Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Today, I’m joined by Robin Schmidt, video creator and former Head of Video & Content at The Defiant. In this episode, Robin and I talk about his love of cinema, 16mm film, Firewire, and anamorphic lenses. Robin tells me how his team found their groove making irreverent explainers and analysis with their video about Curve, and we discuss how The Defiant’s video team scaled production to 7-videos a week. Robin also sheds light on BasedAF, his upcoming PFP collection, and his ambition to create the MTV of the metaverse. It was great talking with Robin about his experience building at the intersection of crypto and the creator economy. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - The Defiant - That one time Nicholas was a guest on The Defiant - BasedAF - Make Art Now Youtube

Today, I’m joined by Matt Galligan, co-founder of XMTP Labs. XMTP is a messaging protocol built atop EVM wallets. Situating itself in the lineage of email protocol SMTP and Jabber IM protocol XMPP, XMTP aims to make DMs, notifications, group chats, and more available to everyone with a blockchain wallet. XMTP Labs, Matt’s new company, is the primary developer of the protocol. In this episode, Matt shares what it was like to be one of the very earliest Twitter users. We discuss his prior startups Socialthing and Circa, and his motivation for creating a decentralized comms protocol atop the existing blockchain infrastructure, today. Matt sheds light on why developers may choose to send messages using a shared protocol, rather than building their own solution or using a centralized service provider. It was great talking with Matt about XMTP. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - XMTP Litepaper - @xmtp_ - Relay app

Today, I’m joined by SirsuHayb to learn all about the past, present and future of esports gaming DAO BLVKHVND. Sirsu is a prolific Web3 builder and organizer. In 2021, Sirsu co-created The Mint Fund, Crypto Cookout, The Well, and the primary subject of today’s conversation, BLVKHVND. BLVKHVNDis an esports DAO. It’s essential premise: put ownership of an esports team into the hands of the players and fans. At the time of recording, BLVKHVND’s world class teams participate in Halo Infinite, Apex Legends, Pokemon Unite, CS:GO, and Rogue Company leagues. HVND also holds NFT gaming assets, including a significant Parallel NFT collection. In this episode, Sirsu explains the inner workings of BLVKHVND, and we dive into their latest project, Stadium, a Web3 platform for esports players to create teams and compete together. Sirsu is an inspiring creator who has used crypto crowdfunding tools to launch a series of communities all dedicated to increasing equity and access for participants in traditionally gatekept domains. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - The Mint Fund $BOUNTY fundraiser that led to Zora Auctions - BLVKHVND - Project Stadium

Today, I’m joined by NounsDAO developer Brian (aka @pbrianandj). Brian is one of a small group of developers in residence at NounsDAO. His work for the DAO is focused on the nouns.wtf website, which is the primary interface to the DAO’s daily auctions. Brian is also the creator of AddressForm, a Google Forms for Web3 SaaS product. In this episode, Brian tells me about his experience working on NounsDAO and the DAO’s builderly culture. We also discuss his new project, AddressBoard, which aims to replace the popular Discourse forum software, with a Web3 native alternative. Brian walks me through the process of applying for a Nouns Prop House grant to build AddressBoard, and we explore the merits of having onchain reputation built into the governance forum. NounsDAO is a fascinating ecosystem of projects and builders, and it was great to get a chance to learn from Brian about his experience as a Nounish Web3 developer. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed - Brian’s Twitter - nouns.wtf - AddressBoard Prop House Proposal - NounsStats.wtf

Today I’m joined by LordOfAFew (aka LOAF), Cairo developer and core dev at Realms. Realms started life as a Loot derivative NFT collection on Ethereum Mainnet. In the year since the collection’s initial deployment, LordOfAFew has led the charge transforming Realms into an onchain multiplayer resource management game. The first module will be called Realms: Eternum. In this episode, LOAF tell me about the creative constraints of onchain gaming. We dive into the game feel and mechanics of Eternum, and get a glimpse at future questing modules their composable ZK architecture enables. We’re also joined for brief appearances by fellow realms dev Threepwave and Starknet dev Eetherway. This episode grounds discussions of ZK GameFi potential in a concrete description of the Realms: Eternum game. I hope you enjoy the show.

Today I’m joined by Jonah Erlich and Ittai Svidler, cofounders of Den. Building on their experience coordinating multisig transaction signing in ConsitutionDAO, Jonah and Ittai are creating a suite of tools for operational multisig teams to create, track, and execute Gnosis Safe transactions. At the time of recording, Den comprises a webapp interface for building and annotating multisig transactions. Den also maintains Discord, Telegram, and SMS bots that can notify teams of pending transactions at regular intervals. In this episode we talk about the past, present, and future of onchain coordination. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed Operational teams need multisig coordination tooling ConstitutionDAO Gnosis Safe, SafeDAO, Zodiac Building on top of Safe Den today: Reading and signing multisig transactions  Den tomorrow: Constructing multisig transactions DAO Ops role: staff engineers that are facilitating DAO operations

At the end of each week, I sit down for a Friday afternoon conversation with some of the brightest people building web3. In this episode, I'm joined by David Silverman, Project Manager at Lens Protocol and Aave. Lens Protocol is a set of social publishing primitives, built for the EVM and currently deployed on the Polygon Network. David and I discuss the motivations for building Lens, its essential architecture and data structures, and the design decisions his team made when building this first iteration of the protocol. We chat about the power of data portability, the tension between social graph infrastructure and algorithmic discovery, and whether we would see frontend decentralization atop Lens, should the protocol gain traction. I learned a lot in this episode and came away very excited about the extensibility Lens provides to its users. I hope you enjoy the show.

Today, I’m joined by Nader Dabit, founder of DeveloperDAO. DeveloperDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization composed of thousands of Web3 developers. In this episode, author, educator, and developer relations specialist Nader Dabit walks us through discovering his passion for programming in his late 20s, his time at AWS and Edge & Node (creators of The Graph Protocol), and how he created the Devs for Revolution NFT that became the membership token for DeveloperDAO. We’re joined by DevDAO Operations Lead Kempster who sheds light on the many areas of activity the DAO engages in, and what to look forward to in the upcoming Season 1 launch. DeveloperDAO is an exciting emergent community for experienced and new devs alike. Their expansion into formal education, project incubation and investment is inspiring. I hope you enjoy the show. Produced by 0xSTVG.

Today I’m joined by Dan Romero. Dan is the co-founder of Farcaster and former VP of Operations at Coinbase. Farcaster is a decentralized communication protocol that uses Ethereum as a username registration service. Farcaster promises users a direct and uncensorable relationship with their audience. It promises developers permissionless access to all content on the network, no API required. In this conversation Dan walks me through the early days at Coinbase, and what he learned interfacing with global banks. We discuss the technical architecture of Farcaster, and how its security model maximizes decentralization while limiting risk for users’ Ethereum assets. Instacaster.xyz developer Zach Terrell joins the show to lend his perspective as a builder working with the Farcaster protocol. Few things in this world are more challenging than launching a successful new communications network, but Dan’s design for Farcaster is an exciting attempt to recreate the open and permissionless access of Web1, with the trustless assumptions enabled by blockchain and the rest of the Web3 technology stack. I hope you enjoy the show. If you would like to join Farcaster, sent Dan a DM on Twitter.

In this episode I’m joined by GUN founder Mark Nadal to discuss GUN. GUN, also known as GUNDB, is a real-time, decentralized, offline-first, graph database. In practice, GUN provides a Javascript API that allows webapps to sync data between peers with no centralized server dependency. GUN peers use WebRTC and similar transport protocols to sync data to localStorage and IndexedDB in the client. GUN also provides access controls, which allow developers to store encrypted data on the network. The API can be used in browser tabs, on mobile apps, or run as a relay peer in a NodeJS process on a cloud instance. In this conversation, GUN’s founding engineer Mark Nadal and I dive into the technical details to explain what makes GUN different from IPFS, WebRTC, and blockchains, and why so many devs are excited about GUN. I hope you enjoy the show. Topics Discussed · GUN in 100 seconds Youtube Video · Learn Cryptography in seven 1-minute videos · NERFs for photogrammetry · GUN for Metaverses · Comparison to IPFS · WebRTC, Gun Relays · Every Gun peer runs a WebRTC signalling peer · A GUN Instagram competitor by an early Bitcoin dev iris.to · Project built with GUN