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 Denison Bertram of DAO Governance DApp, Tally, and Danny Aranda from PartyDAO, creators of the NFT collective bidding dApp, PartyBid. At the top of the show, Denison tells us about the evolution of Tally and the history of DAO Governance. Denison also shares the origin story of Dope Wars, a TI-83-inspired loot derivative that has spawned a vibrant DAO community of musicians and artist-creators. You'll also hear Danny share his experience researching the Park Slope Food Co-op, a long-lived Brooklyn institution with many parallels to modern-day DAO experimentation. Later in the show, John C. Palmer drops in to share his insights into the Uniswap governance process. John tells us about his experience building Fish.Vote, a Uniswap grants-funded website that makes Uniswap governance proposal submission accessible to those with smaller uni token positions. The show closes with surprise guest Django from Juicebox for a conversation with members of the audience about the intersection of DAOs and college education. Thanks for joining me for episode two. I hope you enjoy the show. So today, subject of the show, almost undoubtedly going to be about DAOs. I called it DAO shit. I'm popularizing, propagating this DAO shit, hashtag DAO shit phrase. DAO shit intensifies is the original tweet. Oh, there's Denison. Hey, let me invite you up. And then Django from Juicebox shortened it to hashtag DAO shit, which just kind of speaks to the mayhem we get up to sometimes, usually not on purpose. Danny is just fixing his microphone. Hey, Denison, how's it going?

Dennison Bertram: Hey, it's going good, actually. I thought I was going to have a baby emergency because my baby was crying, but I am good. I'm doing well. Doing well. We're talking about DAO shit.

Nicholas: That's it. DAO shit. That's just what we're on about. Danny is fixing his microphone. Let me do some kind of proper introduction now that you're both here.

Dennison Bertram: Cool. I was going to say, like, today I decided that I'm going to officially start using the word DAO as a verb. And I'm just going to say, like, yeah, you want to go DAO? Yeah, I'm DAOing down to DAO later. Like, I'm just going to start using it as a verb now. Like, that's what I'm going to start doing. So it's no longer grammatically incorrect. I officially say that DAO is a verb as well.

Nicholas: We should totally DAO this. Yeah.

Dennison Bertram: Exactly.

Danny Aranda: Exactly.

Nicholas: I think that's as good an introduction as any. Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain Episode 2 with Denison Bertram and Danny Aranda from With Tally, well, I guess Tally, and PartyDAO, respectively. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about DAO stuff wherever it takes us. If this is your first time listening, Web3 Galaxy Brain is the casual podcast I host. Maybe every Friday. We'll see. Trying to host every Friday afternoon, have a fun conversation with cool people from Web3 who maybe don't get a chance to talk to people as often as they'd like, hang out, crack a beer if you're into that kind of thing, and chill out on a Friday afternoon, chat about whatever comes up. Totally unstructured conversation. So you're going to use DAO as a verb now. Is there something in particular that inspired that?

Dennison Bertram: You know, I think I was sort of writing an end of the year kind of like vision statement for Tally. And I was just like, oh, you know, when we talk, because we used to really like on Tally, because we used to be primarily around like DeFi DAOs. And, you know, we were supporting primarily like the OpenZeppelin, you know, previously compound governor standard. So we called them like governances. And then like the space has just gotten so big. And it's really like, you know, there's this thing going on where I feel like there's so many people entering the space that the terms are getting ahead of the meaning, if that makes sense. Like people are like, yeah, I'm in a DAO. And it's like, what does that mean? And they're like, yeah, I actually don't really know what that means, you know. So as part of that thinking, I was like, OK, you know, I guess I want to start talking about DAOs more. And like, what is participating in DAO? Like I work in a DAO. Well, what do you do? You know, I sign into Discord a lot. I talk on Twitter. I do some votes. And it's just like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we could sort of like wrap all that behavior that goes into like participation up just in a word? And it just seemed like, oh, yeah, I'm DAOing because it could just mean so many things. And it's just, you know, if you're going to like tell someone what you're doing, you might as well just explain to them what a DAO is in the first place. You might as well just like lead with that kind of in my opinion. So yeah, I'm just down to DAO, right? Like for me, it just feels like a verb. And maybe I'll be wrong. But, you know, watch it get into the dictionary of the verb.

Nicholas: That'd be interesting. We were talking about this a little earlier. We talked for the first time earlier this week about the shifting meaning of DAO. When did you first start paying attention to DAOs?

Dennison Bertram: Oh, so I first started paying attention a long time ago. And full disclosure, I don't know who created the term DAO or when it was first used. But, you know, in 2017, sort of like full run. before that, I was a member of CryptoNYC, which is like this, you know, New York based sort of like coworking space in the sort of like 2017 era. And a lot of DAO projects came in, you know, like MakerDAO, Aragon, other projects would come in and sort of like, you know, shill us on their vision of the future. And DAOs were like the thing that felt really exciting. You know, at that time, if you remember, like meetup.com was really big, especially like in New York, where there was like always some sort of meetup going on. And it felt exciting, but it felt a little bit early. Right.

Danny Aranda: We didn't yet.

Dennison Bertram: We hadn't met. I have this concept of like the sort of like imaginary primitives that drive crypto. First, we needed like magic internet money, which was like Bitcoin. And then we could build magic internet banks. Then we could have magic internet finance. Then we could have magic internet management. And all these sort of like layers of like magical, insane crypto primitives that sort of need to become real before you can build the next even crazier thing. And at the time, there wasn't yet really clear in a lot of people's heads what DAOs were for or what you could use them for yet. So it's been quite a few years. But, you know, wake up and suddenly people are calling, you know, buying a constitution together, a DAO, you know. It's like, you know, PartyBit is really amazing because it's like all these layers of these like crazy, magical concepts, right? Like NFTs, like, you know, we're going to buy and sell JPEGs. That's like a crazy, magical concept. Now we're going to create like an organization, a magical internet organization to like run our ownership, collective ownership of this magic internet JPEG that we bought and all the people in it will decide how to use it. It's just like layers of layers of like kind of like amazing. But it's built really gradually. And, you know, so yeah, 2017 is the short answer.

Nicholas: Crazy, because my impression is that like we talked a little bit about how Tally was originally focused mostly on on-chain governance DAOs. And my impression was that there's almost like an earlier era of DAOs that were more about governing DeFi protocols. And then now we're in some new era where those still exist and are still launching all the time, like even ENS recently. Maybe you wouldn't call ENS DeFi, but in any case, governance of protocols that predate the DAO in some cases. And then now there's also like everything that's going on on Juicebox, on PartyDAO, on. I mean, even I don't know if people would, probably Andy wouldn't, but Fractional you might consider. There is a governance element in there, at least in as much as I'm aware of setting the reserve price for kicking off the auction to sort of defractionalize a fractional NFT. So there's this whole range. I think Andy would probably say that Fractional is not, they're not DAOs, but there's just a built-in mechanism for voting on the price. I'd be curious to know. Do you think a DAO has to have, is governance a key feature in a DAO in your mind?

Dennison Bertram: You know, I think governance comes from how, I think we talked about DeFi, right? Like governance is how do we govern this protocol? But really DAOs are about coming to consensus on things, whether that's a complete consensus or a small consensus. Do DAOs need to govern things? I don't necessarily, like, there are a lot of DAO purists, so I may get flamed for this, but I don't necessarily think so. DAOs might just be loose groups of like people all over the place, right? Like there's this one group that I started that's just a Telegram chat. It's called MADDAO, stands for Mom and Dad DAO. It's just a Telegram channel. We're kind of an organization, right? Like there's all these people all over the world. We're decentralized, you know, we're in this chat group together. That doesn't really rise to, I think, like our definition of like what a DAO is and what people expect to be a DAO, especially sort of from the Web3 like purists of which, you know, I kind of used to call myself one of. But now suddenly you see all these people who are showing up to Web3 saying, "Oh, can this thing be a DAO? Or can this thing be a DAO? Or I want to work for a DAO? Or I want to be in a DAO?". And you're like, "What is a DAO for you?". And they're like, "I have no idea, but I want to be in it.". And I think that's really fascinating. And I think that changes a lot what maybe the DAO, being in a DAO or what a DAO means. So yeah, I have to say I'm in the middle of sort of like a transition thinking as to like what is required to actually be a DAO.

Nicholas: Yeah, it seems like the word is popular enough that people are going to expand what it means. And nobody can stop that, even if they had a strict definition of it before.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah. Yeah, that's the kind of wild idea of how you can just like fork culture. And, you know, I think it's interesting because sometimes we see kind of really heated debates in the Web3 space about like what a DAO is and what that means. And it's just like, lol, Web2 people have just shown up and just forked the word DAO and they're throwing it on and, you know, every taco and hot dog they come across. And there's nothing we can do about it. So it's kind of funny to see the sort of open source be culture as well.

Danny Aranda: The DAO, the first DAO, was almost more aligned with the sort of DAO that we see today, which is a bit more kind of transactional. Like today, like collector DAOs where they pull capital together and they go acquire NFTs. Like the DAO was pulling ETH together to go, you know, invest in things or maybe go buy things or people buying sports teams now and so on. That's kind of interesting. Versus like the 2017 era DAO was maybe, I guess that was all in the image of MakerDAO, which was more about like governing a protocol, like building and governing and propagating like a specific instance of the protocol. And maybe that's our like taxonomy. Like it's like that. Those are kind of like the two main models. And there's obviously a lot of like space and room between them. But you can kind of like divide the world between those two kind of primary formats. I don't know. I'm probably missing a couple of like major categories.

Dennison Bertram: I would say, I think, you know, if we go on the sort of like purist definition, like decentralized autonomous organization, right, you can kind of look back and see that these things kind of existed always, right? Like, you know, some church groups are kind of decentralized autonomous organizations, some sort of beliefs, clubs kind of count in many ways. I think today we certainly see them as being like intermediated by like smart contracts or something on chain that sort of can enforce decisions without sort of like relying on humans themselves or like codifying the rules. But I would even say that like Bitcoin, especially the early like proof of work blockchains are very much DAOs in the way that they were run in the early days, at least, where rather than it be how to invest money, it's like how to build something. But yeah, I mean, you either keep the definition really strict or suddenly it includes like the Boy Scouts, right? So it's kind of hard.

Danny Aranda: Is that true? Is there no central like head to the Boy Scouts or is the Boy Scouts just like a kind of collective of different chapters?

Dennison Bertram: You know, I actually don't know. So maybe that's a poor example.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, I've heard the AA is run that way. Like there is no central org to the AA.

Dennison Bertram: Okay, yeah, that would be a great example though. I mean, maybe there's some great learnings that we should like go to the AA and ask about because I'm sure, you know, when you think about all the organizational like issues we're going through today and you sort of follow a little bit like a sushi drama going on this week, you think, God, somebody must have actually figured this out before. And actually I have around here in my room somewhere. I posted on my Twitter in like 2017 or 2018, one woman gave me a book that said, so now you've got a DAO. And it's all about how to run a DAO. And it's like, you know, a medium thickness paperback. And, you know, that's five years ago. I have to find that and like share it again.

Danny Aranda: There's also like to go more on the purist track. There's like how Vitalik originally defined DAO, which was about automation and smart contracts at the center and humans kind of on the edges, like, you know, executing or interacting with the real world and so on. I think that take is interesting because, you know, the joke about DAOs is like, they're just a multi-sig and so on. And like, there's kind of zero automation happening in the middle outside of like this multi-sig kind of mechanic. But I think that's starting to change. I mean, everything around like compound governance, like, you know, proposal can actually turn into like instantiated code on chain. I think also what's happening with like whatever the next gen of DAO tooling is, is interesting too. So like, you know, on party bids, something we think about a lot is just trying to streamline like what a party does and to the, you know, to whatever extent that that party is a DAO, you know, anyone in there can bid. And then the smart contract itself will bid on the NFT. We'll then fractionalize it. We'll kind of take all these actions, but with no kind of central coordinator to that or without needing to rely on any specific party. It just relies on software to do that. I would also argue the same for like Juicebox. Kind of Juicebox provides like a default, opinionated, automated way to think about treasury management and issuance of new tokens. And that's all kind of encoded in the software. So I'm curious, I guess like, you know, part of my thesis, and this is obviously still part of my thesis on like the next generation of like DAOs and the software that supports those DAOs is that the software itself is like highly opinionated about what the DAO should do. And then that, that opinion actually is, you know, automated through the software on chain. And I, you know, to use a very bad analogy, like to me, what that represents is like somewhat of a transition, like transitional moment from like, you know, what we saw, say in the internet from like, you know, normal Web 1 to Web 2. And Web 2 was really characterized by like, you know, I would almost characterize it one way as like, it made publishing very narrow and constrained and highly opinionated. So previously to publish online, you had to like use some software stack like Dreamweaver or GeoCities or Squarespace or something to produce like a whole website. And all of your decisions about the website, you know, had to be, you know, thought about from scratch. You maybe needed a logo for your website and a whole kind of like information architecture of how the menu was going to be organized. And, you know, just all of these things you had to think through just to like, you know, put something online. And then it became more about like, hey, just throw a photo online using Instagram or, you know, just post 140 or whatever, 280 characters online using Twitter. And the narrow constraints kind of is what produced a explosion of, you know, information and publishing online. And then just the amount of data that was then being shared because you just made it so easy through the narrow constraints to publish kind of exploded. And so that's kind of one thing to sound like what happens with DAOs. It's like, well, you know, maybe you don't even think about them as DAOs, but they're so easy to use and they're so automated. And that automation happens through some type of opinion approach about what the DAOs should do that you'll just see more of them. So starting from scratch on managing a treasury is pretty difficult, but you could use Juicebox and it'll give you a couple of frameworks and you can get started. And going from that zero to one is potentially like a big unlock. So the same with like, you know, putting together capital to buy an NFT is something you could do on your own right now in a more manual way, or you can click two buttons and do it with PartyBit. Just kind of like lowering that barrier is what will make us like, you know, get to that next stage of, you know, just higher volume, but also more use cases that we can discover through more usage.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, you know, actually I'd love to reply to that because I think that view is probably spot on. From our vantage point, I think we see it as well, you know, where we see a lot of people building DAO tooling coming from a really opinionated sort of like task of the DAO solving like mirrors sort of like, you know, writing. PartyBit is the sort of like fractional ownership or, you know, winning these auctions on NFTs. But I think your analogy about like how publishing really changed when people went from like having their website to like, you know, Instagram or Twitter. And that actually brings back a lot of like thoughts around what we think maybe Tali's role in the future partially ends up being, but hopefully in a better, more Web3 narrative, which is I think what happened with sort of like publishing, you know, when you went from a GeoCities web page to, you know, an Instagram or Twitter is really a discovery, right? Like there was a world full of GeoCities pages where you're like, hey, I'm Denison. This is my website. I like hot dogs, right? But discovery was the problem, right? I can only reach people who knew my URL and, you know, of course, search engines did a better job of that. But then, you know, Twitter and Instagram really seem to dominate publishing just because they also were the distribution. And of course, they did it in a way that eventually would just make the entire ecosystem toxic. And I wonder, you know, in the future where we Dalify everything, right? Like everyone's lemonade stand, you know, apartment condo, you know, block association when they're all DAOs, we'll get back to this distribution problem again, where it's just like, okay, there's all these DAOs. I want to participate, but I don't know where or how. And that's very much a problem that like, you know, Tally is trying to tackle. But it feels so fascinating, right? Like when I think about a party bid in the future where just everyone is, you know, collectively buying, you know, shares in NFTs all the time, you know, you think then again about like, oh, what's the distribution of that? Like, how are you going to sort of like manage that in a way that's not web to exploitative and, you know, caustic?

Danny Aranda: Yeah. Like what is distribution for DAOs? look like on the topic of just like, you know, DAOs for everything? I think the one that made me laugh the most was one on Juicebox actually. I don't know if this one is still around, but there was one that had like the Air Jordan logo as like their symbol. And they were going to acquire like the 23rd edition of every single NFT collection that they possibly could.

Nicholas: I've seen this one. Yeah, I think it's still around. I haven't looked at it in a while. My sense was that it didn't really take off. But yeah, I actually thought that was a very funny idea.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, I thought it was like hysterical and pretty. There was like definitely some charisma to it.

Nicholas: Yeah, aside from the logo use. Maybe as good a time as I need to say, obviously nothing anybody says here is financial advice and do your own research, etc.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, yeah, I'm not endorsing ETH into 23DAO or whatever it's called.

Nicholas: But no one here is a lawyer nor a financial advisor.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, but on the topic of distribution, so a couple of ways to think about it. One way is or at least one way I think about it is like, you know, effective distribution mechanisms bring like some type of "liquidity" to the long tail. So like, for instance, if you think about like why Google dominated search and the web more broadly was because, you know, if you search like back in whatever 1999, if you search like Britney Spears on AltaVista and on Google, you pretty much got the same results. Like that was a big item that people were searching for. But if you searched your own name on AltaVista, you got that crap, like you got back like stuff that didn't make any sense or just wasn't relevant. But I guess unless you're Britney Spears. But if you search it on Google, you might get like your high school, whatever, newspaper online that might show up. And so their ability to kind of like service like the nooks and crannies of the internet, you know, made it more effective. And, you know, because they were able to serve that long tail use case, it meant you use them for every use case, like the best distribution method, then just serve like every single use case. I think the same is true in crypto. The best example would be like Uniswap or DEXs. So there's this like period that like, you know, for a long time, crypto, like the game was to like, you know, if you were building a crypto project, your crypto project had a token, like the number one thing you wanted was to like list it somewhere. You know, you paid Bittrex like a hundred grand, or you finally like got your token on Coinbase. And it was this kind of like big manual, like meatspace kind of BD endeavor to like get your token listed somewhere. And then Uniswap automated that. And, you know, anyone could, you know, you had automated, you know, liquidity providers, market makers, and, you know, anyone could kind of LP the token. And all of a sudden, like any token could just like find a market and some liquidity. And so you kind of had this like long tail distribution for tokens now via Uniswap. And so Uniswap then becomes something that's like very central and powerful within crypto. I don't know what that analogy looks like for DAOs, like to the extent that DAOs, you know, maybe are trying to serve like two primary functions, which is to, you know, accumulate capital and accumulate talent towards like some common goal or mission. That's a very crude, simplified definition. But just as like one framework, you know, you could think about liquidity could be like, you know, just the ability to be discovered so that people can contribute either capital or their talent. And what the discovery method looks like is, you know, pretty unknown to me right now. It's interesting to think about. But whoever can like solve that problem, that's potentially a big opportunity.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah. You know, something that's kind of I've been thinking a lot about recently is DAOs. You mentioned it there. Like. it's this opportunity to like, you know, sort of like accumulate some capital and resources and like deploy it. And that's what people are doing. And I think that's true. But I think I feel it changing as more and more people get involved, right, as these things become sort of like super massive. And I'm wondering, this is really early thought. So, you know, like maybe I'm totally missing the mark here, but it feels like DAOs are starting to become how people identify and kind of like maybe even lifestyles. It's crazy. Like if you look around, you know, like last year, you know, DeFi Summer were yield farming, right? And then if somebody threw an Ethereum conference, like we would be there. And you fast forward to today and like, you know, our host here has a doodle. But doodles is putting on parties at Art Basel with bored apes and cool cats. And like now, you know, I'm following on Twitter. People are like, oh, let's go take over South by Southwest, right? Suddenly, it feels like you're. So I used to be a photographer, a fashion photographer for many years. And being a photographer, I used to always say was not a job. It was a lifestyle. It was like how you identified. What do you do? I'm a photographer. Who are you? I'm a photographer. You identify that, you know, like that sort of job was actually how that was your identity, right? In a way that like, you know, what's your job? Oh, I'm an administrative assistant. Like, who are you? You know, like I'm this person. I go rafting. I do all this stuff. But in fashion, you are that thing. That's your identity. What I sort of feel like maybe is happening is DAOs are and maybe crypto in general. I don't know. It's early, but I see your membership in your DAO starts to become your identity, right? Where you have these people who are identifying themselves in the virtual space? certainly as their avatar, right? I'm a punk. You know, people have their different avatars. But maybe they're also going to become lifestyles. And I was in a conversation, a sort of working group earlier this week. And Kraushaus was there. And they are a DAO, a social DAO, a social token DAO, I'm not sure exactly the proper definition of those, around buying an NBA team. Like, their goals are to buy an NBA team. But they were talking about how they need to build all this DAO tooling. And there's all these products. And people in the community have these ideas about what they're going to build. And it's just like, oh, but I thought you were buying an NBA team. Like, well, yes, but we have to do this and we have to do that. I'm in another DAO, Dope Wars. I started that. But if I started, I sort of put this tweet out. I was blown up into this huge community. And people are doing all sorts of different things, right? Like, some are artists. You know, they're making like a hip-hop album. Some people are like cutting edge, like layer two mathematicians. And in NFTNYC, there was one member who I'd never met before who was in the Dope Wars DAO who showed up and met me and gave me a Dope Wars sweater, right? And, you know, I, quote unquote, created Dope Wars. But, you know, someone comes up to me and goes, hey, this is for you. It's a Dope Wars sweater. And it starts to dawn on me that these communities, you know, they start as crypto. And like, maybe they're pooling their capital technically. And maybe they're like technically pooling resource to like acquire and do things. But maybe they're actually becoming ways of life for people, like how they identify. And that's just wild. Like that, I think we are not prepared for at all. So, yeah, that's kind of like a half-baked feeling. But it's, you know, when I see these parties and, you know, every kind of event, and I see Cabin Dao doing retreats, you know, you start to think the people in Cabin Dao, are they there because they really believe passionately about pooling capital to buy cabins and do some new form of Airbnb and make a profit? Or are they really there because they love this idea of building these communities based around being out there somewhere in the wilderness so you can like think and commune with other humans? Like, suddenly it's like, wait a minute, maybe this isn't the 2017 Dao where we're like gonna make more money, bros. But maybe it's like the 2022 Dao where it's just like, I'm quitting my job because I'm identifying as this community and this mission.

Danny Aranda: So yeah, I'm throwing that out there. - Yeah, a couple of responses to that. So one, you know, FWB feels instructive here, right? Like kind of one of the better examples of like kind of pure lifestyle. Dao where it is like explicitly social, cultural in terms of its mission. And then the branding is all kind of like culturally aligned with some type of, you know, city-based kind of, you know, groups of people. I actually think your example of dope wars is interesting too. I remember seeing your tweet and I think it came out, it was like right after Luke came out, right? It was like the day after. - Right. - And what you said in the tweet was like, listen, like, I don't remember the exact wording, but you're like, I didn't really grow up with all this kind of like wizard shit that doesn't really resonate with me. Like I wasn't into Lord of the Rings. I wasn't into whatever, Harry Potter or like anything kind of like within that canon. I was, you know, the thing I remember from when I was a kid was things like drug wars on your TI-89 and the culture around that, which had like, you know, cars and guns and drugs and kind of like this, but, but, you know, almost like a mean streets, you know, style aesthetic, which, you know, does have a whole culture around it, right? Anything from Scorsese movies to, you know, hip hop culture and so on is interesting, you know, towards the example that you're giving, which is like, well, people kind of cultural identifying with another group of people and that being around kind of a more personal alignment. And I actually think the dope wars and the tweet that you sent is really instructive towards that. It's like, listen, here's, you know, loot is interesting because you've got all these like incredible mechanics plus some technical mechanics around like what's happening on chain with the NFTs themselves and the way that those NFTs become composable into broader things that the community can develop around like games or, you know, deconstruction of the NFTs to rebundle new NFTs like Genesis adventures and so on. There's a ton of cool mechanics, but if the content of those mechanics like do not resonate with you, then, you know, fork it and, you know, imbue with content that like kind of does matter to you or to another group of people. And, you know, the other thing I would lift off of that you said earlier was you were mentioning like religious groups, you know, potentially as like, you know, maybe those are proto-DAOs, right? Essentially think about like, you know, collector DAOs or, you know, squiggle DAO, you know, the squiggle is the symbol of the DAO and kind of unifying aspect of whatever culture they're establishing within that org, within that project. And you could say the same of religions, like every religion has like, or almost every religion has some type of like symbol attached to it. You know, the crucifix is the NFT that is like fractionally shared between all these Christians. And that's what kind of unites them together in terms of like values, shared culture and so on that they can kind of like build within this community. And that obviously, you know, especially in the kind of case Christianity like cuts both ways in terms of how positive or negative can be, but it is kind of seems to be like a very like human dynamic that is maybe increasingly being expressed on chain.

Nicholas: There's been a handful of forks of that DAO.

Dennison Bertram: More than a handful, right?

Nicholas: Yeah, I agree with you completely that DAOs are, you know, I totally agree that DAOs are becoming a lifestyle. It's definitely a thing where I think people complain about OpenSea because it's a company. And obviously they don't like the fees, etc. And they want to see a token because they want to speculate on that token, undoubtedly. But I think people do, some people. I suspect in the long term it will end up being a minority of people because it seems like a lot of people who get into NFTs who don't get so much into the decentralization vibe or the crypto part of what NFTs are about, don't really care about decentralization that much. And so I suspect that audience, if that audience grows faster than awareness and caring about decentralization, which would not surprise me given how little people cared about encryption with messaging or privacy with social media, and still essentially don't care about the centralization of their data for the most part with these ridiculous arguments like, "I have nothing to hide." I suspect that there could be a lot of people who do just like the lifestyle piece of it without even understanding the depths of why you might want something to be run in a decentralized way. But actually my biggest question about DAOs, I think I mentioned this to you the other day, but DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization. But in fact, what a DAO does is centralize the bureaucratic function of an organization. And really the most decentralized autonomous, if not organization, but the most decentralized autonomous on-chain activity you could do is one that doesn't require governance. So there is something a little bit fishy about the way that the term has come to be used and so often connected to token-based governance of protocol when really the ultimate kind, like I wonder, for instance, a split. Let's say we do a split, we sell an NFT of this podcast and do a split between the three of us. If the split doesn't require any kind of governance, I think most people would say it's not a DAO. However, it would be a very practical way to, in a decentralized manner, execute some kind of social collaboration on the blockchain. I suspect that the case in the end will be the DAO gets used and abused so much that people just apply it to all kinds of things that aren't DAOs at all. Maybe even see things that are primarily centralized calling themselves DAOs, just in a kind of social signaling way. Obviously we've seen this week, what was it? Like Pepsi, Budweiser, White Castle all have .eth addresses now.

Danny Aranda: Or Burger King or something like that.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's cool also. I don't think it's bad. But I guess the question is, I see a lot of people and I think newbies to the scene, especially are inclined. I certainly was this way when I started off, to defend crypto against sort of misinformed environmental attacks on Twitter, etc. Or skepticism about NFTs. I see that happening a lot with music lately. A lot of musicians are very skeptical and quite angry about the idea of NFTs. And people who are fresher to the scene have more energy to get in there and try and defend crypto and NFTs and DAOs to some extent. And I just don't know if people are going to really learn the value of DAOs and even that really the ultimate kind of application of decentralized technology is to not require a DAO at all. If you can get away without needing it and you can deploy the software that's usable without having any kind of governance function, surely that's the best choice of all.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, going back to the very crude thesis I presented earlier around narrow constraints being kind of a good product principle around which to build DAO tooling. Like I think the more you can automate at the center of a DAO, including even the voting, where it doesn't even need to be made, it's just certain things are triggered automatically based on how the software works, I think is a general good direction for where DAOs could go versus being strictly about, you know, multisig plus snapshot votes equals DAO. I think that could kind of lead us to more creative directions for where it goes.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, you know, I totally agree with that. And I wanted to, you know, people sometimes also even like crap on like token voting. And I think that's fine. I think it's a really early form of like how to implement this sort of thing. And I think that there will be better things coming, even though something like reputation I'm personally kind of bearish on. I think, though, sort of zooming out at a higher level on what you were talking a little bit about, Nicholas, before is about all these like new people coming in. And I think something that I've always sort of like noticed about crypto and I think is finally happening is that the Web3 decentralization narrative doesn't have a plan for what happens when we win, right? We've been outsiders for so long, right? Like I got started in my first like crypto business in 2012, right? We've been outsiders for so long that that is part of our identity. And I don't think that we have really appropriately considered what happens like when we actually win when, OK, fine, like you see all these Web2 companies, you know, Kickstarter saying, "Oh, yeah, we're going to go on to blockchain.". And there's been some pushback from, you know, the other folks that are against anything you put crypto on. But what happens when we're all these...

Danny Aranda: It's a carbon neutral blockchain. I think I read in the press release.

Dennison Bertram: Oh, it's a carbon neutral? That's probably...

Nicholas: It's Celo. But that seems to be the only thing they know. This is my criticism of the announcement. I mean, I'm happy that they're getting involved. And this is not at all coming from working on Juicebox in a competitive way. It's just like, why would you announce something where the only thing you know is that you're on a blockchain nobody's ever used? No offense to Celo. I hear the technology is cool, but I haven't used that. That wouldn't be the first decision I would make. I would first try and find somebody. They don't have a leader for the project. They don't have a name for the project. They don't seem to have much of a plan, except they already know what blockchain it's going To me, it sounded like a backroom deal for finding a use case for Celo or something. I don't really understand it.

Dennison Bertram: Well, I mean, I think we know what happened. Constitution down. And that was on everybody's radar. And Kickstarter was like, where the fuck is that $41 million? and why is it not on our platform?

Nicholas: That's a good point. I didn't even think of that.

Dennison Bertram: I think that's where I came from. Absolutely right. Like, there was an emergency meeting and they were like, OK, tomorrow we're launching. What blockchain? Somebody's just like, I know a guy at Celo. They're like, OK, done. Right. So I mean, Celo's great. The team is great.

Nicholas: I do know the team is great. I don't mean to shit on Celo. I have respect for what I hear about it on Twitter. But it does seem like a weird thing to just choose the blockchain, to choose a not the obvious choice blockchain as the first decision you make. It seems like the kind of decision that people are making. Actually, this is a little bit off topic, but we see a lot of people, I forget who it is, was it Dame or somebody else? Maybe you can let us know. Somebody was saying, I can't wait for brands to take some of the heat. Maybe it was Chris Martz, actually. For brands to take some of this environmental heat, et cetera, NFT heat. And choosing a carbon neutral blockchain is obviously a choice to kind of diffuse that argument from the get-go, right? Yeah. Imagine if it was on Tezos. Why don't they say Tezos?

Dennison Bertram: They probably don't know anybody at Tezos, right? But you make a really great point where. why are they saying, oh, we're going to be on blockchain? Yeah, well, I heard that's all about burning the rainforest and scammed. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, not Celo. It's carbon neutral. There's no scams. Oh, OK, well, we'll do it on Celo, right? That's probably how the discussion went. And I think that goes very much into the point of crypto doesn't really have a plan for winning. The sort of like original decentralization maxis never really had a plan for like. when you actually take over the world and now you have to kind of like make it all work. And what you see is, is that this is decentralization. You know, there isn't one blockchain. Nobody controls the idea of like being able to have a blockchain. People are still creating new blockchains, right? Which should be mind boggling to anyone that there's someone out there who thinks we don't have enough of them. But I promise you, there are lots of people out there who think we don't have enough blockchains. And the danger from this, I think, is that like Taco Bell sells the like extra cheesy Dow taco and people are like, oh, yeah, that's like a taco. And what are you going to, you know, you'll be in this conversation and people are like, oh, yeah, you work for that like meatless taco. And you're like, what? But you'll spend energy. I know, like for years being like a Bitcoin maximalist. Every time you talked about crypto, you just were like refuting, you know, endless nonsense to the point where you're like, all right. You

Nicholas: know, it's exactly what I was actually meant to get to, which is that to a lot of people who aren't in the right part of Twitter, you know, if you ever spend time logged out and just look up some of the words that we spend so much of our time thinking about, it really does look like a total scam. Like the PR for, you just don't see the right projects. I saw someone the other day saying that it was because they found Dame's Twitter that they liked NFTs and understood what the value of Web3 was. So it's like, yeah, I wonder if Dow's are going to, it's interesting that Constitution Dow is one of the better known ones now. It'll be curious to see. I was really surprised to see both Constitution Dow and Juicebox on the cover of the Wall Street Journal that week when all the news was going down.

Danny Aranda: Oh, yeah.

Nicholas: So it's super interesting. I feel like we also don't even have, we're so unprofessional about just how we monitor what's being said about what's going on. I don't feel like there's, we don't have like a PR team, like a centralized organization would have that's at least monitoring what's being said. So we don't even understand what people who are coming from a completely different vantage point could possibly imagine these words to mean, especially when we don't even have clear definitions of them.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, go ahead, Danny.

Danny Aranda: Well, I just want to respond to Denison's comment about like, you know, Web3 or crypto not having planned about when it wins. And, you know, there's always kind of new indications of adoption and so on and levels of winning that are coming out all the time. Like it seems like progress is being made. I would maybe argue the other side of it and say it's a solved problem. And the reason why is that there was some example earlier this week of like Call of Duty or some massive video game announced that they were going to have NFTs in their game. And I feel like the holy grail of NFTs, if you talked about it back in like 2018 or something like that, was that some AAA game title was going to have every item in the game become an NFT. And the reason that felt a little awkward was it felt very exogenous. It's almost like the argument of like, oh, just, you know, as soon as JP Morgan adopts Bitcoin, it's just it's game over. We're going to live in this Shangri-La. And I think in adoption, like there aren't really these shortcuts. I think this game ended up like cutting the whole program or the project because, you know, fans like reacted very poorly. And I think they were referencing like the carbon impact and climate impact and so on. Meanwhile, I think the ways that you are seeing kind of some of these brands jump on board is interesting. So, for instance, the Adidas kind of G-Money collaboration, that wasn't about Adidas like making their own NFT collection necessarily. They were very much like adopting like the existing brands within the NFT space like Bored Apes and Punks and using that for their own credibility in the space. And I think that's instructive about how this will gain steam over time. And you literally have like the main Adidas account like on Twitter with a Bored Ape in their symbol or maybe it was like the Adidas original account or something like that. But so you have this like major retail brand with a Bored Ape there, not their own NFT. I think this increasingly will be about like mainstream adoption. What it looks like is people conforming into what crypto culture looks like now more organically versus them just kind of picking up the tools and running with their own content or culture around it. And I think you're even seeing that on the Bitcoin end too, like not just kind of like Web3 NFT stuff. But even on the Bitcoin end, it's like major hedge fund managers writing letters to their LPs and they are literally talking about kind of the Bitcoin maxi argument. It's more that all these hedge fund managers become Bitcoin maxis themselves versus some like co-option of say using like JP Morgan chain to manage money and so on. So I think by the time Web3 or crypto culture wins, it'll be on its own terms and it'll be because the mainstream adopted that culture, not the other way around.

Nicholas: Yeah, that's a great point. Graham from Mirror had a great tweet the other day and people have been talking about this. like that people from Web2, social media, etc. when they talk about NFTs get a lot of flack, brands, but influencers especially get a huge portion of their audiences like unfollowing them. I was working with an influencer who had this problem recently. And so it's like an amazing time. I think one way to read that is it's like it's an amazing time to be a Web3 native creator because the culture will eventually catch up. But it may be like total innovators dilemma problem facing brands that are centralized to trying to become decentralized and social media stars who started off on social media platforms where the majority of people have learned all that they know about NFTs from sort of reactionary environmentalist Instagram stories. It's going to be very difficult for them to transition that audience and most of their audience is not going to be there quickly. So it's a great time for people to start creating directly in NFT culture. And I think like DAOs, NFT culture also is a thing that's the example I always think of is like Unisocks are not technically an NFT. They are a fungible token. And yet they kind of are part of NFT culture. I feel like they would come up in a conversation about the history of NFTs the past couple years. So maybe DAOs are kind of similar. Like maybe it doesn't really matter whether or not it's something that has governance or not. It matters more if it's part of this lifestyle Dennis is talking about.

Danny Aranda: Yes, some type of cultural affiliation with that general space. I mean, for instance, punks like not being 721s like does not make them any less of a quote unquote NFT, even if it doesn't follow kind of the ERC definition.

Nicholas: Yeah, absolutely. NFTs on different protocols are different too. From what I understand, maybe people in the audience might not know, so an NFT contract, really the NFTs live inside the contract. If the contract were to be compromised, all of the NFTs would be compromised also. They aren't independent of the contract in which they live. Versus on other blockchains, I don't have any personal experience of it, but I've heard that on Flow, once the NFT is minted, it does kind of live on its own and it's not dependent on the contract that issued it. So there are, even like the notion of an NFT itself, it's slippery because it's not a specific specification. It's really just an idea of non-fungibility.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, you know, something here though that I want to throw out that's important to keep in mind is there are a lot of projects, well not a lot, but you know, I've seen a number of projects coming to market

Danny Aranda: that

Dennison Bertram: are abstracting away a lot of these things, right? So they are saying, okay, you know, any chain, any blockchain, any network, it's your NFTs, you just like log in and you see your NFTs, right? And you wonder about like, you know, services that do the same thing for DAOs, right? Like it doesn't matter if it's on Tezos or if it's on Ethereum, whatever, just log in and see your DAOs. Will we, what happens if, and maybe this will never happen, maybe this is like a silicon but can we abstract away the hard parts enough that the user doesn't really know if the sort of value system of like decentralization and censorship resistance actually still exists somewhere, right? Like if we have tools, like. I remember the first time I used NBA Topshop and, you know, no offense or anything like that, I love everybody equally and flow is awesome. But the first time I used NBA Topshop, I bought an NFT with my credit card and I was just like, okay, do I have something somewhere? And the experience was just so slick that it drove, you know, thousands of people to spend millions and millions of dollars in that ecosystem. But I didn't understand how flow works. Honestly, I still don't fully understand how flow works. I took a couple cycles to kind of understand it. But I bought it with a credit card. So for me, you know, being like a Web3 person, it actually didn't make sense to me. I was confused. I was like, I don't know what this is. Could you say, oh, you know, sign up with your email, log in with your email and now you're part of a DAO? Would, if that DAO was run on just like a SQL database versus a blockchain, would anyone ever notice? And can the folks who are really good at building distribution, because I think the distribution can be an important point here, can they abstract DAOs so well that they take a few cycles of being like, oh, I log in and you see your Ethereum DAOs and your Tesla's DAOs and your, you know, whatever, your flow DAOs. And can they make the experience so seamless that then they add in a new DAO type that's free to use and it's super fast? And actually, it's just a SQL database in the back end. But because now the user is comfortable and used to everything being abstracted that they don't really know or maybe don't even care anymore since now they trust this abstraction like discovery platform, right? Hopefully that makes sense. That's what I kind of worry about a little bit, right? When I sort of mean that we didn't have a plan for winning, right? Like Robinhood, you know, I thought early on with like DeFi, I always felt that crypto really sort of instructed sort of centralized legacy institutions on like where they need to catch up. You know, in a few years after like Bitcoin, we suddenly finally saw in a place like America, things like Zelle, like the ability to like send money, you know, like people, some people don't remember 2008 when you just couldn't send somebody money with your phone, right? And then Bitcoin started to bring this promise. And then all of a sudden, a couple years later, you can send money with your phone. Wow, they found out how to do it, how they made it work. And I just worry that things like Robinhood will just be like looking at DeFi and be like, oh, yeah, you won't have to deal with like gas fees because you can just trade your dog coin on Robinhood. And what happens? Well, a lot of people trade the dog coin on Robinhood. And they're like, yeah, man, I'm into crypto. I've got like, you know, dog coin. But are they into crypto, right? Like, have we have we done what we wanted to do? Someone, someone shared this stat recently, something and this. I totally just saw this on Twitter in passing, so it may be totally wrong. But someone said that 16% of all crypto is on Coinbase.

Nicholas: There was a number. What did they say in the congressional testimony, whatever it was the other day, there was a number that came out like that in the in the.

Danny Aranda: There was some number, right.

Dennison Bertram: And I would be really scared. I would not scared, but I don't know how I feel if someone were to say that 30% of all DAOs are on Facebook. Right. What does that mean? Right. And like, what is our sort of responsibility? to like acknowledge the permissionlessness of our space, allows our space to be like co-opted in such a way that, you know, that could happen. Right. Like. if Kickstarter is like, no, no, no, it's gonna be on Sello because it's carbon neutral. Right. So I'm gonna be like, no, no, no, no, no, don't worry. No pandas are being harmed because it's on it's on Facebook. Right. That worries me. I don't I don't know what that means. But, you know, when we start when we are sort of like unsure of like what the definition of a DAO is, who am I to say that your telegram group with a four party PayPal isn't a DAO? Right. Like, you know, it takes four of us, you know, two out of the three or two, three out of the four of us need to like log into PayPal to send money. And they have a great chat feature in there. If PayPal was to say we're launching PayPal DAO, would that not be a DAO? So those sorts of things are like what I sort of think about. what I mean, like, we don't have a plan for winning when like the idea is universal, but the application of it really isn't what we intended at all. And maybe, you know, we don't even have the right to determine that. But, you know, what does that future look like? Right. Like masterworks. I don't know if they're advertising to other folks, but they're always advertising me. They're like, oh, yeah, you're into NFTs. You must totally want to like send your money to the centralized platform to like buy a share of legacy artwork. And I'm like, no, but I could imagine a whole bunch of people are like, oh, that's like party bid. Right. We're all going to get together. We're going to we're going to buy this Warhol together on this platform and we're going to own it together and then we'll vote together to sell it. Like they just, you know, sent me some other advertising. They just said sold some painting for like 37 percent profit and shared all to their like token holders like, you know, and Danny, I think I would really love, you know, because I think masterworks is a perfect example here. Like love your sort of like input on that.

Danny Aranda: But but yeah.

Dennison Bertram: And that all happens. Did we win? Right.

Danny Aranda: I don't know. I am. I used Otis once like a year ago and I just thought it was an interesting idea. Opened up, tried it out, found a Tracy Emin painting and bought like, you know, a hundred dollars worth or something of a Tracy Emin painting. And it was kind of a cool feeling. It was like. I, you know, never thought I'd be able to like own anything of Tracy Emin's because she's a famous artist. You know, it's out of any price range I would ever reasonably spend. So I thought it was an interesting idea. Also, thinking back to that experience, like, you know, experientially, it's like very different than I think what, you know, users feel when they're like participating in a party. There's maybe something. It's just the fact that like part of it's a very early product, but like there's something very raw about it. And I think there's also something more special about it, too. Like, I don't think there was a moment of participating in Masterworks. I've never certainly encountered like anyone to talk to who also bought that Tracy Emin painting. And maybe that's like a missed opportunity on their part. And it's something that like crypto enables itself more and more because, you know, if you're going to distinguish like from the UX perspective between, you know, a centralized version of what you're talking about, Dennison, and, you know, what you would build on crypto using whatever juice box party bit or whatever else. I think, you know, the permissionlessness is kind of the key factor. And then there's a question of like who in the mainstream audience really cares about that. I do think, though, part of it, too, is I think there's something around permissionlessness is going to intersect with the topic we were talking about earlier around distribution. And the fact that like there's an API that anyone can call and do certain functions on and there's nothing to prevent anyone from calling that API or building an interface for it just over the long run feels, you know, from a thesis perspective, like we'll win in the long term versus someone creating something that's like gated behind like an iOS app. that feels like a relatively safe bet. But I might be so, you know, so biased as crypto that I'm not kind of seeing some of the obvious things.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, I think, again, that's, you know, for me, it feels like the distribution question, right? Like if you are investing in fractionalized artwork for the vast majority of the world, is it more important to just get them first? And because we are permissionless and they aren't, can Masterworks say now on Masterworks PartyBid, right? And when you buy, I mean, good Lord, if they did that, I mean, hopefully they're not here and they're not listening. But right, like it would be against your ethos to stop them. But at the same time, you know, you mentioned like, you know, the experience of PartyBid raw because it's early. I think it's probably more that it's just Web3 and Web3 is raw. But, you know, if Masterworks were like, yeah, buy your party on Masterworks and run it on Masterworks, but really, you know, your membership in the PartyBid on Masterworks was just like, you know, SQL table, right? Like a database table. Do we, does the fact that they met that Web3 curious person first going to make a difference? And if so, like, what do we need to do to continue? Now, maybe we're like getting way off like DAO shit, but like to continue to make sure that like the ideals of Web3 continue to be attractive, even once these like large Web2 companies who are well-oiled centralized machines show up to leverage it. Right. Because Taco Bell is NFTs and, you know, Pepsi's got it on ETH.

Nicholas: Quesadilla NFT. But maybe actually Coinbase is, you know, Coinbase DAO product. If Coinbase were to knock off PartyBid and do it entirely internally and allow you to bid on NFTs that are being sold initially, internally, primary sales, let's say, on the Coinbase.

Danny Aranda: I would love that.

Nicholas: I'm still searching for what it is. I have this pet theory that Coinbase has no NFT marketplace idea. They're simply fishing for ideas on Twitter. The announcement was purely designed to get people to invent a good strategy for them.

Danny Aranda: It was a PsyOps, the whole thing.

Nicholas: Maybe that is the best idea yet. Maybe a party bid knockoff would be a great way to put DAOs into Coinbase. The safest DAOs you can participate only on Coinbase.

Dennison Bertram: I don't know if I love that idea. I'm a little bit scared.

Danny Aranda: Back to your Masterworks example, there is Otis, which is a Masterworks competitor. They are launching next week something called Otis House. They're almost acting like a reverse bank. They are going to custody physical items, mint them on-chain, and then allow you to do all the on-chain things with them, like have them be in NFT auctions and so on. They are acting as a trusted custodian. It's centralized because there is a physical object. They already have all this infrastructure around warehousing artworks and hiring art handlers and having it sit in a warehouse that is regulated at the right temperature and has security. Custodying that item and being able to move it around into a museum or take it on tour is something they can figure out as well. Testing to the fact that whatever they mint on-chain represents that. Those are all solved problems. I think it's a very simple, interesting product. I'm curious to see how it will do and what people will do with it.

Dennison Bertram: I would say that is a really good idea. I'm just thinking you're seeping in it. Suddenly it occurs to me that maybe PartyBin should partner with real museums and say, "Hey, sell 49% of your permanent collection as PartyBins. Use the money to run the operations of the museum.". Nobody is ever going to call in their 1% of the artwork at MoMA, but maybe you could do a special dinner party for all the MoMA PartyBin holders. That's fascinating. This is awesome. That would be so cool. Again, if these things are lifestyles, then I don't really need to ever own. I never need to necessarily hold the Warhol in my hand, but would I give money to a PartyBin to buy a Warhol if I could go to the Brooklyn Museum of Art on the PartyBin night and it be a gala event and we just walk around the museum being like, "Yeah, I own some of that painting. I own some of that painting.". If it's a lifestyle, I'm not doing it to physically take custody of it. I'm doing it to be part of this group of people doing this thing.

Danny Aranda: Someone in a tuxedo hat to hand you a glass of champagne. You get the whole experience.

Dennison Bertram: Love it. You get some sort of platinum PartyBin card. Whenever you're at dinner parties, people would be like, "Yeah, something something art.". Actually, I own a little bit of that painting. I get to go see it after hours with the other owners and we get to see the backside and maybe sneak a touch. Now that I'm saying this out loud, it's face-meltingly good. Not only can museums make a shit ton of money on that to help fund their own operations, they don't have to worry about losing control of the artwork. Wow, I'm just absolutely loving that. Once you start thinking of these things as lifestyles, you could totally run PartyBin for the Mona Lisa and people would just be like, "Yeah, I was bidding in the Mona Lisa. I own part of it.". That would just be your snobby thing to say at every dinner party for the rest of your life.

Nicholas: I think what a lot of token airdrops argue is that they are not intended for financial speculation, but instead their primary purpose is for governance. What can we make of this social token concept that people like Cooper and Seed Club, Jess from Seed Club, etc., talk about? It seems like maybe DAO has become, maybe like NFTs, people before I got into the scene thought that NFT was too technical and that we'd use a word like "nifty" or something like this, or just "collectible" on the blockchain. But in the end, NFTs, I think, are here to stay as a concept. And DAO also seems to maybe be primed to enter the popular consciousness. But something like FWB, I don't think people are primarily buying FWB to financially speculate on FWB tokens, but instead it is because of the social element. Because you can go to cool parties, because you can meet people in the discord. It's not exactly the same thing as collectively owning a fancy piece of artwork in order to, I don't know, hit on people at a museum or something. But it's not that far. It is an opportunity to have something in common with people and get to know each other, and maybe meet people in new cities when you go to visit the other coast of the country or something like that. We've been talking for about an hour and 10 minutes. I think it would be great to open it up if anybody wants to come up and ask a question. There's a couple people waiting, so I'm going to invite Jade up. Jade, what's good?

Danny Aranda: What up, Jade?

Dennison Bertram: Hey, I lost a little bit of what was said during the connecting. I'm pretty sure people were just saying hi.

Nicholas: Yeah, that's it. Just saying hey. How's it going?

Dennison Bertram: Okay, cool.

Nicholas: I've been listening for, I think since it started, honestly. And I think it was really cool at the beginning.

Danny Aranda: I don't remember who said it, but it was said that DAOs are mimicking a lot of stuff that are happening in the real world, even before DAOs and crypto became a thing. And I've been saying this for a long time, especially when it comes to non-profits, in particular membership-based non-profits.

Nicholas: And I think I say that and people are like, "No, no, DAOs are new. This is different.".

Danny Aranda: But I just wanted to just kind of touch on that again and just see what other things that were happening pre-crypto. that mimics a lot of the stuff that DAOs are doing now.

Dennison Bertram: Totally. Yeah, go for it. I grew up in the 90s in Buffalo. It wasn't a great place at the time, but it still had a little remanence of the 1960s left hippie sort of innovation that had been happening out of Buff State, which was called the Berkeley of the East at the time. And there were all these co-ops in Buffalo, like bookstore co-ops and grocery store co-ops. And now I live in New York and I used to live in this neighborhood called Park Slope, and there's a really famous co-op there called the Park Slope Co-op. And it's amazing because there are all these organizations that exist and they are kind of DAOs in a weird way, right? Like these food co-ops, for example, you can shop at the co-op for really cheap food, but you have to work at the co-op too, right? So there's these arrangements. And many years ago, I met some artists who were part of this thing called Time Bank, which I regrettably haven't actually bothered to Google, and I really should because I keep on sharing this as a story, and maybe it's totally not true. But she was part of a time bank, and there were all these artists and other people where you would show up at somebody's house or whatever and you would do something for them and you earned time. But it's not like a token, it was just like you had time. And then you could spend your time with other people who are in this sort of time network, but it's kind of unofficial. You'd show up at someone's house and say, "I have 10 hours of time,". and that person would be like, "Okay, well, if you give me your 10 hours of time, I'll give you some sort of Reiki lesson or bake you a vegan loaf or something like that.".

Nicholas: The SEC has to shut this time racket down immediately.

Danny Aranda: I know, I know, right? Vegan loaves are very speculative.

Dennison Bertram: Oh my gosh, right? But yeah, there's tons of these. And when you look closer, somehow I think the '90s and 2000s made us forget around all the kind of different ways. There are some cities in America or neighborhoods that still have their own currency, and it's just a community thing. I was listening to some podcast maybe a year ago about this, so maybe someone in the audience knows what I'm talking about. But local neighborhoods will have their own money, right? And it feels like crypto, but it's not crypto because it's just manual money, right? So yeah, Jade, this stuff exists everywhere. when you look closely, and that's a big reason why I start to feel like maybe it becomes a lifestyle thing because a lot of these other communities that people are in that look like early DAOs without technology are lifestyles.

Danny Aranda: I was going to point to the co-op example as well. Actually, when I started kind of trying to research DAOs more seriously at some point. last year or even I think 2019, I joined the Park Slope Food Co-op that Dennis was just referring to. It was explicitly about research. I was just kind of fascinated by the idea. So I joined this grocery co-op and went through the induction process. So to start, they give you an hour-long meeting where they kind of introduce you to the co-op, and they tell you certain rules and different things you should know going into it. But I remember the person opened it up by greeting everybody as comrades when we first walked in, and there was just so many interesting kind of behaviors within the co-op that kind of have their root in kind of the fact that it's a co-op itself. So for instance, because everyone who works in the grocery store is also a member and doesn't work there full-time, there's no one you can really ask where something is. So you ask the whole grocery store. They have an intercom system that you walk up to, and you ask a question. You're like, "Hey, where are the dried mango slices?" And you announce that to like the 300 people in the grocery store.

Nicholas: It's just like a Discord. It's exactly like that.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then someone will pick up an intercom somewhere else and answer the question. They'll be like, "Oh, it's at the end of aisle nine. Check it out at the bottom shelf.". And then just like Discord, that intercom system starts to get abused. So I remember just shopping for groceries there one day, and someone got in the intercom and was just like, "Hey, someone's dog is outside, and it is really distressed, and I really think you should go pick up your dog. It's really upsetting to see your dog this upset while it's outside.". And, "Oh, never mind. Someone picked up the dog. Quick.". There was all types of bizarre behavior there, just all within the context of this being a co-op. To be honest, I don't know what lessons I took away from that, but the idea of running an org like a grocery store, and there is leadership and a team and so on, but that the members are all owners in the grocery store itself and then therefore share the costs and the profits and just make food more affordable and a better experience, I think is somewhat instructive and is the best real-world analogy that I can think of, at least right now. And I think what's interesting about DAOs in a crypto context is I think all the best use cases will have some type of digitally native use case. So DAOs collecting NFTs, DAOs running protocols, these are some of the initial areas where you're seeing product-market fit, and I suspect that will continue within that digital context in terms of use case.

Dennison Bertram: I've got to riff on that for just a second because I also joined the co-op.

Danny Aranda: This is amazing. Oh, my God.

Dennison Bertram: I didn't go through the whole process because they had one requirement, which was everyone in your family household had to work there. You weren't allowed to be the only person in your--.

Danny Aranda: Yeah, I forced my girlfriend to join the co-op. She didn't want to do it, but I had to pitch her on it, give her my reasons why. I had to explain to her how it tied back to crypto. She was just rolling her eyes.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, my wife was a flat no. But we went to the onboarding where they're like, "Welcome, comrade," and you're like, "Okay, is this ever going to be used against me in some sort of congressional political targeted attack?".

Nicholas: There's a Netflix movie about this. I've seen it.

Dennison Bertram: There is something else that's really instructional, I think, for DAOs. If I remember correctly, and Danny, since you were a full member, you may remember a bit better, but there was a requirement that you show up for a minimum number of board meetings and vote, if I recall correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember that they had said that they required you to participate in some minimum number of governance actions.

Danny Aranda: I do not remember that, but I believe that. I'm obviously a bad co-op member.

Dennison Bertram: You're a bad co-op member. I remember that really sticking out to me because I'm the kind of person who will show up for the first time in a place with absolutely no context and immediately have really pointed questions. that makes everyone uncomfortable. I was just like, "I'm going. There's some things I would change around here.". I was there a whole five minutes. The cheese section is the hardest job to get there. I had opinions already, so I do remember that very specifically. How to be a member, there was some requirement that you participate or maybe you earned some sort of time off. I remember you couldn't just drop your shift. You had to find someone to switch with you.

Danny Aranda: That's the most hilarious piece. I think people were joining the co-op and then hiring other people to do their shifts for them. They had to ban that. Someone was getting their butler to go to their shift for them.

Nicholas: I see Aaron Wright. "Were you ever interested in joining the Park Slope Food Co-op?". Because it turns out, seemingly everyone who lives in New York has tried to convince their spouse to join. That's amazing. Maybe co-op culture and Dow culture are already the same. I've been thinking for a long time that it's going to be very exciting when co-ops, a Venn diagram, highly overlapping population with people who are very critical of NFTs right now for not particularly informed environmental opinions, which are interesting, but often just not fully educated. I think those same people, when they discover split, essentially on-chain technology letting you organize relationships that either aren't possible or would be extremely expensive to organize through traditional contracts, it's going to be very cool when people start experimenting with this stuff. Unfortunately, the laws are just so unfriendly to this kind of experimentation. I really struggle with how we're going to make it safe for people to try things, try new things.

Dennison Bertram: The law component people ask me particularly a lot about. We think a lot about it. I think that the legal part can't stop us. I don't mean that in a flippant way like, "Ah, fuck the law.". I think that we have to balance what it is that we're trying to do. Aaron is here, so I'm sure he will have many real things to say here if he wants to come up.

Nicholas: No one wants to give their legal opinion in front of an actual--.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, sorry I even said that.

Danny Aranda: Oh, shit. Aaron's here. Oh, God.

Dennison Bertram: I'm not a lawyer, so I can say anything I want. This is not legal advice. As long as you're-- In my mind, if you get an LLC to at least-- There's the danger that your social token throws a party and people get hurt. That's real. That's probably a greater danger than the US Treasury coming after you because you fractionalized the Mona Lisa and it's doing really well. You're on the front page of the news every day. I feel like that's less likely. The legal part is a real concern, but what's interesting is people deal with that all the time. People decide to do haircuts, and they get permission from the government, which is not a great feeling. But I think that a lot of ideas, we're going to be able to experiment with them long enough to figure out if they're real ideas to figure out how to make these other aspects of it work. So I really like to stress with folks that if your first thing that you think about after thinking about starting a DAO is like, "Oh, the legal part,". I think there you're doing it wrong. Run with it a little bit. Again, not legal advice, so don't be like, "Dennison told me to start at Stablecoin and disrupt the euro.".

Nicholas: But yeah, I just want to say that. >> Piggyback back to Stablecoin. Yeah, it's tricky. I don't know that anyone has any great answers. I would like to see more of the information shared. I know just in terms of being involved in a DAO via a corporation or an LLC that you create, there are options for doing things like series LLCs. But actually, no great criticism to these platforms, but I feel like the thing that protects you from liability is probably the thing you want to be most traditional in its structure, not a piece of experimental on-chain Ricardian contract. But maybe I'm wrong in that. No, I love the concept, but if it's going to be the one thing that's protecting you from liability, to me it's something that I'm inclined to personally, just as an individual. And I still don't feel that I know what I'm doing. I don't know if I would want to do something with the ease of a transaction on Ethereum first. At least I would want to do so from a very informed position, probably from having talked to a human first. Or at least I would like to see the information available enough that people can know exactly what they're getting into, if that's what they choose to do, to wrap their involvement in DAOs and things. I think these are questions that people, obviously nobody should be giving advice without having an actual relationship with a lawyer, in a contract, or paid for. But I do think that there could be some more guidance for, here's what some people have done in the past. Do with that information what you will. And just sort of develop, where are the Reddit posts on, "Oh, I got an offer for a DAO, what do I do?". What's the best comment in that Reddit thread that doesn't yet exist, most likely? I think people should be able to have access to that information just to know what the sort of best practices are.

Danny Aranda: Nikos, you were going to post, were you going to do a blog post on kind of your own recent learnings and kind of setting up a corporation? Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to blog it.

Nicholas: I've just been talking to people. You're putting blogs in my mouth. Aren't you going to give us legal advice, Nikos? Hey, you promised us legal advice the other day. Where's the legal advice you promised me?

Danny Aranda: I want to see that on Mare, on-chain.

Nicholas: Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, it's going to be an on-chain SVG. Can you do an on-chain PDF? Probably not, huh? I don't yet have any great guidance to give, but I am talking to people about what I've been thinking about and what information I'm collecting from talking to lots of other people and just trying to piece together some kind of picture. And I don't doubt that this ever made, like I just saw someone sent me the other day in the Juicebox Discord, a link to someone screencasting with also a camera on herself showing how to set up an Aragon DAO. And it was like, someone just showing that. She seemed to know what she was talking about, but she didn't seem like a deep insider. I don't think she's working for a DAO, or it didn't come off that way at least. So it's like, this information will come out if the protocols allow you to do interesting things and interesting projects get done with those. I think it's been very interesting. I didn't expect six months ago that the killer app for whatever this DAO 2.0, like multi-sig based social DAOs, not related to a DeFi protocol, or token issuance directly off the back of some kind of fractionalization or intended fractionalization. That kind of DAO, it's really proved to be one of the killer apps for this new range of the sort of collector DAO, the NFT collector DAO or other initiative that feels like an NFT collector DAO, which is not at all what I think DAOs were in that prior era, 2018, 2017.

Dennison Bertram: - Yeah, we should all create a guild of DAO creators that makes a deal with the government to prevent people simulcasting how to create a DAO without paying us lots of money.

Nicholas: - Where are the DAO Twitch streamers? Is there even a TikTok about DAOs yet? Of course there's ones about NFTs 'cause the sort of pumponomics, and there's tokens, but is there really content about DAOs? I feel like the creator economy of this stuff is still just spinning up. I think that's one thing I really love Mirror for is if you're a creative person who doesn't want to learn to write smart contracts, just spinning up a crowdfund and announcing it with a blog post, it's a beautiful way to sort of mentally prepare people for doing that and give them a forum in which to publish about what they're doing also. I got that question this week from a couple people who are working on something. They're thinking, "Should it be a DAO? "We want to do something about fundraising "for sort of popularizing underutilized research, "research that just doesn't have attention.". And maybe their focus is not on setting up tokenomics. Maybe they need some kind of tokenomics that just make it easy. And there's lots of people thinking, OpenLAW, the LAO, Syndicate, lots of different groups, or LexDAO. It's exciting to see this stuff build up. I see we have another question. Anyone, especially if you're mutuals with folks on the panel already, I'd love to hear from you. But anyone is welcome to ask a question. Here comes Scott. Hey, Scott, what's up?

Dennison Bertram: Hey, how are you? Listen, I stumbled across the podcast because of the algorithm recommending things through Dame, which is funny because I got involved with Loot, and you guys were talking about Loot and Dope Wars. I got involved through a party bid on a Divine Robe, but it's led to a fascinating journey into watching a derivative of Loot go through the process of raising community funds through liquidity, being liquidity providers, and then organizing into a DAO and opening its new marketplace and introducing new NFTs. So it's been this really incredible journey of really seeing what NFTs are becoming, which are really identity and community markers. And just as you say, it makes you at once a member, a shareholder, and a manager of a common collective effort, and it's all based on a common fascination. It's really cool.

Nicholas: Totally. Denison, can you tell the story of Dope Wars?

Danny Aranda: Yeah, I'd love to hear that.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, totally. It's both really simple but kind of beautiful at the same time. Basically, I saw Loot, and we mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I saw Loot. I thought, "Oh, wow, that's really cool,". but I don't get into potions and magic and dragons and shit. It just never was my thing.

Nicholas: It's Dope Wars to you.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, I mean, for better or worse, I grew up in a city. I was in an urban area. I used to play Dope Wars on the TI-83 calculator. So I just said out loud on Twitter, and there was one learning that I did there that I think made all the difference. It felt good to me, so I just created the Discord first, which I think is all the difference. I created the Discord first, and I said, "If you were also like me, not into the dragons and stuff like that, but you love this energy around Loot, come build Dope Wars," right? And I put out the tweet, walked away from the computer, and by the time I got back, a few minutes later, there was thousands of people in the Discord. They created a Word doc where everyone in my community was adding all the things that they wanted on the NFTs. Someone was writing some of the smart contracts. They were just self-organizing right away. I was kind of shocked, but the thing that I kind of did was I saw what Loot had done, and I kind of instantly knew that there would be a little bit of a power vacuum of how it worked because it's so permissionless, right? It's like whatever you folks want to do with it, you can do something with it, but I've been on this hype train of trying to get governance into everything, and NFTs, I was really digging nouns down, and I was like, "Well, let's put the nouns down NFT into the project so that the actual NFT holders can do voting on what happens,". and on top of that, I said, "I'm going to take nothing from this,". right? There's no secret mint. The Loot contract had a special privilege function for Dom where he got to mint X number of NFTs for free for himself. I'm taking that completely out. There's nothing for me that's privileged here. I hope that you folks refund the gas fees, and let's have at it, and the other key thing I said was there will be a 5% royalties on OpenSea that go to fund directly to Dow Treasury, and that's what the NFT holders can vote on spending, right? So anyway, I did that, deployed it. Everyone sort of like aped in. People got really excited. Some close friends of mine saw it and were like, "Oh, I remember the game. I love it.". Actually, Terrence is here who can at this point tell the story even better than me? because he basically called me the night that I put out that tweet. He was like, "Oh, my God. Where's the Discord? I want to get involved,". and I kind of closed my computer, walked away from it, and came back, and there's all these different groups in Discord. They've all organized. People are talking about what it's going to be, what it's going to look like, and I think a real major turning point was this guy, Mr. Fax, showed up. He's an artist, and he started making the pixel art versions of the NFTs before himself because he was like, "Oh, I like it. Hey, guys, this is what I made,". and people were like, "Oh, we love it. Can you make it for everybody?". Like all, you know, what, 8,000 of us, and, oh, by the way, there's like half a million dollars in the treasury now from this initial enthusiasm of people flipping it. We'll pay you. So they did a proposal, an on-chain vote that paid him, and Terrence can, you know, I almost feel bad. He's in the audience, and he has been really one of the core members there. I just really came up with the idea. So the kind of amazing thing here is that they created this NFT DAO, right, this community where the point was to spend this treasury, and there is a connection between the NFT and your money other than the vote, right? Like when we see other governances, other DAOs like Uniswap, the token holders themselves, there's kind of like this tension between spending the money in the treasury and the token holders who get to decide on how to spend the money, right, because every dollar that comes out or every uni that comes out of the uni treasury dilutes the participants who voted to spend that money a bit, right? So, you know, the very first Uniswap thing, there had been a mistake on how it was distributed, and there was a vote to give the people who should have been part of the airdrop tokens, and people were like, "No, screw you. We already have the money distributed. I'm not going to dilute myself.". So by sort of having this idea of an NFT DAO where the NFT controls the money, but you spending that money doesn't devalue your NFT, right? The value of your NFT is its own thing based on its rarity or how much people want it. Suddenly you had a community where it's very clear from the beginning. The point of this community is to spend the money in this treasury to try and make a game, right? And what's happened from that is people feel pretty happy to spend the money. People aren't attached to the money in the treasury. So they propose things like artwork, Starkware, Layer 2, this new game piece that had been built, The Hustlers. They're actually voting on creating a hip-hop album, an LP. There's actual music producers in the group who are like, "We want to make a Dope Wars soundtrack.". And the result of all these people having ideas of how to spend the money has actually driven more participation so that now after this period of time of just spending money, they actually have twice as much money in the treasury. So it's become this sort of like perpetual motion machine of people coming up with cool ideas, just bringing more people who want to help implement and participate in it. I mean, I really feel that like at this point, we should, you know, if Terrence is willing to like talk a little bit about it, but, you know, maybe you don't want to get into like a shillathon here. It's really kind of wild, the challenges that Dow has gone through because there's been a lot. And the opportunities and the sort of like things that I am even learning from them how to do, right? Like if you had asked me a year ago, should a Dow even consider proposals like, "Hey, I'm a musician and I want to make a hip-hop album around the idea of your Dow,". I would have thought that was a crazy idea. I would have said, "No, absolutely.". But this community has really shown me that, you know, and again, this goes to my thinking that maybe what's happening is lifestyles are being created and like identities are being created. If you can have a structure that allows all these ideas to like flourish, actually just drives more people who feel like, "Oh, this community is a place that I can build something, where I can contribute.". I think now they have like an animation studio in like Indonesia working on like animating the characters. I think there's like a collaboration like with World Wide Web going on. All this crazy stuff where you're like, "Oh my God.". And it really comes from that sort of lifestyle-y feeling of a Dow where people really feel like it's important to be a part of something more than, you know, we pooled our money to make investments to, you know, do X.

Nicholas: - So take me through the tokenomics quickly just once again. So you dropped the contract. It's sort of a spin-on loot. The piece that you integrated from Nouns was the governance aspect of Nouns? - Yes, yes.

Dennison Bertram: So this is a key thing. And actually I was just talking to OpenZeppelin. I believe that it is in this release because they just merged the PR where they are adding this to the OpenZeppelin contract library. So now anyone's going to be able to do it. the same way they make regular NFT. But basically the NFT itself can be used on-chain to vote. So the other token voting, like governances or Dows, you have some ERC-20. And, you know, the number of ERC-20 tokens you have is your voting power, right? Well, in this case, it's your NFT is your voting power. And this is kind of proving to be for a lot of social organizations a better abstraction of participation because people are voting with their NFT, which is already kind of like an avatar of themselves. So you can imagine in the Doodle Bank, Doodle DAO, you're voting with your avatar, which is sort of some weird extension of who you are, right? So, but because of that, there isn't this, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the sort of like vagueness of. is a multi-sig a DAO? In this case, you don't have that. Dope Wars is special and has sort of avoided some of the like, you know, the chaos that you've seen elsewhere where there is no one with a privileged piece of power. There's no small group of multi-sig holders that control the protocol, right? The token holders in Dope Wars have absolute final say on how the DAO treasury is spent. Absolutely, from the beginning. And that means that you don't have this thing of like, you know, a cohort of like leaders who are sort of like making decisions for everybody else and using a snapshot to sort of like inform their decision. But it also addresses a lot of the legal concerns, right? Like this is, you know, by the people for the people and sort of like a funny way. And that distinction, I think, is really important because from day one, it's actually a true DAO. And yeah, it's messy, super messy. But I think that also makes it really resilient because it's not, there isn't like a core dev team that can like turn against you and say, no, we're not going to finance a hip hop album, right? Like, you know, if somebody had asked me directly, Denison, would you finance a hip hop album? I would probably have said bad idea. But then if you don't have any control over that and say, well, sure, I mean, what do the people think? And then turns out the people wanted chip tunes. They're going to like do chip tunes and they're like, okay, well, if we're going to do a hip hop album, can we also get some soundtracks for the game in 8-bit style? Okay, we'll throw that in. That's the compromise. We'll do the hip hop, but we also have to have like chip tune. We also have to have this for the game. And suddenly you're like, oh my God, no one person or even small group of people can know what's best. These communities kind of have to find out how to do that. And that like Park Slope co-op problem of like people show up and they don't know where things are and they have to get on the microphone and ask where the cheese is, is very real. But they do that a couple times and then someone new joins the DAO and when that person gets on the microphone and says, hey, where's the cheese? That person before is the first one to answer the call, right?

Nicholas: - I have a technical question for you. So Now's DAO is a fork of Compound, right? And so this is a fork of that or maybe even, yeah, a fork in the sense that it's exactly the same thing or I guess made to be better integrated with the loot derivative contract that Dope Wars started with.

Dennison Bertram: - Yes. Yeah, it's a Frankenstein.

Nicholas: - No, it's beautiful. It's a synthesis. But I did notice that there is a Dope DAO. So first of all, Dope Wars is on Tally. You can check out Dope Wars on Tally. I do wish this, I was thinking about this when I looked at Tally the other day, but I wish I could tell which governance technology they were using.

Dennison Bertram: - Oh, which governance. I thought you were going to say which NFT voter.

Nicholas: - I do want to see the pictures of the NFT. Because when you were saying, of course, like if it's your avatar, like obviously there's a, the problem is that there are whales who have many, many NFTs from an individual collection. But nevertheless, if they're very involved in the governance of the community, they probably have at least one that they're using as an avatar. So of course it would be sick to have their images next to the votes. - Yeah. - But I wish Tally showed like a compound or a link to the GitHub or something.

Dennison Bertram: - You know, first of all, you're absolutely right. And we are working on a new version, which will be out. There's still a little time before that comes out. But absolutely, we've got a lot of feedback around that. The other half of that answer is like right now, all of the DAOs on Tally are actually compound DAOs. We had been opinionated. We will be less opinionated going forward, but we had been opinionated.

Nicholas: - So then what's the snapshot for, or is DopeDAO the name of the DAO for DopeWars? - Yes, yeah.

Dennison Bertram: So DopeWars has a snapshot to do the, you know, voting on chain is expensive. We know when we started Tally, it was not nearly as expensive as it is today. So snapshot is an integral part of the sort of decision-making process to figure out, okay, 'cause something that happens in the DopeWars community, which is interesting, is they roll together votes. So improvement, you know, dips, dope improvement proposals, they get rolled together into proposals, you know, when it goes on chain so as to not like take up everybody's time and money in terms of voting. So the snapshot is a way that they sort of like decide what's going to get rolled into there and, you know, sort of like three ways of deciding things.

Nicholas: - Is that gnosis reality tech? Is that how they do that?

Dennison Bertram: - No, no, no, no. So gnosis reality tech is a whole 'nother? thing, but the snapshot is not the actual final vote. And this is a part of the sort of awareness thing that we have definitely got to get better at and the sort of like ecosystem as a whole. No, the snapshot is just used to get a temperature check to see like where people are thinking. And then anyone can make the actual on-chain proposal, you know, by a tally, but any other interface as well. And then the treasury is on chain. It's not multi-sig controlled, it's timeout controlled. So the token holders, anyone can make a proposal and who has like enough, you know, support and then have it pass and, you know, basically control the treasury. But there is a note that I do want to like get back to you on because you mentioned how you have whales that hold, you know, lots of NFTs. And that is very true, but something that we've found when talking to people as part of like our sort of like customer research at Tally is that people don't mind that as much. What we've noticed is, especially when it comes to participation, when you vote, if you have one token out of a trillion tokens, voting feels like one teardrop in an ocean, right? Like when you go to like, you know, Uniswap or, you know, something like that where there's just like billions of outstanding tokens and you've got like one vote and you're like, "Okay, here's my vote.". It doesn't feel great. And when you have whales that have like, you know, a billion dollars worth of token and you have like $2 worth of token, it doesn't feel great, right? And the only, all the tooling that exists in the ecosystem around ERC20 exists to show how much ERC20 you have, right? Like, "Oh, I have a million dollars worth of this ERC20," right? And they always show you, "Oh, this person holds this amount of union that's worth this amount of dollars," right? So that actually creates in communities a kind of weird feeling. It's not like great for small holders. But the difference is in NFT DAOs, first of all, the number of like participants tends to be smaller. There's like an upper limit of, you know, non-divisible items, which is like, you know, generally like 8,000 or 10,000 NFTs. But the thing is when your NFT votes, your NFT still voted. And the tooling is such that when someone who has 100 NFT votes, it's still each one of those individual NFTs voting. And eventually, these people may sell these different NFTs. And these NFTs will still participate in other votes or can participate in other votes. So there's this like aspect and, you know, this is something we want to expose more. on Tally when it comes to like, you know, see which NFT voted. You know, you have a doodle. If you vote at the doodle bank, which you should because they have trouble reaching quorum on the snapshot, your doodle voted, right? Like your doodle, four, five, six, eight, whichever one you have, they voted. And that's a very interesting avatar of participation in the community where this is already an avatar of you and it has a say. And it doesn't really matter if someone else has like 30 different says, but they're still individual avatars of a member of an organization. And probably the ideal state is to eventually get your organization to have like a one-to-one ratio. And if you look at OpenSea, it's really interesting to sort of gauge how fairly distributed these communities are where you see, "Oh, there's 10,000 pieces and 5,000 holders.". And then you can think, "Oh, well, on average, people hold two." Right? And suddenly, when it comes to participating, it feels a lot better because it's not just like, you know, you're one token in a sea of billions.

Nicholas: - So four, one, five, six would have a voting history. It's interesting because it kind of turns on its head the delegation thing. It seems like delegation is really important for ERC-20 token voting because it's so hard to get people to have the bandwidth to pay attention to every little governance thing going on and every little doubt that they're a minor stakeholder in. So delegation seems like a really important piece of ERC-20 voting. But in this case, you could almost imagine a circumstance in which, I mean, four, one, five, six, whatever it was today, yesterday, did vote to rage quit in the end. But the NFT still has a voting history that will continue. I find that's the biggest question about the identity. The four, one, five, six one is really the one that's brought it up for me. How do we treat the person who takes, if they do in fact take that on as a Twitter avatar, how are we going to treat them? It's like people selling, what is it like, one of the Spartan DeFi pumponomics kind of people sold their account a little while ago, right? Like four, five months ago or something? Or there was, what was it like, horse e-books or whatever sold? It was like a poetry, seemingly autonomous poetry bot, but actually a human behind it and they sold it or something like this or they became public. It's like the changes in the identity with the way that these things get used, it really isn't just a low issue in CRC-20 with a picture. It does have some kind of, the human mind does kind of want to turn it into a narrative at all costs.

Dennison Bertram: - I think that's what's going to be really powerful. One of our former colleagues had a really great thesis around these avatars as brands unto themselves and if you sell them all that brand equity doesn't disappear, it just goes with the--.

Nicholas: - It seems there's some attrition though, right? Like part of what we liked about 4156 was that they were really smart. Like as 4156. I'm curious about the Twitter handle because my joke about it is if the copyright doesn't come with owning a punk, then surely the Twitter account doesn't either.

Dennison Bertram: - Well, yeah. I would say that I threw out a project. It's on my GitHub called NFTNS which was around this idea. It was actually from a 2016 project they did at Buenos Aires which was called KittyGram where you could take photos with your CryptoKitty and it got saved on chain. but the CryptoKitty owns it and when somebody buys a CryptoKitty they would buy it not just for the CryptoKitty but it's like album of photos of like who owned it before. - Very cool. - I think that idea starts to play here again where for NFTNS the idea was that the avatar is the thing that matters. and who is custodying the avatar is almost not relevant and not important because in this funny way these avatars are going to outlive us. They're never going to go away especially if it's stored in RWE. This stuff is going to go on for hundreds of years. So we are just custodians of the NFT in a really strange way. Nicholas, you have a doodle but that doodle doesn't really belong to you. You just sort of get to custody it. And I love that concept and I think that when we talk about communities especially when we start to talk about the metaverse which is a term that I unfortunately hate and even the idea I kind of hate. but these are going to be their own sovereign things and we're just going to custody them.

Nicholas: That's true. If anything, I belong to the doodle for this part of time. Either I'll liquidate it or some heir of mine will or it'll be lost with a wallet that gets lost. And yeah, I really have no control.

Danny Aranda: The 4156 case is interesting just because well, one, I think that was the highest punk sale in history, correct? That was the highest Prince Punk ever?

Nicholas: Well, there was the sort of tricky one that was a bit of an explanation.

Danny Aranda: The Lost Trade.

Nicholas: Yeah, the Flash Loan one will exclude that one. I think it's maybe up there. I actually don't know. This is revealing how little I checked. They took it down. No, but were there higher previous sales?

Dennison Bertram: I don't know. I know that they took down the Flash Loan one, Larger Labs.

Nicholas: Oh, really? Oh my God, that copyright doing work. Largest sales, no. 4.2K. 4.2K for two aliens. 2.5K, 2.25. Yeah, I guess he's number three. Or I assume it's a he. 4156 is number three, top sale.

Danny Aranda: But in ETH terms, but I think ETH was a lot lower when Oh, you're right, you're right.

Nicholas: It is number one in terms of.

Danny Aranda: So dollar-wise, or the way we ascribe value today. Fiat, yeah. Fiat-wise, highest sale ever. And so one question is, would that punk, given its traits and just what you'd see on-chain, have been as valuable if it wasn't owned by the personality behind it? And I think the answer is yes, given the price. from what I could tell or my little knowledge of the punk market.

Nicholas: Well, that's actually my point on it too, that I think it's worth less now. I think especially speculators, not 4156, but people I've seen in DAOs, a lot of people who are doing collector DAOs make this mistake and think that, sure, the NFT may appreciate beyond the purchase price. Who knows, who can say? And maybe not, maybe apes, flippins, punks, I don't know. But either way, it does matter who owns it. And owning it as a piece of memorabilia versus that person owning it themselves, there may be attrition. If someone really lame picks up the Twitter account and starts tweeting, "It's 4156," then we'll all be like, "Oh yeah, remember when 4156 was cool?". So it's not like. some part of it, there's some attrition, or there can be, depending on who it is who picks it up. Obviously, if Kanye was the one who picked it up or something, it would only accentuate it. But it does feel like some of the people who are buying these expensive NFTs are not necessarily good at Twitter.

Dennison Bertram: Yeah, I think, though, that the Kanye example is maybe what's going to happen. And it's not necessarily going to be Kanye. But if you think about collectors over time, and there's a big period of time of owning relics, where you'd have some bone of a finger of a saint from the Holy Land or something like that. And of course, nobody could prove, especially then, that this was actually the bone of it. But if some king owned it, it's not really important if it's really Bartholomew's finger, right? Like you lead with, "Oh yeah, yeah, "King Louis V owned this bone of Bartholomew," right? So the fact that the person owned this punk, I'm going to argue that they imbued this punk with a history and a reputation and a story that it actually goes with them, right? Maybe that attrition is true at the moment. But for collectors, whoever now owns the punk, I think it's safe to say that they may not sell it ever. And maybe I'm wrong on that. Maybe eventually they'll sell it for 10x, right? But if that is the ultimate journey of this punk, that doesn't make it any less substantial. Famous people die in the real world. This punk isn't dead. Hopefully somebody who's bought it is going to do something amazing with it. But what if rather, and this is where I think these things are going to end up going. What if the person who bought this punk was actually some sort of talent agency from out West or some media company, right? And then six months, this punk comes back and it's got like, obviously in this case, they're going to need to make a deal with Larger Labs. But if it's a media agency, I'm sure they can work it out. What if it then comes back as like a character in a video game or as a movie or a TV show, right? You start to see how at that point they would never sell the punk, right? Because they know that the brand is the punk and like all this effort that you do around the punk gets imbued in that punk. So I actually think that it was a really bad idea to sell it. Like I understand that he was like rage quitting and then he had opinions. But that brand has gone with him in many ways. Of course, we all still know because we've been following him on Twitter, so sure. But actually I think the attrition is going to be for the human being who is custodying it, not the punk itself, right? The punk still exists, but that magic component of the punk plus this person on Twitter doesn't exist anymore.

Nicholas: What if UTA, the agency that Larva Labs signed on with, bought it and then are going to create a caricature of 4156, the original person, based on his tweets, but using the punk as the voice and becomes like whatever the bad guy is in the McDonald's universe, you know?

Danny Aranda: And then the person formerly known as 4156 sues Larva Labs for infringement of his own.

John C. Palmer: Yeah, there you go.

Nicholas: John Palmer is here. What's up, John Palmer?

Dennison Bertram: Hey.

John C. Palmer: Yo, what's going on? I just wanted to throw an idea into the mix.

Nicholas: Let's go.

John C. Palmer: I'm slightly out of breath because I am on a run, but I've been listening to this. And the analogy here is obviously that there are already titles in the real world that different people get over time, right? Like think about like the Pope or like the President. And so like different people get to hold that title over time. And sometimes there's good ones and sometimes there's bad ones. But when the right person steps into that role, that is a lever that they can lean on and use to accentuate and magnify their influence. So I think about the tool, like the NFT, if you consider it an identity, as a bit like a store of value in a way for some kind of like social exponentiation or something of whoever is in that seat. And it's interesting because like when you think of like a store of value for money or something, if you look at like Bitcoin or whatever, it's like, or ETH. Yeah, shout out ETH. But if you think about it that way, it's like, okay, cool. This thing can like ostensibly live forever, or at least outlive me as a person and other assets. And it's like verifiable on chain in a way that it can't be spoofed. So like I'm comfortable, you know, it can't be inflated. So I'm comfortable like keeping the value there. You can think about like the NFT or the identity the same way, like this store of social value. And so, yeah, I really, I guess it's a matter of like, what's the activation energy, or what is like the performance level required by an initial owner to get an NFT to that status. And then from that point, that provenance is attached to the thing, you know, as long as people remember it or any kind of that activity is on chain. You can think about like 7804 when Dylan sold it, you know, he made, not only did he hold it for quite a long time, but he made a pretty like influential statement on it. And regardless of like Perugia who now owns it or whoever holds it in the future, I do think that elevated that punk to a status that's kind of hard to topple. And I think those things will be kind of windy. So I don't think it's as quick as like, oh, the owner's gone, the status is gone. I think there's this residual effect around the title. So yeah, I guess I'm kind of a believer that like, there'll be like, I don't know, off seasons or like down rounds for the current owner, but that's always gonna be a lever that, at any point in time, you know, you said like if Kanye bought it would have gone up, it would be like even better. I think that's true today if he had just bought it, but I also think it's true five sales from now that if Kanye buys that punk in the future, whoever, that's still a huge lever that that person can pull on.

Nicholas: - It's true. If somebody bought Beanie and started saying interesting things from that account or if somebody, you know, any of the characters, I really like this framing as a role. I think that's very accurate. And especially for collections that are, you know, cap supply, where the NFTs really aren't gonna change over time, if they become canonical collections, you know, you could imagine these punks having very long political careers. And maybe that's actually one of the, you know, like Marc Andreessen talks about like jobs from the future or whatever, like we could never predict whatever CSS slinger in 1909, but maybe this, it's not really a job, but this activity, this performance art of spinning certain NFTs into leading voices. I mean, 4156 even did it without there being governance. So it doesn't even require on-chain or off-chain governance. Just the reputation, if it becomes a popular PFP project is enough.

Dennison Bertram: - Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that the wild crazy is actually still to come.

Danny Aranda: - I think also just maybe a very obvious point is, you know, you wouldn't be able to do these types of things with ERC20s for a whole bunch of reasons. I mean, one, like the 721s have a statefulness to them. You can track, say, an on-chain history. So Noun started doing this with profile pages for each Noun. You can kind of track what their votes or proposals have been over time. Ostensibly you could have something similar for 4156 for, you know, that punk's on-chain history. And then also like, there's just like the metadata, the image itself. Like you begin to think about those actions on-chain being imbued with like personality of the image itself, whether it's a doodle or a punk or any other kind of collection. And both of those things aren't both like psychologically or technically possible with an ERC20 specification.

Dennison Bertram: - Hey folks, I'm going to actually have to bow out. This has been awesome. It was a fantastic way to spend my Friday evening. But I do have a baby. So I'm going to need to bow out right now, but this has been really fantastic. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks to everyone else who's come. This has just been really great.

Nicholas: - Thanks, yeah. Thanks, Dennis. And this was awesome. It was great to talk to you and great to hear the Dope Wars story. I'm super excited about that. That's awesome. And Dope Wars seems like a really, really cool project. I hadn't heard of it much since the loot drop. So very cool.

Dennison Bertram: - Oh yeah, yeah. You definitely have to check it out. Terrence is still in the group. So if you have any other questions, you can ping him.

Nicholas: - Yeah, Terrence.

Danny Aranda: Thanks for chopping it up, Dennis. This was really fun.

Dennison Bertram: - I sent you a PM, DM. I really think that, you know, party bid for real museums would just be so amazing. You know, they custody the asset. We all trust them more or less. We can go inspect it to make sure it's there. And that would just be, that would just be wild.

Danny Aranda: - Just take it to its logical conclusion and just buy the whole Met.

Dennison Bertram: - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Danny Aranda: - You know, you have a tiny slice of the Met.

Dennison Bertram: - Tiny, you know what? It doesn't seem unreasonable that the Met should put up 25% to party bid so that you can like, you should just get them to try it on one work of art. Like just one. And part of the deal can be that the Met always has to keep it at the Met. And you know, all that jazz. But I would love that idea. And man, I would show up for those special party bid holder only events where you get to walk around and be like, "I own part of that thing at the Met.". That would be amazing.

Danny Aranda: - Yeah, that's rad.

Dennison Bertram: - All right. Thank you, everyone.

Nicholas: - Yeah, thanks for coming through.

Dennison Bertram: - Bye.

Nicholas: - I don't know if anybody else wants to come up and say hello. I see a bunch of cool people in the audience. Terrence, Django. People have come in and out. What's new with you, John? We really started this off by shooting the shit about DAOs. And actually, you know, the piece of feedback I wanted to give to Denison was, Juicebox needs this actually, like a page to point people to about governance. I feel like Tally is really oriented towards that in a way. It wouldn't support our kind of governance just yet. But it would be nice to be able to point someone to a place with, you know, whatever the description of the governance process, how to participate in temp check, et cetera.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

Nicholas: - I'd also love to see like a variety. I know he kind of commented that they're going to be supporting more than just compound governance. I've actually never participated in a compound governance. Have you ever voted in one of those, Danny or John?

John C. Palmer: - Do you mean for the compound protocol specifically or just comp forks, like comp style governance?

Nicholas: - Yeah, actually, what does Uni use for governance? I know you have a lot of experience with that.

Danny Aranda: - I think they use compound style governance.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, Uni is a comp fork. So not only have I voted in most of the proposals, but I authored one proposal that passed, which is the second one to pass. And that proposal was pretty non-controversial. That was just to lower the proposal submission threshold to a lower quantity of tokens so that more people would be capable of even taking a proposal to governance. That was back in March.

Nicholas: - What are the numbers?

Danny Aranda: - So the tooling for that was interesting. It's kind of party bit related.

Dennison Bertram: - Yeah, I did.

John C. Palmer: I did also with Anish. actually, we did a Uniswap grant in March to build a custom website and UI for something called Autonomous Proposals. This is also something actually that Compound developed. But the way that Compound voting and governance works is basically, you have a few important numbers, but one of them is the proposal submission threshold, and it's an amount of votes or delegate votes that are granted towards you that you need to have in order to be able to submit a new proposal. Anyone with votes can vote on proposals, but you need to set X number of tokens that you need to be able to write proposals. Obviously, what this is all about is just, can you get the delegate votes? But there's this idea of an autonomous proposal, or sometimes referred to as a crowd proposal, wherein you deploy a smart contract, and that smart contract holds within it all of the information for a specific proposal. But that contract itself can have votes delegated to it. If enough people delegate their votes to that contract, it submits the proposal on everyone's behalf and votes for itself. So this is a cool workaround Compound governance to let people delegate to a proposal instead of a person. So Anish and I built a cool UI, which is a proposal builder that let you write up a title and description and choose an arbitrary chain of smart contract function calls, which it would then compile into packed bytecode and deploy an autonomous proposal. Then there was a UI where you could see autonomous proposals and delegate to them. Then after we build that, I use the tool to write a proposal, an autonomous proposal because I didn't have the delegate votes that I needed to write this proposal myself. But I wrote an autonomous proposal that said, "Hey, the proposal submission threshold should not be 10 million uni.". That was like $400 million at the time. It should be two and a half million. So like a conservative 75 percent reduction, which would have taken the number of accounts capable of writing proposals on Uniswap from about 20 to about 150. We submitted that proposal. It actually then ended up getting 10 million delegate votes, and it went through. So today, the Uniswap proposal submission threshold is two and a half million uni.

Nicholas: >> That's super cool. Wow. That was phish.vote, right? >> Yeah.

John C. Palmer: It's called phish.vote. It is actually currently out of service because it's just using the code for Governor Alpha and Uniswap recently migrated to Governor Bravo. But for everyone listening, it is also totally open source. So if anyone wanted to make a simple pull request to update the contract ABI for Governor Bravo, I would be happy to merge it for you and update the deploy.

Nicholas: >> I have a question. So phish.vote was made through a Uniswap grant, correct?

John C. Palmer: >> Yes, that is correct.

Nicholas: >> Is it possible to do retroactive, like let's say somebody, I guess this is not that big of a fix, but let's say it was a bigger change required. Would it be possible to pass Uniswap grants for paying somebody for something that already happened?

John C. Palmer: >> There's no precedent for it, but it's totally on the table actually. So yeah, I mean, the way that would happen now is you would just submit a proposal to the grants program that said, "Hey, I would like, in this case, maybe a couple thousand dollars worth of uni to make this change.". And that would probably go through since it's a tool that's already been approved by the grants program. There hasn't been a retroactive grant yet as far as I know, but it's totally within the ethos of Uniswap governance, if you just look at the values of the program. So yeah, I guess it's yet to be seen.

Nicholas: >> That would be interesting. I had another question for you as a Uniswap expert. Is there a place where the relationship between Uniswap Labs and Uniswap DAO is spelled out? Is that in a governance proposal or written somewhere on the company's website? Maybe you don't know this. I'm just shooting in the dark.

John C. Palmer: >> I actually know. I don't know the best place to point you to. I mean, I could point you to like the --. I think there's maybe a pinned post on the Uniswap governance forums, and I also believe there's different copy on the website that alludes to this, but I don't know the best place. I'd be surprised if it wasn't written in like a canonical form somewhere. It's easier to point back to the relationship between Uniswap DAO, Uniswap governance, and Uniswap grants program because the grants program originated out of a non-chain proposal, so you can actually see, "Oh, here is when the DAO voted to create this separate entity. Here's its mandate. Here's its process. Here's how it's run.". Of course, that's different in the case of labs because labs preceded a UNI token.

Nicholas: >> Right. That's it. It's an immaculate conception of the relationship or something. It must be somewhere because they're using that structure to try to be legit, so they must have that spelled out somewhere, but I wonder if it's public. I'll have to ask somebody right at Uniswap. >> Yeah.

John C. Palmer: I'm sure we could find it if we poked around online for 10 minutes or so.

Nicholas: >> I'm also curious. I don't follow this stuff, but how many grants go through Uniswap grants program? What's the throughput? >> Yeah.

John C. Palmer: Today, I believe wave six just went out, and I don't remember the exact numbers offhand, but I think there's something like 11 grants in the round. I believe that puts us to date somewhere around 80 or so grants lifetime since Uniswap grants program started, and the cadence there has picked up. Waves are happening on a slightly more frequent cadence. I'd expect there to be something like 50 or so grants a year, but again, there's not a scarcity to number of grants. It's more like as many high-quality grants that are within the mission of UGP get proposed will go through, provided it doesn't exceed the budget of the grants program, which was, of course, set by Uniswap governance in the first place. So it's hard to predict. I think one other thing I worked on this year was building the visual identity of the brand for Uniswap grants program because I think it's quite possible that the number of grants accelerates a ton, not because the grants program in particular does anything, but just because more talented builders realize that they can get money to just build some really cool stuff from the grants program. And so one reason for doing that brand work was saying, well, the Uniswap grants program at the time was just using the Uniswap logo on a separate Twitter account, and it didn't look all that polished at the time. And I thought it would be really cool for the grants program to have a really awesome visual identity, wherein getting a grant, like applying to the program and becoming a grantee would feel like something that awesome developers and builders were really proud to get into. And so, yeah, I mean, there's no set limit or throughput right now. It's really just all about how many people have ideas and can build stuff and want to apply. And I should note, it's not just about, they're not just developer grants. There's a number of grants happening for people who are working on community education. There are newsletters funded by the grants program. So really anything related to Uniswap and also broader Web3 infrastructure is all kind of within the mandate there. I think the grants program has given funding to open source Ethereum clients and other tooling. that's not even Uniswap specific.

Nicholas: That's super cool. So when the proposal was written to create the Uniswap grant, I imagine it included what amount of funds should be allocated for it. And did it say anything about, maybe you don't remember this, but did it say anything about how that entity would manage its own staff? Is it written right in or is it delegated to some group of people who can choose their own staff? How does it work?

John C. Palmer: Yeah, I forget the original numbers in the proposal around budget and stuff. I think it was something like a million dollars a year and they were going to fund it for one year to start to see what could be done there and if it felt worth it after a year. In the original proposal, I believe the proposed structure was a committee of five committee members who would all work together to review grants and decide what to fund out of the grants program. And those committee members would also be multi-sig signers on a four of five multi-sig, I think it is, or it was proposed at the time. And then there would be one committee lead who is responsible for basically managing the overhead of running the program. And that person is Ken and he's still in charge of UGP. He does an awesome job and has really done more than anyone else to get the program up and running. And it did propose, I believe, an hourly rate in USD in that original proposal that he would be paid. It did not offer a ton of guidance around how the committee members would work and it did not offer pay for the other committee members who were mostly meant to be in a lightweight review role. But the program was updated after that first year for a V2 in which a couple of signers on the multi-sig were swapped out and there was a broader hourly rate approved with, of course, an hourly cap on how much people could get paid. But that approved anyone on that committee to work on working with grantees and supporting their projects, reviewing applications, and doing whatever other work was required to keep the program running.

Nicholas: - What's the fastest way to find prior Uniswap proposals? I ended up going to Tally. Where would you go?

John C. Palmer: - I think you can just go to uniswap.org/gov. Or for me, I think the native UI, I'm pulling up my computer here.

Nicholas: - Oh yeah, there's a link on the homepage, /governance.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nicholas: - Governance portal, I guess?

John C. Palmer: - Well, if you go into uniswap.org, yeah, it's /pound/vote. It's a little confusing with the pound in the URL. But if you go to uniswap.org, there's the button that says Launch App. And then in the app, in that top menu, there's Swap, Pool, and Vote.

Nicholas: - Oh, okay.

John C. Palmer: - It has the UI for all this stuff. And you can see, they have their own proposal creation UI now as well.

Nicholas: - So nine proposals so far, one pending. The rest, a mix of executed, defeated, and canceled.

John C. Palmer: - Yes, that is correct.

Nicholas: - That threshold is doing work.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, yeah, the threshold's doing work. But I think another thing here is I think it can go a long way to seed ideas for proposals and to clarify what the mandate is for usage of treasury funds. I think there's maybe just a broader question for uni holders and the community that's involved in governance to know what should people submit on-chain proposals for. There's also a bit of a social cost sometimes as well. And so I think this is something that I'm pretty excited about, is that there's an organization called Other Internet that just got a larger grant from the grants program to conduct a year's worth of governance research and experiments, a combination of researching how decisions get made, running experiments in terms of writing and publishing ideas for what Uniswap governance could do, et cetera. And I think simply getting more experimentation happening and also clarifying what the range of activities that Uniswap governance might be doing could really accelerate the amount of things happening there. I mean, you've got a few billion dollars worth of capital in the Uniswap treasury, and most of it's just sitting there, not even earning yield, let alone doing slightly higher leverage activities. And so I think figuring out how to put on-chain treasuries like this to use is a huge unsolved problem within all of crypto. And I think there's a lot of good that could be done if we can figure out how to take huge pools of capital like this and use them in ways that are effective, either for an organization like Uniswap or even just like the broader ecosystem. So I'm pretty excited to see what they do with that grant.

Nicholas: - Awesome. Yeah, I totally agree. That's something people have tossed around a little bit in the Juicebox Discord, ideas about putting the treasury to use or part of the treasury. It is an interesting question, especially if someone like Uni were to do it.

Danny Aranda: Wow.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, it's worth checking out. Other Internet has recently done two smaller grants, one for Uniswap and one for Pool together, which were simply research reports and ethnography studies on Discord activity. And so they had researchers observing different Discord servers and channels for a few months and just kind of writing, publishing public research on what the patterns are that they observed in these kind of crypto community Discords and some takeaways and recommendations for communities that want to have more effective off-chain governance processes happening in these social channels. So if you haven't seen those, they're both out there somewhere, probably on the other Internet website, and you can kind of read some of the research that's been done there before.

Nicholas: - Yeah, I'm just going to pin them in the Twitter right now. That's incredibly interesting. I haven't spent a lot of time with many of the other Internet articles, but I know they write sort of well-researched stuff about, is it only DAO specifically, crypto in general, even things not crypto sometimes. All right, I see we have Cash wants to speak. Hey Cash, what's up?

Speaker 3: - Hey there, how's it going?

Nicholas: Sorry, I was on mute.

Speaker 3: So super interesting to hear John explaining different things. So my question was, I just launched DAO today. So our goal is free college for everyone, and the idea is to unbundle the whole college experience and build it on-chain. So some of these, what are the great resources for tokenomics? I think that would be my questions. Should we choose Mirror, raise money on Mirror, or Juicebox, or where should we go raise? And I know it's a little bit far away from Uniswap grants, but if John can add something on it, that would be great.

Nicholas: - Yeah, John, which should the people use?

John C. Palmer: - Just ICO, no, I'm just kidding.

Nicholas: - Yeah, put it in your own chain, L1 or die, come on now.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I feel like honestly, that use case is right up Juicebox's alley. So I know you're more involved there, Nicholas. I feel like it's really hard to know without knowing kind of what the plans are for a specific organization. I feel like there's a number of good ways to capitalize a project on-chain, and maybe one first question is kind of like the longevity and timescale of the organization. I feel like what I've seen from Mirror Crowdfunds, and this is purely anecdotal, is just that they tend to be geared towards a project that kind of has a finish line maybe. So we're going to go complete this project, period. But then again, a number of DAOs have been formed there that have continued to live on to date. So I don't know, I don't have a perfect answer, but there's a lot of good products for it.

Nicholas: - Another cool thing is that even if you issue one token, if there's shared community will to switch to a new token, or even like we saw FWB Hot Wallet that was sort of out of their control was hacked, and it caused a crisis in their tokenomics, and they were able to essentially fork the community with a new token, there is flexibility. So maybe one way to put it would be like, start with something that's applicable to what you're working on, and maybe as simple as possible to start might be a good place, because you can always add more features later with new contract work.

John C. Palmer: - Yeah, and the other thing I'd add to that, less than I've seen personally with PartyDAO and with other organizations, is I think more so than like the platform you use is before doing any kind of crowdfunding or token issuance, I think you want to write down and make clear exactly what it means to hold that token and establish upfront as much process as possible, as much clarity around process as possible, before those tokens end up in a bunch of people's hands, because if you don't, as soon as you have a bunch of token holders, any kind of changes to process or any kind of work you want to do will be slowed down or bottlenecked by either infighting over what the governance should be, or just confusion around like who has a say. And so I think like up until the point that you launch your token, you have kind of free range as the originator of a project to clarify as much as you want. And then after that token's in people's hands and you're decentralizing decision-making, every change beyond that point is going to be like an amendment or something. I mean, look at, bad analogy, but look at like something like the constitution, the bulk of it's written up front and then you've got this really heavy amendment process. And I think that's not just circumstantial, that's because of the way these things work. And so for me, I think one lesson from PartyDAO is I really wish we'd, now we have a pretty good cadence and set of precedents now, but it would have been really helpful up front to clarify. And of course I didn't originate the project, so it's totally out of my hands.

Nicholas: - You did write a very good post very early on in the history of PartyDAO. I remember you shared a sort of mandate for PartyDAO and people really got on board.

John C. Palmer: - Totally, yeah. I think in terms of like setting what the mission was or like some value statements. that luckily was somewhat clarified there, but I think what would go a long way as to early on, even before the token went out. So like, here's what the token means, here's how the token will be used. And here's the set of decisions that this token governance has control over. And here's the set of decisions that it does not have control over. So then it's very clear and nobody is either entering the DAO who doesn't want to kind of go along with that process. And also then there's not kind of debate over like what even needs a vote or not and how does that vote even work? What's the threshold that would be required to pass? These are all kind of like really hairy questions once you've already got a token out there that you could just like answer ahead of time by just putting in a little bit more effort.

Speaker 3: - Thank you so much. That was definitely very helpful.

Nicholas: - Yeah, that's very, very good advice. Very, very good advice. I don't know if anybody else in the audience wants to ask a question.

John C. Palmer: - It's probably time for me to cruise. I got back from a run and I'm gonna go get ready to have some dinner. But Nicholas, thank you so much for hosting and seconding Jackson Dame's tweet that he stands Nicholas's voice. Definitely good Twitter spaces/radio host voice. So it was a pleasure talking.

Nicholas: - Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. I've open-sourced my setup at Jackson Dame's request. - If you want this very same microphone, we can find out how much of it is the microphone.

Danny Aranda: - You can replicate the voice. You can replicate the voice.

Nicholas: - I don't know.

John C. Palmer: - Actually, you can do what Holly Herndon does and open-source the voice model.

Danny Aranda: - And add it to your voice and option it off.

Nicholas: - Okay, I'll fractionalize, sure.

John C. Palmer: - All right, peace out, everybody.

Nicholas: - Nice talking. I would love to hear from Terrence if you want to talk on Dope Wars at all. But in case maybe you're not in a situation where you can speak. Or Django, if you want to come say hey. Anybody else with DAO topics to discuss? Danny, I'm curious. For PartyDAO, PartyDAO works, like Juicebox. I don't feel works like in sprints particularly. Maybe I'm just not in it enough, but it seems like something happens every day. And I'm often surprised what it is. Does PartyDAO work more in sprints?

Danny Aranda: - Yeah, it was never a deliberate or intentional model. I think it came out relatively organically, but basically PartyDAO came together on AmeriCrowdFund. It was 25 ETH initially, and then there was a mandate to just go produce a V1 of a relatively high-level spec of what PartyBid was. And then a team formed after that to people basically volunteer, raised our hands to contribute and go build that thing. And that process took roughly two to three months. And then after that was done and we launched it, and it felt like there was some user reaction to it, the next step was like, okay, let's just do the same thing again. We'll just do another kind of two to three months of work on this product and then kind of iterate on it and produce the next version. And so that produced this rhythm of, yeah, I don't know what we're gonna call them yet. There probably should be some terminology. I'm sure there is some DAO terminology out there like seasons or epochs and so on. But there is this concept that, yeah, contributors work on a rhythm of two to three month cycles. that has like a budget assigned to it, which has treasury consequences. And then also has some high-level goals, which are primarily articulated as kind of product goals. right now, given that the main focus of PartyDAO is to build party-bent software.

Nicholas: - Interesting. Django, what's up? Welcome.

Jango: - What's good? This is a really great conversation to tune in at the very end of. I wish I'd got the beginning.

Nicholas: - You never know. It might go for another two hours.

Jango: - It might go for fucking ever. I just stepped out of a spot that was blaring music. So now I'm in a fitting space to speak. Otherwise, it's nice just listening in the background as you do other things.

Danny Aranda: - Nicholas, you didn't tell me this Twitter space was never going to end, that this was just going to be.

Nicholas: - It's permanent. - Going forever.

Danny Aranda: - This is it.

Nicholas: - This is streaming straight to Arweave.

Jango: - It turns out we can all stand Danny's voice too.

Nicholas: - Ah, okay. This is going to be the new meme. I was actually thinking earlier, what if this show was at a late night show instead? I don't know. I tried to pick a time so that it would be convenient for people when people are starting to slack off anyway. But there is something about the endless conversations. It seems like real D-Gen hours are around 11 or midnight or something.

Danny Aranda: - Yeah, it's a good point. What about 10 p.m. on a Thursday or something like that?

Nicholas: - Yeah, it's the new Letterman or whatever. Jet Leno.

Danny Aranda: - Nicholas is the new Leno.

Nicholas: - Oh my God.

Jango: - I also love the theme of reflecting on things people are currently working on and then things that are very future focused like solving college tuition and digging into what the hell that means. 'Cause infrastructurally, it's one thing, but then conceptually, we could do that for hours. What the hell? That's sick.

Nicholas: - It's true, yeah. Unbundling the college. A lot of people are very angry at college. I feel like a lot of people who are very angry at college had very bad college experiences. I've certainly had levels of education that I didn't like, but I was very happy at my college. So I know I was unusual for that reason, but I don't have the same animosity towards the whole concept of college, more like badly run colleges. But there's lots of people in the startup scene who would answer Cash's request with like, "No, college must be destroyed outright.".

Danny Aranda: - Well, the thing with college in the U.S. is the expense. I mean, I'm sure playing people have a good, varying experiences at college, but how much is it now? It's like $250,000 to send someone to college for four years?

Nicholas: - I remember I didn't go to RISD, but I passed through, and I remember their tuition was something like $78,000 a year or something like that for like a four-year art degree. - Crazy, and don't quote me on the numbers, but I think tuition generally increases something like one, two, three percent per year anyway. So it's sort of approaching infinity eventually.

Danny Aranda: - Start a DeFi protocol, which are options on future college tuition so you can lock in a rate 20 years from now and create a DAO for that DeFi protocol and solve everyone's problems.

Nicholas: - Yeah, problem solved.

Danny Aranda: - Problem solved, that's it.

Speaker 3: - I've been itching to jump into this conversation.

Jango: - Yeah, I'm very curious to hear Kash's take.

Speaker 3: - Yeah, so I grew up in Pakistan. I moved to San Francisco five and a half years ago, and I was a journalist in my previous life. And when I came here, I decided that I want to work in tech. And I thought I should go to college. And when I saw the college fee, I was like, "Hell no.". Can you guess my whole 16 years of education in Pakistan, how much does that cost? Any wild guesses, anyone?

Nicholas: - Wait, what's the question? How much does what cost?

Speaker 3: - My 16 year of education back in Pakistan, how much does that whole thing cost? Any wild guesses.

Nicholas: - I'm gonna say free. I'm gonna bet zero.

Jango: - It was $2,000.

Nicholas: - Okay, okay. 16 years, that's what level. to what level?

Speaker 3: - Like grade one to like... So in Pakistan, they call masters at grade 16. So you can call it undergrad level. Yeah, and that was my most expensive degree. But the point is that the whole thing cost me $2,000. And here, when I came here and I saw that $200,000 why would I give four years of my prime career and go to college and do that? So that was the inspiration from start. Then I went to a coding bootcamp, learned to program, worked for Adobe and did all of that. So I think that is unfair. A lot of people are putting their important life decisions like having kids or buying a house or because of that financial strain that the college loan and student loan put on them. So for that reason, I'm passionate about it and I want to solve this and see if we can build the community and solve this.

Danny Aranda: - I mean, that's rad. It's an enormous, endemic societal problem. It's huge. I think it's a great problem to try to tackle. It's also like an enormous problem. It's intimidating.

Nicholas: - Yes, it is. - What was the name of the startup that was doing, oh geez, I'm not going to remember the terminology for it, but they pay for you to study and then they take 10% of your salary if you make at least a certain amount and not more than a certain amount. - Lambda School? - Yeah, Lambda, that's it, Lambda. YC kind of project. I know there's been mixed feelings about that, especially in its earlier iterations. I don't know if it's improved, but that was one version of sort of buying your future education, buying your education with your future salary or something. I don't get the feeling. that's what you're after though.

Speaker 3: - There is another startup, Andila, you might have heard about. So they train people for three to six months and they sign the contract with them that they will work for them for four years. So they get actual hands-on experience and while earning money and the computer science degree at the end.

Nicholas: - I think the Singaporean government does exactly the same thing.

Speaker 3: - Really? I didn't know that.

Nicholas: - I know that they will pay for foreign education in exchange for years of work equivalent afterwards to pay off the bill essentially.

Speaker 3: - That's interesting. Yeah, so there are certain models in front of us and John's advice when I was taking notes when he was mentioning before issuing the token really sort out what you want to do with that. So we will follow one model and try to be as fair as possible to everyone.

Nicholas: - So is your goal to provide a kind of traditional campus experience, American college campus experience or like online, do you have a sense of what you're after?

Speaker 3: - So yeah, so we asked this question, why do people go to college? And we identified there are six main factors. Number one is getting credential and then for the college experience, a promise of a job, networking, lifestyle, prestige. So we want to unbundle all these six parts and build it on chain. For example, if we want to build a credential for someone as a software engineer, if they are committing their code on chain and they're selling NFTs, right? So this is a good enough credential, right? You don't need a piece of paper anymore to prove that you are capable of doing something. So this is just one example of how we are thinking of unbundling.

Jango: - It sounds like if the intent is to work for a DAO of sorts, then the education coming from a DAO and the financing might make sense. But I'm curious how many younger folks or their parents have that intent ahead of time.

Nicholas: - Also, I would say if there's all these different things to be unbundled, like most likely a computer didn't look like a typewriter or whatever, or they didn't invent a new kind of ink, it's probably going to be just tackling some piece rather than the whole thing. It's interesting that you say DAO because to me, I describe SharkDAO as DAO school. And really, I think every DAO is DAO school for people who are involved, even if they're quite experienced, you're always learning something. So I wonder if there's something intrinsic about it being a DAO that could be educational, that could be valuable, or if that's just join any DAO.

Speaker 3: - Sorry, I didn't completely understand this question.

Nicholas: - I just mean like a DAO is probably, you're not going to have an on-chain college. You're going to have 10 other things that sort of overlap with what a college did. And so maybe it's not going to be, it almost certainly won't be 100% skeuomorphic to what college looked like previously, but instead there will be many different things in many different ways that serve the same kind of needs. And one of those things is actually participation in a DAO itself, is I found very educational and potentially lucrative in terms of the knowledge that you gain, expertise. I think in five years, most people in most offices are not going to have an idea of what to do to run a DAO. But the people who'd spent their time in certain discords will. - So it's like we talk about, what was the other one? Like a DAO politician is one of these kind of Andreessen new jobs. And the other one I think about sometimes is like a airdrop officer or something, like somebody that you hire who maybe manages many people's wallets, claiming all of the airdrops you have access to, and maybe liquidating NFT derivatives that are pumping and they have no faith in or something. So maybe there's some, I don't know if learning about DAOs is the thing that you're seeking to teach particularly, but that does seem like something that DAOs are intrinsically good at teaching.

Danny Aranda: - Okay, could that be, like you could imagine?

Nicholas: - Oh no, I lost Danny.

Jango: - Damn, I lost Danny too.

Nicholas: - I think probably got a phone call.

Jango: - It reminds me of Denison's earlier comment of Bartholomew's bone owned by some king. It's interesting to have like a history lesson also, but like applied to what's currently happening. How can we teach each other history via these same mechanisms that we're currently teaching ourselves? other things, more modern things, but really kind of thread the needle throughout how humans behave in DAO format, or in a modern sense.

Nicholas: - The first thing I thought was, when's a DAO going to try and buy that bone?

Speaker 3: - I just want to add a few things here. I understand there are the question that you asked, or comment that you made that something overlapping related to college. The thing is that college in current state, it's an old institution. It's been there for hundreds of years. Don't get me wrong. I'm not against college. I think it has pushed through a lot of innovation and advanced the human civilization in great ways. I'm against what my problem is against like being so expensive for billions of people. And when we say it's our college, DAO college for everyone, it means for everyone.

Nicholas: - Right, right. I'm just thinking like, DAOs are probably going to change more than just where the money comes from. We can't just be dumping $275,000 or whatever it is into every American's college fund through a DAO. The solution will probably have to do with changing the economics of getting an education in America, or some people believe the increasing irrelevance of a lot of these degrees relative to actually getting jobs, which is unfortunate because people end up also throwing out all of the other brilliant things about college that are not directly monetizable. So this is just my opinion. I would think that maybe one should focus on some aspect that people get out of the college experience rather than try to just find an alternative way to fund the exact, because in the end of the day, if you create a DAO that just collects money to pay for people's tuition, then they just end up paying, you know, like Khan Academy is a version of everybody's, give everybody access to the information held within academia. So I don't know how to, it is just a comment. It's not really a question.

Jango: - But I don't think we've seen yet a DAOfication of the endeavor, and it'll probably need to go through several experiments before getting to something that might scale. Although the question Cash brings up of how to start a foundation towards this end is certainly interesting, because I mean, we're still experimenting at the infrastructure layer and the tooling layer, but the actual endeavor is pretty experimental in itself. So lots of questions and maybe not enough answers.

Nicholas: - Yeah, I think one thing that is interesting about DAOs as it is, is that the people who are interested in them are very interested in them versus a lot of traditional schooling kind of makes people anxious and isn't a fun experience, which is crazy because it should be. So maybe education that people are excited about would be a priority for me for any kind of new initiative to educate or to offer education to people.

Speaker 3: - Sorry, I got to run. Thank you so much for giving me the space and sharing the thoughts. We'll be issuing a white paper very soon, and a lot of these questions that you have raised, I hope we'll be able to answer and some other comments, so we'll be able to answer. And as Django said, that this is an experiment, there might be some different versions of this. So let's see where we go with this, but thank you so much for giving me the space.

Nicholas: - Awesome, yeah. Come say hi in Juicebox Discord if you want to chat about how you could use Juicebox for your project. - Yeah, sure, I'm there.

Speaker 3: I'll say hi.

Nicholas: - Cool.

Danny Aranda: - Thank you.

Nicholas: - See you around. I missed somebody who wanted to come speak. If you're still around, feel free to ask again. Danny, how's your phone doing?

Danny Aranda: - We're back, baby.

Nicholas: - Did you overheat?

Danny Aranda: - I ran out of batteries.

Nicholas: - Classic.

Danny Aranda: - Right, right, right in the middle of a thought. I don't think it was a very good one, though. It's fine.

Nicholas: - I don't remember. About college, surely.

Danny Aranda: - I think it was about the idea of Dow School. - Oh, yeah. - Maybe this is a Juicebox idea, when you first go to the Juicebox website, juicebox.money, and you're like, "Okay, I just want to check out Juicebox." And you don't know which one to join yet, or you don't really know what to do. The first thing you do is you join the Getting Started Dow. And that kind of runs you through the motions of contributions, contributing some work, voting, kind of all just the normal actions you would do. And then it also maybe helps with discovery of other projects. And then it's essentially like an onboarding thing. And it actually can be used also for onboarding new Dows, too. And it has a treasury. It potentially grows a lot. You can actually imagine some economic opportunities around it, given the discovery angle and also kind of like onboarding contributors or potential members and that being monetized in some form. And that can be like a Dow in its own right.

Nicholas: - What if you just click a button to like get one JBX on L2, and then everybody who has one JBX you know is like, you know, starter learning Dows in the Dow learning program.

Danny Aranda: - Like Juicebox Dow is the learning Dow?

Nicholas: - Yeah, I'm messing with your idea, but yes.

Jango: - Is it oversimplified or overkill? This is on RinkBeat. Is RinkBeat harder to use for most folks? - Or is it more accessible?

Danny Aranda: - I think it's, no, assuming most people are on MetaMask, like you just have, like, you know, you just have a mirror wallet on RinkBeat and that's easy. I, it's actually, the tough part about RinkBeat is it's non-obvious how to get tokens into, like to actually get ETH into your RinkBeat wallet.

Jango: - Yeah, same page. That seems to be the bottleneck, but from an educational perspective, it seems a little bit easier to play with it on there and really understand your risks and responsibilities out of time. Although I love the idea of an experimental version on mainnet, although things tend to be expensive. So I'm with Nicholas that either L2 or perhaps a RinkBeat pretend version is really enticing here.

Nicholas: - It would be cool to get, to get a, well, either in its own DAO or JBX bridged. Like, I don't think anybody has bridged JBX to Polygon yet. I feel like Polygon might actually be easier for people because RinkBeat has a weird name and what is a testnet? And Polygon probably has a lot of like TikTok material about it. Maybe people know about it. I wonder. JBX on BSC. Oh no, wait, there's a scam. Don't, don't buy JBX on BSC, especially if it's issued on BSC. I see some other people in the crowd here. Synth, you want to come chat? Anybody else got a question?

Synth: - Yo, are we talking a multi-chain JBX future here?

Nicholas: - Yeah, I think there was a little bit of non-financial advice being slung around.

Synth: - Do you mean like alpha to buy JBX?

Nicholas: - No, no, no. That's the last thing I mean.

Speaker 3: - Oh.

Nicholas: - No, but it would be cool to have, to have JBX on, on chains where it's cheaper to move it around.

Synth: - I was, I was happy though because my Uniswap position is now back in range. So I am, I am participating in liquidity providing, doing, doing a service to all.

Nicholas: - The blockchain. thanks you undoubtedly.

Synth: - Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, I am super excited for like layer two feature. I was tweeting about it the other day and, you know, in, in Sharkdown, I put out an announcement like a couple of weeks ago about how, it's like asking if anyone was waiting to join Sharkdown because of the, the, because of gas. Gas has gone down. So I don't know if like, they were just, you know, saying they were going to join and then not actually wanting to do it. But, but I really do think that the moving shark to, to layer two would help with, with accessibility and, and allowing people to join who, cause, cause we don't have a minimum. So people who just want access to the discord and access to the group could, could be able to join through, through layer two.

Nicholas: - So that's awesome. Maybe Shark really does become Dow School. Like that's the purpose. Get some Shark, join Dow School.

Synth: - Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to formulate it. Like, like I am wondering, because, you know, we keep tossing around the idea of like Shark Dow's business model and stuff, but it could just be like projects that people do like, you know, ad hoc. Like there's no actual product that we do. It's just a bunch of different projects grouped together under a Dow. That might be Shark Dow's future. I'm still, still toying with the idea. It's kind of hard to materialize, but, but the vision does become clearer. And I think it'll help once we get the profile picture projects up and running and seeing what, what new interest that brings to Shark. But I didn't mean to hijack the conversation.

Nicholas: - Yeah, super interesting.

Jango: - Is there any appetite for an experimental version of any of these protocols that prioritize an L2 deploy, but it's kind of unapologetically, slightly experimental still? Maybe an alpha builds, maybe one that has gone through Rigby tests.

Nicholas: - Oh, you can do like, like the corruptions function names, which are all like, I agree to whatever, like I disclaim any, you know, like the whole function name is super long and includes a sort of click-wrapped kind of agreement. EULA in the function name.

Jango: - Interesting.

Nicholas: - Maybe no interface.

Jango: - I feel as though, yeah, just making use of the, the kind of un, like there's a lot of block space in these L2s. It feels Rigby-esque, but it's obviously like the bridgeable, actual use that you're, that you're using. But it still seems potentially like a playground where if it takes hold and is actually useful and people actually give it real credence, then it has value. Otherwise it's just a precursor to a more official mainnet release.

Nicholas: - I would love to see that for what it's worth. I think it's crazy that we aren't all playing on these L2s, or at least on Polygon, that's been out for so long. It's like, where's the fun? I was really happy. Did you see that contract I threw together? The leaderboard one? That was like three hours of just like-- - Yeah, it came up quickly.

Jango: It came up quickly.

Nicholas: - Yeah, so I-- - I'm curious. - Yeah.

Jango: - We're going, I was, I was gonna, I'm curious to hear what Danny thinks about NFTs and party bids for NFTs on different layers. I know NFTs are a different subject slightly. They're kind of given particular credence on, on mainnet. But it's, there's certainly opportunity all around.

Nicholas: - It seems like NFTs on L2s haven't really taken off, and people sort of hate Polygon because it's full of spam because it's so cheap to mint and OpenSeal even pay for your transfers. Have you thought about L2, Danny?

Danny Aranda: - Yeah, it, you know, it comes up from users who obviously complain about gas and those things. And I think, so the party bid smart contract is doing a few things. One, it's interfacing with NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and Zora and Foundation and so on to actually purchase NFTs. It's also interfacing with Fractional, and you can also imagine like additional ways to like own or share an NFT based on different protocols. So, and then, you know, Fractional is integrating with Uniswap. Uniswap is on L2s and so on, but, you know, the deepest liquidity is on L1. So, you know, party bid, one way I look at party bids, like it's kind of like this like singular instantiation of like a product experience, but with a lot of different protocols interacting and composing with each other underneath. And specifically the supply of NFTs is pretty important in marketplaces for those NFTs. And that you don't get a ton of on L2s. So that makes some of the L2 conversation a non-starter. And I suspect that party bid, you know, who knows what like the very, very long-term roadmap looks like, but I suspect that party bid will remain for some medium to long-term, like very much about like actually calling functions in order to do certain actions in acquiring things or doing things with the funds that are accumulated into a party. Rather than being kind of like arbitrary, okay, we're putting this money into a multi-seg and we'll do whatever kind of trust the counterparty wants to do with it. It'll be about, you know, actually like doing some type of, you know, calling some type of smart contract function like bid and purchase and so on. So the conversation about moving to an L2 does become about like the ecosystem. I mean, you know, I did spend some time with, you know, like in the L2 space, just kind of researching and spending time with those teams. And I think that's like the big go-to-market challenge is, you know, how do you convince kind of all these developers? And usually you're talking about the same, like, you know, 5,000 Ethereum developers to like all migrate at the same time to kind of create that network effect. But that's really, I think that's a really hard problem to solve. And I suspect it comes, you know, right now you're already seeing kind of like, you're basically seeing all that kind of the stages of crypto being replicated on L2 just like a faster pace. So it's like, you know, you can transfer your ETH into Optimism. And then, you know, Uniswap is on Optimism. And then some of the DeFi protocols move on there. And then I guess eventually you get to the NFTs. But I'm just curious about how those ecosystems are going to think about broadening what they're doing or bringing more developers on board.

Jango: - Yeah, I feel like there's always this dependency cringe almost. The more dependencies you have beneath you, the more unstable you perhaps feel. And you really want this stability as you create your own experiments on top. And Mainnet certainly feels like the most stable place for experimentation 'cause everything else feels like an experiment in its own right.

Danny Aranda: - Yeah, I also think like for, like I think the reason that new use cases and new products get created in crypto is because there's more like tooling surrounding it. Meaning, you know, we talked about an example earlier. Like there's that kind of traditional Web2 company, Otis, that it lets you kind of like buy a share of a painting and they're gonna start minting like physical objects on chain. The reason they're doing that is 'cause like, if they're like, okay, well, there's a ton of liquidity in the NFT space. If we bring like, you know, a really famous painting on chain, maybe we'll find liquidity there too. And so there's nothing like special or decentralized about like just minting a painting on chain. that's gonna be held by a custodian. It's more about like, well, just the market becomes so big on chain that you're gonna wanna get access to it.

Jango: - Got it.

Nicholas: - So Danny, you're saying L2 party bid, unlikely because there just isn't a massive NFTs there yet. Is that a partial summary?

Danny Aranda: - That's a, yeah, that's a good partial summary. I suspect like a lot of developers feel the same way. Like if there's just kind of like less overall liquidity of both, you know, capital, but also other projects to compose with, other tools to kind of get access to, then that becomes very difficult. But I suspect, you know, Nicholas, I think you and I have talked about this before, like I suspect there is some point at which, you know, gas fees start to outweigh some of the cost of migrating. And I guess it's what we're seeing now. Like I'm sure you could actually like, you know, someone smart could actually calculate it out exactly how that works and why you're kind of seeing additional activity on like Solana or L2 or anywhere else.

Nicholas: - To me, the biggest problem is I was waiting for, I called it, I thought this last summer would be L2 summer. I made a t-shirt for myself that says L2 summer because I thought people would onboard directly to Polygon. I thought people would be buying, and I still don't understand. I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, you know, L2, like Arbitrum, ETH gift cards should be a thing. It should just be really easy to onboard directly into L2s and sidechains. And I guess a lot of people come from centralized exchanges, but why can't you just get an Arbitrum, ETH gift card in a vending machine?

Jango: - Yeah, yeah, totally. That is the thing that is preventing us because honestly, I'm super down to experiment and sure, take on some risk, but also have a little fun over there. I think the big thing is, imagine a constitution now where there was an additional step for people to bridge their ETH to Arbitrum. Sure, you would, I mean, A, you'd pay the--.

Nicholas: - Oh, Django's mic cut out.

Jango: - Yeah, so A, you'd pay the fees to bridge, and B, you would feel way lost, like three transactions in prior to even contributing to the campaign. So it's a big trade-off right now to take the users to the user journey of, "Hey, here's Web3," and then let's make all our way up to Arbitrum or L2. But I think it's certainly our responsibility to start experimenting there and taking risks and playing around. I think the team there has been doing a lot of great work and ready for folks to come in and put weight on it. So I'm excited to head over and try things out, at least as they're in experiment phase for ourselves, as we build V2 and whatnot going forward.

Nicholas: - I think it would be really cool to see, I mean, I think people should be playing with Juicebox, and I don't know if PartyBit is on Rinkabee, but we should encourage a culture of playing with this stuff and also deploying kind of crummy contracts, especially on Testnet, and just having fun with

Synth: them. - I do have some thoughts. Oh, we lost Django. Maybe he'll be back. - But I have been thinking a lot about the whole L2 movement and I think part of the problem is it feels like a bootstrapping issue, because from my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, I think we have a few solidity devs on here, so, but roll-ups work by bunching up transactions and then submitting them to mainnet, right? And they get cheaper as there are more transactions. So right now, Arbitrum is not that cheap. It's like, I don't know, I think I was providing liquidity on Uniswap on there. It took me like 40 bucks or so. So it wasn't nothing. It was better than over 100 you would get on mainnet or something. But it wasn't like a 10x, 20x improvement. It was more like a two, three x improvement. And it'll improve over time as more people join it, but it'll only get better if people join it. So people are just waiting for other people to join so it gets better. and then you create this kind of negative feedback loop or a bootstrapping problem. I don't know what to call it. But it's kind of difficult to get people to go on. Convincing them that it will get cheaper, but it isn't cheaper just yet.

Danny Aranda: - Well, there's also the question of what happens when these L2 networks become clogged and become just as expensive as L1 or starts to become, I mean, you're basically pointing towards that, right? It's like, it's not a 50x improvement. It's just a two or a three x improvement. And Arbitrum, just as an example, like the network is called Arbitrum 1, which maybe implies there will be an Arbitrum 2, 3, 4. The relationship between them is kind of interesting to think about whether they will be kind of parallel networks, kind of side by side, just like you're just a parallelization thing. Or if Arbitrum 1 will kind of be like the point which you always kind of access the rest of the Arbitrum networks, which are roll-ups on top of that Arbitrum network itself, like more of kind of like a tree diagram or something like that.

[Unidentified]: - Hi, everyone. I was interested in finding out if Juicebox was integrating into any L2, like Polygon or Arbitrum.

Nicholas: - At present, no, it's not. I mean, the contracts are open source, so I suppose anybody could deploy them, but no.

[Unidentified]: - So what do you feel about the UX of the existing L2s? And as a dev, how approachable do you feel they are? 'Cause I feel one barrier to entry is the mental shifts of moving from Ethereum to an L2, which in reality feels like an entirely whole new L1. Sure, you can write solidity on it, but it's still a roll-up, right? You're not executing on Ethereum directly. So as an NFT dev, or as a dev at Juicebox, how do you feel about L2s? And is it on your roadmap to integrate L2s?

Nicholas: - Yeah, I think Juicebox is interested in L2s and would like to reduce the costs. Juicebox has some gas optimizations that Django wrote into it that are pretty cool. Like when you pay a project, it doesn't mint the ERC-20s directly. Instead, the accounting is done in the contract itself. They're called staked tokens, and then you can claim them and mint them, unstake them in the contract's language. I haven't played with L2s, so I don't have any informed opinion about the dev experience on L2s. - Do you believe in them? - Yeah, I think everyone's excited about them. I don't know, I've been hearing a lot about Starkware lately, Starknet.

[Unidentified]: - Yeah, but in reality, if your customer focus, the idea is to make the blockchain more approachable for your customers, right? So a major focus would be to reduce costs at the end of the day, 'cause cost is a major UX barrier. So the idea is you would expect also people to migrate to L2s. But personally, I feel like the mental shifts of moving to an L2, as opposed to running your contracts on Ethereum, isn't particularly easy for everyone to do. And it's nice to talk to someone that actually works on a protocol like Juicebox, and seeing you haven't migrated to an L2, it's quite telling where L2s are right now.

Nicholas: - Yeah, I think there's just not that many people who are there yet. I think the other thing is also that all of the contracts that we're dealing with on L1, many of them are, you know, Juicebox launched to Mainnet in July, I think July 15th. So we've been busy.

[Unidentified]: - Yeah, I hear that, I hear that.

Nicholas: - Working on V2, I think, has consumed a lot of the dev attention the past couple months. Writing tests, planning for audits, et cetera. So I think, just in a practical example, the Juicebox protocol devs are working more on V2 than thinking about how to deploy V1 to L2. So maybe once V2 is around, then it'll be a more appropriate time for us to think about just bridging tokens, and then maybe allowing you to make contributions and have tokens issued on L2. Perhaps those tokens are tokens that are bridged from L1, you know, like sort of proactively issued on the Juicebox protocol on L1, and then bridged to L2, and then issued through some new contract on L2 that can collect the funds and then bridge them back to L1 in exchange for L2-bridged project tokens. Or maybe there's a smarter, you know, maybe if you've been mucking around and have smarter ideas, please hop into the dev channel and talk to us.

[Unidentified]: - I'm interested in some adoption pattern that most protocols would take for L2. So particularly for Rainbow, like Rainbow is mostly a UI, so it's mostly like just tweaking the URL you make. The URL you make your RPC request to, so just changing to Abilutrum or Optimism or whatever. But I'm interested in seeing actual protocols like deploying on L2 chains and how that would look like. But yeah, that's my question.

Nicholas: - Yeah, great. I don't know if Danny or Synth, if you know of any cool L2 deployments. I don't think I, you know, I played with like Uniswap V2 redeployed on Polygon.

[Unidentified]: - Yeah, I saw that. I saw the grant for that as well, and the proposal for that. It just seemed really cool, but yeah.

Danny Aranda: - I see Graham from Mirror in the audience too. I know he's thought quite a bit about L2 implementations and so on, and maybe he has thoughts about how Mirror's thinking about it. Could be instructive.

Nicholas: - All right, I'll invite him up. We'll see if he's able to speak.

Speaker 3: - Yeah, we'll see.

John C. Palmer: I have to get rolling.

Danny Aranda: This was really fun.

Nicholas: - Awesome. Yeah, I think we'll probably close this out pretty soon.

Danny Aranda: - Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me.

Nicholas: - Thanks for coming through, Danny. - Totally. - You've now been on 100% of the episode supply.

Danny Aranda: - I intend to keep my impeccable record. I'm going to try to show up to every single one that I can.

Nicholas: - Do you think this Friday afternoon time slot, I actually thought a lot of really cool people rolled in around six. I'm wondering if we could do later. I know people don't like to commit in advance to hanging out on a Friday night on Twitter. So late afternoon is sometimes easier.

Danny Aranda: But I think maybe when people start getting a Friday afternoon-- - I think six might be like, like kind of you're finishing with work. Maybe you want like a little bit of space, but then it's like before dinner. Yeah, it's just the idea.

Nicholas: - All right, we're going to keep experimenting. Well, thank you everyone for coming to hang out for episode two of Web3 Galaxy Brain. Episode one and episode two eventually, but episode one in short order will be posted to a podcast feed. So I'll spin up a website for that. So you can follow me. If you're interested in catching a link to that, it'll be in Spotify first because they're faster to allow podcasts into their directory. And then later on, it'll be coming to Apple for obvious reasons. So thank you everyone for coming and see you next Friday. - Thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter @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.