Cults, Culture, & Crypto with Meltem Demirors | Layer Zero
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Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2022
⏱️ 79 minutes
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Summary
Meltem Demirors is the Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, a digital asset investment firm that manages $4B. Meltem is also known as the vibes sorceress, curator of vibes, and the queen of crypto. She’s been in the space for more than eight years and has seen the ebbs and flows of not only the markets, but the people that make up the space.
As a whole, the people that make up the space are part of the entire crypto cult. Whether you’re team Bitcoin or Ethereum, or whichever other coins, protocols, DAOs, people, etc. you support—you’re part of the cult. We don’t mean the negative connotation of the word cult, anon. Relax. Cults are everywhere.
Over the years, the online magic of crypto has bled into the IRL side of the space. How will this trend impact the future of the space? Why are cults everywhere? What advice does Meltem have for new crypto participants? Answers to these questions and so much more in the episode.
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Topics Covered:
0:00 Intro
5:02 Meltdem’s Trajectory into Crypto
13:08 When Crypto Became Real
20:17 The Power of Removing Your Ego
27:50 Why Meltdem was Wrong About Ethereum
34:24 Cults Are Everywhere
46:00 Cults vs. Communities
48:00 Meaning & Social Crypto Culture
52:00 Inter-generational product-market fit
54:50 Developing Your Own Perspective
1:05:53 How Social Crypto Has Changed
1:20:15 Meltem’s Advice For People New to the Space
1:22:44 What Meltem’s Optimistic About
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Resources:
Meltem Demirors
https://twitter.com/Melt_Dem
CoinShares
https://coinshares.com/
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22613.Simulacra_and_Simulation
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2761.The_Denial_of_Death
Finite and Infinite Games Book by James Carse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infinite_Games
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Layers0. Layers0 is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that |
| 0:11.3 | make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code but is composed by people, and |
| 0:15.6 | each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. |
| 0:19.7 | CypherPunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layers0 |
| 0:23.2 | focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and |
| 0:27.2 | it always has been. Today, I'm talking with Melton Demiris, the vibes sorceress, the |
| 0:32.0 | queen of crypto, has been in the crypto space for over eight years now, and has so many |
| 0:36.9 | lessons to share as to what goes on in part of every single corner of the crypto industry. |
| 0:43.2 | Melton is a relentless grinder. She's a super hard worker, and she's also a diluted |
| 0:48.9 | to the queen of vibes, I'd like to say. She's a big curator of experiences and vibes |
| 0:54.1 | in the real world, which is where the crypto world is trending towards, in my opinion. |
| 0:58.7 | I actually didn't know that we were going to get into the subject, but we end up talking |
| 1:02.4 | a lot about the concept of cults, of communities, of organizations with shared values, and |
| 1:08.9 | how we are going from a world of few of these things, starting with like empires back |
| 1:15.1 | a thousand years ago, going into religion, going into nation-sates, going into corporations, |
| 1:20.6 | building the cult model to understand what a corporation is, to where we are now with |
| 1:24.5 | where there's one community per token, and we have DAO's and NFT projects, and each |
| 1:29.3 | one of these things represents in a way some sort of cult. Well, there's a lot of people |
| 1:34.3 | that think the word cult is negative. We don't do that. We actually kind of consider it |
| 1:38.9 | as for what it is, which is alignment of people around shared values, shared sets of interests, |
| 1:45.3 | and now that there's so many tokens and so many DAO's and so many NFT projects, there's |
| 1:50.3 | many different reasons to all find one's resonance with some sort of organization. We also |
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