Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas, and I go by Nicholas with four leading Ns on Twitter. At the end of each week, I sit down for a casual Friday afternoon conversation with some of the brightest minds building Web3. The conversations are unstructured and wide-ranging. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Ellie Day, programmer, decentralized thinker, and partner at Seed Club Ventures. We talk about Ellie's new project, Always Online, and Ellie teaches me all about decentralized joint ventures, or DJVs. Later in the episode, I'm joined by Danny Aranda of PartyDAO, Stefan Delev of Caribbean Blockchain Alliance, and a handful of Web3 builders who ask questions and share their comments on DAOs, onboarding musicians to NFTs, and more. Thanks for joining me for this inaugural episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. All right, well, let's start this off properly. Welcome to what I'm calling Web3 Galaxy Brain, which is kind of a vehicle for me to hang out with cool people on a Friday afternoon, try and relax a little bit. I guess it's not an afternoon for you. Welcome, Ellie Day.

Ellie Day: Hello. Yeah, I'm in London right now. Been here for a little bit, but I'll be going back to the US on Sunday, probably. But yeah, I've been hanging out with my co-founder, Maz, who is sitting sort of close to me in the same room, also listening to this space. So hopefully there's not some weird Terrence space time from that. But yeah, glad to be here. We've been DMing and had some calls, but now we get to talk with some audience slash, I don't know, about stuff. So yeah, excited to be here.

Nicholas: Totally, yeah. Thanks for coming out. So you said Maz is your co-founder? I don't know Maz.

Ellie Day: Yeah, if you see the person with the green avatar profile picture in the audience, that's her.

Nicholas: Oh, welcome.

Ellie Day: It was actually kind of cool how we met. We got introduced through Julia Lipton, who's a cool person I know.

Nicholas: I've heard of Julia Lipton. What does Julia Lipton get up to? I forget.

Ellie Day: I don't know how to share things in this.

Nicholas: Oh, if you go to the tweet and you hit the share button, there's a share to spaces thing at the top.

Ellie Day: Nice. Okay. Well, maybe I'll try to do that. But yeah, she runs this awesome people ventures thing, but is also an awesome person herself. And Maz and I were at a dinner that Julia was hosting in Lisbon back in October. We're both kind of looking for co-founders. I was determined to do what I'm working on now, either way with or without a co-founder. But we just realized we were a good fit. And then I flew out to London to basically work with her and see if it was a good fit. And it has been. So yeah, that's how that works. Sometimes you just meet people and realize it's a good fit. We both have similar experiences and backgrounds, but it's like complimentary. So I'm still trying to figure out how to share a tweet.

Nicholas: No problem. No problem. So what are those complimentary skill sets actually? I'm curious.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Good question. So I'm like historically more technical and product focused. And I would say Maz on the other hand is, I mean, she likes to call herself a generalist these days. Like oftentimes people become generalist by focusing on lots of different, I mean, that is like kind of definition. You focus on lots of different things, but almost like by focusing on lots of things deeply, you almost become like generally really good at lots of different stuff. So I guess to compliment my like more product and engineering background, she has a lot of experience like in growth and marketing, just overall like operations of early stage companies or, you know, most recently she was a VC. So yeah, just like all around someone who, I mean, a good way to say it is she likes making calendar invites. I procrastinate making calendar invites. So you always need someone on your team who likes making a calendar.

Nicholas: Definitely need to cover those bases. So we'll get into what AOL is going to be, which is a hilarious name, by the way. But there's also, there is also a DAO attached, correct? Or there will be a DAO.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Yeah. Well, interestingly, the name always online or AOL for short, actually came from the DAO side of things like this. It sort of originated back in, in like April is sort of an offshoot from FWB friends with benefits. Like, and it was originally like the discord was made Phil from FWB. I don't actually know his, I mean, I think that's his actual name, but I don't know like his last name, I think. But Phil, all I know is he roller skates in real life. But anyways, like him and I like made a discord and we originally called it gorilla apes. We, cause it was like the idea of like, we were just going to like make a discord for people to ape into like shit coins and degenerate like defy stuff, like DJ and defy. So it was like pretty cool, but we needed like a better name. So we asked GPT three excited GPT three account.

Nicholas: Awesome.

Ellie Day: We asked a GPT three, what we should name, I guess, name the DAO or the discord. And we decided to buy and decide. GPT three decided that apes online was actually a good name. because I mean, and we're like, wow, that's awesome. You know, AOL throwback. It was great. So like, you know, the AI that open AI built you know, actually was doing the important work of helping this like discord group come up with a cool name. So kind of just like we had planned to launch like some sort of throwback type interface that was originally going to be on a well. GG is going to be sort of a front page of web three type thing. And, you know, at that point I was like, also like trying to figure out what I was going to spend my time, you know, doing like essentially my next like venture in the, in the space. And so at the time like dabbled in other stuff, AOL the DAO kind of, it wasn't even fully a DAO. It was like an emerging, it was like a pre DAO, like a precursor to a DAO was just like almost in hibernation. But like I knew that like if it was like via me working on it directly or just like helping the DAO get funding that the time would be right. And yeah. So like many months passed, but like we had this boardroom, which was like a private channel with sort of like the main supporters and it wasn't until recently that it sort of like, I came back to my roots of apes online. And we had since like realized that we needed to like have a more general name. So that's when we came up with always online. Someone in the server came up with it. And from there, it was like the project that I was working on, which is now always online, like the AOL_XYZ. Twitter was most recently called counter. That was just a name that like someone came up with, didn't really have too much of a backstory. But I realized that like we could sort of like join forces, the DAO side of things and then like the AOL Inc. And I think what's really cool is like, unlike Web3 projects that start with like a centralized team and like a corporation and then progressively decentralized, like you could have a corporation that sort of exists at the same time as a decentralized DAO. But like the corporation is almost like a partner of the DAO and the DAO is a partner of the corporation. So it's more of like a symbiotic relationship. I think like, you know, at least like in 2021 corporations still have like the corporate structure still has a lot of power, I guess. Like there's as much as I would love for like DAO only forms of like organizing. I still think like there's a lot of things you get from like traditional corporate structures in the US and elsewhere. We definitely have a plan of like, you know, we even have two separate Twitters like AOL_XYZ is the corporation. And then the other, I guess the Twitter is always OnlineDAO, I believe. And that's like still has the original like ape based branding. We haven't changed it yet. And the websites are not online yet. You know, it's intentionally kind of like lacking a presence, but yeah, like the plan, this is kind of semi-secret. Actually, I can't say it. Don't say it's secret. Well, it's more like, you know, SEC rules.

Nicholas: Oh, I see.

Ellie Day: It's more I can't, I think like I'd break the rules. Yeah. But if signed my DMs, if you want to talk about things, but pretty sure the SEC will get mad. I'm not supposed to say like, Oh, nevermind. I'm just going to, but yeah, big things coming. If you at all, like I want to talk like I can.

Nicholas: Okay. So, so you can't, you can't announce anything about whatever might, you know, pique the interest of everybody's favorite three-letter organization. But in general, what has this aping DGN project become? What, what was, what was the name of the counter? you said was the other project. Yeah.

Ellie Day: Yeah. So counter was like, what I was like individually pursuing is like my, I guess, like, like to say like my serious project in web three, because the rest of it was just fun. But then I was like, why, you know, just have, I have like two separate things, like, you know, so I just kind of, we merged it together and the DAO is like sort of going to be retaining its roots as like, you know, more of like a DGN based, just like sort of just a more like shadowy super coder type vibe, but the actual like AOL, you know, underscore XYZ Twitter handle, like the vibe of always online ink is going to be just like, kind of think back to like 1999 to 2004, the era of the internet before Facebook destroyed democracy before all of the unique individuality of deviant art. And I don't know, just like, I mean, geo cities was kind of like on its way out, but you know, just like back when not everyone was on the internet. So it was kind of like a fun place to hang out. And it was even before our beloved cryptocurrencies got there, but imagine that, that ethos of, you know, the internet before it turned into a big corporate homogenous bland thing of web to social media. And let's like combine that with the cool parts of cryptocurrency and sort of like make a gateway to web three. And then like, let's use that sort of, I don't know. I like to call it like a venue, like a, like a metaphysical space for, you know, communities, like web three native communities to exist and everything. Let's like use that metaphysical space that would live on like these channels within AOL that XYZ. that's the domain we have. Like let's like make this space a space for organizing a space for sharing kind of like all the good stuff about the space that we're building. Let's use it to like organize and like really like develop like strong intellectual property and technology that can then power literally like the internet infrastructure that we need to like coordinate. I don't know this feature that we're trying to build. So it's definitely like fading of the web three galaxy brain title of today. Like I'm not even joking. Like I really want this internet that we have to be user owned. I want the laborers who build in this space, like all of us to actually get the value that we create and have it like accurately accrued to us. I think like, you know, DAOs aren't that was a layer to coordinate, but they're not the final stage of like how we operate and collaborate as humans. Some of you may have been seeing like my tweets about decentralized joint ventures, but that's something I'm pretty excited about because like I think like throughout history, like people have had to come out with like have had to make these essentially containers that are like boundaries of where value accrues when it's not able to be like precisely allocated to an individual. So you can think about like a corporation, the value, like you get paid as a worker, a salary or like money in some shape or form. that's essentially like a very inaccurate and generally like not fair way of getting paid. So all of the like intellectual property and value that you create by default, anything that's not like pre negotiated accrues to the corporation, like the outer container of like this coordination and work that's going on. So with, you know, tokens and sort of, you know, even NFTs and just like these like crypto native ways of coordinating, that's obviously like an improvement because now there's tokens and like you can be a user of Uniswap or ENS or get coin, all these things and sort of get to get a retroactive airdrop of the value that you were producing, you know, potentially years ago, you know, like all of the people who got ENS airdrops, like essentially like, the protocol was paying you back for the value that you added some point in the past. Like they probably should have paid you interest as well with. like decentralized joint ventures. The idea is to actually it's like ideally becomes a primitive that's not owned by anyone. So actually it becomes like an ERC 721 type standard that can be used in ever like, it's just like people can implement it. But the idea is like, let's just say all of us who are on this call, like wanted to move forward some reusable feature or implementation or like something that like is, is sort of like intellectual property in the traditional corporate sense.

Nicholas: Web3 Galaxy Brain. Let's say we take Web3 Galaxy Brain and we turn it into some shared, you know, this space doesn't require me.

Ellie Day: Yeah, exactly. Like even independent of a DAO, we're all part of DAOs. We all like are also humans probably. There may see maybe some AIs among us, but we're all like people that like are just trying to like, you know, make stuff happen in this space. So instead of like the work that we do being like essentially the value that we create being, and essentially the value creates wealth, you know, like labor results in value. And then like that value becomes like wealth when it's like combined in the right way. So instead of like that value, like assignment being like attributed to like the DAOs that we're a part of, it actually gets attributed to, you know, this decentralized joint venture. One might be like, Oh, why is that? How is it different than a DAO? It's like, well, like decentralized joint ventures are almost like headless DAOs. They don't have to have the same amount of branding as a DAO. They don't have to like, you know, sort of institution. They're really just like, you could imagine that in a like a more software engineering sense, like it might be like project or even like a sprint might be structured as a decentralized joint venture. And what's interesting is like.

Nicholas: Would that be like, would a split be an example of a decentralized joint venture in your mind? Or is that.

Ellie Day: Yeah. I mean, that's like sort of like getting there. I think it's like. the idea is like, and I think DAOs all around like are trying to figure this out. It's like, how do you like break a group? Like how do you like break a bigger DAO up into smaller pieces so they can actually like.

Nicholas: Perfect. Yes. I want to, I want to get into, I want to talk about para DAOs. I think that's your term, sub DAOs. I've been sort of ranting about occasionally. Cooper put out a post recently this week, I think on mirror about sub DAOs. I have a bit of a bone to pick with sub DAOs because my feeling is I don't want to be in a sub DAO. I want to be in a proper DAO. If I'm in a DAO and there's no, it seems like it sort of seems inevitable. That people are reaching for this term sub DAO. So I think we're not going to be able to escape the use of the word sub DAO, but to me it's, it's like, I understand that say, fingerprints incubating raw DAO or there's another one that they also incubated and taking like a percentage of the tokens sort of pre-mined tokens, pre-minted tokens for their work incubating it. I understand that activity, but I don't really feel that that, from what I understand for fingerprints, the idea is to expand membership. They need means to expand membership, but I don't really see that as a sub DAO. To me, raw DAO is just another DAO and it just so happens that, I don't know, 15% of its tokens belong to fingerprints. But I would hope that that would mean that it's, you know, aside from the fact that 15% are owned by another DAO, it's now fully independent and is not sub in any way. It's not subordinate or subsidiary. Instead it's just a certain percentage of its tokens have been allotted to the DAO that incubated it, but you know, it doesn't owe them anything beyond that and whatever governance they can squeeze out of what tokens they have, I would imagine. So I'm curious what you think about power DAOs and things like that.

Ellie Day: Yeah, well, I mean, that was like sort of my complaints or like sort of gut feelings about the use of sub DAOs. Like, you know, just like even with like this summer, with the evolution of, you know, working groups or, you know, I guess like they've been called sub DAOs within like FWB, friends with benefits. It always felt like a bit weird because it sort of, it does like imply like a sense of hierarchy and that like, these. this like, you know, call it a sub DAO is essentially a agent of a bigger DAO. Whereas like functionally it, I don't see why it needs to be essentially nested under a bigger DAO. And that's where I started to think about like, you know, the terminology mentioned para DAO, para being like parallel DAO instead of like subordinate DAO. And, you know, I don't think para DAO like is like maybe going to be the thing that sticks either, but it's just important to like think about that. Like whenever you have this, like if DAOs are like the term, I mean, that's the term that everyone uses. Like, I really think like, you know, the words that we call like groups of people coordinating towards like a, a common objective, like, you know, you can call it whatever you want, but I think like depending on like the way you understand things, like it's going to have like a bit of a different practical

Nicholas: reality,

Ellie Day: you know? Cause like, for example, if you're a sub DAO of FWB even though you are like a group of people that probably like have a membership of FWB, like you also are working on this thing and like you're creating value. And like, does that mean that like the value accrues to the sub DAO or does it flow through back up to the parent DAO? And that's why I think like DJVs like are perhaps like even a better version of like pair DAOs in the sense that like DAOs, you know, groups of people might emerge from other DAOs. But like, I think DJVs are implicitly like, or actually more explicitly rather neutral to like the associations. Like, so like, for example, you mentioned like that raw DAO or whatever, like Fingerprints DAO is like a 15% stake in that sub DAO. Like with a DJV, the idea is like you could have a sort of a funder. Like, so for example, let's just say like with Web3 Galaxy Brain, it's like sort of going back to the example of Web3 Galaxy Brain is a DJV. Instead of it being like a DAO and instead of it being a sub DAO, instead of it being like whatever we used before, like you can have like a funder. So like, let's just say, Nick, you're like really passionate about this. So you as like sort of someone who's an early person, you can contribute, maybe put in some ETH to sort of like kickstart the treasury of this DJV. But then let's just say I sort of take off and run with this. I can start using the treasury because, you know, you could grant me tokens and, you know, of the DJV. And then I could, I could start, you know, accruing value via some like potentially coordinate type mechanism. But what's cool is like, you know, this isn't part of like an existing DAO. Like you could actually have like one of our affiliated DAOs, like choose to vote and fund this decentralized joint venture. You know, it's more of like a unit of work that also has like DAO, like capabilities built into it. But what's cool is like, it can be like as granular as we want. In the case of this, like there is like potentially a brand associated with it. But unlike DAOs that generally have to have like a Twitter account, they, you know, they have to have like a discord, all of these things. DJVs are essentially like more headless. They're intentionally like more of an impersonal thing because they actually allow us more to like, I guess, go outside of the boundaries of our like guilds or squads or whatever, like organizational boundaries that we find ourselves in.

Nicholas: Okay. So wait, so I'm a little confused. So for anybody who joined us recently, decentralized joint venture, decentralized joint venture is what DJV stands for. So the purpose of a DJV, actually just to finish up what we were saying about sub DAOs and such before, I also know that like there are really large DAOs like Bankless DAO that has a concept of guilds. And they also are sort of working through, you know, the DuPont versus Apple, divisional versus sort of product oriented team structures. I think they're trying to figure that out as well. I think guild is an interesting word. I believe they have guilds for each skill set. So if you're like a developer or marketer or whatever, you might go into a different guild. I'm not a super expert on Bankless, although they are doing incredible research and I heard them speak, someone from there speak in Shark a month or two ago. It was really informative.

Ellie Day: Yeah. I mean, I could give you a better example if you want, that's based on like what were one of the first use cases of a DJV would be. Yeah. So if also, if anyone wants to like be added to the Telegram group, the working group, which eventually is going to become a DJV in its own, right. Which is kind of cool. A practical example is there's a Syndicate DAO or Syndicate. Like they have people working on on-chain token gating. So there's a developer on their team, Connor. Very, you know, genius, you know, programmer. Very awesome. Very nice person in general. Basically came up with this innovative primitive that can be used to like enable on-chain token gating. Then you have Guild XYZ, which many of you know, they're doing off-chain token gating and they're also thinking about token gating. There's two companies that are thinking about token gating. They have people working on token gating. So if you think about like what a joint venture is, it literally is like a joint venture. It is a, it can be structured legally different in the, in, in the real world, the old world, so to speak, you know, the web two world, but the general idea is like it's two independent entities coming together to create something. So the decentralized joint venture takes that one step further and allows not just two entities, but potentially N number of entities, whether that be a person or other DAOs or guilds within other DAOs to come together to work and I guess like cultivate, you know, intellectual property and then benefit from that cultivation. So practically speaking, you would have Connor who works at Syndicate. You would have, let's just say Raz who works, Robert, who works at Guild. You might have Syndicate the DAO. You might have Guild the DAO. So that's like four agents right now in this DJV. So you have the DAOs that like sort of like non-person entities, non-human person entities funding, like contributing capital to this DJV, but then you have the two humans that are actually doing the labor, accruing ownership of essentially the tokens that represent the, the DJV based on a consensus of the stakeholders. So it's really critical that like we separate the actual people doing the labor from the entities that fund the, I guess the labor. So I think the reason it's important is because you can imagine that in this case, like, let's just say, you know, there's people who work at Guild, there's people that work at Syndicate and then there's just like people who are individuals who don't belong to a specific DAO. In this case, you can actually, it's like you could have me, like I could be a part of this DJV to develop on-chain token gating. I can like, you know, talk a lot about the strategy and stuff. And then in the same way that you would have like sprints in like an agile programming sense, you can have retrospectives at the end of these sprints that where everyone sort of mutually agrees on like value that was, you know, contributions that were contributed over a time period. And that would allow the individuals to, I guess, like accrue ownership of this DJV. But what's really interesting is like beyond the actual work getting done, like we all can do work, you know, in a DAO, but like, what happens like in terms of like the ownership of the, I guess, the innovation that was done, let's just say like, if you didn't have a DJV developing this token gating feature, what would happen normally is let's just say like, you know, Syndicate is developing this, whoever developed like a feature for them, it's going to get compensated based on the, like the equity compensation agreement that they signed before this feature was actually even like conceived by the people who worked on it. So there are already like captains in terms of the upside that they're able to, you know, receive, but in terms of the benefit, the value and then the wealth that was like created via the intellectual property that they generated, that value is actually going to automatically by default accrue to the outmost container, which is like Syndicate as an entity, whether it be a DAO or a corporation. But if the people who participated in the creation of like on-chain token gating were in doing this via DJV, they would actually accrue ownership in the DJV, which is a more, which is a container that's actually closer to the labor that's actually being done and intellectual property that's being cultivated. So it's actually catches that, that value and assigns ownership closer to the labor. And what's cool is now like, you can actually have compensation that more mirrors, you know, sales of NFTs, for example, by artists or, you know, creators in that realm. Like, I think like knowledge workers are actually like, you know, we obviously have a lot of advantages in terms of the work we get to do, but like more often, like, because it's like technically burdensome by default to like granularly, like allocate ownership of like a big DAO, for example, people just aren't able to do it. But with if like projects and like even features or, or primitives are structured as DJVs, you actually can make it. so the people who innovate and do the work, you know, whether it's a squad or a guild, they actually are the ones who are co-owners of that, that intellectual property, which then can result in future royalty payments. in the same way, an owner, an artist of an NFT, even if that like that NFT is sold in the future, they can continue to benefit financially from the value that they've created or like what they've created. So that's the general idea is to like bring the like ownership closer to the people that create things that end up being owned.

Nicholas: So, so if I understand, basically what you're saying is a DJV is a structure that allows for individuals or DAOs or companies, any entity, I mean, in our world, maybe you just say an address, any address can participate in something. that looks a little bit like a split, but you mentioned retrospectives. So it sounds a little bit, it also reminds me a little bit of coordinate. So like I'm hearing like splits, for those who don't know in the audience, coordinate is sort of a reputation system for, I don't know what it's for in general, but it's used in DAOs a lot in order to assign basically people who participate in an epoch, which is the name of the timeframe cycles. In one epoch, members of a DAO who have been included in the, I forget there's a term for it, like the circle or something like this. In any case, participants in the epoch are allotted a certain number of tokens and they're able to allocate those tokens to other people in the epoch. And it's a way to sort of determine who contributed the most based on what other contributors think. It's not perfect and it's, I'd say experimental. There's obviously opportunities for people to create sort of little groups that all pat each other's back, et cetera. There's also problems around who gets the most, you know, people who talk the most in the discord or telegram obviously have a better chance of getting tokens allotted to them than people who are maybe quietly doing work on GitHub. that isn't as visible. So I'm hearing a little bit of like coordinate in the sense that we're going to come together to work on a project. Some people are going to be contributing funds. Some people are going to not even be people that be entities composed of many people, be they corporate or, you know, decentrally native DAO type organizations. And there's going to be individuals. And most likely it's the individuals who are going to be doing the sort of groundwork to make the thing happen. Although who knows, but in any case, that there could then be some kind of, let's say they're going to create some kind of, I mean, there was a piece you mentioned that it's sort of not about as much like a headlessness, like in a way, a DAO tends to so far require a kind of brand that people are familiar with, but a DJV maybe is not as necessarily attached to a well-known brand.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Like ideally a DJV is more of. eventually it will like, I anticipate it will sort of become more of a protocol versus like something that people are like even actively, actively aware of doing. But I think like, it just kind of goes back to my point. I tried to emphasize that like, as it stands now, like a lot of the issues we're having with scaling like DAOs is that there is like a sense of tension among the people actually doing the work and the, I guess the structures that like, I guess, inflate the underlying token that represents the, all of the labor and work and energy that is like a result of the DAO and its members coordinating. So it's a bit of like a definitely more of like a left leaning take on it, but like, you know, it's just this idea that just because you were early and like accumulated ownership in a traditional like container of, you know, like, cause like, as it stands now, like DAOs are lines in the sand that say, okay, everything in this circle, the token will accrue that value. - Right, right, right.

Nicholas: Because what I see is like the possibility of what you're suggesting. I think DAOs are hitting this point where it's like, if you were early in a DAO, you potentially have more tokens than someone coming in later, but you may then become distracted, find some other project. You already have a bunch of tokens. So why bother working on the new initiative that's really going to carry the DAO into the future? And for a new entrance, it's less incentivizing for them that they have less access to the tokens themselves, aside from whatever community funds, the treasury of the DAO is able to allocate to them. So it sounds like maybe a DJV is a partial solution to. how do we apportion off a new project and then allow people who participate in that new project to be compensated fairly for their work, rather than all of the value being accrued by the larger organization that they're a part of, which maybe they don't have a huge stake in.

Ellie Day: - Yeah. I think the main pieces are that, but also to essentially remove organizational boundaries. One of the beauties of Web3 is you don't have to work for one company. You can sort of weave in and out of collaborating between a bunch of different initiatives, whether that be a DAO-based project or just people raising money to buy the constitution or whatever.

Nicholas: - I heard about that one.

Ellie Day: - Technically, a constitution DAO didn't need to be a DAO and sort of was more of an ephemeral DAO. I would argue that buying the constitution or raising money to do something specific could be suitable more as a DJV than a DAO. Technically, there was lots of stakeholders. Some people contributed capital. Some people contributed labor. Labor is capital. So I think there just needs to be more specificity and granularity in how we, as humans that exist in the space, are allocated the fruits of our labor.

Nicholas: - But brass tacks, and I guess this is an experimental idea also that you're working on in this Telegram group that unfortunately we can't share to the Twitter because it seems this space refuses to have pinned tweets. But in any case, you can go search Ellie's tweets and find the Telegram group. What is the difference on a technical level between what you're thinking about and just, I mean, frankly, a sub-DAO or some new kind of DAO, like a project-specific DAO? Let's say SharkDAO wants to do a new project and needs to get a Solidity developer, but a Solidity developer doesn't want to work for ETH. They want to work for a share of some new project. So why would SharkDAO not just spin up a new DAO? Or is a DJV potentially a kind of DAO?

Ellie Day: - Yeah, I think that's a good question. DAO is a term that people have spent a lot of time getting people aware of what it means, but also that obviously adds confusion because everyone has different opinions on what it means. So I think it's more about, less about a technical difference. In theory, you could use the same software that's used for DAOs in DJVs, but I think it's more of a semantic/conceptual difference.

Nicholas: - Got it, okay.

Ellie Day: - It's sort of intent versus just like, I guess it's sort of just the agreement that like, I just, so FWB, for example, like, or even just all of these DAOs that have sort of grown beyond their initial core team have often, you know, formed guilds. And I think guilds are really good, a good abstraction for grouping people into logical guilds. They're basically a fancy word for team. And I think the key part of, do you form another DAO or do you form like a DJV? I think DJVs are more of like, if you think about whatever like project management tool you have, a DJV might be like the project that you make that then contains like tickets or think about like a Kanban board that represents a project. Like a DJV is probably that project. And a project has, you know, has stakeholders. It has, you know, people who will do the work. I just argue that like the, I guess like the ultimate owners of the, I guess, intellectual property that's like was created by this project shouldn't default to be like a DAO or like a corporation. It should be, yeah.

Nicholas: Because I think what you're also touching on another point that I think about a lot, which is like, you know, DAO is like this really broad term. I think a lot of the time, obviously there was the DAO, but also, you know, DAO, like maybe DAO 1.0 before the current era was more, maybe more in line of like what ENS is doing, Uniswap, like essentially a governance token for managing a DeFi protocol where the DeFi protocol in most cases predates the governance token. Although it can also be the other direction. Whereas now, I don't want to use this like integer based system. Like I don't want to call it DAO too, but whatever's going on on Juicebox, on Mirror, there's a lot of different people who are there. And there's many other protocols also that are super interesting. These are, you know, DAO house comes to mind, Moloch. These are, you know, NFT collector DAOs, software development DAOs that are run more like small businesses or startups. Not to pique anybody's interest from law enforcement, but, you know, investor DAOs are things that people talk about a lot. So I'm also interested in like DAOs where, like I think a split is even a form of a DAO. It doesn't have governance in the same way. And maybe to some people that's like the bright line around what makes a DAO a DAO, the fact that there should be some kind of governance. But I was actually very interested. earlier in the year, maybe three months ago or so, this artist, Brad Trammell, who's a really awesome artist on memes from years ago, published this piece on NFTs, a video piece. He does these great reports on his Patreon channel. And unfortunately, he doesn't really understand crypto. And the second half of the video is kind of, in my opinion, vaguely embarrassing take on NFTs. But the first half of the video, he makes some really incredible points. And the one that I found most shocking was he really hates this artist, Kaws, who's kind of like a meme fine artist whose works sell for tons of money. Not quite Banksy, but in that neighborhood. But more just like iconographic repetition of the same character. And he really, really dislikes this artist. He thinks it's totally bankrupt as art and indicates how bankrupt the fine art market had become at that time. I have no take on this. I couldn't care less, frankly. But he does point out that what happened in the fine art world was that, at least from his perspective, with quite a lot of knowledge about fine art, is that the museums were like tastemakers in art for the longest time. And they told the wealthy, their profession was telling the wealthy what art was worth collecting. And so they served this role as tastemakers. But over time, through, I don't know, consumerization, rise of an even more new middle class in America and elsewhere, the tastes of consumers have kind of invaded the fine art world. So things like Virgil Abloh. Actually, everyone's thinking about Virgil lately. Of course, RIP. Virgil's work and other streetwear work like that had made it into the fine art spaces. But that was work that came from a very commercial remix culture. And so over time, the sort of authority of the galleries and the fine art museums has been eroded such that the wealthy people are of a kind of middle class pop culture. And we tell the museums what's cool. And the museums respond by having shows on Nike and on Louis Vuitton, et cetera. And all of this is background to sort of set up the point that I thought was really interesting in his video, in the first half at least, which was he talks about fandoms and how fandoms are fundamentally decentralized. And it makes me think about BTS, et cetera, all these fan cultures you can find online. And it made me at the time reflect on DAOs, because really a fandom is like a really decentralized non-organization, but a genuinely decentralized following to a particular cultural movement, like what you might find on Reddit, et cetera. Whereas a DAO or what we traditionally think of as a DAO, which is like a governance token driven treasury or management of some kind of protocols parameters is actually in some ways you could see it as quite the opposite of decentralized. If anything, it's centralizing. It's bureaucratic in the sense that there's like a process around governance for making changes or allocating funds. And I guess it is an organization, whereas like a fandom is not really an organization. So in practice, a lot of what we do today in like today's forum, 2021 form of DAOs, like what you find on Juicebox, Mirror, et cetera, is often actually like, I visualize it as like, if a fandom is like this really large amorphous thing, a DAO in its current structure is kind of like a belt around the center of the fandom. that's kind of squeezing so that all governance has to pass through a single bureaucratic organization or process at the center. So in a way, the decentralization is like, so if you really are interested, and this is kind of my reflection on the LOOT sort of governance crisis, brief governance crisis where there was a move to try to make AGLD into the governance token for the LOOT community, which went back and forth for a little bit and ultimately resolved to DOM writing a proposal that was passed by LOOT holders directly to burn the keys to the LOOT contract. I think Fred Ursham also has a post on this. It's like minimum viable, minimum viable governance. Like you actually want as little governance as possible where possible, or at least that's one way to approach DAOs is to just get rid of all the governance. Because at the end of the day, we don't all want to be governing everything all the time. The best systems are the ones where they work smoothly without governance. So I'm very interested to bring this back to what you were talking about is to think about how can we have structures like maybe DJVs, I don't know, or splits or other forms of sort of collaboration on the blockchain that allows for us to not require engaging a lawyer or writing any kind of contract, but nevertheless share in some kind of project. And maybe even if you allow me to think of DAOs in this way, maybe even think about DAOs that are created and resolved within the space of a block. If we don't need to have an enduring organization, then ideally we don't if we can get done what we need to without it.

Ellie Day: Yeah. I mean, definitely. I think people are always talking about how you can be employed by a DAO. It's like, no, I do not.

Nicholas: Oh, maybe another phone call. Are you there, Ellie? Okay. Well, we'll wait a second for Ellie to come back. Yeah. If you haven't seen that Brad Trammell video, I don't think it's floating around on the internet just yet. I think it's not token gated, USD gated on his Patreon. The second half is really, really not very good. But the first half I found extremely interesting in terms of like what created the conditions for certain parts of the NFT boom to happen. And just in general, how do we contextualize this thing? I find it's kind of strange that NFTs have become, by many people, especially people who aren't actually in the scene, NFTs are seen as strictly fine art objects or collectible art objects. But to me as a developer and just someone trying to think kind of broadly about it, NFTs, it's not even a data structure. It's a concept and it has a certain kind of implementation in Ethereum, but it looks different on different protocols. Flow NFTs look different, Tezos NFTs look different. And at the end of the day, they're just sort of a practical way of distinguishing a certain kind of data structure from a fungible token. So for instance, one weird form of NFT is a juice box project. A juice box project itself is represented by an NFT. And the wallet that holds that NFT is able to modify the funding cycle parameters for juice box. So in that case, the NFT is obviously not a fine art object. It's something quite different. Ellie, welcome back.

Ellie Day: Hey, sorry.

Nicholas: That's okay.

Ellie Day: Technical difficulties. Really don't let your phone accept phone calls when you're talking.

Nicholas: I know. We all have to figure out how to use that focus thing in the new iOS.

Ellie Day: It's too complicated. So I don't know what. the last thing, like luckily, Mads was in the room and she realized I, she told me that no one could hear what I was saying. But what was the last thing you heard?

Nicholas: Oh geez. I don't know. I think we were talking about sort of DAOs that can resolve quickly. I don't know that we got too far into your remarks.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Well, I mean, I was just trying to say that ideally we're all not owned by DAOs in like a sense that like, we don't work for DAOs. Like I don't want to be employed by a DAO.

Nicholas: No, you're a contributor in a DAO. You're not an employee of the DAO.

Ellie Day: Yeah. It was just like, I don't want to like, I think like governing organizations, like results in people wanting to like accrue power to then exert their power over other people. And I think like the beauty of web three is that we are like, we can become truly sovereign individuals and rely on infrastructure that isn't, I guess, like, you know, controlled by, in theory, like it wouldn't be controlled by people who essentially want that control. I like to tell people that like the true innovation in crypto networks isn't, you know, that we can have digital money. It's that we can have like scarcity and like an assurance of accuracy of like digital records, you know, without the use of violence or a monopoly on force or violence, you know? So like traditionally, like governments use their monopoly on force to essentially convince someone that like a dollar is like worth something and that, you know, it's the threat of their military that supposedly makes that dollar, you know, worth something. But now we can use crypto networks that are backed by mathematics and like advanced cryptography. And that's like, obviously powerful. So like, why do we need to replicate these structures of governance and sort of like trickle up ownership? And that's like sort of just like what I feel strongly about that we need to avoid in this space, you know, like, like I, I personally, I'm like motivated just by like the possibility that like I can contribute to the betterment of like so many people, but like I don't have to put myself in a position of like power over other people, you know, even just like me becoming a co-founder of like a traditional corporation, like people who work for this company that I always online ink, you know, the corporate side of like the dual Dow corporate parallel structure, like technically I will, like there will be like a power imbalance between myself as like a founder with like who runs the payroll and all that stuff, you know, like because people do need to get paid and all that stuff. But like, I think like we can increasingly like make systems that don't require our fallible selves to, or the systems we create to have like a power over other people, you know, and that's, I feel like just something that isn't talked about enough in this space. Like one of the reasons I feel so strongly about not having Dallas be like where the value accumulates is because increasingly the people are just like over time, the people that will continue to benefit or the people that were able to take the risks early and like kickstart a venture. And then they backfill the actual like value and like wealth generation with the labor of those who are seeking an opportunity, you know? And the thing is like, you know, it frustrates me that all of these like a hundred million dollar protocols are encouraging these contributors to like do bounties and, and get tokens when the people who, you know, sure had the idea like are the ones making millions of dollars because they wouldn't be there without the people that like actually are continuing to run the organization.

Nicholas: Well, I think, I think even more than, I mean, I totally agree with you, although it's hard to come up with a calculation of who deserves what really, I mean, does anyone deserve anything? We're all sort of born into this universe without being responsible for any of it. But you know, I think that where it hits the pavement is going to be in. how do you convince people to, who are excellent to spend time building out the 15th feature of your protocol when if the founders are not involved or if early contributors are, have already made so much money by liquidating the token without any kind of lockup or something. One thing that's interesting about web three at the crypto side of web three, especially as opposed to everything else. And actually one of the things that interested me most about it was not so much the exit opportunity or the lack of lockups, but, but that, you know, I was looking at Roblox for years wanting to invest in Roblox just as a, you know, you know, a person with a regular day job collecting a little bit of money and savings and wanting to put it somewhere smart. But I just couldn't invest in Roblox until so far down their history and, and crypto at least for now enables that. And, and on the other side, it also in general allows people to sell their tokens relatively early. It depends. There's some, obviously some protocols and DAOs do, do lockups, but many don't. So yeah, I think the big problem for DAOs is going to be. how do you, how do you keep going? How do you keep the enthusiasm? So everybody wants the, when it's new and when the token is pumping initially, but how do you keep the excitement up over time?

Ellie Day: Well, yeah, I think it's just, I've said this before someone tweeted out and quote tweeted me or something, but like, I think DAOs are meant to die. Like, I don't think like unlike corporations that seem to try to live forever. Like. I think the best DAOs will be ones that don't live forever. that like, you know, shut down when they've lost that energy. And I think like the ultimate plan is to just like have the groups, like have groups of people, whether online or in person, like that you'd like to hang out with and you'd like to work with and then do work with them. Like, you know, make a living. But like ideally, you know, these like corporation-esque DAOs are not like, not where people have allegiance to. Like. I think like one of the reasons Web3 is great is because you can just more freely associate yourselves with awesome people. You know, I see like, I'm just like looking at the people who are listening in. Like. I would consider all the people that I know, like you're all my friends and like the fact that like we're building a new, hopefully more good for everyone world together. It's like fucking dope. I'm loyal to all of you. I'm not loyal to whatever like fucking DAOs we're a part of, you know, like DAOs are a means to like serve us, you know, we don't serve DAOs in the same way that we don't serve corporations that came before us or governments, you know? So I just like think we need to get away from this idea that DAOs are like the actual driver between, from all of this, you know? Right, right, right.

Nicholas: They're coordination tools. They're not the ends.

Ellie Day: Yeah, they're memes, you know, like DAOs are like memes that like focus us towards like some North star for an initiative. But like, that's not like, that's not what like, that's like, it's just, it's just a utility, you know? Like I think the best crypto native organizations are just going to be like group chats, you know?

Nicholas: Yes, the individuals that we're meeting today that are going to be here in 20 years, but maybe not all of the DAOs. This is actually why I'm a little bit skeptical of like speculative games on governance tokens for protocols because it feels to me like there, and when I think about this for governance, for juice box, et cetera, it's like, how do you make sure if you have a DAO stewarding a software project like a protocol development, how do you make sure that the DAO doesn't end up primarily serving its own interests as a DAO rather than the protocol it was created to steward? And how can you get to a point where like the DAO can actually go away? Like if you set, stand up a protocol and eventually the protocol is like open source on chain software doesn't require maintenance after a certain point, you know, the DAO should be able to either change its purpose, return the money or just, just go away one way or the other, you know?

Ellie Day: Like you're, you're, you're saying that the DAO is like stewarding the protocol. No, the DAO is like essentially a container that helps like coordinate the people to serve the protocol. You know, I feel like we're, we're losing. fact of the doubt, like it's the individuals that are like actually the ones who are making all this happen. And like, I think it's actually unethical for a DAO or a corporation to exist and hold captive like people via like essentially economic incentives. because like think of all of like the so-called zombie corporations. Like I would even argue just think of like corporations in general that like pay people money to stay there and waste away their potential because they are trying to like, they're essentially like harvesting the life of like people who are getting paid. They're making a trade and the corporation is trying to like increase its longevity so it can perpetuate its existence, but it doesn't actually have a reason to exist. So I think like in web three we can actually create a future where like organizations don't exist past their point of like, of the reason they need to exist, you know? And that's why it's like I'm long people, not DAOs or like I just, I think people in general want communities, but we don't want like these entities that we have to like, you know, trade our labor for money.

Nicholas: The DAO is the people. The DAO is the people. There should not be something that exists. The token holders are the ones who constitute the DAO and the DAO existing separate from those token holders shouldn't really be.

Ellie Day: Yeah. It's just, it's the problem of like, you know like token based waiting of like governance, like voice, like I really think like, I don't really believe in, in like a sort of token balances being like the weight of voting.

Nicholas: It's just difficult to, to figure out, you know, the civil resistance problem is difficult otherwise, or even with that.

Ellie Day: I mean, we've solved lots of stuff. Like imagine if we just like said we weren't going to put up with token based voting anymore. I'm pretty sure we'd solve it. You know, I mean, not if I have anything to say about it, but you know, like we don't need anyone scanning our eyeballs and we don't need, especially Sam Altman scanning our eyeballs. I guess like, you know, to any like, what if like, how do you solve this problem? We've all solved lots of fucking things as, as humans on this earth. And sometimes, you know, we've solved things in the name of like some pretty bad stuff. So like, let's like start solving things for, the benefit of everyone. And I just think like this pessimism that exists, like think of even just like tokens in general, some random people came up with like the ERC 20 proposal and it took off. Like, we're just a bunch of random people.

Nicholas: You know, I'd be curious to know, you know, I know there's skepticism and I I'm fully on board with skepticism around tokens as the voting mechanism. I know Vitalik has written about it, but I'm not sure how you manage to get beyond that without some kind of reputation system, you know, some identifying people essentially, who's a human, who counts, what address it counts.

Ellie Day: I mean, ideally, like, I mean, I don't think there should be some person or some group of people that can decide that. So obviously it is hard. Like we don't want some authority.

Nicholas: That's a credit credit Bureau on the blockchain.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Fuck that. Fuck that.

Nicholas: Yes. Okay. I don't mean to change the topic, but AOL tell me, tell me. So what you described it earlier. It sounded to me, a lot of people ask, Oh, I wish someone would reinvent Tumblr on the blockchain. Where's Tumblr? Where's Tumblr? Is that a reasonable way to talk about it? Or tell me, tell me why that's wrong.

Ellie Day: Hopefully someone could leverage like the technology that like AOL is going to put out there to build like a web three Tumblr, you know, but I, I'm more view it as an infrastructure play, both on the software and physical hardware layer mixed with, you know, a brand and a metaphysical space on the internet via AOL. X, Y, Z to actually bring all of this stuff together. So one of the reasons like, I talk so much about DJVs on this, like spaces so far is like, I'm actually really excited about using DJVs to build, to build all of the like functionality that I want to exist on AOL to X, Y, Z. And to be clear, AOL. X, Y, Z is not going to be something that's like owned by some corporation. Like. ideally we even like figure out how to make decentralized DNS. So that literally a corporation doesn't own the servers.

Nicholas: So would you say that this is in the neighborhood of like urbit then?

Ellie Day: I mean, urbit is too complicated. No, but like, yeah, I mean, maybe I just think it's bad that AWS and Microsoft and Facebook own so much of the actual physical underlying infrastructure. And then they also own so much of like the internet application layer. Application layer that powers all the software experiences, you know, like, and I want to like figure out how to like almost leverage the like corporate structures that exist in this world that like have been essentially lobbied into existence by like corporations over the years and use that to our advantage, like accumulate, I guess like a physical presence, like ideally like the goal eventually is to have AOL coordinate installing and installment of undersea cables that like have internet go across continents instead of cables that are owned by conglomerate consortiums of like Facebook and Google and Microsoft.

Nicholas: So you're saying some kind of like FOMO ramp using the FOMO ramp techniques built up by startup culture, et cetera, VC culture to maybe propel some kind of web three infrastructure into existence.

Ellie Day: Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of just planning on tackling it from all angles. Like, like ideally, you know, like there are tangible benefits from like a complexity boundary as like a user to use like software that's like bundled, you know, like. it's nice that like with G suite, I kind of, you know, know that using a spreadsheet, the Google sheets are using a docs. You can have like a similar experience. I can log in with one account, but like, I don't like that. Google is the only one that can like really change that, you know, they actually, they have like plugins and stuff, but like, imagine if you could go to AOL docs by Z and have like the best, like experience and like the best productivity suite. or like a best calendar and email, you know, you have like AOL mail, but it's like, it's not built by some single corporation. It's not even built by one single DAO. It's like a truly collectively owned public good that like can be powered by squads or guilds of groups of people built by DAO. You know, it's not, it's like, it's like a, it's kind of like no one owns water, you know, on this planet. It's like a renewal. It's a resource that is like for us, like we're blessed with water, but then Nestle fucking wants to say they own water and they want to say they can charge you to access that resource, you know? So I'm just trying to like really think about how like we can get to a point where like the internet, this thing that like is increasingly central to our lives is like, actually like for the people, by the people.

Nicholas: I see some people are interested in talking and I'll, I'll invite some people up to ask questions if you have time, Ellie. But before that, I wanted to ask, you gave me a little preview of some of the hardware stuff you're thinking about. Is that something you're at liberty to talk about or would you rather wait?

Ellie Day: I would, that's kind of like the secret stuff.

Nicholas: Okay. Okay. We don't need to get into it.

Ellie Day: Yeah. I mean, ideally once we figure out a way to make it so like for-profit corporations can't steal it.

Nicholas: Perfect.

Ellie Day: Then I'll gladly share it with the world.

Nicholas: Okay. We'll have to do a follow-up episode. So I got a couple of people I'm going to invite up. I see Danny chain die, a bunch of cool people around Stefan. If any of you want to ask a question or just say something, feel free. Let me bring up Katie. Hey Katie. Welcome. Do you have a question or a idea?

Ellie Day: Hey, Hey Ellie.

Danny Aranda: I just love what

Ellie Day: you're

Nicholas: talking about with, with

Ellie Day: water

Nicholas: and

Ellie Day: how. that's just such a good metaphor. And we're living in an age right now where data is the most important asset yet. There are all these huge companies that are like secretly, you know, storing all of that data and using it and figuring out ways to creatively do that.

Nicholas: And I'm just curious about how we as creators and how we in this like ownership economy can create revenue streams for ourselves in ethical ways that actually promote a better power structure for everyone. It's something that I really want to think about as we build a better world.

Ellie Day: And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. That's a great point. I mean, this is something I've like thought about for a long time before, like even just like who I was thinking about in like a web three crypto way, but like the idea of like, how can you like have service providers, businesses that like build software and make it useful to like the end user without like, without them like getting an unfair advantage because they like process your data. I think that's where like the architecture of hopefully like what will become like the AOL, always online network will like make it possible. We're seeing this a bit with, I guess with like, Ethereum, I can defy like, because like all of the data is like public and out there there's no one really has a competitive advantage, at least compared to like private processing and ownership of data that's produced. Like anyone can remix it. So therefore it's like kind of like a level playing field. But what if like you could take a step further where an individual user can kind of have their own data vault? that like is like their unique data and like no one can access it from a, like, I guess no one can hoard it and basically claim ownership of, you know, your data, but they can essentially you can use software that they've written to like, I guess, make your own data useful in a secure container somewhere on the internet that like you control. So you can imagine that, like, let's just say like I have, I'm like a software vendor and I wrote a program that can securely add up numbers together. We can call it a calculator. And I want to like offer this service to people in the olden days, maybe like I would benefit from knowing like the numbers that were added together. And I also don't want to have other people know the numbers that are being calculated either because as a provider, I think people should be able to keep the numbers that they have, like essentially private. So obviously one simple solution would be to have a calculator. People can download and, process it locally and that's good for a lot of stuff. But like, what if, it requires like the data of other people or like requires like computers that are too powerful to run on a phone. Like there's always different edge cases where you may need to like put something in the cloud, I guess. So what if you could make it where I as a developer could develop the software, but then Katie as a user can go and submit numbers to be calculated and be processed in a secure enclave in this network and then return to her and be encrypted and then updated in her own personal data vault. That's like kind of the idea of how I see, I guess, software providers evolving into the future. And no one's really like solved like the logistics of that yet, but that's kind of like what I feel like I've figured out how to do. And that's like why I'm raising money and working with Maz and like building up a team. That's the secret thing I forgot I shouldn't have said, because I think there's some rule where you can't say raising money. But since I said it, find me at my DMs if you want to.

Nicholas: Okay. Well now it's definitely was.

Ellie Day: hopefully, hopefully it wasn't in the chat.

Nicholas: sec.xyz, uh, J O seven. What's up? Hey, um, really enjoyed this conversation, Ellie, thank you so much for the insights and just kind of sharing your thoughts here. I think, um, you know, I think, uh, the type of web three that you envision is one that I think I certainly subscribe to. And I just really got my mind kind of jarred here around the idea of like a fem morality and dows and, um, DJVs and kind of, it's interesting to see how quickly the idea of like dows and collective ownership and coordination is becoming nuanced.

Ellie Day: Um, and it's sort of branching off.

Nicholas: It's like this, it truly feels like this organism type of thing where it's like just budding off into different things. But, um, I just had a couple, one or two questions. One is, one is this, uh, simple as like your cover photo. is that, I don't know why I'm asking this, but just really have a personal memory attached to it as well. Is that, it reminds me of team labs in Tokyo, the borderless exhibit. And I just don't know if that's, that was what it was, but I'm just curious for that.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Good question. It was actually, um, yeah, it was in Singapore, um, at this, like it, maybe it was like a similar exhibit, like a traveling exhibit, but it was at, it was in Singapore, like at some like installation. I don't know exactly where, I don't remember.

Nicholas: I think it might be the team labs one. Cause I do know that they have one in Singapore as well.

Ellie Day: Yeah, it was really cool. He kind of like walked. Um, yeah, that was just kind of a cool service. It was like this mirror based thing, but yeah, like lights. And was there like music too and stuff kind of, yeah.

Nicholas: I mean, it was really interstellar vibe going on and stuff.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Yeah. So maybe it was, yeah, absolutely. Good.

Nicholas: My second question is, um, just around the idea of like creating this brand, uh, AOL. I think one thing that's kind of struck me, you know, in this web three spaces that like, there's just what I love about it. It's just the intergenerationality. I guess there's, there's folks who like came online web two, there's folks who most of, I think folks came in kind of like web two kind of social, you know, post sort of like not post, but like the, the, at the height of Facebook. Right. And then there's some, I think myself included, who was kind of around connected around like one point. Oh, web 1.0, maybe even like, well, if you want to kind of delineate, um, but you know, I mean, certainly I was around during AOL, the original AOL America online. I just find it funny and full circle. AOL. What's that? We've never heard of it.

Ellie Day: I mean, cheap, but just curious, you know, what was the idea behind that? Yeah. Um, well, I mean, I think it's like talking to people and also being like a bit nostalgic for the internet before it became owned and.

Nicholas: Although ironically, AOL would be your nightmare. I think actual AOL keep paid keywords and such.

Ellie Day: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, that's like, that's why it's kind of funny, you know, like.

Nicholas: I feel like that was when the internet got really messed up.

Ellie Day: Yeah. But I think like, it's yeah, that is true. Um, but I think like, because it sort of was like rose to prominence in that time, like it sort of takes people back. And I think like, I'm always someone who likes to subvert expectations in terms of branding and like, I guess, um, leverage, uh, something that like people think is going to go one way and then, um, Make it repurpose it into something that's like sort of the opposite. So one of like my goals of. AOL is like, you know, the name, but also just like harkens back to like, it's always online. Like, I kind of want it to feel like almost like a parody of, I don't know, like a.com era, like company or like sort of like, you know, a bit of, uh, you know, like you think about like, yeah, just, I think it's like, you know, we're still working on like fully articulating it, but just this sort of vibe that like, you know, you think about, um, kind of like American consumerism and excess, like, and just like multinational corporations. Like, I think it's interesting that you could almost like leverage that excess and like try to like, use it, use that like vibe to almost like make it not necessary. Um, in the same way that like, you know, pool suite FM is sort of leveraging and like repurposing sort of like early nineties, like business slash like executive vibe, you know, if anything, this is almost like trying to reclaim like the internet that was, I guess, taken over by like corporations that tried to like repackage it and repurpose it. But at the same time, like I think AOL was useful for a large group of people who weren't extremely online. Like my mom used AOL and, uh, it was like a good, like on-ramp consumer friendly too. The internet, it was like, it was a curated, um, subset slice of the internet. But I think that's the beauty of like, you know, what we're, we could curate, like, I think like we're all tastemakers in this space. And I think like, um, we could really create like a, a place that's easy for like everyone to sort of hop in and like start using web three, um, in like a single place, but have it be curated in like a decentralized fashion. So I know that was like a lot there, but it was really good question. Yeah. It was intentional. Definitely. Like the nostalgia factor, like there was actually this article that I'm going to try and like share that. I like that. Like I need to read still. So if it's shit, I'm sorry, but, um, actually talks about like nostalgia of some New Yorker thing, but it's called like Pokemon and the first wave of digital nostalgia. It says a pixel art revival is pushing back against the doll slickness of social media and building a new internet aesthetic from the old. So yeah, it's kind of just like this vibe, I guess. And it resonates with me, obviously like I'm 27. So it was like kind of that era. I'm going to try and share this link. Cool.

Nicholas: I'll retweet it. if you don't make it, uh, do you have a, I guess is the last question quick. Cause I want to let someone else ask some questions. No more questions.

Ellie Day: I just want to say, that's awesome.

Nicholas: I love it.

Ellie Day: I love the idea of that kind of like flipping its onset. I think there's such a strong story and like richness to that. So appreciate you saying, thanks. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you.

Nicholas: Hey, Brina. Hi, first of all, I love this conversation so much and Ellie, we definitely need to talk more because even the whole like concept of AOL and everything I've been like messing around with like smart contracts and stuff.

Ellie Day: And the thing was very similar. So this is like, so cool, but my question is kind of like related to a point that you brought up super early in the chat about kind of balancing currently like working with a corporation and a company because of like funding and things like that. There are some like clothes of that kind of centralized system just in the beginning.

Nicholas: And then also having a Dow on the side.

Ellie Day: And that is actually like a dynamic. that's like been an issue for me lately with working with some ideas because I don't know, because of the whole like

Nicholas: web three push on like decentralization and just like

Ellie Day: the whole,

Nicholas: I definitely have this,

Ellie Day: like it feels like a little bit of a guilt of being like,

Nicholas: okay, is working with like a company or like doing some

Ellie Day: sort of thing like

Nicholas: that while having the Dow kind of like

Ellie Day: selling out. So I don't know if you feel the same way, but like just grappling, like figuring out that dynamic, how do you feel like that's going? Or like, how did you figure out what the right balance is? Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question. And like something I think a lot about, I mean, even like the idea of like accepting money from venture capitalists, like, or just like people with money, like that always feels a bit weird too, because, like morally, like I want to like jump to this world where like everyone has the same shot at everything. But like, obviously like as trying to think about things pragmatically, it's useful to like get like do a precede raise and like be able to like have the resources to do things the right way and everything. So, I mean, to your point of, I guess your point of concern about is it selling out to like, you know, be employed by a corporation or while you're also building a Dow? My personal view is no, because especially depending on where you live, like health insurance is fucking expensive. Corporations have an unfair advantage, you know, over decades of lobbying that have resulted in like, you know, corporations legally being able to like get cheaper rates on health insurance. There's like literal advantages to being a employee versus being an independent contractor. There's so many things that are stacked against us in 2021 that I think anyone who tries to shame anyone into like, anyone who tries to shame anyone for working for a corporation, you know, while also doing Dow things is not really thinking about things in the right way. I think that my like, I guess balanced approach to dealing with this is to make a corporation that doesn't look like a typical corporation. So like one of the, you know, pieces of, I guess like, you know, the core team, like if they want to, they can be like employed by AOL, the corporation. Like we already have like six of us who are, some of them are in this call who are going to be, I guess, like getting a paycheck from AOL or Always Online Inc. One of the things that like, as I guess like the co-founder of that Inc or corporation is like, I can be like, yo, the work week is 32 hours a week because fuck like working like 70 hours a week at some job. Like we're all, we're all multifaceted. We all have like lives outside of like our jobs. Like, so it's like, because like, you know, we're creating this in real time, like just because like conventions exist in like entities that are traditionally structures, corporations doesn't mean that we have to follow any of them. So I think that's like my answer to trying to like make it work.

Nicholas: Perina, I'm curious, what was the specific, or I don't know how specific you can be, but what's difficult about doing working corporate and Dow at the same time?

Ellie Day: I guess the area where I'm really struggling in is because, sorry, I like my roommates are talking. That's okay.

Nicholas: Because we're working on like an infrastructure,

Ellie Day: like Ellie, you're talking about like AOL and like, I really do agree with the fact, like the whole value of making sure that

Nicholas: at the end of the day,

Ellie Day: the end goal is that everyone

Nicholas: owns this infrastructure, like anyone who's on the internet

Ellie Day: and people can create from any place. So I think that whole fear of like selling out to me is figuring out just

Nicholas: in the beginning, if a

Ellie Day: company is making this infrastructure,

Nicholas: how do we like use the Dow to kind

Ellie Day: of make sure that like,

Nicholas: at the end of the day,

Ellie Day: as we start building more and more on top of this, you know,

Nicholas: it

Ellie Day: is something that everyone can

Nicholas: own.

Ellie Day: And like, what is the fine line? Because if it is then something that everyone can own, why not just keep it a doubt? Right. But then of course, like you said, there are people that are having the company thing, benefits, et cetera. And like, there is a core team that starts off always. So I don't know. I think that's why, just because the infrastructure part I'm like grappling with.

Nicholas: You're trying to decide whether it can become, if it has to be down. And frankly, I don't think that just being a Dow native is going to do it.

Ellie Day: Yeah, no, that's a really good clarification. And thanks for like additional context. Yeah. I don't claim to have all of the answers. We're still figuring out like the best way to, I guess, ideally going back to like value accrual. I think perhaps the way. You know, you solve it is you make it. So I guess like the initial people who put up like the capital are rewarded, but then also like the people, I guess, use that capital to, you know, and refined it into the solution or awarded. But then I guess like ideally the ultimate, like, you know, once the infrastructure is in place, it's sort of like a public good. And like, just thinking about like the maintenance of public goods, as we think about them, like, you know, governments like, like, I don't know this thing about like central park. Like, I think maybe the city of New York, New York technically owns it. But like, we try to like, as a society, like make central park, like a thing that like all people can just go and like, take a stroll in the park. So I think like, there's probably going to be like people who like groups of people, like a Dow, a Dow could like, I imagine a Dow will eventually like maintain, like there could be a single Dow. That's like a group of people that, you know, aren't going to maintain like a data center in like the AOL network. But I think it's really just, we want to avoid this like idea that like, there's like passive stakeholders that can like perpetually like increase their power just because they like happen to like have the money to buy it. I don't know. It's really complicated, but I think like compared to even like 10 years ago, we have so many more tools to, to try and take a chip away at this problem space. So I think it's just like, we have to really just be intentional about it. You know, like I'm going to be intentional about how I like navigate, having a corporate structure and also a Dow, like also like, like when I say I like, like ideally the Dow is like, doesn't have really anything to do with like me and Matt, you know, like. obviously we could be like participants, but we're like, ideally on the same footing as like anywhere else, you know?

Nicholas: Yeah. Yeah. No, that really does help clarify. Cause I like, I kind of was dealing with the problem exactly as how you were describing it with the only part that was kind of confusing for me is like, if a company is starting out with like building the infrastructure, isn't that almost like centralization? because they own all the source code, they own everything, they can make decisions and that is a goal.

Ellie Day: So yeah. ideally like there could be easy ways where I guess the company doesn't own the source code. It can like maybe get like a royalty or like sort of benefit, like from the resulting network that's created, but like ideally like it's like more public. Like I'm actually, we're talking about this in like a call earlier today with relating to like decentralized joint ventures, which was like, I was talking about for a lot on this call and like, I think like that's going to like sort of play a part is like. ideally like it's more like, how do we just like keep momentum going and like fund all of us to build these things that like are generally helpful. But then like one things are in motion, ideally like they can stay in motion. Yeah. Like, cause like there are like people who own Ethereum and like, you know, those people can benefit from like the work that's done to like keep Ethereum online. But like, I think that's a good example of like a network that's not just owned by like investors, but obviously like, I mean like if I was like independently wealthy, like I would already like, I would just like fund this and like not even go like an investor about, but like, I think like as long as we figure out a way to sort of like make everyone happy, I guess, you know, I know it's kind of maybe a little bit idealistic, but that's just like the way I'm thinking about things. No, I have another follow-up question about DeFi and how DeFi is kind of like recollecting a lot of the financial power.

Nicholas: How, how can we like, because like, I'm interested in working on like, yeah. What do we do about DeFi, I mean, kind of, kind of, yeah.

Ellie Day: Yeah, no, it's a good, it's a great question.

Nicholas: It's a good question. What's, what's the answer, Ellie? Tell us.

Ellie Day: I mean, I think about that too. Like, I think that's sort of like. why, you know, I, I just don't like, I mean, I'm always like a skeptic when it comes to like interest rates in general, you know, like ever since I was a kid, I'm like, how can you make money out of money? You know? So I think the fact that we've like digitized this and like made it on chain, you know, it's just like kind of, it's kind of a mess. So I think that's like sort of why I'm just like, lately I've been focusing on like actually like thinking about what do we need as like people to actually thrive and not just survive. So I think the solution to that is like, you know, obviously benefit when we can from like this defy situation, if like, we're going to be able to like get like some like a hundred thousand percent APY or something. Sure. Let's like try to like use it more importantly. Let's like try to build systems, both physical and digital that actually provide for the needs of people on this planet. You know, like I was talking to some people about, I mean, I'm talking to a lot of people about, what's the results of like building these like data centers that could exist. Like you could actually have communities, like you could create jobs and not like Facebook creating jobs for people sense. Like you could actually have communities that are like powered by, you know, renewable energy that are like serving like the local people who live where that physical space is, but also like powering, you know, digital infrastructure and experiences that help us run our lives. And I think like, that's kind of the answer to like how I would approach like, you know, not repeating the same, you know, power dynamics. It's like, people want to accumulate a lot of tokens. It's like, like what if we just make it so like, you know, those don't really get you access to things. Like, I just like, you know, the reason people want tokens is because they can like exchange them for ETH and then they can exchange them for fiat. So then they can buy things, you know, like. we can have other paths to providing like, you know, ownership or not even ownership, like ownership providing.

Nicholas: There are things native to Ethereum that people already want, but I don't, it's not clear. I mean, one of the reasons that I jumped into web three with such a speed was because, you know, it took a long time. It took like three years between the launch of mosaic browser and the banner ad being invented at wired magazine. So it's like the existence of the economic built into blockchains from day zero means that it's, it's moving much faster. So it's not like, basically there's a lot of nice ideas out there that don't get traction because they don't have a viability mechanism, finance being just one of them, like memes are a non-financial, like reproducing through time kind of organism. So it's like a mixed bag with DeFi. It's not just like the, the existence of DeFi is also the reason why NFTs are important and more than, more than just JPEGs. So it's complicated.

Ellie Day: But like. also though, like, let's be real, like most people on this planet who are alive now are hardwired to think about our existence in terms of how it's been done in like the last, like, I don't know, 60 years, you know, like. if you think about like even 500 years ago, countries didn't really exist. You didn't have credit scores. You didn't have, you know, like, it's just like, people need to like, I guess, literally like think outside their minds and like, you know, fathom like entirely new ways of like creating, I don't know, lives like in conditions that we all can thrive in. You know, like I, I like to say that like, I'm building for my future self and my future self, you know, is going to be doing things that I can't even fathom, you know? And I think that's like, what we need to just start being really cognizant of is like, we think that we need like money in the traditional sense. We think we need like loans and all these like different things. But like, think of like, just like the fact that all of us can be chilling out here with these like things that like these phones, Like that like sort of happened because a lot of it happened because there's profit motives, but like what happens when you can sort of remove the like profit motive in the traditional sense. And you sort of, then you sort of start creating these like abundant focused systems that are like able to function, not because they need to like, you know, have a return on investment, but because they sort of, you know, exist to like make other things exist. So again, I don't claim to have the answers. Like my present day self again, is trying to make my future self do these things. I'm just saying that, like my goal as like, I don't know, in this space is to basically put things out there that enable these new ways of like existing as a society that are like more equitable and more favorable. Like, I really just like feel strongly that like, I don't want people to feel like they, they have to like do things without like truly like wanting to do things like, like I think like the existing way the world works is like based on coercion. Like there's people that can like essentially like if you have a certain like, if you're like, if you have enough money. that gives you like autonomy to exist and then decide what you want to do. But anyone who's not financially independent doesn't have that privilege. And I've like, I guess this year, you know, one point I had literally like $0 this year. And, you know, luckily I actually happened to get like an airdrop from like the get coin airdrop because I had used get coin over the years. So it's like, that was like how I was able to like pay for food in the real world. Like that was just like a mechanism that didn't exist a few years ago. So like, what are other mechanisms that we can like create where? like, you know, we're not just like, you know, economic agents that are like, you know, making trades with people. We're more just like people that we should all like be like trying to lift up and make it. So we all have a good time. Like my voice is kind of getting tired because I've been talking for a while, but I really think like, if anything, like we're at this point in history where we can coordinate the shit out of this stuff and we can live in an abundant society. And anyone who says that you can't, they just want to keep that abundant society that they live into to themselves for whatever reason, they're just selfish. You know, like I, I know that like life is really hard for a lot of people. And I know in some ways, like, you know, people have more than other stuff, but like, I just believe like that if we can like chip away at all of these problems, like then we can really start getting ahead of way. And yeah, I just like, I'm skeptical of anyone who says that like this stuff isn't possible. Yeah. That's kind of like my end of talking. Cause it's late. Yeah.

Nicholas: I'm going to hang out for a little bit. If people want to keep talking, Jade and I see Danny is also around. I'd love to hear from both of you, but Ellie, thanks so much for coming and chatting today. It's been awesome.

Ellie Day: Yeah, totally. Thanks everyone for listening and put it up with my long rants, but I appreciate it.

Nicholas: You'll have to come back when you can spill all the beans, all the secrets.

Ellie Day: Oh yeah. Well, I mean, if you want to like anyone who's interested in learning more, slide into my DMS.

Nicholas: Well put. Very compliant way of putting it. All right. Thanks. Have a good evening.

Ellie Day: Yeah. Bye.

Nicholas: See you. Yeah. So Jade wanted to say something and oh, I'm going to bring Danny up also. Jade, go for it. All right. I guess maybe the person you wanted to ask a question just left.

Danny Aranda: Ellie's gone.

Ellie Day: I was actually going to ask a question about.

Nicholas: Oh, sorry.

Ellie Day: Translating that amazing business idea to like tech people, but it's okay. Don't tell me, tell me, tell me, make sure to follow you so I can.

Nicholas: Yeah. We got some other brains around. if you want to shoot the shit with people other than Ellie, but if not, no problem.

Ellie Day: Yeah, I know. So I know Ellie is working in tech currently and there's some big grife between tech and like web two and web three. And I was just wondering if anyone here has like seen that and announcing these projects, how have they dealt with that conflict?

Nicholas: So you're saying announcing a web three project and how web two people will perceive it or vice versa.

Ellie Day: Yes.

Nicholas: Okay. So web, you're doing some, okay. So NFT hate, would that be a good summary? Yeah.

Ellie Day: NFT hate is a great way to.

Nicholas: Okay. Yeah, this is a great question. I am helping out through a strange sequence of events, a very large, I got in touch with a very large influencer and kind of convinced them to try to do an NFT thing. And they're getting a lot of hate. So I'm actually thinking about this also lately. Honestly, I don't have a great answer. I wonder if Danny has any good, good ideas. I mean, I feel like a lot of people, I spent when I first came into web three stuff in a serious way, really focusing like all my time on it in end of 2020, early 2021. I talked about it and I got such feet, such hateful feedback from some people. I remember one particular person, very smart person who I got into a real like personal fight with over this. Someone who works for Google actually, and was very critical of the ecological impact of NFTs and how crypto isn't good for anything has no actual use case. It's, you know, whatever it is, it's just, it's not worth the ecological damage. And this actually happened coming around again today. There's a post going around by an artist who does an analysis of the ecological impact of the current state of Ethereum. And basically this is not a good answer to your question, but what I'll tell you my perspective on it, which is that like learning new things is painful because you have to become the kind of person who understands that thing that you didn't previously. So you have to become a new kind of person different from what you were before. And some things look really complicated. Some things tweak us because they disagree with our identity from our current self. And some things tweak us because they're, they look too complicated and we don't feel like we should be forced by society to deal with the labor of learning and incorporating these new ideas into our identity. And so at the end of the day, what I kind of found through these conversations was like, and God bless the people who are willing to have these slow conversations, but I was reminded of my father, maybe six or seven years ago saying to me, "Why would I text when I could just call?". This was before he had an iPhone, of course. Now he has an iPhone and texts all the time. But the point is like arguing with him about, or like trying to coach him into understanding why he might want to text was not ever going to convince him to text. And I don't give a shit if he texts. Please don't text if you don't want to. I don't care. So I think on some level there becomes a cultural divide, which was how I first interpreted your question, that Web3 people almost erect a wall between Web3 and Web2, or somehow are telling Web2 people implicitly, like you are the past grandpa, which is obviously not a great way to start a conversation. But actually I think part of that is almost like, I want to say it in French, like a scarring or a reaction to how many people treat, people who are interested in NFTs, among other things, NFTs just being the most visible. So are you looking to explain this to your Web2 friends and fans? Is that the challenge?

Ellie Day: Something like that. One of the projects that I'm working on is with a nonprofit that focus on diversity and tech. And they posted the big announcement that they'll have an NFT project and that they're going to turn into a DAO. And they got some backlash. Like I personally don't get it, but I'm just trying to help them navigate through that. And I just wanted to see how other people have been dealing with it.

Nicholas: This is a great question. It's a great question. We don't talk about this.

Danny Aranda: Yeah. Just to maybe add two points to it. So one, just from some experience of speaking people in more broadly call it more traditional fields. Like for instance, my girlfriend is a producer, works with like filmmakers, artists, photographers. Some of them are big names and I like will sometimes be in a position of like explaining NFTs to them and kind of riffing on NFT ideas with them. A frequent reaction that I will find like when they're interested and they're like, okay, I want to do this project and they'll kind of outline the project or what they're thinking about it. It ends up kind of being either a like add on or derivative of something they've already created. And that theme like comes up again and again. So, you know, you're a famous filmmaker and it's like, yeah, I'm going to take this image or my film and just make it into an NFT and sell it for millions of dollars. Cause I'm like a big name filmmaker. And then that seems really easy and like totally possible. And there's a bunch of money in NFTs. And part of the answer I give is like, well, just think about it as like a separate product. Think about it as like its own standalone thing and think about it maybe from the ground up. because just taking, you know, the New York times and pasting a, you know, PDF copy of the New York times into a website, like that doesn't necessarily make it like a truly web native experience. There's definitely some like skew morphism. I think always attached with speaking with people who, you know, are just approaching it, which I think is like completely fine and natural, but that's sort of like where I try to gear the conversation. The other part that may be more addresses the NFT hate you were speaking to. I think it's actually maybe just like a natural thing in the evolution or adoption of like new technologies and new, new media. I think like basically every new medium receives some type of hate from established mediums around. I think there's always like two core themes. There's one theme is that like it's unskilled. So, you know, painters looked at the first fine art photographers and were like, anyone can do that. Anyone can kind of like pick up a camera and point and click. impressionist painters were looked at by, you know, classical painters like, ah, like anyone can kind of just like pick up a paintbrush and just start, you know, doing like an abstract version of a flower. Same thing with like abstract expressivism or any form of abstraction. They're like, ah, like anyone can kind of like throw paint on a canvas that there's always that kind of reaction that it's unskilled. And NFTs received the same thing. I mean like anyone in the traditional art world, like I would say it's like pretty much ubiquitous. that like looks at NFTs or just like, ah, these NFTs like look really dumb. They look really stupid. A child could have made them literally. sometimes children are making them. So, so there's always that kind of unskilled argument.

Nicholas: Some of my favorite ones are made by children actually.

Danny Aranda: Yeah. What's the name?

Nicholas: I'm always pumping zombie zoo.

Danny Aranda: Zombie zoo is rad.

Ellie Day: Love it.

Danny Aranda: Yeah. And actually I'll, I'll come back to zombies in a second. So, so there's the unskilled argument. The second one is that the medium is alienating. So there it's like, you know, imagine the transition from like a parent who was used to listening to music in a concert hall with like a symphony. And that's a very kind of rich sensuous experience or anyone. And then all of a sudden you introduce like the phonograph or you introduce the radio and, and, you know, their kids are really into the radio and they're really into listening to like Chuck Berry or something on the radio. And they're like, you know, this whole experience of like you listening to the song and the radio is like, it's, it's, it's very alienating. I'm I'm not around like the community or I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm not getting the same type of like rich centers experience that, that, that I get from.

Nicholas: It's missing likes and comments. So it's not comfortable.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's also, you know, that the internet itself or an online experience itself, or even a crypto and some experiences there are like alienating to a certain degree. And I think that's always just kind of endemic. in like new distribution mechanisms, like new distribution that comes with will typically become over the long arc of time, like more and more democratic, they would just like reach more people. And so I think to like the prior establishment or in crowd that will feel on the onset more alienating. And I think overall, like what I think it means is like access to like the means of like producing culture or producing anything like, like as that access becomes brought into more democratized, that is like, that is uncomfortable to like the existing practitioners or to, to, to the existing establishment. If like more people can do it now. And like, you know, The zombie zoo is a good example of that. It's like literally a child now can make these NFTs that might resonate with an audience. And is that a good or, or, or a bad thing? Is it, is it bad that, you know, a child now can, you know, have an online audience be able to, you know, as a creator, you know, make something I regard it as a good thing. I mean, like, to me, like, I don't know, a really bad analogies, like soccer, like soccer is like the most, you know, it's the most popular sport in the world. All you need is like some open space and a ball and, you know, some feet and you can get going versus, you know, something that requires like more structure, like, like golf and so on. that might be considered like a more refined sport. So I think the NFT hate is just part of the adoption cycle. It's like, it's like it's a, and there's always going to be that piece. And, and I don't know, I've made peace with myself and just the fact that like, it's fine. 99.9% of people are not going to be early adopters. And like, that is kind of by definition, it's like, okay that most people like it, it doesn't click for, they don't see it.

Nicholas: They don't, they don't feel it. You're not going to get what I, you know, I, I have astrologically, I'm like the injustice of it bothers me, but I really think like no one's going to apologize for what their opinions of all this stuff was 10 years from now. In fact, they're not even going to apologize it eight months from now when they, when some of them start flipping. And so the only thing you can do, and this is what I resolved with my encounters with NFT hate was unfortunately it's sort of balkanizing. I don't know if that's a politically incorrect term. I don't mean to use it that way if it is, but in any case, it causes this barrier to be erected between where we instead focus on people who are building in web three, because the people who aren't are such haters so often that it's, it's like toxic to be broadcasting to a broad audience. And so you end up focusing on people who already get it. I do think though that the people who do focus, like you mentioned, I forget what you said, the organization you're working with put out the NFT we're doing, but like whatever their, their area is, if they're doing that today, they're probably among the first of people concerned with whatever their cause is to be exploring web three. So there'll be also the first to potentially encounter like, Oh, actually, you know, just selling an NFT is cool, but actually a split is really cool because then we're really using like some of the, um, skip the lawyers features of smart contracts that allow you to make like arrangements, like a split without, without creating a contract anywhere except on the blockchain.

Danny Aranda: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think it's also, you know, this is like very crude, but like what gets people into the space is like just seeing other people make money and like just, just seeing other people. Yeah. Just like seeing other people be successful with a new medium, people are like, Oh, like I first saw it and I didn't get it and I kind of hated it and it went against like a lot of stuff that I believe in. And, and then, yeah, these are these other people that I know or that I saw online or I read about in the news or like making all this money around it, that that's what kind of like, you know, we'll make them like take a second look. And then at a certain point, it's like, you know, the new, the new thing, the new technology is like so well distributed and all of your friends now have crypto wallets and they've got NFTs and none that they're displaying and they're getting access to all these different things. They're getting all these types of benefits from it. You know, then eventually it just kind of engulfs everything.

Nicholas: The other thing I would say is that it's, it's when you're trying to like, this is what I told people from outside who are thinking about doing like NFTs. It's like, you've got to appeal to, there's a very small number of NFT collectors in the world today at all. So if you're thinking, if you're like a nonprofit thinking about, or whatever, some influence, it doesn't matter. If you're thinking about making NFTs on some level to generate revenues, you have to understand that there's like probably around 120,000 people trading NFTs on Ethereum total, 120K. There's like 250 million on Roblox. Like there's no one here yet. It's very, very small. And on top of that, to the point earlier, DeFi is where most of this money comes from. Originally there's a handful of people who are coming in who are bringing fiat straight into ETH and buying, but most of them made money in DeFi. And most of those people came from CeFi. So there is a new culture of web three. Like, I don't know, maybe a lot of people in this room are not from traditional finance via DeFi to get their, to buy their NFT bags, but you do need to appreciate that there's a very small number of people who are actually buying and the wealth is concentrated among an even smaller group of them as is so often the case. So if you want to make revenues either for charities or whatever purpose, it's probably going to have to be selling to those people, and there's a very small number of them. So given that there's only ever been 600,000 active addresses on OpenSea, and if you look at the numbers, like it looks like there's something on the order of 100K active NFT collectors, maybe a little bit more, then the things that you create have to appeal to those people. And what those people are appealed to is genuine web three engagement. Like there are many artists who have come from the traditional world and because of their wholehearted embrace of Ethereum and, you know, broader web three culture, but frankly, Ethereum, they find collectors who like fuck with the mission because they believe that they are genuinely involved and invested in the scene. As opposed to people who die trying to cash grabs, in which case their engagement with the scene is superficial in the first place. And frankly, I think it rarely connects with people because the actual collectors, no one is buying a thousand ETH NFTs with fiat, you know, they got their ETH somewhere else most likely.

Danny Aranda: Yeah. And it's an argument for why like native brands, whether that's a service or it's a artist or creator who's, you know, let's say making NFTs. I think over the long run, there'll always kind of be exceptions and so on, but over the long we'll probably do better because they don't have to deal with this problem of like porting over their existing audience into the new thing. They can kind of create an organic audience that is like educated on the medium from the start and from scratch. And then by the time, you know, adoption is like a very like spiky, messy, chaotic process. And it's not linear at all. And, you know, this happened with crypto. Like I still remember like December, you know, 2017 when things were just going totally nuts. And in the space of a couple of months, crypto went from like this kind of very orthogonal, like, you know, somewhat known on a kind of mainstream level, but no one had really interacted with it to like being in a bar in a neighborhood that like did not have any tech people in it really. And everyone had their phones open, like looking at the price of Bitcoin on Coinbase. And when that happens very quickly, like I think it's those native brands that benefit the most and it happens kind of all of a sudden.

Nicholas: So I could totally see people coming from organizations that are trying to transition and then they find, Oh, actually shit. Like 90% of our audience has been brainwashed by Instagram stories to think NFTs are destroying flamingos or whatever. So then it's like, Oh, well there's, we can't get traction with new ideas within the structure of trying to port our audience because the majority of them fucking hate this stuff. Even though in literally one calendar year, they're probably going to all have one. So we'll go do something. So the main organization says, well, we can't jettison, you know, they have innovators dilemma. They can't sacrifice their existing built-in market in order to find a new market, especially because the new market is smaller at the time. So they don't do it. And so individuals break off and go create those organizations and those become the ones that are the huge organizations in 18 months or 24 months.

Danny Aranda: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, sorry, go ahead.

Ellie Day: All of the points that you've both made have been really on point and definitely in line with what the nonprofit is currently doing. They actually have been working on a roadmap to help onboard people in the space, especially focusing on diversity, because that's what their mission is.

Nicholas: Nice.

Ellie Day: So I think just hearing the you to go back and forth, I think I have enough information to help them navigate this little hurdle that they just encountered, but I just wanted to say, thank you both. And I'm going to go ahead and switch back to listener.

Nicholas: You're welcome. Awesome. Thank you. Wow. We really solved it there, Danny. Yeah. Yeah.

Danny Aranda: It's good that she can go back with an answer of. it's totally natural that people hate it at first and there's nothing you can do about it.

Nicholas: It really feels good helping people. Doesn't it? I actually came up here just to say everything you guys said that y'all said are perfectly excellent. For Jade, just to add, I mean, there's, you're right. There's been a lot of that going on.

Ellie Day: A lot of people are getting like kept out of it just because of the fear of either backlash or not understanding. But I will say a lot of, you know, the articles, a lot of the information that has come out about the environmental aspect has been very, very, very overstated and I guess overvalued for lack of a better word.

Nicholas: And a lot of it came from one or two websites back in like maybe February, March, maybe a little earlier than that, that was full of misinformation and bad calculations.

Ellie Day: So a lot of what's been going around about that aspect is just flat out incorrect.

Nicholas: So you could let them know that as well. And then at the same time, even if they're talking

Ellie Day: about the environmental impact of blockchains, which is high, of

Nicholas: course, basically reminding people that

Ellie Day: blockchains are essentially just server networks and

Nicholas: everything that we do that involves technology, everything that we do that

Danny Aranda: involves the internet

Nicholas: uses

Ellie Day: a lot of servers.

Nicholas: So it's, it's not that different than the fact that people are singling it out as opposed to everything else while we're literally on Twitter right now.

Ellie Day: I think people just need better comparisons because, because blockchains are so new crypto, so new people don't understand it.

Danny Aranda: They see it as this kind of crazy, ridiculous thing, but the comparisons help a lot in my opinion.

Nicholas: Yeah. For people who are dealing with that, I mean, you know, it's Ethereum definitely for the amount of bandwidth that you get on Ethereum for the number of transactions of things you can do on Ethereum. You know, it's a very energy intensive way to get that much bandwidth. But the point is people often make this comparison between, you know, you can do like a hundred thousand Visa transactions for one Bitcoin transaction. There's some graphic from The Economist from years ago. And that may on some level be true, but the point is that Bitcoin works without like a lot of people are not ready to accept this, but like Google operate, if you're going to calculate Google's cheap servers, you probably should also calculate like all of

Ellie Day: the

Nicholas: fossil fuel engines of all of the Google AdSense employees cars as they drive up and down the coast getting to work because without them, Google couldn't offer those cheap services. So it's not like there are other externalities that are not being included in the calculations that make these companies run to do the centralized versions of what Ethereum or Bitcoin are doing in decentralized way. Again, that doesn't solve, of course, these things need to become higher bandwidth and Ethereum obviously has plans for that and people don't like to hear about future plans. But the point is like, it's not equivalent. Further to that point, I like to point out to people that in order for something like Visa to function globally, to do what it does, it requires, I mean, essentially the US military, which is the largest polluter in the world, because you need to be able to enforce contract law internationally across jurisdictions. And the way that that kind of thing has been historically established is with military might. So it's not like Visa depends on a kind of global financial system, which is enforced by not just the United States, but many other countries and all kinds of activity that is not included in the calculation of what it costs to send one transaction to swipe your card once. No one's counting in that aircraft carriers and drones and the threat of those things, even if they're not rolled out. There's a lot of complex interconnected systems that are the equivalent. I think a counter argument to that you could argue is that actually the price of Bitcoin and the price of Ethereum also depend upon the same systems. Because if the world were to fall into a violent disarray, undoubtedly the price of Ethereum would fall because people would want food, not Ethereum as much until a day such as which Ethereum is so sufficiently installed that people still want the Ethereum more than food. I don't think we're quite there yet, but there's a lot of others. It's too late. It's too late. I'm already tweeting.

Ellie Day: Web two is driven by imperialism.

Nicholas: So like there's a lot of other, a lot of other factors at play that people aren't ready to accept like, you know, Ethereum. Sure. It's expensive for a transaction. Everyone likes to complain about how expensive an Ethereum transaction is, but if you can do a transaction like a split, I'll explain it briefly for people who may not be familiar, but Mirror Foundation, others have created these split contracts, which allow you to point revenues from anything on the blockchain, such as an NFT sale or any other activity you could see on the blockchain at an address. And then that address is a smart contract that will allow a list of people to extract whatever percentage is allocated to them in advance. Thereafter, with no lawyer, no legal contracts, no international agreements, no checking of jurisdictions. You just do it on the blockchain and it works 100% of the time. The code is open source. You can audit it. It's been audited, et cetera. So yeah, it might cost you, I don't know, $150 to set that up, or even $300 to set that up. But what would it cost a lawyer to do that for you if you have contributors all over the world? It might be something you wouldn't even find a lawyer who would be willing to take you on because you're too much of a small fry. So to do direct comparisons, like implicit in all of this, is that the people who are criticizing really have not engaged with the material. And they're making judgments based on secondary sources. So if you don't have MetaMask and if you haven't made money on an NFT, then you don't know half the use case of NFTs thus far.

Danny Aranda: One thing this made me think of is there's an engineer I used to work with, and he had to take the morning off and then we spoke afterwards and he was talking about what he was doing that morning. And he was like, "You know, we had to fix our phone line.". And the phone repair or the telecom person came over and they had this really interesting gadget that they were using to test the phone lines, which was the phone line was actually an internet connection. So it was all. the phone was actually voice over IP. And the equipment that the repair person had was, it was essentially trying to reproduce the sounds that a phone line used to make, like the kind of same bleeps and boops, and still using the same kind of equipment that the repair person used to use, say like 10 or 20 years ago. And the phone person was actually like talking about how voice over IP is actually worse for phone calls.

Nicholas: Yeah, it sounds terrible. It's slow. There's a longer delay, apparently.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, but most phone lines now are voice over IP. Most of the phone network. now, even when you get a landline at home, that's voice over IP now.

Nicholas: I remember John Carmack talking about this, about how people, relatively young people these days, have never experienced the low latency of an actual phone call. And we're all used to FaceTime, and I guess what has been swapped out for VoIP underneath the hood for landlines. Although, I mean, fuck, when's the last time I touched a landline? I have no idea. But cell phones, in any case, all VoIP too. So it's like, we don't even know. So in the context of like a VR research experience, where like low latency equals immersion, like we actually don't have a comparison point that people 50 years ago would have had regularly.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, well, I guess the analogy I was trying to draw there was like, you know, the biggest network wins, basically, even when it's worse. So, you know, people are now using voice over IP, they're using internet infrastructure to do phone calls, even though it's actually worse than what exists previously. But it's the biggest network, and so that's the network that will win, and that's what people will use. And they'll even like retrofit everything else to accommodate that network. That network then becomes very, very powerful. I think the same will be true with crypto. In a whole bunch of different ways. So, you know, some of the examples you're using, like doing a Visa transaction today is like very, very cheap. But I don't think it's that crazy to imagine a world where like Visa will probably use some version of what's happening on top of Bitcoin or Ethereum to actually like process their transactions.

Nicholas: Yeah, they're like already announcing it every six months. They talk about how they're going to do it.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, that's kind of like marketing stuff. I just mean like in a real way. I think they'll eventually be like, well, this is the ubiquitous network. Like all the wallets. Right now, Visa's all about just connecting different bank accounts. If everyone's account is on chain using a wallet, they're going to use that network for sure. Even though it's more expensive or it's slower, it's got all these kind of disadvantages to it. If it has a network, that's where the value is. I think the same is true with some of the DeFi things. You can imagine these traders, these OTC desks are trying to fill orders and do all types of hedging stuff. Using Uniswap to trade an order is way worse than what you would typically get from a normal OTC desk. But if that's where the liquidity is, that's where they're going to go. That's where they're going to kind of do their trades, even when the experience is ostensibly worse across some dimensions. I think it's also true for NFTs. There's this company called Otis, which does rare collectible trading in an app. It's a Web2 company. I used it for the first time last year. I bought a couple hundred dollars worth of a Tracy Ammon painting. Tracy Ammon is a traditional artist. I just thought it was cool. I was like, "Man, her stuff is usually over a million dollars. I would never be able to access that, but here I can put in a couple hundred dollars.". So I did that. But they're launching a new product called Otis House, which will mint physical objects that they have all the infrastructure to actually store and hold and house and transfer and so on.

Nicholas: Oh, my God. This is from a fucking communist novel or something. You buy the product, and you never touch it. It just stays in a warehouse perfectly manufactured for you.

Danny Aranda: Or they have the capacity to go display it, like take it somewhere. Let's say the people who own it. So they mint it as an NFT, and then it gets access to everything that NFTs has. You can sell it on OpenSea. You can put it on Zora. A juice box could buy it.

Nicholas: But it's a physical thing that I never touch is the idea.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, but it would be a physical thing you could never touch. It could be like the Constitution, for instance.

Nicholas: The ultimate physical thing.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, and then they have all the infrastructure and the logistics and all the pieces figured out to say, "Hey, let's go put this on view at the Smithsonian.". And we have the art handlers who can go move it around, and we've got insurance to make sure that if someone tries to-- I don't know, if Nicholas Cage shows up trying to steal the Constitution, they can handle that.

Nicholas: If Dow tries to buy it.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, yeah. So I think what's starting to happen there is that it's not that the physical object as an NFT in and of itself delivers more value. Having that object as an NFT, I think on face value, you're like, "Why would I do that?". But it's all the services, applications, liquidity that are increasingly coming on chain that you want that object to get access to. And that becomes the reason why. So NFTing the Constitution maybe sounds stupid on the surface, and maybe it is. Maybe that's a bad example. But the idea that it could eventually get access to being owned by a Dow on Juicebox is compelling for a variety of reasons.

Nicholas: The point is that people are figuring out how to bridge real-world assets so that they are accessible to Web3 entities or Ethereum. Let's call it what it is. What's that tweet, the old tweet? You've been around forever. It's not blockchain. You don't mean blockchain. You mean Ethereum or whatever?

Danny Aranda: Bitcoin, not blockchain.

Nicholas: Yeah, is that it? Okay, all right. I thought it might be Ethereum. Okay, Nima has been waiting to speak for forever. Nima, what's up? Hey, guys. No, I appreciate all the discussion that you've been having. So I've been avidly listening. But I wanted to go back a little bit to the NFT Web3 hate and just give a little bit of my thoughts. So I come from a music background. I'm actually in Milwaukee. And I am deeply connected with most of the Milwaukee music scene. So I've been an advocate for music NFTs. And so I've experienced quite a lot. You poor bastard. Yes, it is. Convincing musicians of NFTs is heroic. I'm trying my best, man. It's been a tough battle because one thing that I've noticed quite often is musicians are very against music NFTs. It's like from the jump, they do not think it's a good idea. Our artists are some of the most conservative people I've ever met.

Ellie Day: Yeah, totally.

Nicholas: And so one thing that I've seen succeed in terms of being able to overcome NFT hate, for me at least, it can be different for other people, but it's just being an advocate, being positive, and being optimistic, and being willing to listen to them. Because I think more often than not, the struggling artist loves to tell you what's their struggle. And so if you're willing to listen to that and also give them the opportunity to bridge how NFTs could potentially improve their lives, there's been a lot of positive change with some of the people that I've been in the music scene with. So of course I'll go to a show, and people out there know me as the crypto guy. And some of them snark at me, and others totally ignore me. But as soon as I have a conversation with a group of people, maybe nothing comes out of it. I get a DM after the show from one or two of the guys, or one of the band members, and they're curious and they want to learn more. And so it's exposure. I've noticed that the best way to get people on board is being the advocate, exposing them, and not being afraid to be the advocate, and not being afraid to take the heat. And it's going to be a long journey. And I think over time, adopters will increase. But I think if you personally want to make a change, that's the best way is just be a positive advocate. Yeah, that's a good point. Ajir, am I pronouncing your name correctly?

Ellie Day: Yeah, it's actually Ajir. Ajir, got it. What's up, guys?

Nicholas: Hey, yeah, welcome. What's going on?

Ellie Day: I'd like to go back to something Danny said about Ethereum gas fees. So I'm currently a builder, and I've built a couple applications in Web3. It's quite funny that many don't talk about the use of sidechains, actually, lower the fees when you've launched stuff on the Ethereum main chain. Like Polygon, for example, there's AVAX, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff, which is just quite weird. There's so many ways to lower gas fees right now.

Nicholas: Yeah, I love Polygon. I posted a Twitter poll about this. Actually, I never launched it, but I was working on a project for a long time that I was thinking about launching on Polygon. That was the plan, at least, for an NFT minting marketplace project. And I think Polygon is super cool. I think it's especially cool if you don't need-- I think it works really well for ERC-20s, because if you don't need the asset on Polygon to last forever, I kind of don't think Polygon, as it stands, that blockchain will exist in 10 years or something. I wouldn't want my permanent artwork to be on there. So what I'm really interested in for L2s and sidechains, whatever it is, can we come up with a structure where initially you mint it on the L2 or the sidechain, whatever it is, wherever the cheapest gas is, let's say. And then you can bring it back to L1, but the sort of canonical mint will end up being the version that was on L1, rather than if you just naively deploy an NFT contract on Polygon and then bridge to L1, the NFT actually depends upon the security of L2, or sidechain in that case, which you don't want. But if you could create on L2 or sidechain and then bring it back to-- So I think a lot of people in the gaming space are starting to think in this direction, because you can't play games on L1. Essentially, it's too expensive. Although I don't know if anyone has done the minting part on the sidechain or the L2, but I totally agree with you. The fees, we need to find solutions, and I would love to see some cool tech in that direction. They are also a feature, but listen, there's a big difference between if you had some ETH before it cost $5,000 a coin, or if you don't. So if you actually are entering with fiat, it's so expensive to do anything. It actually costs $300 just to do an OpenSea buy if the NFT is free. So I think that's unacceptable. If we want to onboard new people, we're going to end up in a Tezos world if we don't solve that. It's a tiny little audience that's on here already. So for everybody who hasn't made any ETH or doesn't get paid their salary in ETH, it's so expensive to do this stuff. Especially if you're from a part of the world where you're not earning USD, it's even worse.

Danny Aranda: I wonder, there's an interesting equilibrium to think about between the comments we were just making before about the network that becomes ubiquitous has the most value because there's all these other applications you can interact with and so on there. Is $300 too expensive to actually get access to the rich ecosystem that's there? Is it $500? I'm sure there is a point at which the market starts to say this isn't really worth it. Maybe we're actually already beyond that point. Just the existence of other networks that actually have non-trivial amount of activity points towards that equilibrium.

Nicholas: I'm curious. I talk to a lot of developers who get in touch with me from India and many of them are interested in chains other than Ethereum, POS chains that have cheaper gas. I think that's indicative of something. Sure, the developers in America and ancillary countries have made some money in ETH perhaps and so those developers are happy to continue building on ETH. But if you're a developer in another part of the world and you didn't start off with an ETH bag, how can you even deploy your contract? It costs like $1,500 US to deploy a contract or something. It's too much.

Ellie Day: Is there anything to actually track? I know that there's a website to actually track gas fees, but is there anything to sum up the roll-ups and the sidechains to see which is best for developers to really optimize gas fees? Is there a tool for that?

Nicholas: You just want the cheapest EVM chain? Is that what you're looking for? Of the major options, I think Polygon or BSC maybe but Polygon I think would be the cheapest one to deploy on, gas-wise. It doesn't inherit the security of Ethereum. An L2, an optimistic roll-up like Arbitrum or Optimism are considered to be more safe options. Although if you look at the details, there's recent tweets from transmissions that taught me something I didn't know. That Arbitrum is kind of in its current alpha, beta, whatever phase. It actually has a very similar security model, a trusted security model with a multi-sig as Polygon. According to the tweets that I read, Polygon and Arbitrum both depend upon bridges that are controlled by multi-sigs. And Polygon additionally has a proof-of-stake validator network that is somewhat centralized with Binance and others. So you're kind of making a compromise on security on both in terms of a centralized bridge from what I understand. Then Polygon also has an issue of validator centralization. It depends what you're doing. I think for a newer developer experimenting, I think actually being on Ethereum is really bad for you because it convinces you that you shouldn't deploy unless you really know what the hell you're doing and you could lose people a lot of money, etc. Versus Polygon, it's like, "Geez, why even use Testnet? Just do it on Polygon.". People have been floating this idea, what if Rinkeby became a valued asset? What if it wasn't POA? What if it went straight to POS or something? I think there's a problem of who has all of the Rinkeby right now. For some reason, Rinkeby feels slower or sort of sluggish compared to Polygon. Even though I don't know if that's accurate. I guess the block time is maybe a little bit longer, but you can get right at the top of the block pretty easily. Azure, does that answer your question? Are you looking for where you should be deploying? I've seen a site go around that compares all the L2 options. I can't remember what that site is called. Danny, do you know?

Danny Aranda: There's Arbuscan and there's Optimism. That do track gas fees.

Nicholas: There's an L2 fee. I'll take a look. I'll see if I can find it and tweet it out. if I do. You can also go polygonscan.com Arbuscan, both are by EtherScan Company. If you just want to see the current gas price.

Ellie Day: You cleared up some questions for me still. What I really wanted to point out is that the development of the ecosystem itself, there's so much need for tools for builders to actually optimize the entire building process. That's why I was really asking, is there a tool? Let's look at VS Code, the GitHub Autopilot AI optimizer, for example. What if there's a tool to help optimize the code?

Nicholas: I think most of the chains that we're talking about is like EVM chains. Forks of EVM, Ethereum, all the L2s, Optimistic L2s, Polygon, BSC, Phantom, Loopring, I guess. I'm not sure about Loopring. If you write Solidity and the chain supports whatever version of Solidity that you're writing, it'll work for any of those. If you use Hardhat and whatnot, or Dapp tools, or is it called Forge, Georgios' new thing, all of those will output code that will run on all those chains. As far as I know, I honestly haven't done that much development on chains other than Ethereum and Rikubi and a little bit of Polygon, which all works just the same. Those are all going to be compatible and the same tooling will work for all of them. I think if you go to ZK Sync, you start looking at ZK options. I think there's Cairo, Aztec, Polygon, Hermes, I don't know how that works. But you might need to integrate some custom stuff, especially for ZKs. I think there's other affordances that you need to take into consideration, but I haven't done any ZK development, so I don't know. Cool, I hope that was helpful. I guess we have been going quite a while. Iban, what's up? I was just going to say the website I think you were looking for is called L2beat. They have a breakdown of L2 solutions and also fee infos. I was looking for L2fees.info, but I just see screenshots of that. I think this one's new to me, L2beat.com. This looks pretty cool. What do you have to say about L2s? What's your experience with L2s? I tried Loopring out in May, I think. I was just blown away by how quick and cheap it was. I kind of forgot about it until they started popping off recently. I'm just waiting for that sweet, sweet responsibility, honestly. I think that'll be pretty sick. What's that? I don't even know what that is. The governance, man. We like the governance here. Oh, I see what you're saying. I honestly am super pumped because I think it obviously solves all these scaling solutions where you're not spending... I had no idea. it was 15K, is what you said, to deploy on mainnet? I don't know. It can easily cost you $1,000 to deploy on mainnet if you're deploying something sophisticated. It can cost a hell of a lot more than that. That's crazy, right? I'm just kidding. It's like Danny says, it's also a feature. It's like everyone wants Polygon and FT's banned off of OpenSea or whatever because they're trashy because it's too cheap to make them. Chains like Polygon have this state problem where because it's so cheap to send transactions, the bots can be a whole order of magnitude stupider and more risk-inclined. For people in the room, maybe you know, they can just bloat the state with all kinds of dumb transactions. It's really cheap to revert transactions so you can do things that you don't think will work just in case. It's really dumb. I'm not technical enough to give a dissertation on it, but from what I've used, Loopring, ZK Sync, I just donated to Gitcoin using ZK Sync. It was awesome. Seamless, five bucks, it was great. I'm excited for what they do.

Ellie Day: I think it's going to help open up the space even more.

Nicholas: Absolutely, totally on the same page. I guess I'm probably going to call this quits soon enough. Is there anyone who wanted to say anything before we get going? Any final comments? All right, well, it's been great having you all here. Thanks for joining me for the first episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. I see Ravel is in the audience. They help me create podcasts sometimes. Well, at least episode two of Solidity Galaxy Brain we did together. So I wonder if people are going to want to listen to a two hour and 25 minute recording. If you're hearing this in the recorded version, thank you for making it this far and see you on the next episode. Thanks everybody. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 6 p.m. Eastern or 2300 UTC on Twitter Spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.