Base Builder Roundtable 003: Memes & Culture

Yeah, perfect. I'm Tori Hawk. I've been building in the basic system since before main net I've built lots of different things. I'm here in a capacity representing the blue chip token CTO today and Just been helping them out with comms and socials really love the meme and happy to chat about memes and culture today Awesome. Yeah, feel free to unmute and speak maybe yasak you can go next Hey, what's up? Hopefully you can hear me. Yeah, I'm yasak from DJ and DJ and one of the first memes not the first because we Got Coco and Toshi here, but one of the first base memes That went to billion market cap. Yeah, happy to be here Hey awesome Coco you want to go next with did we the cocoa drop off? No, I'm here Oh, yeah, awesome. Hi everyone. Um for those who don't know me. I am Coco. I lead the community efforts on Toshi Toshi is As yasak correctly mentioned The first meme to survive base we launched end of july 2023 RCTO and have built it into one of the most powerful communities in the industry I think And still going strong more than three years later And happy to talk about memes culture and everything else on base Yeah, I'm excited to have you and you know like I feel like We've been chatting in the M's and we've been chatting in groups. I think it's finally let's let's get everyone on Let's chat about like memes at culture or what it looks on a space. That's pretty cool Uh, yeah, who's who's left. We've got base cat here. Base cat. Maybe you want to like chat Yeah, hello. Hello everyone base cat here detail the project from the second day august 16 and we've been building community from there um We're new but We're growing fast so happy to meet everyone Okay, I think that's that's everyone for this round table Also, I want to like quickly say that if if you are a product a project building on base Feel free to reach out to us because we do these now weekly right and it's it's less of favoritism or reaching out to a particular project but more of hey if you're building on base We want to feature you We want to give you a stage so come you know like Just floored our DMs if you're building together and we'll find ways to back and spoke you now on that Sorry, so I just want to shout out as well because I'm looking at the the attendees I see Emily Jr Yeah, it's like a big drb maxi. So also want to give a shout out. Yeah, I know you guys got like verified on four recently. So Congrats on that Cable as well Memory project Yeah, sorry Of course, okay, so the first piece we're we're gonna talk about like the current meta You know state of memes culture and base And the first question again more like in open statement sort of question is Let's talk about culture and capital and what matters more. How do you differentiate? How do you define this in your specific communities and specific projects? So I'll open the floor on that team I'll give it a shot Go go go ahead go for it Okay, cool. Um, I think that I think on the base value you would say capital but in my opinion culture is the most important because Money brings attention, but culture gives People a reason to stay and you see the strength of community when price is down especially like um Whenever that happens and When you Read that Community and that culture people will stick through the ups and downs Yeah, I'll jump in for me. It's a little bit different I really think a lot of people from like the retail crowd like the norm the normies or you know So to speak people haven't really Doven deep into crypto They all sort of hear this story of like man if I had bought big coin 10 15 years ago Today I would have just you know, I would have retired. I would have been a millionaire And so I think that that speculative aspect of crypto is really big with some of like the normies like the retail Maybe like the web to crowd and so I really feel like they sort of feel they feel like they missed out on that opportunity back when And they almost want that same opportunity today except today It's a little bit harder because we've gone through several cycles of crypto And now we're sort of in this cycle where there's a lot of VC money There's institutional money And it's a little bit harder to find that runner to find that big coin You know where you can get it for a few sensor a few dollars and it'll run to like 60 or 120 Thousand dollars or whatever So I do think that that is Alluring to people and it does kind of bring people in the question is what happens after once they sort of Get killed What did they do after that is it just speculation for them or They meet you know learn about the culture and you know culture can be In your meme community, but I can also be you know onboarding people to actual products with D Gen We started on FARCaster And we were sort of like the meme of FARCaster like the decentralized social network And we were completely unrelated to them And so some people came just to air up farm the token and that was you know probably like you know I don't know how much but let's just say like 90% of the people Like even if 10% stayed and learned about FARCaster And then got piled and then went on to build things or even just to join other communities And I think we did net positive So I think they go hand in hand like people want to see a nice clean chart They want to see upside potential. They want to earn money people come to crypto because they want to earn money in my opinion But once they once they have that Then they can they kind of go deep into the rabbit hole or at least you know some percentage of them do And I think that's the culture part which is also really great Yeah, I mean I want to like quickly add here before you go to the On how I know in fact like to do you and I were both on FARCaster when D Gen happened And it was just such a rave it was like everyone tipping each other Everyone so many and you're saying your point I feel like so many people that came in as part of that And made some capital in lieu of that eventually stayed and I know That started building broader started writing about things Go but opposite capital just because they had a starting point So I feel like 100% aligned on how memes can be like a great entry point To this like beautiful technical world We and financial world we operated Yeah, I'll just add to that really quick I think D Gen had one of the biggest air drops of maybe 2024 probably not of all time but we gave away In our air drop to about 50 million dollars worth of tokens and that's Calculating the token price at the time of giveaway not some higher market cap value So at the time of giveaway that's how much money people received in total So it was a really big big air drop. I even talked to somebody yesterday and they were saying There was even bigger than their ENS air drop which they thought was already really big and I know personally a few founders I've now even pivoted to like AI in other places but other founders as well You have state and crypto who got a pretty sizable air drop which we were able to give them Um and then they went out they went on to like build products Uh on forecaster and elsewhere using that money So we took the speculation crowd who was there to sort of gamble and speculate and put you know Try and get that 100x or 1000x And we were able to also transfer it to like to sort of you know The quote-unquote smart money the devs and everybody else who were like okay. This is good. I'm going to sell And when I use it and then of course, you know That's the way we did it other meme coins. It's more ground up where it's a fair launch and so to speak And there's no air drops you have to buy from the bottom up and then you kind of ride the tide But yeah, thank you for for mentioning that I hope we did some good with DJ and on forecaster Yeah, for sure. Yeah, do you you want to share Yeah, I was just gonna say that I think that this question speaks To the current meta to with with stock memes being at the forefront of what a lot of people are trading right now You know blue chip is is a stock meme if you're not familiar if you're listening and you're if you're not familiar with what that means It just means that it was launched paired against an on-chain organized equity in this case in the video And I think the interesting thing Relive to this question is that when you're talking about culture and capital Stock memes are are literally you know culture x capital like the You're creating culture that then pairs with the capital and I think it becomes an interesting middle ground To sort of be a trojan horse to get people interested and get people Getting distribution of on-chain stocks that they might you know otherwise not even be interested in So I think that's an interesting thing to look at as well as you'll get different people as Yassik mentioned who are coming to crypto Some of them are just going to want to trade silly memes and join communities and see that sort of things and other people may want to just do strictly defy and and maybe trade on-chain Equities and these types of things and so what has made me really interested in stock memes like blue chip and others is that It sort of straddles this gap between like people who who maybe have a little bit of an interest in both and and are curious to explore I you know I actually want to chime in on that because I recently been seeing a trend on stock memes right I think stock memes initially started out as a way to kind of um Bootstrap liquidity and and volume right but I think more and more so I've been seeing some interesting ones that I actually building Products and I know a lot of meme caught a lot of meme communities here. You know have been doing products like Tochi you guys were being tochi mark like in a day And then you did a bunch of other cool stuff too um, but you know, I'm seeing like This one called delivery guy pair of Amazon. Um, they're doing some Um some fun stuff F you and D fun um, and I think there was also like a um It's slipping me. Ah, all your base like one of the OGs they were doing some Palantir shit Which I thought was really cool So I think like this is no for me for me right um Because I've always like very strongly believe that builder is kind of in our DNA, right like builder is basically basis DNA And so like that kind of extends to memes as well like we seeing like stock memes also kind of Get a bit of that flavor and so I just thought it was like wolf hale i think I really love that if you don't mind I am I'll share a few different thoughts And uh my thoughts are more on abstract level So i'm gonna go back to your original question of uh culture and capital and my answer comes um both from building on base from building to she But also from a lot of the advisory work I do i've advised eight different blockchains Alonzel twos In helping build our ecosystem or go to market strategy or talk an omics or error or whatever it may be A whole different a whole sleuth of different things And these were hyped Big blockchains and many of them honestly filled And that brings me to the culture and capital Because culture drives capital But capital also drives culture So um You can have a super hyped l2 You could have mercenary liquidity on your chain Basically just grabbing your airdrop For those that don't know a lot of l2s not base but a lot of l2s had these incentive programs And if you put money on their chain And did some things with it There was a significant size airdrop for you at the end But that liquidity disappears a second the airdrop happens right because people are there just to farm the airdrop So what you saw there was a lot of tvl was always tvl tvl airdrop happened volume disappeared on chain What happened to culture culture imploded project that were building teams that were very serious that were defining the culture on that chain Just disappeared And at the same time the exact opposite is true as well Without organic culture it's very hard to retain capital And um we've seen that in various cases as well So from that angle i believe that culture and capital um basically Work as an accelerant to empower the other rather than the one or the other having more effect I think that base for example has done a tremendous job Bring a lot of capital on chain and i think that's Doji dejan a lot of the early builders have done a tremendous job Setting a culture of building Doing things the clean way um not being the chain of pump and dumps rugs Organized cabals that are launching 500 tokens Um and then just seeing which one sticks and then put in the rug money from the other four and the 99 on the chart of it 500 Like we've been able to define that culture and i think that has had its effect on base long term And i think that combined that has done very well for capital retention also so it's a different answer um There now i could speak about toji when we've done Well, i can tell you this i personally bought toji in the first few minutes that it launched Didn't sell that supply for clarity yet it went from 20 bucks where i bought it To it's or maybe a hundred whatever it may have been To uh eight figures at the top And i think culture in a way also makes people Done right like we buy we hold we keep believing that it's gonna go somewhere And whether we believe in the project