you will see many emojis along the way and this is how we actually help you to
identify wallets based on certain traits smart money traders be like seven days 30 days to
actually help you to identify are these wallets are worth copy trading and as a wider umbrella
nonsense as a product three main things that we help you to do
we help you to discover new tokens be you have no idea where to start so we actually have ai signals
to see what our smart money buying into where the money is flowing into and this helps you to
discover and after you have discovered what do you next, due diligence, where you actually use Nansen to research into the token to find out what this token is, who are the ones buying it, is it like a short-term pump and dump, who are the people really buying into it, and what do you think the longevity of this token is.
And finally, if let's say you do decide to ape into this token, the last thing that Nansen does help you to do
is to defend your portfolio. A lot of times by the time we see
KOL saying that they've exited a coin or something like that, by
then the price is already down. But with our smart alerts, we
actually will let you know directly notified through your
Telegram or Discord wherever certain conditions are being met
say specific wallets are sending tokens out they are selling they are dumping so on and so forth
you get notified instantly straight to your telegram or discord so this is a pretty wide
umbrella of what nansen nansen is for someone unfamiliar with blockchain technology
what Nansen is for someone unfamiliar with blockchain technology.
Nansen, as for how long our project has been active, our founders actually founded this company,
I believe around five years ago, and it was started as a very basic wallet labeling system.
And then we realized that through the data that we can get on chain, we are actually able to
determine how profitable certain
wallets are what certain wallets are doing and proud to say that five years later the product
has evolved tremendously if you have used nansen for like the past two to three years ago probably
not the most user friendly i'll admit i was actually a user like two three years ago i'm like
this is way too complicated for me for like a normal retail. So I faded it. But I'm proud to say that now the user experience has improved
tremendously. And yeah, this is, I dare say, considered a milestone that we have achieved in
a way. And pretty recent, like a couple months ago, we started supporting a lot more chains.
We have improved our infrastructure significantly such that we have day-one integrations.
Chains like Unichain, Barochain, I think one or two days after it launched,
Nanser was one of the first few data analytics platform out there
which actually had day-one analytics.
And on that note, to share a little bit personally,
I was actually at Yves Maxie for the longest time.
I didn't dare to trade on Solana because of the lack of strong data analytics tool.
And the moment Solana was supported on Nansen, that was where I started aping a lot into Solana meme coins
because I am able to tell through a good analytics dashboard whether a token is good, it's bad, the longevity of it as well.
Nice, nice.
So you guys are essentially
sort of like a central intelligence of Web3.
Okay, so from an analytics platform perspective,
you guys essentially have a front row seat
to how the market is.
So let's talk about that right
now what is what is your read on the uh nft and meme coin space and uh maybe more importantly
where's where is it headed in 2025 and beyond
well maybe i think to share some observations that I've made personally, compared to like, say, five, six months ago,
where there's a lot more meme coins,
and like, say, the LA VIP cabal was a lot more popular then.
Compared to then, I dare say liquidity has dried up significantly in the trenches.
But over the past three or four weeks or so,
I do see the trenches starting to hit up a lot more.
But it still lacks that same liquidity, that same conviction and drive.
A good example is Remus.
I'm not sure if you guys are aware.
It's apparently this direwolf that was able to be cloned again.
If this token or this incident happened, like, say, six months ago,
I dare say it could have hit 100 million market cap easily.
But unfortunately, it seems like it has hit at most like 12
mil if last I checked.
And I mean, even Elon Musk himself is like posting tweets of this
to highlight about Diawool.
It captured so much mindshare and somehow it just couldn't break
that barrier.
So I dare say like compared to a couple months ago, the meme coin market,
the liquidity has dried up a lot.
And yeah, there's a lot lesser, like, 1000x that you see, a lot less crazy.
But I do see the trend just hitting up over the past couple of weeks.
I do see this trend continue moving forward.
As personally, I do feel that at the start of the market,
we're not at the state of the market we're
not at the end of the bull yet and i dare say we're just getting started very nice and cozy
what what is your view on this sir yeah man i mean it's a great question i wish i had more
firm understanding of where things are going i I would probably use that more personally. But here's my read. I mean, I agree with everything that Sean just said. I think that the way to understand,
in my view, memes and NFTs even more so are as leveraged exposure to the underlying assets,
right? So like, for example, you can take like Pepe and ETH, right? Pepe for the longest time. And I think this will still be true. Emerging as kind of like the number one meme coin on a given chain. What it's going to give you is higher upside on the exposure of like how ETH is going to do. It's also going to give you lower downside. Right. Because if ETH dumps, then Pepe is going to dump a lot, too.
If ETH dumps, then Pepe is going to dump a lot too.
And I think that this is true on all chains, right?
You kind of have those winners that come out.
Like on Solana, you have like a bonk or like a whiff or whatever it is, which don't feel
too great to be holding these days with Solana below.
I don't even know what soul is at right now.
Probably what?
110, 120, maybe lower.
So I think that you're kind of, yeah, exactly like Sean said, just competing
for like that underlying liquidity. And so when things are dry, or when the market is spooked,
a lot of those risk assets are going to go down even lower than crypto, which generally is like
a risk on market. So I think that looking at that, and then NFTs, I think are even more so that and
it seems like the real opportunity for NFTs, to me, is in those emerging chains, emerging markets, where, for example,
I think of like a Baruchain, where you had just recently, what, in the last month, month and a
half or so, Baruchain launched. And then Steady Teddies launched within, what, the last week,
two weeks or so here. And it had a clean 10X from Mint.
It's kind of consolidated, I think, probably.
I'm actually not sure where SteadyTeddy's are sitting today, but something on the order of like a 5 to 6X.
Now, that's like a great launch.
But SteadyTeddy's had a ton of hype.
It had a ton of excitement.
I think the founder of Baruchain wears one.
They've been kind of like chosen in some ways by the chain as like
the mascot of it. That's something where like, yeah, again, a few months ago, you probably would
have expected steady teddies to be worth like thousands of dollars. And it kind of struggled
to even break a thousand, let alone hold that in the long term. So I think that looking ahead,
it really is going to depend on, I think, the big man in the White House and just how things
shake out in the tariffs market. I do think that global liquidity still looks fairly good. And,
you know, Bitcoin and the whole space is kind of pegged to like those liquidity standards.
But it's also in a lot of ways coupled with the stock market, even as I hear a lot of talk of
Bitcoin potentially doing well, both in like a global economy collapse as
like a flight to safety. But we've never really seen that before, right? We know that Bitcoin does
well when the market does well. But if the market is kind of tanking, will Bitcoin be that shelling
point for capital to go and that to flow down into the rest of crypto? Not entirely clear.
I do think that retail has been burned in a lot of ways. Right. So like you've seen a lot of people that have had those real convictions. Right. Believe in something. Believe in a meme coin. And then I feel like you had stuff like Melania, like Libra coin. And I heard on a great podcast called The Chopping Block, Hasib from Dragonfly was talking about this. It's kind of like when you see how the sausage is made, when you kind of go behind the scenes and see
how a lot of these coins were getting made, and there was a lot of insiders and people that were
sniping and promoting and all of those things, it just kind of disenfranchises people. So I think
we're at that crossroads in a lot of ways. I'd like to think
that we're at a point where maybe we'll have this kind of flight to quality over the next few months
or year. I don't think that means that memes and NFTs are cooked per se, but I do think that people
might be looking for more fundamentals, especially as institutional capital seems to really be coming
into the space. But there's still people gambling. There's still people going after it in the trenches. It's just a different context, like Sean said, than it was
a few months ago. And so really, I think that just means that the ceiling is lower. Like you're not
seeing coins breaking out to 10 million is the new 100 million, like Sean said, things that would
have been much, much higher a few months ago. and so forecasting how that's going to evolve over the next few months it'll kind of just depend i feel like on the
broader global market and then how majors play in turn so that's kind of my read
thank you sir you both uh gave some great points there um you know building something successful in this space whether it's an nft or a meme coin
um there are a lot of factors hitting that so uh obviously you guys just listed quite a lot of uh
factors already um the performance of the native coin where the nft and the meme coin are located and the general market and you know sean like from vision to
execution what would you say would separate the you know sort of the the successful meme coin
projects and nft projects from the rest sir yeah? Yeah, I think I'm not exactly familiar
with the meme coin communities, really,
because I do see a number,
but I do feel that the most successful ones
for the meme coins, at least,
are those that are a lot more organic.
We see Doge, Pepe, we see APU, for instance.
It's all pretty organic organic and we don't see
like a large figure head shilling it but i would say with regards to the nft side of things um
strong communities what sets projects apart is really this cult-like mentality that they have
i've been a paji penguins holder for the past like i think three or four years already
and the cult there is really, really strong.
And we look at the other projects out there
that are doing relatively well in terms of floor price.
We see the apes, we see the azookies, for instance,
and these are the cult community that they have managed to build.
It's really, really crazy.
And I think what sets them apart is really the founder. As much as, oh, we are
decentralized, we try to be decentralized, everything is community-owned, but I dare say
the founder actually sets the tone. And it is very important. Like, for instance, we have
Azuki's Zagabon trying to come up with this very cool persona. And likewise, if you look at the
Azuki holders, or at least the ones I've interacted uh like they have this cool kind of vibe of sort and then we
see the apes they give you the frat boy kind of vibe and it's it's it's it's its own community
whereas like say the pudgies for instance it's its own uh slightly morey, clowning around chain, that sort of stuff.
So I think if you were to look at, say, all these communities
as rallying around a common interest in that sense,
be it the personality or the art,
and then it creates this sort of strong community
which will likely do better and stand the test of time
compared to like some other
communities like say after a while the founders like hey i've made enough i'm not going to really
be involved vocal founders are very important sadly in this space as much as we try to say it's
a community first sort of thing so yeah maybe to summarize although i do understand it's a little
jumbled my thoughts are but But yeah, I think strong organic
community as well as, say,
a founder with a good vision as well
as a vocal one
are signs that will
eventually lead to a successful NFT
or meme coin project.
I totally agree with you.
I think that this part
sometimes gets overlooked.
Meme coins and NFTs are super super
like dependent on their community. The most successful IP communities you know these are
the meme coin NFT projects of course they aren't just you know always about making money. I think
they are about culture, storytelling like you said uh memes azuki
for example built a whole anime and anime style or uh let's say dogecoin is uh it literally launched
just a joke and uh people loved it and uh you know if you make your meme coin or nft project engaging
you know beyond the financial aspect i think that people will stay just because
they enjoy being part of it being part of the the community because um we are um we are humans we
are tribal creatures and uh people want to belong to something right um for example it's why both
apes blew up right the art is cool but uh it was also flex it was a state as a symbol a club and um yeah so
if your project can build that sense of identity where people feel like they're part of something
special um that's uh that's essentially how you create loyalty um cozy uh would you like to add
on onto this um sir yeah i mean i totally agree with everything that Sean said.
I think that building a strong project is really about, yeah, that cult mentality, like getting people in and excited.
The only thing that I would add, and I think it's something that Sean spoke to earlier, is just like the importance.
I think what it all comes back to at the end of the day is if it's not is if it's not exactly a meme coin or an
nft although this is true of those as well the product has to be excellent it has to be s tier
it has to be the best right that is true of memes and nfts insofar as i think in a lot of ways the
best memes and nfts are the funniest memes and the coolest NFTs, like the ones that create aura, that
give you some sense of like, by holding or by being a part of these, it's worth the price
of admission.
And I think for us building Kuru, at the end of the day, what is the most important thing
is it's great to do awesome marketing.
It's great to have a thriving Discord and have people that are excited about it.
Those are the people that are going to tell others about it. But at the end of the day, you need a phenomenal product. You need built the best spot and perps decks around that's
decentralized, that competes some days even on liquidity wise with centralized exchanges,
which is the dream of every decks. And they made their users rich, right? They did a points program
in a way that was just clean, well done, effective, and their users made like insane
amounts of money from it, right?
So in that way, you have people that are engaged, that are with the product, and then they become
your marketing team.
They become your evangelists to go out and spread the word, right?
We've all seen this.
These guys, they sign off every tweet with Hyperliquid because it is like the calling
card of quality.
And that is going to expand your voice
more than like any marketing effort or community.
Although those things are, I think,
essential in undergirding the creation of a great product.
So for us, it all comes back to
what are the users interacting with?
And I think that Sean mentioned this earlier, right?
It's the difference between a few years ago
having like a challenging
UI UX perspective with Nansen, although I think they've always been a great product to now it
being super easy. That's easy to tell your friends about because you know that they're going to have
a good experience. You know that it's going to be plus EV and they're going to be able to get
a lot out of it. So for us at Kuru, I think that it's just like product is number one. And then
it's supported by everything that number one. And then it's
supported by everything that you do in your marketing and in your community to bring people
inside, create that cult mentality, and then send them out as your people to go and spread
the word to their friends and the people on the timeline.
Very good, sir. But on the flip side, everything works so let's let's talk about that
uh what do you think are the common pitfalls what what makes a project or a meme coin an
nft project in particular fail and uh how would you say builders should avoid that Core Exchange? Ooh, man. Okay. It's a great question. Yeah, I'm thinking. Okay. What are the common pitfalls?
I think there's a few things, right? I think that one is incentivization and user retention are fickle, right?
They're really hard to manage.
So Hyperliquid is a great, it's just, I don't want to keep returning to it, but I do think
it's one of the best examples that we've had of the cycle.
They weren't showy about it.
Their points in terms of the ways that they went about distributing them. It was never entirely
clear. So you couldn't farm it. I think you have to be really careful in terms of the ways that
you go about offering people tokens and like how explicitly you do it, like how you bring
the community involved, because at the end of the day, you don't want mercenaries, right? You don't
want people that are just there to capture value. You want people that are there for the excitement and the
usefulness of your product and then sprinkle some incentivization on top of that so that they're
even more excited about using it. But if that's your only draw, then you're going to have a really
hard time of having, yeah, like the project
continue to be relevant beyond your TGE, right?
And not only that, your TGE is probably going to be challenging because everybody's just
going to want to be dumping their coins to get the payday that they've had from interacting
with you over the past however long.
Even Hyperliquid, which has done the best job of this, I just was reading from Ren from Electric Capital, who's a great follow on Twitter, was time. So I think that those are the big,
that's the big piece that comes into it is really just that tokens are a challenging thing.
I think if you look at something like PumpFun or whatever, even though there's
a lot of controversy surrounding PumpFun, and maybe rightfully so, but they built a great
product. It really is the best game in crypto. That's what memes and NFTs are at the end of the day. They're gamify at its most like kind of core element.
By not having a token, they've kind of like defrayed just a lot of the upper downside
that can come with like building that product that they've that they've made and really
established themselves as kind of like the, you know, like Kleenex of like launching meme
coins or whatever it is. When you're, when someone launches a coin launching function,
they're like, oh, this is like pump fun. Like, oh, I'm going to build the pump fun of Monad,
or I'm going to build the pump fun of Baruchain or whatever it is. So, okay. That just made me
think of one last thing that I'll say, which is, I think that you really, pitfalls, you need to be distinctive.
You need to be, even if you're doing the same thing that someone else has already done,
if you're going to do it, you want to be the best. You don't want to be a follow on. This
is true in memes and NFTs, especially, I think. We all know that a lot of times when you see a
coin that's like going crazy, right?
You're like, oh man, this coin is already pumped.
So I want to go to like the beta.
I want to go to the next option that's going to pump off of it, right?
So like I remember like with Pepe, there was Wojak, right?
Which I still love Wojak.
I think it's a great meme.
But you kind of want to ride whatever is coming next.
And in the long run, there are great
gains potentially to be made there. But a lot of times it's more of like the, what do you call it?
I can't do the, I'm thinking of the meme, but I'm trying to think how to describe it. It's like the
roller coaster where it like gets smaller and smaller. It's diminishing returns, right? And so if you're going to follow on to a
project or a kind of framework for something that's already been done, you need to be distinctive and
it needs to be better if it's going to succeed. Like if you're just a copycat, it's going to be
really hard to generate those network effects. Again, unless you have a product that you can
actually point to the real benefits and the ways that it's better than the competitors and everything.
So that's kind of how I would describe common pitfalls.
It would be in mismanaging, incentivization, and not being dynamic or distinctive enough.
Very nice, sir.
No, I totally agree.
I think that one of the biggest problems in Web3 is over promising and under delivering. I think that these two examples, Hyperliquid and PumpFun did exactly the opposite. It had enough differentiation from the rest of the market, and it did solve a real problem and was in a way that the users did actually want to use it.
Kozy, would you like to add on to this?
Oh, I'm sorry, Sean.
Yeah, guess as much.
Kozy, love the point that I brought up about hyperliquid and
i i'm surprised it got over my head to be honest yeah i think hyperliquid was a great example of
a very strong community being built and even as of now we do see at least in my twitter feed i
do see a lot of people replying like hyperliquid like like price is down, hyperliquid. And it's this kind of cloud community
that it's hard to force
and it's really like bottom-up built.
And it's something that, yeah,
it develops over time
and it's amazing to see really.
Hyperliquid was a great example, Cozy.
But yeah, I think with regards to common pitfalls,
one of the things that i see happening
towards the end of the peri cycle especially is ego ego among founders when their project just
has a lot of hype be it bothered or people are just farming the whitelist and people let this
ego get into their heads and then as much much as how, when FTX blew up,
and then, I can't remember what's that female's name
where she was like, oh, sell me all your FTT
at a certain price and F off.
And similarly, we do see certain NFT founders
sharing a pretty similar kind of mentality,
like, oh, sell me all your NFTs,
like, floor your NFTs and GTFO.
We start seeing this kind of ego being thrown around. all your NF like floor your NFTs and GTFO we start seeing
this kind of ego being thrown around and it's not always the best because we do not know how strong
these communities are and are these people just out there farming the whitelist just to dumb and
make a quick flip and a lot of founders let this ego get into the head and thinking that they're
untouchable they have infinite money the community will always support them and this eventually leads to the downfall when
yeah the community is just in it for a profit and likely this causes it to fail
and by extension to this another pitfall that i do see is when founders just
remain so high in their ivory towers that they do not listen to the community.
Like the pinpoints of the community, be it like the token price is down,
they're developing something that is not necessary in line with what the community wants.
And this is where products start to fail because there is a disconnect
between like be it the teams and the community.
And ultimately, if let's say your community no longer believes in your product,
no longer believes in the vision, and then you lose your core user base and this creates makes them
being jaded and eventually they just stop using this product and like what uh cozy said the moment
you lose all this kind of um your core supporters that's it that that will likely be the end of
your project so yeah i think to add on to the points that cozy has brought up this likely be the end of your project. So yeah, I think to add on to the points that Kozy has brought up,
these will be the two major pitfalls that I do see in the space for NFT projects
and maybe meme coins by extension.
Wonderful. I think you both gave very, very different perspectives on this question.
And honestly, they both make so, so much sense.
I'm learning so much during this AMA.
So, so grateful for that.
All right, so let's move on.
And this is actually add on to what you just said, Sean.
Can you answer this question?
What actually keeps the community engaged?
What is it that makes them stick around?
Well, that's a very interesting question, to be honest.
I think what makes people stay around,
if we take out the financial incentive of it,
is finding your account.
I think one of the reasons why I stayed so long within
the Pajri Penguins community is that it felt like a safe space for me. It's like, I wouldn't say a
cult of sort, but it sometimes feels like an extended family within the Web3 space.
The community is always there. If I need any help, any network, for instance, I do know that there's
this community out there that
I can fall back on. And it's always slightly reassuring. I dare say that's one of the reasons
personally why I stick around with certain communities, for instance. It's really that
common mindshare. And like, if you will take out the financial speculation of things, finding that,
I can't remember if it's yourself or Kozi who said it,
that tribalism, that
cult mentality of sort, to really
find your tribe. I think that's
one of the strongest reasons why people still stick around
despite, say, the lack of financial
incentive.
Very nice. Kozi,
would you like to add on to this, sir?
Yeah,
for why people stay, I think it's exactly what Sean said when he touched on pudgy penguins, right?
And I think that this has really been strong and the builders being S-tier
is that what keeps bringing people back is like friendship at the end of the day. Like I'm very,
even though I'm like terminally online and like a shit poster professionally and all of that,
I'm a human, I'm pro-human, right? Like I believe that people thrive and were built and made for relationship, right?
And so that is where the strength of community managers and discords and all of those things
come into play.
And I think it's a flywheel effect for all of the assets that exist on the chain.
I think that this, I'll just use Monad as an example, the NFT community there and the
artists are so strong and people know you have this reputation system built by these discords and these communities existing for so long.
So I remember this from the early Milady days, despite what I talked about with, you know, like derivatives and everything being not the strongest play.
Just by being a part of the early Milady maker community maker community, there were so many M'Lady derivatives that came out. But because it was like an artistic and like awesome community to be a part of,
you would go and mint different people's NFT projects just because you liked the person,
just because you wanted to support their success. You didn't really have any expectation of gain or
profit. It was just about like supporting your friends in the same way that
if somebody was having like a art gallery downtown, you would go out and like eat some pizza or
whatever to like support them and be present at it. And so I think that for communities that build
these really strong, yeah, just like places, proving grounds for people to make the work that they're doing known.
You can create just like awesome potential financial benefits as well.
We've seen that on Monad.
There's already a number of NFT projects.
The chain wasn't even live until like two, two and a half months ago.
And now NFTs on Monad testnet have just gone insane.
I don't think you've ever seen this before on a testnet.
And, you know,
obviously I'm biased, but it does feel like a real chain. People really care about their funny
money testmon and, you know, the chog star or the scrumpy or the, you know, spiky nad or like
whatever it is. And these projects are known. And I think when mainnet comes, they're all going to
go crazy and people are going to have a ton of fun with that. And that's all a follow on effect from community. And it's what gives a lot of staying power. So
I think for us, like we've done that in a way with like claw monsters, where we have this
initiative on our site, where every week we have two different loot box drops. And we have these
little funny characters that are maybe this awesome artist named Evo. And so we basically,
for trading on Kuru and interacting with the platform, drop different themed traits to people.
And it's entirely for fun, right? Like it was just a way for us to make the experience of a
financial instrument on testnet have more staying power because people could identify with these like
silly little characters and trick them out in like all of the swag that they want and to keep coming back so that they
could make their character look like as cool as possible right so i think that just goes in line
with like art relationships these are the things that make people tick and so you have to build
those on top of great products and that's what keeps people around in the long run very good sir I think you both gave a lot of good points users show up
for different reasons whether it is reward status or you know a great
product of course it is the sense that they feel connected and uh of course i would like to include the
a great point that i that sean shared a team and a team and founders who actually respect
the community's time and investment so all of them are very very important to build a successful
project and that ties us into community building which i know both of your projects are
of course focusing on so um sean what is the approach there from nansen what strategies are
you using to grow engage and actually provide value to the community and are there any short-term
plans you'd like to inform the community about yeah for sure i think from a super short-term plans you'd like to inform the community about yeah for sure i think from a
super short-term perspective um now that i'm running the main discord over at nansen one of
the initiatives that i have pushed forward would uh be this daily alpha bytes that we are sharing
across so it's things like market watch monday to tuesday wheel watch wednesday something like that to actually deliver
that value for our community so if you are not ready within our nansen community it is open for
all users you do not necessarily have to be a nansen subscriber to enjoy this knowledge these
info bytes to keep up with what's going on in the space. This is something that we are implementing for a shorter term sort of thing.
And if, let's say, you guys have been following Nansen
for some time, or even my founder, Alex Svanovic,
we have been teasing Nansen points
that will be coming out very soon.
All points are already being recorded retroactively.
And you can earn points by subbing to nansen
sticking with nansen or our affiliates program you refer users to nansen so nansen points is coming
we do expect the dashboard like how many nansen points each user get um to be launched later
probably over the next one to two months we are aiming for it to be live this
quarter so stay tuned and drop us a follow if you haven't already nice nice so definitely follow
nansen and join discord and look forward to their nonsense points um kuru any short-term plans you'd
like to inform the community about and And would you like to share about strategies
that you guys are using to grow and engage the community?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, man, Sean, that's some alpha right there.
I did not know about advancing points.
So I might need to go take a peek
and get in the Discord and everything.
But that's super exciting.
Yeah, I mean, I kind of already told on myself, right?
So like one of the things that's one of our main initiatives is Cloud Monsters. It's, I kind of already told on myself, right? So like one of the things
that's one of our main initiatives is Claw Monsters. It's been a ton of fun and it gives
us the ability to like partner collaboratively with different projects. So I would say if you
don't have a Claw Monster already, definitely go over to Kuru.io, which is our testnet site.
Check out the platform. We would love to hear any of your feedback on using it. But when you go onto the site for the first time, you'll be directed to
our pro mode. And in the top right corner of the screen, you'll see a little egg that'll be popping
out and you can hatch your claw monster and get your first little loot box of traits to be able
to trick them out. And every Monday we do just like a regular drop of like random traits. And then on Thursdays, we've been doing collabs with different NFT and eco projects to give
little prizes, little rewards.
We've been giving out 20 whitelists for NFT projects every other week.
And then just a few weeks back, we did like a collab with Leverbets, which is a leverage
sports betting platform that's building on Monad. And we were
able to give out like testnet tokens for Monad to every user that had interacted with Kuru at that
time. So you can get a bonus and go be interacting with other platforms through your usage of Kuru,
which is pretty sweet. So I would say that those are the main things. I also would just shout out
kind of the two other approaches. One of them is in our community.
We have KB, who maybe if you're in the Monite community, you probably know KB, right?
CryptoBaby777.
She's just an awesome yapper, awesome host for spaces.
We do a weekly space on Wednesdays that's called Kuru Live at 8 p.m. on Wednesday evenings.
And it's kind of like the late night show for crypto as we pitch it.
And we talk about the market, what's been going on, have different special guests and everything. So it's a ton of fun. And that is another way that, again, it just kind of unlocks these different ways of like cross pollinating communities because we can have different founders.
We can have different Monad team members or whatever it is come in and share about what's going on in that week.
And we find that to be way more effective for us than kind of like bland partnership announcements
that don't really do a lot for the content
that you're putting out.
And so hiring KB from the community
who when she had already been involved with Monad
for so long, had that trust and reputation built up
was just like an awesome value unlock for us
because KB just brings a lot of people
that love her to Kuru. And a lot of other Monad
Eco projects have kind of followed on in that strategy. Like you've seen like G-Van go to
Purple. King Louis is working for Narrative. And that's been the case with a lot of different
projects to kind of tap into the talent that's already been bred in the Monad community and then
to place them in key ecosystem projects. Because I think we all know that L1s really only go as far as the best projects that are built on the chain.
Just the last thing that I'll say is, you know, for myself, I think that one of the big things that we've done
that's very intentional is to just try to have like an entertaining X timeline, right?
That's kind of where my niche is. i came up in the space as a shit poster
and now i got a job literally just because i built an account that posted funny memes and
shit posted and did all that stuff i think that what um a great insight that intern from monad
has shared is that as a project on twitter you're not just competing with like, say for us, like the other DEXs in the world on the timeline,
right? If you're a data platform like Nansen, you're not competing with like the other
analytics providers. You're competing with like Kobe. You're competing with Ansem. You're
competing with the funniest accounts that live on crypto Twitter because you want to get into
their timeline. You want to be shared and be viral
and be fun. And so for us wanting to try to be both like a place that can hopefully be like the
future of finance on chain, but really at the end of the day, come from like that DJN crypto
native background that we want to embody that in our timeline. And so we do a lot of fun posting,
just memes and like silly stuff, just to kind of keep Kuru present and in people's minds. And I think that the best accounts that you've seen do that have really carved out a significant amount of mind share. And it's just really plus, yeah, EV in the long run, it can be a great value unlock. The only tricky thing is that you have to be good at it, right? If you're not funny in the way that you do it, it'll just kind of look cringe or you
won't get the engagement that you want.
And it can really be a value suck.
So it's like a high ceiling, low floor approach that if you have the right personnel in place
for it, it can be an awesome addition.
But if not, I would honestly say like you should go out and hire someone that can just
bring that cryptnotativity to your timeline to just be able to keep yourself in the eyes of the users that we
currently have and the users that we're hoping to grow to in the future. You've seen that with
like different Web2 protocols as well. Like I think of like TeamSpeak, which is like a voice
chat software that I didn't even know was still around. They just have this hilarious guy
who will like reply guy discord and like other main accounts. And he just goes viral like all
the time, like once a month. He has like a 50 or 60K is insane, hilarious tweet that goes out and
it just keeps your name in people's minds, right? It just sticks there. And there's more examples
that I could draw from. But I think that for crypto companies, you want to signal that you're in the in crowd,
like that you get it. And so, yeah, having people that are native both to the ecosystem that you're
building in, but also just taking that dynamic X account approach, I think are two ways that
really keep people around and engaged.
Awesome, awesome, sir. All right, so that was our last question.
Well, Sean, Kozy, really appreciate you
both taking the time today.
And to everyone who tuned in, thanks for being here.
If you wanna learn more, check out Nansen, Courage Change,
and of course, Orch Network, Twitter's websites and discords and um yeah we'll get you
in the next one take care guys awesome thanks thanks everyone yeah thank you man great to be
here with you guys yep have a great one bye guys Thank you.
