Bankless - SotN 6/29: PleasrDAO and the NFT Bear Market | Jamis Johnson

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Jamis Johnson is a founding member and Chief Pleasing Officer of PleasrDAO✨. We bring him on to hear about the state of PleasrDAO, and the NFT bear market! ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https...://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini   🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave   🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ 📣 Ledger | Securely Exchange with Paraswap https://bankless.cc/LedgerYT2  ---- State of the Nation #49: The State of the Charts Guest: Jamis Johnson PleasrDAO is a fascinating experiment in internet culture. At the intersection of DAOs, NFTs, and internet culture, Jamis Johnson works as Chief Pleasing Officer. In this NFT bear market, we look forward to what happens next in this emerging space. Now is the time to be paying attention to this space. The start of PleasrDAO was with pplpleasr's "x * y = k' NFT following the release of Uniswap V3. It was an organic eruption of collaboration for a shared social cause. The emergence of PleasrDAO is a salient demonstration of the nature of DAOs. In many ways, they resemble an open-world sandbox game, where individuals can come together in a flexible domain and organize collectively. What began as a fever dream auction has coagulated into a flexible, powerful organization for the curation and management of big-ticket NFT items. The future of PleasrDAO remains open, but there will be more to learn as this Culture DAO continues trailblazing. ------ Resources: Jamis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_jamiis?s=20  PleasrDAO on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PleasrDAO?s=20  PleasrDAO: https://pleasr.org/  ----- Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 10:00 Jamis Johnson, Chief Pleasing Officer 18:42 The Start of PleasrDAO 26:49 Getting on the Map 33:30 Snowden and the Gallery 39:40 Rugged Coordination 46:30 Plans for PleasrDAO 55:33 Participating in the Future 1:02:41 The NFT World 1:08:15 The Next Big Catalysts 1:12:22 Closing & Disclaqimers ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, Bankless Nation. Welcome to another State of the Nation episode where we talk about what is happening in the crypto community related to some big picture stuff and drop some insights and action items for you. David, I'm back from vacation, man. You did a great job. I don't know how many podcasts you streamed or recorded last week, but like great job, man. Well, since this is happening so early in the show, I'm going to have to throw out a disclaimer because Ryan is on a cell data. He has local internet issues where he lives. And so we are working our way through that.
Starting point is 00:00:45 We have tested it out a little bit. And so we spent some time in Zoom. Usually it's been going well. But he is having some internet issues. But he looks like he's back with us right now. Ryan, you were talking about how good of a job I was doing. Well, you were doing a great job. And I'm just saying, I'm still trying to get caught up on all the content you guys produced last week.
Starting point is 00:01:03 So it's a crazy task. Anyway, State of the Nation comes at you guys every Tuesday. release it on YouTube live, and then we also release it simultaneously on the podcast. David, what are we talking about today on State of the Nation? We are talking all about Pleaser Dow, and Pleaser Dow is a really interesting experiment that I think more people should have their eyes on because they have a bunch of really smart people with some really cool plans for Pleaser Dow. And for those that aren't familiar, Pleaser Dow is a Dow that is specifically going after very specific, very targeted, high-value internet culture NFTs. And so there's a
Starting point is 00:01:37 a conversation to be had about, you know, the intersection of DAWS and NFTs and internet culture and as well as the rest of, you know, Ethereum and Defi as well. So there's a lot to unpack. And so we brought on or bringing on at James Johnson, who is, I guess, informally titled Chief Pleasing Officer over at Pleaser Dow, the benevolent dictator of Pleaser Dow. And he has a really cool vision for Pleaser Dow that we want to hear from, hear from him all about that. And then as well in the second half of the show, go into a conversation of those, like, what's being built in the NFT bear market, right? Now that things are kind of quieting down, we're not getting celebrities, just doing random NFTs. Like, what's going on behind the scenes?
Starting point is 00:02:21 Like, we kind of had our first NFT equivalent of Defy Summer, like right after Defy Summer. And so what happens next? What happens in the next, like, you know, NFT, like, Mania, NFT, like, Resurgence? Where, what's, what is James seeing behind the scenes? I got some questions for him all about that. Yeah, if you guys know anything about crypto bear markets, of course, in sectors like defy or any sectors like NFT, now is the time to be paying attention to these sectors when everyone else is not and when they're not mainstream. Now's the time to be paying attention, making your purchases, getting invested, making your buys. David, before we get into it all, let's talk about what's new. We just released an Heath Bullcase episode on Monday.
Starting point is 00:03:03 This is like a sequel episode to when we did six months ago. Six months ago, the price of ETH was 650. We had three ETH bulls on, and they called for much higher prices across the board. We got those high prices, went all the way above a 4K. And now we're back in kind of like doldrums, I guess. I mean, we're above 2K. It's phenomenal. But it feels like the market has cooled down from some of those highs.
Starting point is 00:03:27 So it was a great opportunity to bring the bulls on again and to get their takes. What do you want to say about that episode? Yeah, I think we're going to continually do this bull case for Ethereum episode. every roughly six months or so because, you know, the bulk case for Ethereum changes roughly every six months. And so this is going to be a reoccurring theme just to keep ourselves updated with the general valuation thesis and ideas of Ethereum at large, right? It's a moving target. And so it's going to be a consistent piece of content to come out of the bankless sphere every, every six months or so. Eric Connor took his, took his leave from the cast and we brought in
Starting point is 00:04:03 Cyrus UNessi, who added a great, just, you know, alternative perspective that we didn't get the first time. And so definitely go listen to that as well. Put that in your to-do list to listen to that episode. Speaking of bankless content, David, I've heard you got a new show. You went renegade while I was out and you're going and launching whole new crypto shows. What's what's happening? Right. Going rogue. So we are launching a top signal. We announced it literally a week ago today on the last date of the nation, which with my co-host Michael Wong, who's not going to be the co-host of Top Signal. It's all about comedy. It's all about.
Starting point is 00:04:36 entertainment. It's a it's nothing we say or do or anything on top signal will be fact checked. So everything is a in a super position of the best alpha you've ever heard and a total shit post. Pardon my language. But it's it's going to be an opportunity to like unwind and relax and actually make and produce some content for you the listeners to consume content that feels like a content comfort food, right? You know, let's create a different vibe with like crypto podcast. And so we got some pretty cool get like bit. and gags lined up where there's going to be some drafting going around and some points being allocated. We got some plans. And so if you are a bankless Dow member, you get access to the Zoom webinar.
Starting point is 00:05:18 And so the Zoom webinar link is in the Bankless Dow Discord channel right now. And so the bankless Dow is actually going to be like our audience, right? And we're going to find ways to interact and engage with the audience and pull the audience and make sure that they are a part of the show. And overall, this is an experiment that we're just trying out. How are we? going to make this funny. We don't really know. That is a part of the show itself. Everything is a little bit of experiment. But I think this, I think this has a lot of potential. So I'm pretty excited for it. That is happening. 6 p.m. tonight at Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern Time on the bankless YouTube. And then if you're a Dow member, make sure you go and get your front row tickets by the Zoom
Starting point is 00:05:56 webinar link that is in the Discord. Dude, the way you're team this up, it feels like it's going to be like late night TV, late night comedy or something. Late night show. Late night talk show, a little whose line is it anyways, a little of our own little spiffs and spaffs. Yeah, it's going to be fun. That's going to be fun. I'm going to be in the audience, man. I'm not going to be on that show. I'm maybe in an audience like heckling you or contributing as I can. I'm really looking forward to that though. Okay, last thing, before we get into the episode, Ledger and Paraswap. That is kind of the Marvel team up. I know both of us have Ledgers. Everybody in the bank list community probably has a ledger, but you can now do some really cool stuff with it, David. What is Ledger announcing here? Yeah, the cool thing about
Starting point is 00:06:35 specifically the Ledger Live app, if you have not tried out the Ledger Live app, make sure you go try it because it is a piece of software, especially when newbies come into this base and they're like, all right, I want to go try this Defi thing. Where do I go? Where's like the Defi place? Ledger Live is actually the Defi place. They are, as Defi gets built out, more and more apps are going into Ledger Live, the software.
Starting point is 00:06:57 And so if you want Defy all in one spot, check out Ledger Live. They just integrated Paraswap. Paraswap is a Dex Aggregator. So now you can swap your tokens, swap your Ethereum. tokens through Ledger Live using Paraswap. When Paraswap does all the hard work for you, gets you the best rates, gets you the best quotes, and it's all accessible through the Ledger Live app. So check that out. There's a link in the show notes if you want to go and try that out. New way to use your ledger. And of course, Ledger is bankless technology, which we really like and
Starting point is 00:07:24 support around here. All right, David, I'm going to start with the question. I ask every single state of the nation, which is, what is the state of the nation today, sir? The state of the nation is pleased. We are pleased this week. We're talking to Pleaser Dow, and so I'm pretty pleased that we're talking to Pleaser Dow. Disclaimer, I'm a part of Pleaser Dow, and so there's my disclaimer there. But also we're pleased that ETH is back above 2K. And I wrote in the Market Monday this week that the window of opportunity for ETH really just like falling through this like 2K floor and really going down to previous all-time highs, which is what the bears were calling for. I think that window is closing. And I'm pleased that that window is closing. And then also,
Starting point is 00:08:02 Ryan, I'm also pleased to have my co-host back. I missed you last week. know, it was great, it was great to have some time away from crypto charts. I only, I probably only checked prices like once a day, which is like a record low. I don't know, 99% reduction price checking for me. And I didn't, you know, check socials either. So it was nice to be back. It was nice to be away, but it's also nice to be back. I'm feeling refreshed. I'm excited to dig back in with you here, David. So I'm pleased to be back as well. So we should take a break for sponsors and then we will be back with James Johnson who is the chief pleasing officer of Pleaser Dow to dig into this story. Balancer is Defi's most powerful automated market maker. Typical AMMs just have
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Starting point is 00:09:59 Avey is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum and just recently released AVE version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using AVE even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Avey, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral. Here you can see me getting a 200 USDC loan against my portfolio of a number of different DeFi token and ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable
Starting point is 00:10:38 interest rate option, but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently. One of AVE's V2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets, trade them on uniswap, and then deposit them back into AVEA. Avey does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction, so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral you have backing them. Check out the power of Avey at Avey.com. That's aavee.com. All right guys, we are here with James Johnson. Like we said, the chief pleasing officer over at Pleaser Dow, who's really the guy, I think, with the motivation and the vision to really take Pleaser Dow to the next level.
Starting point is 00:11:17 We're going to get into all those details. James Johnson took his, apparently, took his student loan money and invested in the Ethereum ICO. And so... What? Yeah. And then also correlated to that, also has a D-Gen score of a D-GEN score of 20. So a true ape of his kind and a true member of the bankless nation. James, happy to have you on to talk all about Pleaser Dow NFTs and the whole gamut of conversations.
Starting point is 00:11:43 Thank you. Thank you. That student loan money, I still have an email that I sent to all my friends and family that says, this will change everything after I read the Ethereum white paper. And of course, none of them listened to me, but I cite that email every once in a while. Oh, my God. Did you pay that student loan back, by the way? Or is that still outstanding? It's still a little bit out of the same. In the interest rate on that. compared to the defy gains, you know, you gotta balance the two. Yeah, that's right. Debt is cheap these days compared to the gains you can win being a defy-dgen. So James, let's go into a little bit more of those details.
Starting point is 00:12:15 Before we get to the story of Pleaser Dow, and perhaps it's just a little bit more about your background. What about crypto really gets you excited? Are you like an NFT guy? Are you a DFI bro? Or your little mix of everything? Like, what do you pay attention to in this space? I mean, and I apologize early on that I am a little bit sick. if I cough, I'm sorry. But kind of my beginnings were just a fantastical realm of ideas that could be built on top of Ethereum. That kind of moved into retirement around the end of 2017 as I felt like there was a lot of vapor
Starting point is 00:12:46 underneath this whole ICU craze, which was great to kind of remove myself. But, you know, when I saw compound for the first time in 2019, it was another one of those aha moments that these systems are being built out and you can actually use them. And that was just kind of the beginning of leading into DFI summer. All of these financial constructs that are being sucked into the Ethereum network just really could not be more exciting. And I think that, you know, the next big movement that we're seeing play out is the whole category of non-fungibles. You have fungibles and you have non-fungibles and there's a universe within both that you can explore. And I think we're just barely beginning to tap that.
Starting point is 00:13:29 So I want to get this straight. actually, so James, because this is a super interesting story. So you're there during the initial Ethereum ICO, right? You made a big bet on that, like a really big bet. But then it sounded like you got jaded in 2017, the end of 2017, with all of sort of the futility tokens, ICOs. But then you kind of came back for defy and NFTs. Am I getting that story right? And I guess I'm curious with this sort of a through line, if that story indeed is right. What did you see in the original Ethereum ICO that made you think this is going to change everything. And then how is it like the same or different now than what you expected? Well, yeah, when I was a, I was working as a program around
Starting point is 00:14:09 2012 and we would have these water cooler conversations about Bitcoin. And I was like, I'll throw a thousand dollars in. And of course, I was too lazy. And I watched as that $1,000 would have turned into a million dollars. And I basically beat myself up about that. And then when I went to do my master's here in New York, you know, I was like, this tech. technology is not going away. It's also very funny. I thought I missed Bitcoin. But, you know, the whole paradigm shift for me when I read the Ethereum white paper, which was posted just as a comment and I think of Bitcoin subreddit back when the subreddits were still palatable. It was basically just, you know, I was in computer networking courses and I had been learning about,
Starting point is 00:14:48 you know, IP, HTTP, TCP, UDP, and the standards of like information transfer and how the entire in the network and how these protocols, you know, are stacked on top of one another. And then it just kind of like, I read this white paper and it was like, this is the value transfer trust layer, computational layer protocol. It will allow us to just use turning complete languages to program any construct of trust and value. And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. And then, you know, going forward, I mean, it was years until we got to 2017.
Starting point is 00:15:23 I was mining. I was doing a lot of machine learning, a lot of generative art. a lot of NLP and a lot of computer vision. And then, you know, just that slow tug of crypto pulling you in. 2017, I was kind of moonlining as an investor. And I think towards the end, it just got so scamy and so, like, post a white paper with a team. And that's all you have to do to raise $4 billion, you know?
Starting point is 00:15:47 You had your EOSs and ripples and IOTAs. And but there wasn't, you know, that the tag tweet, have we earned it yet? And I think I just got so overwhelmed with it. the amount of stuff I had to sift through even to find the gold nuggets and, you know, the diamond and the rough. And it was almost just like a natural retirement. It was like I was just overwhelmed. And I was like, I'll just turn these hands into diamonds, let it ride. I know, I know the future of Ethereum is strong. And that took a lot of mental capacity to watch it ride down 95%. But I was, you know, I was strong enough in my belief that this is the future. I do not at all think
Starting point is 00:16:24 in a 2017 bubble situation. There's just too much utility undergirding the system. And I think that largely when it comes to NFTs, there's kind of a reflection of the 2017 bubble. But, you know, ultimately it feels like these adoption cycles compress over time, very similarly to like any technology, you know, vacuum tubes going into transistors and Moore's Law and the rate of internet speed and nodes on the internet. And I think that NFTs could likely be in a state where, yes, there may be a long tail,
Starting point is 00:16:59 99% of NFTs that are ultimately going to burn individuals. But there's just, there's too much capacity in the network with Defi and with these platforms that we're seeing that have products that people are actively using. And there's too much dispersion of the infrastructural tools like Metamask and even centralized tooling. and interest from big names that are Web 2.0, that I just don't see it going as the route of the 2017 bubble. And that was a lot of information there that we can cover. But that's kind of my take on it right now. And I think that what you just said about how there's so much infrastructure and so much else going on is really a through line to talk about pleaser doubt, right?
Starting point is 00:17:47 And even though they are already totally different, ICOs and NFTs, they could. could still go through a hype bubble and bust and then, you know, NFTs are real. They will, they will make themselves, you know, they will pick up the scraps. But there's what's really cool about the NFT world right now is it's also being coupled by the Dow world and the Defi world, where like ICOs had to like exist under their own weight and they couldn't bear that weight. And so they crumbled. NFTs also have like alliances with the concepts of Dow's, with the concepts of DeFi with and just overall a more mature ecosystem. And I think the, the Pleaser Dowell is really at the head of that, right?
Starting point is 00:18:25 Not only is Pleaser Dow specifically a Dow going after NFTs, but it is also a Dow, right? It's not just NFTs. It's also got this supporting infrastructure. So let's get into the conversation of Pleaser Dow. So, James, you were there from the beginning. And people that have been paying attention probably know the story because we reported on it on bank list,
Starting point is 00:18:43 did a little interview with Leighton Kusack, who he threw up this tweet about when he realized that he wanted to purchase the uniswap v3 X times Y, equals K NFT and then quickly realized that he was going to be like immediately out of his budget. So Layton Kusack threw it out this tweet. It's like, hey, who wants to pull our money together to buy this really awesome uniswap NFT? That was the formation of Pleaser Dow. But Pleaser Dow has come a long way from just a group of people in a telegram group pooling their money to buy this uniswap NFT. So maybe you could pick up with that story left off and lead us down the progression
Starting point is 00:19:17 of Pleaser Dow and what Pleaser Dow has done since it purchased the Uniswap NFT. Yeah. So, yeah, let's just go through the story. It was a very special moment in time. Basically, I had been following, I had turned notifications on for Layton Cusack's tweets because I was the highest honor. You could give someone on Twitter. Yeah, well, I was a, I mean, I still am a Unisox holder. And he had mentioned that if Unisox crossed 100,000, that he was going to have a dinner for anyone who had one or more Unisok. And I was like, you know, I'm going to that dinner. And we can get in later to like what that means, you know, how the world is changing where your on chain history is kind of becoming the defining
Starting point is 00:20:02 characteristic of your digital identity. But I turned on tweet notifications. I get, you know, I knew people pleasers art very intimately because anyone who was around during Defy Summer knows that she was kind of a seminal artist of that entire special moment. And I had actually kind of been in contact with her early. earlier during Zai Protocol debacle. That was a fun one.
Starting point is 00:20:26 But yeah, so I get this tweet, and it just says, who wants to form a Dow to buy People Pleasers piece? And I had already known that the piece is being auctioned. So I immediately just said, I'm in. Through just being a D-Gen in Discord and all over Twitter, I had become very close with Blue Kirby and with Andy 8052. And so the next tweet, I just pinged them and said, you know, let's do this.
Starting point is 00:20:51 that evolved into a Twitter DM chat where Kirby refused to move forward until I did something hilarious on video. And then we just kind of had a casual chat for about four hours. And then finally I was like, all right, let's just set up a telegram group and just start pinging everyone we know. And that was just a surreal moment to, you know, I had met Mario Conti at DevCon. I reached out to him. I reached out to Alex Nanavik. I was going to at one point do some machine learning work for him. Everyone just continually started reaching out. And it was just so surreal to see this telegram group be like, you know, Santiago has joined, Turun has joined, popcorn Kirby, you know, Darrell Lau, G-Money. It was just like what is going on. It was a Friday night. We were all
Starting point is 00:21:37 kind of out. I was, I had this dinner plan and, you know, trying to coordinate this. And also starting the bidding process and Andrew King drops a hundred-eat-bid and we're like, get them in here. So you're in the bidding process for the Uniswap V3 NFT. You're collecting all these big names, heavy hitters in the defy community to all pool their funds. And then Andrew Kang bids on the NFT under his own weight, right? And so he's bidding against the Dow. And then like you said, you said, get him in here. So how did you guys reach out to Andrew Kang?
Starting point is 00:22:12 Someone in the group knew him. I'm not sure who ended up getting them. Every time we do an auction, it's pure unadulterated chaos in the chat. Someone grabbed him and he decided to join the Dow. So this is a really cool story about Dow's at large. Is that instead of Dao's being competitive, the Pleaser Dow being competitive with Andrew King, they're like, Andrew, just come join the Dow and be aligned with us instead. Like, pull your money with us rather than competing for us.
Starting point is 00:22:41 And I had sort of this come to Jesus moment that night where it was like, you know, the future of art collecting. and even, you know, investment clubs is absolutely going to be DAWs. You know, Gopis will form a larger entity to compete with whales. And in the end, it was like, these DAOs are going to roll into their own cultural identities that kind of permeate across all these different platforms and protocols with like capital organization. And instead of just being an individual roaming around Web 3, you'll likely become, you know,
Starting point is 00:23:15 a member of or a subscriber of an ethos and a part. participant within a larger organization. And, you know, DADS have been around for a long time, but these, like, private DAOs have struggled to really take off. And I think we're really seeing a very compatible merging of art collecting and cultural curation and even, like, investing, angel investing. Those concepts, I think, are being made very seamlessly with DAOs. And, you know, we're very rapidly seeing these NFT platforms in particular, but also web
Starting point is 00:23:47 three blogging platforms like Mirr and like portfolio display platforms like gallery.com. So really quickly understanding and deploying features to embrace DAOs. I think DAWS will be a first class citizen. You know, in Web 2.0, you have your cultural identity that's inside of a walled garden like Instagram. But ultimately, we're going to have more of an amorphous fluid identity. And I think DAWS will, you know, it's kind of like. the word e-commerce. Eventually, you're going to have that moment where DAOs are just a known word,
Starting point is 00:24:22 or maybe you didn't have to have the word DAO. But yeah, you saw party Dow came out and basically just re-engineered the process that we did with X times Y equals K. So now there are even decentralized tools where you can just say, I do want to be, I do want to bid on this piece, automatically forms a collective, distributes tokens to all the people that participated. And, you know, the future is absolutely collective organization. So we finish up with talking about pleaser Dow purchasing the X times Y equals K, but immediately Pleaser Dow kind of became something even bigger than that. It started off as just trying to purchase the gift, but then it turned into something more.
Starting point is 00:25:02 Was there like a moment where Pleaser Dow went from just like a single purpose Dow of owning this one NFT gift to something grander? Was there like an inflection point? Or like what was the transition between like, hey, now that we have this, this NFT, what do we do next? Who asked the first question, like, what now? Yeah, I mean, those first few weeks were pretty fun. Just a bubbling of a lot of ideas.
Starting point is 00:25:31 And we were very much all over the place. But, like, you know, I wasn't even sure. It wasn't even, like, known that we were going to continue this journey. Largely, we could have just stayed in the realm of holding this piece and doing something fun with it or selling it or, you know, just kind of being the owners of it. There was a, as we're moving forward, you know, people realized that we need hierarchy, at least a leader. And I offered because my full-time job was DGEN lifestyle.
Starting point is 00:26:05 And basically, I don't think I entirely knew how much responsibility that was going to entail. But I think the real shift came. I mean, I was drafting vision documents and I was drafting, you know, trying to harness energy of different ideas and focus on a certain path. But ultimately, I think it came when Snowden happened. And that was kind of a moment that we knew that we were on the map. That is a very fun story, too, which has not been public if people want to hear that. Yeah, no. Let's hear the quick story about how you got this Snowden NFT.
Starting point is 00:26:41 Well, I can't remember who dropped it in the chat. It may have been Alex Svanavik. You know, there were other NFTs that we rejected going after. But people were excited about, but we still didn't really know what our ethos was. And someone dropped the snowed in NFT and it was basically like, yeah, we all want that one. We didn't really have a clear path forward. We thought, hey, let's raise some money. In the meantime, after X times Y equals K, we were able to do like a fork of compound contracts, I believe.
Starting point is 00:27:10 And we created our own token. called Peeps and we distributed pro rata a portion of those tokens to the people who contributed money to the first auction which by the way the first auction we didn't we had to just give someone uh i think it was late and we sent him all of our ether to be the bidding individual because it was too early for dows to even connect to these systems and bid but ultimately we moved to a multi-sig you know we we put the nfts assets into that multi-sig we have a token underlying the ownership of those assets we have remaining ether we're going to have more protocol network tokens and fractionals in that multi-sig. But we were lucky enough to have Mario Conti to kind of just
Starting point is 00:27:46 lead the construction of that governance token. And so we essentially, it was about 12 hours before the auction end of Snowden. And I get, I'm in bed and I get a DM from People Pleaser. And she's like, are we getting this Snowden piece or what. And it was one of those, you know, those late night moments that are so familiar to all of us where you're like, oh, shit, let's go. So I just get out of bed, I'm in my robe, and just, we have a lot of members in Singapore and Taiwan. And so I'm just communicating with the, the Asian members and basically saying, look, we're going to raise money to buy this. And I think a lot of power of Dow's and, you know, I mean, the biggest power of Dows and multi-six is like capital efficiency and the ability for capital to move at speed of
Starting point is 00:28:32 information. And I basically stayed up all night. We gave ourselves evaluation. We started distributing peep's tokens to individuals. And there was a gigawail competing against us. And you can, you know, these are like early days when we're figuring out strategy for bidding. And he can see how much money we have on the blockchain. We can see how much he has. And it's clearly getting close to our exact desired price. And a famous unnamed individual who had decided not to participate in the round gave us basically terms of a last minute deal, which we all voted no on. And it was a very good offer. It was basically a zero percent extremely large loan for something in return for basically Peep's membership. And everyone voted no and just like literally four minutes left
Starting point is 00:29:26 before the auction is over and we've lost. And our chat is basically like, it's just auctions are so stressful and so adrenaline filled. And our chat is just kind of like, feeling defeated. And one of our members just said, you can have half my peeps. I don't care. And then another member was like, you can have half my peeps. I don't care. And he's like, all right, let's go. And he beams in a large sum of money into our Dow with four minutes left on the clock. Meanwhile, we cannot connect to the auction house through the multisig. And Mariana Conti has to write a custom, you know, function call that then has to be verified by three of the five multi-stake holders, we are all trying as fast as possible to, you know, execute that
Starting point is 00:30:09 transaction. I just throw gas up to 500. And we thought we lost it. We got one last bid in with like, you know, five seconds left. And that was the final bid. And we were able to take it down. And that's a story that no one knows yet. So that's a little bit of insight into the chaos. That is. I mean, it's crazy. These things are like very organic, chaotic organizations at this stage. like every Dow that has some sort of traction I found has been like that. I'm curious about this piece, though, James. Like, why is it so important? So also describe for people who aren't familiar with this story, like what it is,
Starting point is 00:30:46 what makes it special? Did Edward Snowden have some sort of role to play in this? Did he sign it? Did he, you know, are his private keys on it in any way? What's the significance of this? And why did pleaser doubt think it was so important in the first place? I mean, I think that a lot of us, because we've been in, you know, computer programming and, and, uh, the world of the internet for a long period of time, we're very familiar with the importance of what Edward Snowden did as the whistleblower. I basically blew the story wide open of, of, you know, what the NSA was doing worldwide as well as on its citizens, you know, inside the United States of America.
Starting point is 00:31:24 And so it just, it felt like an iconic he's from someone who is absolutely a historical figure. You know, art is controversial and, you know, Snowden is largely still a very controversial figure. And the piece itself has the text of a landmark court decision that ruled that the National Security Agency's mass surveillance program violated the law. And that all came from Edward Snowden's decision to leave the country and his family and friends. And, you know, in a way, sacrifices life to inform the public of what was happening. you know, beneath her nose. And on top of that, we are huge fans of donating to charities. This was for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Starting point is 00:32:11 And we doubled their annual budget overnight, which is pretty exciting for us. And that's also a part of the X times Y equals K Uniswap story that we also miss is that all of the revenue for the Uniswop NFT also went to charitable donations. And so not only are these two pieces of internet history, but all of the revenue from both sales went to charity. Right. I mean, yeah, so X times Y equals K as well as apes together strong went to against Asian and Pacific Islander hate. The tour piece went to the tour foundation.
Starting point is 00:32:47 And the Doge piece went to a lot of children's rights foundations in Japan as well as the Red Cross World Food Program. And we, I don't think we limit ourselves to charitable auctions. We do want to, you know, we're not going to be a nonprofit. We will be monetizing these assets. But there's nothing that makes you feel better than being able to give back. So when, how would you describe the desirable NFT for the, for please or doubt? Like, what is the perfect NFT? Does charitable donation like tick a box, but it's not a required?
Starting point is 00:33:26 box and like why did you pick Doge? Why did you pick like the the Tor browser, NFT? Like what's the, what's the theme of the gallery, the art gallery that the pleaser Dow is trying to produce? Is that even a concrete like conversation that you guys had? Or is it just kind of like a rough consensus kind of thing? There is always conversations about isolating that vision, but we're also willing to broaden our horizons at all times. There is an element of just consensus. this group formed around one ideal.
Starting point is 00:33:57 And so we ultimately do share a lot of overlap and like what we desire, right? And these things play out in real time in the chat. We do try to find guiding lights and guiding principles. I think Muni, Muni, who's a member, said it best. You know, we want to be the museum of internet culture.
Starting point is 00:34:16 There are a lot of important moments in internet history. You know, people pleaser defined defy summer. Snowden defined, you know, he's the whistleblower of the ultimate surveillance program on the internet. Internet tour is the definitive privacy protocol. And Doge is the, in our opinion, the top dog internet meme of all time. And so I think that is right now, I think that's our guiding principle, but we're not limiting ourselves to being too serious. I think the acquisition of Doge really kind of defined are that we're not joining with, you know, being a museum, we also want to be broader media, culturally identifiable organization.
Starting point is 00:35:02 Interestingly, the bidding war for the Doge piece itself was its own meme because everyone kept on bidding meme numbers, 1337-69-Eath.6969-420. The fact that the bidding war also invoked meme culture was something in of itself, I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, we were, we had DMs of, I think it was Zora, reach out to us and say, hey, could you stop doing like 20 decimal places? Because if that bid goes through, it's, it could, they have to like split it in smart contracts to various people. And they were like, we don't know if there's going to be a floating point bug or something like, calm down. James, I was, I've been kind of stuck on this phrase. You know, in American culture, like the term rugged individualism is, it's, it's, it's.
Starting point is 00:35:52 thrown about often, right, as kind of a virtue. And I think that that sort of applies to crypto, but there's another term that I think also applies to these DAOs, which is, you know, rugged cooperation, rugged coordination. And what I really see here is this ability to coordinate a pool of capital and go accomplish a mission is kind of the genesis of what DAWS are and what Ethereum can can do and create. And like for people who, aren't familiar with this world as, as you are. And like you had terms like multi-sigs, you're purchasing a digital NFT, you're bidding, you're talking to like these pseudo-anonadous characters, like people named Blue Kirby and Tetranob node, you're dealing with millions of dollars in capital with a multi-sig.
Starting point is 00:36:40 In my mind, I'm trying to like think of what this would take if you were to kind of coordinate, do this rugged coordination in the legacy world. Like, how would you even do this? So I'm I'm just thinking my head like, okay, I want to go bid on a banksy piece, an art piece or something. Like, how would I set this up? I'm trying to coordinate capital with all of these individuals across the world. Do I go and create an LLC, a C corp? What kind of like legal retainers are going to be involved? How do I get participation from, you know, internet, pseudonymous characters and people from Singapore and, you know, Hong Kong and the U.S.
Starting point is 00:37:18 And then how do I structure a bank account for all of this? And like, how do I pay for it? And the cool thing about this is defy and Ethereum and NFTs and DOWs. These are the primitives that give you all of that coordination capability right out of the box. And it's like magic. Have you ever thought to yourself what this would take to do in the legacy world or even if it's even achievable? Very much so. I might as well shill that I have a fun that I am doing with.
Starting point is 00:37:48 two partners. If you want to follow us on Twitter, it's underscore perceptive. Perceptive capital. And I got to tell you, I'm thankful that I'm working with some ex-Goldman guys, because just getting banks and auditors and all of the paper meat space, things aligned are just, you know, taxes and accounting. And I have to go contact my bank later today. And I guarantee that's going to take three to seven days. I don't know when the last time was that he walks into a bank, but it is a nightmare for sending a wire transfer. And yeah, it's been like a revolution of the mind for me. I think that like a lot of people focus on governance of Dow's,
Starting point is 00:38:28 which like, you know, those tools are very important. And there's like a whole spectrum of decentralization where, you know, as we get larger and larger, we're going to go from, you know, less off-chain governance polls and multi-sig trust to ideally kind of a representational government on-church. chain that can make sure that it's fully decentralized. But in my mind, like, as we slowly reverse engineer these corporate firm structures of doubt inside DAOs and these democratic ideals that we've been building for hundreds of
Starting point is 00:39:02 years to DAOs, you know, that will take time and there will be progressive decentralization. But what is the best part is the capital coordination. Like, it is outrageous. Like, even, you know, we're participating with the universe and my own Conti just writes a custom smart contract interaction. Now we're staked there. We've got protocol network tokens. We've got NFTs.
Starting point is 00:39:27 We'll have fractionals. We have an ether treasury. We can use the available DeFi protocols to maintain our treasury. And we haven't announced yet, but we did successfully raise around. And even, you know, VCs are becoming extraordinarily comfortable with sending USDC into a They are especially comfortable with full on-chain governance, but I just found that ridiculous. Because in the traditional system, it's like the amount of overhead required for all of these operations is just tremendous. And now we have the tools for anyone with an internet connection to have access to capital.
Starting point is 00:40:06 And importantly, you guys wouldn't have gotten the Edward Snowden NFT without the properties of capital coordination that Ethereum can really give you. You guys wouldn't have beat the buzzer on that. James, I know people pleaser or people pleaser, pleaser Dow has some interesting mechanisms to build on top of exactly what you're talking about. So like the Dow can become even more orchestrated, even more formal. I know you got some plans and some visions for Pleaser Dow. I want to get to those conversations as well as ask you just overall what's going around with the NFT world at large, the platforms that are innovating during this quote unquote NFT bear market.
Starting point is 00:40:43 So I'm going to ask you those questions right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to. to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's
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Starting point is 00:43:16 All right, Bankless Nation, we are back with James Johnson of Pleaser Dow. And Pleaser Dow has some plans, and we want to hear about them. And so Mechanism Capital recently invested in Pleaser Dow. And James, you and I have been talking about some concepts or ideas that I know you've been thinking about to kind of take Pleaser Dow to the next level. So tell us what's in store for Pleaser Dow and maybe use this as like a model for just overall the growth of Dow's, infrastructure and the growth of the maturity of the NFT ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, you know, there are not many DAOs, art collector DAWs, private investment does, smaller DAWs, have bridged this gap from 50 members to worldwide available membership.
Starting point is 00:44:01 We very much so look forward to getting everyone access to becoming an investor in our ethos and our principles and our underlying assets. And I think that, you know, first and foremost, our membership is Defi Native. We are looking at a lot of various interesting protocols and defy technologies that we can use to kind of bring our pieces back to the people. That's one of our driving principles is we want these pieces to be accessible to everyone. Hold out, you know, the traditional art world, oftentimes you find that famous pieces end up in vaults and they're purely a investment play.
Starting point is 00:44:39 While these are definitely investment plays for us, we want to open up access to anyone who wants to become a member or just hold PEEP's tokens that represent ownership. There are specific plans to get those tokens in the hands of people. I will say that, you know, we are looking at air drop mechanisms. I think that we're very interested in people who are in the NFT space as well as people who are charitable. Hint, hint, the alchemics hack. I think that like there's a lot of on-chain activity that kind of proves who you are as an individual that we can leverage. There are other mechanisms that we're exploring like we are exploring all of the classic yield farming, equinity mining techniques. One of our members is releasing a fractionalization protocol.
Starting point is 00:45:26 And I want to say too much, but if you are interested in working with us, we're trying to create a community. I would DM either myself or PleaserDow Twitter. You can just DM the words Doge. And we will start to, once that's solidified, we would love to bring you into a little select group community where we can all work together. My Twitter is underscore J-M-I-I-S. And the Pleaser-Dow Twitter is Pleaser-Dow.
Starting point is 00:45:55 So definitely DM us, just DM us, Doge, and probably in a week or two, we can start building a community around our plans there. So we're all extremely excited. So I'm curious here. So like Mechanism Capital, this is a VC firm, right? Defi, Crypto Native VC firm. I'm curious about their investment thesis here.
Starting point is 00:46:17 And I think they said it, and I'm reading a post here. Why did they invest in Pleaser Dow is kind of the question I have, right? And they said it's like investing in an art fund run by professional curators and art funds, traditionally have outperformed the S&P over the last 25 years. But they also say they are investing in the Dow brainpower
Starting point is 00:46:39 and the Dow community. Like this is sort of a like a play in both. Yeah, it's a talent play. It's a curation play. It's an NFT play, all combined. But there's definitely like a, an investment thesis here. It feels like for somebody like, like mechanism,
Starting point is 00:46:57 you know, capital. I'm just curious. your general thoughts on on that is just how how does somebody invest in the nfts space and like how does somebody even invest in a Dow like pleaser Dow? How should they think about these types of investments? Are they buying a community? Are they buying a set of assets? Do they not really know what they're buying? You're just buying future potential. What are your thoughts there? Well, I think red phone crypto, who's a member, had a really nice tweet and I cannot remember it exactly. But it basically was along the lines of, you know, we rebuilt finance and value. And now we're
Starting point is 00:47:34 rebuilding culture and, yeah, basically culture. You know, Suzu talks a lot about the value with the bulkcase for Ethereum is just one point is how do you value all of culture. We, we don't know the answer to that. I mean, you're seeing a lot of the big dogs come on. You know, I've talked to people in fact channels that these big Web 2.0 companies are actively. looking to integrate NFTs. You know, TikTok is definitely going to be integrating NFTs, I think only fans is as well. I think that there is a huge just media and culture and fine art play here that is just at its inception point right now. Also, Jesse Walden from Variant talks a lot about investment clubs. And, you know, if you take the capital coordination mechanisms of Dow's
Starting point is 00:48:24 and played out to its logical extreme, they're going to ultimately challenge these venture capital firms to an extreme degree. I mean, you're going to have 18-year-old kids forming collectives that do a better job than venture capitalists in their high tower. And we're just at day zero of this. I think that as these capital coordination mechanisms really start to shine, and especially L2 comes online, you know, you won't need that much capital for gas fees and people.
Starting point is 00:48:54 people will be able to coordinate to an extreme degree. I think that pleaser, you know, we had a special inception moment, a special birth, where we just so happened to get the biggest NFT influencers, the biggest defy natives, the biggest brains in the industry. And so I think the investment play is basically that we will have good taste. Or we will, you know, we will be able to also leverage all of these bleeding edge technologies. You know, we've worked with literally five engineering teams to try to help them produce features, whether those are social or multi-sick connective or whatever to kind of push forward the industry as a whole.
Starting point is 00:49:34 And yeah, I think that the future of Ethereum will shine with culture. Yeah, what's super interesting. So David and I have a, we're doing a podcast recording with a guy by the name of Luke Burgess, who wrote a book called Wanting. And it's a book about what he calls Mimetic Desire, which is like the thing he says underpins everything. Like we mimic each other's desires, right? And that's how we social signal.
Starting point is 00:49:58 And anyway, super interesting conversation here. One of the things as we were preparing that agenda that struck both David and I is it really feels like the internet is playing out in two acts, right? So like act one, you have back to your comment about like TCPIP and UDP and all these protocols. You had this communication technology, this propagation layer for digital mememic desires, right? So you have all of this internet culture that has been birthed since the 90s, 1990s, right? And now with the second act of the internet, which is kind of act too, the crypto act, we've invented this thing, the scarcity technology.
Starting point is 00:50:34 This is like digital scarcity technology. And now we can assign value to all of that culture. All that memetic desire that's been pent up, we can actually like assign value to those things and trade them in defy markets and coordinate capital around them with all of these. tools we've created. So what's super striking to me is like you take the Edward Snowden piece, you take the Doge piece. These are original artifacts of the act one of the internet that now crypto is bringing into like digital scarcity into this second act. And so like, well, it may seem sort of weird and bizarre and far fetched for somebody like mechanism capital to be like, we're just investing in culture. Oh my God, how much internet culture have we created over the past 20 years?
Starting point is 00:51:19 that hasn't yet been monetized. And that's what's so interesting about what you guys are doing with the Pleaser Dow. Any thoughts on that? Is that sort of? Yeah, I mean, I think that that plays in like, you know, I think people underestimate how much blockchain history will play into our digital lives and our daily lives. Like, I was in a funny tweet thread with Larry Sermak and Matthew Graham from Sinal Global.
Starting point is 00:51:43 And I just posted my D-Gen score and they were like, can we interview you? You know, I don't need it. And it's like, you know, you're going to be going, you're going to be doing away with credit scores in the social realm. You're likely going to be doing away with follower accounts. You might be doing away with resumes. The proof will be on blockchain of what you've done. I mean, that's why I followed late in Kusack's tweets because I was like, I have these exclusive rights to participate in this event, this real world event because of my on chain history. I have the ability to interview with some of the best minds in crypto because I have a high D-Gen store.
Starting point is 00:52:18 And I think the NFTs will largely be, you know, both digital and meet space access entities. Someone tweeted, can you imagine trying to raise money from VCs for an NFT project and you don't own a crypto punk? Like at the end of the day, you know, a lot of people who are not into NFTs are like, why does that, you know, why does that matter if I can just copy paste it? It's like, that is like, all they want to know is the provable history of your life that you are actually. That you're about that life. They're about that life, exactly. And, you know, Pleaser Dow definitely wants to integrate that as well.
Starting point is 00:52:55 We want to have a real world component. We want to throw events worldwide. You know, we want to have PleaserCon after DevCon or before, where it's kind of contingent on these digital historical records. You see friends with benefits and all these Discord gated communities where you can verify on chain if you have an NFT or if you have a certain number of tokens. And I think we're in the very nascent stages. of that playing out, and I believe NFTs will play a big role in that.
Starting point is 00:53:23 This is what I think bankless listeners should prepare themselves for. Crypto-Natives is what we call them on the platform. It's like your entree in history, your D-Gen score, that is your new resume. Like what dows you are a part of, where you've worked, your reputation, like that's going to be part of how you are evaluated in this new ecosystem. And if you guys have listened to our Josh Rosenthal episode where we talked about the new Medici, this new crypto renaissance that is upon us. This is how you become part of the new Medici class, right? You have to like level up your scores. You have to participate.
Starting point is 00:54:00 It's not a passive thing. If you want to participate by only owning Bitcoin and Ether, cool. That's great. Like that's the passive life. But if you want to really dive deep down the rabbit hole into this space, like go join a Dow. Go buy an NFT. Go be part of the bidding process. go figure out how to use all of these defy protocols. If you can't afford it on main chain, go do it in Polygon, right? Like this is a very active thing that we are a part of in a big movement. I think early adopters, as with buying Bitcoin and Ether in the early days, early adopters that are getting experience in how to coordinate capital will be the vanguard
Starting point is 00:54:39 of the future. And I think that's what you're talking about here, James. This is like, this is a whole new paradigm shift in how we evaluate talent opportunity and really like jobs. And it's going to affect everything that we do. Just to add on to that, but before I throw it back to you, James, there's like a certain amount of desirability
Starting point is 00:54:57 of having like a large on-chain footprint, right? If you were the average defy user throughout 2018 and 2019, you got over like $40,000 to $60,000 worth of airdrops. If you just use the average protocols. And what a D-Gen score, what that really is, is it's measuring the magnitude of your on-chain footprint.
Starting point is 00:55:18 Like how much surface area has your specific Ethereum address touched in all of Defi. Have you touched every single contract on Ethereum? Well, then you have a Defy D-Gen score of like one. You are the most D-Gen person ever. And like to some degree, that's your experience. That's like what you have done. And having that instantiated on chain is a useful thing to prove to other people that you are,
Starting point is 00:55:40 like I said, about that life. Totally. Could not agree more. It's like I play it instead of pay. to play, it's going to be play and earn. I think largely in the future, we're going to have much more of a gamified digital life. Even social will be more gamified. And yeah, I mean, you see it play out with like even Wall Street bets. Everyone's becoming finance. I think that as the financial system gets more digitized, it's just going to play a part in everyone's daily lives a lot more.
Starting point is 00:56:09 So, James, one of the reasons we wanted to bring you on is to hear about what's going on in the world of NFTs as it's kind of going through its first, like, you know, quiet period, right? It's kind of gone, it's gotten a lot quieter. There's a lot less going on. We still have some of these big name NFTs coming out, like Doge that kind of, you know, grab some headlines, but no longer. Jay-Z did something, right? Like last week, why I was out, I guess. Stuff still happening a little bit. Stuff still happening, but, like, there's a lot of, like, very big things that are happening, but, like, the basal level of just, like, there's no more, like, Cryptopunk Forks. There's a quiet time in NFT land. What's getting built?
Starting point is 00:56:45 So, like, I was paying attention to NFTs while it was going through its hype mania. But, like, now that it's kind of quiet it down, I've stopped paying attention to it so much. What's going on behind the scenes? Like, who's building what? What's the competition like? What's going on? First off, first off, it's not an NFT bear market. If you have a board ape yacht club.
Starting point is 00:57:02 That's true. Board apes are the bull market inside of the, inside of the NFT. Yeah. That was a very fun project and has, I think they're doing big things. And Cryptopunks. have seen like a, I think their floor just rose by like five E's, probably largely from Jay-Z changing its profile picture to a crypto punk. That's pretty dope. That's pretty dope. Not in line. Yeah, I mean, like, I think that projects will continue to, you know, iterate on the base layer of
Starting point is 00:57:35 innovation, whether that's through like integration with defy or even just further decentralization. I think there's some problems of standards. Like if you meant on one platform, it doesn't interact with another platform so seamlessly. I like what universe is doing where they're basically giving creators the capacity to build a Dow around their NFT projects.
Starting point is 00:57:55 You know, I think it's hard to predict what's going to happen in terms of like the innovations within specifically the non-fundable spec because like that's, it's an entire universe of ideas. What about the use ability? issue inslayer like the foundations, the rarables, the places where people go to produce an NFT. Have you seen sort of any innovation or progress or development in that realm?
Starting point is 00:58:21 Yeah, I mean, largely they're just building out features to integrate like Dow's as first class citizens. They want to have more of a social component. They want to drive traffic to their entity in a way where people can interact with one another. I think that there's a lot of infrastructure being built that people don't know about. Like, you know, I don't want to get, well, like, NFT encryption protocols will probably be coming online. And that's going to be like a base layer for allowing an entire world of renting out IP. You know, you can issue a decryption key and you can revoke a decryption key and I could sell or I could rent out my piece to a museum in Buenos Aires for the weekend or something. And, you know, IP, real world IP,
Starting point is 00:59:05 bringing that on chain is something that's pretty heavy and is still a work in progress. But I think that components like NFT encryption, I think you're going to see one thing that, at least I personally am very bullish on, is the combination of L2s with NFTs and DFI. I don't know if anyone's played the game, Come Meath, where you can literally play a game and earn money and your spaceship is a NFT. I think we're going to see. It's on Polygon. It's kind of an old game.
Starting point is 00:59:36 I'm not sure what they're doing now. But I think I personally would like to see a lot of projects interface with other projects. I don't understand why no one's made a magic the gathering with Cryptopunks and their attributes. I would like to see more ecosystem building. It's an open system. So why not build on top of other projects? I mean, I think another wave that is coming that will maybe be done poorly initially, but we'll really, really begin to show that these are, these NFTs are not going away,
Starting point is 01:00:08 is just mainstream coming online. I know that all of these big Web 2.0 companies are trying to figure out how they can access the NFT industry. I mean, you saw Jack Dorsey yesterday. Todd was on Twitter Spaces with Jay-Z talking about how title is going to integrate NFTs. Yeah, that's kind of my high-level thinking of where the space is going. I think NFTs will be a huge media play.
Starting point is 01:00:34 I think people are underestimating how much we're going to pull in. You know, we always talk about defy pulling in these financial institutions, but what about NFTs pulling in media corporations? I think that wave is absolutely coming. It may look a little weird at first, and hopefully everything integrates seamlessly across multiple platforms. Yeah. Do you have any ideas what the next big catalysts are going to be, right?
Starting point is 01:00:56 So like, you have layer two, maybe, maybe the U.S. X needs to improve this sort of thing. But like it felt like over, you know, in the winter time, just NFTs absolutely blew up. And it wasn't really clear what the catalyst was, but maybe there was a catalyst. And when do you think we'll see the next kind of mainstream moment for NFTs? It feels like as David was saying, we saw this mainstream moment. Things have kind of died down. What's what things should we look for before seeing kind of the next big jolt? into NFTs and it breaking into mainstream conscience. I mean, I'm not entirely convinced we're in a bare market.
Starting point is 01:01:37 I think it might just be more reflective of the price of Ethereum. You know, every auction that we look at, it's basically like, well, the market's crap, so we probably won't have very new competitors. I think that, you know, with 1559 and the merge and ideally this foremarket not being over, that is a very simple catalyst to people wanting to play more. Interesting. So you think the basic economic, of defy and ether play directly into into nfts yeah yeah definitely because people don't have a lot of
Starting point is 01:02:06 these projects cater to people who are in the ecosystem already and if you don't have expendable income if you you know you're a trader and you were long eth and now you're down a bit you're probably more tightly strapped for cash um i think they're very very interconnected i think um it's going somewhere with that i don't remember sorry to tell you're trying to thought no that's okay uh i think Yeah, getting back to like the compression cycle of technological adoption, I think that from what I can tell people that are heads down building and by virtue of NFTs being, I don't want to say more simple than Defi. But I think that a lot of Web 2.0 programmers are coming into space and able to spin up these systems faster. Like we just need a really killer social like portfolio viewer of our NFTs, right? Like the major heavy lifting there is going to be Web 2.0.
Starting point is 01:03:01 And so I think that there is going to be a arc of, you know, heads down building, but I think it will happen a lot more rapid than people believe. And I think that that could be a major catalyst. I'm very excited for a social component, whether that's like you need an NFT to purchase this set of clothing or you need to your DGEN score represents your follower account or, you know, or replaces your follower account.
Starting point is 01:03:24 I think that a huge catalyst could be social. And ideally, a lot of these exist on L2, so we can get Gen Z involved. And, you know, the only 18-year-olds in the space won't just be Rari Capital. And I mean, everyone in Gen Z is just like, I don't think that they're going to, a lot of them will not have the experience of even opening a bank account, right? Like, they're coming online very quickly. I think everyone here remembers, you know, we complain about how MetaMask is kind of hard to use and it's hard to learn these things. but I remember digging through Windows 95, Windows 98, not knowing what the hell was going on
Starting point is 01:04:00 and having to learn all of these things before I could even use a computer. And I think that people don't understand how rapidly college students will be playing around these systems. Totally. James, thank you for coming on the bankless state of the nation to tell us what you are seeing in the world of NFTs and DAOs. And Pleaser Dow, I think, is a really great test
Starting point is 01:04:21 to see what we really can get done when some of the brightest minds come and put some power and some umph behind both nfts and dows and sees what happens so i i i'll of course have my eye on pleaser dow with what you guys are building there um and so if if anyone wants to find out i you you shouted out some some uh some twitter profiles earlier in the show but if people want to find out more about pleaser dow where should they go i mean there's the pleaser dow twitter and pleaser the second e there's no So please or doubt Twitter. There's pleaser.org.
Starting point is 01:04:54 You can check us out on Foundation and Zora. We have some donated items in our foundation portfolio, so it's a little bit. We got to get those cleaned up. You can always reach out to me at on my Twitter underscore J-A-M-I-I-S. And we are absolutely, I think our next step is going to be something very, very big with Doge. You know, Doge backed by Real Doge, Proof of Doge, Network. work. So if you want to participate, help us out, get a foot in the door of the Dow. We're trying to build a community. Just DM us, Doge at my Twitter or Pleaser Dow's Twitter. Guys, I think we are in the early
Starting point is 01:05:33 stages of a Dow's. We are in the early stages of crypto culture, internet culture. Pleaser Dow is going to be part of that. Get involved somehow. Keep your eye on the space. It can be huge. Of course, risks and disclaimers. Eat this is risky. None of this was financial advice. Bitcoin is two. So our NFTs, prices go up and down. All of crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier.
Starting point is 01:05:56 It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills.

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