Episode 54: DAOs, NFTs, Social Tokens – A Crypto Landscape Update with Cooper Turley

Ben: [00:00:00] Welcome to the alt asset allocation podcast, exploring alternative investment opportunities available to the everyday investor. Here’s your host Ben Lakoff.

Hello. Welcome to the alt asset allocation podcast. Today’s interview is with Cooper, Turley, or Cooper trooper on Twitter. The crypto ecosystem is quite vast and always very quickly moving.

There are a few major trends that are accelerating Dalles, decentralized autonomous organizations in FTS, non fungible, tokens, defy, decentralized finance, and social tokens. There’s no fun acronym there, unfortunately, but there is loads to it. On each of these and Cooper is just the guy to do it. Before we jump into the episode, I wanted to take a second to thank you for all the great questions and feedback I’m getting.

I love getting these messages and you guys really rock. If you’re getting some value from these podcasts, please drop me a line or a review. These things really, really help. And they mean a lot. All right. All things crypto with Cupertino. Enjoy Cooper. Welcome to the all asset allocation podcast. Excited to finally have you on.

Cooper: [00:01:17] Thank you, man. It’s a pleasure to be.

Ben: [00:01:18] Indeed man. We’ve been we’ve been talking about this forever, it’s been a long time coming at kicked off this podcast about a year ago. Alex was the first guest and he’s a friend of yours. And I think we’ve been talking about it ever since then. It’s been a long time coming and I’m actually confused why we didn’t do this in person now that I think about it, but w we’ll save that for the next rent round too.

Cooper: [00:01:40] That’s right. Totally man. I mean, it’s exciting. The world’s opening back up. I think there’s been so much that has happened in the last year that I’m glad we get a chance to look back and reflect on at all. Now that we have a lot of time to actually. Absolutely.

Ben: [00:01:52] In this space that we play in crypto, all of these things you’re a big deal for my my listeners, but with this podcast and this audience, we have a lot of alternative investors, people not even into crypto.

Let’s start off with a bit of your background, who you are and how you got into.

Cooper: [00:02:11] Sure I’ve been working in crypto now for about five years. I’ve really been in love with this idea of community and the creator economy. So I went to school for music business. I quickly fell down the crypto rabbit hole because of the idea of smart contracts.

No really just the ability to help expedite royalty payments and the way that artists get paid. Basically it took a leap of faith. Didn’t know what I was doing out of college started working for a bunch of projects, started going into a bunch of conferences around the world. Got really into defy, started a couple of D five blogs wrote about that.

Actively did the whole defy summer yield priming type thing. And then woke up one day and realized that finance wasn’t getting it done for me. You know, like adding another zero to the portfolio, wasn’t really driving or motivating me. So that’s when I fell down this whole creator economy, rabbit hole with things like NFTs, social tokens, and now most recently doused.

So if I had to summarize everything that I do, I love helping creatives learn how to use the technology. And I spend most of my time contributing to projects that help keep the ball rolling and advanced industry.

Ben: [00:03:05] Awesome. Very well said. This space, Joe is very broad. You’ve touched a lot of the different pieces of it, and we’ll definitely get into these creator the greater economy and everything that that has to do with crypto.

But. Since you have this broad experience within crypto and you’re involved in a number of different niches. What is the most interesting? To set the stage right now, it’s July 20, 21 almost. What’s the most interesting area of crypto as we know it right now for you.

Cooper: [00:03:37] Yeah. The most interesting to me is figuring out what mainstream adoption looks like.

You know, a lot of the work that I do now is actually taking a step back from these highly sophisticated financial instruments that we’ve created. And instead thinking about how does someone get involved with buying their very first token? What does it mean to join a community online? And what does it mean to be a member of that community through ownership?

And so before we go super deep onto the nuances of that I’m really fascinated by what it means to just join a community. And so something like a discord server is very foreign to most people, something like downloading Mehta mask is very foreign to most people. And so a lot of my time is around innovation, you know, bringing new people into the space that can help advance it and then really drilling down on if you have an active community around an idea or a project, how do you empower them to be able to get work done in a distributed.

Ben: [00:04:22] Yeah, I love it. And actually in one of your articles, you explained dolls as internet communities with a shared cap table and a bank account. I had never heard it explained like that, but it’s something that very, very much resonate. With me. I’ve had episodes on here about social tokens and NFTs and dowels.

Hopefully my audience is pretty familiar with this, but what about these internet communities and dolls do you find so, so fascinating,

Cooper: [00:04:52] great question. To me, it’s the relationship between social and financial capital? I think for a lot of us, our day-to-day jobs. Accumulating as much income as we can trying to build up our bank account.

And then outside of that, we have these social circles where we spend most of our time to me a are sort of the first evolution where you’re working with your friends. And I think being able to tie those two together, you know, it creates deeper relationships and at least on my I’m trying to figure out how to make an impact on the world, by working with your closest friends, those experiments feel really exciting, you know, to the point that, and a couple of years from now, I hope that most people can be working on things that they love.

And hopefully dowser are just one conduit of being able to.

Ben: [00:05:29] Yeah, absolutely. Let’s give it an overview of the Dao ecosystem and where it is right now. I completely agree in the future like Dallas. Well, we hope and think we’ll have like an integral part of how we organize across different areas, but where are we right now?

And what does it look.

Cooper: [00:05:48] Basically, we are at a stage where there are a dozen new Dallas popping up every week. People are brainstorming incredibly cool ideas, and we’re going from the ideation phase to the execution phase. So today there’s over a hundred dollars managing billions of dollars in assets.

What we’re seeing right now is a transition from them existing to them actually be building meaningful value for the community. Some that I’m involved with that I’ll call out friends with benefits. This is a culture crypto community, where you come out, hanging with friends, and now we’re building product around IRL experience.

I recently joined the style called pleaser Dow. That’s an NFT collection now looking to democratize ownership to some of the most iconic NFTs you’ve ever seen before seed club, which actively contribute to which is a social token incubator. Could name a couple more, but basically we’re seeing a lot of doubt.

Raise capital into a community owned bank account, and then using that capital to pay people in the same way you would accompany, except it’s all being done on chain through crypto towing. And I think that that design space is both exciting from like a distributed work perspective, but it also ends up a lot of interesting questions around how do you value, you know, a dowels underlying token?

You know, this might not be a defy protocol that has billions of dollars of TVL, but it is someone that. 50 plus people contributing to it every day, spending all their free time coming to community calls. And what does that mean for us as a, as an industry to play some market value on that and to see where the stocks are relative to all the other assets that exist.

Ben: [00:07:10] So presumably COVID and everybody’s staying at home and working from home and the more acceptance of remote work and the fact that, you know, I may live in a city that’s different from my family. That’s different from my best friends. That’s different from my co-founders investors. This is becoming more and more normal.

So presumably this was all fodder for the dowel fire, but why is. Crypto such an integral part of the way that these communities are formed versus just a data database. And, you know, we just started an LLC and I let people in it and a couple people are signers on the account. Why is crypto? So it’s such an important piece of the way that these dowels are formed.

Cooper: [00:07:57] I think it’s the ownership element. You know, I think that the tokens associated with these doubts they’re global and permission-less in nature to the point where. If someone in the middle of Europe has a fantastic idea, they can collaborate with me here, working in LA, and we can both, you know, add value to the same token.

I think that over time, we’re going to see the word Dal is going to vary in terms of how deep of a technological process that is. But right now, you know, the concept of having a token that represents ownership of a vehicle that you’re contributing to, you know, that core premise alone, I think is enough to take this from a chat group to a more sophisticated vehicle that actually has financial upside to be gained from the work that they do.

Ben: [00:08:33] Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll caveat this next one by saying neither of us are financial or financial advisors or lawyers. Not legal advice, anything we say in here, but I run the crypto Mondays meetups here in LA and I actually, Dallas came up last night as that they do Mo.

These are some of the topics that tend to come up and somebody was saying, you know, they wanted to start a doubt to do this thing and how great it would be to, to, to help collaboration across across borders with people that perhaps you don’t trust, you don’t know their pseudonymous. And we started talking about like the legal.

Steps to set up a Dao. T talk to me like I’m a, I’m a young entrepreneur that wants to launch a doubt to do something, whether it’s give grants or make investments. What do I need to know from a legal perspective to get stuff?

Cooper: [00:09:28] I think what you need to know is there’s very different schools of thought on this subject, you know, there’s no concrete right answer right now.

I’ve seen it vary from on one end. You have a formal entity set up here in the U S and LLC. That basically is the registered entity behind the doubt and that situation, we see people. Limit participation to accredit an investor is limited to only 99 participants total. And that way you really buttoned up and kind of covering your bases.

If you guys are making for-profit decisions on the other side of things and where I honestly spend more of my time is kind of the more on chain web three world, where you have an address that basically holds all of the doubts. You have signers on that multisig wallet. And you’re basically figuring out how to allocate capital in a very fluid way.

You know, as far as the legal ramifications of that, I don’t think anyone has a great idea of what that looks like. And then, so we’re all basically following social precedent that the members of that are acting honestly, and that the capital is being used in a productive manner. And not until then. I think that we’re all going to basically try and figure out how to take this to a point where the government recognizes it as a legal entity.

And this is what we’re seeing now with Wyoming. So very, very early stages. But I think one side of the puzzle, you have like very buttoned up formula credit investor doubt. And then the other side of the puzzle, you have Yolo, this is a new world and we’re going to redefine the rules as we make them happen.

Ben: [00:10:44] Yeah. And this is the frustrating aspect because I actually, I got into a disagreement with these guys. I said from a legal perspective, like if you’re talking to a lawyer and he says, you don’t have a legal structure in place, it’s treated like a general partnership and you have unlimited liability.

Oh, but it’s an anonymous person. That’s setting this up. And it’s not that. There’s conflicting things. And I think the unfortunate reality is if you’re trying to do things. Buttoned up by the legal way. It’s, it’s not going to have the same feeling at all. And it’s, you have to pass accreditation and limited the number of members.

It’s a very different structure than like the, the utopia Dow that we see that everybody’s collaborating and working together. Not finance, not legal advice, but it’s a, it’s certainly in, in a design space right now. I hope that the regulation doesn’t clamp down hard on a lot of these, because that would be a real shame and setback.

The industry going forward, I’d be curious from your side, what needs to happen? For more clarity on the legal aspect or, or just in general for more people to kind of go, oh, it clicks that’s what a Dahlia is. That’s why that’s useful. What would be helpful in this way?

Cooper: [00:12:02] Yeah, I think that’s a two-part question.

I think on the legal side of things, we need to see dowels go more mainstream. So dowels that are worth billions of dollars that basically invite clarity to be made because it’s so top of mind that everyone needs to know about it. I think in order to get there you know, accessibility is a term that I use a lot and that we hear a lot in this industry.

I think the flow around joining a doubt, you know, whether that’s going from a discord group to joining a token permission, chat to being involved in governance, you know, The world today is that we have all of these tools on the table to be able to do fun things like voting, like a token data chats, you know, like treasury management, but they’re all very scattered across the board.

And so one thing I’m paying very close attention to is these web three native chat platforms where you can basically operate as a Dow without having to go to. Five different websites and have track of five different logs, et cetera, et cetera. And I think over the next year or two, we’ll slowly start to see, you know, the complexity stripped away.

And basically what’s left is like the core set of tools that’s necessary to operate it down on a very, very light level. Yeah.

Ben: [00:12:59] Right. I was commenting earlier. You have a great article. Like the dowel landscape with a number of these different tools. And it’s like each one of these are used for different aspects within it.

The idea of all of these things packaged up as some like Dow call a starter pack would be, would be amazing and really help more and more people get involved.

Cooper: [00:13:19] Yeah. Okay. Can I. Yeah, please. I think what’s interesting is that when the Dow space started, everyone was trying to build the dull starter pack.

You know, projects like Aragon were basically trying to build an operating system that had all these tools baked in. And it’s funny that as an industry, we’ve stepped away from wanting to use an out of the box starter pack to wanting to custom design, like what are down needs. And we now have a lot more focus on these off-chain tools.

So things like snapshot where you don’t have to pay gas fees to be able to do. The things you want to doubt to do, like use your tokens to vote. And it’s my belief that over time, we’re going to see more and more push towards, you know less decentralized versions of things. I’ll call it like less crypto native things, but that give us like this core set of tools.

We need to be able to coordinate and operate effectively without having to worry about all of the learning curves that come with, like making on train transactions and tributing funds and doing all these weird things that kind of existed. It’d be one of the Val.

Ben: [00:14:13] Yeah, definitely. I think that was a very helpful Dow overview.

They’re incredibly fascinating. I’ll definitely link up your article. Is there anything you want to add on Dallas before I jumped to the next step?

Cooper: [00:14:25] I would say, if you’re thinking about starting it now, I would challenge you to join one first. I think there’s so many exciting projects out there right now that it’s actually more beneficial for you to get involved with an existing community than starting your own.

And if you get involved with one, you’re finding that it doesn’t quite fit what you want to do. Go ahead and start one, but recognize that there’s way more opportunity today to join it up. And there is what the headaches associated with starting your own firm.

Ben: [00:14:47] Absolutely. And what’s the best way to find out of the existing dowels out there and kind of choose which one you want to join.

Cooper: [00:14:55] It’s going to be a vague answer, but Twitter, I mean, like spend some time poking around Twitter, following all the accounts that talk about Dows and very quickly you’ll see the ones come to the surface that are exciting. Yeah.

Ben: [00:15:05] You know, a common thing that comes up on all of these interviews is people really, really valued Twitter as a platform, as a way to curate knowledge and, and opinions and all of these things.

I’m curious, do you use any tools to do Twitter better or is it just. Most of us, which is just spending a lot of time on the platform, which I’m sure.

Cooper: [00:15:29] Yeah. Default Twitter here. I mean, the one thing that I do is tweet storms. We’re all kind of like bucket up a lot of tweets into one very nice long thread.

But outside of that, you know, it’s just twitter.com.

Ben: [00:15:39] Yeah, they are. I’m always hoping for like some secret sauce, but unfortunately the, I did have one, but they’ve actually discontinued it anyways. It’s not even worth mentioning at this point. Clearly not that many people were using it. There’s that the next thing I wanted to talk to you about it kind of fits into this this overall structure is creator token.

Through creator economy and social tokens I’ve mentioned these on the podcast before, but for my listeners, can you just give a brief overview of what these are and why they’re important?

Cooper: [00:16:08] Sure. So creator tokens or a token representing a brand individual or community in the same way that you can basically have a really loyal following online, a token that gives you the ability to have somewhat ownership over that.

So think YouTube stream think Twitch, streamers, YouTube influencers, Instagrammers, athletes, musicians, et cetera, et cetera. To me, creator tokens are important because it goes beyond having a really deeply technical crypto platform and instead applies those same primitives to. A group or a community that we all know and love in our day-to-day today.

Yeah, definitely.

Ben: [00:16:40] Who do you see right now? Crypto of the, like the social token landscape is very much in a in a exploratory phase. You see things that look like income share agreements, you see things that look like just a utility token within the. Products and offerings that me, the creator offer.

But who do you see, like gaining the most traction within this broad area that is social tokens.

Cooper: [00:17:06] Yeah. So I’ll break it down into two different buckets. The first is crypto native communities and the second is non crypto native communities. The first one for crypto native communities. I’d like to say friends with benefits.

We’re doing a really fantastic job here. Basically have a token permission discord server, and now we’re building products around what it means to be a member of that committee. The bank Listowel has been doing a fantastic job. They watched the token a few weeks back and basically they’re looking to reinvent what it means to be a media company and a web three age, you know, on the non crypto native side of things, a platform called rally has been onboarding a ton of awesome streamers tech, talkers, influencers, musicians, and then now have about 150 creators.

Providing people with an easy on-ramp to buying tokens with a credit card. And when you pop into one of those discord servers, you can see different mindset. You know, people engaged at a lot lower level, but we’re starting to see some really fun experiments around what it means for someone to buy their first token and use that to join into a VIP chat with them.

Ben: [00:17:59] Yeah,  it’s super cool space and I’m excited to see it pushing forward, but rally tokens are on a side chain or something, right. They’re not ERC 20. They do they play well with things like collab land, or is there a bit of a disconnect there?

Cooper: [00:18:15] Rally basically has its own set of tools around its token.

So they have something called coin join, which acts similarly to collab land, I think you know, honestly, There is a world in which I wish that they were ERC 20 tokens. What I’ve come to appreciate is by having that siloed ecosystem, you do get to poke around with some more mainstream use cases. And I think this is the exact reason why we saw nifty gateway gets so popular and then empty space because they really, you know, shift the way a lot of the complexity with launching interactions to favor those retailers.

And it’s my hope that we can kind of find a world in which that bridge becomes more synonymous, that it’s not an all or nothing centralized versus decentralized. We can kind of share the benefits of both worlds offer a good solution for users of all archetypes. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Ben: [00:18:56] It’s called coin join.

It’s a terrible name. Isn’t that? The, the Bitcoin mixer,

Cooper: [00:19:01] like it’s like a little turtle bot. It’s kind of funny. Yeah. Well,

Ben: [00:19:05] okay. All right. Next, do you want to talk about NFTs? I feel like this, this, this whole story arc, wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t mention NFTs NATS next, give me a, give me an overview of what’s happening in the NFT world, what you find interesting.

That would be helpful.

Cooper: [00:19:21] Yeah. So generative art is really popping off right now. I mean, on Twitter, you’re now seeing a bunch of token launches where you have a script. Assets, we’ll call them board apes, crypto punks, Paulie, Morris, whatever you want to say, but you know, this race to mint, these unique characters and then kind of collect the highest quality ones, ads for their different traits.

I think on my end, what we’re seeing is, you know, strong communities forming around different projects, which just further validates the creator token and community thesis that I appreciate about for a long time. But we’re seeing less focus on drops from like individual artists. Nifty gateway or something like that.

And more kind of around these projects that develop communities around like an overarching theme of assets rather than the individual assets themselves. But with that being said, you know, I think that specific NFTE artists are going really deep on building out communities. Now, now we’re seeing artists mincing their own custom smart contracts.

They’re doing contracts where, you know, an NFC has the power to mint more NFTs and doing some really fun punching games. You know one thing that I’m excited about is fractionalization. So basically taking an NFC marketing in a contract and then make an ERC 20 token that represents a claim on that underlying asset.

And so across the board, people are still really excited about NFTs. I think from the mainstream perspective, we seen it kind of died down because the numbers aren’t as high as they were a couple of months ago. But under the hood, I think the social capital being invested in the sector is those highs.

Yeah.

Ben: [00:20:41] And I mean, this, this world that I envision in the future has this, this wonderful intersection of NFTs as financial assets in this metaverse world that we play in perhaps, but social tokens are a bigger part. Me as a podcast, I can issue my own token and have this nice economy. And it’s.  and dowels are a key key part of, of all of this.

So I think all of them mixed together in this, this very intricate, beautiful way. That’s like ticking the box of all these reasons why we, we got into web three in the very, very beginning. That’s for sure.

Cooper: [00:21:18] Absolutely, man. I mean, I think it’s all intertwined. Like what I’ll quickly comment there is the creator economy is not one sector of crypto it’s everything combined together to offer, you know, the best of both worlds.

So I’m excited to see where it goes. Awesome.

Ben: [00:21:29] Well, this one wouldn’t be an investment podcast without asking investment related questions. You saw our friend defy dad asking this on Twitter actually as well, but Let’s start with dowels and then go social tokens and then NFTs. For the average investor wanting to have exposure.

You’ve gotten them over the line. They understand those are going to be a big thing. How, how do I invest? How do I get involved from a financial perspective to make sure that I participate in this rising tide that is Dallas.

Cooper: [00:22:03] Yeah, most styles today have fungible tokens that you can participate in, you know right now a lot of these are kind of lower on the market cap side of things between like 20 million that 10 to $20 million market cap.

And it’s definitely a long bet in terms of them being able to pan themselves out. But you know, that doubt map that I’d share, I’d say. At least 80%, 90% of them have a token associated with them. And so I think it’s more just about one understanding what that project does. And then two being able to have a little bit of access into the community and that, that feels like a good fit to you.

Chances are you can either earn tokens from participating in the group, which is what I highly recommend or be, you know, going over to a unit swap or a decks like that and scooping some up off.

Ben: [00:22:42] Awesome. it makes sense. This comes up a lot, as well as like get involved, jump in these discords be helpful.

And it’s surprising how many times somebody will say, Hey, that actually yeah, we could use that. Come on in here. Appreciate that for sure. Okay, good answer. Most of these dolls have a token, this, this, this makes sense. Social token. What’s what’s the best way for the average industry, just to get broad exposure as opposed to buying individual creator tokens, perhaps.

Cooper: [00:23:11] Hmm, that’s a good question. I don’t think that the social tokens spaces at quite the basket level quite yet, I think in the next like six months, we’ll start to see more index plays on social token as a whole, we’ll start to see more platform tokens, but I would kind of echo my earlier statement. The most high-value way to get exposure to Dows and social tokens is to work for a community early on, you know, for a lot of these groups, they still have non-transferable tokens where, you know, the value of them is undefined.

They’re often at generous valuations because of the fact that they are. And so being able to find a creator or a group that you really love and just popping into community calls, finding out how to do a couple of products, sprints here and there, you know, to your point, like any skill set is really valued at this time.

I think being able to just get in the weeds and pick out a couple of creators that you really back in support, you know, chances are, you can earn an allocation and a tokens are going to be worth far beyond whatever you’re going to make from trying to speculate and pick them up on a secondary. Yeah,

Ben: [00:24:04] completely agree.

Okay. What about NFTs? I D I do get this all the time because people jump on an open CA because they want to buy an NFT. And they’re like, I, I don’t, I don’t know anything. Aside from perhaps buying a bundle of governance tokens, what’s the best way to get broad exposure to the NFT world?

Yeah.

Cooper: [00:24:24] So I think in the next six months, we’re going to see a lot more platform tokens come onto the market. So NFC marketplaces that don’t have tokens. It’s my belief was still don’t have them. I also think that doing for these community plays where there’s something like a board at yacht club or a punks, for example you know, the new generative arts stuff that we’re seeing, I would be less inclined to tell someone to just hop on whatever the latest NFT mentoring train is and look over time to see what people have as their Twitter avatars, and then work really hard to try and accumulate those apps.

You know, it’s my belief that the more that you see people associating their identity with an asset, the higher likelihood it is that that will have long-term value. And so I would just kind of keep your eyes peeled for Twitter avatars. And if you start seeing a bunch of one specific type of NFC, I think that’s a good indicator that you might want to go out of your way and try and scoop one up.

Ben: [00:25:10] I go on Twitter. Unfortunately, everybody’s listening to this like, damn, I got to spend more time on Twitter, I guess. And it’s

Cooper: [00:25:16] back to Twitter.

Ben: [00:25:16] Maybe. I know it’s a. It will, especially with crypto, but finance as well fin twit is a really, really good space. I get a lot of good information.

So on that topic, there is a lot of information. I mean, so far we’ve covered a lot with dowels and FTS. Social tokens. Like these are some of the biggest macro trends within crypto right now. The, the other one that we didn’t cover would be defy. And you said last summer, like defy summer, you were playing around.

Are you still much involved? Anything you’re watching? That’s incredibly interesting. Perhaps innovative within the defy space

Cooper: [00:25:55] worth covering. Yeah. I mean, I think just putting your assets to work, like basically every token I, that I own at this point, there is somewhere to stake it, an earned yield on it.

So I think being aware of what’s happening across chain right now. So ecosystems like MADEC ecosystems, like what’s happening in sauna right now. You know, I’m not buying new tokens on a day to day as much, but I am actively looking for places to deploy stable coins, to earn not only native yield, but also tokens on top of that.

One project I’m excited about is called. You know, what really stood out to me about this project, as you deposit tokens into a vault that basically earns yield on selling options against it. And you know, they have a non transferable token right now. So if you were an early user, you got an airdrop, but the community has intentionally voted to not make that transferable yet.

And I think what you’re seeing now is because of the fact that it’s not transferable, more people are funneling into it. You know, the bolts are filling up really fast. And one thing that I love about that is this kind of cap approach where a project starts. Not transferable token. They offer some incentives to accumulate it, but they make it set.

It’s a little bit more scarce. We’re not, anyone can just farm with $10 billion. You know, there’s a fixed race to get into a small allocation, thus kind of rewarding, the most active participants for being involved. That’s kind of where my mind is at, with DFI across the board, like what do cap launches look like?

What do good airdrop experiences look like? Where are the places to be interacting with protocols that you think are going to tokenize? And I think across those three buckets, there’s still a lot of unharvested harvested alpha. That’s still to come in the coming months. Yeah.

Ben: [00:27:19] Yeah, that makes sense.

And the amount of like more mainstream interests, you know, driven by money printer,  memes and, and lack of yield and bank accounts. People are starting to Wade into the waters of defy and way further out on the risk spectrum than they probably realize. But  they’ll come along to it.

I’m curious after like the good overall view of the market and these individual niches which, what do you see within crypto right now? That is totally over-hyped or the narrative that you hear most commonly that is just plain wrong.

Cooper: [00:28:00] That our technology is ready for the mainstream. You know, I think that there is so much work that needs to be done about bringing this entire industry to an average user.

And I think right now we’re severely overestimating how easy it is to get started with crypto and not really focusing enough on the very base level interactions that help us. Yeah.

Ben: [00:28:17] Yeah. And I I’d be curious your thoughts on like, okay. So the whole goal of crypto is that you have, you can self custody, your assets and your own, your own, your bank and all of these things, right?

Like on sense of goal, all of these things. But then you have things that help accelerate mainstream adoption, such as Coinbase or nifty gateway that have kind of opt the skated, the whole. Keep your private key. You can log in with an email and like whatever we’ll like custody it for you. How important are these things for mainstream adoption?

Is this how we get there? Or is there some other path that I, I, I’m not seeing.

Cooper: [00:28:57] I think it’s extremely important, but I don’t think it’s extremely important for mainstream adoption. I think there’ll always be a subset of power users that will absolutely love these, these qualities. And it’s something that will exist from now through the end of time.

But I think for your average user, that’s poking around with a hundred dollars worth of crypto them being able to self custody that doesn’t really matter. And I think it’s actually more important that they can put that to work rather than making sure that they have true ownership.

Ben: [00:29:21] Yeah that totally makes sense.

For the average user who’s interested to get into crypto, perhaps dolls, social tokens, NFTs. What what resources do you push people towards to kind of like welcome to crypto. Let me dunk your head in the water. Where do you send new?

Cooper: [00:29:39] Yeah, I think I’m trying to find the right discord servers to be a part of is kind of my end state with where I try and get people involved.

The ways that they get there, you know, forefront is a great resource to learn about kind of the wider social token ecosystem there’s outlets like bank list and the defiant, which are doing shop reporting on defy on crypto more generally NFT now, which is a news media for NFTs that I really liked doing fantastic to there.

And so. I think it’s less about where do you look? It’s more about how much time do you put into looking? Because if you actually take time and effort to research any one of these sectors, you know, after five-ish hours of studying, I think you’ll find, you know, a couple of key players they’ll be able to help drastically expedite your learning curve in the space.

Ben: [00:30:18] Awesome. Great stuff. And I’ll link up all of those in the show notes. Cooper. It’s been a pleasure, man. We, we dumped a lot of knowledge, a lot of alpha hidden in there. What else? Where can my listeners find out more about you or where would you like

Cooper: [00:30:32] to send it? Best place to stay up with me is on Twitter.

I’m at Koopa trooper on there. If you’re looking to go a little bit deeper, send me a message on discord. I’m at Cooper, trooper number 9, 7, 9, 9. No shortage of opportunities to get involved. So I encourage you to reach out and see about what the best next steps are

Ben: [00:30:47] of it. Cooper. Thanks so much for coming on.

Really enjoyed it.

Cooper: [00:30:51] Thanks for having me, man.

Ben: [00:30:53] Absolutely. There you go. First off. Thank you very much for listening all the way through. I hope you got a lot of value out of that conversation as always. You can find show notes, links, and [email protected]. Please share this with anyone you think might be interested and derive any value from this conversation.

And as always, you can reach out to me for any feedback or questions. Please give the video a like, or even better subscribe on YouTube or your podcast player of choice. This really helps others find the podcast or the video as well. Thanks a lot. Hope everybody has a fantastic day and stay safe out there and invest wisely.

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