Web3 games are taking off and Planet Mojo is one of the premiere titles leading the way. On Ep 23 of The Zeitgeist, CEO Mike Levine shares the web3 opportunity for game publishers, how digital ownership empowers gamers, and the future of community gaming. About Planet Mojo:Planet Mojo is an ecosystem of interconnected games built by Mystic Moose and set inside a mysterious alien planet with an evolving narrative. Players compete with customized teams of fantastical creatures in a suite of eSports, PvP games. The long-term goal is to create a sustainable and growing catalog of games for the next generation of gamers, empowering players by allowing them to own their in-game assets and have a say in the project’s future direction.Show Notes:01:02 - Background and how he started in Web3?04:34 - Unique challenges in Web307:25  - What is planet Mojo?         11:17  - Owning your assets in planet mojo12:50 - Is Mojo Planet a Play-to-own model?13:5 - The future of in-game economy in Web319:31 - Why are traditional gamers skeptical of NFTs?23:15 -  Would traditional games benefit from adding a Web3 component?24:54 -  The future of Web3 gaming    28:58 - A builder in the Web3 gaming ecosystem he admires?          Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Mike Levine. Mike is the CEO of Planet Mojo, one of the leading games on Polygon. Mike, welcome to the show.Mike Levine (00:28):Hello. Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be here.Brian Friel (00:32):I'm excited for you to be here as well. We got a lot of really awesome stuff to talk about. Just the time of recording this, I saw you guys sold out your first mint on Magic Eden. You've got this great ecosystem you guys are building out related the web 3.0 gaming. But before we dive into all that, I want to learn a little bit more about you. You have a very interesting background. You're a veteran of the gaming industry and you spent a lot of time at Lucas Arts Entertainment. Can you walk us through what your background is and why you started working in web 3.0?Mike Levine (01:02):Yeah, I started working at Lucas Arts in the early 90s, I'm going to make myself sound as old as I am. But I'm from the east coast in Massachusetts where I am now. But went out to California with dreams of, well, really going to grad school. But I needed a job and amazingly Lucas had one in the paper. Lucasfilm games at the time, and I went in and somehow convinced them to hire me, and just really clicked. I never considered it for a career at all. I'd played video games my whole life growing up and Nintendo and all kinds of other games, but I hadn't really played PC games, so I kind of had to lie a little. I remember when I called a friend back east who was like, tell me some PC games that I could tell them about. Little did I know they were about to release their first console game, so it was like, oh, you played console games?(01:52):And they're like, so yeah. And I started at the bottom floor I guess doing QA, which is a great place to start in the industry. But I didn't sort of let my dreams of why I moved to California die, and I took an internship, and I was working 90 hours a week at Lucas and this other place and I was learning all about basically the beginning of digital media and video, and started using the computers at Lucas. And next thing I knew I was working in the art department, I was really just using their Macs to practice Photoshop and the art director noticed it and was like, wait, you know Photoshop? But then I started to get more brave and propose ideas because I was just using these cutting edge tools. And I guess anyways, to fast forward, that theme has gone throughout my whole career because I'm always sort of tinkering with what's new and what's next.(02:40):And yeah to give you the quick version, worked on some amazing games at Lucas. Went on to sort of create the visual effects department there, and did some great games. And eventually it was a pretty big mass exodus of people that I was at the beginning of. But went on to do a startup with people from ILM because the visual effects department or company that Lucas owns or did. But I had worked with them a lot just because all these techniques we were doing and Skywalker ran, so did a startup with those guys for a couple years, it was more about tools and effects, and wanted to get back to games. I missed games after not being in it. So I moved back to the east coast, started my own companies, and over the years I've just done a mix of our own games but also done service work to survive with Hasbro and Spin Master and other things.(03:33):And we had a great run doing augmented reality, and we had Apples game of the day, and worked with Phil Tippett, but also worked with big companies like Niantic and others. And ultimately that disillusioned with mobile AR, at least the short term future of it. And we made a VR game a couple years ago for Sam and Max, which was a game I worked on the original way back at Lucas. So that was a lot of fun. But during that game, that's when I started getting obsessed with first NFTs, and then blockchain and blockchain games, and that's how we got here.Brian Friel (04:09):That's awesome. So you painted an awesome story there. I guess starting from the bottom at QA intern, rising up. And you've worked on titles that you didn't mention, but like Jedi Knight, the Force Within, Rebel Assault One and Two, so you've seen what it takes to make really successful video games. Coming into the Web 3.0 space, what have you noticed that's different? What is uniquely challenging about web 3.0?Mike Levine (04:34):We could talk for the next half hour just about this, but it's completely different, and it's completely the same. And I think that's what we're seeing now, is each company finding that balance of what is a web 3.0 game right now? You have some that are completely on chain and others that are completely off chain. And then there's things like us, which are in between which some people call Web 2.5 or whatever. But I think we're closer to 3.0 than 2.5. But I say as someone new coming into the space, which I was a year and a half ago at least, it's an overwhelming amount of stuff to learn. People say the rabbit hole for crypto and web 3.0 and blockchain. And as I've talked about here, we've gone down other tech rabbit holes in my career learning all about AR and everything related to it.(05:23):That was a pretty deep rabbit hole, but nothing compared to this, right? There's just so much more. And it took at least six months to just sort of get our bearings, get our sea legs basically, where it's like you start to figure out what's important, what's not important. And a big part of that at the beginning, because there was still so much lack of clarity, was making a good game. Making a fun game. We were in the minority I think on that in the beginning when everyone was kind of obsessed with play to earn and we're like, well let's make sure the game's fun. Because everything else kind of stems from that. Or you're really just going to have people there only to earn. And I'm not an Axie slammer, but that's kind of what we saw happen there, right?Brian Friel (06:10):Right, that makes sense.Mike Levine (06:11):So yeah, I mean there's massive differences, and I think it's really about finding your rudder and then once you do, just going for it basically. And there's just a lot of noise in this space. So it's constantly, is this call important? Should we partner with this company? How many partnerships can we do? Because we're still a relatively small company, you can spread yourself thin in this space. And then you have the whole Web 2.0 side of it, which maybe want to save that for another question if it comes up.(06:41):But yeah, just taking that on and trying to bring people over to web 3.0, it's easier when you're just in web 3.0 and these are already the converts, so we don't have to convince them. And I think there are other companies that are content to just sort of stay in this web 3.0 echo chamber right now. But I feel like the reason us and all these companies were able to get funding, the whole idea was games can bring more people into web 3.0. So if we only stay in with the converted, we're not really doing that justice. So that's kind of been our philosophy.Brian Friel (07:15):Trying to grow the pie. I totally resonate with that. So I think this might be a good time to talk a little bit about your project Planet Mojo. What is Planet Mojo in your own words?Mike Levine (07:26):Yeah, planet Mojo is an ecosystem of interconnected games built by us, Mystic Moose. That's the company. It is set in a mysterious alien planet, which we're going to keep revealing more about over time. We're really just the first chapter now, and we like to say it has an evolving narrative, just like the game has evolving seasons, eventually. Players compete with customized teams in our first game, Mojo Melee of fantastical creatures in a suite of eSport PVP games over time, because we plan to make more games soon.(07:58):The long-term goal is to create a sustainable growing catalog of games for the next generation of gamers. Empowering players by allowing them to own their in-game assets and have a say in the project's future direction/ which is a really simple way of saying we believe in decentralization and player ownership, digital property rights and all those fun things.Brian Friel (08:20):And so when you first had the idea to go into web 3.0, did you have this vision of what Planet Mojo would be, and was Planet Mojo the catalyst for this? Or was it more that you were interested in web 3.0, you wanted to tinker with new technologies, and Planet Mojo kind of arose out of that curiosity? Which way would you say that evolved?Mike Levine (08:39):It was a lot of things coming together. I mean first off, we love creating original IP. We've done that over the years. We created an indie game before the term existed, Colin Insecticide, I think part one is still on Steam and it was on the DS as well. And that was a complete fantasy, amazing fictional world that a lot of us worked on, a lot of friends from Lucas Arts. So creating original worlds and IP is not easy, but it's something we enjoy a lot. And we also just know from history sort of that whenever new platforms are born, new paradigms begin. That's usually when new IP is born, or has a chance to be born before the big licenses and IP. We've seen this over and over Whenever a new console launches. You see it with AxiE and things like this, that just IPS kind of rise. So it seemed like a great opportunity.(09:40):But yeah, I mean I guess before that we really had the specific idea, it was just the understanding what web 3.0 was, and we didn't even call it that then, right? Crypto games or game-fi or whatever we were calling it. But just understanding what that was going to mean to the players, to the developers, what it could do to gaming in general. People talk a lot about indie games and that's a big thing in games, but I'm here to break it to you, it's a bit of a fallacy. It's like there's thousands of indie games that don't really succeed, and then we have one or two that sort of propel, it's kind of being a rockstar when I grew up. It was like, good luck, right.(10:20):And that doesn't mean you can't do it, but the game is kind of rigged. There's usually outside funding involved, and publishers, and the platform fees. And so web 3.0 was a way to me also it's like wow, we can flip the script here and have more control as indies, and control of our own destiny, and it was like the evolution of community. We've seen community and gaming become a huge thing over the last decade. This is the natural evolution of community to me.Brian Friel (10:52):Yeah, that's very well put. So let's dive in a little more then. You've mentioned you paint this great picture here of players owning their assets, the decentralization aspect of it. How exactly does this work in Planet Mojo? So for reference, you guys just had this mint madness NFT moment on Magic Eden, you guys sold out in four seconds. I imagine these NFTs are used in game, is that correct?Mike Levine (11:17):Yeah, I mean first and foremost and we really have taken a, we're the tortoise not the hair approach to the blockchain, and we haven't launched our token, and we've always wanted to take a slow and steady approach to it.(11:30):So yeah, first and foremost, and we're literally still hooking this up right now. It's about to be done. But if you own the Champion NFTs, you will have them in the game. We're soon, we've kind of spoiled the players up to now by the way, because we've been in alpha, we haven't really worried about the game progression too much, and we've just kind of given everything to players to make tournaments more fun. But we're really only a few weeks away from being an open beta. And that's when we'll be taking everything away from everyone and resetting all stats, and then people will have to play to unlock champions and abilities, and spell stones, and different skins, and eventually arenas when we hook those up, because those could be NFTs as well, maybe. Intent.(12:16):So, yeah. When you own them you will automatically unlock them to use in teams and play within the game, and you won't have to worry about the progression, just like free to play. But the difference here of course is you truly own it. You can sell it if you want at any point on open markets or our marketplace when we launch it. And our whole thing is as we launch more games, you're going to get to use that character in our other games as well, only if you own it as a NFT.Brian Friel (12:44):And so this model it's kind of like a play to own model, which I've heard about. Is that a correct characterization?Mike Levine (12:50):Yes. I mean I love and hate acronyms I guess I'll just go on record of saying that. But we do kind of need them in a way. And I think I can certainly get behind that a lot more than anything with the term earn in it. Because that was just a bad idea. Free to own, I know Gabe really pushes that, but I always was just like, wait a minute. Let's not take play out of this. If we're really going to have an acronym debate now. The word play should be at the center of this. There's just not enough words. So that's why I like play to own.Brian Friel (13:25):I like that as well. So then talk to us a little bit about the economy of this game. You guys are building this world, you're going to be adding on a piece arenas over time, this thing's going to continually evolve. Players also own their own assets, but you made a point up front to be like, this isn't something where we're just advertising a quick way to make money in this game. How do you see the in-game economy here evolving over time?Mike Levine (13:52):Good question. And back to the last point related too, we do plan to add other features to owning the NFTs. And I didn't even mention by the way that we have what we call a, it's an in-game collection tier basically. And the very easy way to explain it is the more NFTs you own, the more chances for rewards and prizes you're going to get in the game. Because we sort of tally up, look at all of the NFTs you own, there's like a point system, and you'll sort of have a different tier, and then each month you'll get these collection tier points basically that you can put towards our premium quest, which if you didn't own them would take much, much longer to unlock, basically. So that's another thing. And we also want to eventually have some form of sort of holding slash staking with rewards as well.(14:39):And then moving to your question just about the economy. So right now we just have a soft currency in the game, it's called Ore, or you're going to earn it through the battles, it's going to help you rank up, level up. There's a whole free battle pass system that you get battle pass points for that unlock assets, champions, currency, all kinds of things. We're going to have a hard currency too. And by the way, just backing up, because I don't even think we really explained or, I jumped over this, my fault.(15:09):But so our game is Mojo Melee. It is a next generation strategy auto-chess battler. We've been nominated in a bunch of the web 3.0 award shows, which has been in great. The game's currently still in alpha, it's in the browser base game, so you can play it right in our web browser, and we are planning to take it to mobile very soon as well. So I just want to make sure we explain what the game was-Brian Friel (15:34):Cover those bases. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Mike Levine (15:36):And you can play, if anyone has played team fight tactics, that's kind of where these games really came from Dota 2, Underlords, but Teamfight Tactics has sort of become the most popular one. But making this for blockchain and why we say we feel it's like the next evolution of these games, even taking the web 3.0 part out of it, is all those games really came from PC downloadable. There are mobile versions, but TFT matches can take easily 30 minutes to play. And we wanted to make something that was faster paced. Even the browser version, when you play it, you'll notice it feels like a mobile game, that's because we designed it that way. So when you're playing it on mobile, the matches can take 5 to 10 minutes, you can play against one-on-one or eight other players at a time. It's like a round-robin tournament format, which is another one of the big reasons we chose the genre to start off with because we did take a lot of time debating what kind of game do we want to make first.(16:33):And we just thought this was a great way to introduce the world, the characters, and this is the other big thing we changed with these games is we're like, okay, players are going to own their characters. And normally these games up to now and it's very new genre, but you typically played with a shared deck. So players are playing against each other but they're pulling from the same deck. And what we did was kind of make it more like Hearthstone and other games and we kind of took that out of it, we made it more about collection and team building. Where you have just insane amount, every time we add a champion or a spell stone, which is another element we added, it just gives you insane combinations to try and strategy in terms of how you lay them out and use them.Brian Friel (17:18):The theory crafting because endless, yeah.Mike Levine (17:20):Yeah. So we sort of made a new paradigm sort of around that, and as we were making it, Supercell started testing their auto-chess game and they actually did something pretty similar so we were like okay, they're pretty smart, we must be onto something. So it just gave us confidence that we were on the right path.Brian Friel (17:37):That's good validation.Mike Levine (17:39):Yeah. Their game is way more casual. We kind of built something in between TFT and what they built. But yeah, web 3.0 with community we're always listening, and we've taken huge amounts of feedback. I mean we started privately play testing it last August, and so we've definitely listened to the community, we've added tons of features that people have asked for, and we may even add longer form matches eventually, enough people request them. But our sort of goal right now is to get into open beta and test like I was saying the progression and the retention, and all this awards and things like that in the game.Brian Friel (18:20):That's great. That's a big overview. Thank you for that. I guess I'm obligated to ask this question for all your fans who are listening, but when beta? Can you share anything about that?Mike Levine (18:29):I mean we're real close here. I would tell you within two weeks, but we have this little thing coming up called GDC and a bunch of our team is going there, so we may decide to wait till right after that, just till we're all back. So we're talking hopefully before March is over I'm fairly confident we'll get open beta, knock on wood.Brian Friel (18:51):Right on. So I guess switching gears a little bit, at the start of this conversation you talked about the idea of growing the pie and that right now web 3.0 is relatively to all the gaming industries that are out there, it's a small subset of user base. There's people who really resonate with it, but then the vast majority of gamers maybe don't care or don't see the value prop. But I'd say there's also, I've seen a little bit of blow back where anytime the term NFT is mentioned to traditional gamers, a lot of times it elicits this response where people immediately say, no, I don't want it, I don't like it.Mike Levine (19:26):It's a trigger word.Brian Friel (19:27):It has become a bit of a trigger word. Why do you think that's the case?Mike Levine (19:31):Oh, this is very simple actually. And first of all, we don't have NFTs in our game. We have digital collectibles.Brian Friel (19:39):Good marketing.Mike Levine (19:40):And I've seen a lot more people use this term, especially who are bringing it to the masses or trying to. But I was talking about this for many months ago, just that the web 3.0 gaming space needs to break free of the NFT space. And it hasn't yet. Because there are these rules, many of which are very silly in the NFT space. You've got to sell out, and in terms of pricing, and distribution, and quantity and just all the sort of FOMO around it, and not to mention all the scams and rug pulls and it's like, we've been on tons of calls in the beginning of this where meeting with very DeFi crypto groups on Telegram. And at the beginning we were just sort of surprised at all the questions, it was like, how do we know this isn't a scam and all this stuff?(20:30):And we're like, we've been doing this for over 20 years, this is what we do. We make games, we do what we say, but we get it. So I think that's, the mass public, first of all I think it's a myth actually that gamers hate this. I really do. They hate something else. It's all that stuff we were just talking about. And I think we hit the peak hate months ago. I think we've been getting much more people like yeah, I'm interested in this actually, and what's it all about? And I just know from firsthand experience, that's why every time now when I'm doing these spaces or whatever I'm trying to say, everyone on this call, we're in the bubble already. What you have to do is everyone go bring in one friend. Just go talk to your friends about this, because there's nothing more powerful to this day in any media than word of mouth.(21:23):I just saw a chart on this, and it's like over 50% the most powerful form of user acquisition. And I just know from firsthand experience, when I talk to gamers young and old, what are you doing now? I'm making a web 3.0 game. What's that? Crypto. And then I say, well, have you ever thought about owning your assets and what that means? And then literally their eyes open up. What are you talking about? Because they're like gamers, they stream, they're watching Fortnite and playing Call of Duty, like wait a minute, that skin that I paid so much for, I could sell it? Yeah. Ooh, tell me more. So this has to be a grassroots campaign really to win over people. See, this is the big difference here is that people like to compare this to free to play, and it's not the greatest analogy. Because free to play had one thing, I don't know if I should say over us, but it was the main point of it.(22:25):It was free. Right in the title. And to the average consumer, to Joe 6-pack, whatever, they don't care about decentralization and blockchain and immutable and any of that stuff. They want to know is this a good deal for me? What's in it for me? And if we just explain to them, yes, you can own it, there's value in it, you can make it better by playing, and when our new games come out, you're going to be able to use it. Maybe you can use it in other games. It's really a lot of value. It just has to be explained to players.Brian Friel (23:03):Well put. I guess on that thread then, are there any traditional games that you think should be adding like a web 3.0 component in the short term that you think would be in that benefit?Mike Levine (23:16):No, none.Brian Friel (23:18):Interesting. You want to expand on that?Mike Levine (23:19):I want them to pay out and be ignorant and let us dominate. Usually happens in others game cycles and then they come in and want to acquire companies like us or have to play catch up. I mean Disney, other companies, they're still playing catch up on mobile and things like that.(23:39):So look, I can't control what they're going to do. And we're already seeing from Asia, being in North America and Europe, I think we're heavily biased by the sentiment in Asia. From every people I talk to over there, which is a lot and Reid, the sentiment's almost the opposite. They're bullish. So you're seeing, look at Oasis and all the companies that they've brought in from that side of the world. I don't have to even sit here and say what companies should add it because it's happening. Those companies are doing it. Will the big companies from North America and Europe? We'll see. Let's put it this way. If they see those companies making money, you can bet. But there's the legality and all that involved too. And that's where startups can afford to be nimble and take risks. So I don't have a crystal ball, but I know it's going to be an interesting year.Brian Friel (24:33):Yeah. Well I know you said you don't have a crystal ball. But I want to know, blockchain is young, especially in the gaming space in particular, everyone's I think still figuring out what the right kind of primordial soup of ideas and gaming talent, trying new things. Where do you think the space goes from here? In the next year or two, how do you think the space unfolds?Mike Levine (24:55):I mean, there are a lot of roadblocks for games right now in this space. On the mobile side we have Apple with their guidelines, which is depending on who you talk to a step forward or also very restrictive, or sometimes a deal breaker as we've seen with other companies. And on the PC side, again, we're sort of limited. Epic will allow games. So in some ways this space is back to the 1990s and 2000s where everyone has their own website and come here and make your own account and connect your wallet. But yesterday, the Amazon rumor was in the press again, right, about their marketplace. And you're seeing big Web 2.0 players get into the space. So if I'm going to make wild predictions or my hopes even, is that those are the companies that kind of need to help bring in the masses, and hopefully some of those barriers will come down, or the smart ones will realize the opportunity, the GameStops, who already jumped into it.(26:05):And I think those people who have those relationships already, and a lot of those companies like overseas and Japan, China, et cetera where they're so bullish on it, it seems like it's an even easier path. But I think those gateways will sort of lead the way. And of course just more and better games finally coming out. So the public can see, oh wait, there are some cool, actual games here in the web 3.0 space. And I always make the analogy about this space, and I think I've even realized it's bigger than I was making it, because I think it pertains to anything like pro sports, whatever, but I usually make it with gaming. Is that there are ways to earn in Web 2.0 games today. You can go to tournaments, Magic the Gathering, card game, and you can make millions of dollars and travel around there.(26:56):But that only applies to a certain percentage of people in gaming. You think about eSports and all this, right? There's like three spheres to this really that intersect, that help all drive each other. There's the professional level, then there's the spectators, the fans, the people who really pay attention, who are watching. And then there's the mass audience who just plays the game. And that's why I'm saying that it's no different than golf. The people who watch golf or NBA like, oh, I want to wear the shoes he's wearing, and I want to get the shirt he wears. Or like my son, I want to get Jason Tatum's high school jersey. I'm like, are you kidding me? And you're going to see that same parallels here. And it's just like in web 3.0, the earning part is going to appeal to some people. And it should be there and all the web 3.0 aspects, but you have to have those three layers.(27:55):That's why we think we made a PVP game and eSports are important to this. That's why we did a tournament, and worked with a lot of creators. And that's really important here kind of to take it to the masses, and let everyone kind of choose at what level they want to go down their own rabbit hole. Do I want a wallet? Do I want to own these NFTs? And the idea is going to start to snowball. And the early adopters are going to be like yeah, I want to own these things. And then other people are like, why are they owning them? I should probably own them too. I'm putting all this time in here, maybe I should actually own my assets. And yeah, that's where I think it's going to go. That's my optimistic feel. I ended more optimistic than I started.Brian Friel (28:36):That's great. That's a good way to do it. And also on the word of mouth part as well, which you said, the most powerful force of growing, word of mouth.Mike Levine (28:44):Totally.Brian Friel (28:45):Mike, this has been awesome. I guess on this last topic of getting more games into the space, we always end our podcast with a similar question. I want to ask this for you. Who is a builder in the web 3.0 gaming ecosystem that you admire?Mike Levine (28:59):Oh boy. It's easier for me to name projects because we're big fans of multiple people at these projects. So like Trap Knoll, we're very good friends with, and Undead Blocks and Phantom Galaxies, and I mean, I know I'm going to forget people I feel like. I mean, BoomLand were really supportive to us because they did their mint before us. And just Magic Eden, the people there, Matt, Knock, Liz, and Polygon. The people at Polygon are building too, I think. So probably named more than you wanted. But yeah, there's so many projects.Brian Friel (29:40):The more the merrier.Mike Levine (29:41):Yeah, I mean we're always looking at other projects. At the beginning we were always just, whoa, what are those guys doing? And then you get to the point where it's like, well, maybe they don't know any more than we do. So that's where everyone starts, the creativity comes from. You start seeing cool ideas.Brian Friel (29:58):That's awesome. Well, you named a lot of folks there. I guess all potential upcoming podcast guests, we'll have to reach out to them as well. Well Mike, this is a really fantastic discussion. Thanks for sharing a bit about your history and your journey from Lucas all the way to now pioneering web 3.0 gaming. Where can people go more to learn about Planet Mojo and Mojo Melee?Mike Levine (30:18):Easiest is this go to planetmojo.io, and then there are links right on the top right to our Discord, that's really where all the action is. Please join our Discord, Twitter, and there's a link to the game. You can play the game right now in alpha. We're actually hoping to push an update up today. Well, I guess my, it'll be last week when this comes out. But that's a play.planetmojo.io.Brian Friel (30:41):Awesome. Mike Levine, thank you so much for coming on the show.Mike Levine (30:44):Thanks for having me.

Launched in 2019, Rarible is one of the leading community-centric multichain NFT marketplaces. As an aggregated multichain marketplace, Rarible is unique in that it supports NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tezos, and Immutable X. Rarible also offers users the ability to create their own marketplaces in just a couple of clicks.Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Alex Salnikov sits down with Brian Friel to talk about Rarible's rich suite of products and services, his current views on NFTs, and where NFTs are headed next.About Alex:Alex Salnikov is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Rarible, a top-ranked community-centric NFT marketplace. A blockchain trailblazer and an active developer in the crypto space since 2012, Alex previously served as the Chief Technology Officer of CoinOffering, the first company to offer its shares in the form of blockchain assets. With a BA in Computer Science and an MA in Data Science, Alex’s specialties span a variety of sectors including market analysis, decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenomics. Show Notes:01:06 -  Who he is and how Rarible started04:38 - How Rarible differentiated itself from othe marketplaces06:30 - Community marketplace products10:20 - RARI foundation. What is that? Can you dive a little into what that's all about?13:39- Rarible DAO and the RARI token 16:10 - Multichain NFT marketplace vs single chain22:17 - His current view on NFTs. What is exciting?25:39 -  What is limiting NFTs?  27:42 -  A builder he admires in the ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:05):Hey everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Alex Salnikov, the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Rarible, one of the leading top ranked community centric NFT marketplaces. Alex, welcome to the show.Alex Salnikov (00:28):Hello. Hey Brian. Thank you so much for having me today. It's going to be an exciting talk. Thank you to our listeners for connecting and to hearing our chat. I'm excited.Brian Friel (00:41):I'm excited as well. This is a great time to be having this conversation. Right about this time, Phantom is gearing up to launch its multi-chain beta out to the public and you guys are super well positioned for this being one of the first NFT marketplaces to take a very multi-chain approach. I want to get into all that today with you, but maybe before we go into all that, let's start with a little bit about you. Who are you and how did you start building Rarible?Alex Salnikov (01:06):I have a computer science background. I've been getting my degree in one of the best economic universities in my country before moving to the United States, and that was the most pro-Western liberal part of university. And I guess that laid a big foundation for me to be predisposed to crypto because the crypto is very openness, pro-liberal environment. And even before that, during high school I was trying to earn money online and I had a lot of troubles with just accepting payments. Everybody was like, Hey, give us your passport and KYC," and, "Oh, you're not 18 yet. We can't really work with you." That doesn't make sense at all to me.(01:49):So in the first or second year in my university, I discovered crypto, never left the space. It was 2012. I can say that I'm born crypto, never done anything else. Fell down the rabbit hole as soon as I read Bitcoin white paper because of the very fruitful background that I've been growing in. And yeah, started doing startups with my college partner. We did a lot of cool stuff that eventually grow into Rarible. I mean not exactly grown into Rarible, but our experience of doing projects led us to do Rarible because of the following of the natural progression. There was exchanges like DeFi stuff and NFTs. So we tried all of that and NFTs were the most consumer native out of all that. DeFi is for nerds.(02:42):And NFTs are for people. We always had been doing something for nerds and we wanted to do something for people. And I'm joking. It's not that I'm disrespectful. We wanted to do something for people and it was just so much fun. We traded a little NFTs and my experience of facing obstacles with online ownership, it made so much sense when you have an item and you can change the wallet. You enter the same 12 words into another wallet and you have all the same NFTs with you, you don't like the marketplace, you connect your wallet to another marketplace. So it feels maybe not that important. Many projects saying, "Okay, we'll do email and password." But this idea when you can change your tools and have all the same environment, this is what sells you that vision because you feel like you are the owner, not someone else is the owner. You feel control and ownership and that is the key part of all the NFT market.Brian Friel (03:45):Yeah. No, I totally agree. It's that ability to exit anytime and not requiring the permission of somebody else. That's really cool too your experience early on with online businesses, especially in a foreign country. Where did you grow up, by the way? What country did you grow up in?Alex Salnikov (03:59):Russia. One of the most restricted.Brian Friel (04:02):Yeah, trying to operate an online business as a teenager in Russia, it's probably one of the best educations for the value of this kind of stuff. That's awesome to hear. So you mentioned you're in university, you start 2012 in crypto, you're going through iterations with your co-founders on DeFi, then you get to NFTs. And I agree, NFTs was really one of the first mainstream consumer applications of crypto that it kind of clicked for everybody. Let's talk a little bit about Rarible. So when you guys started Rarible, what was different about Rarible that you guys decided to do at the time from some of the other marketplaces that were out there?Alex Salnikov (04:38):Rarible was probably one of the first five NFT companies that went out there and back then, OpenSea was around, SuperRare was around, a couple other platforms were around and there weren't almost any NFTs. So you had all the wallets, you had all the collectibles, tabs on your wallets, all the infrastructure, on ramp marketplace, but it was almost none NFT. There was a couple copies of CryptoKitties basically. And even if you wanted to create an NFT, you needed to either deploy a smart contract yourself or you needed to go to SuperRare, submit an application to get accepted, wait several weeks and then to create something.(05:26):And for us, after spending that much time in the crypto, it was a little contrarian to the openness and all the values that you bring. You're the owner. You don't want to ask anyone before creating an NFT. So we just did a simple experiment. We created a page that allowed you to create an NFT, no verification, no questions, upload your picture, upload your name, description, royalties, and connect the wallet, deploy your own smart contract and deploy your own token and all that just direct access to the chain without any intermediary. This just blew up. Apparently the crypto people resonated with that vision.Brian Friel (06:10):That's awesome. I love that. I think that's a good segue into some of the features that you guys have going now as well. So you started that kind of self-serve, create your own NFT marketplace. You guys have continued that same sort of spirit with your community marketplace products. What are some of those? Can you give us an overview of those products that you guys are building for the community?Alex Salnikov (06:30):The whole story goes more or less like this. Just a year after Rarible is life, we are taking a look at the market and we understand that the potential of NFTs is just so much more and so much wider than art market, than PFP market. We are very early at this point of even discover of the market what's possible with NFTs. And we understand that the more the market develops, we will need different verticals, like best for gaming, best for tickets, best for art, best for music, best for everything. And just naturally I feel like a big part of our team, the big part of the company DNA is technical. Both our co-founders are technical by background, our CTO, head of product, a lot of technical experience, a lot of just even math and physics background. So when we were deciding, "Oh, let's build a marketplace," without even realizing that we created an indexer that reads all data on chain, stores all NFTs in our database. Because it felt like, "Okay, let's do it."(07:41):And turns out that's a big strength that we have as a marketplace and that's one of the hardest part for other marketplaces to go and actually to use. That's why we created product, which is called Rarible Protocol. We wanted to go down the layer of infrastructure and power the next generation of NFT products, be it this platform that you want to build a wallet, like Phantom for example, and you need to have API to access, "Oh, what are even the current users NFTs that he owns? Or what's the market data for these current NFTs? What is the floor prices for the current NFTs that they own? What is the metadata for them?" So this product is called Rarible Protocol and it exists for two years now.(08:26):The next thing that we learned is that there's still pretty heavy stack to build on top of that protocol. If you want to create a marketplace, you need that API and moreover, you need to have a great UI on top of this. And a great UI still takes a lot of time to build. That's why we went ahead and created the UI offering too. Here is your protocol, here is your API, and here is your UI to create your own marketplace.Brian Friel (08:53):These are all tools that are being used by creators essentially to have their own community centric marketplace that's powered by Rarible in the background.Alex Salnikov (09:01):Yes. At this point, we have almost 2,000 marketplaces created with this infrastructure, both UI and protocol. There is not much, maybe 10 projects that is using Protocol directly without the UI, but quite extensively. I think like Coinbase Wallet hits us pretty hard with some API calls and several others. So all this is just all this shared vision that we want to power the next generation of apps, of marketplaces, of protocols. The community marketplace today is a no code tool. A creator can come if they have their own collection and create a marketplace using our UI and UX without actually even writing any code. You can deploy your own marketplace in minutes tomorrow.Brian Friel (09:48):That's awesome. I love that. So you have all these tools which for most people who are interested in maybe creating their own NFTs, the infrastructure set up and the software side of things is usually the biggest hurdle. So you guys are eliminating that from people's stack. You guys also have this white glove service. I know that's being used by a number of NFT projects, some even on Solana that shout out to Degenerate Ape Academy who has built their own marketplace with you guys there. And then you guys have this thing called RARI Foundation. What is that? Can you dive into a little bit about what that's all about?Alex Salnikov (10:20):Yes. Yes, of course. Wow, we have a lot of things. Shout out to Degenerate Ape Academy, a great partner. They've been actually maybe the second or third project to use our white glove solution, the first on Solana and the biggest on Solana. So we love the partner. The very foundation, so as many of you know the Rarible issued this thing called RARI governance token quite early in the days. And the idea is that this is the governance token for the Protocol. It is fairly standard, as we know, route for the projects to gain security and credibility and neutrality. So why Curve is great, because it is fully on chain, you don't need to trust anyone and it is community owned. You have an exposure to the activity that happens on Curve with Siri.(11:25):Usually the companies that do that in order to prevent the conflict of interest, you want these companies to be separate. You want to have a lapse company that is doing software and you want to have a foundation that is overseeing the actual governance and the token, and this is what RARI Foundation is. If you would go to RARI.foundation, you would see everything regarding the token incentives, the fully on chain governance. It's a cutting edge governance that we created. I don't know if our listeners are familiar with the VeToken model. It's vote escrow token. In order to vote in the foundation, you need to log your area for the certain amount of time, and the longer you log them, the more Ve RARI you get because you are committed to be with the project long term you're looking for two years. The votes of people who are known to be committed for two years are much more valuable than votes from people who will not be here tomorrow. I think Curve pioneered with this model and we at RARI Foundation actually created the first solid implementation of the VeToken model.Brian Friel (12:36):Oh, no way. I didn't know that. That's awesome.Alex Salnikov (12:37):So if you want to launch the VeToken model, you can come to us and we would help you to set up DAO. And it's not easy today. A bunch of projects sit on the tokens that cannot be even used in voting because they don't have the snapshotting mechanism. I know we're getting into the weeds, but if you created your project several years ago and didn't think that you will use it in Adel, it might not be possible. And by adding VeToken, using OpenZeppelin Governor and using Tally as the interface, you can have a full featured, very robust DAO that is fully on chain that can operate budget, that can operate treasury, and that will weigh much more committed votes in favor of those that are not committed. It's great.Brian Friel (13:24):That's awesome. So the purpose of the Rarible DAO and the RARI token, as I understand, is that you guys have plans for this over time to take ownership of this Rarible Protocol that we talked about earlier. Can you talk a little bit about the current state of that?Alex Salnikov (13:39):It's all started kind of blended together. There is Rarible, there is Rarible Marketplace, there is Rarible Protocol and the governance and ownership of that is blended. So the end state is there is RARI Foundation that has fully robust on chain governance that overtook the Rarible Protocol and governance of the Rarible Protocol. The Rarible is doing laps, it develops the protocol, it develops the code. It submits the proposals to the foundation sometimes like, "Oh there is a new version. Can you please approve that?" And today the RARI Foundation has full control over the undistributed supply of RARI, something like around 40% of the network, and the full control over the governance processes and the branding and IP of the token. That's the step one.(14:31):The step two would be establishing participation requirements. There are certain activity requirements at which we can say, "Oh, now the foundation is ready to overtake the Rarible Protocol." And then RARI Foundation will overtake it and Rarible will just operate the front end on top of that. So that's the end state and end goal where we're going. Yeah.Brian Friel (14:52):That's super cool. Well, it seems like you guys have been on this track from day one with your community minded perspective here, so it's really cool to see that being laid out in front of everything.Alex Salnikov (15:03):Yeah, it is not easy. We had all this community spirits, but this is more or less the duration of the DAO. Even the first was signaling DAO and it was signaling, but there was not much execution done. The second was an onboarding DAO. We've been doing grants to work on protocol and there was a lot of participation, there was a lot of people working at the DAO, but the effectiveness was quite low, just too much coordination. This is the third version. Yeah.Brian Friel (15:32):So I want to take a little step back here and talk about how you guys have been multi-chained basically from day one. This has been something that wasn't always the norm, especially coming from Ethereum very much focusing on Ethereum and maybe other EVM chains. You guys were one of the first to recognize Solana, integrating there, then taking a step further, adding Tezos, Immutable X, and this comes at a really interesting time because as we're recording this show, Phantom is gearing up for its multi-chain launch. I want to hear from you, how has it been building a multi-chain NFT marketplace, and what insights have you found in building that that might inform you what you think the future of this multi-chain versus single-chain narrative will play out?Alex Salnikov (16:11):Yeah, this is a great question. We started with adding the second chain that was flow as early as Autumn 2021, so quite early. And of course, the narrative behind multi-chain is always easier. There is Ethereum. There is a lot of artists that are unhappy with paying a hundred dollars of gas prices to create their NFT. So what do we do? We adopt a faster chain and the future is going to be bright. Not that fast.(16:45):I guess the biggest learning of multi-chain development is that it's quite easy to buy that narrative that we will abstract away the blockchain from the user and the user doesn't even need to know, the same way the user doesn't know that we use HTTP when we run a website or HTTPS, but we're not there yet in terms of the community. A lot of these chains, they are networks. They're networks of communities and these communities have values and these values are sometimes even opposed to each other. Somebody compromised decentralization in favor of speed. Somebody compromised speed in favor of decentralization and it gets even political. There is not much intersection between these blockchains, at least yet.(17:31):We're seeing more and more of conformity. Say at some point Ethereum and maybe Cosmos and maybe Arbitrum and maybe Polygon and Solana at this point are almost equal chains in the sense they're commonly accepted as being cool. The more the subset of okay chains are growing, the more we can grow towards the multi-chain vision. But before that, it was like you support the chains, but users of one chain, thinks that the users of other chain is almost like political enemies to you. So this is the biggest learning, bootstrapping the network on the new chain is much more hard than we could have expected. We tried going that route and multiple projects followed that route. I think OpenSea followed that route and struggled to get a meaningful market share from Magic Eden on Solana. Magic Eden added Ethereum and struggled to get meaningful market share from OpenSea on Ethereum. Now everybody's going to Polygon. We'll see how it gets there. It's much more interesting.(18:43):But yeah, we're seeing convergence obviously, but it happened two years after we added the first chain. Doodles migrated to Flow. We're seeing some convergence between ease in Flow. But again, this happened two years after we added that. We were a little ahead of time to get there.Brian Friel (19:03):Yeah. You guys were early to all that. I am curious though, you mentioned there's this narrative that some people have, definitely not everyone in crypto, but it's like, "Oh, in the future we're going to abstract away what chain you're using." And it's just like you're using a normal website and it doesn't notice anything. Do you buy that narrative? Do you think that is still coming despite all the differences between chains that we have today?Alex Salnikov (19:27):I don't know. Honestly and truly, I don't know. It feels like at this point at least EVM chains are all getting abstracted away. If you connect Ethereum Wallet or Rainbow Wallet, they would display the balance across all the chains just like a single shared (wallet). And you'll see, "Oh, here's my Optimism balance, here's my Polygon balance, here is my Ethereum balance." And then the next point would be bridges. MetaMask just added bridges so you can move things across these chains. This is definitely happening among the EVM chains. We haven't seen this happen among... I guess you are very well positioned to make that true for Solana and Polygon and ETH. So that is great. We're seeing this happening for sure. And even OKX Wallet. If you connect OKX Wallet, I loved that innovation and I'm dying to see that innovation among every other wallet. They don't ask you to change the network. I don't know why we need to ask people to change the network. Please don't ask people to change the network. It's impossible for a newcomer to understand.Brian Friel (20:32):Well, Alex, you'll be very happy to know that you'll never be asked to change your network in Phantom's multi-chain version. It all happens behind the scene. You just connect once it's considered connected on all chains. So we'll make it happen for Rarible. It will be a great showcase for all of that as well.Alex Salnikov (20:48):Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's collectively push MetaMask or the whole market.Brian Friel (20:54):Yeah, absolutely. A lot of this stuff is not intuitive. You're already getting people who are maybe coming to crypto because they like an NFT, they have a lot of questions about crypto, they're not sure. And then showing them these network change popups in their face, it's probably the last thing they need. And it's all about making this a safe and intuitive and familiar experience so that we can grow this thing.Alex Salnikov (21:17):There are two things that are almost impossible for the newcomer to overcome. It is the stuck or failing transaction. A failing transaction is okay, you can just resubmit it. But a stuck transaction, you need to wait until it goes so you can submit the next one. I've seen countless people just drop on that and this change of the next one.Brian Friel (21:40):I couldn't agree more.Alex Salnikov (21:41):It's so bad.Brian Friel (21:41):Yeah. That's something that we all have to fix, I think, as an industry. And we definitely have our take on those two problems. So we'll share you a beta code after this is done so you can play around and get your feedback on it. But yeah, I'm excited.(21:54):I want to switch gears a little bit to talk about how you see the NFT market evolving. You sit in a really interesting spot because as we said, you were very early, not only to NFTs, but to crypto. You're starting this in playing around in crypto in 2012. You've been early to the NFT marketplace scene. What is your current view on the NFT meta per se? What excites you about NFTs today?Alex Salnikov (22:17):It's a great question. More or less the whole story of NFT, we had CryptoKitties, which I actually believe is a way more advanced NFT than all that we currently have. It's living things that have DNA that can breed on chain and you can own them. Wow. After that, we take the giant step back. Okay, it's too hard for people to understand. Let it be just pictures. Let it be just art, and that went out. Art has a product market fit, very clear generative art, plain art, one-on-one, open additions. The current meta of open additions is through the roof, but it is all the same category of art. Quite clear. The simplest use case to make you get the idea of NFT.(23:10):The second biggest use case is PFP profile picture. Again, great one. It's virtual clothes for your digital identity. I find that the biggest cool thing about NFTs is that your digital you can own digital things that are directly owned by your digital you. And Twitter integrated that. Amazing. Instagram integrated art. I think Reddit integrated but not fully yet. So a PFP digital avatar. Great. And sadly, this is the only two use cases that work for NFT today. Maybe the third small one is memberships. You can have NFT membership. And that's it. Nothing else has yet worked. There are a lot of discussion. People usually think, "Okay, what's next? Or let's connect phygital. Let's do physical and digital at the same time."Brian Friel (24:05):I haven't heard that, phygital. That's funny.Alex Salnikov (24:07):For me, this is not as exciting. It is definitely what's needed. But the digital world evolves much faster than the physical. And by the time we have this, "Oh, digital, let's do an NFT for the house." So you need to have laws and it would take 10 years to get laws in place and during that 10 years, we'll have metaverses that are far more advanced than it is now. So it's just this part of the market, it's growing. It's faster. So to me, something that excites me a lot is something like CloneX is doing. You have a 3D avatar that you can import into the different metaverses and that would be you. So digital and native virtual use cases that have not been possible before. PFP have not been possible before, the interoperable between platforms PFP. The digital art have not been possible before. So some new use cases that have not been possible before that will utilize NFTs is what excites me. Games makes a lot of sense. But I don't know, CryptoKitties was such a cool project. There have got to be more to NFTs.Brian Friel (25:21):We got to get back to that same spirit for sure. I'm curious, do you think there's any one thing, like one bottleneck that's holding the NFT sector back? Is it something on the wallet side? Is it something just on the user education front, technology, or do you think this just takes time to iterate on?Alex Salnikov (25:40):I think the main value prop of NFTs is the standard. It is looked at everywhere as the same item. And this is the biggest bottleneck as well. We're coming up with the smart NFTs, so the smart NFT, every wallet should adopt it, every marketplace should adopt it, and some projects ideally should adopt it. So just the cooperation, the intersection of projects to adopt the same idea. I've subscribed to the newsletter that's called This Week in Ethereum, and I think that's one of the best newsletters out there. I read about new developments of NFT standards. Almost every week, there is something. Composable NFT, rentable NFT, this NFT, that NFT. And when I look at this proposal, I understand that several years need to pass before we will actually see any of these new NFT standards adopted.(26:39):So we will all need to come up with some addition to NFT standard that we all love and that we will all adopt and that will not be as hard as composable NFT of like ERC 998, or 988. That is very complicated, and very complicated standards do not get adoption. So some small increment, some better standard and a wider adoption of that standard. So complexity. Getting back to your question. Complexity. Yeah, complexity and coordination. Yeah.Brian Friel (27:10):Yeah. Complexity and coordination. Coordination across a lot of different people. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, that's a great insight, especially for us as we're gearing up to go multi-chain and supporting NFTs. So we're going to have to take a deep look at a lot of those different standards that are coming online and continue to iterate. So Alex, I just want to thank you. This has been a really great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the show. One last question that we ask all our guests, and I want to hear this from you as well is who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 Ecosystem?Alex Salnikov (27:42):Vitalik. I might come to some better answer, but-Brian Friel (27:48):You are the first person to say Vitalik on this show. So the spotlight's yours, you can take it.Alex Salnikov (27:52):I'll take Vitalik. He's built so much and his article... I've been recently diving into the article that explains how ZK works. I recommend it to everyone. They say that, "Oh, the next decade is going to be ZK decade." So just try to digest it, understand how it works. It's going to change a lot of lives.Brian Friel (28:11):That's a great answer. Well, we all have our homework assignment after this. Alex, thanks so much for coming on. Where can people go to learn more about Rarible?Alex Salnikov (28:19):It's always on twitter.com/rarible or twitter.com/insider0x. That's my personal Twitter, if you want to follow me. Rari.foundation is the biggest and exciting part that just started. So there's going to be a lot of development on that end. We're going to be East Denver. Let's meet. It's a great place to catch up.Brian Friel (28:41):I love it.Alex Salnikov (28:44):Yeah. And I feel like the second part of our talk is better than the first. Let's skip to the second part, guys. Maybe we can put that into-Brian Friel (28:52):Yeah, we'll get that in the show notes for sure. Awesome. Alex Salnikov, the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Rarible. Thanks so much for coming on.Alex Salnikov (29:00):Thank you for having me, Brian. You are a part of an amazing team that built an amazing product that actually have chances to compete with the giants that we all know are really hard to move. Good luck with that. Let's not change networks, please.Brian Friel (29:15):Yeah, let's not change networks. I love it. That's all. Awesome. Thanks so much.Alex Salnikov (29:20):You're welcome.

The Yakuverse is one of the most anticipated cyberpunk metaverse games being built on Solana. PapiChuloGrim, Chief Marketing Officer at Yaku Corp joins Brian Friel to talk about their approach to building open world games that facilitate social interactions and e-commerce, and what the future holds for metaverse games being built in web3. Show Notes:00:06 - Intro01:13 - PapiChuloGrim background03:57 - Background on Yaku, an open world gaming experience05:30 - Overview of Yaku API08:55 - Overview of Yaku App11:47 - Overview of Yakuverse game17:49 - What the future looks like for blockchain Metaverse games21:36 - A builder he admires in the ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:06):Hey, everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Papi, the chief marketing officer of Yaku Corp. Yaku Corp is developing one of the most anticipated cyberpunk metaverse games on Solana. Papi, welcome to the show.Cole McMillian (00:29):Glad to be here, Brian, thank you for having me. Excited to dive in a little bit to what we've got going on.Brian Friel (00:34):Yeah, likewise. I think you have one of the most unique names of any guest we've had on here on The Zeitgeist so far, so you're already winning an award for that.Cole McMillian (00:42):Anything is possible on Web3, right?Brian Friel (00:45):Yeah, exactly. You never know who you're talking to on some of these shows, but I'm really excited to talk to you guys. You guys are building a really ambitious game on Solana, which I think has a lot of promise in the gaming space on Solana, and some of the stuff you guys are doing, building foundational pieces of connecting gaming environments to Phantom and Solana wallets, so really excited to dive into all that today. But maybe before we do all that, I would love to learn a little bit about you. Who are you and how did you get involved with Solana and Yaku?Cole McMillian (01:13):Absolutely. My real name is Cole. We were actually joking a little before this, at the in-person events, I'll introduce myself as Cole because people feel strange calling me Papi in real life, but then ultimately, they just keep calling me Papi. My background is primarily digital marketing. Before making the dive full-time into Web3, the majority of my career, I was the head of digital strategy and on the side, I had a small digital consultancy that was primarily focused on media production and paid media. Then, I ultimately made a short transition into sales before diving headlong into Web3. The sales pivot really was actually what got me here. I moved from Kansas City, where I'm originally from, to the Oregon Coast and had a lot of free time on my hand making such a big move. During that time I just was able to dig a little deeper into the world of crypto, which had always intrigued me.(02:13):Naturally, got involved in Solana, based on some poor experiences on Ethereum and what I thought was not a conducive ecosystem, actually, on the crypto.com Cro coin ecosystem to the sort of things I was interested in and how I wanted to grow in my pursuits in this space. Ultimately, I joined Yaku just by organically finding the project. I was one of the first couple hundred people to join the Discord and when I saw the vision and the scope, I said, "This is awesome. Why is there not more attention on it yet?" Ultimately, I became very close friends with our CEO, Kevin, and we've had a really great rapport and he asked me to join the team in a larger capacity. A few months later, I said, "Web2, we're good for now. I'm going to go chase this Web3 thing full-time" I've been full-time coming up on, I believe, 10 months now. What a crazy time to go full-time, by the way.Brian Friel (03:10):Well, 10 months is ancient in crypto, as well. 10 months is about five years experience there in most jobs.Cole McMillian (03:16):It's fun to try to explain that to people. In my sales job, I had another regional manager who was a little further south of me down in the California area who said, "I think that guy, Cole, left to do Bitcoin," so we've still got some education to do, right?Brian Friel (03:31):Yeah, for sure. Well, let's dive into a little bit of what you were saying. You found this project early on, one of the first people in the Discord, and you were blown away by the scope and the ambition of this project. For those who aren't familiar with Yaku, what is Yaku, what is this concept of a Yakuverse? It sounds like there's more than just a game here, maybe just a whole ecosystem, but can you give us a little high-level understanding of everything that you guys are up to?Cole McMillian (03:57):Absolutely. The high-level overview, short pitch of Yaku is I like to refer to it as an interactive open world gaming experience, so a lot of people will sum this up as metaverse. I think that just the word metaverse has had a very strange connotation evolve over the last year or two, because people are confused as to what that really means. There's so many ways you can view a metaverse, there's so many different lenses through which people absorb it, and so to me, I've tried to get a little bit away from that terminology, but I definitely want to stick to the ethos of it.(04:32):We're very centered around gaming, online interactions, I'd say that it's, in some ways, the next evolution of social media. Instead of repping a profile picture, you're repping an avatar, you're having these live, in-person chats. I think that you will see a good evolution from things like Twitter spaces to more, quote unquote, in-person digital experiences like that via these virtual worlds. I think for us, the three main things, to sum it up, are we are centered on gaming, facilitating social experiences, and then the third key is we want to elevate the experience of online commerce, of e-commerce.Brian Friel (05:08):That's awesome. In addition to the game that you guys have, which I introed it saying that there's some cyberpunk elements to this, but I'll let you describe that in your own words, but you guys have really built out a whole infrastructure side of this, as well. You guys actually have what you call Yaku API. Can you talk a little bit about what is that and how do you envision developers working with this API?Cole McMillian (05:30):Absolutely. It's been something we've been working on for quite a while that we haven't really been publicly disclosing, not because it's anything to hide, but just because it's maybe getting a little into the weeds, but now that we're getting close to getting to a first version of these final product layers, as we call them, it's really good for people to, I guess, visualize how do these things all work together? The Yaku API is what we call layer one of our product layer. What we are doing is we are constantly listening to nodes, we're gathering transactions on the blockchain. We're doing that on both Solana and Ethereum, by the way, which we can dive a little bit more into that. We're very much built on Solana, but sticking to that metaverse ethos, we want to do our best to include some of these other communities, because ultimately, the ships will all rise with the tide and there's great communities everywhere. So, built on Solana and we're checking these nodes.(06:29):The second part of that is we're also continually scraping social media data. Not only do we have, through the second layer of our products, the capability in our Yaku app at Yaku.ai to connect your social accounts to the profile you build there, but on the API side of things, we're just continually gathering this data. This is data, everything from how many profile pictures are there being worn by users from a particular collection to the size and scope of the ecosystem as a whole, how many generally are there across the board and just trying to track those user data points. I think how we see people being able to use this in the future is being able to utilize it to create their own interactive experiences, because we are really trying to be focused on this gaming and social side of things. We're not necessarily positioning this, I think, as an opportunity to go out and create a DeFi application.(07:29):There's been some really cool innovations, actually, on this open API front right now. I believe it was Helios Labs rolled out some really cool innovations recently, as did Hello Moon shortly after. Data's really important. People need it as easy to read, as accessible as possible, for them to make the correct decisions to format it and ultimately, to springboard them to what it is they're trying to build long term. I think for us, the goal for this is to facilitate the gaming side of that thing. For us, what we are using it for, as it feeds into the funnel, is to help create a experience that aligns with users' interests and activities and what it is that they're doing from a day-to-day basis, whether that be the NFTs they are buying, how they are trading with their friends, how they are interacting and representing on social media. That's how we are using it internally and I assume that others will find the data the way that we've collected it and will be distributing it, good for similar use cases.Brian Friel (08:30):That's awesome. I like the analogy there of you saying that the API is the layer one and then you hinted at you have this app at Yaku.ai and then you have this game, as well. Maybe before we dive into the game, which is maybe what most people really want to know about, let's talk briefly about that app, as well. What is currently at Yaku.ai? I see you guys have a number of different widgets and applications there. Who's using this and what are they using it for?Cole McMillian (08:55):The Yaku.ai application is really viewed as the partner application to the Yakuverse. We're talking about layers, the third layer is the Yakuverse, so the API feeds into the app and the app feeds into the game. The app allows you to create your own profile, you can connect with Phantom and also MetaMask, which is hilarious because initially, when we talk about including these other communities, MetaMask was the one. We're very excited, because we work more frequently with Phantom, that you all have finally onboarded these other communities because it makes our lives a little easier. Not to shill for the audience out there, but I do think Phantom far exceeds the user experience on MetaMask. I'm just waiting for the day that Phantom takes that crown away.Brian Friel (09:45):Oh, love that, appreciate that. Hopefully, by the time this episode's out, we'll be very, very close to opening up our beta to the public, but that day is coming soon. I can't wait.Cole McMillian (09:54):Yes, absolutely. The app, generally, is a place where you can manage your entire Web3 life, both on the financial side and on the social side. On the social side, we've got Dialect Chat already pulled in there so you can communicate freely with people, we have some base functionality, where you could do things like earn social badges that display on your profile, you can connect with friends. In a soon-to-be-released update, so here's some alpha, I don't know exactly when this is going live, but my guess is it may beat this update, we are introducing communities, so you can actually see how many users there are within the application that also own the NFTs that you do, in hopes that we can facilitate some social congregation within that app amongst holders, in addition to a bunch of other stuff.(10:42):We have everything from burning multiple NFTs, multiple NFTs send. Probably the coolest on, I guess, the project management side of things is we've got an automated HR tool, so if you want to go in and set up automatic ACH-style payments for your moderators, alpha hunters, whatever it might be, you could just go in there, set the intervals, what the pay is, and you don't have to think about it, it just does it on its own.Brian Friel (11:07):I love that. The alpha drop on the podcast, that's great.Cole McMillian (11:09):Got to get it out there a little bit. I'm notorious for having loose lips, so if our community tunes in and they hear that I didn't drop any, I might get skewered in the general chat.Brian Friel (11:20):Oh, that's great. Well, that's a great picture you painted of the first layer of the API, the second layer, the app. Now, let's talk about the game. Ostensibly, this is what most people that I see on Twitter, whenever I tweet anything about Yaku, my notifications get flooded with your guys' user base. You've got a lot of rabid fans for this game. Can you talk a little bit about what this game is, how do I play this game, what's the story, and how do you see this game evolving?Cole McMillian (11:47):This is, for me, my favorite thing. I am also the marketing guy, so I am biased. The numbers side of things, sometimes, I won't lie, I gloss out just a little, so this for me is my favorite thing, especially being a longtime gamer. The general feel, I would say, for a traditional gamer that we are going for is a cyberpunk-themed futuristic, neon-lit world with a similar general play style to something like Grand Theft Auto. We actually are currently testing our alpha version of the open map internally with the community and letting them poke around and in a few weeks, we will have a much larger public launch, where we'll be able to go in and fix those bugs, as well as add in some added functionality.(12:36):On that first public version that we are really trying to get out there, what you'll be able to do is sign in using our Yaku Relay, which is our connection between Phantom and Unreal Engine. It essentially serves as a single signature to read all of your profile data on the app, on Yaku.ai. What that allows us to do is create token-gated experiences. Not only can anyone come in and drive a motorcycle around, race their motorcycle, use proximity chat to hang out with their friends, go hit the shooting range, there's some more fun information for you, we already started impslementing some PVP stuff, so they'll be able to go in and race and shoot and congregate and hang out and explore the open world, which is pretty large actually.(13:20):That's been the first feedback we've gotten from in this first alpha test is, "Wow, this is a lot bigger than I thought it would be." But additionally, through this API input through the Yaku Relay, we can do things like create a tower for Monkey Dow, which currently sits in the center of downtown, and create a token-gated experience, where only holders of that NFT can get into that area. That is really able to be extrapolated out to innumerable experiences. If you were interested, you could create a specific minigame that's only accessible to your holders. We could do a special short-time promotional event for Phantom, as an example, if you were wanting to have a virtual conference, to some degree. There's just a lot of ways that this can unfold and create these unique experiences. That's really what we're trying to facilitate, is an open world that's accessible to everyone and based on the communities you take part in and how you interact within that world, you'll be able to elevate the base experience. Brian Friel (14:24):That's super cool. This game, you mentioned it briefly, but it's currently in alpha, is that correct?Cole McMillian (14:29):It is, yes. It's the first alpha version of the full open map.Brian Friel (14:33):That's awesome. I think this is a great use case for crypto gaming. Like you said, you can build these expansive worlds for games we know and love, like Grand Theft Auto, I'm also thinking a World of Warcraft, you're exploring through this world, finding things.Cole McMillian (14:46):Absolutely.Brian Friel (14:48):But there's so much open public data on crypto already, you can just bring that in and enhance the experiences. I'm interested to hearing from you, too, you mentioned that it probably best resembles a metaverse, but maybe you don't like the term metaverse.Cole McMillian (15:02):Right.Brian Friel (15:03):Do you see a world where the Yaku universe in which you are is blending with other games that are on chain, as well, and you can bring other games' assets into Yaku, you could bring your Yaku character into other games? Do you guys think about that much and how do you see that unfolding?Cole McMillian (15:18):That's definitely something that we are using as a cornerstone of our general growth ideology, I would say. We already have, in this alpha version, avatars representing, I think, nine other communities currently live, and in the first public version that goes out, we'll probably have five more, if I had to guess. We'll be starting off with a pretty good representation of several different communities and for us, that serves many benefits. Number one, it really sticks with our company ethos of decentralization, number two, it enhances the experience, both for people who own those assets and are able to utilize them in more ways, but also for people who maybe don't and they are just looking for a broader experience generally. We're definitely going to continue to do that. We've talked to other collections above and beyond the avatars about things like vehicles.(16:18):We had a collection that we worked with closely leading up to their mint, we sort of incubated them, called Cha Cha Vans, that their branding is around the digital nomad lifestyle. They have these awesome 3D vans, so those will also be available in that first public version as a drivable vehicle. We don't want to really slow it down there. We've talked for a long time that if we can create something akin to a software platform for other creators to leverage, it will just make the experience that much more grand and ultimately, drive more users to the platforms. At the end of the day, we're a small team. I'm very proud of what we've made, but we are a big bottleneck. If we want to centralize all of it to ourselves, we're really doing the community and ourselves a bit of a disservice.Brian Friel (17:00):I totally agree. I love that thinking of it. It's funny, because most games today, the whole story of the game and what you decide to go out in the world to do is often set very top-down by whoever the game publisher is, then you get these MMOs and you can just go out in the world and do your own thing or get creative. It feels like this is the next evolution of that, you are basically giving everyone the tools to bring whatever assets they want into this sandbox world that you've created. Who knows, maybe one day someone else could even drive the storyline? Do you guys see that in the future, someone else coming in and almost co-owning development of this? Do you think that you guys will always be driving the vision of this? That's a pretty far-out there question, but I do wonder what the future for these metaverse game developments, where the vision for it goes.Cole McMillian (17:49):I think long term, again, it just makes sense, because when you're working with a world that is so large and so flexible and the attention economy is so fast, people are moving from place to place so quickly, especially in this world, it is lightning fast as compared to the traditional gaming world, I think providing more experiences, providing opportunities for people to build on what you have set out for them, is a win-win across the board. It's driving more traffic to us and ultimately, if they're driving traffic to their particular storyline, their particular experience within our world, we will benefit as a result, because they have to come to our world to experience it. I definitely see that in the future as being part of what we are implementing.(18:37):I know from our end, we are very excited to... You talk about, "Oh, I can see the ideas of questing and exploring in this sandbox feel." I think that that's something we've really embraced, because for me, personally, this is a personal opinion, I think, a lot of the, quote unquote, metaverse experiences that are out there now do not have player retention. You get in, there's an open map, there's things to look at, but there's not really much to do. I think that's why we're trying to hammer more on the gaming side of things rather than just creating, necessarily, this open world, because that's what we want is people who come in and stay and as a result, have all of these benefits around them that they can leverage, in addition to whatever is the core driver for them.(19:22):We do have, coming out soon, a new GitBook, what we're calling the YakuWiki, and it includes general information about the project as it sits right now, things like our community. We always get the question what's with the lemons, because there's constantly lemons in our content, and so now, forever and always, I'll be able to send people there and go, "Hey, I, you check out the Wiki, it's in there. You get the full history of it." Part of the Wiki is also the future though, where are we headed? We're waiting to release that, but I will give you a snippet that part of that future is that we want to, I think, change what does a multiverse of game modes look like under a single umbrella and concept.(20:02):We're working on a point system that we can implement in the future that is basically as a result of all of these different inputs. It is based on your racing outcomes, when the racing game portion is live, it's based on your completion of quests, as there are quest lines that are created, it's based on your activity in the application, it's based on your activity on socials, all these data points feeding into what is one larger goal that everyone is achieving. I think that that is going to be a really good opportunity for what you're talking about, where you're not siloed to a single style or experience and you're also empowering other people to create their own that can feed into this larger concept.Brian Friel (20:43):That's really awesome. I love the vision you're laying out there, that's really cool. I also want to know what's up with the lemons, but we can save that little bit of alpha for the Wiki release. I don't want to steal too much.Cole McMillian (20:53):The really short version is we had one member early, early on in the Discord who reacted to every single announcement with a lemon emoji. It just slowly picked up steam until the point where it got to 1,200, 1,300 lemon reactions on a single post. We were like, "You know what? The community is making a stance on this emoji here, so we're just going to adopt it as one of our own."Brian Friel (21:17):I love it, that's the best. When stuff like that arises organically, that's 100% the best, one of the best parts of working in this space, as well. Well, Papi, this has been an awesome discussion. One question we ask all of our guests, and given the vision you just laid out, I'd love to hear this answer from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Web3 ecosystem?Cole McMillian (21:36):This one is really easy for me, actually. I saw this question and I said, "I know exactly who it is." It's someone I talk to, I would say regularly, not super frequently, but regularly, we're doing some stuff together. They're, I think, a really good balance between someone who is a heads-down shipper and someone who is an active participant, as well, and is no bullshit, which is maybe my favorite thing, and it's got to be Foxy Dev from the Famous Foxes, man.Brian Friel (22:05):Love it.Cole McMillian (22:05):He always keeps it like it is, he is a straight shooter. What I think I appreciate most about him is one of the hangups I think we have in the space, in general, is because of that attention economy I was talking about earlier, the question when arises all the time. There's so much pressure, there's announcements for announcements for announcements because you've got to keep the attention here and there's always people moving to do things. He is very, very good at staying active, really reaching out to his community and getting their feedback, but shipping things when they're ready and not trying to play the it's coming, it's coming game. He is a guy who just builds relentlessly and when it's ready, it's ready and if you want it sooner, well, you'd better just chill out and wait for it.Brian Friel (22:49):I couldn't agree more. You're not the first to bring him up and we have had the Famous Foxes on the pod before. But I agree, when, when, when is we went mobile all the time back in the day. It's definitely part of the culture, but when you can back it up with shipping quality on your timeline, that's the best place to be.Cole McMillian (23:06):100%, man.Brian Friel (23:07):Well, Papi, this has been an awesome discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people go to learn more about Yaku?Cole McMillian (23:13):If you want to learn some more about Yaku, I would suggest jumping in the Discord, for sure. Custom URL, so just /YakuCorp, and go to the website, check out Yaku.ai. Make a profile, claim your name, and start checking out what's there, because it is about to have a pretty big facelift, as well, and I think that people will be excited for the direction that it's headed.Brian Friel (23:36):I love it. Bring your lemons to the Discord, too. Get them ready.Cole McMillian (23:39):Yes. We'll make fresh lemonade or limoncello, whatever you prefer.Brian Friel (23:43):Beautiful. Papi, the chief marketing officer of Yaku Corp. Thank you so much.Cole McMillian:I appreciate it Brian. 

With over 80% developer growth the past year, the Solana ecosystem has never been stronger. Chase Barker, Head of Developer Ecosystem at The Solana Foundation joins Brian Friel to talk about the current initiatives happening on Solana that excite him the most, along with the biggest opportunities he sees for Developers on Solana in episode 20 of The Zeitgeist. Show Notes:00:05 - Intro                            01:56 - Background / Start with Solana                        11:49 - Highlights from last year with the developer ecosystem16:13 - Latest exciting initiatives in Solana                  20:56 - Opportunities for devs in Solana 25:03 - Opportunities to build a project on Solana27:36 - Solana plays Pokemon" game           30:43 - Where will Solana be in 5 years                          32:55 - A builder he admires Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey, everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to introduce none other than the man, the myth, the legend, Chase Barker of Solana Foundation. Chase, welcome to the show.Chase barker (00:24):Hey man, thanks for having me.Brian Friel (00:26):This has been a long time coming. For those who don't know, Chase is the head of developer ecosystem at Solana Foundation. He's one of the earliest guys you could have seen if you were a developer coming into Solana. And it's special for me personally because Chase was the first person I reached out to on Solana. We actually did an episode on your old podcast, Chewing Glass at one point. It's great to be on the other side of the mic though, but officially welcome to the show, Chase.Chase barker (00:49):Thanks man. Yeah, it was super cool and it's also wild for me to be on this other side because we met in some interesting circumstances, you trying to dive into the whole ecosystem and I had no idea what I was doing and I needed help. And you wrote some really cool shit for me for the Solana Cookbook and here you are, leading Phantom. So anyways, I won't dive into that too much. Maybe we'll talk about it later, but it's super cool to be here, so thanks for having me.Brian Friel (01:15):Yeah, thanks for coming on. No, I couldn't agree more. Probably a good place to start, is maybe rewinding time a little bit, going back to some of those early days. Solana's pretty unique from a developer perspective. There was always, having worked in the industry pre-2018, it was always... If you're doing something development wise, solidity is the only game in town you got to be working in EVM. And Solana basically struck it out on its own and completely changed that narrative and you were around to see pretty much that whole evolution. Can you talk a little bit about your journey to finding Solana? Who are you, what were you doing, and what have you seen evolve in Solana since you've been there?Chase barker (01:56):Yeah, for sure. So I've told this story a lot and I'm going to keep this one shorter than I normally do, but I was an engineer for 12 years and then started trading crypto in 2017, made a bunch of money, lost it all in 2018, like most people. And then along that journey I found this project, Kin, who now exists on Solana, but they had their own fork of Stellar and I was into crypto and the bear market in 2018 and they had this hackathon thing and I built a tip bot with a group of other people to be able to tip on Reddit, discord, Twitter and Telegram. And I was like, okay, this is really cool. I really sort of hate my web2 job right now. I'm doing this government contracting work working on legacy Spring VC systems. It was miserable and I've talked about this a lot before and I just got everybody's email addresses and started saying, give me a job.(02:47):And they told me that all the jobs were based in Tel Aviv, but they have this developer relations role for Kin. And I was like, okay, that sounds great. What the hell is that? I had no idea what developer relations was at the time. So did a little bit of research, ended up taking the role and really just started working. They had an SDK, but documentation tried to grow a community. It's a little bit different. I'll get into this from Solana because Kin was like, this is the ICO days. Nobody really gave a shit about use cases. It was just like how am I going to be the most degenerate thing here. It was way ahead of its time, but eventually flash forward after a couple years of really loving what I was doing, traveling around the world, speaking at conferences, and helping people learn how to build in crypto.(03:31):And I heard, and it's March or April 2020 way early, and I'm talking, nobody that I knew, knew about Solana. So they were like, we're going to migrate to Solana this new blockchain. Nobody knows about it, but it's going to be super fast. Our tech team says it's great. So I followed along. Around December, I was involved in the migration process and I had spoken with Dan Albert, who's now the head of the Solana Foundation, and Raj and I engaged with a bunch of these guys but didn't really know them, but I was part of that migration. And then a little bit later into 2021, early 2021, people don't know this, but actually I was leaving Kin and I was looking for another role and I got hired by Circle for one week as a developer advocate. And then I saw Solana had a developer relations role, applied.(04:21):So I actually had an awkward situation where I had to tell Circle that “I know I just started, but I'm going to go work at Solana.” But the reason I worked at Solana is because I just DMed the shit out of Raj and Dan until they finally submitted into saying, okay, finally we're we're going to let you take this role. And at that time all that existed was the core documentation and the PaulX Escrow tutorial, aka the Solana Bible. And that was the start. May 5th, the day after my birthday of 2021, I joined Solana as the first sort of developer advocate and that's sort of the entry point.Brian Friel (05:01):Wow. So yeah, it's not really that long in calendar days. Chase barker (05:07):It's been 20 years. It's been 20 years.Brian Friel (05:09):Yeah, exactly. 20 years in crypto years for sure. A lot has changed since then. Maybe the only thing that hasn't changed is the strategy of just spam DMing somebody to try to get a job. I definitely tried to employ that with you back in the day. I know a few other people who have successfully deployed that strategy as well. But yeah, it's been crazy. There's a lot to talk about here. Maybe we just focus on the last year in particular because you mentioned 2021, it's a pretty crazy year. There was just the public tutorial on the docs and then all these people come in, you get anchor that gets built around that time. Solana takes off, a bunch of independent teams.Chase barker (05:49):Actually, let's go a little bit before that because I think this is just a really interesting thing and I like telling this part because when I started at Kin I was begging people to build on it because nobody was really building on blockchain except Ethereum at the time. And then I started with Solana and I had the exact opposite problem. You had a ton of people that were like, hell yeah, this sounds really awesome, but how the hell do you build on this thing? What the hell is rust? There's no documentation. You go into the Discord and the cord devs are just “go read the tests, that teaches you how to build on Solana.” And that's literally the world that we lived in at the time. And then started putting together this sort of part-time dev advocate team, if you want to call it that. I just skimmed Discord and looked for people who were helping others and be like, hey, come over here into this private discord with me.(06:39):And I'm like, help me scale myself. Because I was starting to write some example code and there was none of that. And then luckily I met Donnie and then Jacob and a couple other guys that are now full-time at Solana Foundation and they were helping in dev support. Jacob was working on the Java STK with Skynet Cap, if any of you guys know him. He was really one of the early OGs there. And then this whole group formed and they were writing content and then you reached out and contributed to the Solana cookbook and this whole thing just came out of nowhere. And I was literally sinking. The demand for Solana was so high because the tech was so new and the sort of hardcore engineers just really wanted to build, and the Dafi’s and the Max’s and the Armani’s just figured the shit out.(07:28):But everybody else was like, let me, let me. And I could not do that on my own. I didn't even have the brain big enough to supply the knowledge to all these people. And then long story short, or maybe long story long is that you and I started talking and you wanted to be part of it and you wrote some really important stuff for the Solana Cookbook, I think retries, possibly PDAs and some of these other things. And it's like, thank you. And I do remember you being like, hey, can I work at Solana? And I didn't have any approval of power at the time and you left me and probably a month later I got approval to hire somebody else, but by that time you were at Phantom, but it seems like it worked out. So it is what it is.Brian Friel (08:12):I think you're right about the demands being so strong for people to figure it out that you just saw people coming together. A lot of times, you look at people who are evangelizing new tech and they're like, hey, here's this awesome thing. Try to explain it. And the first reaction of everyone is like, okay, cool, but then they just move on. And I feel like Solana was one of the few cases where that was the opposite, where everybody was like, this is incredible. How do I use this thing? How do I build this thing? And it was just this hive mind of people coming out of the woodwork to try to make it happen.Chase barker (08:43):Even me leading into Solana, and I say this a lot too because it's true in my mind, and I was like, listen to Anatoli and all this stuff, and I'm one of two things. This is the giant scam, or this is actually really fucking awesome. And luckily my instincts were right on that one and everything sort of worked out. And when I met you and then we started doing this part-time DevRel team that you were a part of for a while, first Solana Foundation.(09:09):And the next thing, my Twitter account became this thing where people would create content and I would share it and then somebody else would be like, oh, I want my shit shared. And then they would make content and I would share it. And this was this huge flywheel and that's really what turned into my account was this person who, you do cool shit, I'm going to share it. And then I became this other guy where I'm also, I do stupid shit and then I also share good shit. So it's this perfect mix of this idiot and then this guy who knows where the good stuff is.Brian Friel (09:46):You either die a developer or you live long enough to be a Twitter celebrity, I guess in your case?Chase barker (09:52):Yeah, I mean I don't necessarily love the celebrity side, but I do love getting DMs from people to say, Hey, all the things that you shared, and you probably hear some of the same like, hey, I got a job here because of this tweet that you made or this thread because I started making threads, who's looking for a job or who's whatever. And in the early days that's all we had, was Twitter. There was no other way to connect. I made a Twitter developer list and I added 300 people to it so that not everybody had to come into Solana Twitter and be like, follow each individual person and these were such manual, weird, really hard... I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily people showed up and were there and then just ran with it. I mean, looking back, dude, it's just awesome to look and see what's happened since then.Brian Friel (10:40):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. Lots of connections made in those early days, like you said too, where people get jobs, all this kind of stuff happens and it's crazy how little interactions like that go really far.Chase barker (10:49):Yeah, exactly.Brian Friel (10:50):So I guess taking it now to this past year, so we're recording this January 2023. The past year in particular, if you were just an outside observer looking at crypto, you're like, wow, prices are way down, everything's dead. And there's a report that comes out just the other day, Electric Capitalist Developer Report, which says Solana developers grew over 80% in the year. You and I... I had an intuition for this, I'm sure you did too. It was just developer activity.Chase barker (11:20):I didn't have intuition. I actually knew.Brian Friel (11:23):Yeah, you knew. But other people I'm sure had intuition if you're around the developer ecosystem, it's not stopping. Developer activities keeps picking up, summarize a little bit in your words over the last year, what has stood up to you? What are some of the highlights? You mentioned you started this thing and it's just you and DMing people on Twitter and getting this thing going. Now it's a serious operation of a developer ecosystem here going. What are some of the things you're most proud of that stood out to you?Chase barker (11:50):Yeah, so I think the start of the year in January of 2022, we're all sitting there, and the crypto markets nuke, and the blockchain literally is devastated. And that was any sort of pre any sort of ideas about what is wrong, what is it? Basically it was all these sort of liquidators, spamming to try to liquidate people and that just turned into this thing. And I think by that point in time though, we had some really high conviction developers that were already super invested themselves in Solana. So they stuck around and I think that's very unique for that to happen. Everybody's like, when are you going to fix this? But it literally took two to three months before they even identified what those solutions might be and those solutions to many of you, the devs out there were quick and fee-markets and some of these other things that improved.(12:45):But even though these solutions were being built, that shit takes time. So during that same time, Solana NFTs were going through the roof and these bots were spamming the network. Luckily we're flash forward briefly to right now all of those things have been implemented, but the work is never complete. But we've been pretty battle tested and recently, but I think to your original question, what I'm most proud of is being able to keep that morale up, being able to really build out this sticky community and I'm focused on devs, but it's not just the devs. Without that normal diehard community, without the Dev community, without the NFT community, we would've failed miserably like every other blockchain that tried to do what we did failed.(13:33):But I think a lot of this really comes down to personal relationships and when you come into Solana and you get involved, people really cheer you on and there's that sort of camaraderie there that kept people here, even in the darkest of times. I'm just really happy. Like I said, I knew that those numbers were high and to be honest, a lot of the reason while I've been memeing about the 75 developer ridiculous reports that have been coming out, I was memeing it so hard in the last couple weeks because we crawled GitHub internally and we know where our dev numbers are and we always make sure that we know where those things are. So it was sort of funny to me to just keep memeing that and then knowing Electric Capital was going to put out a report that sort of reflected... at least they have some pretty strict rules around what they constitute a dev. Our numbers are slightly higher, but their rules are strict. As a full-time dev, you have to commit code X amount of days per month or whatever that is.(14:32):I'm sure they have that somewhere and the way that they do it, but yeah man, it takes a village to do this and there's not one person you can point to, but there's obviously some champions out there that really made people inspired to continue building. The proudest thing I can think of is all the shit we took this year and we're still here and now we just have been pretty much named and given the silver medal of the second strongest developer community in crypto and you got to give a shout-out to Eat the Kings, fully open source and putting up numbers for devs, so you got to give them credit.Brian Friel (15:06):Yeah, we mentioned a little bit early on about how it was a narrative violation for Solana to have a completely different programming paradigm to not be using Solidity to get into an account model lower level dealing with Rust.Chase barker (15:20):There was FUD that was like “Solana's using Rust? Good luck. You guys are basically screwed.” Nobody's ever going to build on Rust. So that was false.Brian Friel (15:29):Yeah, most loved GitHub developer language though I'm pretty sure that's another narrative violation for you there. So talking a little bit more about what you guys have been up to you, you mentioned you guys have been crawling the GitHubs and you've seen this dev activity, you now have a full-time team like you said that, that you're working with, but it's not just you guys at Solana Foundation, there's all these other ecosystem teams now. There's people like Super Team Dao who are doing their own thing, coordinating devs and building devs. I'd say there's stuff on the community side getting devs and raising awareness there. There's Lamport DAO, I might be giving you too many answers here, but the community side and the tech side, what are some of the initiatives that are happening right now in Solana that have you most excited?Chase barker (16:14):I think one of the most important things to note about Solana Foundation and Labs in general is the headcount stays low. This sounds weird to a lot of people, but our job is to make ourselves irrelevant in the next five to 10 years as an organization, the super team and the Lamort DAOs and Meta Camp and Singapore in these different groups, a lot of them will get grants from the foundation to get themselves up and running. But after that they basically become these sort of miniature Solana foundations where they start growing their community from the inside out and giving out grants and doing all these really cool things. But you think of Solana as this giant bubble and every time one of these new miniature groups spins out, the Solana Foundation bubble gets smaller, and then these other bubbles start getting more and plentiful to eventually you reach a point where Solana Foundation bubble was the size of the rest of these small groups.(17:08):This is the antithesis of Web 2.0, hiring as many people in as much headcount as you can and trying to own everything. I don't want to own everything. I want to find Mertz, I want to find Super Teams. I want to find Meta Camps and I don't want to just go find them and ask them. I want to find these guys that just put everything they have into Solana the blockchain and they’re just so passionate about it, that it's like this is the team that we want to put our energy behind. In the beginning it really was a lot of us at Foundation and Labs doing a lot of the talking, but now you have these stronger voices and I'm not going to lie, it makes my life a lot easier to not have to be doing all that talking online anymore, but I still do it.(17:53):And I think the important point here is that if we're going to become a decentralized blockchain, we also want to become a decentralized organization itself and that means nobody has to get our permission. I think one of the greatest examples of no permission is Hacker House was kicked off, everybody's like, when my city and MTN DAO was like, fuck this, I'm just going to make my own thing. And they actually built the best thing that's really happened out of our community to date and they produced multiple, clockwork previously, Kronos, mtnPay, all these guys won hackathons.(18:33):Because T.J. Littlejohn literally came up with mtnPay at MTN DAO and a food line being like, Solana Pay just came out. Oh shit, maybe I should just build a payment thing with this new thing. And then he set up the system and people were paying with USD right there. So if that trajectory keeps happening through Solana, and I know other blockchains are trying to emulate what we do, but there's no way to emulate this unless you actually do this organically and it's happening. And anytime I just find somebody like a TJ or a  MERT or whoever or a Brian or whatever, I'm going to put all my time and energy behind them and that's literally my philosophy and the foundation's philosophy in general, I think.Brian Friel (19:15):Yeah, for sure. No, I've seen that too. It feels like there's more... Solana is the only ecosystem I know outside of Ethereum really is there are these factions not the best word, but it's these unofficial groups of people that... Maybe it started as simple as we like to ski in February and we want to get together and hack. MTN DAO, but it's becoming an official collective now. People are identifying with it. And it has influence in the community. I mean I totally see what you're saying too about the Hacker House is I know we had our own last summer, we kind of piloted the Summer Camp Hackathon fan of Sponsor [inaudible 00:19:51]. But I just see that model continuing to go and more and more teams coalescing around certain regions and sponsoring their own thing.Chase barker (19:57):And for everybody listening here, don't ask for permission, don't ask when, just literally do it. And if you do it and you do it well, the attention will get drawn onto you and then I'll come find you and I'll knock on your door and ask you how I can help. So that's really the sort of mentality that I personally have.Brian Friel (20:15):Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. That was my approach trying to work in this space, just do it and then ask for help or permission. Someone will find you. That's so much better than trying to ask somebody for permission to do something. So I guess that's a good transition to, let's put ourselves in the shoes of a developer who's looking at Solana right now. There's a lot of devs out there that might see Solana and they still think, oh, Rust and scary. That's probably not true. We can talk about that. But there's also probably a lot of devs who maybe know a little bit about Solana, they're kind of like right on the cusp, because they want to jump in. What do you want to say to these devs? What are some of the biggest opportunities that these devs should be looking at right now in Solana?Chase barker (20:56):Yeah, I think there's a couple things here. I think it depends on your demographic and age range. I mostly meant age range. So if you're in college right now, look up solanau.org and it's @SolanaUni on Twitter because Dana is our university relations person who is absolutely crushing it, sponsoring and participating in hackathons, doing workshops, just really bringing in my opinion, the next generation, the most risk averse group of people are students who are still funded by their parents that can make some sort of mistakes early on. So they're the next generation that's going to take this forward and luckily they have some really tech heavy guys out there that are just so dedicated to this, the Solana core engineers and the Jito team and all these different groups that are there to mentor them when they're ready to get in this. But I think SolanaU is probably a really high leverage thing.(21:54):We spend a lot of time working with Build Space who's built Solana Build Space Core, which is an amazing program. Things are getting easier. We're still in that place where new things are coming around the corner and I get a lot of shit for this, especially from Rust maxi’s, but there's Seahorse Lang where you can build smart contracts on Python right now, not fully ready for production. There's a version of this in typescript coming. We're doing whatever we can to make it easier because the Chewing Glass thing is true and it's mainly true not because of Rust, not because of Solana, it's because learning Rust and Solana and all those concepts at the same time, is literally painful as hell. But content and all these other things combined put together right now and all of the sort of tooling that different groups are building like indexers and all these things are making the lives easier because as adapt dev you want to deal with “get program accounts and all that stuff”, it's not...(22:56):We're getting to a better place and it's coming right now there's a couple places, I mean solana.com/developers we're curating our own list, but I cannot negate what ELO from SOL Dev has done at soldev.app and the whole entire thing that he's built out. So I'm super bullish on a lot of the stuff they're doing. I think there's just too many things to name of how many independent contributors are out there just building shit. I said this the other day on Twitter, I know when things are getting really good when I can't even keep up with the retweets of the things that are being built that I have no idea about. And then you have this other guy that most people don't really know yet. His name's Jonas and I think it's Soul Play Jonas on Twitter,Brian Friel (23:40):He's our hackathon winner.Chase barker (23:41):Is he?Brian Friel (23:42):Yeah. So when we hosted the Summer Camp Hackathon last summer, we had a Deep Links prize and he won as the best use of Deep Links because he was the first to build a Unity game on Solana using it.Chase barker (23:53):I'm not going to dox his location, but I'm going to tell you this mfr is legend and really going to try to push the gaming world forward on Solana, which I think is the blockchain that has the best ability to actually scale. And I want to give credit where it's due, zk-Tech is going to be fucking amazing, but Solana as is right now, has the best chance to scale if a big top tier sort of gaming company hits and decides to leverage that tag.Brian Friel (24:24):Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I had Anatoly on as the first guest and he always talked about how his dream was blockchain at Nasdaq speed and it was like “it's DeFi all the way". Then you and I are both around for the 2021 craze where it was just all of a sudden it's the world's greatest JPEG trading machine, it's all NFTs. Now we're seeing stuff about gaming. Is there a certain type of developers interested in something they should come to Solana? It's just like everybody... It's not necessarily specialization here, but what are some of the biggest opportunities maybe if you're looking to start a company on Solana, build a project on Solana?Chase barker (25:03):Yeah, I think we're being honest here. If your use case does not necessarily require high throughput, then the options are pretty unlimited in blockchain. But if you want to be able to have fully on chain games.. And not to say that we both know this, when you're building a game on any blockchain, not everything has to be on chain and it's almost like not necessary to the extent, but DeFi, we need to reignite that on Solana. There's been a series of unfortunate events that–whatever, but I think there's a really strong group of people that are working on this open book DEX and this massive amazing thing that came true. But for me personally, I think that the big unlock comes in gaming and the real original use case of crypto that has never actually been solved, which is payments. I mean it's been solved but not in a usable way. If you're going to bring payments to new and emerging markets, the fees and stuff are important because the fees on some of these different chains is more money than is-Brian Friel (26:12):Not feasible. It's a non-starter.Chase barker (26:13):It's not feasible. And Solana Pay and a lot of these other payment options are starting to enable that. And I think it honestly just has the potential to change a lot of lives, JPEGs and all these other things. That's cool. And I love that people are having fun on blockchain also. Solana is definitely the funnest chain by the way, but payments, man payments, we have to do it. We have to get payments, remittances done on chain and Solana's the most equipped to do it, especially related to fees.Brian Friel (26:45):Yeah, I love you said it too about it being the most fun chain, priding yourselves with that because for a while, and I think you noticed this, with every new blockchain, something that starts, the first thing everyone does is copy what worked before. We're going to have an AMM, we're going to do some DeFi thing, we're going to have an NFT marketplace. But I'm starting to see now on Solana things that are uniquely Solana and just couldn't be done elsewhere. And it definitely feels like there's a unique culture. And I'll shout out too, one, we talked about T.J. Littlejohn and you mentioned payments, the Solana pay spec. Yeah, you can send payments to anyone, but you could send any transaction. So he built that NFT photo booth. You take a photo, scan it, and it mints as an NFT using the payment protocol. It's pretty cool. There's another one though, we just had him on as a guest, which will launch fairly soon on this podcast. Have you seen the “Solana Plays Pokémon” game?Chase barker (27:37):Yeah, I have briefly, but I don't know a ton about it.Brian Friel (27:40):I don't know. It's a game like that... It's like you said, it doesn't have to be crazy. It's not everything on chain, but it's almost like a new genre of game because here you have this emulator that's sitting off chain, it's playing Pokémon and it's like anyone can permissionlessly show up and just start voting to say, press this button, press up, press down. And Solana's so fast that it's basically processing these very quickly and all of a sudden you have people warring over, should we train a Squirtle? Should we release the Squirtle? Should we fight this gym leader? It's a toy today, but you can kind of see how wow, this could become kind of a new game genre where it's multiplayer and, you don't know who you're even playing with or against and it's all real time. It's all being coordinated. It's pretty wild.Chase barker (28:22):I think a lot, and I'm a big advocate of looking at the Web2 world and seeing what is possible on Solana, and also what makes sense because not every use case makes sense, but for example, like I said, I mentioned Shek earlier and Wordcel Club, which is the blogging platform and they're doing some other cool social primitives and it's like they're starting to open source those primitives, but why would you do something on web 3.0 that you could do on Web 2.0? And the answer is sort of incentives. And you look at some of these bigger social platforms that absorb 99.9% of the value and there's a way to distribute that value on web 3.0 that there never was in web 2.0. So I think that's an important one. There might be some disagreement here, but I think the group that really got closest to some sort of web 2.0 success was Stepn, because they went product first instead of... You see a lot of stuff in web 3.0 of it's like, developers first developing for developers, they're developing for things like that.(29:27):But Stepn was like, what does everybody do that we could reward them for and get this on chain? And that was working out, this is an incentive mechanism. Obviously it didn't fully work out and I think there's probably... They're working on that, but at the same time, we need to start thinking what in the web 2.0 world is working, how can we do that on web 3.0, and why would that app make sense in web 3.0? And then usually it's incentive mechanisms that give the user a reason to use it, but they're not going to do that with massive delays or lag times or all this stuff. It better work just like web 2.0 if not better if you're going to do that. So really focusing on things that Solana can do that other blockchains can't at this current moment is probably going to be some of the highest rate of success or at least some more of the higher impact things I think.Brian Friel (30:21):Yeah, I agree. It's got to be seamless in the background. There's people in crypto who care, but the vast majority of people don't want to sit around and wait for something to load. So we talked a lot about the state of Solana today, what you're excited about all these different people building. You alluded to this a little bit, but paint a picture for us. What do you see the Solana ecosystem five years from now?Chase barker (30:43):Five years from now, I see myself not having a job anymore, and I'm okay with that because I've said this since day one. If I do my job the way that I'm supposed to do my job by empowering, enabling others, then there's no need for a me anymore. And any true ecosystem that has a foundation or a labs, whatever, there should be a point that they're looking towards. The North Star is literally being able to walk away and that community in those small groups that you've sort of empowered and sort of distributed out, you can walk away and that shit just runs itself forever.(31:19):That's not just the blockchain that's actually distributed community, not just the distributed blockchain. So that's the North Star. Five years, probably not likely, but I do think in the next five years that it's going to be about as easy to build on Solana as it is to build on React. That's what I have in my mind. And we have the firepower in the ecosystem and the dedicated people that I already see completely just trying to push with Seahorse and all these other things. People are just thinking, how can I make this easier for people if we're already there two to three years in from [inaudible 00:31:59] Beta Solana, we're progressing rapidly right now and if we keep that rate in the next five years, it's going to be insane.Brian Friel (32:09):Love that. And yeah, the beta tag, I'm sure given all the trials and tribulations, we will be shedding that beta tag soon.Chase barker (32:17):I haven't seen the Bernie meme in a while and if anybody listening to this doesn't know, Anatoly said that we're going to drop the beta tag after one year from the Bernie meme that he posts about validators.Brian Friel (32:27):Zero days since last Bernie meme. Really? Okay.Chase barker (32:31):I mean who knows if that happens, but I haven't seen him post that Bernie meme in a while, so we'll see. We'll see.Brian Friel (32:36):Yeah, I'll miss that Bernie meme. We'll put some pit vipers on Bernie again, just for all time sake. Well Chase, this has been an awesome discussion, really great having you on, and it's been a long time coming. One closing question we ask all of our guests, I want to hear it from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Chase barker (32:55):So my initial sort of instinct is to probably mention somebody that's never been really mentioned before, but I can't not just talk about Armani because he was part of the first wallet. He was part of the framework that made Solana better in terms of developer experience with Anchor. And I mean I know he's now building another wallet and it's just the truth. Armani, his whole sort of ethos and what he is trying to do is just trying to make crypto usable and better for a lot of people.(33:34):And I think that's just an important thing for me and I really respect that about him. So I truly think that Armani is one of the people that I really respect the most in the space for what he's done and transparently and just like everybody who has a very large voice gets a lot of shit. And for people like that to stick around, it's incredible. We all deal with it. You work at Phantom, I work at Solana Foundation. Armani has worked at various groups or whatever and we have to just continue what we're doing and just deal with all the that shit we get and you just got to respect that, man. So that's pretty much my answer.Brian Friel (34:17):That's Awesome. I couldn't agree more. Well, Chase, it has been awesome having you on. Thank you so much for your time. Where can developers go to get started with Solana?Chase barker (34:27):Solana.com/developers or I'll also not show our own stuff and you can go to soldev.app as well. We have different offerings like soldev.app has a lot more, solana.com/developers has a little more curated smaller list, but both are very good options. So yeah man, that's the place. So check it out and let's get going.Brian Friel (34:53):Love it. Chase Barker, head of developer ecosystem at Solana Foundation. Thank you so much.

Security in crypto has never been more important. Blowfish.xyz makes it easy to identify & stop crypto fraud before it happens, and it is the engine that powers Phantom’s Transaction Previews. Blowfish Founder and CEO Fabio Berger joins Brian Friel to talk about some of the recent high profile hacks in crypto, what blowfish is doing to stop them, and how you can stay safe. Show Notes:00:55 - Background / How did Blowfish start?04:14 - What is Blowfish?            05:59 - High Profile Hacks08:35:08 - Types of Scams, how to avoid them?17:18 - A builder he admires                Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:06):Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Fabio Berger, the founder and CEO of Blowfish.xyz. Blowfish makes it easy to identify and stop crypto fraud before it happens, and it's the engine that powers Phantom's transaction previews.(00:29):Fabio, welcome to the show.Fabio Berger (00:31):Thanks so much for having me.Brian Friel (00:32):I'm really excited to talk to you today. We've been working with you guys for quite a while now, and you guys have been doing great work. We just shared some stats on how many millions of transactions, I think it's 85 million transactions you guys have scanned with us to date in protecting users from wallet drains. But before we get into all that, I'd love to have you introduce yourself and explain a little bit about who you are and how did you start Blowfish?Fabio Berger (00:55):Well, I guess I need to start with how I got into crypto. That actually happened in my senior year when I was still studying computer science at Duke and a friend of mine sent me the Bitcoin white paper and I read it. I didn't get it. I read it again and I was like, "Ah, digital scarcity. This is going to be interesting. We can build some interesting stuff with this." So I ended up working full-time in crypto starting at the end of 2016, and I joined 0x Labs as the first hire and was there for three and a half years launching several versions of the protocol. And actually, while I was there, we had launched a way for people to trade assets, peer-to-peer, and there was a subreddit that started and people started to send back and forth these off-chain orders for assets and that was the first time that I came in contact with crypto native scams.(01:47):People started to create orders for assets with the same name as USDC or Die, but that were actually counterfeit tokens. And I thought to myself, "Oh, this is problematic. Someone will definitely solve this." And then, I guess, fast forward four years later, the problem was still not solved. And so actually, while I was doing some contract work for Phantom in sort of the space of software supply chain security, I saw again how big of a problem these crypto native scams had become and I decided that I wanted to work on it. So together with my two co-founders, who had also worked at 0x with me, we decided to start Blowfish.Brian Friel (02:27):That's awesome. And so just talk a little bit more about that counterfeit token thing because I think to you and I work in this space, we might be very familiar with it, but it sounds almost like an oxymoron where it's like, "Hey, you're in crypto. You're verifying everything you're doing. How can you have counterfeit tokens? How does that actually work?"Fabio Berger (02:44):So it all comes down to the fact that the only guaranteed to be unique identifier for a token is the contract address where it is deployed. And so anyone can create a new token, a new asset that has the same symbol and name as a well-known token, let's say, USDC. And so unless you really check very carefully if the contract address is the canonical USDC contract, you could easily get fooled into thinking that someone's trading you real USDC and instead, you're getting a counterfeit token.(03:18):And I think that this actually points to this fundamental issue in crypto or fundamental problem that we still have to solve. We have all this amazing math in cryptography to ensure that, Brian, you own this private key and you're the only one who knows it. Therefore, you're the only one who can sign this transaction and authorize the transaction. But, actually knowing what you're signing, that's hard.Brian Friel (03:41):Yeah, absolutely. And that might be a good segue to where you guys come into here. As an end-user at Phantom for the past almost a year now, I'd say, it's, what, about eight months or so that we've been working with you guys, it doesn't seem maybe like a whole lot has changed. Hopefully, also if you're using legitimate sites, you see Blowfish too often, but some advanced users might have seen that our simulator has had some pretty big upgrades over the past year in large part due to the work that you guys have been doing. Can you talk a little bit about what Blowfish is and how does this all work under the hood? What are you guys actually doing?Fabio Berger (04:15):So at its core, what we are building is a suite of APIs for wallets like Phantom where whenever a user of a wallet is visiting a site and it's asking them to sign something, so it could be a transaction or a message, that wallet can first send it to us and be like, "Hey, is this kosher? Is this doing anything strange, or is this just a vanilla transaction?" And what we are doing under the hood is we're scanning and simulating that transaction and we are looking to see if there are any patterns that we can recognize from previous scams.(04:50):We also figure out from the user's perspective, what is this transaction going to do to that user's assets? How is it going to modify their token balances or their NFTs? And we send all of that information back to the wallet and the wallet can then present it to the user. And what's really nice about this is now, instead of going and having to read the smart contract and read a bunch of code to understand what is this transaction going to do, the user can just see, "Okay, this is how my balances are going to change. This is where my assets are moving or not moving." And then they can self-verify if this transaction is doing what they thought it was.Brian Friel (05:26):And that's very topical. We're recording this right now in January of 2023, and unfortunately, just earlier this month, there was a very prolific hack where Kevin Rose just lost over $2 million worth of his NFT collection. We've seen many other high profile hacks come in the space as well. Can you talk a little bit about how some of these hacks actually work and maybe, specifically to the Kevin Rose incident, was there anything that he could have done or a similar user who fell into a similar pattern could have done to maybe identify this without having to read the contract code like you're saying?Fabio Berger (06:00):Yeah, so it's super unfortunate for Kevin. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people have the same thing occur to them. In this particular case, the attack vector was essentially a OpenSea order. This OpenSea order was crafted such that Kevin was trading his very valuable NFTs in return for nothing. So we call this a trade for nothing OpenSea order. And if you are not using a wallet that sort of shows you what you're about to sign, you could easily fall for this. Had Kevin used Phantom or any other wallet that's powered by Blowfish, he would not have lost his NFTs. We have had a check in place for this exact scam pattern since June of last year. And so this wasn't actually a new attack. This is one that we've known about for a long time and that sort of security-conscious wallets have been protecting their users against. But it turns out that unfortunately, Kevin wasn't using one of those wallets.Brian Friel (06:59):And so what would you say to people also who say, "I get it. Signing stuff in crypto is really risky. That's why I have a hardware wallet." What are the strengths and weaknesses of these things? How should people think about using one? Is it like a cure-all solution or maybe, do you have different opinions on that?Fabio Berger (07:16):I think a hardware wallet can make sense. It's really designed to protect against malware on your laptop. It's an air-gapped device that has a very minimized interface. All it can do is essentially sign things and you need to physically press a button to authorize that signature. But hardware wallets suffer the same sort of UX challenges and the same scam and hack potential as any other wallet. So there's nothing about a hardware wallet in particular that would've protected, let's say, Kevin, from this attack. What he would need is some sort of an interface that would show him what he's signing and also provide him warnings if he's about to trade, let's say, an OpenSea order where on one side, he's handing off $2 million and in return for that, he's receiving $0.Brian Friel (08:07):That's tough when you don't have much of an interface on a hardware wallet to be able to see that for yourself.(08:12):Well, let's talk a little bit more about some of these scams because you mentioned the OpenSea scam and that didn't even necessarily seem like it was anything that was wrong with OpenSea, per se. It was just that there was an end user didn't really even know what they were signing, and they were, unfortunately, led to a situation where they thought they were interacting with a trusted party and they weren't. What are some of the other types of scams that you guys see in the wild?Fabio Berger (08:35):So there's obviously many different ways that sort of scammers try to lure their victims into signing something. I could kind of talk at length about that, but everyone's seen sort of the scammy NFT AirDrops or the Discord messages promising you huge rewards. But the attack vector, essentially, how do they actually remove the funds out of your wallet? A lot of the times, they're not actually exploiting a weakness in a smart contract. They're either crafting a smart contract that is made to steal your funds or they are crafting a transaction or an order or a message that is made for that purpose. So in the very early days, they weren't doing anything fancy at all. They were literally just asking you to approve them to withdraw your assets and that was kind of enough.(09:27):But now that wallets like Phantom are actually showing users these simulation results, it's become a little bit harder. They have to get more creative. So a lot of the attack vectors that we're seeing are actually attempts to circumvent or fool or take down the simulator. These scammers really don't like the simulator because if the user sees that they're about to lose all of their assets, they're much less likely to click Confirm.(09:54):I guess the more sophisticated attacks that we're seeing are ways in which the scammer can steal the user's funds, but indirectly. And so in the solana ecosystem, I can give you an example, which is every token that you own, you own in a separate token account. This token account has an authority. This authority is essentially the person who's allowed, authorized to withdraw funds from that account. And so in the early days, the scammers would literally just ask you to sign a transfer that would transfer them your funds. But now, they'll try and be a bit more sophisticated and they'll actually just ask you to change the authority of the account. So the assets haven't moved, but now, the scammer is authorized to move them on your behalf. And so these are some of the scams that we're seeing right now.Brian Friel (10:43):So those are things where if you just simulated what's the pre-balance and the post-balance of me signing this transaction, in that case of transferring an authority, you might just say, "Oh." If you're doing this simulation yourself, you're saying, "Well, no coins are going to move," but then come tomorrow evening when you're asleep, the scammer could wake up and say, "Oh, I have authority of all these accounts" and sweep everything.Fabio Berger (11:06):This sort of delayed sweep of your accounts obviously gets a lot of people and then makes it really hard for people to actually even know what happened. So a lot of people are then confused and they're like, "Hey, my funds just moved out of my account and I didn't even sign a transaction" and actually, they signed one yesterday.Brian Friel (11:22):Yeah, we've heard that. We've seen that in the wild where people post the Twitter and say, "Oh, I was hacked, but I swear I didn't touch anything this week. My phone was off." And that's really unfortunate when that happens.Fabio Berger (11:33):When I think really deeply about this problem, I just realized that a lot of this technology was built with some trust assumptions, especially around the dApps that people are using. People kind of assume, "Oh, well, the dApp, you went to this website. You trust this website. We can trust this website and this dApp." And because of that sort of trust assumption, there's essentially a lot of room for scammers to mess with things. And I think that we really need, actually, to rethink this whole dApp to wallet interface and we need to reanalyze it and maybe patch it with this understanding that, actually, users can't trust every dApp, and so we should maybe try and minimize the trust in that interaction.Brian Friel (12:16):I keep thinking back to email like how when the early email providers, you would set up your own email server and then anything could come in and now, we take for granted all the amazing spam prevention that's out there. That obviously comes with its own trade-offs and costs as well, but it seems like we're in a similar moment right now in the crypto space trying to figure that out.(12:34):Do you think it's fair to say, too, that you mentioned earlier that a lot of these hacks, maybe we hear a lot when they happen, which is not that frequent, but you hear about the smart contract vulnerabilities that occasionally happen. But is it fair to say that more often than not, it's really social engineering more than anything else that gets the common user, getting them to, like you said, click on a scam link or a bad NFT drop that sends them to a website where they input their seed phrase, those kind of things. Is that what you would think is the bigger issue that we need to face?Fabio Berger (13:02):I mean, they're both problems. And that's the interesting thing is we can find stats online for, okay, how much money has been lost to hacks, but there aren't any good stats of knowing how many people have gotten scammed and how much money has been lost to scams. And my hunch is that the number is either equally big and ginormous or maybe even bigger. And yeah, there's definitely sort of an element of it, that social engineering, but it's not only social engineering. Honestly, they kind of prey a lot on people's desire for easy money or a reward or to get in on a really hot NFT mint. These sorts of economic incentives is how they sort of lure people into engaging with them and you could sort of consider that social engineering, but I think it's more a psychological engineering or manipulation.Brian Friel (13:54):The sense of urgency that's required with a lot of these things too, potentially.Fabio Berger (13:58):Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.Brian Friel (14:00):That makes a lot of sense. So I guess putting yourselves in the shoes of an average Phantom user, not reading the smart contract code for themselves, are there any best practices that you would impart on maybe any crypto user? How should they go about thinking about interacting with dApps and signing transactions?Fabio Berger (14:20):I mean, so first of all, always triple-check the domain that you're on. A large portion of the scams that we're seeing are on domains that are pretending to be a legitimate project that that user might trust. In the same way as with emails, you always have to check the email that you're looking at and make sure that it's actually coming from eBay or whatever. You have to do the same thing in crypto when you're dealing with these dApps.(14:45):On top of that, I would say, yeah, always look at the simulation results, always sort of double check and make sure that it's doing what you'd expect. Another good piece of advice is to really think similarly to the way you do about your money in the traditional financial system. You have a bank account or a savings account or you have the majority of your funds and then you have a wallet that you carry around in your pocket where you do day-to-day expenses.(15:14):And I think that's a good model to have where if you're going to ape into mints, do it from a wallet that doesn't have all of your NFTs in it, right, and that'll already limit the maximum downside that you have. But obviously, it could still hurt to lose all of that money and so you still need to be vigilant and definitely make sure that you're using a wallet that takes security seriously. Obviously, Phantom is a great example of that, but if you're very, very stubborn about sticking with one that doesn't, and I'm not going to name any names, then at least look to see if you can maybe augment the security offered by the wallet with an extension or something like that.Brian Friel (15:52):That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you and I were talking just before we started recording about how Anatoly always recommends people have one wallet that only sends to another wallet, never interacts with the smart contract, and that's where you keep most of your funds. Augmenting that with a hardware wallet is great as well. But then, when you are signing things, just using really just the balance that you really need and making sure that you're checking the domain and checking the simulation results.(16:18):The domain front, that is hard and that's definitely something that we're definitely thinking a lot about. We have that block list that I know that you guys are big drivers to takedowns on that site or on block list as well. That won't always catch everything. Often, it is reactionary, but it is a wild world out there for users.Fabio Berger (16:37):Yeah, I guess one thing that we are working on is copycat detection. We actually want to be able to show users a warning if they're on a site that looks like it's impersonating a well-known site and this is something we can do with machine learning. We've already released it out in a limited sense, but in a broader sense, it's coming to Phantom soon.Brian Friel (16:59):Oh, I love that. Dropping the Alpha on the podcast.Fabio Berger (17:03):Just a little bit. Just a little bit.Brian Friel (17:05):That's great. Yeah, Alpha that keeps us all safe.(17:07):Well, Fabio, this has been really awesome discussion. One closing question that we ask all of our guests and I want to hear your opinion on is who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 ecosystem?Fabio Berger (17:20):Oh man. I mean, there's many people doing a lot of really awesome stuff. One thing that I have been digging into more recently is a new Permit2 specification or standard that was released by Uniswap. I think it is a really big improvement over the way that sort of token approvals were done previously. And yeah, I think I really give that team kudos for constantly trying to improve every layer of the stack, even things that aren't part of their core product. And yeah, I'm excited to see how this is going to improve the UX experience on Ethereum.(17:58):And yeah, I think it's funny even there, it's a great step forward and everything, but it's clear that they haven't been thinking about it as much from how can this be abused by scammers? One thing that we want to do at Blowfish is actually help them improve on that front. But I keep saying this, and I'm going to keep saying it, "We're still early." I said it back in 2016. I said in 2014, and I'm saying it now, "We're still early." And so there's a lot to build and yeah, I'm just excited to be a part of it, part the solution and try and make this space a bit safer.Brian Friel (18:33):That's great. Well, we're very grateful to have you on board as well and thank you so much for all that you do in keeping users safe. I just saw and confirmed the stats that it was 85 million transactions scanned with you guys since last April 2022. We're recording this in January '23. During that time, over 18,000 wallet-draining transactions prevented through Blowfish alone. So, thank you guys. We view that as 18,000 users who would've left crypto altogether but are now here to stay. So Fabio, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people go to learn more about Blowfish?Fabio Berger (19:07):Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Honestly, it was really great. Yeah, if they want to learn more, check out Blowfish.xyz. That's our webpage. You'll find all the information there and you can play around with the API yourself if you're curious and yeah, follow what we're up to.Brian Friel (19:23):Fabio Berger, founder and CEO of Blowfish. Thank you so much.Fabio Berger (19:25):Thanks.

sol_idity, a developer and creator known for building a community-controlled Pokémon game on the Solana blockchain, shares his exciting journey. He discusses the innovative features of Solana Plays Pokemon, where players collaboratively navigate challenges through blockchain transactions. The conversation dives into the technical struggles of NFT integration and the need for user education in the evolving crypto gaming landscape. sol_idity also reveals his vision for expanding the game and encourages aspiring developers to join the Solana community.

Rea Dulcetta and Anton Restuta - Co-Founders of Sharky.fi join Brian Friel on the latest episode of The Zeitgeist. Sharky.fi is the first escrow-less, decentralized NFT lending protocol on Solana that brings DeFi liquidity to NFTs. Are you NFT-rich but SOL-poor? Sharky.fi allows you to instantly borrow SOL by using the NFTs in your wallet as collateral. For lenders who want to earn yield on their SOL, Sharky.fi allows users to offer loans for specific NFTs in a collection and earn yield in return.In this episode, Rea and Anton share their journey into web3, how Sharky.fi works, their views on NFT royalties, and their vision for the future of NFT-backed lending.Show Notes:01:10 - Background / Origin Story 02:57 -  Why Solana and NFTs? 06:54 -  What is Sharky? How does it work?09:55 -  Transition from web 2.0 to Web 3.0? 15:18 -  NFT collection 20:03 - State of royalties on Solana26:24 -  Sharky’s roadmap and vision for the future31:44 -  A builder they admire in the Web3 ecosystem34:10 -  Learn more about Sharky Full Transcript:Brian (00:06):Hey everyone and welcome to the zeitgeist, the show where we highlight founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to have on today the founders of SharkyFi, Rea and Anton Sharky is the leading NFT lending protocol on Solana. Rea and Anton, welcome to the show.Rea (00:29):Hi, so excited to be here.Anton (00:31):Hey everyone. Thank you for having us.Brian (00:33):I'm super excited to have you guys on, I think we actually first met way back last summer. We were all working out at the Solana Labs office in San Francisco. For those who have never been there, it's a really cool environment where a bunch of ecosystem teams are huddled together, iterating on ideas. You guys were very early to this concept of NFT lending and since then you guys have just exploded in success. Before we dive into all things Sharky, I'd love to know a little bit about you guys in particular. Who are you guys, and how did you come to start working on this idea of Sharky in the Solana Labs office in San Francisco?Rea (01:10):Oh, yeah. Well, that's a pretty long journey, but yeah, I've always been a fan of startups. I think I started engaging in startups even when I was in college. I started hacking using my college student manual labor to really hack for free back then. And I really fell in love with the idea of being able to have so much impact. And I think that you can have impact anywhere if you're passionate about what you're doing. But there's something that's really intrinsically beautiful about being able to touch something so closely, be able to talk to someone about the problems they're having and then actually solve that. Do all parts of that. Being more than just a full-stack developer, being a full-desk founder where you do the design, you have to walk through the customer stories. So I found that entire thing really exciting.(01:59):So I've been bouncing around startups since and Anton and I actually co-founded a startup before this for engineers because we really like the idea of giving back. And Sharky is another way that we're giving back to another community. We're really, really proud to be part of the NFT Degen crowd and this is some way that we can actually give NFTs lasting power. We can give NFTs this sort of financial backbone that it needs to really be this asset that people don't have to take so lightly and think of as just JPEGs. So I'm really excited to be contributing to that cause.Brian (02:33):That's awesome. So Rea, you graduated from CalTech, I see you were the former founder of Slack community and then as you mentioned, you co-founded a startup with Anton. Both of you guys do have an engineering background. Anton, I'd love to know from you what brought you guys over from working in Web 2.0 Together? What was it about Solana and NFTs that made you guys think this is a problem we're solving?Anton (02:56):Yeah, so I had also pretty long journey before I came to Solana. I’m originally from Ukraine. I started way back when as just an engineer working there. I remember pretty well how board startup was pretty scary for me. It felt like, "Oh, it's a whole different world. I don't know if I'll ever be ready to help my own startup and things like that." Then I moved to the United States, moved to Bay Area and Silicon Valley and all of this became way easier and way more tangible. And I started working at a lot of early-stage startups, kind of preparing myself for the journey. Then co-founded my first company and then I met Rea after work we were working on again one of the startups and we met just engineers and we faced some problems in that company as engineers that we were unsolved and we thought, well how about we just hacked something over weekend and also had another common friend, mutual friend and was like, "Well, let's hack it together. It seems fun. Maybe we can solve this problem."(03:59):Most of the stories like that, it grew slowly, we got our first customer, we sold our own problem, and somebody wanted to pay us for it. Then we started thinking, "Well, maybe it's going to be a business." And we grew it to a pretty substantial profitable company. Our goal was to try building a company, try running a startup, try working together, but keep it small, keep the company small in all the separations. And I think we succeeded on that. And since then, I kind of worked a little bit on other Web 2.0 companies, worked on education, passionate about education, and we've been in crypto as an investor for quite some time. And I think last year in August, I think that's where I first heard about Solana, maybe in July.(04:48):But August when I seriously read about it, I listened to podcast with Anatoly (Yakovenko), was impressed with just general intelligence and thinking behind how conceptualization of ideas and the grand vision I get similar wipes, how that I got from Steve Jobs when I first listened to his presentations, and I wanted to build here and try how it feels. And I think I pitched Solana in kind of this whole space to be at, and we came to Miami for Solana's second hacker house, kind of met a bunch of people in the ecosystem, fell in love with all the people we met and the energy around. And that's where a decision was made to, well, how about we found the company here. And by that time, we already were passionate about NFTs and saw them as the future, if anything would bring crypto to the real world. I think the first theme of concept that is likely to do it is NFTs.(05:47):And it felt good to be early in that journey. It felt good to kind of try and build something fundamental. And I think financial products are very fundamental for NFTs and that's kind of how we got to it. And we were not sure at first, we were all very confused kind of how things work in general and not how technology works I guess how dynamics of building Web 3.0 companies works. That was definitely a new and very, very interesting journey. But yeah, that's how we met and that's how we started.Brian (06:18):Yeah, I love that. And so you guys had this key early insight that Solana was unique. You mentioned listening to Natoli, getting those Steve Job vibes, but then also that NFTs were really what was bringing it into the mainstream a little bit more. At the time that I met you guys, pursuing this financialization of NFTs was basically unheard of in Solana. I'd definitely say that was a contrarian bet and then now that's worked out pretty well. Could you walk through for the uninitiated, what is Sharky? What is it that you guys are doing for people? How does all of this work under the hood?Rea (06:54):So what we do is allow you to take all these JPEGs in your wallet and basically use it as a credit card. If you're willing to put the JPEG on the line, then you get access to a lot more of that liquidity. So anytime people say, "I'm rich in JPEGs, but illiquid AF." This is what Sharky comes into play, you can take those NFTs that you have and actually put them as collateral in a loan and then you can take out that money and do whatever you want with it and then you pay back that loan and then you get an NFT back.(07:32):Now, traditionally this requires you to actually put your whatever, if you're using a physical object, your grandmother's heirloom ring, you would have to put it in a safe box somewhere and not have access to that during the time that you have access to the money. But what we actually have done is allowed you to be able to do this in wallet. So you keep your NFTs in your wallet, you don't actually have to send them away somewhere and never see them again. You hold onto the NFT during the loan, and you just can't move it around, so it's locked in your wallet. So the escrow is effectively staying in your wallet and then when you pay back the loan, then the NFT gets unfrozen and you can do whatever you want with it.Anton (08:11):Yeah, and I guess the second side of what Sharky is about is we also allow you to be a lender. We'll allow you to lend money versus borrowing them. So in the traditional world, it's either you go to a bank and bank lends your money or maybe you go to some pawn shop and that small pawn shop lends your money. There is not really a lot of opportunity to be a lender just as an individual. And that's what Sharky also allows and that's one of the most talked about features I would say. You hear lots of stories on Twitter, Twitter threads, basically how to make money in the bear market, and usually Sharky comes up. So as a lender you can lend money. I would say you need to be somewhat knowledgeable about the space. You don't have to be an expert, but at least be aware of what's going on. And you can make a pretty substantial yield with Sharky in the current volatile market. But yeah, so that's that we're kind of creating this two-sided market in a sense. Rea (09:09):Brian, aren't you a lender?Brian (09:11):I have tried it out. It is a pretty interesting novel phenomenon. We have a few folks at Phantom who I would say are, I don't know if the term whale is right because it's Sharky, but giant sharks, I guess. But...Rea (09:23):Whale sharks.Brian (09:25):I am curious because to build all this, you mentioned that building a Web 3.0 company is pretty different from your previous Web 2.0 ventures. It's not just a consumer app that you guys are building, which is already hard enough trying to build a two-sided marketplace, get these consumers. You guys also had to build the plumbing and the protocol for all this to happen as well. Talk a little bit about that, the difference between your guys' success and Web 2.0 and what lessons you guys had to learn to bring that knowledge into Web 3.0.Rea (09:56):I think one of the biggest shockers when we came to Web 3.0 is seeing the amount of traction that people were having with no product or even the semblance of one people were raising from community and raising from VCs with, “I have a plan”, and sometimes that plan isn't even very well thought out, but I mean I attribute that to the infancy of the space at the time. I think at the beginning of any bubble that's still inflating, there's just sort of dumping money in and it's exciting. Everyone's euphoric on that whole experience. And now I would say this ecosystem, it's been only a few years, but for most people in this space, it's only been one year. And it's already mature to the point where I see lots of founders that were famous, no longer around, or lots of products that were literally the epitome of – that was your role model when you grew up on Solana.(10:55):And that's also not no longer around. And I think what you see is some of the lasting teams who are continuously building and that's something that I have to hats off to everyone who sort of stuck through the storms on this. But even beyond that, something that I'm noticing is all of that hype and that big rush of raising before pre-product and all of that. That is no longer the extreme meta that we're seeing. We're seeing people having to prove yourself a little bit more, but what I think is also I guess coming to some of the pros I see in Web 3.0 is it's so much more of a community atmosphere to build in. I think previously there was a lot more in Web 2.0 we see more under isolation or you kind of go heads down until you either make it or break it.(11:38):Whereas in Web 3.0 there's a lot more of this open communication. I would say it's almost more similar to if you ever participated in a kickstarter campaign for everyone out there who's Web 2.0 and doesn't understand Web 3.0 yet, you see this continuous discourse while they're sort of raising from the community and having this conversation back and forth. And there's a little log of how the founders are going about this. "Oh, today we had production issues, so sorry about that." But we really nailed a prototype on this other thing. We finally got some of our supply line issues figured out. And that open communication, that transparency is so important, and I dare say a lot of times we kind of idolize some of these tech founders whether Web 2.0 or Web 3.0, but they're human, and their teams are also human and they're really worth learning from.(12:27):So a lot of times you have these stories and you hear and the more transparent a team is, the more you actually get to be a part of that process and it builds so much compassion within the ecosystem because a lot of times I think it can become you're building this thing you promised this time and you said you're going to do the deliver this exact thing, what's up with that? And I think this discourse. One, makes it much more fun to build it. And two, allows the community to be much more excited because a lot of times if you only get the finished product every quarter or whatever, you're not able to really stay continually engaged. So I think a lot of these things makes this much more of a more welcoming atmosphere to build in both for the people we're building it for and for the builders.Anton (13:10):Yeah, I would say it's hard to separate Web 3.0 building from just building and crypto space and I think this space is just very volatile. So I think another side of the story of what Web 3.0 is describing. There's a lot of apps, but there's also lots of downs. There's like market downturns or just space volatility. There's always things that are hard to predict. You wake up every morning and you kind of read the news, Twitter and all kinds of things can happen positive and negative.(13:44):And unlike Web 2.0 companies that move much slower, everything moves faster and if everyone moves faster, it doesn't mean everything is just better. It just means in the condensed time you'll experience these ups and downs. And to me, it's definitely a more challenging aspect I guess as a founder I feel like I needed to step up in terms of mental health and mental stability even more than usual and don't let myself to be too high or too down and try to be more even here that less reactive and more strategic and it's sounds generic but it's real. This pain is real, and the hardship is real.Brian (14:27):Yeah, one year in the crypto ecosystem is living 10 or 20-years in traditional markets, just compressing those ups and downs not only in the market but also as a founder, journey, and all of that as well. I definitely resonate with that. One other thing just on this topic of differences between Web 2.0, Web 3.0 is that you mentioned the community buy-in aspect, you have this community that's rabid. If you haven't seen Sharky's Discord, you go in there at any time you guys have a product update, it's like there's a stadium in there that's going crazy. But in addition to all that, you guys made a pretty interesting decision. You guys, not only are you this protocol for lending NFTs, you also created your own NFT collection. Talk a little bit about that. What is this NFT collection? Why did you guys decide to launch this?Rea (15:18):We are an NFT centric company, so it only made more sense to completely Degen-ify ourselves. I mean there are also business aspects to which I'll let Anton dive into the more boring parts, but I think that has just been just so fun. I mean our entire team is really creative and for me, I've been a part of many NFT projects, whether as a consultant on the team or just help with some of the strategy there, but never taken something that's really fully our own. And we considered hiring other artists, but since we had people that actually are artistic and on our own team, like myself included or championing that effort, it was just really fun to actually take something, give back to the community in a wholly different way than we have in the past with our tech without products. But now actually being able to take our art to the next level and to put it out there with the Sharky standard, that was really, really fun.Anton (16:14):So there are several aspects of why. One, we planned this from the beginning when we started the company. We thought we would do an NFT sale sometime around August and we did this in October. So we were not even that far in our estimation in obviously this aspect of fundraising, kind of public fundraising and you get extra funds for company runway operations, all of that. But it is also what we thought would be useful, but we didn't realize how useful. It’s one of the best growth mechanisms for the company because you build in so many incentives for people to promote your company without you doing this. It's kind of like this network snowball effect and that's very powerful. I think all of our metrics pretty much doubled within just two weeks of intense... I wouldn't say promotions because we didn't do promotions of us announcing that we’re going to have an NFT collection and how it's all going to work and just trying to sell that vision, pretty much within two weeks we got more customers than we ever had gotten.(17:20):So that's just a very powerful growth strategy. And a lot of companies run NFT projects as a fundraiser before they have a product. I think it's also super useful and nice, but it accelerates growth basically if you do have a product. And third aspect, we want to embrace building in Web 3.0, and I think building in Web 3.0, the major difference from Web 2.0 is building together with your users, users/ investors and that social building is impossible without aligning incentives and alignment of incentives. It basically allows everybody to be part of the journey, allowing everybody to invest, to be holder, to get benefits from platform growth. And that's what we ultimately wanted to do, and experience how it feels to truly build Web 3.0 company, truly build community and succeed with community together.(18:09):So yeah, I guess NFT is not the only way to do it. Realizing and talking through the ideal process would feel somewhat similar but not exactly. I think the NFT community is unique in that it is formed by more, I guess, demanding investors, some smaller, less experienced, but also much more focused on being involved, versus just basically observing the company. So those are the reasons why I would say.Rea (18:37):I would just add that beyond all of the very reasonable or good reasons that we've already said, the community every single day was like when NFT. So I think that was also a pretty big driver for us.Brian (18:49):Fair, definitely fair. It's pretty wild when you go on Twitter, and you just see someone that you've never interacted with before wearing your NFT as a profile picture. In your guys' case you have these cute little baby sharks that are going to power up as the protocol evolves. They're definitely pretty cool. But yeah, I agree it's a pretty wild and unexplored lever for growth when you have users who just are continually showing their allegiance and buying in with displaying these NFTs month, after month, after month. It's pretty wild to see.(19:21):Now that you guys have your own NFT collection, I have to ask you guys, the hard-hitting question that the Solana ecosystem is pondering right now is, what is your take on the state of royalties on Solana? So for those who don't know, every NFT sale traditionally has paid out a percent royalty to the creator, it's baked into the tokens metadata, but this was not enforced programmatically. It required some sort of social buy-in by the marketplace or whoever was selling it. And now months into this NFT journey that's coming under fire, what have you guys seen in Sharky that informs your opinion on what's the state of royalties on Solana?Anton (20:03):Yeah, I think we're in this state where we're trying to figure out how to make it work. So clearly, how it was working before is not sustainable. So right now, it's kind of like everything is broken and with really building and rebuilding, I think incentive systems and also technology, how to make it all possible. I think Sharky’s stance is that there needs to be a choice at the time of creating a collection allowing holders to decide whether they want to invest into something where they have to pay royalties or not. I think it's not great to do it retroactively, kind of remove royalties from project creators or introduce royalties to holders when they didn't agree to them, and the choice wasn't possible before. And right now, we have quite a few approaches that make it possible. None of the technical solutions are perfect. So unfortunately, we will have to choose some trade-offs.(21:00):Whatever we choose, we have to support two things. One, we should allow existing collections to migrate all at once without making it to be a holder's decision. So basically, the choice that I described before, allowing holders to decide what projects they want to invest in. Unfortunately, we'll have to kind of reinstate this and make everybody re-decide that if... Let's say as Sharky, we want royalties because it's part of our benefits for holders, part of benefits for the team as well. But maybe some holders don't want royalties, so they would have to exit the project at that point in time and that would be a decision. But what I don't want to happen, what I think would be really bad for the space, if all holders would have to decide one by one whether they want to upgrade their NFT to be royalties enforced or not. I think that should be a choice for creators, for collection owners.(21:52):So that's one aspect of it. Otherwise, it'll be a fractured ecosystem. It'll be kind of like, oh, within the same collection, some sharks from our collection support royalties, some don't. And there'll be confusion all over the place. And second, there is this debate right now. So basically, for context, all of the solutions involve some kind of whitelisting and blacklisting protocols that NFTs allow you to interact with in some sense. In my worldview, the approach with blacklisting is much more forgiving. Imagine if we go with a whitelisting approach, I think there will be a negative consequence for the ecosystem. Let's say Solana Hackathons. I want to experiment and build a new protocol and deploy it to main net and demonstrate how it works. If that protocol is not whitelisted, I cannot demonstrate this using any popular NFTs that use this royalty enforcement because I need to go through approval, I need to get some DAO or some authority or somebody to get my protocol approved.(22:48):And I think that extra hoop, that extra step, just would stagnate innovation and would create a lot of roadblocks, but it'll be in the sense, some kind of perfect solution excluding that because then we can only trade on these whitelisted marketplaces or at least the protocols and everything is great. But I think the trade-off is very significant. Versus if we go with a blacklisting approach, then we can just say, "Hey, you're not allowed to trade with these protocols that are not respecting royalties and the trade-off there will be like, there would be a lot of attempts and protocols (created) to work around royalties short-term and as a space we would have to play the catch up game. We'll have to keep blacklisting them, and keep kind of finding solutions for that. But I think it's better, I think it's better than the alternative because we're still open for innovation. We are kind of permissionless by default, if that makes sense, and require less authority, less authority on decisions. So not a lot of solutions allow for those two. And I don't know where we land in this space, but that's our viewpoint, I guess, on this year.Rea (23:50):I was also going to add that with royalties, you also kind of have this free rider problem if you allow everyone to pick and choose what they want to pay. Because whether it's a team that's not really doing anything and then they're just collecting royalties and you kind of feel bad, they're like, "Oh man, we're all paying and they're just sitting on their asses, that's so messed up." Versus a team that's really actively putting out content or new ways for you to earn or whatever it is that the team is doing. And then you have a bunch of people that don't pay for that and then a bunch of people who think it's worthwhile. So they pay for that. The creators aren't really getting paid for their work and the people that aren't paying for that anyway are also receiving the benefits. So what is the incentive to be a good actor in this case?(24:37):So I think that there are some ways that we've thought about within Sharky about how we incentivize, and people who are not caring about these benefits don't need to have these benefits and they don't want to pay for these benefits. But the people who do care about these benefits can actually be a part of the contributing community. So I think this is a problem that really requires a tailored approach according to what your company or project is doing. And I think I would just like to see more people put more intent towards this, whether you're just a part of the ecosystem, someone who's buying and selling flipping NFTs or a team.Brian (25:08):I think that's a great-nuanced take, which we don't always hear on the crypto Twitter side of things, but I agree it's definitely in this state right now whereas you said, Anton, we kind of have a way to just wipe a clean slate and rebuild this. And there are a lot of benefits to this Web 3.0 ecosystem where it is permission lists by default and people like you guys can come in and build a protocol idea without having to ask anybody's permission and keeping that spirit alive, I think is pretty important.(25:37):So I want to look ahead a little bit, what do you guys see as the future for Sharky? So today, Rea, we started this podcast, you said if you have JPEGs and you're JPEG rich but cash poor, you can lend these things out, you risk losing the NFT, but you can get immediate liquidity on the flip side of that. There's some speculators who think that they'll be able to make a pretty good ROI, assuming that the market holds up. Obviously not financial advice, very, very risky, but that's the current state of things today. As you guys look out about the long-term potential for what NFTs could be, what financialization of NFTs could be lending of these things, what excites you guys? What's on the roadmap and on the vision for Sharky?Anton (26:24):Yeah, it's a good question. So I think we'll be releasing a series of new products next year. So that's one exciting thing. Basically, applying our learnings to make the product better. One of the big ones is mortgages, or Buy Now, Pay Later. We've already been seeing experiments in this space with that. And yeah, basically the overall goal is to allow you to finance JPEGs on the entire spectrum of that. Whether you hold this JPEG or maybe you don't yet hold this JPEG, maybe you just want to get it, but you don't have enough funds to get it or maybe you want to just buy with leverage and buy several. So we want to release that product to the market, allowing you to basically pay a down payment and get an effect. You pay the full price of the NFT later, but still start being a holder immediately. Imagine you can join MonkeDAO and only pay 20% of the price and kind of see what's it about.(27:24):And maybe if you don't like it, you can sell it back but you only invested a fraction, or for any other benefits, you can look at the community or you can just trade. There's two different aspects. Deciding whether you want to be a holder or just trade in with leverage, which we believe will be a pretty popular use case as well. Obviously, there's a lot of nuance with our existing product and we are adding more features to that, but I think one of the things that I'm excited about is not directly a Sharky product feature, but it's more experimenting with user experience in this space. And we've been trying to pioneer at least some approaches and try to see how we can establish new norms. Right now, every interaction with a DeFi protocol on Solana on other chains, I call it click approve UX.(28:12):Basically, you do some meaningful action and then you need to approve a transaction in your wallet. What we want to experiment with is to build a different kind of experience that allows you to interact with protocol and look ahead, do actions, several of them, and then approve it all at once. Basically, making this experience more smooth and fluent. And that's kind of a UX pattern that we are developing. I'm personally very excited about releasing it and seeing how users will accept it, and see whether other protocols and other products will also try to do something similar. And on the NFT side of things, we are releasing our gamified revenue share program. It's not a passive revenue share, it's kind of requires users to actively contribute to the platform, engage with our product and with our NFTs and with that we will share some portion of upside with them. So that's coming pretty soon. And for the next year there's a lot of secret strategies and secret features for our holders that we will release over time. Did I miss anything, Rea, do you think? Like anything major?Brian (29:20):Anything for the clamoring Discord channel that is asking when, when, when any hidden nugget you can drop in here.Rea (29:28):I was like, "Are we going to drop some alpha?" Yeah, I mean I think that there's probably some other further development. I should probably check with the marketing team before I say anything crazy. But there's further development on the NFT that I think the community already knows about and that involves more goodies for the people who are really excited about sharks and love the art style. So there's a lot there. And yeah, I think that's it.Anton (29:54):Yeah. And like you mentioned something about the future of NFTs, how we see that. I think it's very interesting to see the first attempts to bring NFTs to real world assets and tie them together in some ways. And we're already talking to teams who are trying to do that. So our vision is to stay in the space of JPEGs, but also branch into the space of where NFTs start representing assets that could be your car or any collectibles and stuff like that, and provide financial infrastructure there. It'll be a pretty different product because the market is different, volatility is different, but fundamentally it's kind of the same type of incentive systems.(30:36):Fundamentally it's like lenders. Some people could be lenders, people could be borrowers, with just a different structure and maybe different terms of loans. So we definitely want to be in that space as well. And that also requires us to not just build a protocol, but requires us to gain expertise in those specific domains. Because lending is not created equal. What works for NFTs, and JPEGs may not work for collectibles, may not work for houses or cars. It requires different risk models and probably slightly different products. So yeah, that's kind of the vision for the next three to five years is expanding to those areas as well.Brian (31:13):Yeah, that's exciting. I think we can all kind of picture a world where one day those assets are represented on-chain. Obviously, the frictionless nature of transferring those makes a lot of sense. But as you noted, it's important to stay in-the-now and be realistic that right now there's a lot of JPEGs,  and I'd say that you guys are handling that use case pretty well. This has been an awesome discussion. One closing question we always love to ask our users, and I want to hear this take from both of you is who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 ecosystem?Anton (31:45):Yeah, it's really hard to pick one. I would say top of mind is the Tensor team, Tensor founders. So I think both of them are pretty amazing builders. It's impressive to me how just two of them, how much they built and how quickly in this space. And not just with Tensor. I was following their journey before, and they built lots of cool things for the ecosystem and they also just have a good intent. Things they built, they try to align those incentives with just like what's good for the space. Not just like, "Oh, let’s build a cool product." There's plenty of really good builders in Solana that just like to build things, but the reason I'm highlighting that team, I think they have a combination of both. They're really good builders but also built things that are very, very important and useful for the space and make the space better. So that's my take. It's Richard and Ilmoi from Tensor Trade.Brian (32:42):Yeah, Tensor Trade, the real-time NFT trading platform. Rea, your take.Rea (32:48):Yeah, like Anton said, it's pretty hard to pick one. I think if I had to hat tip to my origins, I learned a lot of my early technical knowledge on Solana from Brett, who's now at Star Atlas. And he’s done a lot of, I think, open-source work that is just a lot of the necessary work that goes into making the ecosystem something, who builds for the builders, is kind of how I think about him.(33:16):And so he is also been really fun to talk to about the different, if you want to look sort of long and far at what's going to happen to the technology down the line and what are some of the upcoming scalability issues, roadblocks that Solana faces, if you want to just get a pulse on that to be able to build with that in mind so you're not constantly building to catch up. You always have really good conversations with Brett, and I just really like that he's also someone who you can tell is genuinely passionate about the space. He's working on his own time to learn more and also to contribute more. And a lot of times when something happens in the ecosystem, if no one knows what's going on, you can still go talk to him about it. And he always, we can always theory craft and it's always a good time.Brian (34:02):Oh, that's great. Well, Rea and Anton, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Sharky?Rea (34:12):Well, the Sharky.fi is a really good place to start. You can look at the beautiful order books. We've recently rolled out some performance improvements, so that's going to be really fun. And I think nothing creates a better impression than making money. So go and make some money. Not financial advice.Anton (34:31):You can read over white paper on the homepage. Kind of gives you a high-level overview. Otherwise, if you just type “Sharky lend Twitter” in Google, you'll see threats that are written by the community. At this point we've seen more than 10 just not even sponsored by us in any way. Just some lender supporters describe how to use Sharky. And I think those are the best to learn because it's through the eyes of real users and there are even YouTube walkthroughs of how to open Sharky. Yeah, it's a pretty rich ecosystem already.Brian (35:05):Awesome, thank you so much. Anton and Rea, founders of SharkyFi.Anton (35:09):Yeah, thank you for having us. It was a pleasure.

Nader Dabit, Director of Developer Relations at Aave and Lens ProtocoI talks with Brian Friel about his journey moving from developing in web2 to web3. From creating educational content and authoring one of the first "Intro to Solana" programming articles, to founding Developer DAO and building the infrastructure for the next generation of web3 social apps. Show Notes:00:49 - Intro02:43 - Origin story / Background  06:13 -  AHA moment in Web 3.0 ?10:49 - Lens and Aave                18:30 - Composability between blockchains  21:45 - Advice to newcomers24:15 - A builder he admires in the Web3 ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian (00:00):Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom. And I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Nader Dabit, the director of developer relations at Aave & Lens Protocol. Nader, welcome to the show. Nader (00:25):Hey, thank you for having me. Good to be here. Brian (00:27):I'm really excited to talk to you today. A lot of folks may know you from Crypto Twitter. You've been around a lot of different places in the Web3 ecosystem. But for some folks who might not know, you actually wrote one of the earliest intro to Solana programming articles that there were at the time, back in, I believe, summer 2021. And it's special to me, because this is actually the first article that I found on Solana that got me working at Phantom full time. So, before we dive into everything, I want to say thank you and welcome, and it's great to be talking to you today. Nader (00:58):Yeah, I remember very clearly when I wrote that article, because at the time I was trying to learn how to build on Solana. And I had a hard time finding all of the pieces that I needed to build out the types of application that I was used to building, just for a hello world type of thing. And I was actually traveling at the time from Croatia, and also Mexico during that week. And I remember just staying up sometimes all night, just trying to figure out what I thought was some basic stuff. And I was like, I have to document this stuff. It has to be documented somewhere, in a way that I would want it. (01:32):Because it's probably documented in other ways, like bits and pieces. But putting it all together, I was like, okay, this is going to be what I wanted to find. And I remember when I tweeted it out, it was one of the most popular tweets that I maybe have ever had, in the top five. That tutorial, the reception was just enormous. So, there was a lot of interest in Solana for developers, and I think that this was one of the things that enabled a lot of developers at the time to just get up and running, and see how it felt to build a full-stack application on Solana. Brian (02:02):No, I couldn't agree more. It was a time where there was a ton of demand, and just not enough resources or infrastructure. And it's been really cool, to just see all the derivative pieces that have come from that. A ton of folks have taken that article, built their own version, extended it in some ways. And view that and the initial paulx escrow tutorial as the two sparks that kicked off Solana development, and DevRel and all that. But before we get into everything today, you have a really interesting background. You were early to Solana, but then you worked across a number of different protocols already in the Web3 ecosystem. And before that, you were deeply involved in React and Web2 land. Could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your background? Nader (02:43):Yes, so I've been a developer for about 10 years now, a little over 10 years. And I've specialized in, I would say four main areas of specialization during that time. I started off as a front end and single page application developer, I would call it, working with stuff from just plain JavaScript and HTML, to Angular, to React. And then, I moved into mobile development for a little over three years, specializing in cross platform application development with React native. (03:16):One of those years I was running a company called React Native Training, where I would train teams of engineers, where they had these siloed teams that were focused on either iOS or Android, and I would introduce them to React Native. And there was quite a bit of demand for that. So, a lot of the clients that I had, were large companies that had a lot of overhead with their developer budgets, and they were trying to find ways to not only have less resources needed to build out applications, but also to be able to build faster, and also to have a better singular code base, so we don't have to have two separate code bases. (03:54):So yeah, I had clients like Amazon and Teams at Microsoft, or individual engineers from Microsoft that would come to my training. Teams like Warner Brothers, and banks and stuff, were also my clients. So, that was really fun for about a year. And then, the next thing that I did is, I got interested in cloud computing. So, I ended up moving and working at AWS for a little over three years. And during that time I was doing developer relations there, which is what I'm doing now as well. And after a little over three years there, I got interested in the blockchain space. And I thought that while the work that we were doing at AWS was super important and very real world, there was a lot of applications and companies using it. I thought that the blockchain space was a little more exciting, just because it was newer. I thought the opportunities that were available for this technology, once it became mature enough to actually be usable for the ideas that we had, were really powerful and stuff. (04:50):And I felt like it was so early that there was a lot of room for growth, because a lot of these ideas were there and the technology... The primitives were there, but the maturity of those primitives weren't quite there. So, being part of that growth and stuff, to me it seemed really exciting. So yeah, I moved into blockchain space. Brian (05:07):And what year was that, Nader, real quick before you jumped in? Nader (05:11):So, I joined the blockchain world in April of 2021. So, a year and eight months ago, I guess, seven months ago. Brian (05:22):You made a huge impact in just that little time. I would've put you back at least a couple years on that, but that's really cool. Nader (05:28):Yeah, definitely the first time I got into this from the perspective of a developer was then, I had dabbled in crypto as an investor before that, but knew nothing about anything actually until then. And then, in that time, in the last 18 months, I've worked at the graph protocol, I've worked with Celestia, which is the first modular blockchain. And now, I'm working with Aave and Lens Protocol. Brian (05:48):That's great. And was there anything at that time, you had this great job at AWS, you've written a number of books, React Native in Action, all of these great resources that are used across a number of traditional companies. But was there anything about Web3 in particular that was an aha moment for you, or just made you just say, "I have to work in this space"? Or do you think it was more of a culmination of just years of watching it off to the side? Nader (06:13):Yeah, there was a few things. I'll look at this technology as a new way to build certain applications that wasn't possible in the past. I don't look at it as, oh, Web3 is going to replace everything that we had before. Instead, I think I look at it as it's going to probably disrupt certain types of industries, but it also just opens the door for new types of applications that are really exciting to me. And I think the one thing that stood out the most to me, is that we had public immutable and permanent infrastructure that developers could share, and use, and build on top of, almost like the way that we have code that is open source, that everyone can share, and use it, and clone it, and fork it, and do whatever. If we applied those same principles to actual software infrastructure, that was instead of the... We're kind of used to brittle infrastructure. (07:02):Most of the time when you're building on top of someone else's API, you don't know if it's going to be there tomorrow or even later today. You also have no control over the access of that. Someone can shut you off, someone can prevent you from using it at any time. So, you can't really share backend infrastructure. So, everyone's out there building out their own backend infrastructure for their own ideas, which is great if you need something custom. But there's a lot of things, I think, that would be very valuable for other people to share and not have to rebuild themselves. But it's just not possible through the traditional software infrastructure primitives that we have. Because a database can go down, someone can go and delete things from a database. You can't depend on that data being there, but with blockchain infrastructure you actually have those properties. (07:49):And that's really exciting to me, because what we're seeing exactly I think with Lens, is that if you provide a really high quality backend, and you bring a really high quality API that enables developers to build on top of it, you've done away with a large majority of the work that's needed to build an app, building out the backend. Just imagine if you only had to build out the front end, and you didn't have to worry about this, and everyone could share that backend infrastructure. (08:16):And that's what excited me the most. There weren't really a lot of real world implementations of this though at the time. There was NFTs and DeFi stuff, which is great, but I don't think the coming to market use case is going to be that. I think that will be things that are used a lot in the future, but not that. (08:32):And then, the other thing that excited me about this stuff, it's payments. And I think that also stablecoins, this idea of stablecoins, and offering stability to currencies around the world that don't have that, was pretty exciting to me. And also, just being able to permissionlessly access and send payments was revolutionary, as someone who has a lot of family in the Middle East and stuff, and is also familiar with what's going on in different parts of the world. I think one thing that was an aha moment for me, was someone was a cryptocurrency is very volatile. And I realized that some people in parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, they don't realize that everyone else's currencies are also volatile. If they think that everyone's currency is the US dollar, just is always... But they don't realize that the majority of the world lives in places that where their currency is just as volatile as cryptocurrency. (09:20):So, realizing that so many people just don't understand that, and there's so much privilege in the world that there's opportunities to build out these things, that bring equality around the world for stuff, just having stability in their currencies. So, stable coins to me, are really exciting. And that's again, one of the things that excites me actually about working at Aave is, we're going to be launching a stable coin. So, being able to be part of something like that, is pretty cool. Brian (09:44):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And for folks who might be based in the US, or don't have the privilege, not having to worry about their own currency not being stable, even just having to go through the pain of sending a bank wire somewhere across different countries, it's like pulling teeth. And once you send something over crypto rails, and it's near instant, you're paying near nothing, and you realize it's on this public infrastructure that you just talked about. It's like an aha moment, where it's like how could we not use this in some capacity? It's pretty incredible. (10:15):So, you hit on a couple different things there. You hinted at Lens Protocol and Aave, both of which you are the director of DevRel at. Could you talk us through a little bit about what each of those two protocols are? For folks who have been in crypto for a little while, they probably know Aave, it's a household name. Darling of the DeFi Summer days. But it's quite interesting that then Lens is also under the same house as Aave, two very different protocols. Could you walk us through a little bit about what each of those are doing, and maybe why the similar teams are building both of them? Nader (10:50):Yeah, basically I'm working a lot more closely with Lens. Just the first couple of months that I've been here to get a lot of the ideas that I personally had off the ground, as someone who's been building on Lens. And I think we're going to be doing a lot of work in Aave though, starting at the beginning of next year. A lot of work actually is happening right now in Aave, but from the DevRel perspective, we're launching some stuff. So, we're going to use DevRel power to help bring that to market. But yeah, Aave is basically a Defi protocol, and allows people to lend and borrow crypto and real world assets, without having to go through a centralized intermediary. So, that's the main value prop of Aave. And then, Lens is a Web3... Or I wouldn't even bucket in that. It's essentially a social media protocol and social media application API, that allows developers to build social graph applications. (11:41):And with Lens, you can have a lot of this backend infrastructure, like I mentioned, already there, ready for you to use to build out applications. And I think that when we think of the five billion or so people on the internet today, we might say there isn't maybe a single thread that ties everyone online together. But if you do look at the most widely used applications in the world today, you could almost probably assume that a high nineties percent of those five billion people around the world, have used a social application so far. So TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of these applications, are social graph applications. And they have very similar characteristics. You go to the app, and you have to create a profile. So you do that, you have a profile. You then have the opportunity to create content. You then have the opportunity to follow people. You're then given a feed of content based on who you follow, and then people that are following you, your content is put into their feed. (12:39):So, if you think about an application from that perspective, you can actually bucket a large majority of internet traffic into social graph applications. And they all literally copy, and have these exact same characteristics. So, what if we could abstract some of that away, and make it to where people could actually have those features in their application, without having to build all of that from scratch. And that's what Lens is doing. And I think that from the sheer user adoption perspective, it's the first real world use case to me, that actually appeals to people without having to teach them anything off the bat. (13:15):And that's just one thing, but making that accessible, is another story, because historically blockchain applications are very not approachable by the average person. In fact, the UX is terrible for most blockchain applications. And I don't think people understand how much friction is involved in most web three applications, for the average person I know at AWS, we would literally spend weeks and months with customers. Sometimes those customers would spend millions of dollars just to remove a couple of hundred milliseconds of latency from one of their APIs, because that latency was costing them millions of dollars in revenue, because they would drop customers or whatever. (13:56):So, when you think about a few hundred milliseconds of latency being a huge issue for a real world application. Imagine telling a new customer that they have to first download this wallet that's going to give them these private keys and these seed phrases, and they have to understand how that works. Then, they're going to have to go and find this token somewhere on the internet, and they're going to have to find out how to purchase that token. Then they're going to have to learn which network that token is on, and they're going to have to transfer that token from the place that they bought it, into that new wallet, on the right network that they bought. (14:30):Then they're going to have to pay for every transaction that they make on the network. It's crazy to think that the average person is going to be interested in this stuff. And down the road, when people start using DeFi, and stuff like that, they might understand the value that you do probably want to have that security for paying for a transaction, and understanding how all that stuff works. But for onboarding new people, it's just crazy to think that we're going to onboard millions of people this way. (14:54):So, the approach beyond having an actual use case that makes sense for the average person, also lowering the barrier to entry for that UX, is a huge thing that we're trying to solve as well. And we have some stuff rolling out next year, that's going to address that. But we've already done some stuff. Or when I say we, I'm really speaking of the Aave engineering team, and the Lens engineering team, who is just really, really incredible. They've already done a lot of stuff. I think that lowers the barrier to entry for users. Gasless transactions, meaning that the user doesn't have to pay for the transaction on the network. Low cost networks like Solana, like Polygon, others out there, make this possible for the first time where you can actually subsidize transactions the same way you can subsidize software infrastructure like AWS. (15:38):When you use an app by Twitter, you're incurring cost on their backend, but it's so small that the company eats that, and pays for that software infrastructure themselves. You don't expect to pay for a tweet. When you tweet, you don't expect to have to pay them to do that. It's like that would be crazy. So, that's where we're getting, I think, with more scalable blockchain infrastructure. And that's one of the things that they implemented into Lens. And then, the other thing is that they implemented, is a dispatcher that allows you to delegate your signing to an abstraction that allows you to do certain things on chain, but not everything. So, you don't want to be able to send money without having to sign a transaction. That would be a security concern. But posting something to a social network that's delegated without you having to sign, makes a lot of sense. Because you could always go back. (16:24):And obviously, we've never even really, that I know I've had any issues with this, but let's say that you did something wrong and then posted a post that you didn't like. We have a soft delete feature in the API, you can go and delete something. But I guess my general point is that being able to post, and comment, and stuff, you shouldn't have to sign for all of these different interactions. And that's what the delegator allows you to do. You just have the same user experience that you would in a traditional Web2 app. Brian (16:49):Yeah, totally. You touched earlier on just a couple milliseconds, a hundred milliseconds of latency, makes the difference in user attention spans. Imagine having to go find that browser extension pop up. It's going to make you not want to tweet as much, second guess some of your actions. And then I agree as well, even we've seen this from a wallet side, a lot of... I think this is definitely where the space is going. Having some permissioned system right now, if you think of permissions with wallets, pretty much all of them just, it's a connect. And then by default, you could have any permissions, but it requires manual approval. And I think we're almost training users negatively in that sense, when everything's a pop-up action, they start to not take pop-ups as seriously. (17:31):But if we could make a system where we know certain actions are safe, we don't even have to alert you about this. But then, there is a transaction that potentially you'll be exchanging funds in this transaction, you should review this manually before sending it, that's definitely moving in the right direction. So, that's really cool to see that you guys are already building on that front. (17:49):You touched a little bit too about just how these blockchain ecosystems, up until now, have been largely inaccessible. And I would argue, also largely siloed from one another. There's a lot of different ecosystems out there. You've spent time at other projects that touch multiple different blockchains, multiple different layers. You're at the graph, you're at Celestia. Now you're at Aave and Lens, which is all over the EVM ecosystem. Can you speak a little bit to how you see everything that we're building in Web3, all these different blockchains, how some of these might compose over time? What is your worldview when you're working across all these different siloed ecosystems today? Nader (18:31):The thing that really turned me off a little bit when I started really understanding the ecosystem in general, was this Maximalism that you see. And I thought it was really toxic and stuff. And I didn't really like that at all. And so, that was one of the reasons I went to work with Celestia. I really liked their approach to technology, and I like the solution that they're bringing to the table and stuff. But I also really liked the founders, I would say anti-maximalist approach to their communications and stuff like that. And I just think that being so bought into a single idea, prevents you from seeing and understanding everything else that's out there. So, I don't know... Not only think it's just toxic in general, but I also think it's very limiting for your own career and your own understanding of the whole landscape. (19:18):Because if you box yourself in, you're preventing yourself from doing any research or understanding everything else out there in the world. So, my take has always been to really try to do due diligence on all of the different technologies that are out there, and try to truly understand them, and not have any bias to the way I look at something new. And really try to get to the bottom of it. But it's hard, because there's just so many different things that are happening at a given time. And there's also so many people that are shilling their own thing, without being very honest about what are the trade-offs sometimes. So, it is challenging to understand everything that's going out there. But yeah, my take is to always try to say, "Okay, this thing is here. I'm going to do some research." And once I understand it, I want to know the trade-offs, and I want to speak honestly about those trade-offs in the future. (20:10):Because nothing is perfect, and very rarely is something legitimate actually not worth anything at all. You'll see people that try to talk about certain technologies, as if they're completely worthless. When in reality, there's a trade-off there, that's actually being made, and they're just trying to make their thing look better by talking negatively about the other thing. But I think most of the technologies... Not all, but most of the technologies that make it into the mainstream, do have a good value proposition. The question is whether or not that is the right long term trade off to make. Those are the questions that I think that we don't always know the answer to. Brian (20:47):No, couldn't agree more. And I think it times up really well with what we're doing over here at Phantom. I think by the time this episode is live, we'll be taking the first few people off our beta wait list, for a multi chain Phantom, where it's all going to be one aggregated view of switching chains, and we agree that we want to get past the maximalism front. There's a lot of really awesome work being done across the VM ecosystem, across the Solana space, and everything in between. And I think it's a really cool time for the industry to be bringing this all together. I couldn't be more excited. (21:17):So, a few more questions here for you as we wrap up. You've hit on a lot across your journey through Web2 to Web3, everything that's going on now in Web3, across Lens and Aave. If you were a new dev coming in here, let's say you have TypeScript experience, your classic what you would need for some Web3 JS work, how would you point new developers who are interested in the space and coming into the space, and wanting to potentially contribute, and end up working full-time in this industry? Nader (21:46):Yeah, I think front end developers are just very uniquely suited, but also they are in a great position, and huge opportunities lie to them without having to learn a lot of new stuff, which is really cool, and really exciting. At least for me, as someone who is for the most part, just a front end or a mobile developer. I thought that it was very approachable to get into this space, because every application still needs a front end. The only difference is that instead of sending an HTTP or GraphQL request, a traditional HTTP request, you're sending an RPC request for the most part, to transact with these different networks and stuff. And I think that's the main thing that you would have to just try to dive into a little bit, and understand. And then, you probably would be ready to start doing some interviews. (22:29):And I think if you're a good front end engineer, even with the market as it is today, there's still a very good demand for that. I think the challenge has always been for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, unfortunately. I think it is still somewhat of a challenge if you're a junior, to land that first role. But beyond that, I think that if you have some skillset on the front end, you can get started with... Most companies that are hiring will probably give you a shot. If you've done just even the slightest amount of due diligence, to understand what are these client side libraries. So, you have things like Ethers.js, you have things like Solana.js. I believe we have WalletConnect, Rainbow Wallet. And then, I think that you probably know some of the more Solana specific wallet adapters, and stuff for JavaScript. (23:14):Anyway. So experiment, figure out which ecosystem you want to be in. Look at all the different client side libraries and stuff that are there. Just build out a couple of apps over the week, literally just building out two or three apps, and throwing on your GitHub, will probably set you apart from 99% of the people out there. And yeah, it's really not rocket science, I don't think, to get hired in this industry if you're a friend and developer. So, that would be my take, is just to realize that 95% of your skills are transferable. The other 5% is just understanding these blockchain specific interactions with RPCs, and the wallet stuff as well, which is the web3 blockchain version of identity. Brian (23:50):I couldn't agree more. Building in public, building out that resume, is such a stronger signal than anything else in this space. And it can be done. It's just a couple of weeks. If you put the hard work into it, you already have the skillset. It's just about showing your work at that point. Well Nader, this has been awesome. One closing question we ask all our guests, and I'd love to hear this from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Web3 ecosystem? Nader (24:16):Wow, that's a good question. I think that there's not just a single one, there's just really so many. I would say that if I had to point out maybe a couple of people, one of them would definitely be the team I have here, that I've met here at Lance and Ave. They're not really that active, or as active on social media, I would say. But I want to give a shout-out to Josh, who is the main backend engineer on Lens. He's just incredible. He'll come up with a solution for what is a problem that maybe has never been solved before, an idea. And then, he'll actually have implemented that in sometimes days or weeks. And just seeing that done on a consistent basis, is just really wild. There's a lot of developers from within developer DAO, that I would shout out. I think that engineers over at Celestia, like Mustafa Al-Bassam, and the rest of the folks over there, are really incredible. There's a lot of high quality people that are building right now. It's hard to say anyone without feeling like I'm leaving a bunch of people out, to be honest. Brian (25:17):That's a good sign though. Nader (25:18):But yeah, but Armani Ferrante. Armani is in this salon ecosystem. He's definitely one of my favorites as well. Brian (25:24):Oh, that's awesome. Well, I couldn't agree more. Lots of great names all through that list. No shortage of folks in this industry, who are working hard every day to push this space forward. Nader, thanks so much for coming on the show. Where can folks go to learn more about what you're up to at Lens? Nader (25:39):Yeah, I would just say, you can go to my Lens profile. It's nader.lens, on any of the lens front ends, like Lenster, on Twitter, on DaBa3. And then, I have my personal webpage set up on RWE, that's my links to my YouTube and stuff. And that's on nader.rwe.dev. Brian (25:58):Awesome. Nader Dabit, thanks for coming on the Zeitgeist. Nader (25:59):Thank you for having me. 

What do Nike, Starbucks, reddit, and AAA gaming studio 12am have in common?They all use Polygon to build in web3.Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt joined Brian Friel to discuss crypto's mainstream adoption and the future of web3 gaming on Episode 15 of The Zeitgeist.Show Notes:01:36 -  Background / How he started working at Polygon?05:09  - Why Polygon and web 3.0 gaming?11:29 - Partnerships16:58 - The state of web 3.0 gaming today20:28 The future of web 3.0 gaming22:29 How will wallets evolve in the space24:35 -  A builder he admires Full Transcript:Brian (00:06):Hey everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relationship fan, and I'm thrilled to announce my guest, Ryan Wyatt, the CEO of Polygon Studios. Polygon is a platform for scaling and building decentralized blockchain apps on Ethereum. Polygon Studios specifically is the business team working to help advance the Polygon ecosystem across its various products. Ryan, welcome to the show.Ryan (00:35):Dude, you've got a perfect podcast voice. Let me tell you, man.Brian (00:39):Thank you. It's a good thing no one can see my face. It's a voice for podcasting, but we'll keep it at that.Ryan (00:44):Yeah, that's fair. That's all that matters. That's all that matters. Thanks for having me.Brian (00:48):Yeah. Hey, we're really excited. By the time that this episode's live, the announcement will be out that Phantom and Polygon are joining forces and bringing the Phantom experience to the EVM ecosystem. We couldn't be more thrilled to be working with you guys.Ryan (01:01):Yeah, we're super excited. Long time coming. Glad the day has finally arrived. We can share it with everybody. You can't see it, but I'm wearing my Phantom shirt, so I'm fully celebrating the moment.Brian (01:12):I love it. And we definitely got some more of those Phantom shirts in stock. We can be giving it out to all the Polygon community.Ryan (01:19):That's right, man.Brian (01:19):Getting the merch going.Ryan (01:20):Send them my way.Brian (01:20):Hey, well, you know, you have a really interesting background. I really want to dig into that before we get started on everything that's in what we can be teaming up together across Polygon and Phantom. But for the uninitiated, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became to be working at Polygon?Ryan (01:36):Yeah, so my whole background was really in the creator economy all the way back to my days in college. So I played games competitively. I commentated tournaments for Major League Gaming. I ran the online tournament infrastructure for Major League Gaming, 2008, 2009. Ultimately went to Machinima, which was a really early gaming company on YouTube, and then went to YouTube to start the gaming vertical where I was the head of gaming for almost eight years at YouTube. And gaming is the second largest vertical for YouTube. It's got 350 million logged in users. It generates billions of dollars for the platform. So a really fun time that I had of 12, 13, 14 years in the creator economy. Last year in 2021, I really started getting into angel investing of Web 3.0 projects. And the way that I actually got connected into Web 3.0 projects was just really game developers that I really believed in that had a high degree of talent that were going over and they were making at the time, calling blockchain based games.(02:33):And I just became very enamored and fascinated with the concept of what can you do when you really own your digital items and how big of a business that's becoming. And so as I spent more time in that space while still at YouTube, I got really excited about what can I do to jump in full time. And I came to Polygon and I thought I really like Polygon for a couple key reasons. First and foremost, I was already sold on Ethereum where that was going to be a base layer for developers and users, and not to say that other alt ones don't have a place in the world. Ethereum had kind of already checked that box that they'd been able to gravitate a lot of users and developers. And clearly there was this conundrum that existed at Ethereum of the inability to let it scale.(03:12):And so I started focusing on protocols and companies that were really looking at this idea of how do you scale Ethereum? And landed on Polygon because I had liked their ZK tech acquisitions that they had done. They spent about a billion dollars acquiring three different ZK companies. I looked at that as like, okay, that's a real scaling L2 future for this platform.(03:35):And I thought I could come in given that I worked at a platform like YouTube, saw a lot of verticals, saw what it's like to scale a company, and knew Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 really. Well, I thought I was in a unique position to come into the company and help out. And so I joined Polygon Studios in January of this year. I lead our whole business team. So if you can think of Polygon as there's a product and engineering team that's focusing on ID and our different ZK solutions, our POS chain, avail, our super nets, a lot of work going into our product efforts across the board over there. Everything else kind of sits under my camp of everything from BD to partnerships to marketing, finance, legal, compliance, a lot of these different other business areas. And so it's been an awesome opportunity. I've really enjoyed being here and Polygon had such a tremendous year. It's been fun to be on the ride, that's for sure.Brian (04:24):Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think Polygon is a bit of a meme that you guys have the most legendary BD team in the Web 3.0 space.Ryan (04:31):I love that meme too. I won't lie to you.Brian (04:33):Yeah, I want to get into all that and what you guys have cooking over at Polygon, but just to quickly go back a little bit on your background, you mentioned you were the head of gaming at YouTube, and that's at a time when it really wasn't popular opinion that it would be a popular thing to watch people play video games on the internet. I think you were very early to that movement and now you see that movement potentially heading to the blockchain space, you know, mentioned that your interest in Polygon really peaked from seeing game developers move over. For you, what was the aha moment for you that made you leave a job like YouTube to come into the Web 3.0 space?Ryan (05:08):Yeah, no, I love the question. I think the funny thing too is, so, taking a step back at the first part of hey, you know, you got involved before the creator economy was even a thing. And the reason I got involved was I really was such a gamer and it was fun to watch gaming highlights and clips from other cool moments in games. And what got me into it was simply, I think there's other people like me that might enjoy this, other gamers that are watching these videos and stuff. And so it started just with something as innocent and simple as that and kind of kept building off of it. Okay, how do you introduce this to more people? What barriers do you break down in order to get it into more people's hands and so forth? And so some of it you control, some of it you don't.(05:54):So a good example was really where you started to see scaling of more gaming videos being uploaded was when the Dazzle capture card came out, it was like a 50 or $60 capture card you plugged into your Xbox or PlayStation very simply captured to a hard drive. You had this raw footage output that you could just clip up and then upload, right? Then also software got better with Final Cut and Premier and all these different things. And so you started to see a lot of these things happen that other companies were contributing to and really what you don't ever sit there. And at the time I was never like, oh, some of the biggest celebrities in the world one day are going to be people that upload videos on YouTube. You don't start with such an insane point of view that I wouldn't have believed it at the time.(06:38):You didn't need to sell this huge idea and you just believe, hey, there's people that are interested in it and this is going to keep getting bigger as more people progress. I say all of that because clearly the outcome was, again, 350 million logged-in people watch gaming video on YouTube every day. Some of the biggest celebrities in the world now come from YouTube. Mr. Beast was uploading gaming videos, Dream, all these different people, right? And so I saw a bunch of similarities in Web 3.0. I love this idea of decentralization. I really did believe that, hey, there is a power dynamic that negatively impacts users. You see it in gaming, a lot of this is anchored around gaming and that as people are spending more money on digital goods, there's going to be this desire and push for more genuine ownership over it. So I started to see something where I was like, hey, this is interesting to me and I think it will be interesting to other people.(07:27):And now I also saw a lot of capital in the space, and by that I mean there is so many different people focusing on so many different problems like Phantom with the wallet, us with a protocol, Magic Eden who we just partnered with on the marketplace. You saw all these great talented people contributing their part in advancing the overall ecosystem. And so I had this perspective of, well, the creator economy took about 15, 16 years to really hit its stride in a meaningful way. I think that Web 3.0, if you think about where we're at, can really cut that timeline in half because of the type of people, the capital and resources that are in this space. And I felt that there was already a really good product market fit as far as people wanting this. And so for me, it actually was a really easy jump.(08:11):I had no issue leaving. I did awesome. I loved my job at YouTube, running gaming YouTube was so fun. Great people love Susan, our CEO. Really enjoyed who I worked with. But even saying all that, it was actually really easy to come make the jump here because I was like, oh, this is going to be so fun over the next decade, there's going to be so many different learning opportunities, things to build. There's this blank canvas of creativity and yeah, it's littered with a bunch of issues. That was no different than YouTube in these early days with people uploading porn or videos that had copyright or music. You're dealing with a bunch of abuse factors in crypto right now. We're seeing it play out, but that's okay. It's a lot of what you expect in first movers and early adopters of a new product. And so I'm really optimistic about how this stuff shakes out and what the future looks like and how even on a personal level I can contribute to shaping that in some way.Brian (09:01):Yeah, no, I agree. There's nothing quite working on the frontier attack. It's really exciting.Ryan (09:07):Frontier indeed it is. Yes. We're reminded of that every two months at this rate.Brian (09:13):Absolutely. So let's turn a little bit to Polygon specifically. And you mentioned that you just jumped in with two feet into this space. What is it about Polygon that piqued your interest and why do you think it's particularly well suited for this movement into Web 3.0 gaming?Ryan (09:29):So going back to Ethereum, I was betting on Ethereum, so I was like, I want to be associated with a protocol that's focused on scaling Ethereum. And so there's some great companies, Immutables out there and so forth. I just really liked Polygon because I love the founders, so I got to spend some time with Sandeep. I mean these guys have the heart and spirit, JD, Milo, Onarog. It's really inspirational. I kind of like an underdog story too. And if you think about even where YouTube was relative to Twitch and some of these other things in the gaming category, we had to overcome some of these battles to stay being the largest video platform. Facebook, Mixer with Microsoft, it was just fun to kind of compete. And so I just really like the heart that they had of one, they were really well intended about how much they believed in the future of decentralization and polygons' role in it.(10:20):And two, that passion, you can't recreate that stuff. And so I just very easily gravitated towards them. I also, again, well capitalized the product and engineering team, brilliant people on the ZK side. We have some of the best engineers, mathematicians, PhDs when it relates to cryptography and ZK work in the world on Polygon. So it was, it shot up. I don't think we're an underdog anymore, obviously I think we've arrived, right? We have all this great talent across the organization. We've got a really clear vision of what we think it's going to look like. And so it's just fun. It's just fun to be on a team when you work with people that are really talented, it makes you want to work harder, it makes you get excited to get up every day to work. And so we've just got one of those teams and organizations and I love it.Brian (11:13):That's awesome. So you have a great team that you guys have here at Polygon. We mentioned a little bit earlier that you guys are at the legendary BD team in the Web 3.0 space. Let's talk a little bit about some of those partnerships that you guys have landed recently. What partnerships are you particularly excited about?Ryan (11:29):Well, I mean honestly, selfishly, the Magic Eden and Phantom partnerships are pretty fun. Seeing these, a great marketplace, a great wallet go multichain is so good for the space. I think multi chain is a good thing for the space. Oftentimes too, I say it's just like we're so small and so early to be super competitive. And so I think multi chain is just a great way for all companies to look. Even games and things that are building on Polygon. So that's been really fun. We've also had a lot on the gaming side this past year. We partnered with Tilting Point, we partnered with Midnight Society, which is Dr. Disrespect’s game. I mean obviously we had just a heyday on the enterprise side. We had Nike and Starbucks and Reddit and Meta. I mean, honestly, that list gets crazy. Super proud of all the team's work there.(12:19):DeFi, we had a really fun year too. I really feel good about what we've done with DeFi, Robinhood, who was a really exciting announcement. So there's just been great momentum. The teams really, it's a mix of Web 2.0 background folks from big tech with Web 3.0 native gurus, and they just really work well as far as learning from each other. It doesn't come without its hiccups, but it really has been a great collaborative effort. So we've just had a lot of fun partnerships this year. It's great to be able to announce Phantom as we come to the end too as well. I think that's going to be exciting as we go into the new year, especially with all the projects we announced and so many of them we haven't even launched yet. If you think about Starbucks and some of these other ones, we haven't even debuted them yet. So 23 is going to be a fun year. I'm really excited. I know people right now are pessimistic bears because that's the season when the highs are high, they're really high and the lows, they're really low. I'm kind of pretty excited going into 2023 with all this momentum we have. Then our ZK tech coming out, we're going to be able to do a bunch more and the DeFi space with our ZK tech as well. Vibes are high on IM my man.Brian (13:27):I love it. That's great. You mentioned a ton there that hits across a bunch of different sectors. When you talk to these teams, especially, I'm curious, the ones who maybe aren't as Web 3.0 native, are there any commonalities between all them about what they're particularly excited about or maybe some specific areas that they think are most fruitful for growth in the Web 3.0 space?Ryan (13:46):It varies so much from each one. Think about a Magic Eden or a Phantom opportunity versus a Starbucks versus Meta. I do think a lot of folks are really interested in these ideas of these decentralized, let's say peer-to-peer networks, if you will, in layman's kind of Web 2.0 terms and kind of what you can do with it. So yeah, I think from that perspective, there's a lot of intrigue and appetite in the space. I would say it's not necessarily a growth vector for them. I think it's a lot of it is, hey, this is really interesting, new tech, what can we do? How do we participate in it? How do we learn in it? How do we trial? How do we try projects in it? And then there's varying degrees. I mean if you look at Instagram, they went really in, you mint on Polygon. You can sell directly from Instagram as they build on that. That's a really just valuable tool from a creator product feature set.(14:37):And people don't really need to worry about the Polygon aspect. I mean, it's fun if you're in the space, Polygon, but at the end of the day, it's like it's a great product feature they unlocked via Polygon, Reddit and what they're doing with Starbucks Odyssey. And basically they're going to allow this rewards program to be on chain, and the NFT part will be really passive as it should be with users that are going to use it. Same with Reddit, digital collectibles. So I just think you're really hitting a stride in how people are figuring it out. And there's going to be learning and iterative work here for all of them. But yeah, I think everybody's looking for something different when they come to the table. And I feel like what we have that's pretty unique is a bunch of people that can look at all these different perspectives from institutions, to finance, to big tech, to DeFi, to being a NFT, degen trader, all these different users that matter in our communities that matter. We've got good representation of it internally.Brian (15:32):Yeah, no, that's great. And it's great to see so much enthusiasm from these orgs actually putting their money where their mouth is and learning by doing and shipping and iterating, doing all that. It's a really cool time to see. Just a couple years ago that would've been basically unheard of in the crypto space. So it's really awesome to see that changing.Ryan (15:48):It's fun that crypto's ... look, dude, I would never call myself a crypto native. I didn't read a Bitcoin white paper and it changed my life back in the day. So you are seeing this new wave of people. This is good for the space. People that come in-Brian (16:02):Totally.Ryan (16:03):That got really interested in some of the ethos of Web 3.0 that is entering the space. And so this is why I feel good about these cycles that we'll have of people coming in. And it will be an ebb and flow. We'll have these big breakthroughs. We'll have moments we've been going through the past couple months on pulling back, and that's a natural part of the course that we're on. And I think what you continue to see with each stride will be more talent, more innovation, more use cases, more people each time.Brian (16:29):Yeah, no, I agree. And each new wave of users has their own perspective. As you said, it's no longer the hardcore cyberpunks and crypto maxes coming in, and that's how the space grows. It's really exciting to see. Totally. I want to bring it back just a little bit to gaming in particular too. Given your background, everything. We talked about how excited you were moving into the Web 3.0 space from head of gaming at YouTube. Talk a little bit about how you see the state of gaming, Web 3.0 gaming today and how that might change in the coming years.Ryan (16:58):So if you think about Web 3.0, the first version of it was, they were rudimentary Ponzi-esque type games. Some games I don't think operated with malice. I think some did, right? No doubt. I think that it was a great learning experience of what can you do with all these different things? You have a token, you've got decentralization, you've got ownership. You're trying to balance game mechanics. You're just doing a lot. Making a game is really difficult. You start adding all these different elements, it becomes very complex. So I'm pretty empathetic to, let's call it generation one of Web 3.0 games, none of them, which would be anything that I'd be interested in playing. I think Axie even playing that was like, okay, at least it's like there's something here. But these are all kind of base level games. A lot of great talent though coming from that space as far as generation one Web 3.0 games as far as learning and iterating.(17:50):And that's not super uncommon if you look at some of the early gatcha games and what mobile first offered up and some of the pay games that mobile ad were pretty atrocious as well. And so mobile went through a very kind of similar era of how do you iterate on these things? How do you improve? And so Web 3.0 games now, it's like you're starting to see some really good. One, it's like if you think about really great games take years to make. So you could have been last year been like, I'm going to make a Web 3.0 game and I have this really good studio and I've got a great background. And you're not seeing that game next year. You're seeing it in like 2024. So it's going to take a while and it's not going to happen fast in gaming. You're going to keep seeing new things come out in Web 3.0 gaming that will continue to pique people's interest and be like, okay, that's cool.(18:41):Or oh, what they just did with memberships and NFT, that's cool. Or what they just did with governance, that's cool. And games are just going to keep getting better and better and better. It'll be beyond just digital marketplaces and things that you own items in and all of that. So anyway, I say all that is, I think really the reality of where games are, where you start to see mass adoption of Web 3.0 games is years away. I think I feel very confident Web 3.0 gaming will be a pretty sizable subsection of games revenue in 2026, 27, and then you'll just keep seeing it go up to the right over time as far as users revenue, how many wallets, all of this. So yeah, I'm excited. I say it in a little more tempered way because it's more of a long term bet. We've been placing a lot of them now though.(19:25):You got to place those bets now. Those trees take a long time to grow. They're really impactful when they do, but you have to plant these seeds now. So we spent a lot of time this past year investing in different gaming projects out of our ecosystem fund, partnering with really large game developers, some of which we haven't even announced yet. So yeah, we've got some cool stuff that's coming up. And I definitely think things that's going to show what gen two of Gaming and Web 3.0 looks like. Again, I think where you see a meaningful breakthrough is more likely in this gen three era in four years or so.Brian (19:59):Yeah, for sure. No, it takes a lot of cycles to make something that's kind of a generational game like that. You know, mentioned some of these early investments, planting the seeds on this. If you had a crystal ball and you looked out, do you see that most of the games people are playing three, five years out from now? Are these being made from the existing AAA game studios that are coming into Web 3.0? Is it these web one game developers who are more crypto native iterating and finding something special? Is it some sort of blended between the two of them? What do you think there?Ryan (20:29):It's probably a blend. I actually think of more of it a regional thing. I think APAC game developers, largely in APAC will be the ones Web 3.0 native or Web 2.0 will be the ones that really do really interesting things in Web 3.0 gaming that will then spew towards the West. And so I think of it more as a geo-specific thing than anything else.(20:50):I do think you will have a massive Web 3.0 game hit the equivalent of Minecraft. The thing about Web 2.0 gaming is it wouldn't be incredibly difficult to pivot when they need to. And then when they do pivot, they would be very successful. So if you could imagine a world, just take any AAA game that is a platform, a Valorant, a Call of Duty, any of these different ones that are allowing people to buy cosmetics and skins, and people are spending boatloads of money doing that, they could very easily start to think about how do you flip on something where there's governance, how do you, true ownership, scarcity of items, and even just put membership passes, stuff like that where they could play in a very low level way of playing in Web 3.0 versus there's going to be other games where people are going to go off and create all kind of different mods and versions of it and communities around it and could start from it being a PFP NFT project that evolves like a Board Apes-esque kind of path.(21:51):And so I think it's going to show itself in a lot of different ways. But generally speaking, if I had to make a bet, I would say game developers largely in Asia will set the tone for how Web 3.0 gaming will look in a couple years.Brian (22:04):That's pretty exciting. I'm very interested to see what comes out of that region. And just to bring it back, one thing that I, selfishly here at Phantom were curious about is how do you see the role of wallets evolving in this space? Wallets right now touch a lot of different aspects of Web 3.0. I think the gaming space is relatively unexplored right now. Is there anything in your mind that you're particularly excited to see about from wallets and from Phantom in particular as it relates to this?Ryan (22:30):The user journeys are tough on wallets. Wallets bear the brunt of it. When you think about bridging and making entities really accessible and displayable all in a wallet, you know, have all these on ramps, it's just very digestible. It's clean. Maybe you start to have specific vertical specific features across DeFi gaming or music as you own these things. Like wallets can then go vertically deep, I think, which would be really interesting. But right now, so many of them are just dealing with this onboarding issue. It's complicated. It really is. It's not easy to set these things up for a lot of folks. So as wallets can go deep and then be really seamlessly integrated into all these different consumer experiences, which it's like, well, on its way, that is an already accelerated timeline. You guys have done great work there. This is what I would like to see for wallets.(23:18):I want it to be, my mom can set up a wallet and use it really easily and be like, oh yeah, I mean, here's how I add money to it. Here's how I buy an item. Here's where I can look at it in my inventory. Here's how I easily send it to Brian. That's like when we get there. And I think that's everyone's North Star. And so who's going to do it the best and who's going to do it fastest, I think is what we're going to find out. But look at, you guys have hit a really great narrative in the Solana ecosystem of having this very clean, simple, easy to use wallet. And so you've got a huge leg up already on that because that's what people are looking for and what is needed first.Brian (23:56):Yeah, no, I agree. We always saw that this was one of the bottlenecks in the space of getting things easier, getting it so easy a kindergartner could use it. So we're really excited to bring that to Polygon as well.Ryan (24:06):I love working with you guys because that's good for us. We want to make it easy to come on a polygon and use all these things and have no problem immediately setting up. And as we continue to onboard big games and different enterprise companies and so forth, this is going to be really important to do. So I think it'll be awesome.Brian (24:23):Yeah, I love it. Well, Ryan, this has been an awesome discussion. One closing question we always ask all our guests, and I want to hear your take on this, is who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 ecosystem?Ryan (24:35):Man, I've plugged so many of them here. This is a tough one. Gosh. I'd say right now I think I'm going to go back to Midnight Society. It's a little bit of a curve ball, but the reason why is, that team has a bunch of ex Gears of War, Call of Duty developers that are really from prestigious game development. And they've been a builder that's focusing on how they introduce Web 3.0 to the masses, which I think is obviously, I'm personally fascinated by that. And the way that they've done kind of the membership pass and so forth with NFTs, all these anti NFT like, oh, I hate NFTs, blah, blah, blah. Gaming communities really served it up in a way for them to think about it differently. So I read it too, but sticking to this, and I think as we just touched on how we see gaming start to evolve, I look at them as going to be someone that's going to crack what Reddit started to do with the idea of owning out of a PFP NFT, right?(25:37):They're going to start doing this with gaming, with general gamers that don't really care about this crypto NFT, blockchain, or decentralization bit. They're not interested in that, but they'll be interested in this concept of having genuine ownership of items and memberships and so forth. And they're going to get introduced to it in a way that is different from an NFT perspective than they ever have. And so I like them as a builder because they're Web 3.0 builders, but they're targeting the crypto naive in a way that's really interesting. But honestly, dude, it's an impossible question. There's so many bad asses working in this space right now. This is why it's fun to be in it. So yeah, you guys and some others fall into that category for sure.Brian (26:16):Yeah, no, it's a bit of a selfish question too, so that we can get our next guest lined up for the podcast. I think Midnight Society would be a great guest there.Ryan (26:24):We got to get them out, man. I think. There it is. Yeah, I think they're really, really fascinating group to talk to and dive in about gaming.Brian (26:31):Awesome. And I know there's no shortage of people we could all list on this, but that's great to hear. Well, Ryan, this has been an awesome conversation. Really appreciate your time. Super excited to see what we can do together to push Web 3.0 forward. Where can people go to learn more about Polygon?Ryan (26:45):Yeah, I mean just polygon.technology, right? Honestly, that's probably the best. It's where our blog posts are and all of our updates you can follow then all of our socials that you're interested in. If you want to go deeper on our tech stack, whether you're a developer or just interested, we have all the engineering and technical documents that you would want to look into as well as social and what we've been up to, partner announcements. So I'd head there for all things Polygon.Brian (27:10):I love it. Thank you so much, Ryan Wyatt.Ryan (27:13):Take care, man. Thanks for having me, Brian.  

Helium is the first people-powered decentralized wireless network.In episode 14 of The Zeitgeist, Boris Renski, GM of Wireless at Nova Labs sits down with Brian Friel to discuss how crypto is enabling new ways to deploy wireless infrastructure. Show Notes:00:52  - Who is Boris Renski / Background 03:23 - What is Helium?                  06:44 - Catalyst behind creating a network11:20 - People's network built by the people14:50 - Is Web3 essential to this network? 17:08 - Partnerships                     20:20 - How do Saga users benefit from Helium?24:41 - Building in a bear market / Roadmap29:05 - Things Boris is excited about       33:30 - A Solana builder Boris admires Full Transcript:Brian (00:05):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web through the space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to have with me today, Boris Renski.(00:20):Boris is the General Manager of Cellular Wireless at Nova Labs. At Nova, Boris is responsible for leading the charge of all things related to Helium Mobile, the world's first people's carrier. Boris, welcome to the show.Boris (00:33):Thank you. Great to be here.Brian (00:35):Great to have you here as well. I'm really excited about what you guys are building. For those who were at BreakPoint, you might have seen a little bit about how you guys are going to be powering some of the upcoming Saga phones. But before we get into all that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. Who are you, and how did you come to start working at Nova Labs?Boris (00:52):Yeah so, this happened fairly recently. I, what the people in the cryptosphere refer to as the normie, not a Degen, so to speak. Most of my career, I spent in open source cloud infrastructure. Prior to my [inaudible 00:01:11] to Web3, I've helped build and co-found a company called Mirantis, which to this day remains one of the bigger players packaging this cloud, open source cloud operating system, so to speak.(01:29):My journey towards crypto was the extension of the work that I did in the open source cloud infrastructure, in that when I was still working for Mirantis, one of the open source projects at that time my team was focusing on, was this project called Magma that is can think of it as the open source software that allows anybody to build a cellular network.(01:58):And I, about three years ago, left Mirantis with the idea of taking this open source Magma project and creating a very simple way for people to basically take advantage of it such that anybody can just click a few buttons, get a small hardware appliance and have a small cellular network that they can operate.(02:25):And the original focus was very much towards the private LT and private 5G space. There was no even thinking of crypto at the origination of this company, FreedomFi that I've started, but then midway for our journey with come across Helium and some of the folks of the Helium team and they've pitched to us to look into this other use case which is a distributed wireless.(02:52):And we did a couple of pilots and basically the rest is history, and the whole thing culminated, and Nova acquiring FreedomFi, and my joining the team and now working on Helium Mobile.Brian (03:05):That's awesome. Yeah, I definitely think you have a unique path towards coming towards crypto building, very practical open source everyday solutions, and then finding your way into this industry.(03:17):For those who maybe aren't familiar with Helium, how would you describe what is Helium and what do they do?Boris (03:22):So Helium is a people-powered decentralized wireless network. In a nutshell, it's from the standpoint of a builder. It's a new way to build a wireless network where anybody, be it an individual or a company, can buy a piece of hardware, click a few buttons to enable it, and then this piece of hardware effectively becomes a node on a wireless network. And then the Helium blockchain aggregates all of its individual nodes into a single macro network that is usable effectively by anybody.(04:04):And I think that Helium started this with the idea to build a global worldwide network for sensors using this IOT protocol called Laura, but it ultimately has become so successful and was built out so quickly, there's over a million nodes on the network now, that it's almost like it's become a beacon for a new way to deploy wireless infrastructure. Not so much just specifically for Laura, but for almost any use case.(04:40):So that drove the community to explore, okay, well we've built out this global worldwide network for sensors, but the model, this bottoms up model of building the wireless coverage is so powerful where else can we apply that model? And that led to this concept of introducing the network of networks of which I think the cellular network for not the sensors, but the phones which Helium Mobile is all about, is the first instantiation.Brian (05:16):Yeah, and when you say sensors specifically, what type of sensors are you talking about?Boris (05:20):So any sensors that use this protocol called Laura, which is a particular protocol with a couple of aspects to it that make it useful for situations where you would have very low bandwidth and very low power usage. So if you have for example, a sensor to see if there's termites in the ground, you will have that sensor of a battery buried in the ground that'll just live there forever, and it needs access to some global network to transmit something once a day, whether or not there's termites eating something.(05:57):So there's basically a huge ecosystem of these types of Laura sensors, and any Laura sensor can work with the Helium network. So I come from a cellular side, so I'm a little bit less in the weeds with the types of lower sensors specifically, but at a high level that's what it is.Brian (06:19):That's great. Well then let's jump into the cellular side of things. So, you described this network of networks essentially that Helium now is, and one of the initiatives though as you've pointed out is this Helium Mobile.(06:31):You talked a little bit about how "Hey, we have this network that's growing very fast and is very popular and worldwide," but what specifically was the catalyst for starting a mobile network and then what does this mobile network look like today?Boris (06:44):Yeah, so let me see if I can give you a little bit of history and that will also share, provide the bigger context. So at FreedomFi prior to my joining Nova, like I said, what we have built is a very straightforward way for anybody to deploy a mini cell tower. You can think of it like a cellular wireless node, which was our technical know-how and the core differentiation for FreedomFi as a company.(07:17):And at that time, Helium was already fairly far down their path of creating global coverage for Laura. And when they saw what we did with respect to simplifying the cellular deployments, I got that pinned literally by a buy who was chief product officer at Helium, and he said, "Hey, look at the stuff that we have built with Laura and what you guys have done with the simplification of deploying cellular infrastructure at FreedomFi is amazing. How about we marry these two concepts? We enable people to deploy mini cellular towers or small cells and basically compensate them in crypto depending on whether or not the placement of the small cell is useful or not."(08:10):So it was like, "okay, that's very interesting." And we did some pilots, and we did then a bunch of work to actually productize that and we launched that to the general public just some months ago. And obviously the community just took that up and started building all of a sudden. So in the matter of, I think, now three or four months, we have close to 7,000 small cells around the US that people have deployed and that are operational.(08:43):And in parallel with doing this work to marry a Helium way of building networks with our know-how, making it very simple to deploy, we started talking to a whole bunch of operators, the mobile network operators as they call them in the US, about saying, "Hey, look at this network that we are building. How about you guys partner with us and integrate this network that we're building with your macro network?"(09:17):And we got to some degree of success there. We've announced a couple of partners, but at the same time it's also become clear that the carriers in general are very conservative and very importantly slow moving entities. So in our thinking of how we can further accelerate this? We've decided that an important pillar to doing this would be us actually eating our own dog food and launching our own people's carrier as we call it, which is Helium Mobile.(09:54):So this was the catalyst to the partnership with T-Mobile and the people's carrier announcement that we did recently.Brian (10:01):That's awesome. And so this people's carrier, this is essentially what people would expect from their normal iPhone or Android phone carrier 5G connectivity being able to make calls throughout the US. Is that right?Boris (10:15):Yes, that is absolutely correct. So it's basically a US nationwide network for cell phones that provides connectivity for data and voice globally. And what makes it unique is that unlike almost any other carrier, we are not exclusively using one macro network, but we're using the macro network of our partner, T-Mobile, which we've talked about, and we compliment that with the people built network that is basically being built by the Helium community using this very model that I have described.(10:55):So the back end to the service that the people yet to take advantage of is actually very much also built by the community.Brian (11:06):I see. So The Peoples Network quite literally means the network built by people who go in and they take the effort themselves to put up these infrastructure and then they're compensated in crypto for the effectiveness of that?Boris (11:20):Yes. That is correct. And that's the whole notion behind this concept of the people's carrier. And I think that the unique and interesting thing about it is that if you look at the mobile wireless industry at large, if you look, peek under the hood of how a mobile operator functions, there are always dozens of different entities that are collaborating under the hood to make a carrier. So if a consumer, you go to AT&T, you buy a cell phone, you buy a subscription, and then you just start using it.(11:57):But if you peek under the hood, it's not really almost one company. Any carrier is an entity that has assets in the form of wireless spectrum and there are subscribers. And then under the hood there is dozens of different organizations that actually do work to comprise a carrier.(12:22):So most carriers, they don't build their own radios, they don't build their own wireless software, they don't install or operate their own towers. Most of the time, don't even own and operate their own stores. So many different companies aggregated under one umbrella.(12:40):And I think that this notion of a people's carrier that we're trying to pioneer with Helium Mobile is all about using blockchain and crypto economics to dramatically improve the efficiencies of the value chain that is basically the modern day carrier. So instead of having dozens of different independent entities all shuffle paperwork between each other, but ultimately roll into this one umbrella of whatever, like AT&T, or Verizon, or whatever it is, you actually simplify a lot of this overhead by actually having the blockchain take care of it.(13:25):And probably the most capital intensive part of any carrier and the most complicated is actually building the network. So finding a location for deploying a radio, contracting with somebody who either builds a tower there or who maintains a building, then actually deploying it, maintaining, et cetera. So this is all very capital intensive, complicated process that usually involves a lot of entities that we are making significantly more efficient.Brian (13:56):Let's talk a little bit about that crypto element. I mean you yourself said that you consider yourself a normie and that you found yourself into this crypto environment. I think this is pretty unique because we, as a wallet, we see a lot of different players in the crypto space so much or just inherently digital. It's either DeFi or NFTs is the vast mass 95% of the use cases we see. This is very different. This is taking something that's very much real world cellular infrastructure and trying to incentivize a network around that.(14:29):I think also everything you described too, it seems other carriers may be more potentially top down, whereas this is almost a bottoms up movement of getting individuals to go out and create this network. To you, what is the importance of this Web3 element? Do you actually think this could be made without Web3? Or is Web3 really a vital ingredient to all of this?Boris (14:54):I mean, I think that this is next to maybe solving some of the problems in the financial space, probably the second biggest opportunity for the Web3, because from my standpoint, Web3 is really the key enabler, is the new way to coordinate economic activity. That's when various parties, I would argue. This is what the crux of where Web3 can unlock the most value.(15:18):And if you look at various industries, the mobile network industry is one where you have a tremendous number of different parties that are collaborating with each other with a tremendous amount of inefficiencies in between. So if you could, instead of having a company that is building and operating cellular towers, and a company that is building the radios, and a separate company that is operating the stores, and a separate company that is doing the RF planning, combine all of that using blockchain and coordinate the economic activity between these parties using blockchain and radically distribute the value that is created by this collaboration using crypto economics, you will cut out a tremendous amount of inefficiency from the value chain, and then consequently you can transfer this value to the end user, meaning the subscriber of the user of the cellular network.(16:28):So there's a few industries I think that they're like that, and I would argue that the cellular wireless space is up there and to the extent that you can apply this concept that Web3 allows more efficient collaboration and then better and more creativity around the economic activity between the different parties, can apply that to that space. There's an enormous amount of opportunity to unlock value.Brian (16:54):Yeah, I love that. I couldn't agree more. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some of the partnerships that you've been mentioning, so.(17:00):The first one that you brought up is T-Mobile. What specifically does that partnership entail and what made them get involved with Helium Mobile?Boris (17:08):The network that we're building uses a particular type of wireless spectrum called CBRS. And this is a shared spectrum, which is a new innovative model that allows basically anybody in the US with just a little bit of money to get access to clean wireless spectrum that is usable for the cellular use case. That spectrum and the radios that are built to operate in that spectrum, the physical properties of it are such that the reach of the wireless radio is limited to a couple of city blocks. And because of that, using that technology, it's very challenging to build a network that would be contiguous and will provide contiguous coverage around the entirety of the US.(18:00):And obviously if you're building a wireless network and if we as Helium Mobile want to provide a service to our end users, nobody's going to be using a service where you only have it working around your house and then you leave and all of a sudden there is no service, and then maybe you traveled half a mile and then your friend has a cell, and then you have a service again, and then there's no service.(18:23):So you need to have contiguous coverage.Brian (18:26):Right.Boris (18:26):So no matter where you go, you always have access to your voice and data. And to make that happen, it's important for us to partner with a macro network operator with somebody who has the service throughout the US. So T-Mobile is that macro network operator that we partnered with. And the way that, as I mentioned, Helium Mobile works is that whenever there is Helium CBRS cell in range, the subscriber would use that cell, but whenever there is no cell it would use the T-Mobile service, so that's going to be the technical underpinning behind the partnership.(19:07):The business logic here is that for T-Mo, I think we are effectively another MV&O customer. So it's not uncommon for an operator carrier to resell their network to other wholesale customers. So the relationship between us and T-Mo is that we basically procure macro network capacity from them. We augmented with the Helium 5G coverage to create this hybrid network with The Peoples Network component in it, and we sell service to the end users as Helium Mobile.Brian (19:48):That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I could definitely see that being an important and necessary piece for when you're launching this network to have a reliable fallback in the cracks there for continuous coverage.(19:59):One additional partnership you guys mentioned more recently was actually a breakpoint that you guys are going to be powering the Saga phone when it launches. So, Solana Labs initiative to showcase what they call SMS, the Solana Mobile Stack, where they're trying to push Web3 mobile. Why is this a big deal and how might Saga phone users benefit from something like Helium Mobile?Boris (20:20):So first of all, we are quite excited about the Saga partnership. The specific thing that I think is going to be the direct benefits to any Saga users is that all the Saga phones that are sold in the US will come with the 30 days of free Helium Mobile service. So people will get to actually experience the people's carrier on their Saga phones. But I think that there's also a tremendous benefit from the technical side.(20:54):So Saga phones, unlike any devices in a cellular space, have been designed top down to support everything required from a security standpoint for people to basically use them for performing different crypto-related operations, starting with the basic ones such as having a wallet on the phone that is also secure.(21:21):Now the concept of the people's carrier, like I said, around multiple parties collaborating to build this new type of carrier does not exclusively involve folks deploying small cells contributing to the network.(21:37):It also, equally importantly, involves the users of the network as the important building pillars. So I've explained how we have this concept of the macro network that is T-Mobile and The People's Network that is providing this non-contiguous supplemental coverage to the macro network.(21:59):Now, for this network to continue growing, it's extremely important for the builders to understand where it's important to deploy additional coverage. Because in some locations you might already have three people, like maybe your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor already has a Helium 5G cell deployed, so there isn't additional value from you deploying yet another cell. But that information needs to be continuously fed into the blockchain and everybody needs to be aware of that information. So to that effect, the users of the people's carrier, they are not just exclusively the users, they're also contributors of that information of where is it that the coverage is needed.(22:47):And our approach to making it happen is basically the users are able, on an opt-in basis, to effectively share the information, share information about the experience on the network, share information about where they're using, what type of coverage, and then we use that information to ultimately feed into the community and have them build the network around it.(23:12):Now for sharing this information as a user of Helium Mobile, I get rewarded via mobile tokens, but this makes your cellular phone effectively into a cryptocurrency miner. And with that, it creates all of the same challenges around securing, making sure that people don't game it, et cetera, that you would see with any typical mining situation. So being able to securely store your keys to be able to perform these operations with the blockchain using a phone, so that we can know exactly based on your specific phone, how many tokens you should receive based on what information, et cetera. All of the security around that requires a different type of device.(24:06):And Saga and the work that has been done on the Saga phones is actually unique in that it's basically one of the few, if not the only device on the market that enables one to do it today.Brian (24:18):That's awesome. Well I pre-ordered Saga phones, so I look forward to playing around with the network on day one when it launches.(24:24):You hit on how essentially the phone becomes a bit of a cryptocurrency miner. Right now at the time of this recording, it's quite obvious the cryptocurrency market isn't a bit of a bear market. How has it been for Helium to be building during a bear, and what is on your guys' roadmap upcoming?Boris (24:41):Well, I mean this bear cycle is fairly recent, but I think that all of the Helium community historically was born out of a bear market. So the Laura based IOT network, that the Helium community has successfully built, originally was launched immediately after the recent downturn. And all of the building happened during the bear market.(25:10):At the time when the original Helium miner was launched, nobody wanted to touch crypto at all. That was a completely toxic concept. But then ultimately the team has focused on building through the bear market and then on another upswing, this is where Helium became the popular Helium that everybody knows it today.(25:30):Now, today we're just going for this other cycle again and we're just following the company culture mantra of just continuing to build through it and not focusing on the macro environment. And that's really the only way to do it.(25:48):So this is not like anything magically new, but it's actually oftentimes harder to do than to say. I think that in our case it's a little bit easier in that just the whole community culture and the culture of the folks at Nova is such that it's nothing new and people are just basically used to building through the bear cycles.(26:13):As far as the roadmap, I think I touched a little bit on it, but when it comes to Helium Mobile, what's extremely important to us is building the tooling to enable the community to actually create useful coverage. And it's particularly relevant to the cellular network versus a little bit less so for the lower network because of the properties of how the cellular network works, because the signal doesn't propagate very far, it's very hard to build a network that'll just blanket Earth using cellular small cells.(26:54):You can only sort of augment the existing network such as that of T-Mobile. And for that, you need to have intelligence in the system and tooling for the community to be able to understand where to place the radios, and you need to have the proper tuning within the reward mechanisms such that only useful coverage is rewarded. And I think that there's a whole bunch of work that needs to be done beyond what has already been created for the lower network to make that work for the cellular space. And I think that a lot of this is what we're focusing on.(27:37):Another pillar is about making wireless coverage hotspots more affordable for the community. So the CBRS space, the CBRS spectrum is relatively new. The CBRS small cells are relatively new. I would argue that the Helium CBRS network today is probably one of the biggest in the US, so we are leading the way, but because it's new, it's still fairly complicated and clunky and expensive to deploy a CBRS cell. So it's a lot easier than it was two years ago where it was near impossible.(28:15):But it's still a long way away from the simplicity of what you'd experience with, for instance, a wifi access point. And truly making a very large people-powered network requires that there's a lot more simplification for deploying the cellular hotspot, so that's another vector of engineering investment I think that we are spending our cycles on.Brian (28:42):Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I guess as this network continues to improve, and you guys get feedback coming back, and you're fine tuning the crypto economic rewards, how do you see this whole space playing out? I guess both the crypto side of things, but also just how does this as The Peoples Network play out and challenge existing carriers, and what are you personally most excited about seeing?Boris (29:05):I am excited about the work that we are doing with other carriers that we have announced actually culminating in them formally joining via mobile DAO and becoming another operator on the network. So I think it's an interesting trend in that if you look at mobile space at large, there's been this push towards disaggregation and decentralization in the mobile carrier space in general. So when cellular communication became first possible, everything revolved around basically a carrier that sells you a phone that only works on that carrier and you have a cell number that only works on that phone on that carrier. And that was V1 of cellular communication, the complete lock end around a single entity. And over time, I think during the last, what, 25 years, 30 years of the industry existing, there's been this continuous push towards disaggregation.(30:15):So V2 was that you could have different phones and then you have different phones working on different networks and then people said, "Hey, my phone number is my property, and I want to be able to switch my phone number and carry it with me if I switch carriers." And the new thing now is, that's particularly becoming pronounced is carriers using multiple networks under the hood. So instead of just having one set of radios that work on the spectrum assets that you as a carrier have purchased, you also have relationships maybe with some of the other operators or some of the people that have built infill coverage certain locations, or maybe you operate with the wifi networks, Boingo that people have probably have seen. So this concept of carrier becoming less of the monolithic one macro network, but carrier becoming more of an aggregator of many networks.(31:15):And this is this next wave that we're seeing, and this is not related to specific layer crypto, blockchain, or Helium Mobile. This is just a thing that's happening by itself. And the reason why it's happening is because as more and more data finds its way onto your phone, you need to build networks that have bigger and bigger capacity. And the physics of it is such that the only way to do that is that you need to build networks that operate on higher frequency bands. And the higher the frequency band, the worst this band goes for walls and trees, so be short of the range. And because of that you need to have a lot of density. So if 20 years ago you could put one tower and cover a whole city of it, today you need to have many towers. And the more and more data is on the cellular network, the more and more of the cells you need.(32:09):And because of that, it's no longer economically viable to have a network where just one entity is basically building it. And because of that you need to have multiple networks working together. So I think that what we're doing with people's carrier and applying the blockchain to coordinating economic activity between many network creators and aggregating that into one network is a natural extension of where the entire cellular industry is headed.(32:41):So obviously we are super excited about eating our own dog food and launching the first people's carrier in the form of Helium Mobile, but I feel that we are just leading the way, and we're hopeful that additional carriers in the context of this trend that's already happening will start joining in the freight.Brian (33:03):That's great. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of tailwinds there that you described it. It's a really exciting time to be where you guys are in bailing this network to the world. Well Boris, this has been a really awesome discussion. I really look forward to using The Peoples Network on my Saga phone when it arrives.(33:18):One closing question that we asked to all our guests here on this podcast, and I'd love to hear it from you as well. Having been a normie entering the Web3 space is, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Boris (33:31):Yeah, it's a good question. As a normie. So as a normie, I really liked the StepIn app to be honest, that I still continue to play with. And I don't even care so much about the rewards or making tokens with it, but just the fact that it's really well built and it allows me to, it just almost forces me to get off the chair and walk around. Doesn't matter if I make money for it or not, but the user experience is quite amazing.(34:03):And this is just an everyday example of it, but at large what really makes me excited about the Solana ecosystem is the really quality of talent and the dedication of the different groups building on Solana at large. And one important thing that we haven't really discussed much about today is that all of Helium community is moving to Solana.(34:35):And I think that's part of the reason why that move's happening is because we are seeing tremendous amount of support from the Solana builder ecosystem and have gotten to interact with a lot of folks that are building for Solana. Even trying to do POCs, figuring out what it is like, what would the incarnation of Helium look like on the Solana L1 gave us a peek into what the quality of the talent and the passion of the community of top Solano looks like.(35:08):So I think that it's exciting to see. It's exciting to see so many smart people building and whenever you have a congregation of smart, passionate people building, there's always good things that come out on the other end. So maybe, I'll conclude on that note.Brian (35:26):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more from where I sit, develop a relationship. It's invigorating energy here. Anyone who is at Break Point, you probably didn't even sleep, because there's just so many people who are just in the builder mentality who love this space. And it's really awesome to see you guys leading the charge on the mobile front in this space as well.(35:45):Well Boris, this is really great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people go to learn more about The Peoples Network?Boris (35:52):HelloHelium.comBrian (35:53):HelloHelium.com. All right. Well thanks again for coming on. Boris Renski, the GM of Cellular Wireless at Nova Labs.Boris (36:00):Thanks Brian.