Jango & Nnnnicholas: Juicebox, programming internet-native organizations

[00:00:00] Sina: Hey everyone. This is Sina with another episode of Into the Bytecode. Today. I sat down with Jango and Nicholas from juice box. Juice box is a programmable funding protocol. You might've come across it as the protocol that powered SharkDAO, ConstitutionDAO, and AssangeDAO. it's an incredibly ambitious project that is trying to reconceptualize the relationship between shareholders contributors and how we conceive of a business or an organization from the ground up. And I think one of the most interesting things about the project is how the Juicebox DAO is built on top of the juice box protocol. There's a full closed loop and theyre dog fooding this protocol and operating their own organization.

I also want to give a shout out to Nicholas who runs an awesome podcast called web three galaxy. He goes deep into smart contracts and how they're architected. And as you'll hear, he's a very thoughtful and articulate person. so I recommend you check him out before j ping in. I also want to give a note that nothing we talk about here should be construed as investment advice, getting into the conversation. The first voice you'll hear will be Nicholas and Jango coming in soon after that, I hope you enjoy.

[00:01:33] Nicholas: I first discovered juice box, last year in 2021 in July and, fell Down the rabbit hole via shark Dao, which was a project on the protocol. I think really the, the, it was the largest project at the time when it came out and it was, a group of people. Raising Eth to purchase nouns right at the beginning of the nouns project. and they successfully purchased the second noun on main net, and a bunch of other nouns after that, and have one of the most iconic, iconic nouns, actually the shark. so I came in through that project. I was interested in nouns and then I, I found Sharko and, and I was curious how, shark Dao managed to raise the funds.

And that's how I landed on juice box, which is the protocol they used to, to build their project. And I pretty quickly fell in love. I, I thought there were a bunch of interesting, I thought it had a great, ethic and position. It's a Dao building, Dao tooling for other Daos, as well as other projects that maybe don't consider themselves Daos, but just have, a desire to use decentralized rails for whatever their project might be.

there's a lot of projects that are trying to build, picks and shovels for the gold rush. whereas this really is a part of the, the shift to doing, project organizing, via decentralized tooling and, and, and via Ethere . So it was a very appealing project and there were a bunch of network effects and, and things that I found interesting about the protocol at first, among them, I noticed that there were, independent contributors to the juice box Dao who had decided to very early on in the history of the protocol split off into their own projects and talent with related skills.

turn that into projects that could then be service providers to other projects on the protocol

[00:03:22] Sina: this is like, just to call them out. Maybe like canoe do and peel do, which is building that, the website, the, the kind of main front end for the protocol.

[00:03:32] Nicholas: Yeah, definitely. those, canoe does community management, peel does front end development. wame does, what I call me more fair? wame are the creators of, Bann the, the joint smoking banana, who's the mascot of juice box.

and they, all these organizations have varying degrees of other relationships with other projects.

They could be on the protocol or not. But the interesting thing about being on the protocol is, I guess we can get a little bit into the basic mechanic, which is, when a payment is made to a project, the project issues. Tokens to the, the person who paid or parameters can be set to, to split those up in different ways.

But the essential mechanism is money goes into a project and that project's own tokens are distributed to the, the, the address that made the payment. so it's interesting because it's sort of naturally leads to an ecosystem of projects and allows for projects to be stakeholders in each other, especially in the ones that they have financial relationships with.

I really appreciated that orientation where we could imagine a genuine alternative to. I think a lot of, startups are on this treadmill where, you know, even really inspiring companies like apple to me as a child was a very inspiring story and it continues to be a, a, a great product company.

But, I, I think there may be problems with 150,000 person organizations in general. I think they have certain limitations. They always have to be growing. They have this quarterly performance, requirements, et cetera. So, and they always need to be expanding into new areas and growing what it is that they do in order to keep the stock price rising, et cetera.

So I I'm interested in one angle on what. Decentralized organizations can change in societies, potentially allowing for much smaller organizations that have a much more specific remit. and so those are some of the things that, that interested me about juice box in the first place I, I hung around and was a contributor for about seven months.

I took a few months off. I was interested in doing some NFT project and after a few months of tooling around, I, I realized there just was nowhere else that I wanted to work, rather than on, on juice box, for juice box now. And on, on the juice box protocol, it's just so compelling to me. So after a few months break, I, I came back and, started poking around and seeing if people would be interested in having me be a contributor.

And for context, when I decided to, to take some time off and, and step away, everyone was very understanding and there was no bad blood or any feelings like a betrayal or anything like that. People were very supportive. You know, if you don't want to, if you wanna do something else. Go do that. You you'll, you'll be doing the best work you can if you're passionate about it.

And I think that's the general ethos at juice box do. And one of the things that makes the juice box ecosystem special is that there is this feeling that everyone is there by choice. forced to be there. No one is, coerced to be there at all. Everyone's really choosing to be there. Especially juice box style is the one I know the best.

And I think that that ethos spreads to some extent, to other projects in this early culture of juice box. So when I decided to come back, I said, Hey, you know, would people be interested? I I'm I'm I just can't stop thinking about juice box. So I'd like to come back and people were very supportive of the idea.

, there were, you probably saw in the discord, people were very, ecstatic about the idea in, in via react to messages. And so I followed the same process that, we've kind of naturally evolved over time. I think part of it comes from Jengo and, and other, early contributors to the, the Dao, but this process of, Basically we perceive of the Dao, at least I'll speak for myself.

I perceive of the Dao as a, a permeable Dao, where we allow anonymous contributors. We encourage contributions from anyone, including people who don't have a res e or a reputation. They're not gonna import their web to reputation into the web through ecosystem. And so in order to prove out who they are and to build trust, we have a, a kind of a process that is just suggested anything could happen.

You could do something different, but, the way people seem to successfully onboard into working for the Dao is exactly what I did when I came back. And, and that process was making a few little contributions hanging around, getting back up to speed with what's going on. so doing little helpful things around the discord, around the Dao, and then making a governance proposal for a one time trial payout and juice box Dao operates on a two.

, governance and funding cycle. So I made a proposal to do a trial, two weeks working for the Dao for a smaller, I don't remember what the s  was, but something around 500 to $1,500 is, is a typical amount. And, in that period, I, I suggested some things that I could do during two weeks or four weeks.

I forget how long exactly I did the trial and I made the proposal to governance and it allowed, the members of the Dao, the holders of the jbx token to vote. If they were in favor of that in the end, they were. So I did a trial payout and sort of built further rapport with the current set of people who were building the Dao and the protocol and, sort of narrowed Down what it is that I could work on.

And then after two or four weeks, our typical durations. a couple governance cycles. I made another proposal for a recurring payout and those are, seven cycles long. So about 9,000 days, long and have to be renewed every 90 or a hundred days. And those recurring payouts mean that you get paid every two weeks.

, and typically at a. Somewhat higher salary than the original trial payout. So it lets you sort of build the contributor, build rapport with the, the group, see that there's a good fit and something that they really wanna do. And it's easier. Of course, someone could just drop in and say, Hey, I wanna immediately do a recurring payout proposal, but they'll have a harder time winning governances governance votes.

So, I think one thing that makes juice box unique is that, while it's not currently, on chain governance, like some really on chain maxi Daos I do actually think it has a very healthy governance process where we do anywhere between eight and 25 proposals per two weeks. it happens regularly on a two week cycle and we have a lot of engaged people voting and it's, it's not like a very rare process to have something succeed in governance.

Instead. It's very common that the Dao is giving input on what they feel is worthwhile spending money on.

[00:09:54] Sina: It's almost, you know, seeing, seeing this proposal's channel in the discord and these proposals get regularly approved, it's almost a narrative violation of a. Larger group of people being able to make decisions quickly. I definitely want to get into some of the nuances of how you think about decision making and how these sorts of things have evolved.

But I think one of the things that has happened in other Daos that are, you know, fully on chain, every token holder has to vote, you know, and some quor  needs to be reached is that decisions just don't make, don't get made and like, you know, especially risky or somehow non-consensus decisions don't get made.

But, we can, we can get to that. Jango, maybe if you wanna j p in, how does the juice box protocol itself work? And I think it has, you know, some very wise ideas like these funding cycles that Nicholas was talking about, this notion of like default expiry people opting into things, always having an ability to exit.

I'm curious, like what are the core design, goals or pillars of the protocol and how you think about them?

[00:11:11] Jango: Yeah. So that's, this has evolved, over time from the original seed of thought, which was meant to solve another problem. me and some friends were having, trying to build mobile apps and web two, and has certainly evolved, through those early days of juice box that Nicholas was describing into the protocol that it, it is today.

It's more can evolve, version two of it. The original seed of thought was, Hey, if we're building software as a service, the unit economics doesn't really justify charging, per unit, you can just obviously always dish out more copies of your software and sure you have to maintain these, these costs for serving your compute and your databases and ping people to build, A lot of spend, goes into like advertising and growth and stuff like that.

, where, a lot of the projects I was working on in 20 15, 20 16, we were just bringing users into a, a slack channel at the time and really building a community with our users and talking about what we were building and being very open with conversations. and so it was hard to, like bridge the, the product we wanted to build with also the financial aspect and figure out like what to charge.

and then meanwhile, everyone around was slapping subscription models on things or telling people to like overcharge, cuz like, you know, you have to, like whatever, whatever. And I, I think like I had a seat of thought that was just too compelling to not, really follow follow up on, I, I have all the inputs to just put up a n ber, like, what does it cost to sustain this project?

, and I could come to that n ber on a monthly basis, you know, that aggregate all of all costs for service providers and, what we wanted to get paid. And I could put that n ber out there. Let's say it's like 20 K a.

, then the users, you could suggest a monthly price or a price, and then users could pay as much or as, as, as little.

, and if that cost was not met, then we would turn off the service. We could do something else. Great. If the cost was, if we had abundant, fees come in, then everyone's price could be, essentially pushed towards zero as we got more people using it. Cause you know, if you get a thousand more people, using the app and ping, then everyone's price gets pushed towards zero because the core cost of running it, doesn't scale at that same rate.

So then everyone's someone incentivized to help be the propagation machine. Right. so we're not spending extra on ads. We're just spending extra on people as they pay fees. And so the, the initial model is great. How can we, and I started. Trying to build this in, in web two stacks with banking, APIs, and cloud functions.

And it was actually a lot of fun, but really, really complex. And just like you can imagine, like trying to talk to banking providers of how to manage these, like one off refunds, that really became the product we ended up,

[00:14:20] Sina: So were trying to build a thing that someone at any time could like, kind of like end their subscription and as like more users came in, the price of everyone else's subscription would adjust at the same time and go Down

something

like that. Yeah.

[00:14:35] Jango: Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, so, in, in trying to express it in like web two world, there would be these refund calls and like these escrow accounts and whatever, whatever is just super, super pain in the ass. But like, I was very convinced that this was a compelling business model for, for like indie SAS projects that didn't want to pursue VC or like, follow the, like the bait of like, quote, how does this become a billion dollar project?

Which like, I don't give a

[00:15:03] Sina: so it started as this, like. Business model kind of like idea like a new business model, which like at its core was we don't, we don't want to have a crazy amount of upside. We instead want to build this in a more kind of like, like alongside our users. And as the n ber of users, increases, we're going to decrease the price for everyone and kind of like pass on to savings to them.

And this will have the kind of second order effect of these users becoming all kind of like owners and champions of the product and helping pellets growth rather than us needing to like, have that extra money to spend on advertising. So it was kind of like shifting to a different kind of like location in the design space.

[00:15:50] Jango: Exactly. And the builders still have leverage. Like if you push everyone's price Down from like a dollar to like 5 cents, then like, okay, now we want to pay ourselves like three times as much. It's like, great. And everyone's price is 15 cents. It's like, you, you, you still maintain the leverage point, but now you, you are playing a, like a more, positive s  game, between the, the, the project builders and the community.

And then you start to kind of blend those two worlds of like, who's actually building the project. And the answer's always like, like everyone who touches it, everyone who talks about it and like, will. Wherever that is in the world. Right. like all that is really contributing to the, the sustainability, like the S of like a concept.

, so how do we model that? Right. And then at the same time, I was, it was like 2017. So I was living with someone who was working at Coinbase. So I was like accompanying very closely what was happening in crypto, but more from a, a n ber go up perspective. And, eventually in defi s mer, it, I started really being compelled by, these, these contracts that, that folks were writing, you know, early days of, of defi, we had yams, we had sushi, we had.

, wifi. And that was like really, really, really incredible to start studying these contracts and hearing these developers talk about what could be done here. So I started prototyping there and then really quickly realized this was the way to express the concept. And so basically made the decision to basically scrap a lot of like the years of work that was in development to prototype this out in, in contract land.

So it was really built for, for, from a prototyping perspective, it was built to solve that problem. And then I was gonna later, once that was set, set up, then you can go ahead and build whatever other project you want using that as the core business model. And then thinking about how to express it, using contracts and all the primitives that were, being popularized.

[00:17:46] Sina: And then what's interesting too, is like, as you switch to building this in crypto and in smart contracts, there's like behavioral change in the people who are surrounding this project. Right. So it's just like a more like, people are almost more receptive to new ways of coordinating and new business models.

So I imagine that was kind of an unlock to and

[00:18:09] Jango: Oh man. It was, it was a, it was a coming home moment. Like I, this, these were my, were my people like ethos were similar. It was like very dev oriented, like devs have the leverage. And, it was a lot, a lot more about like building something new, questioning like the core.

more like, like macro econ setup that like we were building software against. and that was really exciting. So we could, it, it was, it was philosophical nature. and ultimately it is all about the people. So yeah, it was, it was cool making the shift, although it was a pretty like quiet, like I'm not a really loud person.

So I, once I like was convinced that this was a way to do it, we, I was working with some friends and we just kind of got to work and started chugging along. And there's obviously learning everything along the way. So it starts off as like one simple contract that does one thing. And then I'm always.

You know, adding like what ifs, what ifs, what ifs, and, over the scope of several months, it evolves to having all these, these mechanics that, that, that, that together solve the original problem, but then also open up other doors for what can be expressed using these levers. So ultimately it's like, all right, cool.

Theor  gives us this global state machine, which is incredible. And juice box kind of gives you the, the, the data model, according to which data can be stored in access. And then the, the product at the end of the day, what it's become is really like, if this, than that for organizational finances.

So like under what conditions can funds come into the project and what happens when they do and under what conditions can fund, leave the project or be redistributed to, to, to the community, or be accessed by the community, and, and be constraints around those. And the idea of a funding cycle is, is basically, taking this original kind of defi, like core philosophy of, right in unchangeable, unstoppable machine.

, and then, scoping it into timeframes so that a project can evolve over time and set these immutable constraints, with some flexibility. So they can evolve, in chunks of time or have total flexibility or be totally immutable, depending on what they want to do. that's like the core, data structure of juice boxes, encode your organizational rules around funding cycles and then evolve those funding cycles over time, which is the big decision that product donors are responsible for making is the reconfigurations of these cycles.

[00:20:39] Sina: Yeah, man. So cool hearing about this story. one of the suggested, and a lot of this stuff is tuneable when someone sets up a new juice box pride project, but one of the core mechanisms is that anyone who basically sends money to a particular juice box project or contributes to it, Can receive some n ber of that projects governance or membership tokens in return.

So there's this kind of like fluid token swap that's happening and that's been happening in the case of juice box Dao itself. and, this means that the, the organization and the cap table of this organization is always open to new capital contributors. you know, as I was kind of becoming more familiar with the mechanics of the protocol, you know, there's parallels to other projects that I really admire, like nouns, for example, you know, where there's these like new NFTs going on sale every day.

But then what's interesting in the case of juice box is that there's like additional things you can tune. like two kind of key differences with the nouns model is that, and you know, all these things are con configurable and, and a continu  at the end of the day. But one is this notion of like reserve tokens, which is that, the doubt itself can choose to anytime new tokens are being minted as a result of capital contribution, it can kind of carve off or mint an additional piece that it gives to contributors.

And so in this way, it balances out, contributors having a voice in governance and capital, you know, capital providers having a voice in governance and, I'm just curious, how you think about this tension between these two different groups. what have you learned about how it's developed in the case of juice box?

What do you, you know, see when you look at other projects like nouns, that are evolving, cuz this has been one of the, one of the questions in my mind in that it's, it's also really hard to quantify these things on a, you know, on a similar scale. Like how do you quantify, like what's $1 worth of contribution?

How many units of like, how many units of work that's like equivalent to? yeah, I'm just curious how you've thought about this and how it's evolved in the case of juice box itself.

[00:23:07] Jango: yeah, we had no idea going into how these things were gonna be really useful when it was deployed. This was all a big like experiment and just great.

We can put this protocol out and then we can start building stuff using it. And then as people started using it themselves, we kind of reduced our role to just making the infrastructure sturdy for, for people. but the initial intuition for how juice box Dao was deployed, which is the first project in the protocol.

And so the whole protocol on juice box style was deployed together, was a. A 20% reserved rate. So initially when you deploy the project, it has zero funds in the treasury, and zero outstanding tokens. and whenever, funds come in, either via direct contributions, just there's a, a pay button, or via fees being, taken from projects who are also distributing on the protocol.

You're gonna mint 20% of those tokens inwardly to pre-programmed addresses at the time, it was just me and Perry, who were the two people working on the project. And then, the rest, so 80% of the tokens were issued outwardly to new people. So basically, feel, think about it as like you have an, inward like self preserving aspect and like an outward integrative aspect.

we were, we were nobody and we had nothing and, we just had like this body of work. Right. So it's, it's a tricky point of leverage to, to really like, be really self preserving when self doesn't really mean much then. So, we, put in, 20% as our reserved rate and then people started in trying to like, and then we started to do the work to build projects on it.

That's kind of our form of marketing and rather to build stuff than go out and just talk about what we've already built. and so funds started coming in and then people started contributing and then we realized, at some point we need to figure out how to manage. Tokens and make this thing feel, fair to everyone participating.

Right. And that's always a perennial tricky problem, and we still haven't gotten this totally right. It's always a work in progress. and I think over time, we've tended towards 50%. Like as fun funding seemed adequate to, really carry out a lot of these, these projects, we think are.

Pivotal to like the core infrastructure. and so now we're at this interesting balance of 50% of tokens issued or, or created into existence, will stay within the people working on the protocol. So it's very of owned in that way. And then 50% is still accessible, for new contributors, but then meanwhile, there's, people, that aren't Dao sponsored have stood up AMM pools to create markets in between, that new issuance price and, and whatever else.

So there's also, pretty wide difference between what the protocols willing to issue tokens at and what people are currently trading tokens at on, in, in the open.

[00:26:09] Sina: and the protocol is like, kind of it's, it's kind of a bonding curve, but that's also kind of adjustable by the project,

[00:26:17] Jango: Exactly. there's, this there's one perimeter called the discount rate and that's the rate at which a token issuance is gonna decrease per funding cycle. So for operating biweekly funding cycles and every two weeks, the total issuance of tokens for each E that comes in decreases a BI little bit to give everyone, slight pressure to contribute sooner rather than later, or pay fees sooner rather, rather than later.

, and over time, that discount rate is also tended towards zero to stabilize issuance, as well. But it's, it's always a discussion. It's always kind of a moving, moving target, and there's always proposals and discussions sometimes go through other times, it just kind of raised these, these more philosophical.

which I think most people in the community are really eager to dissect and talk about, which makes the fairness bit, a little easier since everything is done in the open. there's no sense of, privileged decision making, albeit that are just like people working and people who have worked for, for a while.

People who've participated in discussions for a while. So the sense of legitimacy kind of evolves organically and sometimes the newest members have like the best ideas.

[00:27:28] Nicholas: Would it be useful to do like a quick runDown of the, the five core mechanics

[00:27:33] Sina: that

would be awesome. Yeah, let's

[00:27:34] Nicholas: maybe

you can do the, you can do the chopped and screwed version and maybe put it at the front or something if it's helpful to give context,

but basically there's a

[00:27:41] Sina: we can take our own meandering path through it.

[00:27:44] Nicholas: Basically there's five, in my perspective, five key mechanisms in juice box protocol. The first one is this funding cycle we've talked about. So a project is created it establish it, it configures its first funding cycle to open fundraising. and the fundraiser funding cycles have a bunch of different parameters.

, the first one is the funding target. That's how much you're aiming to make. So in the original Jen's original example, the impetus for the whole project, that would be like, I'm working on a project. I wanna make some kind of software, or maybe it's not a software, but it's an easy example. I'm working some open source project let's say, and you know, it's gonna be me and a friend.

And we each earn around this much in the market. So that's what we want our salaries to be, to work on this project. And so our goal is our salaries times, for the duration, of the funding cycle, which could be typically two weeks or a month, or you even open-ended duration, but in juice box now we said it at two weeks.

So you say, all right, You know, this person and me, we each want $5,000 a week and we're gonna do a two week cycle. So we need $20,000. That's our funding target. And anything that you raise above your funding, target falls into what's called overflow and overflow is, funds that are not accessible during that funding cycle.

You'll need to set a new funding cycle and a new funding target, and that funding target can eat into the overflow. so it's sort of like money that's set aside that you have not yet earmarked for anything. And it just sits in this overflow pool. And, when a person makes a contribution, as Jengo mentioned, either through the pay function or maybe buying an NFT and it sends its primary sales revenue or secondary royalties to a juice box project, all those, revenue sources generate tokens.

So money comes in and tokens are generated outwardly. So all the tokens for all the projects are by default, at least UN capsed token supply. Which is part of the reason that tokens, like jbx the token associated with the juice box project? The juice box Dao, are difficult to, they, they, they aren't as easily made into speculative tokens as, projects that do like one time large.

Airdrops where fixed total supply and a pie chart of who's getting how many tokens. Instead with juice box projects, you start with zero tokens issued and people who make financial contributions one way or another are receiving tokens in exchange.

[00:30:07] Sina: a very interesting balance between pre-commit to an inflation schedule of like when value flows into the Dao, new tokens are minted and it's gonna follow this bonding curve. So it's committing to that without committing to a particular supply. and the rate of growth, because like the, you know, there may just be like 10 massive users who come in in a month, in a month And min a ton of token.

So it's this, it's a very, yeah, it breaks that like speculative price, reliability that you want, you might want to have as a trader, but turns it more of this like cooperative,

[00:30:47] Nicholas: exactly. And you're getting tokens because you made a financial contribution. So, and the tokens that you're getting, what we call project tokens, because they're unique to each project, they each have their own token. those tokens are a claim on the overflow. So all of the, funds that come into a project in excess of its funding target during a funding cycle can be redeemed by taking the project tokens that you received when you made a contribution and redeeming them in the protocol and getting that the proportion of those tokens over the total supply of tokens, worth of the overflow.

So essentially it means that money that isn't earmarked. As part of the funding target in a funding cycle is in this overflow, pool. And that pool essentially belongs to the people who hold the tokens, the people created the treasury in the first place, there's an extra, little wrinkle here, which is the reserved rate that Jengo alluded to.

And the reserved rate, lets you say, when someone makes a contribution, the project is gonna generate a bunch of tokens. How many of those tokens go to the person who paid the fee and how many of those tokens go to a reserved list of typically builders or other people who have an interest in the protocol, but are contributing in a way other than financially, such as building it build or the project in, in question, you know, doing something useful.

So, typically that's like being a developer, being a community manager, maybe in some other projects, it could be being like a advisor or a venture capitalist or something you might want to peel off some of these tokens and direct them at a short list of. reserved addresses. So this lets you, compensate, people who are making financial comp contributions with a stake in the project while also pointing a part of that stake at people who are maintaining the protocol without consistently making financial contributions.

So more than just financial contributions are, rewarded and become stakeholders in the project. so those mechanisms are the funding cycle, the funding target and overflow beyond that funding target the reserved rate, which points some of the tokens at a short list of people who are being helpful and the redemption rate, we didn't talk about exactly yet.

So redemption rate is, if I go to redeem my tokens. And get a portion of that overflow. if the redemption rate is a hundred percent, then I get exactly the portion of the overflow. That is my n ber of tokens that I'm redeeming over the total supply of tokens. So I get just a proportional share of the overflow directly into my wallet and the tokens are, are destroyed.

If I set a redemption rate, that's less than a hundred percent than I get that amount less than, than the, the proportional. So let's say, I said 50%. Excuse me, 50% redemption rate. Then I'll only get 50% of my share of the total token supply worth of the overflow. So it's a way to sort of limit people's interest in essentially refunding their share, and to keep some capital in the project, so that people, you know, that maybe the project has some motivation for doing that.

And the final, mechanism that I think is one of the core mechanisms is the discount rate. And discount rate does is over when you program your second funding cycle, if you set a 10% discount rate, then vanilla juice box project issue, 1 million project tokens per E contributed. So if you set a 10% discount rate in your second funding cycle, then in, in the second cycle, it'll only generate 900,000 tokens per E contributed.

So you can sort of curtail how many tokens are being issued over time as the risk for being involved in the project diminishes.

[00:34:16] Jango: they'll roll over automatically. so you, yeah, you, you have like, the overflow also serves as a runway in a way since these funding cycles are just kind of looping, the discount rate will, will tick Down automatically just as time goes on. that was well, well, put Nicholas.

[00:34:35] Nicholas: I think it's, it's useful for people to have a perspective because the point is that all of these tools are given to every person who wants to create a project. And a project could be something like Sharko we talked about earlier, or it could be a, a very small project that only has a few people who are gonna be really responsible for the thing.

But other people want to be supportive. We've seen charitable projects. we've seen large projects like constitution Dao. So it's not, it's not exclusively like Dao tooling trying to capture the Dao tooling market. Instead. I think it. These are mechanisms Jengo came up with through, through the process of development.

And when I discovered them, I think the reaction a lot of people have is like, this is confusing. This doesn't, align to what I expect for like speculative ERC, 20 token assets. And couldn't this be simpler? Couldn't you just remove all of these mechanisms and make it more like things I'm familiar with.

And I think the, the challenge for people which I've gone through myself is to, I, I believe recognize that these mechanisms are actually interesting enough and essential to creating projects that allow, people to become stakeholders in the project itself that they're worth learning and actually are significant in the same way that a lot of Ethere  concepts are, were foreign to people before they were

have proved.

[00:35:51] Sina: I totally agree. I mean, they, they each seem like kind of fundamental. Primitives or, you know, core building blocks that are needed to build. And it's, it's also interesting seeing the parallels between the, these mechanisms and what Jenko was describing as like the original inspiration of like building a new type of, company. It you know, you have a unique perspective on this because you're operating juice box using this protocol, like you have the full closed loop. Have you run into issues with any parts of this? Cause I mean, it's a very ambitious undertaking to design a kind of entirely new way to build a business. Like whatever we wanna call these things from the ground up and completely. Reconceptualize the relationship between the shareholders, the contributors, like the cap table revenue flowing in shares being handed out.

Like it's, it's a crazy, like, ambitious, creative undertaking. And I mean, like one, you know, just as you were describing, like one of the things which I think you have an answer to is, like how does the core team, for instance, like if there is even a notion of the core team, like how do they plan for the future when the, shareholders are.

Continuously opting into being a part of this journey. And at any time can redeem their piece of the balance. And you have this redemption mechanism, which allows like the Dao to decide that no, we want like X percent of it to stay here to give the team an extended runway.

Are there things that you see as potentially needing to evolve to make this really, really like click.

[00:37:40] Jango: Yeah, totally. It's it's been a big work in progress. From the start. And I think we've been reflecting on it somewhat out loud. I used to write a lot of blog posts, like kind of short thought spurts. And I think that helped, stem some good conversations on ways we can tune these variables over time.

We've definitely tuned the redemption rate. quite a bit, going from low n bers, like 60% to really kind of put the redemption price, a little lower to incentivize funds, staying in the treasury for longer. And then we've had periods of pushing the redemption rate up towards a hundred percent to basically push the redemption price higher.

So if you think about like an AMM price sitting between, it's always gonna sit between the redemption price, which is the floor. If the AMM price was little lower the redemption, then it's worth redeeming tokens and then then market making. and then there's the issuance price, which is kind of the ceiling of the am.

M if the, because you'd, you can always get tokens by contributing to the treasury as opposed to buying them on the a M. So we've we, our job is to kind of tune the floor in the ceiling, taking into account the balance and the treasury and the kind of outstanding token holders, sentiment, right.

And, and that's been, a, a big thing that we've, we've moved around a bit to make sure that token holders they have agency over the funds. but also that builders feel confident, in the future that, that we're we're building. and that's confident both financially, as well as, like everyone here is just individuals, right?

So we all want similar flexibilities and freedoms and to work with other developers that share similar passions. and sometimes, depending on which stage of the journey we're on, that's gonna fit better than others. a good example is this past year or this past, I guess, about a year now. since like maybe three months into the protocol, it became clear that we were gonna need a version two of this protocol to really, meet a lot of the initial, needs that people were making due with the original protocol.

But it'd be convenient to have these other levers. To make it more open ended. and so a lot of the past year was spent developing this, this V2. And so it was a lot of, kind of E work and architecting and, and, and testing and getting that right. and a lot of that time earlier on this year, as, as Nicholas was alluding to, it's not really, useful to, to someone like Nicholas, who's trying to leverage tools to tell stories and build auxiliary, auxiliary, tooling to bring more use and in traffic into the protocol.

So the time off there was very warranted cause we were just building shit and you're, you you

to figure out how to be most helpful, but then once the V2 is out, then great. Now there's a lot of stuff to do right now we can actually build. so, so that's, a great unlock for a lot of what we wanted to do.

And now we're working on one of our first extensions that we want to do As a Dao and like funded by the Dao, to really set some patterns in place that we think can then be re replicatable by other, other folks, to really plug in, some contractual outcome that happens when payments come into a treasury.

And then, you can have some contractual custom outcome on, on redemptions as well.

[00:40:58] Nicholas: is that Jengo, is that one of the major differences between V one and V two, would you.

[00:41:02] Jango: yeah, for sure. Yeah, just the extensibility and like, you can bring your own, Data source and delegate for like what, for both the pay function and the redemption function. the core juice box pay function was very stripped Down, trying to be as efficient as possible to accept funds and issue out project tokens.

so projects can now bring their own risk and their own expenses and their own whatever for, for that, that event. And then we're gonna, and we kind of make generalized tooling that project projects can plug in into. but I think the big thing that that's still a big work in progress and maybe forever will be.

And this goes back to, to the nouns question. All juice box initially was, is like a, a pay function. And the best way to express that visually is a text field that you put a n ber in and you click pay, and that's pretty, a pretty boring way to fundraise. it's like the most stripped Down thing you could possibly do.

Whereas no's basically like the, the auction is basically a fancy pay function, a more engaging pay

[00:41:58] Sina: right.

[00:41:59] Jango: and so what you can do is, take any fundraising mechanic, NFT wise or whatever happens in the future and then route it to the pay function. Cause it's all contracts anyways. so then like why would I go to a project and click.

And send an E to it and click pay when I can instead buy a, a, a work of art or an article or something that they, a piece content. This project, is promoting for that same one E I pay a little bit more of gas maybe to actually manage the, the, the extra storage, but it's, it's well worth it. and so that's kind of the, the world that we're now stepping into now that the fundamental, structures are in places.

How can we now, create more generalized, compelling fundraising mechanics that projects can then take and make pointed applications out of.

[00:42:46] Nicholas: So, this, this V2 functionality, which essentially lets you bring your own additional contract with its own logic that will be executed when anyone makes a payment or when anyone does a redemption allows a lot more extensibility, but it doesn't remove any of the functionality of V1. It just gives you the option to add your own stuff.

So Jengo was referencing there, the ongoing NFT rewards project, which will essentially check, is the payment above a certain threshold. If yes, then issue. The NFT associated with that, threshold like tiered reward NFTs, based on payments. So suddenly you're getting NFTs issued based on calling the very same pay function you were calling before.

, simultaneously I'm working on a little experimental project to see about making, an NFT auction, something like the spirit of nouns, where the auction proceeds are pointed into a juice box project. And we're exploring if maybe the NFT itself can be, you can redeem, redeem the NFT for a portion of that overflow that we talked about earlier

rather than

directly dealing with the fungible.

So there's a lot, there's a huge field for experimentation. That's possible O on the noun question, I think, a couple of the big differences that I see and basically, I don't think there's really like. I don't think, I think it's way too early to think about competition. I always think about years

[00:44:04] Sina: Oh,

[00:44:05] Nicholas: C-suite people from, MasterCard and I asked them about square.

It was like early on in the days of square. And they said, no, actually we don't see visa or square or any of these things. As our competition, we see cash as our competition cash is the, the we're, we're fighting. And I, I don't think we're so, so, so much earlier than even any of that kind of logic in the space that I'm really interested in the way that juice box positions itself as composable on chain immutable contracts, where even if you have a V1 project, when V2 came out, it's up to you as the project owner to decide.

If you'd like to upgrade to V2 and, and transport all of your, your tokens, et cetera, your, your community into the V2 protocol. It's not something that the protocol can force on you. So it's a very different logic to web two dynamics

[00:44:55] Sina: mm-hmm

[00:44:57] Nicholas: However, there are some observations I have about announcing that are interesting.

I think one, one difference and, and maybe an even better comparison for the redemption mechanic is the MOIC rage quit. and I think that's kind of redemption in juice box is sort of like a rage quit, but it lets you do it, like fractionally of your membership. It's not a binary decision. You can redeem a part of your token holdings in a project without exiting completely.

, whereas nouns doesn't have that kind of mechanic built into it. but you know, I, I I'd be interested to see how, how they can work together actually, or, or these things where a nouns, auction treasury with the NFT driven, governor Bravo fork can be intertwined with the juice box. I think there's a lot of potential for composable contract.

[00:45:43] Sina: but the ecosystem can also surprise with how it grows exponentially. Like exponential curves are really hard to gro beforehand, but, I definitely feel like we're in this early stage of, even uncovering what these primitives are and what, how they could each be used.

And yeah, I mean, one of the, one of the interesting ways that the nouns mechanism could compose with the juice box mechanism is yeah, nouns are, non fungible, right? So you have to, You have these quant s of like, capital and contribution that could be quantified in, in a particular NFT, but you can't really like engage interface with people outside of that, other than paying them with the Ethan, the treasury, which also there's, there's an interesting parallel to juice box, of like conversations I read in the discord, which is Jango.

You, you were kind of making this point of not paying people in jbx tokens, but instead paying them out of the treasury and giving them the kind of like option to go and buy jbx on the open market, which I think is also what nouns tries to do. It just pays people in heat and says, go and buy noun with that in an upcoming auction.

, it's very, very interesting.

[00:47:06] Nicholas: I definitely see it reminds me a little bit of this airdrop thing because I feel, another point of comparison or interesting dynamic between Daos is where their point of origin is and how that informs their culture. I lot of the projects who do these large airdrops, have really wonderful core teams, but they end up giving this token

sort of, it sort of becomes like a PVP token for who can extract the most value by selling at the high, rather than creating a.

Community in which the people who hold the token are the people who actually want to engage in governance rather than just like huddle until the, like the prime moment to sell.

So I think there's, there's more to be discovered about that. And, and that's actually one thing that I find really compelling about juice box, that the issuance of the token happens over time and can be directed separately from salary compensation.

you know, I was listening to your conversation, the other day with. Nadia Aspar Hova. Is that how you

pronounce the name? and talking about salary compensation for open source projects. And I think juice box is really, to me juice box do is one of the most interesting projects on the protocol because it's so successful at demonstrating that if you have an open source project with on chain revenues, you can have a, a project that both pays salaries to developers.

Full-time, part-time occasional contributor, and also creates this option for stake holding in the project as it has a, a longer life than just the, the duration of the salary that you're earning for the project. So I think there are interesting new models that Ethere  enables and juice box in particular enables around open source projects or really any project with, on chain revenue stream.

One of the things that I I'm really interested in is like, you know, Jengo reference like me coming back right as the protocol is ready for, for exploring other things. I, I want to demonstrate to people, over and over again. So the message gets through that a juice box project can have. Multiple sources of revenue.

So you could dropping multiple NFT collections. You could have a defi protocol that it, takes fees and points, limited juice box project, and that really juice box, although it's maybe has been popularized as an equivalent to like an E Kickstarter or something, actually it's much more like a bank account for running a decentralized organization

[00:49:23] Sina: Right. It just, it just has a notion of like debits and yeah. Receivables and it's, it's, more fundamental than that. It's like the building blocks of an on chain, organization or business.

[00:49:35] Nicholas: Exactly. And one, one aspect of this that I think is under, represented in the market's understanding of juice box is I think there's these open source projects like juice box, protocol development itself, that's, a good fit, but there's also all of these NFT collections, which are whether they know it or not open source projects with on chain revenue streams.

And I think it would be very interesting if those projects said, look, we are gonna take 10% of our primary sales or 50% of our secondary royalties, some n bers, I, I don't know what the right n bers are, but point those at a juice box project and give the token holders of our NFT collection governance over what we do with those, with those funds.

And some projects have experimented with this, like cryptos and doodles. I know both have Daos where the NFTs are governance votes in. I believe it's usually a multisig treasury that they're using rather than an actual treasury protocol, but what's cool when you start using juice box for those things is you give people.

Like transparent information into how you're going to use the funds in advance of using them. So I think it's very interesting to give communities, you know, if you believe that your NFT collection is the kind of community on chain in some kind of metaverse community or, or whatever, then I think it makes sense to give them some power and to give them some assets to manage together, to fund what projects they think moves the, the community.

[00:50:49] Jango: Yeah, something that I find very interesting in this conversation with regards to managing. Funds, and paying contributors if the funds are themselves, backing the governance asset. So in the case of juice, boxed, Dao the jbx tokens backed by the funds from the treasury, right.

You can redeem the jbx and get funds outta the treasury. then, then you create this, this incentive of like, in order to justify spending on anything, the trade off is the thing that you own will be worth a little bit less in the meantime.

Right. And so you have this like tug and pull and then you as a community have to decide your, your time horizon. Right? Like, cool. All right. Is it worth spending this much on a recurring basis to do the work, to then create a system whose expenses maybe 10 towards zero over time so that value can accrue, or is it worth just sitting and doing nothing?

Right. So in, in the case of these NFT collections could also be compelling to have those same NFTs backed by the funds and the treasury, so that there's like a, a floor. and then the decisions to spend, aren't just like, oh, we, we have fun. So we must spend them. It's it's this interesting actual,

[00:51:59] Sina: Cuz you can't redeem

this is the equation that any kind of like business owner or operator should have in their mind at all times. Right. Of like, is this dollar like invested, allocated, going to have a positive ROI or is it better to just pay this out in dividends?

And I mean, there's some subjectivity in how each person evaluates the future of the project. And also depends on the time horizon that they have. Right. If someone's like looking to exit within three months, like they will make certain optimization, like a certain trade off.

But if they're taking like a 20 year time horizon, or like not even like multi century time horizon, they're trying to like build something that out I've last themselves. They would make a different trade off and. we can even see this, like in the case of Twitter, for example, and this battle they're having with Elon Musk where they, I, I think they moved past this discussion point, but like the management team could, have a certain view of the future potential of this business.

And then their acquire is making the opposite case and what's at stake is like billions of dollars. so it's very interesting to work through these types of questions with a community. And then you know, what's additional here is that everyone always has the option to exercise this, right?

Like according to the protocol, like there's always a right to exit and there's always a right to, to enter in into the agreement. so I think it will just naturally resolve itself into a different kind of like point in. the game theoretical space or like how things evolve,

[00:53:44] Jango: right?

It's it's so interesting. And I think we're very lucky to have a, a sizable treasury, so like huge shout out to everyone who's contributed to making this experiment possible. And then also an incredible group of developers and thinkers and storytellers. I, I don't know how this particular group ended up, floating into the, these discords and con contributing, but,

[00:54:07] Sina: a rare group of albino unicorns, as , as I've heard the group refer to,

[00:54:13] Jango: Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's pretty special, but, and then, and everyone understands and enjoys the complexity of these conversations. So we, we like to have 'em often we, we look like the cold compensation discussion are, often my favorites, cuz it, we really have to, create a sense of confidence and, and everyone has to really grow the trade offs.

And if we can enjoy the day to days in between these longer term timer horizons, I think will be pretty well off.

[00:54:45] Sina: Yeah. I'm really curious to, to hear your thoughts on. Compensation and, and, you know, the broader question of open accounting and doing all of this out in the open.

And, I'm curious about what you find inspiring or compelling or required, about like this model, like that, that this needs to be the case. And then I'm also curious about like, what kind of guiding principles or policies have you evolved in going about these sorts of conversations?

Cuz they're very difficult ones to have. And this is one of the biggest questions I have about this kind of larger movement. And I, I am very inspired by it, but I also. sometimes think that it, kind of hooks into deeper h an, issues of like comparing one's self versus other people, like notions of fairness.

And like, you know, I think people's estimation of the value they're bringing and the value other people are bringing. And these things being, you know, people would rate these sorts of things differently. people don't necessarily have a, you know, don't approach it from the point of view of, okay, like what is the market rate for these different things?

How irreplaceable is this person? Like, what are all the intangible values that they're bringing? So there's a lot of nuance and complexity around this. So yeah, just opening up this, this piece and I'm, I'm really curious about, what have you learned about navigating these sorts of things?

[00:56:26] Jango: I'm a big fan of open accounting. I think it plays itself out well over a longer period of time. if you're willing to be patient and have these discussions, if you're scared or trying to dance around these, these discussions, I think it's very dangerous. But then I think so is closed accounting in, in under the same circ stances.

, like the goal essentially is like you, you want to, create an environment that attracts. Other people who are gonna be, like assets to the mission statement. Right? So like the thing we're trying to do, which isn't juice box stop and find it's largely web three, Ethere , in principle.

So it's, it, it's hard to draw boundaries. Right. but the, the payout is a big component of that. it's creating an environment that people feel supported and welcome and, and it encourages, Curious minds to come in and while also creating a Dao's immune system. So like actually facilitating conversations that actually critique, in a compelling way.

, sometimes you push, you try to find that line. Sometimes you push over the line, you figure out how to communicate your, your way around it. it takes some moments of sincerity and then, you know, colored by many moments of levity. but yeah, you have to really create that Dao immune system that knows like, alright, how are you gonna take in some random, new idea or some random new influence, and make something productive of it, or just kind of try to repel it from the system altogether.

I think all these, these behaviors are fairly healthy and we, there's a lot of kind of organic precedent that we can look at. I also think the, I guess, on the line of the organic precedent, the like Dao mitosis concept is also, compelling where if an organization is growing, big enough to the point where maybe it's managing payouts in the Daos making decisions for several unrelated, like smaller decisions and several unrelated, departments, if you will like, evaluating front end contributors, evaluating folks, working on legal frameworks, et cetera, it's oftentimes better to skinny up kind of the, the, the foundation treasury and then, grant funds to auxiliary treasuries for management.

So it's leaner, and then folks can have a better conversation about how, their time spent, relates to the, the group's c ulative. Resources. I think those are like, so creating little pockets of, of autonomy and of, of experimentation, as, well as just really, structuring conversation and channels and, and not necessarily structuring in like a rigid way.

I think zoo and the community manager just sort have done a great job of just setting up a discord, in a way that the, that conversations can evolve, fairly organically and also shouted engineers at, at discord too. I think the, the tools are pretty, pretty, useful. yeah, but it's all about the people, right?

It's, it's, it's always all about the people and the people are gonna bring their, their flavor, their taste. And, just have to be aware that like, Hey, we're building internet shit and there's gonna be, and we're all a bunch of weirdos. We're all a

weirdos and like that's gonna express itself in all kinds of ways.

And you like, you better love it, or else like the space for you, right.

[00:59:55] Sina: Totally. So on, on the point of the creating smaller pockets. So the, like the analog to that in a traditional company might be, you know, there's like a product team that's working, you know, on a specific product instead of the management team, you know, deciding on that team's compensation and like, you know, trying to somehow keep it in line or balance it with other product teams.

You just kind of give a grant to that team. with an estimate of just like how valuable that work and that direction is, and then give them autonomy to distribute that however they want hire the team, you know, grow the team, shrink the team, like whatever they do,

as long

[01:00:43] Jango: Yeah, you can pursue other partners and business models, and now you have competition. So like, okay, cool. If you have better opportunities, then now, we can find individual leverage across different things. We don't have to hold each other, to, like UN unreasonable constraints or rather like non-productive constraints that seem like artificially, grounded, I think like just reducing, like always trying to reduce ourselves to individuals and, and people, as opposed to, these, rigidly bounded teams, is, is useful.

Like it's nice to have treasuries that you can manage payouts from, but those don't necessarily have to, also correspond to like the thing that you pledge allegiance to. Right. I think, there's always gonna be floating around. There's always gonna be cross pollination and contribution across all these projects.

So being mindful of that is also. Important. but I'm a big fan of, of just trying to play out multiple experiments or at least have a, a situation that welcomes multiple experiments. so it's, it's tough to like really sponsor or get behind like the official something like you, you want to just

allow space for things to happen and, and try to support those both, socially and intellectually, like being part of the conversation, I think is like the most valuable thing.

And also financially, so folks can spend time, on it in earnest

[01:02:05] Sina: Yeah. This also rhymes with this concept of subtraction that we, you know, we kind of evolved at the Ethere  foundation and it's really about, pushing out scope responsibility two, two like players in the ecosystem rather than trying to do them inside of the foundation.

, and I think, yeah, it's, it's one of the core kind of, mental models that I think is incredibly helpful when thinking about these organisms in crypto,

[01:02:37] Nicholas: I, I really definitely agree with smaller organizations. I think, I, I was, I remember sitting in the airport in Paris and experiencing, difficulty with a flight and wondering if Daos could have anything to say to, airlines. And I think the, the, obviously it's like a bit of an absurd question in a way, but I think the, the way that.

, organizations like Daos are the, the, the move, the decentralized organizations, if they would have anything to say to something like an airline, like air France, it would be much smaller airlines that maybe regional providers or something, rather than trying to use this model to directly recreate what exists in web two, which actually the nature of this kind of, endless cancerous growth of organizations, I think could, could be seen as, I mean, , I'm judging it a little bit with those descriptors, but

[01:03:31] Sina: Well in the

case of airlines, it definitely seems like a good description.

[01:03:35] Nicholas: yeah. and.

[01:03:36] Sina: fair share of painful interactions recently.

[01:03:39] Nicholas: Oh, my gosh. It's it's, it's, it's brutal. And it's because there's such a disconnect between the people who are making the decisions, the people who, if there is even anyone, if it's not just the, the organization as its own organism, that has no particular leader in a way, that that that's causing the people at, who are actually executing the work in the airport to have to have bizarre or disconnected, distant, cold relationships with the customer, et cetera.

There's just so many layers of bureaucracy and, abstraction that are not helping to achieve the goal. In fact, they're, I mean, or they they've made the goal something different from providing a quality service. And I, I think the other thing is that, sometimes we encounter people who, say things like, you know, some, some people are very obsessed with this idea of, like replacing discord with a, web three alternative.

And sure, I, I I'm Down. If, if you find me something that works great, then we'll do it, but there's no need for new technological interventions to directly replace existing products, existing workflows. They are complimentary, you know, we didn't destroy books when Kindles came out or when iPhones came out, we still have.

And we still have lots of older technologies that are still very good at what they are good at. And new technologies allow us to explore experiments with different paradigms and different affordances. So I don't expect Daos to replace all companies. And I think if you're trying to do that, it's really, it is geomorphic,

the

what I, I really like the way Jengo often frames what we're doing, which is as an experiment.

It's not, we're not going to pull our hair out to make it work for a situation that it apply properly. So I think we're just exploring what, what does make sense. And for instance, you know, there are some things where we still rely on API providers who are traditional companies. If there are options where we can remove those from the process, then we'll do so, but we're not going to spite the product and the users, or, you know, developers, whoever's interacting with the protocol just to stand on a principle where the solution that we can come up with, if we're too strict about it is really just an inferior result.

So we have goals and ideals, but we're also flexible in using what makes sense, where it makes sense. And, part of having smaller teams that are more agile means that you can have multiple say juice box projects, being service providers that are building front ends or doing community management, and maybe they have different approaches and maybe one of them has private compensation.

Maybe they just take it into the project and then, you know, off ramp the funds and distribute some other way versus a project that does it openly. And we get to find out which one, the juice box Dao community for instance thinks is more effective. So it, it's rather less didactic and top Down and more.

Let's just see what happens and give people the, give everyone the option. You know, I think. One thing. I, I really think about juice box is that it's, it's sort of like the tool set. We talked about those five mechanisms. I think it's really the tools that people need in order to create these kinds of organizations as if they were delivered from the future in which people already have what they actually need rather than skew morphic tools

that are

[01:06:37] Sina: working our way from the present to there.

[01:06:40] Nicholas: Yeah, exactly. They feel delivered from a future to me.

a future we

we, might not actually get to if we only insist on, paying too much attention to what existing institutions expect of us.

[01:06:54] Sina: You, almost have to take this inspired inspired leap into the future and, and see if it works. If it all like shakes out.

[01:07:03] Jango: And the fact that it's all open source, well known, doc ented code is it's meant like we're meant to all eventually like given eventual scarcity, we we'll be competing on grounds of how we organize ourselves as opposed to like the, the actual functionality, cause you can just take and copy it. And theoretically the Mo more efficient, operating schema should, should be, be cheaper, right.

Or at least like, I, I don't think anyone's expecting to pay zero. I think this whole world is very much acknowledging that things cost money and, Good things come when we pay good people to spend their time on, on interesting problems. but I think that there's also this, like, from, from my point of view, I can speak individually.

, like I'm excited to finish up working on infrastructure for the juice box protocol and really setting a safe risk averse foundation for us to build on. And then I'm excited to spend time helping other projects that are building applications and, and, and other stuff using the protocol actually come to fruition and then spin off projects my own.

So I don't, I'm excited for, to pull my personal payout from juice bucks out towards zero over time. It's, I'm, it's, it's great to keep it where it is currently, cuz it sets that tone that like, Hey, clearly out here, spending a lot of attention on this. and so I encourage other people to come in and if you're gonna do something similar, please make sure you're, you're taken care of.

, but over time as attention goes into other things, I, I think it's also healthy to 10 towards zero. and

[01:08:46] Sina: contributors

[01:08:47] Jango: Make room for new contributors or just encourage, encourage the, like the foundation, like the, the, the protocol as like a founding open source always running thin just to be somewhat finished from like a, a core perspective.

Obviously it, it creates a lot of avenues for people to bring extensions, so further layers of opportunities and risks that sit, on top of the protocol that could be, funded by juice box style, but maybe in a more experimental way and not just paying people recurringly to solve open-ended problems, but in the early days, like, like today, it's really nice just to have consistency.

So individuals aren't, we're not always just funding grants for projects. We're, we're just paying people to be around and to. And to care about the day to day and to care about each other and to care about kind of the open-ended projects, and create scope and solve problems, but tend towards a world where, Hey, maybe we can, we can acknowledge the fact that users are paying like risk ultimately is go, is held by people transacting on this thing.

And the cost is also born by them, feel like the gas fees. And so, a lot of the opportunity, is going to just keep evolving onto subsequent layers. And then I think value capture will also go there. And then, and then hopefully the, the juice box protocol and juice box Down jbx can just kind of, be more so managing a more like insurance pool and maybe occasional grants, and certainly storytelling work as long as that's needed.

At a first first party, layer, but I think there's a lot of opportunities to create, yeah, further layers of, of opportunity on, on top of the main juice.

[01:10:33] Sina: totally.

[01:10:35] Nicholas: If anyone feels that it's really necessary, that there be a juice box V6. that changes

[01:10:40] Sina: They

that

[01:10:41] Nicholas: they can go do that. It's open source code. They can do that. And if they can convince juice box Dao that that's worth doing, then maybe they can receive some funds or in some way become the primary development contributors at a forever existing juice box Dao.

And if they can't, maybe they can deploy their own code and, you take their own fees and build their own institution. It's, it's very open and I think juice box and the tone Jengo and Perry and other early contributors have set is one where you asked earlier about are, are there core contributors?

And I think that's something we really issue. It's like anybody can come in at any point. And it really is a culture that we've cultivated. I think successfully I'm really pleased with it, at least so far where the best ideas are the ones that win. And, we really give a lot of credit to people for being good community members in terms.

Pushing this kind of collective idea forward and bringing what's the best part of them to the table, not just, you know, oh, you're a front end developer. So you gotta be really good at react. And we don't want to hear about your, you know, your rock band. No, we want to hear about that because maybe there's some unforeseen connection that allows the protocol to develop in this like genuinely grassroots cultural way into unexpected places.

And I think that's something you can really only achieve with open source projects that are really hardcore open source and enabled by this like global state machine that allows us to collect, on chain revenues for all these different projects, regardless of borders, et cetera.

[01:12:03] Jango: Yeah, huge shout out to everyone who's built infrastructure and culture,

[01:12:09] Nicholas: I want to ask about EF. So does EFC itself as something that will eventually sort of, dissolve? I, I ass e Ethere  ultimately ends up being like a piece of solid infrastructure that doesn't see updates at some point. Is that the general philosophy?

[01:12:24] Sina: Yeah. I mean, I, I wanna be careful about speaking on behalf of the EF cuz I don't work there anymore. And you know, these are kind of deep philosophical questions, but I, you know, the way I at least understand the EFS mission is to, you know, the, I I've talked about this on a previous episode of the podcast too.

I, I think it was maybe the one with Josh stark at the Ethere  foundation who kind of like talked about some of his perspectives on, on the, on this stuff. But like the way I, I interpret it is that you can kind of imagine Ethere  Ethere 's, you know, history and, and lifetime as, you know, in the beginning when it was, when it, you know, when the Ethere  network was built, the protocol was built.

, The, the effort to do that was quite centralized, right? It was like, it's like, almost like a, I'm just thinking of this for the first time, but it's almost like a, you know, the, the big bank where like, it's this like dense core at the beginning. And then it like, it, it like starts expanding and opening up.

But in the very beginning, you know, you can see the, the first programming language solidity being developed by the EF the first client's GEF being developed by the EF the first conference Devcon being developed by the EF. And it's, it's kind of like doing all of the work required to get this thing off the ground.

and then, you know, from then to present, there's been this, gradual. decentralization of, the EF very intentionally, you know, and this is what the subtraction philosophy is referring to. Is that unlike a traditional organization, that's looking to continuously grow, right? It's trying to grow its revenue, grow its head counts, like do all of this stuff.

The EF is actually trying to shrink over time. If that is like correspondent with the ecosystem becoming more robust and flourishing. So, so through its lifetime, it's basically tried to use its resources like both its financial resources, it's, you know, whatever credibility it has. to help, push responsibility and, and work out to the ecosystem and, and this mirrors, some of what you're describing with juice box, right?

So, you know, then, and, and there's moments. And so, you know, the, the kind of intuitive response when someone in the ecosystem is like, Hey, I'm building a, you know, I'm gonna run a new hackathon series or a new events, you know, thing, the intuitive response is like a yes, that's amazing. Like we wanna encourage you to do that rather than, you know, what a traditional company might think, which is like, oh shit, this is gonna compete with what we're doing.

Right. So, so then, you know, when say east global comes around, the EF is like, yes, this is amazing people who are aligned with this ethos, with the future of this ecosystem, we're gonna do what we can to help them give them grant funding. And then help them become self-sustaining over time. And so, you know, that's, that's just happened on multiple dimensions.

It happened with funding public goods with for instance, Bitcoin grants. It's happened with, you know, a bunch of like the infrastructure with consensus. It's happened with the core Ethere  clients with now many teams building execution can, and, you know, consensus clients that are soon gonna be merged.

And, now at this point, the EF is playing a much, much smaller role in the ecosystem. but it's still, you know, kind of like stewarding some of, some of the core, both like practical, functional things that need to happen. And also some of the values and the, the core functional stuff is for instance, you know, I mean, work on the merge to this point, but also, you know, work on like charting and data availability and these sorts of these sorts of things.

And. You know, you can imagine some point in the future where the Ethere  becomes something analogous to the internet, where it just doesn't make sense to even conceive of their being like a, an org that, that is required for its like sustaining, you know, flourishing. And I think that's an open question at least like as far as I know of, like at that point in time, What is the EF.

And that there is probably still sorts of things that are, that, that an organization that's a nonprofit that's fundamentally aligned with this ecosystem can do, like it can think much longer term. It can think, you know, across organizational boundaries, it can, it can really like, kind of help inspire these leaps.

So there may be things for the EF to do, even at that point. But the, the real like through line is to get to this point and, and like it's been happening that it's, that the ecosystem is completely not re relying on this organization.

[01:17:37] Jango: Massive. Congratulations on that. The, huge, huge body of.

[01:17:42] Sina: Yeah. It's, it's super inspiring I mean, it, it takes really special people to do this kind of stuff. And I, yeah, so much respect for the people at the EF. And I see, I mean, I honestly see mirrors of that in, in juice box and how you guys are approaching things. which is some of what I find really inspiring.

[01:18:01] Nicholas: Thank you. That's a, a great compliment. yeah. What Ethere  foundation is doing. I'm interested in how I, I don't know if it's been a problem so far, but I'm interested in how, with juice box, like for instance, I think Jengo has kind of led the charge with this idea that juice box protocol doesn't have a voice.

It amplifies the juice box. Dao can have something of a voice and its role should be primarily to amplify its contributors rather than to have a centralized style branded voice. wonder over time as contributors do lots of different things and people have different opinions and make different kinds of projects.

How has if Ethere  foundation, for instance, has ever dealt with like, what is the EFS position on this rather than like, because I feel, sort of in the social media, Environment. There's an expectation that brands have political opinions and obviously EF has some opinions about infrastructure, but even then it, it feels like it gives a lot of autonomy to contributors.

So I wonder how we can, maintain that logic where it's the contributors who have opinions and whatever kind of consensus can be achieved among them is something like, foundation or organization opinion. But at the end of the day, it really is. Everything should really be attributed to independent actors within the organization.

, I wonder if that's like viable in, Twitter, Instagram kind of

[01:19:23] Sina: I mean, it's, it's, it's a question. I know that folks at the EF have like really like grappled with, and it's a nuanced one and like one, one, kind of example of it that I think a lot of like a lot of people aren't aware of this, but it like shows the level of like painstaking , you know, like thought that.

They're going to is, so yeah, the EF doesn't represent Ethere  and they're, they're like totally distinct things. And I think they, you know, people there go out of their way to. Always kind of say that, you know, our, we don't, you know, any, any sort of influence is, is like soft, you know, it's soft influence and it comes from the credibility that has been developed over time through being a good steward for this ecosystem.

But beyond that, there's really no hard control. And one kind of like interesting around like the branding and stuff is so there's ethere .org and there's ethere .foundation. There's actually two different websites. And ethere .foundation is the EFS website. And ethere .org is meant as a, you know, ecosystem, ecosystem website.

And so the entire, like the entire process of. ethere .org being developed as a website, like I know has been an ongoing thing and, and the entire thing's like open source on GitHub with PRS and like people contributing and, there's even, you know, some decisions around, okay. A new developer lands on ethere .org and wants to build, you know, a, a new applica, a new smart contract application.

Wouldn't it be amazing to just have a tutorial right there that tells them use X, Y, Z tools and your stack and, and you're done. And instead ethere.org has chosen to not do that because it would have to give preference to certain, you know, developer tools, certain like RPC endpoints. And, and instead it's, it has like multiple tutorials that it just kind of like puts you towards, and those tutorials are written by people in the ecosystem.

So there's no official, like this is the Ethere  like tooling stack that you should, you should use. So it's, yeah, this, this question of like, the branding, the voice, and really like embracing, diversity, like allowing multiple, independent actors to pursue the good of the ecosystem and have those people occasionally cooperate, occasionally compete and, does basing your actions on what, what is best for like the overall ecosystem is, is a very interesting problem.

And yeah, one thing I know, they really think about.

[01:22:17] Nicholas: ethere.org is a wonderful website and really inspiring, especially for some work. I'm working with other contributors at juice box style to build educational resources. Exactly what you're talking about. I mean, everybody's seen the, the wallet page that, which is so on. And opinionated, just sort of lays, tries to lay out the facts, which even that is contentious enough, I can

what, are

[01:22:38] Sina: imagine building a page for like layer twos. Like what do you put on there

[01:22:42] Nicholas: Gosh, but it is, it is to me, it's like, and it's interesting. I'm just, I pulled off the page now and it says that it's inspired by the Mozilla developer network, which is another really inspiring group of online or open source, devs and, and community. I, I think the, it's a big question for us. Like, do we want to build educational resources that are directly financed by juice box do or to pay contributors, to build them directly or, and their sort of the responsibility of juice box Dao?

Or should we instead have juice box Dao fund, like multiple parallel grants to orgs make to individuals or projects that they build that are gonna create, parallel educational resources with different orientation? I mean, one thing that comes to mind thinking about ethere .org and tutorials is like, not even, you know, it would be, it would be wrong for the foundation or whatever the ethere .org group is to push people in the direction of a particular programming language, even.

[01:23:34] Sina: Right. Exactly.

[01:23:36] Nicholas: But you still wanna be helpful. You don't wanna be completely neutral on every subject. So it's, it's a fine line, but I, I find that particular effort really inspiring. I think it's one of the best websites on the internet as far as I'm concerned in terms of education and, providing clear information about a complicated topic without bias or with, you know, a, a bias that tries to let people make their own decisions.

[01:24:00] Sina: Totally and yeah, it has been a very complicated project. I've only followed from a distance, but massive shout out to Sam Richards, who who's been, you know, driving that. And, I, I don't know the team as well these days, but I know multiple other people are involved. They've yeah. Just super thoughtful about how they've evolved it. last question, thinking about the culture and the people inside of, juice box Dao and how interwoven that is with the decisions that the Dao makes and how, you know, just things evolve.

I'm curious, like what have there been particular crucible moments when you look in the past there's been a precedent that's set, or if like important kind of, guiding principles or philosophies that have emerged out of them. Like how, how do you look back on the cultural history of juice box and how it's evolved, to date.

I mean, it's, it is an ongoing experiment. I've been, you know, one thing I noticed we have town halls every, Tuesday at 6:00 PM, us Eastern time, at least. and we have consistently, now, yesterday there were, or two days ago there were, 37 people in the town hall. I think AF after an hour and a half or so, there were still 35 people in the room and we try to make an effort to. Keep things, you know, running, a good meeting. But I, I also like to, at the end of the meeting, make time for anyone who's new or who didn't get a chance to speak, to just say whatever, whatever they have to say, say hello, or, or intro their project, or, or just, just ask a question or whatever it might be.

[01:25:41] Nicholas: And I think, I'm always saying that like 30 really dedicated people, or even, even just two really dedicated people, but at this point in our history, 30 ish, people who are really dedicated to the project is more valuable than a hundred thousand, the, you know, fake followers on Twitter or whatever. So I've been really inspired by, I think juice box is also kind of a microcosm of this larger phenomenon.

I discovered when I. Started playing around in the Ethere  ecosystem, which is, I noticed like, oh wow, I'm Canadian. And I noticed, oh, wow, there's a lot of Canadian, Ethere  devs.

[01:26:15] Sina: Yeah

[01:26:16] Nicholas: so I'm like, wow, there's a lot of Canadians around. And the way I read that and over time, I discovered, in fact, there's a lot of devs from India.

A lot of devs from Australia, a lot from China, from all over really, from France, from, from all kinds of places. And I think what it showed to me was that. Blockchain with a dedication to open source compared to something like Silicon valley logic, you know, in the Silicon valley logic, you have to move from wherever you live to Silicon valley to get the best jobs, or you can work at a local outpost, but those probably aren't the top, top, top decision making, positions, unless it's like a, a local strength in something like AI, that gives you an office that really is leading the charge on a particular initiative in general, there's this kind of gravity pool of you have to go to America.

You have to go to California, you have to go to the bay area. And that that's all right. The bay area is cool, but blockchains really. Unlock all this global talent and the way I read it was, you know, Canada's got a great education system, healthcare, let you take some risks. do some, you know, switch job paths, leave web two, try something different, experiment in the evenings.

I, I really admire that about Ethere  and about blockchains in general. And I think juice box has that also. So I love that we have such a ragtag crew of global contributors who maybe, you know, were not like the CTO of whatever, but instead had a lot of talent and have found an outlet for that talent in our community.

And it's a very permeable organization. like I was saying, so people can come in and if they have good ideas and are contributing in an interesting way, they're gonna get, Compensated for it. and we're not gonna we're not gonna say, well, you live in a place where rent is cheaper, so we're gonna pay you less.

, not gonna do all these kind of, sort of punishing gestures that a lot of traditional organizations do. So that's, that's, that's part of what I admire about the culture.

[01:28:08] Jango: yeah, the, the Bri the name, your own. like n bers, N name like, like basically people are responsible for coming in and saying what they want, what they need. No, one's going to give you a templated. Anything, even though sometimes that's been called. I mean, we give you framing. I think that's been a that's evolved over time, as, as suggestions, but, yeah, like EV everyone has to somewhat develop their own sense of leverage, whatever that means.

which is exciting. It can be burdensome at times, but over a longer period of time, I think it plays itself out decently, at least reflecting on it. Now it seems decent. I think that one of the coolest things looking back though, is recognizing in the year and some change history of the protocol being, being public and accessible. We've seen a lot of momentary, hype usage of the protocol,

constitutional

shark Asange. And those were really great to get people in interested in at least interacting with the protocol and then trickling like those who were curious, trickling back into juice box data to ask, more fundamental questions and, and, and getting involved.

But over the scope of this past year, I think a lot of the people in the discord and a lot of the people in these town halls aren't contributing to the core protocol. They're building projects, they're building. like affordable housing projects in, in Houston or, a food and wine startup in the bay or, you know, all, all kinds of things all over the world.

And so, and then there's a lot of cross pollination of ideas where these project creators can now share insights over how they're configuring their treasuries and other more like I L operational techniques that they're, that they're using. And then we, people contributing to the base protocol, then learn from that.

And we all kind of are just a bunch of builders working on all, all kinds of things. And that's the coolest thing, cuz like I feel like my, a large part of my day to day is just to listen to people's big ideas and ask questions that hopefully like lead to some, sense of strategy and then kind of find patterns, among all these projects and try to connect dots or be as helpful as I can without, while also just.

Leaving space for things just to happen over time. And then the consequences right now, we, we've just seen a lot of really, more complex, longer term projects start to emerge. And they've been in development like in the discord for the past year, just scheming of how we might orchestrate this like studio Dao that can fund in indie films in perpetuity, right.

And stuff like that. And those are not startup weekend bootstrap, a treasury like LFG. Those are like complicated, like legal structures with like orchestrated like sequences of treasuries that empower ND creators as well as, as, as community members. And there's a whole, and then there's like content bits of that.

And so we're about to see a bunch of these more. like longer term, longer oriented, experiments start to, come outta the woodworks and, and, and try to make a case for themselves and leverage these tools in, really creative ways. And I'm very, very excited about

[01:31:25] Sina: What.

what is the shape of studio Dao for instance, or another one of these kind of more long term oriented projects that you think is interesting just to, just to provide a brief sketch so I can see what sorts of things people are doing.

[01:31:39] Jango: Yeah, totally. studio do. There's a really great podcast on this done by Matthew and Briley that I'd highly recommend in a series of articles. So, and studio Dao is now, on, on rink be, how it's organized is there's a main juice box project for studio Dao. And then there's, each indie film being funded, is its own juice box project.

the tokens and, and payout distributions are organized in a way that links the, the projects together. So, studio Dao takes a, a fee from the, the funds are raised by the project, the project in contributing to an indie film and helping to fund it. you meant, an NFT, across three different tiers.

So you have an option of how, of what level of patron you wanna be for the film. And then that gives you access to be, a member of studio Dao, which then helps to decide, which films it's going to put its weight behind. So all the funds acc ulated in studio Dao then get pointed by the community, to fund Indy films along the way.

And so their goal is to really create like a million person green light committee, that can just, you know, over time funds will trickle in from the, these fundraisers. and then they can, essentially be, be recycled to fund further films. And it's just being led by some really incredible thoughtful people who are, very entrenched in the media industry and have, have been, pushing the, the, the, horizon on, on the stuff since like early days of, of the internet and of like, of media.

So.

[01:33:16] Nicholas: check out the, the juice cast episode with, studio Dao. I think it's a mechanism we're still, I'm still learning about how they're orchestrating the thing they're using a, unincorporated non-profit association. I believe it is, which is sort of one of the, the hot structures for, legal structures for Daos, right now.

And I think it's gonna be a really interesting experiment and, and possibly really successful project. So the juice cast episode with, with Kenny is a great way to, to understand how they're tructure.

[01:33:43] Sina: Yeah.

super interesting. And on this, on, on this last question, I promise, on the point of, legal kind of like regulatory design, like what are, what are models or, you know, sketches of different models that you think are interesting or could work with these more kind of like permission list.

[01:34:06] Jango: I, I think it's a really cool concept to, treat profit as a recyclable, kind of pocket of resources to further the mission of the Dao. So the con the contributions, made to projects, can perhaps yield U NFTs or participation, in, in decision making. and probably other stuff that we haven't even come up with yet.

And haven't like, we don't have words for yet, but. The, from a sense of like RevGen, like treating the Daos funds as, a means for reinvestment, I think is pretty exciting, but I also think it's really cool to really try to figure out how we might shape securities on these platforms and really structure them soundly so that people can create experiments that are, highly potent from a, a n ber go up perspective too.

Cause we know like the power of these things. And I think what we're trying to do, juice box from an infer perspective is really give, creators and, and indie artists, the toolbox to make sure that they're well funded and supported in their creative endeavors. so however we can give people confidence in doing so.

I think it's worth our while.

[01:35:14] Nicholas: Yeah, we've seen charitable organizations, like 5 0 1 , use juice box, constitution Dao. If they had succeeded, had an arrangement with enDaoment to use enDaoments to charitable status, to custody the constitution and to, integrated into, a legal model that, that, that is well known and understood in the us. we also see these experiments with A's and there's some contributors who are working on sort of laying out, frameworks that are available and that people can do further research into, by. Think the truth is that, it's still very early days for figuring out what all the right structures and options are.

And, and we're not alone in that. Everybody everybody's thinking about this.

[01:35:56] Jango: There's cool tools coming up though. A few contributors are, are, have been working, a lot on these legal doc ents that are plug in play with juice box configurations. So like actually in the legal agreement that, is, is either, Signed off on by someone who's, who's an official member or in Una's case, someone who, who, agrees from, two, adhering to it, as they join the, the organization, those docs can, will soon hopefully be able to be temporized and then spin up where you can just plug in.

All right, what's the reserve rate, what's the redemption rate, what's the discount rate and all that stuff inform the legal standing of the organization. and then we can obviously Ize some of the, these, JB parameters to kind of give people a cleaner onboarding experience without having to, sift through all of these choices.

If they're trying to make a, a very simple thing happen, but give people the, the full suite, if, if they want something more experi.

[01:36:57] Sina: Totally like something like Clerky or like Stripe Atlas for juice box juice box projects. And it, it totally like the, the kind of modular plugin design and the fact that each project is kind of a new instantiation of a juice box projects with its own parameters also means that people can continue experimenting with different models and kind of do their own research around what, what it should look like as a, as a fit for what they're building.

[01:37:25] Nicholas: Yeah. And because each project is its own entity and the juice box Dao has no access to the funds inside of other projects. They really are all independent. And although they share a protocol, they can operate entirely separately from one another. And, and we can't, you know, nobody from the Dao can stick their fingers into their treasuries.

So it's pretty cool because it really is making more accessible, some more advanced tooling than just like a ERC 20 deploy. For instance, it really gives you this transparent, treasury for a decentralized organization. So I'm excited to see how this legal stuff comes into the picture more over time.

[01:38:01] Sina: amazing. Well, we've been talking for some time. I think we can bring it to a close. thank you both for taking the time. I'm super, super inspired by where you're building. yeah. Gonna be gonna be following the journey in the discord.

[01:38:14] Nicholas: much. This was

Hey, I'm going to make a small ask here. If you've been listening to these conversations and want to support what we're doing here, . I would really, really appreciate if you could leave a rating and review for the podcast, wherever you're listening to it. This might seem like a small thing, but it will really help other people also discover the show. Thank you. I'm grateful to be able to do this and look forward to being here together again soon.