• Originally did Economics at York.

• Went to a community college for blockchain development camp when everyone thought crypto was dead.

• Met people who helped with the curriculum and got intern gigs.

• When he decided to jump into it, he was just experimenting on things.

• Originally thought crypto was going to fix everything, later in the program realized that crypto utility for him was primarily on the financial side with some identity stuff.

• Hasn’t touched Remix and Gears since he got into the space, he learned it before but just the way he went about diving into the space he never really applied himself on the developer side.

  • More recently wanted to make a token curated registry and to integrate into Metamask, and couldn’t do it. Although he learned and understands the technicals, he hasn’t applied it at all.

• Crypto requires some baseline level of optimism, where even if you don’t necessarily have cryptography or CS degree you want to be part of something that is revolutionizing.

• It's not too different from any other industry, you have to understand the bare minimums and have baseline fluency. Baseline fluency helps you identify whose in it as a grift and whose not.

• NFT’s helped popularize and opened doors for a lot of people, as long as people could spin up an IPFS or something they don’t have to go down the DeFi route necessarily.

• The space is heading right now to a place where people understand that you don’t have to be a shadowy super-coder to contribute. This was a big hurdle back in the day.

• Now things have gotten even more complicated, with L2s and different blockchains with different compilers.

• People have learned how to onboard, with the latest cycle you can see that it has become easier now to onboard people.

• More education tools will be built next cycle to onboard more people

• Crypto has the most interesting growth mechanic ever, instead of incentivizing through referral codes like other companies, in crypto you can experiment, have airdrops etc.

  • Ton of people got onboarded because of the uniswap airdrop – airdrop farming helps people become competent on chain

  • People are incentivized to participate on chain and are introduced to new projects: "log on, play with our dapp and you get something that might be worth something"

• Airdrop traction was peak with Cosmos last cycle and Solana summer.

• Projects like COPE were hyped because you could sign up and incentivize airdrops across platforms, which is good for younger people who can familiarize themselves with ecosystem and get paid to do it to an extent.

• The NFT whitelisting frenzy that happened was the same thing:

  • People were learning about how to hunt, flip, use wallets etc.

• If you want to identify last run with a narrative, the NFT narrative was probably the biggest thing.

• Similarly, BSC narrative was huge, because BSC was the earliest scaling EVM.

• Probably comes from retail based transactional services, as soon as people understand how fast money can move compared to traditional fiat rails.

  • People find a seamless way to spend crypto balance and things are settling instantaneously (if CashApp, Apple Pay etc. implemented it).

  • People can earn interest on them (even though past examples like BlockFi blew up).

• There's a bit of growing backlash regarding if protocol really needs tokens and if airdrops are most effective method

  • Can make the case that it illustrates a selfish nature of people in general:

    • During the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war when there were addresses to donate, donations were limited and then when a potential airdrop was announced donations exploded.

    • If anybody had an idea about the future of tokenomics they would be rich, best bet is to try and bring people in, and hope that with the help of the people brought in you can figure out how to incentivize efficiently.

• When people leave office/desk jobs and retail jobs that are not rewarding and start making money/learning information/working from home on web3 jobs there will be a massive wave of onboarding (albeit it will be quieter/less revolutionary/more indirect compared to NFT/BSC narratives but more impactful).

• Ton of projects are building around DAO infrastructure, and making it simple to not only come in on the user side, but also on the contributor side.

• Currently it's hard to create good incentivization loops and retain talents in DAOs because of:

  • Unclear benefits, taxes and payments - a problem especially if you want to work in crypto and you have to support a family

• DAO tools and infrastructure will bring contributors in eventually.

• The gap between traditional/corporate structures and DAOs are kind of lessening:

  • Different legal frameworks that add bank solutions, tax reporting, new payroll solutions, and allow to operate out of entities are being developed.

  • There's still the issue that even if you get a good crypto job offer, when you compare it while calculating the taxes and other benefits offered by traditional structures, it might not be worth taking it.

  • It's likely that that gap will be closed rapidly over the next 6 months

• Currently DAOs cannot onboard people directly off the web2 space.

  • Trying to convince someone and bring someone from a FAANG company is impossible not because they don't believe in web3 but because job security is not there.

• To onboard contributors there needs to be a shift away from current work system.

  • Currently: people are reliant on the workflow centric nanny state with Slack/Corporate CRMs etc. where there is a reliance on project managers and strict guidelines

    • It's a big shift to move into a DAO Discord/Telegram and try and understand a fundamentally decentralized system with lots of autonomy.

• Although DAOs might be decentralized their planning and execution cannot/should not be.

• You need more people who are also worker bee's etc.

• DAOs stumble because everyone is doing multitask roles and mostly focusing on strategy: few people are doing operations, administration, note keeping, HR etc.

  • Although these roles are fundamentally unglamorous, they are the connective tissue in the way that DAOs operate.

• Sami's protocol does strategy sessions to come up with key building blocks and money legos and striving towards their common goal of immutability.

• Instead of focusing on scaling and only growth, allows them to focus on what they are striving towards: immutability, a permissionless system, composability and easy integration.

  • If there's a common goal there aren't issues, since the end goal is to dissolve the foundation and let it live in the world as it should be, which others can build on.

• People hate Andre Cronje because he "rugged" Solidly, reality is:

  • It was a great idea because you have a fully immutable DEX that people can collaboratively work on.

  • There's no need to have a DAO for everything and tokens don't need to be upgraded constantly.

• There's a bad feedback loop in the industry currently:

  • This idea that if you have a token you have to have a DAO and push out governance proposals all the time.

• Protocols should work on creating something that can be released into the wild that others can build on top of

  • Part of the reason why crypto is so concerning into so many legacy institutions: it's a system that no one controls, that is egalitarian, permissionless and self sustaining and antithetical to a legacy system that needs to control.

  • Bitcoin is like this: its not immutable there are changes that were made to Bitcoin, there's no governance token but if the nodes agree to it changes are implemented.

    • A much better path compared constantly pushing governance proposals, making everyone involved as they can be, constantly make changes.

    • If there's a core flaw or someone comes along that makes your protocol useless, there should be a migration of sorts and major upgrades are a good idea, but there is no necessity to constantly push a small fix and end of year it doesn't look the same.

    • Case study: Sushi:

      • Sushi was a great DEX, they had a good PMF, they introduced so many things. Now it's unclear, they could've just focused on growing the DEX, they didn't have to keep pushing on new codebases.

      • A protocol that didn't initially have structure, then had too much.

      • Protocols should just make a good product, instead of burning cash and employees for something that might not work out. Instead focus on the core product because if it is valuable it can be used by other protocols like SDKs or APIs are

• Redacted/New Order first came onto everybody's radar, because it has a distinct design/aesthetic/visual style:

  • Tactile style, with streetwear and cicada 3301 aesthetic.

  • Spoke the language of the old internet: ARG's, shadowy/hidden cartels etc.

• The form represents the function, the Redacted end goal is to build a liquidity engine.

  • Since it is less user facing protocol, and more something to be used by DAO native projects, to integrate and increase liquidity, they could have more fun with the branding and tailor it towards what CT likes.

  • Not something for non-crypto natives/retail, the success of Redacted depends on it being integrated into dapps and if its smart contract are being used without being realized.

    • This is already being done with Aura, and other big projects launching now with one of their products called the Hidden Hand, where they don't even know they're using the product because of autocompounders and etc.

• Redacted was a shift away from Neon Labs Solana Style or Instagram/Corporate Art that many projects use

  • Solana Style branding (minimalistic FAANG/Apple style) is the path that most people want to go to since they want to be in everyone's phone and wallet and be user friendly.

  • It's also a way to Trojan horse your protocol to look like something TradFi might like, and to reduce the intimidation factor of self-custody and etc. by making sacrifices and making it more user-friendly.

  • AAVE is one of the few that uses the simple/minimalistic style and it works really well and is interesting.

  • CT probably appreciated the shift in branding since they got tired of seeing Solana/Corporate style projects.

• Projects do not need to tailor their products only for institutional capital, they can also build for the next generation, the kids who grow up with Metamask wallets before bank accounts and who will be more familiar with Ethereum compared to TradFi system.

• Projects do not need to be scared that institutions are scared of crypto, there's value in DeFi because it's something that many people enjoy.

  • No one enjoys the traditional finance/banking system - focusing on enjoyability is a good and important part of the process.

  • A lot of people would rather use UniSwap (because of gamification and enjoyability) rather than Coinbase, not because they don't like the centralization, but because it's not fun.

  • Food farms were popular and successful because people enjoyed them despite the product being flawed.

• DeFi 1.0 (SNX. Comp etc.) everyone thought that it would replace TradFi.

  • It is more realistic and fulfilling to build an alternative or complementary system, rather than a system which would replace.

  • E.g. Redacted wants to provide liquidity-as-a-service to DAOs who do not want to work with traditional MMs or those who bootstrap liquidity. Doesn't mean that they want to replace MMs.

How to attract those dissatisfied with TradFi:

• Next generation already in the bag.

• Boomers are famous for following trends and tapping into markets younger generations have show interest in.

  • If younger people show that there's a demand for DeFi products, boomers will be forced to come.

• The issue is with Millenial crypto haters who are skeptical and provide blanket justifications about why they hate crypto.

  • Most environmental concerns are fixed with PoS - but hard to explain PoS vs. PoW to people since they don't put effort to learn.

  • Justifications are usually hypocritical, since they're not benefited by it they blame it, while they are okay with receiving Amazon packages overnight, while two people had to die of kidney infections on the line for it to happen.

• Projects feel the need to be headline chasing, to make sure everyone knows about them.

  • This ends up being super unsustainable, since they are pushing tech onto retail that retail was not ready for.

  • This was apparent in how Anchor became popular because people were calling it something like savings accounts.

  • Similarly media companies can use headlines to get clicks, and they do this through fearmongering headlines.

  • This is not too different than what the industry does with all these partnership announcements everyday to get people to click on the dapp.

• Approaches to crypto are reactionary, to the point that they say "we've seen enough scams/failure/bad actors that we should either ban it or regulate the hell out of it".

  • Next cycle there will be even more scams than even these one's. Next cycle will be most likely major family offices/banks buying bitcoin and kicking off the next rally.

  • Liquidity attacks will happen next cycle.

  • What happens is, a lot of people who were tailoring to those types of markets perform an attack on Tether (in the form of a massive short). What will happen to crypto is that, because the institutions have lobbying power, they'll use it as an angle against the industry.

• What is your favourite anime of all time:

  • Sami only got into anime recently, favourite one he's watching right now is One Punch Man.

• Who is your favourite poster on twitter:

  • USDCBULL1

• Do you know who USDCBULL1 is:

  • He doesn't

• Criminally underrated on twitter:

  • @0xdrej

• Unusual food take:

  • Recently found out that not everybody likes poutine. Favourite drink/cocktail?

  • Trying to quit drinking, not alcoholic, favourite drink prior were jägerbombs.

• How was NFT NYC:

  • Sami didn't go.

  • Kitsune thought it was fun, midtown Manhattan is worst food in the world, fakest part of NY, designed to make people from middle America never want to come back to NY.

    • Fun to see how publicly embarrassing only NFT bros are - and kind of a reality shock that NFT people and crypto people are vastly different and part of different sides of Twitter.

    • Kitsune realized that Kitsune name might not be the best name since it makes him seem like he's fresh off the Anime convention holding onto a body pillow.