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Equity

Financial flash mobs meet fundraising memes

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2372 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. And this week, it was all about the ConstitutionDAO. For those who weren't online last week, here's what you missed: a not-so-subtle group of strangers on the internet banded together to try to buy one of the remaining thirteen copies for the constitution. With crypto. The bold bid eventually fell short, but many saw it as an inspiring onramp into how communities can mobilize around a shared goal in a Web3 world. The whole movement, from its meme start to its poetic, and billionaire Ken Griffin-themed, end, was just too interesting for Equity to not dedicate an entire episode to. So, Natasha and Alex brought on Lucas Matney and Anita Ramaswamy to unpack, decompress, and bond over our shared experience of witnessing this 'financial flash mob.' We talked about what a DAO is, and what they might be used for. We dug into the question of just how many folks the effort really brought to the larger "Web3" space. And, of course, we had to talk about gas fees, NFTs, and the pace of innovation in crypto more broadly. Lucas even broke out an excellent analogy to explain level-two chains! The crew were generally bullish on the blockchain economy, if skeptical of some of its current uses. In short, the potential remains potent in crypto even if some of its projects, today at least, are a bit more boring than breakthrough. Crypto, we're told, is going to shake up the world. More of that, we reckon, and less of the meme-wars wouldn't be amiss. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we

0:13.8

unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I'm Natasha Masgrinus

0:18.0

and today we're going to be talking about the Constitution Dow. This happened last

0:22.1

week, a bunch of strangers on the internet got together

0:24.9

to get into a high stakes bidding war to buy a copy of the Constitution. And it is as crazy as it sounds

0:31.3

so I brought over an entire crew to help us explain it.

0:35.0

As always, I am joined by Alex Wilhelm.

0:37.6

Hey Alex, how's it going?

0:38.8

I am so hyp to talk about this because it's a combination of like tragedy and farce and so it's going to be a blast.

0:45.4

I know I really thought GameStop was where it was going to stop, but it feels like that's just where it started

0:50.7

from the craziness of this year. We also have Anita Ramaswami. I think it's your second week at

0:55.8

Tech Crunch and your second time on the podcast, so congratulations on that. Anita, it's great to have you.

1:00.3

Yeah, excited to go in. And we also have Lucas

1:03.0

Matony, Lucas covered crypto far before it was cool, so we had to have him

1:06.8

on the show to explain it. Thanks Lucas for being here.

1:09.3

I'd say it was pretty cool when I started covering it, you know I appreciate the insurance nonetheless

1:14.8

Okay you started covering VR before it was cool like I feel like that's I'd say it's still before it's cool

1:20.3

I was gonna say it got cool when like did I miss something when did that happen there

1:25.5

are so many different like rabbit holds for us to go down and we will but I thought it

1:29.6

would make sense to set up this discussion by explaining what went down and why people were

1:34.4

getting together on the internet to buy the US Constitution.

1:37.6

Alex, do you want to walk us through kind of a little bit of like the dramatic

...

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