The Gwei Forward for DeFi This Bear Market

Transcript

hey everyone can you hear me okay yep oh there we go okay sold out house here we go uh hey nice to meet everyone i am defy dad i am a long time defy user like to think i'm one of the earliest aggressive adopters of of defy i'm based in the u.s if you ever come through the boston area let me know i now work full-time investing and working with define web3 based teams at fourth revolution capital so um i'm going to talk to you about a pretty simple message today and i'm going to give a brief background

on what is referred to as memetic desire it is something that has uh an immense influence on our space it really is a force that is affecting all the relationships and the way like the world turns turns around and i'm trying i'm going to try to give you some examples of how that's come to life in crypto specifically i would say in our ethereum web 3 community but then i'd like to give some examples of why that mimetic desire can actually be harnessed to focus on building for the users that are already here in the bear market so

let's go to the next slide all right so i'd highly recommend if if any of this ends up resonating with you check out this book called wanting by luke burgess um it's about the power of mimetic what is it the power of memetic stuff in your everyday life and so this quote here that is really like the best summary of what is memetic desire so it's a man is the creature who does not know what to desire and he turns to others in order to make up his mind we desire what others desire because we imitate their desires so this comes from a french historian renee gerard who later in life ends up being a renowned professor at a number of universities

across the world including stanford what he's basically saying is that our desires don't come from within that we are mimicking what other people want and again this is this is an idea that i think it is somewhat familiar in the crypto community because we talk about memes and how those have an influence on the way we think but this concept of memetic desire is really as simple as there are people in your life in this community here people that you are in the same sorts of communities that you can easily get in contact with you know someone that's in your family a friend and then there are those that are sort of beyond that community who

have an influence on you i think it's really important in both the crypto community and beyond uh your life in the crypto community to understand what are the models that are influencing your own memetic desires so a few simple examples here uh you go on a date you post a selfie the person you were dating before your ex who was unwilling to speak with you is now wanting to text with you because they see that you're you're happy and you've moved on with your life uh another one which resonates more with me is i have two children if i buy one of my kids a pack of pokemon cards or ice cream or a toy the other one

will most definitely then scream that they want the exact same toy and ice cream uh and then here's here's another sort of common example of memetic desire you're at uh university you're trying to choose a concentration or major and you end up choosing something because someone in your life that you look up to the roommate who you think has it all together chooses a major and you feel that this is a safe choice now when you think about the major categories of memetic desire there's two in particular i want to highlight that i think have an influence uh two in particular that i i think stand out in terms of our relationships as builders investors and participants in the crypto

community the one here is basically those that are already in your community you know you have a very uh you have some sort of direct contact with them you know you work on a similar project maybe you work on competing projects this tends to be a a model for memetic desire that leads to conflict so i would say one like really simple example is if you think back to when sushi swap launched obviously having you know forked uni swaps code there was an intense amount of competition even though at the end of the day i would say both communities seemingly wanted the same end result that you could have deep liquidity and trade long tail assets

whenever you want trustlessly and permissionlessly but because of the fact that we ultimately fixate on you know what it is that our competitors want or what it is that someone that acts as a model of memetic desire for us it tends to end up leading to some sort of conflict um the other one here just very briefly is is referred to uh so it's it's called celebrities it refers to the fact that there are those that are again outside of our community um you could think of this as like michael jordan for me so i don't have any contact with michael jordan but i still think he's the greatest basketball player of all time probably also one of the positive models in my life for what it

would mean to be a great leader so um giving a few more examples here now then of the memetic desires that i think are having a greater influence on on us as a web 3 community um you've got we just lived through this bull run where everyone you know and their their best friend are trying to join the next great web 3 project and so this this for me has actually been a way to harness mimetic desire to grow the community you discover that a friend is joining a project now you're starting to look for job listings yourself maybe a negative example of how memetic desire influences our behavior is you

know you have that friend who mentions that they just made a bunch of money on some token and now you're you know trying to essentially find that next gem and you end up making some poor decision to ape into a coin that that really has no fundamentals um and then of course there's there's the most common example here of every bull run your family asks you how can i get involved in crypto how can i invest right now though when we're living through a period where prices are down but we as a community have fundamentally grown to a point where there's so much utility in the crypto space specifically you know within d5 web3 media still the very

nascent uh community of web3 gaming there's so much for us to participate in but yet again our families our friends our you know strangers they're not interested in joining us until some of these models of memetic desire really kick in at the height of the bull market all right i think i sort of covered this already but just a few uh examples of healthy versus unhealthy i think vitalik continues to be one of the uh one of the the most important standout and healthy models of memetic desire for us as a community and this you know this doesn't matter whether you're a founder you're an investor you're a builder

you're a user he exudes uh traits that ultimately have the rest of us as a community i think focused on the long term of building a more equitable finance system building a world where you truly have a censorship-resistant blockchain that you can build permissionless applications on um by the way too just i i just threw up some examples here i'm not recommending or advocating that they should be ranked like this and i i i think that andre was one example i personally don't look to him as a model but i know that during the last few years there were a lot of builders who were very inspired

by the new ideas that he built despite some of i think his downfalls all right so this leads me to to really like the the sort of takeaway i want to get to today is that we should ultimately be building for users that are already here i'm gonna try to very briefly cover this but i really like the fact that i was trying to get some feedback on this idea yesterday and felt like uh this this was the best way to sort of frame it up if you believe in everything that i just shared about how memetic desire sort of drives our behaviors and it actually has been a a um a positive catalyst for us to grow the crypto community for us to grow usage of

of defy of all sorts of web 3 applications growing the community from a builder standpoint then i think it makes sense that now during this bear market you have a very very short window to be able to really focus on those users who despite the fact all the froth has sort of drained away the fact that you know prices are down whatever 99 these are the folks that i believe are going to be let me skip ahead here these are the folks that i believe are going to be future models of memetic desire so that next cycle the the users that you focus on now that you're able to add value for

these are the folks whether they become it doesn't matter whether they become some crypto twitter personality these are individuals who will have mastered the wide array of applications and all the new radical ideas that you're building they're going to be able to communicate that to the next class of of users and just just a few other notes here part of the reason i think it's important to to take advantage of this window of of markets being down so much is again just the fact that we we have been essentially left with what are these long-term devoted types of users

and you've all lived through this the bull run is uh it's a very confusing time there's there's so much being thrown at you as builders and as as users they're they're seemingly every idea uh looks like it's promising enough to work out but now that we're you know we're thankfully back in a time where i think people are thinking more rationally we can really start to focus on these users who are here for the long term and ultimately will act as these future models of mimetic desire so just a few quick examples here before i wrap up i tried to think about

uh how different projects over the last four or five years have focused on these bear market users and you know there's there's certain examples where i i might be shoehorning this idea because i'm i'm i'm looking back at like maker dao in 2018 2019 you have to remind yourself you couldn't do jack back then with ether there was nothing to do other than you could transfer it you could trade it on a centralized exchange which many of us if you believed in that decentralized future that wasn't an option and so i think a part of uh i think a part of maker's story is they were the perfect project to evolve through the bear market because

they were catering to such a weird niche group of people who were long eath while it's down 95 percent who wanted this non-volatile liquid form of payment and we're desperate to adhere to the principles of holding what is self-custodied what is truly censorship resistant um and so anyways that's sort of an og example uni swap sort of similarly i think that they benefited at the time from catering to this sort of oddball niche group of bear market users who had been brave enough to try dexes in 2016 and 2017 you know what what few existed at the time

and they wanted to be able to trade long tail assets without having to go through a centralized exchange uh let's skip ahead oh here we go i want to give credit then to and this doesn't fit as neatly into the focus on your bear market users that are here right now i think that uni swap uni swap v3 with with their concentrated lps i think it's a great example of a protocol making the least obvious decision to focus on the community of lps that had grown with them the fact that you know uni swap had reached a point where the capital inefficiency no longer made any sense um i do believe that beyond

like some of the newer market makers that have entered the space there is this homegrown community of lps and those lps did need to be able to fine-tune liquidity within ranges and obviously it resulted for all of us as traders and being able to trade with less slippage and deeper liquidity uh just a few more examples here it's just i mean you can start to really rationalize a lot of the successes over the last four or five years by looking to those protocols who who have all not made you know they haven't all made the right decision at the right time but they've made a few key decisions to

really double down on these savage bear market types of users and so i thought synthetics more recently demonstrated this by moving away from the sort of whimsical idea that we we all buy into in the long term we want to be able to trade commodities and forex and every other asset but you know they recognize the fact that they have a protocol that facilitates trading something as simple as you know ethan and wrapped bitcoin that there's those trading in size on chain that could be trading with less slippage i thought this was a really like clever win for them bitcoin uh years ago i don't know if everyone remembers when they implemented zk sync

another example of like in the heart of the bear market you know they recognized that uh the the ability to fund a bitcoin grant was so dependent upon you know allowing more people to be able to transact at dirt cheap prices you know using zk sync um nifty phi is is i think nifty phi is is one of those teams where if you look at what they've built over the last few years it seems like it seems like there should have been a competitor that that came along and said we are going to allow you to borrow against any basket of nfts we're gonna we're not gonna focus on these super expensive one-of-one pfps these are collections that a a very

small select group of people are able to access just because they cost so much money but i i believe like they're another example of sort of doubling down on what will eventually be a bear market user over the last few years having the bull run was was i think even more commendable the fact that they focused on these sorts of users who now are actually flourishing with them in the bear market by the way i'd highly encourage go to nifty nft5.com and you'll be amazed at the fact that they're they're doing peer-to-peer matching and these loans the the minute a loan is

submitted if it checks off one of these like top four or five pfp collections these um these uh potential borrowers are receiving multiple offers uh lens protocol i don't need to say much more about that other than i think this is this is an example of a protocol that is going to flourish during the bear market you need users who are are so intentional to adhere to you know owning their owning their own data not having to compromise to trust a centralized entity that controls the social media network or all the different forms of web3 media that lens is actually enabling to be built

fiat does another one to keep an eye on just again countless examples of teams that recognize that d5 fixed income has really never taken off the bull run allows us to earn incredibly high yields you know that are in most cases variable rates and this is a project that is the one project now where you can actually lever up against fixed income assets like element or sense or yield protocol or notional and then um just lastly uh epns the ethereum push notification service an example of a team that from the start

we we've all wanted this to be a web 3 communications protocol but recognizing that they were born in i want to say that the idea was born in 2019 the team was building into like early 2020 before they actually launched and the the idea here was that we already have this emerging group of defy applications which at the time was a list that was you know it's like maybe like a i don't know a dozen 20 plus applications but they recognized that they could use a web3 communications protocol to give you real-time mobile notifications and so again doubling down on those sorts of bear market users who will in the future

become these you know models for memetic desire and ultimately grow the crypto community ultimately grow our web 3 community so i think i'm going to just end it there i i hopefully found the sort of background on memetic desire interesting i probably butchered what incredible work luke burgess does in this book called wanting but if you dig into that and start to sort of understand how that mimetic desire plays into you as a founder as an investor as a user as a builder you know as any sort of contributor you can really i think start to understand

what are the goals that that will drive you that will bring you joy in this space and then beyond that if you can learn to sort of harness that mimetic desire that is distributing and growing the crypto is distributing crypto content sort of growing the crypto community i think that leads us to this conclusion that you are you are best at this point to not be thinking about this is going to sound like the most anti-defy dead thing ever i want to build for the masses too i want to bank the unbanked it's just going to take time and we have to be patient and this is a part of getting there is focusing on those that are here that we know will be with us into that

next bull run and will be those future founders and users and content creators and builders so anyways thanks for your time [Applause] hey thank you you