Reimagining NFT's - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] GM friends and welcome to the medical hospital Corner productivity by navic I'm your host Nico and today I'm joined by Vijay chandaram he's a co-founder and CEO at Luda who are the creators of Neo fairies our goal today is to talk about Luda how it approaches web 3 technology and also to talk a bit about some of the mistakes or you know some of the learnings we can take from what we see happening within the blockchain industry today so first question Vijay who are you and could you tell us a bit more about loot as well yeah sure yeah thanks for having me so um me uh engineer at heart uh have been a designer engineer in Silicon Valley uh for my whole career more or less I've spent a bit of time at big companies spent some time at small companies

starting my own it's a little bit of time in Venture Capital as well and yeah it's funny actually you know in other in other contexts uh I talk about as like a regrettable stint in Venture Capital but that's really not fair it's very very Illuminating in fact I I when I really tell my story venture capital is where I discovered my own sense of purpose funny enough and I think it's actually very natural because venture capital is a role where you're kind of offering Founders money right and so uh you have to find some other value prop to differentiate yourself from every other person offering someone money and it puts you into a much deeper soul-searching mode I think than when you're a technology professional where skills are differentiated and you know kind of what you do and you're good at it but you really have to stare yourself in the face and ask what am I bringing to this founder that they're going to take my dollar versus the other and so no no joke you know I like I said I make

this regrettable joke but actually in fact like a lot of my personal purpose um and kind of where I ended up going in my own career was figuring out that what I loved I've always loved deep technology and how you can create impact with new technologies but the idea that you could use deep Technologies for play that was a thing that fully came uh you know kind of into my view when I was in venture capital and it very much kind of steered my entire life after that so once I left venture capital I spent some time uh doing some Angel Investing and also tinkering and ultimately ended up at Google where I ended up working on an r d program started an r d program for interactive entertainment and the entire premise was how do you use all these magical new technologies like machine learning and Ai and uh what's around the corner but using it for play and using it for storytelling and using it for kind of creating these moments of playfulness and joy for people and so that was where

I spent about three years working on a bunch of different new technologies new Concepts and the ideas that you know we're going to talk about today kind of came from from there so I can go more into that but that that kind of takes you to to kind of where I am now almost great and so after working on or researching how new technologies can be used to build new interactive experiences you then decided to found Luda yeah yeah so the the segue I guess from from my time at Google to Luda is uh is you know at Google the thing we all ultimately got most excited about as we spent a bunch of time looking at different different categories in entertainment different um Mechanics for gameplay different types of Storytelling tools we got really excited by I'm very inspired by this Sandbox game genre or open world genre things like Minecraft and Roblox and the idea that you can create these types of open-ended creative worlds that players

can contribute to and fans could be part of right not just consuming but we could use machine learning as a creative superpower that these players have so instead of just having a basic mechanic like being able to get blocks and build structures you have the ability to actually create pretty powerful things with generative models and you can see this now a lot with things like mid-journey and stable diffusion right like people are super excited about what you could do to kind of close the gap between a player's creativity and the kind of fidelity of outputs they can create yeah you can see the same type of thing happening although it's a little bit more out of view for animating so actually animating puppeteering characters right this is also something that is increasingly possible using machine learning because we can map scalable forms and put them onto the structure so that whole idea that we can create creative tools with machine learning that then become kind of the building

blocks for these sandbox games right the next gen Minecraft and Roblox is that was what the time that Google spent kind of honing in on and just kind of having our minds blown about and being super excited about this because now it's about empowering players not just to create in the game worlds and the story world but with these tools that make them feel like they're super powers right um and that that was kind of the the jump off point a year and a half ago when we started to see what was happening with nfts and Dows and both Shannon and I my co-founder have been part of crypto and been following crypto for years but the idea that now you could use things like nfts to represent the things players create in games and you could have dowels be mechanisms by which a community collectively owns something kind of set off the light bulb that we can now just make not just make games where players create the worlds with these tools but they own them too and that was kind of the you know the set-off point for us to say okay this is

not something that's going to happen at a you know at a big company it's not going to happen at a tech company and it might not even happen at a game company right you really kind of rethink all of these systems from the ground up and so that's kind of what what's kicked off Buddha Okay so you are essentially using the blockchain as a mechanism to distribute ownership and value accrual to everyone that actually added value to any digital experience and this could be an asset but this could be way more in the whole game yeah yeah so I if I kind of fill out the picture a bit more I mean when we think about so if I step back Luda itself is a company um thinks about this idea of putting people at the center of entertainment right and we we talk about that way because putting people at the center of entertainment means a couple of things it means that they're in the center of entertainment socially and you know right they can see themselves into stories that we're telling they can be part of it creatively they can actually

contribute to it directly with the tools they have and economically which is the Creations they contribute they own and they have a say in the future of where these things go and so yes then if I translate that to uh kind of the interpretation of what we're doing we're creating new kinds of Entertainment Properties right new kinds of story worlds and new types of sandbox games but in those store world and sandbox games you the player or you the fan gets to create the characters of those worlds get to create the settings and the locations and you creating those locations in those settings and those characters also means you own those as nfts so you're not buying nfts from us in a Marketplace to be able to play the game you create things in the game and in the world like you would in any other ugc Sandbox game or story world but now you just own those as nfts nft is almost in this sense a tool or a technical mechanic to ensure you as the player actually own the thing you created

as opposed to what's you know we'll get to this later as fundraising tool which is not actually what uh you know it so nft can be a lot of things and I think right now we think about it that way but in our context it's you're already going to the story world because you love the story world right you're coming to the sandbox game because you love playing this with your friends you're creating things in those worlds and you're sharing them with each other and it just seems like a basic right that you should own those and those can be yours to do what you want with and uh and so that's where the blockchain kind of has a tool on the back end for helping people have ownership and rights over the thing they created and then the ability to use that in a collective form of some kind right you me hundreds of thousands of people make a new game successful because we come there and we build stuff in this game world we all should have a say at least a small say in where that game goes right and that's where the Dao mechanisms and on-chain voting and governance and using the nfts you created to participate in votes is kind of the other part of this equation which is not everyone's going

to want to do that but people should have the ability to do that if they want right as opposed to being kind of on the outside of a Twitter handle trying to you know make sure they're heard to the Creator is making the project that they're a part of so I think when you talk about having people create things within games everyone probably immediately thinks about Roblox if I would so I'm trying to understand what you say right if I would translate this this into Roblox terms what you're saying is I am a Creator I create maybe maybe it's the best example right but um a very cool looking car yeah Roblox yeah any experience can actually start using that car in their in in their game and then you know I own that car as an nft so you know anytime there's any monetization thanks to that car I can get a tiny part of that one organization well yeah so let's let me um no I love this analogy yeah so let's take take Roblox right you come to Roblox you create a an experience

actually this is one of the neat things about Roblox just to to kind of appreciate what they've done people can think about them as games like it's a platform for making games but actually a lot of what people are making are things like uh I had a dream last night and it was really weird and so they'd create their dream and they invite their friends to come experience their dream that is so cool and that is not that is not a capital g game right that's it's hard to even call that a game and I think we talk about metaverse in these like broad hand wavy terms which is another thing that we can we should you know we can go we should we should go into that if we want but but when you get down to it you know I shared a space I made that's a dream I had and you can come into it and enjoy it I mean that's that's beautiful and that is actually what makes ugc so special is that it's not it's not that kind of heavy I gotta make a game right so then what we're saying is for an analogy you know Roblox 3.0 Roblox for web 3 is I come to Roblox I create this little scene of a dream I had

that is an nft that I own and then that nft that I own that makes me part of the Roblox Dow and then when Roblox decides that they might want to charge more like 70 of profits as opposed to you know 83 I get to have a vote saying yeah that's a great idea right uh and and that's so now the nfts representing the things you've created and contributed to the Roblox world give you kind of a voice and say in how Roblox as a project is governed and and managed and that's not to say that everyone who contributes to roadblock should dictate the future of Roblox like there's a lot of people investing in building Roblox that should have a big say but it's a it's a step towards more involvement of the community in the actual Enterprise of this project called Roblox as opposed to you know no connection at all economically or governance wise yes um it is it is the web 3 thinking

about given stakeholders an actual stake in the whole ecosystem right and giving them more more power and then also more a sense of ownership yep yep okay so I want to also one other thing about this because I think we're going to get to it later too most people who create something in these worlds the nft that we just talked about of the dream I had it might never be worth anything to anybody right default value is zero now to me personally I don't care I didn't make my dream in Roblox because I wanted to make myself rich off of it I made it because it mattered to me right and so I think one of the things that's always fun to talk about in the model that we're pursuing is that's okay most of these are gonna be worth zero right most content on the internet is not worth anything but one for the people who create it doesn't mean you shouldn't give them ownership of it and shouldn't give them access and rights to do what they want

with it and two every now and then something you create does become valuable right every now and then you know that dream that you had that uh you know you share with a few friends strikes a chord right it goes viral there's a cultural moment and now maybe that thing you made is a piece of art that you can sell right and now you the creator of that thing directly control how you benefit from it and in that resulting transaction of you know selling it trading it whatever it is that you might do with it it's your choice um and then the platform benefits but it's flipped around right it's like you choose in a way to get back to the platform to help you create economic success as opposed to you know you pay forward and hope you make money later or you create success for you know the project and then maybe the project turns on monetization and gives you a cut of it um and so that's the that's the inversion there but it's people can get tripped up a little bit I'm like well okay mostly worthless it's like okay what's the problem with that

personal meeting does not mean economically worthless does not mean lack of personal meaning right yes it's interesting how 99.9 of the nfd's in existence today in value will all converge to zero but we're still we're like really thinking about nfts as Financial assets um that have like that are supposed to be worth something um interesting how uh how paradoxical go that is well I mean that's the thing right you start you start uh and this is a little bit of a web 3 crypto phenomena right as things start with having Financial economic value and then you know meanings may follow from that sometimes now I actually I don't feel that way about Bitcoin honestly and and and in other projects I don't actually think that's a bad thing for the use case but I think nfts kind of um they complicate this a little bit right I think nfts is Art also makes

sense right because it's inherently there's something of value and that's why it's there and people can appreciate it and put a price on it but I think as it's kind of slid from uh that to like an element in a game you know or an asset in a game like the the thinking for all the other things kind of has to probably adjust with that too and that's yeah it's dependency you know you kind of have to work from where the world is to where you want to go 100 so you allow people to create things and truly own them and then the fact that there's potential for them to actually earn something with that is is absolutely secondary um and is you know it's definitely not the purpose um how does attribution work in in your vision and what you're building so just just to give you one question right one person builds like a massive like an MMO world right and then another person um builds a tiny cupboards that they

dreamed about um how does attribution work there what do you mean by attribution so you know you you said that both of these people will gain some ownership of the whole trip I know that you described right right right right you know one like they did like the value that both people add is different yeah so how does that work yeah it's a great question I don't think I have an answer for that yet because it is it is kind of like the the next logical problem to solve um there's a lot of soft Dynamics you know but just to cut to the heart of it like the hard Dynamics are hard to figure out so I'll uh I'll Riff on this you know and I'd be curious if you got your own take on it but in the soft soft yeah so so just to kind of spell this out from from foundations yes the idea that you come into this world you create a character we'll talk about our first project but you're creating a character in a story world that story world doesn't have kind of its cast yet right and we don't know yet

which of those characters or which of that cast is going to be like the phenomenal character that everyone wants to follow so to your analogies one person shows up creates you know the black widow or the Black Panther of this story world and another Protestant comes in and creates you know the character that no Booker uh the character in the world that no comic book or no movie has been made about yet right yeah and so now both of those folks have an nft of that character they both for now are a single vote in the Dao for Neo fairies uh and now it's like well is that really fair you know it's like it should and so I think part of this question is part of this question is um kind of like resurfacing all of the all of like the learning about politics that it feels like we're doing in this ecosystem that we've done over like you know centuries as humankind because well you know voting in the government also works this way like no one gives you more votes because you might have made

more of an impact on you know the tax the tax uh the tax revenue for the country deploying him in one vote right um and then you can go to the other end Spectrum which is we could try to measure that impact in some other way and then to accrue you know some sort of voting power to that so you know it could be that if you're able to tell on chain that you know whatever metric you're optimizing for if it's time spent or the number of the amount of love people have for a thing you know if people heart the thing you contributed then maybe that gives your voting power uh you know boost so that you have your nft but that nft is associated with a certain amount of Engagement and contribution and then you've got you know voting power to cruise relative to the impact you've had um super complicated though right I mean the mechanics feel like we'll figure that out like how to implement it on chain how do you track like it but it's the harder human question of like what's the right way to govern these kinds of things and do you you know does every

player have voice do they not um another part of this complexity is the Civil attack and civil resistance problem because you know it's one thing if I actually came in and I poured my Blood Sweat and Tears into a character that no one ever cares about but me right and in a way like I think I'd say philosophically just now hot takes that person and the person who creates like the next you know uh epic character maybe should get the same say because they're you know they're part of the system they've done the same work and the outcome the you know the benefit of having the uh the hero that everyone loves is that's going to have relative value compared to mine so we don't necessarily need governance to also mirror the economic value of what you've created but the hard part you know Sans like a good uh civil attack resistance botting situation is yeah you create a scenario where someone comes in they don't care they just hit a bunch of buttons or at worst they have a bot come in and get

you know 10 000 of these things 100 000 these things um and that's that's the part that keeps me up at night a bit more you know and it's it is it is made much harder in an ecosystem where even our values are aligned about uh privacy and security and not forcing everyone to docks themselves not making everyone go through kyc to contribute to a ugc project so that part's the hardest and we've we've got some very crude tools we've started to experiment with to to do that but it's yeah that so I think some of these things kind of have to fit together before you're going to have a great answer to that problem because if you can trust that the person you're talking to is a human and they're not you know tons of bots and you can kind of measure the effort they put in and we can get a sense for like um kind of the texture of this project like is it going to be like 10 people who make amazing things or is it going to be you know is it 0.1 percent that's going to drive a lot of the impact or is it going to be 20

um all of those factors just you know you just you don't you don't pretend to like know all those things going in or at least you shouldn't um and take it kind of one day at a time man our life in web 3 would be so much easier if we had a proof of humanity that didn't necessarily reveal who exactly you were yeah yeah it does it's it's so I'll tell you the closest thing that that kind of shows up which is very unsatisfying is um is when a platform that you already don't bother trying to hide from can be an intermediary and that's that's basically what I think different projects are trying to be so different projects are trying to become this but right now for example Discord is kind of solving this problem for us today right because we do want to make the earliest parts of this community as secure and scam free and uniquely

individual users as possible right because in our project right now you can create locations in the world where fairies are going to return but we don't want someone coming in and getting every location around the world and just sitting on it right so we have to do this filtering process but we don't want to kyc people we don't even want to ask for people's uh personal info in fact it's amazing I can't believe how many projects the ecosystem ask for phone numbers or ask for email addresses I am shocked and there's there's one that was actually asking for me to enter a phone number to register to become part of the community I was like what okay this happens like people let this happen so so but that said so we're trying to stay away from that um but we're kind of doing our own version of that that bad behavior which is we're forcing you to go to Discord and we're setting the security setting a Discord to the highest level which means you have to actually connect your phone number or verify your phone number with Discord but the nice thing is you're verifying with Discord which you might have already done for all these other

projects and so you know there's this intermediary trust centers equation again but you're kind of like well you know are people not going to use Discord anytime soon uh you know in this ecosystem probably not so it feels like less than asked for people to to do that with a third party and not us that said I've I've already had uh you know like really thoughtful ideal community members basically opt out because they don't want disco to have their their phone number so yeah I think you've got these stand-ins which are almost like web 2 stand-ins because that's the world everyone's kind of been dominated by and then they become like this intermediary where we don't need to see as a small project your personal info um but but I think over time someone's going to have that critical mass as a web 3 project that we can trust with you know using a bunch of this the really cool privacy preserving techniques that are that are coming out and then that'll become it but you're just waiting for that uh you're waiting for that critical mass winner take all moment where everyone's just like okay

that's the that's the de facto like you said a human verified human uh but you don't know who it is and yeah yeah so could you um maybe quickly more like be more specific around Neo fairies your first project yeah yeah because we've been talking in a high level and totally and thinking like high level I wanna I wanna understand exactly what's going on yeah yeah I love it um so neofaries is our uh it's our first project and think about it as an experiment in decentralized entertainment right the idea is if you truly wanted to create the kind of projects we're talking about um what are all the things you'd have to do and and how do you build something world changing in the process right so not just treating it as like a weekend hackathon but it's something we believe in deeply as a team creatively and technically so um you know one way to start talking about

this is think about it's like a it's an entertainment franchise that's what we're building and the aspiration the ambition like long-term ambition ends up being to be a generational iconic franchise like a lot of other entertainment IPS and intellectual properties you know of um it has extensions in fashion and movies and games and film and now so all these possibilities but the key thing with this is how do you do this with a community is part of it from the very beginning and it's not just part of it was at the center right so so because we all know what happens when you create a franchise that's world changing but how do you do that in a way where the the communities be part of it from the beginning at the core and how do you step towards it um you know instead of spending five ten years building investing in a franchise and then eventually having fans starting from zero and bringing your community along okay so for us the formula for Neo fairies and it kind of steps through what the project is pretty tangibly is kind of four parts the first part and this is the starting

point for all of us is make a story make a world that anyone and everyone can see themselves in most important thing right people of all sizes shapes colors places ought to see themselves in the stories and the characters that we're going to bring forward and so Neo fairies as a fiction uh is much better felt than heard you know so if anyone's actually curious go to Neo fairies.com and check out you know the content because it's much better seen than her but as a fiction the idea is that fairies are real they're in the world all around us they've just been in hiding and they've been in hiding because humans have chased them away centuries ago but a new generation of fairies is now here and like all generations one comes around that's done with tradition and wants to break all the rules and this generation of fairies is done hiding and what's going to happen is they're going to start to reappear in the world around us and the world they're in is our world

it's the real world right it's not some fantasy world and so the idea is to represent kind of these characters and their stories and their adversity right and to help make us the fan base part of that process and part of what's neat about the fairies is fiction if I can geek on this for a little bit is turns out that actually cultures and societies all around the world have deep history and lore and mythology around fairies or imps or elves right like the idea of these small creatures that is already there in lots and lots of literature and lore and so between the fact that this is in uh places all around the world with history all around the world with humanoids shapes and forms that can look like anyone we know is kind of the core to the fiction itself and the idea behind this fantasy and that's sort of Step One step two is you get to create

this world and these characters not just us so we've started kind of rolling the ball downhill do you think about it that way like we've created a backstory and a a motive Force for the the world to exist and why and where these came from but uh you will create the locations in the world that these characters show up in you will create the fairies themselves and you're going to do this with these sort of playful web app uh experiences right you're not going to have to be an artist this is not like a a work Dao you know this is like a you come to a web app and you get a really playful immersive experience and you get to contribute to this world and when you do right step three is those contributions uh those additions to the Neo fairies universe are nfts and they're nfts that you can mint and own directly so when you place a location in the world to create a safe space for a ferry that's kind of the first um that's the first part of the fiction

is you got to create safe places with eakers eakers are little beacons that create safety in the unit in the neo-farious world for fairies to return when you come to our experience right now you're placing Eco anywhere in the world that eaker is a safe place for Fairy to come back you can then mint that safe space and own that safe space as an eager and then the next step and the next release will let you create a fairy and the ferry will be created in a 3D environment where you can pick and choose lots of different attributes for your fairy uh there will be uh yeah there'll be no shortage of options and I'll talk about the numbers in a second but same thing right you create that Ferry you create that character you place it in the world you now mint and own that fairy and then as this roadmap builds out you'll be telling stories about these fairies in this world and you'll be kind of uh filling out the adventures kind of of this of this world together with the rest of your community members because you've got these building blocks of locations and

characters and a world in which um different kinds of motives and motivations will kind of pop up and drive this so um the last piece of this and this is the key thing is when you think about a project like this you don't want ten thousand locations you don't want 10 000 fairies right I mean this this is like why would you imagine Roblox or Minecraft were like hey everybody we got this great new world but once you get to ten thousand you're gonna have to go buy this from some hodler for 200 and then maybe get financing to buy it from a hodler right I mean that's so so part of what we're trying to do is build these systems and build this neo-faries project in a way where there's Millions and then eventually tens of millions hundreds of millions of possibilities right because it's a creative space you want to be fairly open-ended so right now if you go to our project there's I think a 4.1 million spaces in the world so there's no excuse not to

have a space and because it's a story world it's about the story you tell around space right you don't have to have the Metro Metropolitan downtown Center because somehow people think it's worth more you know all of stranger things is written about Hawkins Indiana right Hawkins doesn't even exist uh and Indiana is a wonderful place uh so that's kind of thing exists everywhere it's all really about your personal storytelling and same thing happens for the fairs we'll probably have tens of millions we have to figure out the number so there's no shortage of options for how someone can enter how someone can create how someone can own something and then like we're talking earlier that is just a matter of uh you know what you do to make those characters and locations meaningful and valuable um and what what meaning they have to you and then all those make you part of a Dao it's the Neo fairies Dao the moment you're an eager holder in your Ikea Round of tea older today you have governance rights and participation in that Dao um and some stuff we haven't talked about just yet uh is giving the Dow the

ability to hold the IP rights to Neo fairies so the Dow is going to be more than just a group of people with nfts it'll also be a way for us to really have ownership of the IP uh supported by governance of that IP with the community in a very tangible Way Beyond this kind of you know either ccoing it or holding on to it as as Luda ourselves so if I understand it correctly you are doing the web free practice of giving ownership of the whole ecosystem to everyone who contributes to it but it sounds like it is for now impossible for me to invest and gain more ownership by putting in some money is that correct yeah I think that's a good good summary and I guess technically technically you could you know go try to buy Acres from other okay other creators who made them you know I I mean we certainly haven't engineered anything

with this aim in mind right so there's there's very limited number of speakers we've distributed you have to do a lot to get one you can only get one but yeah I mean I guess in theory uh in theory once this thing rolls out but then you know you get into a weird situation of well if you've got a you've got 10 million of these um are you going to create you know hundreds of thousands are you gonna so that's a there's a tokenomics discussion that's really it's really a good one but it might take us down a rabbit hole where I just say dumb things um for a while because because you do have to think about tokenomics very differently like yeah I don't none of us want the nfts in this system or the Dow to be worthless right that's not that's not the goal um but you kind of we are optimizing for it being accessible affordable enjoyable first right not financially speculative and economically you know uh driven first and so I think

once you start from the pers everything I just shared with you is about making accessible affordable enjoyable now once you've set those kind of Flags in the ground you kind of have to come back to the tokenomics question and that's that's where you know the contrast is very easy to make you know nft project with only one thousand five thousand ten thousand um has a very clear path to creating as much demand for those limited Supply as possible that drives your price and then that gives you you know some version of calculus as an investor how do you want to participate in this thing and what percentage you want to engage in and you know you can evaluate like how much do you believe in the road map behind this project or whatever it is people so here it's like no you got to come in and create something and uh and I think over time maybe we come up with other ideas that do allow for the kind of investor audience to engage but that's sort of cart before horse in our our perspective it's really fascinating it sounds like

the way you've built this is in such a way that um because there's no limitations on the number of nfts right now if I was like this VGA I kind of like what he's doing and I think this he might be onto something if I'm going to buy all of the nfts that you have it's kind of like a weird investment because you you buy a steak in the whole thing but there's still millions of them potentially to be created which will almost be necessary to create the full value of this exact thing exactly exactly which is and that's that is a feature not a bug yeah in my opinion because I want the owners and the creators and the holders of these things the people who care about the IP not about the I the number on the IP right which which I don't maybe it's a controversial Point like maybe maybe you can't separate the two and I totally I could totally see why some of the magic of web3 is that those things are kind of intertwined you know so I definitely want to come across as someone who's you know naive about like that's the Ben

that's that's a perk of web 3 is the ownership part I mean we're talking about that here so yeah I think finding out a way for um is put on like the VC hat a little bit like finding a way for the market to price the project that's kind of indirect from the nfts themselves does feel like an important thing and maybe that's where governance tokens if you kind of redefine them if we can redefine governance tokens from being tokens you get for holding tokens you know like if we can get to a slightly more uh if we get slightly more um rigorous understanding of why governance tokens should exist that might be an interesting way to separate the idea the ideas here right and I think there's a uh optimism I think is it optimism has like a two house governance model that's it's it's really kind of neat they they've you know they're thinking about people are thinking about this model of there's the NFC holders and the participants in your

ecosystem and then there's like the governance tokens and you have a relationship between two but you don't let one override the two right so I think that's override each other so that starts to be like a very natural way to maybe think about how you know you as investor want to engage and you want to have a say then there are tokens you can engage in that don't involve you you know if you want to if you want to hold um 10 000 Acres right you don't have to come into the app and make 10 000 Acres you can engage in you know a near fairies Dow governance model that lets you have that in a in a different in a different kind of token and manifestation and then you just have to find ways to balance you know the voting and the the participation of those two sides so that um you know there's a bit of a check Mouse but I think there's some pretty cool models that people already thinking hard about the song so I don't necessarily have to invent this from scratch but you those are actually

particularly important in this ugc context because up until now I think nfts have been able to kind of conflate those two ways of engaging because they largely are still kind of speaking to a investment and speculation oriented endeavor but once you separate that out now now you have the problem you're talking about which is you do still want a value prop for the investors in the show and that's good right because they will actually help validate um and help lift and help create the resourcing to you know continue investing in and doing bigger and bigger things with this for this community so so yeah I think I think you need both and I'd love if you have any ideas on this but this is this is me kind of giving you my my um like very uh amateur you know amateur thoughts on on how we might solve that so first of all Vijay we are all just figuring all of this out still so you know I guess you know there's no right answer

um I I think what you're doing is right now um I think timing and having a good use for any token that you issue um like you will you always need to have a good functional use case for whatever you do and so you know this this brings us to the discussion which we can go into later about like issuing tokens to fundraise but it seems like right now what you're building is or like requires not necessarily funding but more creation and creativeness and so the tokens that you have right now are nfts that you give to people and that you allow like which give people the power to create to actually like start building this and then maybe at some point once you reach this scale where it starts making sense to use funds to accelerate it um yeah bring it out there then it might make sense to start thinking about how how do we how do we actually do this and and at that point I think you know a retroactive airdrop to the ones that contributed most you know

totally yeah just makes more sense in the lines incentives and in a more beautiful way totally yep yeah someone someone um a couple folks who I respect a lot had feedback that was um honestly if I can capture this right but it was like it was you know it's like centralizing distribution at the start you know is not a bad thing like it's it's it's not a like it gets to things like how do you do and you see this all over the board like how do you do Fair mints how do you make sure you work in so there's there's a I I think like it's it's nice to see like and these these folks come from um I'd say the more purest side of the of the you know blockchain and web through ecosystem and So you you're seeing I think a lot of people starting to to be more nuanced and where do you hold the decentralization you know where do you put like the dial on decentralization when it comes to practically building something important

and big and you know curation and distribution of your earliest members and um you know leadership of a project in the Dow you know like just handing everyone the rain start off that so you know this so it's Evolution process that's good and it feels like we're we're opening up in the right directions to Yes to make this work we're um we're speed running new ways of collaborating and new Financial systems to incentivize that collaboration yeah it is really fascinating because last week and you don't know this but I had a discussion with some of the foundational Builders within the loot ecosystem oh okay loot was created a bit more than a year ago and yeah you know there's so many similarities between what loot or like what what the current loot is right because the way they describe it is loot is a decentralized Disney or a decentralized Marvel yeah it's building our universe um and but it's and and they struggle with this it's

it's way more decentralized than what you're doing yeah and so it's really interesting there's a soup they were very inspiring for this I mean at the time that Shan and I left Google um and started this it was like spring the fall spring the summer of last year uh and we had kind of I told you kind of seen all of these signs kind of in the the months and quarters probably but loot kind of came out around the same time it just kind of reified this right salute and board ape Yacht Club right they both kind of put points on the map that kind of validated that yeah it's not just about nfts for art it's like there's a bigger larger thing you can do and I'd say we've kind of um we've taken more inspiration from loot than from say like the the nftp crowd because There's Something Beautiful about this composable modable extendable world right and and so but but that was very

much like the you know you always have the benefit of learning from you know what others kind of paved the way doing uh there is definitely some there are more experiments to be done in the middle ground between wild open-ended um decentralization to the point where your community has to literally like come up with and come up with the ideas and write the code and deploy software right so that's one inspect from the other inspectrum is you know what we know which is like you go into a room for two four or five years this is what our team this is what our teams well class that right is you go into a room for two to three to five years equate like a a triple A game and a Hollywood movie or a you know uh Next Generation machine learning model so like we're we're in the middle of that can you land and kind of get the best of both worlds like can you actually get the the creative Direction and the vision and the execution of the world we know where people do this well and the you know the open-ended experimental uh Community

ownership of the you know the wide open so we've definitely Fallen somewhere in between there very intentionally but you know like again taking a bunch of inspiration from from the um the pioneers of the the space so you seem to have like you have thought about this a lot um there's this concept of a dunbarment number which is the maximum amount of people you can be friends with or like yeah connected to or maintain relationships with it exactly yeah yeah what is like it maybe it already exist right but what is the Dunbar numbers for for for now I have no clue I mean we have to I I can't I can't speak to this intelligently because we are we are still very tiny you know we've been very curious and very small with the folks we brought in and but then um but then I think we also treat a dow very differently which I can talk about if that's that's useful but

um it it really depends how you define these things right if you look at like a Minecraft or Roblox there's a massive community of people there but they don't necessarily have to serve dunbars they're not limited by dunbar's number because I don't need to I don't need to make pain relationships with the with the millions of people in the in the right yeah um so in our in our world right the Neo fairies Dao we're kind of doing two things a little differently than a typical dowel so on one hand which I think more and more people are doing is we are committed to more leadership early on so we talk about ourselves and the kinds of dows that Luda makes as crater-led Dao's and just being really clear and open right from the beginning with people that there is leadership and that comes with the goods and bads of leadership right and but that's the way we believe these types of things should exist and so we talk about Crater lead dials and we've actually heard this from uh like dozens and dozens of fan

interviews and play tests right people want this at least the people we're talking to want this they want a Creator that's driving that and that's Luda yeah but on the other hand um we are trying to reframe a Dao from being a thing you join and get paid to work at like the next kind of job to something you're part of by being part of the community of people using this product right so the moment you come to the Neo fairies world and you make your first addition to that World by placing an eager you're part of the Dao there's no there's no you know work proposal you have to make and there's no payment for your time and services you've done the job of adding to this universe and therefore you to have you deserve to have a say and so when you when you think about it that way our Dao over time will have millions of people in it right because

anyone who's part of community and contributes is part of the doubt so from our perspective right when you ask the dial question it's like well I actually think every user in this collectively created Sandbox game or story world and things we build they should all be part of the Dow and they should all have a say in the governance of the future of the IP but then the Dunbar number I think is just something that's sort of like Falls then in the cracks of well is there like a subgroup of these people in the Dow that are really passionate about you know building a neo-ferries comic book series okay that's awesome and that group probably needs to be 150 or less to be able to you know to work functionally it needs to have a leader of some kind that's got the ability to drive that Vision forward and um you know you see you see that uh yeah so you see that play out in that way I think for us but I you know yeah I when people talk about whether Dallas can scale human coordination and you know I've even used that line you know

in different kind of material it's It's Tricky like I think I I don't think you uh I don't know if you can scale like The Human Condition you know and relationship management but there's definitely other parts of this that can be made quicker easier you know and so that's probably more about less about stretching that number and more about making the way people can do this and they can do it in their free time you know like they don't have to quit their day job they don't have to quit their day job to engage in Neo fairies that's kind of the um that's what we're trying to help push the thinking on is like you can be part of a Dao simply by enjoying the project you're part of and you can contribute and participate simply by doing what you would have done in any other context which is come home from your day job right or have some time on the weekend and this is the story you want to keep track of right not you got to quit you got to join and this is like your new life and we're going to find ways to make these tokens worth something so you can get paid by them it's like that maybe we get there

but that's just not the starting point what do you think the current nft landscape would look like if the supply of crypto punks was a hundred thousand instead of ten thousand ah yeah I I don't know I have no clue and I've heard so many theories about I've heard different theories uh or at least different kind of case studies people cited me but I you know I partly I'm not in that ecosystem so I can't I can't speak from a personal perspective which makes me uncomfortable right but uh with this with this but like you you there might be differences between launching a hundred thousand versus launching ten thousand and then adding ninety thousand hmm like that that's that's an important thing right um and I I don't know where the you know I think smarter people than me in this ecosystem might have like you know better theories about this or at least references but you know loot had a version of this they made their first batch and to Dom's credit you know he

instantly turned around wanted to create more for other people to engage right and synthetically but um but that created a backlash you know of different kinds or the market kind of effectively voted with its money to say like well these are the only ones that matter and so if that's going to happen anyway then did you really did you really expand your set in the in the way that you wanted now I think actually for them in their case if they create um if they create products around their universe that are compelling they're definitely people who just are going to want a free a free loot nft to be able to play and think and they should and that's wonderful that's so I think it actually did the job but when you ask the question of what would happen if crypto bunks were a 100 ten thousand yeah pardon me is like well maybe they would have set a pattern that other people on the market would recognize is valuable and then other people could do it that's basically what happened right they set a pattern with exactly the first 10 000 everyone followed it um but I don't know I don't know if

there's a physics to these things where like you create scarcity and that's your core value prop and then the physics of the system just kind of purge out you know anything that goes against that um counter example is it seems like boarding block club and others have done a really good job finding kind of extensions you know so you have your your 10 000 board apes and then you've got you know all these other kind of variations whether they're pets or extensions or Transformations on the core set and there's differentiation there but they all have the relative standing in like the you know the the Canon of like the original set and so those types of I think those types of playbooks have done probably more a better job than even I give credit to on expanding the supply without kind of undermining the you know the core the core early Parts but um but I think they're also fortunate to be able to do that and they could probably do a lot of things

you know that are new and different because they have such a great community and so engaged most projects aren't doing that you know and and they never will they're like they'll never get there or they'll never choose to go there and that's you know that that stuff is definitely the the Vestige of like a pattern that was set once and you know everyone collapsed on it as my final question to you I I'd love to like people know I do enjoy I'll take once in a while and so you know it seems within the web three space there is still so much to figure out that people see something that others have done and they're like people really like copying some of these things which is why I asked you the question what if crypto books were a hundred thousand with like the whole ecosystem looked different um so what I'd love for you is to to tell me like what do you think is or what bugs you most about what people are doing around nfts right now because you're like experimenting with them so

much yeah um as as you're hoping yeah yeah yeah I'm gonna force you to jump in on this one too but I I mean I think you you and I both know we shared this I actually think you know I'll say I'll say the hot take thing and then I'll be conciliatory like I I think the the absolute total obsession with uh I'll say what the outcome is because I don't know where to pinpoint the blame honestly the outcome is that a lot of these nfts and a lot of these projects are entirely driven around scarcity price action flipping and trading in order to create royalty streams and that kind of equation has just literally permeated everything everywhere and it has all kinds of these weird effects which uh you know when it gets like what bugs me it doesn't bug me that these projects exist I think people should do what they want I mean everyone from the consumer buying this stuff

to the craters creating it but everyone should do what they want and and um so that's not the issue but then I think the end result is it does drown out all of the noise like the thing that bugs me most is how much it crowds out the discussion about other ways to think about these things that that's the thing that bugs me most because it's fine for them to exist um but now like every conversation in different contexts with a user with an investor with a uh partner with a employee candid has to confront this question of the dominant model for an nft is a pfp of a pixelated thing that sometimes like you know is inversely correlated to what you think art should be right uh and this thing trades for certain amounts of money and the only way you can get it is by winning a mint or participating in lottery or buying something an expensive price and the way people engage around it and the way people talk about this stuff you know on Twitter

um even now I'm still shocked like every every other tweet from you know some think fluencer on on Twitter is talking about how like we have to move past pfps the 10K pfp model is old I've heard this for six months for every one of those tweets there's still like 99 tweets talking about how you got to believe in this next project because it's got this team with this road map and it can't be beat and floor sweeping and so that is uh that Dynamic makes it very hard then to say hey maybe there's a different way to think about incentive team there's a different way to make it accessible to people and it goes a little against everything we're saying web3 is for which is to bring people in to give them ownership of something to make it inclusive to the world and how you're going to do that with 10 000 things that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars you know uh and and to do that in the community and culture of like you know random pixelated things that feel extremely offensive in some cases to different audiences so that's

what bugs me um the the conciliatory part of this is like well fact is we had to start somewhere like if these projects all didn't do what they did we would not be having conversation about how nfts could be more than that and they've kind of established a pattern you got to give them credit for that for sure I actually think the pfp concept is strong in its nature you know like the idea of identity and Avatar is for ourselves it's a beautiful it's a beautiful thing you know and the idea of communities having a small group of people that can get excited about a thing so it goes kind of the concentration earlier which is it's more like a thing that always happens which is something works and if people stretch that thing way outside of what it's meant for uh and I it maybe is one of those things that feels magnified to me being a operator in it or it might be magnified in terms of its noise and it's um clutter like cutting through the noise because money is involved and as soon as money gets involved in anything it's

like blows up something that was already hard to talk about you know um so yeah it's it's got to give private credits too but uh it's time to move on yeah it's it's been time to move on and I think like the one thing if anyone cares you know about this in this ecosystem I I the one asked I've given everybody who has a megaphone because I don't have megaphone I'm like I'm a rando you know I'm just kind of working on this company and no one's like no one cares what I've got to say but if you've got a megaphone the number one thing you can do is to like down boost yet another conversation about how you know a limited project is going to become next big thing and people should mint it and then up boost like the weird experimental new things that show people these other things so you know I just see way too much discussion about how we need to move past it and way too

little showing people what those projects are and pointing at them you know or responding to messages where people are sharing you go some of these comment threads and some of these people are like hey check out this project and they're awesome projects they're the really creative interesting new things doing stuff like you know you know not to compliment ourselves but they're doing stuff like we're talking about build your own nfts right create your own things they're free mints but um but those don't get you know signal boosted like like a single boosted is like the hot take that we need to move past the thing we're doing and so so I think that's like that for me is a very precious resource if you've got a megaphone to try to to get everyone else seeing these new things and then yeah you know then there's other stuff we can do like supporting these projects and getting involved and all that but um I don't know though I'm super curious to get your take you've got you know you've got a a good vantage point on this and if you if you think there's like what are the pressure points that get us

to the other side is just time you know is it a breakout for one project or another that kind of gets guess people thinking differently and we've already had loot you know and others that have done a nice job doing the right thing in terms of free minting and making more Supply available but um yeah I don't know so what I'm going to do is I'm going to organize a a jam session a public jam session like this and we can get maybe one or two others on as well and we can just yeah awesome try to try to think about creative ways in which we can use these new technologies and if these fungible tokens to do cool right um I have some ideas um I think and I've said this already we're using nft screamorphically and so I can I can make that case then and then we can we can jam about that um but you talked about people you know having a megaphone and a boosting conversations about new ways of doing this if you enjoyed this conversation listener this is perfect for me just like this you know you don't have to use

a megaphone just retweets you know like this conversation subscribe on YouTube that's the first step um and then you know you'll be um like we'll let you know when we have this discussion um where we go into some some use cases because we're we're getting to the end of this episode but uh this I think this is definitely conversation worth having um and I'm super excited to do that I love it so um Vijay um where can people find more about you uh more about Luna yeah great uh me I'm at uh at VJs syndrome uh which is not going to be easy for anyone to spell so I'll say it'll be in the description so yeah you find me on Twitter there um but also like happy to field emails from people so it's VJ at ludaprojects.com uh ludaprojects.com is where you can learn a little bit more about our company and um projects and team and uh we are definitely hiring right now uh across the board but particularly engineering Talent of all all flavors

um so there if you want to check out a bit more about our roles you can go to careers.luderprojects.com and then the other thing I'd have to say is if you're interested at all what we talked about with Neo fairies or what a project like this uh could look like or being part of an entertainment Dow check out neofaries.com and uh and you can kind of join today through our Discord and find your way to the world we've built and play sneaker and have an nft that you create on your own from scratch and be part of the Dow so any of those things I'm happy to chat with people about on Discord or uh on email or wherever else people want to find me fantastic PJ thank you so much for being here yeah I know thank you this is awesome I agree this uh it was very interesting and I'm inspired to start thinking about new cool ways to use nfts and all of this stuff so um thanks for that um listener thank you for listening if you made it here um really appreciate it

if you did like it please um give us a thumbs up in Spotify or wherever you're listening or watching this and yeah we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode [Music]