Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. Today I'm joined by Chris Carella, Osama, Bill ZH, Phil Mohan, K-Mac, and Alex Payton to discuss PURPLE, a DAO dedicated to proliferating the Farcaster protocol and its ecosystem. Farcaster is a progressively decentralizing open source social network protocol. Its account system is built on top of Ethereum. User identities are managed on L1, while Farcaster's increasingly decentralized network of nodes called Farcaster Hubs manage message storage and sharing. For more information about Farcaster itself, listen to my interview with Farcaster co-founder DWR, linked in the show notes. On this episode, the PURPLE gang and I discuss how PURPLE was born from the enthusiast community of open source builders that Farcaster has attracted. Compared to other ecosystem funds, PURPLE is entirely community run and funded, rather than originating with the Farcaster founding team themselves. We discuss this, as well as the now-niche DAO model PURPLE is using, what's on the horizon for open source funding, and a variety of projects that have emerged from the Farcaster ecosystem. It was a pleasure speaking with some of the members of PURPLE and learning about this unique experiment in crowdfunded ecosystem development. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Hey, Chris. Hey, Osama. KMac. Oh, Alex, nice to have you here too. Hey, Bill. Oh, sorry, my microphone was off. I thought I was talking to everybody. Welcome, Chris, KMac, Osama, Bill, Alex. Henry, how's it going?

Bill Zh: What's up, guys?

Chris Carella: Hey, what's up?

Nicholas: Hey, I'm glad everyone could make it. This is going to be a great episode, I think. I'm excited to talk PURPLE. So I guess we've got so many people here already, we might as well just launch in. Maybe I'll point questions at individuals, but anybody, feel free to jump in. Chris, maybe, could you tell us the story of how PURPLE got started?

Chris Carella: Yeah, sure. It really, kind of the origins of it all is that I discovered Farcaster. Farcaster is a decentralized social networking protocol. And so I joined Farcaster and there was just a lot of builder energy already on Farcaster. It reminded me of early days of Twitter when Twitter had a really robust API and you saw some useful utilities and then you saw some useless but fun utilities. And it just really had a lot of that energy already. And so I just started out with a cast and in the same way you might send a tweet that you never really expect to act on. And I just sent the cast that said, hey, we should start a Navish DAO to support all the builders in this ecosystem. And then Osama...

Nicholas: Around about what time was this? Around when?

Chris Carella: When was this? So this was like, we launched in October, but this was like, I don't know, July, August, maybe August is probably fair. July, August. And so I sent this cast and then Osama and Matt immediately slide in from my DMs and Telegram and they're like, hey, let's do this. And one of the reasons why I kind of thought like, this is not a thing I'm going to do is because Nouns.Build didn't exist yet. And so I am not capable of forking and launching the Nouns smart contracts. But Osama and Matt are and so they were like, this is great, we should do it. And by the way, we already have this little prototype of some Nouns contracts that we're working on. And that really started it. And then we shared that in our Telegram around Farcaster. Farcaster was still small, it was like really relatively small at the time, but people started joining the Telegram and getting excited around this idea. And then Jacob from Zura entered the Telegram and pointed us to Nouns.Build and he said, hey, we're working on this thing. It'd be really cool if you guys used it. It was testnet at the time. And so we sort of organized what we want the parameters of this DAO to be. And then we tested it a lot on testnet, helped them find a bunch of bugs and the like. But then when they were ready to go live, we were ready to go. And so the moment it went on mainnet, we deployed the smart contracts and I think not really knowing what to expect. And then we had like pretty great demand right from the start of other people who were excited to get involved in this DAO and support the Farcaster ecosystem. And then we all met for the first time. Me, Matt and Osama. We're like, holy shit, this thing is working. We better jump on a video chat and actually talk to each other about it. Wow. So that was just kind of the chaotic origin story.

Nicholas: That's awesome. Yeah, please go ahead.

Osama: Sorry, I would add. actually, it wasn't purple when we started. It was actually purple.

Nicholas: Oh really? Because that's the ENS handle, right?

Osama: That's the ENS handle, yes. And that was because there were actually two efforts within Farcaster. One was by the handle Katsuya and they wanted to build an investment DAO. Oh wow, okay. And Kritz and some of us, we had the idea of like, yeah, building a builder DAO. And it just seemed like the builder DAO resonated a lot more with the community. So we had chats with the purple folks and they were like, yeah, okay, you know what, let's just bring it all into a single DAO, which was as Kritz said.

Nicholas: Wow, awesome. So we should maybe zoom out a little bit and first say what attracted each of you to Farcaster and what kept you coming back and really made you want to do something like Purple in the first place. We can start with Kritz and we'll go down the line.

Chris Carella: I don't know how I found Farcaster, besides the fact that I'm always trying all the apps and I somehow saw it on Twitter and I slip into DWR's DMs and ask for an invite. And then what really hit me was, and I was actually feeling pretty bad about Twitter at the time, this is pre-Elon. I just felt like the conversation on Twitter really highlighted and the algorithm really promoted people dunking on each other and being mean to each other and being funny at each other's expenses. And it just felt like Twitter had really lost a lot of humanity to it. And so then I jumped on Farcaster and it just felt like the complete opposite. It was like, first of all, everyone on Farcaster, still to this day, loves Ethereum. And so you kind of have this Ethereum community there. And it was like this very elevated intellectual conversation around things happening in crypto or things happening in the world. And so that's sort of my first, why I just started keep using it. I started using Twitter less and less and Farcaster more and more. It's just like the people on there and the dialogue and the conversation and some of the product choices they made to foster that kind of conversation just really resonated with me. And then the second part of that is, and then I saw the developer ecosystem and the cool things people were building and I was just totally inspired.

Nicholas: Would you have joined Farcaster if it didn't have a decentralization story? Was that essential to what made you interested in it? Or is that incidental? It's more about the community of people who were there.

Chris Carella: I certainly would have tried it in the same way that I tried TikTok. I think the people that really grabbed me, I think I wouldn't have invested my time and energy and love into it if it wasn't decentralized. Because it was like, oh, this is a really cool social network. Just like TikTok was a really cool social network. Oh, this is kind of how social networks should operate. This decentralized way will solve a lot of the problems that we've had over the last decade with social networks. And so that maybe is like the third point. Like the first point being like, cool, the people are great. The second point, wow, developer energy is amazing. The third point is like that aha moment. I get to go a little bit down into the rabbit hole and then into the rabbit hole of like, oh, this is how it should have always been.

Nicholas: Okay, I'm looking forward to getting into more later on about what the developer ecosystem actually is and what the affordances of Farcaster imply. But first, K-Mac, how did you find Farcaster and what was it that drew you into Purple about Farcaster, I guess?

Kmac: Yeah. So ETH count to account messaging had kind of always been on the brain. Like, why hasn't this been solved before? Why can't I message somebody address to address? And that kind of came out of making a decentralized protocol for smart contract exploits and insurance. I wanted that forever customer and I wanted to be able to reach back out to them. So that was on the brain. You might recall a juice box. Was it Bill Giddle? Bill killed a hackathon over the summer and had done a project with a high school kid to try to get that messaging done. And so that bit on my brain. and then when, you know, Lens, of course, checked that out and Farcaster. So I slid into Dan's DMs as well and said, hey, I'd like to check it out and was extremely skeptical. Not decentralized, not offline. first, a lot of design choices that I might not have made if I were architecting it. But as Chris was saying, the community was so awesome. But I'm like, I'm gonna stick around. And then I was like, okay, you know what, I think I trust these guys. I don't love that. I have to. But I do believe that they will do what they say they're going to do in terms of decentralizing this progressively. And that seems to have happened. And I'm going to slide to mute now.

Nicholas: Very cool. Well, yes, I remember that hackathon and your prototype on GunDB and then leading into the Farcaster thing. It's interesting. Actually, DWR was on this show. Gosh, I'm gonna have to go look at the date. But it must be a year ago now. Osamu, what was it about Farcaster that attracted you and kept you coming back?

Osama: Honestly, when I joined, there was nothing to keep me coming back. I don't know if I should wear this as a badge of honor, but I lost about 60% of my following because when we purged accounts which were inactive, I lost all the early followers at that time. But no, really, what happened is, interestingly, at the same time, I think 2021, I was exploring what to build after doing a few projects within Web3, working with a few DAOs. I had built something on top of BitCloud, that other old Web3 social network. And it just felt like, you know, it was peak DeFi, post-DeFi summer. So everyone was just shilling tokens and everything was going up and everything was amazing. But for me as a builder, it was hard to find a community where you could just talk to other builders and just talk about, you know, building. And I think that was very attractive to me. Even early on, there were people just talking about building and possibilities and what's not possible and just having real conversations. And that just drew me to this. I'm not a Twitter influencer and Twitter just felt at peak Twitter, peak crypto. It was just too much of shilling and not a lot about building. So yeah, kept coming back.

Nicholas: Was there an element of the potential to eventually build your own front end or your own algorithm more easily? Or I guess a part of why you would bother or just a change of place?

Osama: So if you ask me, so, you know, the first time Dan got on Clubhouse, I think, you know, the idea behind building clients has evolved over time. Early on, there was a thinking that there might be, you know, like a Winamp like interface or a VS code like interface to Forecaster where developers would build plugins into the main thing. So yeah, from that time, I think it was just really just the community and just seeing something come out. And I had spent some time also looking at GunDV and a bunch of like P2P stuff and there's the Indrop project by Sir Tim Hornerly. So yeah, it just felt like the Forecaster decisions were interesting. There were discussions around CRDTs and stuff. So I was like, okay, I'm one just very curious about the tech that they're using and the way they're approaching this build. And then too, you know, you had a lot of early people who were just builders, right? Like, I don't know if they're here, but yeah, some of the people, you know, Danny Mack and others, they were just around and most of them ex-Coinbase. So they were very deeply technical too.

Nicholas: Great. And Bill, what was it that drew you to Forecaster and what made you stick around?

Bill Zh: Yeah. So I first discovered Forecaster, I think it was last September, when I listened to a podcast that Dan did with Eric Thornberg. And when I was listening to that podcast, I deeply resonated with his idea, especially the sufficiently decentralized network that he wants to build. So right after I finished the episode, I sent him a DM saying that I wanted to join. And then I got the invite. I think I joined maybe in mid-September. And immediately after I joined, I discovered that there's so many great builders, like many others have already mentioned. And the energy is just incredible. It's so different from Twitter, where anyone, you know, they would DM you and they want to sell you something. And on Forecaster, people actually want to help you because everybody is a builder. And after that, I joined the developer group, the Telegram group of Forecaster. And there are just a bunch of people trying to build, you know, all kinds of third-party clients and just fantastic toolings that would help users on Forecaster to access all the data in the entire network, which is impossible on Twitter. So that is basically how I got started. And then I just found Purple, I joined Purple, you know, then I just got more involved in the Forecaster ecosystem.

Nicholas: I love it. Chris, could you tell me a little more about the Telegram? Actually, I'm not in the Telegram. Is that where the majority of the Purple activity happens?

Chris Carella: Yeah. So first of all, I see Phil is in our crowd here. If he's available to speak, it'd be great to pull him up. But yeah, so we've actually mentioned two different Telegrams on this episode already. And so the initial Purple Telegram was a group of 100 plus people who were just interested in making this DAO happen. And it was really like. the whole purpose of that Telegram was pre-launch. We were like, sharing documents and working on the artwork, even though we ultimately decided on a Purple Square. And we were just collaborating with a group. And it's just kind of interesting. It's now like some feedback I give to people as they want to launch their own now-ish DAO, which was, we did this very organically. We were not thinking about marketing. We were not trying to build a community. But I did realize, maybe three months later, I realized like, holy cow, we had 120 people on the Telegram before we even launched, with all of that excitement and energy around our launch. And so that's kind of a relic. You know, obviously people are still in there. Our message goes around a little bit. Most of our activity happens either synchronously through Discord or asynchronously through Farcaster and Trumverse. Bill had mentioned a developer Telegram, which is what it sounds like. It's like a lot of developers are in there, including the Merkle team, talking about what they're building, sharing tips, all of that stuff.

Nicholas: What's the Merkle team?

Chris Carella: Oh, Farcaster was built by a company called Merkle Manufacturing.

Nicholas: Ah, okay. Yeah. Got it. So that's Dan and... And V. V, yeah. And so I've sort of sussed a little bit from the Farcaster experience that they are the core devs of the protocol. But that's the extent of the team altogether?

Chris Carella: No, I don't know. Some of you probably know better than me. But those are the two co-founders of Merkle Manufacturing, who again launched the Farcaster protocol and the first party client, Warpcast. But they've got, I don't know, 10 or 12 people now. I don't know if anyone has a more accurate number than me.

Phil Mohun: But... Yeah, they're up to 10.

Chris Carella: And I'll just add that many of them came from the Farcaster community, or at least as I've seen it, or have contributed to the open source code base before they even joined the team. So it's been sort of like, it feels, watching from the outside, it feels like it's a very organic process of people who love Farcaster, have proven themselves in the community, often make their way into Merkle Manufacturing.

Nicholas: There's two things that you said that were very interesting to me. One was that you, because Purple, maybe for context, is aside from BuilderDAO itself, one of the only, I think the only, it is the most successful in terms of auction price consistency over time. Purple is the most successful of all the nounish DAOs, aside from the BuilderDAO, which is also on the protocol itself. To this point, you've got 165 auctions or 165 NFTs because 21% are reserved for nouns, Farcaster and PurpleDAO, as I understand it, and 122 unique owners. But part of that momentum that is exceptional of all the nounish DAOs that have launched on NounsBuilder, maybe comes from this having already had a really substantial community. Rather than launching a new idea, day one, you're launching the idea and the token itself. Instead, here, you had months of preparatory work, building a strong community of enthusiasts who would be that audience to purchase the tokens. It's interesting.

Chris Carella: Yeah, I would just add that I feel like our natural advantage here is being an ecosystem DAO. It's an ecosystem around the protocol, but that new people find Farcaster every day. And whereas nouns need to proliferate themselves. They need to put their brand out there. They need more people to find out about nouns. So they come and participate in the nouns auction and all the nounish things. Where Purple gets the benefit of people finding Farcaster and then falling in love with Farcaster and then going down that rabbit hole and wondering how they can participate further. And Purple is something we're pretty all over Farcaster. So it's something you learn about probably in your first couple of weeks. So we have this interesting flywheel that there's the Farcaster flywheel that keeps growing and growing and growing. And so as a result, we have fresh faces coming in getting interested in Purple all the time. Yeah, it's very interesting.

Osama: I think one really interesting thing also is generally such DAOs are initiated by the protocol themselves. And I think that, in my opinion, is the reason why Purple is... Well, now Dan and Varun are bidding for a square. And yes, they do get an allocation on the Farcaster.eet address for Purple squares. But really, this was built by a community instead of the venture-backed company building the protocol itself. And I think that distinction was very critical. And like Chris said, they're starting organically, growing organically, staying consistent with that growth in a very organic manner without any kind of, I would say, backing from a venture-backed company which is building the protocol. I think that makes it interesting. And also another thing which makes it super interesting is that most members joining KMAC and others, they really just defined it in a very different way. I think maybe, I don't know if Chris would agree or disagree, we never thought of a lot of the things that are happening. So yeah, I just find these very interesting versus everything else that I've seen before in Web3 Social and otherwise DAOs where the protocol and the DAO is just so tightly knit together.

Chris Carella: I'm sorry, but I would just follow up and get some of Phil's opinions because he was a really early token holder. And he just sort of wrote the blog post that I think kind of set some of our culture. I mean, very, very early on where he wrote a blog post about Purple and public goods. And we really kind of just never really, we really left on to that and as new people come in, it's not like we point them all to Phil's blog post, but it's like that public goods angle really runs deep in us.

Phil Mohun: Yeah, I've really enjoyed watching Purple develop. I mean, the thing about Nouns that's interesting is obviously the fact that it was the first of this style that you could do a token every day forever. But one thing that I think Nouns suffers from is a lack of sort of a solid vision around what the treasury funding should be used for. And that sort of results in all sorts of wacky proposals and people don't really agree on what the right types of things to fund are. And interesting things come out of it, but ultimately it results in a form of stagnation where the treasury just grows and grows and the incentive is to make the number as big as possible. And I think we're early enough in Purple that we can set a culture of actually deploying capital effectively. And our mission statement, which is to proliferate the Farcaster ecosystem, I think it's really important. That's the lens that I try to put when I put to any voting. Is there something that we could be doing right now that would be better at proliferating the Farcaster ecosystem? And if I feel as though this is the best thing that we currently have, I'll vote yes. Otherwise I'll abstain or vote no. And with Farcaster, there's lots of people that are building on top of it and it's awesome to see, but lots of people have really traditional ways to get funding and venture capital is one way or bootstrapping is another way. And I hope to see Purple fund more things that wouldn't otherwise get funded. And I think that is sort of the types of things that I get really excited about and the types of proposals that I try to back.

Nicholas: Bill, did you want to jump in and say something?

Bill Zh: Yeah. So I wanted to echo what both Osama and Phil said. When I pitch Purple to my friends, what I always mention is the fact that none of us at Purple work at Merkle. So nobody at this call works for Merkle Manufacturing. However, what we are doing every day is to help the protocol grow and to fund developers, especially those who wouldn't get funding otherwise. So this is actually an incredible experiment that would not have happened in Web 2. Imagine that we want to start a DAO that would fund the development of Facebook. Zuckerberg wouldn't allow us to do that because, first of all, we wouldn't have access to data. And second of all, he would want his own people to work on a product but not relying on third-party developers. So I think this is the beauty of the Fodcaster ecosystem and also the beauty of our DAO. And I think that is one of the main reasons that we'll be able to attract talented people, both joining DAO and also submitting proposals that will benefit the entire ecosystem.

Nicholas: Even if you compare it to something like Optimism or Uniswap, their foundations that do this kind of work are predefined by the company. So even though maybe the membership of them is not entirely the company, the origin, the genesis and the direction of those groups is very different from even I think about Juicebox where I spend a lot of time. The DAO was created in that case, there's no company. So it's only the people who are building the protocol who are in the DAO. But they are still like the same genesis event versus this. situation is very different. Why do you think people are so motivated to proliferate Fodcaster? I don't feel like people do that work for Twitter.

Bill Zh: Yeah, I think the main reason is that the Merkle team has created a strong guarantee, both in technical terms and in cultural terms. They have created a technical infrastructure, what they call hubs, to enable developers to access the protocol, to have the same access to a protocol as the core team. But a lot of other Web3 teams would also do that. It's not uncommon in the world of Web3. But the other thing that they have done really well is to start from day one when they were not decentralized. In fact, as of today, they are actually not truly decentralized. But they've done a really good job of supporting developers, giving them access to the APIs that they themselves are using, so that a lot of people would want to spend a significant amount of their time building on top of the network. Once you spend so much time on a network, both as a user and a builder, then you would naturally want to include more people into it. So that's why when I, for example, go to East Denver or other events, I always pitch FogCaster and PRPL to most people that I meet. And I think it is not the case for many other protocols where they have a huge foundation, a huge fund that will give money to attract people to develop something for them. But the growth is not organic. For FogCaster, the Merkle team has never given a single dollar to any developer. And that is just incredible.

Osama: I just wanted to add one more thing to what Bill said. I think, and this is what I was trying to get to with Dan and Varun not running PRPL. The Merkle team is not biased towards a client A or client B versus client C. They cheer everyone who's building. And historically, most Web3 socials. without taking names, being a builder in some of those ecosystems, I can tell you that the founding team there were definitely shilling and boosting specific clients built or apps built by their friends. So just the Merkle team just being so indifferent and just equally praising everyone for building good stuff. I think that's one of the other reasons.

Nicholas: Interesting because none of the growth is artificial also by what you're saying. They have a better indicator of product market fit around the development of the protocol as compared to someone who's giving out liquidity rewards for participation.

Chris Carella: I just wanted to zoom out and also answer that question by saying that it's also just an inspiring vision that the public square should be owned by the public. And so I think when you go down that rabbit hole, obviously this is for decentralized social as a whole, I think. And so everything that these guys said about the Merkle team really fostering a good development community and just a community in general is all true. But when you zoom out, it's just a very inspiring mission to think that the public square should be owned by the public. And we've seen that taken away from us. And we all have feelings about it. And so what would be an equivalent to that would be like, you want to solve independent journalism or something about the political system. There's a very big mission here. And it's easy to get inspired and join.

Phil Mohun: Yeah, I would also say, from an individual incentive point of view, Farcaster isn't that big. I think I checked and there's something like 1500 daily active users. There's not that many of us on here. So everyone that's on the protocol right now is in the same tribe, to use some of biology's language. And we're all fairly incentive aligned. As it grows, a few things are going to happen. One, everyone that's already a user is going to benefit and probably gain social capital. That's the way these early social networks tend to work. If you were on Twitter in 2008, you probably have a lot of legacy followers and distribution just because there wasn't that many people on the network. And so as new users join, you get into the recommendation algorithm and you tend to have compounding effects from being early on the network. I think today, all of the people that are on Farcaster really want the network to get bigger because it's the same reason when you have an angel investor, you invest in a startup and later rounds, you see the capital multiply. I also think there tends to be a cold start problem with some of these networks where before the protocol is very good, people aren't willing to build products on top of it. But until there's products that people are worth using, the protocol can't really grow. That's what we see with a lot of these social networks and web three protocols. There's just a lack of good products. And I'm hoping that this sort of public goods DAO is a way to cross that chasm. And it's really hard and a whole bunch of people are talking about the cold start problem. But this is because the protocol is open and I think because the distribution of users tend to be very web three oriented, it sort of works. And yeah, it's an interesting experiment. I'm curious to see in six months, if we look back at the types of proposals, which ones got funding, what's still around, what people actually use day to day. I'm a big fan of retroactive funding for this reason.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of the alternative social networks that we've seen over the last three, four years, there's been many in the last 10 years where they simply try to,

Phil Mohun: I

Nicholas: remember somebody trying to get me to sign up for something because it didn't have ads and Instagram was so full of ads. And then this period of free speech, somewhat right leaning political spectrum plays, obviously centralized infrastructure as well. But in this case, because the motivation for leaving, it sounds like a common ones are the tenor of conversation on Twitter and the algorithmic, as a consequence of the algorithm declining in quality and being a sort of regrettable place to hang out for people, paired with the builderly desire to have direct access to the firehose essentially, led to the genesis of a developer community who are the perfect people to appreciate the benefits of a decentralized social network, as opposed to something where the demand was generated through marketing towards a vertical that would not, a subcultural group that would not have the wherewithal to actually benefit from the decentralized infrastructure.

Phil Mohun: Yeah, I'm just, I'm less afraid of getting canceled on Firecaster than on Twitter, right? Like on Twitter, like you say something and it gets picked up and retweeted and all of a sudden, like there's a whole bunch of people angry at you. Firecaster just smaller and people tend to be more ideologically aligned and like it won't last forever. But, you know, I think about why I use certain group chats or why I like am active in certain discords or social networks. And it's because there's a conversation happening there that I can participate in. that I can't do anywhere else. And for right now, Firecaster is the best place, in my opinion, to talk about Web3 and crypto projects. Like you just get great feedback. Your engagement is much higher on posts. People are thoughtful. They're respectful because it's like a small town. You're going to run into somebody else again. And if you're a dick to them, like they're not going to talk, right? It's like versus on Twitter, you talk to like user 5678 and you have no idea if they're a bot or a real person or someone that is like, you know, just, I don't know. I've met so many of the Firecaster community and like in person as a percentage of the network, it's just in, you know, orders of magnitude larger than Twitter.

Nicholas: I've always had a much, I mean, I started at when Firecaster came out, I had many more followers on Twitter than obviously the Firecaster following. And that has led me to spend more, continue to spend more time on Twitter. Do you find people, it feels like you have to natively participate in Firecaster. You can't just be like cross posting things. You have to genuinely be interacting with people in a different way in Firecaster. What is the like texture of a Firecaster relationship?

Osama: For what it's worth, I do know people who cross post and they do get engagement on Firecaster and they built a decent following just by cross posting. Having said that, yes, you know, like, like. I don't know if you got a chance to see or if you were at the first IRL or not. the first, I would say, but the biggest IRL meetup we had at Eat Denver and, you know, all the other IRL events we've had across LA, Vancouver, I think SF and a bunch of places. I think it's really like bridging the digital and then meeting IRL. And I think like, you know, some of the cultural things that are happening, like there's this whole UnLonely app and Brian and there's this whole kiwi versus mango and, you know, eating the kiwi with the skin kind of thing. So I think it's like some of those things are just like turn into a conversation between friends, as Phil said, you know, a tribal conversation between 1500 friends on a group chat. And it's less like, oh, I got to do a thread because I got to create influence because I need to rank up and, you know, get followers.

Nicholas: What's the kiwi? Someone eats kiwi with the skin?

Phil Mohun: You don't want to know.

Nicholas: I think I've seen this, but there's someone who that's their ideology. That's their kiwi practice.

Osama: So as far as I know, and someone please correct me, KMak, you might be the right person. You've got a kiwi in your thing. But I think it's as it goes, someone posted a picture of a kiwi, which was which was bitten with a reply asking, oh, shit, have I been eating it wrong? Is this the right way to eat it? And then since then, it's become a thing where it seems like people on Podcaster really love fruits and kiwis and to eat things with skins and wrappers on. And, you know, there were pictures of quarter pounder McDonald's burgers posted with the wrapper, you know, a bite taken out with the wrapper.

Nicholas: It sort of reminds me of Hacker News or some subreddits in this way. It is a community, a specific community right now. I think early Twitter was a little bit similar in that way. The South by era. Did anyone else want to jump in and describe what the social experience of how it differs in Farcaster, maybe how that contributes to Purple? If not, maybe we could talk a little bit about the proposals that have been funded. So there's 36 ETH in the treasury right now. Purple has sold 61 ETH of NFTs. So about half the treasury has been allocated already or of the current. what's been raised currently. Are there any proposals that jump to mind as ones that we ought to discuss for better understanding Purple and its goals and how it's achieving them, how it's struggling, etc.? I can name some if nothing comes to mind for you.

Chris Carella: I would like to take the first shot and then and then and just say that, you know, one of our challenges that Purple, since day one, is deploying capital and even just getting good props up on chain. And one of the reasons why is because we're an ecosystem now around the protocol that is rapidly developing. And so there's always like some cool new feature, like some really important feature right around the corner. And so every time we think about, let's do a Farcaster-wide hackathon, it's like, well, let's just wait for hubs to come out. And then it's like, okay, let's fund the clients. And then it's like, let's just wait until sign in with Farcaster comes out. And the exciting thing is like those two things that I mentioned. And I pushed back against that. I was like, let's deploy capital. And then the developer communities would hit me up and say like, hey, I'm not going to participate in this until hubs is out. Like just hold the capital until it's really effective. And so for the first couple of months, and if you look at our proposal list, you can maybe see this cadence. It was pretty sparse. And we had a bunch of initiatives and we funded that meetup in East Denver and we did a retroactive prop house round, which was really easy to do because people had already done great work. But it was pretty slow going. And now with hubs and sign in with Farcaster, literally right around the corner, we're talking about like a fortnight, maybe if not days for some of this stuff. Our cadence has really picked up. The developer energy has really picked up. People are eager to just start working on things. And so we've had a flood of proposals in the last maybe 10 days of a new prop house round. Alex, who is here in the audience as a developer in residence. There's been a lot of activity lately. And so I would love to hear from the group, things that they're really excited about or think really encapsulates Purple's mission.

Bill Zh: I think one of the proposals that we did, I thought was very interesting, was the proposal to fund developers to contribute to hubs. Hubs, as I mentioned, is the decentralized infrastructure for the Farcaster network. And I think we started the proposal at the end of December, I think right after Christmas. And we were just able to attract more developers to help with issues on GitHub and they would get compensated according to the impact that they have made. And I think since the proposal passed, I would say a lot more people started to pay attention to the GitHub repo and some of them actually fixed the issues on GitHub and got rewarded by Purple. And I think it is, again, as I mentioned, an incredible experiment because we don't work for Merkle Manufacturing, but still we would pay people to fix their bugs to help them ship product faster. And all of that is because we have a shared mission to proliferate the decentralized social network, which is Farcaster.

Nicholas: Awesome. Osama, was there a proposal that sticks out in your mind?

Osama: Not a proposal, but just an idea that sticks out. And, you know, like, well, the most recent proposal, I think, Chris, you've drafted it. It's really wonderfully done. Like, you know, we have Oxen creating all this amazing art. And this is where it gets really interesting, where, you know, while we're waiting for hubs and stuff, it could be, you know, we've never seen a DAO influence a protocol in a way where an artist can be an artist in residence and then, you know, they create an image and those images can become the app icon for you. Right. Like I know Rainbows got Zorbs and Rainbows got toggles and stuff as an app icon. But imagine minting an NFT at a DAO and then that becomes your social app icon, basically. So there's this really interesting, I would say, integration that's happening. And again, very organically, not orchestrated. And the team building the protocol has almost nothing, not nothing, but you know, they have no influence on the community. So I just wanted to highlight that.

Chris Carella: And then I'll speak to a proposal that is on team right now to fund Warpy. And this is a set of Python scripts that you can run to pull down the entire forecasted data set locally. And so this really strikes me as something that is strong in the forecast submission because it's like, you know, it makes it very easy to analyze the data set. And it's just like it's open source. It's, you know, it pulls the data down for everyone. The open data is now available for everyone. And so I think of it as like this totally, one is a public good and then two, helps the proliferation because it gets like the actual data of the protocol in people's hands and maybe people who are less technical. So there's one that we haven't even voted on yet. I think the vote starts in 24 hours. But it's something I'm pretty excited about and feels very purple to me.

Nicholas: So what is the motivation for the devs behind that? Are they trying to build a company or they just want to build something and are happy to get some funding to do so?

Bill Zh: Yes, I can speak to that. I actually helped the dev to submit the proposal. The dev, Vincent, he's not a PRPL member as of now, but he has made a few projects on FODCASTER. I think from what I'm understanding, he just really wants to make a public utility that would help people on FODCASTER better understand the data on the network. And that's why he's asking for some funding so that he could continue to finish the project.

Chris Carella: Yeah, I would say if I were speaking to a pure Web2 legacy audience, I'd say like, this is an open source project. There's lots of open source projects built around it. We have a lot of open source developers and this one's being a new mechanism to fund open source development. And so, historically, funding open source has been really challenging. I think Anamish DAO is a really good way to fund open source software. And it's like a very traditional way to think about it, but it's a totally strong analogy, I believe.

Osama: Yeah, just to add, Vincent and another user, Tim, on FODCASTER, Tim Dobb, they were part of this, I would say, short hackathon sprint that we were all building towards. And what's interesting is that Tim replicated the FODCASTER architecture and tried to poke holes at it from a security and scalability perspective. And he built a demo app around it, like he rebuilt the entire thing. And he's gotten retroactive funding from the Optimism Fund. So, again, it's just super interesting to see. What Kirsten is saying, basically, the knowledge DAOs are a great way to actually fund open source projects, which are building public goods. It just seems to be working. It's still early, but seems to be working.

Nicholas: I definitely agree that there's something to be done here around. I mean, we're all aware that the world runs on a handful, a bunch of things that are maintained by one or two people who are not paid to do so. Or maybe in the best circumstance, it's like HTML, et cetera, standards or ECMAScript, where big companies employ people who part of their time is like an open source role trying to influence protocol development and such. But it does seem like there's some opportunity for people to get paid for doing things that are useful to others in writing software and creating protocols and such. And there's something very powerful here. Right now, the funds that Purple distributes are collected exclusively through the sale of the Purple tokens, the Nounish style auctions. Do you have any thoughts on the efficacy of that? Is that really a good way to decide who can be a member or not? And how is the supply regularity relative to demand to enter the DAO? Are there any dynamics here that you've come to understand better by being maybe the most successful Nounish style DAO aside from Nouns itself?

Chris Carella: I'm deep on this. So let me see the floor if anyone else wants to go.

Osama: No, you go, Chris. I know you're deep on this.

Chris Carella: So, you know, what really is a DAO? It's a group of people with a common mission who are pooling resources. And so, you know, in the case of Nounish DAO, the first resources that you're pooling is capital. And so, you know, I think it's very fair that you deploy capital or you contribute capital to the treasury to join DAO. So in general, that's just, you know, there was an argument of like, should anyone be able to join Purple? And we made the choice that like, no, no, you have to buy the token to join Purple so that you're contributing to the treasury. So that's number one. You know, another way to do it is you issue a lot of tokens. And then 10,000 people join your DAO at once. And that's pretty good, but there's no recurring funding. So often when a DAO does that and they turn through their treasury, there's no obvious way to refill that treasury. You sort of like got the money from all the people you were going to get the money from. And so I think the Nounish auction mechanism does a few things. One, it's like this slow and steady growth. And so, you know, Purple grows roughly around one person per day. And so we're sort of the early people pay the premium on the token to be there first and help establish the culture. And now, you know, the culture changes every day with every new user. But it's like it's slow and steady and you can learn what it means to be in this DAO. And, you know, it's just a much slower pace of things. So that's really good for like having a cohesive membership who understands the culture as people join, you know, in our case, once every 24 hours. Then, you know, there's like this flywheel. that is what I think makes these things fundraising mechanics forever, which is you have the treasury, you deploy the treasury and the people doing really cool shit. Lots of people see that cool shit. They want to be a part of it. And so they want to join your DAO. And so they bid at auction and fill your treasury. And then again, use that treasury to deploy, to build really cool stuff. And then people see that happening and it happens over and over again. And so I think there's like a long term mechanic here that is missing. in a lot of other kind of ways you can start a DAO. And so, you know, maybe if we had issued 10,000 tokens up front, we would have a bigger treasury right now. But I think if we think about five or six or 10 years from now, the NAMISH mechanism is something that like it just keeps going. It's like this perpetual money machine. You know, obviously, if you're doing good and people like what you're doing, in our case, more people keep joining Forecaster and so want to keep getting involved. I think it's like a very healthy way to build a long term sustainable organization, you know, with a aligned mission.

Nicholas: Essentially, the perpetual auction at a regular interval where a contribution to the treasury is a requirement and the minimum contribution is whatever you can get away with in the auction. There's no cheating.

Chris Carella: That's right. It's the market, right? Every day the market is different. And so you even see it even though our token price will be like it will drop down to 0.15 and then next thing you know, it's an ETH and then it's 0.3 and then it's 0.5. You know, it kind of just jumps around all over the place. I've also seen like on holidays, you can buy a little bit cheaper. It's like there's just like a true market dynamic at play every day to join the DAO.

Osama: And I think something that Chris touched on earlier and that's super critical too is when the hubs were not ready and the protocol was still evolving. Had we done like a 10,000, you know, commit, 10,000 NFT sale, that would mean people would have gotten anxious and they would have wanted to see utility. But growing this slowly while the protocol is growing also enables us to do things sensibly versus just trying to gather a lot of treasury. And then what would you do with it? I mean, the protocol is still evolving. Right. So I think that's critical too.

Alex Paden: I think it's worth noting on this too, like this is all talking about the Purple membership, but it's also like pretty open just to outsiders trying to come in. Like I'm not a member. Pixel's not a member. The TipCast guy I don't think is a member. And the bot friends I don't believe were either. So it's very welcoming just to people to come in and talk, put a proposal up through someone else, that kind of thing.

Nicholas: Alex, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?

Alex Paden: Oh, yeah, sure. I'm Alex. Sorry, guys. I just got home. So I've headphones now. Yeah, I am very grateful for Purple. I mean, to me, this has been basically what's enabled me to keep working on Parkaster for a while and kind of just pilot out the juice box.

Nicholas: What were you doing before you started working with Purple? And what are you doing now?

Alex Paden: Yeah, so I mean, pretty much I was just trying to build stuff on Parkaster freely, and for the most part, I was really just trying to learn how to how to do it for a couple of months now. I had stopped founding maybe like a year ago. And since then, I've just been like floating around doing freelance work or really nothing, kind of browsing the Internet. But yeah, to me, this is like an exciting place to be. I've worked in crypto basically since I was in college. I think this is just kind of the next place to be in terms of social first payments.

Osama: Also, just to add, Alex is being humble, he's one of the earliest users and maybe one of the only followers who stuck around across all purges. So thank you, Alex.

Alex Paden: Much obliged.

Nicholas: So you're working on what's the project that you just got funded? So a proposal was passed. I think KMAC submitted it, right? And this was to fund a residency for you?

Alex Paden: Yeah, so this is a residency program. It's not really centered around one project unless you consider the residency of the project. It's kind of a mix of me just building things I want to build as well as some projects I've outlined, whether they're like consumer and user facing or I'm trying to get a little more into like projects that help other people build on top of it. One of my ideal things would be the GPT plugin, but I'm kind of on a wait list for that at the moment. And also just helping like newer devs on board. And kind of on that point, it's worth bringing up Pixel's proposal recently. I think that has already had some people from the Farcester Python chat just talking about it, saying how it helped them get into the data science, like open their eyes to it. And it is a super easy thing to just start up and play with.

Nicholas: Can you describe that project a little bit? I'm not too familiar with it.

Alex Paden: Yeah, basically, he's just providing a downloadable data set, as well as some Python code on how to query it. He's put instructions for OpenAI. So you could just do like OpenAI, tell me the total CAS per month or something. And GPT is going to generate that SQL query for you and run it through. He's provided some samples in a Python notebook. And I think he just wants to continue on that thread.

Nicholas: This is warpy. This is the thing Bill mentioned. Yeah.

Alex Paden: And along those lines also, I mean, I'm speculating a little here, but I think he is a bit younger. And I think that is also the audience that Dan wants to go for on Farcester now, based on his whatever they hosted yesterday. I think they're just like going for college age students and stuff. So I think kind of trying to help those people and get them to retain them longer on Farcester and just open them up as builders. Here's a reason to stay. And they just kind of have that. I mean, yeah, they're self-motivated. They have the time, that kind of thing.

Nicholas: Chris, I was curious about your observations. You know, NounsDAO is an interesting organization. It feels like in a way, until recently, no one really talked about what was going on there. But there was a huge schism between PoApp.Eth, who was one of the largest holders of the token and had contributed through purchasing at the auctions, a huge portion of their treasury versus, in some ways, versus the founders of Nouns. Or at least they appear to be set in opposition to one another. And maybe even a third faction, with all of the people seeking grants from the organization, who mostly are outsiders, seemingly not wanting to comment on any of it lest they upset one of these factions within NounsDAO. I'm curious. And more recently, I think the drama has shifted towards people who were financially motivated NFT purchasers and nouns who have realized that there is not really a secondary market for these things, at least currently, asking for a rage quit function by which they could burn

Chris Carella: or

Nicholas: give back their NFT in exchange for some portion of the treasury, which seems like an indication that even beyond PoApp, who is maybe benevolently or otherwise motivated, there were another set of people who were purchasing NFTs throughout the Nouns auction last 600 days who were motivated financially. And that demand has, at least right now, seems to be going away. Do you think, how do you think about the fundraising model? Does it, do you get any lessons about this, about both the fundraising mechanism and the governance community that it creates? Because it seems like in Nouns, I'm not so sure that Nouns has such a nice governance community. It seems like a very contentious one, actually, where people can be quite angry with one another.

Chris Carella: So now you want me to comment on this so that they all get mad at me?

Nicholas: No, no, no. I want to preserve your ability to get grants.

Chris Carella: No, it's fine. Look, the first thing I want to say is like, yeah, no one was buying me back Nouns. That's a gross overstatement, but you know, it was like less in the zeitgeist before 2023. And then crypto, crypto just sucked and prices went down and DAOs were just struggling to operate on a quarter of the treasury that they had at the beginning of the year. And Nouns just kept chugging along. Right. And so now wake up in January 2023, it's like, oh, this model is working. These people still sell this thing for, you know, sure, sure. It's not 100 ETH like it was at one point, but it's like these things are still going for 20, 30, 40, 50 ETH every day. Right. And so, hey, there's something working here when everything else is not working. And so number one, I feel like that sort of put it in the zeitgeist. Then the second part of that is I entered Nouns through SharkDAO, which was a very early successful juice box project where we've raised a ton of money and bought six nouns. In the first 50, we own six of them. And there totally was this community. The first year, the first 365 nouns extends beyond that. But this community of people who are buying in to just do good, to be playful, to build the brand, to think about CCO and what can open source business look like. And that was like really very unified for the first, you know, a little bit longer than a year. If you look at the proposals, you'll just see that it's like totally reflected in it. And then sure, then the people who wanted to make money off of Nouns came in. And it's not. these doubts are not fundamentally set up to like, I don't think Nouns or Purple is an investment because they're not really fundamentally set up to return you money. Besides if you do projects and get funded by the treasury, but it's like it is delivered by nature, right? It's like there's one new one happens every single day. And so I think there was a lot of tension between the two crowds of people like, hey, what can we do to make this token price higher? And then sort of the first 150 nouns that emerged were like, what are you talking about? We've never discussed that. That's not what we're trying to do. And so I think that still plays out today. And I think there are many, many factions in the... I don't know about factions, but there are many, many aligned groups inside of Nouns. But certainly if you zoomed out and you just chose two, it's like we call them like the book value people, which is like they just want to know how the treasury can affect the price of the token. And then there is, we call them the Nounish people who are like just trying to proliferate the brand and the meme. So that's sort of what's happening. Then I would say like, I don't think that should have a friendly governance process. Like it's not decentralized if everyone agrees on everything. In fact, you know, I'm in more centralized Dows. Like I'm in Friends of Benefits and I really love it. And it's highly centralized. And every proposal passes with 99 to 1. You know, and it doesn't really feel like there's a diversity of thought there. Or maybe the community is not empowered properly to express their opinions. And so it's like, I don't think that that... I don't think proposals should pass 90 to 10. I think maybe something is wrong. You don't have a diversity of thought.

Nicholas: No, for sure.

Chris Carella: You're not open enough.

Nicholas: To me, I mean, and I haven't maybe paid attention to the latest developments at Nouns, but to me, the great unspoken truth about Nouns is that it's a two class system where the elitist, defy rich are the authoritarians on some level while they're voting. They're voting amongst themselves. And the plebs are trying not to offend anybody who is a voter and trying to align themselves with... It's sort of like a courtly drama or something. I don't know. There could be a Netflix about it in that respect. To me, the part that is unappealing about that eventuality, if that's where all Nounish dows go, I don't know, is maybe not in this case because it's a slower burn organic growth, whereas that one started with 600-eath bids. But in Nouns, it means that you have this class system where the underclass are in like a very awkward position where they don't want to say anything. They don't want to be critical at all. And then there's this contentious... I agree with you. It's great that there's contention in the governance process. But the dangerous piece or the weird piece to me, sociopolitically, is the distinction class-wise between the voters and the grant, whatever, requesters, the proposers. But you don't need to comment on it if you don't want to.

Chris Carella: Yeah. I mean, for one, I don't think it's super different. It doesn't seem super different than any other organization. It's like, you know...

Nicholas: Well, Purple seems quite different.

Chris Carella: ...funding from the US government. Oh, for sure. I mean, yeah. But it doesn't necessarily have to always be that way. And like I said, for Nouns, for the first 150, it was very highly aligned until it wasn't. So yeah, I guess one of my fears... There are other Nounish doubts. Like I think what you just described is really amplified in Little Nouns because you might own one Little Noun but someone else might own 300. You know? And Nouns, I think it's like... I don't think it's as bad as you described. You know, it's like someone may own 20 Nouns and you may own one. For the people who own Nouns, I feel like they're more on an equal footing. And at least the people I know who own Nouns are more willing to speak their mind. I think that's true of the greater community. One of the things I think people don't often understand about Nouns, and actually, we were just talking about it with regards to Purple, is that most of the funding does not go to people who own the token. And that's proving to be true in Purple right now too. It's like, the token holders manage the treasury and they deploy those funds into talented people from the outside world who want to do something in support of the mission. So I think in the Nouns universe, yeah, totally. If you want to get a prop on chain, you might be worried about offending people. And so you might think about your tweet before you send it. But I feel like it's not as bad for the Nouns holders themselves. But then if I go back to Little Nouns, the imbalance is dramatic. There's a couple of people who literally own 300 plus Little Nouns. And then most people own one Little Noun. And then they only really get 2% of the people to vote at all anyway. And so I always think it's like, well, there are so many more people holding one Little Noun than the three people who own 300 Little Nouns. But yeah, no one votes.

Nicholas: Is delegation possible in that though?

Chris Carella: And delegation is possible. And I think structurally Little Nouns is a little bit different because a lot of people just bought the cool PFP and never wanted to govern or never really care about the governance. They just wanted the artwork. So I would say, my guess is 90% of the people who have ever bought a Little Noun have not looked at a governance thing in a year.

Nicholas: But they are very successful. Are they maybe the biggest Nouns holder outside of Nounders? And they're one of the top holders, right?

Chris Carella: They're one of the top. They have a huge treasury. And yeah, they bought a lot of Nouns for sure. And now they get to vote with weight on Nouns props. But within that community, if you want to do a cool project, they have the goal of collecting Nouns. So they deploy a lot of their treasury towards collecting Nouns. But then they want to fund their builders too. But it's like, practically speaking, to get that funds, you need these handful of whales to align around you and vote because they do vote. So they're like 900 plus votes or whatever. They show up every time. And like I said, since it's only like less than 5% engagement or something, it really matters.

Nicholas: Did this Purple... One thing I found interesting about Little Nouns is that they have this 0.15 minimum bid and they will not be issued or they'll be issued to the zero address if nobody bids within 24 hours, the minimum bid. Does Purple have anything like that currently?

Chris Carella: We have a minimum bid. I don't know if Dylan wants to or is looking at it. I think it's close to like 0.05. I mean, we've like come nowhere near our minimum bid. I haven't really looked at it since we launched. But we do have some nominal minimum bid.

Osama: I think we kept it low to be more inclusive back in the day. But yeah, it's 0.01 or 0.05.

Nicholas: But this seems like a maybe different, a big difference between Little Nouns, Nouns and Purple is that Purple has this much more organic growth. It's not accumulating lots of funds immediately. It's really quite a slow burn, which I can only imagine will have a huge impact on the long term governance community.

Chris Carella: Yeah, well, I think the risk of building these Nouns is, you know, one of the troubles that Nouns has found itself in is like if your treasury gets too big, well, that's what people are buying into. And so you might be buying a Noun because the treasury is so huge and you might mean and that might mean something to you. And so I actually think it's very important to the political... Everyone on this call knows that my philosophy is that we should be at a zero budget at the end of every month and rebuild every month. Now, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in Purple who thinks that way. But it's like the funds are there to be deployed to satisfy our mission. It's not like the stacked funds and stacked funds. And then when you do stack funds, then everyone's afraid to spend the funds. And then you wind up with these factions of people who are like, don't spend the treasury. Let's hold it so that the book value of our Noun goes up. And so I just philosophically believe it's important to deploy capital. And I do think it's hard when you're Builderdao and you start on day one with a thousand ETH. It's hard to get rid of all that ETH. But it's actually a good example. Even in Builderdao, there's a big discussion on like, let's not spend the money. What is the KPIs around this? What's the return on investment? And that just paralyzes everyone. And so now Builderdao is not deploying funds because the community is having this conversation about like, well, how many funds should we be holding? So I think there's just some of it's just philosophy. It's like you have the money, deploy the money, new money comes in, deploy the money. Because I think it starts to get a little bit toxic if you just hold the funds.

Nicholas: So you don't perceive of funds as runway?

Chris Carella: No, because the daily auction means that you have another thing. Right. We have no one full time on the staff. So it's not like we have to worry about downsizing. And tomorrow, another purple token will be sold. And so the purple just represents the treasury just represents our capabilities. But having a bigger treasury means you have more capabilities. But if we have only 0.15 ETH today, we could deploy that too. Like, you know, there's three people who 1.05 to memes on forecasting. So it's like any amount of money helps you set fire goals. But obviously, the larger, the bigger your treasury, the more impact you can have and the more capabilities you have and the more you can deploy. But yeah, I don't think about runway at all. And that's the whole point of this perpetual auction mechanic.

Nicholas: Do any of you have contrary opinions or different opinions?

Kmac: I may be segue on that, Nicholas. When we put up the Devon residence, one of the things that I thought would be interesting to experiment with is kind of pulling in this, hey, we've got this nouns mechanic. What kind of optionality do we get if we kind of settle one of those past proposals into a juice box project? You know, we gain a couple of different properties as far as, you know, timing of pay outs, the ability to rage quit if someone's not delivering tiered NFTs to raise donations, all sorts of new optionality, which I'm super interested in experimenting further with. I don't know if it's the right time for that in this DAO or not. But when I hear this talk about little nouns and nouns, I start to think about, you know, is there a way that we can, you know, how do we say, increase the reach, proliferate the meme, but do it in a way that's not just this TikTok every day of, you know, we want that TikTok, here's this perpetual thing. But if there's something we're building and people want to jump in, can we get there faster? So I think there's something super interesting happening there. And I know that you have a lot of experience and involvement in the juice box side. I'm curious, has anyone done this with nouns and juice box that you know?

Nicholas: I think Sharkdown is the other example that comes to mind. It's the reverse. I don't know if it's the reverse or what, but using juice box to bid on nouns comes to mind. I think that's the only example. Osama, did you want to say something?

Osama: Yeah, I think this is, there's something that we're working on, we'll be releasing. We're just going through audit right now. But KMAC, definitely, you know, being able to fund projects just so that they have certainty that, hey, you know, we won't be killed through a counter proposal or we'll get our following funding. But at the same time, having the option to rage quit, I think that will open a lot of doors. And, you know, it doesn't even have to be maybe milestone based. And that's what we're building, actually. So if you go to nouns.stream, it's password protected right now because it's going through audit, but it's literally KMAC, what you're saying. Multiple payout mechanisms with rage quit options built in, you know, it's a public good. So Nounage DAOs can start deploying that. They don't have to do like, you know, crazy transactions for that.

Nicholas: But I... Can you explain a little bit more how it works?

Osama: Yeah, it's got like two kinds of payouts right now. It's periodic payouts, which is similar to what KMAC mentioned, which is like, you know, every biweekly, every few days, whatever frequency you set it to and you set them out. And once the transaction is approved, it's an escrow contract that holds that and then disperses the funds as per schedule. And then the other one is milestone based. So you can have date based milestones saying, hey, two weeks from now, we'll have an MVP or, you know, we'll have design three weeks from now, we'll have the MVP. four weeks from now, we'll have the marketing side. So you have these date based milestones. And unless the governance proposal or the DAO holds the payments back or, you know, makes a counter proposal saying don't make the payment, the payments go out as per those set dates. Right. So from a DAO's perspective, it's really efficient because all you do is you have one single transaction and then, you know, you have a custom schedule on a per proposal basis. And from the builder perspective, you know, they know that the DAO has already put this money in the escrow so they can go about and build whatever they promised they would build without, you know, without really worrying about future funding, etc.

Nicholas: Very cool. So it's like a vending machine.

Osama: Yeah, it's part of the Nouns hackathon. Yeah, exactly. It's a vending machine. Yeah. Or it's an escrow.

Nicholas: Yeah. OK. And I'm curious about the phased piece, how one achieves or does not achieve the next phase.

Osama: I think that's really, you know, we can get all we can really nerd out on it and be like, oh, there could be like bots and GitHub bots and oracles and stuff. But we figured what makes Nouns DAOs and even Purple so effective in some ways is that there's a lot of conversation happening. And we figured the best feedback loop is, you know, you can have a cadence of every two weeks if you're working on a proposal, which is funded through such an escrow mechanism as part of Nouns Square or something. You just show up and you share your updates. Right. If you don't show up for one or two weeks or one or two times when you were supposed to, then maybe there's a conversation to be had and maybe there's a proposal to be done to just cancel your funding because you're not showing up, you know, like a demo, a lightweight demo day of sorts. Right. Yeah.

Nicholas: Cool. So the Nounish governance is able to pass proposals that can either move to the next phase or end a periodic payout prematurely before the maturation.

Osama: 100 percent. Right. But the initial proposal funds the entire thing. So there's no uncertainty for the builder. Yeah.

Nicholas: Very cool.

Osama: Yeah.

Chris Carella: I wanted to like talk a little bit about some of these topics. It's not necessarily a payout, but one of my real interests is in using Juicebox and then also Gitcoins, Allo protocol is how can we experiment more with like private-public partnerships. And so Purple is kind of an interesting petri dish because while we may be funding Alex through Purple's funds into his Juicebox account to do the work that we set out that he outlined in the proposal to do, there are other venture capital funded companies inside the forecast or protocol who may also benefit from his work. And so how do we get them to contribute to the projects that we've already contributed to? And then, you know, even zooming out, I think is probably even more practical is just finding some common ground with someone who wants to want some open source React toolkit. And they have the funds and we want to find a React developer. And then so together, via Juicebox or GitHub Allo or some other mechanism, we can all fund it together. Right. And so it's like if Purple put the first 10 ETH in, can developers rally support for the next 40 ETH they need from the greater ecosystem?

Nicholas: Very cool. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I've thought a little bit about this question of how do you give people, does it make sense to give people who make contributions direct power over the allocation of the rewards? KMac mentioned earlier the Build Guild hackathon I organized last year. And in that we gave people contributed to a juicebox that Build Guild created or I created with Build Guild. And then a receipt was kept of how much they donated at this point. It could be an NFT, whatever. And then those receipts, which were concomitant to how much they donated, were taken. A snapshot was taken of those receipts. And and we did a joke dow on Polygon. We issued an airdrop proportional to the token holding on Mainnet. And also I think JuiceboxDao had given a big grant. So we redistributed those votes to members of the joke dow community, the Build Guild community and the JuiceboxDao community. And then everybody voted and it was a ranked choice vote for which submissions to the hackathon should receive prizes. And basically people just got a proportional allocation of one half of the total treasury raised, which included this grant and other people just pitching in along the way. And everybody walked away with a little prize, even though the last place won. If you got any votes at all, you got something. Versus like maybe this downstream idea would be more like the JuiceboxDao grant to joke dow, where there were phases that unlock. We had to use the multi-sig had to use some discretion about whether they had achieved the phase or not. But to do some kind of the token holders are voting on whether or not a phase has been achieved also seems like an interesting model.

Chris Carella: Yeah. And I would just like to speak to NounStream. Noun deploys a lot of capital. And so at least two proposals have been for a thousand ETH. It's a lot of money. They have a lot of ETH and so they can do really ambitious stuff. And so they can deploy 5,000 ETH into a project. But that kind of money needs some sort of accountability for everyone to feel comfortable. And that's kind of where these milestone payments really, really make sense. I mean, we're doing milestone payments with Alex. It's not like a huge amount. And if he rugged us, we would still be fine. But when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of ETH, it's hard to give that as a no strings attached grant and everyone feels really good about it.

Nicholas: I guess you have some kind of amount of governance attrition as the decision making becomes more and more granular within a single proposal. Like let's just say the NounsBuilder thousand ETH proposal had been phased. Yeah. Would you see enough participation for it to be truly meaningful in the internal steps if you split it into five steps or four steps? I wonder.

Chris Carella: I think you would if it had to be canceled. And so I understand what Osama is building. And what we did with TwoSpots is like these payments are automatic. We have to vote when something is going wrong. When something is going wrong, that's like, you know, or when you're voting on someone's income or salary. Like I bet this is true at TwoSpots. Probably the most engaged votes probably have to do with budget. It's like people ignore the really important stuff, but then they want to show up and say yes or no to how much you're going to pay for the next quarter.

Nicholas: Yeah, for sure.

Alex Paden: Well, just to add to this, I think the accountability of it is really... For me, it's like an exciting thing. I like that. BorrowDutch is kind of riding my ass on this and just pushing me along. To me, it's been like kind of daily output so far. I think ultimately it's going to make for a better experience. I would say I don't really see where there's a case that it's not useful to do this style. I mean, maybe if you have to like pay the actual employee salaries upfront or something. But I think just having an option eventually where it's on L2 or something with like lower fees and just like lower security risk overall is going to be pretty good for the style of funding. Definitely. For one $2,000 project.

Nicholas: I think it's interesting. We talked a little... We touched on it a little bit, but here Purple is giving a grant to Juicebox to automatically send transactions out. But it doesn't have. the other element we're talking about, which is letting people say, oh, yeah, I really like what Alex is doing. I also I want to mint a commemorative NFT for this residency period. And that the proceeds from that should go to sort of adding on to the Treasury's total balance. So that maybe the residency can go longer or the salary can increase or something. So it would be interesting to have both.

Alex Paden: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think the best option for, in my opinion on this, the best option would be just like creating alternate funding mechanisms for the builder residency program specifically. that kind of helps pay for someone else in the future. To me, that's probably like either a really light product NFT or just something commemorative.

Nicholas: Yeah. Imagine if like Vitalik's Teal Fellowship was something you could like buy into now and it funds someone like Vitalik in the future. It's not so much about giving Vitalik more runway, but about increasing the endowment funds opportunities. If you if you once you can see the value of its output, you're more motivated to contribute to it going forward longer.

Osama: Now you've touched on my favorite topic, the creator economy. And I've spent a lot of time saying developers are, you know, creating. And if you look at any of these streamers or creators online, they don't have a single source of income. They actually have mix. And that mix varies from their niche to niche. So, you know, if you're a streamer, when you're small, you rely on subscription money. But when you become a large streamer, then you actually have brand partnerships taking a big share of your pie or, you know, making you a lot more money than subscriptions. Right. So similarly for developers, those mixes exist. And maybe for Web3 open source developers, you know, we might have an interesting mix. Like you said, NFT is being part of that.

Nicholas: It's interesting. I'm not. it's not clear to me if all the open edition meta, maybe you've all variously participated in. It's not clear to me if there is an airdrop farming element that is driving a lot of it or if people really do just like spending 10 bucks to mint something that's free or costs somewhere between zero and fifty dollars. Is that is that a genuine new impulse people have? Or is there an element of maybe Coinbase is going to reward me for minting their open edition? I'm not sure.

Kmac: I've been asking the same question. There is optionality and those options are worth something. Right. So while there is no such thing as a free mint, you know, that five, seven dollars that you're putting into gas, it does give you an option. Should there be some utility or something that happens down the road?

Nicholas: Yes.

Kmac: I'm really curious to see how all this this minting and collecting plays out. It's definitely ownership is a very strong property and emotion that people have. So it seems to have legs.

Nicholas: It does seem like something in the last bull market for NFTs, at least it would have been informing allow lists. So you would say, oh, well, if they contributed to the base mint and the Zorbs and the Rainbow Zorbs, there's somebody who I want in my community because they have some influence or maybe they're the type of person who supports the type of project that this is. So I'll give them something for free because it incentivizes their participation and maybe makes them favorable to the project. So having the snapshot of all data, at the very least, both of who holds them currently and especially who minted them originally could be could be quite valuable. It's interesting. Some of them do like one address, one per address only, but they managed to achieve huge, huge numbers of mint. So I think there is something in that. for, you know, if a new version of whatever Python library you love, but is maintained by some poor person who gets no respect for it, it comes out. Maybe you do want to mint it, not because they're going to airdrop you, but because it's like being a Patreon supporter and you get some specific memento of that season in which you supported them. I could see it.

Bill Zh: Yeah, for context, the Coinbase based NFT is actually the second most held NFT on Fodcaster. The first one being ENS. So I think it is a very successful marketing campaign, but as well as a way for people to show their love for the product. Because I think the Coinbase team has been fairly active on Fodcaster, Dan himself being a former Coinbase executive. So I think that the community just has a natural affection towards, you know, the Coinbase product. And I've been thinking about this recently. I think maybe for Purple, we can also do something like that to celebrate, I don't know, maybe the launch of Hubs or the launch of some critical infrastructure in the Fodcaster network. And, you know, we don't have to promise anything, but it is just a good way to engage with people.

Nicholas: Well, we've been going for about an hour and a half, so I wanted to ask before we close up for today, is there any topic we haven't covered or any angle that you'd like to tell people about before we close out the show? Something I should have asked you about?

Chris Carella: I'll just, my one thing is that I believe we have a very sophisticated Web3 audience. And so maybe I'm like, you know, stating the obvious, but it being an open protocol means that it's like highly composable and composable with the other parts. I'm talking about the Fodcaster protocol itself, which is very highly composable and can interact with other Web3 products. And so something I do is I'll make an allow list of all of my followers on Fodcaster. Everyone on Fodcaster has a wallet address. And so now we have a social network with kind of a strong identity attached to Ethereum. And so all of my followers, I create a whitelist. when I mint an NFT, I put them on the allow list. And, you know, either it's a free mint for them or sometimes only for them or it's free for them and I charge everyone else. And so I always like that as an example of just the promise that the Fodcaster protocol can have in the long run, which is like it was just a very core Lego block in social networks.

Nicholas: Maybe we could close up the show with each of you could mention some project from the Fodcaster universe that you think is cool and people should know about. Chris, is there anything that comes to mind as like a specific thing?

Chris Carella: Yeah. I mean, I use a tool called FarDrop. FarDrop.xyz. I pop in my username and it creates a whitelist of wallet addresses of people who follow me. And so it's always like a very simple utility. It's always maintained and updated. And I use it often. It's like, you know, it actually has utility to me.

Nicholas: All right. I'm using it right now. It's fetching my followers. Cool. K-Mac, is there anything that comes to mind for you? Any cool utilities in the Fodcaster space?

Kmac: I absolutely love Discove. And I think it's Discove.xyz. Maybe somebody can confirm. But it might not be obvious, but if you kind of peel it back a little bit, there's this progressive disclosure for essentially a query language, which I think is really going to be powerful as it relates to kind of bring your own algorithm type feeds. So that'd be my call.

Nicholas: Interesting. So almost a latent app store for algorithms in this product somehow.

Kmac: That's exactly where I think it's going to go.

Nicholas: Very interesting. And they want me to sign up. If I sign up, it's with email. Okay.

Kmac: So you can use it without. You can use it without. I've never signed in.

Nicholas: Wow. Okay. Cool. Okay. I'm going to take a look at this. Discove.xyz confirmed. Osama, is there something that jumps to mind for you? Obviously, NounStreams is very cool and kind of in the same, but not exactly Fodcaster. Is there anything Fodcaster?

Osama: It's not Fodcaster. Yeah. So just about Discove.xz, that's 100% where they're going. They want to like, there was like this early discussion on having an open engine like, you know, Rexxus basically for timelines and Discove started that. So that's where they're going. I'm going to cheat. Instead of giving a product, I think I just love all the builders. So like one builder I really love and most of the projects they've done, including PowerDrop is Greg. So I've just loved almost everything he's built. I just wanted to give Greg a shout out.

Nicholas: Awesome. Thank you, Greg.

Chris Carella: Bill, please talk about what you're building because I'll have to go twice if you want to talk about your own project.

Bill Zh: I didn't really want to show because I'm building on top of Fodcaster full time. But I would just quickly mention that I'm building a DAO focused Fodcaster client. It's called alpha-caster.xyz. And my goal is to build a social infrastructure for DAOs. And today, if you go to the website, you can see a feed of governance events, auction events, as well as people's Fodcaster feeds. You know, we support Purple, BuilderDAO, Nunz and a few other Nunage DAOs. So that's what I'm working on right now.

Nicholas: So this is like basically putting the Fodcaster, because you're aware of the NFTs.

Bill Zh: Yeah. So I know NFTs people hold. So I can automatically create a almost like a DAO space for, for example, Purple or Nunz holders on Fodcaster. You'll be able to see a Nunz only social feed on Fodcaster mixed with governance and auction events.

Nicholas: Very cool. I see I'm in the Nunz Builder one because I hold a Builder token.

Bill Zh: Yeah.

Nicholas: What's your pick?

Bill Zh: Sorry.

Nicholas: No, I was going to ask what's your? what's your other Fodcaster pick aside from your own project?

Bill Zh: Yes. I was going to say that I want to echo K-Mac and Osama and say that I actually really like what Discove is building. To me, they're like a dune for Fodcaster. And Dune is actually my favorite WebStreet project. And you can use Discove for analytics. But also, I think in the future, there will be a lot more interesting use cases. And, you know, I think just a really cool project in general.

Nicholas: Awesome. Alex, did you have a suggestion? Yeah. It can be yourself, Shil, if you like.

Alex Paden: No, I think kind of to me, I haven't really found that like client. that I mean, I use WordCast, I guess is what I'm saying. But I don't think the Fodcaster protocol, like what that is, is intuitive to people. So I just kind of like browsing around on all the random clients and to give a couple shout outs. I mean, like I think HashCast is cool now. I know Dylan is building a Fodcaster. Blockchain Explorer is what he calls it. But it's kind of like a mix of feed and profile. Searchcaster from Greg also is pretty great. And then AlphaCast and Discove and also Jam. I think that just kind of helps build up like the actual knowledge of what Fodcaster even is.

Nicholas: Is there like a product hunt kind of thing for Fodcaster community apps?

Alex Paden: Yeah, it's Jamie's product.

Chris Carella: It's called Launchcaster.

Osama: Launchcaster.

Nicholas: Cool. I'll check it out.

Chris Carella: Well, Launchcaster is like a product hunt for the Fodcaster community. So, you know, whatever project you're launching, you just add the launch bot and you get on the list. And so obviously a lot of the Fodcaster native stuff is on there. But it's also kind of bigger than just that.

Nicholas: Okay, so it's just like trending concepts on Fodcaster in a way.

Chris Carella: It's like trending launches.

Nicholas: Launches. Cool. Very cool. Well, thank you all so much for coming through and educating me on Purple and also Fodcaster and also DAO's. Learned a lot today. So thanks. Thanks to everybody for coming through.

Chris Carella: Awesome. Thank you.

Bill Zh: Thank you so much.

Nicholas: Yeah, this was great. Okay. Thank you, everybody. And thanks to all the listeners for coming through. Next episode next week. Same time, same place. Friday, 5 p.m. Eastern. See you there. Thanks, everybody. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter at Nicholas with four leading ends. You can find links to the topics discussed on today's episode in the show notes. Podcast feed links are available at Web3GalaxyBrain.com. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, 2200 UTC on Twitter Spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.