#282 Simon de la Rouviere: Bonding Curves, Curation Markets, Token Curated Registries... and Art

Transcript

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 aka.ms/epicenter. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Couture. And I'm Mihir Roy. Hey Mihir, welcome back.

Good to be back. Yeah, uh I'm sure everybody will be very happy to have you back on the podcast. Uh so yeah, Mihir went on on a short hiatus since November uh as as our listeners will know, uh he's 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 uh spent a lot of time looking after the infant, and I also managed to launch two validators, one on Loom and one on Cosmos uh this winter.

But it's been heads down, a lot of work on both fronts. But the spring's really nice, you know, uh the infant's 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 And of course, like the token prices have recovered, so it's one of the happiest springs I've had in in a while. That's good, Yeah, after a long winter of uh yeah uh probably like sleepless nights and and uh and long days of working and putting out validators and um yeah, I guess now you get the fruits of

that uh labor or, you know, sleeplessness. Yeah. Yeah. And now now I get to experience the fruits of that labor, yeah. Great. So, yeah, we're happy to happy to have you back on. I'm sure everybody will also be happy to uh have you back on episodes uh once in a while. Um so, today we're speaking with Simon de la Rouviere uh 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 at ConsenSys. He's a co-founder at Ujo uh which is a music platform uh that was that spun out of ConsenSys.

Um and Simon's been doing a lot of writing over the years about all kinds of things. I mean, in the early days in like 2014 he was writing about Bitcoin and more recently he's been doing a lot of writing around um tokens. Uh oh, also was one one of the people who um was part of the original spec of the ERC-20 tokens. So, he's been doing a lot of work about a lot of a lot of thinking around tokens for quite some time and and more recently has been writing and speaking a lot about token curated registries uh and um in continuous organizations and all kinds of topics that kind of gravitate around uh token curated

registries. And so, we talked to Simon about a lot of those things and explored some of the economics there. And uh yeah, it was a fascinating conversation. Um before we go to that interview, I did want to mention one thing that uh 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 of weeks ago I started thinking about it would be great if Epicenter would have a Wikipedia page.

And um started doing a bit of writing and writing some of the uh origin story around Epicenter and how Brian and I met back in 20 like late 2013 and the LTV contest. So our early listeners will know about this uh about the story and and also you know how Meher and Sunny and Fadeke came to the show and uh started putting that into a draft Wikipedia article and so I've been I spent a little bit of time to digging through old episodes and digging digging up quotes and things like that to have proper citations and um 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.rocks/wiki. So if you go to that URL you'll be taken straight to the draft page for that article. And 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 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 to have the episode list released. And um yeah, so we'd be really happy. It would be really really great if if people out there could contribute to that. So without further delay, here is our interview with Simon de la Rouvière. So we're here today with Simon de la Rouvière. Hi Simon.

Hi there. I don't know if if you usually pronounce your name so 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 at all. Like my ancestors 200 years ago they they spoke French. But it's the first time I've actually heard it like that. That's great. I I I wouldn't know how to pronounce it any other way. But thanks for joining us today. Yeah, please tell us tell us a bit 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 a couple weeks and then I thought it like I need to pay attention. This is really interesting. But then I only stayed as a hobbyist. I was still student studying. And then in 2013 um when this experiment still didn't die, it seemed to become more and more important back of my head. So I I started checking in more fully. And so back then I started actually working in the Bitcoin space, building side projects.

My first side projects projects back then to actually starting to look at the code of Bitcoin itself. And then while I was finishing my master's degree um I I actually started building applications for it. And then in 2014 when Um, I I managed to save up some money um to work full-time in the space. Uh, I didn't know if it was too early, but I was just really excited to experiment. Um, and so I bought I bought my own altcoins. I forked forked it. I committed committed some code back to Bitcoin. I just had a lot of fun um playing around and experimenting with what was available back then. Um, 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. Um, I I wanted to join as easy as early as I can. Um, and so back then um through through luck and being online, um one of the first employees of ConsenSys found me um and then I joined in January 2015 um as one of the first employees at ConsenSys working and building and developing Ethereum applications. Um, over that course of the four years, I've worked on various projects from um co-founding Ujo Music which created one of the first smart contract royalty payments in the music industry, to inventing um new kinds of economics. Um,

I helped co-design the ERC-20 standard um and started the first smart contract security best practices. Um and now today uh I am just back in tinkering mode uh after four years at ConsenSys and Ujo Music um 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 in the space of the last four or five years. Uh, when did you start to see this intersection between blockchain technology and art and music and economics?

I guess it comes from my background. Um, I I was always interested in um in creating things. Um, I I I 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 a developing country and having to interact with the internet and not necessarily 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." Um, so it it is becoming from a different while. My master's degree, for example, it was a completely unrelated field. I

was studying information overload on social media, um, which actually did inform some of my ideas later on. But so it is 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. Uh, I didn't have to fly to Silicon Valley to participate. Like I could be in my bedroom in South Africa and participate. So, it just was really exciting. Of course, Simon, like you've been one of the earliest team members at ConsenSys. Is that right?

Yeah. Uh, it's I think it was employee number six. Yeah. You were employee number six, and of course you have recently left ConsenSys two months back. And how many people does ConsenSys have now? Um, I I think it's still hovering around a thousand people. Around there, give or take. So, you've seen this company go from six people to a thousand people. Yeah. Uh, what was the journey like? How Like how has ConsenSys changed from the time it it was so tiny to now this largest company in the Ethereum space?

I mean, it was it is a super fascinating journey just because it's well, you know, I tried creating my own startups when I left university and it it didn't get off the ground. So, in in more ways than one this was my first like job experience and I put it in quotation marks because I don't think it's like a what people would equate to being a normal job experience having worked at ConsenSys and I put I put that in a good way. Um It there was a lot of freedom that we we could do uh many things, a lot of autonomy. So, it was like a just a really great experience to going from university sort of trying to start things into environment like that where I could just experiment and and create things. And I think that was also

the intention early on is 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 do what you would do if you if you had an open weekend and you just wanted to tinker. And that was really great initially. Um but like the 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 while 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. Um even at like 30 people, I sort of like learn from people to a thousand 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 I have to get out of these 2,000 Slack channels. This is I I'm not actually getting to my work. Um but it was just interesting to see a change over time and and how a company like that deals with certain organizational stresses as it grows, uh growing pains and so forth that, you know, ended up being valuable lessons, but it was a a journey I wouldn't um

it 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 uh when an artist creates a piece of music and ultimately is distributed. So, uh give us a sense of Ujo's journey. Uh what was the original plan? What you ended up building? And where that startup is at today?

Yeah. So, uh early on at ConsenSys, we again, there was just this sense of sort of Cambrian explosion of possibility. We It's like there's so much to explore. We have to try everything. And so, the a lot of the early projects were just because it was people initially interested in these things. Like Truffle was started by Tim Coulter because he wanted to build an Ethereum dapp, and he felt it sucked, so he started Truffle. Um same for me. I'm a musician. I always looked at the problems of musicians. And um back then, there was another guy that also joined the team, Phil Barry. And we looked at the music industry and realized

there's opportunity here. Um and um one Imogen Heap at that time started seeing the same promise, and we got in touch with her said like, "Look, let's do something. Let's create this experiment just to prove that it's possible." Um and so, we got working, built the prototype in 2 months. And back then, I think October 2015, this was one of the first dapps that came out. And so, you know, 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. Um so, we had to run our own nodes and keep everything running. It was one of the first articles cuz we had to put the serum US dollar price as well in there.

Um, so it was a fun experiment. Later on, um, she didn't end up selling any of the ethers she made cuz it's like $1 was 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 cuz like at least we helped one artist make a living. Um, and over time, um, we went sort of back to drawing board, researched the music industry, and discovered there's 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, um, asking many more questions, and then eventually led itself to to building today what is the Ujo portal where musicians can upload music, they own the rights, uh, metadata's created, um, that that represents the music, and they can be paid. Um, 100% of the music 100% of the royalties goes to them. And it's split according to whoever whomever is, um, uh, part of the collaboration that made the music. Um, so that that's been the course over the past few years in Ujo.

Uh, I think the hardest thing just have been getting the the the the music industry really likes the blockchain, but it's actually really hard in practice to like get people on board. Um, and that's been just the hardest thing. Also just bumping up into the legal issues of copyright, intellectual property, and how the blockchain works with that. Uh, it's it's it's not easy problems. So how did all of this lead you, uh, to become interested in things that we're going to talk about today, which are, um, continuous organizations, token curated registries, etc.

I mean, for me I I saw Ujo Music and curation markets and all these new kind of cryptoeconomic 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? Um are there new ways to build new economic models build more things to create more things and to create communities around these things. So, Ujo Music was in a one end a 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, uh reduce the

cost of the metadata problem in the music industry. And then the other side is the creation markets which is let's create new economies. Uh let's allow people to do things new things in new ways and that's how it was always like a a tennis match between the two for me is like some days I would spend more time thinking about curation markets, some days I would spend more time about the real problems in the music industry. Um so, that it happened in parallel. So, of course uh over the past couple of over the past three or four years uh I have I have 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, right? 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 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've found practical success with uh with these inventions. So, uh maybe the first thing we could start with is the idea of the bonding curve. And um could you explain to us what a bonding curve is and what kind of economic interaction it it seeks to be?

Yeah, sure. Uh I I I've tried this a few times before um and it's always an experiment also explain it in new different ways. So, let me give this a go. Um a bonding curve is essentially uh it stems from the desire to create a continuous token model um as opposed to an ICO. So, um 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.

Um and this which is why it's called the bonding curve cuz it would generally change based on the supply of the tokens in circulation. That's why it looks like a curve. Could either be linear, exponential, or logarithmic. Um and then over time, once there's 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 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 If a lot of people want it,

the price will be higher. If no If fewer people want it, the price will be lower. And you can buy and sell at 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. Uh we can think of ether first, maybe 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 it's the And the smart contract has uh the rights to mint a certain token. And this token could be could be any token. Mhm. 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 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.

Yeah. Maybe in the beginning, so if I am the first person to deposit uh 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 as more ether gets accumulated, um it might mint lesser and lesser tokens in the future.

And this idea that the number of tokens minted per ether uh depends on the total number of ether inside that contract. So, you can 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 we end up accumulating ether and then issuing a bunch of uh project tokens.

When I saw this model in the first uh the first time my fundamental question was like as as a person wanting to create a token, I usually want access to the ether that got collected, right? Like normally if you look at an ICO, right? Cosmos project did an ICO. Yeah yeah. 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. Mhm. But like this bonding curve design that you 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? A initially especially the early designs was around just finding a way for people to commit to some cost, uh in this case the opportunity cost to lock up your ether um for minting some token that represents a community of value. Uh and it depends what the token will be used for. The initial example that I had was people would take this token and then um stake this token to into information and that does to a curation market as in like you would be able to create topic tokens like, you know, um Ethereum as a topic or football

as a topic or um gardening as a topic and whatever. But it was just a way to price how valuable the information was. And so, it wasn't necessary to develop anything. You know, 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 is a signal to the rest of community that I want to put some value where I want it to be and it's a pricing mechanism to do that. Um so initially what is that the pool would be just that. Uh 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 the in there. It it can be 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 can be a big undertaking. And something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IoT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself. Well, the folks at Microsoft have you covered. You already know about the Azure Blockchain Workbench and how easy it makes bootstrapping your blockchain network pre-configured with all the cloud services you need for your enterprise app. Their new development kit is the IFTTT for blockchains.

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And be sure to follow them on Twitter at msftblockchain. We'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their support of Epicenter. In some senses, like when you look at many societies, like societies, cults, religions, there are many times that these societies have you know, like entry costs. So, you might have you might have a cult. 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 societies, cults,

they are also ways to coordinate people. But they create an 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 it is in essence to have some kind of signaling cost that whoever came into the organization paid a price to to come in. Yes absolutely. and therefore they are committed to the to the cause. Right? So, in a sense, like this is like the blockchain equivalent of of of that system where anyone can enter, but in order to enter, you'll have to part with your ether.

Yeah. 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. Um and and you can you can you can see that on the blockchain that the ether are not all right there. You have You have certainty over over that. So, this is sort of an entry mechanism. Then, how What's the exit mechanism? How do I exit this group of people? It depends again, like in the sort of most simplest version of a token bonding curve is you can exit at any time. Like cuz there's always a pool of collateral in the smart contract. And if the price is zero, there's zero collateral. You know? But when the price is 100, there

might be, you know, 100 ether in there or or 20 ether or 30 ether. Depends on the obviously the 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 value 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 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 to these 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." Um 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 um currencies and whatever. So, it 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 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 want to. How does that lead us then to the next topic, which is creation markets? Um maybe by starting with describing what is a creation market? Mhm. Sure. Um So for me a a creation market is a way of using a like a subset of crypto economics that is specifically about the curation of information. Um and whether

that is for a 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 the next monthly call. So it's it is a very broad description of various information that need to be curated. Um and so curation markets always been like, okay, how do we use crypto economics to to 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. Um 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 result in some ranking system based on different weights or value that's being staked. Um then on the other hand um this is a tongue twister, but I like to call it as staked slashing shilling 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. Like 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." Um, and you guys need to now vote whether I that is the case or not. Um, so it's like two different forms in that sense. And people have started mixing this in various different ways um currently. And so it is still like a a topic that 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 the So, when I visited like Devcon in the Devcon in London, this was I think 2015. This This was when you were working on the ERC-20 standard. Yeah. This was uh So, you had a presentation on tokens, tokens, tokens and then Yeah. After that presentation Shortly after that presentation came the ERC-20 standard.

Yes. Uh so, the natural question is of course so you have 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 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 these communities.

And so, that was the first idea. Now of course, there 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 it's it's saying like in in order for us to work together across the globe in curating information that also adds economic signals to it or new at least new signals, a proof of something that this is valuable information.

Then, curation markets 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 and what you currently see in the web is that, you know, we we 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 we want to know what we like what we see has been built up and shared by these sort of economic principles. Like 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 like 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 and their motives to to give us that information. Um so that that's sort of how these kind of cryptoeconomic games would hopefully result in this kind of outcomes in these kind of outcomes. It's at least like more transparent information with more clearer incentives involved. Can Can you describe maybe an example of a curation market like in in its simplest form or one that some people might be able to relate to.

Yeah, sure. Um so the the simplest one is maybe the the original design that I had, which is you have this this bonding curve, which is there is a community of people, they're excited about football. Okay, so they 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." Um 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,

uh a link that you know, "Look at this great goal that happened this weekend by this Premier League match." Um if more people stake to that link, the higher it is in this list, and thus it is a novel um 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 football token, it is a signal to say, "I care about this topic." And if if it's it's like um if you go to a music concert, um if you the the cost to buy a 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. Um so over time this list will change up and down. It's it's like if you were able to add economic um incentives to Reddit, you know, that that's that's that's some of the the earliest designs. Okay, yeah. I I was just going to say that that that kind of looks a little bit like Reddit in the way that popular content kind of rises to the top.

So, I I I guess this is sort of related, but you've you've described uh you've talked about uh 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 inter- intertwined? But, just to preface um when I used to wear 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 it is basically all encapsulated information like it's your 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 what what not. So, speaking to that, it is when we look at the way people are sharing information now today, um there is this feeling of there being this you know, {quote} {unquote} a curation market for meme or a meme market. Um you know, there would be memes that are suddenly popular and then go away. Uh it's like it's the it's incessant 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 commons.

Like we're all sharing this these memes, and if you make funny meme, yes, you might get a few retweets on Twitter, but that's about it. Like if But, you actually contributed some good to the people's lives by making a viral inter- internet meme. So, the one of the earlier goals was to say this can actually be used for people to become {quote} {unquote} meme traders, right? And that was like one of the earlier ideas I had. And coincidentally, this was extremely serendipitous, but exactly that there was a blog post that came out which I made that first idea that like, "Look, we can have meme markets. People can trade internet memes." Literally on the same day was the day that the Reddit meme economy subreddit was created. And in

in Reddit 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 buy 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 if they can actually make money, then it I I always imagine this weird future where my kids one day would be meme meme traders just having fun with themselves and making money on the side. Um

but that that's that's part of that vision was something like that. And there there was a team that actually built a version of it. It was called meme lords. Um it it is live on Ringby. Um and people have been trading memes on there having fun. Uh I'm not sure how much it's used now, but I've been poking the team to put it live to main net so we 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 gamed?

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

And then because more people will enter the the sort of price will rise. The price of a football token will rise. And I'll I'll have a bunch of football tokens and I can burn them and I can exit and I can make a few ether. Yeah. Uh doesn't this start to attract the kind of person that you don't want? Like uh the person that's there in order to make a bunch of ether, not really curate really good information on football. Yeah, as absolutely. Um in its in its simplest forms, I think there is there is a lot of uh possibility for participants to get involved that aren't necessarily aligned with the goals of

the experiment um or the community. Uh you can have like rampant speculation just ruining the community and its value that it's created amongst each other. You can people will absolutely be be fleeced out of money uh if if if just those simple versions exist. E- especially if people don't necessarily understand what they're getting themselves into. Um it is there's definitely ripe and possible for people to be exploited in various ways. And I think a lot of the research since since these original ideas were published were, 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? If for example, the Ocean Protocol team recently published stuff on how to do short selling on um uh bonding curves, which would allow just the price volatility to be mitigated somewhat. Um so that that's one solution. Um so there's different ways people have come forth to to combat this. In general though, I mean, it the the 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 this is so important and so valuable wealth generation that we will be all become meme traders. And I don't think that's necessarily a world that we want either. I 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 he made a very good blog post. But I think what's important to

consider is um to what extent 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. Um 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 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, that the economics could scale to protect people um over time. Um because you don't also don't want to put up too many barriers to entry when people start. So, that it is a very interesting topic and I think people will experiment. I think at the end of the day also, user experience will just be so important as well. People need to understand what they're doing. Um they need to feel like they're in control. They're they're empowered. Um and that is still an open blank canvas that people need to work on. So, yeah.

So, essentially like I I'm able to visualize uh how this would look like. So, to to me to me ultimate end-user product is something like a Reddit. So, right now we have all of these Reddits on these different topics. And uh Reddit really doesn't have an economic mechanism. If I am if I'm a Reddit user, I can go and upvote stuff in any subreddit. Yeah. And ultimately like people upvote in these subreddits and it uses these upvotes in order to have a list of interesting content items. Other people go and see these content items.

So, the difference the difference here would be if there's a particular curation market. So, the curation market is like a subreddit. 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 the number of football tokens I have. And then there are other people with these football tokens and their um all of their upvotes with these differing strengths are used to, you know, populate the the Reddit.

And so, you can have football tokens, you can have basketball tokens, you can have like thousands of these tokens, and you can power a decentralized Reddit that way. Um So, if if I am a user, like 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 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 So effectively, this interaction of depositing ether getting football tokens satisfies um 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 2 years, yet we don't have a Reddit-like product that works that way. What do you think is the chasm? What Why does it not happen? Well, I mean is it the the closest one would be to to say like let's look at Steemit because um it it it also has this economy where you're you're you're putting up um it's this curation game with token economics involved. But it is not community specific um and I think that that's the difference. I think I think the biggest thing is is that it For example, I haven't personally tried it. It's just because like I have it this is there's just like a lot of

variation of the ideas and I currently I just enjoy exploring what's possible and and writing and and researching still. Um I I think user experience is hard. It's going to be hard for people to understand what's going on um and and whether it's meaningful to use the blockchain in in this manner. So, there's there's a lot of open-ended questions. I think the closest one is um uh Slava's Relevant. Relevant is an application which which is similar to this, uh where you have this prediction game using bonding curves um on posts, but they have one thing which mitigates somewhat speculation, which is there is a concept of reputation. So, um if you have been an

active participant, then um your the it it as far as I understand it, your reputation would also affect the the ranking of the posts along with its sort of economic weighting. Um or or at least each other it would support each other. So, I think it's just early days currently um for people to experiment with this. Um my um when these ideas were first created, the interesting response was that seeing that actually a 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 um other

projects using this. In 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 it has been buying and selling stuff for you, and if you've been making producing value for people, then you would just find that your wallet has increased. You've made some money. Um so, it it will depend. I think we'll we'll still see what how it works in the future. Earlier you mentioned token-curated registries. Uh let's dive into that a little bit. So, uh I think I think it's a better term than a stake-slashing shelling game. Uh it's actually much easier to say, so let's

focus on on a on the TCRs for a little bit and describe cuz I I that kind of describes it like the stake slashing selling game, of course, like you know, you you obviously understand what's happening here, but let's let's dive in a little deeper. So, I mean, to token curated registries when I first read the paper from I mean, Mike and James, um it it was very interesting to me because I uh me on my own set of ideas around curation 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. Like we can do different a lot of different games and permutations to produce valuable or novel information for whomever is

interested." Um but, you know, for those who don't know, a token curated registry is a is a primarily a sort of binary information game, which is you apply to be part of a list, and if 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 deposit in that list's tokens. Um 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 is 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 um a list of reputable publishers like an ad chain or in Civil it's case like a list of ethical newsrooms.

Um so, it it differs, but I think it's a it's a a very broad broad topic as well because a lot of people have been writing about it, researching, and producing code for it. Um from like talking about subjective TCRs, which is the the information that needs to be allowed in is not necessarily clear, to objective TCRs where it's like easy to evaluate. Um to different ranking and layer systems, how is the list ranked? And so they're they're just like a it's also a very broad topic. I I think um there are definitely a few that are in production uh currently. Um 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 people are using it

is very interesting. So could you describe then the different forms that token curated registries can take and the way that people are using them in applications? The there there are different ways forms it can take. Um primarily people have experimented in ways on how the voting happens. Um it's like if you want to be an applicant, how are people going to decide whether you should be allowed in or not? Um to also how the information is ranked once you're inside.

Um there's different variations of that. But I don't think any of these have been implemented in a very like the more complicated versions haven't been implemented yet. I think only the sort of sim- 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 TCR for points of interest on the global map. Um so people say like, "Hey, I think, you know, look here, here's the Brooklyn Bridge." Or "Hey, look, it's um it's Table Mountain." Um so it's it's a way to annotate a map and produce a valuable list as a result. Um and what's interesting about that was just just seeing how people are using it because

a TCR thrives on the fact that there there needs to be disputed content um, because that's what produces value for the token because the curators will come in and then vote either in or out this this application. Um. It's like 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 probably might be a lot more complex than I know, but uh that is that is an example where one is like you don't necessarily need a TCR to classify which objects are green. Um.

So, it thrives on having disputed information. In the case of Foam, there's been interesting examples where there's been territorial disputes. Um, so there was like an island between South Korea and Japan where there's been different Foam users which have um 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, uh it's quite interesting in that sense um where it's been used. That's interesting and and so I wanted to get to actual sort of applications of TCRs and and it's true that yeah, Foam and we had

Foam on I guess probably about a year ago that it it it constitutes this registry of points of interest that were curated by people. I I never really thought of it that way until now. But it's so with regards to that that Japan and South Korea example, but of course you know, that that's counts as I guess a signal, but that doesn't actually solve the dispute over who owns the land and like you know, marine tankers will solve that dispute if it comes down to it.

Yeah. But I want to bring it back to 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 Wok in Frankfurt, I know 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 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 you know Google Maps and like other such communities that have amassed like a a large amount of people that are you 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 this um desire to participate in things and and to to sort of create this this thing that people have. Um I'm sure we could come up with other examples but there's also the the amount of money that has gone into marketing this list and so all the venture capital that it um TripAdvisor has raised and invested in marketing and invested in outreach to restaurants and and like all these different things.

So you know, looking at Foam, it seems to be a similar type of example than um than to TripAdvisor, but I mean, I don't know how many users they have, but I I I doubt that that would scale to that extent without that that sort of like jolt of capital to to bootstrap this network effect. Are are token curated lists, you know, relevant to this type of use case in the end? Is this sort of sort of like where we should think that things will go or are they more relevant for use cases that, you know, don't require such massive network effects and maybe we just need sort of like signaling mechanisms and maybe

perhaps in the aggregate uh they form like a some some larger higher level signal. You know, on the surface I think one could say like it it is it makes sense, but I think there's there's a few things here that makes it a bit different I think and I think token curated registries are a fit for a different class of sort of lists, so to speak. Um and so in the case of something like TripAdvisor you I mean, like like like we can see it it exists, right? Like there there there 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. Um they get benefit from it and we participate in sharing our reviews about certain places. So there there's an existing set of benefits that make this work already in the same way that Wikipedia also works. Um I I think in a context of list for reviews like restaurants or places or travel-related things, I think the the value where a decentralized list could be meaningful is that um there's not necessarily confidence that this list would always remain reputable. So, in the case of TripAdvisor and other rating systems, we

know that there are people that have built bots to submit reviews um that does sort of produce a more um or poison the list in some sense. So, we do know that we could see these things and relatively trusted good enough that it's okay, but we're not 100% sure whether we should trust it fully. And so, for now, it's just it's good enough. It's good enough. But the problem is when it could 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 centralized entity.

Uh so, I think it's valuable there, but I think for me personally, token-curated registries are are interesting more so when one asks the question, "What are ways in which we are coordinating now, which is difficult to do?" Um and could list uh sort of decentralized list be a way to achieve that? Um so, I think token-curated registries in a new set of applications is what's going to be more interesting. Cuz the way I see it is building lists for something is a form of self-regulation.

Like, we are curating 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. And thus, we're kind of like self-regulating our world view. So, but self-regulation works. We we know that is the case. But it stops working when it's the economy is too big. It's like um the economy for that list is becomes too big. Um 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 is becomes easier for capture, easier to

bribe, um, because the economy is different. So, it's like 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 as 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 it's interesting and the jury is out for me with like whether there there are actually those kind of problems or not. And I think that that's that to me is the more interesting space to explore. Like, what are we ways in which it's difficult to coordinate now to create lists that we think could be valuable here.

And I it's still an open-ended question. Simon, could you give an example of a TCR that would be valuable? Like a con- concrete example. So, I mean, this this gets into like weirder territory. Um, so so I came up with one a while back. And this was based on Cape Town had a drought, right? Uh, 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 from drought was a lot of it was social pressure.

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

Um so it became more costly just to consume water. Um so we're like different things that was done to ensure that it that it didn't get there. So 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 be 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 commons that we all use for our cows to graze on. And so the concept of like something like water supply being scarce is you tell people, look, you if 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 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 will go up. So this late the price of the label will 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 now protect the commons. And so you have this counter wage, which is a label which a reputational label becomes more valuable, which classifies people as good commons users. And so there's always this market interplay between people saying, I need to be a part of

this TCR that that labels me as a valuable participant. And if I actually do this in a manner that is an early adopter of of environmental measures to protect the environment, then I will be 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 it profitable to be be a part of a 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 commons. So it makes people's 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 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 it it there's still so many questions about an idea like that, like whether it's actually doable in practice or not. But that that is the sort of direction of thinking that I was when I think about those class of problems. Like what are things that it is 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 So essentially there's this TCR. There are the curators of the TCR. So the 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. And entry to that group of people is determined by this bonding curve, this idea we covered previously.

So like you have to buy some water wise 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 as water wise, it's going to be very costly for you. As well. So if you're early adopter of being water wise and you think this community is valuable, you would apply early on to show this reputational label to others. Um And so that's why it becomes you make it a profitable action when it's necessary to have that label. It it is the it is sort of what you're doing is like you're creating basically very strong shelling 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 payoff. Yeah. Right. So when I'm interacting with my friends and all, I can say that I am part of this list and Self regulation work there when the community 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 the 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 water wise person. And so that's why this economic game is useful for ways beyond self regulation. That's yeah. So yeah, food for thought. Food for So there are many implementations of TCRs, right? There was this ad chain, there's things of of um civil Which implementation of TC TCR are you bullish about? Because of the fact that there is still sort of uncertainty about how this value is communicated. Like once you have a list that's produced, you actually you have to go to people and say, "Hey, this

is a usable list." Cuz like 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, I 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 they won't defraud me, right?" So, there's 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. Um but those kind of TCRs happen more at the protocol level implementations. But I

I mean Ocean originally had that as part of their white paper. Uh like a very base level TCR. Uh but I think they pulled it out. But otherwise, it's it's hard to know. I think I think I still think TCRs for like interesting community member management is a good way because um people would use the token to signal being a part of it. And I think that's one of the reasons why FOAM is also also sort of succeeding in their TCR because it attracts a community of cartographers. And if you're a cartographer 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 um called "This Art Is Always for Sale." Uh or "This Artwork Is Always for Sale," rather. Uh can you tell us why you did this? What was the goal here? Like what 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 the creative arts and new economics and few months back I read the book from Eric Posner and Glen Weyl on radical markets. And one of the proposals in there was around a novel way to look at property rights and that is Harberger tax.

Uh 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 up as a value of five bajillion dollars or whatever because then you have to pay tax on five bajillion dollars. Um so that incentivizes people to price their assets in a more reasonable manner. Um but obviously the trade-off is anyone can buy it from you at any point in time. So that was like the a very simple concept to me that was very interesting which I thought could be used in new ways. So I I did a lot of 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 we could do that?" And 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's an NFT a collectible it represent represents an artwork um and this artwork will always be on sale." And so the goal was just to say, "Hey look, no one has experimented with this kind of property rights before on the blockchain and um the art market is notorious for being interesting and different. Um but it's also a very um insular market. Like the art market is very sort of self-referential about themselves. Um you know, that they

the idea of the art auction is very specific, you know. Um 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, it was 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." Um so, I launched it about 20 days ago. Um and it's been interesting to see the response.

Um it start The sale price started at zero. So, I didn't put up some that initial value. Um someone bought it, set the price at $40. Someone bought it for for $40, and then set the price at $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've 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, um just by the fact that this artwork is always on sale. So, it it's just an 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 curators come to me and say, like, this is super interesting. People in the blockchain space have said it's 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, uh uh the uh uh it goes into general critique about the property model in general, which is like, you're not technically an owner. Um you're 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, um it brings into question whether this is a good model for art or not, um especially digital art. It's not going to work for traditional art, like Right, it would only work for something digital where the where the asset itself could be where the value of the asset or the the property could be not the tra- not the value but the the the the actual ownership of the asset could be transferred.

Exactly. And so, that's why I I was like very explicit in the language that I used. Um I I tried to not use the word owner. Uh I just use the 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 it is supposed to represent sort of stewardship or patronage. Um and it would then allow the artist to also earn in perpetuity for the art that they have created in the past.

And with it, I asked a lot of questions, like, you know, would this change the behavior between the collector and the artist? Um Does the the does it change various things, the way we think about art, essentially? But yeah, the the critiques have mainly been about, like, look, like, I I don't want to own art that someone can take away from me. So, I 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 it's possible. Um it because here's another way to think about it. Um I I was thinking about in the context of CryptoKitties, right? Where you look, a

lot of people played CryptoKitties, and now they're they're just have a bunch of digital cats 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 have created value, like the artists, the developers. Um you

know, what if Axiom Zen actually makes money from this kind of model instead of charging for the exchange fees? Um so, there's a different bunch of ways and different participants can earn revenue from it. And it is possible model for a podcast as well. You know, create collectibles that people want to create that's related to Epicenter. Like, let me uh buy and sell uh Se- Sebastian bobblehead 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 I'm building like I I've built a Cosmos validator, it could be useful validator slots cuz like there's only 100 of them. And 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. Yeah, I mean I mean like this model seems to be that people who value that position or that thing the the highest will end up owning the thing. Yeah. It is I mean the the original premise was that this kind of property model works best for things um as it said in the book ought to be owned in the commons, right? So, it's it is it is things that aren't supposed to be held

and then kept off the market. It it's not supposed to create monopolies. And I think that's that's where it's kind of interesting and whether that relates to art or not, I'm not sure and that that's what we will still see. Um but there's dif- different interesting places where this could be useful. I mean, it's not going to be used for something like ENS, for example, because you're building a value under a brand and someone just takes your brand, it's like it's pointless. Like you you you lose all value in doing it like that. Well, with that, uh Simon, I want to thank you for coming on the show today. It's been really fascinating to dive into uh bonding curves and TCRs. Uh sorry, I was calling it two token created lists for most of the episode, but yeah, token created registries, etc.

Yeah. So, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you very much. We release new episodes of Epicenter every week. Click here to subscribe for hundreds of insightful interviews with some of the leading minds in blockchain and crypto. You can also listen to the audio version of the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and other podcast apps. Click here for full list of places where you can listen. Thanks for watching Epicenter, and we hope you'll join us for our next episode.