Ep 4 - $AGLD & Building Abundance Mindsets - Will Papper

4:55AM Nov 29, 2021

Speakers:

Keywords:

loot

gold

adventure

community

people

governance

ecosystem

token

launched

projects

build

holders

builders

scarcity mindset

loot bags

derivatives

contract

space

game

nf

Hello friends and welcome back to club C clubs podcast. My name is Jess, very excited to be here today with my friend, Wil PAPR, who is a co founder at syndicate protocol and also the creator, the launcher from an airport of adventure gold. This conversation we dove into loot, the game loot, and all sorts of fun things that sort of emerged around it. We talked about why loot is interesting, we get into the story in the history of adventure gold, which is absolutely fascinating. And I think probably the most interesting part of a conversation is when we'll start talking about scarcity versus abundance mindsets, as they relate to token design and economic design. really fascinated with his idea around how long term thinking and the abundance mindset truly matters when building products and kind of hints at the fact that maybe we're not doing that so well right now. This conversation with Will is absolutely fascinating, and I'm really stoked to share it with you. But before we do, you may have noticed there was a new intro song. It was called flower seeds. And it was part of a fun collaboration we did with our friends at song cap. So this is the Sea Club podcast official song 30 different artists contributed potential tracks through a mini camp with our friends at song camp. So we're very excited to have flower seeds br anthem moving forward and we want to thank everybody over at song camp for leading such an amazing creative exploration. Alright, let's jump in it will PAPR on Adventure gold loot, scarcity and abundance and building the future. Well, are you ready for a super serious conversation?

Yeah, let's do it. I can't even keep a straight face.

Yeah, when you just give us a brief introduction, and specifically, you know, lead off with here we're really interested in me you do a lot of different things out in the world. And what do you start off with a bit of an introduction and tell us a little bit about what you're working on?

Yeah, sounds great. So um, well, I got them but decentralization space in 2013 when I was doing research on Mesh networking technologies one summer at the MIT Media Lab mesh networking, another prominent peer to peer technology that in BitTorrent kind of are like be like ugly stepchildren, of the blockchain space, I guess you could say because they're not blockchain applications and the decentralization space kind of like, got all the air got sucked out through by blockchain. So I was doing decentralization stuff that was not blockchain initially. And I knew about Bitcoin at that point in time, and was curious about it, but didn't really have money to invest in it. So I was just packing on side projects, things like that. And in 2013 2014, there was as a weekend project tried to compile my own fork of the Bitcoin network, it was really cool for Google to launch their own token where they'd like fork the Bitcoin network, change the token name change, like the max number of tokens change, like some details about like block confirmation times, and then redeploy it, and then find a bunch of miners to hopefully secure the network. So I was doing that as a weekend project, and saw just how absurdly difficult the process was like, I just wanted to make a little test token and I need to find miners to secure the entire network and protected against 50% tax at the time, the Etherion presale popped up. And I saw, Oh, wow, you can create your own token, and it's secured by the Ethereum network. That's super cool. So I took the $10 signup bonus I got for signing up for Coinbase. And I tossed that into Aetherium presale was like overdraft in my checking account at that point in time. So I did not have much to put in, but put in $10 If I had been able to put in $100 I could have been able to buy a house. But you know, hindsight is 2020. And, yeah, so I've been tracking Aetherium space for a long time doing various side projects in in the crypto space and my full time working it started when I was working at IDEO. I was a collab fellow there, where I was basically working on r&d with them on some blockchain applications, some machine learning applications, remote work before remote work was something people are talking about. And while there I met Ian, and Ian Lee is the My co founder at syndicate. We've known each other for four years now. And we've been talking about syndicate for the last few years in terms of pseudonymous on chain reputation, and we decided to go make syndicate happen and January of this year, so Syndicate is my day job. And then I launched adventure gold on the side. And fencer gold is a token that is a potential in game currency for the loot ecosystem. I coded it in four hours at an airport in Bend, Oregon. There wasn't like there was one shop, so I was just like Like, surviving off of prepackaged vegan cheese sandwiches, as I as I coded this in the airport, and then once it live on a clubhouse tab, and I'd say that, yeah, everything that followed was just way, way, way beyond my expectations. I didn't expect it to get so much traction so quickly.

So I want to get I want to get into all of that because just like you're gonna, we're gonna zoom over some really important things here, which I think is interesting, but I worry that there's maybe a somewhat of lack of context here. Well, I think most people in our space have heard of loot before. Maybe you can just like spend a give me like that the high level overview of what loot is. And then why is it so interesting to somebody like yourself? Obviously, you're a builder, pretty sure you always have some sort of side hack thing that you're doing, you know, what is loot? And why is it so interesting to somebody like yourself?

Yeah, so loot is essentially an on chain NFT that as the building blocks for a feature RPG game, and loot itself is lines of text of items that your character can have in this RPG, I saw the original movement and Dom the creator of loot, who's the former co founder of fine when I saw that he was the one who had made it. I knew that it would be very interesting because all of Dom's NF T's are completely on chain. And most NF T 's are not on chain. So most NF T's if you look at the data in the NFT, it points to a URL. Oftentimes that URL is a centralized server. So the NFT itself is not actually decentralized. Sometimes that URL is pointing to decentralized storage on IPFS. Or we've, which is better but the data is not available on the Etherion blockchain itself. Dom's NF T's are unique because all the data is available on the Etherion blockchain, which means like any other smart contract can hook into that data and build on top of it. And that is why we've seen the explosion of creativity and loot because it is fully on chain. And that is extremely rare. So a lot of people like early ridicule of Luke was people were like it's just lines of text like that's where we are in the bubble like we went from gender divide like yep, I have two art blocks pieces made by Jake from coin fund that I am that I also printed out and put up so my background like we got from all this art, this legitimate generative art and PFP projects to like lines of text and that's all they are. And I'm sitting there thinking this is not lines of text. This is on chain data. That's very rare in the space and that's what's really unique and really interesting. So I'd missed the original meant I was hiking in Oregon had no cell service I had no access to any of my crypto when I got back I just sold my new bed and swept the floor for that Sunday which turned out to be I loved my new bit I have a sad to say go but it turned out to be a very good decision. Okay,

so was it purely just like it was this mixture of like on chain and DOM that made you sell your beloved knee bit and an APN? Or was there like, did you see sort of like because you know what went on to happen in that space was like loot pumped. All of a sudden it was like the talk of the town for at least a couple of weeks and I think maybe arguably still is in certain circles. Was there something like inherent to the simplicity of it or Regis betting on on the horse here.

I so I knew that Dom's NF T's were on chain and then I looked at Loot contract and I saw it had like, get getter functions for each individual item. It's like you could get the weapon you could get the shoes that someone was wearing. I'm like, Okay, this is programmatic. This is really interesting. And that's when I decided I'd dive in was looking at the contract itself. I'd heard some buzz around it. And that buzz definitely made a difference but it was looking at the contract that made me park with my loved one the bit to to go into.

Yes. There's something I don't know I already or interest there. And as you're like, selling one Metaverse what? Yeah, a character that's potentially could live in Metaverse as Lisa was the promise of it for one that is maybe like the atomic units of a potential, far less, visually represented. Metaverse, though, I guess, who knows where Lu might go? And there's there's sweetness in that.

Yeah, I didn't make that connection before. I think that yeah, generally like the NF T's I bet on where the FT is, I bet like decent amounts of Ethan were stuff that I thought was building blocks of the future. I used to say that I was a terrible NFT investor because I thought I was like, I didn't have some NF T's that were totally worthless back in 2018. I had like, if I I knew if I decided not to miss something, it would probably go up. You know, like I saw the board eight minutes and I was like, Oh, I'm not a big fan of the art style. Like all of the crypto punks didn't match my aesthetic tastes so like, I thought it was a terrible NF T investor because my aesthetics totally did not match the rest of the space. I guess. It didn't matter because there were no aesthetics.

Yeah, I love it. So okay, the challenge I have all these conversations There's so many threads I want to pull on. And I want to make sure we get the appropriate context out of the way first. So, you floor sweep, you're excited about the on chain data and through the individual items. And early on my sense was all of a sudden, like, I went to bed one night, and then all of a sudden, there's this like community of 1000s of people that were building on loot in the discord. What did that early community formation look like? Or when you came to that community, what sort of energy was there?

Yeah, that's a lot of that actually is part of the inspiration for adventure gold, I started working on venture gold before I even athlete, but seeing how the community evolved in the first few days, gave me more confidence in in the direction of a ventricle. So early loot was, it was like just wonderful energy from builders who are launching tons of derivatives on top of it, the very first derivative was abstract lead, which leverages the on chain data to create generative art out of different loot bags. That was super cool, because I was like, wow, like they are using the data that's on chain. And another smart contract for these generative ideas like already this thesis of the on chain composability. And on chain data that complete a thesis that matters is showing to be true. And abstract loot was really cool. There were other derivatives that were really interesting. And then there were some derivatives that were not, there were some derivatives that were very cash grabby with like super high mint prices and eath. And they would try to create some FOMO of like, Oh, your loot derivative is only reserved as a loot holder for a little while. And after that, it'll be a public sale. So clean. Now before someone else can claim your loot, you're like reserve blue. And it was just it just struck me as like, okay, there's some derivatives that are really cool. And there's some derivatives that are just trying to extract value from the community rather than contribute back to the community. And one of the first use case they had in mind for adventure gold was we could permission mints using adventure gold. So instead of pricey means that he where it like just extracts values for the holders. What if we price these things in Adventure gold, and started to have this in game economy in game ecosystem, and there wasn't meant

so we need to do some definitions here with adventure gold before we go on, because that context is gonna be super necessary. And also, there's a couple of interesting stories in around the creation of adventure gold that I want to make sure that we capture here so can you just very high level? What is adventure gold, and then zoom us back into the the pre packaged egg and cheese sandwiches in the airport in Oregon?

Yes. So adventure gold was an idea I had before I opened any loop. The core premise was, why don't we take these NFT projects, and we give them an in game. We're like, effectively a social token. Let's take NFT projects, and give them a social token and see what happens. Um, adventure gold for loot was the very first prototype of that. So adventure gold, was an airdrop of 10,000, a GLD tokens, a gold tokens to every loot holder. So every single loot bag you owned, or undo 10,000 A gold tokens. And this was an experiment to see what would happen when we AirDrop a bunch of tokens on a community that they can then use within their own ecosystem. And part of it was motivated by the early months of like, if repricing an eat, it's not really doing anything for the community, it's not really helping build up the community, as you price it to make gold, then that helps like create like this own community social token that they can use internally and the potential infrastructure for any future in game currency that a gold could be adopted as so yeah, a gold isn't ERC 20 that every single holder received. The a gold contract is flexible and supports, for example, new seasons of a gold that is up for the eagle holders to decide. So future airdrops are technically possible, whether they happen or not, is up to the community. So there's also this additional element of governance, which I know we'll dive into, which is like, how does the community want to govern loot? How does the community want to govern a gold? And where do the interests of those groups overlap between loot, a golden, more loot, which is like a inflationary version of loot? And where did those interests diverge? Because that got very, very interesting in the subsequent few days?

Yeah, so I think alluding to some interesting drama around this, maybe maybe we can get some some backstory or at least your first person perspective of it. But you know, just to catch up so we have this NFT droplet which people were minting the original lutes and FTS from a contract. There's a big rush into it. I remember like I bought one loot. I remember buying it on open sea after the fact that maybe point oh five eath but I couldn't get transactions through because the floor has been swept by so many people that were so excited by it. And that should have been my first indication of like, oh, there's something here to pay attention to, but of course, get on with the day and wake up a day or so later and all of a sudden everybody's just talking about loot. And then adventure gold is, you know, if you held on to a loot, you'd be able to go and essentially meant adventure gold to your wallet. Each one of those entities sort of had a claim on 10,000 Adventure goal. I think it's an important thing to like, there seems to be early on remember some mischaracterization around the intention behind adventure gold? You know, we'll get into the governance pieces there. But like, was there a pre mine associated with it? And also, can you tell me how like, there's, it went from like going from not a thing to a thing with like millions of dollars, if not more worth of liquidity and being listed on FTX, and all sorts of things very, very quickly. So can you just sort of give us a little insight into like, how did it go from you saying pushing like, you know, signing a transaction all the way through to this like crazy VC slash market interest?

Yeah. So I had been building up buy in from the community over the previous few days. So I had been posting near daily updates on the progress of the contract, I was finishing up some tests I was doing. I was I was I had the community audited. So there were a bunch of community members who reviewed the contract. One person pointed out some particularly helpful gas optimizations. So I was working with the community to get buy in over the previous few days. And then I was on that good time show to talk about loot busted by Shri Ram and a number of other folks in the tech ecosystem in addressing this ecosystem. I was talking about adventure gold, and how I was working on it. And then everyone in the loop discord was like, Is it ready? Is it ready? Is it ready? And I had like, done the deployment earlier that day. But I had I didn't have any like mint instructions prepared. I didn't have like any documentation around it. We had done two minutes testaments total, me and some friends like, but everyone's asking for it. And the testing had been solid, everything looked good. So I thought, Okay, I'll launch it live on the clubhouse call. So I just dropped them in like forever, when, as they're asking for it in the discord. And then I just see the claim amounts go up and up and up. Gets like, immediately, like millions of adventure gold are claimed. And I just keep refreshing. And I see like hundreds of 1000s of more are being claimed. I was like, wow, people really want this. It's worth the cost of gas. That's cool. So yeah, the the claims went crazy. And like that day, I'd woken up at 5am That day, because I'm still kind of on like a hiking schedule of like, wake up at sunrise and go to sleep at sunset. And then that day, I ran support for 24 hours straight and went to sleep at 5am that day. And yeah, I don't talk about the president. Any thoughts on the price adventure gold is purely a in game currency. That's how I view it. That's my only focus nothing more than that. I I'll just say that I was the the community adoption received and the attraction received in the broader cryptocurrency communities was wildly beyond my expectations for something I wrote in four hours at an airport.

Yeah, so I think that was like, the interesting thing I remember. You know, we have a C club group chat with our collaborators. And I think Brian Flynn was in that group champion, like, Adventurer goal. This is a social token. You know, loot has changed the game as far as what, you know, how communities are going to come together and build stuff. You know, what does this mean for how we at Sea Club live and breathe in? Did we miss out on this? What? And so I went into like, immediate mode of like, Oh, my God, should we? What is the deal with this? Like, what is the story behind it? How did adventure gold launch? How did this thing just come out of nowhere. And, you know, great that I have my claim on one of them. But like, I pride myself in being in the loop, I want to be in the loop well, and I felt very like kind of out of the loop. And so I started going around and I was like I saw you had said something about it. And I think I reached out to you. And I'm like, well, like, what's the deal with this? And you're like, Oh, well, like I was in this airport in Oregon after a hiking trip. And it kind of like just wrote this thing. And now it's like that. And I was just like, I mean, honestly, it made me feel really good. Well, that I was only one step away. I mean, you're zero degrees away from being Canadian right now. And I was just one step away from Adventure. Gold didn't solve the problem of me being like, wow, how come I didn't, wasn't fast enough on the front way. But anyways, it said, part of my existential dread is something trying to lead a project in the space. But what really blew me away was just how you can just tell a story that it's just like, and I was just nerding out over this thing. And I wanted to put it out in the world and you do have a bit of profile right so you're on the show within within you know, a fairly well listen to show I guess within the the the clubhouse ecosystem, but more so it was just sort of like this ravenous community of individuals that are in this discourse ever just eating up they saw the promise of the same burn really, really bright really fast. And contrasting that with just like your nonchalant pneus over this. I mean, the reality is that adventure gold launched and I think it was like a $300 million plus market cap probably higher than that. I know you don't want to talk about pricing, so I won't hold you to that but it is a significant valuation put on this and even today, I think it's you around the $270 million market cap like these are meaningful things. And it just I don't know, it's just a wonderful thing to see, almost like the leverage and the randomness and the scale that can kind of come from just being earnestly interested in something.

Yeah. And I think that the thing that made adventure gold, what it was, is that it was a totally fair launch. I didn't reserve any for myself, I held some loot, not a ridiculous amount of loot, enough loot to hold it a good chunk of it ventricle, but not, not anywhere in the top 20 holders. And it was just something of hey, here, this is for the community, then you can use it as you wish. And I think that one thing that I've been trying to push forward in the space just in the way I act and the way I the way I am in the space is this like the 2014 to 2016 Aetherium world was like very techno utopian, and there's all these really radical experiments and human collaboration and community building, the Dow in 2016, which I put 7.5 eath into when back in that was not very much money. The Dow being one example of like things like radically optimistic, radically utopian experiments in collaboration, and crypto goes through cycles, I'd say the 2017 to 2020 2020 cycle was more financially motivated than like, collaborative and techno utopian. I think that data's and social tokens are where I see that same like collaborative and techno utopian spirit. And that's what convinced me to go full time into this space and, and CO fan Syndicate, with loot and adventure gold. I mean, it wasn't about any sort of profit seeking for diamond, it wasn't about any sort of profit seeking. For me, it's just the entire community ethos was, hey, this is cool. putting this out there, and anyone can do with it as they wish. And I'd say I got the full spectrum of what happens after you launch a project, I got people telling me that they were broken, that they have enough in the loot ecosystem to go buy a Lamborghini, I hope that they saved it, or invested it and put into my Lamborghini. But I'm glad that they were able to if they want to do I had people message me one particularly moving story is someone whose father just died and his family was Muslim and for his father to pass on to, like the after, like his father's debts had to be paid. And this person paid off their their debt and their father's debt with the loot ecosystem that was just incredibly moving to me. So I got some really wonderful stories like that. And then I got the other end of the spectrum was I got death threats. I got suicide threats. I had people photoshopping me into porn. I had basically like, anything you could think of. I probably received it in my DMs. Yeah. So it's very interesting. Seeing both sides of the community. Both are really good, really heartwarming parts. And also the underbelly, I'd say of what happens after the launch project.

Yeah, that's, that's absolutely wild. The Internet is a weird place a fun, crazy, scary, weird place that maybe some of us have to inhabit in a little bit more of a public way than others on occasion. So I'm glad you're able to thrive through that. And the uncertainty. You know, what I witnessed around adventure gold, I think actually, when we talked, first of all, like I tried to get you on this podcast a couple weeks ago. And you're sort of in the midst of this sort of series of governance decisions that I think are interesting to get into. And just to sort of backtrack a bit here, one of the interesting byproducts of the way that you launched was that there wasn't an ecosystem fund, right. There wasn't like a, there was not some pool of capital that was sort of designed to like, withheld by the adventure gold down,

right adventure, gold had no specific structure built in, there was a down menu function that you could use to generate more adventure gold, and I was assuming that an ecosystem could form around the diamond function, but I didn't require anything on the contract related to that there's no obligation of the community. So

I think that's super interesting, because it's like, how do you one of the things that we think a lot about is like, and one of my critiques of fractionalized NF T's is like a starting point for social tokens. Is this the challenge of like, What is the incentive for somebody to go do things with, like, like, where is the ongoing funding, you know, people need to be rewarded for for contributing work. And it sounds like you sort of have that baked in at the contract level, assuming there's some sort of consensus around it, but like, the immediate challenge was one of legitimacy and consensus building Correct. Like what was can you take us into like the, you know, go from launched it's live to, all of a sudden they're snapshot votes up, and there's some sense of trying to build legitimacy and direction and cookie submit around the project. Very curious how, how you navigated that

in terms of legitimacy? So I think there's two elements to legitimacy, right? One is, is the community going to take this on, as it's like, as something that it wants to wants to use and wants to leverage and wants to bring forward? And then there's legitimacy in terms of like, okay, well, how should this thing be used now that the community is decide to adopt it? So on the first aspect of legitimacy, which is like, does the community view this as the in game currency belief ecosystem? And the answer was very unambiguously, yes. There was a fair launch. It was, it was available to any lead holder to claim it was that if I say so myself, a clinic well written contract that was gas efficient, and like, like, secure and reviewed by the community, and all these factors, like and I building buy in from the community over the past few days. So the question is, like, is the community willing to accept this as the in game currency? ecosystem? The answer was very much. Yes. And then there was another question, which got very contentious. And this is why I'm glad we're having the conversation a few weeks later, now that we have more time to reflect on it and see how this plays out. Because I was like, yes, we need the governance after all first, before we talk. Oh, the governance pieces are still a bit in flight, but there's a lot more clarity around them. So interestingly, I didn't have strong opinions on how adventure gold should be used. When I launched it. I suggested a few ideas to people and the ideas I suggested were in game usage. So like there's various games where people that people are working on weekend, steak, like adventure gold to be able to battle for example, there's, I was thinking of like in game like marketplaces like views, adventure, gold, divine items, and upgrades, kind of like any any other video games, internal currency, this one's actually on chain, which is a really cool feature of it. And then I also threw out the idea there governance, and I thought, Well, my thinking there was mostly loot only as 1000 bags. To have a playable ecosystem for builders. In the long term, you need something more participatory. I knew builders who are talking with who didn't hold any loot, and they were still building on top of loot. Now, the question is like, what's the incentive to do? So I talked to some people where they think there's very little incentive to build on top of loot, because the economics that of starting new projects are very strong. I think the answer is more along the lines of You need for people to feel like they're part of the community. And the only way to be part of the community is to hold one of 1000 bags, that's only going to expand so far. If any adventure gold holding makes me feel like part of the community. That means that we can build a much, much larger community of builders and players and create a really healthy ecosystem. So as their governance out there as an idea, mostly because it was a more participatory way to run the ecosystem than like 8000 NF T's only when you could have plenty more than with a dozen holdings, but venture gold it's like most cryptocurrencies are basically infinitely divisible. So like you could theoretically have like infinite holders of adventure gold. The interesting part is that governance is what people latched on to. And that got very, very contentious. So some people were like, is loot Carpani loot is adventure gold governing loot, which one is it? And then the narrative was that adventure gold was a governance token, which I mean, it was an idea I suggested, but it was never the intention. The primary intention was like a in game currency that people could use inside of inside of games in the loot ecosystem. So this like narrative kind of formed on crypto Twitter that adventure gold was a governance token. And this counter narrative form that like, adventure gold is like a vampire attack on the loot ecosystem, because it's like trying to take governance power away from loot holders and transfer to adventure gold. And then there was a third narrative that formed which is that the ecosystem should have no governance and it should be totally permissionless and totally experimental and bottom up, and like that, like any governance is a failure. So there were some people who were like, adventure gold should govern loot. There are some people who said adventure gold was a vampire attack on loot. There are some people who said really because ecosystem should have no governance at all. All of this, like none of this was the original intention of adventure gold. So trying to navigate that was very interesting. Like the only reason why adventure gold as governance got traction was because people were actually using adventure gold for governance. There was a group writing lore that was using adventure gold to bet on storylines, like the reason why people were talking about adventure gold governance was because people were using adventure gold for governance.

So the discussions got very, very contentious. And it got so contentious that there was ultimately the burn the keys vote for loot. So this is where things culminated, there was a bunch of people who were pro adventure gold governance. There are a bunch of people who were pro loot governance. And there were a bunch of people who were anti governance of any kind. And the idea was, okay, let's have a vote to burn the keys. And if you want to sacrifice a treasury of 200, loot bags, and the corresponding adventure gold that can be cleaned for them. And if you want to, if you want to sacrifice the Treasury, and not have that and miss out on some benefits, I think of governance of like, for example, like coordinating an effort, like I know, multiple people working on player versus player battles for loot games, like it'd be better for them to coordinate and build one game that to try to all build their own games on their own, like governance services structured but if you want to just completely like, have no governance at all, they'd be completely bottom up, can vote to burn the keys. And the interesting part is that there was Brenda keys vote. And that vote, I was like one of only a handful of people who voted not to burn the keys. I don't remember the exact conclusion of it. But towards the end, it was 98% Burn the keys and 2% don't. And this was after another contentious vote that had been conducted which was should adventure gold governed loot. And that vote was like, basically split 5050 Which interestingly is pretty much the makeup of adventure gold of loot holders who also held adventure gold, about 55% of loot holders held adventure gold. And then the split of shared adventure gold government loot was like also roughly 5050. So there's this like, rejection of governance from the community. Like first people were split on which one should be the governance token loot or adventure gold over this like treasury of loot bags, and the corresponding adventure gold. And then the loot community, the loot holders were just like, Okay, bring the keys in just mainly. So that vote occurred and then went on honeymoon. Needless to say, no one in the community dumb myself. Other people involved in the early days expected this reaction to give had expected this he probably would have like, scheduled it differently. Around the around the honeymoon. Anyway. So DOM went on honeymoon isn't on honeymoon until the end of October. And then at that point, so this is the really interesting thing. And this is the thing that makes me like think a ton about governance mindsets, and scarcity versus abundance and building long term ecosystems is that the brand the keys vote was pretty much like nearly universally, Brenda keys after the brain, the keys vote, which explicitly said in the proposal, if we bring the keys, we won't have a treasury, there is a proposal that Don put up around how should we think about a Treasury and the brain, the keys vote was pretty much universally like in favor of bringing the keys to sacrifice the Treasury. And then the discussion post on the forum about how should we think about a treasury was like, pretty favorable to the idea of a treasury. And it's like, those two things don't match up. But I was about to bring the keys and not have a treasury. And then you're in favor of a treasury. There's questions in my mind about governance processes, and how much the long term for short term implications are being considered.

So okay. I think that is absolutely fascinating, because not only through that, that tension there, but what sort of participation level are you getting in these votes? And, you know, there's seems to be like a big difference between saying, Hey, we're going to come together, we're going to go make these things, the way that we're going to make decisions as token holders having a vote through something like snapshot, and there being some sort of focus put on governance. This was such an emergent process that all of a sudden, there was sort of a snapshot stood up, there wasn't even this underlying understanding, I think, for most people in this idea of governance or governing or decision making. So it's to me snapshot was was used as a way of trying to, you know, use the word build legitimacy before. But were you getting like deep involvement in in the governance process? Or like, what sort of percentages were we seeing? Yeah, it

was like a quarter of all loot holders were voting and governance was substantial. And that was our sorry, not a quarter of all holders, a quarter of all loot bags. But yeah, like pretty substantial participation. And yeah, this is, this is the thing that I think a lot about is that as soon as loot launched, so there were two things that made me realize how scarcity minded the community was. One is that when we launched there's this like abundance mindset of builders and getting people involved and how do we how do we create a really strong ecosystem? And the earliest days adventure gold, there was also that mindset. And then, at some point, the mindset shifted to a scarcity mindset. And this I think the turning point was one more little launched. So DOM had originally created this thing called synthetically and synthetic loot is essentially it generated a loot bag for any wallet address. So basically data in a wallet address like intergender loot bag in the idea was like, this was a way you can participate in loot ecosystem and play any future loot games without needing to actually hold any loot. You don't even need any, like any entity you don't even need to pay for any gas you just do. synthetically synthetic loot was out there. It was available people like some people would like post screenshots of like, Oh, check out this synthetically for like my wallet and like, ooh, this like I have a divine row for like this model just like it was a cool, it was a cool thing that people were working with. And then, but synthetic loop kind of like, just because it wasn't an NFT like it didn't like not it didn't gain much uptake. Like there were a bunch of loot derivatives that were literally just like the loot contract, but like, you know, forked to like add more bags total. And they were like a few of these. So DOM was like, Okay, I'll make more loot, which is like, can be minted. And it's like, slightly inflationary, but you know, like not super inflationary, it's based on like number of blocks and like the hard cap, and it was like it was it was like elegant, like inflationary tokenomics, he lost more loot. And the community just Well, that's when he started getting his random death threats as the weird but he got death threats over more loot the floor price of loot dropped by half. And it was just incredibly negative reaction from OG loot holders, to something that was a version of what already existed before synthetically already existed more or less, it was just saying, Okay, let's take synthetic loot the idea, isn't it and let's just like make it an NFT. Because like, people really want the idea of an NFT. So like, let's give them an entity. So from the perspective of people deeply involved in loot ecosystem, more loot, and synthetic loot had similar origins, similar ideals, more loot just led to this, like, huge like outcry among OG loot holders. And that was, in my mind, the first sign of the scarcity mindset that had taken hold, because it seemed obvious to me like you can't build a game with 8000 holders, you can no one's gonna build a game for 8000 players. And like, I think like when you look at the breakdown of loot holders, it's actually 2500 or solid holders total absolute. So I can't build a game 2000 3000 people, no one's ever gonna do that. And you need builders to like be part of the ecosystem and feel like they felt like part of it to want to build on top of that community just reject that. I think that there's this mindset. And a lot of cryptocurrency communities that inflation is bad, deflation is good. And 1000 loot bags is good and a million loot bags is bad. And I think that the scarcity mindset is very short term. Because it's very much how do I preserve the value of my holdings as much as possible. It's not thinking about the builders, it's not thinking about the ecosystem, it's not thinking about a treasury, bring the keys ecosystem and bring the keys vote to like sacrifice the Treasury is a good example of that as well. And that was assigned to me that like the scarcity mindset had taken hold. And the community was thinking a lot about how to preserve the value of the loot bags, and not a lot about how to get a lot of builders involved.

I really love love highlighting that tension, because I think any project was launching in the space needs to address that in some way. And I think, but personally, I believe when we look back on Dows community tokens of this era, it's going to look kind of weird that we've done it with sort of fixed token supplies, like, you know, one of the the core issues that exist in the space is where's the incentive to continue to contribute. And if you get your bag early, your incentive truly is just to preserve the value of that bag playing the short term games versus trying to build networks that have no like when we think about a token model than C club, you know, I want C club to be a thing that outlives me, right that that sort of has an infinite time horizon.

That's why the title is instigator, right? You're the catalyst. You've kicked it off. Right? I

want to put it out there and but thinking through like, Okay, well, just 10 million tokens. Make sense if we're dealing with, you know, 1000 years, and as maybe sounds like a little ridiculous thing to say, but I think it's probably the time horizons we should be thinking about. So this idea of like inflationary supplies, I think will be much more popular. But you're right, we come up against the valuation of these things right now by the market is very much based around very simple narratives very easy to understand narratives, the simpler, the better in many ways. And the scarcity narrative is such a clear one. Like, I wonder, is there lessons in communication and messaging, in product design that would kind of like help us orient towards more of a long term view?

Yeah, I think that this is one of the most important things I saw from the adventurer go launch and something that at Syndicate, we're helping a lot of dads consulting on because there's so many so many useful insights about governance tokenomics that come from the whole loot in Adventure gold journey. And one thing that's fascinating is I coated in seasons just to be done by a Dow, but like the Dow could vote to have a new season and if they want to have a new season, then it takes place. Some people have asked me over time, like what would I have done differently? And the answer is I would have made it inflationary. I would have coded in seasons as a time based requirements every three months or six months or 12 months, there's a new season, instead of coding it in as a down vote, which I thought was the best option to give the voting power to the community. But when such a scarcity mindset takes hold, it's, it's, it's harder. So I think that one thing that that inflation does inflation aligns the interests of everyone. It aligns the interests of early holders and late holders, for example, like early holders who got loot bags with an adventure gold claim. And late holders who got loot bags after the adventure gold's already claimed outlines those interests and it also aligns the interests of building long term ecosystem because you're not relying on scarcity to drive to drive the dynamics of the community, you're relying on abundance and how you choose to use that abundance is a really powerful thing. And I think that the reality is that as soon as a project launches, the scarcity mindset, by default will take hold. You even saw a criticism of Aetherium. For years, I was like that Aetherium was inflationary. Well, Bitcoin was deflationary. So therefore, Bitcoin was superior to Aetherium. Like that was a very common argument made like 2015 all the way through, like, Please still see that argument being made. So all the way until like 1559, which like started to prove that deep is deflationary with usage, which is like exactly the dynamic you want, in a long term, eco enter an ecosystem thinking a bit longer. By the way, that's not like a subtweet of Bitcoin in any way. I think Bitcoin is interesting, too. I'm passionate about Bitcoin as a peer to peer electronic cash system, whether it's to those goals is another question or whether it's a store of value. But anyway, yeah, I think that if I built in abundance tokenomics From the start, we would have had more of an abundance mindset, and I think loot would have benefited from the same thing. The question is then kind of momentum around loot in the NFT space in general, the NFT spaces of FOMO driven space, you told me about squiggles back in January and thought, oh, wow, 100 US dollars for a squiggle that seems really expensive.

And I really missed the bed on that one. And the NFT space is very FOMO driven. And it's very driven by like, you get in early and you make it big. And if you don't get in early, you want make it big, and like you just need one, when to make it big. It's kind of like, I'm not gonna say that it sounds like a gambling mentality. But a lot of the dynamics are like, reasonably similar, even down to like, minting things feels in a way like gambling, like really get something new, like aesthetically like it's a bear. I think the like thing that no one really says in the NFT space is that like the current dynamics are mostly gambling dynamics, it's driven by being early, it's driven by foam, or it's driven by these random myths. Like you couldn't engineer a better system of gambling and lottery ideas if you tried. And for NF T's to be useful in the long term. And for these to not look like the 2017 patterns where a bunch of ICOs were super valuable and never recovered for NF T's to like have long term enduring value, they will need strong communities and they will need to have real fundamentals of community members and builders who are pushing the ball forward. Loot is one of the very few communities that has that there are so many people building the loot ecosystem, there's dozens of derivatives, there's new projects launching every single day, the quality of the builders is just absolutely incredible. Loot has that some other communities have that a lot of communities don't. And I think that my prediction for the next like three years of the NFT market is that the NFT markets dynamics will look very similar to the ICO market dynamics, where in 2017, something spiked to absolutely insane values and crashed and never recovered. We're seeing that spike, we're seeing similar things like gas wars to get into projects very early that is very reminiscent of 2017, we're seeing some of the less savory elements of 2017, like teams lying about their backgrounds lying about who they are, like getting tons of money anyway, we're seeing like people like deep into things just hoping to sell at higher without knowing nothing about it, a lot of it feels like 2017. And to avoid the crash of 2017 that occurred, these entities need a community and they need builders. And this only comes from an abundance mindset, most NFT is that our 10,000 profile photo drops, fundamentally don't have an abundance mindset. And while a few will be very valuable, I'm sure most will go to zero. And yeah,

I really love that framing of like that. So it's like, you know, preserving the value of of my thing is a scarcity mindset. I think you use the language is something around like how do I invest the abundance or make use of this abundance? And I think that's actually a really helpful way of phrasing it right and much more active engagement with value creation. It's like here are these resources that are being created. And yeah, one way to look at it is like it's just going to dilute down everything you created, but the only way that's really truly going to be the cases If you're not putting that those assets to productive use, and, you know, the productive use of those assets really should be core to what your community is trying to build, or what your network is trying to build. And so like this, this idea of, of building an abundance engine that can be used to drive the future creation of value, like we should be able to get by in an interest and excitement behind that is it feels like a lot more of like an optimistic and exciting and, you know, if, if, you know, one thing I'm very excited about around, you know, the narratives, at least this time around within Kryptos is how, how much we value builders and how, how much of a badge of honor it is, when somebody calls you a builder versus a dirty investor, you know, it's dirty VC investors. But if you're a builder, you can do stuff. And so like, I feel like there's there's narratives here that we can harness to say, like, you know, truly, we want more community members to be builders, that the value that we can co create here, you know, for community tokens for Dows, for social tokens to really work as we need to be able to leverage the social capital and financial capital these organizations can create to go create more value and just know that we're like a really great project and a narrative that takes hold away from I think that really being a flag to fly. I want to recover up on the hour. And I want to I wanted to sort of like wrap this up a little bit. Because I love this conversation. It's very winding and you make me nerd out of a bunch of about a bunch of different things. But I'm very curious, what does the existing loot ecosystem look like? Where are we at with adventure gold, like, what is uncertain today, but going to be more certain? And what do you sort of see for the next few few months?

Yeah. So I think that there's incredible energy from builders. And there was this rash of projects that launched and those projects were a derivatives that were like, very, very heavily inspired by Dom's original contract, mostly changing some of the some of the variables and the parameters and relaunching it. So people saw a bunch of projects launched. And then they saw like derivative stop launching, and people thought, oh, it's dead, the builders have moved on, what they didn't realize is that what was still being worked on was the high effort project. The things that take more than a few days to build, were what people were working on. And there was this rush of like, very quick copy paste jobs. And then this low and a lot of people thought that means people aren't building but in reality, it was people building really, really incredible projects. One of those projects that launched recently was loot Mart, which is made by an amazing team love them or manifest, which is a fantastic NFT protocol. Some of the artists involved are like are deep in the GaNS base and customize their GaNS for loot Mart Bluesmart team like it, it took them weeks to run the machine learning algorithms necessary to generate the images like it took them weeks of just processing power to make it happen. And the result of loot mark is incredible. You can unbundle your loot bag into items, you keep your loot bag to get the items. So it's like a nice derivative on top, you don't have to custody your loot bag or anything like that. And you can then use those in anything that you wish and other games can build on top those items. And loot Mart does this key thing where it shifts people to an abundance mindset because now, instead of 1000 loot bags, there's loot for every single item. And you can go acquire an item and do something in the ecosystem. So like it has very cleverly like shown that an abundance mindset can work. And if loot Mart, for example, or other projects that support more than you have this just like explosion of playable items that people can use, which still preserves and accrues value back to the original loot and adventure gold holders. And the derivatives that are being worked on now are just incredible games incredible, tokenomics Amazing, detailed art. That is what takes more than a few days to launch. So I think a lot of people saw the exponential. So they were like, Oh, well there aren't derivatives lumpy. Now, even though there are like dozens of derivatives that have already launched, the community must have moved on. And in reality, it was people working on the hard stuff. And we're just starting to see that and we'll see more of that. And it's it's pretty incredible as as we think about how the future of builders and looks. The abundance mindset I've seen for builders makes me very optimistic.

I love that. Yeah. Big fan of the manifest team could get people over there. What is the current status of adventure gold, is this a governance token now are we really deal with these things?

So it has two roles Liga system. One is that it's back the original goals of an in game currency, which I'm very glad about. Adventure gold has already been used for an NFT swap by the Genesis team. It's already been used for permissioning minutes. I'm talking to builders who are discussing using adventure gold in their marketplaces. As I'm talking to builders who are discussing wagering adventure gold, to be able to join a battle. So it's an in game currency. And the momentum I've seen there from builders has been fantastic. The other element of adventure gold is if the loot ecosystem decides to go through with bringing the keys, it's an adventure gold, to have an abundance mindset and think about the long term, because there's this great adventure gold tokenomics puzzle put together by a number of community members. And like that's one proposal that would lead to some inflation that would both accrue value back to original loot holders, potentially emlid holders and also provide a treasury that adventure gold could go and give to projects to really build a strong ecosystem, I think that we'll see how the loot, bring the keys aspect plays out, we'll see what their loot decides to work with treasure or not. But if Luke decides not to the ball is in Adventure gold holders court. And I'm hopeful that adventure gold holders will think about the long term, think about how to encourage builders to use adventure, gold and ecosystem, as has already been occurring. And not also think about a scarcity mindset.

Absolutely fascinating, I'm sure have many more questions and more will come as I think you're still very much in the middle of this. This sort of emergent world that's happening, I love getting the sort of most recent update on what's happening there. Because I think for you know, for those of us that are on the app, not deeply involved in these communities, all you really see is like the the hype, like the big pickup, and then the drop off, and you don't have a sense of really what's happening underneath. Yeah, without a doubt, great things take time to build. And excited to see what that community brings together. appreciate you sharing the story. It's a story that I just wanted to capture. Because I think it's such a, it's emblematic of so many great things within crypto that were just sort of, you know, it was a crazy idea. And then it becomes a thing. And so much of the excitement I think of working in the space really leans into that idea, right? Like we can be a part of these things. And there's a rollercoaster ride that can go along with everything. And you're sitting at the front of that roller coaster sometimes can be a little bit more of a whiplash, I think and glad that you've weathered that. Well. Yeah, really appreciate you sharing the story of appreciated your collaboration over the last few months and look forward to many more. And I wish you Yeah, just the best in this. And I feel like there's a whole other line of questioning, I'm gonna get into with you some of your time around the contracts that you've built for ventricle, because I think that's maybe the other thing here where, yeah, you know, if adventure gold hadn't gone on to be this really big thing that sort of sucks so much oxygen out of the room, my guess is that you would be launching multiple tokens on the backs of NF T's using the contract that you use to launch or venture gold because in there's an interesting primitive that you're working with, right, which is like for NF T collections, would it be useful to have an ERC 20 associated with that and claim a little lie people who hold that. And specifically, as I think about how we launched tokens around squiggle, Dow, you know, the ability for squiggle hold, like, there's something really interesting there. And that dynamic that I think is, has a lot of room to explore.

I agree. And I think that's where, yeah, we can we can do a part two at some point on lead ventricle tokenomics and lessons for other NFT projects. I think that, um, the short version is that's why getting the tokenomics. Right, Up Round is so important. It rentre gold, I think, hit on tokenomics that aligned well with the general community. But I think that I think that like those tokenomics can be tuned even more finely and thinking about how to expand this idea of attaching social tokens to other communities to other NFT projects. I've been, yeah, talking with a bunch about their goals and figuring out what they're interested in, figure out how to come up with a set of best practices for tokenomics in the space. So that's what I've been spent a lot of time on at Syndicate is helping projects with tokenomics. And yeah, we'd love to do a part two, you did dive into that at some point in the future.

Yeah, okay. Well, we'll bring the goods to people at some point. But before that, you and I need to chat about that. Because there's a number of things we're working on that I would love to get your opinion on. I know I've threatened to send you stuff in the past, but I need to make sure I follow up on that. We have some fun things cooking at Sea Club. All right, we're gonna leave it there. We'll appreciate your time and all that you've done, and stoked to chat with you again in the hopefully not so distant future. Thanks so much. Oh, wait, well, wait, wait, where can people find you on the internet? I have to do this. This is a podcast thing. I need to make sure that you get people flooding your DMS with positive notes

hopefully complements up efforts. Yeah, I'm on Twitter. I am at Willow pepper. at will and then P a PP er like paper the extra p you can find me there. And I talk a lot about the loot because it's the man's butter. I talk a lot about governance, economics. And so if you're just that stuff, come Come hang out.

Awesome. Yeah, check out well on Twitter and also syndicate protocol. You do have a date. Don't you? Well,

syndicate. Yeah. And if you need to reach me for anything syndicate related, we'll at syndicate.io

Amazing. All right, we can leave it there. I'm getting better at this podcasting will I'm gonna have it all down by episode 100 and feel completely fantastic. Yeah,

yeah, it's it's, uh, it was one of the best conversation conversations I've had so far.

Awesome, man. Appreciate that. All right, we'll leave it there. Have a good one. calculator just