Unchained - The Chopping Block: Iggy Azalea, Hamster Kombat, & Airdrop Insights - Ep. 660

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner, and Tarun Chitra explore the latest trends in the crypto world. In this episode, we dive into the impact of celebrity-endorsed memecoins, featuring Iggy Azalea's new coin 'Mother' and Andrew Tate's 'Daddy.' We discuss how these phenomena influence the broader crypto market, recent trends in airdrops, and the challenge of Sybil resistance. Additionally, we explore the permissionless nature of crypto and the trade-offs involved in fun and chaotic projects, including the explosive rise of 'Hamster Kombat.' Tune in for an in-depth look at how pop culture intersects with the core principles of cryptocurrency, shaping current market sentiment. Show highlights 🔹 Crypto Market Sentiment: Discussion on the latest market trends and how inflation numbers are impacting the community.  🔹 Memecoins & Celebrities: Analysis of Iggy Azalea's $Mother and the phenomenon of celebrity-launched memecoins.  🔹 Emerging Memecoins: Insights into new memecoins, including issues with fake and hacked accounts.  🔹 Tap-to-Earn Games: Overview of the rapid growth of simple click-based games like Hamster Kombat.  🔹 Airdrop Controversies: Exploration of recent controversies, particularly involving zkSync and LayerZero, and challenges of Sybil attacks.  🔹 Future Airdrop Strategies: Discussion on the evolution and need for clear, ungameable metrics. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert, what do you think is the end game for how celebrities monetize their fame? You know, I think being the face and co-owner of a product has been proven out to be like an incredibly lucrative, completely legal, and value-creating way to monetize brand. And I think if you compare that to celeb tokens, which are at best zero-sum, right, are not creating anything. Are... Remember, didn't you argue earlier on a show that meme coins were positive some? Done, done. No, I said meme coins in breakout successes could be positive wealth. Do you think Iggy Azaleas created $200 million in wealth?

This is a lot harder to... Not a dividend. It's a tale of two-clan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm into trading firms who are very involved. I like that ETH is the ultimate Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. Quick intros. First, you got Tom, the defy maven and master of memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Robert, the crypto connoisseur,

and czar of Super State. GM, everybody. Next, we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. And finally, I'm Hasee, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto, and I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping

blocks at XYZ for more disclosures. So boys, it's been a little bit since we've been on. It's been kind of a slow couple weeks. I feel like, you know, the news in this industry, I feel like it kind of all comes at once and the crazy deluge and then it kind of slows down and gets really quiet. Feels like it's been a quiet couple weeks. We've got a few items that we're going to run through in the news today, but I just want to get a vibe check. How are you guys, how are you guys feeling? How are you guys feeling about this bull market? Where are we? What's like the, what's the lived experience right now of going through this period of crypto? Well, just to reverse engineer sentiment from price, you know, today, and it's Wednesday for whenever you're listening to

this episode, today was some great inflation numbers that came out. And markets across the board were extremely enthusiastic about it because people started to see light at the end of the tunnel of the Fed potentially being able to lower interest rates this year and get us back on track. And crypto is really exuberant for a couple hours. And then by the end of day today, it was, you know, a big sell-off again with, you know, people left asking why and how on the sidelines and sort of back to this like, you know, you know, very plateau-ish, you know, I don't want to say stagnation, but it's been relatively quiet over the last couple weeks. There hasn't really been any, you know, significant breakouts in

the asset prices up or down. It's been, you know, a very sideways sort of quiet existence for last couple weeks. And so, you know, just to take a look at where the sentiment is at, right now, it's kind of a lot of waiting and seeing. There's only one fact I want to point out about an event that happened today that's related to markets, but no, it's not the one you think. It's the fact that the biggest news on crypto Twitter was Iggy Azalia going to the NYSC and shilling her meme coin. Like that tells you where we are at the market. And Kramer put him for a photo with her. Yes.

I did see that. I was like, okay, the angel of death has arrived. It's not going to bode well. For those who don't know the meme, apparently whenever Jim Kramer is caught on camera with anybody, it is the beginning of their downfall. So I don't know. Iggyzalia seems to have not been aware of the, I mean, I don't know why she would be. but she does not seem to be aware of that.

No, I think she wrote some tweets saying, I can't be canceled or cursed or something. It was like, she was like, I'm unstoppable. I'm sure that's like her social media team. That's like more clued in. I have to imagine. It could be her. I mean, you know, she's been pretty with the, you know,

D-Gen culture lately. So, okay, let's talk about, let's talk about Igiazalia and mother. So we alluded to this a little bit when we did our live consensus show. But so Iggy Azalia, if you recall, we talked briefly about Sahil, this character who seems to be crypto-pilling a lot of celebrities. And Iggyzalia was one of the people who Sahel in his attempt to get all these celebrities like Kate and Jenner onto the crypto train, tried to get Iggyzalia on board. Iggyzalia was like, no, screw off.

And she decided to launch her own coin without the help of Sahel called Mother. And people have gotten now very excited. Iggyzalia, who I guess is post her music career. She's no longer actively doing music. Now she's just a general influencer type. She is now fully embraced the crypto Digen meme coin subculture that is mother. But unlike, you know, maybe Keitlin Jenner, who's just kind of more generically, hey, token go up, pump, pump, you know, up into the right,

Igizalia seems to have really taken a very different stance toward the crypto community. So she's gotten very competitive toward a lot of the crypto. figurehead types. So she started talking a lot of shit to Vitalik, to Hayden Adams. She's called people like losers and had a bunch of memes of them like sucking on pacifiers

or, I don't know, kind of weird just picking fights with random people in crypto. There was one quote from an interview that she did with Thread Guy where she was talking about basically almost accusing Vitalik saying, I'm just going to

kind of paraphrase a little bit of this quote. I'm not mad at this man's opinion. I just question what you're trying to do with gas money. So it's rich of you to have an opinion about charities and hospitals. For the record, Vitalik was claiming that, oh, meme coins could do more to be pro-social and to give some of this to positive social causes. He said, yeah, it's rich of you to have an opinion about charities and hospitals or whatever the fuck you're saying.

Let's talk about gas, the gas fees, the gas tax. Maybe some people should have an opinion. Sometimes I respect that you made something. Don't get me wrong. I do. But we're in a meme coin world. and I have an honor in the way that should be approached, blah, blah, whatever. Almost insinuating that Vitalik is skimming gas money on the top of it.

Yeah, I think she genuinely believes that... She also posted this meme. I figured for our YouTube audience, maybe it's worth showing. Can you guys see it? Yes, yes. Why don't you describe what this meme is depicting? Yes, maybe... Vitalik is a baby who is being breastfed by...

Iggyazilia, and she is calling, she is intimating that she is his mother. Because that is the name of the token. Yeah. So, yeah, real, really refined stuff that we cover here on the show. Well, I mean, let me tell you, Memecoin land this week, you know, you're talking about the market being slow. Memecoin land was not slow. There were so many C to D list celebrities who suddenly have been getting in on memecoin.

Yeah, Hulk Hogan came out with Memecoin. That was a hack. That was a hack. Hulk Hogan was a hack. That was not real. When Hulk Hogan got regained control of his accounts, he deleted everything. So Hulk was a rug. Somebody hacked his account and then, which I guess is now like the best way to monetize

a hacked celebrity account. Like it used to be, they send me Eith and I'll double it and send it back to you right. Back in 2020, that was the way you monetize this. Very accurate. Yes. Exactly. Now you launch a fake meme coin and then you just dump it onto retail. And then we just said Andrew Tate.

So Andrew Tate, for those of you who don't know who it is, God bless. Andrew Tate is like a male supremacy, pop goblin influencer. Not agree. Yeah, he's a very bad guy. Apparently he's like stuck in Romania because he's wanted for some kind of whatever, some kind of rapey charge sex trafficking. Also sex trafficking. And so anyway, he launched a meme coin in response to Igiazalia is called Daddy.

and he's now picking a fight with Anson. With Anson? Yeah, with Anson. Wait, we really do have to get Ansem on as a guest. We do really get Ansel in. I feel like, I feel like the problem is we're like the boomers talking about meme coins. We're like, we're trying, we're the boomers translating meme coins for other boomers.

And I think we need to go to the source. Yeah, he's mainlining it every day. You know, it's dangerous stuff out there. Yeah. I would say we are like the Gen Xers who are explaining it to the boomers. and trying to get the people who actually do meme coins on the show and stuff and stuff. Yeah, so any thoughts on, thoughts on, okay, we've gotten to peak celebrity, uh, saturation of the meme coin story.

And it does, I agree with to, it does seem like the only thing that's happening. This can't be. There's going to be a worst peak. Trust me. There will probably be a worst peak. That's true. That is true. I mean, right now the market caps of these are still not insane.

I mean, they're, I mean, in objective, terms they're insane, but in relative terms, they're, like, kind of reasonable. So, mother is on the order of about 150 to 200 million. I think. Yeah, Andrew Tates was about 100 million. It peaked at 350. It peaked at 350. Yeah. So it's been, I mean, it's been moving around a lot. She's managed to get some, like, real world integration. There's, like, some store that you can now buy something in and mother. That's her store. It's like a merch store. Oh, it's her store. Oh, I see.

Yeah, she's starting at telecom. Oh, that, that was, yeah, yeah, this telecom thing. I saw You can pay your phone bill. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she's starting. I mean, I don't even know how the crypto intersects with the telecom, but simultaneously to launching this celeb coin, there's a telecom, you know, like a Boost Mobile or a cricket. Yeah, it's like an MVNO and you can pay with mother. Right.

So she's trying to launch a startup telecom at the same time as this crypto and have them intersect. Right. Doesn't that just create more cell pressure on the token? I don't think that's the primary concern. yeah i i guess yeah it's true i don't think i think many people will use this it's just like the narrative that it's getting integrated into telecoms yeah a telecom yeah okay so do we think that let me ask a question just so we can actually have something to talk about besides just just who we can awing uh do we think that this is how increasingly celebrities are going to start

monetizing their celebrity right we can't there was a moment where oh Celebrities will make money by, you know, doing, what's it called? What's the app that got super popular in COVID where celebrities would like sing birthday, happy birthday. Cameo. Camio. Camio. Camio, cameo.

Right. There was an idea that, oh, maybe celebrities will monetize their fame using cameo. They'll find all these little things that, you know, Patreon and things like this. Do we think that the future way in which famous people will monetize their fame is just come here and bet on me continuing to be famous? No. Why not? Why not? Why not? What's the end game?

Robert, what do you think is the end game for how celebrities monetize their fame? Because Gamios also had Fall from Grace. So I think the highest value way is for monetizing fame and personal brand through like new business ventures, whether it's like a tequila brand or, you know, cell phone company or a vitamin water or headphones that gets bought by Apple. like whatever it is like you know i think being the face and co-owner of a product has been proven out to be like an incredibly lucrative completely legal and value-creating way to monetize brand and i think that's kind of like the gold standard in a lot of ways and i think if you compare that to celeb tokens, which are at best zero sum, right, are not creating anything.

Robert, didn't you argue earlier to show that meme coins were positive sum? No, I said meme coins in breakout successes could be positive well. Do you think Iggy Azaleas created 200 million dollars in well? This is a lot harder to get them. Robert is just like Robert is just afraid of getting beaten up on Twitter by her because she is fierce

No no come at me Iggy Give me your work Okay that's true You might actually That's kind of win-win What's the psychology here Why mother is not wealth creation But then Doge is

What's like the thing happening in your head? Okay well Doge Doge has a unique value proposition right which is Doge was the first satirical, to my knowledge, satirical crypto assets. There might have been others that were trial balloons for this concept. Coinier West. Coinier West.

Is that before Doge? I thought it was, I thought it was before, but I could be wrong. Whether or not it was first, doesn't matter. I get the idea. But like Doge has a unique value proposition in which it, one is it's, you know, it was trying to be its own blockchain as a parody of Bitcoin and like coin and all the other Bitcoin forks, right? There's something innately unique about Dogecoin that there's not something unique about the 14th DLift's Leapcoin. And I think Dogecoin for that reason has a much

larger permanence in like the societal, you know, Wikipedia of crypto than, you know, a completely continuing ununique list of C&D list celeb coins. I think that's kind of true for even the things that you mentioned, though, right? It's like every meta eventually gets saturated. Like you can't really launch your own celeb tequila brand in 2024 because the market is like so saturated. So if you're the first one to figure it out, great. You know, if the first celebrity to figure out you can sell an NFT or you can launch a meme

coin, great. And eventually when everyone tries to do it, there isn't enough demand, there's enough liquidity and sort of the meta gets, gets, gets dry and someone's trying to find something new. Not that that I think necessarily like alleviates your criticism, which is like, you know, hey, at this point, maybe there isn't actually any sort of value creation. But like, I don't know. I just wonder like how much more demand there actually is for this kind of thing or like, you know, hey, if there's actually any more room to run or if like this actually is the peak,

the peak. And fundamentally what you're, so going back to the idea that. that, hey, long-term celebrities are going to be, you know, making, monetizing their celebrity off product endorsements. I mean, fundamentally, a product endorsement is just advertising, right? And if you become a co-business owner, it effectively gives you free advertising. So our advertising budget is now cheaper because, you know, LeBron James owns this brand, and so he's just going to do it for free.

So it's effectively subsidizing one part of the business cost, which is advertising. Arguably, it works for anything, right? It's not necessarily, you know, consumer goods. It can also be a casino. It can be, you know, anything else, right? And so in a way, well, a meme coin is also to another good, right? It's a good that, you know, you can imagine Bonk might have paid people to advertise, you know, or drop some to KOLs to get them to talk about the token.

It's also an advertising cost effectively. I don't know that Bonk did that, but other coins obviously do. So maybe it is not any different. And to Tom's point, as the meta is evolving, like it's, you know, Grimes for NFTs or Igiazalia for meme coins, there's always going to be the first few movers who end up finding this new good where, you know, celebrities are underpriced. And there is such a demand for distribution that being one of the very first ones to attach or name something creates a lot of value, but it gets arbed away. And then, you know, in three years, assuming meme coins

are still a thing in three years, which who knows if they will be. But if meme coins are as crazy in three years from now, it might be that at that point, the only meme coins that matter are like, you know, LeBron James and Kanye West meme coins and nobody else can really compete. I think there's actually like also this weird thing where the dream of crypto and this type of stuff has always been making revenue sharing more easy, right? Like if you look at like general revenue sharing agreements for, you know, different components of a brand that as a person, it's actually super. complicated, very hard to enforce, hard to get all the payments right, whatever.

And somehow I feel like the meme coins are sort of like, you know, in every good lie, there's a kernel of truth. I think the kernel of truth here is like they want to get around that somehow. They want to get around actually having to think about how they're selling their likeness and just be like, here's a likeness and I'm just, you know, I can do what I do best and promote it. But yeah, they don't really solve the problem. They just kind of, mask it. But I think there is this kernel of truth, which is like kind of what you're getting at, that there is something people want out of this, like from the side of the people making the assets. But, you know, I think by the time their market cap gets to $100 million, they forget about

the kernel of truth behind it. Or they make a new kernel of truth behind it, which is, you know, Well, I mean, yeah, or Andrew Tate. I mean, I feel like that guy is making like a meme coin a day or something. It's like it's not just one. There's like a bunch of them. Well, are there? I'd no idea. Yeah, I think there's like there at least three.

I had a lot of trouble. I'm going to be honest and me really made me feel old reading the tweet fight between him and handsome because I was like, I don't fucking understand. I just do not understand what is going on. Honestly, I thought the words were pretty. easy to understand. It was a fairly straightforward fight. But yeah, I don't, I don't necessarily recommend following along because I think it will, it will make you sad. But do you think there's anything venture investable in this space? Like, do you think, do you think, like a D-Gen purchase,

is that like a good idea? Do you think like a pumped-out fun? Do you think that's a good idea? Are there other things that you guys are excited about backing or is it just, you know, cheering on from the peanut gallery. I think pumped-off fund's interesting because it really does make it easy to use. And I, you know, obviously, I think they're raising lots of money or close to, and so I'm not super, I'm not, I think they have, everyone knows that they have figured out

something quite important. I'm just more curious what like the next evolution of pumped out fund is. Like, I feel like pumped out fun is much closer to anything that the billions of dollars that were invested into blockchain games wish they could be. Because it's like much closer to a real viral consumer app than like any of these things that raise hundreds of millions of dollars to be like blockchain gaming. Out of all of the things that like fit this mold that I think it's unique with is the first like launch pad type project that's actually works.

Right. Like how many times have we seen from across the crypto industry? Some like, we're going to be a launch pad to launch other tokens or other projects. or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There have been like an infinite number of them, right? And none of them have worked to the point of gaining, like, critical mass or, you know, significant traction or product market fit. And what's unique about Pump.

Dot Fun is that it's the first launch pad, if you want to use that term, that I think has really broken out into critical mass. And I think that's- But the launch pad with a gamification element. It's not just a launch pad that's like, here, here are some free tokens that you can farm, right? Like, I think that that aspect makes it more like a game as well as a launch pad. And that's why I'm comparing it to these blockchain games that like, I, they, they just, they haven't been able to have user retention the way it pumped up.

Well, as a whole lot of, there is a lot of, there's a lot of stuff to talk about with blockchain games, because if we're talking about user engagement, we've seen some crazy numbers being posted lately in the tonne ecosystem. So there's two projects in particular that I think are worth, worth us talking about. So the first is a, project called Notcoin. We kind of passed over it previously, but Notcoin. I think they had some, what was it, like 30 million users that were interacting with Notcoin. Recently, there's been a new project called Hamster Combat. So Hamster Combat is a telegram-based game where it's basically like a, it's what's called a tap to earn game. And a tap to earn game, what you do is literally

you install the app on your phone and you tap a big picture of a hamster. And you tap it and it gives you, you know, haptic feedback. And that's kind of it. And then as you get points, you can, like, buy things in order to increase your productivity and, like, go through this, like, kind of skill tree.

So if you ever played, like, an idle game, it's kind of like that, except you're literally having to click in order to, like, get through the idle game. So I remember playing, like, cookie clicker. Long time, this is like, you know, 10 years ago or something, that the first generation

of this game was created. And so anyway, these games, this category of games, has become incredibly viral. So far, Hamster Combat, has over 100 million users. Recently, just because of Hamster Combat alone, TAN has flipped Ethereum with daily active users.

Something like, you know, recently, I think just within the last month, they flipped Ethereum for daily active users. Hamster Combat has gotten banned in multiple countries. It's one of the reasons why one of the Telegram wallets, I think I just posted this on Twitter a little bit ago, a Telegram wallet became the number one app in the App Store, for finance, simply because of not because of not going, but because of hamster combat. And so we've seen these incredibly viral games.

There's a story about Iran trying to ban the game because people are like just playing hamster combat in Iran all the time. And apparently it's, I don't know, Haram or something. Wait, it's illegal. I didn't know hamsters have any rights. Hamsters have like almost dog level rights, if you're saying that. I don't think, I don't think it's for the hamsters. I think it's for the people who are addicted to

monster combat. Wait, but by the way, do you guys remember when lightning, there was that like chicken thing that you could tip in lightning? No. You could tip Bitcoin to this chicken, lightning chickens or whatever, and it was like with the only ever used lightning app for a long time, it was like chicken feeding.

Do not remember this. Poyo feed. That was what it was called. Pollo feed. Okay. You could like, you basically could send lightning to this wallet and they would feed this chicken and then they would show you a video of them feeding the chicken. second.

Amazing. Well, right now, I mean, I would say as a game, it's pretty thin. There's not a ton in the way of gameplay, but this so far has massively, massively, massively been larger than any other game we've ever seen in crypto. This is closer to pumped out fund than all the things that raise money under the guise of blockchain gaming, though, if we're going to be very honest, right? Because, like, the blockchain game things are like, we're going to do StarCraft on the blockchain.

Like, yeah, we're fucking right. Like, you know. Yeah, I will say this does kind of comport with my thesis that the blockchain game quote unquote that becomes successful is going to be perceived as a social problem. It's going to be the kind of thing that you're like,

oh my God, you know, this is horrible for the youth and they're wasting all their time with this like mind-corrupting virus. And that's kind of what I mean, I don't know, not to throw any shade on people who like answer combat, but it is just kind of a like, you know, it's not like, oh, you're being immersed into this fantasy world

and you're having this incredible journey and deepening your relationships with other people through your working together on some task in the Metaverse. Instead, you're just clicking a button over and over again and watching numbers go up. That's what people like. They like number go up. And the number literally cannot not go up in these games.

And I think that's kind of where the dopamine comes from. There's another story about Banana, which is currently the number three game on Steam. And it's just a cookie clicker. But then, you know, Steam has a Steam Marketplace. And so people are then trading the bananas that they're creating in Banana on Steam Marketplace for like $1,000. And so I think it's like broadly speaking, there's like a idle gaming cookie clicker revival. And like crypto is like one reflection of that.

But yeah, I don't really know where this is all kind of coming from, some sort of societal malaise that wants people to have a number go up. Yeah, what is what is your diagnosis, Tom, for why people all of a sudden are playing these like brainless number go-up games? Maybe it's just, you know, a reaction to all the, you know, really glossy, you know, triple A gaming. People are like, no, you know what, I don't want an immersive world that is too much to ask for me right now. I just want to click. And these are, these are scratching that itch. You know, it's, it's always sort of the cyclicality of culture. and this is where we are right now.

Yeah, I just think there's always like return to simplicity thing. And whenever that happens, like blockchain seem to win because they're low compute, generally simple. You can't do really complicated things. And I actually feel like there's this malaise, my diagnosis, which is like pure speculation, is there some malaise in society coming from like the over AIification of things. There's like too many automated bots for everything. So like complicated games aren't fun anymore.

and like the spam protection isn't working as well as it used to. And these simple games are very hard to like, the AI bots are just like not useful for. And it's actually some weird thing that like crypto is good for these types of things. And it has natural. I don't know. We don't know how many people are pumped up on. Yeah.

I mean, if you look at Notcoin, right? Notcoin has a huge market cap. It's what, like a couple billion total market cap. So yeah. Honestly, I would. was shocked to what I thought on Avo. Yeah, yeah.

If people think that hamster combat is going to be a similar outcome or even bigger outcome, you know, why wouldn't there be lots and lots of people, you know, creating accounts just in case if they click a lot, you know, that they'll get a big air drop. Yeah, click farms are definitely a thing. So I'm like,

why would that not be especially true? This is not even what we mean by a click farm, right? Normally a click farm, it means like you're replicating a bunch of fancy stuff to simulate a real human, you know, to click on ads. whereas in this case, like literally there's just mechanical clicking that you don't even need to emulate a human. Yeah, I definitely think because there's been millions of people trained to be civil air drop farmers jumping through hoops, it lends itself naturally to this activity where it's like, I'm going to get something for free by clicking and like doing a very light amount of work, even if it's a game like entertainment focused experience.

And I think, you know, it's why it's successful, right? And we'll probably see more of this. Probably not as like unsophisticated, you know, very simple games. But like eventually like, you know, probably more interesting, more sophisticated, longer lasting entertainment, you know, things that don't just like get super repetitive super quickly and like higher quality interactions. Yeah. The thing about cookie clicker, I mean, this is a long time ago that I played dokey clicker.

But the thing about cookie clicker is like, it doesn't, it's not a game with super high retention. It's a game that like you get very obsessed over for a, like a fixed period of time and then you hate yourself. And you're like, why the fuck that I just spend the last like six hours optimizing how to click a cookie as fast as possible? And then you like never want to look at it again. And so I sort of anticipate that that's what these click to earn games will look like. Unless people are getting that crypto from it, in which case they're not going to. Yeah, yeah. So like when they get, because right now, the anticipation is like, look, I'm going to click this every time I'm in the train, every time I'm on the toilet, every time, like any time that I have any free time.

But once the air drop happens and like the economics are kind of fixed at a certain point, like you have to pay to play the game. Otherwise there's no, you know, how can the economic loop fundamentally work. And, you know, people will just be like, well, okay, now am I actually making money playing this game? But until then, like the hopium of what if I make a lot of money from all the clicking I'm doing while I'm sitting on the toilet? but I'm sure is a very, very great way to get very large engagement. Yeah. That's my guess.

But like, yeah, these clicking idle games, I mean, obviously some of them are continue to be popular, but they do seem like one of these things that they're sort of transient. You know, they don't, there's not like a long-term cookie-clicker community that's still playing cookie-clicker, you know, 10 years later.

But the funny thing, too, about these games, to your point to run, is that everything here could have been built in, like, 1995. You know, there really is nothing that requires any innovation and technology. It's just like a static image that you're clicking on and then like a, you know, like if else trees of, you know, things that you can buy that automate you're clicking. So, but okay, coming back to the point about air drops, let's talk a little bit about the irdrop meta, because we've seen a continuation in this theme that we've been seeing throughout

the year of a lot of the big air drops being beset with drama. So if you think about almost all the big airdrops the last year, there's been some kind of drama. So whether it's Starkware, eigen layer, there was, what was the layer zero. And then, of course, now ZKSink has been the most recent air drop, which has also been embroiled in drama. So ZK Sync, by the way, we're investors in ZKSink, and I believe robots are an investor in layer zero. So ZK, ZK, ZK, it's a zero-knowledge roll-up. They announced an airdrop that they're going to be air-dropping roughly 17.5% of the total token supply

onto users of ZK Sync, both ERA and ZKSync Light, which is the predecessor to ERA. And there's a very large air drop, much larger than the median error drop. Most air drops are around 10% or even sub-10%. So very, very dramatically large air drop. And of the roughly 6 million wallets

that had ever interacted with ZK Sync, only about 700,000 of them qualified. So a little bit, you know, 11% roughly, of the users that interacted with ZKSync are going to be getting theirdrop. And they had a bunch of thresholds of like you have to put some amount of liquidity, you have to interact with at least this many contracts.

And they made a lot of people mad. So now, some people were happy. I saw some mixed reactions, but there was a huge amount of anger, mostly coming from farmer types, right? And of course, everybody at this point is seen, there's all these kind of farmer guides that are out there in farming influencers

and farming strategists who will like tell you, here's how to farm this and farm that. I believe the technical term is KOL. KOL, yes. Nowadays, it is very true that almost every KOL has some kind of farming advice that they give to users. So anyway, so first you had this backlash. And despite the size of ZKSinks AirDrop, a lot of the backlash was particularly focused

around, one, there being a large discrepancy between the smallest airdrop and the biggest irdrop and a lot of real users who had relatively small balances or who didn't provide liquidity, not getting any airdrop, as well as a bunch of sibbles that managed to get the irdrop. Now, then on the other side, you have Layer Zero, who's still kind of in the midst of their drama. So I think we talked about this a little bit last time. Layer Zero, their approach to their irdrop was that they were going to allow users to self-report. So they were going to do their air-drop in three phases. So first, if you were a Sybil, you know that you were acting badly and farming the protocol, you can self-report. And by self-reporting, you get, I believe, 15 percent of the

airdrop you would otherwise get. And if you report somebody else and you sort of an irdrop bounty hunter, or a civil bounty hunter, you find somebody else who is a civil and you report them and your report is accepted, you get 10% of their stake. And then finally the remaining users

get their airdrops distributed. And so, you know, Brian Pellegrino, the founder of Layer Zero, has just been, for the last week, like trawling through all these reports of Symbols and people reporting other people's Symbols and blah, blah, blah, trying to decide what's real and what's not.

And he's gotten, I think, a mix of both enthusiasm and then criticism for how this whole situation has been handled on the layer zero side. So it's all very complicated. The thing that strikes me the most, and I'm curious to get your guys' take on this, is that I can't remember the last time that there was anirdrop that was uniformly positive.

Like, I don't know, maybe Arbitstrom or something. Like, it was a while ago, the last time I saw an air drop that people were just happy. And everything that was airdrope now. What did you know? People were happy about. Yeah, Gino. People were happy about, but that was really like before, I mean, that was what? September?

Right? So it was more than six months ago. Like what within the last six months of like a major air drive that people have been happy? I think being the first in like a new ecosystem in some way that is like a new novel mechanism. You know, like Celestia, Gito. There's a few of those that like really stand out as like they hook a very different tact. I actually think, you know, in the case of Celestia, I feel like they, did this huge air drop to developers, researchers, et cetera. And then literally everyone after that just copied that

and I think the problem is now the expectations were set by the first one and expectations are only increasing. Right? Because like, oh, I got this big celestial air drop because I wrote a piece of code and wrath in like a Ethereum client library. I'm expecting to get

like 10 more. Right? Like there's this like kind of ascending ladder problem of like once you have it, everyone, and I don't know what to call. There's like a word for this type of thing that's kind of like, Hedonic federal? It's like a head, no,

no, but there's like a technical behavioral economics word of like this like conditioning thing where like you can't, you can't, you can't like you turn on on salary expectation type of stuff. And it feels a little bit like that right. Because like in the Celestia case, there was actually people who did a lot of open source software work got this thing.

And now they're like, oh, cool. Now I can, I'm just going to. And I feel like that, you have to be the first, right? When you're copying that something someone else did, it's like you're, you're, you have to pay this premium for that.

I don't, I don't know if that, I think that's part of it. That's certainly the pattern, but I don't know if that's the cause, right? Because if you look back six months ago, you know, when Celeste did their air drop and when Jito did theirirdrop, industrial farming was nowhere near the scale where it is today, right? It was all that's really ramped up. No, it was still significant. I don't think it's where it was today. I don't think it's where it was today.

I think it's increased a lot this year. Like, and at that time, for Tia, but I feel like Tia was definitely industrially farmed. And then all the industrial farmers got, felt like, oh, wow, why are the developers getting so much of allocation, not us? That was like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly, certainly. But I'd say, like, the number of people who are doing this has gone up a lot, not necessarily the fact that, yeah, there was always farmers, but the farmers were more sophisticated

back then. There were fewer tools that would automate this stuff. There were many fewer people from emerging markets who were doing this. Like, I think the, a lot of the farmers were more sophisticated, because, you know, because you had to be. You know, if you're just like some, some,

you know, some random person in India or Malaysia, like how are you going to get the tools to be able to do industrial air drop farming nine months ago? But today, it's actually pretty straightforward. And there's all these guides that people,

you know, they train people in different countries to just do this with very small amounts of capital. And so I think the, the one side of the market has grown a lot. The other thing that also feels true is that for something like Jito, or for something like a Dex,

right, it's relatively straightforward to meter what is the activity that's supposed to produce theirdrop, which is, you know, trade if you're on a dex or, you know, provide liquidity if you're on blur or, you know, whatever it is, right? You know, put in capital if it's a thing that requires capital. Whereas for a layer one, for Celestia is a good example, right? What was the thing you were supposed to be doing on Celestia that makes you worthy of anirdrop, right? It's pretty vague. It's like unclear what exactly you're supposed to be doing. And so I think that uncertainty that naturally arises when you have a protocol where it's not clear what the North Star metric is supposed to be that's actually valuable to the protocol. You know, on some level, it's also, you know,

it was kind of true for Layer Zero. Like, people weren't exactly sure what Layer Zero wanted to reward. Was it the number of transactions? Was it the amount of fees paid? Was it, you know, certain corridors? Was it doing a lot of transactions for small amounts? And Layer Zero, you know, eventually they sort of told people, here's the thing we cared about. And I think it's like that big reveal at the end that ends up causing people to get really pissed off is that they can't anticipate exactly what it's going to be and naturally all the people who mispredict what the thing is going to be get mad.

But as long as, like the thing that I think is most common is that when it's pretty obvious what you're rewarding, people don't seem to get as mad. Right? So like the decks air drops and things like that seem to be pretty straightforward. I think it's the also requires some, like, more skin in the game. And, you know, it's like, yeah, are you providing capital? You are paying fees to do to do trades, but yeah, it's like the other stuff is a bit more nebulous.

Speaking of people getting mad, I really love this meme. I think it was from the ZK Sync Discord. I was dying when I saw that. Talk, read this out to us. Read this out to us. It's three Indian flag emojis. Today is worse than September 11th for India. We do not forgive.

We do not forget. No, you're forgetting the airplane. Oh, the airplanes. Three airplanes emoji. And then three, uh, Angry face emojis. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

And then three ZK Sync emojis. ZK. Sinkler, messing with India. A bunch of canceled emojis. And this is reposted many, many times. It's, yeah, it's great. I mean, I feel like the whole ecosystem has, like, you know, lost the plot a little bit, right?

In that you have all of these people that are gaming metrics, right? in order to get money. And the whole thing just seems a little bit convoluted at this point, right? We're like, you know, no matter what, there's these brouhawas because, you know, people didn't get the right amount of expected reward for the right amount of work. And all the discretion is in, you know, one or two people's hands. And why is it being a mess? And, you know, I just feel like at some point,

the meta is just going to shift entirely away from air drops. I think it's going to have to. It's going to have to. This system doesn't seem to work that well, you know, for distributing a token necessarily. There's got to be better ways to distribute tokens broadly, right, than like this, you know, black box, extremely aggressively sybbled and gamed, you know, air drop system. It's like, it's a pretty shitty way of distributing token. It's just, it's not adversarily robust, right?

Like there is no way in general, unless you have a, again, a very clear, ungameable economic metric like, you know, fees paid or volume or whatever it is. There is no way to ensure that, yes, this thing is real. When we have literally pseudonymous accounts and we have all these like really crappy heuristics that we use to try to tell whether people are real or not. And we know that they're messy. We know that they don't work very well. And the better theirdrop farmers get,

the worst these techniques become, right? So it's kind of like, if you were doing this anti-cibil stuff, you know, nine months ago, you could actually do a pretty good job tracking a lot of the civil activity. And it's a cat-mouse game. The Sybils get better and better,

and they become more and more like real users. And as a result, any attempt to do civil filtering is going to hit real users and is going to let Sybil through, right? Like the error rate just gets worse and worse over time. Yeah. Just to complete the analogy, you know, it's like I don't totally hate all of this, you know, work, and I'm using work very specifically as a word for token. Because if you look all the way back to Bitcoin, right, as like the first proof of work chain.

I mean, there's obviously concepts for proof of work part of Bitcoin academically. But like, if you think of Bitcoin's distribution as very simply proof of work to distribute the token, the, the, entire supply of the token, it made perfect sense, right? That work is completely tied to the root of what the project is in the first place, which is like providing security to the system so that you can like, you know, solve the double spend problem and, you know, have a currency that works. But like, there's very clear examples in my mind of proof of work for token being. incredibly positive and incredibly successful. And I just feel like this current world, it's like it's fake work, it's bullshit, it doesn't

provide anything of value, it's all optics, it's not contributing to the broader, like, you know, success of any of these projects. And that's why I think it's just going to have to evolve. And like the teams that figure out how to more closely tie, you know, the work to, to the distribution to the actual point of the application or blockchain or whatever, the better. And I think, you know, hopefully the meta evolves from here. I think, I mean, so there's a bunch of things that are kind of important to note regarding this. You know, I was on, you know, one of our guests' podcasts a few weeks ago, Gwart talking and, you know, he's a P.

P-O-W Maxi. And he, you know, we were talking about P-O-W versus POS. And in general, POS is always strictly worse. It's like a worse security model. It has a lot of problems with the fact that it, the final distribution of tokens is very correlated to the initial distribution.

It's very hard to diffuse the token distribution comparatively. And part of the reason for that between proof of work and proof of stake is there's this property called dynamic availability, which means that I can join and leave the network whenever I want. And proof of stake, you can't do that because I have to know how much everyone is staked in order to randomly sample from the set of validators to pick the next validator. If people are joining and leaving, then I might miscalculate how I'm doing that sampling. And so you have this problem in proof of stake where you have to actually lock the stake distribution for some amount of time.

And I think air drops are even worse than that. There's actually some nice research that is in other fields that, in mechanism design that shows things that look like air drops are kind of don't work. So I kind of agree, although I think don't work for distribution, like welfare maximization, which like supposed to welfare function. Relative to what? Relative to like what the optimal is. Let's say you're optimal as like everyone gets equal distribution based on their contributions.

But I mean, practically speaking, how would you even measure what the baseline is, right? For ZK Sync, what does it mean to allocate ZK tokens based on somebody's contribution? Because the AirDrop is attempting to be in some sense, right? It's obviously a very messy way and a very imperfect way of trying to measure that, but that's what they're attempting to measure with theirdrop, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The point of kind of these theoretical results is more saying, like, there are very few objective, like, welfare as you can take, that you can actually achieve the optimum easily for by some type of inter-distribution mechanism. Like, it's very similar to this proof of stake problem where, like, the initial stake distribution determines the long-time stake distribution or how things look over time much more directly.

And this is what I mean. There's this fact that there's like memory of the initial distribution is like really kind of a bad thing. You need to somehow get in more randomization. But getting out of the weeds about this, I guess I'm, I think the thing is if you look at fraud in a lot of different fields, like in gaming, fraud in Spotify stuff where people are like paying people to like their song. So they show up higher in the ranking algorithm. I don't think this is like a fully is a solved problem in many fields. I think it's this type of thing that like iteratively improves. And each time people are complaining about anirdrop,

that's like a gradient step in trying to improve these distribution mechanisms. And I suspect that, yeah, it won't be this kind of like wholesale air drop thing. It's going to long, in the long term, it needs to be something like more continuous, like over many rounds and more random between rounds. Like there should be very low overlap between the round. And if there is, you know, I think like people are starting to do that. I think a lot of the layer twos initially did that, but then they kind of had this Dow governance distribution problem like OP and arbitram. So I think like in the long run, we'll find new mechanisms.

I just think it's, you know, people are going to be angry because they made a million dollars on the first one. And then after every subsequent one, they got 10K and then they got angry. I feel like there's this expectation setting thing thing that's, fundamentally why ever... Yeah, the expectations get worse continuously. Yeah, only worse. Yeah, I think that's right.

I think on some level, there's also a little bit of a Faustian bargain that takes place on behalf of the projects that, you know, entertain these big kind of... Like, the projects know they're getting air drop-farmed, right? It's like, you know, if you're... If you got these crazy metrics going on and there's not that much real economic activity on the chain, like you kind of know,

Lair Zero kind of knows. ZK. Sink kind of knows. Like, you know, these projects know that there's a lot of farmers on the chain. And on some level, they know that it looks good for metrics. Like, nobody wants to be, you know, it's kind of like when public companies report these like bullshit metrics, like, you know, community adjusted EBITDA or whatever, because it's just like, oh, whatever. People like this metrics that will report it.

Obviously, we know that this is kind of bullshit. It's like, okay, this is just something that people made up. But everyone else reporting it, so we don't report it. Like, we're going to look bad. And so everyone starts reporting this, like, stupid metrics. that trick that everyone thinks is stupid. And on some level, when you engage in this Faustian bargain

to allow AirDrop farming to continue unchecked on your platform, what it ultimately does is it, like the Faustian bargain is that those AirDrop farmers, most of them will not get your token if you're doing your job right. And there's so many more of those people

than of the real users that are actually going to use your token post-Airdrop that almost certainly, no matter what you do, after you do your air drop, more people will be mad than happy. Like just by the raw numbers of it, right? Like there was just, you know, everybody on Twitter has one account

and has one ability to like or retweet. But the people who actually use your protocol, instead of putting in $10 on your chain, they put in, you know, $1,000 or whatever. Not that obviously real users can't have $10 on a chain, but it's just true that by the numbers, the vast majority of people with $10 on a chain

are civils. Yes, they're doing it to get an airdrop. Like, there's a 0% chance that most of those users would have ever been using that chain if it wasn't specifically under the expectation of getting an aircraft. Most of them, most of them for sure. There's a small number of people in it for the tech who want to demo a brand new chain specifically to discern the technical differences and nuances of that chain relative to the system. And look, I don't think, and I agree with you, at the same time, I don't think it's useful to moralize.

and say the people who are air drop farming are bad people or they're doing something wrong. It's like, no, you can do whatever the fuck you want. No, I didn't say that. People are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I agree. But I want to make clear that I am not saying that either. I think that if you'reirdrop farming, kudos to you.

Go get yours. Like, that's totally cool. That's, you know, the spirit of crypto is if people are laying out some, you know, economics out on the front porch, you are free to go pick it up. But I think at the end of the day, like, this is the inevitable byproduct of both sides, right? of the projects that are, you know, kind of openly allowing the air drop farming to take place and the air drop farmers who are coming in

and, you know, kind of ruthlessly optimizing how they extract from the protocols, both sides get smarter over time, and that causes also both sides to get hurt more over time. So it does feel to me like, I mean, I could be wrong, but my guess of where this meta is going is that, one, people make things legible way earlier than they do.

Right. Like, Tarun, you made the point of like, oh, randomness is good because, you know, the people in Celestia couldn't have predicted that you should be, you know, doing stuff on GitHub. And if it was, it would have been gamed.

I think that only works when you still have the element of surprise, right? And it was true with Uniswap. With Uniswap, it was all just a wonderful thing to wake up to. Nobody, how could you've been mad during the Uniswap paradigm? You know,

but you knew sushi happened. But you knew sushi happened. I mean, I mean, the Uniswap is like kind of a little bit weird because, like, of the sushi, you anything. No, no, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. I think Uniswap was just an

absolute, it really, I mean, I was there. I was there. It is true. Like, there was, there were no bad vibes for the, right? It's the first time it was really been done. No, it's the first time since like 2017. Like, if you remember, there were air drops. Okay, Tron was an air drop. Okay. Yeah. I would say it was a very successful one, right? Right. It was a couple other airdrops of that era that were all stupid and did not lead to like sustainable projects that were survivors right but like mostly since that long ago bygone era like the just send tokens to every user was a forgotten concept it was a lost art like you know it hadn't really been used successfully in like three-ish years and so I personally remember it surprising everybody because

it was like, oh my goodness. Like projects do this and it's like, oh, good project that's already has traction and is successful. And there's something of like importance here. Like, whoa. Mind going. And then it ruined it for everybody else, you know. Yeah, no, totally, totally.

But I think like the further you get away from that, Jen, like when we were all babies and nobody had any idea that project could air dropped anyway. Ha, ha, ha, ha. What a surprise. You know, you wake up on Sunday morning and there's a chocolate under your pillow. But let's be real. This happens in like all. tech, right? Like, if I think about even just like online ads, SEO is the same dynamic.

If I think about social networks, there's tons of spam and fake, you know, it's like, this is an inevitable thing about the internet and the idea that identity is very hard to preserve. And I think, I think we just have to accept that like, hey, that's just the way it is and we're going to learn slowly. So this is interesting. This is interesting. I think there's two ways you can see where this is going. So one is, I think, what you're at, which is cat mouse game forever, which is theirdrop farmers and the projects just keep trying to one up each other of trying to out Sybil and anti-Sibble and so on and so forth forever. And it's like this mannequian contest.

I actually don't think that's where we're going. I think where we're going long term is one of two things. One is I think that people are just going to be like, fuck it. We'll just tell you exactly what we're going to reward in advance. and we're going to choose metrics that are ungameable. So whether it's liquidity, whether it's, you know, just like here's the thing we're rewarding. That's it. No surprises.

Here's how many tokens are coming. And the tokens, you know, get, I guess you can't do that for security reasons, whatever. But like, here's the thing that we're awarding and there's no surprises. Because if there are surprises, then people get mad and then there's gaming and then there's uncertainty. And it's like, I'm just going to remove all the element of surprise. Or two, we go toward full-on KYC to get. air drops, which is I'm just going to break the crypto invariant. That's because already we're blocking on like, you know, if you're from Luhansk or from,

you know, uh, Crimea or if you're from US, you don't get the airdrop. So okay, if we're already doing that or India. Or India. Or India or whatever. So yeah, like, so some of these like a large part of the developed world, well, fine. Let's just let's just K. and just get it over with because we're basically trying to do that through the back door.

So I would predict actually that we're going in one of those two directions rather than that's just so static. I don't think it's true. I just don't think the KIC thing works. I don't think the KYC thing's going to scale and you're just going to have this problem where your distribution is even more concentrated.

How does it not work? Why do you say that would not work? No, no, no. It's just not going to scale. You're not going to get this like crazy distribution of your asset. You're going to have this like highly concentrated. concentrated to whoever passes the KYC and is like easy, you know, first and like has the most capital. It's not that hard to pass KYC. I mean, like, the, it's, I trust me. I know, I know, I know a lot of industrial airdrop

farmers after I went to Dubai and Singapore. And all I have to tell you is none of, I would say greater than 50% of them won't pass KYC. I'm not saying that air drop farmers won't pass KYC. What I am saying is that if you are trying to do a non- who is replacing them? Who's replacing them? And they, who is this KVARF? magic set of KOC people is going to magically want to take these tokens that isn't already doing it. Well, I'm not understanding your question. If they can pass KIC, if they can pass KYC, I'll also. Well, of course, they can pass KYC, but they can KYC with one account and or, you know, the number of people they have on their team, right?

So they have three people working at this air drop farm. Okay, they have three accounts that can pass KYC, right? Instead of having 5,000 accounts that can pass KYC. Yeah, I think maybe to your point is just a return to linear air. There's this very nice idea that, you know, one addresses one person, which ideally we would love to have. Of course, in practice, that is not true. And so we, we apply all these little heuristics to try to like filter that out.

But practically speaking, it's not possible. And so I think I maybe lean more towards your first point, which is just like it's a return towards, you know, linear air drops. And, you know, that's just kind of what people come to accept. Like even all the other air drops have also been, you know, linear air drops, proof of work. That's basically a linear air drop, right? you get paid out proportionally to how much compute power you're providing. And so it kind of sucks, but I don't know.

I think the KYC stuff is just somehow, it's a third rail. And I just don't know if crypto people are going to ever sort of sign up for it. I mean, ultimately KYC is like, you know, what are we trying to do with KYC? It's some kind of proof of humanity, right? It's going to prove if you are a real person. What we're doing with all this anti-civil stuff is we're trying to do a janky-ass version of K-Y-C, right? The idea is like, well, if I can see that you interacted with this thing and you're not connected to this many other addresses, then that probably means you're a real

person, right? If this were a normal tech company and you were like, okay, we're going to try to tell if these are real people by like looking at all these weird signals of, you know, the amount of activity and this and that and blah, blah, blah, like you would just be like, okay, well, just, you know, show us your credit card. Or like, give us a mobile phone number and we'll like ring you and, like, there's a hierarchy. Like, yeah, you used to work in anti-fraud back when I was at Airbnb. And there's a hierarchy. of, you know, what are often called frictions that you will throw at a user

in order to verify that they are real. And the heavier of the friction, the more drop-off you're going to have and the more annoying it is to users, so you really don't want to use the highest frictions unless you're dealing with a lot of money. So, you know, very low friction is like send an email. And, you know, if they can verify,

they have a real email, you know, it's not trivial to get a Gmail. It's not hard, but it's not trivial to get a Gmail. If you have a very low repute email account from, like, I don't know, some one of these, you know, throwaway proton mail or something, then, okay, that doesn't count for me.

much. And then above that, you've got, you know, a phone number. And above that, you've got a credit card. And the very top of that list is KYC, right? Of like, you know, a passport, a driver's license, something like that, some kind of government ID. Because these are just the hardest signals to forge. And now I don't know that we necessarily have to go all the way there, but, you know, something along the lines of some kind of proof of humanity. And maybe it's a, you know, humanity Dow or WorldCoin, or maybe it's something like, you know, maybe it's, Maybe it is straight up KYC, or maybe you do something like, you know, part of the irdrop is done on chain in a linear way in response to some metric.

And then part of it is like some super cheap coinless sale or, you know, something else that you can say, look, if you're a real user and you want to get this thing, you know, come in through the front door if you want to buy it on one of these platforms. But it doesn't feel to me like the idea that you can do all those things at once is going to survive. I think that is what is not going to last. I just kind of get the feeling that if you did AirDrops by KYC, then you also just make it so easy for governments to be like,

this is security, and now it's security is offering, and you have to register and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like, if we go down that road, like, crypto is so boring. I mean, they're not doing that for AirDrops, though, right? If we look at AirDEC has tried, hasn't it? Yeah, but it hasn't worked, right?

Everyone just goes to domiciles that are friendly to it. And I think that is the nature of this thing. Like, I think the moment you go to this KYC like system, then, it's like, okay, give me a securities offering. Because like, what's the point? You might as well do that. That's like, it really doesn't feel like you're doing anything. You've gotten rid of the point of crypto.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can do it in a ZK protecting ways that you're not actually disclosing your KIC information to the token issue. Yeah, yeah. No, no, that type of stuff I agree there is a future for, right? where I can give you a private credential that the contract can verify. I just think that right now we're just not at the point that those attestations are in the,

and I think they'll get there. But even then, I'm not, I still feel like there's something missing in that scenario because it's like, you're still excluding a lot, a lot of people from. You are, you are.

There's no system you're going to create that's not going to exclude people. But the stuff we have now is also excluding a lot of people. Right. Like ultimately, when the Sybils are this. good and this organized, like your precision and your recall just have to suffer in any, no matter what algorithm you're using. And that's what we're seeing, right? That's why people are so upset is that there are a lot of real users who have to be excluded from any sufficiently

good criterion. And there are a lot of fake users that are getting in if you want any number of real users who can also get in. So when the arms race gets this heavy, there's always going to be losses on both sides, unless you ratchet up your military. right? Unless you start, if it's all bayonets, like, yeah, a lot of people are going to get hurt. If you bring out guns, all of a sudden, the balance of war can change. Anyway, I guess we'll see, yeah, I guess we'll see it's interesting, but anybody who's air dropping in the near future, I guess the other thing, too, you know, it's always unfortunate to see when a project goes through, you know, whether it's layer zero or eigenlare or Zikki-Sink, doing an air drop and not, it not being this, like, celebratory moment. but instead people just being mad and politicking and arguing and you know it's very much like government right where like any bill just the only thing you hear is people arguing and being mad and it kind of

feels like that's it's sort of what airdrops have become is this moment of people like you know putting a project on public trial it's it's unfortunate to see but you know anybody who is considering doing anirdrop in the near future you know i guess i would just wish you the best of luck because it's really rough out there if you are in any way attractive to farmers. I feel like this is the team singing, singing ground control to major Tom to all founders right now. I mean, I'm saying anybody's listening to this show. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there's been a lot of lessons learned on the battlefield. Ground control. Ground control to Sibble Tom. I mean, you know, I, uh, Tom's a good guy. Tom does a

I remember right, one of the first meme coins. The only meme coin I think I've ever owned other than Doge is Tom. I'm honored. I didn't even know that. Wow. That's a great. Is that the one you can redeem for a custom-made meme? That is correct.

Yes. Oh, that has more utility than Mother. It has more utility than Musa. Hey, can you buy mobile phone plan using Tom yet? Not yet. Don't tell Iggy. I don't want to be put on blast. I, I, uh, I, uh, I kind of,

I kind of, I got to say, I actually really like the Iggy Azalea energy. Because like, I do kind of feel like the point of this meme coin stuff is to show that in permissionless stuff, I don't have to donate to the charity or whatever. You know, like in all the fights that those happening. And I kind of like it because it's just so blatant in your face. And like, it shows you the tradeoffs you make in permissionless systems, right? Like, like, you know, you can't, you can't have everything you want. And, and here's, here's, here's.

here's one example of that. And I think like, yeah, I feel like that the stuff is, it, it brings out parts of humanity that, you know, you sometimes forgot existed.

And it's good to, it's always good to get the, you forgot she existed. I did forget she existed, honestly. I honestly didn't know what she did. I had to look her up. I was like,

that name sounds familiar. Really? I don't know. I listened to too much tech now. I don't know. I know anything about. Biggie Zia. That makes sense.

That makes sense. She is. I will say the thing I respect about mother and Iggyzalia is that it's fun and chaotic. And that is very much the roots of crypto is being fun and chaotic. And it's good to have projects that get back to that core of what crypto is all about. So I respect it. Anyway, cool. With that, we got to call it a wrap.

But thank you, everybody. And we'll be back next week. More news. Thank you.