Livestream Interview with Ameen Soleimani

Transcript

I'm here with a mean sum of money would you like to introduce yourself briefly because we only have five minutes uh sure I'm a coordination arms dealer these days uh helped summon Iran Unchained uh NGO Dow to send funds to Iran helped with uh tornado cash now working on privacy pools which is a fork of that helped start molok Dao also run spank chain uh started reflexor this Rye stable coin okay so there's a pretty wide range there um from spank chain which I think of a as a rather let's say irreverent project to moak which has this kind of grim mythology behind it

um Rye privacy pools Iran Unchained all seem a little more shall we say grown up uh or I don't know how you you you're free to give your own descriptor but um what do you think are some of the kind of common threads that have drawn you to all of these different projects um I think I I despite appearances I'm a principled man uh I like to work on things that allow me to express my values and promote my values and each of these projects in some way uh promotes something that I value a lot of it is freedom uh the freedom to you know express yourself maybe sexually and like transact around that uh the freedom to

run your own money uh I don't think we necessarily need to like inherit the central banks that we were born with we can make our own and make better ones and the freedom to have privacy which was taken away from at least American citizens rather brutally a couple months ago and we're trying to earn it back by building privacy tools that are still compliant with the laws okay so I am going to ask this question that you asked me immediately before we went on camera a lot of the like work that you've done and kind of the way that you communicate is pretty meme driven our memes the same as poetry or what is the difference

uh I I think like even things like rap are poetry and the the memes that we're putting together it might not be like poetry in the spoken word sense but it's poetic in the sense of contributing to the story of ethereum like one of the things that was brought up on the last panel was the concept of history and how we're moving towards this uh you know like like recorded history almost for the first time in humanity and being able to have these memes uh in place like makes it permanently part of the ethereum story and the ethereum culture in a way that I think is you know poetic okay so memes sort of resemble poetry

maybe in the way that they add something to a story or they sort of tell a story in a way that is freed from I don't know the constraints of logic and uh sort of continuous narrative um do you think that you've like learned things or like the way that you approach that kind of narrative has evolved from say 2017 or like early days until now uh I think a little bit maybe I have the similar strategy uh the strategy generally is like think of the most uh sort of out there meme uh that might be a little more controversial and then

iterate it down to something more palatable uh I think now I maybe tend to start a little bit more conservative uh but I think it depends on uh the kinds of things that we're doing I think we don't necessarily need to be as extreme in the just the memetic representation of the thing because what we're actually doing is Extreme in itself and so we can just represent it as it is uh like privacy pools for example is a project that I you know we're pretty buttoned up you know trying to lower it up uh trying to present it to actual Regulators but even in doing that uh it's sort of an extreme project because it's a fork of tornado cash

which has a whole taboo around it now of why do you want privacy bad guys want privacy you know and so in trying to change that you know it helps to put the positive out there first and be like we actually want privacy for everybody we want to follow the rules we want to you know turn this into something that is not just seen as like a weird criminal conspiracy it's like something that everybody should have access to well said and that's our time thank you foreign [Music]