DAO or Die: The Future of PFP NFTs - Michael Kriak

hey everybody uh mike kriak i'm the managing operating partner at consensus mesh and i'm going to be talking about dou or die the future of pfp nfts so just to set the stage a little bit the challenge that we have or at least that i believe is that so many of these nft projects at the moment like what are they doing what's next are you really just looking at the floor and what are they actually doing and how are they actually entertaining how are they actually bringing value and to me the answer is dolls and and having the creators and then having the people that buy those nfts participating in dallas so much of what we talk about here at shelling point earlier today if you listened you heard kevin awake speak about the importance of dowels and coordination and it's my belief that it's not enough to simply have ownership of ip and taking a look at floors otherwise those projects are going to be worthless quite quickly so dow or die so sorry for the dow pun i have actually i think there are a couple dollar die statements out there but i thought it was really appropriate so just a couple quick disclaimers about this i'm going to be talking and using examples on various pfp projects that i think do dowels well i may own some of those the mesh actively participates in many dial projects and so these are just my own personal views there's no shilling going on here it's really just meant to discuss what we think are and what i think is some of the best projects that are out there that are using dowels in the most effective ways okay so quick uh let's take a quick poll so how many people have pf first off pfp nfts raise your hand all right um okay that's great i love it i was not surprised all right so how many of those are dow based okay oh i like this i'm going to like you i'm going to be calling on you in a second wait show those hands again dial-based okay a little less all right do you actively participate in any voting within the dalles okay great oh dow pugs all right whoo all right i dig it maybe you should come up here and give this talk okay so let's dive into what the problem is again or is the problem as i see it so and correct me if i'm wrong we could talk about this a little bit but right now when you look at your kind of typical pfp project you meant there's some type of derivative mint ape mutant ape there's probably some 3d version that you get for free there's some 720 token that promises to be the ecosystem economy and then it's going to be in the metaverse right so that's like literally every roadmap and look i'm not knocking those but i think i want to ask the question what's next so to what degree is that actually going to have sustainable value and certainly a lot of the values that we see in many of these projects today so specifically um and i should comment too by the way my background has always been in media and entertainment and tech so prior to joining consensus mesh i've been there four years prior to that i was the chief operating officer at mashable the leading digital media company so i got to see firsthand how brands and entertainment were built and content was made and this is what really got me to use kevin's phrases green pilled in um and to note that the question here is how do you actually build a franchise how do you build a franchise if each of us own the ip around our specific nft and there are say 6 300 owners or 10 000 owners how do you actually create long-term value if all of these projects are designed to be this next great enterprise this next great entertainment brand or this next great gaming brand so it's in my opinion that those nfts themselves have to become the governance layer ones in which you as the owner of those nfts take action where you vote where you have reputation and credentials and you actually take back the ownership of value creation and again the problem here is not simply just to own it and say you own the ip you have to do something the coordination of that project has to happen otherwise you're only going to be looking at the floor so this is how i think the solution should look so the question is do you simply want to go to the moon or do you want to go to hollywood and so to me instead of mint derivative etc that's the start but this continues on in the participation in a dow so what exactly happens in a dao so i'm saying this i've complained about this for a few minutes and then i actually want to say okay well great so i have this nft i want to participate in the dow what exactly am i going to do well the first thing is you're actually going to vote using that nft to decide on what the collective project should be doing so aside from nfts how many of you have 720 tokens that you actively participate in dials broadly show of hands okay one or two people so uh how many of you own uh get coin tokens gtc tokens raise your hands a couple a couple back there how about uniswap tokens okay a lot do any of you actively participate in the governance okay couple so this is the call to action that i'm speaking about here the question is your participation in the dow to affect value and specifically in nft projects that many people are currently flipping look i love to flip jpegs i spend a lot of time looking at a lot of projects i very much enjoy it i enjoy the creativity but you have to participate in order for there to be significant value and this is what i mean so the first thing is vote use your nft to vote it becomes the governance layer the fungibles are 720 tokens that those usually end up giving or being created and air dropped so if you have a board ape there's going to be a 8 token or banana or whatever they're going to call it sometime in q1 here but that sure can be the economy for the game or whatever they're going to do but the nft itself has to become the voting mechanism and you have to participate so think about it when all these mints happen and all the royalties are being collected on open sea or it looks rare 2.5 5 these dial treasuries are massive notice i say they're dow treasuries right all of these creators you know minted 4 million 20 million have 100 million in their treasuries but who are they how do you trust them to spend the money to create long-term value you should have a say in that your nft is not only the ip but your say in how that hundred million should be spent so to me particularly if you want to go to hollywood instead of just the moon you have to be able to say i've got a higher talent if i want to build a franchise i want netflix to make a movie from my nfts i want my nfts to sing songs you have to be able to hire people that know how to do that people that not just simply know how to organize and create variants or do a very smart job on game theory for what looks rare and what doesn't and that's okay those are very smart people that have created that and again i'm not knocking that i think it's super massive and i love it but the reality is that you have to be able to hire other people within the dow that actually know how to build franchises knows what it takes to make music knows what it takes to make movies so that the long term value is going to be accrued collectively to the pfps so i'll use this example what if i didn't do that so what if my board ape somebody wants to license it for uh and my ape has like these little coins on his eyes and say like a bank i don't know wants to license it for a commercial short term short-term win for me great you get to license it fantastic and then what about your ape and your ape and your ap does all these things the value gets so diffused that everybody gets these short-term wins but think about the broader public for like what that's supposed to mean pretty soon nobody knows what these apes are designed to do why they hold value now contrast that obviously with disney and marvel and star wars and the world building that happens there or contrast that with many games where the world building that happens so many of these nft projects are designed to mirror that to be the next star wars or to be the next you know gaming world but none of them at present have the people or the ability to actually make that happen so the dow with these huge treasuries should hire so vote to get people to hire to get them to build to enter into concrete agreements on how to design the world that these nft projects are supposed to exist in and then obviously this is media it's content what's the distribution model how is that supposed to work and then by the way if you've trusted the dial to do this you should participate long term so in this scenario there's a recommendation where you actually end up taking your nft licensing it for short term back into the dow so that they're able to handle and coordinate how these various nft various specific nfts are a part of that larger world and then you benefit from that surely there are smarter people than me that would be able to understand the best way to use my pfp or a collection of pfps versus each one of us individually doing it this is by definition what a tao is and what a coordination mechanism is designed to do so i want to go through a couple examples and then maybe have a few questions so the bestest out there i think are various projects one of which is called ready player dao which does exactly this which in this instance acquires various nft assets doesn't necessarily have to be pfps but then goes through and has the ability then to stake those nfts onto a platform that can be lent out and have very similar to ygg or other you know yield collecting uh projects to be able to share in the distribution of the utilization of those nfts so in this specific instance we're trusting this specific dial ready player dao to be able to know which assets and which players are going to produce the largest yield in theory again i could do that i could have an open platform that i could stake my nft and assume some player is randomly going to use it but again wouldn't it be better to have experts within a dow than know how to do that the next is actually i think decentraland as well i think in this specific instance they're doing a very difficult job and trying and working and iterating into how they handle governance that focuses specifically to ensure that the value of these nft projects and the value of the nfts that are within their platforms grow value they have a committee layer they have a governance layer and then they have they iterate through that governance in a way that i think is quite challenging i highlight them because i find it very interesting that they are literally world building and that they have a host of nft projects sorry a host of nfts and they're trying to be able to understand and they want the participation of those holders of the nfts to figure out how to lead forward one of my favorites bright moments so bright bright moments actually started having a 720 token as a governance mechanism like many protocols do and then converted to an nft pfp related dow so the way this works there are 10 cities right now in new york venice berlin was just announced and there are a thousand nfts for each of those cities that are pfps that represent the cities and they act as a membership for both a physical gallery as well as being able to have discounts on various relationships with artists and others so in this instance my pfp that is a crypto new yorker is both and can represent me but then also acts as a specific way in which how that gallery is one run in new york down on worcester street or the one in berlin and how that's run so i get the benefit of the representation as a pfp and then i also get the benefit of saying how a gallery is run so in this instance a lot more real world but also the fact that the nft itself is representing the governance something that i really dig and then finally uh what farook is doing at rug radio i think in that instance too you know you started off with a membership and then you moved into various specific nfts the rug nfts that had a host of different representations in them and so in that instance as well the rugs that could actually act as great like banners perhaps on twitter uses and is a way to represent your stake as those specific nfts that can be used as pfps as a way to have a stake for the people and by the people so there's only a few examples that i've seen and i'm very curious as well for what others have felt but in terms of the polls that i've listed earlier i think this is something that needs to happen i think that fundamentally that you need to be able to have nft projects specifically those that get minted on various platforms to be able to form in a dial as quickly as possible and then for you to actively participate in those dials for the long-term success of those projects otherwise we're just going to watch the floor and we're going to sell and they're all going to go to zero and i think that's not what we want we want this to be the next generation of entertainment creation and the way to do that is to be able to actively make it and participate yourself so i think whoops in terms of uh i'll go back to the if there's any quick questions that's the uh that's the whole nutshell i'd love to be able to talk to folks more about that you know we participate in a lot of different dials and dow structures i'm very keen to see how this iterates