Internet Renaissance: The Emerging Creative Economy in Web3

let's see do we have the next uh panel ready oh great thank you jonathan this is going to be really interesting one it's called the internet renaissance the emerging creative economy in web3 and we have five very talented speakers gonna present them one by one uh scott boomer from bitcoin hey scott um we have uh pre decide from open law hey hi how's it going uh jess oh really good we have just lost from seed club what's up guys uh blake catherine hello hello and we have roman uh brahma uh brahma nathan i'm really sorry uh from my dlvc hey reuben hey hi everyone well uh oh there's a mosquito here i'm sorry summer in buenos aires uh okay now that i have the the five of you here i'm gonna jump off and uh just let you carry on a nice conversation so please take it away awesome i feel like any of us can really start um you know jess um maybe if you want to start with an introduction and we can go around the room just kind of uh introduce what we're doing in the creative economy in the first place and then we can take things from there sounds good nice to see you all my name is jess and i am the instigator at seed club c club is a social token incubator so we help creators navigate this wild weird world of web3 and we've just recently launched our second cohort we have 11 projects that we're working with over a six week period to help them design and launch a social token so i'm glad to be here maybe i should pass it on to pre hey everyone glad to be here um i work for a project called open law which puts together legal dows we you know put together the lao which is a venture-based community driven dow um and outside of the lao um another dao was born uh called flamingo which is specifically related to the nft space um i also help jess a little bit on the seed cloud side of things so kind of just super interested in in the creator economy in general both on the nft digital art side but of course also like the social token side too we all have the same order i think i'm next but i don't know because some apps do that and some don't but i'm scott i work at get coin um we're enabling critters to work for the open internet um especially developers and uh i also have just with c club i think we're gonna see a common trend on that front um some really interesting stuff happening in both the nft and social space which we'll get into in a minute and then i believe uh reuben is below me is that true for everyone hey everyone i'm ruben i'm an investor at ideocollab benches but uh like a lot of folks here we work on a lot of joint projects together uh like seed club now the layout bitcoin um and i think from from my perspective it's a it's a fascinating space to think about um this this web three dream actually coming to fruition like right in front of our eyes it's it's amazing to be here um blake hello uh hi everyone i'm blake blake catherine uh i'm a digital artist i've been around the block in the digital space for about five years now but with crypto approaching maybe a year or not a year and a half a half a year and uh really just dove right into it i'm mostly in the nft space for now and am definitely intrigued further and further with the social tokens which has kind of just gotten on my radar but yeah really excited to chat with you guys today i love that we're all from such different backgrounds actually so blake given that you you really like the core creator here i mean we all work on projects but like realistically like you are the target audience for a lot of like the nft space a lot of the social space in terms of thinking through you know the problems this is solving for you so like maybe one sort of stage setting thing we could do would be just to understand sort of you know what was your experience like in web 2 and sort of just like building um creating art in that space and how have you seen any like or have you seen really any differences in how the community in web 3 is engaged on that yeah i mean as a whole um i think it just goes in general i i can't speak too technical between web 2 and web 3 as i am very much on the visual versus development side and i'm still acquainting myself with those terms but uh as a whole like with the traditional sense of web and creation like it is a very much uh you rely on others like i rely on clients i rely on exposure uh granted not that free kind but uh i i had to very much like a gorilla market myself in a really intense way and what i'm seeing what's so fun right now especially at least with my experience in the nft space is how there's kind of just this wild west moment of feeling like you can really just discover anyone you can turn a corner and there's something totally new or refreshing and it kind of gives back this like individualized power as a creator i feel and of course that then leads into hopefully commercial gains which has allowed me to have more control into both my craft and my career or artist projection so it's been really positive honestly that's awesome and i guess like pre like you have done a bit of work on this front like with uh flamingo like both i think with with blake actually but then also with other artists like how is that being on your front like what are you seeing there and then by the way like i'm kind of i guess moderating but we don't really need to i told like everyone earlier like we can just kind of do like a kind of random clubhouse style like anyone jump in don't feel like i'm the only one that like needs to uh guide things totally thanks yeah um so for those of you i guess who aren't uh familiar flamingo is a community of people who are enthusia enthusiastic about the nft space and and want to collect and really push the boundaries of what you can do when once you acquire you know an nft so we created a dow um for these for these folks who who wanted to collect um you know the idea there is just to pull capital and and get nfts of all different types i guess the strategies have really been everything from like digital art to collectibles to uh gaming assets and even investing in underlying nft infrastructure um so i mean coming from that vantage point i i mean i think what people and at least you know my cleaning on the membership of of flamingo a lot of what's fascinating is not only like this curation aspect of the dao of of people really kind of in a way taste making or signaling in the community what they want based on this dow but some of the fun things you can do once you actually have an nft um i mean it's awesome to flex your collection on twitter or whatever app um is out there and and you know show off your wallet address to show you know signal your taste and i think that's kind of actually been really interesting to watch as well um see these curator taste makers emerge but um also some of you know what could be done in the metaverse too like putting up um a you know gallery or museum in the in the in the metaverse somewhere to display a collection or even thinking about like dowifying um an artwork so having a bunch of you know we we purchased the crypto punk alien a few weeks back which got a couple headlines but you know there's thoughts about dalifying that and and maybe like creating a you know almost like an avatar or personality around the alien um you know merch that could emerge derivative work that we've already seen like people create a different derivative work of that and uh you know with nftx uh uh we're seeing like bundles of work so i think that there's some fun things that can emerge and and of course like at the end of the day we're all here to create a better creator economy and and i mean you know i think finding a a group of people to push the boundaries on on some of where you could actually take a work once you acquire it has been really interesting i think from from my my angle and we've really just gotten started there so it doesn't stop from just collecting i think i i actually like part of me wants to transition into talking a bit about like the social stuff but actually i do have a quick follow-up there which is like so you're talking about like the diafication of different kinds of like individual art pieces the other thing that came up in a conversation yesterday with the foundation team was this idea of like what is the equivalent almost of like texture or like scale and art like you have this experience in physical art like being in the gallery of like seeing the art in person like do you see these sorts of like dalification mechanisms or like interactivity mechanisms is like almost an analog of that like do you see there being like and actually like you as well like do you see there being kind of a distinction between um and is it like purely a difference or is it also like is there an augmentation or an attraction like in terms of how people interact with digital art versus other pieces that you might have made in the past yeah i mean you know on the downside it's kind of cool because you have a community rallying around a creator and supporting that piece and kind of going beyond um you know what maybe even the artist's intent wonder intent was they're giving a personality so i think yeah in a way it's augmented the experience of that work has completely been augmented by a community that's rallying around it and a creator which is kind of weird but like very cool and then i mean beyond that in like a in a very tangible way like if you go to a metaverse and like wear oculus lenses and decide to like look at a piece like that i think experience and visual experience is entirely different than like going to museum i thought that it's better or worse but it's like you know a 3d augmented reality like we're going to see all these pieces kind of hid at once and you can then purchase that and take that from one world to another and i think those kind of things are i mean it's just a different artistic experience and i mean i'd love to hear what blake thinks about that but i do think that it is um augmented i guess in many ways uh absolutely yeah i completely agree and honestly a lot of times even because again i'm coming from the artist side here when i chat with colleagues who have maybe been skeptical or just now getting into the space and try to kind of onboard them in an easy way it is one of those things where you know if i show them a decentraland gallery for example they're immediately like oh this is amazing whereas if i show them someone's xyz.com website they're just like well this is just a different social platform and it doesn't impact me and they don't view it as that same tier you know without those comparisons of the more tangible one like for you was saying with like having a space whether that's an ar vr etc to be able to go and have almost like this copy paste but digital version of the gallery experience because there is that stereotype in your head as a creator that you need to have some kind of grandiose display at some point if you're selling your works for a certain threshold you know so i do love to see that creativity and i know that we're really early in that and there's so much limitations still with being able to build these really high fidelity kind of experiences but it's really exciting to see and i do think that i don't compare it so much to a gallery like if i could go in person like i would love to see what a crypto gallery would look like in person like i would i'm sure i would geek out and it would be amazing and stick with me much more than hopping on a browser or putting on goggles and seeing it in that way but i still do like that we're bridging that gap and that we are going from here's a thumbnail to okay here's a bit past that and now you can actually walk around have your avatar maybe you're having a voice chat with some a buddy you know across the country or something while you're both appreciating art together just following on from that blake you mentioned some of the things that are getting you know creators excited about this whole space and then you mentioned some things that would get you know your fans and supporters and community excited where do you think we're seeing the most progress right is it creators or is it kind of fans coming in first and and kind of you know forcing creators to really consider the nft medium i think that's a mixed bag i do think there's a very good pressure like there is a good peer pressure you know with your audience or you know patrons viewers etc to do well you know like i think that it's helping in my opinion especially because again digital artists were kind of like we're cursed to only social media for so long with being able to get our work out there uh it's kind of forcing you to take a stop away from fast art you know that like really quick content creation and look at your practice in a more meaningful way so i do think that it's very heavily relied on the community and i think it's better for it i think before you step away from nfts like it is funny how there's one creator and blake i'll absolutely love your work it's fantabulous um but i think there's like you know the initial thing of collecting art is a is an easy way to understand nfts but this world is just going to open up so much over the next little while and we've even seen that in in recent weeks with the essay token um and this of of you know the written work and you know reuben i know deeply involved with zora and just sort of this crypto media movement that's that's happening as well so i think uh i think this is a space that already might seem like to many as if it's really just you know a runaway freight train and maybe a bit too late but i think the space is so early and the types of media that are going to be minted and even just like the understanding of why somebody would want to own one of these things which i think touches on like the idea where does it get displayed but i think there's sort of this nuanced understanding of why owning an nft is going to be interesting and valuable not only as a flex but you know as some sort of uh deeper sense of ownership and participation in this creator economy yeah i just want to add something that i think we haven't seen much of yet but i'm hoping to and i think we will is this idea of like metaverse and virtual economies that emerge like stores and other things like i mean like you have your own gallery at some point and it would just you know you could be there with an avatar to enter you know entertain it i've seen like sneaker shops i think there was one a few years ago in crypto boxes so i think it'll be kind of interesting when we see people uh you know pushing nfts and in kind of stores and and online economies i'm you know it hasn't quite taken off yet but i feel like it may uh in the next few years the the one like just follow-on idea to that going to the essay point again as well like the dalification of like individual art pieces is really cool but the one other concept that came up in another conversation was the idea of like having a sort of like i'm like a huge nerd like d is something that i like participate in and like you could almost have collaborative storytelling in which like parts of its story are like managed by the community and like those are you know those written works in like a mirror sort of type environment um going back to the platform jess was mentioning that did the essay token and i think that sort of collaborative art like or those sets of collaborative collections whether they're written or whether they're like just you know visual art like i think in both those cases there's a lot of really cool elements that like just weren't possible before unless you had like a thousand like galleries that you could like put into one single room and like somehow get to coordinate with each other um i have another question for blake as a creator and and free as a as a collector and curator what are we missing right when we the builders are designing protocols and platforms with what we think creators and collectors want what are some of the things that we're missing that you can see right now i have to think on this so pre you can go first like it's hard to say like what's missing right now since it's happening so quickly so it's like i i think um you know things are moving pretty quickly i think maybe there's a lot of i think what's maybe missing is kind of the communication into uh and bringing more people along although i think that's kind of slowly happening pretty quickly um you know more and more friends are reaching out about nfts i think still there's like that conversation about like what it can you screenshot something like isn't that the same and it's like no it's not but okay and then like so i mean i think that there's some i mean that's not really a good answer on like a technical sense i'm sure there's like a lot uh that needs to be done i mean i guess the thing that everyone always complains about is like ux and this idea of like um making it easy to to buy in a one-stop shop or like how do i see my collection or how do i display my collection like i think like that all will get answered over time but um i guess in the short term maybe that i mean i'll continue to think on that one we just need more people doing stuff more people doing more interesting things that's the answer to everything i don't think you keep up love it this isn't so much like uh i guess literal and what is missing but one thing that's come up uh with a lot of my close friends who are also uh an ft artist and myself is uh that when again when you compare to the other side of the art world which is just basically not crypto art um that you have a lot of curation and art critics and there's not really that voice here yet on that in either the curation or the critics side i'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing but i do find it's interesting that it lacks a presence um so that's something i'm just kind of curious and would love to hear other people's opinions on too um because if there is something with having those types of voices and those formal writings and reviews that do kind of help elevate a creator or a collection or a piece and so it's just something i've noticed that is missing and i'm curious as to it i would actually love to see more community curation like i would love to see we do have a lot of platforms which are just like and actually flamingo doubt it's kind of bad like i really think like you should make like a flamingo dial gallery if there's not one already maybe i'm like that's actually in the works probably yeah awesome like i think that sort of is is to me really really cool like yes it's nice to have these platforms where you have just individual creators like getting sort of like white listed onto this platform but you ultimately want it to be a collaborative process and you have someone mentioned that this is idea of like gallery curators aren't just picking artists they're like trying to tell a story amongst like all the different artworks that are in their gallery and trying to like let you go through like a narrative as you go through the like physical space and like there isn't really that kind of like level of detail i think people are putting into like the curation uh at least yet but like i think that's that's coming yeah so yeah i mean we i i mean it's like thinking about creation in general i feel like i guess that space is still emerging you have some platforms doing the creation for you like you know foundation is a great uh example uh i mean super rare others are kind of there's a you know million amazing platforms it'll be interesting when we start seeing like the emergence of these like mega taste makers like almost like a sub stack type of um like you could almost subscribe to the taste maker to see like what artists they're recommending like i would imagine that that may slowly emerge as like people start garnering followings based on what they like i mean you kind of see that with like the museum and others i i actually wonder if this is a good segue into the social token part of this because like there is this element in which like these social tokens or community tokens start to be used for whether it's like curation or whether it's for like trying to find those like 100 true fans of a piece of artwork or some given like artist's work like rac is a good example that comes to mind of this i don't know jess ruben if you want to talk a bit uh to those points sure i mean i think the what's interesting i think is that curators are going to be extremely valuable and be able to capture a lot of the value that they create in the space um and and maybe the the types of people and the types of curation are going to expand quite a bit compared to having to you know run a gallery versus you know it's probably going to be much more like having a popular blog back in the early 2000s right like but being able to monetize it actually um so i think yeah two things one i really when i use the term creator i'm thinking in the broadest possible sense of which captures artists it captures people who are bringing communities together on the internet small squads of people that are creating value all the way through to um you know individuals or large groups at the same time and so i think you know web3 technology is empowering that type of work is just the most fascinating thing for me right now you know more specifically we have 11 projects that we're working with right now and you know one of them is a an nft that is essentially going to be building a virtual influencer sort of personal brand around them and the core thing that they and their community will do is curate nft art and so they have some really interesting mechanisms that are involved with that so the i think potential for um how entities interact with social tokens is just fascinating but we're seeing you know use cases across the board so ways of bringing people together to collaborate and create written content and reward creators to reward their their fans as well all the way through to sort of unlocking some vaults of of photographs and media that have been locked away in some vault in africa for for many years and um you know turn that over to the community and looking at different ways of monetizing that and you know i think we start to play in and around the dow space and mechanism design and and uh you know cooperatives and it just gets really really interesting really quickly um and you know the the only sort of big thing that i put out there is that everything is so early in the space and um i think my answer before of like we just need to do more of this is something that i truly believe especially in the social token space and we're just really excited to see you know all these projects come out and learn and ideally flourish um but i know reuben has some interesting experiences in this space as well oh jess those are some great examples and i think like we've seen a few different um eras already of personal and community and social tokens as people realize like how these things can actually generate and share value at the very start i think people had the idea that you could just like launch a coin or launch a token and all of a sudden it should have value um but i think you know the narrative especially in the second half of last year is around um that being a way to share and collaborate and distribute value rather than actually generate it so the nft component like fits really nicely into the social token component as a way to actually like converge value on content um and then have the community like be able to share and create and generate that that value so zooming right out you know the really nice thing about ethereum is that it lets you create a token and when you create a token you can have it represent anything that you can imagine the hard part is getting other people to imagine it too so when you kind of reach that point you have to have to kind of zoom back in and think okay what what is the the unique thing that this token this social token is doing that's gonna um gonna result other people valuing that token as well as you so i think that's why i'm super excited about this intersection of nfts as representing value in in content and the social tokens representing the value in the people creating that content i really love that framing yeah like the there's a sort of like level of you know having like the gallery example maybe is good right like you can have people managing this gallery together which happens to have this artwork which maybe builds in you know has its own program like programmable cash flows of sorts we'll say um and i think that ultimately having that sort of uh ability to like track that together as a community is really powerful um i don't know like what what are the different like when would someone in your opinions choose to do you know just an ft art versus like a social token like like i know we've talked about this problem right like is it is it really always good for people to be creating tokens like what's what's like the most interesting so maybe example of a social token you've seen today where you think that really like made like sense i can really see the value in that i mean i think you said earlier like ric is a great example um i really love uh i think it goes well with what ruben said about like the distribution of the value where it's like you support me and it's like here's these cool cassette tapes or this or that and it does feel like a really light even playing field to be able to kind of like in an artist since i almost look at it as like a patreon even though that's probably like a bad comparison to make with it uh but it does feel like you can really build this like rewarding multi-tiered uh kind of environment going off that kind of structure and i personally as an outsider and again very very new to learning about social tokens thought that was a really awesome and tangible example that i could grab from especially being a musician since i know music is still not as popular as like visual art et cetera with the tokenizing kind of world what i kind of like about social tokens because i think they're actually very complementary uh nfts and social tokens i mean i like this idea and rac is a great example of someone who's kind of really pushed the boundaries here as like a grammy winning producer whatever he already had the community um and the foothold to to begin with so he's he's an excellent candidate for this kind of thing but what i kind of find interesting is now that he has this token he can actually create nfts and redeem it for his token and the more and more people that you know you can create a sub community using that token and let's say you're a mega fan you could accept payment in that token and create like a micro economy based on his work as a super fan and so having more people transact in your social token only creates a larger network effect and thereby just makes you more popular and bigger and um and i think kind of creating these micro economies around a certain person and their fandom and i actually remember like reading something about like fish um fans like they have all of these merch like sub communities in the field i mean if you're a fishbowler you'd kind of get that but there's like people and the grateful dead similarly like they have all these people making merch um using um all this you know copyrighted uh stuff but if you and whatever like i'm sure that they're the bands are fine with that but if you had that transaction occur in that domain um native currency i think that's pretty powerful um you know that that only you don't have to necessarily worry about some of these copyright ip issues your network is growing because people are buying that merch with your social token so some of those like i think components like go away if you have a token and everyone's kind of leveraging that in your network um but anyways yeah i think i think there's something there for sure it's a great point about rac you know he spent many years building a very loyal community a very tight-knit group of fans and supporters and he was able to kind of create an instant network um by distributing rac tokens and giving the value back to the community but what we also need to be doing is making sure we enable new emerging and underrepresented artists to be able to get started by kickstarting a community um if it's only existing established artists that we're serving then i think that would be a massive failure yeah i think that's the you know the the challenging opportunity right now is that we're seeing some templates that are working rac friends with benefits rng you know this idea of holding tokens to get access to a community and the ability to sort of bring a community together around a token i think is fascinating it doesn't create a revenue stream for artists necessarily um so it's not quite like a patreon it's pretty different in that it's got a lot of other benefits to it but you know i think that's an important note that that is often missed um and i think you know the other thing is it's not a substitute for doing all the creation and all the community building that needs to happen to create value on the internet and so we often talk about the importance of either you know bringing somebody's social capital or pooling together a group of people social capital to then launch a token within and i think you know that's still necessary we're very focused right now on sort of how we turn that capital into something that can can be valuable long term and create more value but i think the that early stage stuff is i think going to be solved as creators then begin to reach out into their fan groups and bring them in and act as platforms to help launch other creators but you know these are far from a sort of magic wand at this point though sometimes it kind of feels like that or at least we hope it feels like that this is a great discussion i know we're pretty much like one minute left any final closing thoughts just on the space on the future i actually feel like jess that was like a great sort of summary like where i think we're going as well um final final words from anyone and then i'll make sure jonathan doesn't kill me for going too far over okay sure i mean i just say that this is a i think like you're talking about just the excitement of being in something new and seeing new things around every corner and that's how i feel like my life is right now and i just want to welcome people in come join the party there's so much interesting exciting things that the folks that are on stage here have been wildly supportive of myself getting into the space and uh and i know we're eager to do that for others as well so find us on the internet social token and the nft space is warm and welcoming and we'd love to see you a part of it i think that's a good note to end it on um so i mean we're actually uh mariano there's some backstage stuff happening here where you're trying to decide what's happening with the next talk how is that going um yeah so um i've heard you talking about the social tokens and community tokens for the last few minutes and our next guest james young was going to be talking about just that he thought he was going to be on a panel but turns out that he's actually going solo but uh what do you say if we uh just invite him over to the conversation and we can keep it going for another 20 minutes and because i'm sure he will be able to uh uh share a bunch of interesting things about the communities and you know how to build them around tokens and just uh i think it's going to be good how about that i'll help create some space for james thank you everyone thank you mariano cheers reuben a huge james fan personally uh coming back online there we go um so i'm down to i'm down to stay yeah i mean like i uh i know that feeling of like uh not like panels versus presentations are very different beasts um and so like i'm happy to just like even jam on like collab land specifically because i think there's a lot there that's really relevant to what we just talked about um so um maybe james if you want to just do like a quick intro and we can go from there yeah sure thanks for uh having me and uh appreciate everyone sticking on where i don't have to like go solo for 20 minutes uh so i much much appreciated um yeah so uh my name is james young i have a consumer product for communities called collab land and uh we have a bot that works on telegram and on discord and uh that bot makes sure that everyone in a channel holds a certain token at a certain threshold and so if uh you have a token great you can be in that chat room if you move those tokens out of your wallet the bot will remove you from the channel uh and so we've seen a lot of interesting kind of emergent design and really the idea of the collab land bot the kind of thesis is in line with crypto in general where uh we believe in terms of crypto it reducing the coordination costs so uh you know everyone holds a token and they're all incentivized and motivated uh you know to to make that token accrue value and that's the the shelling point um you know my whole background um prior to doing collab land has been in layer two research and more specifically with daos and what was really interesting and what really challenges my assumptions because we are just at this beginning this new frontier was you know i've been through the whole like bull bear now we're getting up to this new bull run here and gas prices are killing me just kind of an aside uh at the moment um what i what i thought you know looking at like 2017 and you saw the full run it's all pure speculation and i was very much like anti-token you know you can't have a token just just speculating uh and so it helped create this malik dao which had no token and it was just skin in the game and uh what uh i thought was to build online communities you had to have uh you know no token you had to start with this level of trust and once uh this trust has been built then you can introduce a token once we launch collab land what i saw emerge was really challenging to my initial assumptions of that because you know for example um i saw one of these communities called meme and meme token their only feature at the very beginning was the club land bot and then you know after they it started as a joke they launched the token you needed a hundred token to get into the citadel and club land managed that group and they said hey guys like what should we do now uh and it was an interesting kind of psychological thing where you know everyone else in the chat room knew that everyone else had the token so there was more of this like focus to like try to come together and make something happen and in two weeks time they had launched this idea of nft farming and um with nft farming it kind of just took off right place at the right time uh and i just remember uh like when they launched that feature uh the transaction the 24 hour transaction volume for meme just shot up to like a million dollars and i was like whoa like you know i always thought you needed trust first and then you put this transactional element of social tokens on top but you had this community meme that had this that just came together as a joke and really they were aimed for a specific specific goal was to increase the value of this token and like they made it work i don't know if it's the exception that proves the rule or because we're so early on is this a way of being able to form online communities um and so yeah it's just super interesting i think that we don't talk enough about uh i think we don't talk enough about the initial token issuance and the initial distribution of the token and we kind of jump ahead to like okay what are we going to do with this token and whatnot but i think the mechanics of the initial distribution and the bootstrapping phase not the steady state but the bootstrapping phase of the of the token is um important and critical um and i've seen it so many times with social tokens what will happen is someone will launch a token and uh you know someone will provide liquidity for it on uniswap and there's like a bunch of bots that are running on uniswap that will like start pumping the token and then once the you know people start hearing about it they buy the token on uniswap and then the price will dump because these bots are just front running everyone else and then will sell and then so you get people that uh you know are starting the community their initial members and they're a little salty because they're like underwater from like day one so it's like you know really important when you talk about tokens because you're adding this extra dimension or element of price that could be somewhat stressful because now you trying to grow a community but you have these users that you know may not be in it for the long haul they just want short-term number go up so you can see that there's this like tension between you know short-term incentive versus long-term value of what you're really trying to build from a community perspective right and so i think yeah how do you think like that actually like with respect to those kinds of like decisions like how does someone prevent short-termism from like coming into their community how do you avoid that kind of problem in your mind yeah so i've seen some communities that um will have kind of a master issuer and they'll like just be depending on how people react in discord or telegram and you know the value that they provide in terms of discussion they'll start just tipping them and this is where the initial distribution comes into play they refuse to provide liquidity on uniswap for the token and are just hand issuing it and just through social norms via the culture of the community will say please don't provide liquidity for the token yet and what you see is people in the community saying okay i'm holding this token and i want to see value for it and you see these initial creators that are holding these tokens and doling them out it's a lot of work because you have to read all the messages you're really cultivating and kind of hurting cats and then you know what eventually happens is when enough people want liquidity for that token you see these community admins kind of break down and say okay q3 of this year or you know 90 days or whatever so that people you know don't go rogue and then provide the liquidity so you know having crypto and the ethos of like permissionless is great but it's hard at the same time because you know people can kind of have their own agendas so it's really important when you're starting to create the proper foundation um i think i think so that's really tricky i think that's one of the things that the broader crypto space kind of doesn't quite get or they look at what's happening in social tokens and they go okay but there's so much trust that i have to rely on here like if i'm holding alex tokens there's nothing that's holding him accountable to actually give the percentage of his earnings out or to follow through and give tokens out in the future for future projects he works on so like inherently there's trust in that relationship same with any of the communities that we see out there where there's a central issuer or um and i think the trust goes quite a way and so i think what's interesting is like that's totally fine and should really be leaned into in the short term where we want to create these expectations and norms and um you know there's a bunch of design decisions that can be made as to whether tokens should be tradable or not and i think those are all interesting but at the core it's like can you bring people together that you like and can build a sense of trust and a vision and a direction that you're going in and that actually carries you through um quite a bit of the setup phase at least and i think what we're going to see as more tools get built out is that those tools will reduce the trust required and therefore allow these communities to scale quite a bit previously we're talking about you know nfts and on-chain revenue etc i think that's kind of something that unlocks that social scalabilities that that blockchain brings to to the world but i don't think it's necessary right now and i think we're going to see a lot of smaller communities start up using tokens as kind of a coordinating mechanism really built on trust built on promises and some of those are going to scale as as tools technology or at least the zeitgeist i guess catches up with them james i kind of have a quick question i guess this is more like the psychology of a a community token but i mean you've i mean i'm a part of a few tokenized communities but and they're you know obviously have been fairly successful as i wouldn't necessarily be a part of them but i'm curious like from your vantage point um is binding a community before a token lead to a more successful outcome for the said community or is kind of starting with that token um and then seeing how the community gels and what they do with it a better outcome i'm sure it's like you know variable depending on the community and the people but you know my feeling is sometimes if you throw a token it can kind of build that trust automatically and it could lead to a successful community you were kind of touching on that but i mean based on all the communities you've seen i'm just you know curious as to what what's gone on with that yeah that's a great question and this is what i'm trying to really figure out the mental model that i have is is this community transactional by nature or is it trust based by nature and there's another dimension to it is there extrinsic value are they motivated extrinsically by just price or are they motivated intrinsically by some core value that they're trying to like push forward in terms of community uh and i think there's like this trying to figure this out in my in my mind there's like this multi-dimension intrinsic extrinsic trust versus transactional and what's interesting to me is i see like communities like meme that went from transactional to trust and i've seen other communities that were based on trust turn transactional so it's like trying to understand what are is there data points like whether they're on chain or off chain sediment analysis that you can actually run to see if a community is turning from transactional to trust or trusted transactional extrinsic to intrinsic or entrance to extrinsic i think there are these like border lines so i don't think a community is just one thing and it kind of stays there it's always evolving and and and morphing and i've seen communities that were like i didn't really care for or think that we had any value it was just like a lot of speculation that actually it kind of grew and turned turned great and i've seen the opposite so it's really like it is is the extrinsic intrinsic trust versus transactional the right framing and is there like measurements that you can put to see when like different communities like cross that threshold because i think right now we just need a lot better metrics so you can go to coin get go or whatnot and you can just see price action but i think price action is like looking in the rear view mirror and trying to drive forward it because it's all things that have passed and so uh we need better metrics like how long has the average member of the community held the token if people are turning in and out then you're like okay this is more transactional if you have people that are holding that have never sold then you're like okay this is more trust based even if the price especially if the price is volatile you have like strong strong hands and i think that's like really important to like talk about when you uh look at like community based tokens um so i'm still trying to reason about it and um every time i think i figured it out like there are a couple of examples that kind of break that mold and so i'm i'm still trying to grasp at this and uh trying to do this in in a way that's a bit more data driven or scientific if possible but i'm i'm not i'm not quite sure yet it'd be interesting to see and i don't know if this exists i'm sure there must be some research in like reddit communities and other web 2 communities to see i mean like for example if you looked at gamestop that was in a way it's transactional but they also had their own lingo and ideology and you know culture within that so i would describe that as both trust and uh transactional but you know it'd be kind of just i think maybe taking some lessons there and seeing what happens because i think to your point it probably does ebb and flow between the two or it could be both um but yeah i mean i just think that's fascinating to see the evolution of of how these may come and i'm sure if like there is some major price volatility that can also change you know people's incentives um so yeah it's fascinating stuff yeah like wall street bets is super fascinating uh and i think that like you know it is transactional the way i see it is that there are some really strong hands there that won't sell no matter what right and so that ups the floor and so how many of those strong hands do you need to make the community viable what happens if you know from a metrics perspective you see uh like uh you know those strong one of them in the pillars of the community like sell does that mean that the whole community falls apart it's really funny we had early on we had a bug uh in in collab land um where uh we would only indicate if people got kicked out of a chat room every 12 hours because we didn't want to like spam the room and uh there was one community i was in and there were a bunch of people that sold across that 12 hour time span but at that 12 hour mark you saw like 10 12 people leave the room and then everyone else panic sold and so it was like oh we said okay well we can't have that from like a feature perspective and we just gotta like when people like cell just immediately like show show in the telegram chat and uh you know we we took kind of a a poll and they're like oh that's better um so it's just like it shows you the strength of that community right like you know if there's strong hands or weak hands and i think that's going to be part of like the the sentiment analysis the data the metrics that you have and i think that's why it's really important when you start with issuance uh and then just initial distribution if you find the strong hands out there that can serve as that kind of the bedrock of the community from like a tokenized community perspective how do you think uh ethereum fits into this framework that you've outlined i think that's like uh that might be too spicy question but i'm really curious like i i personally think i have my biases towards towards you i'm sure probably everyone on the panel does but like how do you see its evolution getting in there for ethan general i i think that like you have to be uh what i'm seeing is you know crypto and blockchain native tokens are definitely meme driven it's values driven uh and you know it's about it's about more than just price action uh because you know there are people that got underneath when it was sub ten dollars and still moving forward and still motivated because the vision has not yet been realized so it's outside of price price is a good metric in terms of measure of success but it's not what you know you're focused on so i think that like with ethereum and in any of these communities it needs to have that value driven because you know bear markets bull markets the cycle continues and it's really like flushing out and keeping the strong hands as you kind of move forward and that's the only way to continue growth i think awesome thank you everyone i think that that's the best note to wrap up on um and thank you all for kind of doing this double panel yes thank you appreciate it mariano i'll pass it over to you yeah uh thank you very much everybody scott priyanka james blake jess uh this was really interesting i'm i'm really happy that we're finally talking about more things that just uh you know defy and you know that the space is growing and uh you know accommodating communities and art uh you know collectors it's a it's an incredible thing to see so uh i'll be following closely and uh thank you all for being here i appreciate it have a great day thanks folks thanks everyone [Music]