Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Today on the show I’m joined by musician and NFT artist Jonathan Mann. For over 5000 days, Jonathan has written, recorded, and published a Song A Day. After discovering CryptoPunks in 2017, he fell down the crypto rabbit hole. Over the past 6 years he’s melded his daily music practice and his interest in artist empowerment through NFT creation. In this episode, we discuss Song A Day’s evolution from a Youtube song writing project into an NFT collection and full-fledged DAO. We discuss the legal organization of SongADAOas a Colorado co-op, Jonathan’s collaboration with RaidGuild, who built the website and contracts, and why he chose to assign the rights to all songs in the collection to the DAO. We even get a glimpse of the comparative revenues generated by the Song A Day collection between traditional music streaming and NFT sales over the past year. We’re also joined by Edouard Bessire, co-founder of GBM Auctions. Through their experience building NFT charity auction protocol Cryptograph between 2018 and 2021, Edouard and his collaborators invented their signature “Bid-To-Earn” mechanism. In short, when a bidder is outbid in a GBM auction, they receive a small percentage of the new highest bid as compensation. We discuss the advantages of bid to earn for incentivizing early participation and price discovery in English auctions, and how Song A Day was able to integrate the mechanism into their existing contracts. Songaday.worldfeatures a plethora of sophisticated features that demonstrate a true affinity for NFT collecting, decentralized organizing, and web3 experimentation. It’s always a pleasure chatting with Jonathan, whose down-to-earth approach and humble ambition are an inspiration to crypto musicians and creators of all stripes. I hope you enjoy the show. Links - Cryptograph White Paper where GBM mechanism is first described - SongADAO’s Discourse

In May of 2022, the Truth NFT studio secretly released the Goblintown generative PFP NFT collection on Ethereum. As the crypto bull market turned into a bear, Goblins and the meme of “going goblinmode” took Crypto Twitter by storm. In my mind, Goblintown is most identified with a surprising and creative new use of Twitter Spaces for NFT community building. During Goblintown Spaces, a short clip of clanging, dungeon-inspired music plays on loop in the background while a cast of volunteer voice actors sourced ad-hoc from the Twitter Spaces audience put on their best Goblin character voice. These unscripted participatory improv comedy happenings felt truly new. Goblintown Spaces regularly reached thousands of concurrent listeners, and tens of thousands would tune in to each episode. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, I’m joined by Allsee, Truth’s Director of Vibes and the original instigator of the Goblin Twitter Spaces, and four real life Goblins: i_miller00, icecreamsandwhich, Doktur Grobler, and Jon Macapodi. We discuss the origins of the unique goblin Spaces culture and its connection with performance art and voice acting. This is a wonderfully unusual episode of Galaxy Brain. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. A note to listeners and goblins alike: after recording the show I found a recording of the May 29th, 2022 edition of goblintown Spaces that I ripped from Twitter and uploaded to Arweave. A link to that file is in show notes. Links - Arweave hosted May 29, 2022 Goblin episode (Download the file and append .aac to listen)

Public Assembly is a burgeoning software development community that describes itself as a “distributed collective building the missing pieces of the internet.” Today I’m joined by Valerie, Salief Lewis, and Neesh Chaudary, three of the seven founding members of Public Assembly. In this episode, we discuss the barriers to growth and learning that they’ve faced in the first phase of their Web3 careers, and how they’re working together to enable more people to become empowered crypto builders. We also discuss Neosound.xyz, the group’s first project, and their Nouns Builder proposal to build a WYSIWYG website builder for Nouns style DAOs, which was approved by the Builder DAO just a few hours after the conversation you’re about to hear. This is the first time the members of Public Assembly have made a podcast appearance. It’s exciting to get to meet passionate developers in the Web3 space with a mission to make a difference just as they begin to form a vision and a DAO. I hope you enjoy the show. Links - Public Assembly - PA’s DAO Membership auction - Jacob Horne’s Hyperstructures essay - Neosound.xyz

Today I’m joined by a chorus of organizers and critics of ConstitutionDAO2, a crypto crowdfund effort attempting to buy the Constitution, again. Just over a year since the original ConstitutionDAO failed to acquire the Constitution, a group of contributors to PeopleDAO have banded together to attempt a repeat fundraise, with some new ZK powered technology in hand. On this episode, I’m joined by MatterTurbulent and Y4K from PeopleDAO, who are two of the original organizers of ConstitutionDAO2, aka WAGBTC (We Are Going to Buy The Constitution). We’re also joined by Matt Wyatt, co-founder of Nucleo, a Zero Knowledge multisig on the Aztec network. Matt and his team at Nucleoare pioneering the new, ZK-powered portion of the ConstitutionDAO2 fundraise, which allows the DAO to raise funds without revealing the total amount raised publicly. In the second half of the show we’re joined by Dennison Bertram, founder of Tally, an onchain-voting aggregator frontend. Dennison has been a vocal critic of the use of multisigs in DAOs. In the conversation you’re about to hear, he presents those views and interacts with the team on the practicalities and challenges of buying real world assets with crypto crowdfunds. Since the recording of this episode on December 9, 2022, Sotheby’s has announcedthat they will be delaying the sale to allow interested institutional investors to raise funds to participate in the auction. ConstitutionDAO2 has not yet announced their plans going forward. It was interesting to get to sit down with DAO organizers and critics in the throes of uncertainty, disagreement, and hope, as they organize a large initiative for the first time with some brand new technology. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - ConstitutionDAO2 fundraise website

Today I’m joined by Drake Danner, data analyst at Flipside and MetricsDAO. In this episode, we discuss Drake’s latest work in progress, Badger, an ERC-1155 based badging protocol currently deployed on the Polygon network. Badger was conceived in the course of Drake’s work at MetricsDAO, where contributors providing blockchain analytics services needed access to various SaaS tools like Dework and Wonderverse. Inspired by JokeDAO’s disposable ERC-20s, Drake co-created Badger, which allows system administrators to grant access to Web3 compatible tools by provisioning NFT Badges to their members corresponding to their roles. Drake believes this mixture of managed roles running on transparent and decentralized infrastructure is crucial glue for Web3 working groups. It was good to sit down with Drake and chat about his journey from traditional finance to DAO tooling experimentation. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - TryBadger.com - Github - Badger launch post - Lite Paper - @MasOnTheChain - @NFTChance - Gas Station paper

Today I’m joined by Backseats and Frolic, two independent full stack Solidity devs, for a conversation about their latest projects. First, we discuss Backseats as-yet-unnamed NFT primary marketplace browser extension. His work in progress idea is to deploy an NFT discovery browser extension that populates new browser tabs with 1/1 NFTs for sale from the artist. Artists will list works onchain via contract interaction and artworks will be removed from circulation when sold. Second, we discuss Frolic’s EthFS, a tool facilitating onchain data storage and composability. EthFS is a frontend and smart contract backend for writing arbitrary data to the blockchain efficiently. Its permissionless and open source design aims to make it easy for anyone to write data to Ethereum that can be retrieved and composed to create onchain XML such as HTML and SVG. It was a lot of fun brainstorming on the design decisions and applications for these two interesting projects. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - Backseats - Frolic - EthFS.xyz

Today I’m joined by Shreyas, co-founder of Llama. Llama is a community that works with the most respected DAOs in the world, including Uniswap, Aave, ENS, Gitcoin, MakerDAO, Nouns, and more. Llama’s contributors work together to provide engineering, treasury management, and analytics services to these protocol DAOs. In this conversation, Shreyas explains the ins-and-outs of Llama’s organizational structure. We discuss how blockchains enable a new way to organize laborers, which he calls a Contributor DAO, through the lens of his article on Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm. Very few people have experience making successful proposals to such a broad range of high quality protocol DAOs. It was a pleasure speaking with Shreyas. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - Llama - Llama on Twitter - Coase in the 21st Century: Building A Contributor DAO by Shreyas Hariharan - Llama Aave proposal

This is a special episode. Today I’m joined by Brandon H Gomes, CTO at Manta Network and Poseidon Labs. Brandon is one of the smartest people I’ve had the good fortune to meet this year. He’s deep in the ZK technical stack and able to clearly communicate the core mechanisms of ZK to laypeople. In this episode, we discuss what Zero Knowledge Proofs enable, the difference between ZK as a technology and its specific application for rollups, and various cool things you can do with ZK. Brandon shares his candid opinions of the ZK protocol landscape, and what the best path is for Solidity devs interested in building ZK applications today. We discuss a ZK powered Poker game he’s building at ETHSF, and we explore the Solidity compatible ZK future that he and his colleagues are working towards at Poseidon Labs. This was one of my favorite episodes of the show yet. It was a pleasure getting to learn from Brandon. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - Brandon’s Twitter and Github - Efficient Zero-Knowledge Argument for Correctness of a Shuffle by Bayer and Groth (PDF) - Circom - Jessy’s Hacker House founder @13yearoldvc - Brandon and Shumo explaining Poseidon (YouTube) - Porter’s Youtube ZK series - Brandon’s new project OpenZL - Manta Network - Poseidon

On today’s episode, I’m joined by three members of Nouns eSports. Sasquatch is an OG member of SharkDAO. ApeNoun (aka Oni) is Noun 119. Together they co-founded the Nouns esports Pod, which now participates in several esports leagues. We’re also joined by Costabile, a pro Dota 2 player who recently represented Nouns at The International, the most prestigious tournament in the Dota scene. In this conversation, we discuss the esports world’s economics, the Nouns governance process that enabled the founding of the Nouns Esports Pod, and the successes the Nouns teams have had playing Dota 2, Pokémon Unite, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. In the latter half of the show, Costa shares his personal perspective on the emotional and mental challenges of playing esports at the professional level, and what he’s learned over the past year. It was great getting to talk to the team about the inside baseball perspective on professional esports today. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed: - Nouns Esports website and @nounsesports - Team Nouns Dota profile - NounsDAO Proposals 68, 119 - Costabile’s Dota 2 player profile - Dota Pro Circuit - Nouns Esports multisig Safe - 4 Zoomers - Team SoloMid - The International Dota championship by Valve - Pokémon Unite Championship 2022 in which BlvkHvnd and Nouns placed first and second

Today, I’m joined by XR researcher and creator Jin. You may be familiar with Jin’s work building and evangelizing open and interoperable VR and AR experiences through the many projects he’s been affiliated with, such as Webaverse, Exokit, M3, The Meta Factory, and more. In this conversation, Jin and I discuss his newest project, Open Voxels, an effort to fund research and archiving activities focused on Cryptovoxels. We discuss the recent Webaverse NFT drop, M3’s latest discoveries, and his upcoming Burning Man-like party that’s set to take place in an archival snapshot of Cryptovoxels. Jin is a luminous figure in the web centric XR research community and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him about what he’s been learning and developing. I hope you enjoy the show. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - Webaverse - M3 - Openvoxels fundraise