11 - Pet3r Pan of MetaCartel

hello and welcome to the green pill i'm kevin walke and this is the podcast about public goods and regenerative crypto economics today on the show we have peter pan who's the founder of metacartel and now an investor at 1kx networks really excited to have peter on the podcast because he started one of the earliest dowels in the ethereum ecosystem the meta cartel dao and that has gone on to germinate many dozens of interesting projects in the space and has served as one of the earliest homes

for founders and engineers through the bear market of 2018 2019-2020 in the space so peter pan is in many ways the father of different parts of the ecosystem through the work that he's done with metacartel and he has some really interesting thoughts on how to germinate healthy communities and cultures within daos and i think that that's very very fruitful for founders out there who are designing regenerative crypto economic systems so without further ado i give you peter pan i hope you enjoy this episode if

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itself by using yield from your deposit to pay off your balance you're only dead his time what was once inconceivable is now within your grasp already welcome to the show i'm here with peter pam the founder of metacartel who is now an investor at 1kx what's up peter it is good to be uh talking to you again likewise all right so first question here's my hardball um when did you learn

to fly and when was the last time you fought captain hook uh you know probably uh the last time i had a fever which was like um you know when i had covered over the new years fun fact i actually really enjoy i actually really enjoy getting sick because obviously you excuse me you know not take care i didn't have questions yeah yeah but the second thing is that the fever dreams are ex fever dreams are very agitating the you know the um almost you know the frightening but like they just i come out of them so many like so

many new ideas it's almost like this like you know like little jumble you know of ideas in my head that goes on we we've got a we've got a girl board at get coin called kevin's fever dream hallucination sneaky note list and uh the team only lets me pull one of those in per quarter so but i do think time away from the computer is important for synthesizing and digesting what's going on in the space and where to spend time and energy so that's a lead into my next question where are you spending your time and energy these days yeah i think you know all of this all over the

place but i think in the last couple months been really uh digging into um crypto games play to own and just realized that you know this is a mental model that almost can be applied to you know an ownership model right that can be applied to really many different things other than just games and um yeah i've been really really excited about that because it sort of provided almost this new like framework to think about you know uh building like the the dowser building and the networks with what sort of building um yeah so i'm very excited

about that yeah so say more um as i understand that play to earn is the type of games where you show up you do some sort of in-game mechanic and you earn a tokenized reward as you advance through the game is that more or less it so that's a general common you know understanding of uh play-to-own and crypto games but you know i sort of think of it as you know it's in in most you know economic systems at least in the legacy systems there's always this middleman right right that really like you know coordinates everything and they take a heavy cut and due to the la you

know the inability for the market to actually coordinate effectively they sort of like stay in power right you know uh in gaming these these entities all these middlemen were you know would traditionally be uh games publishers or games studios right that would not only you know coordinate the development of games but they would you know release it market it distribute it and then you know monetize it right and i think you know um there's just these massive coordination failures where like you know these publishers are just like because they have total control over the full um you know production cycle of games

uh you know and you know they basically can do whatever the [ __ ] they want right including you know pushing really you know extractive and uh vampirical sort of like about extraction and monetization models right onto these economies effectively that players belong to and bring value to while having you know while the players almost have no absolutely have no you know governance uh rights no input uh you know despite being actually being the actual you know uh ones that bring value to them right so um i think you know for me like crypto um

games and you know play to earn is actually about you know building like i guess decentralized economies where you know the full value cycle and production cycle of the game of these games right and these gaming ecosystems that you know sort of uh unchain and transparent and and you know decentralize right and um so i think it's more about you know the governance and you know of of how games are built and maintained and run and and how the economies are managed and you know uh more so than than you

know being able to earn from games right um i see so so it sounds like it's it's more about plato or i guess like play to earn is just kind of scratching the surface and then over time the full value cycle uh is such that these games are released and as players proliferate their economies the governance of the game kind of is gradually transferred over to the community from the core team uh is that a more accurate synopsis of what you said definitely and i think you know the

current you know when when plays you know let's say like a crypto game like axe infinity when plays you know play the game and they earn say that's all you know like slp tokens you know uh like it's basically you know these tokens like represent ownership of this economy that allows you know and these circuits also allow them to breed more axes right like these circums i i would say uh you know all the distribution of these tokens more or less represents like the distribution mechanism in which ownership is like transferred over to the player and the economy right so you can do this for many ways but

um yeah this is actually been sort of the one landmark or platon project that's really emerged right and yeah yeah yeah i think that you know like defy summer had all of these like yam forks and everyone was doing vegetable coins and then we had like nfts and everyone was copying loot and it seems like within play to earn axia is kind of the undisputed king or queen of of play to earn and maybe people aren't aren't forking it and copying it but it's certainly inspiring a lot of interesting conversations i maybe heard somewhere that there are there are people in the

philippines that just live their lives and make money by playing axe infinity which i thought was incredible that's right um oftentimes you know um they play the game they aim tokens uh and then they lift up that revenue right that they produce and that's a quite a controversial topic around you know uh you know in general because you know actually like there's this question like what you know when you're building this in-game economy you know there's a question of like what is you know what are the goals of this economy right you know and you know it may have

many and i would say that um there's a sort of question of like what uh what are like valuable contributions or valuable activities uh of this economy and then you know arguably you know playing the game uh in a playing the game and just like you know sort of in a very low skilled you know i guess like having like low skill plays just playing the game owning tokens and bombing almost like farming and dumping without actually contributing any sort of value to the overarching community it would not be considered you know a

valuable you know sort of like a weight would not be considered like you know a valuable contribution right to the economy and and regardless of this this is sort of what's being sort of rewarded right now and how the set of structures have built up and you know actually sort of used the sort of like initial way to just reach tokens as a means of you know maybe growing the economy but how they you know district tokens may will actually dramatically change over time you know as it shifts towards retaining uh you know and rewarding more valuable

contributions right yeah it's really interesting to think about this design space of designing around the goals of an economy and rewarding the most valuable activities and contributions in an economy where my mind uh immediately grows goes is like um you know the difference between value created and in value captured um and basically if you have too many people focused on value capture and in like business model stuff then you don't get the public good you don't get the value creation without the expectation of returns and the more you can tie the

value capture to the value creation then like the more there's aligned incentives of the participants but like i'm a software engineer and the code that i wrote this morning i don't even know if it's going to make it to production and if it is in production is it valuable and if it is valuable then how do we measure that and i think that there's a big problem where when you've got um when you've got work that you can't prove was valuable um and and so that's one of the sort of designs that i'm trying to figure out as we as you know as someone who's been thinking a lot

about funding public goods um is is like how do you align the value creation to the value captured and um and i'm wondering if you know what are the most what are the most innovative ways of measuring measuring value and rewarding value uh that you've that you've you've seen within the play to earn space i think that uh we get to really see uh you know iterations emerge which they also happening right now um i would say that you know i think the current innovation like

i i think the current innovation that's sort of emerging is just like this uh focus towards you know uh building like i guess focus towards like you know i would say um i get or focus or discussion around like you know what are the you know actual you know like goals and kpis of the economy and that i think like these economies and communities right now are only starting to realize that you know economic like maximization is just like not the focus and i think that's the that's a unique differentiating factor between you know let's say a company

an economy uh in general is that an economy about it looks at balance multiple different goals and purposes uh all at once right so like you know a nation state you know economy main you know optimizing optimizes for many different you know sort of like uh like kpis from not only just gdp growth but gdp per capita uh air quality right uh genie coefficients uh you know and i think when building up a virtual economy it's more like you know you're trying to build a viable place for people to thrive on

top of right so you know culture like diversity of you know people ideas talent you know uh you know individuals that's also you know another factor that you know that enables you know these economies to thrive and so i think like um i think that right now a lot of the you know there's a lot of actually actually copycats that are copying axes but mostly on an economical layer but you know that they yet to really innovate you know uh on these other aspects that you know actually have been sort of thinking

about but they've been less visible and i think you know over the next year we'll see you know more plato and economies really think more you know broadly about how to how what should they be optimizing for so i think like realistically it's it's you know the you know the innovation play to earn here is more of a mental model like you know really like a mental model innovation or like mental model shift uh you know on like how to manage and how to build these in-game economies interesting yeah so i'm gonna i'm hearing a little bit about value being multi-dimensional

you wanna optimize for several different kpis not just like gdp of the economy um it reminds me of like you know so so the podcast that we're on right now is called regenerative crypto economics and i've been working on a definition of that which which is an economic system that satisfies human needs creates positive externalities and is generally net positive and creates balance and finds equilibrium is the third component there and i'm wondering you know it really struck a chord with me when you said that it's it's building for human thriving i i think that um you know it's

really hard to boil that down into a measurable kpi um you know how do you think of of an economy that's regenerative or like satisfies the needs of the of the participants that are in it that's a that is a question yeah well if you could solve it now we could all go home peter but uh it seems like we're all iterating towards it yeah yeah yeah i think uh it's it is a question um you know could you could do that for game then i'm sure we're on the right path right perhaps you know

uh you know with our physical uh meat space you know uh yeah and i yeah i think it's it's a good question i think i've gotta you know maybe stew on that a bit totally yeah um well i'm curious uh i'm curious if we could back up a little bit uh into into sort of like the story of how you got into the web 3 space and um how the how your history in the web 3 space has has brought to you to where you are today

i think that most of our listeners are familiar with you from your work in founding meta cartel and evolving that into a dow and moving that forward i know the meta cartel mafia uh is is deep in a lot of the different crypto events that that i uh that i go to i'm curious if you can tell us about you know what what was that story arc of getting into crypto and then getting involved in meta cartel and how does it inform how you view the space today yeah it's a it's a funny story i guess um i was a designer outside of crypto so

i was like designing user interfaces talk to users doing user research and obviously you know in late 17 there were all these amazing products and end users for me to work with right of course it's just sarcasm really terrible sarcasm but you know there was it's just like it was the worst time for a designer to actually enter crypto no products no end products and user products at least you know and use applications no any sort of use cases at all really just clearly identified amongst like payments supply chain uh like you know like this

is the solution looking for a problem stage yeah it was like it was mostly just like you know maybe kpmg industry report you know use cases and that was it so um i i came in and was like okay [ __ ] like um i can't really country as a designer so what i can what can i do so i i really spent some time digging around in history learning about you know crypto before it was you know about blockchains cryptography uh i started just like you know learning about computer science and having computing backgrounds so just like got a rough sense of like why blockchains were

important after i got done i sort of like done this contextual research i started like just contributing to different like open source online communities within the firm ecosystem just like acting almost like just finding things to do from like writing notes to like spell checking like i mean i i would probably claim that you know one of the you know i am in the mastering of your uh credits you know that book uh the book credits mostly and but if you look at my github contributions they're mostly like typos typos spelling fixes grammar fixes and it wasn't even

it wasn't even me read like doing i just like took the content like like one day i took the content put in grammarly and realized it was all these spelling mistakes and i was just like i just like ran ran ran like arbitraging between writing the book and grammarly yeah basically and i added some history that i knew and i i did this you know that was like one example i went and i filmed was trying to figure out its governance back then so i was doing like cultural surveys i took those survey results and was like the first one to maybe like decipher

them and like synthesize the insights and that was a lot of like user research work that i've like sort of done so it's just like patent recognizing uh and then i realized that you know you know people were talking about yeah like okay how do we build products i mean like how do you improve the build products how do you improve the ux of things and i think medical like you know that's where medication came out it was like like a working group folks in like user research uh infrastructure mostly meta transactions and hence the name um but i think when working through like working with user uh user experience infrastructure like there's all these

design meetups that kept on talking about like how do we improve key management how do we do that how do we attract gas and no at one point i sort of thought like this makes no [ __ ] sense because it's like what what use cases did we have right um like it's just we wouldn't we didn't have any compelling use cases you know if we used to actually uh come into the crypto and i think that's when i pivoted you know medical into thinking like how do we like incubate and discover and just experiment with new use cases um and i think um yeah from then it's like

trying to you know make it uh accelerator incubate it then try to make it and then wanted to join mullet to make this a thing and then got rejected and then uh yeah then that became medical gal right yeah obviously a um really long journey and and i think a compelling one uh for people who may be entering the space now the thing that i hear from you is that you just kind of kept showing up and kept pulling that threat of your interests until you find something that deeply resonated with

uh with your skill set and your purpose and um and and i think that there's no there's for a lot of people there's not a linear path for entering the the crypto space and then finding what they want to do so uh that's a very elegant way of putting uh putting it but i was just severely unemployed and then just like really felt like crypto was gonna work um so i just like kept on you know uh yeah like you know experimenting and like and i think uh the reality was it's like i got rejected from markdown like you know

yeah so i was like why not work on something you know and then actually back then i was actually applying to a ton of jobs in crypto like product roles communication community roles but i was just no one just wanted to hire me so i was like what is like so really just like nailed down like what what are some areas that can just like come in and make concrete values like hope we can sort of find some funding afterwards right um yeah right yeah what are some areas where can come in and add concrete value i think that's a question that uh some listeners out there might be thinking as they're

trying to figure out how to enter the space but not only enter the regenerative cryptoeconomic space um which is kind of a smaller subset of cryptoeconomics so i want to drill in on that next uh so how was it that you came to be really interested in coordination games solving for the public good solving for the community good and you know where was it or where was this sort of like light bulb moment along this journey of uh mastering ethereum designer communities meta cartel accelerators innovators getting rejected from molok dao where the light bulb

really kind of clicked for you about the opportunities that for crypto to to do good um where was that light bulb moment yeah i've always sort of been building communities online uh in different ways you know like built designing communities like uh you know uh built different sort of creative communities and i didn't really think too much of this to be honest you know i just like i liked you know coordinating and organizing it's like it's like it's like sort of fun right in a way um get a sort of a rush from that um but i think i got back into

the coordination role in ethereum uh back then mostly because out of frustration i just realized that like you know when this initial technical working group around meta transactions emerged just like the right this these really really smart engineers weren't just like coordinating with they weren't talking to each other they weren't like like it was like it drove me insane and i realized that this work was something like any monkey could do so i was like all right i can maybe do i can you know i'm i'm time rich you know these other people are you know time poor why don't i step in here and uh run

all this grunt work right and make sure that you know we actually figure out how to standardize mental transactions we figure out how to maybe decentralize the execution of them and i think it just comes from a lot of frustrations it's like this an annoyance at the you know opportunity cost you know and the lack of uh you know like just this unrealized potential right and i think that's always been the driver a lot of a lot of the coordination games that i sort of i've run and you know like would consider myself this

like coordination junkie it's just like anything that you can like to coordinate on i will like come in themed you know and then phenom and sort of like uh you know look for different ways coordination can happen right um yeah yeah so i'm curious to to to sort of pinch and zoom on that word coordination because i heard from you a very visceral story of being a coordinator of people at small scale um in the meta cartel and then obviously as that grew you were coordinating more people and then um

and then i sort of i sort of view ethereum in web 3 as this substrate for human coordination that's completely scalable because it's global in nature it's transparent it's immutable um and it's programmable so basically you've got this sort of like coordination in the ether pun intended and and so you know like what's the scale from like organizing a group of five or ten people in in the sort of old world to global scale coordination in in your view uh

you know like is is that like a linear scale to you do you think about what you're doing now is just coordination at a greater scale now you're a capital allocator as opposed to like a like a a project manager is is that is that a linear scaler for you it's an interesting yeah it's an interesting question because you know i think i you yeah like i i you know initially when i was organizing medical talk i've always been you know folks in small groups and you know i and then and then hindsight you know i didn't i kept these groups small and tight and coordinated and i grew you know and i

sort of like grew groups i almost scaled the medication ecosystem horizontally you know by like starting different squads focusing different objectives and then scaling out businesses meta factory um metagame like is that what you mean by how exactly yeah correct like medical adventures and so on right and as opposed to create you know just focusing like growing large groups of a single monolithic large group and i think you know in charleston uh 20 when d5 somehow came about like you know you have these like protocols that like launch or like hunt like tens of

thousands of users and community members at once and i was like oh have i been doing things wrong and i'm like this is this a different way of like coordinating or starting off and yeah it was a new pattern but i think soon after like when these larger you know larger supposed dowels like really started to started like to fail to coordinate i realized that you know there were no shortcuts to coordination you do have to actually like you know there is this like process that you can't skip which is this process of like establishing a mission creating clarity around goals

bringing you know finding countries that care about those goals and then figuring out a way to retain them and reward them and keep them you know focus on those goals right and you know these things always start small so you know and over the last two years i think i've come back i've come full circle i've like you know uh did my did my own experiments saw how uh you know the ecosystem sort of like defaulted to experiments and realized that was interesting but then that didn't work so i think i'm coming back full circle and realizing that or dial should actually really start small regardless even regardless of you know

how many users you have right now you know even and that's sort of even a side side topic where i think you know uh doubt you know like instead of like doing large air drops you know of tokens and to community members or users you should actually always be starting dows you know pre pre-token in you know and as contrary to working uh contrary to groups and like pods and then you know and then you know once you have a contributed community then you know uh retroactively disputing ownership so that you already have a you

know fully functional uh and live and operating you know came to contribute from day one as opposed to like launching a token and being like oh now let's think about community development and like building community contributors it's just like there were a few like you know um incongruencies that you know i sort of more or less uh recently realized yeah yeah you know what you said sort of like the difference between scaling horizontally and like out with like small pods that have strong culture um but are more emergent versus like going

bigger going home is like hey first off i want to say that the fact that it came full circle for you and now all these like large d5 projects had a lot to learn from you uh you know i think that's like a fun karmic circle um when all those launched in the in d5 summer um but the thing that really comes to mind to me is this quote by vitalik that even a billion dollars of capital uh doesn't mean that you have a soul um or even a billion i think the quote is even a billion dollars of capital can't compete with having a soul and what what i'm hearing from you is like just from

knowing the horizontal groups that that you've that you've been involved in scaling out of meta cartel uh raid guild meta factory um metagame i feel like a deep essence of soul and mission drivenness and a strong culture that come out of those projects and i think it's interesting to think that like if you add capital and scale too early it's almost like you blow up the anime patterns in the culture that um and i don't mean like blow up like explode i mean like you you pinch and zoom them and and they they grow and

and then they become like cancerous in the larger part of the organization so i'm wondering if you have any sort of like comments on that um you know like is is that initial pod that's kind of like the seed that grows into the plant and and it's really important to get the culture in the mission and the working norms right at that small scale before you grow this was probably the only thing we got right building gals like a ton of learnings you know over the years like this would be the only one one

single takeaway is that you know we from very beginning we said you know we wanted to curate the community based on values and a strong mission um which was back then and the missions evolved right of medication but you know initially it was like build ux infrastructure index it was like build you know use cases and experiment and then it slows like experiment shifts into experiment with use cases and start like experiment with dowels and coordination mechanisms right and i think just experimentation was like at this core and people wanted to just see things emerge regardless of like whether there was funding that was

you know that had you know like i guess agenda like agenda-driven funding right like you know we were doing grants funding mostly because it was just the fastest way to get an experiment built and shipped right um with no strings attached and we just wanted to purely see the results of these experiments um so i would definitely say that you know that's the one thing we got right um yeah and i think like you know it's sort of this effect of like you know um the first like you know 20 the first you know not even 20 the first five

contributors you you have right uh are going to attract the next 10 and the next 10 are going to attract the next 50 and and so on the next 50 attracts next 200 and and you know the the thing is that's why like you know who who who's part of your community early on it matters so much but you know if all you do is like you launch a community with like you know a thousand people even hundreds of people all at once with no context and no shared sort of sense of mission and you know no loyalty to the core values right um

uh you know ownership that i think you know you just what you get is a bunch of people who then just like you know go off and like you know leave the community uh straight you know it just becomes a sea of noise uh of the in in the the individual's own agendas right that just like fuzz everything up um right yeah so so i think it's like you know starting small uh you know uh and building a strong like like cultural foundation is just like right it there's no shortcuts here yeah

got it so it seems like dallas are kind of like this emergent place for each agent in them each member of them has their own agenda and by curating that mission and culture when you're small you make sure that you've bundled up like everyone's kind of rowing in the same direction and that kind of acts as a filter that keeps everything on track as as the dow grows that's right um yeah when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your

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