gm, ConstitutionDAO, and the Republic of Memes
Hey everyone,
Crypto culture is growing.
New civic-minded communities are popping up which use blockchain to pool financial resources in pursuit of common goals.
Blockchain-literate groups have a distinct advantage over competitors because they use a more advanced version of the Internet known as web3, sometimes called the “Internet of blockchains.”
In the last week, two intriguing web3 communities have emerged: $gm and ConstitutionDAO.
Let’s take a look at how these new groups are using blockchain to fight for a fairer, more civil world.
gm
A new meme coin has burst onto the crypto scene, spreading like wildfire across Twitter and spilling out into the broader world.
$gm is a token on the Ethereum blockchain. It was created a little over a week ago.
The token's name refers to the practice of saying "good morning" on Twitter with the abbreviations gm, Gm, or GM.
$gm is potentially the first token backed purely by a cultural practice. As a result, it has been dubbed a culture coin.
The practice of saying gm is a meme in crypto and NFT circles that connotes optimistic civility grounded in belief that crypto can change the world.
Because of its optimism, gm has become associated with the meme acronym "wagmi," short for "we're all gonna make it."
Wagmi expresses the belief that crypto will deliver financial freedom to the masses. The opposite of wagmi is "ngmi," or "not gonna make it," used to dismiss crypto doubters.
Wagmi and ngmi have been around for a while. Bloomberg picked up on the phenomenon of gm at the beginning of October.
Mainstream news coverage of the $gm token has been minimal so far, possibly because of controversial and misunderstood memes.
Despite limited coverage, interest in the token has grown rapidly, with an estimated 15,000 wallets having purchased $gm.
Several exchanges are expected to list the $gm token in the coming days.
More importantly, it looks like gm could turn into a blockchain movement with a powerful presence in the non-digital world, perhaps the first of its kind.
Culture Tokens
The $gm token is the latest turn in what is sometimes called the Tokambrian Explosion, or the tokenization of everything.
So far, the biggest effect of the Tokambrian Explosion has been on ownership of digital artwork through NFTs.
Now, the token revolution appears to be unfurling into ephemeral units of culture.
As crypto takes root globally, blockchain technology will interact with the outside world in novel ways.
Gm could become a universal greeting for denizens of the metaverse, signifying citizenship of the Internet, that great connector of global humanity.
Tokenization allows anything to be made into a commodity, even cultural practices.
Markets get to decide for themselves how valuable the practice of saying "good morning" is based on demand for the token.
So far, it's worth about $300 million—not a bad start.
By comparison, the market has decided that dog memes are worth at least $60 billion. $gm could have a long way to go.
Like Doge to a dollar and Shib to a penny, $gm has an ambitious meme-based price target: flip the market cap of General Motors.
The ability of the gm community to meme this idea into existence should not be underestimated.
There's also something about the tokenization of "gm" that speaks to this particular moment in history.
The global population is emerging from two years of pandemic conditions, including social distancing, lockdowns, travel restrictions, censorship, and other measures of state-imposed isolation.
People are looking for new ways to connect.
Out of necessity, they're experimenting with blockchain to create novel forms of decentralized community.
Tokenized community could be a big part of the answer for pandemic isolation.
The ability to fund communities around units of culture is a new and powerful tool.
So far, $gm has caught because of its simplicity and minimal barriers to entry.
Shortly after $gm started picking up steam, another civic-minded community emerged: ConstitutionDAO.
ConstitutionDAO is taking the energy of $gm and channeling it to create political influence.
Here's how it's going down.
ConstitutionDAO
ConstitutionDAO a Decentralized Autonomous Organization whose goal is to purchase the US Constitution.
DAOs operate like companies, but they are run by rule-based code instead of leaders. Members of a DAO can vote on its direction using governance tokens issued on a blockchain.
In just a few days, ConstitutionDAO raised over $40 million worth of Ethereum from 17,000 donors to buy one of the 13 existing physical copies of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction. The average donation size was $200.
ConstitutionDAO has gone viral, landing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and attracting thousands of members.
Its model allows anyone to participate in the owning of a physical copy of the Constitution simply by sending Ethereum to the pool.
In return for contributing, people receive governance tokens "with no expectation of profit."
The tokens allow their owner to vote on "where the Constitution should be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and the mission and values of ConstitutionDAO."
Like $GM, ConstitutionDAO is a meme-savvy movement, taking on the acronym meme WAGBTC, short for "We all gonna buy the constitution."
On Thursday, ConstitutionDAO broke the record for the largest crowdfund ever to purchase a physical object, and made history as the first DAO to work with Sotheby's.
In a stunning turn of events, ConstitutionDAO was outbid at the auction by meme-stock arch-villain Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel Hedge Fund.
On Friday, Griffin said that he will loan the Constitution to an Arkansas museum founded by Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton.
Griffin has been a bogeyman for the market-populist AMC/GameStop Ape movement since January, when evidence emerged that Citadel had coordinated with Robinhood to restrict trading on meme stocks.
Throughout 2021, Apes have targeted Griffin as a symbol for corrupt elitism in the financial world.
The optics of a single billionaire CEO outbidding seventeen thousand citizens for ownership of the Constitution are mind boggling, especially amidst one of the greatest wealth transfers to the upper class in history.
Last month, Griffin criticized crypto as a "jihadist call" against the dollar while Citadel's Twitter account chided retail investors for trafficking in conspiracies.
His recent actions could unify the Ape movement and the blockchain community into a powerful, civic-minded, and meme-savvy political bloc.
Griffin appears to have won this round against the plebs, but the political battle for market fairness is just getting started.
The Meme Advantage
The ability for likeminded people to pool capital over the Internet has far-reaching but mostly unrealized consequences.
The emergence of $gm and ConstitutionDAO is a sign that blockchain-based community is on the rise and could become a powerful political force in the coming years.
Each group was able to gain thousands of members and raise millions of dollars in less than a week. Other political groups are surely taking notice.
As the Internet grows into a decentralized, borderless civil society with its own lingua franca based on the sharing of memes, similar campaigns and movements will likely arise.
As a political bloc, crypto is up against entrenched, moneyed elites of the legacy system. The old system isn't going without a fight.
Time will tell if blockchain and memes give the people a winning edge in the battle for fair markets, but the future looks promising!
Dogey Treats: News Bites
Elon posted an documentary about General Motors (GM) called "Who killed the electric car?," said Mars needs babies, trolled Bernie/Biden, questioned the objectivity of the media, posted a meme of a viking raid, and posited that we live in a simulation.
Hillary Clinton said that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies threaten the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
The Island Boys recorded a video about GM.
SpaceX scheduled the first orbital flight of its Starship for January. It also deployed 53 more Starlink satellites into orbit.
Tesla has begun adding Starlink Internet service to its Supercharger stations.
The stadium once known as the Staples Center, home of the LA Lakers, will be renamed Crypto.com Arena in the largest stadium naming rights deal ever.
Robinhood COO Christine Brown gave an update on Robinhood crypto wallets, saying the #WalletsAlpha program has begun.
Reason magazine published a video analysis of Bitcoin's environmental impact.
Time Magazine will hold Ethereum on its balance sheet.
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