Decoding the ethOS Ecosystem with Geeloko.eth

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast, and I'm your host, Millie Yearley, aka Tim, aka Hot Mike, aka Iced coffee much? And I'm here with G Loco, who has created the PoolTogether app for none other than ETHOS. G Loco, welcome. Thanks for joining us on the PoolTogether Community Podcast, sir.

Thank you, Millie. I'm glad I'm here, man.

So as we do with all of these, I want to hear your origin story. How did you get into crypto? How did you come to this crazy place?

It's a pretty wild and interesting story. So I kind of started hearing about Bitcoin. Everybody really heard about Bitcoin and people were using Bitcoin for all this kind of startup accelerator. And it was kind of this paid accelerator. And I ran into payment issues. I couldn't pay them directly with my credit card. And the only way to do that was to, I think, use Bitcoin. So I think I bought my first Bitcoin above $200 around that time. joining the startup accelerator, and I got some perks from joining them. So fast forward, I've graduated from school. I have all these things on my mind I want to do, but I don't know what to start with. And then I figured I have Amazon credits, right? So let me figure out how to make some money with that. And then I did a whole lot of research and I chanced upon mining. This is around fresh off of COVID in the 2021 new year. February, February 2021. So I was, I was part of the last batch of miners. I used, I used the remaining 10K servers to spin up, 10K credits to spin up servers, and I used that to get my first ETH, you know. And it was, it was, it was an insane journey. That was the actual time I actually discovered ETH, you know, because it was Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin until I realized I couldn't mine Bitcoin with my servers. No more GPU mining for Bitcoin, you know, and all that was left was Ethereum. So I just started mining Ethereum and then joining Telegram groups. And then all of a sudden, I'm all the way here. It's actually pretty crazy. It's actually really insane.

So similarly, and not similarly at all, I was making Alexa skills and got Amazon credits. And I was just content with winning Amazon, like Alexa devices for my home. So I have like an Alexa in my corner that I did because I made an Amazon skill, whereas you are mining Ethereum.

You just made my Alexa beep.

But, uh, that's awesome that you used your AWS credits to mine, to do Ethereum mining. That's awesome.

Okay,

so then you already had the dev skills, right? And so you're getting into Ethereum, you're making money. So that's how you got there. Now, how did you, you know, find PoolTogether?

Okay. So I didn't really take coding seriously until I moved out of the house. After I made a little crypto money, I moved out the house, found my own place, and then it became really clear that trading crypto was not a stable way to survive. So I was technical. I could do tech support, but I couldn't actually code. So I used what I knew from tech support to pick up JavaScript and TS, and I started working on a few projects here and there. few freelance gigs here and there. And I submitted a prop for Nouns, right? There was a Nouns prop I worked on for decentralized commerce. And I don't know, when I entered that ecosystem, you know, when you're on Twitter and you start interacting with a certain page, you start seeing other things from that ecosystem. So I realized EthOS kind of pop up, and then I followed the page. And then fast forward 3 months or 4 months later, EthOS kind of post a tweet, and I'm like, are you serious? Is this really happening? You know, like, is this Ethos phone really going to happen? And then I was like, is this real? And then Marcus commented under it. He was like, yeah, it's real. And then I found all the links and I joined Discord. And I think at the time I was working on ENS subdomains. So, and all these things, funny enough, they kind of tie into the ecosystem. Like everything sort of is already working together. Like you guys have subdomains already. So I felt like I was just naturally being drawn here, you know. And so he gave me a list of projects, you know. I DM'd him and talked to him. I was a dev, I would love to work on some projects, get myself out there. And he gave me a list of 5 projects, right? And I think it was Tornado Wrapper, Aave Wrapper, PoolTogether Wrapper, and I think 2 others I can't really remember. And then I, I, I knew about all of them. I didn't know about PoolTogether. You know, so I did a quick Twitter search and then I was like, okay, let's do it, let's do both together. And he was like, oh, that makes sense, TJ already asked to do something like this. So he was gonna hit TJ up and see what happens. And then the next day, you know it, everybody had to go. So I had to tie up some loose ends on my end, and then within a week I was already started on the job. And you know, like I said, the whole thing is just a learning process. So the whole journey is just insane. You

know, what did you, what did you find on your Twitter search that encouraged you to do PoolTogether over Tornado Wrapper or Aave Wrapper? Yeah,

that's the thing, because I already knew about all those apps, so I already knew what they were. When PoolTogether hit my face, it sort of seemed like I was working on something that seemed like ENS. You know, I didn't even have the idea that you guys were doing sub-protocol. It was after I got into your ecosystem that I realized that you guys already are tapped into all these other ecosystems as well. But then all I just saw was, okay, I'm building something like this already. I can quickly tap into that energy and build something like this. It's basically a wrapper. I'm building something as a contract. And the subdomains I made was basically the same thing. I created a contract wrapping ENS wrappers so that you can sell and You can sell and rent ENS subdomains. So I felt like it was basically on the same line of work with a smooth trajectory. The energy felt good.

Yeah, totally. Can you tell me about EthOS now and what that is, just for folks who might not know what EthOS is and

why

developers are involved?

I'm not officially a spokesperson for EthOS. I'm maybe one of the early contributors because of the work I've done on PoolTogether. Basically, the idea is getting an Android device that is permissionless, a mobile Ethereum device that is permissionless, so that we can have crypto apps on there without having to get removed from the App Store. So that's the basic energy behind EthOS. It's a permissionless mobile device and it's based off Android. So it really just taps into the Android ethos as well because Android is already open source. You know, so building on top of that just makes sense. And it kind of ties back to where I came from because back, back in the day when the startup I wanted to do sort of wanted to make Kindle devices, you know, and then the Kindle devices were going to have custom Android OSes on them. So all these things sound like things I wanted to do, but I never got the chance to do them. So I'm just kind of living out my dreams working with these. I think I know. You say?

Why were you interested in making a Kindle device to do more stuff, like to jailbreak it?

So I realized that— it wasn't a realization, it was just probably a want. My dad used to work in newspapers. He was an editor for the Daily Graphic up until the end. And it felt like a natural trajectory to take my dad's business online. So I wanted to make a device, a cheap device where you could actually get your daily newspapers in a Kindle, directly sent to the Kindle, and sort of bundle books and magazines in a whole package and just bundle it mainly for— it's a light OS for just reading. I wanted that to become a whole thing here, reading device mainly for African content, African books, African magazines, and African newspapers.

And when you say permissionless, I think I know what you mean, where No one's restricting what apps you're installing on it, right?

Exactly. We could—

right. So it's only the user to care about security and to do their own research as far as what they're on. But there's no gatekeeping, so there's no censoring.

It's a lot similar to what PoolTogether has going on with V5 right now. Maybe you have your protocol, but the community has a list of trusted things that they trusted vaults that they want. So anybody can create the vault. But we are not encouraging you to drop your money in any vault. That's what EthOS kind of is like. So they are building their own apps, and I'm sure with time, as their ecosystem grows, there will be other people who create an app store, and they are going to review people's apps and make sure that those apps are not malicious. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Okay. So it's just really early. The EthOS ecosystem is really early. The software builds are not really completely done yet for public use yet. They just did the pre-orders for the Pixel 7 version of the EthOS. And I don't think they've really shipped those out yet. They're still doing final tweaks with the OS itself. There's a whole lot of work to do before it's finally out. But as it is now, to me personally, it looks great. I'm a fan, so I'm going to say it looks great.

That's cool. So, so then what's the future for you, G Loko? Like, what are you still working on? EthOS stuff? That's what you're going to be doing for the near term or what?

I've sort of fallen in love with EthOS and PoolTogether, so I'm just going to keep building in that direction. But right now I'm more excited about building for PoolTogether because I talked about Susu, community savings and loans. And it has me really thinking about creating a vault for African savings. The idea is most of the time spending depends on dollar. So when the dollar goes higher, basically the price of goods, fuel, everything goes higher. And I felt if people were saving directly from Ghana cedis into price tokens, it was going to be cool. So I'm working on a little something where people can onboard themselves with an email and maybe they could use their local wallet to directly buy some pool tokens so they don't need to worry about swapping and all that. We'll keep some pool tokens in store and we'll be giving them out to people who want to join our pool. That's just some early ideas I have for PoolTogether. And for EthOS, I'm still working on the mobile app. that I got started with and plan on doing something to onboard funds onto your system wallet.

Okay. And with this concept of Susu, when you talked about it, I learned— I looked it up. But can you just explain Susu for me?

Yeah. So like I was trying to say before, Susu is a community savings and loans, right? So basically in Ghana, how it works is If maybe you are a lady who runs a business, you have a saloon, you sell drinks, you sell food. There are normally people who work for small communal banks, right? And they come around to your office with books and maybe you give them $2, $10 worth of local currency, right? And they tally that up and add it to your so-called bank account. And most of the times these savings and loans banks, they collapse. Because how else are they going to, I mean, reverse, return the yield? How are they going to pay the people who are going to work on coming out and collecting the funds? So most of the time these businesses collapse. But with something like PoolTogether, there's no way I or anybody else can rug anybody's money unless, well, when the person is buying, we don't do the transfer correctly. And that's not the plan here. You know what I'm saying? As long as we can get you your pool tokens, your savings are good. And the spending power of your tokens increase over time compared to saving maybe 1,000 cedis and saving maybe $100, because 1,000 cedis is almost the equivalent of $100. If I saved $100, I'll probably be better off in the next 6 months than saving 1,000 cedis. Saving 1,000 cedis, the possibilities are it's going to get rugged. Or the spending power is going to decrease. But with PoolTogether, spending power increases and then the money is safe. Yeah,

understood. So for example, in 2 weeks, we're working with this provider called Cypher Wallet and they're going to actually give— people could sign up during the community call for a spending card. So you can actually save with PoolTogether and then you can convert your PoolTogether savings into USD and spend it with an actual physical credit card.

Yeah, that's actually kind of interesting.

I'm wondering though if that would work in a Ghanaian context, you know, or is it more mobile money or is it credit card based? Is it— what would like that kind of look like where you're saving with PoolTogether but then also able to spend with it as well?

Well, you are saving with PoolTogether. Normally when people have these savings, they don't try to spend them. You know, in in in our in our countries, like your rainy day savings. So that's why it's kind of fucked when people run away with it. You know, it's it's it's it's kind of most people kind of see like a rainy day savings. They don't they don't go for the money unless they have like a business to invest in or something. That's why they they petty save it daily. They work maybe make 100 cedis a day and put 10 cedis down for that day. You know,

right? Yeah. So the point is to not you want to make it difficult to spend.

It's more about making it not necessarily difficult to spend. But safe, you know, that's the biggest issue. The money being safe, literally the biggest issue, plus spending. Then you have some extra room for saving in dollars, you know. But ATMs are not so popular. And even where I live, I have to— I probably have to pick a car to find an ATM. I can't walk to the nearest ATM. It's actually kind of far.

But you're going to use cash or you're going to use like a mobile payment?

So we're going to try and put the merchants, Momo merchants on the site, right? So people can use mobile payments, or then we manually collect the payments and deposit into their wallets like a P2P system. Normally, that's how we transact here, even on regular days. Normally, if I want to buy crypto or sell crypto, I have to do P2P. I don't normally use a card. I either send my ETH to Binance exchange to USD, get somebody with CDs to send me CDs, and the person keeps the USD on Binance.

Got it.

So when we give them— we are giving them account abstraction access, like email access to the PT tokens.

That's great.

Instead of having MetaMask access.

Yeah.

MetaMask swap is email straight to PT. That's the concept.

I love it. Well, then how does ENS work in this way as well? Is that also abstracted?

No, ENS is a different project altogether. So I told you I was working on subdomains and selling subdomains is cool and all, but there's no actual use case for it. So I was sort of brainstorming ways to use ENS subnames for payroll, not just payroll. You can actually use it for community gating and a whole lot of stuff. But I kind of stuck with payroll because that's where money, liquidity, and all everything moves. That's what kind of shines my eyes sometimes. So I decided to build a subdomain payroll system where maybe you could have like marketing.pool together and a list of employees under marketing.pool together and send money to the ENS, not to the wallet. And the contract, the smart contract does a CCIP read. figures out which owner is on which wallet, checks if they've already claimed the addresses before they send out the payouts. There's also another account abstraction concept I'm working on.

I love that. I love that. I think that one thing that came up when I was exploring subdomains, when PoolTogether got our subdomains, was the idea that sometimes people don't want to show what they've got paid. And so the ability to actually swap out wallets so that you don't see that amount, right? So every time you get paid, it's either a new wallet or a different wallet.

Exactly.

Or a way to hide the wallet, you know, at least at the payroll side of things.

And it's actually kind of cool because the integration is actually with— the integration I'm thinking about is with Namestone, you know, so it's going to be gasless and free. So we're going to give them a chance to change it like that. Anytime you want to change your payment address, you can just change it like that.

I love it. Are you talking to NameStone?

I'm still doing a whole lot of research on CCIP, so I haven't really gotten my API yet. I'm trying to make sure I can get the data on L2, L1 data on L2. Got it.

Cool. All right, well, hey, any parting thoughts, G Loko? Anything that you want to say to the PoolTogether community or people listening to the podcast?

Man, you guys are so welcoming, man. I've never been anywhere and been invited to talk on Twitter and on Discord. It's actually pretty cool how you guys do, man. For real, if there's anything I have to say, you guys are really, really, really down to earth, and I love it. For real, you don't get this kind of love anywhere else.

Thanks for building. Thanks for being part of the community and, and actually coming on the podcast and stuff. It's, it's a joy to talk to you, sir. And, uh, we'll keep talking, keep building together.

Thank you. All right. All right. Bye.

All right.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.