SotN 6/29: PleasrDAO and the NFT Bear Market | Jamis Johnson

Transcript

hey bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation episode where we talk about what is happening in the crypto community related to some big picture stuff and drop some insights and action items for you david i'm back from vacation man uh you did a great job i don't know how many podcasts he streamed or recorded last week but like great job man i well since this is happening so early in the show i'm going to have to throw out a disclaimer because ryan is on a cell data he has local internet issues where he lives and so we are working our way through that uh we have tested it out a little bit uh and so we spent some time in zoom usually it's been going well uh but he is having some internet issues

but he looks like he's back with us uh right now ryan you were talking about how good of a java is doing uh well while you were doing a great job and i'm just saying i'm still trying to get caught up on all the content you guys produced last week so it's a it's a crazy task anyway state of the nation comes at you guys every tuesday we release it on youtube live and then we also release it simultaneously on the podcast david what are we talking about today on state of the nation we are talking all about pleaser doubt and pleaser doubt is a really interesting experiment that i think more people should have their eyes on because they have a a bunch of really smart people with some really cool plans for pleaser dow and for those that aren't familiar pleaser dao is a dow

that is specifically going after very specific very targeted high-value internet culture nfts and so there's a conversation to be had about you know and the intersection of dows and nfts and internet culture and as well as the rest of it you know ethereum and defy as well so there's a lot to unpack uh and so we brought on or bringing on jameis johnson who is uh i guess informally uh titled chief pleasing officer over at pleaser dao the benevolent dictator of pleaser dow and he has a really cool vision for pleaser dow that we want to hear from hear from him all about that uh and then as well in the second half of the show go into a conversation of those like what's being built in the nft

bear market right now that things are kind of quiet quieting down we're not getting celebrities just doing random nfts like what's going on behind the scenes like we kind of had our first nft equivalent of defy summer like right after defy summer and so what happens next what happens in the next like uh you know nft like mania and nft like resurgence where what's what is jameis seeing behind the scenes i got some questions for him all about that yeah if you if you guys know anything about uh crypto bear markets of course in in sectors like d fire any sectors like nft now is the time to be paying attention to these sectors when everyone else is not and when they're not mainstream now is the time to be paying attention making your purchases getting invested uh making your buys david

before we get into it all let's talk about what's new we just released an eth bull case episode on monday this is like a sequel episode to one we did six months ago six months ago the price of youth was 650. we had three eath bulls on and they called for much higher prices across the board we got those high prices went all the way above a 4k and now we're back in kind of like um doldrums i guess i mean we're above 2k right it's phenomenal right but it feels like the market has cooled down from from some of those highs so it was a great opportunity to bring the bulls on again and to get their takes what do you want to say about that episode yeah i think we're going to continually do this bull case for ethereum episode every

roughly six months or so because you know the bulk case for ethereum changes roughly every six months and so this is going to be a reoccurring theme just to keep ourselves updated with the general valuation thesis and ideas of ethereum at large right it's it's a moving target and so it's a going to be a consistent uh piece of content to come out of the bankless sphere every every six months or so um eric connor took his uh took his leave from from the the cast and we brought in cyrus unessi who added a great just uh you know alternative perspective that we didn't get the first time and so um definitely go listen to that as well put that in your to-do list to listen to that episode speaking of bankless content david i've heard you got you got a new show you

went renegade while i was out and you're going and launching whole new crypto shows what's what's what's happening right going rogue so we are launching a top signal we announced it literally a week ago today on the last date of the nation which with my co-host michael wong who's not going to be the co-host of top signal it's all about comedy it's all about entertainment it's uh it's nothing we say or do or anything on top signal will be fact checked so everything is in a super position of the best alpha you've ever heard and a total post uh part of my language uh but it's it's it's going to be an opportunity to like unwind and relax and actually make and produce some content for you the listeners to consume content that feels like uh content uh comfort food right uh

you know let's create a different vibe with like crypto podcasts and so we got some pretty cool get like bits and gags lined up uh where there's gonna be some drafting going around and some points being allocated uh we got some plans and so if you are a bankless dow member you get access to the zoom webinar and so the zoom webinar link is in the bankless dow discord channel right now uh and so the bankless dow is actually going to be like our audience right and we're going to find ways to interact and engage with the audience and pull the audience and make sure that they are a part of the show and overall this is an experiment that we're just trying out uh how how how are we going to make this funny we don't really know uh that is a part of

the show itself everything is a little bit of experiment but i think this i think this has a lot of potential so i'm pretty excited for it that is happening all right went to 6 00 p.m tonight at pacific time at 9 00 pm eastern time on the bankless youtube and then if you're a dow member make sure you go and get your front row tickets uh by the zoom webinar link that is in the discord dude the way you're teaming this up it feels like it's going to be like late night tv late night comedy or something late night show late night talk show a little who's line is it anyways a little our own little spiffs and spas yeah it's gonna be fun that's gonna be fun i'm gonna be in the audience man i'm not gonna be i'm not gonna be on that show

i'm making an audience like um heckling you contributing as i can i'm really looking forward to that though okay last thing before we get into the episode ledger and paris swap that is kind of the marvel team up i know both of us have ledgers everybody in the bank list community probably has a ledger but you can now do some really cool stuff with it david what is ledger announcing here yeah the cool thing about specifically the ledger live app if you have not tried out the ledger live app make sure you go try it because it is a piece of software like especially when newbies come into this base and they're like all right i want to go try this defy thing where do i go where's like the d5 place ledger live is actually the d5 place uh they are as d5 gets built out more and

more apps are going into ledger live the software and so if you want defy all in one spot check out ledger live they just integrated paraswap paraswap is a dex aggregator so now you can swap your tokens swap your ethereum tokens through ledger live using paraswap when pairstop does all the hard work for you gets you the best rates gets you the best quotes and it's all accessible through the ledger live app so check that out there's a link in the show notes if you want to go and try that out new way to use your ledger and of course ledger is bankless technology which we really like and support around here all right david i'm going to start with the question i ask every single state of the nation which is what is the state of the nation today sir the state of the nation

is pleased we are pleased this week we're talking to pleaser dao and so i'm pretty pleased that we're talking to pleaser dao uh disclaimer i'm a part of pleaser doubt and so there's my disclaimer there um but also we're pleased that eth is back above 2k and i i wrote in the market monday this week that the window of opportunity for eth really just like falling through this like 2k floor and really going down to previous all-time highs which is what the bears were calling for i think that window's closing and i'm pleased that that window is closing uh and then also ryan i'm also pleased to have my co-host back uh i missed you hey man you know it was great it was great it was great to have some time away from cryptocharts i only i probably only checked prices like once a day

which is like a record low i don't know 99 reduction in price tracking for me um and yo you still there yep yeah we still got you okay cool and i didn't you know check uh socials either so it was nice to be back it was nice to be away but it's also nice to be back i'm feeling refreshed i'm excited to dig back in with you here david uh so i'm pleased to be back as well um so we should take a break for sponsors and then we will be back with jameis johnson who is the chief pleasing officer of pleaser dow to dig into this story balancer is defy's most powerful automated market maker typical amms just have two tokens inside of one liquidity pool which can lead to fractured liquidity across the many pairs in devi

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on ave there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral here you can see me getting a 200 usdc loan against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens and eth i'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option but i could choose the stable interest rate option if i wanted to lock that interest rate in permanently one of ave's v2 features is the ability to swap collateral without having to withdraw your assets trade them on unit swap and then deposit them back into ave ave does all of this for you all in one seamless transaction so you don't have to repay loans in order to change the collateral

you have backing them check out the power of ave at ave dot com that's aave dot com all right guys we are here with jameis johnson like we said the chief pleasing officer over at pleaser dow who's really uh the guy i think with the motivation and the vision to really take pleaser down to the next level we're going to get into all of those details uh james johnson uh took his uh apparently uh took his student loan money and invested in the uh ethereum ico and so what yeah so and then also correlated to that also has a d gen score of a d5 degen score of 20. uh so a true ape of his kind and a true member of the bankless nation jameis happy to have you on to talk all about pleaser dow nfts and and the whole

gamut of conversations thank you thank you that uh student loan money i i still have an email that i sent to all my friends and family that says this will change everything after i read the ethereum white paper and of course none of them listen to me but i cite that email every once in a while oh my god dude did you pay that student loan back by the way or is that still outstanding uh not it's still a little bit understanding and the interest rate on that compared to d5 games you know you gotta balance the two yeah that's right debt is cheap these days compared to the gains you can win being a d fight so let's go into a little bit more of those details before we get to the story of pleaser doubt and perhaps just a little bit more about your background what

about crypto really gets you excited are you like an nft guy are you a d5 bro or your little mix of everything like what do you pay attention to in this space i mean i and i apologize uh early on that i am a little bit sick so if i cough i'm sorry but um kind of my beginnings were just a fantastical realm of ideas that could be built on top of ethereum that kind of moved into retirement around the end of 2017 as i felt like there was a lot of vapor underneath this whole ico craze which was great to kind of remove myself but you know when i saw compound for the first time in 2019

it was another one of those aha moments that these systems are being built out and you can actually use them and that was just kind of the beginning of leading into d5 summer um all of these financial constructs that are being sucked into the ethereum network just really could not be more exciting um and i think that you know the next big movement that we're seeing play out is the whole category of non-fungibles uh you have fungibles you have non-fungibles and there's a universe within both that you can explore and i think we're just barely beginning to tap that so i want to get this straight actually so jameis because this is a super

interesting story so you're there during the initial ethereum ico right you made a big bet on that like a really big bet but then it sounded like you got jaded in 2017 the end of 2017 with all of sort of the futility tokens icos but then you kind of came back for these d5 and nfts am i getting that story right and i guess i'm curious with this sort of a through line if that story indeed is right what did you see in the original ethereum ico that um made you think this was going to change everything and then how is it like the same or different uh now than what you expected well yeah when i was a i was working as a programmer around 2012 and we would have these water cooler conversations about

bitcoin and i was like i'll throw a thousand dollars in and of course i was too lazy and i watched as that 1 000 would have turned into a million dollars and i basically beat myself up about that and then i went to do my master's here in new york you know i was like this technology is not going away it's also very funny i thought i missed bitcoin but you know the whole paradigm shift for me when i read the infinite white paper which was posted just as a comment and i think a bitcoin subreddit back when the subreddits were still palatable um it was basically just you know i was in computer networking courses and i've been learning about you know ip

uh http tcp udp and the standards of like information transfer and how the entire internet worked and how these protocols you know are stacked on top of one another um and then it just kind of like i read this white paper and it was like this is the value transfer um trust layer computational layer protocol it will allow us to just use turning complete languages to program any construct of trust and value and it just hit me like a ton of bricks and then you know going forward i mean it was years until we got to 2017 i was mining i was doing a lot of machine learning a lot of

generative art a lot of nlp and a lot of computer vision and then you know just that slow tug of crypto pulling you in um 2017 i was kind of moonlighting as an investor but i think towards the end it just got so scammy and so like post a white paper with a team and that's all you have to do to raise four billion dollars you know um you had your eoses and ripples and iotas and uh but there wasn't you know that the talk tweet have we earned it yet and i think i just got so overwhelmed with the amount of stuff i had to sift through even to find the

gold nuggets and you know the diamond in the rough and it was almost just like a natural retirement it was like i was just overwhelmed and i was like i'll just i'll just turn these hands into diamonds let it ride i know i know the future of ethereum is strong um and that took a lot of mental capacity to watch it right down 95 but i was you know i was strong enough in my belief that this is the future um i do not at all think during the 2017 bubble situation there's just too much utility under getting the system um and i think that like largely when it

comes to nfts there's kind of a reflection of the 2017 bubble but you know ultimately it feels like these adoption cycles compress over time um very similarly to like any technology um you know vacuum tubes going into transistors and moore's law and the rate of internet speed and nodes on the internet i think that nfts could likely be in a state where yes there may be a long tail 99 of nfts that are ultimately going to burn uh individuals but there is just there's too much

capacity in the network with defy and with these platforms that we're seeing that have products that people are actively using and there's too much dispersion of the infrastructural tools like metamask and even centralized tooling and interest from [Music] big names that are web 2.0 that i just don't see it going as the route of the 2017 bubble um and that was a lot of information there that we can cover but uh that's kind of my take on it right now and i think that what you just said about how there's so much infrastructure and so much else going on

is really the a through line to talk about pleaser dow right uh and a even though they are already totally different icos and nfts uh they could still go through a hype bubble and bust and then you know nfts are real they will they will make their themselves uh you know they will pick up the scraps but there's what's really cool about the nft world right now is it's also being coupled by the dow world and the d5 world where like icos had to like exist under their own weight and they couldn't bear that weight and so they crumbled nfts also have like alliances with the concepts of daos with the concept of defy with and just overall a more mature ecosystem and i think the the pleaser dow is really at the head of that right

not only is pleaser dow specifically a dow going after nfts but it is also a doubt right it's not just nfts it's also got this supporting infrastructure um so let's get into the conversation of of pleaser dao so jameis you were there from from the beginning uh and people that have been paying attention probably know the story because we reported on it on bank list did a little uh interview with uh leighton cusack who uh he threw up this tweet about when he realized that he wanted to purchase the unit swap v3 x times y equals k nft and then quickly realized that he was going to be like immediately out of his budget so leighton cusack threw out this tweet it's like hey who wants to pull our money together to buy this really awesome unit swap nft that was the formation of pleaser dow but pleaser now

has come a long way from just a group of people in a telegram group pooling their money to buy this unit swap nft so maybe you could pick up with that sora left off and left off and and lead us down the progression of pleaser dao and and what pleaser dao has done since the it purchased the unit swap unisop nft yeah um so yeah let's just go through the story it was a very special moment in time um basically i had been following i had turned notifications on for leighton cusack's uh tweets because i was the highest honor you could give someone on twitter yeah well i was a uh i mean i still am a unisox holder

and he had mentioned that if unisox crossed a hundred thousand that he was going to have a um a dinner for anyone who had one or more unisock and i was like you know i'm going to that dinner and uh and we can get in later to like what that means you know how the the world is changing where you're on chain history is kind of becoming the defining characteristic of your digital identity but um i turn on tweet notifications i get you know i knew people pleasers are very intimately because anyone who was around during d5 summer knows that she was kind of the seminal artist of that entire special moment and and i had actually kind of been in contact with her earlier

uh during the zai protocol debacle that was was a fun one but um yeah so i get this tweet and it just says who wants to form a dao to buy two pleasers peace and i had already known that the piece was being auctioned so i immediately just said i'm in um through just being a dj in discord and all over twitter i had become very close with blue kirby and with andy8052 and so the next tweet i just like pinged them and said you know let's do this uh that evolved into a twitter dm chat uh where kirby refused to move forward until i

did something hilarious on video and then we uh we just kind of had a casual chat for about four hours and then finally was like all right let's just set up a telegram group and just start pinging everyone we know and uh that was just a surreal moment to uh you know i had met mario kante at devcon since i reached out to him i reached out to alexanovic because i was going to at one point do some machine learning work for him uh everyone just continually started reaching out and it was just so surreal to see this telegram group be like you know santiago has joined tyrone has joined um popcorn kirby you know daryl wow g-money it was just like

what is going on um it was a friday night we were all kind of out and i was i had this dinner planned and you know trying to coordinate this and also starting the bidding process and andrew king drops the 100th bit and we're like get him in here so we yeah so you're you're in the bidding process for the uniswap v3 nft we're you're collecting all these like big names heavy hitters in the defy community to all pool their funds and then andrew kang bids on the nft under his own weight right and so he's bidding against the dow uh and then like you said you said get him in here so how did you guys reach out to andrew kang someone in the group knew him um

i'm not sure who ended up ending up getting him every time we do an auction it's just k it's pure unadulterated chaos in the chat uh but someone grabbed him and he decided to you know join the doubt and so this is a really cool story about dallas at large is that instead of dao's being competitive the police are dow being competitive with andrew kang they're like andrew just come join the dow and be aligned with us instead like pull your money with us rather than competing for us and i had sort of this come to jesus moment that night where it was like you know the future of art collecting and even you know investment clubs is absolutely going to be doubts um you

know guppies will form a larger entity to compete with whales and and in the end it was like these dows are going to roll into their own cultural identities that kind of permeate across all these different platforms and uh protocols with a capital organization and instead of just being an individual roaming around web 3 you'll likely become you know a member or a subscriber of an ethos and a participant within a larger organization and you know dad's been along around for a long time but these like private dows have struggled to really take off and i think um we're really seeing

a very compatible merging of art collecting and cultural curation and even like investing angel investing those concepts i think are being made very seamlessly with taos uh you know we're very rapidly seeing these nft platforms in particular but also web 3 blogging platforms like mirror and like portfolio display platforms like gallery.so really quickly understanding and deploying features to embrace dows i think dows will be a first-class citizen um you know in web 2.0 you have your

cultural identity that's that's inside of a walled garden like instagram but ultimately we're going to have more of an amorphous fluid um identity and i think dao's will you know it's kind of like the word ecommerce eventually you're going to have that that moment where doubts are just a known word or or maybe even have to have the word down um but yeah and you saw party party dow came out and basically just re-engineered the process that we did with uh x times y equals k so now there are even decentralized tools where you can just say i do want to be i do want to bid on this piece automagically forms a collective

distributes tokens to all the people that participated and you know the future is absolutely collective organization so we finish up with uh talking about please or dial push purchasing the x times y equals k but immediately pleaser dow kind of became something even bigger than that it started off as just trying to purchase the the gif but then it turned into something more uh was there like a moment where pleaser dow went from just like a like a single purpose dow of owning this one uh nft gif to something grander was there like an inflection point or like what was what was the the transition between like hey now that we have this this uh uh nft what do we do next

who asked the first question like what now yeah i mean those first few weeks were pretty fun um just a bubbling of a lot of ideas um and we were very much all all over the place but like you know i wasn't even sure it wasn't even like known that we were going to continue this journey i largely we could have just stayed in the realm of holding this piece and doing something fun with it or selling it or you know just kind of being the owners of it um there was a as we're moving forward you know people realize that we need hierarchy

uh at least a leader and i i offered because my full-time job was degen lifestyle um and basically uh i don't think i entirely knew how much responsibility that was going to to entail but uh i think the real the real shift came i mean i was drafting vision documents and i was drafting you know trying to harness energy of different ideas and focus on a certain path uh but ultimately i think it came [Music] when snowden happened and that was kind of a moment that we knew that we were on the

map uh that is a very fun story too uh which has not been public if people want to hear that yeah no let's see let's hear the quick story about how you got this note in nft well i can't remember who dropped it in the chat it may have been alex manovic um you know there were other nfts that we rejected part uh going after but people were excited about but we still didn't really know what our ethos was and someone popped it snowed in nft and it was basically like yeah we all want that one uh we didn't really have a clear path forward we thought hey let's raise some money um in the meantime after x times y equals k

we were able to do like a fork of compound contracts i believe uh and we created our own token called peeps and we distributed pro rata a portion of those tokens to the people who contributed money to the first auction which by the way the first auction we didn't we had to just give someone uh i think it was leighton we sent him all of our ether to be the bidding individual because it was too early for dows to even connect to these systems and bid but ultimately we moved to a multi-sig you know we we put the nft assets into that multi-sig we have a token underlying the ownership of those assets we have remaining ether we're going to have more protocol network tokens and fractionals in that

multi-sig but we were lucky enough to have mario conti to kind of just lead the construction of that governance token and so we essentially it was about 12 hours before the and the auction end of snowden and i get i'm in bed and i get a dm from people pleaser and she's like are we getting this one piece or what and it was one of those you know those late night moments that are so familiar to all of us we were like oh let's go so i just get out of bed in my robe and just we have a lot of members in singapore and taiwan and so i'm just communicating with the the asian members and basically saying

look we're going to raise money to buy this and i think a lot of power of dows and you know i mean the biggest power of taos and multisticks is like capital efficiency and the ability for capital to move at the speed of information and i basically stayed up all night um we gave ourselves a valuation we started distributing peeps tokens to individuals and there was a giggle whale competing against us and you can you know these are like early days when we're figuring out strategy for bidding and he can see how much money we have on on the blockchain we can see how much he has and it's clearly getting close to our

exact desired price and a famous unnamed individual who had decided not to participate in the round um gave us basically terms of a last-minute deal which we all voted no on and it was a very good offer um it was basically a zero percent extremely large loan uh for something in return for basically peeps membership and everyone voted no and just like literally four minutes left before the auction is over and we've lost and our chat is basically like

it's just auctions are so stressful and so adrenaline filled and our chat is just kind of like feeling defeated and one of our members um just said you can have half my peeps i don't care and another member was like you can have half my peeps i don't care and he's like all right let's go and he beams in a large sum of money into our dow with four minutes left on the clock meanwhile we cannot connect to the auction house through the multi-sig and mariana conti has to write a custom you know function call that then has to be verified by three of the five multi-stakeholders

we are all trying as fast as possible to uh you know execute that transaction i just throw gas up to 500. and uh we thought we lost if we got one last bid and was like uh you know five seconds left and that was the final bid and we were able to take it down and that's a story that no one knows yet so it's a little bit of an insight into the chaos it's crazy these things are like very um organic chaotic organizations at this stage um like every dow that has some sort of traction i've found has has been like that um i'm curious about this piece though jameis like why is it so important so also describe for people who aren't familiar with the story like

what it is what makes it special did edward snowden have some sort of role to play in this did he sign it did he um you know are his private keys on it in any way what's what's the significance of this and why did police or doubt think it was so important in the first place i mean i think that a lot of us because we've been in uh you know computer programming and and the world of the internet for a long period of time we're very familiar with the importance of what edward snowden did as the whistleblower i basically blew the story wide open of of you know what the nsa was doing worldwide as well as on its citizens um

you know inside the united states america and so it just it felt like an iconic piece from someone who is absolutely a historical figure um you know art is controversial and you know stone is largely still a very controversial figure and the piece itself has the text of a landmark court decision that ruled that the national security agencies mass surveillance program violated the violated the law and that all came from edward snowden's decision to leave the country and his family and friends and you know in a way sacrifice

his life to inform the public of what was happening uh you know beneath her nose and um on top of that we are we are huge fans of donating to charities um [Music] this was for the freedom of the press foundation and we doubled their annual budget overnight which is pretty exciting for us that's also a part of the x times y equals k uniswap uh story that we also miss is that all of the revenue for the uniswap nft also went to to charitable donations and so not only are these two piece pieces of internet history but all of the revenue from both sales went to charity um

right i mean yeah so x times y equals k as well as uh apes together strong went to against uh asian and pacific islander hate um the tour piece went to the tour foundation and the doge piece went to a lot of children's rights uh foundations in japan as well as the red cross uh world food program and we i don't think we limit ourselves to charitable um auctions we do want to you know we're not going to be a non-profit we will be monetizing these assets um

but there's nothing that makes you feel better than being able to give back so when how would you describe the desirable nft for the for please or doubt like what is the perfect nft uh does charitable donation like tick a box but it's not a required box and like why did you pick doge why did you pick like the the tor browser nft like what's the what's the theme of the gallery the art gallery that the pleaser dao is trying to produce is that is that even a concrete like conversation that you guys had or is it just kind of like a rough consensus kind of thing there is always

uh conversations about isolating that vision but we're also willing to broaden our horizons at all times there is an element of just consensus like this group formed around one ideal and so we ultimately do share a lot of uh overlap in like um what we desire right and and these things play out in real time in the chat we do try to find guiding lights and getting guiding principles i think muni muni who's a member said it best you know we want to be the museum of internet culture there are a lot of important moments in internet history uh you know people

pleaser defined defy summer uh snowden defined you know he's he's the whistleblower of the ultimate surveillance program on the internet internet tor is the definitive um privacy protocol and doge is the in our opinion the top dog internet meme of all time um and so i think that is right now i think that's our guiding principle but we're not limiting ourselves to being too serious uh i think the acquisition of doge really kind of defined our that we're not joined with uh you know being a museum we also want to be

um [Music] broader media um cultural culturally identifiable organization interestingly the bidding war for the doge piece itself was its own meme because everyone kept on bidding meme numbers uh one three three seven 69 eth point six nine six nine four twenty it was the fact that the bidding war also invoked meme culture was something something in of itself i thought was pretty interesting yeah we were we had dms of um i think it was reach out to us and say hey could you stop doing like 20 decimal places because if that if the bid goes through it's it

could they have to like split it uh in smart contracts to various people and they were like we don't know if there's gonna be a floating point bug or something like uh calm down with jameis i was um i've been kind of stuck on this phrase you know in in american culture like the term rugged individualism is is thrown about often right as kind of a virtue and i i think that that sort of applies to crypto but there's another term that i think also applies to these dowels which is you know uh rugged cooperation rugged coordination and what i really see here is this ability to coordinate a pool of capital and go accomplish a mission um is

kind of the genesis of of what dows are and what ethereum can can do and and create and like for people who aren't familiar with this world as as you are and like you had terms like multi-cigs you're purchasing a digital nft you're bidding you're talking to like these pseudo anonymous characters like people named blue kirby and you know tetra nobe node you're dealing with millions of dollars in capital with a multi-sig i'm in my mind i'm trying to like think of what this would take if you were to kind of coordinate do this rugged coordination in the legacy world like how would you even do this so i'm just thinking my head like okay i want to go bid on an uh banksy piece an

art piece or something like how would i set this up i'm trying to coordinate capital with all of these individuals across the world do i go and create an llc a c corp what kind of like legal retainers are going to be involved how do i get participation from you know internet pseudo-anonymous characters and people from singapore and you know hong kong and the us and like and then how do i structure a bank account for all of this and like how do i pay for it and the cool thing about this is defy and ethereum and nfts and dows these are the primitives that give you all of that coordination capability right out of the box and it's like magic have you ever thought to yourself what

this would take to do in the legacy world or even if it's even achievable very much so um i might as well show that i have a fun that i am doing with two partners uh if you want to follow us on instagram twitter it's underscore perceptive perceptive capital and i gotta tell you i'm thankful that i'm working with some ex goldman guys because just getting banks and auditors and all of the paper meet space things aligned are just you know taxes and accounting and i have to go contact my bank later today and i guarantee that's going to take

three to seven days um i don't know when the last time was that he walks into a bank but it is a nightmare we're sending a wire transfer and uh yeah it's been like a revolution of the mind for me of i think that like a lot of people focus on governance of dows which like you know those tools are very important and there's like a whole spectrum of decentralization where uh you know as we get larger and larger we're going to go from you know less off chain governance poles and multi-stake trust to ideally kind of a representational government on chain um

that can that can make sure that it's fully decentralized um but but in my mind like as we slowly reverse engineer these corporate firm structures of doubt inside dows and these democratic ideals that we've been building for hundreds of years to douse you know that will take time there will be progressive decentralization but what is the best part is the capital coordination like it is outrageous like uh even you know we're participating with universe and mariana conte just writes a um writes a custom smart contract

interaction now we're staked there we've got protocol network tokens we've got nfts we'll have fractionals we have an ether treasury we can use the available dfi protocols to maintain our treasury and we have and we haven't announced yet but we did successfully raise a round and even you know vcs are becoming extraordinarily comfortable with sending usdc into a multisig they they're they are especially comfortable with full-on chain governance but um i i just found that ridiculous because in the traditional system it's like the

amount of overhead required for all of these operations is just tremendous and now we have the tools for anyone with an internet connection to have access to capital and importantly you guys wouldn't have gotten the edward snowden nft without the properties of capital coordination that ethereum can really give you you guys wouldn't have wouldn't have beat the buzzer on that one jameis i know i know people pleaser or uh people pleaser pleaser dow uh has some interesting mechanisms to build on top of exactly what you're talking about so like the the dow can become even more orchestrated even more formal uh i know you got some some plans and some visions for pleaser dao i want to get to those conversations as well as ask you just overall what's going around with the nft

world at large the the platforms that are innovating during this quote-unquote nft bear market so i'm going to ask you those questions right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible bankless is proud to be supported by unit swap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants

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pleaser dow and jameis you and i have been talking about some some uh concepts or ideas that i know you've been thinking about to kind of take please or doubt to the next level uh so so tell us what's in store for for pleaser dow and and maybe use this as like a model for just overall the growth of dao's infrastructure and the growth of the maturity of the nft ecosystem yeah i mean you know there are not many dows art collector daos private investment does smaller dows have bridged this gap from 50 members to worldwide available membership we very much so

look forward to giving everyone access to becoming an investor in our ethos and our principles and our underlying assets and uh i think that you know first and foremost our membership is define native we are looking at a lot of various interesting protocols and defined technologies that we can use to kind of bring our pieces back to the people that's one of our driving principles is we want these pieces to be accessible to everyone um hold out you know the traditional art world oftentimes you find that famous pieces end up in vaults and they're purely a

investment play while these are definitely investment plays for us we want to open up access to anyone who wants to become a member or just hold peeps tokens that represent ownership there are specific plans um to get those tokens in the hands of of people i will say that you know we are looking at air drop mechanisms um i think that we're very interested in people who are in the nft space as well as people who are charitable hint hint the alchemics hack um i think that like there's a lot of on-chain activity that kind of proves

who you are as an individual that we can leverage there are other mechanisms that we're exploring like we are exploring all of the classic yield farming liquidity mining techniques um one of our members is releasing a fractionalization protocol and i don't want to say too much but if you are interested in working with us um we're trying to create a community i would dm either myself or please or down twitter you can just dm the words doge

and we will start to uh once that's solidified we would love to bring you into a little select group community where we can all work together um my twitter is underscore jameis j a m i s and the pleaser dow twitter's pleaser down so definitely dms uh just dm us doge and uh probably in a week or two we can start building a community around our plans there so we're all extremely excited i'm like so i'm curious here's right so like mechanism uh capital this is a um vc firm right uh d5 crypto native vc firm i'm curious about their investment thesis here um and um i i think they they said it and i'm reading a post here uh why did they

invest in please or dao is kind of the question i have right and they said it's like investing in an art fund run by professional curators and art funds funds traditionally have outperformed the s p over the last 25 years but they also say they are investing in the dao brain power and the dao community like this is sort of a like a play in both yeah it's a talent play it's a curation play it's an nft play all combined but there's definitely like a an investment thesis here it feels like for somebody like like mechanism you know capital i'm just curious your your general thoughts on on that is just how how does somebody invest in the nft

space like how does somebody even invest in a dow like please or dal how should they think about these types of investments are they buying a community are they buying a set of assets do they not really know what they're buying you're just buying future potential what what are your thoughts there well i think red phone crypto who's the member had a really nice tweet and i cannot remember it exactly but it basically it was along the lines of you know we rebuilt um finance and value and now we're rebuilding culture and yeah basically culture um you know suzu talks a lot about the value with the bold case for ethereum is

just one point is how do you value all of culture we we don't know the answer to that i mean you're seeing a lot of the big dogs come on i you know i've talked to people in back channels that these big web 2.0 companies are actively looking to integrate nfts um [Music] you know tick tock is definitely going to be integrating nfts i think only fans is as well um i think that there is a huge just media and culture and fine art play here that is just at its inception point right now

um also jesse walden from variant talks a lot about investment clubs and you know if you take the capital coordination mechanisms of daos and play it out to its logical extreme they're going to ultimately challenge these venture capital firms to an extreme degree i mean you're going to have 18 year old kids uh forming collectives that do a better job than venture capitalists in their high tower and we're just at day zero of this i think that as these capital coordination mechanisms really start to shine and especially l2 comes online

you know you won't need that much capital for gas fees and people will be able to coordinate to an extreme degree i think that pleaser you know we had a special inception moment a special birth where we have just so happened to get the biggest nft influencers the biggest d5 natives um the biggest brains in the industry and so i think the investment play is basically that we will have good taste or we will you know we will be able to also leverage all of these bleeding edge technologies um you know we've worked with literally five engineering teams

to try to help them produce features whether those are social or multi-sig connective or whatever to kind of push forward the industry as a whole and uh yeah i think that the future of ethereum will shine with culture yeah what's super interesting so dave and i have a we're doing a podcast recording with a guy by the name of luke burgess who wrote a book called um wanting and it's a book about what he calls memetic desire which is like the thing he says underpins everything like we mimic each other's desires right and that's how we social signal and anyway super interesting conversation here one of the things is we were preparing

that agenda that struck both david and i is it really feels like the internet is playing out in two acts right so like act one you have back to your your comment about like tcpip and udp and all these protocols you have this communication technology this propagation layer for digital memberic desires right so you have all of this internet culture that has been birthed since you know the 90s 1990s right and now with this second act of the internet which is kind of act two the crypto act we've invented this thing the scarcity technology this like digital scarcity technology and now we can assign value to all of that culture all that mimetic desire that's been pent up we can actually like assign

value to those things and trade them in defy markets and coordinate capital around them with all these tools we've created so what's super striking to me is like you take the edward snowden piece you take the doge piece these are original artifacts of the act one of the internet that now crypto is bringing into like digital scarcity into this second act and so like well it may seem sort of weird and bizarre and far-fetched for somebody like mechanism capital to be like we're just investing in culture oh my god how much internet culture have we created over the past 20 years that hasn't yet been monetized and that's what's so interesting about what you guys are doing with with the pleaser dow um you know any thoughts on that is that sort

of yeah i mean i think that that plays in like you know i think people underestimate how much blockchain history will play into our digital lives in our daily lives like i was in a funny tweet thread with larry cermak and matthew graham from steno global and and i just posted my degen score and they both were like can we interview you you know i don't need it like all right and it's like you know you're going to be going you're going to be doing away with credit scores in the social realm they're likely going to be doing away with follower accounts you might be doing away with resumes um the proof will be on blockchain of

what you've done i mean that's why i followed leighton qsax tweets because i was like i have these exclusive rights to participate in this event this real world event because of my on-chain history i have the ability to interview with some of the best mines in crypto because i have a high degenerate um and i think the nfts will largely be you know both digital and uh meet space uh access entities someone tweeted can you imagine trying to raise money from vcs for an nft project and you don't own a crypto punk like at the end of the day you know a lot of people who are not into nfts

are like why does that you know why does that matter if it i can just copy paste it it's like that is like all they want to know is the provable history of your life that you are actually that you're about that life i hear about that life exactly and uh you know pleaser dow definitely wants to integrate that as well we want to have a real world component we want to throw events worldwide uh you know we want to have pleasercon after devcon or before where it's kind of contingent on these on these digital historical records you see friends with benefits and all these discord gated communities

where you can verify on chain if you have an nft or if you have a certain number of tokens and i think we're in the very nascent stages of that playing out and i believe nfts will play a big role in that this is what i think bankless listeners should prepare themselves for crypto crypto natives is is what we call them uh you know on the platform is like your entry in history your dgen score that is your new resume like what daos you are a part of where you've worked your reputation like that's going to be part of how you are evaluated in this new ecosystem and if if you guys have listened to our josh rosenthal episode where we talked about the the new medici this new crypto renaissance that is upon

us this is how you become part of the new medici class right you have to like level up your scores you have to participate it's not a passive thing it's if you want to participate by only owning bitcoin and ether cool that's great like that's the passive life but if you want to really dive deep down the rabbit hole into this space like go join a dow go buy an nft go be part of the bidding process go figure out how to use all of these d5 protocols if you can't afford it on main chain go do it in polygon right like this is a very active thing that we are a part of and a big movement i think early adopters as with buying bitcoin and ether in the early days early adopters that are getting

experience in how to coordinate capital will be the um the vanguard of of the future and i think that's what you're talking about here jameis is like this is a whole new paradigm shift in how we evaluate talent opportunity and really like jobs and it's going to affect everything that we do just to to add on to that but before i throw it back to you jameis there's like a certain amount of desirability of having like a large on-chain footprint right if you just you were the average defy user throughout 2018 and 2019 you got over like 40 to 60 thousand dollars worth of air drops if you just use the average protocols and and what a degen score what that really is is it's just measuring the magnitude of your on-chain

footprint like how much surface area has your specific ethereum address touched in all of d5 have you touched every single contract on ethereum well then you have a divide d-gen score of like one you are the most dgn person ever uh and like to some degree that's less your experience that's like what you have done and having that instantiated on chain is a useful thing to prove to other people that you are like i said about that life totally could not agree more it's like a play instead of pay to play it's going to be play play and earn um i think largely in the future we're going to have much more of a gamified digital life even social will be more gamified and

um yeah i mean you see it play out with like even wall street bets everyone's becoming financed and i think that as finding the financial system gets more digitized it's just going to play a part in everyone's daily lives a lot more so jameis one of the reasons we wanted to bring you on is to hear about what's going on in the world of nfts as it's kind of going through its first like uh you know quiet period right it's kind of gone it's gotten a lot quieter there's a lot less going on we still have some of these big name nfts coming out like doge that kind of you know gets to grab some headlines but no longer jay-z's did something right like last week jay-z released something so happy

stuff's still happening but like there's a lot of like very big things that are happening but like the basal level of just like there's no more like crypto punk forks there's there's quiet time in nfc land what's getting built so like i was paying attention to nfts while it was going through its hype mania but like now that's kind of quiet quieted down i've stopped paying attention to it so much what's going on behind the scenes like who's building worlds what's the competition like what's going on first off first up it's not a nft bear market if you have uh board api club that's true uh board apes or the bull market inside the inside of the inside of the nf team um that was a very fun project and has it's i think they're doing big things

uh and crypto punks have seen like a i think their floor just rose by like five e's um probably largely from jay-z changing his profile picture to a crypto punk uh pretty that's pretty dope it's really not gonna lie um yeah i mean like uh i think that projects will continue to you know iterate on the base layer of innovation whether that's through like integration with defy or even just further decentralization i think there's some problems of standards like if you meant on one platform it doesn't interact with

another platform so seamlessly um i like what universe is doing where they're basically giving creators the capacity to build a dow around their nft projects um you know i think it's hard to predict what's going to happen in terms of like the innovations within specifically the non-fungible spec because like that's it's an entire universe of ideas uh but what about the issuance layer like the the foundations the wearables the the the places where people go to to produce an nft have you seen sort of any innovation or progress or development in that realm yeah i mean largely they're just

building out features to integrate like taos as first-class citizens they want to have more of a social component they want to drive traffic to their entity in a way where people can interact with one another i think that there's a lot of infrastructure being built that people don't know about like you know um i want to give well like uh nft encryption protocols will probably be coming online and that's going to be like a base layer for allowing an entire world of renting out ip um you know you can issue a decryption key and you can revoke a decryption key and i could sell or i could rent out my piece to a

museum in buenos aires for the weekend or something um and you know ip real world ip bringing that on chain is something that's that's pretty heavy and is still a work in progress but i think that components like nft encryption um i think uh you're gonna see one thing that at least i personally am very bullish on is the combination of l2s with nfts and and d5 i don't know if anyone's played the game comb meath where you can literally play a game and earn money and your spaceship is a nft um i think we're going to say

it it's on polygon um it's kind of an old game i'm not sure what they're doing now but um i think like i i personally would like to see a lot of projects interface with other projects like i don't understand why no one's made a magic the gathering with crypto punks and their attributes um i would like to see more ecosystem building you know it's an open system so why not build on top of other projects um [Music] i mean i think another wave that is coming that will maybe be done poorly initially but will really really begin to show that these are these entities are not going away uh is just mainstream coming online i know that all of these big web

2.0 companies are trying to figure out how they can access the nft industry um i mean you saw jack dorsey yesterday todd was on a twitter spaces with jay-z talking about how title is going to integrate nft's um yeah that's kind of my high level thinking of where the space is going i think nfts will be a huge media play i think people are underestimating how much we're going to pull in you know we always talk about d5 pulling in these financial institutions but what about nfts pulling in media corporations i think that wave is absolutely coming

it may look a little weird at first and hopefully everything integrates seamlessly across multiple platforms um yeah do you have any ideas what the next like big catalysts are going to be right so like um if layer two um maybe maybe the ux needs to improve um this sort of thing but like it felt like over you know in in the winter uh time just nfts absolutely blew up and it was it wasn't really clear what the catalyst was but maybe there was a catalyst and when when do you think we'll see the next kind of mainstream moment for nft is it feels like as david was

saying we saw this mainstream move moment things have kind of died down what's what things should we look for before seeing kind of the next big jolt into uh into nfct's and it breaking into mainstream conscience i mean i'm not entirely convinced we're in a bear market i think it might just be more reflective of the price of ethereum uh you know every auction that we look at it's basically like well the market's crap so we probably won't have very many competitors um i think that you know with one five five nine and the merge and um ideally this four market not being over that is a very simple catalyst to

people wanting to play more but interesting so you know you think the basic economics of defy and ether play directly into into nfts yeah interesting no way because people don't have a lot of these projects cater to people who are in the ecosystem already and if you don't have expendable income if you you know you're a trader and you were long eath and now you're down a bit you're probably more tightly strapped for cash um i think they're they're very very interconnected i think um it's going somewhere with that i can't remember it okay no that's okay uh i think yeah getting

back to like the compression cycle of technological adoption i think that from what i can tell people are heads down building and by virtue of nfts being i don't want to say more simple than d5 um but i i think that a lot of web 2.0 programmers are coming into space and able to spin up these systems faster we just need a really killer social uh like portfolio viewer of our nfts right like the major heavy lifting there is going to be web 2.0

and so i think that there is going to be a arc of you know heads down building but i think it will happen a lot more rapid than people believe and and i think that that could be a major catalyst i'm very excited for a social component uh whether that's like you need an nft to purchase this set of clothing or you need to um your djing score represents your follower account or you know or replace your follower account i think that a huge catalyst could be social and uh ideally a lot of these exist on l2 so we can get gen z involved and you know the only 18 year olds in the space won't just be rory capital and [Laughter]

i mean everyone everyone in gen z is just like i don't think that they're going to a lot of them will not have the experience of even opening a bank account right like they're coming online very quickly i i think everyone here remembers you know we complain about how metamask is kind of hard to use and it's hard to learn these things but i remember digging through windows 95 window 98 windows 98 not knowing what the hell is going on and having to learn all of these things before i could even use a computer and i think that people don't understand how rapidly college students will be playing around these systems totally jameis thank you for coming on

the banquet state of the nation to tell us what you are seeing in the world of nfts and daos and plethora dow i think is a really great just test to see what we really can get done when some of the brightest minds come and and put some power and some oomph behind both nfcs and thousands and sees what happens so i i of course have my eye on please or dao with what you guys are building there and so if if anyone wants to find out i you you shouted out some some uh some uh twitter profiles earlier in the show but if people want to find out more about pleaser dow where should they go i mean there's the pleaser dao twitter and pleaser the second e there's no e so pleaser down twitter

um there's pleaser.org you can check us out on foundation and zora we have some donated items in our foundation portfolio portfolios it's a little bit uh we gotta get this cleaned up um you can always reach out to me at uh on my twitter at underscore j-a-m-i-i-s and we are absolutely i think our next step is going to be something very very big with doge um you know doge backed by real doge proof of doge network so if you if you want to participate help us out uh get a foot in the door of the dow we're trying to build a community uh just dm us doge

uh my twitter or pleaser dad's twitter guys i think we are in the early stages of a dao's we are in the early stages of crypto culture internet culture pleaser dao is going to be part of that get involved somehow keep your eye on the space could be huge of course risks and disclaimers eth is risky none of this was financial advice bitcoin is too so are nfts prices go up and down all of crypto is risky you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from

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