Cute anime girl pfps or funding mechanism for esoteric neo-fascism? (Miladys and Remilia Corp)
For this episode I spoke to James Brennan (@jt_bren) who has been finishing up his Masters at the University of Colorado focused on crypto. As part of his research he took a dep dive into the infamous group behind the Miladys NFT collection, Remilia Corp. During the discussion we spoke about esoteric political ideologies professed by Remilia and those associated with it, their financialized tactics for earning revenue, and all of the controversies surrounding the project. We also asked ours...
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Transcript
Hi, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast. I'm Josh, and I'm here with my friend, James Brennan. He is, currently a student who's finishing up his master's degree at University of Colorado in media and public engagement, and he's been doing some incredibly interesting research on a very, let's say, controversial group in the, crypto world. And so I think just as a heads up for people, I think this episode and conversation may be a little bit spicy just due to the kind of nature of what we're gonna be talking about, which includes the NFT collection called Milady's and its parent company, Remilia Corp. But, yeah, James, would you like to maybe give a a quick introduction to yourself and the research that you've been doing in this spicy world?
Sure. Yeah. And and thanks for having me, Josh. So like you said, finishing up my MA on this. And this has been the fascination for me as ladies are for any good story. You want controversy, some absurdities, some humor, but also like a very fascinating lens to get to the heart of what's going on with NFT financialization and the kind of community and timeline dynamics that that really shape the emerging and, I guess, reemerging NFT landscape.
Yeah. Yeah. So, like, for I'm almost like like, I don't know how to convey to the listener if they have never heard of Milady's before, what exactly they're getting into with this stuff? Because it's like it's so beyond weird and also, like, yeah, like you said, this incredibly controversial, the type of stuff that they're associated with, the kind of, like, lore that's behind it, and all the different types of accusations that are involved in this entire community. But, maybe to start off, could you explain a bit what are Milady's? Yeah. So
if you've been on crypto Twitter, you've almost definitely seen and even if you're not on crypto quitter, you might have seen they, these kind of anime avatars. They're like three d drawing or depictions of anime girls. And the style is referred to as Neo Chibi. Chibi just being a kind of word for like diminutive, feminine, chewed. You can think, like, anime cat, pictures, large eyes, big heads, small bodies, that kind of thing. Now they're dressed in, like, 20 or, yeah, like y two k Tokyo streetwear, which makes for this kind of interesting mismatch. But you probably will also have noticed if you've seen them on the timeline or heard of them, the kinds of outlandish, prop provocative, and oftentimes just like trolling for with for the most, like, bigoted vitriolic thing you could think of on the timeline. And that kind of, juxtaposition of the cute anime girl and the, wow, that is, like, incredibly offensive together is what makes the unique eye catching potential of the Milady's thus far and what they've been known for.
It was essentially, from my understanding, like, one of those profile picture collections of NFTs that people could buy, and then they put it as their profile picture on Twitter or on social media so that they could identify with the the larger milady group. And that was a very common thing, especially in the hype cycle that happened previously. I believe they were a big part of that as well, but they were a bit more, let's say, yeah, controversial. You would like, which is like a very common thing with, I don't want to make necessarily the comparison too quickly, but throughout Twitter, you will find like cute anime girls, like, profile pictures saying, like, the most, like, vile racist, like, alt right kind of things. It's similar to that, but then, like, the absurdity, I think, like, 10 x ed a bit.
Yeah. And we're really, the kind of parent company, the artist collective, that produces the the Milady Maker NFT collection. That's like the full name Milady Maker. One of their, like, central tenants is jovial irreverence, is is that they call it. But this combined with this posting style, and they invite anyone to put on these NFTs, which is actually one of the things that in the 2021 kind of NFT bull market, they took pride in setting them apart because while bored apes were threatening to sue people for stealing their j ladies were like, no. Just pick anyone you like. Right click save. Wear it. And if anything, that actually helped build their staying power and kind of, yeah, like, prevalence on the timeline because, like, they didn't pretend we needed to own an NFT in order to wear a JPEG, which is just like a small example of, like, a tactic that they picked up on early. And there's a lot of these things that would take a collection that, you know, and and behaviors that people would other otherwise, this would bar someone from mainstream relevance. But it's actually a lot of, like, key tactical decisions that ended up out competing other maybe stronger and often VC funded NFT collections along the way. Ladymaker wasn't VC funded. It was just a self started by this Romelia
collective. They call themselves a corporation. It's not they've gotten bigger over time, but it's never been, like, a sizable enterprise. Right. I think one of the things to keep in mind is that a lot of the words that they use are sarcastic or, like, the way that describes it was very yeah. You can't take it for, like, at the surface level of what they're telling you. There's something there's always something
weirder that's going on behind the scenes, I feel like. In your recent episode with Adam from Asset Horizon on accelerationism, where you guys unpacked effective accelerationism In the kind of weird lore and continental philosophy, esoteric stuff that got brought up in that conversation, it's probably a good primer for getting at least the kind of gist of the kind of like esoteric background to Milady. Now they take that accelerationism kind of the ballad, Adam was talking about and they add in esoteric far right spirituality. And again, that's to make it like a kind of syncretic blend to really build what I would say is a brand, and a brand that shines through in posting that is just very jarring to normal people. And I guess these kinds of sources of like post Marxist accelerationism and like Julius of Ola putting those together is going to make anyone who sees it be like, what what the hell am I looking at? Why is there an anime girl saying this? And and that just it's a great formula for outrage and and generating attention. And I think this kind of gets to a lot of contemporary media trends. I mean, you've seen this a lot since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the ways that like rage made content has just taken off. How vitriolic, how offensive can you be is like a surefire way to get the algorithm to promote you to people who will engage with things that offend them. And it's this kind of trolling economy in that sense.
Yeah. There's it's like their alternative to venture capital investment was trolling economy, perhaps. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. I think one of the things that so, like, yeah, what kind of maybe one of the things to touch upon is that the if you go into the Milady lore and their, like, documentation and whatever else, you'll see a lot of references to Nick Land. I talked a bit about Nick Land with Adam in the previous episode on effective accelerationism. In short, for people, maybe feel free to to add something in there if you want. But Nick Land is imagine somebody who understands who has a Marxist view of society, but then chooses to side with the evil people in in in a sense where you can see the contradictions of technology increasing and that technology being in the hands of capitalists, therefore, meaning that inequality is only going to increase. Things are only going to get worse and saying that this is a good thing that we should side with the robots in, you know, being a vulgar summarization, maybe.
No. And I think that's it's yeah. It's a great way to describe Nick Bland. He you you got, yeah, Marxist reading of capital and you're like, wow, this is correct. I'll take the side of the capital. I think what maybe changes with the kind of Remilia reading of land, and they would say he is their, like, prime inspiration, is the reason they would call, like, the side of capital good is they try and invigorate spirituality into this and say that movement of capital is God. Mhmm. And this is they would call it network spirituality. It's again, that kind of, like, syncretic kind of traditionalist, I would say, is the kind of lineage they pull from dissident right traditionalist beliefs. Combined with though this, like, view of technology as, like, unstoppable progress that in in that human agency, they don't believe it exists, that we are moved by God. You could say, I think it's very Calvinist in that sense that we're and it because they would say some people are destined to be poor, some people are destined to be rich. And this is and they think that's good. They think hierarchy is good. And these kinds of blending together, this kind of, like, spiritual or or this, yeah, this kind of, like, ontology of, social hierarchy. Or it's an ontology in the sense that it's as primary as capitalism is for Nick Land. And and they really just, like, equate these things, this, natural social hierarchy, the movement of technology and capitalism, and that's their kind of like belief system. And in its own way, I think funnily enough, most of the ladies don't probably engage with that stuff. They'll say they, they, they believe or the word they'll use is I long for network spirituality and that they have this belief in it. They, they affirm, but I think for the most part, they, they post pictures of cute anime girls and say offensive things. This kind of is reserved for a small group of them who claim they believe this stuff.
My religion is posting anime girls and being offensive.
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. So that other stuff, the founder Charlie, that is like his that's what he's into. And I guess maybe I I should mention as well, Charlotte Fang Mhmm. Is the the founder of the lady done by previous names. The the first original controversy was when Charlotte admitted to being this previous account, Maya cyber angel baby or something like that. And that was, like, the account that started out posting this, like, Nick Lahn meets traditionalist, you know, right wing traditionalism. And so but, yeah, I don't think too many Milady's actually engaged with that stuff. You gotta you gotta waste a lot of time reading books that aren't about anything. But, like, I called speculative nonfiction.
Yeah. Yeah. No. Like yeah. I've I've been through some of their documentation. It is interesting. I think that they were recommending, like, Grundrisse by Marx and then Deleuze and then Nick Land and then, like, some other racist philosophers. It was like and it was I don't know. It was, like, interesting. It it maybe just be like, I I it's hard for me to believe that they read necessarily all those books. And it was more well, a friend of mine was telling me about how you can tell more by someone about the books that they have in their bookcase that they haven't read than the ones that they have read. And I think this is like a very good case of that. They're like showing their bookcase, Like, these are the you're trying to embed yourself in some sort of like intellectual tradition. And you can probably see it in my bookcase and the video here that I've read all of these and maybe you can tell a lot about me. But Yeah. There's like, I think there's something in there about trying to appear more intellectual and more like, almost, like, quasi religious and cult and there is, like, a a very big, like, cult factor in all of this. And it's heavily embedded in Nickland, which I think Nickland does have, like, a cultish kind of following with certain people in in certain spaces. And then it's also important to keep in mind since Mark Nick Lamb is, like, the one of the original accelerationists, that this is still very different than effective accelerationists. Milady's being perhaps their their ideology being more more original to accelerationism than EAC is because they are much more anti human than EAC purports to be.
I think that's definitely accurate. EAC, effective acceleration. You you would, at least from the perspective of, like, a Landian, say they put too much emphasis on human agency, which kind of Landianism overlooks, neglects, or just, like, outright denies effective accelerationism is taking technology and using it for it. It's like a humanist futurism. And this would be an inhumanist futurism as opposed to it. I think for a lot of people though, they just see accelerationism. These are like naive techno optimists and they could end the conversation there, but there's quite a lot of like love lost between or there's not a lot of love lost between the two of them, like, intellectual groups. But and I think, and on them kind of being a cult or land in this and being a cult, I think, actually, a lot of the kind of posting behaviors that they do facilitates the cult dynamics to their benefit. So for example, the kind of cancellation that they underwent. What it really was it fostered a cohesive group dynamic through the kind of the outside world does not like you. Right? Let's say you identify as a milady on the internet. People see this, they say these milady PFPs, they are, terrible people. Get them away from me. And then you have this kind of community of miladies that you hang out with. You have fun, you enjoy your time with. And on the outside, the people will, they say these things. And then on the inside, it's like, oh no, they don't get us. Don't worry. And there's this kind of like, and along with this, a lot of the kind of signaling that, the lady community performs and then Remilia encourages are very, is very antisocial. So for example, one of their like most popular merch items is this hoodie or t shirt that just says Sakikomori condition, which if you're not familiar is a reference to the Japanese word for social shut ins. So this problem of of people who they don't leave the house for years on end. They are total isolated, generally single young men. And so the Middle East, though, they they identify as the Gigamoras. They identify as shut ins. They identify as schizophrenic or agoraphobic. All of these kinds of antisocial identify that when put together makes for a more cohesive kind of cult dynamic. Part of a cult is isolating people from the outside. Mhmm. And what they can effectively do with milady Twitter as a kind of nebulous location on social media is insulate a a a this kind of isolated Twitter experience for their users. It as it connects with crypto Twitter, that's its own way, but they they they can really through this kind of like these ideas you're talking about are legible to the outside world. The things you say make you outcast. We all like take joy in these antisocial identifiers. This makes for a much stronger meme in its staying power on the feed. Yeah. And it's also I I think, like, it's fairly
to be similar to, like, these general kind I don't know to the extent like this maybe, but there are, like, plenty of online kind of communities that revolve around almost like a collective downward spiral of, like, mental health and things like this. This is, like, what kind of comes to me is that I imagine a lot of these people who are in there are probably yeah. They have some sort of, like, mental health issues that maybe they need to work on. But, it's like this when you're able to use the Internet to find other people who are also in this kind of strange mental space, then you can there's a certain collectivity. You find, like, an amount of community you get to be a part of while also not having to also giving into, like, the worst kind of impulses maybe that you have. But so, like, I don't know if you wanna talk about this, but I know you did some research or at least you took part in person for some of these events. Could you explain a bit what those things were like? What are the some of the things that maybe you noticed?
Sure. Yeah. So so the the events that they throw, they they call them their milady raves, and it's a series of parties, less so raves other than the fact, like, the music is, like, break core and just, like, contemporary nineties dance music revival with this, like, zoomer twist on it. You're playing jungle. You know, adding, like, lots of yeah. Like like like jungle, but, like, add, like, a montage of, like, anime cutouts and remix that together. And I guess I wouldn't say rave so much because the they're just like I don't know. One in New York, it was just like in a basement at, like, a very poorly ventilated, like, Chinatown, like, bar. I don't even know. And then if you go to, like, a crypto event, all the kind of crypto parties have the same, like, here's a big empty room. Let's put up cardboard cutouts and give out swag. And like, it's not a very authentic scene. And I think actually, like, Milady knows and presents this. They they said they weren't gonna throw a party in Denver because they knew it would be lame. And last year's was overrun with crypto guys, which is always true. And they did one anyway, an unofficial one. And it was, yeah, it's anyway though. So I will say they are trying to do something more, I guess, like culturally in touch with like other concurrence in, like, art and culture such as, like, yeah, the kind of revival of, like, nineties dance music. Brooklyn's been on this for, like, I don't know, five, ten years now. And it just like, your regular crypto guy though. That's, like, foreign language to him to, like, go to that space. He would be a fish out of water. So it like, on the one hand, Milady is trying to bring this together. And I think to their own detriment, they've hitched their ride too closely to cryptocurrency to attain lots of the clout they would hope that they could. Yeah.
And then maybe we can talk a bit about the maybe if we go a little bit deeper with the drama with the founder just for, like, maybe a little bit of extra context for people. I don't know how much I know you've looked into this probably as well, but Charlotte Fang, which I can't remember his real name. Krishna Okandiyar. Krishna, yeah. He was accused of, like, a lot of, like, like, grooming of girls. Like, in the past, he's been, like, accused of a lot of different types of things. There was then, like, now either he's being sued or, like, someone else is being sued within it because there is actually an existing LLC that I think he owns or something like that. Which in mind, I think, in the big blank spots I got for. So like I was saying before, Krishna was previously Mia, this account. This is pre release or
Right. Yeah. This is, like, 2019. And the account Mia started this cult called Caliac, Kalia Yuga acceleration zone, which was essentially taking in, like, eastern, mysticism, specifically, like Hinduism, and to bring together, like, a cosmology or, sorry. Like, basically, an apocalyptic vision of technology. So you take the kind of AI singularity discourse, right, that the world is running towards. We're gonna build AGI, essentially. This robot, it's gonna go Skynet. We're all gonna die. And the Kiali and acceleration essentially says we need to destroy technology. We need to nuke ourselves back to the stone age as a way to escape incoming death. And Charlie led what was there. Yeah. Very much a cult, not like this kind of on the timeline dynamic. This was like manipulative, the kind of allegations being pro anorexia, where they would take up essentially a lot of eating disorder Twitter tropes and attract people from that space to be essentially like bullied through like that spell, like women should be thin. Very, like, kind of misogynistic stuff and very manipulative. Often, I'm not sure underage. I haven't seen anything confirming that, but at the very least, like, teenage, like, 18, 19. And, yeah, that Krishna was the kind of part of this. I know as well that, like, the the kind of Bored Apes people, and this is like rider rips died on this hill, their association with Kali Yuga, Yuga Labs being the the company that behind Bored Apes. There looked like a weird kind of network of crypto people who were around in Kalliak in, like, 2019. But, anyway, that's the kind of yeah. So so those allegations float around. The lady went through or the community went to large efforts to dispel many of them. Some accusers came forward and either retracted their allegations or said, this person speaking on my behalf is lying. They're saying it wrong. So the waters are very muddy. But what what essentially comes out of this is that, like, now they can never be canceled again. Now Krishna is totally like he can be like, what? I you guys already called me like a neo Nazi pedophile. What what else could I possibly do? Right. In any way, so now though, after the cancel, a year or so later, two years later, some of the founding members of the group who in the lawsuit, now they're definitely distanced as no, these guys were never founders, but this group of disaffected Remilia members was disappointed in not getting equity in the company. And so they essentially froze one of the code bases for an ongoing project and froze assets to one of their NFT collections that was ongoing mid process. It was like one mince every day. And so then there was a lawsuit essentially, between these three members of what the Milady community now calls the coup, the Milady coup, where they attempted to, yeah, basically sue Vermelia for equity and to basically close the project. Now, very recently, as of a couple weeks ago, the lost proceedings all finished. They wrapped up, they settled, and Krishna and Vermelia essentially won. The people in the, the coup did not get what they wanted and the project is still going. Now, the code base that we seized during the queue, the coup was for this project they've been working on for a while now called Remilia chat or Remi chat. And this is, I think, where we can say and move the conversation to the kind of tactics and politics of it is that this platform they were trying to build, that the kind of cool leaders took advantage of for leverage is, I think, I would say their political motivation. They would call it the the new Internet where they want to change the way, like, people interact on social media platforms by building their own as an alternative to, like, Discord or Twitter or Telegram or wherever else ladies already hang out to build their own in the model of and Charlotte or Krishna has talked about inspiration from people like Ted Nelson for this to go back to more web one point o model of interaction. He's very obsessed with hyperlinks and the kind of Wikipedia style of trolling the web. And that so you can think of the money that Remilia makes, though. It's being reinvested into building a platform like this. And that they have this kind of motivation for what they do. They have this kind of grander vision that kind of goes beyond a cash grab. And this kind of vision, I'd say lies at the heart of where the last few years of Remilia has been building towards. And it's just been put on pause because of this lawsuit.
Interesting. Yeah. So it's interesting that's so, like, at the earlier point, I think it seems that kind of the the downside of cancellation that it like, as if it ever happens is that after the cancellation, then that person is basically invincible in in in many ways. Like, it's like it's like Yeah. It's it's I don't wanna make too much of a a comparison, but, like, whenever there's an attempt at a coup within a country of some, like, strong man and then the strong man survives, then that gives him way more power. We saw this potentially in Turkey with Erdogan back in, is it like twenty fifteen, sixteen, where there was an attempted coup and then he just became a whole lot stronger out of that or became more solidified in his position. Perhaps similar things happen with cancellations, which hardly ever really work whenever there is, like, this cancellation of people being not being woke enough or something like that. But, yeah, it it's so, like, he's been able to do that to create to fund basically itself, which in one way is, to be fair, impressive in the sense that they didn't have to get VC funding for a lot of and their as far as I understand, their their accounts are pretty big. Like, they do have a considerable amount of ETH in their treasury, which they can and have been deploying for whatever it else whatever it is that they're doing. And so, yeah, there is, like, this question of, like, their tactics, something that we should learn from or something we should try to understand, not solely as something as like a, oh my like, beyond like a being, oh my gosh, I can't believe they did that. And wow, like this feeling of just like, holy shit. That's so fucked. But to instead be like, alright. What's our next move? What do we do about it? What is something that we can take from it? Yeah. And and I think here there's, like, a number of things we could discuss about
the kind of specific projects Aurelia engages in within NFT financialization that, I guess, point to a way in which they've been able to accumulate capital towards the kind of vision I just mentioned for their new Internet, they call it. One one easy example is if you saw a couple years ago or I forget exactly the timeline it was, Uniswap launched a merch product called Unisox on a token bonding curve for kind of a unique experiment in financialization. Now Remilia saw this, they copied it and they launched their own NFT plus, giant doll. So it's a giant doll of a milady that you could buy on a bonding curve and redeem the token for two NFTs and a doll. And they did with this was they had the, they have a 1% transaction fee, right? So every time someone trades the token, 1% goes to Vermillion. Now this has a deflationary effect on the token price, but what it also does is it gave them a large amount of this token to then redeem and then mint their own NFTs. And I think this is like an interesting tactic that worth delving into a second because they did something similar with Milady Maker. The NFT didn't mint out. They had 10,000 of the original. So they had to mint it out themselves, which essentially paying themselves for their own NFT to basically, help people sell the ones that already happened. Right. The to lower the supply. But what they did with these NFTs, now they have this problem of they hold their own NFTs. They can't sell them because that would just reduce market price and be a terrible signal, right. That the founder of the project selling. So what they do is they use the platform called NFTX. Now NFTX is, a popular platform with NFTs to essentially, provide liquidity for NFT markets. What it works by is taking several NFTs, premising them all as being worth the what's called for price, which is the lowest value by which someone could buy an NFT up this collection for. And Remilia deposited, called a 100 of their Milady's and as well as certain, a large amount of the Sumo. It's the name of the Unisocks copy. So they deposit their own NFTs to these pools. And then what they do is they by making them available at this price, anyone can come in and buy whichever one they want, and they earn a percent on that. And so what they have done is by inserting themselves into the market for their own NFT, they have found a way to generate yield. I checked their NFTX platform this morning. They have 3,200,000.0 worth of their own assets staked on NFTX, and they've earned about $800,000 in interest already. Although that's generally been reinvested into the NFTX pools. But I think I I can pause for a moment there, but I think this is a kind of key point for identifying potentially useful tactic.
Yeah. So maybe just to to back up a little bit in case people don't know, Unisox was a project. I think it was 2020. It was, like, pretty early. Actually, I remember where they had a bonding curve. So you could basically purchase a token that would give you the right to purchase a and they had, like, I don't remember what the supply a pair of socks. I don't remember what the supply was. Let's say it was a 100 or something. There was a 100 socks, so there was a 100 socks tokens. And if you bought a full token, then you could redeem it for the actual physical socks. But what ended up happening is that some people held on to their token rather than redeeming the socks immediately, and then the price kind of skyrocketed. And so they I don't really know what the current state is, how many socks are left or whatever, but, some people made a killing off of buying the token and then selling the token later for someone else to either speculate it on it again, or that's how much they thought the socks were worth and they redeemed it for the socks. So they're potentially like the most expensive socks in the world. I don't know. But so has this tendency, which all kind of crypto projects have this tendency of making derivative projects of whatever is successful. If something is successful, then you simply copy the code base because in crypto, everything is open source, at least all the smart contracts are. And so you can make your own version, make a couple of tweaks so that it fits whatever exactly you're trying to do, and then deploy it again. And to me, this seems like a way to attract what I coined, like, twenty minutes ago when we were or however, before we started talking before we started the podcast as, like, FOMO capital of just, like, people who, like, also saw that huge, success and then then wanted to try to, yeah, make money off of something very similar because they've already seen it happen before so they can, potentially make it happen again and make some money off of it. Yeah. And and I think another key example of where Milady's did this successfully,
although this wasn't Remilia sanctioned, this is also another thing. Oftentimes, just like prominent members of the community go off and do things. And because they wear the profile picture while they do it, people associate it with Milady. It helps build the brands, like part of the brand building. And one of these is popular meme coins, especially over the last summer and continuing to now, have been run by essentially prominent Milady's. And if you remember almost a year ago, kind of Pepe token took off. But in now the ones that kind of wrote Right now, Pepe is Yeah. It is. Like, 3 and a half billion or something in market cap. So it makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah. Normal. But so so one of the prominent tokens last summer that kind of rode off Pepe Walk, so a bunch of other ERC 20 meme tokens could run. Of them being and this is, again, what's the, like, the culture of absurdity in this kind of corner of crypto. The ticker was just Bitcoin except written as a full word, And the title was Harry Potter, Obama Sonic, 10, Inu. Combining names together, just combining them for this totally absurd concept. But it was like prominent maladies holding, like, being the top wallets holding the supply. Mhmm. Clearly, currently now the one that's probably most popular is Mog, another kind of, token that popped up. Another ERC 20 token has no utility other than speculative value. And, yeah, it's it's Milady and the kind of side collection that Romelia launched. They're called Romelia Babies. You could think of it just the younger sibling to Milady is what they call it. Anyway, so these Romilios and Milady's run these tokens, and it's great for the Milady brand. And it's but like you said, though, this kind of with Unisox, you see something that's successful and you replicate it and you tend to do it with a better mind for branding and for algorithm dynamics in mind. And that builds the kind of clout that the Romilly ecosystem holds, because people within that ecosystem are recognized for their, like,
in navigating these things. So there's a certain, like, creation of elite. I can't believe I'm saying this stuff. But, like, there's, like, a there is this impression of, like, Milady holders being elite, like, degens in the degen world, that they're the ones who've been able to make the best trades, make the best moves for creating mainly meme coins and meme projects. But if you are someone who is, like, getting into the crypto space and you are trying to degen your way into some money and you see all these people with the same profile picture as top holders of these projects, that's probably, like, what they're trying to do with their branding or the creation of their Mistika in some way. And then, therefore,
creating the FOMO for other people to want to be a part of this this group. Yeah. And and I think it it goes the branding part is is spot on. And I think there's a at least, they would claim and whether or not how much this is true or ends up being correct in the end remains to be seen. But they would say the kind of success that they bring to members of the community, prominent members, say that the people who the mob team, for instance, the mob coin team, that what they really thinks they're building is a class of, like yeah. Like you said, elite traders, degens, but just wealthy people who can then in the future go out and influence the world underneath the Remilia banner Yeah. Or at least underneath this ideology and always bring profits home to Remilia. This is something this is like a kind of community bullying thing, actually. People try to make derivative projects with Milady and people say, hey, the proceeds on the Mint, you guys didn't sweep the Milady floor with. Right? In in the sense, you guys didn't buy Milady's with help increase price. There's this kind of expectation that you bring the bacon back home and everybody wins off of this. And I think there's there's even, like, an official this even kind of official Romelia expectation, not so explicitly if you buy things, but that like this process of seeing the kind of elite traders or degens or whatever, prepping Malady as they do so is a kind of positive sun flywheel where, it just attracts more and more people up this specific kind of mindset. And they imagine ten years from now, these people are gonna be running startups. Right? Like, we're gonna have, like, Elon Musk's gonna be in Milady. Infamously, Elon Musk did tweet out a Milady meme a year ago, skyrocket the price. But they they want to get Milady's in the positions of power. And, yeah, that's the long term vision.
Unfortunately, it is the world that we live in. Like like, we're it's, like, levels of absurdity that you never thought you'd ever reach. But, like, I do think this is very similar to what Elon Musk has at least was doing. He's been not been doing it so much anymore. But was doing, I think, with all of the in the first the the other the previous hype cycle where he was, whatever, tweeting about Dogecoin or tweeting about whatever meme coin and then everyone making these Elon stupid meme coins. Like, the absurdity was a way to keep normies out, so to say. It was to keep the people who could not stomach it out of the equation, get the most degenerate people that they could find, and also make them rich, which I think is a big part of it that Elon Musk is able he was able to create, I think, a lot of people who follow him into jumping off of a cliff because he made them rich. And I think that's, like, a very strong, a way to congeal a kind of pseudo community around someone, really more like a kind of cult following
to get it going. But it it worked in many ways. And I think this is a common tactic in crypto. Yeah. You don't need to make everybody rich. You need to make people believe that you're making people rich and they will cling to you. This is like everyone licks Elon's, like, boots because
I'm gonna be the guy that has the Doge Lambo Right. Even though there was only, like, one guy or something. Buy and buy my Tesla's Doge when I bought it right before tweet he tweeted about it or when he tweeted about it or whatever.
And and so and I think though NFT projects do this already in lots of ways. I think an example of which would be recently Pudgy Penguins. Another NFT collection has gone up quite a lot, and this has been on the backs of news of their partnership with Walmart. People can now buy toys that resemble the NFT. Yeah. We're moving into the bull market territory. And the part of I think what would adds to this, the similar to this kind of, this idea of, oh, everyone's gonna get riches. The toys that are being sold in Walmart are, like, identical copies of existing pudgy penguins so that they look like certain people's NFTs. And those people collect royalties on the sales of their NFTs. And what this is as a narrative is it's a narrative of yield on the asset. If you own this NFT, you earn the rights to the kind of earnings or or some percentage of the profit on it. And that this model though, even though it's only like five or six Pudgy Penguins actually making money on that right now, and there's like, I don't know, 8,000 something of them, people that the NFT price has gone 10 X. They're now worth like 20 something ETH a pop, which is probably like $60,000 Even though only five people are the ones. I don't even know if they're getting rich. I haven't seen the numbers of how much they're making. It's probably not like 6 to hundreds of thousands of dollars yet, but this is like the narrative though that can attract people to an NFT project. And that's all you really need to do to play this role of a successful project is cultivate this kind of widespread belief. And we were just talking about the kind of cult of Elon. He does that effectively and in the kind of image he creates. Romelia does similar with even the narrative we're propagating here about the kind of meme point founders who, you know, wear the Milady PFP. This generates this idea though, of this association between the capacity for essentially, like, lottery levels of getting it striking it rich. Uh-huh. And and that association is very powerful all throughout crypto where it's at its core, selling people on a dream Mhmm. Of, like, financial independence Sure. And, like, shrinking it rent. Yeah. Definitely.
So maybe let's well, are are there any other kind of, like, fan financialization
tactics that you want to to touch upon? Yeah. So I think stepping back a bit to the the NFTX part, I think what's key about that and and I think similarly the kind of way ways Remilia have encouraged users to use blur when that NFT trading platform launched with its own kind of lending protocol built in, that this narrative around financialization, yield attached to an NFT asset, is part of a narrative strategy to up price, essentially, that it would make sense for something to be more valuable if it has constant returns. But for something like NFTX where people can and it's not just Remilia who can stake their assets in our yield. Anyone can come in and also stake Remilia assets in our but this yield is proportionate to volume. So it's a self fulfilling prophecy in this way. Right? If I got 1% of every transaction, let's say, in a token, that's all well and good so long as their transactions in this token and so long as, like, they're a lot. And and and this also comes with, like, you can only exit so much, like, from these protocols before, like, you hurt liquidity so much that you're actually hurting the asset you're trying to pull out. Mhmm. It's catch 22 in that sense. And I think NFTX has gotten some flack recently because people have realized there's always someone left holding the bag at the end of the day, and this yield has some strings attached. But and we don't go into too many particulars on other instances of NFT financialization. Just that narrative surrounding it, similar to the cult of Elon, is what drives up price often in crypto. Pudgy paying would be another example of this, the actual pudgies themselves, unless you're one of the special few does not generate yield, but you get the price boost as if you were a yield bearing asset. And in the speculative kind of frenzy, the ways in which that narrative propagates is I think of a key interest. But then the other side of it being when there is yield, when there is volume on these things, it is very, I guess, powerful to be the person who facilitates the swap. This is like, when the swap is as big as Uniswap is because they sit in the middle of like, essentially every ERC 20 transaction, there's other exchanges, but there no one holds a candle to Uniswap. And they get whatever their take is, they get a take. Whatever the liquidity providers on Uniswap take, that's their take. And this essentially, with the rise of automated market makers in crypto, we've taken the institutions out of the middle. In traditional finance, someone could play the world market maker. They set a bid ask spread on on some stock and and and they they get to collect the spread. Right? So that they get point five, whatever percent on this transaction because they took on the risk of holding the bag in the middle. That's now in the sense of it decentralized. From say it's someone who's affiliated with a bank, someone who has this fit of institutional structure, someone who in a situation like 2008 can get bailed out, right? Say the whole market's collapsing, whatever. You're stuck with a lot of bag. Now what we have is though with crypto, everyone's spinning up yield. Yield is the basically anyone's right. So long as you can create enough attention around a market that can keep the wheel spinning, you can be that privileged person in the middle who takes out percentage. And I think that's what NFT financialization accomplishes on two fronts. A, the narrative work does a lot. But b, when the yield actually works, you are building something like like Remilia, where you get $800,000 in yield off of staking your own asset. Mhmm. You can do a decent amount with $800,000 And I think that kind of translation from decentralized financialization to the capacity for building something like an institution is where I think this project then becomes relevant
for someone like blockchain socialist or crypto leftist in general. Yeah. Sure. So now we're getting into, like, the the really spicy bits of like, okay, let's, we can probably agree that what, like, we don't want to as a left. Well, first we're making the assumption that the left needs money and we need to make money in order to survive in the current system, and that is it's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's simply a thing that we have to do if we want to be real with the current situation. And we don't want to really make kind of deals with the devil with, like, I don't know, venture capital or something like that. It doesn't really fit with the kind of same things that as the left we want to do. We don't really want to make a kind of monopolistic platform in order to, like, make money or something like that. But we need to find ways that are different than the ways that generally this isn't always the case, but, generally, we are reliant on just, like, donations and maybe, like, grants from public institutions occasionally. We need something slightly different. Of course, there is, like, the cooperative movement, I think, is in some ways an attempt at the kind of being a islands of socialism within, an ocean of capitalism as in practicing what would a socialistly run business be like. But now we have this, like, added element of crypto, which has this kind of open ended, completely, at least somewhat malleable way of designing different economic systems and being able to very easily take part in economic systems and then choose to govern with those assets the way that we want to. So, yeah, I guess, when you were doing this research, I imagine this is this was part of the I imagine one of the questions you were going in with. So I guess after deep diving into the into the depths of Remilia, is there like, what how do you see this can the left use financialization as a tactic, or is this something like, as usual, the left is very anti financialization, which I'm not saying we are pro financialization, but it is also, like, what exists?
How do you see it? Yeah. And I think this is yeah. This is a kind of exactly where I think any question of, like, the left's interaction with crypto boils down to. Because cryptocurrency industry, it it it is financialization. They're almost synonymous. Maybe at its core, right, say say Bitcoin was the only thing you were interested in. Maybe you could say, okay, that's not financialization strictly in the sense it's being used here. Mhmm. But Ethereum and smart contracts and the kind of layering of, capitalization onto a series of dependencies and triggered by oracles. There there's a kind of system of finance being built and an economy being built that any engagement with kind of needs to grapple with yet how, how do we settle the externalities with ourselves? I think a good example of this is actually a project you're involved with, Breadchain, where for those not familiar, you should check out, but it's essentially a wrapped DAI, a wrapped stablecoin. And what's happening though is that DAI is generating yield. And that's the kind of it's a very simple process of financialization. Right? It's just liquidity providing you're playing market maker in a sense, and that this yield gets returned to an institution with this kind of political motivation behind it. Now I think you could make the case that, like, most crypto projects have a political bend, whether they like to admit it or not. They claim a politicalness under the banner of some ideology usually. Mhmm. But I think that's the kind of essentially idea and I won't say I'm the first person or anybody's, like, the first person to come up with, like, democratic finance or even, like, publicly run, like, a hedge fund or something like that. These are similar in the same wheelhouse. I think it's particularly in the case of crypto where the money printer's on. Even you die any stablecoin, they're shadow banking. They they they are creating this, subaltern economy even though it's not that, like, hidden. It's not hidden at all. Or DeFi, they're creating unregistered securities left and right. There is a large, creation of wealth going on. And who do these returns go to is I think the yeah. The or or what world do these go to building? Lots of the crypto projects or lots of crypto VC goes into the most, like, asinine projects that you've ever heard of. You've done so much on network states. Yeah. I I don't think network states as they come about without the large influx of crypto capital, the Logi's money, how much does he have that comes from crypto? Obviously, there's other things as well. Projects, whatever they may be, they're trying to build a vision through the allocation of crypto capital. And I think at its core, that's the kind of question that we can say. We gotta throw up our hands. We turn to the regulators, and I don't think the regulators are going to stop crypto. I think crypto is gonna win. Or you can try and intervene and say, hey, this is like something we should get involved in at the level of control, not at a level of opposition or kind of like, yeah, passive acquiescence. It should be something engaged with. It should be something that's part of because it's not just who gets money. It's who builds the future. Because that's what venture capital. That's what Silicon Valley has done over the last three years. That is the story of tech is building our present and the story of finance and capital finance and tech together, is a story that we might often, as leftist, turn away from. And I think that's a key mistake that we should intervene on. Yeah. No. Totally agree. I think
it's a very for a lot of people, I can imagine I I can understand why it's, like, perhaps difficult to stomach, that it's not like something necessarily yeah. It feels counterintuitive in many ways just because there is so much on the left. We've criticized financialization for a very long time as, like, a intellectual tradition for a good reason. But I think it's also the fact that capitalism is constantly recreating itself. That's what it's very good at. It's constantly evolving into whatever next thing it's going to become. And we no longer live in the type of capitalism that Marx lived in and many others. And, of course, there are many good writers who have written about contemporary capitalism. But that means, I think, we need to rather than wait for those, like, conditions to solidify and then, like, scramble to make come up with an answer, I think there's a need to figure out how can we be actually a part of how either capitalism is going to be recreated or we are going to, like, push capitalism in another direction in some domain. In particular, we're talking about crypto. And it seems to me that crypto just is one of these places where a lot of capital is going into and is starting the process of de- and reterritorialization of the economy potentially, and so we should be a part of that. But I think it's interesting kind of what you're getting at is that there is this interesting role that the market maker plays, that they have a privileged role in the creation of a market in that they can make money no matter what is happening underneath the market. That you would rather be almost like you'd rather be Nasdaq than, like, a particular stock if you want to ensure continual existence or growth in some way. Is that kind of like where what what you're saying? Does that make sense?
Yeah. I mean, in the case of, like, New York Stock Exchange, like, there's, like, a designated market maker. I'm like, it's cushy job. Now there's risk. And this is, like, they always defend, like, what finance financial sector defends itself, the the profits it takes on the basis of taking on risk. Now after 2008, it's clear that's not the case. They got bailed out. People didn't go to prison. Really what I mean, this and this isn't even risk. This is just, like, criminal negligent kinds of, like, things they were doing with, mortgage backed securities and, kind of rating agencies letting this slip. And then, again, we saw this very recently with Silicon Valley Bank. FDI's insured far more than the minimum the kind of minimum deposit amount they guaranteed. And this was a bank that serviced, like, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. And then this just goes to show though that, one, yeah, we should question. And this is outside of crypto, outside of this kind of quarter of financial technological innovation, the economy writ large, do market makers take on risk? And in the ways that they do, is that do they have a track record of market makers going belly up at like an institutional scale? And I guess maybe I would have wanted to hitch my boat too much to that question or claim, but more so just say that the risk they do take on, if it being socialized in giant crises like 2008, if it or even I wouldn't even say there was too much of a risk. There wasn't much being socialized. Silicon Valley Bank that bailout didn't harm people. But what actually happens though, is if this is the case, the government is actually the one responsible, then we should look to public institutions in the ways in which they sanction and license private enterprise who plays the role, who facilitates exchange, and think of the the role they might play. And I think similarly, bring it back to crypto in the kind of role of the market maker and what the kind of lesson could be in the to set up an institution that would play this role. And this is, like, lots of crypto projects are already facilitating markets. This is what, NFTX is like, hey, come be your own market maker, right, for NFTs. That taking on this responsibility and trying to, from the kind of ground up rather than the top down, say the federal government, from the ground up, socialize the returns of financialization of market making. And in this case, it could be projects, like project like LaborDAO. I'm not sure what they're up to these days, but a great example of a project whose funding could come from something like BrightChain treasury. I know they're a member of BrightChain. They're one of the affiliated DAOs where the idea is that money gets returned to them, gets invested in them for the kind of social benefit. And this creative vision of like, hey, here is where the money printers are. We're like, oh, there are these VCs, these, crypto guys, they're standing in front of these giant baskets, and they're just, like, putting it over their shoulders, walking away, and then, like, reading Ayn Rand and saying, oh my god. I have this giant basket. Let's make Atlas Shrugged. Like, the world or let's let's build a let's read Balaji's book, and then let's all convince ourselves this is the way the world ought to be. It's this bizarre kind of social configuration we live in where that is possible, where going back decades to, like, the birth of the Californian ideology and the kind of birth of the internet. And then eventually web two point zero, where it got extremely privatized that similar kinds of narrative work was just in particular locations, particular contingencies within history that allowed ideology to then manifest into reality. And it's that kind of bridge that financialization had had allows for those who create the benefits to practice. And venture capital is it's its own kind of beast and the ways financialization affects it and kind of insurance or the the kind of unicorn hunting they do. Without getting into that, just that we have our own kind of ideology that could be translated to a reality. But understanding that there's a way in which capital can bring that about, Yeah. This is attention a, but this is also, I think, where the focus ought to lie. Yeah. So, like, the way that I mean, it's interesting that I say that in Red Chain kind of
I mean, I was thinking about it in similar ways in the sense that it's like there is going to be markets and speculation within the foreseeable future, and there is, like, not much that you and I can potentially do to turn that off and make it different anytime soon. And so how do we how was there a way that we can kind of fund ourselves, again, without needing venture capital and without needing to be like or not to become a venture capitalist or like a a trader in some way to, like, make risky plays and ask people to give us some money to make risky plays, which was then what came out of the the creation of the bread crowd sticking application, which creates the bread token, which essentially is a way for people to passively fund the entire project itself while still being able to make payments with a stablecoin as you would any other. So it doubles as a kind of community currency and a kind of like I think you said this once whenever we were together a couple years ago that it's like a a leftist credit union, which I really which I like. I'm not so sure about the legal implications of calling it that, but it helps explain kind of some of the similar functions that are going on in here. But with Remilia, what they've done is they've they're definitely taking it a step up as far as risk, but they are using their brand and their memetic power to attract capital in ways that are yeah. They're basically to me, it seems like they've created their own universe that someone can immerse themselves in, put aside whether or not you personally would enjoy immersing yourself in. There are people who would, and they can put their money in, make some money off of it, etcetera. And there is a question of whether or not how do we take part in something similar, but that isn't, of course, within the same ideology as Remilliacore and stuff that they do. I guess we've already gone past the point of saying we need to engage. How would you imagine leftist, let's say, bread chain starting to engage in something similar? And I'll start writing notes to see what we can start planning out.
Well yeah. And I think this is a perfect place to go with this because, yeah, like you said, they create their own universe. In fact, they they call it the Malayvi meta metaverse even, so it's already on their minds. And I think for bread chain, what that looks like and this is where I think it's difficult. And the most difficult part though is creating the kind of consistency of an online space. They have their own universe. It's right. People can log on every day, be entertained, and the algorithm will support this. Right? This is like that they're playing into the tendencies of the platform to kind of mold and maintain this, like, ever shifting sphere of a community online. And this is like lots of online community students. This is how any online community success on, like, algorithmic platforms or anywhere, really. You need to maintain consistent attention. And I think that the biggest challenge and and this is, how do you make I think this was, like, a a Todd McGowan psychoanalytic academic, but he's like, how what is left enjoyment? And, like, this is the kind of problem, in the Trump era is that, like, Trump is so just, like, memeable, funny. You root for him because he's the meme and for, like, a, you know, general American. And then there's no kind of, like, satisfaction to be derived from a kind of democratic politics. And then for him, he would be like, the the left has this problem of how do you get, like, libidinal investment routinely into this kind of project. And I think for and the reason I go in in this direction with it, because I think this is intimately related to the difficulty in creating that kind of online subsisting metaverse of interest. It needs to be fun. It needs to be enjoyable. People log on to the internet. And even though, like, people log out the reason the lady trolling works is because people love to get upset Mhmm. At things they hate on the Internet, for better or for this is, like, another problem with how the platforms are designed. We shouldn't be playing into people's tendencies like this. It's different. Put that aside for a second. But to be able to create, let's say, like, Brightchain NFTs, like, Brightchain or Mila, they created their own, like, Minecraft offshoot that people, like, hang out on and play. They have this very, like, orbiting active sphere of engagement Yeah. That in order to take that yield out of, right, people need to exchange. And I think you could think it's analogous between the way, say, an NFTX platform, You earn yield off of exchanges happening for the NFTs on NFTX. You think of it like an attention yield off of constant exchange going on social media between people, and you create this kind of, this kind of meta sphere that that subsists somewhere on Twitter or wherever else. And from there, you have the attention. You have the investment. You can translate that into finance capital. I think that is what crypto Twitter does. That is why Elon Musk tweets Dogecoin. That that is just why social media and cryptocurrency exist hand in hand, in this day and age. And and I think that's the challenge though. How does Bread create that community of continual investment that everyone logs on and sees this? And that's then when and and outside of that, maybe you create projects that's that feed on other people's spheres. Right? Advertised a platform, create a new platform, advertise it to someone else. Mhmm. But you need that kind of that existing sphere of attention to translate that into some kind of capital to basically play the role of market maker. You need volume.
Interesting. So it's not even necessarily that they're making money off of, let's say, like, it's, yes, they are. It's like making new collections with the kind of derivative works of the little brother and the little sister or whatever. But it's that they're it's because they're making money off of the exchange and trade of these objects being the market maker that they're able to continuously sustain themselves. So you don't necessarily need to go into continuous, like, fundraising mode. There is already a derived value happening from the trade of the different collectibles or whatever. And the yeah. That's we were I was joking before we started, but I was like, maybe we need to start our own bread chain universe with little bread characters, which we already have one bread character, and people have noticed in our tweets and call, breadrick angles. But maybe we do need maybe we need to bring breadrick angles to life, and people would collect it and and make it fun. But I do like, what when you were saying that earlier about, like, there this, like, libidinal economy for the left that I've heard before and it's something that Mark Fisher had written about before as well that, like, Trump is funny even though he's horrible. He is fucking hilarious. And people can, like, profit off of, like, the ridiculousness, including the left. Like, plenty of left wing, content creators or whatever use his his likeness for for making memes and jokes. But, yeah, the left doesn't really have that. There was Bernie Sanders in which that was, like, the one like, one of the few moments I was able to see continuous capital being put in, but it was really donations, and it was still very political. And it was really, like, people wanted universal health care and all these things. But and there was some fun involved, I think, with kinda Bernie is also a kind of funny character and is memeable. But now that he's lost and probably I don't know. I'm not too hopeful that he's gonna come back again. There isn't really a libidinal place that the left is putting their capital into. Yeah. And I think like you're outlying,
this is like a I guess, a current crisis. Right? Why are we listing? Why are we in this kind of real dark era for it's just like political left wind. And yet, like we without our avatar, where does the faith go? Where does politics go? And I think once that's found, then I think the way that we need to be social media aware, we need to understand the way these algorithms can move attention, can harvest attention and reinvest attention into kind of realizing visions. There's the long touted narrative that four Chan, through its dispersion of, like, Pepe and other memes, was able to help Donald Trump get into the White House in some significant way. And regardless of whether or not that's true, the dynamics underlying it, I do think, are, like, real and effective in their own right, and that that can't be overlooked. Maybe we do need to start making Frederick Engels cartoon or something memeable with Frederick Engels. I think there's something to say for Engels being the son of a a very wealthy factory owner who used his money to fund
marks who could never get a job. That's not true. He was actually a journalist, actually, and, he did work. He just didn't make enough money to to make ends meet a lot of the times. I think there's something there to perhaps centralize around to bring money in. But, yeah, there is yeah. I don't know what else to say, actually. There's so so something to think about as on the left, we now have access to these tools. What are the things that we should start building, or what are the things that we should start thinking about building out, and how do we actually bring capital in so that we not aren't dependent on the kind of usual suspects? So, yeah, if you're listening to this right now, take that in mind. There was one one of the memes that were was made during our last bread chain community event was, spread the bread. So make sure you're spreading the bread. Like, I'm imagining, like like, butter on the bread, like, spreading the bread. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks a lot for coming on and sharing your experience
and research. Are there any kind of, like, last bits you wanted to touch upon maybe before we close it out? No. I think we we got to a really fine point with it and got to, like, deeper questions that, yeah, I think listeners to this podcast, regular or new, can take things away from. Cool. Yeah. Maybe just to end it if you wanna share where people can follow you, if you want to be followed. Yeah. I'm not too active on social media, unfortunately. I need to start being, but I've been putting together some of my, like, projects and stuff on a site. I can give you the URL to put in the description or something like that. Other than that, yeah, I'm not too active on social media. Sure. Cool. Will do. Alright. Thanks, James. Yeah. Thank you, Josh.