Beyond Exit Liquidity Community in Post Memecoin Crypto | Cameron Thacker | Alex Bird | Lucy Coulden

[Music] all right everybody next up we're going to be talking about Beyond exit liquidity community in post mecoin crypto presented by Jay from the cugh please give a round of applause for our next speakers yes everybody put those phones down and put your hands together for our beautiful panel woo [Applause] very nice very nice now I have some really bad news to share with you but first we're going to introduce you to these wonderful people up here uh first we have Lucy Lucy you want to give us a quick 15 minutes on what you're working on 15 seconds he knows I'm a talker um yeah so I'm Lucy I've been in the polka dot um space for about 3 years and um I've recently been big part of the launch of the polka dot Ambassador fellowship and Global program director of that initiative building a fellowship an ambassador Fellowship okay thank you very much Berto hello uh I'm Berto I'm doing product at polka dot uh one of the things I'm working on is a new like beginner friendly crypto app for beginners I guess easy on boarding to crypto polka dot web 3 this kind of thing okay building products for beginners very nice and then we have Cameron ther co-founder of mythical games yeah hi co-founder Cameron co-founder of mythical games um and I kind of will describe us as uh maybe the most successful web 3 gaming platform or ecosystem you haven't heard of uh so we've been around since 2018 I I'll keep it short but uh we started with Blanco's block party had over a million players um our current you know uh uh top tier game is NFL Rivals uh and it's on the App Store players can buy and sell uh nfts in app so they can trade with each other making us um the only web 3 game in the App Store where players can trade on chain um and you know you put all that together we've had over 6 and a half million players uh in that game beautiful they were telling me about mythical backstage somebody was saying that recently it was the second highest blockchain in the industry by volume and it was the the the mo the highest uh game blockchain in the industry by transactions is that true yeah so the back the blockchain that powers this is a Mythos blockchain and it's consistently within I would say top three top five uh blockchains for nft transactions that's amazing I it's very bullish but we only have 17 minutes left here and I got to get to the bad news this panel is about community and um I'm bearish on community I am bearish I have seen SE all sorts of exploitations and evil go down with communities myself I've lost thousands of dollars trusting people who I thought were my friends but it turns out they just dumped on me and I never heard from them again so they uh they put me on this panel I have no idea why um I mean does this resonate with you guys you ever see any bad behavior with communities have you ever seen anything like that I I don't know where I'm here either I think communities no I don't really no I know I know what you mean there are a number of Bad actors in this space but there are a hell of a lot of good ones as well um and I think what we've seen in this um in in the bare Market that preceded this bull run um after covid I think with that the combination of the two made people remember that actually doing everything online maybe isn't the answer and a kind of hybrid approach is important so an inperson and virtual Community but really taking that that Global stride that this is meant to be for so actually allowing a community across all continents to come together um and I think the stronger a community you build the easier it is to um weed out the bad eggs let's say Okay stole all your money it's it's slightly compelling but I won't be so easily sway Cameron I mean when we talk about gaming like the token flips the grinding I think you know certain communities are going to breed certain behaviors uh so you know the mcoin community famously had some pretty bad things happen recently uh and it's because their their primary focus is value extraction or profit their profit seeking right I think the unique value prop for gaming um is that Gamers mainly play games to have fun to relax and and you know they may trade items right they may make some profit but it's not their primary motivation and so because of that especially if you know like what we do we try and focus on the positive aspects minimize you know speculation um you you get benefits because the players they want to be there longterm if they're having fun and so your incentives are aligned and uh in that case you know we don't I don't know I mean there's some games when they focus on the the extraction and the you know flipping jpegs or whatever yeah yeah and they're shortlived it's painful people have a bad experience but um in our case you know we've had pretty good success with our model that's interesting how many gamers do you have playing mythical games say how many players yeah yeah so there's been over 6 and A5 million for NFL Rivals which is our biggest blano is over a million NFL like the football yeah NFL National Football League so we have um a game with with them that we've made it's on its second or just finished its second season uh correspond to the second NFL season that we've been alive and um it's it's pretty awesome I mean it's a big brand that they're trusting us with um you know their their IP and all that comes with that I mean they they don't want to be involved in scams right so all of that means that we're like we're good actors uh we do our best to you know promote uh a healthy community and um a community with longevity yeah that's interesting you said something nice so you said lining around what was that yeah lining incentives lining around incentives the incentive here is to have fun playing games exactly so like you know if you're launching a meme coin I don't know the incentives line everyone wants to make money yeah so it's a race to who can do it first good point um in this case people are just playing games you know they might want a better asset or something because there's utility attached to these game assets they're not just a collectible though some of them are you know there's there's more so awesome Lucy you were talking there a little bit about bringing people together from different points of the world but uh my question for you is what are you bringing them together to do it's not yeah so the the polka dot Ambassador Fellowship is um an initiative that sits alongside the technical Fellowship led by um Gavin wood so it's a a a we're trying to build or will be building the largest onchain decentralized community in the world with a focus on scalability and resilience so what we're really looking to do is create bonds and like lasting bonds focused around the web 3 space with polka dot leading that but it's it's bigger than just polka dot it's polka do and all the other chains around it you know the they say the uh the rising tide raises all boats and that's what we're really looking to do with the fellowship and so we also have um a very strong rewards and recog program just like incentives that Cameron was talking about so we we've uncoupled ranks and salaries so we give people a title so that they have they have a a platform of legitimacy on which they can go out into the outside world and talk about polka dot um in whatever way they feel comfortable whether they're marketing whether they're BD whether they're a Dev um and what we incentivize them to do obviously the token price goes up if we do well that's an incentive that I don't think many people hobbies and passions can do I don't know of any other hobbies and passions that uh Pokémon Pokémon cards what what was that Pokémon cards go up in belly if you get the good ones right Pokemon I mean I think to kind of like to Dove tell on what Lucy is saying it's also like uh we see many social Dows in crypto and it's kind of like taking this social D concept and actually bringing some like IRL function to it as well and like actually having meetups and seeing people face to face and uh which I think is super important and uh super needed we're we're also for the first time giving agents who aren't attached to projects and ability to work within the ecosystem yeah yeah so that's that's that's a really new thing that's never been done before I myself found myself after leaving par which is the engine room of polka dot being a proper employee for wanting to work with polka dot but kind of just wanting to you know attach all of the different things that have going on cuz there's not many Cross communications and so I'm one of the first people that's actually being sort of hired by the ecosystem by the people through open gov so I think it's going to really Empower us to do more by keeping hold of you know good skilled people not that I'm saying that I am but uh you know that's really going to heighten us yeah know that that's interesting because if I understand polka dot correctly it's not like there's like this Central Foundation that's making all the choices it's actually a project that belongs to the shareholders people who will dot right and I think what you were saying there is that there are some people that belong to organizations that are working on polka dot but then there are some people who are just solo agents and what you're creating is kind of a platform for people to align on the growth of the whole network that right yeah exactly like polka dot is you know undeniably the largest decentralized community in the world with a $200 million treasury including stable coins that is owned by the community and spent by the community it's powered thousands of individuals projects communities yeah um so you know there is no Central Force but if you're not attached to a project that makes it you know sort of harder but then the big problem is this asymmetry of information yeah so people like myself who want to be you know a little bit attached to everything and just want to be polka dot now have an opportunity to help bridge those gaps yeah it's nothing like getting together in person and uh and aligning there okay so you you mentioned open gov there Berto this is something I heard you talk about backstage you're saying like 1,500 public referenda or something like that so far what is this about the public referenda or the whole thing the whole thing this open gov thing like what what is this yeah sure I mean I think um like as Lucy was saying polka dot is like the world's biggest Dow in terms of like token holder voting and uh the kind of interesting thing I think that poota has in this kind of governance space which which not sure if I've seen anywhere else is actual onchain execution of things so for example if you raise a proposal to pay yourself funds or pay someone funds and it gets voted on it gets executed straight away there's no intermediat there's no middleman there's no third party that like goes and signs a transaction and sends it to you which I think is pretty awesome and also interesting for things like runtime upgrades um like the Dow did a huge token swap with like mythical games and so like the Dow itself co-invested in a project which is like permissionless which is also kind of cool um you said a few things what's runtime upgrades Oh So like um say for example if you have a blockchain and you want to make an upgrade to it um one of the things that polka dot can do is runtime upgrades um via this like decentralized governance so there's no Fork there's no Forks there's no uh it's like everybody votes together to upgrade it like a like an app on your phone or something like that yeah I guess so the the community is being the App Store essentially right yeah and and what's this about this token swap what were you saying yeah yeah the uh the Dow did a token swap with uh the Mythos Dow so that's the you know the blockchain and DOW that um governs the Mythos blockchain that we use and uh it's done yeah totally decentralized way which is super awesome um you know I'll add on to this um Mythos is actually upgrading uh doing a big chain upgrade this coming week and uh inspired by padot we're going to have onchain governance as well so uh it's cool I mean it's another way to promote Community to give people you know interest access power you know to some extent uh voice and um I don't know a lot of other chains that that actually have that right on chain governance the things that happen get enacted immediately there's no middleman yeah yeah that's so cool it's like uh as I understand it polka dot has governance and and then all of the rollups can have governance as well which is something for every Community to do right to drive the chain forward brto you're saying it's like also you're saying it's permissionless yeah I mean so like the the interesting thing is like anyone that holds dot can make a proposal for anything yeah which sounds a bit scary but I mean there are some limits and there are some controls right uh but like say for example you could propose you know assuming you Fellowship you could say hey I think we need a something and you could propose it and if the community is aligned or you can get alignment then it gets voted on and you can create a new sub Dow or create a sub pool of funds like a bounty to to do specific things um it's kind of up to you right could could I propose to to pay myself $5,000 for hosting this panel I could raise a tip yeah to propose you $5,000 for hosting the panel why not I'm I'm gonna vote against that you're gonna vote against that uh no no no I'm just kidding you should it should be 10,000 it should be 10 okay nice but if everybody votes in favor then that those funds are coming and nobody can stop it right correct it's not like some Foundation is saying like huh the community thought this is good so maybe we'll do it it happens For Better or Worse very nice so Lucy you're just starting this this Fellowship project pretty recently right yeah yeah we um we went through open G um back in November December we um I pulled together a Manifesto um nice short 19 page read um which uh yeah which which um brought together all of the Community Voices because we've we've had um Ambassador programs for a while so we wanted to look at what had gone right what had gone wrong what can we learn and pull that all together and then we put that to open go through a root referendum which actually changes the the code changes the pallet um and it was voted through with I think 86.5% um and we asked for um a lump sum of money to Kickstart the program over the the next few months and uh we're halfway through that funding at the moment so we're we're a bit of a building site so we're we're building we've seated 161 ambassadors and we're building a framework of on boarding rewards and recognition um obviously building the pallet to make this the first ever onchain Collective which is the huge thing that we're doing and we will also have our own governance system so any anything that happens within the Ambassador Fellowship will be voted on by each Ambassador so if somebody wants to be promoted they'll put themselves forward it'll be voted on we have our own sub treasury yeah so we're our own little kind of yeah we're our own little Dow our own mini polka do it's like subd Dows all the way down eh yeah exactly very cool hey speaking of onboarding on the product side um traditional retail uh investors or crypto people um how are you reaching out to them um by creating great products yeah I mean I think in the poka dot space uh the app that we building is is a really good first step um it's like you know we don't show the seat phase there's like uh Cloud backups there's you know basically no transaction signing it's it's you can imagine it's like venmo PayPal but actually built for crypto um and so I the aim is that um it should be something that is quite simple like I could give to my mom or maybe my dad and uh they could use it to you know have some crypto stake it you know this this kind of thing yeah I love this idea of hiding the chain I got a chance to do a really quick interview with Nat from Ian Lads earlier this week and I was like what's the thing that everybody's missing and he was like people I don't think people are seeing that we're starting to be adopted by people who are using this technology they don't even know it right like screw all this these logos and stuff like there's actually people building stuff and you know not even know they're using it I mean I think the thing that most people have realized is like oh we need things for people to do we need applications we need stuff like right we can't just keep building infrastructure forever or or or telling stories about software that never develops has happened a few times right I'm sure yeah uh camon you're 6 and half million players they do they know they're using the methos chain do they know they're using polka do a very small fraction C right I mean we we we try one of the reasons why we have such a nice Community is um we try and focus on things that matter to real people right people that maybe don't care about blockchain they like some of the features some of the um abilities you get with blockchain but they don't they don't really care it's like I I don't know is your database SQL or is it something else like who cares uh and so yeah they um it's a similar process where we want it to be as similar to a web to experience as we can get because we want to minimize friction we want to maximize adoption and then once they're in that ecosystem um they can you know take their own keys if they want to or level up something like that beautiful yeah it's like the the total addressable market for web 3 everybody who's going to be using it they're not going to be yapping about it on Twitter that's right yeah yeah I I think for me I would say there's there's two things that I would like to get out of um the fellowship and for for the web three movement in general there's bringing people on board that are there to enjoy a game or to use an app or to pay with things they don't need to know how it works but then when you have governance things that I guess when we say we all want to change the world that's really something that could and that's what that's the thing I want my mom or grandma to understand and I think that you know that bit is really important for us to be shouting from the rooftops and explaining to people beautiful ladies and Gentlemen let's give it up for Lucy Berto and Cameron thank you thanks Jay [Applause] [Music]