Ansem 🐂🀄️@blknoiz06
when you're creating a new primitive that does not exist, you are going to fail attempting to pigeonhole it into existing archaic systems. the argument I am making is twofold
1) there is an intangible value reflected by attention and collective belief that memecoins accurately ascribe value to, and that influential creators have disproportionate impact in garnering this same attention
2) that it is possible for token holders to directly benefit from a slew of distinct businesses without having a defined claim on every company's cash flows
i) I disagree that equity structuring solves the problem you are describing. It may solve this problem for a single company, but it does not scale when there are multiple different businesses involved and token holders get some value from each of them. Yes you are correct that the economic value of these businesses accrue value to me directly, but similarly to Hyperliquid, $HYPE holders do not have any official structuring where they are entitled to revenues from that business. The buybacks are entirely discretionary, and it works for tokenholders because of the trust associated with Jeff and the team. Blockchains as decentralized networks do not function the same way that businesses do, and their value is not tied one-to-one to specific revenues or some equity structuring. The holders of the native token of an L1 may benefit from burns, buybacks, or other mechanisms, but there is no defined relationship between how much revenue the L1 makes and its token holders. I'm defining this pursuit as an attempt in building the first tokenized attention network. The same way that we cannot effectively value blockchains based on antiquated stock-equity definitions, we will need to expand our perspectives for thinking through how to understand these new networks. I believe that there is actually a way to create much more value for token holders than just giving them a claim to the revenues that a business is making, especially if marketed in a unique way. This is even *more* true with creators in finance because a ton of the value is created when followers learn how to deploy their own individual capital through learning how to trade. If I teach 100,000 people how to trade and they each make $10,000, that $1B is completely misreported in any financial metrics around the revenues that I make as an individual or even in the businesses that I own. What I have been trying to explain in detail is that creators have value for people in a way that no existing financial instrument correctly portrays, which is why tokenization is vitally important here because tokenization is the best tool in the world for ascribing value to things that are usually intangible. Collective belief and trust is worth a lot. Yes, it is also true that the reason that these creators have value is because they are experts in generating attention and the attention that they generate from their fans turns into real revenues in sponsorships, brand merchandising, and other businesses, but I am highly confident that there is a possible way for the consumers of this content to also have access to the upside their own attention generates, & believe it will actually supercharge the relationship in a symbiotic way. It has just never been done before.
ii) You are misunderstanding my comparison. I'm saying that yes Meta shareholders have legal ownership of the company, but Instagram *users* are completely locked out of the equation. This is a structural problem that I believe crypto and tokenization can uniquely solve. It is also not foreign to crypto to ascribe value to an asset that does not have durable revenues underneath, most notably Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. It does not make any real revenue and it is not a regulated business. Bitcoin’s value is derived purely from the entire network’s collective belief in its essence of a noninflationary asset whose underlying blockchain will continue to produce blocks. It is objectively true that social coordination around shared belief has massive value, $BTC is one of the only assets that accurately depicts this. I believe that tokenized attention networks will be similar in their construction, it's just that nobody has successfully built one yet. $ANSEM, or The Black Bull, as a meme represents a collective belief in BULL markets and a community emphasizing positivity and a desire to be autodidacts.
iii) I disagree for the reasons I also stated above. I have helped a lot of people make money in markets, not all of that is easily represented by my personal assets nor my personal business revenues. There is substantial intangible value in these relationships between creators and fans that typical equity valuation metrics do not accurately capture. Simply because creator businesses are successful and there is no legal definition for a relationship between creator tokens and those businesses yet, does not mean the future state will look the same as the present. A decade ago "creator businesses" weren't even a thing. A decade from now we will be saying the same thing about tokenized attention networks.
iv) Yes there is an enormous dependency on me as an individual, me owning 58% of the supply is a positive thing not a negative and part of the reason that the token has traded so well the past few weeks. There is plenty of liquidity in the market to absorb the trading volume as evidenced by the token consistently doing $50M volume a day across various liquidity pools. The intent with the airdrops is to not airdrop large portions of the supply at once to avoid meaningful disruption to price action. The first set of airdrops did not impact the price action of the token at all.
v) I agree with you on this, there definitely will need to be other sinks around marketing that do not purely depend on token price. This is readily apparent by my existing large following which followed me without any token attached because of their desire to learn about markets and crypto. There are a lot of creative ways to add value here for token holders without depending solely on price going up, in addition to partnering with other protocols that also will add meaningful value. The relationships that I’ve built on crypto twitter over the past decade definitely have meaningful value and there is pretty clearly defined recurring activity between me and my followers over the time that I’ve been here.
vi) yes a token is needed because it is the only way that followers also benefit from this upside. I disagree that the social network doesn’t exist yet as I feel like I have a strong network of people that I interact with here on a daily basis, now there is just added value to that. I do agree that retention will depend on whether the underlying product is useful without rewards, but that’s already proven to be true with the following that I’ve gained over the years. In relation to other protocols, yes there will be ones that do not have staying power, but it’s undeniable that it’s a serious advantage for protocols to want to incentivize activity from a group of token holders because of the amount of attention that group brings with them. Agree that I will need to better define how these partnerships work at scale, but it’s still early days!
vii) Our core disagreement is that you need these traditional equity rules to define the value capture between token holders and the associated creator. I don't believe that you do, but even if you did, there needs to be someone bold enough to attempt to do this first as there cannot be rules built around something that doesn't exist yet. I appreciate the feedback and the acknowledgement that attention purely on its own can result in supernormal returns, but I believe it's possible to do both. To capitalize on the speculation around collective belief and attention, and also to create a sustainable methodology for creating value for those token holders. If $ANSEM is just a creator-backed memecoin with an unusually strong distribution channel, then it has a great shot at being one of the most successful memecoins of all time. If $ANSEM is also successful in building sustainable value around this network of people and defining how creator-fan relationships can be accurately represented in the future, then it will be the first incredibly innovative achievement around tokenization in the burgeoning creator economy estimated to be worth $2T over the next decade. That’s a bet I am willing to take 10 out of 10 times.
