Episode Description
Today we’re going to discuss a topic brought up in a Tweet from WalletConnect’s Pedro (link below) about the difference between digital ownership and digital control. We’ll be bringing on Julien from Unlock-Protocol and Rick Dudley to dive in further. Sit back and relax as we hash out all the details for you!
Web3 Triangle Meetup - Social Crypto Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La9cPRhyQKw
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pizzas awesome work really appreciate it and shout out to ryan obviously for setting up space and everything for us and uh wild earth we uh i guess quick uh housekeeping thing if we can refrain from any candid photos make sure you’ve got everyone’s consent when you take a photo that would be great uh we’ve got corey pretty here a bit of an ethereum og or web free og he’s been around the speed as long as i can remember working at status now but i’ll let him kind of introduce himself he’s got a really cool presentation for us and just moved down to the area so i think we’ll see more of him uh from here on out thanks for coming out uh like i said uh my name is corey petty i work at status i’ve been around since probably late 2012. started mining um bitcoin while i was in graduate school started a podcast after graduate school did some like uh i guess government consulting and education in maryland for a few years and then moved status and been there ever since uh when i started i did security uh i was had a security status and i’ve just now recently into moved into infrastructure products and uh for those no status is a it’s hard to say we’ve been around since early 2017 when the ico boom happened and have been trying to create the concept of uh a usable interface to web 3. uh and definitely driven by the principles of of early ethereum which is as much privacy and security ownership and and all the bells and whistles of what you heard when you thought about early bitcoin and ethereum in web 3. so i’m going to talk about the concept of the rise of social crypto and why i think it’s the next wave of um maybe attention and understanding of this ecosystem and in the end i’ll give you a little bit about what we’re doing um and announce some new things that we’re doing at status to try and capture some of that and help you use it so i have to walk over here when you click buttons that’s good no this talk is uh a bit thrown together i was asked to talk a few days ago and i’m giving a similar talk at f denver in a few weeks and so um i wanted to try and throw something together that brings about the concept of what social crypto is i’m going to start by probably giving you a history of of crypto and how people interact with it over the over the course that i’ve been around and experienced it so start off with the medium is the message and it’s a common old saying that i think we’ve heard quite a bit and what it means to me is is the technology that you use ends up shaping your ability to communicate with the people you’re communicating with and that has a lot to do with with the relationships you build when you use that technology and the type of social interaction and implications that you have in the communities you interact with some of these technologies and that’s something to kind of keep in mind as i go through the rest of this uh don’t reinvent the wheel just realign it there’s just concepts going through my head that i can’t quite put to work so i’m trying to come up with a couple different concepts that may get to the point and so what i’m seeing today is a lot of people using a new technology to redo things that we’ve done in the past just maybe a little better a little faster a little cheaper in some cases not cheap at all but there’s not as much innovation when you think about what the power this this technology can have and the last one on the right is uh if i had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses so in some cases people don’t when you’re building something or trying to innovate uh using new technology you can’t go off what people think they want you have to give them something that uh changes their paradigm or does something completely new so the concept i want to kind of put across is a mix of all these things so what is social crypto um i think that all blockchains well the root value and all of this stuff is community the only reason why bitcoin ever got value is because it had a community rallying rallying behind it and someone was willing to give someone real world value call it dollars when maybe or a pizza from the first ever transaction in bitcoin uh for this digital good that they all agreed on was worth something to them over time that value got larger and larger and larger people started taking more and more goods and services for it and then ethereum came along and we’ll go through the history a bit but it it’s it’s all about a community and when you think about how you interact with things now whether it be a collection of nfts or uh getting in on some new coin or like when you find out something new your first inclination is to where the people that care about this thing what’s the ideals what’s this useful for and when you talk to those people who have the same thing you tend to talk about those ideals those those concepts those this you know unifying uh set of beliefs that the underlying asset represents and so crypto social crypto is quantifying that in a lot of ways whether it be the new 10k or some new utility token that runs a network that allows you to do freelance or whatever right there’s all kinds of things you can do in crypto and so these are kind of the headlines you’re seeing today uh that allude to the concept of social crypto so uh or ave however you want to say it i don’t know recently announced that they’ve uh rolled out a decentralized social media protocol dubbed lens it’s a way for you to kind of create a profile have that profile own things so on and so forth that is tries to encapsulate a lot of the web through ideas as well jack dorsey talks with a bunch of other rich people about uh why he likes bitcoin and that’s mostly because the community and the network it’s the people involved and what they care about uh bellagi has been talking for the past couple years about this concept of social crypto and how to make things like a better twitter a better facebook a better all the social applications you use when i say show so i’m trying to say something that’s much more broad than than twitter or facebook right i’m talking about human interaction and i would like to include value transfer in that human interaction how you participate in these things uh friends with benefits is a nfc club there’s this is a news article that we put out at status social crypto is uh more than a trend it’s a short list of a bunch of different networks assange dao recently raised 53 million to help julian fight or fight for freedom there’s groups of people coming together to raise money to try and do something they care about and the assets that they’re rallying around are kind of quantifying that and giving value to to these ideals and in ways we couldn’t beforehand your karma upvotes and reddit don’t quite do that for you and let’s see what do i have down here uh last and most important community is built around a collection that’s board at yacht club right so it’s the concept of what a yacht club you have a 10k but there’s also this larger community of kind of exclusion and status associated with it you’re going to see quite a few like high-profile people get into it so you’re hearing about it but it’s not being talked about explicitly in a lot of ways so i’m going to walk through my version of the historical progress of digital assets starting from from bitcoin when i got in where did you get in i got in i started heavily researching it late 2012. um funny enough through watching a ted talk about the concept of money and she relayed an example of somewhere that i don’t remember using buckets of tide as a currency because it was better it was more useful for them in their small community and that then parlayed slowly but surely into the concept of bitcoin i was like what’s this and then here i am so uh bitcoin started out a long time ago bitcoin is the og crypto social it’s the the asset that it represents all of you can probably think about the ideals types of people um types of political leanings etc that that asset or the people who care about that asset represent it may not be explicit but everyone who’s involved in the bitcoin community has some type of shared ideal set that’s probably more overlapping than uh their neighbor right a couple years later this is incredibly incomplete and rough this is just uh illustrative purposes because the next slide i want to talk about uh kind of talks about the people and how they interact with all these things so theorem came along that introduced a new type of kind of social context where uh they wanted to do a bunch of things that bitcoin couldn’t do so they made a new network and that was probably the largest new network that uh changed the ideal set of the the types of things people cared about it was ridiculed for a while it grew clearly it’s big now um most of these things in the past are associated with it or built on top of it the dow which is this d down here is the infamous d dao which was the first kind of uh i don’t know how you put it like explicitly talking about building infrastructure to coordinate around a given token how do we do smart contracts to then encapsulate an organization off to do something and for this purpose it was it was it was funding projects uh they made a vital mistake of not putting any human interaction whatsoever new smart contracts and suffered a bug that drained a lot of the money and a lot of pr firm and resulted in what we call etc right theory classic right so a lot of controversy a lot of quality news et cetera but after that about a year later uh we had this cambrian explosion of projects uh all through smart contracts right we have we lowered the barrier of entry by introducing the erc20 standard which made it really really really easy to make a token and then tell people what that token was about the majority of those things was this is what we care about by our token see you later and they left but there are a few of us that left that state status gnosis there there’s some representation here aragon uniswap was a little bit after that cryptokitties so we also had nft which is the year season 721 standard it happened that same year makers started and then die after that so we have this huge amount of uh groups of people rallying around ideas and hoping to build a community around those ideas all represented by some token moloch a couple of years later a bunch of stuff happened in between but moloch dao was kind of the resurgence of this concept of how do we make a smart contract-based organization that does things with finance does things with money we’re going to fund things we care about and have some type of voting mechanism or reputation mechanism for how we decide on how we do this where it’s not just i said it i have the money you do it and uh after that there’s way too many things to put on this i didn’t have time to do it but you know you have layer two solutions with polygon and solana and avalanche like other other evm based chains and often those into the boarding yacht clubs that start to compete with punks and all this weird stuff happening with groups of people making assets to do stuff with other people right so rough timeline of the actual digital assets and the on-chain organization associated with it right so let’s talk about the progress of the supporting software we use to communicate around these things so you can’t really see it but there is the same stuff behind that that’s faded out back in bitcoin the way in which people communicated about this thing was email and read it and github you put all your code onto github you have some subreddit our bitcoin started in early 2010 i think not sure and then the newsletter and then bitcoin talk if you heard anything about any anything whether it be the ridiculous amounts of clones dogecoin started back then uh litecoin started back then bitcointalk.org was the first place you heard it it was a forum it was just a regular old forum run by regular old people and i don’t i’m not mistaken it’s still kicking around and then later on kind of people started moving over to twitter and now we have crypto twitter we use that app to communicate what’s going on uh where you should go and like around ethereum facebook started going to the mix death research kicked off a discourse that was a uh self-hosted forum where you could vote on things submit things so on and so forth so kind of like a reddit but controlled by the ethereum people themselves and those in that community people started wondering how do i like broadcast the stuff i care about where’s the blog i put medium became really really popular and then this new app i think that surfaced that you know created the concept of the virtual workspace called slack entered the picture and at that point when all of this ico stuff was happening everyone had a slag every single project had a slack that’s where you went that’s where you learned there were different differentiated channels you could talk to the devs you could talk to other people you couldn’t do anything with coins nothing with coins still can’t do anything with coins well maybe a bot i’m not sure no one uses slack anymore except for me apparently uh but like the problem with slack use this i still have plenty of them but not a lot of crypto uh bitcoin podcast is a slack it’s the best in the world it’s my pocket uh so uh the problem with these especially during the ico it was wrought with scales anytime something got popular because like if you think about these early icos there wasn’t anything anybody before this could do with all of their crypto they just sat on it they had bitcoin the ethereum they had a lot of gains and they’re like all right cool so i have gains what do i do ico started happening they’re like here you go take all my gains i don’t care because i have so many of them and all of the early icos were incredibly successful and so that’s why you saw a tremendous amount more because what else we’re gonna do with it right and then it was a matter of garnering attention and marketing went up and that’s a whole different story but slacks were disgusting because you couldn’t you had this problem of identity management uh administration that’s when the community managers really started taking a place we were hiring people to come in and try and like kick scammers out or like figure out who’s pretending to be the ceo and ask for money and so on and so forth and so uh i’ll skip gnosis for a second everybody moved to discord a little easier to do that slowly but surely everyone left slack moved over to discord where if you’re in a if you’re in a crypto project today you’re in a discord first thing you say is where’s the discord or telegram and those things are run by bots so if you want any type of integration that’s crypto it’s someone has made a bot that allows you to prove you own an address and therefore give you token permissions to enter the whole thing or write in one channel or whatever right so we rely on these services for communication accompanied by bots we never check to do things with to to to talk about the projects we care about but the people we care about and all along the way people are reading that and either censoring you stopping you doesn’t work the way you want it to because someone’s bad with web hooks i don’t know right uh no it’s a safe was there’s a few shiny lights in here in terms of crypto stuff was gnosis made the first usable multi-sig on uh on ethereum people started using that to safeguard their money you think about what most dowels are today it’s a sub stack a multi-sig and a discord and some token right some some set of tokens some and that’s basically what your dow is or a voting mechanism so you have some snapshot in here which is a little lightning over here a way to vote that doesn’t cost you fifteen hundred dollars uh and then notice safe upgraded and became the gold standard for how a group of people hold a treasury and then interact with it on various chains right and then people said we don’t like medium anymore or move on to substance what i’m trying to get here is that all this we use has nothing to do with crypto all of the communication the relationships the it has nothing to do with the with crypto and it’s not built on the ideals of the same thing and in some cases we’re just bolting on and frankensteining something that allows us to talk with the people we care about about the things we care about but isn’t built the same way so we’re going to have a lot of friction and i think we all feel that whenever we try and scroll through the millions of discords that we’re in to find the person we need to save or whatever so what are we focusing on this is kind of a slight shift but a similar type of thing that i want to talk about the problem i find is that if you look at every single wallet app this is a smattering of uh ones i could find that give you a pretty good detail of the dashboard status included so i’m not i’m not being too high here what’s the what’s the priority what’s the thing what’s this what’s the dashboard telling you you should care about right what is this worth what can i sell this for and the priority is what can i buy for how long to sell and make a profit so are we surprised that when we talk to new people or we try and on-ramp someone onto the ideas of crypto that they’re like cool how do i make money what’s going to do for me why am i not making money it’s because we’re telling them that’s what they should care about in every single case so circling it so i i’ve i i think that in order for us to make a difference in communicating what this stuff is useful for bringing the idea of social crypto and bridging that gap of of i got this thing to talk to these people to do these things not only does the software that we use to do that communication need to change and be more aligned with and integrated with the assets that we care about to exchange manage understand what they belong to etc but the focus of the software we use can’t be on price prices price matters there’s no doubt about it there’s value in the assets you hold and how that represents the contribution you make to the communities you’re in for sure but that’s secondary to i have this thing that gives that allows me to do this if we want that change to happen if you ever want people to come in because they want to go do something or do something new and find create value in that then this all the stuff has to change yeah that’s what you want you want people to feel valuable based on the contribution they make or belonging to a group of people that have shared set of ideas and all the stuff that we’re doing and creating around the assets is not pushing us in that direction so if the focus and point is community and utility are we building things correctly i would say no i’m not and i now would like to tell you a little bit about what we’re doing at status to start to shift that in a direction we think is is is useful this is i was finally allowed to announce things because we kept it under wraps for quite a while this is uh these are designs of our desktop application um which i’ll then be doing more of later throughout this year and a lot more other things but we’re trying to make an attempted status and this is the design that we have for uh status desktop which starts to give you an idea of um what i would consider a better discord for crypto people in communities the feature is called communities no communities do not live on a blockchain parts of it will they’ll reference assets in a myriad of different places but the goal is that you have a place to go that has everything integrated into it right you have your normal chat your normal discord thing but your identity and status is just a private key it’s it’s the same technology you use to hold assets in your wallet so a wallet is built into this stuff we have a data browser you can use you can basically it’s a it’s a it’s a desktop browser with a wallet built into it like you would have you know firefox with metamask that’s built into it as well you can send you can have dms a lot of stuff you can’t see because these are you know slides of a much larger application that does a lot of things the goal here is that you only have one application that does all the things this concluding getting to the communities that you care about relative to the assets you hold so you can take a look at your wallet and say all right i have this asset this gives me access to this thing if you look down here not only can we get you to the communities you care about but as an administrator you can administer how your community engages with you in a lot of different ways say you can only enter this channel the promote your stuff channel that has token permissions in order to chat in this channel you need to hold .18 10 smt and 15 mana it doesn’t cost anything every time he boasts no you just need that level of status no that’s up to you well the interesting thing about this is that we can’t do anything about it it’s built in such a way that the administers have full control over how to run their community and we can’t stop that this is so if you have a community that has shitty administrators then maybe that’s a possibility but more often at the base layer protocol no it can be perfectly open and free to do everything but if you would like to start to gate permissions and access based on the tokens people have then you can do that as well built into it and we have a myriad of different ways to help people identify that they are who they say they are because you don’t want someone in the in a chat channel pretending to be mark cuban asking for money or pretend to give you things so we have a myriad of other ways to to help people identify via the assets in their wallet like an ens name to give larger validation that you they are who do you think they are that’s a much larger conversation that we’ll have blog posts about um oh yeah so it’s not only is it communities but built into status is like private chats as well so yeah so we don’t have as of today we don’t have voice and video built into it like you would in discord right yeah yeah yeah okay 100 and that’ll happen later because negotiating a webrtc isn’t that big of a deal but priorities are tokens yeah so we have a eip that is so identity verification and status you start with nothing we give you a private key we don’t care anything else it’s up to you to then attest what you want about yourself to show others who you want to be in a given community and then it’s up to them to help verify that type of stuff so we have a myriad of ways of like one proving that the chat key is unique so this little circle around each name is a deterministic way of showing the chat key so that you know someone with the same profile picture you can’t like someone trying to duplicate you can’t if they have a different chat key because that would be that would be different and but a bunch of other things like that also like if you have an ens name that’ll show prominently on the line with this check mark right kind of like a validation things like that and you can keep adding these types of things and they’re optional for whatever your administrator if your community wants to do they don’t want to use that stuff or then they don’t have to but in the back this is an example of like token permissions so like an administrator’s view of of the sox community is allowed to set permissions based on channels and you can do these types of things like you know you need 10 snt to view and post in this channel or this set of channels and you can mix and match as many of these things as you want we’ll have to continue to roll out access to different chains what’s interesting about holding assets is that it’s easy to verify you don’t necessarily have to integrate uh a chain completely to verify that someone owns assets on it right they need to verify that they have access to that address and then we can just check that the address has token so there’s like some shortcuts there keep in mind this is all design this is not rolled out yet a good portion of it is close but this is what we’re working on and finally here this is kind of like a backdrop for administrator uh kind of looking at metrics of of their particular community number of messages number of members stuff like that things like this because you have access to say for instance i require this many people to you know have have a wallet address i can do token air drops and have interesting relationships with my community based on how i’d like to do it it’s easy to do air drops when you have when the stuff is built into it natively i don’t have to rely on third-party bots or anything like that so there’s a myriad of ideas that we have on how community members and their administrators or whatever relationships those are giving them a tool set to have to interact with their community the way they’d like to whether it be isolating channels based on various criteria or giving and receiving tokens to minting things to revoking things and so on and so forth and i think that’s it all right so one thing i thought about a lot with um the intersection between particularly web 3 technologies and web 2 platforms is that they don’t for the most part cater to the types of mission structures that you might have in on-chain organizations and so i’m really keen to hear in status’s case if that’s something you guys have considered like how how you think about a dow owning a community so you talked about administrators is that the potential for the dow to be the top level in a straight up there is right now the communities don’t live on chain that’s a key so making it making some type of of uh plug-in even for those is safe of ownership of a given key i could i could see being pretty straightforward and in the future that’s that’s kind of the goal right the goal is to provide tooling for communities to use crypto in a social way whether that be voting management ownership and you can have you know without doubt owning a community is that seems to be the best way forward so we’ll make it happen eventually it may not be in v1 but like that the end goal is to bring together the concept of cryptosocial because that’s what the whole point is yeah absolutely i mean that seems like a really huge chasm across in the context like people’s traditional applications but for one through applications think about organizations right like crypto organizations and their attempts to defy themselves and decentralize themselves that’s really hard we look at look at shapeshift and their difficulty in trying to do it they’ve dedicated themselves to it but it’s going to take a long time we’re trying to do it since we started it’s incredibly difficult trust me and it’s based on the tooling and the lack of the ability to make decisions in a way that you want to and the the tools we have to try and do that now so do you guys have any kind of plan like for example we have 3 600 people on our discord uh i would switch to this personally right this second yeah you know but getting 3 600 people to switch when probably people haven’t been on discord six months i’m not gonna attest to 3 600 people yet um we certainly with the so not only are we doing the applications we’ve also built all of the infrastructure underneath whether it be the messaging network uh completely private and secure scaling an incredibly private network is very difficult so i’m curious to see how that happens over time but as we roll this product out we have uh what’s the word looking for a way for discord people their administrators to export and archive their discord server and then use our tool to create entire community that preloads everything for them and then they can start to load not only like permissions and so on and so forth but so that has to be continuously worked on as we integrate the token part to that but like the goal is to try and get people to seamlessly move from something like discord telegram onto a community relatively quickly yeah that like you’re basically bridging your discord you know if you guys did that we would switch immediately so we’ve been doing bridges for forever using mata bridge we have our own fork that allows us to use status like the status network and bridge people onto status channels as well we have way too many things to name simultaneously going on in the company that are culminating in to this being the where you go to build a community in crypto and hopefully outside of crypto so that these people that are coming in artists who are thinking about experimenting with nfts and engaging with their community can just do it directly with us and not have to figure anything out they’re like oh i just make big huge status and do my thing and that’s what it does right like eventually we hope to get there and it’s and i cannot stress enough it’s really hard to build all this stuff simultaneously but we’re we’re really fast is so i’m wondering did you all have the ghostbench look at that where you started talking about can you make a lot more well we started we started with the ideals of ethereum which was messaging blockchain and and data storage which was swarm whisper and the blockchain you all know whisper was abandoned pretty hard and so was swarm i mean it’s not abandoned underfunded comparative to the blockchain and that’s that’s because it’s really really hard to scale a blockchain we took over whisper that’s called waku now completely and that’s we’ve we’ve been running with the concept of uh decentralized secure ephemeral messaging so that’s that was the backdrop of why status got started was we took all three of those but unfortunately that infrastructure never got built so we’re starting to build it build it out and the growth strategy was provide an interface give people a way to access this stuff whether it be a debt browser that you can chat with people we want people to have a chat context with not only can they communicate but they can say all right well let’s settle up for the pizzas today right you can do that directly inside of it as opposed to relying on some bot or some weird cryptocurrency we don’t know about you should be able to use the assets you have with the people you want and not be forced to based on what the application tells you to and so like the growth strategy is to provide that interface it’s always been provide that interface and make help make communities have better tooling in crypto and this is just the kind of iteration of like all right we’re getting there we have applications that do that and the infrastructure’s starting to support it now i don’t know if that answered your question but i don’t know if i’m just doing good i’m sorry we’re all open source we’re completely open we’re hiring a lot of people so we’re hiring we’re completely open source um so like if you’re not a developer we got a lot of roles that are outside of that please supply happy i’m happy to i’ll be here for the rest of night um what i’m looking for is something you already described the assange style basically fundraising mechanism uh my fundraising is a very community oriented it’s building a school you guys know how much it costs to build a school these days a lot any of you any idea start at 10 million and end at 30. okay now i’ve got to raise that money before august 2023 and i need somebody to join my team and put the assange down someone we call assange now and be called freedom and i’d like you to do that for me it would be great if you actually like schools but you that’s not essential i just want somebody who can do the job but a bit of passion about schools would be nice what’s the purpose of the school it’s a k-12 school it’s going to be in great the first one’s going to be in graham north carolina if however we overachieved and raised more funds than we need we’ll build more than one school i’m happy to build two or three schools i might even bill