How VEME is building social platforms around meme culture

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the Crypto Coin Show today on blockchain interviews with have ramayan Ananda CEO of VH ramayan welcome to the show and it is great to see you again yeah man it's good to be here it's been a journey yeah and I'm especially interested in hearing from you as an expert in the space right now because community and memes have been hotter than ever in blockchain and

0:24I know that's a big part of what VH has been working on for many many years now since you know maybe even since Doge was the only meme coin and now there's a whole community and billions of dollars of market cap in there and I feel like you guys just predicted this so I'm excited to dive into everything I would love to start off our conversation today with first of

0:45all just getting a little bit of background on yourself and in business and blockchain what gets you so excited about the space and then we can dive into everything V Yeah man so I got into the space right when the Bitcoin white paper came out you know I remember reading it and early days because even before the Bitcoin white paper we were working with a group

1:04of people that are now running Hol chain art Brock and the community over there you know Fernanda there was a project called the metac currency project and I was really passionate about these ideas around how we could change value in the world there was a real luminary his name was Michael Linton and he had a system called the let system or the local exchange trading

1:23system actually out of Vancouver and so I was really passionate about new money systems just because I saw the level of control that the money system had on our world and when you really start getting into systems change thesis and you trace a lot of the issues back a lot of it ends up coming back to the centralization and control of money so the you know I didn't actually believe

1:43in the Bitcoin white paper when it first came out because I saw okay we're replicating digital gold but that doesn't actually solve the problem and I didn't really understand it until I think ethereum came out it was really when ethereum came out and I was there I read the kickstarter page for ethereum I remember reading smart contracts and my mind just went I'm like oh I get it

2:05this is way more than just digital gold this is actually a new methodology of being able to create value exchange transparently this is a new way to take out the middleman in all types of contractual relationships back then I actually thought just like contracts that were smart like I was like an advertising contract or a contract to pay somebody in their job or like I was

2:25literally I was thinking quite literally I didn't have any idea of the level that it would be today like Defi and like you know I definitely didn't predict then but I definitely saw at that point this is going to change our world this ability to decentralize the distribution of capital the ability to build trustless networks the ability to disintermediate and to create direct

2:45relationships was really powerful and I and so I've been in this space for a long time and you know I got into this space really because I see the ability for self-determination and the community self-determination and the ability for groups of people to decide how they want to interact and to create much more sovereignty and you know that was

3:07what got me into this in the beginning wow that's incredible that's being there on day one and you know looking back in hindsight it does seem like it was meant to be that Bitcoin wasn't the only cryptocurrency yes sure we're we're we're digitizing gold but there's limitations on you know all all the different functionalities that you need and yeah I was there as well with

3:32the birth of ethereum and thinking smart contracts okay this is the programmability we need to be able to revolutionize every industry not just the payment part but everything related around the payment and the actual business which is incredible and who knew that we would be able to start tokenizing and monetizing memes and culture on the internet and be

3:56able to trade it freely if you mention that you know 20 years ago right before Bitcoin they would think this is insane but here we are and I know you and your team at at vhim have been working for a long time on tying these aspects of culture and Community into the blockchain and onchain would love for you to speak a little bit about you know the vision and

4:21what you and your team are working on at VH yeah sure so you know there's a couple of things one we believe that the future of social is communal and that communal networks are going to run the future of our world not just social networks and that the evolution of this kind of Arena of social which is like the Adolescent phase right when you're an adolescent it's all about you it's

4:42about validation it's about how good people see you it's about the likes it's about your follower account going up and it's it's a very Primal part of our being so there's nothing wrong with it's just a phase of ego development but as you grow older you're like wait a second this is not just all about me it's kind of exhausting that's kind of boring now okay I went through that pH

5:00it's all about us what how do we create value together how do we build communities how do we build real authentic relationships what are we creating in terms of our value together right and I think the meme tokens are also going through this right I think what people don't really talk about around the meme token is that two things one they're battle testing the

5:19blockchain networks themselves because of the high transaction volume and two it's the first time we've been able to like monetize internet culture in such a you know clear and easy way and what's happening is that communities are coming together and realizing the power of network effect this kind of started during the Wall Street bets time when a

5:37group of MERS on a subreddit decided to you know give the Wall Street Banker shorting Bed Bath and Beyond to run for their money and realize the power of a mean Community could actually be the thing that threatened Wall Street nobody would have thought in a million years that a group of redditors posting memes all around the internet and galvanizing

5:56Community could actually challenge the might of one of the biggest institutions and this spoke a lot to me I was like okay we're learning about Network effect power we're learning about the power of us as a collective to exercise our mic or cultural power to create real world effects and real world impact so while a lot of meme tokens now are like kind of

6:16BS a lot of them are like pump and dump mechanics a lot of them are like 20 minutes and their value is gone a lot of them are rug Poes it's like it's a young phase it's an immature phase kind of like the icos of 2017 were right that's the kind of phase we're at for meme coins right now so what we track at VH is we track what is the evolution of this where is this going right how do we

6:37actually start to build communal networks that understand the power of shared mimetics how do we understand what mimetics really are and you know the word meme came from Richard Dawkins in the 70s describing how DNA communicated wirelessly with this environment and it became a field of epigenetics and then the field of mimetics became a science if you go look

6:58at Wikipedia you look at mimetics it is the science of information and culture transfer across the world and then it jumped to an internet meme where you had a photo with text over it's like why did that happen how did the entire field of mimetic Sciences become like an image with text where did that occur it occurred because that was the quickest

7:18and simplest and easiest way to convey a piece of information you have text Left Brain image right brain the simplest unit of culture and that same image which access a certain part of our brain can be recontextualized thousands of times to be a visual metaphor for a statement so any subculture any Niche could use those same templates to express themselves across the internet

7:42and that built culture then it evolved into gifts because the internet bad was started getting a little better and we started having moving photos and now 90% of internet traffic this year is short form video short form video has won the medium Wars it is literally the most used and the most predominant medium it's the most fast growing medium by far

8:02and so now the theme literally stands for video meme that's what it means in the dictionary so the video mic is a recognition that short form video is the current Zeitgeist of the immune sphere and so we are propagating and we're creating the evolution of that so you know vhim is two things right one it is using V templates in short form video to share ideas because anybody can use

8:28those same templates in any type of culture with Now video high resolution video with audio to remix and reuse and reshare culture so that's one the second thing V is it's a social video Network built for communities so rather than just building a social video Network around a brand or a personality we're basically doing what Reddit did by creating subgroups and sub niches and

8:50having V slash communities so any subgroup any Niche any web 3 Community can create a sube and organize their community and co-create content using short form video so those are the two things that v is about and the web three components are really focused on how do we allow users to own their own data and own their own identity how do we create incentive reward structures

9:16using smart contracts so that the value accured in the network goes back to the users and how do we create a methodology that the future meme tokens are going to be Community tokens which is our thesis wow it's it's fascinating and I feel like for some it could get confusing because it's monetizing culture and you know in the in the centuries past even with Bitcoin it's a

9:41new asset and people are like I don't understand this is different than it ever has been before you know so I need to understand how this fits into my current reality and the transition with memes of like yeah it's it's a text text on top of a picture okay how all of a sudden now investing in this in this idea of the meme do you know I but even so it's gotten so popular

10:10that I think maybe even more people can relate to memes than they can Bitcoin it's just a matter of understanding how the monetization part fits in there but I feel like we're still at in that adolescent phas phase as you mentioned yeah we are definitely still in the Adolescent phase because most people who are getting into meme coins are doing it to make money right it's

10:32whack Mees we're all going to make it you know everybody's going to ape in you know unfortunately the majority of meme coins have a very select few players who have like meev algorithmic trading Bots who are like sniping the meme tokens at their height and yada yada so there's actually still a pretty small group of whales that are kind of making the money

10:50up most retail investors that's the way it is right now you know but the idea a meme is a shared idea right so and it's see it's this like wag me we're all going to make it you know pump the meme token let's all get rich you know kind of idea but in the future we're going to see that a shared meme in a community can evolve and I'll give you an example

11:13look at the shba enu Community right they actually started with a really cool fun playful Mission they were one of the first people that said 100% of the token is going to be fair launched we're going to do it in this Innovative way it's all about the Sheba Army we're all going to build around this Mission you know and it created this amazing Sheba Army

11:30Community where everybody initially was there to pump the token but then they were like you know come for the meme stay for the meaning is what we say meme right like you came for the meme and now you have these you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of people there four million wallets they're just crossed that threshold I think this week and now they're like wait a second

11:49we actually want to do something with this they were here in Dubai they just raised $12 million and they're actually going to be building infrastructure so what started as just a meme if it's not just like pure pump up if the founders actually have an intention to do something meaningful that community that rallies around that shared idea can actually create real world value and

12:08that's really powerful and so we're building a lot of the rails in vhim to allow that to be deployed really quickly and so that's where we see the evolutionary trajectory of this going wow that's incredible and makes me think about Dogecoin as well as sort of one of the first crypto memes that people can that people think of and not only that is that yeah the

12:31underlying infrastructure of it is actually in the top tier of blockchains that so much that the richest man in the world may integrate that blockchain into Twitter X because of the functionality not because it's a meme of course that makes it awesome for the community but because the blockchain is actually really good and fast and cheap that I feel like memes

12:56although there's so much culture around it can still have very very good technology that it's like hey there's a there's a reason that this is so popular is that it actually works and it's actually better than other things that we're using and it's a meme and we have culture around it absolutely and that's what we want to empower at theme right we want to create

13:16these sub communities these subve communities so we want to create these memetic communities that use short form video as a medium and you know we're building a whole different stack of create tools at theme because where Tik Tok and Instagram are all about using the tools to project your personality better filters make me look better AR filters I look sexier I look better a

13:36communal network is different because you're there more to share and remix culture you're there to remix current events you're there to be able to propagate and use templates and AI is going to be incredible different voices being able to integrate different faces being able to take certain videos and use them as templat so that any Community can recreate so we're creating

13:54a very different stack at theme because the focus is building around communities around shared niches and what we're building in beam is a prompt-based video Forum so any Community can be like hey what do you think about X or you know a meme prompt like what is it like working with Ashton you know at 4 in the morning and everybody can respond with their

14:13prompts and everybody can then see each other's beems in relationship to the prompts and it can be amas it can be debates it can be fun memes and we're using short form video mimetics to understand how does a collective see feel or perceive our culture and so this is a social experiment in that way and eventually those communities on be will be able to Min their own tokens but

14:32that's a later play mhm that's very cool and I'm curious about the intricacies of the platform itself you know I maybe I'm not I'm not a Meme creator yet but I want to join a community what are sort of the first steps you just is it just like making a Social account and being like hey I like these memes I'm going to join the Sheba Community join this community and

14:56then be also to create nfts or memes how exactly does that work when when people go to the V platform yeah so it works like any other platform where you go in it'll it'll suggest to you different subcommunities that are relevant to you know so most Community most onboarding will say hey these are accounts that are would be interesting to you right and once you

15:19do you're inside of a community and most people about 90% of people are more browsers what we're doing is we're creating tooling to allow people to express their ideas with a click right so what do you feel about X okay write a simple prompt and our AI will help you generate a beam as an example so we want to deploy mics as a easy methodology to express nfts were actually making a

15:41little bit more special in our app meaning like if you're part of a collective meme thread the best meme in that thread will get Minted as an nft so we're creating nfts as a way to immortalize the kind of meme Lords or the you know the best mems inside of a niche or a group or a category so ra than minting everything which I think devalues on some level unless you're

16:03using something like lens protocol which is using an nft purely as an indicator of decentralized content if you're using it as culture it should be something that actually has stood out as a Zeitgeist of that culture so that's how we're creating we're building that in I love that the focus on preserving value as well and yeah I feel like if you tokenize every single thing your

16:24account the name of the account every picture that you have on there it's like what's you know sure everything's tokenized but does it really have any value in it so and what you mentioned there about using AI to help create the meme or help shape the community I feel like that's something that as more people are starting to use products like mid Journey or Dolly

16:48things like that to actually create images I feel like that's going to be an integral part of potentially creating memes or developing communities and I don't know how deep the AI will be in actually joining the community maybe as a as a sentient being of its own but what are your thoughts on how AI is sort of fitting into these communities at

17:10least in the way that VH envisions it over the coming years sure so we envision a couple of different ways one in content creation right text to video coming out that's going to be huge for us as a tform video Network where you can literally Express and create such high quality content which would be reserved usually for very high level film creators the level of what that's

17:30going to unlock for a creative expression is going to be huge one two you know voiceovers text of voice you know impersonating different voices VM culture is a lot about humor it's a lot about remixing right if you look at you know glig and the creative commment and remix culture the ability for us to remix parody is an integral part of what it means to be human and what it means

17:51to be part of a free Society you know of course there's going to be limits to that because we you know don't want to promote hate speech but commity communities also have the power to moderate themselves and that's why I like building a communal Network because in Reddit a lot of the responsibility comes on that Community to moderate their own community and if you don't

18:08moderate your own Community well well then that's when you get flagged you know but like we really want to give the power to the communities to moderate which is another way AI comes in AI can really help flag malicious content child pornography you don't want any of that stuff on your platform you know and so using AI to be able to see and help flag you know it's not perfect there's

18:27going to be a lot that gets through those filters but using it as a filtration system but the thing that's actually the most exciting to me about all of it is I'm looking at you know one of the formats that we're going to have on V which is debates right so you're going to have a debate and we're creating short form video debates where people will be able to debate and

18:46respond and respond to other videos with videos so we're creating video threading part of the issue we have in this world is there's no way for us to sense make anything right you have a whole Community you have thousands of videos and thousands of comments in this linear thread and then the end with AI what you can actually do is you can pull a lot of

19:03that transcript data you can crunch it and you can reflect it back to the collective saying okay out of 3,000 videos that we posted around this debate this was actually the things that stood out that were the most common and these are the parts that we had the most difference so what's interesting is using AI as a sensemaking apparatus which you know to me is probably one of

19:21the highest uses of AI that's very cool and I love that and I'm excited to see exactly how AI fits in terms of the actually interaction with users and the moderation of the community as VH grows I'm curious on your thoughts on the decentralized autonomous organization or like the Govern part in actually the human interaction when you create a

19:48community on vhim you know if it's to do with for example Sheba do you hold the tokens and then you can vote on how the community is shaped or is it just a one person one vote if you're in the community you get a say how do you sort of Envision governance in communities in how to shape and grow them so we have four levels that we're envisioning which is fans friends

20:15what is it followers fans friends family right so I think one of the things that Dows have got wrong in the past is that one it allows payment tokens to be moderation which is problematic because it's so easy to take down or take over a community or take over governance and do governance attacks and it just it makes the whole thing a mess right it's like

20:34if the US dollar was your vote which you know arguably you could say that it is and you know that's a whole other conversation but we won't go there for right now but you know technically in a democracy you have a vote that you can deploy right that's you know independent of your monetary ability I think that's really important two you know you can prove that by interaction so the

20:55more you engage the more you interact the more you participate the more you're able able to rank up and your participation in the community your the nature of how active you are how much you give to that Community is a much better Benchmark of your ability to vote and actually have meaning than you know a token that you can buy and pay for we envision the token the meme

21:16token being you know when we say the future meme tokens are Community tokens we right now mean tokens are launching and they put ostensively 100% in a liquidity pool we envision a percentage are those going in a community pool so maybe 80% goes in the liquidity pool and 20% of those tokens remain in a Community Fund that Community Fund is essentially the treasury that as you

21:39know the token pumps as the community grows those funds grow and now you actually have a pool that's governed by the community to look at deploying for issues projects creative ideas things that the community wants to birth and grow so I really believe that the future token is going to be the community token and you know we've already built a lot of the uiux for this to happen but it's

21:58actually going to become a late next year like we're we're going to we're really going to get the VM communities active and using this core mechanic of creating a short form video social network and once that mechanic is really well proven out we'll introduce a lot of those building blocks later mhm yeah no that I like that and I feel like yeah interaction is key and not being

22:21able to just buy your votes or just take over a small community and do with it what you want it's like I there's a lot of things that still need to be worked out in Dows so I'm excited to test that out in the v platform and you know it's amazing to see how big memes in the monetization side of it in the market cap of them have grown this year I feel like it's like the biggest

22:49year ever for memes you know of course they've been around forever and in crypto Doge has been around forever but it wasn't until this year or in the past 12 months where we've seen a handful of memes also have multi-billion doll companies or market caps I feel like this trend is going to continue and it's only going to get bigger but I

23:13feel like investors or people that are in the blockchain industry have a hard time maybe it's the understanding of how this culture is monetized but making that a part of their Investment Portfolio diversification and that hey you know I need to be investing in AI projects but I also need to be investing in meme Pro projects what do you think about that mindset that

23:38investors have in how they need to legitimize memes and culture into actually investing into it's kind of funny to see you know to be honest because it's like like meme culture is so antithetical in many ways to VC culture it's like they're almost diametric opposite in some ways you know and like the VCS are like I want to get it on the game because money is being made

24:03and the meme culture guys are like well this is kind of ours you know so I think you're going to have these of course back meme tokens and back bigger meme tokens but I think the speed at which meme tokens move is so fast it is so quick I mean you know funnily enough the life cycle of most meme tokens is like 20 minutes actually funnily enough there's a couple that you

24:26see like the Pepe and the Bonks and whatever that most people look at but I would say 99.9% of meme tokens are like very quick arcs and like big launches to the communities and big ups and down cycles and it's almost impossible to catch catch the knife on that so the VCS that will try to catch the knife on that are ones that are meev like the ones that are investing deeply inside of like

24:49automated smart contracts sniper Bots and infrastructure y y y it's a whole other world the ones that actually want to invest in communities that's where it's going to get interesting because when a meme token actually has a plan Beyond just its own quick small cycle of self-gratification when a group and a collective people say we actually have a vision of where we're going and we're

25:11orienting around this shared Meme and we're going to continue to build this memetic to build hype and grow this community and grow something that's actually going to build that gets interesting which is why Shea Clos 12 million so quickly in their last round right investors in VCS are going to probably invest in a bit of a later stage when they see that a meme token

25:29has some longevity to it when they actually have something that they're building in the world that they're creating Beyond just their own meme because the life cycle of that is actually not very long right and so yeah it's going to be interesting to see where BCS invest you know at V we call ourselves the ultimate meme token and we're calling ourselves the ultimate

25:49meme token because we're building a communal Network so you know once you build a home where communities own and operate specifically around mics and then you a deployment methodology built around communi not just the self-gratification of the meme itself you're able to become the platform for the maturation and the evolution of the space into its next cycle and that's our

26:12intention that's beautiful ran and maybe you can touch a little bit on the road map or what comes next for VH as as the meme space continues to grow how are you going to increase access for the community and sort of what steps are involved in making the platform more interactive and getting more people involved into the meme platform no it's

26:36a great question one of the things we're doing right now is we're building Telegram and Discord mini apps bots so that you can implement the V functionality directly into any Community you already have so rather than just making people come to our app we want to go where the communities are and allow them to exercise a lot of the VM functionality inside of those

26:53communities and then give them an incentive to come to the vmap because there's much richer functionality in there so that is the next part of our road map that we're launching we're going to be you know launching public sales come end of June is our proposed timeline you know don't quote me on that things in this phas kind of move and shift a lot but we want to

27:13start getting the public in on be and allowing them to participate and start becoming co-owners of this with us and start becoming you know more than just part of our Telegram and discords but actually invested in the success of this project so you know that's going to be coming up over the next couple of months so you know stay tuned definitely go to beam.com and check out

27:35our communities and if you're interested in that come participate and then telegram Bots are going to be coming out this summer and then come September when we're actually planning to do our more public outing into the world our app will be available more for the public and over the next few months you know our app is built right now but

27:56we're allowing and only getting beta used users in beta communities from our community from our telegram bot from our token buyers in and giving them special access because we're in the cycle of getting a lot of feedback iteration and growth so that's where we are with them very cool I'm looking forward to those dates and I actually love that you're tying into where the

28:17communities are at you know I've seen social platforms they create an awesome product but there's a huge Network effect on you know the billion users on Telegram and they're just like there's stuck they're stuck in their head on Telegram and they just don't see the value until you create something like a telegram bot that actually injects the value that me that vhim has into

28:39telegram directly and people are like oh I can actually use this on the platform that I am on already and I can move over to VH to get more value I feel like that's an amazing strategy and i' I've seen a few great companies start building telegram Bots and tying into existing Network effects so I'm definitely going to be on the lookout for that moving forward and I'm

29:02going to also you know telegram is building mini apps right they've now evolved their Bots into mini apps you know I really didn't wake up to how powerful telegram has become until this conference where they announced here the founder was here and he announced that usdt and telegram have just done a partnership and I've been using the mini apps now and you can oneclick deploy a

29:24wallet right they're building wallet native function telegram is going all in on this space you know the T blockchain you know you don't have to use their tokens you can use usdt you can purchase usdt using your credit card directly from telegram I mean they're helping people cross the biggest hurdle in crypto which is ease of adoption and ease of use and ease of

29:48setup and they have a billion users so they're creating the rails they are going to be the new app store right so I'm really bullish on that for the web 3 community and I think anybody who's not paying attention to that and really putting an active plan to build on that is falling behind which I was I was one of the people falling behind but we've rallied our community and rallied our

30:09developers and our teams to be like modify build this now this is the highest priority so here we are amazing very cool rayan I will I'm going to be following along with progress for vhim I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the platform so people can check out and follow along for those June potential dates that you mentioned and also end of the summer if memes

30:33continue as hot as they were throughout the summer and even even when I've noticed even when Bitcoin is sideways or sort of boring memes are still so hot because there's so many people getting into this culture that I feel like it's not going to slow down so I'm looking forward to checking out the platform as it continues to develop and I wishing you and your team all

30:53the best with VH and would love to follow up again in the near future I would love that Ashton thanks so much for having me on your show man