[REDACDTED] 2024 | Memes, Agents, Narratives Getting & Holding Mind Share in the 2025 Token Market

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1. 0:00

   I'm zucky uh I let's see I've been in blockchains for 10 years I used to do only Tech stuff so I did like consensus algorithms and cryptography now and then I like did the go to market for Cosmos um and uh now I guess I'm like I'm like a kind of unusual person in like sometimes I do a cryptography sometimes I make a meme sometimes I launch an nft collection um I've been helping the near Foundation think about how to take these

2. 0:33

   like components the like relatively mature near blockchain Tech uh the emerging near AI Tech um and the uh like chain abstraction Tech and turn this into like some sort of coherent hole um I'm not really laying out a vision for this this is more like your like General reminder of uh a regular reminder of what blockchains actually are um what does it take to win uh in in this world

3. 1:04

   um what are the interesting experiments so that's what this talk is about um so the first and foremost thing is blockchains are social coordination Technologies um what does it mean to be a social coordination technology uh social coordination Technologies are uh basically how humans come to agreement figure out you know how to operate relative to each other it's primarily what blockchains are um and when you

4. 1:33

   have uh and so we tend to get lost in all of the mumo jumbo about tps's and l1s and l2s um and it sort of tends to distract um from why we build blockchains uh which was to find a new way so like we've had like historical ways of coordinating socially uh companies Corporation companies tribes nation states Etc uh blockchains are the First new one in a long time um that's why this is an interesting space um it's

5. 2:04

   trying to build social coordination through distributed uh uh databases and through uh uh you know cryptography as a as a trust mechanism so like but like ultimately what we need to make anyone use this is come up with shared Stories the optimal story is a story that are like self-or enforcing through selft talk this is what people say when they're like hey this blockchain is a cult um CU I'm sure anyone who has been in the space uh says like such and such cult you know there's

6. 2:38

   like the cardano cult is like kind of like the the like classic example um Cults are work best so like the optimal way is to like move a story from something that is sort of disseminated in a top- down mechanism so like you know you have a Twitter account you have a set of of people at like a Foundation you have a Founder who's telling a story um to the sort of wider Universe of people who have Buy in and skin in the

7. 3:08

   game in the story are actually propagating the story extending the story and like coordinating their actions through their own internal mental representation of the story so I think that's like when people like sort of positively look at something like salana um and the journey that Solana has been through for the the last two years it sort of has seemed to have gone through this transition from a system where people were primarily interacting

8. 3:33

   with it on the basis of hey what are like you know there's like the salana foundation their super team who are like pushing out a message to now everyone is in that ecosystem is kind of coordinating the story within themselves so monies are the most powerful story that humans have ever created um and it is a story that is like constantly reinforced through selft talk you know every time think about you know am I getting paid enough how much money am I going to make trading a token into

9. 4:05

   like into and out of a stable coin I'm reinforcing this concept of money um so when we try to build secure distributed systems um so like blockchains protocols all these things they're incredibly timec consuming um and it's like really hard to iterate quickly um because you don't like the cost of iterating quickly is like eating everyone's money to either North Korea or the void

10. 4:30

    um uh so this is more like building a bridge or an airplane than building a website um narratives are the fast iteration side of this business um so they support rapid experimentation iteration and Novelty um which are I think really uh you know so like some narratives took a long time so like mod like the modular narrative um I think ecam gave a talk at like the uh GTM con uh yesterday where he was like it took

11. 5:02

    us a year uh I helped work with him I remember when uh eam like first came up with the word modular he was like we're this is going to be our narrative I was like this is smart uh it took us a year to like bring to like sort of get Buy in on crypto Twitter um into like the modular narrative um but it took five years to build Celestia so like we definitely built the narrative faster than we built Celestia um and in general The Narrative side is like the way

12. 5:27

    faster things so like narrative are like low risk in this sense like you can pick a narrative try it in the market probably find out in six months or a year whether or not it has any legs iterate on it um whereas when you're like building secure decentralized technology it's going to take you years typically to build it so like these things have to happen um so your chain abstraction your next Generation defi your FHA your MPC your

13. 5:58

    te your stable coin will not have any users without these self-reinforcing stories um I think like one of the things I think that is a little bit surprising to people on the tech side is in the in previous Cycles um you kind of had these like kol's YouTube people I remember this from 2021 you would we had this with Cosmos right like we had the like the the narratives and the stories that people that were onboarding users didn't really come from any specific place instead there were these people

14. 6:30

    who kind of self-appointed themselves as K's sort of built these stories around your thing um I mean you've seen that still in the cycle with like what anom has done for salana um but I think in general this like this pattern is not going to be the pattern going forward um K's are not going to create your uh stories around your tokens for you um and I think the next thing that we're going to see is like the commodification of narrative creation

15. 6:56

    and I think AI is basically going to do this um so the idealized crypto founder for the last few years has been the 24/7 crypto Twitter reply guy who's constantly advancing a narrative like anatol and this Twitter account is like the perfect example of this I think we see this fully commoditized into like AI agents in 2025 um where like the idealized uh uh crypto founder is now like truth terminal um where you have an AI agent that is like con constantly

16. 7:30

    sort of interacting with Twitter uh constantly advancing a narrative you know this stuff sort of works today but I think we're going to start seeing this working in reality um and so now we're going to start seeing a world in which like all of this Tech that we build is going to be armed with strong adaptable metics like there's the sort of meme go like the there's a sort of thing being pushed

17. 7:54

    about like sort of the dynamic like adaptable meme coins um and like all of these AI meme coins I think this is like generally what the future of marketing looks like um looks like in this space and so for every uh for every uh uh piece of technology you must have the 0iq version of of the narrative in order for your thing to be able to take this is like sort of the left curve right

18. 8:24

    curve midwit meme um but the time of accidentally stumbling into this is probably long past um so that's my talk um does anybody want to have uh ask any questions or chat about anything and then I can gu any questions yeah who is the most interesting person on crypto Twitter see I like I'm like a truth terminal Fanboy I think the most interesting person is like this art project that is like part andd part llm um uh I think

19. 9:11

    this like idea of like sort of like an of of like an a of an AI augmented thing like crypto founder is like the most interesting thing going on right now um I think in general the efforts of crypto Founders to like Drive narratives that are the like old way that we have done this in the past seem to be running into like more and more problems I think like a lot of people have like struggled with this in this like last twoyear cycle because it was like you know people blame the changes in the Twitter

20. 9:45

    algorithm and they were like it's the Twitter algorithm that's preventing us from like achieving any sort of like narrative cohesion um but yeah so like you've had all of these things like you know like we went through the era of like the Anon uh uh Twitter accounts the like balloon lovers and Bas 16 Z's as those were the like interesting Twitter accounts now they seem lame um the like always online crypto founder is sort of becoming commoditized so I think we're like ready

21. 10:15

    for something new a I don't think of this as like the djen audience I think this is the this is like this is like if you can't figure out a way like like because this stuff is social coordination technology there will always be this narrative element like you can't just be like look I have solved this problem for you use my tech um because there are no Moes in crypto like if you just solving a problem and there is no narrative around you um your model is just going to be commoditized

22. 10:55

    by somebody who's like well I've like also solved this problem right like I think this is like like across is a good example of this like yes it's generic like interrupt technology and a direct generic inter like intense protocol but it's like Hart and Brian fighting on Twitter that like gives it some mimetic bandwidth and like maybe this will work but there's no other Moe and like what

23. 11:20

    other choice do do they have um so those are that's kind of where I think this is going so like I don't know if you have a project go find someone to fight on with on Twitter that might be like a good model um like you do have to like Define your enemies Define your enemy Define who you're going toore you have to create narrative tension um so like actually having a like a defined enemy

24. 11:44

    uh is I think like a is a good model you know being like the thing you're against so you know like Celestia did a great job of this you know they like created this like sort of artificial monolithic versus modular like you know we're like 3 years in and everybody has has agree that there just like all blockchains look the same in 5 years but like you know that created some narrative tension and and generated some

25. 12:15

    momentum yeah I I I do I do think blockchain near is a blockchain so there's like a there's a bunch of specific things I will say about that and that's like a good way to end this which is the last two years the like chat GPT era of AI blockchain has been like the you either had a meme or you had a reality and if you tried to combine a reality and a meme they would annihilate each other so

26. 12:41

    like you know you have like fetch which is like a$0 billion Cosmos chain maybe it's more today um with like doing AI agents where there are no AI agents um uh but like if you like added AI agents that thing would be worth actually much less than $30 billion um I think that like right now we're like on this like threshold of moving from like of like crypto plus AI being purely meme to actually being like some reality to it that can be self-reinforcing um I think these AI

27. 13:11

    agents like are showing the way and I think that can feed back into each other and like make the new blockchain for AI thing actually work thank you very much