DRAFT
As such, winning strategies in decentralized systems involve spreading value through cycles of narrative reinforcement, trust building, and alignment clarification. This distinction is vital, as replicating a value extraction model in decentralized systems risks recreating the shortcomings of traditional systems.
And what unites that community - the symbol, of cause.
By self-identifying as a supporter, he gets to participate in the rituals and feel like one with the community every weekend. Every goal scored brings huge collective joy, every foul committed against the team surfaces deep feelings of unjust, and he gets to walk around internet forums with a wholly justified sense of superiority over supporters of other clubs.
He can make friends with anyone wearing the same jersey in a pub, celebrate every win as his own, and despair over losses as if he himself was mortally wounded. No matter how much of a wife-beating hooligan loser he is in real life, he still gets to be a proud Manchester United fan all day, any day. When one game ends, he only has to wait a few more days for the next kick-off, and if he can’t stand to be away from his team that long, he has fan forums, podcasts, and YouTubers to keep him wired for next weekend’s collective ritual.
In other words, a hardcore supporter with true belief and passion gets to enjoy the emotional ups and highs that usually require actual individual achievement and actualization.
Bitcoin stands for freedom, for self-sovereignty, against government overreach. Solana stands for fast chain, global state machine at the speed of light:
Conversely, if a positive cycle sets in, for example - people start to see Solana as living up to it’s genesis promise of being the world’s state machine - then it matters jackshit how much SOL is burnt in transactions - the value of SOL will pamp.
So in this case, the utility of SOL is in preventing spam and enforcing scaracity (sic), but the value of SOL comes from it being the symbol of the successful Solana network.
What does Jupiter stand for?
The decentralised meta. The decentralised meta refers to a world where a critical mass of people are using decentralised platforms daily for their regular financial and social lives -- where people who own crypto are also using crypto.
What does Sanctum stand for?
The liquid staking meta.
What would you do if your objective was to maximise our token's meme potential, our token's symbolism?
Astam:
I think it makes a ton of sense and I've been noticing for some years now how even the stock market trades on memes. Tesla was booming a few years ago and not because any shareholders were getting dividends, it just felt like a strong company to bet on. And even more fundamentally there are "memes" or social heuristics that finance trades on. e.g. SaaS companies growing at x% rate over a year should be valued at a 20x multiple to forward earnings or whatever
One part I haven't fully been able to reconcile is how memes persist. Meme coins that we have must be kept alive by the community, because there is no company etc. no other activity or organization behind it the way that a company does
So let's take BONK for example, what will enable bonk to survive in the attention for the coming months or years?
I think it has to be community driven, and it has to symbolize something more than a funny / cute dog and a meme
So what's the mission of bonk? What can it represent such that people still want to affiliate with it? Not sure if it's defined quite yet, but this idea of spreading inclusiveness and happiness due to the FTX stuff makes sense. Similarly Pepe was started to reclaim a symbol that used to be for hope but was turned into a hate symbol
In some ways you can argue that religion is one of the best memes, survived for centuries or millenium (depending on which one), and I think that's because it's a way to live a better life, there is a real "utility" if you will, or something people can get behind and support for a long time
Sorry that went super long, but really interesting stuff and loved your article
Jup's mission:
- Make Solana the most used chain in the world
- Build a suite of world-class trading products
- Help other projects win with JUP START
Sanctum's mission:
- Make all staked SOL liquid
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