“Juicebox in the words of” is a series that highlights JB community members in interview form. Learn about members’ roles at JB and what makes them tick.
Podcast extraordinaire and overall smooth talker nicholas took a bit out of his schedule to sit and, for a change, be the interviewee. Starting out as a JB contributor who went astray, the prodigal son is returning to the JB atmosphere with twice the gusto he had before. Don’t call it a second coming, just call it finishing what he started. Read on to learn a bit about this erstwhile contributor-turned-vagabond, his aspirations at JB upon his return, and what his plans are for the future.
How’d you get started with JB and how has it changed since you’ve been here?
I found Juicebox originally in June/July of 2021, and I was one of the people who came in through the SharkDAO door. I was involved in SharkDAO and I got to meet some of the people there, and got to meet jango who was the lead protocol dev there. Eventually my interest turned primarily to JB. I’ve always been interested in these tools that allow for social integration and JB was right up that alley in terms of tooling that lets people coordinate to create whatever project they want. On top of that they have this X factor which is the spirit of a true DAO— it’s not about VC or cash grabs— and I think that’s really interesting given the last 20 years or so of centralized social development in web2.
I contributed at JB where I could, did a lot of governance, operations streamlining, starting tye notion library and working on organization. In early 2022 I decided to take a step back, focus a bit more on programming stuff, solidity, NFTs, etc. Over the course of a few months I realized I’m just too fascinated by JB, and especially with V2 coming out and seeing this amazing potential. JB feels like an open source project with a revenue model, which is attracting incredible people from all over the world.
So I decided to jump back into JB. I put proposal in for trial payout and I’m hoping I can jump back into the team.
There’s a lot of excitement around V2. What specifically has you interested in coming back?
Two things are drawing me back— tankbottoms, who has been building/adapting stuff related to NFT creation and minting and turning those into tools that can be used more broadly. If it can be pulled off correctly, I think it’ll go way beyond just JB. It’s really revolutionary and applicable in so many different contexts. I feel like I can be useful there in design/code/helping out.
That’s obviously enabled partly by V2. The treasury management stuff being discussed right now— like creating projects that allow you to diversify the treasury into other tokens, and using JB as mechanism for doing that— is extremely cool. V2 is so open-ended, and part of the lift involved is getting that tooling across to people.
I think that’s a biggie. JB has so many tools, but I agree that it may be overwhelming for a newbie coming onto the scene. There’s also a kind of idea like, if you spotted a restaurant that served Italian, Japanese, Greek and Turkish food, you may think okay, they can’t possibly be doing all that correct. What do you make of that?
Yeah, for sure. What’s great is that JB has really shown that it is aligned with memetic fundraisers in the past. I don’t know if you’d call it product market fit (PMF) yet, but it has the orientation toward PMF with these memetic raises, some of them more enduring than others. Hopefully it can be useful for enduring long term treasury management functions.
One thing I think about— there’s lot of NFT projects that set aside a portion of sales/royalties to a treasury (which is sitting in a multisig somewhere). Maybe the collection lost momentum, who knows, but that funding is still hanging around somewhere. I have an assumption that there are dozens or more multisigs that belong to a DAO that have 50-250 ETH sitting in it without a lot of activity. If those things had been run on something like JB, maybe there could have been tools JB would have offered to make sure funds like that were put to use.
I definitely do agree regarding the interface/tooling offerings— it’ll be interesting to see what happens since JB is one interface right now, and that has value. But ultimately I think we’ll see more interface experimentation. In the past when the Mandarin speakers came in, I was supportive of the idea to create some kind of interface that’s more conducive to that new community group. As JB grows I think we may see things like that.
What do you think PMF looks like for JB?
I’m most interested in enduring projects that use the protocl as their treasury. I think—and maybe my thinking has evolved on it— but last year as I got to understand JB in greater detail, I felt like there’s two functions for DAOs. One is a place to hold your assets— that’s JB— whether assets are ETH or NFTs or whatever— and the other a place where governance happens. I don’t know that we’ve figured out the most effective way to run governance, but JB governance works extremely well in my opinion. The way JB uses the treasury to handle contributor salary, other expenses, or the network effect when projects pay each other— for instance how JB relates to Wagmi, Canu, Peel, Lexicon Devils— collaborative DAOs end up holding a piece of each other and having a stake in each other’s future. That has potential to have a serious network effect.
Look at SharkDAO, they have a huge amount of JBX, in their case they don’t really vote on stuff and their JBX isn’t super valuable, but it would be nice to start to see that happen with partner DAOs.
I think the thing we’re missing is the NFT thing— that’s the key in my opinion to returning revenue over time. Canu, Wagmi, etc., are paid through JB, so they can show how great the network is because they have locked in revenue from the revenue fees JB takes from all projects on the protocol. I think if we could create non-JB originating revenues, that would be fascinating.
Not to mention the landscape may be changing a bit here. Let’s talk about “Soulbound” tokens (SBTs), which may be on the horizon. The idea here is tokens that are non-transferable. Some say good idea, others say it’s just a way to make resumes in web3. What do you make of that?
The idea of non-transferable tokens… it’s interesting. I think no matter what in web3, if you’re an amazing code you will probably always get work. But that being said treating SBT’s like a resume can definitely happen too. I have to say I haven’t read the paper yet, so I’m just going off of what I heard floating around the web3 space.
Long term, there’s a decent argument against it, which is that in ten years I don’t think any of us will be using the same wallet. But overall, I think it’s trying to answer the problem of these membership DAOs. If you base your membership on holding a market-tradable token, the appreciation of the token will ultimately result in the dilution of the quality of the members of your community as people sell.
Also JokeDAO comes to mind, where if you participate in their competition by submitting a joke, you get voting tokens for the subsequent competition.
One-time use tokens in other words.
Yes exactly. I think that’s even more interesting to be honest. The ecosystem rewards people for trying new things and experimenting.
What about SBT’s as a scarlet letter, in other words as a means to damage someone?
For sure that could happen, I think it will depend on the person minting and their reputation. One of the things about NFTs I wondered was people doing antisocial NFTs, like people tokenizing their virginity, or tokenizing school shooters.
Excellent points. Who’s your favorite contributor, and why is it tankbottoms?
Haha. Tankbottoms is great. There are so many great contributors honestly. If I had to point to anyone in particular, the person I admire most or seek to learn the most from is jango. There are many talented contributors, but jango has the talent I most wish I had— which is real clarity. It doesn’t mean jango knows everything and everyone follows him. It means he has real clarity around orientation to questions. You could call it vision, but that maybe that’s reductive. It’s more like in discussions he’s able to refocus very fluently. And of course being able to travel up and down the stack is incredible. Tankbottoms also is an unbelievable contributor in terms of accumulated experience and raw skill, which is so great. I mean, he’s just turning out stuff that other teams talk about for a year, and tank turns it out like that.
What is something people would be surprised to learn about you?
Lately I’ve been doing kickboxing every week with my girlfriend and roommate. I’m also a total youtube fanatic and I rarely watch under 2x speed. My biggest interest for the past little while is in Magic the Gathering! A friend gave me the idea that we’re like the CPUs when we play MtG, and the game is the rules of machine, and… it’s like if javascript was run by a company and the only thing you could exercise and execute were functions that are sold 10 times a year. I’m really fascinated by it. I also love going on really long walks, like for hours and hours.
What does the future have in store for nicholas?
I’m working on an NFT collection, actually, that I’m really pumped about. I can’t share anything just yet, it’s not finalized, but once it’s ready I’ll let everyone know about it!
(This interview was stylized from a discord call, and shortened for brevity. For those who want to hear the full interview, click this link for a mp3 file.