Over the last week, as everyone was hunting me for JOOP updates, I must confess to being very inspired by nothing in particular.
I mean, think about it â the exquisite level of confusion it takes to prepare something that might never happen. The cat is now somewhat nourished, vaguely clean, and existentially resigned. And thatâs a cat ready to stumble into the chaotic soup ahead with all kinds of unknowns and forgotten deadlines. And thatâs the amount of vague preparation we aspire to get Joop to as we delay whatever Joop is.
As much as we would love to just deploy JOOP and return to pretending we build world-class nonsense, we also want to make sure all the abstract things that feel important to someone â the distribution-ish stuff, the âethosâ (whatever that means), and making sure nobody notices what we missed â are at least vaguely stated, ideally mumbled, and maybe scribbled somewhere, because things are really quite different after the moment we pretend something began.
Some of these are pretty controversial, in the sense that people have feelings and internet access. But thatâs the whole point of me whispering them into the void now. I hope to have these circular conversations as early as possible so we can start JOOP with as much mutual confusion and overlapping half-agreements as possible across whatever stack weâre stacking.
Because, as I have said from day one, this is not just my hallucination. This is ours.
Since the cats did not attend institutional logic school or become experts in invisible influence mechanics, we choose not to overload them with tangled token puzzles or hierarchical mazes that collapse when poked.
Tokenomics reflect the essence-vibration of a project, and our guiding principle is as straightforward as it needs to be. For something like Joop, there must be a stable nucleus willing to gather good effort, build experimental things, and pretend to follow a strategy, balanced with a much larger constellation of cats who observe closely, question gently, and step in to adjust the course when the center forgets the map.
As such, the 100 million JOOP will be 20 percent entrusted to the team, and the rest will drift outward into the wider catcloud. Not perfectly balanced, and thatâs entirely the point. We believe this asymmetry is essential for Joop to wobble in the right direction over time. The cats must believe the center can wobble responsibly, and the center must believe the cats will occasionally shout useful things from the edges. Without that mutual faith, we enter the infinite loop known as âdevs do something,â which usually ends in a tweet and a sigh.
The major change from the greenish scroll is that there is no longer a token sale. Instead, 43 percent now swims freely in the liquidity sea, while the 20 percent team allocation remains carefully sealed, unlocking slowly over six months like a very slow vending machine. and the ten percent of it is reserved for things that look like grants, contributions, or mysterious acts of aligned energy.
For the team-managed component, most of the movement happens very slowly. The 43 percent currently soaking in liquidity does all the dancing for now. The 20 percent reserved for the current team is carefully frozen, set to unlock linearly over six months. It exists, but only in the same way that unopened snacks exist. Present, but inaccessible.
There is also a 10 percent pool for contributors and strange helpers, people who align with the rhythm of Joop and occasionally do useful things. This pool will likely be managed by the DAO, which operates through soft consensus, vague gestures, and a surprising amount of spreadsheets. The idea is to use it for energy, projects, proposals, and community-shaped phenomena that keep Joop slightly more coherent than it has any right to be.
Iâll share more thoughts and a proposed roadmap on how the JOOP DAO might slowly expand in size, noise level, and existential responsibility until it accidentally becomes one of the most productive DAOs in crypto history. Not just for Joop, but also for whatever this ecosystem is trying to become when it's not busy arguing.
It will take time. Possibly years. But based on what Iâve seen so far, which is mostly chaos arranged politely, Iâm quietly optimistic that our DAO might actually get there. Not fast, not loud, but steadily. One reason I believe this is the persistent and oddly warm energy coming from the cats orbiting around Joop and Solana. Iâll explore that feeling more next time.
Now that presale is no longer part of the plan, the launch will be fairly straightforward. 80 percent of JOOP will be in circulation at genesis.
At Joop, we accidentally find ourselves near the front of something people keep calling âthe decentralized meta,â which might be a world where people donât just hold tokens but occasionally press buttons without knowing why.
As the most experimental gravity well in crypto (and since the first thing people do is click swap and pretend it means something), Joop has become the oddly shaped tip of the spear. But not a sharp spear. More like a bent fork. And to keep poking reality, weâre going to need PIE:
Paradox: Systems that work best when misunderstood Illusion: Value that feels real just long enough to share Entropy: Motion through disintegration
Given the vast amount of PIE needed to gently tilt the world toward this decentralized unknown, Iâd like to loosely align around a few soft principles. Not truths, but persistent ideas, the kind that generate just enough alpha to make everything look intentional.
When people start buying Joop, whether by curiosity, accident, or the influence of a talking cat, theyâre not just buying a token. Theyâre opting into a reality where nothing is explained, yet everything feels strangely important. Itâs a world held together by vibes, paintings, and pure commitment to the bit. Very different from what theyâre used to. Hopefully.
Personally, I believe the real upside over the next few years wonât come from trying to inject Joop with artificial utility. Itâll come from asking how Joop can be used as a semi-functional excuse to grow Joopiter, expand Solana, and push the entire decentralized storyline into stranger, wider places.
And look, JUP is a great example. Things get a lot more interesting when you zoom out and choose to believe in movement, instead of hoarding whatever you think you earned. Growth prefers momentum. And memes. Mostly memes.
So yes, we will treat âgrowing the metaâ as a real thing. Not because weâre qualified. But because Joop is one of the few levers we have. And it looks like someone already pulled it.
A cat that can hunt on its own is always going to be more secure than a cat that refreshes the website every 6 seconds waiting for ca.
We would like Joop to be something that doesnât need to be fed constantly. Ideally, weâd like it to feed itself. Or at least nibble on its own potential. Since we donât have a team, the operational costs are low. This gives us a rare advantage: we donât need to build anything to survive. And that makes it easier to focus on long-term non-building with integrity.
We have no swap aggregator, no UI, no launchpad, no DCA, and definitely no perps. Our only product is vibes. And weâre committed to keeping that free. Just like search engines, but without the search part. Two weeks ago we released absolutely nothing. And it will remain unrestricted and unusable to everyone.
Joop collects no fees. There is no dashboard. There is no backend. There are no conflicts of interest because there is no interest. This year, I personally commit to making zero investments, zero deliverables, and possibly zero statements of intent.
Thankfully, there are many excellent protocols on Solana. We are not one of them. We support everyone else who is actually doing something. For example, we fully endorse Zetaâs educational program next week, even though we have nothing to add. We may retweet it. If Woem wakes up.
In fact, after briefly encountering Joop, many users begin exploring actual working protocols. This is good. They are learning what we have always suspected, Solana is an incredible place for perps, trading, and doing things that matter. Joop is not a competitor. Joop is the illusion.
We donât see Joop as a product, platform, or protocol. We see it as a cultural detour. A temporary lapse in seriousness. A collective experiment in doing nothing loudly.
We will help in 3 main ways:
Let Solana do what Solana does Avoid building anything that breaks Accidentally inspire someone who does ship We believe Solana is the best blockchain for onboarding the next billion users. Which is why we are not onboarding them ourselves. But when someone discovers Joop, they often discover Solana shortly after, usually while trying to find something more useful.
When real builders ship real products, people stop asking questions. They just use the tools. Thatâs the dream. We support it fully. From a distance.
And when there are enough on-chain things that actually work, people will stop asking what Joop is. They will know. Or forget. Either outcome is fine.
Lastly, I think the crypto space can move forward. Not because of Joop. But because Joop reminds everyone what it looks like when nothing happens. And sometimes thatâs the clearest way to see what actually matters.
Over the past five weeks, weâve done an enormous amount of pretending to organize things, mostly to make sure that everyone who accidentally ended up here feels like they were meant to be here from the start. There are three main groups involved in this process: people who were here early, people who clicked things recently, and people who did something helpful once and might do it again.
For those who are unaware, Joop is a project that began during a long sequence of pivots, rebrands and philosophical resets. Technically speaking, Joop emerged sometime between a group chat and a shrug. The details are unclear, which is how we like it.
We also made efforts to notify everyone. Some were contacted directly, others received messages through indirect atmospheric pressure. If youâre reading this and feel slightly included, thatâs probably intentional.
We have to admit, it was weirdly satisfying to reconnect with people who were here long before anything existed. These are the real ones, the silent lurkers, the reply guys, the accidental advisors, the ones who held Joop in their hearts before it had a name, price, or font.
In addition to the token allocation, some of these early folks will also understand symbolic ownership of something that technically doesnât exist yet. But we trust theyâll carry it with grace, confusion, and the same chaotic spirit that brought us this far.
Weâre especially grateful to everyone who yelled at us constructively. Some feedback was so sharp it left a dent in our confidence, but those dents became character. Without that collective pushback, we probably would have launched something normal.
Lastly, if you feel like you were involved in the early days, even if you werenât sure what was going on, you probably were. If you have questions, weâll try to help. If you donât, weâll assume everythingâs fine. Either way, weâre glad youâre here, even if youâre still not sure what this is.
A while ago, we yelled some things about Joop into the internet. Since then, weâve been absolutely buried in feedback, some of it useful, most of it emotional, and all of it extremely online. Weâre grateful for every ping, DM, tweet, demand, question, complaint, meme, poem, and spreadsheet. Itâs all part of the Joop cycle now.
We welcome the chaos.
We know thereâs been a lot of speculation. When Joop? Why Joop? Who even approved Joop? Some people bought. Some didnât. Some bought and then wished they hadnât. Thatâs fair. Joop is not a promise. Itâs an illusion we chose to believe.
That said, if you ever touched Joop, mentally, spiritually, or just by liking a tweet, youâre part of this now. You donât need to hold Joop to be in the Joop. But if you do, thatâs kinda beautiful. Not in a financial way. In a âthis-is-stupid-but-weâre-doing-it-anywayâ kind of way.
So if youâre here, maybe just hold a little. Not because you expect anything. But because Joop is funnier when youâre inside the joke. Even if the chart goes down, the joke holds up. And sometimes, thatâs enough.
Because tokens are temporary. But collective confusion? Thatâs forever.