Web3 Talks: Stories & Tips from the Builders

Colin Armstrong has been in crypto since 2011 and has spent years working at Coinbase and Google. He built Paragraph to create a more neutral and web3-friendly alternative to Substack. The project has already amassed 5k+ creators and 100k+ subscribers, and Colin shares how they made it happen. >>> Never miss an episode and check how Paragraph works in practice by subscribing to our newsletter: https://paragraph.xyz/@kanfa <<< TIMESTAMP: 0:38 How to make sure you get info about the new web3 talks episodes 1:27 Why Paragraph is a great example of web2.5 Substack 2:22 How Colin’s experience at mining Bitcoin in 2011, building decentralized Kickstarter in 2014, working at Coinbase with the founder of Litecoin, spending 5 years at Google, and being dissatisfied with Substack led him to build Paragraph 13:37 What were the most interesting Paragraph use cases Colin has seen so far 16:24 How do they manage to ship features so fast, and why waitlist doesn’t make sense in most products 19:40 How do they decide what to include on their roadmap 21:12 Why they’ve been integrating with web3 social and how it works in practice 23:17 How they acquired their first 10 users via cold outreach on Twitter, and why they didn’t implement any crypto functionalities in v1 25:16 What they’ve been doing to acquire 5k+ users and how they used the market situation to their advantage 28:40 How do they measure success in their product and why just looking at the number of writers or readers wouldn’t work 30:34 What do they do to protect newsletters from landing in the spam box 33:09 What are their plans for integrating wallets and why is infra not ready for it yet 36:43How does wallets x Paragraph x Farcaster integration work technically and why do they use Searchcaster 39:20 How a developer built a streaming payment with Superfluid on top of Paragraph without needing any permission 40:51 How getting developers to build on top of their APIs was easier than he thought 44:13 Why choosing the right feature set for their niche was so hard and why web3 UX & e-mail limitations led to design challenges 47:10 What would Colin build if he wasn’t building Paragraph 50:00 Why would he get rid of airdrop hunters and speculators with his web3 magic wand and add new useful dapps with great UX 52:33 Colin’s favorite web3 projects (spoiler alert: he mentions Farcaster) 56:00 Where can you learn more about Paragraph 57:01 What other builders would be a great fit for the podcast

SimpleHash is one of the most powerful NFT APIs in the space. It's being used by wallets, portfolio trackers & web3 games. Olly Wilson came to the pod to share the backstage perspective of their ultra fast growth. Timestamps: 0:38 What is SimpleHash 1:39 How their Co-Founder got tired of building back-end infra for an NFT project and decided to start SimpleHash 2:47 Why is indexing NFTs across many chains so hard? 5:25 How being in YC helped them to acquire first users 6:22 Why they ditched the idea of an NFT search tool 7:10 What's their process for supporting and integrating new chains 9:34 Why do they go very deep into NFT data and specialize to compete with other NFT APIs 11:40 How do they solve the corrupted media problems in NFTs 12:37 How they designed the NFT Spam Score to protect wallets from unsolicited and scammy airdrops 15:11 What are their most important metrics? 16:20 Why is everyone on their team involved in customer support, and how do they decide what features to implement? 19:20 Why Olly likes the OG NFT projects 20:50 Olly's thoughts on utility NFTs 21:55 Why joining YC was worth it 23:35 What growth & tech challenges do they see on the horizon? 24:49 How do they take care of their business's infra side, and why is 850M indexed NFTs still a small dataset? 26:00 What would he build if he weren't building SimpleHash? 26:20 Why removing the scams would be the target of his magic wand? 27:00 Why Ethereum Merge is the most mind-blowing project that Olly has seen 28:26 Why he likes the crypto twitter's dark humor 29:20 Where to find out more about SimpleHash

0xFrens is a matchmaking tool used by web3 communities such as: Developer DAO, Jericho & Skylab. Gilbert - Co-Founder of the project - spent almost a decade at Google, then started his social podcasting startup, and in 2022, he started working on 0xFrens with the rest of the AGMI team. 0:37 What’s 0xFrens, and how it helps communities to build relationships between members 1:40 How talking with communities & DAOs inspired them to start 0xFrens 4:30 What has Gilbert been doing at Google for almost ten years & what was his previous social podcasting startup about 5:25 How 0xFrens plays into web3 strengths, what was their MVP, and why they pivoted 7:17 What insights from users surprised them, and how they iterated based on this information 9:05 Why online coffee chats can be awkward and how 0xFrens addresses that 12:15 How they acquired their first users and how they do it (and why “web3 lunch club” wasn’t a good idea) 14:35 What metrics do they follow to track product engagement, and why does choosing the right community to work with matter the most 17:54 How Kudos might become important for building a reputation in a community 22:08 Which lessons from Google & previous startup are the most useful 25:30 Why the biggest growth & tech challenges on the horizon are related to web2 users 27:10 Why solving reputation-related challenges is omnipresent both in web2  and web3 28:08 Why it’s so hard to face market feedback and make decisions based on the data 31:45 Why would Gilbert build onboarding-related tools if he wasn’t building 0xFrens 33:08 Why would he fix seed phrases with his web3 magic wand 34:57 Why web3 ecosystem is so mind-blowing 38:24 What made him smile while using 0xFrens 39:33 Where you can learn more about 0xFrens 40:31 Guests ideas

PWN is a decentralized pawnshop where you can use any tokens as collateral. But it’s just the beginning. Their ultimate goal is to provide crypto loans for decades so that you will never need to sell your crypto. I spoke with Josef, PWN’s Co-Founder, who shared their story, challenges & growth strategies. TIMESTAMPS: 0:38 PWN as a decentralized pawnshop 1:35 How not being able to get a mortgage & risk of DeFi liquidations inspired Josef to start PWN 9:30 Why they decided to give more protection to borrowers by not baking up loan liquidations from the start 13:43 How do they plan to implement filtering to protect the tool from SPAM offers while still keeping the platform open 17:31 How they designed their smart contract to support ERC20, ERC721 & ERC1155 tokens 19:16 Why it’s so hard to develop everything in a crypto-native manner, and they decided to make some shortcuts at this stage 21:10 How they acquired their first users and how they expanded from the friends & family stage by breaking the “stay focused” rule and cooperating with other communities 25:30 How will their tech let GameFi players borrow money on their in-game assets and still use them in the game 27:08 How they let you borrow money to buy NFT assets in a mortgage-like manner 29:19 Most interesting collaterals on PWN - Nation3 DAO, Aavegotchis & Beeple’s $250k art piece 31:40 Trade-offs: openness vs. niche, utilizing third parties vs. decentralized operations 32:50 Why would Josef stay at EF if he wasn’t building PWN 33:30 Why MakerDAO blew his mind 35:20 Why would he make all grifters disappear with his web3 magic wand 37:55 Where should people go to learn more about PWN 39:00 Guests ideas

Zerion is one of the OG crypto companies, operating since 2016. It started as a tool to do fundraising through token sales.  Then it transformed into a DeFi exploration tool where you could track & invest in different assets. Then it expanded into NFTs & other web3 assets. And a few months ago, they also joined the wallet space and already got 80k+ users. What inspired them to start? Why they made so many pivots? And why they're confident that they can compete in a hard wallet space? I spoke with Evgeny, Zerion's Co-Founder, who shared the backstage perspective of the last 6 years of running Zerion. TIMESTAMPS: 0:38 What’s Zerion and why they pivoted a lot since 2016 2:20 Evgeny experience at Google, with chatbots and with a crypto trading app that got 1M+ downloads 3:59 Why meeting Vitalik inspired them to start Zerion 6:10 How they started as a smart contract developers’ team 7:10 Why the 2019 bear market prompted them to pivot to build a token tracking aggregator 8:30 How a blog post about fundraising inspired them to go to San Francisco to earn funding and get the first users 10:33 Why they entered the aggregators & wallets space, and why are these markets less crowded than Mac thinks 14:05 Why there are so few wallets on the market and why the timing is so important 16:45 Which use cases do they cover with their wallet 19:05 How they designed the wallet so it’s useful both for beginners and more advanced users (Web3 Citizens) 20:52 What was the hardest part about making the wallet multi-chain 21:47 How they want to battle MetaMask and why web3 helps them to do it 25:22 What web3-native marketing tactics such as NFT collections and community-building let them acquire tens of thousands of users 28:32 How does their NFT collection that changes based on your wallet activity work 30:45 Why on-chain information can be a goldmine for marketers 33:42 The vision behind their API, why it’s been used by Rainbow Wallet and StakeDAO, and why having it centralized might be okay 36:05 Why wallet can become an e-mail on steroids 38:19 Why open architecture of web3 makes it better for users 39:35 Why building the wallet was the hardest decision Evgeny had to make while running Zerion 40:45 What would Evgeny build if he wasn’t building Zerion 41:25 Why would he fix privacy with his magic web3 wand 42:25 Which web3 projects he found interesting 45:40 Where to learn more about Zerion 46:30 Ideas for other web3 builders

Moralis joined a pretty crowded web3 infra market in 2020, and it's already become an important player serving projects such as MetaMask and Polygon. How did they do it? I talk with Ivan, Moralis Co-Founder, who shares the backstage perspective of their last 2 years. If you don't want to miss our episodes, subscribe to our Substack and get an e-mail whenever the new episode comes out: https://web3talks.substack.com/ TIMESTAMPS: 0:38 Who is Ivan & Moralis, and what got him interested in blockchain 3:52 How their web2 experience inspired them to start Moralis 4:40 Why they entered a crowded infrastructure space with many already established players such as Alchemy, Infura & QuickNode 7:25 Why it’s hard to bootstrap infrastructure business and how they leveraged their online education platform to grow it 9:29 How not thinking too much helped them to start and grow 11:29 How their SDK & APIs help developers to better understand on-chain events 14:51 Why their onboarding process has quite a lot of friction 17:50 How they build strong relations with developers via free education, hackathons & Discord 20:27 How their YouTube channel & hackathon helped to acquire their first users 21:30 How they managed to grow the 100% remote company from 0 to 90+ people in 2 years 24:44 How being upfront about their way of working helped them to recruit the right people 27:08 Why cutting down features was hard and what they learned on the way 28:44 How do they decide what to include in their SDKs 29:48 What does he think about centralization risks by using centralized infrastructure 34:03 Why team building was the biggest lesson he learned from running Moralis 37:45 What would he fix about web3 with the magic wand 39:40 What has been the most interesting project he has seen 42:26 Why craziness of the crypto industry makes Ivan laugh 44:14 Where to learn more about Moralis 44:32 Guest ideas

Hey everyone, today I got the info about something I've been working on for a long time. Twitter link (all Likes & RTs much appreciated!): https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski/status/1587525519398129665?s=20&t=6erYSQKMxrLJMJGD6POfXg Website link: https://macbudkowski.com/how-to-explain-web3-products/ Web3 Talks Substack: https://web3talks.substack.com/

Dan Romero was employee #20 at Coinbase. After helping to build the company for 5 years, he left Coinbase in 2019 to build an alternative to Twitter with his Coinbase colleague, Varun Srinivasan. This idea transformed into Farcaster - a web3 social network that has become a go-to place for the crypto community in the last few months.  TIMESTAMPS: 00:38 What is Farcaster 1:20 How Dan Romero became employee #20 at Coinbase and what he learned about crypto, and why he left in 2019 4:32 Why RSS lost and how Farcaster started as RSS+ 6:56 Farcaster as a Twitter for crypto people, sufficient decentralized social network, why it’s great for users and developers, and what are parallels to crypto exchanges 12:23 What’s so unique about their user onboarding process, and which parts have been inspired by Coinbase 19:00 How permissionless building inspired the community to build a bot to make onboarding greater 20:25 Why they went for slow growth… just like Facebook 22:44 Why are they more interested in Daily Active Users than sign-up growth 26:29 Special moments that Farcaster delivers and how they designed the app to facilitate them 30:00 Why they don’t have quote tweets 34:15 What apps have already been built on top of Farcaster 37:00 Why developers should be able to create new social experiences 38:39 History of pseudonymous co-creators of the US Constitution 40:00 Why does the growing amount of data inspire people to build apps on top of Farcaster 42:45 How web3 social makes it much easier to start a new social app 45:52 How does Farcaster works technically, and how it’s similar to Domain Name System 51:11 Why they gathered FC developers on Telegram instead of Discord 52:45 What’s the 6 months plan for Farcaster, and what’s their 3 years vision 55:50 How switching clients would help people to “build their own Facebook” 58:24 Where people can learn more about Farcaster

ZenGo has been the pioneer in MPC research and the most popular consumer MPC wallet in the world. Ouriel shares the backstage perspective of their early days, acquiring the first users, their product strategy, ClearSign wallet firewall, and marketing activities that led to over 700k users (which is a lot for a wallet!). Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/web3talks Follow Ouriel & Mac: https://twitter.com/OurielOhayon https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski 0:37 Who’s Ouriel Ohayon and why ZenGo is special 1:03 How Ouriel transformed from a crypto skeptic to a crypto optimist by listening to a podcast episode in 2016 3:10 Ouriel’s story when he didn’t like any wallets on the market and decided to design his own 5:10 How they researched different options and learned they couldn’t get rid of private keys so started researching MPC (Multi Party Computation) and became one of the world’s leaders in that space 10:25 How does MPC work, why it’s different from a traditional wallet security, what trade-offs does it make and why it’s being used by Coinbase, Fireblocks & American banks 18:04 What would happen when ZenGo’s servers go down and how they protect the company from this kind of events 19:53 What’s the difference between MPC and Account Abstraction 23:38 Why Mac would recommend ZenGo to his father 25:13 How have they acquired their first wallet users by marketing cryptopgrahy before they started marketing the wallet and how do they promote it now 30:15 How do they take care of the user’s security & UX 32:46 How do they make money and what are their plans for new services 35:55 How does their ClearSign wallet firewall protects the users from attacks 44:10 Why Mac believes we can solve crypto security 45:10 Why Ouriel thinks of crypto as an early car industry and the story about Elon Musk’s driving McLaren F1 with Peter Thiel 51:15 What were some dead-end streets that they explored 56:06 Why would Ouriel fix gas with his web3 magic wand 59:22 What could be solved in the web3 mobile experience 1:02:40 What made Ouriel smile 1:04:50 Where people can learn more about ZenGo 1:06:09 Guest idea

If you don't want to miss our episodes, subscribe to our Substack and get an e-mail whenever the new one comes out: https://web3talks.substack.com/ PoolTogether is known as the #1 DeFi protocol that encourages saving. Depositors participate in a lottery-like process where their deposited money can win prizes. But contrary to a lottery - even if they don't win, they keep their money. The luckiest winner ever deposited $73 and won over $43k, reaching a 589X return. How it's possible? How Leighton came up with the idea? How was PoolTogether built, how they got it secured, and how they dealt with the lawsuit?  Here's episode #30: 0:50 What is PoolTogether, and how it encourages saving 2:00 How PoolTogether started as the result of Leighton's research on TradFi tools that make people more wealthy 3:45 How blockchain makes the premium bonds model more transparent and scalable 5:40 How PoolTogether works technically: non-custodial design, integrations with yield sources, random numbers generation, price tiering contracts 9:19 How have they acquired the first users in May 2019? 12:10 Mitigating security risks via reducing attack surface area, no oracle dependencies, non-custodial design, internal testing, bug bounties, investing over $1M in third-party auditors 15:15 How have they educated the market about PoolTogether? 16:56 The story behind Poolies that raised over $1.5M for combating the lawsuit 24:11 At what stage is the lawsuit right now 26:00 What needs to happen for PoolTogether to reach a truly global adoption 21:30 How do they take care of the community 32:03 Why crowdfunding on the blockchain might be a killer app 34:22 What Leighton would fix with his web3 magic wand 36:35 Why MakerDAO & Gearbox blew his mind 38:42 Why was Uniswap airdrop such a magical moment for Leighton 41:20 Where people can learn more about PoolTogether 42:18 Leighton's guest ideas