all right guys we are back appreciate y'all for hopping into the space it is 10 36 p.m. eastern time on thursday february 22nd look i'm really excited for this one
um we haven't done spaces here in a couple days so this is a great way to come back and jump into the game
we got frank the one and only moustachio aficionado in the space and uh look you know i told frank i said frank
big f as some call him in some places of this universe we got to do this one-on-one we got
to run it back it's been too long since we've done this and uh you know he told me he said
leaf i want you to come up with the hardest questions that you can come up with so question
one frank why a mustache and when are you shaving it i fucking quit this interview man i did
god damn it frank okay well look um i don't want to do like a whole intro all this stuff i think we
should just like jump straight into it um i got a ton of questions for you and uh again it's been
a minute since we've done this so we're gonna start at the beginning um first thing how are
you just like just baseline how are you doing tonight um how are you feeling uh i honestly
feel pretty zen is the best way to describe it um you know if you picture uh when you rake sand
you know in like those zen gardens when you rake sand it's like my head right now
okay is that why you tweeted that out earlier yeah it was like i was thinking about it and uh
yeah you know you have a bunch of curves on your membrane it kind of felt like that
bro what do you know about membranes okay look we're gonna get into it um first things first
and again we're just gonna jump straight into it
talk to me about season three all right i think that's where this starts we already know the
intro we already know who frank is talk to me about season three what went wrong just i mean
what do you think i think the problems really started way before season three um you know i
said this in the discord today i look back on that time and i there were a lot of things that
built up whether it was points and we had this whole point system or the team feeling like we
were really constipated and we just needed to ship a lot of different things um and obviously
the community being really excited about season three um but i didn't become the king of delays
you know for no reason and the reason we always delayed over and over again was because it's
better in this industry to time things right then uh honestly like make people happy in a
short period of time and so for me if i could go back right now i would probably like you know i
remember saying stuff like this but would not have dropped season three and just waited till
the halving and delayed and just focused on community building because we launched it at
a time in the market where it was uh yeah it was just pretty horrendous across the board and so i
think that's like my reflection on it today but leading up to it you know we really just had two
companies and both those companies had different goals um and there was a lot of overlap me being
the kind of bridge between both companies uh at any given time so i almost spend most days
working on the d lab stuff and most nights working on dust lab stuff and those things
really were the same shit you know it really was like working on the community stuff but there's
like slightly different things and when you're leading a group of guys and there's multiple
voices in the room it's just tough to find cohesion and so most people in the community
that review season three and then the greater ecosystem was well it didn't really make any sense
i don't get it it's not that exciting it's just whatever it was hyped about and uh that makes
sense when you think about the internal you know structure and so after season three for the first
time in two years i really just stopped being on twitter and honestly went a lot more quiet because
it became clear to me that we couldn't keep operating with this two company structure
and at that time you know that required obviously moving a lot of personnel most popularly as you
guys have now heard you know kevin who's running dust labs at the time and that was not something
that i was you know prepared to start talking to twitter about or talking on spaces and so i
remember even at the time there's so many spaces that i'd be listening to i want to come on and
talk but i was worried i would leave something or say the wrong thing people would take it the wrong
way and it would kind of blow up the plan that i knew we just had to put in place and so that
started this four or five month journey of merging the companies um getting the team you know cutting
out a lot of people from the team and uh just fixing the culture and ultimately uh stepping
in to run this merge company and so i've really been running it for about the last month now
um maybe give or take a week and yeah we first thing i did was move from slack to discord you
know and starting to just get the whole team on board that hey this bull market is not going to
last forever and i love the idea of us building something for the you know long term i think
that's what we are doing i'm committed to this thing for my life but it's very important that
we correct the sins of the past and just start making things that are very exciting
um again and do that as soon as possible and so yeah that was just kind of a big shift when you
go from a company that was like operating on slack async for a year and now we're very synchronous
and we're kind of online all day and yesterday i wanted to highlight all the guys left on the team
because i fucking love those guys and i think we're going to do some cool things this year but
that is like the intros the people that are listening to it after this on the recording
that's kind of the story from there happy to dissect any any one part of the any part of
any one part of that okay so we got to go back a little bit further than that i think also you
you talked about discord and um and i have a question for you later about this as well but
i've seen pasta has been doing quite a bit of work and i just want to give him a quick shout out
because to see him grow from when i just first met him to being full-time uh on the team and
you know moving even past just doing editing and videography for you guys and now taking a much
bigger role that's been that's been incredible and shout out to pasta um okay so i'd love to
bring him up later too yeah if we get bored of me super down of course he's he's amazing
don't gas him up i tell the guys in the community i tell twitter all the time like don't gas my boys
oh too much uh the team a guy goes through head now they're like oh frank i don't need the retweet
i got my own audience i'm like oh whoa um let's you know but it's all good well i mean and to give
you credit as well i think you have a habit of like bringing up a lot of people around you
um and you know that's always been amazing but shout out to pasta okay so to go back a little
bit further i got to talk about corporate frank right because i think that's where a lot of this
starts and there was an arc at a time where it was like d gen frank is gone corporate frank is here
corporate frank is here to stay and that was something that not only you heavily encouraged
but was celebrated by the community and this corporate frank thing came around the time of
of youth right and even like shortly after that which is when i first met you um and you got to
talk to me now about why dust labs was created because i think that's where this new arc of of
d gods and obviously you'd started so talk to me about why dust labs was created what that process
was and inevitably obviously the raise had quite a bit to do with that so leading into that what
did that mean i've reflected a lot on this um i've had many different answers over the last year but
if i had to make the most simple uh reason it was i was just insecure you know um we went from it
was really like i know sometimes this stuff gets kind of memed but it's really me and my friends
in our apartment that started d gods and uh we were just like grinding on it you know for months
trying to figure out how to uh you know make the holders it started out with just making the
holders whole like let's just get back over fucking mint price um but then it was like okay
i think we're starting to get the hang of this i think we can come up with creative ideas that are
that make people talk and discuss this thing in a way that just goes viral over and over again
and uh it started out in the apartment it just started to grow uh in 2022 you know i think
there was a period where there was 15 weeks of all-time highs in a row and um that was like when
we went from basically like you know nobody's the number one in the salon all this people might
have heard of this story before but in that time you can imagine i'm i'm anonymous i know me and i
know i'm a kind of like normal dude uh and this frank thing was just getting getting mythologized
you know as as any asset that pumps and obviously there's a lot of founders today that are
experiencing this same thing you know when your asset pumps you people really rally around the
founder and i was anonymous this whole time and every single week we go by and i just had this
kind of deep imposter uh syndrome and it got to a point with u-list where i remember it was like
90 million impressions you know in the month of august uh for u-list which was just like you know
it was still fresh in my mind just like begging people to go retweet polls or go raid polls
when people were influencers were asking hey like what's the best nfc community and i was just
getting people to go raid fucking polls it was still so fresh in my mind when we were like on
top of the world with u-list and so it felt like i was just not fit to leave that's that was my
conclusion was look this thing is getting so big i've never managed or operated something at this
scale and so i need to go bring somebody in that's uh probably going to run this thing you know for
me not because i want to step back but because i just felt like maybe there's stuff i don't know
and so that's when the idea for the raise really uh came about and you know i i knew kevin for
many years before um starting this um and so yeah he just seemed like the right guy i asked him if
he wanted to do it he was kind of questioning it at first but then he seemed to be pretty down
and so then we went to go fundraising as you can imagine at the time with the u-list
going crazy on timeline it's the only thing that's popping off in this deep bear market
it wasn't that challenging um to raise and so we were getting a lot of validation not just from
the greater ecosystem but also you know from investors as well i mean i would literally go
mask and like you know that was like that was the energy back then and everyone was like kind of
down um and so that's what really like led me to to rate to do the raise but i mentioned in my post
you know the red flags became apparent immediately because after dust labs created you know we
immediately all the resources from that fundraise went to dust labs and so all the engineers that
are also like the co-founders and people i work with every day and are a lot more than just
engineers basically moved to that organization and i would continue to kind of you know run d
labs but if people have been in the situation to best visualize or imagine it you have one
organization that has like all the money all the resources a new leader that's super charismatic
and everyone's kind of like excited about him coming in and then you have the other organization
that's just like the legacy one that holds like the nfts in the community and um immediately
you just started to notice like well all of the things we're going to do are going to be dictated
it felt like by this kind of mandate to make software uh for dust labs and at first you know
the software is doing really well like imagine you know like software six figures on a lot of
these deals it was kind of crushing it because we're really hot um and then when ftx hit it became
very very obvious like oh fuck you know this is going to be a challenge because all these contracts
started like dry up on the software side and um also the communities were fucking hurting too
you know ftx on salona i made the famous tweet fuck my life god damn it i made the fucking
famous tweet like is there anything optimistic left for salona uh should we just bridge to eat
fuck um and so it was just like fuck you know all this anger now kind of directed towards me
and then i think a week later i got doxxed and this like whirlwind of things did not like instill
confidence you know in both internally with the team externally to the community it felt like
things were kind of uh just like out of control and after spending almost an entire year of really
just dominating it was tough and so throughout 2023 this dynamic continued to play out over and over
again where it felt like before if i had an idea if i wanted to do something there was nothing
really like stopping me from moving the organization in this direction uh but then it became in 2023
every time i had an idea i had to write like a long doc about it and then i had to go kind of
convince all these stakeholders to do it and ultimately if something is a flyer or a risk or
kind of like not ambiguous like something i want to go do um it's very it's very taxing to actually
go and like write these huge docs explain to everybody why i think it might be a good idea
down to every detail instead of like hey i have an idea and the organization kind of you know helps
add to it or build on top of it but it got this dynamic where almost felt like it was frank versus
the world when everyone started hating me and there was also like frank versus the company
internally and this dynamic i tried to like you know tough it out for a very long time
and then when season three hit coming back to your original question and everything just really
started to crumble i was like fuck man you know there's no like i can't keep doing this like this
sucks like we're already like getting crushed on the outside and now it feels like the team's not
even aligned or we're not even on the same page um at all and so that's like at a high level but
again happy happy to go deeper in there does that does that answer your question leap it does um i
think what would provide a little bit color is is starting even with kevin um how did you
how did you convince kevin to come do this i mean here is he a story a story to entrepreneur
uh really successful career and then he basically leaves what he's doing to come work at an nft
pfp project which at the time was on salon right and salon and was like obviously now people are
celebrating salon is crushing it's cooking but salona back then was not this and the sentiment
around that time wasn't that salon is like going to be this this big challenger this top three
coin whatever it might be it was considerably different so talk to me about that how did that
process start um yeah he minted d gods i told him about it you know before the mint um and so he
minted a few and so we would ever so often like talk about it like d gods and there would be times
where you know he would come to the house and uh and kind of give us a lot of advice and it was
actually really good advice like it was solid advice he's a good he was really good at being
an advisor in that spot and so when the raise when i had this idea to do this raise i had him
in mind because i was thinking okay maybe he'd be down he's been having more fun working with us
etc let's see um and i asked him and and he basically said yes um and i offered him to be
the ceo and i gave him a lot of ownership in the company and uh basically just said like yeah like
would you want to do this and he thought about it and he came back and said yes which i honestly
at the time wasn't expecting um to your point of what you said lee but i think he just finished it
he just finished his vesting period at his last startup he'd been there for four years um or not
all startup instacart um he'd been there for four years and uh that's i think the timelines also
lined up where it made sense but you know he followed the journey and kind of saw how crazy
it was just like a lot of people at that time um yeah like that's that's essentially you know
where how it happened i just kind of asked um and he was down okay so he joined uh dust lab is
created the race happens so on and so forth and this was um you know obviously around the time
that utes was happening and that was that was absolutely massive i remember when when dust labs
was created this whole sass business like i gotta give you credit whenever you guys do something
typically a lot of other projects follow and this whole sass thing i remember many other projects
were like fuck it we're going to create our own you know quote unquote labs we're going to build
software we're going to sell it to other projects and that meta was very short-lived like that
wasn't something that stuck around yeah i love to talk about this so i'll tell you like why the
numbers were exciting at the time but why in the late stage it's very hard for this to work out
for other people building kind of sass for nft so i can try to be like a value adder or helpful here
so where is sass like pretty incredible or software sales um in in uh nfts well the margins are
extremely high so if someone mints out a project for a million dollars you know first of all these
founders that are doing this oftentimes are like pretty down for fucking anything you know if they
mint out this is just the underbelly of it like they're pretty down you know to pay a hundred
thousand dollars to a developer if they make the fucking smart contract because who gives a fuck
like you know the numbers are so big and so this was very very uh you know popular in 2021 and even
early 2022 where mints were still really really big and so the numbers get really big and so after
a u-list happened you know i was just getting dm while u-list was happening i was just getting dm'd
constantly by projects about asking if they could use the u-list you know software if they could
use the tech and i would kind of ask them like hey so how much are you minting for and then we
just asked them like hey we're gonna charge 10 15 like the number just kept going up and and
people were down to do it and so we just got this and i'm being very honest here like so we just got
a lot of validation from it and you start to add these numbers up and you're like well even ten
percent of a hundred thousand dollar mint which is a really small mint at that time that's like 10
grand which a lot of really big enterprise you know software companies like that's that's like
their ar annual recurring revenue for an entire year so ten thousand dollars for reproducing the
software that we had made which is really easy um was kind of nuts and so some of these contracts
come in and they would be you know hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars and that
was just you know like holy shit like there's a real business here what i learned very quickly
afterwards it really got accelerated ftx when nobody wanted to mint anymore so all of our
contracts really got cancelled was in the nfc space things get commoditized very quickly
so today u-list which is really like a meta that we started is ultimately like you know found a
million different iterations of like everyone's kind of doing whitelist application-based whitelist
now and it's not really tied to any specific brand or uh it's it's a commodity it's everyone
can do it people figure out ways to hack it but at that time when it was kind of a new concept
um or at least new concept at that scale um it felt like it could be you know kind of running
forever and that's just a learning lesson for this industry as a whole is that when there is
this huge arbitrage opportunity in general these things tend to uh play out and commoditize very
quickly anyway um so that's that was a learning lesson on the sass side but yeah i do agree a lot
of people did try to go make uh sass businesses after that and there are really successful ones
and you happen to work at one right now leap but uh usually the thing that they're doing is much
more obfuscated and less public where our entire growth strategy was extremely public and everyone
could see everything we're doing and like take it apart and kind of recreate it and then just offer
it for free or for uh you know for something a lot smaller so yeah okay so you guys were making
a ton of money and obviously when ftx happened like you said it dried up what happened to
like i mean where are all these developers these engineers that we're working on dust laps were
they were they were down to four um no we did scale out the engineering team pretty heavy um
in uh 2022 right after starting but uh really there's four guys that stuck around two of them
were there before one of them was the first guy that we brought in leonard who does all of our
front end so everyone that loves our like our design our interfaces and stuff like that that's
like one fucking 24 year old 25 i think soon uh kid in singapore he's the fucking best uh that's
my slime leonard you guys need to go follow him um and then and then one additional one whose name
is serious sam uh on twitter and he left google um and he actually owned like 40 d gods before
fucking joining and so the the guys that are left are honestly the most die hard of the bunch but
yeah it just we just started making less like it just we weren't scaling the software business we
had a lot of problems with the project itself the way it to go solve so the team really just redirected
towards working on the bridges which look all right i know the fucking bridge is such a meme
at this point but i'm really really proud of the experience that we created for each of those
bridges and i think to this day most delightful fucking bridge in the game and i think you know
you'll see this year like that should come into play as well because i think we did do a lot of
really interesting stuff with wormhole on the technology side um with these with these uh
cross chain bridges but yeah it just became abundantly clear like i talked to luka about
this you know and like they have like a 30 person creative team and at the end of the day uh nfts
to a degree are more or a lot of times more creative heavy than they are engineering heavy
and so not only do we have like a really bloated big engineering team that's where all the resources
were and but it was an entire engineering company and so after a while as we started to scale and
now we have two projects it was really hard for just me to like kind of man all the marketing
all the creative and um work with the artist and also work with the software team and so that's
why i'm hyped to have pasta here now um and a few other guys that are running the d alpha account
that i keep secret because they're the most talented meme meme guys in the fucking uh industry
right now but yeah it was really like just a bloated team to be honest in a short way um
that wasn't optimized towards the things that actually matter um for for nfts
when you think back and you you look at the the corporate frank from that time period and again
that's what you were calling it that's what i was everybody was calling corporate frank
do you recognize that person does that person feel like the frank that was like in the trenches
like you know doing everything that he was doing when when d got started do you even
recognize corporate frank i i i think the labels are like um it's ultimately a construct of what
happened at that time you know susu had a really good tweet recently i know he's a taboo guy to
say or whatever but um he was like you know after something moons that's when the narrative
gets created that's basically what he was saying um the the the narrative follows the price so if
the price goes up now you're like oh plushies are the fucking most genius thing in the world
or for us when the price is going up oh it's like bridging is the best fucking idea in the world or
web 3 so house is the best idea in the world and so at that time you know we were going to polygon
and things were like going well and a lot of what polygon was about was doing these like web 2 deals
hypothetically or theoretically uh that was the idea um and so i think these labels kind of just
get ascribed to you and people as you said liked corporate frank you know when things are going well
and then they hate corporate frank uh when things are going poorly but when you're in the game long
enough like you realized you know the labels are really just a storytelling device to describe
you know things after they happen and so people love corporate frank then they hated them now
people want deejend frank and look if things go well then they're gonna love deejend frank
but if things don't then they'd be like dude bring that bring back corporate frank or find another
fucking frank or you know do whatever and so ultimately for me i just feel like 2023 was
defined by a pretty deep uh simple issue which was you just had two different types of leaders
that were trying to command a group of like you know honestly only 14 15 at most i think at 1.20
people and just very very different in our in our styles and our approaches and for me what gets me
excited is being in the present and what some people might label as like opportunistic i look
at it like well everyone here in this audience right now that's listening to this and it's trading
that's active you know most people here are following the latest thing that happened and
we reward guys like jack butcher or people that are able to stay on top or time things well or be
on top of the meta um but we don't know what that looks like as much for a regular you know 10k pfp
collection um and we have this construct that you know you need to build in one direction and never
change it but i would say that a lot of these projects the narratives you know change all the
time i mean even ethereum used to be the internet computer and then it became ultrasound money and
so like narratives actually change and it comes back to what i was saying earlier on how people
like make these stories but in reality we just sucked last year and we can find like a lot of
ways to describe that but my guess is we're going to do enough cool things this year uh that will
get people very excited and then there's going to be more stories that come about the individuals
that like drove that change but i look at it way more nihilistically leave to be honest it's it's
simpler than that you know if we do something that's cool that gets everyone to fomo gets
everyone excited then it's like it's going to turn into a narrative if luca told you and he did
a year and a half before he did plushies that plushies was the fucking play of all plays and
this is what you guys you know all go do it would be very hard to like have max conviction on that
unless you really just like luca or you like the way that he's thinking about things and that's the
way i see it um you know for everyone in this space honestly um yeah someone commented uh
bring back sexy frank and i feel like i totally missed that arc i maybe i was sleeping um bring
back bro god damn okay so okay we have to talk about this polygon thing too because i think that's
one of the one of the more and it's even like the returning of the grand i feel like that's one of
the more interesting aspects of the entire arc that is you know d-labs and and associated things
when it happened this idea that okay they had these massive partnerships starbucks whatever
it might be you're going to bring utes in and it's going to be incredible right like polygon
is going to have culture it's going to have a flagship pfp project utes are primed for their
ip because i actually think i look i love the gods but i think the utes ip is is much more accessible
for for people that's just what i personally believe um and yeah we thought it was going to
be absolutely insane this this partnership with polygon um obviously that's not what ended up
happening i have my own theories on why i think that um well i'll save my theories um for you for
after yeah here's like a something to consider or like a thought-provoking statement for the
for people that are listening right now when we did the polygon grant it was kind of unheard of
um to a degree a to like bridge a project from one chain to another but b to like almost treat
it like uh an athlete that was like getting different contracts or whatever you know it's
kind of like a meme uh of a concept at the time that just started attraction because as i said
earlier you know when things are hot people will find narratives that make sense uh and and i think
there was like 10 degrees off with polygon that ultimately today we're seeing a very different
version you know we got the grant from polygon it was actually in matic it was like in the token
like sell when we get it and it was on a monthly basis or whatever it is um today protocols are
running the exact same play but they're not doing it to the company they're doing it to the people
and the holders which is actually beautiful when you think about it like to me what i think is going
to happen this year is nfts will bridge a lot more often not just d gods or utes but pudgies board
apes maladies whatever it is because protocols are going to start offering that same money that
polygon gave to us and other l1s and l2s they're going to start offering that to the individual
holders and users of these civil resistant nfts because there's a finite number of nfts
and there's a finite amount of grants or or money that these l1s l2s can give out and so i think
they were on to the right idea and that's where i give polygon credit if like this idea and all
the other guys we talked to avacs you know finance it was a new concept at the time and
these guys were the ones that bit or were interested but the mistake was giving it to
the company and the real answer is actually just to give it to the users and that's basically the
meta that we're in today um and so i think that that whole concept was just like 30 degrees i use
this term all the time like 30 degrees off where it's like directly in the right way but like the
30 degrees off in in crypto where it's a very low margin of error um you don't have a lot of margin
for error like that makes all the difference so i think this here where you're going to see is a
lot of l1s and l2s use that same capital that all these all these l1s were using as grants for
companies and actually go direct to the user which is really great for people here that have that are
part of communities that are active in web 3 and that's why everyone loves it so much and why it's
probably going to last um but in terms of the deal structure exactly you know and what went wrong with
polygon is i think the other learning lesson when i talk to l1 and l2s you know today is you
just can't buy culture and i'm happy i'm happy that in the history books you know youth on polygon
will be look back at as the defining kind of moment of this like where people you have no idea
man in these behind behind the scenes calls the amount of times people ask me about polygon it's
like um it is like this learning lesson for the industry hey like you just can't buy culture don't
try to do it and imagine if we didn't make that mistake how crazy would the numbers be getting
you know right now as everything heats up in this market for random projects to go bridge and do
this stuff but it was just the wrong idea it was really it should have gone to the users you know
in the first place and that's what these like grants should be about is like attracting users
and using incentives to do it so that's my take i think with polygon yeah we just couldn't buy
they could you know we couldn't force a culture there and there just isn't a pfp type culture
at least not today i still like the guys of polygon and and i don't love it when people
kind of you know shit on it on the timeline stuff like i think they're hard working they're trying
their best and like uh they have a vision i think it might play out and so i'm not like fading in
any way but um it just it just wasn't a match they just don't have the same pfp culture and
it became like fighting upstream pretty deeply so that's kind of my take there but i'm excited
that we got to be a failure point slash learning lesson for the ecosystem because i think at least
to a small degree that's a big reason why things are so lit right now okay so this actually leads
to my to my next question um these allocations for holders and and we'll talk about wormhole and
everything you guys are doing with them in a moment um but i quickly want to talk about pudgies
so obviously pudgies just cooking crushing doing their thing lukas you know unbelievable and um
exactly like you said earlier tonight when i did that space with him you know over a year ago and
he was saying yeah plushies are the play of all plays um i mean look i'm not gonna sit here and
say i believed i mean it was this crazy concept that you know plush i didn't i just gotta take
credit but yeah anyway anyway okay anyway i mean i was sounding from the fucking rooftops on this
like i was like who's your favorite founder frank lucanets like lucanets pudgy fangalays
they're the ones but you know it's like keep going keep going i mean you are and again i
gotta give you credit you're pretty damn good at being early on not only just like concepts and
ideas but people um so this allocation thing i mean what they did with with dimension i mean each
pudgy holder received i mean fucking you know five five figures essentially is if they held
right and dimension did really well um in terms of like price appreciation following the airdrop
we've talked about this even outside of the space uh like in person that this is a potentially a
meta where founders go and source airdrops for their holders and just try to give as much money
to their holders as possible which is like a huge extension from where we used to be where it's like
you have to deliver utility and build all these things and whatever whatever and now it's like
hey we got to just make our holders as much fucking money as possible while we go out and
build things for the business i mean i mean what's your take some people say you want the reality
pill because i don't see this take as much on the timeline but i think people are looking for it
they're like wait is this infinite money money you go it's like where does this you know where does
this end is that kind of what you're asking or i mean like is this what nfts are about because
like many people it's not are the community the culture and while i still think that those things
are really i mean if not the most important thing i actually do think it's really important to make
your holders money and um some people disagree with that what's your take you and you get back
me up on this leap we were pretty early on this huh like i was talking about this like i think
the first day i saw the dimension tweet i was like okay yeah this is it like this is about to be a
fucking whole thing um i think malcolm might be in the audience right now but me you uh malcolm
and thread guy we're talking about this non-fucking stop like the first time we saw each other in a
while um and then i know we were talking about a lot at thread guy's birthday party but yeah it was
here here's like where i've gone and like talked to so many fucking l1 l2s like protocols all this
stuff over the last you know one thing not that's not uh teasing anything or whatever but here's
like kind of my take on where i see this where i see this kind of plan out is i feel like what
you're going to start to see is new protocols and dApps that are going to uh kind of spread themselves
too thin with too many communities and so if you go like really really far uh down the line and
try to hit everybody you're ultimately like marketing to nobody because now it's like
definitely a fucking airdrop it's definitely like something that you're going to get free
money for and it's probably something you're not going to like read into or pay much attention to
and likely like you know sell right when you get it and so once that starts to happen by the way
this is recorded so when this like kind of plays out i'm hyped to play this back but um once that
starts to happen then potentially these allos are going to get smaller you know for NFT communities
and it'll be more raffle based so you might not be able to give all 10,000 25,000 40,000 you know
NFTs uh certain allocation and so then it's going to become a raffle which is going to be less
impactful you know through the overall NFT community than if it was you know for the entire
project that being said there's definitely still so much more to come and this is going to be a
very exciting thing but what i think the next logical step is here is is actually like segmenting
you know your holder base and um these protocols are looking for you know more and more specific
specific criteria uh within these communities and they're just not going to be able to allocate
a significant amount of money you know to each uh person or each NFT in every single community
but that is like where that is where it's going because let's just say you know which is like the
narrative right now and i i hold a bunch of pudgy penguins so i'm like very hyped but like the
narrative is you know puddies are going to get every airdrop and it's just never going to stop
but there's only so much attention that you can put onto one or two things and so as soon as like
the first protocol that either underperforms on the token launch and everyone's like oh it's only
like 50 bucks fuck this whatever or you know they just don't get a lot of love because there's like
five lined up around the same time when bitcoin's fucking hitting 60k and then everyone's just like
you just can't pay attention all of them there's going to be people that double down on like this
strategy on the protocol side they're just not going to get the results for the amount of capital
that they're giving out because at the end of the day it is like liquid money right it is um
hundreds of millions of dollars getting printed in thin air and so if you allocate a community
hypothetically let's just say 10 million dollars in like kind of paper money today um it it is
interesting to kind of watch this play out so i think the next logical step is hey there's no free
lunch forever um what how do these communities start segmenting themselves and how do you like
how do you do it where it's not going to everybody and do that in a way that feels fair um this seems
to me like the next kind of frontier here which i'm definitely spinning kind of game here because
this is like deep strat on this but um like yeah i don't know that's kind of where it's probably
gonna head my take my take my personal opinion how are new how are new founders supposed to
compete with this right like there's a lot of people that they want to create pfp projects
there's a lot of hype ones that are minting right now or have minted i mean is there game
here's a better question how are older founders going to compete with a bull run where it's all
new projects because if you remember like 2022 2020 like like especially throughout that whole
year it it was actually like really you felt like a boomer i know i felt like a boomer even my first
year in with competing with new mints and new projects because a new mint and a new project
in an environment where there is a fuck ton of excitement you being like the big market cap
kind of slow to move like how does my collection how does this collection that's already moon 2x
like you being in that spot when you're competing with like new products that are minting for
0.1 you know 0.2 0.3 whatever 0.01 that can like 10x we haven't even hit that part of the cycle yet
because we still have all the incumbents so you're asking how do new products compete i think when
you really think about bull market psychology it's like actually how do old projects stay relevant
is a better question honestly okay i want we're early to say like you know it feels crazy to say
right now because like what why would i go fuck about a new project but when the first guy that
tweets he hit 100x on the new mint everybody in that community is like holy fuck this is insane
whatever um now all of a sudden 10 people are gonna be way more hyped to mint the next one and
the next one and the next one so and that's where i'm actually excitedly to be at this stage in a
cycle where we are in my opinion my opinion so undervalued um and and really have not been
moving with the market at all like there's like this 150 fucking blend d god wall uh you know
between 2.80 they're fucking 3.2 or whatever and i actually like love the fact that we
when i'm gonna go and start marketing a fuck ton you know now running this thing again like
when i'm gonna start marketing a fuck ton it feels like better to be marketing something
that's genuinely just at a lower market cap and earlier and so i uh i think it's actually gonna
get harder to compete on the on the on the bottom end of like attention because new stuff is just
more exciting than old stuff new coin good old coin bad is like the famous crypto saying okay i
want to talk about wormhole what is going on like d god you got everybody to to jump in their discord
go crazy for a day um i mean i'm assuming there's some i mean there's some allocation
something's happening i mean talk to me about wormhole what does that mean for the holders
and do d gods review to get more tokens i love wormholes man like uh i don't know what else to
say do you like i mean you know i i honestly just can't comment on this or talk about it it's not my
my story to tell um i love wormhole there you know there's two teams there's the wormhole labs
and the wormhole foundation so i work really closely with labs many times actually you know
on all three bridges that we've executed and and you know just gotten close with a lot of the guys
on that team and i really really do think they're on the cutting edge of a lot of stuff and uh i
look forward to helping prove out this multi-chain thesis uh throughout this year you know my dream
um for our communities and i started alluding to this yesterday but i just think it comes down to
the holder's choice and it's actually not even about the collection and again if we can be like
a lesson or failure point to a degree you know i really coordinated the first bridges like i told
the community hey we should all go bridge at the same time and i'm proud of the results of we got
93 percent of fucking d gods and utes you know to bridge over to bridge over to multiple chains
like this amount of coordination it's something that i think to this day is a is a proud moment
for me as someone that runs this community of like wow we when we really align around something
we can like go make it happen to such a high participation rate it's kind of nuts even to
think about now like 93 percent of people are using a fucking thing um within your community
but yeah i just my vision of this is like by the end of this year you know you're gonna have all
the top nfts kind of moving between chains to get incentives be a part of these different ecosystems
because a fungible token or a wallet can be civil attacked and farmed to the max like you can farm
anything you know you can divide a token into one one millionth of a piece of a token and you could
put eth in a thousand wallets and so how do you actually judge a quality user but the beauty of
nfts is they are on chain and you actually do have this ability that there are like a finite number
and when you have a finite number of something it and and it's a long-standing community that has
a history etc um i think from these protocols perspective too it's like one of the better
segments you know of their ecosystem to drop to and so throughout this year i think you're just
going to see a bigger and bigger merge of native crypto and nft communities and for new people
entering the ecosystem they will actually do it through nfts and then get into defi or the deeper
side of crypto um which i'm saying now and it might sound obvious but i want to like make it
very clear that there's a much larger audience today for crypto trading like you know they're
not necessarily talking about nfts all the time on cmbc but they will talk about you know the big
market cap crypto coins the trading community is a lot bigger than the nft community or the web3
community in general but the real rise of web3 is the mix of tokens and nfts and this is what i
look forward to being on the front lines for you know this year and uh and something that you know
i think it's going to be very fucking obvious by by the next three four or five months for sure
okay so talk to me about this multi-chain thing a lot of people say it fragments liquidity and um
even furthermore fragments culture so i have a tweet in my drafts that i've been waiting to
to fire off where you know we're talking about the different cultures on every chain
and i actually believe that the cultures are not as different as what people think
i think people and maybe you disagree with me here but i think a lot of people try to pitch
like the salona culture as different than the eth culture that's different than the cardano
culture the bitcoin culture whatever it might be i actually believe the cultures are quite similar
which is people want to be part of something that's winning and they want to make money
and everything else falls to the wayside to that now obviously there are nuances to what
make the salona community different than the bitcoin community right um but i don't think it
that it's as different as people are portraying it to be do you think that having de-gods and
mutes on multiple chains um like what does that actually what does that even mean like is is
liquidity fragmented how do the holders even participate in the same protocols together
like what are the negatives and positives to doing that
i believe that with decreased friction liquidity uh silos between blockchains are going to decrease
and so if you imagine an interface now this could be this year it could be in the distant future
but if you imagine the simple direction things are going you're going to a world where you might have
eth but it will be very easy for you to one click transact and buy something on bitcoin you're
already seeing this now with the magic eden wallet you know they put out recently where it's
i've never seen it this easy you know it's a bridge within the wallet with your nfts um you
know between eth and bitcoin like i can literally go in and swap my eth to bitcoin right now um
and this is going to be across the abm chains all the new chains and so the next step is interfaces
to aggregate the information between you know all these different blockchains but if you're saying
you know the issue is that things are going to get fragmented well i would argue the point of
crypto is interoperability to a degree and so these things are just going to continue to improve
over time just in the same way that when we first started on salona it like it was like almost like
rocket science to figure out how to put up a mint contract and there was barely any the only
marketplace on there was something called salon art that didn't even in depth you have to like
manually submit a google form to get your collection on there and obviously today it's
a fucking very robust ecosystem arguably leading you know on innovation today in nfc's bitcoin
ordinals literally did not exist like literally did not exist around this time um last year
and look at where that's at right now and so you think about where the incentives today look at
all these venture capitalists kind of getting really into eigenlayer monad you know name a
million fucking l1s and l2s coming out this year and the incentives to me are very clear you know
where that's driving is that people are going to be trying out a lot more ecosystems this year
and those ecosystems are going to start out with a lot more than they started out with in 2021 or
2022 when d5 really started to catch traction was d5 summer 2020 you know and then 2021 it like
really became a thing and so it was like a year old now it's three years old all right you know
three and a half years old and so there's been so many primitives that have been created from that
um and so all these ecosystems are not going to start out bare bones or blank um they're going
to start out with a lot of shit and a lot of incentives to get people to come over but this
is where you ask yourself about the musical chairs are like you know there's not really
like a lot more users in the ecosystem today but there is definitely you know a lot more capital
liquidity rotating around and so um that that's like i think it's something to watch for right
it's like we're really in the rotation game it's the same fucking faces different pfp's i see some
people that used to rock some d guys and youths um rock is some other pfps right now we got to
change that but um but yeah it's like it's a lot of the same faces and i think that we've not seen
this huge influx you know retail coming in and maybe that happens in a month from now two months
from now maybe it happens on bitcoin at 69k but for now we're like this rotation game where
arguably the incentive is to go find the new ecosystem and be early to that more than it is to
double down you know in one single spot that could change if something becomes a clear winner and
starts to accrue a ton of value whatever it is and people start to rotate there but i mean people
are gonna go fucking nuts over blast you know when that comes out right about now and we're
probably only gonna be able to talk about blast for a solid maybe let's just say week two weeks
three weeks three weeks would be fucking nuts until the next thing that gets everyone excited
about and it's the same fucking people so that's like where we're at right now i know things can
change but that's kind of the read so i think one of the biggest criticisms um that people give you
is that you lack focus and that you're the pivot or right that you just pivot you pivot you pivot
and i think some people are looking at this whole multi-chain omnichain thing as kind of
the pinnacle of you not being able to focus like you can't focus on one ecosystem you can't focus
on one chain so fuck it like we're just going to go to every chain what would you say to that
i was that i had this tweet uh the other day of you know i was onboarding people on the jupiter
aggregator i was onboarding eat them at first the jupiter aggregator before they knew what that was
when they thought salona was lame before they even knew what phantom wall it was and uh and um you
know bitcoin very early there too and and so for me it's like i've always been on this wave like it
just became abundantly clear to me very very quickly that nfts are communities of people
these people have many many interests they're interested not just in the blockchain that they're
on but in other opportunities regardless of what blockchain is on nobody's talking about bnb today
in our like sphere you know in our world that we're in like crypto twitter but if you were there in
2021 or 2022 i mean like that shit was fucking hot dude like bsc shit coins are you kidding me bro
safe moon was on bnb now does every person that bought safe moon like did they know what the fuck
bnb was compared to eth or anything like that maybe maybe not but users that are inherently
multi-chain this is the irony of it like users are inherently multi-chain so for me to be a founder
in this space um i actually think if you're not thinking about all the other ecosystems you're
just like you're gonna play catch up you're gonna play catch up at a certain point um and so for me
in terms of blockchains like i honestly do fucking still to this day love solana like holy shit like
it's the best experience of all time and i would tweet about it a million times over like i love
that i love it but when i would get shit you know from eth for telling people about solana in fucking
2022 you know and you know this leap i was on your space getting clown all the fucking time
for being on solana when all the cool kids were on eth and now everyone loves solana and what what
are they gonna love next what are they gonna love next you know to me it's the same fucking people
and so i think that it looks really messy today but uh i'm just always searching for product market
fit and i think that you know what we're doing is building an nft native a crypto native you know
community here at the end of the day and i think it's what most if not all uh nft collections are
like every person and this is luka's thesis every person that buys a pudgy might not even know that
it's an nft but the nfts themselves are are inherently you know crypto native and these
users are curious about every single blockchain and everything that's going on um at any given
time and there are definitely maxis in this bunch but i would say broad strokes it's interesting
because i see a lot of people that are ordinal maxis that were not that that i know were fucking
aping fit coins on solana like a few months like you know a few months before ordinals drop
but now they're normal maxi and um and yeah it's like people kind of shifted rotate over time
even if they're not as aware of it you know themselves so i i just think that's that's the
direction these things are going and today we look like idiots but i don't think we're going to look
that dumb um you know in the future and i i welcome anyone that wants to join us on that journey
their team okay so i know a lot of people have questions um guys if you want any specific
questions asked and i will try to ask every question click that pinned tweet at the top
or the button in the bottom right hand corner just drop your questions there um drop your
hard-hitting questions whatever you want to know um i think it's a good opportunity to ask them
and obviously please drop a like comment retweet because it's the best way to support frank
you were i mean look the way i looked at it at least it's like you were kind of not the savior of
solana um and definitely not the sultan of solana um but you were a big part of it i mean you brought
me over you brought a ton of people over and i remember people were clowning me as well as many
other people for going over to solana because it wasn't decentralized whatever you know things
change and uh like you said people love solana now solana with 10x 12x from the bottom it is the
it is the you know highest performing sort of l1 within that scale over the past year and um i mean
there's this whole narrative as well as etha's dead and we can talk about that too do you think
it was a mistake leaving solana because had you not left solana at the time you were in near 1000
solana floor i mean we look at obviously solana was much cheaper so it was different but in just
in terms of soul i mean we look at mad lads and and all these other high um high performing
collections which i hold to mad lads love them and really excited about them as well um but you
guys were a thousand soul floor a fucking thousand and had you stayed there obviously it would have
probably retraced a bit but i mean the price of d gods would have been it would have been absurd
well let's just have the record straight it went through a thousand because of the news that we
were going to eat um so there's this is just like the fact you know that that's what happened there
um i deeply regret the way that it went down and i wish that i didn't make that tweet
and i wish that wasn't as reactionary uh 100 but you know to be clear you know i don't actually
regret the bridge itself i i really just think and again now a lot of this stuff is coming out
around like the merge and and the struggles we went through as a company last year but i think
it was the right move at the time this i will stand by because at that time we really had the
most to lose i mean we were we were like 70 of the market share of salona like just two nfc
projects really like d gods and ut and um when ftx hit you know i think we went down like 70 and
and uh the community was really like fucking clamoring at me constantly like dude what are
we gonna do is this fucking thing gonna die and so this is like a lot of the narrative that was
kind of getting fed to me um by the community and i really do see myself a lot of times at my best
as a servant to the fucking community like i will go do the stupid shit that they asked me to do
um if it feels like that's actually gonna make them happy or get them excited and um and yeah
at that time it just felt like okay well everyone in my community was asking me to do it um a lot
of people were not everybody of course you're never gonna get everybody but a lot of people
you know that that honestly shit on me today about it i'm like dude i honestly remember the
discord messages bro like i feel like you're in there being like yo frank get us off this fucking
chain um or whatever but yeah i wish i had to do it the way i did i honestly wish i was never
fucking doxed or not not right after i made that tweet and it was just like a million people
hating my face now too um but overall like i i just wish that we were more agile and uh mended the
fucking bonds and let people bridge wherever they wanted to you know way sooner and i just don't
think we as an organization were agile enough to stay on top of shit to do that and so the thing
i regret is that even now to this day it's not easy for holders to go to whatever chain they
want to uh but that is like the north start of me and yeah timing is all is ever is significantly
important in this business and sometimes i think about it i'm like man what if i fucking what if
we drop view list like right now in the fucking bull market like holy shit right like it would be
so sick we just blew our load so hard in the depth of the fucking bear market that uh yeah
like just timing wise it wasn't you know looking back on it a lot of things that we went so hard
on you know didn't wouldn't have mattered you know today but to be clear like i'm hyped that
we experimented on it i'm glad that we actually went through with something that we said we were
going to do there uh but i wish that we had given people the option to go anywhere a lot sooner
and i really do fucking love the the salon community and i think the bond will be mended
one day but uh i get it dude you need like the villain you need it like it's lit like i i've seen
some of these memes they made the bonk bot where it was like man how much like you know how much
bonk frank would have gotten if uh if they didn't burn the thing and it would just like go so high
what am i i'm like well they kind of started bonk like nearly right around when i made my tweet
where i was like fuck you know we might move this along and like it really got a lot of traction
from the frank slash de god's hate early days but that's a different part of the story that
nobody you know wants to hear now because that's when bonk was so cheap compared to where it's at
today but you know it's cool to be interlinked in all of these fucking in this history uh for
salona but yeah i mean i i just like i i still have so many friends there that i really fucking
love because they're making really cool things there and they're crushing it and i'm just i'm
hyped for them um feel the same way about zk it's like hype to me that zk armani and luca are like
the fucking mvp's right now uh you know in this cycle because you know like armani saw the whole
de god's run like luca that's my fucking boy and uh zk was you know worked with us he's part of the
team for so long and um so yeah this has just been really cool to see and i mean i look forward
to me being great again too but right now i wouldn't want anyone else to be crushing it as
much as those guys uh are right now no shout out to them and um yeah i i fucking love zk um and
armani and luca are amazing too but just zk was it's it's amazing to see to what he's been able
to build and um dude he was there for me early like supporting supporting us super super early
and i'll just always be appreciative of that of that guy he's amazing um was your decision to
i mean look you weren't getting any support from the salon foundation i mean i
were i don't even think the founders were following you on twitter if i remember correctly
uh it totally was totally was totally was um but raj was not um
um now when you were going around and looking for these grants and you were talking to polygon
so on and so forth did you talk to the salon foundation and did they refuse to give you a grant
this is the true story and that man this is where it started it was like i got dogs and i'm like
fuck man i the the the story that went out is so much juicier than the truth uh but like you know
so i get it there's no way like the nuance of it would would really capture but this is my take you
guys can choose believe me or not we were talking to other we were already kind of talking to polygon
and bnb and avax and we thought okay like i might as well tell you know solana about this as well
they haven't really taken meetings with us before but like i might as well just saw and so booked
the meeting and it's raj totally myself and uh kevin at the time and um we kind of tell them
what the numbers are you know from these other blockchains and that was where the conversation
went they said like look they've never done a grant like this before they're not sure it's
unlikely etc and so leave that call that's like the information that i have and then i swear it
got mad like fucking four hours later the stories start circulating about how we demanded you know
it just made it sound so insane it was like we demanded this amount of money or else we're
gonna fucking leave or whatever it is and and i genuinely was like replaying that day the entire
conversation in my head and i'm like really like i don't see where this moment could have happened
like i don't see where it's like the way this is getting spun but as you can imagine that headline
is beautiful like it's the juiciest thing to fucking rally around and hate and so to this
point i don't even know where the story really really started um but i mean first of all it's
supposed to be a fucking private call but like whatever um who cares i guess at that point but
it just like really started a fucking spin into this thing that ended up becoming like this kind
of massive you know frank uh villain arc but if you go back even to the video where we announced it
i really never said anything bad i had two tweets man on the fucking day ftx was collapsing i had two
fucking tweets um and and i don't know man i but yeah i also think those tweets were bad and i
get that and i apologize for that too but ultimately no i didn't demand you know um
a massive grant from salona foundation sir i did i did it um here's a comment from yeti said frank
i'll never forgive you when you ruined christmas announcing euts to polygon on christmas eve yo
that was that whole fucking couple months period was i just think back and out just how wild the
entire thing was um yeah that christmas i know yeah i was in a man i just got in docs and i just
told you the whole thing bro it was like it was a rough it was a rough uh week or two so in my head
i was like oh well read this countdown timer for christmas and we gotta announce like we should
announce something and we set it for it should we do like points or should we do this bridge and we
went with a bridge so fuck my life but yeah um that did happen on christmas okay so this is a
comment from julian nito julian nito wrote 100 frank is just riding the latest fad or wave
where's the five-year vision what would you say to that i would say i proudly do not have a five-year
vision beyond like continuing to make this thing better and better um i don't think we're i mean
if you're saying we're riding the early like the latest fad uh i feel like we've been pretty early
to stuff before people think it's cool like over and over again and so i don't know if it's that
we're riding the fad or like we're kind of starting a lot of these fads um but no i mean i i am a
crypto user i love web 3 and if you think if you genuinely think that the new things that are coming
out today are not going to like affect everybody and what they're working on um again i can't point
out this enough like ordinals literally did not exist a year ago and you don't think that blast
coming out soon monad eigenlayer all these different things are going to have an impact on
the overall like crypto market i think they will i think that again if you want somebody that's going
to be super linear straight line and like go in one exact direction there's so many other projects
you know out there for you that will offer you that but uh that's just not how i think about
things at all like i am very interested in the way things are changing and i've watched this
industry change over and over and over again in such deep significant ways that um look you know
there was a moment where i almost launched fucking de-gods on on fucking luna like uh you know what
i'm saying like it was hot at the time we didn't we almost launched it for reasons i was like oh
phantom wall is fucking incredible uh it looks like you know there is this nfc ecosystem that's
starting out here and that's like why we we kind of made a calculated bet there and so what it might
feel like riding you know i think thread guy rides a lot of a lot of waves for sure my guys on far
caster these days what a legend um but no i i think we've made really solid concentrated bets
and you know people harp on basically polygon is one of the big ones but uh outside of that i'm
actually really proud of our track record and making the right bets over and over and over again
and uh we were ultimately just judged on our last at bat and i don't think that season three
or what we did last year was that great but uh yeah that's that's i'm gonna keep doing that i'm
gonna keep fucking identifying things that are early and uh picking the right horses and and
kind of crushing it there so that is definitely part of my strategy do you feel betrayed by the
salona community like you talked about the no i not at all i'm grateful dude i mean man where would
we be i wouldn't have an audience we would not have like yeah we would be like fucking nobody's
if we tried to launch on it because i didn't have any friends you know we didn't really know anyone
in the industry uh when we launched i was like a bitcoin maxi um just with the boys and so i like
i was not part of the cabal and i feel like an eth if you're launching when we launched like september
2021 almost all the founders are really crushed with them like kind of knew a bunch of people
were already popping and that's what it felt like and salona was this beautiful kind of breeding
ground where like nobody really knew anybody and so it was it was actually okay so i don't even
think we would have uh i don't think me and you would have ever met leave i don't think anybody i
would i don't think anything good would have happened if it wasn't um you know for for salona
um so no i i i just have gratitude dude that yeah it's fucking it's the best it was the best for it
was the best year maybe maybe we go back i don't know but uh it was the best fucking year it was
awesome okay so i want to talk about maybe like some of my frustrations um and i i remember there
was like a like an inflection point for me um and you know i love you and you know i'm bullish on
the ecosystem all that good shit i think that goes without saying um the inflection point for me
was i remember it was it was when you had that party it was like the la bonfire party
like the most recent one and i was i was hosting a space and um you were teasing out that you were
going this was like pre season three right this was when season three was supposed to drop
and it got delayed and i'm hosting the space and i'm like i'm ready i'm like fucking midnight frank
is coming in hot this is going to be nuts like this is the moment and the the bonfire party was
happening and i and i chose to to not go to that party and i was like i'm going to host the space
because i i feel that something's going to happen tonight um and i didn't have any information that
the public was not privy to right like you were already teasing things um and there was a video
that came out from that bonfire where you were like d gods on top d gods are going to number one
like this is happening 100 percent and this is also the time where that they took that screen
grab of you where you were just you were just looking tired down bad and everyone was clowning
on you um and instead of it being released instead of season three coming out that night
you guys released the the basically it was like a nostalgic myspace slash facebook website which
by the way i think to this day is still one of the best websites that was released by any nft
project regard regarding any announcement like it was seriously immaculate but it didn't change my
frustrate i mean i had like easter eggs and so much depth and lore it's actually one of the best
things that you guys have ever shipped but it doesn't get talked about because it was delivered
in regards to a delay and when that delay happened it was basically like and i think that was like the
second delay or the third delay it was it wasn't the first and i'm like fuck man like like what is
going on here like you're telling us that this is going to get announced everyone's waiting and
you guys announce a website that that really doesn't tell us anything more than we already knew
um like there were a couple hints here and there i was just frustrated like i was genuinely just
frustrated i'm like what the fuck is going on so talk to me about that night because i don't i still
don't like what i want to know is did you know you were going to delay it that night did you
know going into the bonfire party when you gave that speech that you were gonna and i said i was
going to ask the hard questions did you know you were going to delay it that night
yeah so all right let's unpack this i'm down um when i go to like these events uh there's
these moments that happen at these fucking events where people will kind of like start recording
and they'll be like speech speech speech and in that moment like it's very it's very hard um
to not be like a hype beast or like get people hyped because it's like a bunch of mostly bros
um they're like yo speech speech speech everyone's kind of fucked up and you know you just like say
stuff like i don't i don't i don't know how to go you know about the whole number one stuff like
let's go going to the fucking top 100 it's just kind of the zone that that when i'm in that
situation happens but in terms of like knowing if we were going to delay um
uh it's very tough to say that like um i expected that the amount of hype would build you know as
it did but i definitely my mistake was egging it on too much because if i go back to yeah i know
exactly what you're talking about if i go back to that it's like i understand how there was a
perception that of the whole fucking thing was dropping that night but in my mind i didn't
communicate anything like that but did i retweet people that fucking thought that was the case or
did i you know gas up the potential that it might be that 100 and that's also part of like my new
approach you know this year especially is you know i'm like locked into fucking discord i'm
a discord dog this year i i'm really trying to uh get tighter communication with the community
and more literal or more specific because my biggest criticism of what i used to do that
worked but i don't think it's gonna work anymore um it is really like rally people around something
that's mysterious or up in the air like i'm down for the like i'm down for the casual speculation
like i like it this wormhole stuff spawn wormholes whatever um but no i think i definitely egg on
people that are like adding to the narrative sometimes way too much uh and most recently
where i'm proud that i didn't do anything was there was a whole gta fucking meme of like we
use the gta font um uh on like a cover art and immediately the fucking goons start going at it
they're like yo rockstar games is in here holy shit and then i think i went on the dega's account
like one minute in from my post uh season three ptsd of like guys there's no collaboration with
fucking uh rockstar i was in the discord like guys please stop don't do this um and so i don't think
you're gonna see that sodomy as much but if you're asking about that and that i think is indicative
of a lot of what you know people's perception of me is you know because i i earned that reputation
uh that's a fair categorization like i would definitely fucking egg the fuck on uh you know
with the community and like whatever narratives people are spinning up um and i am not going to
do that as much anymore i can't make fucking full promises leave you know at the end of the day we're
all lizard brains or whatever but i'm really like conscious on amzen uh i'm trying not to but
people are funny man like people have some crazy theories it's uh it's hard sometimes i just laugh
and retweet it but then you realize you have an international audience and people are interpreting
this in a million different ways and then one guy that interprets it in the most bullish format is
going to get the most traction because that's the most exciting story and so even if you don't egg
something on sometimes things can get past that but i think i've beaten the joy out of the
for long enough that uh ideally you know we just don't do that as much anymore i saw full threads
about d gods being the official pfp of grand theft auto i'm like what in the fuck i shut
it down quick bro i was like fucking five minutes in there but but then the news article dropped
and once the news article dropped it was a rap bro i was like fuck i can't even it was a reply
and a comment and i was in the discord but i'm also like barely tweeting at the time because
that's part of the whole shtick for that thing was like i'm just like you know quiet on twitter
so i'm in the discord like guys please stop but it it kind of got a life of its own and then there
were some youths that fucking started threading and being like this is why you guys are all fucking
stupid you two next you guys gta and then those guys got fucking inverse broad and fucking
quote tweeted and dunked on um you know in return as well for being as bullish on the project as
they were so it's a slippery slope but let's be real for people that are listening come on like
the community does it too bro it's not it's not always just the founder sometimes like uh the
community can go fucking insane and i get it they're pumping their bags but that's just how it goes
okay so i'm glad you brought up the community getting dunked on and like the inverse bra and
all this stuff i think and by the way this happened to doodles for a very long time
and it happened to to clone x and it happened to cool cat doodles have made like an awesome recovery
and they're doing a lot of cool things right now so shout out to them but there is a point in which
holders of specific projects get clowned strictly for their pfp like there'll be points with doodles
or cool cats or whatever where they'll comment on something and whatever point they're making no
matter how good it is completely gets devalued by 10 comments underneath it like posting a picture
of their pfp and the floor price and saying like oh is this you like your your point doesn't mean
anything because you're holding this project and you're a clown whatever and i think when that point
comes when your holders are getting clowned for just being a part of that project that is a very
difficult point to recover from and one of the things i wanted to talk about tonight was like
the thread ores the content creators and all the people that were holding utes that left that
literally left because they were getting clowned on repeatedly for just being a part of the project
i mean i know it's something that that you've noticed um and it's not something that you can
fix overnight with a snap of the finger but like what is your take there like how do you feel about
the holders being clowned it's probably my least favorite part um and in that last four or five
month period uh yeah that's the part that sucks the most it's like i i yeah i wish that i could
have been more active and i wish that i i didn't fucking fundraise for you know like uh back in the
day with the split company i wish a lot of things didn't happen that lead to that ultimately
happening but um yeah i don't know now if you try to clown like a d god or you i'm pulling up
and the replies ideally pulling up the the re ratio uh if i can get it but um no that part
definitely sucks for me though i'm not gonna lie like i'm just it's just the rodeo bro like uh
you just mentioned doodles like as an example here but the beauty of sucking for a while
in this industry is that when things get really good um one everybody just kind of floats no
matter what uh it's just it is fun to watch that but more importantly um it adds a much deeper kind
of sense of pride and when people are really confused when d gods was doing so well for so
long when like nothing else was um it is because we did suck for a while right after the minute
for for like five six months it wasn't like a short amount of time and people some people
rock d gods but there was like a sense of pride that you have for sticking around and and going
through that and very likely you know accumulating at lows and all this stuff that becomes like an
even stronger signal and so you know i can't speak for any other collection or any other project but
like i know me and i know like the boys on the team and uh yeah i'm not too worried about that
like i think that's actually gonna be a fucking sick sick moment and make this community stronger
so when we do rally it'll be like uh it'll just make everyone in the ecosystem kind of mad
except for us okay so i want to double click on youts because look i missed the i wasn't on
salona at the beginning i mean i joined when useless happened as well as many other people
so like my initial frank d gods experience my d labs ecosystem experience comes from youts
and the youts d gods relationship is very different from let's say board ape slash mutant apes
or like whatever the equivalency for any other or like pudgies versus little pudgies where these
these these other two projects like if board apes do well mutant apes do well if pudgies do well
little pudgies do well and again other projects that have similarity um they're similar uh
secondary and tertiary collections um they operate the same way but yout is not that like maybe like
by extension a little bit but they're completely different ip's that feel like they're part of
completely different universes now you have made moves to to bridge those two together where it's
like yeah they are kind of part of the same ecosystem but do you ever feel like it was a mistake
to launch like because i know at a time there could have been like baby d gods or just like
some other iteration of what d gods were that could just pump with d gods pumping but now you
have this completely separate thing that they don't look anything like d gods one's like an animal
and one's a human um they were on completely different chains for a while like they're just
so far disconnected how do you bridge the gap between those two and make youts feel like they're
part of the d d labs ecosystem because i'm going to tell you as a holder i don't like
less now but for a long time i did not like if d gods had a win i did not feel like that was
for me i didn't feel like i was even getting any aspect of that win and a lot of yout holders feel
the same way um like how do you even begin to approach that problem i think today it looks like
a really big weakness um but i also think you know when youts and d gods like when youts kind
of debuted and quickly became like number two on soul and uh became really popular i don't know if
that would happen you know um in the inverse and so i think there is like these trade-offs but
give me like a month honestly like give me like a month i'm gonna keep working on this every day
like i merged the chats in the discord yesterday for d gods and youts now we have roles i think
tomorrow we're looking to add uh the specific counts on people's roles so it'll show like
all right this guy is like five d gods three youts um or whatever like their numbers are
this guy's like talking mad shit he has like one yout um you know this kind of thing so that should
be fun and i think it's just really about having fun together and honestly like when you're down
bad for this long it the guys are definitely down to bond i remember trying to merge the chats
a while ago uh for d gods and youts when things were a lot better and people were like really upset
they were like i don't want to fucking talk to you guys i don't know yesterday when i merged the
chats everyone's like yo let's fucking go i'm hyped maybe some d gods are bitching or whatever
but it's like uh you know people are kind of excited and the chat's just been fucking non-sub
you know since since we merged it yesterday um and so for me i think that's just really what
you're describing is community building and just doing that really well and if i if you asked me
2024 like i've been doing this now for two and a half years like what part do i feel is the part
that people are missing how important and how much of a driver could be that i know i'm really
fucking good at and i'm excited to go execute on it's just being a great community builder and
if my challenge is how do i put the youth in the d gods community together i think that's just a
lot of tender love and care um which sounds wishy wishy but uh i think when you start to
see these reactions you you actually talk to the your holders and the people in your community
you uh you start to realize i mean they're all people a at the end of the day and us even saying
like d gods and youts i mean they're fucking cartoon jpegs and behind them are like human
being you know they're like fucking people um and so these people are not actually you know
their profile pictures and when you talk to someone on a human level it's actually disarming
if you're used to being called like a d god or a you or a fucking board ape or a pudgy or whatever
um and so my goal with our discord this year which is a big focus is like making a place where daily
discussions are fucking incredible and i think you will start to see people tweet about this
and talk about it so just pay attention but you know we had like a fucking two-hour debate
in a thread today on discord about the floor price and like strategies and how people are
thinking about it and it was really fun like fucking the smartest guys in the community came out
and like started talking about it and we have like five fucking strats we came up with together as a
community um and as a group you know in our discord today and so for me i just look at it
as another community building challenge but that to me is like my superpower amongst all superpowers
so um i'm just excited for that challenge i don't think it's like impossible thing to solve
and i think the upside for it is higher if done well i just don't think we've done it well yet
so i remember um one of the initial quote unquote utilities of you it's um was that you'd get your
first thousand followers which to this day i still think is one of the best utilities you could ever
offer and i i was talking to jack about this um on the interview that i jack which that i did with
him um like a month ago where he looks at opepins as like a way to solve the cold start problem
for like people who don't have any followers for artists who don't know how to get traction who
can't get traction they can you know make an iteration of opepin and get reposted by jack
and gain a bunch of followers gain some traction that way and i think that yout in a similar vein
where we're trying to solve for the same thing um is that still your same thesis for youts
i agree with you that it is a fucking incredible utility i think the number is kind of like a
goal post um but do i want to see people that are creating awesome things in our community get the
biggest spotlights yes 100 and even in our downtime i think we've done a relatively good job of this
but i think we can do so much better uh but yeah i do think it's fucking awesome utility and i think
that we've had moments where that's been like actually fucking nuts uh but no i don't think
that's the case today do i think we can get that back pretty easily uh 100 it's just more tender
love and care more focus it's like it's like the difference between retweeting someone that joins
and going to their bio seeing you know who they are like finding something finding something to
say about them or talking to them and then uh quotes reading it then with something that
you know shows the community or why should you go follow this person why should you go do these
things and that you just can't like automate you know it's a it's just a tender loving care type
thing and so that's what i think made it work really well back in the day i'm like out of
everyone i know and on the founding side like i'm just so active on hitting the holders talking to
them communicating with them all the fucking time maybe on a one-on-one basis or in replies on twitter
liking their tweets retweeting whatever um and so when people get confused on the outside of like
how did this community get so strong again even when we're down right now i mean that's what that's
that's just how it happened it's just like it's just hard work like you just build the community
it's a whole fucking thing um and so that's just a part of it to me it's highlighting the best
people sharing that with the rest of the community doing that in a quality way that makes people want
to convert or act on it um i don't think there's like a way to automate that as much as you just
got to do it and and put the hours in all the time okay what about did and a lot of these other
things that were announced with season three because i think those actions this is a fun one
right so we track a history of like everything that's ever been done uh if you hold the fucking
d god you've been in our discord or connected to twitter um and so one of the things i talked to
marcell or taylor d gods my co-founder on this a lot is we want to drop like the i minted uh a d god
hoodie or you'll love this one leap the you listed hoodie and you'll connect your solana wallet that
you minted with if you still hold the you and we're making this hoodie that is like you were
you listed only the people that fucking got you listed can claim it and buy it um and there's
like little things like that that are fun on the d id side on the day-to-day practicality wise um
you know i want to add this role structure thing to the discord where people's roles literally show
how many d gods they have how many youths they have how many fucking you know whatever they have
um and make the roles like you know hierarchical so people want to connect more wallets and then
if someone's being a bitch in the fucking discord and you know you you people get triggered when
founders say stuff like this because they're like oh every holder is fucking perfect how
dare you like he bought this nft from somebody else on a secondary market how dare you say
anything uh but no some people are just like they want to be cancers like they actually enjoy that
deeply like they they just really like that and so for me if some guy's being a fucking cancer
and i can see that all right he just joined the community and he has like one new i might be a
lot more stern you know with like hey man like this is why i think you're wrong but if you're
going to keep finding a million reasons for why you think you're right uh in this situation and
just like anteying up the kind of being a bully or dick being a dickhead to other holders too
well like i'm running this community like just just leave bro like it's all good you know you
have one you i'll quarantine you go fucking floor it dude there's plenty of bits like go for it um
and now that fucking doodles are hot i might not say florid gtfo because that's like uh poopies
but uh you know it's a it's a version of this that needs to happen sometimes and honestly
like sappy seals you look at their recovery right now i mean wob is the king of this like
he would just tell people to fucking sell all the time like all the time you'd be like dude you
shut up you'd ratio fucking holders in the in the replies and nobody's again it comes back to my
initial thesis that i started this whole fucking thing with which is you know after something pumps
then no matter what the fuck that person did to that led to that pump or didn't you know people
ascribe the story afterwards so when things are down for sappy seals people might be like wab
why the fuck did you fucking uh you know tell that holder to fucking leave or they'll tell julian or
poopy why'd you tell that holder to leave but now when they're doing really well now all of a sudden
you know that's going to be like a great strategy people are going to be totally okay with it so
i don't take people getting triggered um too seriously at this point you just can't after
doing this for a while because people get triggered really about um you know the the price or the
sentiment and they don't actually understand the things that drive the price to go up anyway so
they'll just ascribe it to whatever you know someone popular on twitter says uh as like the
narrative for why the thing actually did well so even if like one person sweeps like 50 pudgy
penguins in one go it'll be like oh because it's walmart or oh it's because of this it's like it's
not actually you know because there are these different mechanics this is the blockchain that
you can see these things but it's easy to kind of look grab on to the narrative that's most popular
so yeah when it comes to like the discord or the community or people getting dunked on which is
where this whole conversation really started this part of it um i just don't take it too seriously
in that i know that it's a red flag or a warning or like okay like this is happening now um but it's
not something that you know it stresses me out or it gives me any anxiety like these things are so
easily fixable it just takes a few pieces of communication it just takes like you know
understanding what people are talking about and responding in like a adult like human way uh and
and things usually resolve from there my biggest haters dude i've talked to them irl i dm them and
it's like they're people are just nice like it's pretty rare to meet someone that's a fucking evil
person even in this space especially like you know the guys that are evil like you don't even
talk to them they're not the ones you're necessarily talking to uh and the people that are kind of cool
like they might talk shit on twitter but i think they're playing the character you know building
their brand or doing whatever they do okay so i think this is a good opportunity for a quick reset
welcome space guys appreciate everybody for hopping in um i would love to take more questions
click that pin tweet at the top and drop them in the comment section as well as you know like comment
retweet it goes a long way and we appreciate it frank i wanna i gotta ask and if you can't answer
it's totally fine but dust what the fuck's going on with dust there i mean like people who who
bought during useless obviously they're they're down horrendous on and price is a hard thing to
deal with especially with tokens um and i there's two parts to this question what's going on with
dust slash is dust owl thing slash how does like if the nfts are going to be interoperable omni chain
multi chain whatever you want to call it is the same thing going to happen with dust and if so
how does that work we saw omni which was one of these coins recently that like um they like tried
to do something like this i i didn't buy it i don't really know too much about it um but is the
coin going to be multi chain is liquidity going to be fragmented um i mean tell me what you can tell
me about dust here's what i can say i described the situation last year where both companies were
very split and we were rowing in opposite directions which led to a lot of inaction
in that hierarchical uh structure dust was the least prioritized thing by far and that is very
obvious to a lot of people that followed um it is now emerged entity and i'm running it and i love uh
i love tokens i love the whole world the defy i love uh everything's happening uh across the ecosystem
not even on the nft side uh it's where i get it's where i'm the most like intellectually curious
these days um and so yeah i i mean obviously you know the rules like no forward-looking statements
but that's like my current standing is well i know mechanically why we didn't prioritize it last year
and i think it's uh the coolest is is my it's one of my favorite parts of our ecosystem uh by far
but yeah we've definitely done nothing around it for a while is dust owl a thing yeah i mean
technically legally yeah but is it like a thing people can do stuff with right now um not really
uh but yeah it's set up it's it is set up so it just needs some somebody to come along and uh
you know give us some tender loving care i think okay fair enough fair enough here's a question
from jay kimbo so jay kimbo asked what can we look forward to in the next six months for you
to and d gods and what have the d contributors been up to actually that i yo jay kimbo thank
you for asking that because i completely forgot to touch on this there's like a new shout out to
sunny shout out to all the people who are on the team now or part of this like presidential
struck frank what the hell you got presidents and vice presidents and and i don't even know
what's going on so can you talk to me about that absolutely i would love to you this is one of the
most wholesome my favorite parts of this whole thing um there are a lot of people for the last
two years that want to help or participate or be a deeper part of this thing um in whatever capacity
either they're an entrepreneur and want to do something or they want to help with certain
aspects of the project or they're just curious and they're smart and they want to like find ways
more ways to get involved and when you kind of leave that to like no structural randomness what
happens is i'm getting like 20 to 40 new we finally counted like two months ago i'm getting
like 20 to 40 new dms a day um and i was like the central point for a lot of these communications
is i'm going to 20 to 40 new dms a day and if i respond to let's just say 10 of them that's like
10 conversations then now i need to go even deeper on because i started the conversation so they saw
that i saw it they saw that i saw the dm they saw i responded and now i'm like okay now i'm
trying to manage 10 more while new ones are coming in and so it gets tricky and what that led to was
a lot of people that wanted to participate or be a part of it because of the inefficiency of the
system that we'd set up it was just really hard to fucking do with everybody honestly like it was
just every time i tried i kind of burned myself by going really deep with someone that wants to like
make a cool merch thing or you know wants to be a part of the team or wants to work on this thing
and so i built this discord it started out being called d contributors now i just call it d team
and in there i just started adding uh people that you know were smart in the community or applied
or wanted to be a part of you know what i was describing there and then we would just start
chatting every day and we started making threads around okay like this is what someone wants to
work on this is what someone wants to do and it was kind of fun like it and we just kind of
continue to grow that out more and more and more and so now there's a bunch of people in the
contributors discord called d team now and i'm bringing that over to the main discord kind of
the structure that we set up there and what i think it leads to is it creates like this hacker
house type of vibe uh within our within our discord where people are kind of always working
on productive things um and i'm trying to bring that over to the main server now because we've
learned a lot from doing it for the last two months but yeah that's basically what it is it's
just a better way of okay these guys want to actually build stuff in the community and do
stuff that's interesting um let's find a way to prioritize talking to them and make it in a way
that's kind of built for me to make it easier for me to go you know message 50 60 people uh within a
day uh which was just hard to do um back in the day with no sense of prioritization um and
honestly not a lot of help there but now i'm getting help i tweeted you know i'm trying to
find an assistant we'll see okay what about the second part of this question what can you two
d gods look forward to in the next six months oh so i was muted fuck i was just going off
what can you guys and you look forward to in the next six months um i ask the community to judge
us day by day i don't even think it's about six months not where we're at right now i mean who
knows how much longer this bull's gonna go uh to me it's like every single day we should be putting
stuff out it's why i introduced the team yesterday to the ecosystem is because i'm trying to put some
more pressure on on them as well in a fun way like let's go blow your cloud up and now the holders
you can start asking pasta about when the next video is coming out uh but no i actually disagree
with the premise sleep honestly i'm not thinking about the next six months i'm really just going
day to day trying to make each day more exciting the next and if you want a project that's going
to go focus on the next six months or a year this just might not be the right project for you
but what i know for a fact is it's going to be fun every single day and that's my game plan that's
the organization i'm trying to set up here is if you're a holder there's always gonna be stuff
happening within our community um kind of 24 seven and that's what i think we actually did
to a tee in 2022 um and that's exactly what i plan to pull off now that i'm back uh again because i
think that energy is just electric and what that allows me to do is get creative and make things
that people aren't expecting on a bigger scale uh while keeping people thoroughly entertained
the entire time with uh whether it's airdrops whether it's like i didn't we posted this thing
today about like giving out a bunch of dust uh for writing threads about pike finance um
and so yeah like we're just trying to find a way to make whatever we do fun um is my honest answer
their leap i don't have it i don't really have a six month plan i have ideas of stuff i want to
lead to and get to but i've just never thought about it like this when we were successful and
when we're not it doesn't change that um that's just how we've always operated okay i gotta ask
and i think this is one of one of my biggest frustrations too and i and i had a conversation
with somebody about this outside of twitter recently um they specifically went and purchased
use off marketplaces that had more points and they spent a premium to do so because there was
this intention that that points were going to be this big thing people were staking all this other
stuff and i think that's honestly was was a big moment in which people lost trust in you and the
project and and i and i actually think like in a sense deservingly so now it wasn't as simple as
like oh we're just rugging points obviously um points parlor was a big part of this and i don't
want to talk about that as well so we'll just start there so points parlor it was this massive thing
you're giving away teslas you're giving away asops soap slippers whatever the fuck and i think in
concept points parlor was really cool right like you stake your d gods you get points you spend them
here and you can get some rewards and i think the problems were basically the fact that it took so
long to come out i think if points parlor was out a year previous or even more you wouldn't have had
the issue of d gods having like there were certain people in the d gods community that had so much
points at like a widely like just way more than everybody else that you had to find a way to
balance for those massive whales who like let's say you just had it like chucky cheese style
where you could just turn in your points and receive rewards where those people who have all
of these points they would cash out every reward day one so in order to balance it you had to do
what you ended up doing which was kind of this like raffles slash like gambling system if you
would um and a big part of why i don't think it worked out is because if you can assign a specific
dollar value to each point which you can if there are real prizes that have a dollar value to them
i.e a tesla soap a macbook whatever it is then people could start to make the decision the
rational decision that hey it's not worth mistaking my d god anymore because the rewards are not worth
like tying up all this capital you know essentially what would you say to that like
what happened with points parlor what do you think
man imagine if points parlor came out now and man imagine i actually went through my plan of
fucking delaying to the having points parlors coming out now instead of tesla's this meme coins
or its fucking l1 uh tokens and that's like the bd deals that we did i made me pretty fucking sick
but to me i think points parlor was a good idea the timing was the biggest issue one on the timing
of like uh how long it took to come out and then two at that fucking time in the market like or
it's pretty brutal where really like honestly the only people that were left were fucking web2
sponsors uh to a degree and so at that time like doing sponsorship stuff you know like uh there's
always coins and there's always things going on but uh man that's one of those like would uh uh
i'll i'll think about that one it's stuff but in terms of actually like killing points
yeah it got to a point where um as i mentioned you can imagine like if we're going through
a merge and there's deep talks of like having executives leave and all this stuff um it just
felt like i was egging on the community way too long and way too hard on these like you points
after we done points parlor and it was just like a minus ev play for uh d gods at that time and
that experiment clearly played through um that it felt like the mature and i still do back this
decision deeply um it felt the right thing to do knowing that the next two months minimum are
going to be kind of fucked on my end of just like i can't be this like cool fucking dude
on twitter all the time i'm like it's very intense conversations every day it's unwinding a company
it's merging it into another and it's all stuff that i'd really honestly um never done before but
what needed to be done and so those like two three four months it was i just had this term
like rip the fucking band-aid because i felt bad for egging a community on already and i mentioned
that earlier um and for that to continue even longer uh would be i think really fucked up
because it's like we're not going to go invent some in that state as an organization we're not
going to go like make something better than points parlor and uh because it took so long or whatever
it's not gonna be crazier and you do the math around it and as you mentioned like the rewards
math was just really bad like uh because so many utes max staked there's like over 4 000 utes
that i think 5 000 utes that were like in the top interval of points like accrued so it was like if
you do the math there it's just really hard to distribute like disproportionate value to all 5
000 people that have max points and so i heard someone else say it this is not my words but it
was like uh you know it was just a bad ponzi like that's what so you know i i get that too it's like
it's just not like a good fucking you know in that moment in that time with no influx of capital
whatever it just wasn't set up the right way but i do think we were kind of early to fucking off
chain points which is cool to see like semi on chain points or whatever um so it's cool to see
like the adoption around points and the reason i say it's cool is not because it was successful
for us but it kind of just keeps reaffirming my radar for our team of how we come up with new ideas
and it's also gives me confidence that the next ideas that we come up with are going to have a
similar level of impact you know across the ecosystem because it's the same fuckers it's
the same group of the same group of homies that have come up with a lot of this stuff and i feel
like the things we're coming up we're doing now are going to be really obvious you know by the end
of the year um so yeah i'm hyped that we were early to off chain points but i think the actual
implementation of it was pretty fucking poor uh or bad and it was only multiplied by the fact that
the time in the market that we launched that was just just like compared to now i mean i'm just
telling you bro if it was now i'm getting blast fucking tokens as the rewards on uh on points
parlor one million percent brother uh but yeah it was uh it's tough it would be perfect for the
airdrop meta oh maybe we bring it back we'll see we'll see life's short wait you're saying
that there could be blast token rewards for d god's new tolders no dude just stop fucking
my bag up bro no i don't know what you're talking no no there isn't oh stop i'm not egging this on
leave i'm not egging this on at all please i i i'm excited about blast but like i'm not egging on
there's no airdrop there's nothing so does that come before or after the grand theft auto collaboration
okay um we here's my next question um and guys please put your comments in here because
they're they're helpful um and i just you know if you have anything you want to ask i'd love to
get to it um you do feel betrayed though because like the points did get like it wasn't just like
points parlor got removed it was like everything like you've been staking for an entire year
essentially and now like these points are not going to even be used for anything we're just
all right let's just let's clear this up because the math this is what happened the total value of
prizes and the depth of the fucking bear market that we gave out for points parlor total dollar
value was about 300 400 000 before we killed it and a lot of dust that's not including the dust
there was like you know i think about 1.5 million dollars including the dust that we gave out for
utes at the time the floor was about two two something grand and we gave out a hundred utes
all in one go uh four points parlor so technically speaking the dollar value of the rewards that we
allocated for utes were higher than the ones that we did for the entire like two months three months
of points parlor for d guys we just did it all in one go and now i know i sound like the fucking
douchebag that's like pointing out these specifics but if you're out if you're i'm just pointing out
the fact now i understand the feeling the feeling is valid as fuck like they didn't get a whole
experience it all happened in one day it was like uh yeah it was just it was brutal the way it went
down and i i think that was a fucking that's why we're in the spot we're in today right leap like
pretty much it's like it's not rocket science like we did some things and they were pretty bad
and the rest of the market started to do really well and the taste of the bad things have been
like lingering for a while um and that's like my burden and i'm hyped for the challenge but uh i i
do i just want to make sure that the stories reflected accurately is all i'm saying because
when all is said and done i i look forward to looking back at you know everything we build
here in this space and and making sure like it's very clear like i always hold integrity
you know over over everything even if that's not clear in the moment i i look forward to the day
that us giving back the total grant to polygon is like a positive in the story because that was not
necessary and i'm proud of the fact that our team did it and we said we didn't want to keep the
money because we're we're not going to stay here and that's like a thing that people make fun of
me for today but as i mentioned many times in this space sentiment changes and uh i look forward to
telling that story and all the other stories of like the good things that we did and knowing that
that's how we think about things you know when i go to sleep at night so yeah we we technically did
give out more dollar values but that being said the the feeling is extremely valid and the reason
that we're uh we're in the spot that we're in today why did you give back the grant because
you didn't have to right you could have just it felt wrong i felt like uh you know and we we spent
money while we were there we were there for a bunch of months but we gave back the total dollar
value the entire of the entire fucking grant um and so we actually lost the funniest thing is
i get called out that's actually funny i haven't put the pieces together in that way but you know
i get called out for being a grifter and uh for money uh being money hungry for all these chains
but we lost money on polygon uh because we paid them back but we spent money at that time for a
lot of different things while we were there um but no it's just like it's just the right thing to do
right like it's not even like a virtue single thing it's just like it'd be fucked up if i saw
another team that like got a grant from an ecosystem and then left the ecosystem but kept
the grant it's just it's just not right and i would judge someone else if they did it so
how could we do that that was the basic logic there
would you ever take another grant from another chain to do any i told you the new meta is it's
not the founder or the team that gets the grant it's the community that gets the grant it's the
nft holders that get the grant it's the same token allocation from the ecosystem but instead
of going through a team they're going to start giving to the community and i think yeah our
community is going to get a lot of a lot of those grants yes okay speaking of grants and allocations
i got to talk about bitcoin t gods i look i have no information that that anybody else doesn't have
but i'm assuming you're going to go get a bunch of these like runes are popping off and i think
if people think that that erc 20s or sp or anything on any other chain is even comparable
to the amount of liquidity that's going to go into these runes then people are sadly mistaken it's
going to be billions of dollars it's actually fucking ridiculous and it's something that people
should be paying attention to we saw an inkling of it with brc 20s and runes are just going to be
that on another level how are you thinking about bitcoin d gods are you sourcing rewards for them
like what do you think i mean you're preaching to the fucking gospel right now man i got the
orange background i think it's the most slept on uh narrative today uh for sure like it's
bit ordinals are gonna go fucking crazy and there's only 535 bitcoin d gods is all i can say
there's only 535 man there's only 45 listed dude i don't know it's uh it's simple to me but uh
yeah i mean it is cool for me because it's my chance to operate a really small collection
and as like an operator this is the fun challenge of okay 10k 15k that's a whole fucking game
clearly like we see it we've seen it a million times operating a 500 fucking supply collection
on bitcoin is is uh the most exciting challenge to me right now um across like all the different
things i think the token stye dust is also really fun too um and the pfp stuff like the gods and
youths i think we just need to do i think we know what we need to do very very clearly to be honest
and it's just now i'm in i'm ready and every day since has been pretty electric so plan to just
keep it going so i said day to day uh but yeah i think it's like man there's 40 fucking listed
and uh the the floor is very thin so it's just fun like it's a small group of guys we have a
telegram chat we're working on the bitcoin like token gating uh for that telegram chat but i think
we're gonna cook for sure in the fucking are you kidding me bro because as i mentioned earlier
it's just easier to allocate like if you allocate to another community and they have like 2000 3000
which is i think it's like we're bitcoin you guys 500 supply there's a bunch of like sub 10k
collections that have less of a presence but are there that are like smaller supply but after that
it's really like 2000 3000 um and then you know orange eyes with omb they're about to be like a
6000 supply so i very much look forward to the fact that it is uh yeah bitcoin you guys went up
like fucking 2x in the last week already so yeah i don't know it's it's fun i think bitcoin people
are very much sleeping on and and just like try it out i mean yeah but i just try it out dude i
don't know what to say outside of that it's fucking exciting was the bitcoin d gods mint
a factor in the guys returning the polygon money because you did make a lot of money on that mint
like it the company made a lot of money and you didn't need the the grant from polygon at that
point hundred percent i mean i'm not like retarded on business you know what i mean like uh like if
we if we get a big windfall as a company it gives you better it gives you more options and at that
moment it was very clear like okay if we have maximum freedom here in this situation um and
we're not booking this revenue from polygon for the rest of the year we're going to be fine
and for that reason it made the decision a lot easier 100 yeah
how do you i mean okay look this is something that i think a lot of people are thinking
um and again it goes back to the focus question you have bitcoin d gods you've used you have regular
d gods you have irel events that you honestly need to throw because i've always thought that's
probably one of your strongest strengths and the way that you approach that as well
you have dust slash dust now you have your own personal identity as frank d gods and and what
that means for the project as a quote unquote creator influencer founder builder whatever it
is which i think is a big aspect of this too how are you and the team is smaller than ever
right like the kevin is gone um and nothing but respect for kevin but you know he's not there
anymore a lot of the team is not there anymore how do you expect to satisfy this many different
communities that have different needs and want different things i mean how do you even begin to
approach that dude i'm you cut out at like uh midway through in my back hello tusses you're
good uh it's probably just my internet look the point i'm trying to make is there's multiple
communities there's bitcoin d gods you it's d gods dust irel events all these different
things that you guys would do merge a pair all these different things you're working on
how do you expect or how do you expect people to believe that you can focus on delivering for
every single one of these ecosystems honestly i don't expect people to believe it i don't think
people at this point are listening to what i'm saying and like going to blur and fucking buying
you know 10 15 whatever i've just been watching you know how this has played out for the last year
um and not being in the driver's seat i think it was very clear to me sometimes what issues were
coming up and why things ended up the way they did that it wasn't just like the immediate thing
for me to go fix or or go do and so i think what you're asking is how do we make it very
how do we how do we like sustain a narrative for all these different things and to me it's really
like when one thing does well in our ecosystem how do you have more interoperability within
our ecosystem so you're gonna see this kind of become bigger this year about p2p swaps
doing more things with dust that are integrated with all of our different communities and making
it easier for people to trade within you know our ecosystem kind of solves a lot of that because if
stakeholders hold a lot of youths and a lot a big chunk of the youth community also holds d gods
and so to me it's like if one thing in the this is how it actually works like mathematically in
the world like if one thing does well you know it's going to drive more liquidity to the other
things and so the game to me this year is how do i just do something very exciting for d gods then
go to youths but do it on a much tighter time horizon uh than than we did last year and this
is where people i don't see why they would believe me but i think let's just watch like how fast we
go this year um let's just see what happens that because that's my thing is right now people are
going to wait until something really big happens you know for d gods are used to really start
buying or following in or whatever but uh that like in my mind i always see that as imminent like
how do we just make that happen you know as soon as possible how do we start kicking up fomo as
soon as possible so yeah i made my little post yesterday uh today i'm hyped um starting to give
out dust bounties for people to write quality threads i think that's going to attract you know
more people to want to work with us on this airdrop stuff and then i think um you know tomorrow is
going to be something exciting and the day after that and the day after that so that's how i'm
running this and if you're paying attention or you're going to watch you know where it goes my
goal is really the day to day and when you focus on the day to day like the results start to compound
so people get bored if there's only d gods talk for a month and then it's supposed to be the youth
thing you know but i don't feel like that like today bitcoin d gods are still fucking going up
um people are excited about different things within our ecosystem at any given point so i
don't know it's a lot of the same people too okay so you i don't know i don't know how else to ask
this but just to ask this you've had many people within the team that i feel have that have left
right i mean like obviously um some of the co-founders um johnny slash delilah that's something
i want to talk about as well um i know that you try to you know keep them out of the public eye
and you've you made your point on that many times and i actually agree but for people looking from
the outside in they can basically look and see okay look there's frank there's his team but the
the co-founders are leaving the ceo is out people are not staying that is a red flag what would you
say to that i think it is a red flag sir i mean i think that we did have a lot of issues internally
that led to a lot of this stuff happened so um again i look at it like there's a reason why we're
at where we're at today now you can kind of dunk on me or you could think well maybe this turns
around or not um but i think we're fucking early and so yeah i mean johnny kevin um and a few other
guys too fin first of all like johnny um fin like some of these guys they didn't necessarily like
love this or want to do this that much when we first started they were just in the room and we
were just working on stuff together all the time like we were literally neighbors hanging out in my
apartment hacking away just doing stuff all the time we made like an econ business together like
we were just trying stuff and and then we landed on you know having this idea for fucking degots
and degots just took off like so crazy that of course if you're working on something with your
friends you're all 20 something's you're gonna go like walk in and figure out you know that
how to make the thing that took off get better and better um but late stage into it you know johnny's
like actually like a fucking rock star now he's like blowing up on tick tock fin's got his thing
with bags app so i'm really hyped about that i'm sure kevin's gonna go do something really awesome
so i just get hyped about the alumni like we had a good run they wanted to go do something else and
i respect that i mean that's those are my boys at the end of the day um so i just i respect them
and i'm really fucking happy for them but you know this just wasn't for them um in the long term
and that's fine uh it just happens it happens especially when you're it's not like all of us
were in crypto at the same degree or like deep into web 3 when this thing started um and so yeah
people revert back to the mean but uh i'm hyped to see the alumni network you know it's just like
yeah johnny's crushing it on fucking tick tock i'm happy for him fin's crushing it with fin with bag
bag zap um i'm sure kevin's gonna do something cool too i was actually scrolling through um
i think it was actually on instagram instagram reels and and john and i don't need it wasn't
even following johnny and he just popped up with his song and uh he's going kind of crazy
it's kind of nuts it's i always say like dude i'm just grateful that johnny drew that fucking d god
man the first one like uh yeah it was just a view it's like one of those court what's that
inside out the vixar movie like core memories he's on the couch draws his thing and we're looking
at him we're like holy fuck like there's this is i don't know what but this is fucking beautiful
um and yeah dude he's he's paid his dues time and time again and season three which is a really
tough endeavor for everyone so i get it you know people leaving and i'm hyped to see fin doing what
he's doing too okay i want to get back to season three here um d goddesses i know what happened
dude they're fucking happening bro but i just need to find the right artist we've been trying
dude i'm looking i've been on the sleuth i've been on i've been sleuthing for this but it's
it's a no-brainer honestly just watch bro people are gonna fucking buy d gods uh when d goddesses
drop just because the way i'm doing it now it's just gonna be like verified girls now how are we
gonna everyone wants to ask what if i'm a girl am i gonna it's just like bro it's gonna be by
the fucking frank system you know like we there's back in the community who i'm really tight with
there's a few people in the community i'm tight with they're girls you know i know it sounds crazy
there are girls that are in d gods and just on some like web 2 trust shit if someone is a
verified girl we'll get our we're looking for the right person right now we'll get that artist and
they're just going to make a one-on-one version of that that girl um as a d goddess and then from
there you know it's like it's not going to be on chain it's not going to be like on the nft or
whatever but uh we might mint like a soul bound or something like that uh or something that's
attached i don't really know how we're gonna do that that part's easy that that that's table six
but right now it's just finding the right artists but uh it should be fun then there's gonna be
like a queue um it's gonna be lit dude i don't know i'm ready i'm ready and and by extension um
so i was i was hosting a space the night that that season three dropped and i don't think i've
you know in the in the history of me covering d gods news or d labs news and i feel like we've
kind of and obviously thanks to you like we've been at the forefront of like every announcement
and things like that and it's been a huge part of my career as well um when season three dropped
i was so fucking excited that night threaded guy and i we had taken a week for a week we basically
went to what was the name of it it was like some lake town in l.a up in a mountain i can't remember
the name and threat and i were like fuck it we're going to this this house in the middle of nowhere
and we're gonna lock in for a week and cook and work on things internally whatever it might be
and that night um season three was launching and you know shit happens like announcements don't
always go as planned so on and so forth that i'm not really like that's not that part's not as
interesting to me what is interesting to me is the the way that you guys reacted to it and i
remember that johnny had released a video basically defending the art saying look this is why we did
this so on and so forth and i and i have nothing but love for john like you know we did that space
together that one-on-one like over a year and a half ago whenever like he is an immaculate he's
just an immaculate talent and unbelievably nice person but i felt that that video was so out of
touch and just completely just missed the mark and did not it just felt weird i don't know how
to explain it um i want to understand the thought process there did you guys get together and make
that video did you talk to him about it did he just put it out on his own what happened
man um dude this one i kind of don't really want to answer like i fucking love johnny and he's like
not in the company anymore um yeah it was that like what i can say is it was just that was
that video drove like one of the biggest fights to me johnny had ever had in our entire fucking
lives oh um and yeah dude i don't know is that that i feel like it's i don't know i don't want
to like have the fucking record of that uh because he's not in this thing anymore so it's fine um
but yeah i mean summary there intense conversation for sure around the video around all the reactions
around it all this stuff so yeah okay i can respect that um but furthermore to the reactions
i said this and it's on that recorded space i said the original like when the art dropped
with the muted backgrounds it was gray it was dark it was it felt to me i was like all right
this feels cool like it feels cool and it feels like a like an addition to dead gods that make
sense like it's not so far disconnected from what dead gods already were it felt like it was within
the same vein but different in a good way and i said that i said it that night and
to be fair and it's all recorded many people on my stage not everybody on the stage was like this
art fucking rules this is amazing whatever whatever and then over the next few hours it
just sort of unraveled where the timeline exploded and said this isn't what we want we don't like
this so on and so forth and obviously the video was a response to that as well as some tweets
from you guys whatever it might whatever might have been and then you inevitably ended up rolling
out what is now the season three art which i personally and i've said this to you in person
and on spaces before i just like don't think it's even close to as good as what the what the other
art was um even if it was just like simple background changes and a couple traits that
were different here and there those differences to me felt like enough to make this like it didn't
feel premium it didn't feel like when i when a product drops from frank and the team i expect
and have usually been satisfied like a very high quality of design i think what you guys are one of
the best if not in the best in the space act is design like great websites great like it just
design has always been a strong point for you for you guys and then like the new art with the new
backgrounds and all this i just like it wasn't it i want to understand why you did that was it because
you genuinely thought that this new art that you released would be better and would be received
better or were you just folding to what the community wanted and if that is the case i feel
like that's something you'll never do again like you talked about earlier in the space where like
trying to do what the community wants and satisfy them in relation to bridging over from eth or from
soul to eth and i i just don't believe that the community not your community but just in general
i don't believe that communities know what's best for them i believe they think they know what's
best for them but in order to and i gotta give credit to naveen for this term to surprise and
delight people which is what they want you cannot be surprised to be surprised you must not know
something exists you can't know about it to be surprised it's not how surprises work right yeah
so what do you like what do you think just about that whole sometimes i open up a little on the
more personal side because i know a lot of people listening to this like can roll okay might be able
to relate to this but for me it was uh it just felt like the it just felt like the end of a
fucking era you know the whole like last week of uh the right leading up to season three and when
we announced the date and we dropped it where it it was kind of like a very it was an enigmatic
or emblematic of this kind of insecurity that i was trying to overcome of like just hey whatever
the community kind of thinks um is probably right and so the fact they had that reaction to it
we just kind of panicked you know a little bit and and we just like try to fix it um but in
reality you know we were fucked a much longer time before uh that day and when that thing dropped
and so i actually like the idea of like branding it in this kind of gray scale i still think as
fresh as fuck i do and that's like what i like um but i don't think that the art was had the effort
or the quality that people uh expected and it didn't matter that we changed the color palette
it was actually like the entire kind of rollout with the concept and the way that we did everything
that that lost us the most uh die-hard fans you know up until that point because i'm going deeper
than what you what you were talking about leap but hopefully i mean for people that don't know
all the specific details i'll just like keep it relatively high level here you know up until that
point i don't think we i think we only gained die-hard supporters we only gained true fans
because we just kept making things that were better and better um and so when i looked at that
uh that that whole situation i don't think i would have i don't think i will ever like panic
again in the way that i did in that moment uh but i just don't think we should ever put ourselves
in that spot um again and so yeah for me i really do fuck with yeah the gray scale stuff like that
whole vibe uh but i look at season three as hopefully you know knock on wood here the last
time we make the mistakes that we made um in that situation and so i'm actually pretty calm
about it i i get why we made the decision that we did but it was just really stupid it was kind of
burnout type like at the end of a fucking run like you're just a little stupid at that point
and it was just a lot of those decisions that added up and then when the impact happened it
was uh it was just really like fuck like none of us have the energy to to really like uh fix
everything here it's just too much baggage so these last four or five months i think people
look at it like uh you know people look at it like it was just fucking okay it died and then
we just kept getting worse and worse but uh no i think that was still to this day you know a big
kind of painful lesson and had a lot of impact and i don't know i just don't want to make those
mistakes again and like pain is the best teacher but yeah it just sucked and we just made a lot
of bad decisions and if i could go back we wouldn't have fucking launched it and uh that's
i don't know i'm just being fucking real like that's just the truth like i just wish we didn't
launch it and we didn't get to that spot where we felt like we needed to um because we were making
things out of anxiety and stress where i keep urging the team this year more than anything
of like that is actually how we keep that's how we stay losers if we if we just keep like having
this anxious mindset we're gonna get fucked and kind of fall into what everyone expects
but i'm actually getting more creative i'm having more fun it's been more fun and we're actually
getting results from doing that and if you can start winning again but your team and your
organization is having a great time doing that um that is like the virtuous cycle that you got you
you have to have the discipline to create uh otherwise we really have no shot um and that's
kind of the message you know across the board both of the team and ideally the community too
is the more that we can have fun is the more we don't get anxious and then it doesn't lead to
fucking retarded decisions like we made leading up to and during season three and when you're in
your bag is when you are having the most fun i was even talking to to thread guy about this
recently in regards to our spaces where um you know like when we're not having fun we're just
not doing a good job and that comes over really evident to the community what was like in that
moment and that's what i would tell you know this is me being real as fuck right now leave
this just you know it's 9 39 pm but when i see this stuff like the moonberg situation and kind
of some of these teams that are struck i have a lot of empathy you know there's something i don't
tweet about as much because it's not my hill to die on but i think there's a lot of really hard
working people in the space that don't yeah people don't realize how tough it might be sometimes so
for me i look at like the proof stuff and i wish i could just tell them hey guys i think if you
guys have fun and stressed less in a weird way even though everybody on fucking planet earth is
telling you to stress and you made things that you genuinely thought were cool and creative
you would see such so many better results and it killed me last year leap more than anything they
felt like the organization got to a place where things just weren't fun anymore because it was
fucking cartoon jpegs at the end of the day and the way that you fall under the mindset of like
just taking L's over and over again we see this pattern in a lot of teams is you just start to
give into the anxiety too much and and i love kevin to a degree man but it's the anxiety that
was created in this fucking organization that made us really risk averse and we literally are
only popular because of the crazy risks that we've taken um and so it was just a very big
it was just i mean you know man it was two fucking companies for a year and that doesn't
get shown all the time um and what that looked like behind the scenes but i think i'm in a really
good spot right now i think a lot of the guys are too and um i don't know i just don't expect the
space to change anything you know leap like we're doing this and i'm hyped for the people that are
listening but uh we just need to go make things that are really incredible that everybody talks
about and if we do that in a creative way and just really get creative and have fun with it
i think we'll attract magnetically a lot of people to this community and i'm just giving my
playbook as clean as as simple as it is um so that's what i look forward to doing um and i
hope people listening to this you don't need to go buy in today but i hope you're just paying
attention um yeah and we want to just like yeah make things that push the space and are fun and
cool to be a part of so i actually disagree with your last point which is this space doesn't change
anything i actually think it changes everything and i'm not going to say too much about too much
but i have tried to have one-on-one conversations with other founders i'm not going to say which
ones but the biggest ones some of the biggest ones and they refuse to have a space in which
the questions are are not curated and vetted before time in a way and also requesting that
i don't ask questions on the whim now you and i we talked before the space and i said look
these are kind of the things that we're going to be talking about but 98 of what i've asked you
tonight i mean did not plan it's just completely like off the helm it's just random stuff and i
think that's where the best conversations start um and you know i told you that i'm gonna ask tough
questions and i feel like i have asked tough questions so i want to so one i want to say
thank you for that because i know some of these were not easy and i appreciate you being honest
in front of near a thousand people um which is yeah i mean which is awesome um now moving forward
you you brought up moonbirds um and by extension i want to ask your opinion on on the acquisition
with yuga i know this is a little bit different than than just strictly about d gods but i am
interested in your take this yuga acquisition do you just flat out what do you think about it like
and obviously daniel was removed as ceo and someone else is stepping in so on and so forth
i mean like what's your take on that entire situation and can you relate with it at all
my honest take man i'm saying a lot of things i don't know if i should say but you you your silky
voice uh leap always gets me but my honest take here i think beanie had the best breakdown of the
situation i don't know if you i don't know if you read that but uh they're in a very very tricky
spot matt and i'm i'm getting to the point where i'm looking forward to when yuga becomes underdogs
genuinely uh because i think sorry uh someone's calling me i think that when yuga has when yuga
is an underdog it's going to be really fun for everyone to be involved and i think there are
really cool people that both work there and in the fucking lore and the story behind it but i think
they're in a very tough spot with this other side stuff that uh it's really hard um you know i don't
know i think a lot of the critical takes are accurate right now but i'm not uh i'm not rooting
for them to go down i think this industry is better when yuga is an underdog and really trying to
blow you know our minds and expand the space again but i think that that's not the mindset
of the org right now and who the fuck am i right i'm just a guy that's just my take on it um
i might be totally off but that's that's where i see it do you still have that dog in you
all right i'm gonna take that i'm gonna take that as a yes um
i'm trying to see oh i i didn't want to ask you this this one last thing
d gods were meant to be the ultimate club and utus well obviously people are drinking out of shoes
everybody's high i mean the amount of shoe i feel like you guys have propagated shoies more than
maybe anything else in the world um i'll probably get some hate for saying that but anyway you guys
were drinking out of shoes all the time so many shoes were destroyed and there was like a real
sense of like brotherhood in the sense of the people that were part of the community that
really just fucked with each other on a deep deep level and a lot of those og's have left
how do you i mean like how do you even begin i know you probably don't have like a specific
answer for this but like one how does that upset you how do you get back to that point
because it feels so distant from where we are now um
what you're asking me right now is probably the thing i'm most passionate about um on the fucking
planet earth is uh it's the community uh and i know that sounds so fucking uh just pussy you
know sometimes to say but it's so real like i building a community where people are individuals
they're thinking for themselves you're getting exposed to all kinds of different opinions all
the time the conversations are interesting um this is something that i like love and this is
my favorite part about the internet in general um and i think when i think about d gods what was
like the vibe for it it's like a smart frat to a degree at its best but uh that's like bear that
on the internet is just way cooler to me um and i think that's just a certain demo that's a certain
audience and demographic but i'm not trying to pretend to be anything that we're not you know
and and so it was really fun and i think the best version of it is just intellectually stimulating
it's fun you fuck around people are getting people are drinking shoes people are like building fucking
businesses and creating you know projects and all kinds of stuff all around the ecosystem
and uh at the same time and so yeah i don't know i find it to be like a beautiful kind of chaos
at its best uh but it's really valuable you know people really start to love it myself included
um and that's what i think is fun so that's all i'm trying to focus on that's the number one thing
on the fucking planet earth to me right now leave i'm in the discord like hours every day we're
organizing it it's like daily discussions we're talking about interesting things like this is my
dream and i think that's actually worth sometimes the purchase of an nft is if you're gonna get alpha
get into vc deals get into really really cool kind of opportunities go start something
pretty like a hacker house go make stuff with other people in there um this is like liquid
fucking gold to me i think everyone on the planet or at least a lot of people on the planet are
gonna want that experience and i don't think there's a lot of places outside of web 3 you
can find it these days um and so yeah i don't know like that's at a very very high level kind of more
philosophical on the community building side and these people but that's that's what i love um
that's what i'm excited to be working on right now bro what do you know about philosophical um
so okay let me let me say this i i will always stand by that i believe outside of making money
which look we all want to make money i want to make as much money everybody wants to make money
and i don't think people should be ashamed of that but outside of that
i think like you used to call it the friendship company i don't know if you still refer to it
to it as that i actually think that that was like one of the greatest aspects of of the project
and um you know part of that was the irel events and i still to this day feel that look break
point this year was amazing but i they're just different they actually think that was the best
conference i've ever been to um but they're very different than than what i'm going to talk about
last year was i mean dude that shit was immaculate now it wasn't perfect um there were things that
could have been organizationally whatever there are things that could have been done better
but i think for the most part it was one of the best examples maybe outside of the original or
the second eight fest that ever happened um at new york 2022 which was also really good um
but dean new york was so i mean i felt like it was genius right like you were able to arbitrage
the hotel rooms in which holders could all like it was multiple benefits the company made money
the hotels had floors booked and you put all the holders in one spot which is my biggest frustration
with conferences is when people are spread out and i have to take a 40 uber every time i want to
go see somebody you would just walk into that hotel there's holders all over the place everybody's
chatting having coffee having drinks whatever all day every day and it was back-to-back events
the the scavenger hunt was in i thought that was one of the one of the coolest things that you guys
had done was that scavenger hunt and i know not everybody was happy with it but it's really hard
to satisfy everybody with that sort of thing um but i think you guys are just a a class s tier
at throwing irel events but since dean new york i haven't felt that there was um like what you
guys did at art basel i thought was really cool but it didn't feel the same now going forward
are irel events going to be a big focus of this um and like how do you get back to that
point that vibe that dean new york was of course i i think um we have a small team and there's
limited bandwidth and i think last year and we have a lot of internal debates about this but
sometimes you just lose the battle win the war and the way i see it is uh right now going forward
it's not going to be the easiest thing for us to spin up something at the scale of uh dean new york
right now that being said like we're going to ramp ourselves back up so i think in new york we're
going to do like a smaller type of event like i think i tweeted me and erin we're kind of debating
about it on the timeline but probably just a fucking hangout in a park you know on a day
maybe we get pretty fucked up but like no not a loud club or anything like that um or like a big
big party um because i think there's gonna be a lot of cool ones there it's yeah maybe one day
we'll do some of the bigger events this year but i think this year we're taking a very different
strategy we want to have like poker nights at some of these events we want to keep doing
basketball and kind of offer these activity specific um type of events it's just a different
vibe um dean new york was cool it was fresh but let's like innovate again you know let's like do
only activate activation type events at uh these these uh different conferences because that's
just different and i'm focused really on like making sure everything we're doing is is differentiated
and rizzy in our own way um and so for events there's enough parties honestly like there's
enough crazy parties there's not enough like really wholesome fucking awesome experiences like
poker night um basketball golf all kinds of different things like that and so that's what
i'm focused on on the event side and erin is uh a key key key part of everything that makes that
happen erin do you guys i know shout out to erin i mean that deal the start of them was like i'm
finding my voice is all like this it's uh i'm yeah i'm uh it's been a whole day of talking
and uh i'm like dying out all over right now well we're um we're about 20 percent the way
through the space so we got a couple hours left now i want to i brought up pasta um as we're kind
of winding down here and i you know you mentioned you wanted to bring him up earlier and i think he
deserves you know all the credit in the world yo and and pasta that last video that you that you
put out was so fucking good and um yeah it's just been amazing to see you grow um over the past few
years i wanted to just like give you your moment and ask everybody in the room to uh to actually
follow and if you wanted to say a couple words you know feel free yeah i mean thank you leap
uh yeah it's kind of crazy because i was just talking to tally about this today because i
like wasn't really deep in the space and then like december 2022 i started like listening to
your spaces and i was like listening to thread and k money played a big part about in that and
like frank and i kind of got back into things and i was kind of like gonna leave the space
at that time that's when i bought my like youth in january and then like i mean do you know
de new york was obviously like massive for me i don't think i don't think frank even knows this
but like i i like borrowed like 1500 for my dad just to pay for the hotel and the flights just
so i'd go out there and just film and make like a vlog for every single day of the fucking thing
and like sleep like six hours with og over like three fucking days um and then like get back and
continue to grind for like three months like at least until like i started like working with the
team and stuff so yeah i mean it's been it's been crazy but yeah well the way paulson started
working with us is uh i remember calling him probably really late at night one night and
just saying dude just come out to fucking la let's just record a video and uh he booked his
ass out there and in that time you know we brought him out to start making videos but
he really started to just become a valuable person on strategy on production on a lot of
different parts of uh of the business and i have like a really high bar for this so i was like
blown away how fast paulson just keeps getting better and better so i have a joke uh but it's
not even a joke at this point it's like pasta is on his goat arc right now um and really really
happy like one of the best additions to our team and he just puts in the extra hours and i think
you guys are going to see a lot more of them this year so i'm looking forward to that yeah paulson
i didn't even know that that you have to like borrow money i mean what a bet what about on
yourself and uh on the ecosystem so shout out to you and if everybody in the room could could give
follow because he one of the hardest working committed people that i've met and uh in my web
three journey um and okay frank i think we're coming to the end of this we're almost you know
almost three hours in any final words anything you want to leave the room with anybody you want to
bring up so on and so forth and and by the way for the people in the room if you have any final
questions this is your opportunity to ask them so click that pinned tweet um at the top or the
button in the bottom right hand corner and ask your questions there frank please oh and make sure
you follow the host uh leap and uh me my name my handle is frank d god we're on that comeback arc
um i'll take every follower i can get um no i think the only request that i have for everyone
that listened today is i would just appreciate your attention and if you pay attention and uh
let us just make things that are cool and if you like them i would love for you to join the community
and if not no worries uh we're gonna keep getting better and better love it and uh frank just want
to say thank you um thank you lee man um i got very excited when you texted me and i was looking
forward to doing this for a while and i'm really fucking proud of you man you're fucking it's super
set you thread the whole game um yeah it's awesome it's been a minute so we got got to do one of these
so yeah it's like an annual thing at this point and uh the first one that we ever did together
was uh i mean that was probably the biggest moment for my career it was the biggest space
i'd hosted up up until then and um that night i went from like i think 5 000 followers to over 10
000 that one night um it was and everything changed after that and um i know you don't like
me giving you way too much props but i will say frank came into to our space the night we were
hosting and i think we had like 150 people or maybe 200 whatever it is and that was the night
that the whole royalties thing happened and you came up and you're like i want to do this one-on-one
i'm like bet i'll close the space you go start up yours and i'll come co-host it and you sat in
front of everybody no i want i want it on your space because i want you to get the credit that
you deserve and that was to this day one of the again one of the most important moments um
that i had experienced uh just in crypto in my life in general so i want to say thank you for
that too and to everybody who tuned in tonight um thousands of people showed up to this room and
and that means the world to us and and thank you guys so much frank thank you as well
and uh please follow frank and whatever the hell um and that's it i love you guys i appreciate
you guys we actually have um a massive guest for tomorrow's space kit boga uh the legend from
youtube uh millions of subscribers if you guys know kit boga he i'm going to be doing a one-on-one
interview with him tomorrow as well and i'm really really really excited about that if you
don't know him go check him out he's he's incredible he's the guy who he wears the sunglasses and he
like does all the things where he like scams the scammers and that sort of thing so really excited
for that space so tune in tomorrow night frank i appreciate you and uh we'll leave it there i love