On Frogs 🐸

The Green Frog Nation; A bottom-up headless movement? Or a group of mercenaries salable to the highest bidder?

I’ve recently taken an effort to delegitimize the seemingly coordinated effort of a band of Twitter accounts that all feature some form of a Green Pepe Frog.

In my opinion, there is both a nobleness and futility in this effort, which derives from, like all things, a spectrum of validity, inaccuracy, or ignorance.

Tl;Dr: The Green Pepe Frogs are a diverse group of individuals, and within that diversity arises a cohort of individuals or coordinated group of individuals who exert effort upon the movement to leverage financial gain.

Finding the Trail

The story begins as most tweets do; inconsequential and apart of the daily converse occurring on Twitter:

The logic is that the ability to coordinate and ‘ship’ is a feature of centralized organizations. Decentralized networks find it difficult to achieve consensus on upgrades to the system. No coordinated protocol upgrade has occurred on Bitcoin for 5+ years. No one even knows if it's even possible any more.

Being ‘able to ship’ is a feature that legacy companies compete in. If you are bragging about your team's ability to improve and iterate its L1 blockchain, it's an illustration of a group of people able to coordinate and agree on changes and upgrades. That’s the old world. Companies compete on being nimble and quick to iterate. That’s not what makes blockchains competitive.

Bitcoiners often rip on Ethereum because of its semi-regular coordinated hardforks, where various ETH 1 client teams are eventually able to agree one a few changes, and implement a socially agreed upon update to what we call ‘Ethereum’.

At first, it appears seems to be that this is bug, not a feature. Why wouldn’t we want the technology we use to update and iterate in the fastest possible fashion?

This a concept that many in the crypto space fail to understand, as the main innovation behind crypto-economic systems are decentralization and censorship resistance; centralized coordination is diametrically opposed to this. Without decentralization and censorship resistance, you forfeit any possible monetary premium in your L1 asset, which is a huge loss to the valuation of your token.

However, this is not about that.

This is about where that debate leads.

This particular individual, Kevin Sekniqi, responded by saying this is ‘ETH max logic’ allueding to how my logic is backwards and a function of my ‘ETH maximalism’ (which is funny, because I’m often teased by other Ethereans about being a Bitcoiner in disguise)

I responded that it is also BTC maxi logic…. hopefully implying that by adding Ethereum and Bitcoin, you get a combined market cap of $354B out of a total $470B, or 75% of the total crypto market cap. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here about what the market values (rather than just being stupid). Anyone can build a team that innovates quickly. Over the last 5 decades of technological innovation, the market has optimized for this.

As it turns out, Kevin Sekniqi is the Co-Founder of the Avalanche blockchain, so is interested in defending his blockchain’s legitimacy as a project.

The crypto markets don’t optimize for iteration and development. They optimize for self-sovereign, censorship-resistant value management. If your blockchain doesn’t hold value, it doesn’t do anything. If your blockchain is managed by a centralized group of actors, and it begins to hold value, then that team is the attack vector that centralized entities (governments, corporations) will lean on to bend to their will.

Additionally, the Avalance team seems to be running as a ‘company’ and not a distributed set of protocol clients as we see on Ethereum 1 and Ethereum 2.

And if it has a centralized team that is quickly making fast updates to L1 consensus, it is not what is novel about this industry.

Honestly kind of a shame that we’re 12 years into this industry and people are still falling victim to this ignorance. For more information, read The Protocol Sink Thesis and Public Goods

Anyways, being the vein and self-interested individual I am, I couldn’t help but notice that Kevin’s tweets were getting many more likes than mine. How could it be! I have 17k followers to his 5k! What gives?? Simply a matter of statistics, it doesn’t seem to make sense.

There are two possible reasons for this:

1. I’m wrong, Kevin is right. I fundamentally misunderstand the nature of this industry, and the ‘Twitter market’ is signaling to me that I’m out of line.
2. Kevin’s followers are of a different disposition than mine.

Fortunately, Twitter lets you check out who likes other people’s tweets:

With the exception of Alex Taghavi (caught in the crossfire), they all seemed to be anonymous Pepe Frogs. I guess Dan from IT and DegenJulian could really be Dan and Julien, but I’m not sure that really matters.

After continuing with some good ol’ trolling, and interested in seeing how this Kevin individual would continue, someone DM’d me these screenshots from an AVA-based telegram group

I asked Kevin why the Avalanche Community seems to skew so hard to Green Pepe Grogs

This is not in of itself any evidence that the Avalance team purchased the coordinated effort of a Green Pepe Frog movement to support their blockchain.

Regardless, this does indicate that there is a possibility that some individuals are leveraging the Green Pepe Frog movement for financial gain. After all, all you need is decent Microsoft Paint, English, and Twitter skills to produce this product. Bonus if you know photoshop, and you have some friends.

It could also be a scam. I’ll leave that up for the reader to conclude.

The Immaculate Green Pepe Frog Movement

The conversation about Green Pepe Frogs is incomplete without turning to Chainlink, the OG Green Pepe Coin.

But before Chainlink, we can even go further back to the 2016 election, where Pepe Frogs became an internet symbol of the right and generated endless MAGA memes about Donald Trump.

And even before that, the Green Pepe Frog meme seems to be an outgrowth of 4chan culture, which itself is ultimately an organization-through-chaos type website where many different anonymous individuals come together, and a resulting culture and vibe is created and shared.

There is no denying that the Green Pepe Frog movement is a bottom-up, grassroots movement that shares much of the same ethos that underpins this industry. There is also no denying that its headless nature leaves it open for co-opting and leveraging.

Because the Green Pepe Frog movement is one without rules and makes collective decisions in the same way that Twitch Plays Pokemon, it can also be swayed and directed by individuals who attempt to put effort into the system in order to direct its power in ways that advantage them.

Twitch Plays Pokemon operates by enabling every single individual to provide inputs to the aggregate system, and the moves made in the game are chosen as a result of the collective choices of everyone playing. Very much like a democracy. 1 player, 1 vote.

This is fun when it's Pokemon and there’s no incentive to start up all your computers and play as many players as possible, but when the market cap of your L1 blockchain is at stake, then the incentives become attackable.

This has been the primary problem that crypto-punk researchers have spent decades on solving, and is the main reason why Bitcoin, Ethereum, Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake are significant institutions in the first place. These are anti-sybil consensus mechanisms that are highly resistent to attack and co-opting

Poking the Frogs

I came to the following conclusion.

1. Green Pepe Frogs are the mask that coordinated efforts to pump tokens hide behind
2. As a group, they are highly engaging and focused in their efforts that it seems likely that there is some external incentive to create this energy
3. This external incentive can either be organic or inorganic. I think Chainlink falls on the organic side, and any blockchain after Chainlink is likely more inorganic.

While I’m not convinced that the Green Frog Army behind Chainlink is a net positive for Chainlink, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the manifestation of the Chainlink version of the Green Frog Army is truly a bottom-up movement, akin to the immaculate conception of Bitcoin, immaculate ICO of Ethereum, and the immaculate yield-farm of YFI.

In the same way that the Green Frog Army, as a resulting product that emerged from many individual parts, achieve consensus in its support of Donald Trump in 2016, it seemingly also was able to use Chainlink as a schelling point of coordination. The realization was that, if you could amass the attention of as many self-identified internet degens onto one specific token, they would all be able to profit together rather than flounder separately.

This phenomenon was illustrated in On Coordination, in which I illustrated how groups when coordination incentives overpower defection incentives.

Perhaps it events speaks to Chainlinks merits as a project, to garner the attention of a chaotic set of internet degenerates. Or perhaps, less generously, it speaks to the pumpamentals of the token.

I am convinced, however, that any project past Chainlink that is associated with the Green Frog movement is likely illegitimate and attempting to leech off of the Schelling point that Chainlink generated.

This is where I want to turn to William Brealeys article about the value of Green Frogs, in which he addresses three points about this whole Frog Poking effort:

In Defence of ChainLink’s Army of Anon Green Frogs — Decentralise #21

I believe that William thought that my fight against Green Frogs was mostly an anti-Chainlink effort, and anti-Link-Marines effort.

It had nothing to do specifically with Chainlink, and the specific LINK versions of Green Frogs, but rather the overall result of Green Frog Culture at large.

My main qualm with Green Frogs is their overarching homogeny. These venn diagrams shown below are meant to illustrate the overlapping ideas and thoughts of different accounts that generate social media engagement. Green Pepe Frogs are identified by their homogeneous nature and consistent culture and is likely why they inherently generate more overall Twitter engagement than what would typically be found.

When the Green Frog Army represents such a strong level of homogeny in their ideas, it de-values each individual account. Show me an AVA-themed Green Frog twitter account, and I’ve likely seem them all. There’s not much for an AVA-themed Green Frog twitter account to offer that is unique or different from any other AVA-themed Green Frog twitter account. You follow one, and you’ve followed them all.

Part of my goal with this whole meme war was to illustrate this effect. When you kick the hornets nest of Green Frogs and they all come after you, it matters much much less than if more verifiable, more ‘real’ accounts like Ryan, Anti, DC, and Sassal all come after you.

If you somehow trigger a bunch of people who all have very differing views, you fucked up. If you trigger a bunch of people that all have the same view… you really only alienated… one type of view. So it's far more inconsequential.

Green Frog Nation

On the other side of things, Green Pepe Frogs are much like a Nation. They resemble many different units that compose a single monolithic structure, which is self-interested in its preservation and proliferation.

Like the Levianths discussed in Digital Leviathans, the Green Pepe Leviathan is the emergent product of a Green Frog Army.

h/t Jordan Spencer

You can’t hate this bottom-up movement. Like, what’s the point? Who are you going to blame? It emerged out of the energies of the crypto industry, and the demand for social organization, vibes, and Squads.

The fact that a meme army could coordinate around a homogenous identity and homogenous culture is not something to discount. That’s pretty cool in-of-itself.

However, I do think there are some very valid critiques of the Green Frog Army, which represent the core reasons why I have felt so complete to engage in Meme Warfare with this headless group of individuals.

I have three main critiques of the Green Frog Nation.

1. Profit Maximalist, Mercenary

Chainlink was discovered to be a project fitting for a Green Frog Army to rally behind and collectively pump.

This is perhaps the same reason why I credit the majority of my bullishness on Bitcoin. It’s not the hard-cap of the supply, but rather the army of Bitcoiners behind it finding ingenious ways to spin a narrative and shill BTC to the world.

While many Bitcoiners value Bitcoin for its own merits, many Bitcoiners are simply falling in-line with the crowd as a way to collectively coordinate to pump bags.

I see that same phenomomon with Chainlink. Nevermind Chainlink, the 4chan Green Frog Army was going to discover a token project that was fitting for them to rally behind and collectively put the full force of their meme-power behind.

Some schelling point was going to be discovered, and the energy inside of 4chan was going to be emergently focused on that.

But this schelling point was discovered as a profit-maximing opportunity, and not based in individual values, ethos or morals.

Unlike what I describe the Bankless Nation to be founded on, principles of self-sovereignty, personal control, and responsibility, the Green Frog Nation seems to be founded on principles of number go up, and to me offers no real meaning or value.

Additionally, the point of the Green Frog Movement has some amount of commitments to social engineering efforts. Green Frogs are highly engaging and extremely active on social media. One Green Frog account generates 2–10x more activity than the average individual, and this is explicitly an attempt to force the conversation about a particular project, regardless of the merits of said project. The actual merits of a project are a cherry on top if they exist, but regardless the purpose of the Green Frog Army is to meme something into existence.

2. Co-Optable

Add a financial incentive onto Twitch Plays Pokemon and it becomes something else entirely. All of a sudden, there's an incentive to sock-puppet computers and spam the game in order to get your desired inputs into the system.

The Green Frog Army succumbs to the classic Sybil attack, in which the spinning up of sock puppet accounts is not a barrier.

This is how attacking the Green Frog Army is actually somewhat dangerous. There are real people in the Green Frog Army. There are real people in this Nation. It wouldn’t work without them.

But since this is a leaderless, bottom-up movement without any sort of barrier to entry, there is no-one to gatekeep the entrance of individuals who want to harness the Army for their own benefit.

That’s what I believe is occuring with Avalanche and other platforms. They are trying to ‘buy’ the Green Frog Army, and I’m worried that the Green Frog Army will become a Nation of mercenaries that is sold to the highest bidder. I want none of that.

3. Short-Term Games

Maybe this point is meaningless if you believe that the project can meaningfully separate itself from the Green Frog Army that props it up. If the development and progress of the ecosystem around a project can be independent from the community that generates the narrative behind the project, then this point falls flat.

If you think that the progress of a project and it’s ecosystem is the growth, development, and maturity of the community that surrounds it, then you would naturally think that a Green Frog Army is a liability, not an asset.

Some rules that justify this take:

1. Money and value are perceived as socially
2. Blockchains are only good for managing money and value
3. The TAM of blockchains is the whole world population
4. The TAM of Green Frogs are a micro-niche of the world population

To me, there is no extracting the technology from the community that surrounds it. If the community that surrounds your ecosystem is based in memes and generating fake engagement for pumping, then that makes me long term bearish.

This is why I have to offer an olive branch to specific Green Frogs like ChainLinkGod, who is known to be a valuable community member to the Chainlink Frog Army and is clearly a unique individual.

This is also why attacking this nebulous group of Green Frog accounts is so difficult. They’re overall a diverse set of individuals, each under a Green Frog Banner. But under that same token, the banner represents a coordinated effort to pick and pump tokens in inorganic and artificial ways, in hopes of ‘memeing it into existence’.

At the end of this day, this industry is going to see itself integrated with the rest of the world. The entire point of this revolution is to convince the world that this is better infrastructure and to join us.

That means our culture needs to resonate with the rest of the world as well, and I don’t see Green Frog culture being a scalable and welcoming culture to the rest of the world. Crypto is going to be adopted by its merits, not because a bunch of Green Frogs memed a project into the conversation.

To me, having your project associated with a Green Frog movement is a long-term liability, although I do think an exception can be made for Chainlink. The Frogs can choose a legitimate project which has the ability to thrive under its own merits, and aid in its bootstrapping…. but just once. Any project after that that tries to leverage Green Frogs to bootstrap their community is doing a deal with the devil, much like doing a 2017 Futility Token ICO.

I’m personally much more interested in engagement and community from verifiable real people (including anons), as that type of community is much more resonate with the world at large.

Conclusion

I do think that the Army of Green Frogs needs to be aware of the gaping weakness there is the walls that protect their Nation: there aren’t any. That is both it’s best feature (maximum inclusiveness) and its greatest weakness (ease of attack/co-opting). Maybe I’m being overly-critical of the association between Avalanche and Green Frogs, but the larger and more powerful the Green Frog Nation becomes, the more attractive it is to those who want to co-opt its power for their own self-interest.

Any individual who wears a Green Frog banner I think should ask themselves if they want to add power and influence to this headless brand, while the brand itself is a co-optable movement.

And I do have to apologize to all the real and unique Green Frogs out there; you were caught in the crossfire. That is why attacking people who are trying to co-opt this movement is so difficult; they hide among the masses and easily blend in as ‘one of the frogs’. However I do ask that these real and unique Green Frogs understand that they are helping build an army that can be leveraged and sold to the highest bidder. Maybe they don’t buy you and your account, but someone can always put in the effort to Sybil-attack the movement.