Cults, Culture, & Crypto with Meltem Demirors | Layer Zero

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but is composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto 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 talking with Meltum Demirs, the vibes sorceress, the queen of crypto, has been in the crypto space for over eight years now and has just so many lessons to share as to what goes on in part of every single corner of the crypto industry. Meltum is a relentless grinder. She's a super hard worker, and she's also, as I alluded to, the queen of vibes, I'd like to say. She's a big curator of experiences and vibes in the real world, which is where the crypto world is trending towards, in my opinion. I actually didn't know that we were going to get into this subject, but we end up talking a lot about the concept of cults, of communities, of organizations with shared values and how we are going from a world of few of these things, uh, starting with like empires backing, you know, a thousand years ago, going into religion, going into nation states, going into corporations, using the cult model to understand what a corporation is, to where we are now, with where there's one community per token and we have DAOs and NFT projects. And each one of these things represents, in a way, some sort of cult. Well, there's a lot of people that think the word cult is negative. We don't do that. We actually kind of consider it as for what it is, which is you know, alignment of people around shared values, shared sets of interests. And now that there's so many tokens and so many DAOs and so many NFT projects, there's many, many different reasons to all find one's resonance with some sort of organization. We also talk about the moving from the you know computer only era of crypto to where crypto is really starting to take over in terms of social culture. We have our own language in crypto, and now that's starting to bleed out into the rest of the world. And so, what does that mean for crypto culture moving forward? So I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Melton Demir. She's insanely intelligent, she's one of my favorite people in this industry, and she has a lot of very s unique insights about how the world works and how it relates to crypto. So I think you will learn a ton in this podcast. Let's go ahead and get right into it right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. What's up, Melton? How's it going?

Hey, what's up, David?

Oh nothing much. This is the the earliest I've ever done a layer zero and you are in uh London. How long have you been in London before?

Um, so I'm here for three weeks. So I was in London, then uh Paris, because CoinShare is acquired a company in Paris. So we now have a Paris office, which is really fun. Got to hang out with our French team, which is very focused on DeFi. We're gonna be rolling out some really cool stuff in the next few months. And now back in London. So good times.

I think uh your trajectory throughout crypto I think is interesting and it's I think the thing that I kinda wanna focus on over time, but I wanna start at the very, very beginning. Can you just give us the basic picture how you got into crypto?

What do you mean the trajectory is interesting? You have to like you have to expand on that a bit, like unpack that for me.

Sure, yeah.

I want to know what I'm getting into.

I think how I view your trajectory in crypto is uh grinding super, super hard for two, three years, and of which you still are, but then the bull market came and now you are vibing. That's kind of the mental model I have for Meltum. It's just I remember when you came on bankless and you you had the line, I've brought the receipts. And this is in regards to like the money printing, yeah, the inevitable debt issues that the United States is going to go through. And then also just been like working your ass off at CoinShares for years and years. And then and then the bull market came, and then all of a sudden, um the social life of crypto has taken off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've in my brain giving you the nickname uh Vibes Queen, Queen of Vibes.

I do love my I love my vibes. Um

Mm-hmm.

you know, crypto needs a high priestess of sorts. So um, you know, if we're gonna create any energy, I want it to be

good energy. But we can definitely delve into that. Um, I will also say, by the way, David, the way this whole thing came about, so I came on Banklist, I think, over a year ago at this point.

Mm hmm.

We had a fun conversation. I think we were in Whistler. We were like a few glasses of wine deep.

And you were like, hey.

A vibe sorceress. Can I recruit you for my new podcast? So this whole situation materialized during a high vibes moment.

Absolutely, absolutely. And uh it takes a special person with a lot of vibes that have interesting perspectives on crypto. You know, crypto is only so many years old, and it's so much of that history is really baked into like the last five or six years. Uh, and I think you've had a pretty privileged like bird's eye view of the industry, just as somebody who is already financially minded, investment-minded prior to starting in crypto, uh, which is, I think for a lot of people, it's their first escapade into the concept of money, economies, finance. But I think you were already pretty well savvy in that before getting into crypto. And so gaining that perspective from your first entrance into the industry, watching it evolve as an industry, having that prior knowledge, I think is really interesting. And then also, uh, like I alluded to, watching the social world of the industry blossom, especially in New York.

Yeah.

I think is definitely interesting as well. So I wanna I wanna get into all of these things.

Yeah. Well, let's let's rewind maybe. I think at this point, I've been in the industry for

close to eight years, which is

a crazy number if you think about it.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and when I started, it was really Bitcoin. So personally, I got into Bitcoin in the end of 2012. So at this point, it's been almost 10 years that I've personally been.

Really into Bitcoin. I'm still really into Bitcoin, which perhaps, you know,

the coin's been interesting. Um, to some people, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist. To others, I'm not

a pure enough Bitcoiner. So it's it's interesting. Like there's this purity test we now have to pass, apparently. Some days I pass, some days I don't. I've I've given up trying to figure out where I am, what camp I'm in. But I started my formal career in crypto. Um

In in 2015 at Digital Currency Group.

And I think what's so funny to me is when I talk to people now who are new to the crypto ecosystem who maybe came in in 2017, 2018, and sort of the first big wave of growth with ICOs and tokens, or people who came in in this wave with NFTs. When I talk to them about 2015, 2016, 2017, Bitcoin, the block size wars.

They've no idea what I'm talking about. They have no idea who I'm talking about. Even going back and talking about the Dow hack and what happened there. Like most people in crypto today, when I say Slock it, right? Like they can tell me who that is. When we talk about like the parody hack, a parody bug, right? They they don't know what that is. So I think it's just really funny in a way, I feel like Cryptogramma, because there's all of this really rich, really relevant historical context that I think so many people newer to the industry just don't really have. And I think having that context is is so important in understanding like.

Why we're here, how we got here. Because really the ideas that we see implemented today, they're ideas we've been talking about since 2013, 2015, right? Like these ideas are not necessarily new in and of themselves. What's really exciting for me is that we're finally at a point, right? Especially as an investor who's invested in these ideas and watch them fail, perhaps, or not really achieve their end goal. It's really cool now to see those ideas we've been talking about for so long actually being implemented and being feasible to implement because all the tooling and infrastructure, the sort of requisite building blocks around these ideas now exist and also the market for these ideas exists. So

Yeah, so it's been it's been a long time. Um it's also I feel sometimes I feel tired. I'm not gonna lie.

The last six months have been challenging for me personally.

You know, there's so much happening in the space. A lot of it's really exciting, but you also see the same patterns repeating, particularly with like influencers and influencer culture

continuing to be part of crypto. And it brings out sort of this really gross side of the industry. We see a lot of this with NFTs, right? And we can delve into that. I'm not judging it, but it's just it's a little bit exhausting. And sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm like, is this really what I'm here to do with my time and my energy? I'm not, I'm not really always sure. Like, I like to believe that what we're doing is making the world a better place. But when 40, 50% of all crypto in circulation is held by centralized custodians that are effectively banks that are subject to all of the same controls that traditional financial institutions are.

I just feel like we've missed the plot maybe a little bit. So

that's where I'm at personally. That's why I'm trying to lean into the vibe.

Sort of feeling my way through. Um, because I do think some of the aspirations we had, particularly as someone who identifies as a libertarian and a bit of like a cypherpunk, um, I'm not really sure we're living up to those ideals. In some ways we are, in other ways we're not. So

Sure. And w I definitely wanna go into that. But first there's many phases of crypto that you've been through, right? The there's like the proof of work fair launch phase, the ICO phase.

yeah.

One one thing I think might might be frustrating is that like how recyclable are those experiences and skills that you developed while navigating like the Bitcoin proof of workfare launch phase, right? Or like being good at like investing in ICOs, how useful is that that those experiences now that crypto is completely different and has nothing to do with ICOs? And like crypto goes through these waves of uh bull markets and bear markets, and each one has its own flavor and has its own.

Yeah.

Characterization. And you talked about like you can see the patterns, right? Like the influencers always arrive every single bull market. But when you say, tell me you've been in this industry for eight years, I look at this industry and I really only see the last like two to three years as being real. Like only in the last two to three years did the use cases actually like have stickiness when it comes to actual utility for mainstream, other than like the true nature of Bitcoin and the 21 million units. That then, you know, that'll be forever, of course.

I would actually fundamentally disagree with that. Look, I think the premise for me has always been

like money is free money is speech, right? Like money is a core pillar of democracy. Money is a core pillar of what makes a free society possible, right?

And so I think the premise of Bitcoin has remained unchanged. The value proposition of Bitcoin has remained unchanged. You know, I see right now there's a lot of like

pearl clutching around proof of work versus proof of stake. First of all, they're not substitutes. They're not even remotely close to substitutes. They accomplish two very different things, both of which are valuable and should exist. But conflating one to be equivalent to the other is like insanity. I think the whole ESG movement is complete insanity. Like, do I agree that we need to?

Be concerned about sustainability? Absolutely. It's something I'm very concerned about and invest in. But do I think the way in which we're doing it makes sense? Like, no, absolutely not. Um, and so I just think there are a lot of these sort of narrative violations in crypto that come up every single cycle. And there are certain things that it just have remained consistently true. Like

crypto, by and large,

the majority of volume is still coming from market makers, large institutions. It's just that.

Instead of the institutions being TradFi, like we thought they would be, crypto institutions have become so large and command so much capital that they're actually the largest players in this market. And I think will be the largest players actually in all markets going forward, which kind of a scary thought. But look, I think the last eight years have been really informative. And what I've learned does translate from cycle to cycle. And the same characters pop up time and time again. They may have different names, they may have different faces. But every cycle we have, you know, the same sort of characters, the same personalities, the same uh waves, which again is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's um it's interesting to observe because there is this sort of cyclical trend that occurs every two to three years in crypto. And then on top of that, there's this broader secular trend. So cyclical being short term, secular being you know, longer term. If we look at the 10 year trend line on Bitcoin, race up and to the right, if we

Zoom out and look 10 years ahead for Ethereum and Web3 and other protocols and ecosystems, I think you'll see the same secular trend.

I think the question is how do you navigate those cycles, both

as an investor, but also as a person, right? Who has emotions and an ego. And so a lot of what I've been doing with the vibing, as you call it, is just trying to manage my mental state through this extreme volatility. Because after eight years, it does become mentally taxing. And I do see so many people in the crypto space attach their identity.

And their sense of self to a company or an investment they've made that that's done really well, like a protocol they got involved in, ecosystem they got involved in early on,

that has, you know, changed their life. Um, and I think that's really dangerous. Anytime you start to attach your identity to things outside of yourself, I think that's setting yourself up for disappointment, inevitably. You know, it's always interesting to see in these cycles.