Are Farcaster and Airdrops Worth the Hype? | Roundup

Transcript

I would not give out and if people want to complain and [ __ ] about the fact that they're not getting 50% of the token Supply I'm like well [ __ ] off like what have you done oh you own a pudgy penguin oh cool okay why is it that you need to get 30,000 bucks forget about the value it's like why and people I think are entitled in this space just it just bothers me the wrong way my theory is a lot of this airdrops has been as a result of dancing around lack of Regulation and saying okay we need to like decentralizes quickly as possible y y y if you are an Empire listener hopefully you've played around on chain and if you have done that you know that transferring assets across different chains is a pain to put it nicely that

is why we are incredibly excited to have the Wormhole Foundation as a partner of the Empire podcast stewards of the Wormhole protocol supporting over 30 different blockchains and six different run times stay tuned later in the show we have a cool thing that you can claim which is a wormhole nft just for Empire listener this episode is brought to you by PayPal here at Empire you know that Santi and I are really into real world use cases and always on the lookout for the next killer blockchain app we're excited to share that PayPal has arrived in crypto to unveil a way to seamlessly connect fot to digital currencies later in the show you will find out how you can use PUSD to check out at millions of online stores what's up everyone before

we jump into the episode little plug for digital assets Summit coming up in London March 18th to 20th tickets are pacing so far ahead of schedule that we had to decrease the discount codes so instead of Empire 20 it is now Empire 10 head over to the website digital asset Summit Das London March 18th to 20th use code Empire 10 and get 10% off your ticket see you in [Music] London and we're back what up man hey it's good to be back is this our first of the year dude we have we have been slacking I don't know I've been I've been busy man just you know tell the people what you've been

busy with I've been trying to ski but the snow is like I skied in minus 35 uh got frost bit on my both of my feet I still really haven't recovered so the nerves are something you don't want to [ __ ] around with right and I've gotten in my hands when I was climbing kilan jaro years ago it was really cold um and then this time skiing minus 35 deep powder like uh yeah my feet got extremely cold for eight hours I was out skiing and back country and I had to go to the hospital just to May rule out proper frost bite so my feet were not black but I lost all sensibility like and so now I still haven't recovered it all so the nerves like take they're

irritated so they take it's going to take some time but uh for a while there I thought I was going to not be able to like run most first world problem I have ever heard God damn it see this is why I don't share anything about my private life this is why I don't share anything about my private life other than running and I guess that's also I don't know a first world problem I don't know no but good good trip though it was a good trip it's great trip got to see my dad got to see some folks that I love to ski with it's I love skiing skiing is like my favorite second sport outside of running outside of running and well third after running and cycling you like those solo Sports huh not not a big team guy yeah

this is when like people tell me to raise like I'm like perfectly fine having a fun by myself because I don't uh yeah although someone told me recently I'd make a great father I spent a lot of time with uh my my sister has two kids and I love I spent like last two months with them and God I love kids but uh someone told me that I would make a good good dad for what it's worth is this how you putting your hand up on Empire and saying hey ladies yeah I don't where I live I don't think I'm G to find a lot of wife material but hey maybe in a block Works conference and this is the pl go to D I know yeah I know where you'll find them D baby and if you're not D permissionless that is wife material at permissionless yeah

dude I don't know I don't know if I'll find it in the crypto sphere but either but sure I'll give it a try give it a try yeah who's gonna build Tinder decentralized Tinder I haven't heard that [ __ ] in a while actually I have but I passed on it so what's uh what are we talking so there's there's two things on my mind there's farcaster um which I kind of feel like has already been beaten to death in the in the pods and on Twitter and stuff like that but maybe could share my take around it and would also love to hear like why you're not on it and um maybe I can share how we're think about it at block works as a company and I've heard a lot of like user takes but I can share how we're think about it at block works

and then the other topic is uh these air drops the dimension air dropped happened um there's a pretty interesting like airdrop strategy that is forming the cycle um that yeah I'd love to talk about so why don't we start with farcaster what is what is your experience with with far or I I can I can maybe I hav't tried it but I'll say one thing before we talk about farcaster can we just talk about frch because I resisted going there and I know I'm not trying to make the comparison between the two totally different uh but yeah like frch I want to talk about that because I didn't join guess news flash tokenizing and trading and monetizing your friends turned out to be a terrible idea wow who would have

thought let's talk about this then all right I'll give it to you I'll give it to you you you were right you were right there's um we shouldn't financialized everything no you're right about that yeah it was I mean good call not joining frck um what is your thought process when it comes to joining how do you decide if you want to join and like test and Dabble with new things in crypto so so look I'm going to investor in lens it was a relationship check I love stanie you know he's a CO friend and do I believe in decentralized social media yeah I hope because like so most recently contacted an agency because I wanted to build I have a website that I haven't like launched publicly but I was

thinking the other day I'm like well what happens if like first of all the search functionality of X absolutely sucks I just want to have more agency over my content so I believe decentralized social media is really good it will serve a purpose like look at um what is it the journalist Tucker car Carlson Carlson he's going to Russia interviewing Putin it's shocking we don't have to talk about how media is just terrible but I think there is a time to like there's going to be an increasing need yeah I know I believe it like you want to have control and agency over your content and where it lives right and storing it and so look foraster I spoke with Dan and years ago um I think he's an

incredible smart guy and early he was early coinbase employee and I'm I'm very happy to see the success of forecaster I just been too lazy I've been traveling and and so I haven't gone to it I I will get to it the thing about L for instance lens and I've talked to Stan about this a lot so I'll say it here as well is that friction right of give me something where I can post on Twitter and then it automatically pushes it out to farcaster now I've heard some really interesting takes from Shia and a few other folks that say it has felt and I'd love to get your take that up to most recently like there was like an inflection point where the engagement there is higher the conversation's better and so like some people have like stopped thinking about

like Twitter first then farcaster it's now like no I'm just going to go to farcaster so I'd be really curious to hear your experience because I can't talk about it from firsthand experience other than just anecdotally what I've seen from other people people likeing their experience with so what has it been for you i' I've loved it I've loved it so my experience with farcaster was I joined April 2022 and I lost my seed phrase and there was no way to recover it and so I had to restart my account this past weekend so that's my uh wait when you say restart like create a new one I literally created a new one and like I was it like at Jason I got yeah I got no I got at Y and um I got it at Yano and I was like

early these fids which is like your foraster ID I was like number I don't know a couple hundred like let's call 300 or 500 or 400 some something like that I think and uh I got Yan but I was so I didn't do literally anything with it for 18 months shame on me so I had to start over but it's my fault um so I got so I re okay so I had a to-do list so basically here's what happened about a week and a half ago forast was blowing up all my a lot of like my crypto friends were like all right buddy you got to get on farcaster like now it's time so I was like all right I'll do it had a thing on my to-do list for Saturday morning or Sunday morning to just get on farcaster um I usually spend

like one day of the weekend just like doing some experiment stuff with crypto had the episode with uh Jesse Walden and Antonio where they talked about did you end up listening to that probably not you're were skiing we had this episode with umen to it with and and Antonio from spindle Jesse from variant where we talked about headless marketplaces forecaster and frames and that was probably I have these Empire episodes where every one one once every quarter let's call it or once every three to six months where like mind is blown big like makes me take action on something outside of just like oh go buy token or something like that and uh this was that

episode so I got off this was completely went over to Mike in the office said blockworks has to make a push onto farcast in a big way spent about six to eight hours on Sunday getting deep into forecaster set up the blockworks channels blockworks research channels or accounts I set of channels as well which I I can explain if surprising no one was like squatting on an app blockworks on fire so actually someone was squatting on blockworks we're probably going to have to pay like I don't know 10K to buy the ens because on farcaster you can create an account um and then you can also but if you own the ens you can actually take that account with that like ens has the I think is how it works um which is pretty cool um and yeah I set up my thing and it's I'm I'm pretty

hooked like I now open warp cast so the way it works so farcaster is the the protocol best uh farcast is the farcaster is the protocol warp cast is one of the many clients that plug in that sits on top of of forecaster my understanding is warp cast I think is pretty centralized entity uh forecasters built on top of I can't fully figure it out if it's optimism or bass or some part of it is optimism some part of it is bass obviously Bass leverages the op stack um but yeah it's it's it's been great um nice I've I've really enjoyed it what do you like about it like uh who's there how many followers do you have like the engagement about to hit 400 followers I am racing Mike to 10,000

uh Mike is at I saw that yeah hopefully you follow through if you win on the bed because uh you didn't I'm I'm gonna say it again but we had a bet of who had the most amount of followers I I'm G to pull this episode up because I don't think I promised to shave my head I mean I have many flaws but memory is not one of them dude I have a pretty good memory um so yeah I Beach to it breakpoint I'm still ahead now by a wi margin you didn't even shave your head so whatever I'm just gonna say Mike if you're listening I hope you are just make sure that you have a beted that you know I don't know you follow through all right shots fired so but

like the important stuff like what do you like about it like uh what is it okay so special sauce um all right first thing I like is it's basically the highest signal to noise out there and that's like an overuse State like signal to noise I think overw statement but the people on there are the people that I care about um and that I want to interact with so when I open my Twitter notifications it's assess like there's no notification I get on Twitter anymore where it's like or maybe there's one out of every 50 notifications where it's like I want to interact with that and it's it's it's a lot of folks where like I don't know it's just not it's not it doesn't lead to interesting discussions basically so like the way I think about Twitter right now is it's like big distribution channel to like get things

out there um farcaster for me is like everyone on farcaster is very crypto native and very like high signal and it's when I think of forecaster it's more like convers ations I'm like I can actually have conversations on forecaster whereas Twitter is like yeah there's a lot of like either super retail driven or very like maximalist in ideologies foraster doesn't have any of that I would say like the underlying ideology of foraster is curiosity um it's very like kind and nice platform with a lot of curiosity and a lot of interesting conversations uh happening all right so that's my first bucket second bucket that I like is um there is there are the these things called

channels do you know how these work have you heard of these uh nope okay so you create an account like your like you would create a Twitter account you can create an account like Santiago that's your account then you have channels channels are I can't actually the best way I describe a channel is a mix between it's a it's kind of a mix between a Discord channel uh that you can hang out in or a telegram group that you could hang out in uh combined with like a Reddit channel so there's a channel like it's like R you know on Reddit it's like r dnba or something so we have we actually have r- Empire or we have a an Empire channel so anyone listening to the Empire to Empire

they're people are going on there and they're like hey great episode on headless Market places like followup question of that episode um I wanted to like get your guys's take on this and I'll respond to it and we have like a great conversation there hey thought like Ilia podcast on AI and near was pretty interesting like as a followup I'd love to hear from like this person or I'd love to see and so like there's so that's a channel there's a channel for NBA there's a channel for like people in New York City and there's all these great channels that people are hanging out in and so you can post to the channel so that's the second bucket the third bucket is um the experimentation that's happening there have you seen do you know what frames are Santi nope cool Mak him look like a noob

here but I love I love it it's first time in my life I can do that so I'm taking advantage of it so uh fra frames are basically uh the ability to embed actions and applications inside inside of your feed so the best way to think about this I think is so imagine you make a tweet right now the only thing you can kind of embed in that tweet is like a poll you can either add a picture into that tweet or you could add a poll but what if you could actually add kind of anything what if you could add the ability to book a conference ticket directly inside of a tweet or subscribe to a newsletter inside of a tweet or mint an NF directly inside of a tweet um oh boy there's all of these interesting things that are happening in in so

that's what frames are they basically make posts programmable and then you can do because they're programmable you can make them uh you can actually bake in these parameters so I so Royal so uh Royal is like an nft music platform yeah this is blouse thing blouse thing so blow is like go go mint this thing and I was like I'm trying to Mint it it's not working and he goes oh we programmed it so you have to follow Royal first to be able to Mint so you follow Royal then you can mint and there's all these different program so you could say so but if you extend this out it's like okay well maybe I only want my mint to happen for people who have a pudgy in their wallet and have traded over 100k

of volume on Unis Swap and bought a permission list ticket last year boom VIP client they those are the people who can mint something or another right so that was like the the the best take that I've heard that foraster might become like a a very the primary distribution channel for uh initially crypto projects but also a you know extend that further not just crypto projects this programmability and so it's frames that was like the light bulb moment for me on why this went from an application that I think I should play around with to an application that block workor should complete yeah from a distribution standpoint hey we're gonna give out this merch if you uh but how can you prove like hey you've listened to it's not

merch NE x amount of hours no no no not merch but like you're going to get X or Y based on how can you Stitch that is someone working on like if you've listened to x amount of podcast hours yeah so take out the programmability for a second if you just think about all right so block Works here's how we might sell a ticket we build up our permissionless channel on Twitter or let's say I it doesn't matter about the permissionless handle let's say I put if we want to sell a permissionless ticket on social I'm going to post a link to our permission list Channel or to our permission list event page on my Twitter the first thing that happens is Twitter throttles that link or they throttle the post because they are creating they're basically a Walled Garden and they don't want people they don't want users to

leave their platform so any external link is going to get throttled that's why if you post a any sort of external link your post is going to do much much much worse because they make money from ad Revenue the less time you spend on the platform the Less ad Revenue they get so first off post get started but for anyone who does see the post you as Santi you click that event page you then go to the blockworks website you click you scroll down till you hit buy ticket you click buy ticket it opens up an imbed from our event platform called Universe you put in your credit card details they have an they have a link with stripe you buy the ticket it's like eight or nine steps basically to buy buy a ticket now what you can do they get the Boy Scouts uh campaign going on uh

frames and it was like a huge success girl girl scouts yeah exactly so now what you can is what we can do at block works is we can post a link to the event page and then inside of that tweet hey just announced Santiago's a speaker buy your ticket today for 10% off inside of that tweet you can um what you eating over there no was like a lemon seed I like putting lemon in my sparkling water it was just like uh inside of that tweet you can literally you're watching because because farcaster every foraster account has a wallet you can literally just click buy ticket boom like that you just bought a permissionless ticket subscribe to a newsletter same thing right now maybe

the folks said eth Denver if they're listening should adopt this strategy because I heard it took eight steps to buy eth God every time there's an eth event you're just constantly reminded of how little intuition they have in terms of making stuff easy for folks I'm like you're purposely I remember Devcon in Osaka like there was two elevators for the entire conference I'm like God purposefully bad though it's like uh makes it it's like you're purposely building like barbed wire and fences for people to like push away like normies I'm like okay so anyways yeah we're I'm I'm very excited about this so this like frames were the thing that got me we had our leadership meeting this week um at blockworks and I said look we're you

guys got to understand frames we're making a big push into farter and frames and we have our monthly uh kickoff uh for with the whole company NeXT week and uh little sneak peek for any blockworks folks listening to this we're talking about farcaster like this is a big part of blockworks strategy today it impacts everyone it impacts marketing it impacts editorial it impacts the events team it impacts podcasts right so we're we're excited about it yeah I got to join I'll join I'll put it I'll add it to the top of the list what's the um how big does this get does it actually displaced uh X um what do you see as the monetization strategy for

forecaster um like what's your take so I don't know is the real answer basically what I think forecaster ends up becoming is I don't think of forecaster as a social media platform I think of forecaster as a proof of identity basically um which as AI is becoming this incredible like these you know fake but why why couldn't a bot just create a forecaster account and just roll with it why could a bot create a yeah like a bot creates a foraster account multiple forecaster accounts and you know you have the Cil resistance problem you're alluding to is how does that how is that solved I think there's

two ways one is um I think there will end up being something for folks who connect their ens and I don't know if a bot can do that or if that's like too complex the second thing is but as far as I know anyone can create an buy an enss you actually pay actually pay for forecaster so you are paying how much is it you forgot to disclose it maybe that should have been like the first point five bucks a year or seven bucks a year for storage essentially yeah who's providing the storage currently um sounds like them I don't actually know I think how it works is warp cast is built by the forecaster team it's a centralized

client and a lot of that data is stored offchain um um and you're paying them for that for storage space I think that's how it works yeah it would be really cool um have you seen instances where um there's just a lot of stuff that X could do that they haven't like a lot of if you're paying for premium you're you're can tweet more than 140 characters and so a lot of that ends up becoming a blog post I wanted to see and shout out to mer who was actually the one who had this idea and I saw it I thought it was genius I was like give me a a tab in my profile where I can make long form tweets into block content as opposed to people going to substack when I just embeded on Twitter um and like um like I would love to do that like have

the ability to and I now I think they've rolled out a similar like a some features but uh anyways all this to say like um you know what's that mirror for instance like if you post a really good uh whatever they call posts on podc can people have the ability to like mirror collect that as an nft if they really yeah I don't know if Mir has done this but someone else did this where you can actually inside of a frame you can read the article inside of the frame and then you can collect it as well inside of the frame that here's why I like here's why I think this is very different than friend Tech and very different like why I'm so excited about this this in my mind has the ability to be the first ever breakout use case of crypto that's

non-speculative so anything that's gone kind of mainstream in crypto like nfts at the end of the day like why were normies buying Bo Apes not for the art they're bu just speculating they're I think this is the first could be the first thing that uh yeah could be the first thing so yeah yeah I think the activation the the the cold start problem for social media is very real um and you have to insert yourself into flow um of how do you capture that attention and the it's been an uphill battle at least for me to I'm just so grain embedded in in in X and constantly use it but um yeah I'll have to check it out and then report back on

on the experience it's the most excited I've ever seen people in Crypt B about something that doesn't have where actually you're paying them they're not even paying you right that's always a good Hallmark um I mean to be fair a lot of people were really excited about French and then and by no means am might compar frch had a people were excited about frch because people thought they were making money correct yeah yeah right yep I agree um interesting okay well thank you similar to you were on a podcast where you were prompted to go in I will credit you for going on farcaster then so do that I posted now now I can share the secret hold on let me pull up my post to make sure I get this right I I

uh so it's called a cast I think you casted this morning said Empire Roundup today goal is to convince Santi to join farcaster so for everyone I will follow through because I'm a man of my word I think I know and so D do you know how bad I would look as a as a as a bald man I mean you look bad already dude we all look bad I mean look we in crypto man we're aging to 2x of speed like I've given up on me mik was we were sitting in a meeting the other day and Mike looked at me he goes dude you have so many gray hairs man you've already like you're married you're you're Golden man us mortal over here need to struggle

uh think Brian Johnson like longevity kind of things to running marathons here and there to like stay stay in the game he everyone wanted to give a big shout out to today's sponsor Wormhole Foundation stewards of the Wormhole protocol if you are like Santi and I and you play around on chain you know how bad the cross chain experience is today well Wormhole has set out to solve that powering cross-chain transfers for over 200 different multi-chain teams including some of the best like Unis Swap and circle so what does that mean for you the Empire listener this opens up a huge number of multi-chain use cases across defi nfts governance

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got some exclusive nfts for Empire listeners hit the link in the description to claim your unique Wormhole nft today the days of not using crypto for really anything in the real world are over it is time to start using crypto in everyday transactions whether that's shopping online or just buying a bagel on the street we're excited to tell you about py USD PayPal's entrance into web 3 PayPal is proud to share an open letter to the crypto community that outlines their commitment their road map and their goals in the digital currency space PUSD seeks to transform how you interact with your digital assets available today you can send your crypto to your PayPal account swap it for py USD and then use it to check out at

millions of stores PayPal invites you all the Empire listeners to be a part of this journey hit the link in the description of today's episode to read PayPal's open letter to the community it gives you a really good sense of what their vision is take the next step by signing up for a PayPal account today the future of crypto payments starts with PayPal uh let's talk air drops so yeah a lot of those let's start with a dimension air drop maybe so this week there was a dimension airdrop um and it was bit what is dimension what was that what is dimension for everyone listening out there uh they're trying to

basically replace eth I think as the consensus layer for app rollups is my understanding of Dimension yeah is that I don't know I do there accurate is no one really knows but it's provocative but it's provocative yeah I know it's it's that was my Layman understanding of Dimension as well yeah I think the idea is like if you look at today's optimistic rollups they depend on eth for consensus right right like to validate the fraud proofs and they can use external oh God I hope I'm probably going to bot this they can use external da like Celestia to reduce the rollup transaction costs but Dimension offers

uh the same solution via roll apps but replaces eth as the consensus layer here so and I think they use I think Dimension if you are roll up on Dimension use the cosmos SDK to oh boy yeah to implement but then you de you're delegating consensus and security to the dimension Hub and to like uh to the to the dim dym stakers that's my yeah yeah fifth grade understanding of this yeah Dimension Hub is meant to be the analogy like Dimension Hub yeah yeah the dimension Hub is meant to be the L1 uh and then you have this all these

different apps roll apps uh not rollups roll apps that are are the layer twos and so it's meant to be that kind of security Hub and you're attracting a lot of these validators and like and you've got the dimension Hub right is the is now you have this like liquidity layer that can flow across all the roll apps and now you don't have to go recruit a bunch of validators and yeah look uh yeah one of the more interesting teams I've talked to and I would love to have them on the Pod and um is there's been a lot of up like a lot of really interesting stuff in Cosmos happening um for for real this time um like particularly mesh security is one very interesting thing so like what like the core premise is like so if you're a dydx you move over from

ethereum you build your own app chain someone like dydx already has a lot of traction it's easy to recruit validators for that but if you're a new project and you want to like deploy your own app chain you have to pay a it's it's very expensive because you have to have these crazy inflation curves to attract validators and like at the end of day you need to boot strap security the only way you do that is you need to attract you need to attract validators validators have opportunity costs so you need to incentivize them and that has has become it has been very expensive now I think what you're doing with like mes security opens up the possibility to for example take restake eth and use that as the security substrate through I layer and like this project ethos for

instance I spoke with them like in January like to have them on have a really good conversation um and I just think the ability to launch app chains is going to and the cost to do that to recruit and attract validators um is going to be a major theme this year and so it's very exciting with obviously the reaking uh of security and the allocation of that in a more efficient manner basically the coure thesis of Ven layer um is going to have second first second order effects into Cosmos and app chains actually and so yeah really exciting I mean now you have Bitcoin L2

so how do you how do you bet on that though like how do you you're not team no I reach out to the team and try to invest before anyone else does so there's no like if you want to bet I think Cosmos is quite interesting because there's no token that actually the the issue with Cosmos is like I believe in in in the technology I just have never felt that there was a strong enough Link in adom as a security substrate I've always struggled with like was felt very excited about Cosmos not so much Adam right um and so yeah I I how do you bet on Cosmos generally IBC well you know i' I've made I've talked to a number of um teams that are trying to do implementations of IBC

like you know there's uh the composable finance team like Picasso uh then there's polymer Labs Union um and then there's a you know I'm an investor in Bara chain as well like proof of liquid quity is really novel so anyways like I I made I want to have Cosmos is an ecosystem where I felt underexposed um and I and I've kind of placed different bets on that um um but yeah I've I've never really owned much of Adam candidly um but yeah there you go all right so this dim airdrop happened complete it happened I missed it every time I travel

it is very very expensive for me it's like yeah you have to like you have to like put your address on the on this thing and there was x amount of time in order for you to do that and I was like in a long flight what's your take on air drops like do you not what's your take but do you participate in air drops like are you going are you trying to like are you trying to get all these air drops basically no no so you don't do any of them no I mean like I've probably given up a ton of value in air claiming air drop but a lot of times I over time prioritize security um but other times like I never want to go first yeah ever

i' just rather have other people test it and whatnot but um that's my personal strategy I still claim from time to time I think it's uh really interesting how the airdrop game has leveled up most recently and this is something you and I were talking about you know it's if you're a nft holder a particular Hallmark collections torans madlads uh uh pudgy penguins like it has been a you you recouped your cost bases and then some right the Pudgies so some someone at block Works has a lot of Pudgies and um they they're Dimension airdrop just from the Pudgies was

$25,000 and then dim has doubled since then I think they they ended up selling it but uh yeah I mean that's that's a $50,000 airdrop just for holding a bunch of Pudgies that's crazy uh yeah 50% of like the median salary in the US um I think so it's really interesting the what I've always questioned is what is the efficiency of an air drop basically there's two camps I think one is it's like a customer acquisition right uh most people just do air drops as a way to distribute and like decentralize fine the question is like what is the retention rate of that um and I've questioned most zard drop programs are

extremely expensive they probably go down as the most inefficient campaigns to acquire users because the retention piece has been questionable what is really interesting though is um latest side check yesterday someone posted so I'm verified but still that 80% of the tokens that were distributed or 80% of the nft holders that got a dimension air drop actually stay sted all of their Dimension air drop versus sell which was you know pretty compelling actually when you think about we saying 8% of people who got the dim air drop didn't sell it 80% of the people but this is exclusively to the NF the the people that qualified for the air drop that had these nfts so

meaning I I I will just say I think that metric is skewed because the dimension airdrop was the a completely botched air drop I mean it's done incredibly well in terms of the performance but like and I don't know who's Market making this thing but they're doing a ridiculously good job um but but the point still stand so you couldn't sell it you literally could no I understand that but but that if you couldn't sell but okay you stake I guess that's your point right if you couldn't sell you stake it so maybe that's oh it was 80% staked it yeah yeah 80% didn't sell well 80% decided to stake and not sell so they they had gone through the hook that's an impressive set yeah that's

interesting look early right the the drop off on these cohorts can be pretty dramatic so let's revisit this in a couple of weeks and months um yeah the other thing uh someone might say well listen I understand your point around retention you're overthinking it the key thing here is you build mind share and that's super important and this was something where like I feel like a few early Salon projects try to get attention from the eth community and it was just a good mechanism to have people bridge over Port over in the same case here of Dimension right um so we'll see I think uh what do you think of this airdrop

strategy in general of like basically an airdrop used to be to reward users who have used my platform early so Unis swap says look early users people who are actually creating the volume in the early days and creating these pools and stuff like and participating in the pool TOS would get would get dollars now it's turned into basically so it went from rewarding early users to a market it is now a it should be like on your on your p&l like that is a marketing um line item I think uh and now it's basically saying look this is the easiest way to bootstrap users in crypto um and so people are actually targeting these really like I think you brushed over this point but like it's really

interesting like these pfp communities like torians Lads Pudgies uh bad kids has been in a lot of these because a lot of these are starting to be like Celestial related or Cosmos related so bad kids are getting them like it is uh they are making tremendous am of money I will caution though like I will caution there is this strategy now like okay buy Celestia because you're going to have access to like 10 different air drops hold Dimension because you're going to have access to like like it's just C I will caution people yeah on this strategy because at some point the Music Stops and yeah okay you got to keep dancing while the music's on but you know just similar to nft Mania there was there's a lot of speculation around that and so um

here here's what's interesting though what is who's winning right now the folks who decided to go crypto native with their with their brand and their marketing right there were a lot of folks who said it's a bare Market we're going to try to go get the get the normies maybe or get the top of funnel folks um and there was definitely a lot of those people in media and anyone who went the opposite way and went very crypto native those are the those are the people who are winning like Dan and farcaster um the folks who've decided like why are people partnering with bad kids Pudgies and torans and not Bor apes isuki and

like I don't know some like another nft it's because they're the most like crypto native nft Club collection crypto punks are pretty crypto native but yeah punks like stand alone in my mind I like I don't know I almost think like punks folks aren't as active though in like like Punk's people aren't really the people who are going to go claim a $10,000 air drop not be as like super active on chain I get it yeah what about permes how's that been for you guys permes been tough honestly because why the business model of these so the business because the business model of nfts is incredibly

tough if you're not spending a lot of time like if you're not spending a lot of time on them um what happened with permes is we gave them access permes originally were basically just a lifetime pass to permissionless um what folks came to expect though was a lifetime VIP pass to permission list VIP tickets for permission list this year are going to be like I don't know a couple thousand dollar so let's say there's 500 permes and each one is $3,000 that's $1.5 million a year that we're losing by having permes basically um and then become a very expensive customer acquisition very expensive and then because there's not 10,000 permes

there's only 555 when those things they're not like when they're selling on openc or blur or whatever it is like there's not a boatload of volume because there's you know 555 instead of 10,000 so we're not making any money from these things uh and then one other thing we did is we gave permes access to blockworks research in the early days which was helpful it gave us like early user testing and things like that uh you could just connect your wallet and you'd get access to blockworks research the downside is what ended up happening is a lot of folks who would be our customers ended up not subscribing to blockworks research because they would basically just say oh yeah no no one of our

analysts has a permy we're good we got it covered so now I've got you know Pary saying that would be they would be spending you know maybe they'd buy three seats and they'd spend you know five figures that's like five figures of AR now they're saying not Pary specifically but I'm giving you an example of a crypto fund like now they're basically saying look you know we have two analysts with the permy like we get this for free so that's 10k of ARR that we just lost a year so I'm still very excited about permes I like permes a lot like I would I just love I love the community and like I think they're great people and I've come to meet and get to know and become friends with a lot of them through these events but uh I don't think we've nailed I don't think we've solved like the

business model of these things you know so you remember when uh Airlines uh gave people like back in the early days like the 80s I think there was like a pretty hack where like you could buy like unlimited flights or something and some people took advantage of that like they've been traveling for the last 30 years and it's like the most expensive like Rewards program these I think it happens uh it's a Hallmark like early and not like I would love to figure out how to make permes like I don't know I would uh I still like Peres I have a lot of love for Peres look I think you said earlier the programmability of an nft is very interesting I don't I haven't seen much

experiments around this but I do think when I think about token design there is so much that is left unexplored and there is a fine line between how Market wants to understand that there's a very clear mechanism around a v around a token emission schedule of token economics make it too complicated backfires but I do feel like we can push the the line a little bit in in the boundary of like going a bit further and adding more complexity into these air drops and gamifying them and I think the design space is very much unexplored um and that's one of the more fascinating things about crypto is that you can run these social experiments in

real time like I don't know the simple like here's an air drop because you have an nft and like we hope that you're going to add value to this it's like we're gonna probably look back on that and say that was like incredibly crude unsophisticated and expensive yeah like I don't know like curve did it this very well like the the V like the the lockup components and and locking your curve and that was VE bring it back yeah vcv like those things have been probably one of the more well thought through uh token designs yeah out there and airdrops like if I were a

Founder I don't know like people have like Dan I think is a good founder this is Dan from forecaster he I think has said like I don't think we'll ever have a token like I'd rather like I like seeing that because then you really want to strip away and and charging for a product up front is like pretty novel in crypto where most teams just give out free [ __ ] hoping it sticks and I don't know you never really know your core customer what they appreciate how much of it's mercenary opportunistic versus people that really love your product and I think fortunately like you you blow your like 50% of your token Supply hoping that you retain some

percentage and you get M share and I get it but like that's playing a short game what's going to happen is all these 80% plus of these protocols that already have codify their token omics already have air dropped everything to the community air gaps like five years from now be like in a no different spot than urine was where they had already farmed and given out all the token Supply what about and and I had to I had to go through that experiment of increasing the Wi-Fi Supply because who cares if it's a fixed Supply and it's a trying to be Bitcoin def like no one cares I'm like you need tokens to recruit top

talent you need tokens for referrals to bring in more liquidity to the vaults like unfortunately many projects are going to find themselves in a very tough spot and I would be very uh I would be inclined not to own any of these projects because their survival rate over a five period year period is increasingly low but they take the short route right which is Let's uh get traction let's make sure that we get attention yeah man the problem is there's gonna be another project that's gonna give a larger like this game never ends well right and so I think I was having this discussion with a top founder that I've known over the years

over uh in December and he was asking me like what do you think about token distribution like how much you go to the community he he was of the mind that like you had to give away at least 30% of the community probably 45 to 50 which is kind of the standard is and I was like what if you didn't give anything out let's just like hypothetically let's think about these cases just don't give anything out you funded this startup you've taken a lot of risk it's your money like why can't you own 60% of this project why does the team have to own 10% of it like most teams don't most Founders don't end up owning enough of their projects okay and I get it you want to own a a bigger piece a smaller

piece of a bigger pie but I'm like I don't know I think that is just uh doesn't really fully appreciate that the community today is not the community of tomorrow and it's just it just it just off you skates it it's a very very um shortsighted shortsighted way of thinking about your growth and your potential I would not give out and if people want to complain and [ __ ] about the fact that they're not getting 50% of the token Supply I'm like well [ __ ] off like what have you done oh you own a pudgy penguin oh cool okay why is it that you need to get 30,000 bucks forget about the value it's like why people I think are entitled in this space just it just bothers me the wrong way I get it

it's like but well I think we should seriously reconsider I my theory is a lot of this airdrops has been a result of dancing around lack of Regulation and saying okay we need to like decentralize as quickly as possible y y y make people but yeah I don't know I I think it's uh one of those things where hopefully I think we've peaked in the airdrop I it will keep going yeah yeah it will peak in the percentage of the total token Supply that goes out to the community yeah yeah that figure is peaked yeah I I think there are okay so I think there are three reasons why people do air jobs uh marketing a like user acquisition Regulatory decentralization theatrics

and need number to go up because that's how we fund things because that's no because like you know get more money and stuff do you think any of those are a good reason to do it no I mean okay like regul no yeah it's a tough spot I you have to do something but I guess I I'm not totally dismissive on the airdrop strategy I think I think it's just the mechanism by which you design an airdrop is most of the time really inefficient incredibly expensive so I will design a program where people need to do more stuff to

earn these air drops earn them like the ear Unis is not a bad one like okay you provided all this liquidity and trading like Jupiter not bad candidly they're going to do more campaigns so you're incentivized you missed out on the first one because you didn't trade before November okay well now you know I think those type of programs I don't want to be dismissive of them I think they work they are good marketing campaigns pretty good ones yeah so yeah but I just think the percentage that goes out May be a little too hot okay uh last last topic here is someone filed I forget who it was for staking inside of the eth ETF did you see this I've heard talks about

it but yeah go ahead does this make you want to what what is the like second order impact of that like do you think about going out and buying Lio because of this or like how do you think about just like how yeah yeah what's your thought on that and basically the mechanism is uh for instance not with Bitcoin but for future ETFs of proof of stake tokens right so like say hypothetically and most realistically you're going to have a Bitcoin uh sorry eth ETF the idea is you can stake what though the the allowing someone like uh whatever the ETF uh issuer is to stake those

tokens because at the moment the my understanding is that they won't necessarily stake or none of them will right my understanding is that most likely none of them will but they're they all want to think about it because what this gives you is basically the ability to own an ETF with and have a dividend coming well yeah not so much like just be diluted right because if you're not staking you're being diluted yeah uh like if everyone's staking everyone is basically the same right it's just but if it really is the the inflation in the proof stake Network happens to be where it uh it dilutes out people that are not staking um I well there's two trains of thought here one

is uh if you're a more crypto native person then you really like that right because you I guess benefit from you have a a a very big increasingly like Market participant that is buying part of the supply and is not staking it and like at the moment 25% of all the e is being staked across I layer you know um you know lios of the world so yeah like as Tok as there's less tokens out there circulating then it puts like it takes less amount of buy pressure to basically number go up um I think it would be nice to have ETFs you're you're that they're able to stake the question then becomes

as we've had with Lio is you know how do you manage the liquidity of the ETF yeah and I think it's something that probably is not going to happen uh but probably coinbase can facilitate this for because they're already like acting as a custodian right of a lot of these ETF providers for most of them and coinbase has the infrastructure like the acquired bison trails and you can you can stake through coinbase so yeah I would just uh it probably can be figured out I think it's going to happen but I would probably be yeah I don't have anything against it I think it's just not going

to happen in any yeah if it does happen big win I mean it's probably like so have you been seeing Igan lay just sucking up stake de I think 's at five billion five billion five billion tvl right now um Li sitting at like 32% of all stake teeth yeah I mean if if this happens you could see Lio bring in like I think like I think a billion dollars in fees or five like some ridiculous amount of fees this year um which is just tremendous I actually had dinner last night with this uh private Equity guy and he was um he's he he's he caught the crypto bug and he basically was talking about the efficiency of these businesses and that

nobody's woke waking up to the he's like people like SAS businesses he's like because of how efficient they are like wait until you till these like traditional investors who invest in SAS like wake up to the fact that Unis swap is the most Capital efficient business in the world right now maker most Capital efficient business literally I tweeted about this over the years because I I was before going full-time crypto I was at a fund that we were exclusively investing in Enterprise software and you will look at all this stuff and capital efficiency and magic number and all this stuff like yeah recurring revenue is a beautiful thing I'm like well the most the most hot comparison to make is coinbase and Unis swap like yeah there was a time where unisoft started volume started to like

match or even surpass what coinbase was doing in any given day and you're like well one has less than 12 employees or 20 employees the other one has thousands the cost to run one versus the other night and day and you're right I think that's um incredibly powerful and I think a lot of people get sort of like distracted by the fact that like they're not Distributing the fees to UNI holders but I mean that admin contract is occurring a whole lot of fees yeah yeah it's it's it's right two probably big Awakenings that the capital efficiency uh the kind of like Tech asymmetric upside with dividend features is probably gonna blow people's mind

it's like a rate but with like way more asymmetry than real estate um also more volatility and then the other thing is marketers right your point around forecaster could become a huge huge mechanism to acquire customers like just get attention get mure not to mention I was I was actually like really surprised I want to probably end it with this so so I saw someone and I retweeted about this it's crazy stat listen to this uh okay apparently only one or three% of Reddit users actually post most of Wikipedia's content is written by 0.3 of all users like it's just wild and of course

like this is interesting because Reddit is thinking about doing an IPO at five billion like I'm not surprised like we all know these power users like games like the 1% of Gamers Twitter I saw Twitter set Twitter is one I think 1% of users post 9% engage like comment and like and 90% never do anything so that like anyways got my brain working um for once and it was like okay then like crypto users are incredibly active the current cohort and that's incredibly valuable like if you're I think that's what like lbmh is thinking right like yeah there's like probably 100,000 really active

crazy people but if you're an nft holder you probably like your LTV is way higher you're like the core demographic the most valuable cohort for any company out there literally any company because you know these Deion are also spending in the real world and so yeah it really goes to show like people talk about like true a thousand true fans or whatever but like in this case yeah it sort of like made me rethink what mainstream really looks like right because it's the simple mechanism like oh we need billions of users do we really I don't know I think you can anyways I'm in the process of rethinking what is mainstream adoption really look like for

crypto um and yeah it's really yeah I don't know like this of course is Rel we should talk about it in another po but like The Saga phone now selling over 85,000 85,000 is that the number they're at yeah the for the second phone yeah so is it g to displays the App Store seems crazy but at blockworks who's literally switch not just using the salop phone for like to get airdrops and stuff but using it as like his phone because he just graduated college and he's um sounds like I mean hel right uh like this the last thing I want to say like of course coinbase put a report yesterday saying like Americans would have saved what is it 300 million or so if 200 something million if they had you

know for uh coinbase released at state of crypto for Q4 and they highlighted some interesting data page two of the PDF quantifies the advantages of crypto versus traditional Financial rails in the term of cost speed and convenience according to the report Americans could have saved sorry 70 that was way off 70 4 billion in credit card transaction fees in 2002 Alone by using blockchain equaling to about 600 in savings per household Dam now who knows right because of all Americans started using def5 good luck with a congestion maybe with salana uh nonetheless yeah it got me thinking uh who's when are they gonna

post the report on Telco that most Americans are paying between 20 at least 2050 200 bucks on their mobile plans well news flash folks but helius is pays for itself at least for now helium sorry helium Mert's gonna kill me mer most yeah FR most frustrating thing to m in this world at least at least I led with he like his his come back but yeah no uh helium right not helas helium which is the deep and decentralized infrastructure like mobile like so anyways it's radically cheaper so it's going to get really interesting it's G

to get really interesting do you think this is the the question for you sorry this is the last thing do you think this is the year where we start to see these big Awakenings for from traditional companies like like where people start really realizing like as if assuming we enter this application Phase like forecaster really takes off and some applications really take off because we're you know we have the ability to do so better infrastructure like is this going to be the year where you start seeing it in in some of the larger conference gaming conferences marketing conferences banking conferen it's like oh wow like there's a real opportunity here for for real this time we'll see we'll see most hedged answer on the Pod

okay we'll see and you need to come to dash to to see to see for you man come on oh God I don't get enough credit for I got distracted candidly I got a message about some weird thing I got distracted I'll admit it I'll admit it all right well that's the goodest time is ever that's our queue to drop our que um I'll see you on 20 in 20 minutes we doing this call oh yeah I guess yeah all right folks well thanks so much for listening uh we'll be here next week as regular schedule so appreciate the patience next round up will be in March next round up and I'll be forcaster let's go you going to go sign up today not today it's too late now but

maybe tomorrow all right sure this weekend all right nice nice thanks folks see you next week all right cheers guys hey everyone Thanks for tuning in to today's episode don't forget to claim your free Wormhole nft exclusive to Empire listeners hit the link in the description of today's episode and fill out the form to claim your unique Wormhole nft today hey everyone thank you thank you so much for watching today's episode really hope you enjoyed it we wanted to take a second to just remind you about our upcoming digital asset Summit in London March 18th to 20th Santi and I got your back seats are limited if you heard it earlier in the podcast there's a little competition running a blockworks to see who can drive the most number of tickets so when

you register for the digital asset Summit make sure you use our code see you in [Music] London [Music]