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The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.

00:01:06:00 – 00:01:21:16

Steven Miller: All right. What’s going on, everybody? For Crypto Current. I’m Steve Miller and you’re watching another episode in our interview series. Today, I’m joined by John ShapeShift. He’s the CEO of former CEO, but now just co-founder of the ShapeShift Dao. Jon, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.

00:01:22:01 – 00:01:24:10

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. So to be here.

00:01:24:23 – 00:01:44:16

Steven Miller: As I say, we’ve got a big show ahead. So for those at home, make sure that you are subscribed to the channel. We released these episodes every Monday and Friday with new episodes of our new show, The Aftershock, debuting every Wednesday. We really jump right into things here. So, John, if you could please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do for the ShapeShift Owl slash the Fox Foundation.

00:01:45:19 – 00:02:25:09

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah. So yeah I’m a co-founder of ShapeShift originally dating back to 2014. Four years and I started this little thing that became a big thing you know, an easy way to transfer one digital asset to another digital asset and kind of blew up, especially in that 2017 era. And we’ve evolved quite a bit since then. And the biggest evolution that’s ever happened to us, or our biggest shapeshift was, was what happened last July, where we announced that we were decentralizing away the entire company, an organization open, sourcing all of our software and becoming a DAO.

00:02:26:09 – 00:03:01:03

Jon ShapeShift: And so we’ve been kind of on that track since July of last year and it’s really been going quite fast and progressively and to the point where like we had wound down to the point where we have, you know, basically just a skeleton staff of employees left at the organization. That organization is pretty much done. There’s no, you know, W2 type employees left. And every day the Dow community is growing and self-organizing and thriving. And at this point, you know, there there is no you know, I’m not as you said, I’m not CEO anymore.

00:03:01:05 – 00:03:39:28

Jon ShapeShift: I’m not any of these things or any executive title. Eric’s not CEO, none of us. There are no executives. It is really a community run organization now in terms of the Dow, and that’s been really cool to be involved in and see every day. So at this point, you know, I’m I’m basically just another member of the Dow, which is awesome. I love that. You know, it’s not it’s not dependent on me in the same way that there is this whole group of people that have showed up to build things every day. And so for me, being involved in that has been, you know, one of the most one of the most exciting times that I have been involved in anything in crypto over the last ten years.

00:03:41:01 – 00:03:48:26

Jon ShapeShift: So, and really fun to watch. And yeah, that’s, that’s kind of my, my every day now is kind of just being involved as a community member.

00:03:49:26 – 00:04:07:18

Steven Miller: That’s awesome. So if we can just take, I guess, one quick step back, how did you originally get into Web three and involved in all this? I know that you said that you joined the whole no crypto movement with Eric when you guys originally founded ShapeShift, but were you involved prior or was that just your moment of stepping out and what? Three.

00:04:08:18 – 00:04:38:24

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah, so and I got involved. Web three was not a term, it was just Bitcoin. And basically I got super interested in Bitcoin back in about, you know, early 2012. I just I had actually heard about the Bitcoin whitepaper through some news organization that I had followed. There was some news article that had popped up and I had originally saw something about it actually even before that, maybe even 2010, 2011. And my initial thought was like, Oh, that’s stupid. That will never work.

00:04:38:26 – 00:04:59:03

Jon ShapeShift: I didn’t give it too many thoughts. And then I started hearing more about this Bitcoin thing started to evolve. There was some of these initial price rallies that started happening. It really started to catch my attention enough that I was like, Okay, maybe there’s something here. Maybe I should learn more about this. And then I went from my cursory look, learning about the way people were to actually reading it and actually

00:05:00:26 – 00:05:37:27

Jon ShapeShift: going in and learning a bit more about Bitcoin and actually buying a little bit to try and do it, actually researching what a blockchain actually was, all these different things. And I just started falling down that proverbial rabbit hole and just becoming absolutely enamored with this thing where I, you know, within a few months of that, I was convinced that this stuff was the future and that I needed to spend as much time or as much time of my life as I could, devoting myself to this and learning about it and contributing as I could. And so, you know, that led to, you know, some kind of personal involvement in Bitcoin, you know, following the Bitcoin community, being involved in small things, going to meet ups, things like that.

00:05:39:26 – 00:06:21:28

Jon ShapeShift: But then that really took off. Yeah, when I met Eric in 2013 and we ended up basically starting shapeshift. So that that was really I my involvement in the industry really started to become more significant and you know, kind of on a big trajectory since then. But yeah, it’s been about about a decade now since I first came into the crypto and web3 world. And you know, the term web3 really has only become popular over the last couple of years. So I’ve seen this evolve for first it was just Bitcoin and it was, you know, blockchain, not Bitcoin for a period of time which we used to laugh about and of developed into the wider world of, you know, just calling crypto.

00:06:22:00 – 00:06:48:13

Jon ShapeShift: And then web3 is kind of the newest, the newest terminology. I think Web3 is actually one of the better ones. Blockchain Bitcoin was one of my favorites. So yeah, really, it’s to me, it’s, I don’t know, I just kind of fallen into it during that time. And to me it’s just the most one of the most obvious forces in the world changing everything. So I just could not help but be involved in it.

00:06:49:01 – 00:07:30:02

Jon ShapeShift: I love that. And honestly, that’s the story that, you know, we love to hear the most. Here is the fact that so many people just kind of take that leap and jump into it once they figure out, you know, after reading the white paper or even just getting a little bit of exposure, they immediately start getting their feet wet as a builder. And that’s really cool to me that you started that way. But now that we’re, you know, I guess what now seven years on to shapeshift originally then becoming the Dow last summer I wanted to start diving into the Dow with you a little bit because as our listeners know, Richard, get a chance to sit down with Eric, I believe over the summer, last summer to literally talk about the launch of Shapeshifter Dow, right.

00:07:30:04 – 00:07:43:11

Jon ShapeShift: When it did actually launch the Dow. So if you could for the audience, give us the basics on what is a Dow, but also tell us a little bit about what ShapeShift Dow really is and like how it has decentralized.

00:07:44:18 – 00:08:16:10

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah, totally. So let’s let’s back up a little bit to just like what are the mechanics of how this thing started and how does it even work? So back in mid-July, we basically made our announcement about decentralizing away the entity and the launch of the Dow. And what that really meant was that the first thing we were going to do is we did this massive airdrop. So the the native token of the Dow is FOX token. That’s the governance token that basically allows holders to vote on things and basically run the high level organization of the Dow.

00:08:16:27 – 00:08:47:18

Jon ShapeShift: And we airdrop this to a ton of people. You know, over a million Ethereum addresses all of our past users, a bunch of other defi projects, you know, thorchain users, basically anyone that we thought was a good target for this. And they all had the opportunity to claim this token for a little bit over three months after that airdrop. And what that meant is that anyone who grabbed who actually claimed the token and held it could become a member of the Dow. They have voting rights.

00:08:48:01 – 00:09:11:26

Jon ShapeShift: You don’t even technically need Fox to become a member of the Dow. But, you know, the more of it you have, the more say you have in various posts that might happen. So in terms that’s kind of the fuel that started all of this. But at that point, it was still very much a big experiment, like there have been other daos out there certainly before us. And, you know, even all the way back to 2016 and the Dow, that blew up in spectacular fashion. But

00:09:13:12 – 00:09:53:00

Jon ShapeShift: the concept of a DAO is not necessarily new, but a centralized company, especially one like us with, you know, seven plus years of operating experience, really decentralizing entirely into a DAO was a pretty new concept. And I think we are one of, if not the first to do such a thing. So in terms of this question of just like what is a Dao Dow is a decentralized group of people on the Internet that are organized usually via some sort of token, in this case the Vox token for shapeshift and have the ability to govern some subset of the organization and open source products and, you know, open source engineering.

00:09:53:02 – 00:10:23:09

Jon ShapeShift: But they’re doing so in our case. You know, what we did is we open sourced all the everything that we’ve been working on at ShapeShift for the last seven years. And our team started building in the open with the community. Everything we’re doing forward, which actually led to us launching the what we call, you know, the v2 of our web application just at the beginning of this year, which was a totally open source built in the open DAO effort.

00:10:23:25 – 00:11:05:03

Jon ShapeShift: So in terms of how that actually works, you know, you know, day one of the, of the ShapeShift Dao, it wasn’t necessarily clear, you know, what is this organization going to look like? Who’s actually going to stick around? You know, either a former people that were at ShapeShift and new community members that were coming in interested in this. So it this you know, at that point it was very much an experiment, but the experiments going pretty well, I have to say, like at this point we have. Something like eight or nine, what we call Workstreams, which are basically like little working groups that basically propose themselves to governance and voted in for a period of time, you know, something like four or six months at a time and basically request funding from the Dow Treasury.

00:11:05:05 – 00:11:38:12

Jon ShapeShift: So the Dow Treasury is made up of a bunch of Fox tokens that the Dow was given originally. And over time, it has actually diversified those into some other tokens. So, you know, it holds of stablecoins and some other things that it’s done Treasury swaps with and it uses those to basically fund its efforts. You know, the Dow has an engineering workstream, it has a product workstream, it has an operations workstream it has a security workstream. It has marketing and growth. It has all of these things. It’s got a group that’s working on education for new Dow members and the wider crypto community.

00:11:39:15 – 00:12:17:23

Jon ShapeShift: All these things are things that people basically came and said, Hey, you should basically vote me a budget. Here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what my goals are going to be. And then the community basically interacts and says, Yeah, we do want to fund that. And that funding comes out of the Dow in various ways, either paid in box tokens or stablecoins and. We’ll do work on every day. And then on the other side, there’s tons of people that show up. They just want to contribute, you know? So there’s all sorts of various bounty efforts either put out by the Dow itself or put out by various workstreams or just even various community members like Eric, shown up and put up a few personal bounties himself and people just show up and grab is.

00:12:17:25 – 00:12:48:22

Jon ShapeShift: And one of the coolest things that we started to see is especially near the end of last year as we were kind of getting down to the final wind down to the actual company is we got to the point where the engineering team could not put out bounties fast enough, like they actually started becoming the bottleneck. At first it was like, okay, where are we going to find these people? Like, who’s going to show up and just like want to do work for, you know, little bits of fox. But we really got to the point where like the engineers were so they were the bottleneck because they would put out bounties.

00:12:48:24 – 00:13:23:01

Jon ShapeShift: They put out seven or ten bounties in a week and that would be seven or ten bounties would be completed. And so they got to the point where they just could not get them out fast enough without them being totally completed. So that that’s a great problem to have. And it basically just started to show that there is, you know, in every day we see it like new people showing up, trying to find a way to contribute and not just in engineering but on product, on on the marketing side, you know, on the community management side, you know, we have a moderation workstream that was formed with like community members that just want to help moderate our discord in our forums and the community discussions and all these things.

00:13:23:03 – 00:14:06:08

Jon ShapeShift: So really what it is, is it’s a Internet native organization that spans the world that is all of its rules and governance is decided by its members and token holders. That’s ultimately what a DAO is in today’s nomenclature. And there’s there’s various degrees of Daos out there. Some, you know, are more decentralized than others. Some are more autonomous than others. But in one form or another, they are these kind of Internet native global organizations with no nexus other than the community that they built on the Internet, and that all voluntarily choose to just work together, you know, in the open, in the transparent manner, on some sort of subset of goals.

00:14:06:24 – 00:14:37:28

Jon ShapeShift: So, you know, those goals can change for various daos in ShapeShift case, it’s really building this decentralized interface for the crypto world, and that’s one of the main things that the shapeshift is focused on. But you know, a DAO can really be formed around just about everything, you know, especially as we saw last year with things like the Constitution Dao and various silly things. And it’s my personal theory that, you know, just like we’ve seen in other parts of crypto, that as daos start to explode more into the mainstream consciousness, they’re also going to get weirder and weirder and weirder for a period of time.

00:14:38:25 – 00:14:46:29

Jon ShapeShift: And that’s actually ultimately a healthy thing. But it’s going to draw some attention as some daos are formed around very strange things over the next few years.

00:14:47:15 – 00:15:16:04

Steven Miller: And there’s no doubt that that’s coming. I mean, I’ve been privy to able to watch a couple of different daos form, be a part of them, but to see exactly how it’s even navigating the larger regulatory, you know, system has been a really interesting thing to watch. But I guess within that same vein of like navigating the challenges out of curiosity across the last six or nine months of really decentralizing what have been some of the biggest challenges and successes that you guys have faced?

00:15:19:00 – 00:15:51:24

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00:15:51:26 – 00:16:22:10

Jon ShapeShift: Monthly is a 3% royalty on NFT game board sales with 5% royalty on NFT property sales. Board holders will also be airdropped 50 lab tokens. Bought holders will be airdropped free properties. 50% of all advertising sales will go to bond holders and 10% aversion to lag quarterly profits are airdropped to board holders and one of the best parts of the game is that they will be giving away blue chip nfts weekly as an endgame achievement. For more information, go to Soledad’s NFT icon again.

00:16:22:12 – 00:16:24:21

Jon ShapeShift: That’s Soledad’s NFT that come.

00:16:40:16 – 00:16:50:27

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah, that’s a great question there. There’s been a number of challenges that we face. You know, a lot of those were initially just like, how do we structure things? So we had some good ideas.

00:16:52:12 – 00:17:23:01

Jon ShapeShift: My my colleague Willie, who’s a great, very active member of the Dow, kind of he he had been part of some other towers and helped us with some initial organization concepts that the Dow could or could not adopt. And one of these was this Workstream concept, and that’s worked really well, where you basically have a leader of a particular group, whether it’s a product group or an engineering group, you can even have multiple of these, but they basically propose themselves as a leader with funding and then figure out with that funding, okay, I’m going to pay these people to do this work.

00:17:23:03 – 00:17:55:12

Jon ShapeShift: I’m going to produce this sense of community, and then I’m going to show the community, you know, after my six months of funding are up, here’s what I did, here’s why it was worthwhile. Here’s what I delivered to you all. Here’s why you should fund me again. That whole concept has worked really well. I think it was that it was very experimental at first, but it’s given a good degree of organization to the Dow without going overboard and still, you know, kind of adheres to this egalitarian concept of the Dow that anyone can come and do this and anyone come and say that person’s not doing a good job. We should replace them, you know, so that that can happen at any time.

00:17:55:14 – 00:18:25:17

Jon ShapeShift: And that’s worked really well in terms of challenges. I think figuring out what those structures should be, how they should evolve, how do you keep people involved, you know, long term retention of getting good contributors. So you’re not just replacing people every day. And, you know, and we had, you know, a number of people formerly from the company that, you know, some of them have stayed on and formed a great nucleus of this kind of Dao community and helped bring in the rest of the community, kind of helped form our culture of the Dow. And then some went on to do other things.

00:18:25:27 – 00:19:00:00

Jon ShapeShift: That was totally surprising. Not surprising. That was totally expected. But, you know, it was still a challenge for the organization to kind of transition from what we knew as a centralized organization into this decentralized organization. And it’s been effective. But at the same time, you know, difficult to see people that you’ve worked with for a while, you know, move on to something else. But we’ve also had people, you know, even leave and then come back because they go do something else. And, you know, the more kind of structured, centralized world and they’re like, actually, this isn’t for me, that Dow thing actually is really cool.

00:19:00:02 – 00:19:32:28

Jon ShapeShift: And they actually show back up and that’s, you know, this kind of open door that the Dow ultimately has because, you know, there’s no contracts, there’s no W-2 employees. You kind of you either just contribute as much as you want or you don’t. And you get compensated based on that of the rest of the community has worked really well for the most part, but we’ve definitely had these various challenges. I think one of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen in ShapeShift or this time and really in every Dao is just figuring out conflict resolution.

00:19:33:12 – 00:20:06:09

Jon ShapeShift: You know, in a centralized organization you have to deal. People are very used to just going to like some sort of authority figure, whether it’s h.R. Or their boss or the CEO of the company or whatever it is. Like if they have a problem with someone else on the team, they’re generally going to go somewhere else. And in the Dow there is no such authority figure. So like, you know, with the exception of like literally putting up a vote to governance, which, you know, makes it a whole public thing where people basically have to decide whether to, you know, vote to punish someone or vote someone off the island in some way.

00:20:06:26 – 00:20:42:24

Jon ShapeShift: You you have to really encourage a community to figure out a way to resolve these things internally with themselves, to actually talk to each other when they’re having issues that there is no authority to figure out or to figure out what this processes are. And this is an evolving thing. I think shapeshift has dealt with this pretty well, but it’s definitely a point of friction when it does come up. And it’s been even worse than some other daos that I’ve just seen in the ecosystem as I’ve watched. So I think this is the sort of thing that’s going to get better and it’s going to evolve as daos figure out better processes and toolsets to deal with this without hopefully evolving into H.R.

00:20:42:26 – 00:21:14:27

Jon ShapeShift: departments for Daos, which would be just an even another problem in my opinion. But I think that’s been one of the most consistent challenges that I’ve seen in the now world, is just how do you get people to actually talk to each other when they have conflict and find ways to compromise and move forward and work together, even if they’re not always 100% on the same page? Because inevitably, when you have a group of, you know, 50, 100, 200 plus people across the world all working together in various ways, it’s just going to be you’re going to have some interpersonal conflict.

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00:21:14:29 – 00:21:45:28

Jon ShapeShift: It’s just impossible not to when you have that many people together and that many different personalities from that many different places, and that’s okay. So like part of why I think we’re trying to figure out at the shapeshift now and hopefully be an example for others is like conflict or even a little bit of drama is not necessarily a bad thing if it leads to resolutions. What’s a bad thing is if no one tries to resolve anything and it just becomes a everyone tries to. Barry Everything. And then people get mad because the issue festers and then they leave or they or it blows up in some dramatic, terrible way.

00:21:46:20 – 00:21:55:15

Jon ShapeShift: The better thing is to really train the community about like, it’s okay when these things happen and we can resolve them together, but we have to do it and we have to do it in the open as much as possible.

00:21:56:08 – 00:22:14:04

Jon ShapeShift: And I think the question from there, at least for me, becomes. Obviously with there being this separate foundation, the Fox Foundation, it’s not necessarily there to act as that element, right? It’s not there to be the conflict resolving authority. It’s really there to be an admin. Is that correct?

00:22:15:07 – 00:22:46:11

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah. So the Fox Foundation is part of the structure that we’ve set up, and it’s actually been a long winding road to even get the foundation set up. So the Dow has been live since July and the foundation itself, well, we’ve had some of the members ready to go isn’t actually hasn’t even been live yet. It’s actually going live over the next few weeks because there’s all sorts of the legal regulatory structuring that has to happen for that centralized entity, and that’s taking a long time. But once it’s live, the idea is that the foundation really has no control over the Dow.

00:22:46:21 – 00:23:17:00

Jon ShapeShift: They are by no means an authority figure. They’re not even really an advocate. I wouldn’t even call them that. They’re more just the organization that is designed to support the Dow and its mission and help with things that they can’t fully decentralize immediately. So I view them more as a support arm. But yeah, to your point, they’re really they they have no authority over the Dow, so they really can’t come in and solve those issues. They can they can give their opinion if they want, but that’s about it. And they don’t really have that kind of like structure in place within the community.

00:23:17:02 – 00:23:24:23

Jon ShapeShift: They don’t have anything specific that gives them an ability to resolve things. They’re just an organization who’s there to help with the Dow.

00:23:25:26 – 00:23:59:22

Jon ShapeShift: And the way I’ve heard it actually spoken about is that most of these foundations that form as it relates to a Dow is either that of an admin or an ecosystem contributor. So, I mean, it really does make sense to me that, you know, where you guys are coming at this from is that the Fox Foundation really is that ecosystem contributor. It’s not necessarily somebody that’s trying to guide the whole, you know, of where Schaffer shapeshift is headed. So I find that really interesting. But I’d like to kind of head into the big reason why we’re here today, and that’s to talk about this big news that you guys are just putting out in the world.

00:24:00:03 – 00:24:24:19

Jon ShapeShift: And that’s the ShapeShift Dow has officially closed its access token round that’s been led by Coinbase Ventures. So there’s a lot to unpack here, not just the fact that it’s super freaking cool that you guys managed to get Coinbase Ventures to lead this round for you guys. But also this idea of a success token seems to like something that we’re not hearing a lot about yet. So can you tell me a little bit about the news and even define what a success token is for us? A little bit.

00:24:25:12 – 00:25:05:08

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah. Yeah. So this is super cool news that is just coming out is that the community basically led what is really just a diversification effort at the Treasury. So the Treasury has, you know, basically a large amount of fox in its Treasury, but its goal is to make sure that it has, you know, at least enough stablecoins in its treasury to last through any bear market and fund all of its operations as needed. So one of the one of the various routes the community has taken to this was this success token. And what a success token is. This is an interesting new instrument that was designed by the UMA Protocol, and we kind of started talking with them shortly after the Dow launched about this idea.

00:25:05:19 – 00:25:38:23

Jon ShapeShift: And it’s basically a way for Dow Treasuries to diversify some of their treasury without having to sell any of their native token immediately. So the way this works is a new token, as mentioned. That’s what the success token is. And the native token of the Dow, in this case, Fox, is used to collateralize that success token. So basically a bunch of Fox is put into a contract that can’t that fox backs these success tokens. And the success tokens have a certain expiry date in the case of this access token and about two years.

00:25:39:10 – 00:26:15:06

Jon ShapeShift: And the way it works is that the buyers of it. So in this case, you know Coinbase Ventures and the other groups that decided to jump on this round and buy the success token, they basically bought the success token at a price, and they’re guaranteed at least one FOX token for success token at that price at the expiry date. Now the cool part of this and the way this kind of aligns the incentives of the Dow community and the people buying the success tokens is it’s set up so that with the collateral that’s in there, they get more than one fox depending on the price of Fox at a later date.

00:26:15:16 – 00:26:52:27

Jon ShapeShift: So if if two years from now, the price of Fox is over a certain price, I think in this case it’s like $0.80 for Fox. Then added as that goes up, they’ll get more Fox at expiry so they can get up to two Fox instead of one fox for what they purchase at expiration. So this is really cool. And then it basically aligns their incentive that they, like the community, are incentivized to want to work together to basically make the Dow and the community valuable. And the more valuable it is at expiry, the more reward they’re going to get all the way up to getting to Fox for every one fox they purchase basically at a higher price.

00:26:52:29 – 00:27:24:22

Jon ShapeShift: And that only happens if the price actually goes up. So it basically it was a way to like inline these type of VC type investors with a Dow community and do it in a totally definitive way. Like there’s no there’s no legal contract around this. There is no like there is no entity because the ShapeShift Dow is not a legal entity. Instead, all it is is basically an on chain transaction where these people put in their their tokens that they’re giving to the Dow Treasury.

00:27:24:24 – 00:27:58:12

Jon ShapeShift: And the Dow Treasury gives them these access tokens that they can basically alter, do whatever they want with up until that expiration point. So that part is really cool. And it’s particularly cool, obviously, that we got Coinbase Ventures to be one of the leaders of this. You know, they’re one of the biggest, most regulated crypto companies in the world in terms of Coinbase itself. But their venture arm is very interested in these decentralized projects, and I think it was one of the first examples of them basically doing a a deal like this where there is no no centralized entity or contracts at all.

00:27:58:23 – 00:28:17:25

Jon ShapeShift: And basically the entire thing was defi native and all closed in that way. So it’s a very cool instrument that, um, has developed that’s a great way to align the Dow communities with those who want in on these type of things. So yeah, very excited about that.

00:28:18:08 – 00:28:40:08

Jon ShapeShift: So help me understand, I guess for clarity sake. Is it the success? Tolkien is now going to be something that is mostly used for venture based investing in daos based on what you may has created or is it? You know, these types of, you know, success tokens are going to be even open for public purchase now that the concept is coming out there in the world.

00:28:41:24 – 00:29:16:15

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s really up to the community that mints the success tokens to use them. However, I think you’re made mostly envision these as like a way to align a kind of investor group or a VC investor group with a DAO community so that the community and those who are raising the funds can be on the same page and have a very similar incentive structure to want to work together to strategically help each other. But there’s no reason that these can’t be put out there. And it’s actually something that the shapeshift our community voted on as we minted, you know, basically more success tokens than we actually sold in the round.

00:29:17:00 – 00:29:53:09

Jon ShapeShift: And the community is actually going to put up some of the remainder of these in a similar range on Uniswap v3. So really anyone can come up and actually buy these things if they want to participate, just like Coinbase Ventures did and others, which is pretty cool. So, you know, there’s no reason that it has to be done that way. It’s really just whatever the community wants to do with these, this is basically end up being another token and the token can be transferred and put into amms or you can do whatever you want with it at that point. So the community could do, you know, another DAO could basically take six tokens and just sell them to their community if they want.

00:29:53:11 – 00:29:56:14

Jon ShapeShift: They can do whatever they want with them. There’s no real restrictions on it.

00:29:57:21 – 00:30:31:07

Jon ShapeShift: So this is really the first time that I’ve ever heard of or experienced the success token’s structure and the concept itself. It sounds like, again, this is all very novel tech. So as you view it and as you’ve gone through this process of essentially releasing this success token, what do you think the impact of this is on the broader crypto and web3 world going forward? Because I feel like this is a this is a concept a lot more daos can adopt, but even protocols going forward in certain Treasury perspectives can start adopting and utilizing.

00:30:31:15 – 00:30:33:10

Jon ShapeShift: So what are your thoughts on where this heads from here?

00:30:34:17 – 00:31:20:00

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah. I mean, the world of Dow Treasury management and Treasury diversification is actually one of the more interesting ones to me, and it’s a kind of a wide open book of all these things. And there’s a lot of different experiments being tried. And I think the success token is one that is cool, that is being tried now, and we’re one of the bigger examples to use this so far. But there’s a lot of various avenues for Daos to diversify their treasury. And I think the main thing is Daos are looking for ways to do this in ways that don’t require just selling their token to market like no one really wants and no community member really wants to do Treasury like, you know, taking a bunch of token and just selling to the liquidity pool that everyone’s using because it’s kind of just dumping on the heads of the community and no one really likes the optics of that and just doesn’t feel right.

00:31:20:11 – 00:32:10:06

Jon ShapeShift: But if there’s ways to align strategic, you know, investors or people who want to be part of the Dow community in a way where you don’t have to sell the token or, you know, upright, whether it’s, you know, some sort of vesting, smart contract or it’s something like the success token where they have an expiry date. The important thing I think, for the Dow is simply that they are able to package these things in such a way where the token is not sold immediately to market and you can align the interests together of like, hey, we’re in this together to make this thing successful together, you know, because I think one of the reasons I know you define the success token is there was actually a big backlash on some of these types of things with other daos not the shapeshift specifically, but there were other daos, you know, over the last number of months that were trying to raise money from VC funds and things like that.

00:32:10:08 – 00:32:42:18

Jon ShapeShift: And what they did is they would generally like give those VC funds like a discount over a period of time and community members really didn’t like that because, you know, whether or not it’s true and I think a lot of cases it’s not actually true, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s true. There would be a perception formed that these VCs, VCs discarded a lot of the crypto community and crypto Twitter almost gets used like a dirty word that come in, buy these big bags of tokens and then they think, just dump them on the market. You know, they buy at a discount and they dump and they just profit it in that way.

00:32:43:13 – 00:33:14:19

Jon ShapeShift: People really didn’t like that. So like the idea behind the success token, that’s really cool. That aligns the community incentives. They don’t get any discount. You know, when when Coinbase Ventures bought the success tokens, you didn’t get a discount at Fox App Market. Instead, what they get is basically additional upside if the token does well and they can’t just dump it right away. So that’s that’s really aligns with the community as incentives of like, hey, this is a strategic investment that’s working with us together and they only succeed if we succeed. Otherwise, they’re not getting anything that anyone else didn’t get.

00:33:15:03 – 00:33:48:24

Jon ShapeShift: So that was a really cool way to align that and kind of massage some of those concerns about VCs getting these huge discounts and then just dumping them on the community. So I think things like that are going to be the future of now Treasury diversification. I mean, the Dow has also looked into things like, you know, one of the ways that we’ve funded some of our operations is the Dow has found ways to even borrow against its token. So like we’ve used like Rari Capital’s pools as a way to, you know, collateralize our fox as a Dao and actually borrow stables that way and pay contributors that way.

00:33:49:04 – 00:34:25:29

Jon ShapeShift: So kind of these kind of debt financing, you know, financing with ways that, you know, aligns investors via the success token and other types of Treasury diversification is that this is a whole world of tools that are starting to open up. And I think, you know, a year from now there’s going to be, you know, hundreds of these various types of tools for daos and people competing for these daos attention, because ultimately this is end up with these huge piles of money in their treasury and not knowing the best way to do things with them. So there’s I think there’s just going to be a huge market that pops up to serve the needs of these of these treasuries, because it’s it’s just quite obvious that there’s a huge opportunity there.

00:34:26:17 – 00:35:00:03

Jon ShapeShift: I mean, we’ve we’ve already been speaking with a handful of different project creators and companies that are starting to provide tools for Daos. One of which our listeners can go back and check out was Upstream, who’s really focused on providing a suite of tools for Daos to truly form and form in a regulated fashion. So it’s really is another next gen tool for DAO formation. Well, not defamation, but DAO funding down the line. So I love getting a chance to see this. I think it’s really novel tech. I love that you guys are, of course, on the cutting edge of this at all times.

00:35:00:05 – 00:35:23:09

Jon ShapeShift: So big tip of the cap to you guys over at ShapeShift. But one I guess, final question for you, John, personally, because you guys are so known for staying on that cutting edge, what are some other things in the web3 space that you personally are super interested in, whether that’s for shapeshift or personally, did you get really excited by in the current Web3 ecosystem?

00:35:24:12 – 00:36:06:01

Jon ShapeShift: Yeah. And it’s it’s so hard for me to keep up with at this point. You know, I love how quickly the web3 and crypto space is. Evolving and how much innovation is happening in so many directions at once is one of the things that keeps me excited and gets me up every day. When I first got into Bitcoin back in the day, I could literally keep up with all of the Bitcoin news happening just by reading our bitcoin and I could read the front page of our bitcoin and I would basically know that maybe a little bit of bitcoin and I could know everything that was happening and that’s totally impossible nowadays and that’s awesome because it’s just moving in so many directions at once, which is honestly a strength of decentralization.

00:36:06:10 – 00:36:49:25

Jon ShapeShift: So some of the things that I’m excited about, both personally and in regards to ShapeShift, is shapeshift has always been specifically a multichain platform. We’ve never been we’ve always kind of had this chain agnostic overview of, you know, we don’t necessarily care whether it’s Bitcoin or Etherium or some other L2 or some other chain. We just want to be able to provide users the ability to do whatever they want across any different number of chains and make going back and forth across those chains super easy. So one of the things I’m most excited about on that front and something that Chip’s just going to be releasing soon, and our new platform is full support for the for the cosmos world and then also upgrading our Thorchain support, which allows for Cross-Chain trading.

00:36:50:07 – 00:37:23:14

Jon ShapeShift: So there’s these kind of cross-chain things are some of the things where I think the world is really going. And Cosmos specifically has really been seeing a it’s been being built for many years, but over the last six months or so, it’s really starting to kind of explode more into the public consciousness with all these different zones that are being set up and that all connect to each other. So I think one of the things I’m really excited about is that shapeshift becomes more of that nexus of like being able to go back and forth between, you know, Etherium and the Cosmos world and use all these things at once in one place.

00:37:23:16 – 00:37:57:09

Jon ShapeShift: I’m really, really excited about and for the continual development of that world and then also for everything that Thorchain is doing, which is another thing we’ve been, you know, super on the edge of. We we announced support for, you know, back in April of last year. That’s getting really exciting and starting to grow larger. And they’re going to be going to their main net sometime in the next few months. That will have uncapped limits and all these types of things. So seeing all those things grow together and shapeshift, logging into all of them is probably one of the things I’m most excited about over the next six months or so.

00:37:58:04 – 00:38:35:00

Steven Miller: That’s awesome. And again, I think one of the biggest movements that’s going on behind the scenes that more of our listeners need to be aware of is this push for interoperability. If that’s what you’re talking about here, that’s what Thorchain is built on, the cosmos is built on. That’s what ShapeShift ultimately is about. It’s about giving people the freedom to work between these networks and have tokens in different places and have them all work together. You know, Vitalik said, you know, only a couple of months ago, the future is Multi-Chain, it’s not Cross-Chain. So to me, I think that what you’re getting out there is really the most powerful version of the future of crypto, and I personally can’t wait to see it happen.

00:38:35:18 – 00:38:51:01

Steven Miller: I think it’s a really exciting time to be in it and Daos are just the start of it and I love that you guys are right on the cusp of it. So before we go, I always like to give our guests the opportunity, just as my co-host Richard does, and that is to ask you if there’s any final thought you’d like to leave our audience with.

00:38:52:29 – 00:39:36:13

Steven Miller: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, my final thought is just I think and I’m pretty vocal about this on Twitter, I, I think those are, you know, an evolution in how humans coordinate. And I think that human coordination is one of the most important things on the planet, or put another way, is like the superpower of the human species is our ability to work together in groups and to accomplish things in groups, not just as individuals. And I think, you know, the last time that there has been significant evolution on how we coordinate was basically when corporations and companies and these types of things were first created, you know, hundreds, even thousands of years ago, depending on how you look at it.

00:39:37:21 – 00:40:09:06

Steven Miller: So I see Daos as like the first real big innovation in that space in, you know, maybe millennia, but certainly the last few centuries. And I think now there’s no better time than now to basically jump in and get involved with Daos. And that’s the whole thing is they are open and anyone can come and just like show up at the ShapeShift Dao and get involved as a community member and see how you can contribute or even just look around and see what’s happening and that there is no more exciting time than now to do that, and that this design space is just going to grow massively over the next few years.

00:40:09:08 – 00:40:41:01

Steven Miller: These things are going to, I think at some point I don’t know whether it’s this year or next year or two years from now, but at some point they’re going to blow up into the public consciousness, much like we saw with NFT last last year. And people are really going to start getting excited about this new form of coordination and work and ability to work on a goal with people you don’t even know across the world to accomplish something. And I think that’s very, very cool. They’re going to they’re going to evolve in ways that we can’t predict yet. And there’s no better time than now to get involved in such thing.

00:40:42:17 – 00:41:11:12

Steven Miller: They integrate thoughts and. On Jon shapeshift. Thank you so much for being on the show and joining me today. We’re really excited to be able to share this news with all of our listeners at home. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or you’re joining us via your favorite podcast directory, you can of course learn more about ShapeShift the Fox Token and ShapeShift down by visiting ShapeShift dot com. And of course, you can also go follow John at ShapeShift CEO on Twitter. Maybe that needs to change to ShapeShift Founder. Who knows? Yeah, I don’t know.

00:41:11:14 – 00:41:12:29

Jon ShapeShift: I’ve thought about that. I’m not sure.

00:41:14:00 – 00:41:26:03

Steven Miller: We’ll talk about the branding after the fact. But for those at home. Thank you for joining us again. This has been another edition of our interview series and until our next one on next Monday, we hope that you will stay cryptocurrency. See you next time.

00:41:28:17 – 00:42:00:14

Jon ShapeShift: Take her to current crew. We want to give a quick shout out to all of our faithful listeners out there. It’s been an amazing journey and we really appreciate your support throughout the years as we’ve been growing as a community. Each episode, we decided that we would start sharing some of the reviews that you were leaving for us for today. We would like to share this review. Today’s review comes from Jess Corson. I am an entrepreneur who is entering the crypto space. This show has given me the insight and ideas for a direction I should go in. It has also filled in the blanks in my mind to understanding cryptocurrency. I feel like I have joined a community listening to Richard and all the wonderful guests he has on the show.

00:42:00:24 – 00:42:35:02

Jon ShapeShift: If you need a place to give you balance in checks with your thought process and respect the crypto, this is the place I highly recommend. We sincerely appreciate this review and all reviews and would like to ask that if you’re enjoying our show, please take a quick moment to go and leave a review on our podcast so that hopefully we can be highlighting your review next. Simply go to our show notes or go to our website where we have a link where you can share your review today. Hey, everyone. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For more information on today’s episode and all of our episodes, please visit us at W WW That crypto dash current, that’s SEO.

00:42:35:08 – 00:43:06:21

Jon ShapeShift: You can also find a link in the show notes. Want to stay up to date on the latest news in cryptocurrency? Sign up for our newsletter today. You’ll receive daily emails Monday through Friday that are personalized and curated content specific to you and your interest. Powered by artificial intelligence, you can either go to our show notes or go to our website to sign up today. Are you an accredited investor looking to invest in cryptocurrency? Crescent City Capital can help. Go to Crescent City Capital dot com for more information. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the quality of our podcast each week are improving.

00:43:06:29 – 00:43:22:01

Jon ShapeShift: I can only thank my amazing producer, Andrew Ritter with the Ritter Productions, who has been putting all of this together. If you have any podcast, music or audio needs, please go to Ritter Productions dot com. That’s d r i t t e r productions dot com.

00:43:27:23 – 00:43:40:20

Jon ShapeShift: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Crypto Crime with Richard Condon. We’ll be back with more exciting developments from the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency next week. But until then, stay cryptocurrency.

00:43:50:06 – 00:43:52:20

Jon ShapeShift: We 56 now.

00:43:57:11 – 00:44:32:01

Jon ShapeShift: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Cryptocurrency. Just one quick reminder. Cryptocurrency is a cryptocurrency and blockchain education platform that’s bridging the gap between the curious newcomers who are just discovering the space and the thought leaders who are shaping its future. All opinions expressed by Richard Carleton, the cryptocurrency team and their guests on this show are exclusively their own opinions. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Richard. The team and their guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or to follow is financial advice. This show and any other crypto current production is exclusively for informational purposes.