Beyond the Memecoin Casino: Can Crypto Save the World? | Dani - Metaweb Ventures, James -Risk Labs

so we're getting ready for our next conversation not a panel a conversation um we're getting there near the end of the day some have already started with happy hour so um but I'm very excited to introduce the conversation with two ogs um it's called beyond the meme coin casino can crypto still save the world and so we've got James fry from risk labs and Daniel sario from meow web Ventures thank you thank you all right so we're here today to talk about a very pmic issue which is where in the world are we what happened and how did we end up here so uh eigor and I actually know each other from our days at consensus uh way back when I think it was 2017 and uh Joe L would approach you and say do you want to change the world that was the invitation and I said yeah this is cool ethereum is going to change the world and we really believed it we went around and we went to all these Market launches we talked to Founders and politicians about the power of blockchain Technology about immutability about censorship resistance about what the world could look like and one day we woke up in 2025 and this morning the SEC determined that Meme coins were actually not securities and you can totally do I don't know what you can do in America but like it was totally fine and so uh I sit here with a James to say like what is going on are we allowed to swear if you want to because I might um how many of you in the crowd have ever purchased a meme coin yeah yeah lots of you how many of you actively trade meme coins some of you is is short yeah yeah okay how many of you have made money on meme coins how many of you lost money on mem coins yeah yeah I um I don't even know where to start because it's so toxic is the word um and I want to explain this so we this year we kicked off the year we have a new president in the US and a meme coin followed very very shortly after um how many of you think that was a net positive for crypto for those who aren't uh in the audience there's zero hands raised not a single hand went up how many of you lost money on trumpcoin yeah how many of you made money on trumpcoin yeah okay at what cost whose money was that that you made money on so here's the hot take I think meme coins are antithetical to mass adoption because every time we have a mass adoption event like trumpcoin we onboard however many new users and they buy some salana they jump in they open a wallet they buy trumpcoin they're ready to make millions of dollars and then you all use them as exit liquidity and they never come back do you think they never come back or is it like they tried it and then they're going to try something else maybe I'm a doom and gloom in that but I wouldn't come back if if my first experience was trumpcoin and I lost a bunch of money I probably wouldn't come back's the point I think some people talk about as like you know what what are the mechanisms of mass adoption and like you have to incentivize people with something right like you have to give them something that they want in the in the 2017 cycle it was like icos that was gambling right uh the previous cycle was nfts gambling gambling car and cyc mostly gaming mostly gambling so like what's like is there still any hope is there going to be like a mass adoption vehicle that is not gambling I what could it look like what could it look like cuz you have you have to onboard people somehow right like we we can't just say like oh people have to onboard because the techn techology is so cool that you can't do anything with it but you know try it out there has to be like use cases right and right now you think about our use cases like um I heard some really cool ideas the about maybe remittances that's probably the the only use case I've heard about like widely practiced like refugees or like Argentina stable coins right like that's a real use case that's a country that's on boarded so that's cool that's an alternative like what about the Argentina think to say it what about the rest of the world I I think there there are two ways to look at this and I I think you and I probably both agree mostly on this and maybe most of you too even if you've made some I don't mean to shame you I like it's okay trade meme coins that's fine if that's what you want that's okay but also do so with the knowledge that the negative impact is there we can't ignore it there is negative impact and so when I think about like what could Mass adoption look like that isn't just another crypto Casino maybe if we're sitting in this room and we've looked at the icos and we looked at the nft cycle and we looked at now where this interesting meme cycle that maybe is starting to slow down a little bit and maybe not are those really Mass adoption events I don't I don't think so I I don't know how much it benefits the world to see Jimmy Fallon wearing a board ape I don't know how much it benefits the world for the president of Argentina to launch a token and have that just rug what but what about um the the the idea of like value creation right and like Builders who are building and like how are they getting compensated for their work how are they getting compensated for the value they're creating because one of the great challenges that you see is I remember in for the first project I worked for a super super OG project and um you know it was it was still the tail end of that Ico craze and I said like are we launching a token and he said no good projects don't launch tokens that was like 2017 I was like oh okay right and then you have all this value that supposedly gets created and then you have people who maybe have never even worked in the industry who just launched something they extract all the value and moves to erc20 tokens they come through and then you have these Builders who spent five years toiling away Building open source software who have $ and you have some memesters who dropped in you know three weeks ago who walked out with like $10 million so like is that fair right so does that like what what what can be done I'm curious what why did you join web 3 like in the very very beginning you open your first wallet why did you join so oh I mean because Joe Luben hired me and I needed a wallet and metam mask number one but the reason that I said yes to the invitation was because I come from South America and um we have very tricky governments there uh you know Banana Republic is a generous way to refer to them and um I have an inherent distrust of governments and I felt that adding transparency was really meaningful and I actually had some conversations with uh lemon who had been previously the um prime minister of Haiti when he talked about this where he said that when Haiti had uh experienced their crisis with um the earthquake they got some aid from the Red Cross and they raised something like $80 million for them and then they tried to give them a check for 5 million and said that everything else was spent in administration Fe and so he was exploring blockchain as a way to like actually get Aid back to countries in the way that like it was intended and I thought that was a really cool use case and I said this would be so cool if we could add accountability to governments through this kind of transparent Ledger um you know that that was my like idea of like what the technology could do when when I joined uh but in practice you know um you know I opened I open to mamas to just do some pretty basic you know nft trading I I think that reason is a very compelling reason mine mine is really similar I was introduced to blockchain technology early on as a financial mechanism like hey you could make some money and I started to really research and dig into it and I'm not I'm not the type of person that's like oh a buddy of mine made some money so I'm just going to blindly throw some money at this thing and so as I started to understand the ethos of what it means to build on the blockchain it it boils down to me for for a lot of folks It's the Return of ownership to the to the masses um You Don't Own your home maybe you do but most people rent if you own a home if you buy your home you're paying a mortgage probably for 30 years maybe if you're aggressive for 15 most people aren't even owning their vehicles they're leasing or they're taking Bank notes to be able to purchase them heck even this iPhone that's in my pocket I can pay monthly payments to buy an iPhone pretty soon I'm not going to own the shoes on my feet the socks on my feet the underwear that I have on ownership is getting further F and further away as a concept from the general mass of society and that's not okay because if you fast forward that in time what does that look like it means the top 0.001% own everything and no one else has any chance to have any meaningful Equity built up in their lives so do you think the true unlock of blockchain will be the attribution of ownership I think what it does is it gives the hope to dismantle the corrupt Financial systems that have always existed and it's similar to what you're saying it's when you look at countries that deal with corrupt governments crypto gives them a way to truly own their money and that's something that's really powerful I don't know that Meme coins benefit that in any way but what if people just know that it's like like people every day buy the lottery right and and it's a it's like I think like an aspiration and a hope right and and like people know they're probably not going to win the lottery I guess there's like maybe more more regulation and limitations on that but like are meme coins that it's it's complicated right yeah I know the the crowd has some smirks on their faces a little bit of laughter if I go buy a lottery ticket um I know full well what I'm purchasing I think the issue today is that many people buy a token like Libra and they don't full well know some of us do and and it's because we've been around for a while we've we've seen the the pump and dump phase and many cycles over the years but for the new user meme coins as a vehicle for Mass adoption I think is actually quite misleading and and actually if you really pull the thread it's pretty deceptive because and there's no Randomness we it we're not telling these folks that this is actually just a casino we're not being upfront about it okay so I think part of the Crux becomes like we have to provide functionality Beyond this casino right otherwise then you know how can we expect people to use this technology so where do you see the industry going in terms of uh some use use case that like applies to like the average person I wish you would have told me that question ahead of time so I could come more prepared I like it because it there there have been a few air drop events in the space that I think have been done well a lot that have been done poorly we've seen them happen many times uh hyper liquid is a great example if we look at what hyper liquid did early on they found product Market fit they built a great product they had great users they developed a strong community of people who believe in what they do before they launch their token meme coins are kind of the opposite right like it's sort of lead by token lead by Financial incentives there's no product Market fit there's no product to back up the token it's just speculation and so I think the way that we move forward the value ad that we have is true products that solve real problems for real people where we can demonstrate crypto makes your life better maybe there is financial incentive I'm not saying remove that altogether I think that is a vehicle for Mass adoption but if we do it with honesty and with a product that backs the token and there's actually real building happening and real value added I think that's actually a better Mass adoption event yeah so something I've been percolating as um kind of a use case is really like creating things that weren't possible before right and one of the use cases that I keep coming back to and I don't actually know if it's technologically feasible but I hope that at some point it is is like what you mentioned about ownership but actually ownership about like our data as attributed to our identity right because um you know Google and Facebook invented this data economy um at the risk of dating myself I was the first group of people that tried Facebook me too back in the day um and you know Mark Zuckerberg's team showed up on our college campus and said don't worry we're only ever going to let college kids in uh you know and uh we'll never sell your data do you remember the Revolt when they opened it to high schools yes no and the weird when you found like your uncle you know watching you got a call from your parents being like why were you out so late on this you're like whoa what just happened right and but but at the time it was like you know it used to be like for us it was called the green book and it was the the photos and the names of everyone in your class right and then that got turned into the Facebook and um and then you have this whole data economy that has been created by these like giant Tech monopolies who have essentially like developed off like profiting of people right the idea was like you use the free service and then you become the product and that happened in like back in the you know early 2000s and now we've you know we're almost 20 years later and no one's ever figured out how to like take that back into the people right so like um no one's figured out how to say well um I own my data and yes maybe you can sell it to advertisers with my consent and also when you you make you know $40 because I purchased something through this maybe that should go back into you know the a pool of the people or go back into you know the the overall uh Impressions or visions or however that goes and so I think there's like a lot to figure out technically with like how oracles work how you attribute that data and how it works through but I do think that like if we're really Thinking Beyond the casino the unlock is like that attribution of data somehow yeah I agree I work in the Oracle space under Uma we do a lot of work around that data is where real value is your data if you don't own your data if you post images on Instagram you don't own that data that's problematic and if you pull that thread far enough it becomes very much like you don't even own original thought anymore that's that's Troublesome we're we're out of time but should I can can crypto still save the world I think crypto can still save the world and I think that you are all the ones who are going to do this so enourage you to think through how to break the tech monopolies because that's really the unlock the unlock comes down to like really figuring out how to produce real business models how to take over real capital and how to break systems that are you know how how to break the systems that already exist because they're broken so we're we believe in you I I like to think we do because there is still hope and crypto can I believe still save the world so let's do it [Applause]