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Unhinged & Euphoric: The Art of Lore w/ Defi Dave
Recorded: April 30, 2025 Duration: 1:02:48Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion on the Unhinged and Euphoric podcast, crypto enthusiasts explored the evolving trends in the blockchain space, emphasizing the importance of community, authenticity, and narrative in driving growth. Key topics included the significance of partnerships, the impact of historical documentation, and the need for genuine engagement in building lasting lore.
Full Transcription
Thank you. All right, welcome, welcome, everybody.
We'll give it just a sec to let some people join the space and then we'll go ahead and
get started.
All right, Doug, let's go ahead and bring up Nathan and Dave.
And we'll do just a quick check of everybody's audio.
Hey, Dave, how's it going?
GM, GM, how's it going, Nathan, Casey?
Yeah, we'll go to my end.
Sorry, I just switched over. I think I was having some audio issues.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, great.
All right, awesome.
Well, yeah, thanks everybody for joining.
We'll give it just a sec to let some more people join in.
But yeah, this is going to be a fun one today.
We wanted to welcome everybody back to Unhinged and Euphoric, or welcome if it's your first time here.
And for those of you that haven't been here, Unhinged and Euphoric is a podcast-style space that's hosted by us, the Euphoria team. And we explore just a lot of the things that we're
working on and seeing and thinking about. So last time I said, this is just us making our
thought experiments public. And oftentimes we bring on interesting people. We're talking about
topics that are hot on either Twitter or just things that we're thinking about that are happening in the world.
So, I mean, one of those people today really needs no introduction.
But I am joined today by my co-founder of Euphoria, Nathan, and a fellow that I think a lot of you might know, who is somebody who enjoys stable coins and cherry blossoms and smoking cigs inside.
And we're going to talk about war today with this man. And so, DeFiD, we're happy to have
you here. Welcome, my friend.
Thank you so much, Casey. It's an honor to be here. I love the name Unhinged and Euphoric.
I'm such a sucker for puns. And like the fact that the name's Unhinged for Euphoric just
makes me giggle a little bit.
That's good.
That's good.
That's the purpose of this thing, right?
We need to get a little unhinged and euphoric.
Yeah.
No, we need a little bit more of that.
We need like a little bit more fun.
This is like a small example of like what I mean in lore building,
just like these like small things and these small memes that like,
it could be as like small as like a like a little joke or inside joke or meme or as like big as like
like a thought piece that everyone's thinking about do you feel sad dave at some of the law
that gets lost with time to provide a little color on that i feel like sometimes your life is divided into eras where
you're part of a lot of law that happens for one particular era and then it kind of like
disappears and there's like very few people that that reminisce or know about it and you often look
back at your life and you feel like there are all these moments that were very meaningful in the
moment you were like part of you were part of like some great law that was being built,
but like ultimately it kind of gets lost in time.
I think we might have lost Dave's sound.
It doesn't look like he's muted,
but Dave, if you can hear us, we can't hear you. I'll jump in while we fix Dave's audio. Yeah, Nathan, like, you know, one of the
things that I found really cool recently was that we, there's a friend here in the city that went to a recent mega mafia meetup.
And he said, OK, great.
Thanks, Mac.
Yeah, just quickly.
He said that the current state of the mega mafia reminds him, like it's very reminiscent of all of the consensus lore, like the Bogart Street house that was over in Bushwick area.
And the people around during that time
just know it as like this scrappy scene
that turned into like ConsenSys,
this massive company in crypto.
For anybody who doesn't know ConsenSys
that might be here,
they're, you know, the company that founded MetaMask
and a lot of really important things in crypto.
And so I think that that's a lore
that maybe not a lot of people know
about that time and that place.
And it's something that if you were a part of it,
it was really special and I wasn't, so i'm not going to claim that i was
um but yeah it's like those are things that i think it's it's odd that certain people can look
back and kind of relate to what was happening then and that feeling that you got but um i think the
new generation of people just like don't understand where that stuff comes from so that would be my take on that can you guys hear me now yeah i can hear you now okay sorry technical difficulties
yeah i think if there's something that crypto can do better uh it's definitely recording its history
and important moments things just get lost so easily whether it's like you know something i'm
like on the timeline or like what you're saying about consensus, because like a lot of stuff has come out of consensus, like not just, you know, the products,
but really like the people and like what they went on to build after like consensus literally
brought hundreds of people to Brooklyn and Bushwick and the surrounding areas and really
set the stage for New York to become the crypto hub that it is, unseating SF.
And so, but like a lot of that is, is lost. And I think ways to kind of remind people of that.
And so like give credit and credence to like where we came from is like new lures. And in
like one way, ETH Bushwick has done that with consensus, like literally, like, like you said,
like it was by the bogart house and everything
and like in a way i think that each bushwick like part of its lore and part of like the historical
context in which it comes from is from consensus and everything that happened there
dave for anybody who might not be familiar can you shed a little bit of light on each bushwick
and the lore surrounding it and why it's why it's funny and why it's like this inside joke that, you know, if you get it, you get it?
And like what the riff is and all of that.
Yeah, honestly, like a lot of things influenced my lore building article, but a big part of it has been my experience in Eith Bushwick and the microcosm that it is and and how it relates to
like larger things at play um eith bushwick really just started as a meme as a joke between
me and my friend uh he was just saying eith bushwick when we were in brussels and i thought
it was funny and every time i tweeted out eith bushwick um it always got a big response and
engagement i'm like huh there's like something here uh and then
like a few weeks later he just got the username meet Bushwick and I'm just like give me the
password right now and we started shitposting and it just really gained traction that's like
another thing with like lore building like in what lore builders do is that they listen and
they like kind of like see how people react to certain things so it's kind of like a constant a b testing and after like seeing this like how how well it was received by the audience and the rest of ct
and the community i'm just like okay like let's like actually turn this into something and like
you know ended up like we were going to plan a conference but what ended up happening was uh
we ended up just like throwing a bunch of events in bushwick uh in october it's funny and when i started bushwick i wasn't living in new york either i mean i used to i lived in new
york in the past and my friend he lived in new york but i actually like went to new york in
october to like actually throw all these events we started a group chat uh to this day the group
chat is just like full of sound bites and inside jokes and like it's just a silly little group chat
but like the thing with bushwick is like i i'm i feel like more of a steward of it than anything like i didn't create
six inside i didn't create like the inside jokes around i didn't create terrence or soho grand
but they all kind of just like came up organically from the community and just kind of
just ran with it oh shit did i no no i can hear you
just ran with it oh shit did i no no i can hear you
well we heard the oh shit and then we lost you yeah we lost him after the oh shit
yeah i think that um one thing that i would like to have dave double click on is i think that like
in the article one of the things that he referenced was cultivating a living narrative rather than just like trying to tell
a story and i think that eth bushwick is a good example of cultivating a living narrative rather
than just telling a story once and i think it's a good example of like something that actually makes
lore and it makes like again this living narrative rather than something that's static
i'm also interested in the earliest law in crypto that
you've been part of I was gonna ask Dave that but maybe that's a question for you as well Casey
can you guys hear me now sorry I keep on getting I keep on getting rugged I heard you you said oh
and then you cut off so I think everything was fine up until that point oh okay now I'm back sorry
about that no No problem.
Yeah, I was going to ask about some of the earliest lore that you can recall from crypto,
like the earliest lore that you've been involved in.
I wouldn't say that I've been involved in, but I think with Bitcoin,
like things like the HODL meme, that's like a very early piece of lore,
how that came about.
Like some dude was just drunk and he posted like a long rant, and he misspelled hold to hold on became a rallying cry uh bitcoin pizza day
that's a canon event that became more and that actually became now it's literally holiday um
so that like those were things that preceded me and i think like i think probably like the biggest
floor i feel like i've been a part of was defy summer and like all everything that happened there during those few months um
it kind of felt like i mean i was talking about this the other day with someone it was like the
first time it was there was a cambian explosion of on-chain activity like yes on-chain activity
existed before but it was like the first time like you felt this like palpable energy of, you know, everyone was like, kind of like bending together.
Like, oh, like what farm are we going to go to?
Or like, oh, like which experiment are we going to like, like play with it?
It was a really exciting time.
So I felt like being a part of like all those different events during DeFi Summit where
there was like first yield farming or like, yeah, trying to save yams or like wi-fi or like
the whole like sushi swap debacle like there's so many like or like getting the uni stimming like
there were so many different canon events that really bonded people together and that's like
another part of lore building it's like things that like bond people together and uh and like
the more events that happen like the more people like feel connected with one another one another
yeah i think the first thing i was commenting uh on the first time you got cut off was Like the more events that happen, like the more people like feel connected with one another.
Yeah, I think the first thing I was commenting on the first time you got cut off was the kind of sadness when the law passes you by.
I think when I first got into crypto, it was around 2011.
And the law building there was happening in two places.
It was on the Bitcoin talk forums and it was on the Silk Road discussion forums.
Like the Silk Road site had a discussion forum and there are a bunch of people there building law like Dread Pirate Roberts Ross Albrecht was posting there there was like a journalist uh Elon Ormsby who ended up writing
a bunch of books Roger Ver was on like there and he was on like the Bitcoin there's like a whole
bunch of characters and a whole bunch of like interesting things ended up happening from all
of these people but now you know obviously the the Silk Road forum doesn't exist anymore.
It got shut down.
Bitcoin talk is just like, it's basically just all like scam, like all scam posts.
There's not like no one serious really posting there anymore.
And all of the people have kind of moved on and don't really talk to each other anymore.
And it feels a bit sad, like when you're part of something.
And then even though the law that you build ends up making it, like it ends up sort of percolating to other things down the road there's kind of a sadness
of being part of something that is lost to time yeah i definitely feel the same way about defy
summer um and like i feel like everyone's always like oh this will be defy summer 3.0 or like
oh this is like the next uniswap moment this this and that. But it's like, it's never actually the same.
And if like, lore does any, lore is not meant to be, good lore is not repeated, good lore
is built upon.
And so like, what, you know, like everything in like the Bitcoin talk and Silk Road talk,
like that served as layers for lores to be built after it.
One of the things I wrote in my lore building article is
Ethereum and its lore building and how it connected itself to Bitcoin. For example,
in the Ethereum Genesis block, it literally has the same thing as Bitcoin's about 2009,
banks on the brink of bailouts. And so yes, it's sad that it gets lost in time and like you know we all feel nostalgic
about it but in a way to keep it alive is to like have it incorporated in new lore so it's kind of
like you know like your genetics being passed down to your children it's kind of like the
lore's memetics being passed down to the next generation yeah i guess you can also be grateful
for being part of part of something historical
yeah it's kind of like that meme like uh or like dr seuss quote like don't be sad that it's over just smile because what happened yeah i feel like sometimes you don't even you don't realize that
you're in the lore until you look back when the lore is gone so like you know those early days of
being in the the forums and defy summer and stuff like that it was just kind of what was happening
and you were a part of it.
And it's like maybe you don't even necessarily realize
that you're a part of this fleeting era until that era is over.
And then you look back on it with the nostalgia
and like this reminiscent feeling of, you know,
own Ford Ponzi's and that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
In my Meb days, it didn't feel very serious at the time.
Early Flashplots days when I was doing trading,
before it kind of blew up in the media, none it felt very serious like no one thought we were part
of law or anything like that just a bunch of people like trading and hanging out in discord
like never in a million years thought that anyone would ever end up caring about that stuff so
yeah you definitely have no idea that you're building law while you're in the middle of it
i think mev war is really cool um from like being from the outside
looking in and seeing like what would pop up on twitter like it sounded like there was like a lot
of uh respect between gladiators in the arena uh seeing it like seeing how they were like
communicate through like like writing in the blocks and like you know being like witty with
like different like giving credit where credits do when someone comes up with like a fancy scheme or like a fancy strategy um i thought like the mev law is like really cool
um and what's i mean what was it how did it mev law compared to being a part of like early bitcoin
law it was weird the mev law was weird in that everyone was very fierce competitors so even
though on some level the
environment and all the group chats was friendly we all wanted to bankrupt each other and we would
we would pretend to be friends we would like do anything we could to get a competitive edge
and so there was like so much hostility that was going on behind the scenes but there was this kind
of like air of friendliness but there were a few pieces of law that were kind of collaborated on i guess everyone knows about the sauna thing there was this there was this
trend where like no one wanted to talk to like many journalists or like other people who were
trying to mine us for information so whenever we were asked like what is the secret to mev anything
along that line the answer everyone would give was like saunas so if you talk to a journalist
you say okay like i'll only talk to you if you agree to like reference saunas in the article it was kind of like a meme that we all had so the saunas and
mev definitely became part of the law but yeah i'd say the difference was just the like the the
hidden hostility between everyone that was trading mev we all respected each other but we were trying
to bankrupt each other at the same time uh yeah like your gladiators in the arena
yeah early bitcoin is more like collaborative right we were all trying to build towards
something like magical and beautiful and create the new economic future whereas mev is like a
very self-interested game yeah do you feel like then that you know kind of like that lore where
like the lore is being created and that like golden age is a lot
was a lot shorter in mev land than it was in bitcoin land yeah it was definitely a lot shorter
because i think the the mev peak period was like not that long it was maybe like one and a half
years where i think the barriers to entry weren't that high and there were a lot of people kind of
coming and going but after that point it really solidified around different trading groups so end up right now there's like maybe 50 or less kind of like trading groups that
dominate everything but it was much more of like a free-for-all for a period of time and there was
also a brief era around like early flash spots days when there was like some sense of like people
might want to figure out a way to collaborate like maybe there's some way we can democratize this and
we can like make it more transparent that didn't quite end up happening but there was at
least like some community spirit for a short period of time yeah i think there's there's like
an underground lore and then there's like a public facing type of lore like i would say dave has a
public facing lore and nathan has more of an underground kind of lore i feel like uh nathan
you are this this figure in, you know,
MEV circles and flashbot circles and things like this,
it's like you've got this legendary lore about you.
And I would love for you to talk a little bit about the Salmonella article
that is a key part of your personal lore.
And Dave, again, like your lore has been more public.
So I think it's interesting to see the way that these different types of lore develop.
I think MEV is one of those circles where most of the lore has been underground.
And it's like, you don't realize how deep it goes until you start to explore it.
It's like, you know, there's layers and layers to MEV lore that most people just don't simply see.
I think the scary thing about the MEV lore is there was a lot of stuff going on where
it wasn't really clear where the line was, legally speaking.
So it's like a whole bunch of different things going on.
And then, like, someone will get in trouble for something.
You'll be like, oh, crap, that's, like, hacking.
And you were never, like, really sure, like, what was okay and what was not okay.
Obviously, like, the salmonella thing felt, like, a bit risky.
But I was only going after sandwich traders who were like victimizing other people.
So it seemed like a little bit more clear to me.
But there are a lot of like, I guess, MEV law situations that I even stepped out.
I was like, OK, I think this is like is like crossing the line for me.
So there was definitely like this unknown feeling about like this is a regulatory gray area.
We're not sure where things are going to come crashing down in the future.
sure where things are going to come crashing down in the future we're all taking a bit of a risk here
We're all taking a bit of a risk here.
yeah i guess that's that's like a big part of of lore in crypto specifically and dave i would
love to hear your input on this part like um where where's the line with building lore right
like a lot of people are building in public, experimenting publicly,
oftentimes in regulatory gray areas.
Where's the line where, you know,
like doing it for the lore
and doing things publicly becomes detrimental?
I think the right way to think about this is like,
we're all like, I think projects,
I think lore is built constantly.
It's built on different levels.
It's built like on an individual level,
like with myself and Nathan, it's built on a group level, maybe with all these different
group chats that people know about. It's built on a product level, a protocol level.
So there's different levels of building lore. And I think the thing to watch out for is
an article I'm working on now, a follow-up is like lord builders versus
lord breakers and so crypto is kind of has a blind spot and is susceptible to false prophets
that come along and they appear as lord builders and they appear as like uh these figures of
authority that are trying to do good uh but in actuality they're actually like lore drainers and they like extract from the lore
for their own personal gain or whatever.
And I think we can do a better job of being on the lookout for that.
Probably one of the most recent examples that everyone knows is SPF.
He built up this personal lore about himself.
MIT, Jane Street had like all the cred.
He made it off the kimchi premium and started Alameda.
And then there was like all this other things that happened around him, like his famous
like, oh, I'll buy all the sauna you want at three bucks and fuck off.
And also like everything he was doing like for good with EA and blah, blah, blah.
But if you saw his actions, like everything was just about him and about FTX and how much
he could extract and take away from the crypto industry behind the scenes.
In the front here, it was like, oh, I'm doing this for the good of crypto.
And actually, my mission is for the good of humanity.
And then it all came crashing down once like one Lego fell.
I mean, once, yeah, once one Lego, like one brick fell.
And so, I mean, obviously there's still like, so he's an example of a lorebreaker.
And obviously like there's like other people out there that are like lorebreakers and whatnot.
And there'll be a lorebreakers in the future.
It's, you know, people script that is like a short memory.
But it's funny, like lord that is like a short memory um but um
it's funny like lord builders are actually like the quiet ones lord builders are like
more like the people that don't like to be front and center they i think like lord breakers
inherently have an ego and um well i mean yeah lord breakers inherently have a ego and lord
builders are inherently egoless like they understand that they are a part of a system
and that they are one part furthering the story.
And sometimes as a lore builder,
your time could be only for a small contribution
or whether it's like, oh, you started a meme or copy pasta
or a bigger one where you're actually setting the tone
and throwing events and hosting and pushing things forward.
Lore builders really see themselves as like, oh, the lore that they're building is bigger
than themselves.
And I think Satoshi did that brilliantly.
I think Satoshi is the best example of this because he was there at the beginning of Bitcoin,
but then he stepped away when it kind of became bigger than himself and things were kind of getting like out of hand.
And he was like, if I want Bitcoin to succeed, I'm going to have to like exit.
And so, yeah, I think that's like a good way to.
So that's kind of like a preview in my next article.
So just so I understand correctly, the lawbreaker is someone who's like using the law.
They're like manipulating you, essentially.
They're like taking advantage of the law for personal gain. But a law builder might still be someone who's doing using the law they're like manipulating you essentially they're like they're like taking advantage of the law for personal gain but a law builder might still be someone
who's doing something unlawful so like dread pirate roberts would be like a law builder even
though he's doing something unlawful but like yes actually that's a good way to put it yeah
yeah like they could still be doing something on law for like the lower builder uh but like
yeah i guess like yeah so that's a good way to put it
i think for me the way that i see it is there it often starts with individuals but like the
lore builder ignites a movement and the lore breaker wants to continue to be an individual
like i think that that that lore breaker is the person who wants to be the lore and the lore
builder yeah the ones who like spark these movements like
dreadfire roberts like satoshi like you know all of these things that happen and when we look at
historic lore breakers like sbf like do kwan they were very much focused on themselves and
not necessarily the movement yeah or sometimes they're like can be like delusional and like
actually believe like like oh like who knows like did door actually
did do actually believe that uh luna was actually gonna break who knows but like he had whether that
was the case or not he had like such an ego uh that it became centerfold in the lore of luna and
uh terra and all that and so like ego is like a huge trait of lore breakers to watch out for so anybody with
like a big ego just like you got to be like cautious with yeah i think a big danger is i
guess i put it in under the category of narcissistic success we all know a lot of narcissists but
a lot of narcissists actually like quite successful people and when a narcissist is very successful
they get this feeling of like i can manipulate reality like if i just believe something hard enough and i work hard enough i can just like make it true so someone like doe
could build this like massive company in a way he's just sort of like bended realities i want to
be a billionaire i want to build a massive company i want to be a huge success and it's like there's
some element of that like feeding into his narcissism that gives him this um gives him this
like thinking that he can just manipulate reality so he probably genuinely believed that he was yeah it was like a toxic flywheel that kind of
like self-fulfilled itself yeah yeah yeah so it's all good feeling like you can manipulate reality
until the day that you can't yeah exactly um and it's it it's interesting because it's like
as like a lore builder uh you
kind of need to like strike a balance in between like building like lore for yourself and like
building lower for the lower to but like i feel like the best lore builders kind of just build
lore for them like i'm speaking at a individual level They kind of just do it effortlessly and unconsciously.
And like, I know for myself, like the lower adult, like there isn't like a necessary line or story or lineage.
It's just like kind of like things I like observed and kind of just ran with.
And now they've just become part of like DeFi Dave, the brand. So for example, like Arizona cherry blossoms, like I've wearing like arizona and like vaporwave shirts for like 10 years and it was only when i started going these like these
crypto conferences that people would like recognize me with my arizona shirt and specifically that one
and it got to the point where people would get upset if i wasn't wearing it and so i'm like you
know what like i i like this aesthetic i'm just gonna own it i'm gonna take this to the farthest
possible conclusion and so i may or may not be in Soho this weekend,
going to the Arizona pop-up, making my case for a sponsorship.
Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?
But that's just like, that's like one thing I ran with.
And like most recently, like it's like cigs and cigarettes,
which is really funny because I like, you know,
I have my occasional smoke and I definitely like enjoy tobacco more than weed now.
But like I wouldn't I'm not like a heavy smoker or anything.
But like now because of Eat Puss Trick, like SIGs have become part of my lore.
And it's like these like little thing and like with like individual or with anything, it's like it doesn't have to be like this game changer, like defining thing.
It can just be like a fun little thing that people
just for some reason identify you with and identify themselves with and you just like go along with
and have fun a big part about building lore is just having fun and feeling like you're proud of
something and you have like a sense of belonging to something yeah it's definitely a scary feeling
when you i think i was saying this in our chat earlier today it's like a scary feeling when you suddenly realize that you're a bit more
checked out than you used to be with a different law like there was a time when i knew all the
acronyms and then recently i've had people teach me things like oh this is what glazing is this is
what yeah i just started to feel like fucking checked out then recently everyone was as you
said smoking cigs inside and like cigs inside was was lore, I guess. And now it's moved on to matcha.
Yeah, yeah.
And I feel like there's a few people in the audience that have been good at building lore for themselves.
It's like Bread, there's Charco.
I encourage everyone to follow both of them because, you know, Bread, you're incredibly informative on the timeline and shark where you're hilarious on the timeline.
And so like, I think if you want to like look at like people building good individual lore for themselves, like check them out.
I was wondering in terms of lessons, if you think there's takeaways here for marketers,
because it feels like part of this just has to come from authenticity that you can't really.
A hundred percent. You can't fake lore. Yeah.
So what's the lesson there for someone who is trying to build lore is
trying to do marketing or brand building i think the the number one thing to take away is like
is you're not it's not like lore builders are telling people what to do in the direction they
go it's not like top down saying like this is the way this is who we are it's giving your community the space to define the lore and be a part of the lore,
however they see fit. And so like, it's kind of like one of those things, like, does your
lore hit, does your product hit, or does it not? And if like the community doesn't like
bait onto it, or doesn't like attach and engage to it it then maybe you just don't have something there
or maybe it's like kind of a science to you it's like okay how can we present ourselves differently
so then we get people too excited to start participating in the lore lore building is a
collective construction process um and so you have to like it's kind of like how you like i view kind
of your lore and how you how a company or yourself presents yourself
to the world as your frequency and get whatever it you want in return you get where you're supposed
to in return there's some element here of like actively listening to your community and your
time yeah like i really want to emphasize listening and really want to emphasize uh like building
people up in your community like identify people that are lore builders
and elevate them, encourage them.
I feel like, I don't know, like marketing,
marketing in itself has become kind of over,
like how it's marketing its field
has been around forever.
And like, it's a legit, it's a legit, it's worked.
But like in a crypto context,
it's like quite different
because it's not like you're selling products context it's like quite different because it's
not like you're selling products per se it's more so you're like selling like a movement and an idea
and like a lot of times like i mean most recently you see like a lot of short-term marketing
that uh optimizes for just like i said like short-term stuff whether it's like short-term
activity like in the test then or like you're optimizing for like TVL.
And when like, you know, the TGE comes through,
like everything just evaporates away
and like everyone just moves on to the next one.
So lower building is like definitely more long-term
than anything.
And yeah.
Do you think the more successful companies
at lower building have been ones that have had
some kind of narrative and mission?
I look at some companies in crypto
and it's just all about, oh, this is is our tech like our thing is faster than other things or our like our thing
is bigger than other things and that it's not really like something that yeah you can't just
have the tech it's like you need to have uh you need to have look it's funny i just like uh actually
i think two great examples of communities outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum
that have built great lore and have been masterclasses in lore building are Chainlink and Barachain,
especially like Chainlink from 2017 to 2020.
They had this community that built up on 4chan and Twitter.
You had Chainlink God as the lore builder really carrying the torch for the community and everything was like, it wasn't about Chainlink God, it was had Chainlink God as the lore builder, really like carrying the torch for the community
and everything was like, it wasn't about Chainlink God,
it was about Chainlink.
And like for a while, like if you like look at how
that community came about and all like the memes
and inside jokes and copy pastas and canon events
and all like little silly, like I can't even say
cause I wasn't really in the Chainlink community.
I have a few friends that were, that is that Chainlink back then is like a masterclass
in lore building.
Barachain, especially like early on with their NFTs and like is another masterclass in lore
building and they're still like building their own lore and both projects are still building
their own lore in different ways.
But those are two really good examples of lore building it was interesting that
you mentioned 4chan was that like the original lore building location of the internet well it
was definitely one big part it's uh especially like the biz i mean i know with like biz and
and like that's where like chain link really started to gain momentum but it's interesting
to speaking of like lore outside of crypto and like you know really started to gain momentum but it's interesting to speaking of
like lore outside of crypto and like you know what happened to fortune recently it's the interesting
thing about like tumblr basically died like 10 years ago and how much culture and lore came from
tumblr and then like 10 years later like fortune collapses and like how much like lore came from
fortune and you're like really seeing like these previous cultural pillars
kind of collapse and how many things like memes and trends originated from there.
It's like, it's all like a downstream from like either like Tumblr or 4chan.
Yeah, I think Reddit is another place where a lot of lore percolates.
Another example of, you know, back to like the chain link thing, there's, there's a lot
of these dino coins that have lore that keeps them afloat. I feel like when you look at something like the XRP army,
right? Like I, that is such a masterclass in lore building as well. If you look into like the XRP
riddles and stuff like that. Um, I think it's insane and it's, it's in the best way. It's,
it's like so outlandish, but it keeps people going and it gives people something to think about and to
believe in. And even like Murad, you know, I think Murad is another masterclass in lore building.
Like he, he went out there and he talked to shit and he got a lot of people to rally behind him.
And he built this community almost in like a roaring kitty style of crypto of like,
believe in something. And he's just kind of consistently stuck to his
thing. And I think that consistency is another big thing, right? Like, so like, when I look at
cherry blossoms, and you think DeFi Dave, or like, whenever you, you know, when you when you talk
about like, SIGS inside, and I'll let you think Dave, you think he's Bushwick, like, when you see
bread, you think about bread, like, you know, things like that, where people are just super
consistent. And bread talked about this recently on Twitter, which I appreciated about kind of like
niching down, like finding your thing and talking about that rather than being a generalist,
because people will recognize you for that thing. So I guess like that was a couple of things. But
yeah, one is like, I think a lot of these dino coins have crazy lore. And that's what's kept
people around for so long is there people are bought into the mission, not necessarily the coin or like the price action.
And then consistency is a big part of lore building.
Yeah, consistency is huge too.
Like having repeated actions, repeated memes, repeated copypasta.
That's how like lore kind of gets, like parts of lore get solidified.
And it's funny that you mentioned xrp what was it
you said xrp riddles what what's that yeah there's like all of these crazy riddles that uh with xrp
and i don't know it that well but i have a friend who's like a diehard xrp person and he's always
trying to tell me about all of these riddles and i guess like back in the day like many years ago
there there were like higher figures in the x XRP community that would post like cryptic messages.
And they would have like a date and a time on them or like some number.
And people have been spending years trying to figure out these XRP riddles.
It's like it's I don't know. It's this wild treasure hunt of I don't know that any of it has any validity to it.
treasure hunt of I don't know that any of it has any validity to it but it's like giving people
something to believe in and to you know kind of like latch on to and I think that it's pretty cool
has xrp sustained itself for like 10 years plus purely on law it's like yeah it's like the instant
I view it as the institutional main point uh whenever you ask someone that isn't in crypto
like or like oh what are you interested in in crypto? They, they always mention either like Bitcoin or XRP. Like that's, they don't say Ethereum, they say XRP. And it's because like XRP and Ripple may position themselves as like, oh, we're going to bring the banks into crypto. And like, we have this tech, like they've like, they created this like narrative over the past 10 years and solidified by these like memes over and over again and it's like I mean it's
really a master class and something that we could probably learn from as an industry I know it's
it's funny if you asked me like five years ago what I thought of Ripple I'd be like oh that's
a scam like don't don't buy it blah blah blah but like today like you kind of just you kind
of have to like take a step back and like respect respect it it's interesting to think what the law would be in like 10 i think
in 10 years time we'll be reminiscing on the fact that the president of the united states launched
a mean coin i definitely think that is going to be an integral part of future law yeah that's
great that's that's crazy in it of itself um and you bring up a case when you're talking about the
riddles you bring up something else that helps build lore and solidify community is group bonding activities and exercises.
For example, DeFi Summer, everybody was farming together on these farms and in group chats.
When you said riddle, I immediately thought of TempleDAO and what people had to do in Temple Dao in order to get a temple
allocation. They had to do all these puzzles and rituals and stuff. And I guess that one
moment in Temple Dao, that was really a master class in lore building.
Yeah, I think so too. It's just like, I don't know, when you have this edgy kind of thing,
it makes people feel smart and it makes people feel a sense of belonging.
And I think that riddles are like riddles or anything that's riddle-esque like these things have historically done really well.
Like I think that, you know, Mega doing like the Mega Mind quiz and that kind of thing.
I think that it's just like you have this feeling of I'm competing with these people, but we're working together and we're all trying to be a part of the same thing. And it's just, yeah, I mean, it's just community building and
you just, yeah, you feel a part of something. You mentioned the future of lore building.
And so I wanted to ask a question, like going back to what you guys were saying before about,
like, I guess Dave specifically, you're just the authenticity
required to be a lore builder and no ego and all of that. It's like just being you and listening
to feedback from people and just continuing to, to again, be authentic. In a world today where
most of Twitter is AI slop and it's copy pasta. And I feel like the people that stand out are the
people who
are themselves and they're actually speaking and they're saying their thoughts and their opinions.
So I guess like, do you see AI as like a threat to lore building? Do you see AI as like a
collaborator in lore building? Because I don't imagine that AI is going to come up with very
good lore. No, I see AI as a tool and a collaborator in lore building i don't really see
it as a threat um if any if if ai does anything it just like amplifies what is already the case
so if there's like slop it just like amplifies the slop and that's why you're seeing so much
more slop but uh like it's funny i i was like a luddite when it came to ai especially writing
with ai for so long because i'm like i don't know i just like want to do it myself but like when you
use it's like really like the law building article was like the first time i really used ai to help
me like bounce off ideas and like kind of clear up my thoughts and just like it was more just like
try and like like run things through and and sometimes the AI would give me something
and it would spark another idea.
I was like, oh, I can put that in it or this in it.
So I really see it as a collaborator more than anything.
But yeah, what do you guys think?
I agree.
I think AI in its current form is a collaborator.
AI cannot write a good article for you and it can't produce anything that's even remotely
funny.
You still need the humor in the, as the operator is really important. But I think more generally, the law just kind of changes in flavor around AI. Like I'm thinking
about AI law, plenty of the liberate. I don't know if you follow him, but he's this guy on
Twitter who's famous for just jailbreaking AI. He does all these cool things. Like he puts stuff
out there on the internet that he knows that AI will be trained at to introduce
bugs and jailbreaks into frontier models.
So he's definitely a massive law builder in AI.
So AI is like, you know, he couldn't exist without AI essentially.
So I think just like the flavor of law building around AI changes, I don't see it as a threat
to law building.
Yeah, it adds like a new field for people to play on.
Yeah, I think that's true.
I also see a direction where, maybe this is the doomer in me,
but I also see a direction where AI is so sycophantic these days,
and we've seen that recently with the latest GPT update,
where it makes everybody feel like a genius and everybody feel hilarious. And so I think that that kind of taints the lore because you're getting too much positive feedback from AI and telling you that you're a good lore builder when you're not.
Yeah, especially recently.
I've been seeing some absurd screenshots on the timeline from like AI glazing and the AI glazing epidemic.
So I hope they fix that
update otherwise they'll probably induce widespread psychosis if everyone thinks they're the shit but
i want a system where ai can stop glazing me like make it a little bit rude to me
yeah there's just one thing i use where like uh this like I didn't like chat GPT has like a whole app store and I use like the Monday voice and it has like a very like condescending like tone.
It's like the opposite of glazing and kind of just like picks at you and stuff. And I kind of like that because it kind of just like puts you in your place.
It reminds me of like the AI girlfriend conundrum where people don't actually want this positive
AI girlfriend that glazes them.
They want an AI girlfriend that's slightly borderline and puts them down and creates
drama.
I think, yeah, at the end of the day, humans don't want comfort.
Humans, we thrive and struggle.
We thrive in adversity.
It's funny.
You see pics of people.
I saw a pic recently of the Chud Jack guy before he went to prison and after he went to prison or like spf
before he went to prison after he went to prison same thing with doe kwan it's like something about
like putting yourself through like an adversarial environment just like makes you more chad i don't
know it's funny how humans are wired like that we're just like wired for struggle yeah it reminds
me of like the matrix movies right where they say okay the first matrix that we're just like wired for struggle yeah it reminds me of like the
matrix movies right where they say okay the first matrix that we created it was a perfect utopia
and everyone just started dying so we had to create a world with a bunch of flaws and like
conflict and adversaries i think in the in the context of the ai it's like do you really want
if you're going to have this ai companion that is with you all the time helping you out with things
which i think is where ai will go we'll have like some kind of companion that we spend a lot of time interacting with.
Do we want that companion to be glazing us all the time
and trying to act like our personal therapist?
Or do we want someone that we can get frustrated at?
Like maybe I have a bad day.
I wanna step in my car and just like yell at the AI
for a bit and just, you know, and have it yell back.
That would be funny.
You just wanna feel something just want to feel something yeah
we talk about feeling something a lot at euphoria and and how feeling in euphoria how fitting
yeah yeah it's our tagline it's feel something and we talk about how like the the feeling and
the soul is gone right now it's just like this i don't know this pvp environment and we want to
bring back joy and euphoria and feeling something.
Like it feels very dry.
And so I think that lore is a big part of feeling something.
I think that, again, like when you can buy into a story
and a mission and like this collective thing
that you're a part of,
I think that's how we get people to feel something.
Yeah, and another thing I was going to say,
like one of the
big motivations for writing the lore building article is like after going to conferences
for a while and just seeing and hearing the same talks over and over again uh seeing the same
people and not new people like i love seeing like my friends and the same people but when it's only
like them and like it like the new blood gets less and less, you know you have
a problem and there's a glut and a clot.
And so one of the big parts of lore building is it's all about...
A big part of growing lore and lore building is getting new classes of people and motivating
the next generation of lore builders.
So there's kind of this self-actualization element where it's like once you're once you reach like the level of like being like a lore builder
it's like okay like how do I inspire like the next generation to come in um and so and
I feel like it's not lore until you are actually inspiring new generations of lore builders
yeah and yeah and like with a thing like a great case of this and like what I wrote in
the article is like um Ethereum is like all about layering. And so it's like you
have like the ICOs and like, you know, decentralized capital
formation, and the power of that, and you had DeFi and you had
NFT and
were first
like,
like, like, We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here. We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here.
We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. We're here. It's like, it's like, it's like, we like all do together stuff.
We're like, we're all about the same thing.
I don't know if you can hear us, but you sound like a robot.
Now I can hear you.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Now you're good, Dave.
I was going to say, Nathan, was that just for me or could you hear that too?
No, that was for me as well, yeah. Dave, you were very robotic for a bit.
I was? How about now?
Yeah, now you're good.
Okay. But yeah, no, where was I, Todd? Man, consistently getting rugged by spaces.
I can hear you though, Casey.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I mean, I think that I'm not sure what exactly Dave was getting at, but one of the
things that I think I noticed when I think about historic lore is like with, this is just my interpretation, but the lore of Bitcoin was built on rage.
And I think the lore of Ethereum was built on like a softer kind of feeling.
Maybe, I guess hope is what we would call it.
But like the lore of Bitcoin is built on like raging against this
system and people collectively were, they felt empowered. So they did feel a sense of hope,
but it was also, I think, rooted in a lot of rage against what's happening and like, hey,
there is a better way. And this is something that we can do. And it's something that we,
the people can do. And I think that people really bought into that whereas I think that there's kind of a soft lore in Ethereum that kind of holds it back relative to other lore that
exists. Yeah I guess you have to think about the adverse or maybe not adverse selection that
happened in the early days of Bitcoin. The people who invested in Bitcoin very early on before it
was a dollar or whatever all became or mostly became very very rich but if
you knew about bitcoin in those days and you were investing in it heavily it was probably because
you held some very contrarian beliefs like you were some form of like economic anarchist or like
crypto anarchist or whatever you were in very specific parts of the internet and you were
willing you held these these counter-cultural beliefs and you were willing you held these these um counter-cultural
beliefs and you're willing to bet very heavily on them and those people were financially rewarded
for betting heavily on those beliefs it doesn't necessarily mean that their beliefs are correct
but early Bitcoin days did financially reward people with very specific set of beliefs and
like you said it was some element of raging against the machine. Yeah, I feel like the main difference, Bitcoin is a system you opt out of.
And then Ethereum is a world that you're building.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot more Bitcoin by the early days of Ethereum than Bitcoin.
Yeah, it's actually, it's like, that's why like, lore building on Ethereum is like a bit harder than Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin, everything's just about Bitcoin.
And you have things to rally around, like scarcity, 21 million, blah, blah, blah.
But with Ethereum, because you can build an open world, it kind of gives you too much freedom and too much optionality.
And so it's like, how do you value and how do you create a story for something like that?
I mean, at first, it was like the world computer and digital oil uh and then like recently most recently it became all
about like viewing it as like equity like instead of commodity like uh now there's been like a
debate about this but when it became like when equity like became like the primary way to
perceive it and you perceive it at the floor well you're just like perceiving the worst case scenario
which is like a big reason why we think we've seen ethereum perform as it has so i think like ethereum
is due for a lower shake-up and how it's like perceived instead of being like oh like this is
like like the lowest floor you can be like perceive ethereum there's like okay like it's like instead
of looking at the floor like let's look at the stars. In your article, you talked about the Ethereum law becoming somewhat fractured with all of the L2s having their own law that they're developing.
How do you feel that leads into, like, the future of the Ethereum law building an ecosystem?
Yeah, because, like, when you see, like, L2s in practice, it's just like, you have, like it you have like liquidity for the l2 token you have
like separate place for like builders you have a separate place for like mindshare and like
attention and like it's kind of like the the christian church and like protestantism and you
have like all these different like kind of like schools of like oh like we're gonna do like it
this way and that way um but in the i don't it'd be interesting to see like how
we like like bring it back all together where like the original dream of like having l2s be
like a proper layer on top of ethereum instead of like kind of like this imbalance relationship
we kind of see right now um and like it's it comes down to like how that story is told and
also like how that story is like executed in the future.
But like, it's been interesting to see like optimism and they're like super chain and
like Arbitrum and like their thing.
And it's kind of like, they're like, you know, almost like SaaS companies in a way,
like saying like, oh, if you want to be like a super chain, like come along.
Or, oh, if you want to be Arbitrum Orbit or like ZK this or that.
So it's very, it's very, very different than Ethereum. And also like, I feel like another
thing that has to do with it is I think Vitalik and everyone expected everyone to be stage two
or like at least stage one by now. And that hasn't been the case with them, with like, with the,
with the L2s and everybody's just like, okay, now what?
So, I mean, there's a lot of different things with L2s.
I still think Ethereum's leading the way.
And when you lead the way and you're pioneering, you're bound to make mistakes.
But it doesn't mean you can't turn the ship around.
Yeah, I agree that Ethereum is progressing the most in the frontier of technical development.
I would say though that L2
is perhaps captured the most valuable thing in the supply
chain, which is the users and their Ethereum.
The user. Yep. The user.
Yeah.
And that's like the most important
thing at the end of the day is like the user
and the apps. I mean, like the apps
and capturing the user
because the user doesn't
care about like what's underneath they just like want something that works uh i feel like you know
people like talk about settlement settlement settlement but you know like unless you're in
like the most adverse situation then settlement's kind of overrated to like the average user and
it's also not i don't think it's a place where power congregates in the supply chain
because you can switch out to other settlement layers.
If you're an L2, you have captured the users and you've captured attention.
You then have the bargaining power to say, okay, we want to check in on this L1 instead
of this other L1.
So you still have the power when you capture the users.
I know that there was this debate a while ago about fat app, fat wallet,, like where, where does the power kind of congregate in the supply chain? I've had a thesis
for a while that all value ultimately in the supply chain flows downwards from attention.
So whoever, whoever captures the user's attention has the ultimate power. It's like, how much time
do you spend on your like Revolut banking app? Like why why why would power accumulate at the wallet level for
example like the power accumulates like youtube instagram like amazon deliver like capture your
attention those are they can switch payment providers if they want like that the power
congregates with the with the attention so i guess personally i feel that l2s are actually like
capturing the most valuable thing in the supply chain and we're all our brokers and that's another yeah yeah
that's also you you talked about l2s feel spiritually like l1s i guess that's the reason i
agree with that statement yeah because they capture the attention it's like if it looks like a duck
and quack like a duck well it's a duck uh and in terms of like capturing like attention uh and the
user i think another example of this that isn't an L2, but what you saw with pumped off on recently,
how they like, you know, for a while,
they were just using radium as like their tool
for like when things get off the bonding curve.
But then eventually like they would,
it kind of became obvious that they would create
their own radium and their own AMM
and then they created pump swap.
And so now they like,
they started off like owning the user and using the tools underneath, and then they created PumpSwap. And so now they started off owning the user
and using the tools underneath,
and primitives underneath.
And now that they have their own primitive within PumpSwap,
they just kicked Radium to the curve.
And Radium just lost all those users and all that volume.
That's such a great example.
I mean, honestly, they could probably even launch their own L2, right?
Or their own chain.
And they could still capture most of the users. So really, they have the even launch their own L2, right? Or their own chain and they could like still capture most of the users.
So, so really they have the power to commoditize almost everything underneath
them on the infrastructure level.
Yeah.
It's really a matter of like how much shit they want to deal with and how much,
how much attention they have to like build like the full pump fun stack.
Um, and like, right.
If like Solana does like a great job at what they do and they don't have to
worry about, um, you know, what Solana does best and like they don't have to do anything.
But like it really speaks about like owning the stack.
And that's another good argument for why power won't develop on the infrastructure level, because as an infrastructure provider, you have to keep yourself cheap.
Because if you don't keep yourself cheap, then the person above you who captures the attention will swap you out.
Like it would make economic sense for them so if solana is like super cheap for pump fun it's not going to make
sense for them to go to a different settlement layer but if solana has like some fees or there's
like some value for the pump for the pump fund team to capture then it totally makes sense for
them to launch their own chain and capture that value themselves so that's that's like another
force is working against the against value capture on the infrastructure level.
Yeah. And also you can like, say like, like, let's say like, Ethereum kept going without
L2s and everything was like, just happening on Ethereum. And like, it was just ridiculously
expensive, like it was four or five years ago. I mean, you saw before L2s got big, like
everyone went to like all L1s and stuff. And so like, it's kind of like L2s were a necessary development in a way,
but it just hasn't gone as planned.
Maybe they should have focused on scaling the L1 more.
Maybe they should have like focused on,
maybe there could have been like a different path,
but like whatever happened, it happened.
Yeah, I think it's interesting to see the way that this manifests though.
Like Nathan, when you bring up a pump having pump chain,
I think that when you look at something like uni chain that hasn't been able
to gain that traction, but has the traction on the DAP side of things,
I think that it's, I think it's prohibitive for people to,
if that's the only thing that you're going to do there,
then I don't think that there's
the same amount of value. Like what PumpFun has managed to do well is to kind of create an entirely
new playing field, right? Where you can, you're playing a different game on PumpFun than you are
when you're swapping on Uniswap. And so then they went and they captured kind of not just the DGens,
but now with PumpSw swap, there's deep
liquidity there. So you have people who otherwise wouldn't have participated in pump fund degeneracy
now making proper swaps there for other actions that they're doing. So I think that it's kind of
like they've built themselves a bit of a moat, but it would be interesting to see if they saw
value flow to a pump chain where that really failed in unichain yeah i think the thesis for
unichain was like hey we have these dexes and people are trading on them and they're paying
these massive gas fees because they're fighting med wars with each other and all of those gas
fees are going to the validators and essentially it's like this massive tax being paid on the
liquidity providers in the pools so like what is the solution there were all these different people working on like lvr solutions but ultimately
they felt okay well the simplest solution is we just own the chain so everyone is still bidding
but then like the value goes towards the chain and thus like the lp providers in the in the pools
so i think it was like a very specific use case that they were building the the chain around um
maybe that actually applies to like pump fun as well though like there's a bunch of bidding happening on solana um this is like all value right that pump fun could
capture if they launch their own chain as well but perhaps unichain failed to build the ecosystem
around the the chain effectively which is like something that like hyper liquid for example has
been pretty successful at yeah like hyper liquid did it in reverse they started off as like the
exchange that was its own chain uh and then when they launched Hype VM, although it's like two different chains, the important thing is like they had like the mindshare tension and community where like that community was going to go over to Hype EVM.
Unichain, I think it shows how hard it is to even if you're the premier protocol in
Dapp, BlueChip, and you try to launch your own chain, there's so much more you have to
contend and deal with.
It's like if you're thinking about liquidity and user interface and whatnot, and maybe
that takes time to develop.
And maybe in six months, it's a different story with Unichain.
It's like a top 10 L2, L1 in terms of TVO and activity.
But it takes a lot of time to build that up.
It doesn't happen overnight.
Yeah, perhaps the biggest danger also is the scope creep.
Just the attention of the scope creep.
That's the biggest thing is scope creep.
And that's probably why it took so long for pump fun to launch like pump swap
because they were focusing on other things,
probably like more user centric things.
Like they were doing live streams or doing this,
they're doing that.
And then,
then once they couldn't do that anymore,
it's like,
okay,
like what other parts of the stack we can own?
I think if pump did launch a chain,
I think it would fare better and grow faster than uni chain,
just because of like the nature of pump.fun and how little liquidity you need and how like, If Pump did launch a chain, I think it would fare better and grow faster than Unichain,
just because of the nature of Pump.fun and how little liquidity you need and how much less sophisticated the average Pump.fun user is from your Uniswap user.
No offense to Pump.fun users, but it's like, you know,
it's like with Pump.fun, you know it's like a game.
And with Uniswap, it has a different kind of vibe to it.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, I think that, yeah, that was kind of the point of like, they started with this unsophisticated user base.
And then with the deeper liquidity, they've been able to capture, you know, people who otherwise would have been trading on radium or, you know, otherwise trading elsewhere. And that's something that I just don't think that Unichain has been able to
capture. They've just tried to push that same user to a more, to just, I guess, a less convenient
place being Unichain. Like when you have your funds somewhere else and you just want to make a swap,
like you're not going to go bridge them to Unichain to do that because there's not that
ecosystem or that fun thing that's drawing you there like there is with uh
function so yeah i felt like they kept they kept it the user but then they delivered something that
ultimately was more beneficial for lps yeah 100 percent yeah we lord do it for the lord
yeah we lord do it for the lord for the lore the lore must flow well guys thank you so much for
having this conversation i think that it was really insightful i learned a lot about
lore building and i got to hear a little bit more of the lore of defi dave and uh any any final
thoughts words of wisdom anything that you we'd like to offer up to anybody? Dave, Nathan?
Speak less, listen more.
Yeah, honestly, I was going to reverberate the same point.
I felt that was a very insightful comment you made about it's really about active listening.
The authenticity part in law building, the part that you can't fake, is about just like listening to your community, listening to your target community, seeing the people that are kind of naturally emerging as law builders themselves and nurturing those people.
Yeah. And be wary of ego and people that like present themselves as saviors.
Narcissistic success is a danger. Yes. No Machiavellian law builders.
No. All right, guys. Well, hey, thank you, everybody, for tuning in with us today.
We appreciate you being here.
And we will see you back here next Wednesday, same time, same place,
for Unhinged and Euphoric.
Dave, thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
I threw euphoric after this space and a little unhinged.
So thanks, guys.
Talk soon.
Bye.
