Jordan Lyall, Founder of $MEME Project Shares his Thoughts on the Intersection of DeFi and NFT – Ep. 22

Bobby Ong (00:02):
Welcome to the CoinGecko podcast. I'm your host Bobby Ong. Each week we will be interviewing someone from the blockchain industry to learn more about this fast moving crypto currency economy. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming. The CoinGecko podcast is produced each week to help you stay ahead of the curve. Show notes can be found at podcast.coingecko.com. I highly encourage you to join our newsletter where we send out top news in the crypto industry every Monday to Friday. Come back often and feel free to add the podcast to your favorite RSS feed or iTunes. You can also follow us on Twitter and Telegram at @CoinGecko.

Bobby Ong (00:39):
Welcome to the CoinGecko Podcast. For today's episode, we have the honor of welcoming Jordan Lyall, founder of $MEME Project. $MEME project is an experimental protocol at the intersection of DeFi and NFTs. And a little bit more about Jordan, Jordan also serves as the DeFi Product Lead at ConsenSys, leading the team building DeFi score and other projects. Prior to joining ConsenSys, Jordan ran the product team at Totle, a DEX liquidity network. He is passionate about bringing usability to web3. Welcome to the CoinGecko podcast, Jordan.

Jordan Lyall (01:10):
All right, thanks for having me. Great to be here. Thanks a lot.

Bobby Ong (01:13):
A big fan of $MEME, being in the Citadel in the early days as well. For the benefit of the CoinGeno audience, right? So, let's talk about the history of MEME. Maybe can you share with us a little bit about how this whole project got started and how we got to where we are today?

Jordan Lyall (01:28):
Yeah. How much time do you have? It's a long story. Uh, no, it's a fun one. I'll give you the abridged version. So yeah, I mean, you were there in the early days, so you could actually tell some of this story. Man, it was crazy, right? Like if we go way back, it all started from a tweet. It sounds silly to say but I had posted a tweet or just kind of poking fun at like some DeFi dev work and DeFi development practices and just like the DeGen nature of some of this stuff, "Test in Prod". And I just posted a joke on Twitter and I thought it would kind of get some likes and retweets but it turned into something that just kind of spun out of control, took off virally. And I decided to just create a Telegram channel just for people to kind of jump in and have a laugh, right.

Jordan Lyall (02:14):
But people in this community had a different idea and it was just weird combination of like the right type of people. Someone said, "Hey, what should we do? Should we go build this product?, "No, let's create a token first.". A bunch of people are pouring in. People were sharing the link and it was like, "Hey, let's create a token. Let's create the MEME token." And then just within the span of hours, this was like a Friday night, I dunno, it's the middle of my night. And I'm just like, I kind of birthed this thing, but I'm sitting back watching it happen and watching people come in and wonder what's going on. At the time there was like, there was nothing here. It was just a MEME token, right. It was just, you know, we kept throwing the idea around, can we be like the Doge for DeFi?

Jordan Lyall (02:57):
Dogecoin for 2020. And there was nothing. There was no product, there was no team. It was just, "Hey, there's a token". And we're just having some fun, people in the community,. But it started to get into this weird like potentially like maybe scammy territory. And I was like, you know, my name's attached to it. My name is attached to ConsenSys. Like I want to make sure that this is all above board. So it was like, you know what the MEME token for DeFi should be composable, right? It should be a Lego brick and money Lego brick. So we should actually do something with this. I'm a DeFi product guy like you had mentioned in the intro. I worked for ConsenSys by day, building DeFi products. So it was like, "Hey, we could actually do something here". So there were a couple engineers in the early community and we said, "Hey, let's, this is kind of crazy. This is kind of weird position, but let's go build something for fun".

Jordan Lyall (03:43):
So it was almost like this hackathon thing. And that kind of turned into the real product that you see today. But in the early days it was very wild, man. It was, the token was just kind of an afterthought and people kept sharing it and the price is very volatile. And at the time there was nothing there. I was telling people don't buy, don't buy MEME. That's where that came from still. It was a wild ride, man. And it was great to have you there and members of your team cause we were listed on CoinGecko right away. So it was great to kind of kick off that way. But yeah, man, what a wild ride.

Bobby Ong (04:20):
So I'm just curious, right? So you start out with a tweet right, where it was kind of a tweet say that, it's like a point-and-click website to kind of deploy your DeFi project. And then after that you, then you set up a Telegram community and then bunch of people come by and then, did you deploy the contract for the token or some people in a community deployed the contract and then you kind of just like, and as you say and one of my questions early on, uh, I actually thought of asking you this, like, how do you know to trust this random group of strangers online? Because like your name's obviously most attached to it and you're the most visible member of the community. So I mean, if a group of scammers come by and use these thing to kind of make a scam project, you would be the one facing most of the consequences instead of the rest. So how do you, like at what point you say like, "Hey, let's kind of, you know, I can trust this guy and let's go ahead and do it'?

Jordan Lyall (05:09):
Yeah. No, you're right. There are a few of us, a couple of us that had their real names or their like online identity that they used elsewhere. For the most part, many others were anonymous, including a lot of the other core kind of influential or people core to the project. Yeah. I didn't create the token. Someone else in the community did. I didn't create Citadel, someone else in the community did. And I wasn't creating the MEMEs in the early days, right. People were just saying, "Oh, I'll go, I'll do this. I'll go do that". And yeah, it was a free for all. It was, it was crazy. And there were times where I'm like, if this heads into spammy, pump and dump territory, I got to get out. So it was this situation where I'm like, "Do I engage or do I hang back? What do I do?".

Jordan Lyall (05:54):
Ultimately like the dumpers had dumped, right. There are some famous people that were part of the original airdrop that dumped right away. Some famous people meaning in crypto Twitter. And it was still kind of like, "Well, I'm not, I'm not going to dump. I should stick through this. It was kind of my thing. I should at least play this out." But then in the back of my mind, like if this goes into a dangerous territory, just be open and honest and be like, I didn't plan for this. I'm going to be, you know, I reached out to the legal team at ConsenSys just letting everybody know, make sure we're all on the same page. If something happens out of control and this becomes an issue, like that wasn't my intention. I tried to be open on Twitter. I was telling people, you know, this was satire just in case that this went in the wrong direction because you're right.

Jordan Lyall (06:38):
The community could have taken it in the wrong, wrong people could have driven it in the wrong direction. But after kind of things settled down the next day, this all happened so fast. It's like the next day, what do we do with this thing? It seemed like the bad actors had moved on. Right. They maybe sold at the local top, right, for that day. And then things were like, okay, now what? The dust is settled. And then I just decided to kind of engage a little bit more and figure out, all right, we've got an interesting thing on our hands. We've got a MEME, we've got a community. We just don't have a, Oh, we got a token. We just don't have a product. And that's kind of when I stepped up and started working with the developer to build something. But yeah, it was just a weird situation where it could have totally gone in different directions.

Bobby Ong (07:21):
I will be worried myself, if I was in your situation, I will like, do I continue or do I step back? Because like, I mean, both were equal chances of happening.

Jordan Lyall (07:31):
Yeah.

Bobby Ong (07:32):
And I guess, I suppose like that's how the name of website came about, right? Like dontbuymeme.com. cause like you tell everybody don't buy this MEME token because like there's no value to it. I guess that's how, did you buy the domain and did you deploy? I remember the early days it was sort of like a domain and it was a Notion page with some very simple website text and some images like, were you the one behind it or someone else did that?

Jordan Lyall (07:57):
So I built that original Notion page. And that was just the quickest way to get content on a website, right. I bought the domain name, pointed it to a Notion page, made it public, put some texts and images on there. That was before we had anything. This was the first night and into the second day. And yeah, it was like, we don't really know what's going on here. The public seems to be really interested. We have a token that's trading. And at that point it was, it was up to like a million, million and a half, few million dollars in market cap before we even had a product. It was pretty crazy. And I'm like "All right, so I'm just going to build this quick site and put up some information, direct people to the Telegram group". Just kind of stop the fire here. But at the same time it was like, "Guys, this is crazy".

Jordan Lyall (08:42):
Like we don't have anything to show. There's no team, there's no product yet. We're not sure what we're going to build. Probably bad investment. You probably shouldn't buy it. And then it was like light bulb, "Don't buy MEME". That's a meme in itself, right. "Don't buy MEME". And then I quickly went and registered, dontbuymeme.com. And that's kind of been our thing all along and literally since the second day where we've been telling people not to buy. And that's just some of the fun that we've had. And it's interesting seeing how that, like sarcasm plays in different international audiences, like certain people from certain parts of the country, especially English isn't their first language. They're very confused when they see that. They think that they're breaking the rules if they buy and they really shouldn't and we're telling them not to buy because the sense of humor doesn't really translate, I guess. But it's really, it's really funny to see how the community reacted to that line, dontbuymeme.

Bobby Ong (09:37):
It's funny how, when you tell someone not to do something, people have this urge to do it more. So yeah, I guess that works in your favor. But I remember in early days it was sort of known as "DeGenerator". And then at some point you have this, you took on the meme symbol and then the whole thing became the main project. So how did that name shift from DeGenerator to meme?

Jordan Lyall (09:57):
Yeah, you're right. The original tweet that I had made it referenced this fictional product that I came up with called the DeGenerator. So it's DeGen-arator. So that made fun of Degens and DeFi. And that was the original, like the inspiration for me to create this Telegram group. And even to this day, the URL for the telegram group is the DeGenerator. And, so that was really my intention. I was like, okay, let's, this product probably will exist at some point. I designed it, let's go build it. I just thought that would be the next step. I thought we would have some fun. Really the idea of the DeGenerator would be, it was like a point-and-click kind of interface for launching DeFi protocols. And the line was, you know, deploy a DeFi protocol in under five minutes. So it was really just click a little buttons, hit deploy and then now you have a, a DeFi protocol.

Jordan Lyall (10:51):
That was kind of the joke. And that led to the Telegram group. And a lot of people were chatting and like, is that the brand? Is this the name of the community? Is it DeGenerator or is it something weird? Is something different? We had now, you know, an hour or two into this, into the life of the community. We had people in the community that weren't aware of the joke, weren't aware of the original tweet or they didn't have the context or they weren't the DeFi geeks like we were in the beginning. So it was like, well, if we want to kind of cast a wider net and be a little bit more accessible, we should probably like, preface that DeGenerator only works if you get the joke so let's back it off a little bit. We needed a call sign, we needed a ticker symbol. We needed four letters to use in our token. And the easiest thing instead of like DeGenerator, it was just like, let's just do MEME. We're just the MEME group. We went with MEME and then use the Pineapple from my original design. So in creating this Twitter joke, I just happened to put the icon or the emoji of the Pineapple. So that kind of carry through all of the branding. Even to this day we use the Pineapple as our brand. So that's another little Easter egg. But yeah, that's kinda how it morphed from like, well, the DeGenerator doesn't work for a wider audience, let's add that to the MEME brand. And then when we were deciding what product to build, it was a toss up, everybody had a bunch of different ideas and it was like, well, do we build something? Do we actually go build the DeGenerator...

Bobby Ong (12:22):
Yea, was gonna ask you that.

Jordan Lyall (12:26):
And then, well, that could be cool, but really it's very niche-y. It's not a very wide audience. We have like all these consumers in the community. Let's do something that just like picks it up a notch.

Bobby Ong (12:41):
So that's how the thought process went about. Like instead of building something purely for the crypto DeGens, which was the point-and-click tool, which helps to launch more scams in the crypto space, you guys decided to go and build something more mainstream. And that's how like the NFT idea and all came about.

Jordan Lyall (12:57):
Yeah. I want to do something a little bit more mainstream, something that had a little bit more legs that could take off. Yeah.

Bobby Ong (13:02):
You guys are quite innovative in having your MEME community tokens and stake to grow Pineapples. And then these Pineapples are then used to redeem NFT, a limited edition NFT trading cards. So was that one of the only idea or, I suppose you have a few different ideas, were they similar in nature or very different?

Jordan Lyall (13:21):
In the early on in the discussions, it was like, once we decided that we wanted to go into this NFT world, it was like, well, yield farming is big and it's been a couple months now. But like, if you think way back that far, it was an eternity in DeFi terms, right. But this was before, this was mid August. So this was before Sushi, you can believe it or not. So like the food coin wars, right. It sounds crazy to believe, which is, I think like the Pineapple was one of the, after YAM, it was really one of the next food emoji projects where, I think we helped to kind of kick that off but it was like yield farming was huge. YFI was like at 30 or 40K at the time. right. So that was pumping. We knew we wanted to do something in yield farming.

Jordan Lyall (14:15):
Cause that's like the DeGen nature that we wanted to tap into and NFTs were also pretty hot, right. And we thought like can we, can we merge the two, can we do like, can you farm for MFTs? And that was really, that was it. Then we, yes, we can merge the two. Okay. We can find some ways where we can do both farming and NFTs and then let's go do it. And we had a bunch of different ideas. What if you take the NFT and you mint another token, and another tokens, the governance token. Or what if you know, you're minting, right now, it's very straight forward, right? You lock up your mint tokens or your Pineapple tokens. You earn, as you said, and then you, then you're able to mint these NFTs. But for awhile we had like, that was our first prototype.

Jordan Lyall (14:59):
10 days after the tweet, we had this protocol live on main net. So it happened all really fast. And that was like our first MVP or our first experimentation. The thought in the back of our minds was we're going to let put that in the market, see how it does and then build something else, see how it does, almost like a hackathon format where you spend the weekend building something and then it might be done unless it really takes off. But we thought we might build a couple of different things behind it. It turned out that this first version, the, you know, almost like mining for NFTs, that kind of struck a chord with people. And it started to get a lot of traction and people were really into it. Started like, the art was great. So that led to it a lot. The token price kept going up. So it was like a lot of people were interested in this thing. So it was like, "Hey, instead of going and building these other things that these other ideas that we had, let's double down on that". That's why we kind of kept pushing that forward.

Bobby Ong (15:54):
And were you guys are the first to kind of do farming to receive NFT tokens in return. Or were there other projects that did this before this?

Jordan Lyall (16:04):
Uh, no. I claim that we were the pioneer. We were the first. I've talked to some people since that said they were working on something while we were launching or they had the idea, we just beat them to it. There were a couple of projects that have since launched. Most of them are clones of MEME projects, but yeah, we were the first to kind of positive token or LP token and NFTs.

Bobby Ong (16:25):
And you guys chose like, I mean, each person can stake a maximum of five MEME at only one point in time. I guess there must be a reason for doing such a thing. Why, why do you set a maximum of five MEME stake at any one point in time? And why do you use Pineapple as intermediary instead of just redeeming it for the cards directly? And I guess, I think the Pineapples are not transferable but like maybe you can share a little bit more insights on the decisions that you made.

Jordan Lyall (16:53):
Yeah. Great point. Just so you had to walk it back, you stake your MEME tokens limited to five and then you earn Pineapple points and then you're able to mint the NFTs with the Pineapple points that you earn. So you're right, the original direction, and again, this all happened 10 days after the idea, right? So a lot of our decisions were, where can we optimize, where can we be efficient? If we had months to build this thing, we would've done something differently. right? We would have had, we may have made the Pineapples tokens and we might've done several different pools but because we were limited to time and resources and we wanted to get something out quick and prove that we're onto something, we made decisions that in a sense kind of helped us and hurt us at the same time. The five thing was really just about, you know, the limit of five, stealing of five.

Jordan Lyall (17:44):
Yeah, you can create multiple wallets and go through the hassle of doing that.

Bobby Ong (18:02):
More friction.

Jordan Lyall (18:02):
Yeah. Yeah. So it just works itself out. And then at the time we had a minimum of one. We have since a new pools, we've removed a minimum of one but we've kept the maximum at five just because we want to make it a little bit more fun for the average guy, right. You shouldn't be competing with whales but yeah, these were like early decisions where we just had to make the call. And you're right. Now we have several pools. We have the Genesis pool and the Genesis LP pool.

Jordan Lyall (18:28):
We've got various artists pools. And the Pineapple points that you earn are limited to just that pool. You can't transfer Pineapples. For better or worse, again, the reason why that is the case is because like, if we had an extra week of development time, we might've made those ERC-20s, where they're tokens themselves. But because we just wanted to get to the next step, get it out there, that's why they're really just points on the contract just to, it's all on chain but it's just in a smart contract kind of ticking up with every block. So it's not centralized at all. However, one thing that I've found interesting is that that actually prohibits, by launching a new pool and not letting people move their pineapple points it's better for the new user. Because if I'm a brand new user coming to this platform, I put my money into a pool.

Jordan Lyall (19:20):
Well, now I'm competing with everyone, who's been staking in a previous pool, have earned all these Pineapple points and then they moved their points to a brand new contract. So really it's just every new pool everyone starts at the same level. It's there to just help out the little guy, for users that have been there and they have these Pineapples that sometimes can go unused if they miss out on minting and NFT. So there is a plan for future updates that would allow the user to roll over their Pineapple points to a new pool. We're still working out the details there but we do have in mind products that will address that concern.

Bobby Ong (19:58):
Yea, I think what you guys did with the maximum of five MEME per address is good because as you said, it prohibits the whales and it builds this culture where it's very community grounds from bottoms up approach, where people will feel that they are fair. They have a fair chance of playing and participating in it. Otherwise it's just a whale of community. And we know what happens with whales. They come in at a start, they farm and then they dump and then leave the community, and you guys are there. I mean, one of my, my other thoughts as well and it's something that we haven't seen in DeFi and all is that, there's this a lot of this mercenary farming that's going around, where people come in for a short time, they mine and then they leave. There's no reward, there's no incentive for staying in the community for a longer period of time. So I'm just wondering if this is something that you guys are thinking as well. Do you, for example, factor in an age factor or rewarding communities, uh, people who have stayed for longer time in the MEME pools for example. Yeah, what's your take on that?

Jordan Lyall (20:52):
Yeah, you're right. On one hand, we do want to be very accessible to new users but we also want to treat our loyal users, those that have been around for a while, we want to treat them well, too. So we're doing things like drops and NFTs and new pools that favor the whale as well. So stay tuned for new pools but to existing pools, like we'll put some art in there that, you know, the minimum is like 150 Pineapples and there may be only 10 NFTs to be created. Like the new user isn't going to be able to get that. It's only users that have been in there awhile. And we may, you know, just, we're still kind of moving the levers and changing some of the variables. And we want to, we want to find that sweet spot in between like new user adoption and like kind of paying dividends, so to speak, to the existing whales and those that have been playing the game for awhile.

Jordan Lyall (21:45):
I like the multiplier, the longer you've been in there. That's super interesting. I think we're going to see some things like that, those that have been around and you can always kind of tie back into the NFT itself, right? Anyone who's holding an NFT, any particular NFTs, we'll create a new, you know, imagine a new pool where you don't lock up MEME tokens. You deposit your NFT, your Rare Metallic or whatever. Also, it really benefits those that have been playing since the beginning, when we first launched that card. So you can think of things that like other campaigns and other mechanisms that benefits someone who's been here a while.

Bobby Ong (22:21):
And what can you do with this NFT trading cards that you guys are giving out? Are you guys planning to for example launch a collectible trading card game, or what can you do with it? I mean, it's all the collectibles at this point in time, but do you see any potential use cases in these NFTs that you guys put out, so far?

Jordan Lyall (22:39):
Yeah, you're right for now, it's a collectible and they, they actually sell on Open Sea and other markets. They do pretty well. Uh, the secondary sales is pretty well. So if all you saw was this way, it's almost a yield farming with extra steps, right? Create the NFT, you go to Open Sea and you sell it. So in a sense like the APY for some of our users is very competitive, very interesting for some of those guys. But if you're a collector, like it's just, just in general, you can prove like some of these cards, there are only 10 exists. So you can prove to your friends that, "Hey, there's only 10 of these things,". But yeah, with the Genesis set in particular, it's clear that it's has like the early stages of a trading card game, right. We have a wild card. We have these relics, we have various degrees of these cards. It starts to get into like this Pokemon field, right.

Jordan Lyall (23:34):
In addition to just collecting. And that's certainly heading in that direction. We see a future is, like we've got a million ideas. A lot of the community members have a bunch of different cool ideas that where we could go next. I think this trading card game is, is a fabulous one. And I think we'll, we'll start inching closer to that. One other cool thing, and there's many different directions that this can go but we're experimenting with other artists and other brands and working with different mechanisms in the NFT themselves. You know, we just launched the coin, coin artists in our Genesis collection. We launched coin artist cards, both common, rare, and legendary. Imagine being able to take these cards and going into neon district or going over to the coin or NFT farming platform and using those. So it's just a little bit of like, once the more we partner with some of these groups, you can then take these NFTs that you've minted on our platform and take them to other platforms. Another cool thing with like extra utility of these NFTs, we did a, we had a relationship, a partnership a couple of months back with LA Blockchain Summit. And by owning one of these rare NFTs, it gave you access to exclusive events around their conference. So you could, um, attend a private zoom chat or access a VIP Telegram group during the conference. So again, we're, we're just kind of testing the waters with these different, like added value on top of these NFTs.

Bobby Ong (25:10):
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the selling points of NFTs, right? Because like it's supposed to kind of change the way gaming is done because in the traditional gaming market it's all in game items that are sold by the company and it's only used in that particular game. And ideal NFT was that these NFTs can be used across the various different open games across the internet, across a different protocol. So far. I mean, these narratives have been going on for a few years now, we haven't seen any of these play out. Like the idea was you can take a crypto kitty and kind of play on some other games. But the problem I see was a problem of incentive, like everybody wants to sell their NFT and they hope that the NFTs can be used on someone else's platform but nobody wants to adopt someone else's NFT into your platform because it means you can't sell your NFT and someone is benefiting by the sale of their NFT instead. So how do you see this problem being resolved like, cause everybody wants to sell their own NFT and not someone else's NFT.

Jordan Lyall (26:04):
Right, yeah. No, that's, that's a really good point. Cause if everyone talks about like a Triple-A game adopting NFTs, imagine like that's, it gets thrown around a lot, imagine Fortnight and you're able to take one of your skins or one of your gliders and you're able to turn into an NFT and take to another game, but why would other games want to import that? And why would you know, so your point is very valid. I think it's not going to start there. It's going to start at smaller games and it'll work its way up to some of these larger games, but there are ways to build in incentives. And that's, you know, with these fees with some of these transactions where you could actually pay the destination game, so to speak, by moving NFTs into this platform, they may be able to get a piece of that.

Jordan Lyall (26:49):
And then you're able to do things in addition to just like buying and selling and trading, but you can start loaning out NFT assets. I can loan out my skin on some of these games. I really think we're starting to scratch the surface. And it requires like rebuilding, like this game item economy. But we're, yeah, we're doing cool things with like Decentraland, right? You could, in the next couple of weeks, we'll launch a campaign, a joint project with Decentraland, where you can lock up MEME tokens and MANA tokens. And you can mint kind of these exclusive pineapple-themed wearables to be able to get wearables for Decentraland and take from our platform but then put them on your character, walk into Decentraland and the only way everyone's going to see that this pineapple shirt, it's only available on the MEME platform, you know. And, and that's for fun. And it's cross branding, right, on the MEME community we're branding, you know, we're, we're kind of promoting and marketing the Decentraland community. And by people having pineapple shirts walking around the Decentraland community, they're promoting our brand. So it's kind of this cross partnership thing here. And we're really early on in like, how do we solve some of these problems and incentivize the whole, you know, both parties. I think we'll get there. It's just a matter of time.

Bobby Ong (28:09):
How do you see the intersection of NFT and DeFi moving forward in the coming few months?

Jordan Lyall (28:15):
Yeah. This is the exciting stuff. I've been building on DeFi for as long as it's been a thing, I'm full-time Ethereum for three years now, with ConsenSys for a year and a half and I've never been more excited to be a product builder in this space than I am now. We're seeing so many crossovers from DeFi and NFTs. Ours is a really good example where you're able to use the staking mechanism to generate NFTs. And what we've found is that we're like engaging the community in a way that didn't exist before. Any digital artists can go sell to ETH whale, right, a whale collector and transact one-to-one, right. But we've built something where tapping into these DeFi primitives, we're able to generate interest and buzz and almost build a community from scratch for each of these artists. So there's a lot of cool things happening there.

Jordan Lyall (29:06):
There's so many different things that people are working on, where they're able to shard the NFTs and, you know, sale fractions of NFTs. You're able to lock up your NFTs collateral for a loan. That's really exciting. All of these things that like creates more liquidity and we're even, even our project is I think benefiting the entire community as we're doing things to experiment at this intersection. And the more, more activity, the more liquidity, the more you can price some of these assets, right. Uh, where you able to do things like take where otherwise, you know, we don't know what these things are priced for This crypto kitty sold a couple of years ago for one Eth, how much is it going to go for now. We're able to like, just create this data layer now too, which is really exciting. So yeah, everyone talks about like, how DeFi can like change the world of NFTs?

Jordan Lyall (29:59):
And that's really cool. And I think that's like NFTs are going to help bridge the gap and bring on millions of users to DeFi. But as like someone who comes with a background of like product development within Defi, I'm also thinking like, what can we take from the NFT side and bring that back over into DeFi. So some cool things that we're seeing is like, you're able to wrap smart contract insurance, you're able to take Nexus Mutual insurance cover and you're able to wrap that in an NFT. And now it's easily tradable. There's a lot of things like that, where they're almost like making it easier to make it just improving the UX of DeFi and being able to transact in some of these financial tools with the ease of just sending an NFT around. So I think it's going to be and again, we're just, I say, I say this all the time, we're just scratching the surface and it's really early. But I do think that NFTs are really just going to help bring DeFi to millions of users in the next couple of years.

Bobby Ong (30:57):
Yeah. But I also, I think that there's, there is some issue with sending NFTs around. I mean, it's not the simplest item to send around in the wallets that you have. Like I remember the other day when I, I had a, a wallet with private keys and I would try to send one of my CryptoKitties around to another wallet, that was one hardest thing for me to do because I couldn't use the, I had to import it into Metamask, I don't know, there's a long, long, it wasn't the simplest thing. Like most wallets don't have native, I mean, NFT support on your wallets. I mean, ERC-20 is easily supported but like NFTs not the easiest thing to send around in edge cases. But I also start seeing that there are interesting developments around such as, uh, lately this year. I mean, they started doing Wrapped CryptoKitties, Wrapped Genesis CryptoKitties, Wrapped Virgin CryptoKitties, very interesting to me. And I think that as the NFT space mature, we start seeing more of these wrapped NFTs coming out. And I think it's not hard to imagine that all these NFTs that have been generated from the MEME project can be wrapped into a ERC-20, and then people can sort of have more liquidity for these NFTs instead of trying to sell them one, a piece on OpenSsea. So yeah, just my thoughts.

Jordan Lyall (32:07):
Yeah. I agree. Especially with these NFTs, where's there's like a lot of supply out there. If you look at some of our Relic cards, we're in thousands of supply and yeah, you can imagine a situation where you can burn these into ERC-20s, easily go to Uniswap and now create a market for it. Or even some of the more rare cards where there's 10 or a hundred, like we discussed, you can cut those into shards and then you're able to transact there. So there's some extra liquidity, you know, I know groups are working on NFT exchanges, groups are working on almost like a Uniswap for NFTs. Like it's really exciting. Just in the next couple of months, we'll be able to almost bring a lot more utility and liquidity to these NFTs.

Bobby Ong (32:51):
And how many of you guys are working on the projects in MEME these days. So you are a developer, I believe you are obviously putting out a lot of code and I guess there's a few other guys writing code or the prjocets on MEME right now?

Jordan Lyall (33:03):
Yeah, I'm kind of leading the charge here as I guess the quarterback of this project. As a product manager, by trade, I'm responsible for the overall success of the project. We have a couple engineers that are part of the team. Right now, it's still a very community driven community focused. There are no, no real entity behind this thing. We're in the early stages of kind of creating some structure around this and spinning up an entity to handle some of these decisions to hire a team. So we're in the early stages of putting a team together, potentially seeking some funding for that. Long-term would be creating a DAO, getting it back to the community, kind of putting protocol decisions back in the hand of the community. We're right smack in the middle of figuring out the next step, how to take a big step forward with the future MEME.

Bobby Ong (33:54):
So I guess last question right before we close off, if someone is interested to follow and learn more about MEME, where can they do so? Where's the best place to do so?

Jordan Lyall (34:02):
Go to dontbuymeme.com, check us out on Twitter @dontbuymeme. Whatever you do, don't buy it. Follow me on Twitter at Jordan Lyall, L-Y-A-L-L. You can always just search for MEME, #dontbuymeme, #$MEME on Twitter. That's pretty popular too. Yeah.

Bobby Ong (34:23):
Cool, man. It's been great talking to you about MEME project. I learned a lot. Interesting hearing the story in the early days, and some of your plans moving forward in the future.

Jordan Lyall (34:31):
Yes. Thanks for having me. That was a lot of fun. Great to walk back through some of those memories. That was fun.

Bobby Ong (34:37):
Alright. Thank you.

Bobby Ong (34:38):
All right, that wraps up the show. Thank you for listening to the CoinGecko podcast with Bobby. If you like our show and want to know more, check out podcasts.coingecko.com or please leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any feedback, do drop us an email at hello@coingecko.com. Join us for more next week. See ya.

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