James Waugh on Allo Capital Podcast

Transcript

you know like 10 years ago first time to mess around with the stuff I was like just finishing high school going to college being like this is going to be awesome it's going to change tomorrow and now I think over the next 10 years many many more assets will become tokenized and those will be traditional assets like rwas National currencies and then there also be mem coins I don't think the meme coins are that answer and if anything it's actually the opposite of what you're training people to do but I think slowly you know like eum's values of the sort of like decentralized ownership wanting to contribute to something that you own because you want to build a better world you know these like um philosophies are slowly disseminating out I am seeing that I was on the ski lift here the

other day and this kid was talking about ethereum and SM like yeah we're learning about it at school and like our friends are talking about it wow that's a very impressive school with if you want to do money laundering you know you make it back that's the same evilness as the idea that you know if you want to do something [ __ ] up with a to and you should make it D you know and so I think that like we keep going through the universe and another 50 years or another 300 years there will be many new like amazing novel use cases and many more like evil shitty use cases and that's just like a reality of the technology being used all tokens will be Dows and all Dows will be tokens and that was before any token had called thems a dow I think the challenging thing is like um

as you start to look at allocating a a token eardrop and then you start to look at the number of user us users that fall into each category you know very quickly you run out of tokens welcome to the al. capital podcast powered by the green pill network if you're just joining us we are doing seasons on the green pill podcast and this season we are summoning al. capital a new spin out from gitcoin that is designed to build the capital allocation layer of the tokenized internet I think that there's big upside here for gitcoin and for the wider web 3 Community Capital allocation is a multi-trillion dollar design space and VCS governments NOS and DS all have to allocate Capital to survive and reach their goals but is also a place where you can start small every time you spend

money you are allocating Capital things like buying coffee uh things like buying things on the internet are all examples of allocating Capital so there's a whole spectrum of needs and design space here and I think that the onchain Primitives that we're inventing in ethereum are going to change how we allocate capital on this podcast we are threading a through line partnering with Builders researchers and funders to figure out what onchain capital allocation will look like and building it on chain if you want to learn more visit our website at al. Capital where you can download the Alo books for free play with some of our daps join the telegram or participate in the Dow design contest proposal Our Guest today is James W James W is a founder of fire eyes which is a dow design consultancy that helps build Innovative web 3 Dow ecosystems

James and I work together on the gitcoin Dow design back in 2021 and so it's exciting to bring him back and to talk about the aloe Capital design space and D design so on this episode we talk about onchain Capital allocation what are his most exciting use cases what are the ways that he thinks that we should design the aloe Dow what are the open problems in the Dow design ecosystem and how can the most leading Innovations in Dow design be applied to al. Capital so this was a fun episode I'm always excited to talk to James and I think you're going to enjoy it as well [Music] hi James how you doing good how are you

pretty good uh we are summoning aloe capital and I really wanted to talk to you about it because you helped design getcoin back in the day and you and I go way back from those experiences and wanted to hear about your recent work with fire eyes and how you've been doing Dow design and how the State of the State has evolved over the last couple years so maybe you could just kind of te us off and tell us about Fise yeah sure I mean like and definitely St to see how you know you guys are thinking about aloe can be used inside of different protocols to deploy you know Capital inside of ethereum in a meaningful way and not just like spammy uh meme coins s of become the the norm but I am from fire and initially we started it in sort of 2016 2017 as like tokens were first

getting there kick off and sort of continue to develop in that direction really just being like an encyclopedia of all token strategies and how they should launch and how to do an airdrop and um all those kind of mechanics we spend all of our time thinking about how those things work um and so we've worked along many alongside many of the coolest protocols in the universe like getcoin um optimism super rare Rocka pool recently with some little bit with igen LA um and scroll but really sort of like we pick the most high impact projects to ethereum and then we say we want to work with you um and to date no one has said go away yet which is lucky um but really like trying to work out what is going to be the most high impact with theorum and then try to like help them on that journey and so

sometimes that might be you know sitting down with a Founder at an event you know for a few hours and being like all right what's most stressful and doing some sort of bound to therapy type stuff um or it might be you know working for with a project for like 18 months sort of going into a token launch and really workshopping on like how do we want to distribute it what what should it do and how do we make sure the token is sort of the highest impact it can be so I guess my my sort of reductionist summary is that projects hire you to help them deploy their first initial governance and token allocation Dow summoning type stuff exactly yeah yeah and also you know if you're cheap you can just invite you on a podcast episode and get the the advice for free exactly exactly or you

know actually for a lot of the work we do if we're friends we'll happily do a [ __ ] ton of work you know with sort of no expectation because if it's high if we view it as high impact then like that's actually the measurement and like ethereum succeeding is worth a lot more to us than like any individual Cen succeeding and sort of like creating that um foundation so those those wins can happen a part I'm I'm an e bag holder too so I get it exactly uh little sad sad laugh there okay so what I want to talk to you about is the State of the State of Da design and uh where I want to start I think is where our relationship uh or at least start professional relationship begins and that's in 2021 uh getcoins exitting

consensus and it needs to become a dowel because we want to be credibly neutral and we want to fund public goods in a credibly neutral way and we want to be governed by our users as opposed to being a company that's governed by uh just investors I think that we work together with you in dely digital on the gitcoin launch and uh you know tracing that back I think that there's been a lot of lessons over the years for running a dow and executing a dow and being involved in a dow um and the state of Dallas has evolved from my perspective a lot over the last four years years how would you trace Dow in 2021 versus Dow in 2025 what are the big diffs that you're seeing in the projects that you advise well and I think that like there's an interesting distinction there

between like I think back then you know Dows were only just getting their Kickstart first of all of you know tokens calling themselves DS was pretty early but second that like you know the meta cartels and these sort of like more Community Centric efforts you know that we actually were Dows in a sense that everyone is aligned and we know everyone inside of it and we sort of want the same outcomes you know that was like the purest da was almost in its Heyday I think then and so that you know everyone lik that idea and was really resonating with it and that led to a lot of these um token projects adopting the same like language and methodology to describe what they were building which is like we want a big Community we want everyone to be bought in we want everyone to be

aligned you know sort of what are the what's the language that we should use to um describe that and so you know maybe 2020 but really like 2021 forward I think we saw you know the shift I think it was maybe a year earlier in that I wrote this article called like all tokens will be Dows and all Dows will be tokens and that was before any token had called them a DA and that was really sort of like seeing this Vision through of like you know what the da the original one wanted to be and then this sort of spin out of like a million in one different tokens and it's like how do you like reconcile those two things right like how do we pull the da ideology that was sort of launched in 2017 into like every all of these different tokens that existed and so

that was what I think we saw then you know sort of fast forward from going from when there was a handful of these token DS and you know a handful more of these Community DS to now like I think someone's here it's like 200,000 you know like hundreds of thousands of DS now what that actually means I think is a very meaningless question you know like anyone can sort of spin up and make their token da or their you know multi- and call it a DA but still you know we have gone from Zer to one right where there was just like a 10 or 20 to now they're being 20,000 even as a conservative estimation you know that is really um that has moved us a long way but with it has come with um a lot of noise you know where maybe at the ma at

the beginning there majority of those were high impact you know High development whatever to now like such a small portion of those 20,000 or 200,000 are doing anything useful and I think that's like almost been reflected in the way that they even for these bigger token Dows right with like X number of billion dollars in the protocol or a token worth x hundred of million of dollars and they have these DS that are really like stuck in the mud right where like's this the main people and and I've certainly seen this more recently of these like Dow service provider organizations and they might be making proposals or helping you you know shiping your and like that's a valuable thing to be doing but there are now so there's like blood in the water and now there's these sharks circling you know

that sort of like want to sort of Shar and say hey well we'll really help your Dow out and you know all you have to do is pass 50 $50,000 a month and we'll really improve your Dow and like that's the primary way that people are engaging with Ds as these like almost Dow service providers which I like argued for you know I want there to be more of these Dow service providers but it's that you need to be doing stuff that isn't just service providing to the Dow so you can service provide some more you know like what are the tangible things of the way you um engage a wider stakeholder group to actually like get some meaningful proposals going forward and so I think you know to summarize of like the 2021 was like tokens had just realized they could become DS and sort of like what

the what that actually meant and what the downstream effects of that were really unknown and now sort of you know four years on and maybe there's still a lot of unknown unknowns but there's certainly the known which is that just slapping the word Dow on your token you know doesn't mean that people are going to care and actually if anything might harm you know how people engage with your protocol do you think that Dow I think Dows were pretty hot in 2021 do you think that that term is ascended or descendant or kind of just leveled off into the background the cosmic background noise of the space it's funny it's like almost since then maybe you know a year earlier even of like it was like the year of the da you know and I remember like 2020 was there and then 2021 was there and then maybe 22 2022

wasn't but then 2023 was that you know and it's sort of been this like continuing continuous sort of circle of people wanting it to be the years that Dows really get traction and as I've sort of gone from inception of the term you know to now it really feels like that idea that it's going to be the year of the DS is actually missing the Mark it's like you know we don't have the year of the startup you know or the year of the company it's like actually these are just like terms that we use in the background that's like are just like infrastructural or sort of philosophical um frames of Mind of how you coordinate right of like are we in a um Co-op or are we in a company or are we in a DA like it's it's not the year of that

thing it's that it's like a tangential background thing that's like helpful but the way that you push forward and so I think Dows have certainly fallen out of the linelight and even when you talk to investors right like Dow Tooling in 2020 was hot you know like every investor was making a d toing investment and now if you are even near to that being a dow tooling example no one will touch you none of these firms because they've all been burnt from these Investments they made you know three years ago that were like Dow tooling and then you're like oh [ __ ] how do I monetize this how do I launch a token around this when actually it's like a tooling infrastructure and so I'd say we probably have fallen off in hotness and certainly there's a lot of talk on crypto Twitter at least of

like you're running a dow or you want to be a DA you know what are you even doing what is it you know I think there's actually probably some negative connotation that didn't exist back then well I definitely bought the the Dow hype in 2021 that's why we made getcoin a DA and I think there was a good reason for that we wanted to be democratically governed um not all Dows are democratically governed but that was our story for gitcoin at least initially and um you know I think we learned a lot over the years and I wrote a book called How to Da uh which it took us three years to get it out and by the time it was out I think thats aren't is hot anymore but I just think it's such a fascinating design space I mean we're basically going from the LLC and the

company being the best way that we can organize humans towards a share goal and now we have blockchains as the ultimate coordination substrate and I think we're we're five years into Dows and the LLC is like well the corporation is 300 years old the LLC is like 50 years old I think if Dallas just cook for another like 10 or 15 years we're going to see some really amazing stuff BS Dows or at least tokenized networks and what would your reaction to to that prediction be yeah I mean I think 100% And I think it's like you know I don't actually think Dows have done anything wrong in the past five years you know I think a lot of people view it as like oh look how noisy they've become look how useless they've become and it's like no this is just like scaling you know and

as we go from 20,000 meaningful Dows you know to two million meaningful dlls there will also be noise and there will also people are going to co-op the term it's like um is it dow. build or dow. fun the stellano project which is just like pump. fun it's a copy paste you know but like where the money used to go to the liquidity providers now it goes some multi control by one person I don't quite know how it works but it's certainly not a DA you know you're not launching a DA when you press launch you know you're launching a token and that is a pump and dump for the most part and like you know that will continue to happen and I think that like Dow will be used in a um more malicious way you know as the world goes on but that's just a

part of same as companies right if you want to do money laundering you know you make a bank that's the same evilness as the idea that you know if you want to do something [ __ ] up with a token you should make it D you know and so I think that like to your point of as we keep going through the universe and another 50 years or another 300 years there will be many new like amazing novel use cases and many more like evil shitty use cases and that's just like a reality of the technology being used yeah I kind of look at it as an evolutionary environment where we go through these cycles of great abundance and then great scarcity and then in the times of of great scarcity most of the projects die in in the times of great abundance the new keystone species are are born and so

we're in this sort of like evolutionary design space where lots of experiments will Blossom and then the only the fittest survive and instead of natural selection it's Market selection to see what survives year over year and we're actually in kind of a funny I've known you for a whole cycle now and a lot of the projects that we were excited about four or five years ago are dying now because we've just gone through a whole cycle of of life and death so it it's been a journey to see for sure yeah yeah well and like you know one thing is the actual the life and death of those projects but the second is like how yeah how they were viewed at that time right like at the time it's like oh wow this is going to be the best solution and reu yeah exactly it's going to completely

change the way that we do this and then it's like oh actually three years later people stopped using it the eardrops happened and and now has zero users and you know goodbye and so yeah I agree well um I want to Pivot the conversation to Alo now and what we're cooking up with al. capital but before I do anything else you want to say about tokenization and Dows as the design space if you're enjoying this episode please check out the remainder of the episode on the feed hosted at al. Capital you must be a Alo do Capital Patron nft holder to hear the rest of the episode al. Capital Patron nfts give you access to the aluminati which is a private community that has access to the Alo Evolution novel Capital allocation intelligence and research like this

episode like this podcast and also research reports that we are publishing at al. Capital and early access to builds and other Innovations in the aloe Community thanks for listening if you want to hear the rest of the episode check it out at al. Capital peace and love [Music] oh [Music]