Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Simon de la Rouviere: Bonding Curves, Curation Markets, Token Curated Registries… and Art

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

Human beings have a penchant for creating lists. We make lists for things like the top music artists at any given time, the best restaurants in the world, companies which people can trust, and the most wanted criminals. Lists take many forms. They can be maintained by a single authority, or curated by a crowd. But almost always, they remain in the custody of a central party. Token Curated Lists propose a model by which a) the content of lists are decentralized, and b) contributors are incentivized to curate their content according to social consensus. We’re joined by Simon de la Rouviere, an independent researcher and blogger. Previously, Simon was one of the first employees at ConsenSys and founded Ujo Music. He also contributed to the ERC20 token specification and has written about blockchain and token economics since 2014. In recent months, Simon’s research has focused on Token Curated Registries (or TCRs), and the economics of curation markets. Topics covered in this episode: Simon’s background and interest in blockchain, music, and economics Bonding curves as a mechanism for continuous token issuance Curation markets and how they relate to bonding curves Practical applications of curation markets The connection between curation markets and cultural memes Token Curated Registries and their applications The role of TCRs as a crypto economic primitive The economics and game theory of TCRs Simon’s recent project “This Artwork is Always for Sale” Episode links: Simon de la Rouviere – Medium Bancor’s Smart Tokens vs Token Bonding Curves – Medium Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information (with code)! – Medium Ujo Music This Artwork Is Always On Sale – Medium This Artwork Is Always On Sale Simon de la Rouviere – Twitter This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture and Meher Roy . Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/282

This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure. Do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and cost it will take to develop? The new Azure blockchain dev kit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes. Learn more at a.kia.m.s. slash epicenter. Hi, welcome the epicenter. My name is Sebastian Gwitua. And I'm Meher Roy. Hey, Mayor, welcome back. Good to be back. Yeah, I'm sure everybody will be very happy to have you back on the podcast. So, yeah, Mayer went on a short hiatus since November, as our listeners will know,

he's now the proud father of a young boy. How is life as a dad? It's very satisfying. And at the same time, this was the most difficult winter of my life. So, I spent a lot of time looking after the infant. And I also managed to launch two validators, one on loom and one on cosmos this winter. But it's been, heads down a lot of work on both fronts. But this brings really nice, you know.

The infants grown up really well. the validators have come out really well. We had a lot of delegations. And so it's one of the happiest springs that I've, and of course, the token prices have recovered. So it's one of the happiest springs I've had in a while. That's good, yeah. After a long winter of, yeah,

probably like sleepless nights and long days of working and putting out validators. and yeah, I guess now you get the fruits of that labor or, you know, sleeplessness. Yeah, yeah. And now I get to experience the fruits of that labor, yeah. Great. So, yeah, we're happy to have you back on. I'm sure everybody will also be happy to have you back on episodes once in a while.

So today we're speaking with Simon de de Ruevier. who is, well, he's a lot of things. So, I mean, Simon's been around the space for quite some time. He was one of the first employees that's consensus. He's a co-founder at Ujo, which is a music platform that's been out of consensus. And Simon has been doing a lot of writing over the years about all kinds of things. I mean, in the early days in 2014, he was writing about Bitcoin. And more recently, he's been doing a lot of writing around.

tokens. Also, one of the people who was part of the original spec of the ERC20 tokens. So he's been doing a lot of work about a lot of thinking around tokens for quite some time. And more recently has been writing and speaking a lot about token curated registries and in continuous organizations and all kinds of topics that's kind of gravitate around token curate registries. And so we talked to Simon about a lot of those things and explore some of the economics there. And yeah, it was a fascinating conversation. Before we go to that interview, I did want to mention one thing that I've been working on recently that I started to work on. And I would really, really like some help and contributions from our listeners and our community.

A couple weeks ago, I started thinking about it would be great if Epicenter would have a Wikipedia page. and started doing a bit of writing and writing some of the origin story around Epicenter and how Brian and I met back in late 2013 and the LTV contest. So our early listeners will know about this about this story. And also how Meher and Sunny and Federica came through the show and started putting that into a draft Wikipedia article. And so I've been, I spent a little bit of time digging through old episodes and digging, digging up quotes and things like that to have proper citations. And I would be really grateful if some of you out there, if you have some time and kind of remember those days and maybe, you know, could cite some references, go in and contribute to the draft Wikipedia article.

And so you can get to it pretty easily by going to, I've got a short link for you, epicenter.orgs slash wiki. So if you go to that URL, you'll be taken straight to the draft page for that article. And then there's also another article that is in draft that you can find by scrolling down, and it is a list of epicenter episodes. And so I think once the, you know, if and once the actual Wikipedia article gets approved at some point in the future, then we can put out the, we can also suggest to have the episode list released. And yeah, so we'd be really happy and really, really great if people out there could contribute to that. So without further delay, here is our interview with Simon Dilla Revere. So we're here today with Simone de la Rouvierre.

Hi, Simon. Hi there. I don't know if you usually pronounce your name so French. That is honestly the first time someone's pronounced it like that, even though it is a very French name. I'm actually not French. Like my ancestors 200 years ago, they spoke French. But it's the first time I actually heard it like that. That's great.

I wouldn't know how to pronounce it any other way. But thanks for joining us today. Yeah, please tell us about your background and how you got involved in the blockchain space. I've always been a programmer and interested in just building interesting things, tinkering and so forth. And I first got involved in the blockchain space in 2011. I found Bitcoin by just browsing the internet and thought this was really interesting. It still piqued my interest for two weeks and then I thought, I need to pay attention. This is really interesting.

But then I only stayed as a hobbyist. I was still a student studying. And then in 2013, when this experiment still didn't die, it seemed to become more important back of my head. So I started checking in more fully. And so back then I started actually working in a Bitcoin space, building side projects. My first side project back then to actually starting to look at the code of Bitcoin itself.

And then while I was finishing my master's degree, I actually started building applications for it. And then in 2014, when I managed to save up some money to work full-time in the space. I didn't know if it was too early, but I was just really excited to experiment. And so I bought my own all coins. I forked it. I committed some code back to Bitcoin. I just had a lot of fun playing around and experimenting with what was available. back then. Seeing that things were like really tough and considering that I was a programmer

and it was tough for me, I was just very excited when Ethereum came around and actually promised ideologically and technically to be more friendly to developers. I wanted to join as easy as early as I can. And so back then through through luck and being online, one of the first employees of consensus found me and then I joined in January 2015 as one of the first employees at Consensus, working and building and developing Ethereum applications. Over that course of the four years, I've worked on various projects from co-founding UJ Music, which created one of the first smart contract royalty payments in the music industry to inventing new kinds of economics.

I helped co-designed the EURC20 standard and started the first smart contract security best practices. And now today, I am just back in tinkering mode after four years of Consensus and Uja Music, just playing around and still reading, still writing, still trying to catch up with everything that's happening in the space. There's a lot of stuff. So you've done a lot in the space of the last four or five years. When did you start to see this intersection between blockchain technology and art and music,

and economics? I guess it comes from my background. I was always interested in creating things. I've been a musician for a long while. I've always enjoyed writing. And being from South Africa, I've experienced what it's like being in the developing country and having to interact with the internet

and not initially having access to certain services. So when those things converge, I was like, this is a really interesting economics experiment. It is computer science. And it actually provides access where people like me haven't had access before. This is exciting. I need to pay attention. So it has been coming from a different while.

My master's degree, for example, it was a completely unrelated field. I was studying information overload on social media, which actually did inform some of my ideas later on. But so it has always been a constellation of things that have interested me. And, you know, when I looked at the blockchain and when I looked at Bitcoin, there was this promise of of just empowerment and I could participate. I didn't have to fly to Silicon Valley to participate. I could be in my bedroom in South Africa and participate. So it just is really exciting.

Of course, Simon, like you've been one of the earliest team members at Consensus. Is that right? Yeah. I think it was employee number six. You were employee number six. And of course, you have recently left Consensus two months back. and how many people does consensus have now? I think it's still hovering around 1,000 people,

around there, give or take. So you've seen this company go from six people to 1,000 people. Yeah. What was the journey like? How has consensus changed from the time it was so tiny into now this largest company in the Ethereum space? I mean, it was, it is a super fascinating journey just because as well, you know, I tried creating my own startups when I left university and I didn't get off the ground. So in more ways and one, this was my first like job experience and I put in it on quotation marks because I don't think it's like what people would equate to being a normal job experience, having worked their consensus.

And I put that in a good way. There was a lot of freedom that we could do many things, a lot of a time. So it was like just a really great experience to going from university, trying to start things into environment like that where I could just experiment and create things. And I think that was also the intention early on. It's just to say like we need to build this new market and actually have no idea what's necessary. So do what you think is necessary. Do what you would do if you had an open weekend and you just wanted to tinker. And that was really great initially.

but like the way the company grew it grew very very quickly and for me it was just like I was just trying to make sure I'm learning as much as possible why this is happening because this is my first like rodeo so to speak it's like I just want to learn how do you run a company how do you manage people like how do you do finances and then Joe Lubin just comes and starts hiring so many people and and I just got to learn from so many people even at like 30 people I sort of like learn from people to a thousand people people, there were still so many people I could learn from. And, you know, me being someone that's interested in many things, it was just hard to eventually say no to stuff. It's like, okay, I have to get out of these 2,000 Slack channels. There's just, I'm not actually getting to my work. But it was just interesting to see a change over time and how a company like that deals with certain organizational stresses as it grows, growing pains and so forth. That, you know, ended up being valuable lessons, but it was a journey I wouldn't. It was definitely one of the best experiences I've had so far in my life for sure to be a part of that.

So during this journey, you co-founded Ujo Music. And of course, Ujo started off as the project that sought to change the way like royalties are split up. when an artist creates a piece of music and ultimately distribute it. So give a sense of Ujo's journey. What was the original plan, what you ended up building, and where that startup is at today? Yeah. So early on a consensus, we, again,

there was just this sense of kind of explosion of possibility. It's like there's so much to explore, we have to try everything. And so a lot of the early projects were just because it was people initially interested in these things. Like Truffle was started by Tom Coulter because he wanted to build an Ethereum Dap and he felt it sucked. So he started Truffle. Same for me. I'm a musician. I always looked at the problems of musicians.

And back then there was another guy that also joined the team Falberry. And we looked at the music industry and realized there's opportunity here. here and one image in heap at that time started seeing the same promise. And we got in touch with her and said, like, look, let's do something. Let's create this experiment just to prove that it's possible. And so we got working both the prototype in two months. And back then, I think October 2015, this was one of the first daps that came out. And so we even had to experiment with user experience.

We had like a light wallet, like MetaMask didn't exist back then. And we weren't going to tell people to go use mist or sync their own nodes and whatever. So we had to run our own nodes and keep everything running. It was one of the first articles, because we had to put the Ethereum US dollar price as well in there. So it was a fun experiment. Later on, she didn't end up selling any of the ether she made

because it was like one ether. And she sold like a bunch of songs at $1, which actually, those funds went into actually supporting her recent tour, which is great news for us. because at least we helped one artist make a living. And over time, we went sort of back to drawing board, researched the music industry, and discovered there's just so many problems.

And a blockchain can solve a lot of these problems in different manner. But we had to pick, like, what are we good at? What do we care about? What does the music industry need? And so we went in different ways for a long time, just building technology, throwing technology away, asking many more questions and then eventually led itself to

to bolting today what is the Ujo portal where musicians can upload music they own the rights, metadata is created that represents the music and they can be paid 100% of the music 100% of the royalties goes to them

and it's split according to whomever is part of the collaboration that made the music so that's been the course over the past few years in Ujo. I think the hardest thing just have been getting the, the music industry really likes the blockchain, but it's actually really hard in practice to get people on board.

And that's been just the hardest thing. Also just bumping up into the legal issues of copyright and intellectual property and how the blockchain works with that. It's not easy problems. So how did all of this lead you to become interested in things, that we're going to talk about today, which are continuous organizations, token created registries, etc. I mean, for me, I saw Ujo Music and curation markets and all these new kind of

crypto economic models as two ways to solve the same problem, or two different ways to solve the same problem, and that is I was always focused on like the creator. How do we ensure that people can continue creating the things they create? And like, are there transaction costs we can reduce Are there new ways to build new economic models, to build more things, to create more things, and to create communities around these things? So Ujo Music wasn't a one-hand way to do that in the music industry, to say, how are we reducing the transaction costs for musicians to make a living, reduce the cost of licensing, reduce the cost of the metadata problem in a music industry.

And then the other side is the creation markets, which is, let's create new economies. allow people to do things, new things in new ways. And that's how it was always like a tennis match between the two for me. It's like some days I would spend more time thinking about curation markets. Some days it would spend more time about the real problems in the music industry. So it happened in parallel. So of course, over the past three or four years, I've followed your blog. And your blog pioneered a lot of ideas that.

Ultimately, many teams picked up on and they built their projects based on their ideas. The first idea was the idea of a bonding curve. Second was the idea of a curation market. And then very recently you've had, um, you've had ideas around how, how artists can create artworks, um, and, um, and, and, get paid for their artworks while other people can own their artworks and unique models thereof. So it would be interesting for us to go into kind of your journey making all of these inventions and trying to get a sense of what these inventions solve and where you feel,

where you have found practical success with these inventions. So maybe the first thing we could start with is the idea of the bonding curve. And could you explain to us what a bonding curve is and what kind of economic interaction it seeks to be? Yeah, sure. I've tried this a few times before, and it's always an experiment to also explain it in new different ways.

So let me give this a go. A bonding curve is essentially it stems from the desire to create a continuous token model. as opposed to an ICO. So if people want a token for a specific purpose, a smart contract is the automatic pricing and the provider of liquidity. And so how it works is if you have one ether, you bond it into the smart contract

and based on the current price that the smart contract sets in a hard-coded manner, it would mint a new token. And this, which is the bonding curve, because it would generally change based on the supply of the tokens in circulation. That's why it looks like a curve. It could either be linear, exponential, or logarithmic.

And then over time, once this pot has grown, there's more tokens in circulation. Anyone at any time can then sell their tokens back for a part of this reserve or deposit or pool that has been built up by people buying the token. So it's this mental model of a ecosystem growing and shrinking based on demand for the specific token. And the price of the token will differ based on

if there's demand for the token. If a lot of people want it, the price will be higher. If fewer people wanted, the price will be lower. And you can buy and sell to any point along this sort of curve. So the idea here is, like there's a smart contract and that smart contract controls a pool of ether. We can think of ether first, maybe die later.

And there is a creator of that smart contract, like that deploys the smart contract. The smart contract starts with zero ether. And this smart contract has the rights to mint a certain token. This token could be any token. So let's say like these are like Simon tokens. So Simon goes and deploys the smart contract, it starts with zero ether, but zero Simon

tokens issued. And then the smart contract has an open entry mechanism. So anyone can deposit Ether into the smart contract and get a bunch of Simon tokens. Maybe in the beginning, so if I am the first person to deposit Ether, it might be the case that I deposit one Ether and I get 100 Simon tokens. And then like the second person, Sebastian comes along and deposits one Ether, but he doesn't get 100. he gets 90. He gets less than I did. Yes, yeah.

So the smart contract in a sense incentivizes early deposits into the early deposits of ether into this contract. And then as more ether gets accumulated, it might mint lesser and lesser tokens in the future. And this idea that the number of tokens minted per ether depends on on the total number of ether inside that contract. So you can plot these two things, and that is a mathematical curve, which is why you call this a bonding curve. Yeah, yeah.

So essentially, like, you can see that this is a smart contract that will end up accumulating ether, and then issuing a bunch of project tokens. When I saw this model in the first time, My fundamental question was, like, as a person wanting to create a token, I usually want access to the ether that got collected. Normally, if you look at an ICO, right? Cosmos projected an ICO.

So they collected a bunch of ether. They gave out tokens, but then they want to use this ether in order to build some system. But like this bonding curve design that you came up with, didn't have this other mechanism. There wasn't a central team that was collecting the ether and channeling it towards the development of some system. Why? Why remove that aspect? Initially, especially the early designs, was around just finding a way for people to commit to some cost, in this case the opportunity cost to lock up your ether, for minting some token that represents a community of value.

and it depends what the token will be used for. The initial example that I had was people would take this token and then stake this token into information and thus create a curation market. As in like you would be able to create topic tokens like Ethereum as a topic or football as a topic or gardening as a topic and whatever. But it was just a way to price how value

the information was. And so it wasn't necessary to develop anything. It wasn't necessary that the funds would need to be used for investing in infrastructure or investing in people or be used in any other manner besides just a commitment scheme. Like I'm undergoing opportunity cost and that as a signal to the rest of community that I want to put some value where I wanted to be and it's a pricing mechanism to do that.

So initially it was just that the pool would be just that, that the money would not never flow out for additional purposes. But there has been people that have been building alternative designs where the ether doesn't just stay in there. It can become fungible outside of that pool. This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the Azure Blockchain Workbench. Getting your blockchain from the whiteboard to production

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In some senses, like when you look at many societies, like societies, cults, religions, many times that these societies have, you know, like entry costs. So you might have a cult, you can enter, You can enter, anyone can enter, but in order to enter, they have to undergo this ceremony. And like this ceremony is, maybe it's expensive in some way, maybe it's painful in some way, like different, you know, like these society's cults.

There are also ways to coordinate people. But they create an entry cost. And the entry cost is not necessarily in order to create a pool of capital that the organization will use. Yeah, yeah. it is in a sense to have some kind of signaling cost that whoever came into the organization paid a price to come in. Yes, absolutely. And therefore they are committed to the cause.

So in a sense, this is like the blockchain equivalent of that system where anyone can enter, but in order to enter, you will have to part with your ether. and when you part with your ether, you get your project token. Those ether won't, will stay in the contract. They're not going anywhere.

Yeah. And you can, you can see that on the blockchain that the ether are not right there. You have certainty over that. So this is sort of an entry mechanism. Then what's the exit mechanism?

How do I exit this group of people? It depends again. like it in the sort of most simplest version of a token bonding curve is you can exit at any time like because there's always a pool of collateral in the smart contract and if the price is zero the zero collateral you know but when the price is a hundred there might be you know 100 ether in there or or 20 ether or 30 ether depends on obviously the the supply curve um so people can exit at any time and the reason why they would exit is depending on the use case of the token and whether it's still valuable for them and or whether it the price has increased to such an extent that it becomes too profitable

for them to not exit. So, you know, let's say we put tokens together and it's for this community and this token means you can have access to certain services. Now suddenly there's so much demand that you bought it because you just want to get access to services. But now the demand is so much that you bought 100 tokens early on and now it's suddenly worth. a few cars and you go like well I don't I don't need this much anymore for Access City services I will sell a bit to get back some of my return and maybe even make a profit or a reward additional reward for having participated in some form but alternatively like if you get in while the community is thriving and

it starts to decay for whatever reason then it might be that when you sell your token you might get less back than you put in but that's like the normal sort of like growing and shrinking of value that you find in various forms from company stocks to currencies and whatever so it the first and foremost thing is do i want to participate because this is valuable for me then you would enter if you would then leave with no value then you would have still gained something because you were there first and foremost for getting access to something or participating in a community or just having the token for whatever reason you to. How does that lead us then to the next topic, which is curation markets?

Maybe by starting with describing what is a curation market. Sure. So for me, a curation market is a way of using, like a subset of crypto economics that is specifically about the curation of information. And whether that is for, hey, like look at this new funny meme or we need to figure out what is important for this DAO. Like we need to curate a list of topics and issues that we need to discuss in a next monthly call. So it's a very broad description of various information that need to be curated. And so curation mark has also been like, okay, how do we use crypto economics to make it

easier for people to make decisions and or share information with each other that is novel, whether it's a new book or a meme or whatever. And so curation markets to me currently contains many of these crypto-economic primitives, like one of them being token bonding curves. And I primarily put these crypto-economic primitives into two buckets, especially in curation markets, into continuous staking games.

And that is token bonding curves, where you would have a liquid price based on something or a ranking, like many token bonding curves would result in some ranking system based on different weights or value that's being staked. Then on the other hand, this is a tongue twister, but I like to call it as staked slashing, shelling games.

But it's essentially saying people put up some money towards something and they're willing to be proved wrong or right, and then in return they either lose their stake or they gain additional funds. And that is what a TCR is or a token curated registry. People are saying, I want to be a part of this list. I'm willing to put up some money to say that I'm a reputable participant. And you guys need to now vote whether that is the case or not.

So it's like two different forms in that sense. And people have started mixing this in various different ways currently. And so it is still like a topic that is being explored in many ways. is it right to say that first you came up with the idea of the bonding curve so a way to

so essentially like so when I visited DevCon in the DevCon in London this was in 2015 this was when you were working on the ERC20 standard yeah this was so you had a presentation on

tokens tokens tokens and then yeah after that shortly after that presentation came the ERC 20 standard. Yes. And so the natural question is, of course, so you can have a traditional token,

which is, oh, I created this token, and then I sold this token, and I raised a bunch of money, and I did this. So that's the normal ICO. But, of course, of course, like this, this technology is really general. So you don't need to subscribe to that model.

So you came up with this model that, hey, we can create a bunch of token holders by this novel mechanism of depositing ether and allowing these token holders to withdraw the ether. And then we can have these tokens and these communities. And so that was the first idea. Now, of course, there comes a second question, which is like, okay, what can these communities do once they have this token?

And then curation markets are sort of your proposal on what these communities can do, that these communities can curate information. Yeah, it's saying like, in order for us to work together across the globe in curating information, that also adds economic signals to it, or at least new signals, a proof of something that this is valuable information. Then curation marks is a way for people to agree that whatever economic game is being played here and the resulting information is valuable to us or meaningful.

and what you currently see in the web is that we know the web today is an abundant web. There's a lot of information out there and a lot of misinformation out there. If we start saying we want to know what we what we see has been built up

and shared by these sort of economic principles like who has been incentivized to share us this information? That's the kind of questions we want to know. It's like we want organic free range information. We want transparency in how the information got to us. And if there is a transparent economic game that produced some information, we at least there is, we know the participants involved in their motives to give us that information.

So that's sort of how these kind of crypteconomic games would hopefully result in this kind of outcomes, in these kind of outcomes. It's at least like more transparent information with more clear incentives involved. Can you describe maybe an example of a curation market in a simplest form or one that some people might be able to relate to? Yeah, sure. So the simplest one is maybe the original design that I had, which is you have this bonding curve, which is there is a community of people. They're excited about football. Okay, so they want to share memes around football and relevant information, whatever is novel to them.

And so people say, okay, but we also want to participate in sharing the value in the job that we've been doing in curating this information. So what people do is and say, okay, I'm going to put up some ether. I'm going to buy some football tokens. And now it's like, great, we need to now curate this information. I have some football tokens. Then you can take those football tokens and stake it to a item, a link. You know, look at this great goal that happened this weekend by this Premier League. match. If more people stake to that link, the higher it is in this list, and thus it is a novel

information that you think is relevant to that community. And if the information is curated well, it will attract more participants that want to participate, because you're also creating a community at the same time, where when you have a football token, it is a signal to say, I care about this topic. And if it's like, if you go to a music concert. The cost to buy ticket is already a way for you to start having conversations with

people there because you know what the topic will be about. Hey man, have you listened to the new album? So that's the kind of process that is put online in a way for a community to interact with each other. So over time, this list will change up and down.

It's like if you were able to add economic incentives to Reddit, you know that that's that's that's some of the the earliest designs okay i was just going to say that that that kind of looks a little bit like reddit and the way that popular content kind of rises to the top so i guess this is sort of related but you've you've described uh you've talked about creation markets and its relevance to memes quite a bit in your writing can you elaborate on why you think these two concepts are somehow intertwined?

Just to preface, when I used to word memes originally, it was to reference it to the original definition of the word, which is to just represent a cultural unit of information. So it is basically all encapsulated information, like just words and ideas and things. But obviously, memes as we know them, became to be known as like dank internet memes, like the funny dogs and whatnot. So speaking to that, it is when we look at the way people are sharing information now today, there is this feeling of there being this, you know, quote-unquote, a curation market for a meme or a meme market. You know, there would be memes that are suddenly popular and then go away.

It's like it's in essence, in essence, like people are trading memes, so to speak. But it would be interesting if there was just a way in which people can actually make a return on actually contributing to this comments. We're all sharing these memes. And if you make a funny meme, yes, you might get a few retweets on Twitter. But that's about it. But you actually contributed some good to people's lives by making a viral internet meme. So one of the earlier goals was to say this can actually be used for people to be. become quote unquote meme traders, right?

And that was like one of the earlier ideas had. And coincidentally, this was extremely serendipitous, but exactly that there was a blog post that came out, which I made that first idea. It said, like, look, we can have meme markets. People can trade internet memes. Literally on the same day was the day that the Reddit's meme economy subreddit was created.

And in Reddit's meme economy subreddit, they're jokingly doing this now still and there's hundreds of thousands of people that are jokingly trading memes they're saying hot new format buy by buy you know it's like hot new Elon memes coming out this is going to be the stock of the summer you know and so and it's going oh no like sell the joe biden memes it's it's not cool anymore like it's so people are jokingly doing this anyway and I feel like there's such a interesting market where people can actually they're participating in this for just having fun but it's If they can actually make money, then I always imagine this weird future where my kids one day would be meme traders,

just having fun with themselves and making money on the side. But that's part of that vision with something like that. And there was a team that actually built a version of it. It was called Mem Lords. It is live on Ringby, and people have been trading memes on there and having fun. I'm not sure how much it's used now, but I've been poking the team to put it live to main it. So we can actually see what the economics looks like in practice. Don't you worry that a mechanism like that will in the end become game.

Because so when like you created the football tokens, right? Maybe initially the people that enter, they will be the people that are actually interested in football tokens. Because right now, right now the community doesn't exist. And maybe initially the curation is really valuable. But once there is this financial incentive, hey, I can enter and I can curate. And then one day more people will enter. And then because more people will enter the sort of price will rise.

The price of a football token will rise. And I'll have a bunch of football tokens and I can burn them and I can exit and I can make a few ether. Doesn't they start to attract the kind of person that you don't want? The person that's there in order to make a bunch of ether not really curate really good information on football. Yeah, absolutely.

In its service forms, I think there's a lot of possibility for participants to get involved that are necessarily aligned with the goals of the experiment or the community. You can have rampant speculation, just ruining the community and its value that it's created amongst each other. People will absolutely be fleeced out of money if just those simple versions exist, especially if people don't necessarily understand

what they're getting themselves into. There's definitely ripe and possible for people to be exploited in various ways. And I think a lot of the research since these original years were published where, okay, how do we mitigate some of this? Like, how do we avoid, you know, rampant speculation but still having the value of buying and participating? For example, the Ocean Protocol team recently published stuff on how to do short selling on bonding curves, which would allow just the price volatility to be mitigated somewhat. So that's one solution.

So there's different ways people have come forth to combat this. In general, though, I mean, the primary purpose is a way to people and to empower themselves by creating these new communities, but then having this new way of distributing trust among themselves that is also valuable. And it is possible, though, that this could be exploited in many ways in the future, including the fact that, you know, what if this is so successful, that that is what we do, with our daily lives. Like this is so important and so valuable wealth generation that we all become meme traders.

And I don't think that's necessarily a world that we want either. I do also think though that, yes, although some of these ideas are exploitable in some sense, I think it's important to understand the scale of what's necessary or what should be involved. Like Vitalik recently published actually a blog post on collusion and bribing in these kind of curation market games, which absolutely exists.

He made a very good blog post. But I think what's important to consider is, to what extent are we going to scale these things? If you're going to have an economy of football tokens that is worth billions, you're absolutely going to attract people that's going to exploit the economics. But if it's a bunch of people, like 2,000 people across the world that is working together

to create this community of value for amongst themselves, the economics doesn't have to be so foolproof. And we've seen that that's the case in, blockchain in general. There's a lot of cryptocurrency projects out there that don't need the security of Bitcoin mining, but they still provide value for themselves. So it doesn't have to be foolproof. It just has to be good enough. And as the community grows, then perhaps the economics could scale. You know, the economics could scale to protect people over time. because you also don't want to put up

too many barriers to entry when people start. So it is a very interesting topic and I think people will experiment. I think at the end of day, also user experience will just be so important as well. People need to understand what they're doing. They need to feel like they're in control. They're empowered.

And that is still an open blank canvas that people need to work on. So, yeah. So essentially, like, I'm able to visualize how this would look like. So to me, to me,

the ultimate end user product is something like a Reddit. So right now we have all of these Reddits on these different topics. And Reddit really doesn't have an economic mechanism. If I am a Reddit user, I can go and upvote stuff in any subreddit. And ultimately, like, people upvote in these subreddits and it uses these upvorts in order to have a, list of interesting content items, other people go and see these content items.

So the difference here would be if there's a particular curation market, so the curation market is like a subredit, it's a football curation market. If I actually want my upvote to matter, then I must deposit ether, get these football tokens and then upvote. And somehow the strength of my upvote is linked to a number of football tokens I have. And then there are other people with these football tokens and all of their upvotes with these differing strengths are used to populate the Reddit. And so you can have football tokens, you have basketball tokens, you can have thousands of these tokens, and you can power a decentralized Reddit that way.

So if I am a user, let's say I'm interested in football, there are a couple of different utilities for me. The first utility would be, I can get football tokens right now, and if the community of football tokens grows, I can exit at a later point in time, and I can make money. That's one kind of utility. Second kind of utility is, you know,

the belongingness to a community. Absolutely. We all have these football tokens, and we are curating this football-reddit together. The third, of course, is, if I'm also producing content related to football, I would want my content to be prominent in this football Reddit.

So, therefore, if I'm a content producer, I want some football tokens, so I'm able to effectively advertise my content into this subreddit. Yeah. Yeah. So effectively, this interaction of depositing, either getting football token satisfies these desires of mine, which is why, and if there are many people that have these desires,

then actually a design like that could run. This design has been around. for two years yet we don't have a Reddit like product that works that way what do you think is the chasm why does it not happen well I mean is it the closest one would be to say like let's look at steam it because it it also has this economy where you're you're putting up is this curation game with token economics involved but it is not community specific and I think that that's the difference

I think the biggest thing is that for example I haven't personally tried it it's just because like I there's just a lot of variation of the ideas and currently I just enjoy exploring what's possible and writing and researching still I think user experience is hard it's going to be hard for people to understand what's going on

and whether it's meaningful to use the blockchain in this manner. So there's a lot of open-ended questions. I think the closest one is Slava's relevant. Relevant is an application, which is similar to this, where you have this prediction game using bonding curves on posts. But they have one thing which mitigates somewhat to speculation, which is there is a concept of reputation.

So if you have been an active participant, then your, as far as I understand it, your reputation would also affect the ranking of the posts along with its sort of economic weighting. Or at least it would support each other. So I think it's just early days currently for people to experiment with this. When these ideas first created, the interesting response was that seeing that actually a lot, lot of people were more focused on just these concepts being used at a protocol level rather than a user-facing level at this stage. That's why it's like a core part of, say, Ocean Protocol or other projects using this.

In essence, it might be some form of economics that just disappears from the user. As in, you would just be interacting on Reddit. You wouldn't know what's happening, but you put up some funds and it has been buying and selling stuff for you. And if you've been making, producing value for people, then you, you would have you. you would just find that your wallet has increased. You've made some money. So it will depend.

I think we'll still see how it works in the future. Earlier you mentioned token curated registries. Let's dive into that a little bit. So I think it's a better term than a stake-slashing shelling game. It's actually much easier to say. So let's focus on the TCRs for a little bit and describe. That kind of describes it, like the stake-slashing selling game, of course. You obviously understand what's happening here, but let's diving a little deeper.

So, I mean, the token curator registries, when I first read the paper from I mean, Mike and James, it was very interesting to me because me working on my own set of ideas around creation markets at the time, saw this and realized, whoa, hang on. I think the space is much broader than what I've just been thinking on. We can do a lot of different games and permutations to produce valuable or novel information for whomever is interested. But for those who don't know, token curated registry is primarily a sort of binary information game, which is you apply to be part of a list, and the current list participants, it's token holders would then either vote for you to be in or out. and in order for you to be in and remain in you have to put up a deposit in that list's

tokens and the participants that are doing the voting would be rewarded for voting correctly or correctly meaning which way the vote will go so there's a it's a simple curation game that ideally incentivizes people to accept valuable participants for the specific list because there will be consumers of this list who would want to look at it and get some value from it, like the top restaurants in a city or a list of reputable publishers, like an ad chain, or in civil, its case, like a list of ethical newsrooms. So it differs.

But I think it's a very broad topic as well, because a lot of people have been writing about it, researching and producing code for it, from like talking about subjective TCU. which is the information that needs to be allowed in is not necessarily clear. The objective TCR is where it's like easy to evaluate to different ranking and layer systems, how is the list ranked? And so it's just like a very broad topic. I think there are definitely a few that are in production currently. So it's just easy, interesting to see what's being used and how it's being used currently. I think it's just you have now this open economy that's happening and just seeing how it's just seeing how.

people are using it's very interesting. So could you describe then the different forms that token create registries can take and the way that people are using them in applications? There are different ways and forms it can take. Primarily people have experimented in ways and ways and how the voting happens. It's like if you want to be an applicant, how are people going to decide whether you should be allowed in or not to also how the information is ranked once you're inside. There's different variations of that. But I don't think any of these have been implemented in a very,

well, complicated versions haven't been implemented yet. I think only the sort of simpler versions have been, which is just you apply to be in and you're either in or you're out. There's no additional variation of it. So in Foam, they have a TCR for points of interest on the global map. So people say like, hey, I think, you know, look here, here's the Brooklyn Bridge, or, hey, look, it's stable mountain. So it's a way to annotate a map and produce a valuable list as a result. And what's interesting about that was just seeing how people are using it.

Because a TCR thrives on the fact that there needs to be disputed content. Because that's what produces value for the token, because the curators will come in and then vote either in or out this application. It's like, you know, the question of like, are we going to classify what is green? It's like it's going to be a simple problem thus. Well, I'm saying simple problem. It might be a lot more complex than I know.

But that is an example where one is like you don't necessarily need a DCR to classify which objects are green. So it thrives on having disputed information. In the case of foam, there's been interesting examples. where there have been territorial disputes. So there was like an island between South Korea and Japan where there's been different foam users which have said like, no, this is actually territory of Japan,

and the other one says, no, it's actually territory of South Korea, and then there needs to be a dispute, and then the foam token holders needed to vote which one is which. So it's quite interesting in that sense, where it's been used. That's interesting. And so I wanted to get to actual sort of applications of TCRs. And it's true that, yeah, FOMON, we had FOMON, I guess, probably about a year ago, that it constitutes this registry of points of interest that were curated by people.

I never really thought of it that way until now. But it's, so with regards to that Japan and South Korea example, that of course, you know, that that counts as, I guess, a signal, but that doesn't actually solve the dispute over who owns the land. Like, you know, marine tankers will solve that dispute if it comes down to it. But I wanted to bring it back to an example that's kind of near to me. And so I use TripAdvisor quite a bit to figure out where I'm going to eat out, right? Like so when I'm in a new city or when I'm in any city pretty much and I want to decide what restaurant I want to go to

I like trust TripAdvisor pretty much not with my life, but I'm really picky about restaurants and I definitely go to TripAdvisor to like make sure that my day doesn't end badly with regards to like my satisfaction towards a meal. So when I go there and and I see like Jade Magic Walk in Frankfurt, I know that that like that's going to be the best Chinese restaurant in Frankfurt for instance. And I recommend that restaurant, by the way, to anyone who's in Frankfurt. So, but there's a whole like, there's a whole other set of mechanisms that go into play into creating a highly successful list like TripAdvisor. So obviously there's the incentive mechanism for people to curate that list.

And in the case of a centralized list, I think people shouldn't assume that there are no incentives, the incentive is the list itself. So if lists like TripAdvisor and Google Maps and like other such communities that have amassed like a large amount of people that are continuously improving the list exists, it's not because there are no incentives like monetarily. People want these things to exist. So they and they also want to participate. And I think there's like there is this desire to participate in things and to sort of create

this thing that people have. I'm sure we could come up with other examples. But there's also the amount of money that has gone into marketing this list. And so all the venture capital that the Trojanvisor has raised and invested in marketing and invested in outreach to restaurants and like all these different things. So looking at foam, seems to be a similar type of example than to TripAdvisor. But I don't know how many users they have, but I doubt that that would scale to that

extent without that sort of like jolt of capital to bootstrap this network effect. Are token-created lists relevant to this type of use case in the end? Is this sort of like where we should think that things will go? Or are they more relevant for use cases that don't require such massive network effects? And maybe we just need sort of like signaling mechanisms and maybe perhaps in the aggregates. They form like some larger, higher level signal. You know, on the surface, I think what could say, like, it makes sense. But I think there's a few things here that makes it a bit different, I think.

and I think token curator registries are fit for a different class of sort of lists, so to speak. And so in a case of something like TripAdvisor, like we can see, it exists, right? Like they didn't need to be additional incentives. Like you said, the list itself is the reason why people are willing to contribute their time and effort to do reviews. They get benefit from it and we participate in sharing our reviews about certain places. So there is an existing set of benefits that make this work already in the same way that Wikipedia also works. I think in a context of list for reviews, like restaurants or places or travel-related things, I think the value where a decentralized list could be meaningful is that there's not necessarily confidence that this list would always remain reputable.

So in a case of TripAdvisor and other rating systems, we know that there are people that have built bots to submit reviews that does sort of produce a more or poison the list in some sense. So we do know that we could see these things and relatively trust it good enough that it's okay, but we're not 100% sure whether we should trust it fully. And so for now it's good enough, it's good enough. But the problem is when it potentially start deteriorating, and then there is no other list. Like we have to go then reinvent, and there's like a large social cost involved because this list was maintained by a centralized entity.

So I think it's valuable there, but I think for me personally, token curated registries are interesting more so when one asks the question, what are ways in which we are coordinating now, which is difficult to do, and could list, sort of decentralized list be a way to achieve that. So I think Tokig Ridge is in a new set of applications is what's going to be more interesting. Because the way I see it is building lists for something is a form of self-regulation. Like we are key rating lists for value for us

and thus we're saying these are better than others. So we're saying these restaurants are good, these are not. Thus, we're kind of like self-regulating our worldview. But self-regulation works. we know that is the case, but it stops working when the economy is too big. It's like the economy for that list becomes too big. And that's where we end this weird chasm where it's like,

we can't properly self-regulate on certain things. Thus, we kind of like ask the government or nation states to help us regulate those class of problems, which is harder for people to self-regulate on, just because it becomes easier for capture, easier to bribe, because the economy is different. So it's a set of problems which exist between self-regulation and the nation-state. Like everywhere in between, I think TCRs could be valuable. Because the one thing is, well, TCRs work in anonymity.

Like, you don't have to say who the token holders are. So whatever those class of problems are, I think is interesting. And the jury is out for me, like, whether there are actually those kind of problems or not. And I think that, that to me is a more interesting space to explore. Like what are ways in which it's difficult to coordinate now to create lists that we think could be valuable here? And it's still an open-ended question. Simon, could you give an example of our TCR that would be valuable? Like a concrete example.

So, I mean, this gets into like weirder territory. So I came up with one a while back. And this was based on Cape Town had a drought, right? A very, very bad drought. and we were basically going to run out of water. And what happened as a result is the way Cape Town itself managed to save itself from drought was a lot of it was social pressure. You know, if there was this joke going around at the time,

which was you don't go home with someone if they flushed their toilet more than once a day. It was a joke, right? So it's like there was this social pressure. People would point out restaurants that were using too much water and people would avoid them, for example. But one way that was held was because there were additional metrics or additional measures that were put in to also mitigate it, which is the city of Cape Town started reducing much higher water tariffs,

so it became more costly just to consume water. So we're like different things that was done to ensure that it didn't get there. So one way to do this was like what if there wasn't any sort of self-regulation happening and there wasn't any government that started increasing rates and tariffs and or water rationing then what would we have done and one way to do this is say you start making it profitable for people to behave in a way that is beneficial for that people that is hard to coordinate on and that's like tragedy of the commons type problems like you're saying to people look don't overuse the comments that we all use for our cows to graze on and so the concept of

something like water supply being scarce is you tell people, look, you, if you are in a TCR, you can get this label that tells you that you are a valuable person in the community that saves water. But the community needs to validate that. They need to go like Simon is using water fine. Like we believe that is the case. But if it's tied to a bonding curve, it means that if there's more incentive, for people to protect the scarce resource, the price would go up. So the price of the label would go up more and more as the more valuable it becomes

to protect the scarce resource. So there would be this interplay where people would say, we're using the commons now because it's cheap to use the commons. But now that the supply of the commons have decreased such that it's expensive, we need to not protect the commons. And so you have this counterweight which is a label, which a reputational label, becomes more effective. valuable, which classifies people as good comments users.

And so there's always this market interplay between people saying, I need to be a part of this TCR that labels me as a valuable participant. And if I actually do this in a manner that is an early adopter of environmental measures to protect the environment, then I will actually make a profit. I can make a profit from being good to the commons. And so I don't have to give up my profits from using the commons. I can actually get a profit from becoming a part of a game that makes profitable be a part of the people that's protecting the commons.

And so that is the class of problems where it's like, it's not self-regulation, because self-regulation doesn't stop the person from going and just getting some water, but you're making profitable for people to protect the comments. So it makes self-interested behavior to go and actually protect the commons, but it's not the government forcing you to do so. So it's this chasm of class of problems where it's hard to coordinate, it's a tragedy of the commons type thing, but you're making it profitable for people to attain a certain reputational label.

But obviously, like, there are still so many questions about an idea like that, like whether it's actually doable in practice or not. But that is the sort of direction of thinking that I was, when I think about those class of problems. What are things that it's hard to coordinate on that is not self-regulation and it's not the government doing it? And that is where economic coordination can become useful. We're building these new kind of crypto-economic coordination tools.

That's a very interesting example. So, essentially, there's this TCR. There are the curators of the TCR. So what is the registry here? The registry is a list of people that consume water wisely or something like that. Yes, yeah. That's the list. And there's a group of people that's making the list.

An entry to that group of people is determined by this bonding curve. this idea we covered previously. So like you have to buy some waterwise tokens to be able to apply to be a part of this TCR. And so if you're going to be late to be regarded as someone that's water wise, it's going to be very costly for you as well. So if you're an early adopter of being waterwise

and you think this community is valuable, you would apply early on to show this reputational label to others. And so that's why it becomes, you make it a profitable action when it's necessary to have that label. It is sort of what you're doing is like you're creating basically very strong shilling points for people that is out of a local maximum or local minimum where people are caught in. You know, it's like saying like, look, you don't have to coordinate around these things. There's actually new sort of way for us to coordinate that improves everyone's outcomes.

So I care about being in that list, being water-wise, because there's a social pay-off. Yeah. Right? So when I'm interacting with my friends and all, I can say that I am part of this list. It's self-regulation work there when the community is small enough such that everyone knows everyone. Like, then you don't need this game. But in a context like a city, like if I go to a restaurant and a restaurant says, we only want water-wise patrons. Right.

I won't be able to prove to them that unless someone has graded me as a waterwise person. And so that's why this economic game is useful for ways beyond self-regulation. That's, yeah. So, yeah, food for thought. So there are many implementations of TCR, right? There was this ad chain, there's things of foam, civil. Which implementation of TCR are you bullish about? Because of the fact that there is still sort of uncertainty about

how this value is communicated. Once you have a list that's produced, you actually have to go to people and say, hey, this is a usable list. Because if you have the list of the best restaurants in the world, but no one's going to see it, it's not going to be valuable. So that's why it's hard sometimes to have,

like, a list of reputable publishers in the context of ad chain, because you actually need advertisers to come look at this list and say, this is a great list of publishers. They won't defraud me, right? So there is not a economic, it's hard to measure the economic loop between the people consuming the list. So TCRs to me that actually have that economic loop in there measurable in a measurable ways, I think is more interesting.

But those kind of TCRs happen more at the protocol level implementations. But, I mean, Ocean originally had that as part of their white paper, like a very base level TCR. but I think they pulled it out but otherwise it's hard to know I think I still think TCR is for like interesting community member management

is a good way because people would use the token to signal being a part of it and I think that's one of the reasons why Foams also sort of succeeding in their TCR because it attracts a community of cartographers

and if you're a photographer who has a foam token and you meet another cartographer who has a foam token you're like wow let's be friends before we wrap up i wanted to talk about this experiment that you conducted recently called this art is always for sale or this artwork is always for sale rather can you tell us why you did this what was the goal here like what did you hope to achieve or learn with this experiment yeah um so

you know i as you might have heard during the whole show so far i've always been interested in creative arts and new economics and a few months back I read the book from Eric Posner and Glenn Weil on radical markets and one of the proposals in there was around a novel way to look at property rights and that is Harburger Tax which is essentially once you own an asset you have to always specify a sale price and on that specified sale price that you put you have to pay some tax on it so that means if you own the asset you can't put it out of as a value of five billion dollars or whatever because then you have to pay tax on five billion dollars so that incentivizes people to price their assets in a more reasonable

manner but obviously the trade-off is anyone can buy it from you at any point in time so that was like the very simple concept to me that was very interesting which i thought could be used in new ways so i did a lot of into wrote a long blog post on the usage of radical markets in the arts which took some of these ideas and said what if we could do this what if you could do that one of them was you know this artwork is always on sale became this artwork is always on sale so the premise for me was just to say here is the nfti a collectible it represents an artwork and this artwork will always be on sale and so the goal is just to say hey look no one has experimented with this kind of property rights before on the blockchain and the art market is notorious for being interesting

and different but it's also a very insular market like the art market is very sort of self-referential about themselves you know that they the idea of the art auction is very specific you know and in this case there is an always-on auction there's no sort of christie's that's going to put a auction for this artwork because it's always on sale um so that's one of the first ideas i had like let me just put it out there and the artwork itself would be self-referential to the fact that it's always on sale just to prove a point to just put this idea out there and say let's see what people think so I launched it about 20 days ago and it's been interesting to see the response it started at zero so I didn't put up some that initial value someone bought it set the price for

$40 someone bought it for $40 and it set the price to $16,000 then someone bought it for $16,000 and then put up the price at 100. It's now still the same person valued at $130,000 about. So this artwork's always on sale and it's currently valued at $130,000. Now what the interesting thing about this is, is I have now been earning in perpetuity the past 20 days on this value that has been specified. So I've earned about like two ether about,

so like a few hundred dollars just by the fact that this artwork is always on sale. So it's just the interesting way to think about collectibles artwork using blockchain and novel property rights and then seeing what the world thinks about it, including the blockchain world, the art world. I've had art creators come to me and say, like, this is super interesting. People in the blockchain spaces say it is quite interesting. And there's been a lot of discussions, good feedback, critique as well. I mean, this is not going to be for everyone, but it's just a new way to explore. What types of critiques have you received?

I'm curious about that. I mean, it goes into general critique about the property model in general, is like you're not technically an owner. You're basically like renting the artwork and keeping it. And then anyone can just take it from you at any point in time at your specified sale price. So it brings into question whether this is a good model for art or not, especially digital art. It's not going to work for traditional art. Right. It would only work for something digital where the asset itself could be, where the value of the asset.

Transfer. the proprietary could be not the true not the value but the the actual ownership of the asset could be transferred exactly and so that's why i was like very explicit in the language that i used um i try to not use the word owner i just use word patron um and and it's supposed to represent a patronage model which is while i'm holding the digital artwork i'm actually supporting artists at the same time in this case it's me um so it is supposed to represent sort of stewardship or or patronage. And it would then allow the artist to also earn it

in perpetuity for the art that I have created in the past. And with it, I asked a lot of questions. Like, would this change the behavior between the collector and artist? Does it change various things away, think about art, essentially? But yeah, the critiques have mainly been about, like, look, I don't want to own art that someone can take away from me.

So I don't want to participate. have you thought about ways in which one could use this for I don't know funding content creation for instance like a podcast? Oh absolutely absolutely I totally think that it's possible. Because here's another way to think about it. I was thinking about in the context of CryptoKitties, right? Where look a lot of people played CryptoKitties and now they just have a bunch of digital catch collecting dust somewhere. like they're not necessarily participating actively anymore but if there's someone else somewhere in the world going like damn i really want that cat but you're not selling it and there's no way for me to actually get it anymore then they can take it off your hands for a small price you just have to set a sale price right so it seems to me in certain asset classes on a blockchain it could be more meaningful for people to say like look if you opt into this model like this is the way we can we can do this then the revenue that's generated from people paying this price to keep the assets could go towards various people in the ecosystem that I've created value,

like the artists, the developers, what if Axioms then actually makes money from this kind of model instead of charging for the exchange fees? So there's a different bunch of ways and different participants can earn revenue from it, and it is a possible model for a podcast as well. You know, create collectibles that people want to create that's related to Epicenter. like let me buy and sell Sebastian bubblehead on the blockchain and I can just, while I hold it, I'm paying patronage towards the podcast.

Well, I'll have to consider that. And given that I'm building, I've built a cosmos validator, it could be used a validator slots because there's only 100 of them. We have one of them. So if we put a sale price on it, somebody can come and replace us on that slot, right? Yeah. Yeah.

That's actually really interesting as well. Yeah. I mean, like this model seems to be that people who value that position or that thing, the highest will end up owning the thing. Yeah. It is, I mean, the original premise was that this kind of property model works best for things, as it said in the book, or to be owned in the commons. Right.

So it's, it is things that aren't supposed to be. held and then kept off the market. It's not supposed to create monopolies. And I think that's where it's kind of interesting. And whether that relates to art or not, I'm not sure, and that's what we will still see. But there's different interesting places where this could be useful. I mean, it's not going to be useful for something like E&S, for example, because you're building a value under a brand and it's someone that just takes your brand. It's like it's pointless. Like, you lose all value in doing it like that. Well, with that, Simon, I want to thank you for coming on the show today. It's been really fascinating to dive into bonding curves and TCRs. I was calling it

token created lists for most of the episode, but yeah, token created registers. So thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, the guest, or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter.

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