🎙 Layer Zero | Justin Drake

welcome to layer 0. layer 0 is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community ethereum is built by code but it's composed by people and each individual member of the ethereum community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been today i'm speaking with justin drake justin as we all know is the

founder of the ultra sound money meme and we go through the creation process of the meme itself as well as how justin drake has moved across the different stacks the different layers of ethereum first as an entrepreneur than as an l1 dev and now what he what i call actually a l0 engineer uh a memer if you will um he is tinkering with the layer zero of ethereum by committing himself to the ultra sound money meme and so we start

this conversation off with what does it mean to work for a meme this is what justin drake considers his current role in ethereum he's working for the ultrasound money meme and not only that but he's recruiting other people to also work for this meme which is just like kind of breaks the brain uh to anyone who doesn't really understand the role of memes and money and markets and finance but justin drake definitely understands that we also just kind of overall have an ethereum technical conversation it turns a little

bit more into a more traditional bankless podcast where we talk about you know a little bit more of the code than what i advertise on layer zero but all of that context for um you know further innovations on ethereum staggering shards putting oracles at the base layer all this stuff it actually turns into towards the end of the conversation a conversation about justin drake the personality himself his sort of rebellious nature his lack of a nation-state identity and also how that is reflected in his

kid as well and how those values are also instantiated in ethereum and himself uh and so the first two thirds of this podcast is all about ultrasound money uh and in ethereum the protocol a little bit tech focused but then it turns into the actual personality disposition of the man himself as well as his kid and kind of the story of his life and how it relates to ethereum so i really enjoyed this conversation with justin drake i really enjoyed seeing the man behind the meme and i'm pretty sure you will as well so without further ado

let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with justin drake but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the

token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uni-swapped out apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost three billion dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the

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primary source of liquidity in d5 by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange dive into the balancer pools at app.balancer.fi all right bankless nation welcome to the third episode of layer zero here we're bringing on justin drake you guys all know him as the ultrasound money man and i feel like i think that's the right place to start off this conversation uh justin a fun little story for you um after we recorded our ultrasound money

podcast with you me and ryan um i turned to ryan as like this is about to change the game like forever and every single week on the bankless newsletter we have like the market monday uh piece which is like a short little blurb to that usually i write write it but sometimes ryan writes it some right time somebody else writes it but usually i write it and in the uh piece i it was the uh the week before we were going to drop the ultrasound money uh podcast that we've recorded with you uh and in and so i usually write it and then ryan comes

in and edits it and changes things up a little bit and in the in the market monday piece i had written uh the ethereum ecosystem the ethereum narrative will forever change as a result of this podcast and i use some like really like big language and ryan like asked me he he dm'd me i was like are you sure you want to make some like this grand of a statement in this grandiosity statement and i was like absolutely absolutely i do uh and uh he did he did walk me back a little bit but it turns out that that was exactly right like ethereum as an

ecosystem has fundamentally changed ever since the ultrasound money meme really like took storm and it was it was a you know it was a collaborative effort between many people but it was really you so how does that feel how does it feel to be like the ultrasound money guy that like changed the trajectory of his of ethereum well i guess you know i i still think that we're at the very beginnings of the ultrasound money meme i would agree with you that it has kind of rallied the ethereum community

specifically but it hasn't grown yet that much beyond the borders of the ethereum community um i mean there was you know some brief mentions on on bloomberg and on cnbc and whatnot uh but you know i believe the meme will educate a hundred million people and so we're at the very very beginnings uh of of that um i mean how i feel personally i mean the meme has kind of infected me it's kind of taken over my life and then in a way you know like in

the same way that a virus takes over its host you can think of memes as you know the equivalent of genes that take over their host and i i've been taken over by this meme and i'm kind of spreading it to other people and other people are themselves putting it together um i mean are you like patient zero of this meme is that is that what your role is patient zero of ultrasound money yeah i i think so but you know maybe i'm patient one in the sense that uh vitalik had a very very similar meme before he invented me he his meme was uh

supersonic money um and that you know that was good but it didn't really catch on in the same way i think partly because you know it doesn't reuse the word sound verbatim as we have with the bitcoiners with sound money um so yeah this is kind of interesting you know like just like genes mutate memes mutate as well and you can have um a totally kind of um non-viral meme with lots of potential that just needs this one little mutation and that changes the game i mean it's a little bit like monkeys and humans right

where like 99 99.9 percent the same genetic material it's just these these few tiny tweaks that make a lot of difference um the supersonic money meme came around before ultrasound money and you're saying it it actually mutated into the ultrasound money meme but you you were the mutator right yeah that's correct basically you know we were chatting in a telegram group and uh

you know vitalik was uh was was mentioning this meme i was like oh well it's a good meme but it didn't really catch on and then vitalik was like hmm maybe we should try harder you know to to to to bring it out to the community and then like a few minutes later i was like ah i i've got a better version of the meme um and um you know from that point onwards a lot of my time has been that just spent you know trying to make this meme a reality i guess um and you know i have a very obsessive

um kind of a personality kind of addictive personality like when i do something i want to do it like right um and really go deep um and you know it's very different from what i was doing previously you know like i you know when i joined the film foundation i was doing um you know crypto economic research and then kind of i i went deep into cryptography and you know i've done all sorts of other things but now you know i'm i'm kind of doing something totally different kind of going down the stack

from layer one to layer two as a two layer zero and actually i'd say more and more of my work is at layer zero interestingly so for example one of the things that i've been uh doing is recruiting right that's something that that just needs to be done a different foundation and and for some reason um you know i i've been one of the the you know the biggest recruiters uh of the of the uh the research team at dfrm foundation um

and yeah so recruiting i guess you can think of the the ultrasound money meme as kind of being the decentralized version of of marketing um and you know these two things kind of hr and and recruiting and marketing were things i kind of despised and i i didn't really see myself doing these kind of roles but um you know in a decentralized context like they're kind of different and uh you know actually very interesting to to to dive into these these new fields

yeah the the world of marketing historically has always felt like top downs like here's our brand here's our image let's like shove it down your throat but like in the world of of crypto marketing it's very much of just like an infinite amount of just like a b test a b c d e f g tests to like figure out which one works and it only ever works if like the world adopts it themselves rather than have it just like shove down it's their throat by like trillions of dollars of ba of ad spend exactly yeah there's these algorithms

called genetic algorithms where basically you just try tons of mutations and then something sticks and then it just conquers the world um and it feels like you know the dfm community had a lot of of previous failed attempts you know that kind of laid the ground you know the the ground was very very fertile in the sense that the fm community was trying to find itself and it desperately wanted kind of this this meme and once it found it they kind of embraced it um and i i think that's partly why it grew

it grew so fast but you know again i think it's it's it's still a baby meme it it it has to grow a bit more so um from my perspective you're like a genius cryptographer your big brains like can code all the things talk about all the crazy like cutting-edge technology that this industry has to offer that gets like way outside of like whatever i can even like comprehend yet you are like you said going from that from layer one down to like layer zero why do you think that you are most

suited there rather than back up at the like cryptography level i mean i kind of have a bit of a founder kind of entrepreneurial mindset kind of building i just like building stuff and actually before i joined different foundation i was i was an entrepreneur and i um of a company and you get to do everything you know as a as a founder um and i i'm kind of this just jackable trader in that sense um and you know i think part of the the reason

why i like doing different things is because i'm i guess i'm quite curious and i want to try and understand the the full stack you know when you when you look at uh computers for example you know it turns out there's like there's like 20 stacks right if you go you know all the way down to the transistor or to the silicon you know all the way up to you know the website there's just so many stacks in between and um oftentimes people will focus kind of on uh on maybe three four five stacks layers of the stack but you know i i

want to i'd much rather try and get a full understanding of all 20 stacks and i guess you know this is part of just my my personal journey in the film ecosystem to try and understand every every single layer of the stack interesting yeah and every single layer of the stack has like it's its own rabbit hole right with his own rabbit holes upon rabbit holes um but like we say like everything kind of always leads back to layer zero so i kind of i think that makes sense that like that's actually where you found yourself

yeah and actually if you think of me as an entrepreneur i was kind of at layer two right so i was i was trying to make open bazaar which is this uh decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace built on top of blockchain such as bitcoin and then i went to layer one and now now layer zero and you know it's possible that you know once once we're we're done you know shipping ev2 and and and all the good stuff there then maybe i'll go full circle and go back to layer two and build something cool there and just maybe we'll go through the cycle like

one more time possibly so you said you kind of like work for this meme now as in like it's kind of your full-time job illustrate that like how how what is it like to work for the ultrasound money mean yeah so you know we we have these two pieces of infrastructure like one is um the ultrasound up on your website and the other one is the ultrasound money uh twitter account and the basic idea here was to try and

do things as decentralized as possible so you know try and and and get you know different team you know different uh people uh to contribute to to to join the meme and i think i i mentioned basically the the story here which is that um i think it was at the end of your the second ultrasound money bankless podcast i said you know i bought this domain ultrasound.money i'm looking for a team and like 10 people came in and one of the the crazy things is that i had to do

zero filtering on these 10 people all 10 people were invited to contribute they were all very high quality and i think part of the reason they were all very high quality is because in order to get to the very end of the second uh podcast they had to go through four hours of content and so only like kind of the the most uh you know enthusiastic people made it to to the end um and and actually more and more people have have started to volunteer you know through the through the twitter accounts you know they say oh you know we love

your movement we love what you're doing how can i help so you know at this point there's maybe 15 20 people um you know who volunteered to to contribute and um you know i think a lot of the work um that we do at different foundation is the nation you know very similar to to to what danny's you know really really good at and i'm you know i've tried to help coordinate this this team but also you know provide kind of the the initial impetus and and and i guess maybe

inspiration to to to to get this this idea out of the gate with uh so what kind of talent has shown up at the gates like uh is it like dev talent or marketing talent like what's is there any sort of through line like talk about all the skill sets that has like come to the ultrasound money meme yeah so um there's quite a lot of dev um so you know back and then front end but we have also some non-dev so for example there's this um artist rodrigo

um who who just makes awesome awesome art um and um actually i think one of his pieces was auctioned on the on the bankless dao um and you know this guy just just created you know this this this art totally for free and he had no expectation of financial returns and you know he didn't even really have fine you know expectations of you know building much of a name for himself he just he was just trying to contribute and and and do something interesting um you know at the end of the day it turned

out pretty well for him because he sold you know so many copies of of of of his of his nft and then i guess you know we've also had in the non-technical uh field like um someone who i think wants to remain anonymous who um basically is this this meme lord um who you know is behind you know a bunch of memes uh behind the the the twitter account that's that's awesome so how do you have goals like what is the

goal of this like emergent organization like what is the goal with ultrasound money like if it's a business and you're an entrepreneur like what are you what's on the horizon what are you trying to go towards right i mean i think the the kpi is like how many how many mines can we infect and you know this is largely kind of an educational thing it's like um how far can we spread the meme to educate as many people as possible

and you know one of one of the the metrics that we track for example is you know what what we call kind of the ultrasound fam uh the fan wearing the the kind of the the bat signal which is the two emojis uh which uh you know you're you're the grandfather of which is very cool that's pretty cool i am honored to have that spot yeah and uh you know the fan has been growing you know incredibly you know we have uh you know 300 fam members i think right now and it just keeps on growing you know at a

steady rate every single day um and actually if you want to compare it to to other ethereum memes it's it's pretty striking so for example there's this other kind of ethereum meme on twitter which is that you're going to use your ens address you know as your twitter name so for example vitalik.if and so one of the things we we did is that we we went ahead and scraped all of um of ethereum twitter so that's about three million accounts um including kind of like the the two

million accounts that that battalion follows and we found about 6500 um ens uh well twitter accounts with an ens and so you know you have one of the most powerful memes i think in a in ethereum which is the ens which kind of grew to 6500 over over kind of four years and then this ultrasound money meme which kind of in just a matter of you know four five six months grew to to over half the size

that that's fantastic yeah and and so just just for the listeners that uh are a little bit unfamiliar the ultrasound money fam is if you have the bat emoji followed by the speaker emoji does it also work in reverse if you were you also scraping for speaker emoji and then bat emoji or does the order matter so there's tons of creativity and there's lots of flexibility so it turns out there's like three different speaker emojis there's like one with three lines one with one line and one with zero line people also kind

of um change the ordering people sometimes kind of put a comma in between kind of open brackets the vat and people kind of do all sorts of of crazy variations like um you know for example people will use the the dolphin and then the the the speaker because dolphins also produce emojis i mean i kind of like to keep the dolphins separate for the flipping um so maybe you know at the flipping we can uh you know we're gonna pivot

we can all pivot for for a day or two or a week or two um and then you know people change the the actually i i have a you know um a regular expression here on my computer but basically like people will swap out the emojis and be quite creative and like people will put it in unexpected places so for example people will put the bat emoji in the location which is something that we didn't scrape and so now we need to go ahead and scrape that as well yeah yeah i didn't think i finished my my thought but uh what justin is talking about is the

ultrasound fam is those that have the bat and then the speaker emoji in their like twitter header their twitter name right and so if you are a part of like the ens clan you have like your name.eth and then now generally it's followed by the ultrasound money like like bat signal which is the bat and then the speaker emoji usually with three lines uh and it's interesting to see on the ultrasound.money page you have all of the top uh followed accounts that are a twitter accounts that are followed by people who have the ultrasound money

meme in their twitter account and so like it's funny to see like anthony cesano actually recently flipped ryan sean adams as the number one person with the most ultrasound money fam followers but i will have to say i have the met of that i have the highest ratio of followers to ultrasound follower fam on there as well so i would like i would like people to know that but it's a fantastic way to make a fun little game about just like uh putting a personal identifier on your twitter profile which is like kind of what that

that twitter biospace is for yeah i mean one of the you know one of the things that we've had is sometimes we've had kind of uh spam attacks so like people like very low quality accounts like accounts that participate for example in a lot of giveaways um add the bad emoji and so we we tried to to filter those off and like one of the the simplest and most powerful kind of quality metrics that we found is basically how many fam mem fam members

does this account have that that follow them so we call them fan followers how many fan followers do you have um and you know as you can see on ultrasound.money and you scroll down to to the fam like you can clearly see that this these when you start ranking the the fan members by this like the really the high quality accounts stand out um and and this is true not just for the top five members but kind of for for the whole thing um we got we all know like so what what is the purpose of the ultrasound money meme

like why is that so such an important thing to like dedicate your time to right um so i i think part of the part of the reason is basically the realization that um if ethereum is not pure technology right there's if you want if you want utility if you want things like like security if you want economic bandwidth then the the monetary aspect plays a key role and

this is something that i think the devs myself included very heavily under under appreciate um and so um you know what we're basically what i'm what the meme is trying to do basically is educate people on the monetary aspects of ethereum and now why is this important the reason it's important is because money is is a meme right it's you you need in

order to achieve this this monetary premium this this magic meme energy um you somehow need to have you know coordination across the across the community and um memes which are basically just ideas that replicate are ideal for coordination because basically they all program us to think in the same way and so we're in a position where everyone knows that everyone else thinks the same way and so we can all kind of be on the same

wavelength and be coordinated around making if a monetary kind of shelling point um and then as i said once you have this this monetary selling point and you you achieve high monetary premium you're in you're in a position where you can provide a huge amount of utility and one of the reason is because you can have very very high economic security it basically will be you know impossible even for nation state to attack ethereum and so you know some of the

kind of code is law and immutability and kind of all these nice properties and liveness and safety have have more credibility behind them but also because if is used as you know a collateral money um the the fact that the money appreciates unlocks uh economic bandwidth and so you know if you look at uh for example make a dow you know it's actually in a

way disappointingly small you know it's only quote only six billion die um that are that are out there you know especially when you compare it to to a system like usdt which has 10 times the amount you know 60 billion and you know one of the the key limitations is that we need this trustless collateral and we need you know a hundred more times a thousand more times more collateral um and the only way to get you know a thousand more times more collateral is for the the

token to to gain this this monetary premium so uh here's here's a question that i don't i don't think has been asked before um do you think the existence of the ultrasound money meme will has or will impact the genie coefficient of ether um that's a hard question to just like come out of left field with you at okay so so while you think i'll kind of explain the genie coefficient to users

uh the genie coefficient is just a measure of like the distribution of ether or or any currency or any unit ever right and so if you have a strong genie coefficient i can't remember if the number is high or low it's a measure of how concentrated ownership over a certain supply of things are one of the best things about the ethereum ico regardless of what bitcoiners will say about it is that the ico actually allowed the genie coefficient of ether to be pretty strong for a an asset that you know was just

birthed usually assets that are birthed have a terrible genie coefficient because they're in the hands of a few but the ico is a mechanism to distribute ether into the hands of many many people which is really really important if we talk about the properties of money it's good to have money distributed because as we all know like it's easier to get people on board on a particular money if more people have it um do you think so yeah so back back to the question do you think like this ultrasound money meme has impacted the future current or state of or the future state of the genie coefficient of ether

yeah it's a good question i mean i think to to a large extent um kind of early adopters don't need much more conviction you know they already have extremely high conviction and um i think the the meme maybe it kind of crystallizes expresses kind of an intuitive feeling that they had and kind of confirms and so in in that sense hopefully you know it might not um make these these kind of early whales uh

you know not want to sell uh and anymore that they they they previously did not want to sell um i mean one of the things that i'm that i'm hoping is that kind of the the meme and brings on you know many many more people and especially give them access for example to very fresh uh revenue sources which are which will which will lower the the the the genie coefficient and in particular you know

um staking so you know with with staking we're in a position where uh we can really distribute eve to many many people um and and and you know one of the reason is because the the barrier to entry to staking is so low that anyone can participate um and the other reason is that the profit margins are very very high so basically when you combine these two anyone can

come in and anyone can enjoy the fruit of of staking then basically this this this new issuance is kind of going to dilute dilute the the existing the existing holders and i guess another aspect of this dilution and redistribution is basically from those who use the network to the stakers and the reason is because part of the transaction fees will will