Ep.32: Derek Edws (Collab+Currency), Chris Maddern (Floor), Token Market Fit, Notcoin

Yeah, I feel like seeing the, like, just the number tick up like that, dude, it just seems obvious, right? It's like, yeah, of course. That's how Internet money should be flowing.

Around, supporting my channel.

It's pumping your own bags. Every time you like my cast, your bags are going through the roof.

Any bag energy. I love it. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Good morning. Good morning. We've got episode 31 of Internet Explorers. It is Friday. Friday has come quick and the week is full of excitement and chaos and fun stuff and new things and buttons to click. And we're very excited to be here with you today.

If you're hanging out over with us on Twitter, I see people over there on Twitter. You can come hang out at Live C Club XYZ where our cat is. Sign in. You can. Peace. Note how awesome he is.

Good stuff. Anyways, episode 31, Josh is back from his fishing extravaganza last week.

One sec. I lost headphone. I lost.

I just lost five zones. Okay. Well, Keith, you're back. You had some. Some lovely.

Personal time. I don't even know what you're doing, but it sounds like you left and came back sick.

So, yeah, Song Camp had an off site and we did a little bit of a. We did some visioning and planning strategy for this year and then we also.

Did some hackathons. Pivoted twice and then. And then we all went out for drinks with an amazing crew in Montreal and got me nice and sick and sent me on back home to the States. So it. It was a full. It was a full trip. And then all that happened and we were like chronically online. Like tried to watch a movie every night, but we couldn't. We just ended up in Twitter spaces and it was great.

Classic. Yeah, classic. Are you back, Josh?

I'm back. I'm back. Yeah. I'm excited for what the did Peace do on chain because he got back online and got very stoked on something. So I hope that's what he's talking about.

Awesome. Well, we got a great show for you today. We're going to talk to crew behind Alpha Friends create place some products that are out there in the world that you can use qlik and do cool things with today and figure out what the hell piece has been doing online. We got awesome news about demo day. Then we're going to get into. I don't know. This feels more like TMZ here later today when we're going to talk about celebrity coins. Pumped up fun lives. The latest from Fantasy Top. And I don't even know what's in the lightning round. So we get some fun, we got some chaos. I'm sure it'll be insightful, but let's. Let's jump in. I'll turn it over to you, Josh. Sick. Sorry.

I was just retweeting. I went to retweet on my phone and then volume switched over. So, yeah, let's bring. Are we bringing VJ up?

We're bringing VJ up.

We should. I'm sorry. I'm transfixed by this infinity thing.

Look at us.

Hey, guys. Great to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah.

Welcome to Internet Explorer. So I guess probably, Yeah. I think there's kind of a lot to get into here. I think the kind of dichotomy between Superfluid, the protocol, Alpha Friends. I think we kind of talk a lot or think a lot about kind of this protocol kind of application duality relationship. So I'd love to get into that, but maybe. Yeah, Just kind of very briefly, do you want to start off with what Super Fluid is, and then maybe just how that led into Alpha Friends, and we can probably spend most of our time there.

Sounds great. So, for those who aren't already familiar with it, Superfluid is a protocol for money streaming. And by money streaming, we literally mean getting paid every second. So, you know, for example, I receive my salary every second, a bunch of people getting grants paid every second. And that's like real tokens into your account, not some sort of fancy, you know, I have to click go and claim this thing. And that's kind of achieved by us upgrading tokens and making smarter ones, basically. And fundamentally, what we've been building over the past few years is this protocol whereby you can build pretty much anything you can imagine, spend a lot of our time on salary and grants and other fun things, and tried to let other people build out the rest. But I think all infrastructure teams have discovered over the past couple of years the best route to actually figuring out whether you built something great and also improving that cycle between the protocol and sort of development, app development, you kind of have to get your hands dirty. So we've had loads of ideas, I guess, around defi and social fi and subscriptions over the years, but ultimately we wanted to get something on people's home screen. So we knew we had to build something with some pretty DJ mechanics tied to the Super Fluid streaming stuff. So, yeah, we came up with this concept, I think, about nine months ago. Been building it in tandem with some other things, which I'm excited to kind of start talking about soon. But yeah, it's a social fi app connected to podcaster and kind of embed superflow within it.

I dropped some invite codes in our private chat here piece if you want to use it. If you're trying to sign up, we get in there in the streamyard chat here. Oh, nice. Yeah. So I remember Superfluid being like, I mean, you guys have been at it for a couple years now, right?

Yeah.

Founded 2020 First Main 2021.

And so it's just like, you know, I think leaning into one of the most. It's like a compelling thing that can be unlocked because of blockchains and crypto. Right. And it's just like this idea of streaming money I think is really fascinating.

I think for the longest time, interesting to me that it wasn't as widely adopted or like it didn't maybe, maybe it was just almost too far out. It seemed like a simple idea, but it also feels like it's a meaningful shift in how people are thinking about what payments are and earning are, et cetera. And so I, I think when I saw you launch, I would think I was expecting it to be integrated into so. So many more use cases than ultimately happened. And you know, when I saw what you're doing with Alfred's. Oh, great, cool. I think there's, you know, this. You guys are leaning into actually building something that's probably uniquely enabled by this infrastructure that you guys have built for the longest time. But I'm curious, like, is that a fair sense that it just. There was some.

Or maybe why do you think it was quite adopted as widely as I think so many of us thought it probably would be?

Yeah, I think, I think like, you.

Know, streaming money has been a thing in crypto for quite a while. You know, there are like, you know, even as far back As I think 2016, 2015, 2016, like I've seen, I remember seeing concepts around streaming money obviously implemented in maybe a more naive way, not as composable that stuff. But I think, you know, fundamentally, like crypto payments also sort of haven't been a thing like at a large scale over those few years as well. You know, there are a lot of real world implications for getting paid in crypto. I think it's a lot easier in some places than it is others, you know, a lot more easy for contractors than it is for employees and all that stuff. And obviously, like, there are now a bunch of great solutions like, you know, opelis wrapping your crypto salary in W2 in the US and you know, like, I think the direction of being able to pay people legitimately in crypto is, has been really positive over the past couple of years in particular. But I think you know, for us like the original goal was to know, try and find that one domain where we could generate a lot of usage of, of streaming money. And, and the thing that made the most sense to us was, was kind of crypto salaries for people who are getting paid in crypto. But that's a small market so you know, we got decent penetration like a bunch of top teams like maker and 1 inch and like Delphi and the like getting paid in, in streams. And from there we kind of progressed onto, you know, token vesting and grants. And so all of optimism is our PGF3 and hopefully future grants are being paid out with Superfluid. But the dimensional change from that kind of B2B use case to retail something very tangible in people's hands was something that we felt like we had to kind of get over to really make this thing more mainstream.

Yeah, very cool. Why don't we get into Alpha French? Because I think there's some really interesting, I think at the service level it's pretty similar to you know, friend tech or some of these kind of token gated key gated chat rooms. But I think you, I think there's some, some you know, UX improvements. But also I think the way you've integrated streaming into kind of like the speculative games you can play are pretty novel and interesting. So maybe, yeah, introduce those. Would love you to describe what those kind of speculative games are and, and how you kind of thought about their design.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, all of us familiar with rentec, definitely the kind of OG category leader.

But for us basically this kind of idea of bonding curves was, you know, like, is a bit of a limited game. Like it's a bit of a shell game where someone is left with a bag and if you kind of like sell all your keys, you find out your portfolio isn't really as worth as much as it was on the front page.

And you know, with Superfluid, obviously what we're able to do is actually pay people by the second. So instead of, you know, paying like locking up a huge amount upfront or trading for a key, you're actually literally paying.

A few DJ per day over the course of a month, equaling a pretty regular Patreon subscription amount. And essentially the flow of Superfluid of Alpha friends is that you go and subscribe to people's channels to get access to these chats. And people are doing all kinds of things from, you know, gated, like NFT mints their subscribers through to, you know, giving them actual like alpha updates on new tokens are launching and stuff.

And then like for every dgen you're spending, you're basically earning some alpha tokens, which is our kind of platform token. And it's not a tradable token or anything, it's, it's a, it's a kind of utility token that exists within the app. But basically the, the metagame of this app is that you can stake those alpha on channels and doing so basically earns you a slice of that channel's revenue. So it's like basically you're paying your subscriptions, you're earning alpha, you're staking that alpha to earn more degen and basically if you play the game really well, you can earn a lot more degen than you're paying in subscriptions. And if you're a channel owner and you're earning sort of income in streams, you can actually immediately stream out that income to as many channels as you want to kind of truly be optimizing the game. But yeah, we've seen some very interesting kind of meta games emerge out of that over the past few days.

Yeah, it's really interesting. So you're streaming degen, getting streamed alpha and then claiming alpha and staking that on channels that you think will return a high percentage of revenue or something. And does the staking, is there like a curation mechanism there or some product value in staking?

Exactly, yeah. So simultaneously with this kind of degenu earn back, it's a curation mechanism to basically decide which channels emit the most alpha as well. So you're kind of creating an extra incentive, but you're also sort of placing people on this leaderboard. So like the top kind of stake channels are ones where people stake the most and they're kind of emitting the most like alpha in sum total, but then that's divided between all the subscribers.

So it's like.

Yeah, there are some interesting longer term mechanics around that as well.

Yeah, let's go and then go ahead Jesse.

Just sort of curious of like the, the, the scale that we're at here, like what, how many sort of users are using this? And.

I guess that's my question.

Yeah, so we kind of, we got up to 10,000 users pretty quickly. It was kind of nuts actually. We think we hit 500. We hit 50 users in like a couple of days. Like, you know, Reaching out to friends and getting the sign up. We got up to 250 users on the first Friday. Like immediately all of our access codes used up. And then the following week 1,000. And then, yeah, now about 10,000. We have dropped a little bit. We had a bit of a like descaling, I guess, because basically people realized that you can kind of start streaming like to 10,000 different channels at the same time to farm Alpha. And that kind of brought us all the way up and then those people decided to stop doing that and this came back down again. But I think we're in pretty good position. Like we're, we're only four weeks in, so about 10,000 users. I think peak volume was like 10,000, sorry, 10 million djn volume a day into total subscriptions, which is pretty cool.

And is there like a revenue model you're pushing towards here? Is there a token in the future, like how are you sort of thinking about the business here?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think lots of things are on the table. The sort of intrinsic revenue model is that 5% basically of all streams go directly to the treasury. But I think Alpha obviously is a kind of interesting primitive for us, has these existing uses. We'd like to add more uses for it tradability one day maybe, but yeah.

That'S cool.

Do you feel like, I guess the way you've integrated streaming into this is a pretty good example of a killer use case for it, or do you feel like there's still more to do here to really show off the power?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's like, you know, it's one of many use cases that we came up with as a kind of idea for like, you know, how to make superfluid most tangible to people and also to kind of how to use DGEN incentives to kind of bootstrap us to a lot of engagement very quickly. And I think that's, it's done really, really well at that. I mean this is kind of like a peak account abstraction experience, like farcasta sign in, like got a wallet in the background and then all transactions are paid for in dj. So it's like kind of single token experience. And already seeing as you click around, like everything's just one click away, which is kind of nice. And I think that makes sense for a certain category of consumer apps. I think we have a lot of other ideas that are a bit more crypto native. And then obviously in the long run, like there are all kinds of bridge over to Fintech and bridge over to kind of just sort of general non crypto retail like concepts. But ultimately, you know, to get with stepping stones, I think this is the very first one. We have one which is a streaming exchange, which is our kind of next big thing. And that's like, you know, fundamentally a little bit more complicated, but maybe a bit broader reaching in crypto in theory. So see how that goes.

Awesome. So if there's people who want to go try this out today, they still need an invite code and if so, how and where do they go? Get that?

Yeah, I mean, so you found our Friends Korean channel, but on the main Alpha Friends channel on, on Farcast, there's actually like a lot of people still putting out invite codes.

We were pretty.

We, we, we. I think we put a quite a few out the last round, so there's still a lot floating around. Obviously we're, we're still in the early days, so I'm assuming that will get used up at some point. But if you sort of keep scrolling the channel on recents, you'll be able to find something of it.

Amazing. Yeah, I love it. So, I mean, I had numerous people ping me saying you should go check out Alpha Friends. So should go check out Alpha Friends. So glad we were able to get you on here. And I think there's like a much bigger wave here I think that just sort of alluded to, which is this idea of I think teams realizing that we need to kind of push this experience a lot further forward to really unlock the vision, the potential, the understanding of what some of this slightly more abstract infrastructure can actually do. And.

I think we're now at the stage where you could literally just send a link to somebody who really doesn't even know much about crypto and can start to go play these games and participate. And I don't think we've fully internalized that, both from a broader crypto curious sort of perspective and also from a builder perspective. It's like the opportunity there is to really go build these really compelling experiences and I guess the, that also comes with the responsibility to go do it. So, so to see you guys running those experiments and I can imagine, you know, three, five, seven more of those and, and a couple of them hitting and, and all of a sudden the world of streaming, you know, finance looks very different than it does today.

Is happy.

Right on, man. Well, appreciate you hanging out with us today. If you're listening to this, go check out Alpha Friends. I don't know. Peace. Did you set up a channel or are you just subscribing to stuff I did.

I set up a channel.

Well, there you go. So you can go join piece's channel and start streaming today. There's some taglines in there. I love it.

Follow me and earn.

Abj.

Appreciate you, man. Best of luck with everything. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

Cheers, guys.

See you, dude. Yeah, I feel like seeing the like just the number tick up like that, dude, it just seems obvious, right? It's like, yeah, of course that's how Internet money should be flowing around.

Supporting. I mean supporting my channel.

It's pumping your own bags. Every time you like my cast, your bags are going through the roof.

Any bag energy. I love it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not running for office or anything.

I don't know what I'm doing.

No, you could. Why not? I mean, I think you're president of one of our friend tech channels. Oh, I am.

True.

So congratulations for that. Yeah, I do think this is like the new reality. You've been on this for the longest time, Josh. Right. Like the infrastructure without the tangible experience that comes along with it that really defines like the best use case for it. I think this is very difficult to actually really stand out. And yeah, I think the path you get to that is actually just running a bunch of experiments. I think if this first one didn't work, then running at two or three more, you know, I think to ultimately get to it makes sense. My guess is they'll have. Yeah. A few others.

I think you kind of need. You need. You need teams that are just like overly incentivized to do something. Right. Like I remember when we. Whenever we're setting up like seed club payroll, it's like, sure, you could stream it, but it feels like a kind of minor improvement off of just like getting paid monthly. But then you have a team that's like, okay, we're just going to force streaming into existence and show why it's cool. And you know, even if like, if you're just building this from scratch, it's probably not like a part of your like streaming probably isn't a part of your like MVP or something you would even think about early. Right. So I think that just highlights the.

Yeah. The need for these protocol teams to get in there. Love it. All right, let's rock on.

Let's get Joey up here, shall we?

Hey guys, what's up? How's it going?

What's up, man? Do well, Joey.

You're one of my reply guys. You've replied once. You're a reply guy. I love it. Love. Actually reply guys. Were like, hey, here's this whole new thing. I was like, what the.

Yeah, the.

That's cool.

The reply Reply Guy to guest pipeline.

Real.

Yeah, I. I think about it become. In my, in my Reply Guy era.

You have to be. Once you're building something, you gotta be. You gotta get into your Reply Guy.

Eh.

I mean, yeah, let's just, let's just jump into it. We love, love you to start off with who, who you are. Joey. Who is Joey? Joy Ayni.

Joy Ini.

Yeah. Joy Ayni.

Joy Ayni. Yeah. So what'd you do before? Create place and then yeah, I would love to just jump into what crates is.

In a previous life, I was a beat maker producer. I used to make beats.

Actually.

I made some Jake Paul songs. I used to live over there. I used to be like the producer engineer at that house. It was kind of like a label. Not really. Like there's some artists living there who didn't really have association with like Jake publicly. But yeah, it was fun. Like worked with a bunch of rappers obviously, just. Just a good time as you'd imagine. But yeah, after, after like a year or two over there and Jake moved to Puerto Rico and stopped and like really slocked in on boxing and stopped doing music stuff. Yeah, I kind of like looked at my music royalties and realized something was off and like I just wasn't. It wasn't. It was like on all my songs, on everything. And I just realized like something was wonky and when I dug into it I ended up being more confused than before. Like I just discovered like a broken mess of the music industry. Just nothing makes sense and it just set up in a way to fail. It's in a way to be misunderstood. And yeah, from there jumped into crypto and realized like the future of music in some way, shape or form is with a blockchain. Whether. Whether we're routing royalties through it or whether we're building like new types of assets like Music NFTs or now user coins. I knew it's something like somehow or some way blockchain is going to be.

It's going to be the basis of a new music economy.

Very sick. So that kind of led to the insight for Crate Place, which I guess the smooth brain kind of description of it is it's basically pump fun, right? To launch tokens on a bonding curve. Graduates to a liquidity pool. But the big difference is that the starting point is a song or like an mp3 or wav file instead of just a jpeg. So I'd love to.

Why start with that instead of a jpeg, I guess is my question.

Yeah. So taking a look at.

So taking a look at music NFTs from the last cycle.

I missed.

That.

I wasn't a huge Music nft person, even though I was in crypto at the time. I've been in crypto since 2020 and something about collecting is, for me personally, it just didn't hit as well. It just didn't hit for me. So looking at kind of like what Music NFT is, where I think some of the issues were, it's number one, it's like low liquidity. You buy Music NFT originally, they were really expensive, like 1,000, $2,000 and they're going to sit in your wallet and you know you're never going to sell one. They're never going to sell them. So actually I did buy music NFTs early on and I just never. There's a market for them. The second problem is.

There'S a unit bias with it. So it doesn't like you have a thousand of this one Music nft. Like now it's like with free mints, you have a large number of these music NFTs. But it's hard to wrap your head around what is one unit of a Music nft. So looking at that and kind of thinking like, okay, what if we just take Music NFT and make it hyper fractional, hyper liquid and infinitely fractional. What if we just do music coins? Like just song coins. So yeah, that was kind of like the inspiration. The pump fun model. It might not be like the final model. It's just kind of like our starting point to kind of test it out. But yeah, we're already thinking of like tweaks of how to make it more, more, More music friendly, more artist friendly.

Yeah, that was. So you're very. Okay, so you're very much coming, coming at it from the like the music perspective. Right? Like how do we.

You know, or I don't know, capture the like. So the true, like social or cultural value of a song, Clearly.

Exactly.

Music NFTs were cool as collectibles, I think, but clearly, clearly, you know, weren't great at like forming community, truly being these like networked assets and really capturing the cultural and social value around that. So you're interested that you're kind of, you're coming at it from that perspective. I think like another interesting framing of this is actually just as a new, like, starting point for meme coins because, like, I think it's an interesting question of like, if you, if you launch a Meme Coin, you know, you get the jpeg, you get the description, you have the meme, but then you're also launching it with a song or sound or something. Like, is that. Does that give it more like mimetic superpower to kind of break through and take off? So I'm curious, are you thinking about it? Yeah. Are you thinking about just kind of the broader, like, meme coin launching use case as well? Or is it very much like, how do we solve music?

It's very much. It's very much. How do we. How do we. How can artists crowdfund their music? Like, the starting point is. Is that side of things. Like how, like, yeah, how. How can. How can, like, artists just basically just like, make more money like that? That's the starting point. Spotify and like this, the modern streaming model is capped, like, you know, a million streams. You've heard this before. A million streams is five grand. And it, it doesn't make sense. Like, if, if I'm listening, okay, if I, if I'm a. If I'm a Spotify subscriber and I'm paying 15 bucks a month, right? First of all, that is the most I can pay. I can only pay 15 bucks a month. The second thing is, if I listen to one artist only, if I just listen to my one favorite artist over and over, that's the only question I listen to. I don't have 15 bucks. It's not going all to him. It's still getting split with Rihanna and Drake and Taylor Swift and whatever. Because Spotify pays out in their pie chart model, so.

It'S not capturing the value.

So.

Yeah, I just feel like there's so much untapped, like, people are throwing money at, like, Pepe and like Shark Chat and things like that, which are funny and cool and stuff. But how can we get that speculation, excitement, attention into other cultural sectors? Like, and, you know, so that, that's gonna. That's gonna. Where it's coming from.

Okay, well, I, I've got a really exciting news here. You may have seen me distracted through that conversation, but I, I just launched my first AI single on Trade Place. It's called Open Chains. I'm going to drop it here in.

In our live chat.

If you're hanging out on Twitter, you should come over to Live C Cloud xyz. You can see it there. I hope it worked. I think it worked. Open Chain is. It's like a emo pop record or song really talking about the dreams of L2 creators in 2024. Really hoping and praying and yet ultimately being real quick.

You should buy some tokens. Like I always suggest. Like, the artist, the creator buys tokens first.

Did I just fumble a bag already?

Like, I don't want to buy it before you.

You know, I actually.

Got my own liquidity.

Yes.

Peace got in first.

Okay. I can't even. Oh, yeah, Peace is in now.

You bought it. Okay, so now that you bought. I got it. I didn't want to front run you.

Hold on. I'm trying to buy here. Hold on. Just give me one second.

Oh, this is courteous.

All right. I'm in, baby.

So courteous.

I'm in.

I think this is not how the trench. This is not how the trenches are supposed to work.

I'm never.

I have, like, no more eth left. Like, I just spent a bunch great songs, but I'm going to throw up, like, my last little eth at this.

That's awesome. I thought he's my random wallet. But I mean, I think this is interesting, right? Because you're pulling on like two. So there's this new sort of financial medium or economic medium. Like, it's a promise of crypto, and there's this new creative medium, which is the promise of AI. And both those are kind of like open questions around how and what the world looks like if those things sort of take over. And you kind of framed it up in a pretty easy and simple model here. So.

It'S kind of fun.

Yeah, I'm curious. I'm curious to see what's going to happen. We only launched uploads yesterday, so I'm really curious. We. We had once, like. So the very, very first song already made it to Uniswap. Like, I. I made a. Like a welcome to Crate. That was the first song. And yeah, it made it all the way. And yeah, just. I'm curious to see, like, people always, always bought that one because it was the first song on the platform, but I'm curious to see what the second song to do. It will be like. Will it be like a crypto native? Like, can you. I'm just curious. I don't know.

It's gonna be my bet. My bad Austin chains, my LTU graveyard. Come on.

Maybe it's that dude. My bet is it's not gonna be. It's gonna be some meme. It's not gonna be. It's not gonna be an artist. It's not gonna be a song. I think it's gonna be some weird memetic thing. That can be captured. Captured through sound and gets launched. It breaks around here.

What would be the mimetic thing that you could do with. With music that's not as. Not an artist or a band, but it's just what comes to your mind?

I mean the thing that, the thing that comes to my. It's actually, it's interesting. Nicholas and I were kind of talking about memetic sounds the other day and the thing that comes to mind was that huge fight in Congress when there was like the whatever the, the bad butch bleach blonde D. And the first, the first thing the dude leading the meeting said was a what now? And like that leveled me anyway.

If I could, if I could buy.

That, I would have because it's a great. It's a great audio meme. But it's so funny. It is. In that conversation we were just kind of talking about how interesting the surface area of the Internet. The Internet is the surface area that is created by these apps and how TikTok created this new feature that people did where it just started as upload audio and do a dance to it and. But that created this format where then people could like remix any audio and create videos on top of it and create viral audio in this new way. And it was just a whole new style of storytelling. And so I don't know. I. I think this is really interesting because it's just new surface area for creators being like, well, yeah, this thing makes it out to the wild, then that pool. It doesn't disappear.

Yeah. I think like the bird, whatever bird token you were obsessed by at dinner, like if it, if it got launched with. With like its anthem bird song or whatever, like, I feel like you would have loved it even more.

I probably would have. That's true. I don't even know what sound that bird makes. That's pathetic on my end.

I mean, it's interesting is these types of things have like, you know.

A crazy power to start to drive transaction volume through it. Obviously we talked a lot about that with regards to Pump Fun regularly In the top 10 most highest volume transacting contracts. And it looks like you guys have done around 300,000 in volume already since this past week. Is that right or is that.

Yeah, since launch. Most of it was thanks to the welcome to Create song. Like just like the first song People Speak and that I think, I think, I think we still need to. Like, I think a meta needs to form. Not a meta, but like a. A certain vibe needs to form. People are just trying stuff. Like people Did AI songs. People did like, just like a. Someone did like a vine.

Boom.

Someone did like a ducks. Like, you know, I don't know. I think there's going to be a lot of experimentation early, but I. Yeah. So I think once people figure out what the right type of. What the right model is, I think.

We'Ll see some more interesting activity from there.

Yeah, you just kind of need to get to some critical mass of liquidity where you can actually come here and play games, and it's going to be fine. I was playing pumpk fun pre it having that, and it's way more fun when there's just this exact same game but just way more people there. So, yeah, figuring out how to make that happen is.

Yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna add a lot more, like, social features. Like maybe, for example, like the song with the most volume per day. Like, it gets shown, you know, on top. Like it's tweeted or something. Or gets tweet casted. Sorry. Like a Farcaster bottle or just different fun things. We're going to try to make it more engaging and yeah, I definitely want to go that route.

Amazing, man. Well, we're running out of time here today, so we're going to have to let you go. But I'm going to go shill hope and chains because I think it just accurately captures the meta that I see out there in my little weird niche of the world today.

All these things stoke for you to be experimenting here. A lot of green on that screen, which I love to see. So much green.

You can make a song with like a single prompt on the platform.

So, yeah, that's the. I mean, literally, I. I literally wrote that. Like, that's. I wrote that song with one prompt and it took like 10 minutes to do that. Dall E ChatGPT yeah. Upload liquidity. I've got three fans shout out to Eddie for my. My ride or die out here. Thank you, Eddie. As man. Cool.

We.

We'll be. We'll be watching and clicking buttons and wishing the best. Thanks for.

Appreciate it, guys. A lot of fun. See you soon.

See you, dude.

Thank you, Jeff.

You know, it's easy to see these sorts of things at a bit of a higher level of attention, like the market, I think still tens of thousands of people who are probably really eager and willing to go click these buttons early. That's. I think growing people start to love tokens more. The games that emerge from this. You know, I think the thing that you and I have been talking a lot About Josh is just like this path to being able to go launch something and generate meaningful revenue. To bootstrap these type of businesses is just like really compelling. I think it's been a promise of crypto for the longest time and it's sort of taking this detour down venture capital land. And you know, if you look at the pumped up fund guys, you're like, well why the hell are they even raising money? Like why would you. You're doing a million dollars a day, $20 million in the last month. Why do you like.

Why? I mean you do it for either scale or there's maybe reasons, but you're in a very different position when you're racing at that point and maybe you don't even have to. And I think that's very, very cool. Anyways. All right, we got, we got a lot more to get into today, so let's get this train rolling.

Mint that song until we're back.

Yeah, I would feel fine about minting that one.

That's great.

There's really. There's actually, it's. It's worth just shouting this out on the thing because there's interesting like call to seeing if there's a musician in the chat who's basically just like this feels like way too much like I. I couldn't put my art on here. And I do think it is. It is such an interesting space of like. Yeah, do you put your. Your die hard life's work on the shitcoin platform? Maybe not.

But it is.

It's a new third type of thing.

Yeah, totally. So it is interest. It's. It's interesting. Anyway, what was I doing on chain? Apparently not the enough spread across too many wallets.

I hold my.

My lady and my. My peace note account and My score is 700.

Pathetic.

2 of 128 achievements earned. Insane. And so this is Beetle game.

It's kind of broken. I keep trying to generate my card and it's not working. But the cool thing is basically like long story short. Well, Remilia has launched this platform that kind of like brings their insane world into a single place. So it's just like it has all these different traits that you could own. All these different places you could have gone like my lady village and Minecraft or wherever that is. Minted a Remilio.

Yeah. I love this having these trading goals. Whether or not you've used the nlp. I'm assuming they're talking about NFTX or something. And there was scattered art missions.

Anyway, really fun. And then there's just the Beetle game. They just took over Twitter by a storm. Or they took over my Twitter by a storm. All I saw was Beetle Game and they were saying, I never a one man. You didn't see anything. Oh my God. It was like it was a war zone.

I'm like really beating my computer up right now or we'll see if we make it. I might get so Beetle Game, let's just see. Yeah, basically everyone's saying like, you know, it's not an airdrop, it's not a game. This is like, this is a fight. This is a fight to the death.

And there's all these.

I don't know, all these people posting about Beetle Game and they're saying it's you. It's where you, you post fast, you post hard and you win and that's the only way you win. And I think it really is. I have no idea what they're planning, but I think that you get a score and I'm hoping that they continue to update these Snapchats and by being active you can continue to get a better score and be more involved in the thing.

I feel like this is just perpetual. I have no idea what they're doing, but I think they're going to do something cool again. And I hope they keep doing something cool and they keep doing something.

I mean, I think that that's the theme of the P segment.

It's like a never ending same thread being pulled.

You create the most ambiguous, confusing project that just never ends because that will captivate.

And I just, I loved this because it was like literally just yesterday I found this image that was like an image enthusiast. B. Congratulations. You've spent time viewing an image share or see all badges. I'm like, yeah, fucking. Why do product managers want to humiliate anyone who uses their platform? And then Remilia does it and they're like, own a face tattooed, my lady. I'm like, woo.

So yeah, I have, yeah, there's something wrong with me. And the other thing is this cool project, this is. This is worth shouting out different rooms, which is from Baggy Industries who just do cool art projects. Mainnet super hard. I think all their tokens are on Mainnet and they do like, yeah, they just. They have a couple of really cool weirdo collections and this one is like a bunch of pop culture. Well, I mean, I guess maybe there's cultural references, I don't know how popular, but Edgar Degas and Giorgio Morandi and Andy Warhol or some of the references mentioned and Then they took. In order to. Then those were the references for all their base layers of the assets. And then they took the I Ching to create the algorithm for which they're all put together.

Which maybe I need to like, read more about. Which is cool because they're basically saying, like, you know, lines are determined using a method of controlled randomness, such as tossing a coin to produce yin or yang, which is a 0 or a 1 value, thus producing 64 possible hexagram combinations.

Piece. If you've never opened up that book.

I have, but I've never thought of it in the terms of like, binary or of a computer.

What's the whole thing? You gotta. You flip the coin. You know, flip the coins and then go to wherever the randomness tells you. And then there's some deep insight that is really relevant for where you are specifically in your life right now. And then you're like, what the fuck?

I just have never in my life have considered the fact that that is a literal computer. Yeah. But it's really interesting.

All right, well, that's. I mean, we go from Ramilias to. To Mainnet. That's a quite the range today piece.

Totally. Well, I think Vermilion might mostly be Mainnet. I don't think they. I don't think they have anything.

You're probably right. Yeah. Mainnet is actually, like, affordable again with everything going on to LT. So just kind of been fun. We've.

We skyrocketed the 34 Gwe today. It's like a miracle that that's our, like, bad gas.

Yeah. Incredible. All right, well, welcome back, Pete. I'm glad you had time to go click around on the Internet and find some new fun things and. But it is interesting to see with the. The Beetle game just how.

How frustrating it is if you don't have the ability to bring in all your, like your. Your full identity, AKA like different addresses you have in different places.

You know, this promise of composability. And yet at certain layers, that continues to fail us 100%.

Yeah, it'll be. It'll be nice.

Crystal.

I don't know. We're a couple EIPs away. I guess we'll see.

Always a few EIPs.

You're always a BE away.

All right.

15 minutes for some how. Some heat. You're just gonna have to all read my newsletter because we'll get through it.

No, we'll get through it. This is. This is a real quick one.

This is a quick one. Go for it.

Demo day. Demo day. Demo day. June 20th we got a link here. Make sure you RSVP so you ensure that you get your space there. I'm sure many of you have already been to one of our demo days in the past. They're not your traditional demo day. It's not only an opportunity to, you know, traditional demo days are like, for investors, a lot of vests, a lot of all birds. This is for the people. Right. This is an opportunity for these builders that we've been working with over the last three months. They're all incredible human beings. They're all building amazing things to sort of to share what they've been working on to give you the earliest possible look. Not only at some of them have live products, most of them don't yet. But you get to hear the vision and the progress and where they're going with things. And so it's like an opportunity to kind of truly look into the future with teams that are building really exciting, novel things in the consumer crypto space.

We have fun things planned. We always have fun things planned. So you want to show up, keep an eye on our timeline for the next two weeks. We have a bunch of fun drops that are coming out that'll be exciting and you'll want to click buttons on and then, yeah, when you show up with some fun interactive stuff that you can do, that's going to be worth your while. So come hang out. June 20th, demo day.

Yeah, I think this is also just such an important time in the arc of consumer crypto. Like the things that we can suddenly now build that we couldn't even like three to six months ago is very stark. And I recommend reading this post because when I was writing it and I was kind of highlighting all the big questions that teams are running at, I was like kind of just smacked in the face with the things that we can now directly run at solving and building for. Whereas like a year ago is like you get a lot of token or.

Whatever and scroll down to the questions piece here. If you go down a bit further.

Piece, try and I could I really beat my computer up.

Here we go.

Mark. Keep going.

Way down. Yeah, these ones here, up here a little bit, so. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah. What if we built crypto powered social hardware for the girls? How do fashion focused AI models enable new forms of self discovery and expression? How does crypto enable us to bring sports ownership experiences to everybody? What if we allowed category experts or communities to seamlessly own and manage their own marketplaces, you know, the headless marketplaces, unofficials out there in the World of data creating generative social experiences from this open data layer that's coming out of lens and forecaster etc. Like these are all really cool things and I think what's interesting is there's sort of this mix of like, you know, pretty clear paths to the more, you know, speculative, fun, token based stuff. And also teams that are really taking, you know, I think a longer view through that, how they're building, you know, these products that are really crypto native. They're really, they're on chain. They're on chain business models are mimetic in some way and will likely be sort of not only new experiences people can do, but like parts of new experiences that other people can, can remix. So we're, yeah, we're, we're ecstatic about the progress these teams have been making and very, very excited for you all to get a like truly the first look at, at this on June 20th.

Come hang up.

It's gonna be great.

Let's do a hard pivot into celebrity coins.

All right.

Yeah.

So now on to the, the biggest topic of the week. I think we can, we can pretty quickly just zoom past the headlines. I don't know. I'm sick of hearing about Jenner, sick of hearing about Iggy, but I think, you know, I think it really forced us to have some conversations and you know, me to just think more about, you know, this like inevitable kind of influencer, mainstream celebrity involvement in crypto and you know, just like what, what the right way for them to actually get involved and participate is. And I think like, very obviously them launching their own tokens is completely the wrong thing.

So fucking bad, dude.

Just so bad, right? Like there's no opportunity for any real community to form. It's going to pump and dump. People are going to be mad. Like it's just a guaranteed like trust burned and credibility burn for the damn.

I so disagree. That's.

That's.

Yeah.

I can't believe you think that. Like, I actually thought the way that Iggy launched was so sick. Where it was like from, from what I gathered, paying attention to the thing, it was like Iggy. Iggy was contacted by Saheel Sahil was going to launch it. He had a ticker Iggy. She said, no, the way is ticker Iggy ever gonna happen? So she had to slap ticker mother up and launch the token herself. And I just think that was so the move. And like there was not to me there was like, because the token never even got to an insane valuation. The dump to me feels so Marginal or not abnormal from any it's up.

Or the Iggy's doing okay. But I think that's actually more the point Josh is trying to get at here.

Yeah, I think, I think a. This, that was, I agree, like, that was this kind of unique, kind of fun story moment in time. But I think the next. Anyone looking at doing this now, like, there are people tweeting, being like, oh, how do I go? How do I launch, like my own meme coin on. On Solana? And I think, like, those are just inevitably going to fail. I think, I agree with. I think it was smart that she didn't launch Iggy. She launched Mother. I think her just launching a, like, properly memetic meme coin, I think makes a lot more sense. But I think, you know, if I think about, you know, some big celebrity kind of seeing, you know, the value of having, you know, fans create memes around them, promoting their work, coordinating and socializing around, like, their brand, and like, ultimately getting economic exposure to their, like, cultural relevance. I think maybe there are like, two paths to it, right? Like, one, one is you actually just let. Maybe you suggest that you, like, you're interested in this or want this or like, just start getting interested in crypto and just let hundreds of people launch them, see which one kind of either you resonate with more or like, starts forming social consensus and kind of just like, participate in a fun way but not have any. Any kind of like, responsibility to it. I think that that's kind of one fun path. And then I think, you know, another one is it's kind of more the like, scene coin path, right? Where, you know, a celebrity could launch a ticker that's not, you know, not their name. I think that's very important, but, like, relevant to the identity of their fan base. You know, airdrop into past supporters, kind of create novel distribution mechanisms over time that people contributing and participating in their scene can earn. You know, probably at some point, like, launch a product with like, reputation and social games and kind of go the more like serious project path or the pure kind of bottoms up meme path. But I think being. And I think launching one in their likeness with the intention to pump it.

Is just doomed to not. Not go well.

Yeah, I mean, I think, like, there's also going to be this broader sort of like the celebrities who are launching these tokens are going to create a sort of dynamic where it's not going to look super compelling for other celebs, like, for. For more serious celebrities to launch their own tokens. Like it'll be, I think that the joke on the Internet is, you know, D list celebrities launching D list meme coins. And you know that I think with anything that's purely attention based, there is like, there will be winners, right? There will be a category leader of celebrity token, right? Something will jump the shark and it'll be super valuable. I think the challenge is like, you probably don't have a lot of control over making that happen, right? And so it's kind of rolling the dice and pure luck. And when you have your, your, your brand like yourself, the person which I think is actually very different than a brand actually tied to it, you sort of at the, the whims of, of like the, the cycle there in a way that I think it can be pretty awkward. So you don't have control over necessarily making it work or not work in the way that these things are being launched. Purely attention based. Some might win, some might lose, most are going to lose. Do you want to be, you know, associated with that? And I think, I mean if you zoom out, obviously there was obviously some sort of brand reputation damage to people who did really shitty NFT projects back in the day. But you know, if you zoom out, like these people are still popular and things working, so maybe it's a pretty, pretty low risk from that perspective. So I think it's actually more interesting to think, well, like, how would you go do this? Well, and I think Ansem came up with a tweet the other day or earlier today that was trying to suggest something around.

Taylor Swift launching a meme coin. I'm like, that's very much not the way to go do it. This idea of sort of baking in.

The social token kind of tactics, trying to find it. Here you got tweets so bloody much I don't even know.

I think it was something around like launch an NFT collection that gets you.

Like perks or access to things and fractionalize it and it's like, oh come on, let's Boomer thing I've heard from him ever. So I think it is still leaning into this sort of memetic and attention piece. And so.

Yeah, I know the way I sort of think about meme coins and scene coins and I think scene coins is like a subset of meme coins. Like one is purely attention based, the other is trying to sort of distribute and represent the value of a group of people's belief in an idea or thing, a scene, etc. And I just think one is got a lot more luck baked into it. Like there's, how do you go get the cabal on board? How do you get. It's the chart that's driving it. It's a liquidity game, it's an attention game. And the other is really something that you have a lot more levers to pull in thinking about how you distribute tokens. And I think when you layer on some of the new tech that's emerging like zktls, that kind of allows you to. You could literally go in and say, okay, well I want to go distribute a token to everybody who's listened to more than 10 hours of my, my, my songs or my music on, on Spotify. That window exists now and for a little while, I don't know if it exists forever. So there's some pretty cool ways to remix this and to do this in a way that is actually you have a little bit more agency around. I also love the idea of, I think this community launching token and it being ordained by the creator is also a really smart way to go. So you could launch a token probably coming out of a fan club that's related to crypto in some way, allocate a portion of the tokens to the creator that they can come claim. Yeah. Through a tweet or something saying, I'm claiming this sort of stuff. And then just imagine what kind of happens from that. There. Mother's trading at just under a $20 million market cap right now. I don't know if that's a success or not yet, but it hasn't dumped in the way that I think many would have expected. And I think a big part of that is the story that it emerged from.

Yeah, I think mother's great.

Like, there's, there's a.

There's a lot of lore. It kind of kicked off this celebrity, you know, meme coin conversation. Like, there's, there's some, there's some heat there. But I think, yeah, to your, to your last point, like, there's, you know, there's like a Kanye meme coin, for example, that like, these people have just been grinding for years to just create Kanye content and meme and like do all this shit around. Around Kanye and him coming in and just supporting that seems like such a better path to.

To fun and happiness than, you know, try that. He owns a ton of.

All right, well, I feel like we're probably going to be talking about this quite often as I'm sure this is just the beginning of the celebrity cycle here. Interesting to see how much earlier in the cycle celebrities are coming on board, I think that's actually.

Probably pretty meaningful. I think it sort of leads me to think that people are more primed and, and interested in crypto today than they were last cycle. And that probably means that we bring a lot of that attention forward as soon as we start to see more consistent all time highs at some point in the crypto markets more generally.

So interesting times ahead, I'm sure. Yeah, we got three minutes left. This is. We.

Yeah, I can kind of combine these two into, into one topic. So I guess Part A. Pump Fun continues to crush. I think over 750,000 meme coins have been launched on the platform so far, which is super interesting. Just insane number. I think they had their biggest day ever this week at $1.5 million in fees. They just stumbled onto this like insane.

Business. So this week they announced live streaming, integrating live streaming native into the platform. So anyone that creates a token can now go live immediately. In context of the chart and all the social shift they're building, I think they saw this emerging Twitch streamers were using Pump Fun to launch tokens and stream. So it makes a ton of sense to bring that in. But I think really interesting to just see them continue building out the social features or build this social entertainment platform on the foundation of Meme Coins and launching tokens. I, I think, you know, earlier this year I talked to them before any of this had happened and, and that was kind of the insight they were on. So kind of cool to see them continue running at that. But I think really interesting to compare kind of this continued success. I think, you know, interesting note with Punk Dot Fun is there. It's like each Meme Coin has its own storyline, right? Like Pump Fun is like the Netflix of Meme Coins. Each of these Meme Coins have this very like episodic nature. Kind of short shelf life often. But pump.com being the place that just contains kind of all of this, this like ephemeral content, you know, has proven to be very effective. And then you compare that to the fantasy talk, which I think we've a bunch of people were talking this week about just how dramatically their revenues have dropped off recently. I think down like 99% from their high. And I think just looking at them, it's like way more of a kind of like single storyline game. Obviously a lot of people were there because it was kind of this new shiny casino and less there because like it was. They actually loved, they loved Crypto Twitter influencers and wanted to like extend the, you know, the surface area that they could kind of express that. So maybe not there for reasons, but I think just a really interesting comparison of like being the platform versus being.

The, like the game. I mean, my sense with Fantasy is that they're probably trying to make that transition to a degree. I think, like the biggest challenge I saw with Fantasy Top was like, you know, Ben was an early hero there and was using it in his trading and all that sort of stuff. And I'm like, okay, let me go figure this out. And it felt like there was just these, like, that me as a new user was going to be at a huge disadvantage coming in to try to play this game. So kind of created this like sense of a bunch of walls up there. That maybe was fair, maybe it was not, but that definitely was sort of what I felt. And I think, you know, we listened to kind of what the Fantasy Top team is talking about and a couple podcasts recently. We should get them on and just figure out where they're going with this. Because my sense is they've got more interesting things that they're working towards was that there is much more of a platform to emerge here and that this sort of like fantasy game around influence influencers, etc.

But yeah, I think, like, this is the interesting question, right? Is like, are these things, as Chris is saying here, theatrical releases, they're sort of like blockbusters that come out and have a moment and then disappear, or are they platforms or is there a path to go from? And I think there's actually a middle ground here, right? Which is like the. The. Some theatrical releases become sagas, right? They become their entire. They become the Marvels or the Star wars or the Lord of the Rings and kind of have a lot more of an impact than just sort of like maybe a, you know, one hit wonder type of movie. So.

I actually think, like fantasy. Fantasy Influencer makes a ton of sense to me. Like, I think still, you know, I'm not calling them dead in any way. I think that the thing that they obviously need to do now is probably move off of crypto Twitter, probably run at like some other like, interest group. Like go at. Go at like reality stars. Find people at like the intersection of, you know, crypto enthusiasts and reality star enthusiasts and really like build the platform that's like an extension of their. They're like, stand up for that and that extends like the way they can engage with those people because then they're there. You can, you know, you could go find like a couple hundred probably true fans of the experience off that and build from there versus, like, you know, we weren't there because, you know, I cared about playing fantasy with, like, Ben. It was just this new kind of crypto casino to start on. But guess what? They made a ton of revenue, right? Like, it was clearly the right thing to go do. First had a ton of usage, but then now go. Go build a thing that combines like, the social value with like.

Yeah, there's a sense of like, you know, you can run into like, real quick hits that drive a ton of attention and now revenue in these worlds. And I think, like, the, there's. I mean, a lot of the timelines are saying that they've fallen off. And I think your point is, right, like, they've made a ton of money, they've learned a lot, and now the question is, how do they go roll that into the next thing? And so I think, like, the thing to look at is like, is there like a big category here that has a lot of other, like, experiments and compelling opportunities to go play in? And how do those sort of first experiments support and sort of create a new floor for you to sort of leap from, into these, these new opportunities? So it'll be. Be cool to see what that happens. I mean, the crypto's littered with these sort of things that, that hit and then disappear. I think recently we've seen those sort of have Act 2 and Act 3 and maybe Act 4. And so that's kind of what I'm, I'm watching for right now, for sure. Okay, we're over time. Can you just give us to a lightning round here? Give us one lightning round and look the heck out of here.

Pepe is now worth more than every single major NFT project across blockchains combined. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Like the, the NFT narrative. I mean, this reminds me of like, there's. There was a vote that went. So Nouns, I think we talked about before Announce is going to launch, was exploring launching. You know, Nouns Meme Coin or. Or Social Token got voted down by the Nouns governance this week. And it seems like there's just sort of like this.

Almost doubt around. We've gone back and forth on this for the longest time, right? We're like, oh, ERC 20s fungible tokens are the thing. Oh, no, NFTs are actually better for many reasons, especially for early projects that individual components there are going to be better memes, et cetera. Also now we're kind of back in this world where actually liquidity seems to be king. Um, people love tokens generally they love you know, being able to buy, they love to be able to sell tokens.

And I think like you know, at least my current thinking here is like these, these you know, fungible tokens just have far more upside than NFTs though I still hold some of these lovely NFTs that make up that that the left side of the graph here.

So I feel like NFTs existing within like fungible token worlds makes.

I also just think this is noisy data like this all of a sudden change changes very fast with total sales.

I, I think that's the thing too. We're probably very much at at the bottom of the NFT cycle and it's yeah I think very likely some of those come back. But I mean there's actually I think one of the the some guy to venture from for standard crypto I think was put made a bet with with Luca from Pudgy Penguin saying about whether.

NFTs will ever come back or not. I think they Both got like 50k on the line or something like that. So skin in the game. We'll see what's going there. I think. I wouldn't count NFTs down and out yet by any means, but very clearly the meta today is ERC20.

This is a good one. Yuga sucks. What more can be said?

They definitely not doing the best things, that's for sure. All right, we are, we're well over time here today. It's episode 31 of Internet Explorers. Josh. Peace Fridays. Let's go. We're back here every Friday, 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern time with, I don't know, more random stuff I guess that we maybe or maybe don't fully get through. If you're hanging out with us today, RSVP for Demo Day, June 20th. You can find that on our Twitter account. It's going to be fun. You're going to want to be there. Tell your friends, tell your parents, bring your dog.

It'll be fun.

It's the weekend. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and so to see you again. Back here next Friday, 10am Pacific. See you on chain.

Goodbye.

Sa.