How To Build A Cult-Like Community in Crypto with XION

Transcript

this is going to be interesting are you going to wear a hood the whole time or you going to are you going to ask dumb questions the whole time do you ever wear anything like this talking to them this is my what is so wrong about my outfit where I'm just getting all these comments on it what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup welcome to a chain abstraction paloa where we just wrapped up an epic one-day marathon in the heart of New York City diving deep into chain abstraction with some of the top teams in crypto trust me this series is packed with insights laughs and a few surprises you won't want to miss shout out to Aly Network for helping to put this together with their upcoming main net soon targeting the inoperability and ux problem that we're currently facing in the ethereum and majer ecosystem we

really enjoyed this series and looking forward putting all this content out there let's jump right into today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners who make this possible [Music] cartey is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology ctei enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to ci. that's

cy. to learn more about building your own app chain today Everclear is pioneering the clearing layer the clearing layer can almost be thought of as splitwise when you go on a trip with friends but for the blockchain what I mean by that is when users are sending cross chain messages there's often times fillers and solvers who have balances left on different chains that they need to rebalance and reset their positions this is where evercar comes in ever is pioneering a collaborative approach to the chain abstraction future and they are willing to work with inoperability Partners solvers and other providers in the space to build a interoperable and chain of exraction

future check out Everclear ever clear.org and welcome back to L up um this is going to be interest um we're here with Anthony from or burnt bangy burnt to Banky we'll bleep that out it's fine yeah okay it's going to go so well um what shoes are you wearing today blue blue ones okay got it just wanted to check in on those yeah um well this is going to be an interesting conversation about Cham traction we talking a lot about champ faction today and we have a champ faction Builder burnt Banky but um I think the audience needs to know about the story of burning a bangy before we start this conversation sure maybe this

relates to whatever is going on over here attire wise my normal all right yeah let's kick it off with this uh why'd you burn a bangy so uh first of all I burnt a bank SE are you gonna wear a hood the whole time or you gonna show is this an anom are you gon to ask dumb questions the whole time so I the year is I believe 2021 uh we bought a bank SE uh naturally you know spoilers we lit it on fire how much would you buy it for we bought the bank SE for about think it was like $95,000 uh it inevitably ended up selling for about $400,000 um but at the time the I think the highest average price sale of U of an nft was about $100,000 um and so we kind of took the idea of saying you know that time all you had

was like crypto kitties pretty much and so we were like well let's take something legit that people know and try to like proverbially make a spark and so we lit it on fire uh sold the digital version as an nft uh and then for most of 2021 was the highest average priced nft sale on openc okay interesting and then now your Twitter name is burnt bangy yeah because I burnt the Banksy yeah and the Twitter handle for Zion is burnt Zion yeah yep uh burnt is the pound company and we're building Zion gotcha all right help me understand uh how you went from burning a bangi to now building an L1 and wearing is this Colt leader Garb is this what you're wearing this is this is a a

Wednesday and this is just what I wear on a like it's I don't understand what's so wrong with my outfit what what are those jeans and so um we originally started buing building immediately after the burn Banky I have been building in this space for uh at the time a couple years but still I think since like 2017 um and it was a nightmare to do the nft process um but I think the ethos of crypto we obviously believed in and I think at the time what we kind of said was w we know a lot about crypto in this process was still missable how are we going to fulfill the promises of crypto if even for us it was very difficult um and so that kind of actually led us to making

burnt which originally was on the application Level and we started building an application um and then that led to Zion because of the reasons of you know we kind of looked at the application that we built think we had like 30,000 monthly actives but it was almost impossible to reach any retail user um I mean even back in 2021 the onboarding process was miserable still pretty much is today um you know and unironically we didn't really mean to build an L1 we just kind of tried to solve the problems to make a solution for our nft Marketplace um to actually be able to be used by mainstream people um and I believe in 2022 we kind of looked at the most beefy nft Marketplace in the world um and said

we're kind of wasting our potential on just an nft Marketplace we should make this available for everyone in a collaborative way because we genuinely believe in the ethos of crypto we want to break down the barriers that is crypto um and we believe that people should have access to it so that's kind of how we ended up at Zion got it so um you guys are saying that you're like a generalized abstraction or this kind of like meta abstraction project let's just start with like what is even what does chain abstraction look like to you like what does this mean um and then really like yeah let's just start there you know you kind of explained this idea of wanting to onboard people into marketplaces for nfts in an easy way so is that like what

chain exraction to you is is like anybody can come in and interact with crypto in a seamless manner or like what are you building towards with generalized extration and meta abstraction yeah I mean I think all these terms kind of mush together to mean the same thing I I tend to look at it more from the Northstar perspective of what we're trying to solve for which is just regular people being able to have the benefits of crypto uh and we believe that the only way to do that is to extract all the complexities that currently exist so uh very similarly to how people just kind of use the internet and they're not like oh I'm on web 2 not web 1 it's going to be the exact same for web 3 just going to be web cool how do you think we get there cuz oh Zion

Zion but I'm just confused how like you have like these Uber Northface other big names they take you seriously yeah how crazy is that do you ever wear anything like this talking to them this is my what is so wrong about my outfit right now where I'm just getting all these comments on it okay so when you you speak to Northface or these teams cuz I think you guys put out a big announcement what are you doing with like how are these companies involved in Zion in anyway why is this not just another episode of oh crypto project pushes web 2 company that's big big name and uses it for exit liquidity why is this real like how is this real well first of all there's no exit liquidity yet so um but second of all um you know second of all I think you kind of saw

this in the cycle of 2021 where you had multi- multi-million dollar Partnerships with like Starbucks and Reddit um right which you kind of looked at the industry as a whole which was very solutionist which is saying hey let's just take a web 2 concept and just Jam crypto into it and so it's like Starbucks take crypto or like like mash crypto into that and I think the perspective that we took was you know and then I we actually tried doing this pretty originally and realized that it's just it's not it right because there 's a consumer that Uber has that isn't inherently a crypto consumer and I think when we can take the line away of a consumer and a crypto consumer and like

blur those lines to it's being the same person you know it's it's a change in user behavior that Uber doesn't really care for or North base doesn't really care for but if you can provide the tools for products to actually exist to then Market to the Uber or the North Bas we believe that that's solution and so I think there was this lack of a middleman which is this kind of application layer where there were there were there was no incentive to be an application in crypto because the total addressable Market was the size of like metamask users and the friction was too high you couldn't have a sustainable like customer acquisition cost over lifetime value for a user and the hyper growth model that YC kind of

follows is not sustainable because the amense friction you know and so it's more about providing the tools to increase the total addressable market for these products who will then work with an Uber this is the case that we saw with something like an Ros who worked with Uber who worked with Sunglass Hut who worked with the north Bas and has a lot more projects coming soon um because it's not really a crypto project it's just a project and they're providing value that these Brands want that crypto regardless from a tech perspective how are you looking at the existing landscape today there's obviously a number of projects that are like talking about chain abstraction a ton I know you guys at least my understanding is you use more of the like Cosmo Stacks kind

of get a number of these things out of the box like you I think it's like interchain accounts is like a big thing that you guys use and you have these like meta accounts on Zion that simplify the way that people can interact with Zion but these actions are propagated to other places in the crypto ecosystem using interchain accounts that's my understanding correct me if I'm wrong um but how are you looking at the landscape today in regards to like actually achieving the success experience that we're talking about um first of all you are correct um and the way that I look at it is we work with the chains directly um you know because I think everything's very different especially like when we take a cosmos concept and we work with someone like like a landslide for avac or a union for maybe something like a

bear chain or something like that like everything's going to be different on the infro level and how we actually get it done but I think where we stand on a more philosophical level is the only thing that we care about is that people can use products and that's it right and so I think with that there's two issues that I find number one there's no products in this industry um or there's maybe five and they're all repetitive and the product Market fit is airdrop farming um and so I think once we can escape that and actually provide value that people want need I think that there's going to be a different type of specialization that comes in Chains which is like liquidity or um social or gaming um where focus is less on

onboarding the users but more providing a specialized experience um and then I think the second part of that is this kind of crypto user base that we come back to a bunch of you know are these users here for the products or are they here for that juc a drop vertex Edge is now live on say Network say users can now trade 5050 plus spot and per markets with the unified order book liquidity of vertex Edge across arbitrum blast mantle and SE the next 6 weeks 850,000 say tokens will be up for grabs as trading rewards every single week exclusively on say join

vertex on say Network now on fex edge that's fex protocol.com coent is solving the longterm data availability problem where a lot of the data availability providers today in the Moder space when you post data to them they actually only hold that data for about 12 to 16 days and then it's basically they can go into an archive note or often times it's just kind of put away into the abyss and what coill is trying to do is build this long-term data availability solution which can plung into some of these modular data availability provider and provide this longer term Perpetual data solution so what we try to think of

this as is when you post transaction data onto Celestial or Vil or any of these moderate da Solutions or even ethereum coent is able to provide a long-term data storage and data availability platform for that data after the time period blockchains are Billboards not databases and you know we need these providers in the space to be able to kind of hold on to the longterm data that is provided from these providers and these blockchain State this is where coent comes in they just had a nice Rebrand check them out on Twitter as well as the website thank you for being here hope you enjoy the rest of the show yeah um I mean this is kind of related to it's been a weird cycle the past 18 months or so my personal

take on this is that like we saw a bunch of attention coming back in the space because of ETF approvals but like it that's been weird to me because of Prior Cycles there's actually been app level Innovation like something new and exciting that people are getting uh yeah just like people are entering the space because they hear of this thing and they start using this new thing I don't feel we've actually really had that at a technological level we've had a lot of infra Innovation which I am excited about like it is going to facilitate a lot of really new exciting app use cases like what's you guys take on this I feel like the whole Market at large is a little like we are so used to looking at these Cycles like oh nice Bull Run time but it kind of stuttered out here where

you guys feel we're at right now in regarding that uh and what's going to change it moving forward I think that um I think you're immensely correct and I think I always say this a lot where I felt like there was significantly more innovation in the last cycle than this cycle I think you got the excitement and you got the energy that kind of just dissipated into nothing um and I think you saw like pump. fun maybe get some of this attention but mem coins have existed since Dogecoin before that and so I think that you and you kind of saw something similar actually with the nft movement last cycle but like everything was based off of speculation and I think you didn't really have and I'd like to see the numbers but I do wonder what the

amount of genuinely unique new users that came into this system were because I think that there was no to your point like 2017 even the Innovation was there and the amount of users being minimal was very expected and I think the issue that you see now is that we have an adoption rate that kind of mimics um the internet which required pretty significant Hardware investment um and so you look at that and you're like well what Hardware investment as a user should there be right maybe wallets maybe friction like these are the things we're solving for but I do feel that you have this chicken and egg situation in this industry which is there's no users CU there's no products and there's no

products cuz there's no users and I think you can have energy you can have momentum you can have money coming into a system but if it doesn't have anywhere to land it'll kind of just just dissipate and I think that's kind of what we saw what's your take on this yeah I kind of agree um obviously you're pretty binary on like the state of products and users um but that is what it is I just think that like you can only have zero to ones every there's a there's a life cycle of time that needs to pass for zero and ones to for ideas that are zero to one to happen like we literally went from basically nothing on chain in like 2019 is 2018 to like fully fledged amm lending markets uh aggressive options nft marketplaces nft lending like we basically built

everything and that everything was new and so it was very exciting now it's like I think the time needs to pass for like everything else to catch up which is I think where where we're going with infra with the interoperability with some of these abstraction protocols and then I think then we get kind of like the next leg of this exciting Innovation but my take is just that we're going to have to just be be more patient not that it's not coming but just that it's not going to come in such the feedback loop that we got in 2020 which was just like insane so I would say like look to the end of this decade and expect the current uh what we have now to be to look much different but from like now to the next 18 months I don't expect that much over the toop zero to1 Innovation

but I think from like the latter uh years in the decade of 2020 I think that we see some exciting and like more like wo moments that where in 2020 was like capturing a small subset of like retail speculative users and like VCS and things I think the next like the latter years of the decade could be capturing like Mass Market to a certain degree so that's how I'm kind of looking at it um and generally not trying to take too too pessimistic of a perception long term I think that that idea of feedback loop is actually really interesting because I remember I was going to write something on this but I I got lazy um but I think that was very interesting where you saw the hyper innovation of coming out of D5 summer um and you had the nft

marketplaces to the point and like a lot of nfts were really innovating towards doing something cool doing something interesting and then onboarding new users right and I think that when everything crashed that mentality really changed because I think that the idea of trying to do something to get new users kind of fell by the wayside because we all knew we were in a bare Market this is probably why a lot of investment went into infrastructure as well but people tended to revert to what was already existing and I'll give you a great example you looked at the trajectory of nfts um and the aspect of community and you know online engagement um but the market then crashed and then we tended

towards the audience that we already have which is very dii web 3 native and so you saw the blurs coming out and the hyper financialization of nfts and the speculative nature of nfts rather than the unique onboarding featur of nfts and I think that actually put a big stint in the actual Innovation because it was actually regressive less Innovative yeah I mean I remember being at parties of of nft events and there was like tons of tons of people that I would consider like non- Crypton native and tons of girls like that has been the that's a bad flag in this industry no no that is a green flag for the industry just a dependent on where on where we are at in the speculative cycle but like you're saying like that happened as a result of a speculative cycle and then as a result

of the downfall of a speculative cycle that kind of mentality shifted but kind of pulling us out of here and I want to get back into like where you guys are at with Zion here um one of my main questions with like this whole chain abstraction space is like really when but it's ultimately like what is the experience going to be like so like when's you guys just announced the foundation which we can talk about which assumably uh means that uh main Net's coming at some point soon like what is the experience of a user going to look like for me I use Rabbi it's fine in the evm world I you know there's a phantom wallet and there's some other wallets like what is my experience going to be like when you guys are live if I'm a Zion user like how is it going to make

my experience better than what it currently is I mean I think the goal is to not know that you're a Zion user right and I think that you know even when we have this conversation it's a different way of thinking about what a user is rather than being an ethereum user or a uh privy user right you're a user of a product my goal is you know there's obviously going to be project that are deployed on Zion and you're not going to know that you're interacting with crypto on L1 mhm and there's also going to be projects that were connected to whether it be via Union or whatever we kind of talked about before so on other chains correct so am I going to have Zion as my wallet interface um or will I I wouldn't think

about it that way I mean there is no wallets a lot of what we kind of talk about is uh the perspective that we took was saying you know I think we're going to look back in 5 years and saying why did we do wallets this was the very single largest single point of friction in the entire industry so everything's a smart contract account like Austin kind of said uh we kind of are able to mirror smart contracts on other chains via interchain account not concept um but I think the issue that we kind of solve for in that regard is both maintaining composability and the ethos of crypto while also providing a good experience for people who maybe don't care um as then kind of on the power user backend side allowing the security features for

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and hope you guys enjoy the rest of this video all right I want to I want to ask a more crypto native question here uh you are wearing your Colt leader Garb today regular outfit anytime I tweet about chain abstraction and I don't mention Zion I have a cord of people my replies this is not yeah it's not just they're like Andy you know if you don't list us first you're we're coming for you they're like threatening me physically like sense so okay I know you kind of like started working with nfts and a lot of nft stuff is like Community Based uh I guess my question is how do you start this online cult that is harassing uh both of us and uh many other people like I talked with other people it makes sense and I think a lot

of that would be solved if you guys just listened okay but how can other teams learn from this yeah I think you go about Community you should look you could look at the the failures of Austin and Andy here when they don't mention Zion and don't do that dude that's way too aggressive I didn't say anything just relax and and talk to us about how you've done this and what people can learn from it how' you build your cult that's the question yeah that's the question um how did I build my cult h give me advice as another founder in the space how did you build your cult I really think the cult built me dude this

guy okay so with regards to the ex ex like specific Community Management of like people in in your Discord as well as on Twitter like is there a certain strategy that that you give to uh your community or certain tasks or a certain way of kind of like assembling them in different Discord roles different Community roles different hiring positions on the team like what what is it that that how does your hierarchy of community look yeah your Twitter had like open job posting like cult something something are these like roles on the team yeah yeah we're absolutely we're hiring a propaganda specialist um Divine iconography architect I believe um and I I actually really do wish that these ideas were coming from me but I

genuinely speak to a deity figure when I understand like the the vision of the cult and the leadership of the cult and you know I would say that really that look at that that that's a sign no I mean that's just listen we're we're really unveiling the strategies here and if that's not a sign from God I don't know what it is okay so is there anything is there any other um like takeaways that uh communities can have from how uh Zion has built theirs pre yeah definitely pre um I think that we're looking for answers here um and and really it's more in soul searching

um I think that communities are not something to be uh productized um it is more of a Divine Mission okay understand and so I think everyone feels that way and so it's like you ask anyone the cult they're like oh how did you you know it's not they're not coming from Craigs List yeah right they're coming from The Ether well then let me put it to you this way then you guys have just pushed the a Zion Foundation which again we can be careful about how we comment on these things but the community is going to be very excited to be a part of the Zion Vision here so like how does your cult and your community how are they how do they come together with the Future Vision of Zion and um kind of how are you thinking about building a long-term

sustainable uh kind of group here that is also incentivized in the upside of Zion I think that there's an aspect of what we're actually doing um which is genuinely a real answer of like I think the vision is there and I think you get a really tightnit group of people who actually use a lot of the products and test it and see exactly what we're doing and I think the proof is kind of in the projects that we pushed out I think we even pushed out one today um but I think that everyone in the community um especially when it comes to probably you the most often really enjoys uh what they do um in an aggressive Manner and so it's like the upside is like if he

ever has tears that's upside right and some people really think that upside is purely monetary but if you see like if you can bathe in the blood of your enemies who are your enemies you me well me just mentioned me you know what I mean like then we can be friends oh so it's anybody who doesn't talk about time yeah yeah like if you're not with me you're directly against me fair so do you believe in the collaborative approach of chain abstraction or different parts of the stack need to be like in like so Zion will work with different players in the stack to to to make for a better experience absolutely right so like chain abstraction is a collaborative approach for like it's like this like modular stack of different parts like we put out that market map kind these different players

need to interact to make the experience better yeah but like if you don't support Zion then you're an enemy yeah yeah yeah absolutely got it but it's all collaborative it's all love yeah I always say that the only people that I hate are the people who don't love how far are we away from the L1 launching uh very soon very soon very soon these episodes will be out in a couple weeks so cool I don't have any more questions uh this has been a kind of a a mind whirl in some ways but uh I've enjoyed the conversation I also feel like we got quite a bit of it but it also like not much at the same time which is like really weird feeling cuz it's like I feel like I've learned quite a bit but also like what the hell just happened so

overall I mean any closing Thoughts with regards to where you like what your mission is for the coming months how you're thinking about going into the long and yeah um plans yeah I mean absolutely um talk to the community if that's okay we got a lot of work to do we got a big things coming up if anyone does not mention train obstruction you mean anybody doesn't me mention Zion in chain Zion in that um everyone knows what to do um but but in reality just love your neighbor okay I learned I also am walking away more confused as well in certain Dimensions uh but thank you for

joining today it was a lot of fun actually thank you I'm GL glad we could get the the gospel out all right