Empowering Crypto Communities Feat. NameStone

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Millie Yearley, AKA Tim, AKA Hot Mike,

AKA Gasless. That's, that's me. I'm known as Gasless and I'm here with Slowbo.eth, AKA Alex of Nifty Chat and Namestone fame. ENS steward, all around good guy. Alex, thanks for being here.

It's a pleasure to be here. I love your intros. There's just so much positive energy.

I try to, you know, I improv them. I, I try to just whatever off the top of the dome, you know? Uh, so sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't, but you sound great. You just sound great. Did something change about your voice?

I think it's just the mic. I think I probably should have been using this mic all along because I think I sound completely different when it picks up the entire bandwidth. Is that the right term?

Spectrum? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. There's, um, the producers, audio producers use like, people have a good print if you sound good, if your voice sounds good on the mic. So you got a good print. Alex, and congratulations on the new mic. I just wanted to give you a shout out for, for doing that, joining the Yeti gang. So, uh, hey, normally we talk about the— you're a two-timer club. You've been on the podcast before. And so this kind of changes the game a little bit. We've only had a couple repeats. And so pumped to have you back again, but we're not, we're not so much talking about NiftyChat now. We are talking about Namestone. So can you You know, if this is your first time listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast and hearing Alex, Alex, can you just give us a little bit of your background, how you got into crypto and then how you got and how Namestone came about?

Absolutely. So I got into crypto a few years back and it was ENS that really kind of triggered that light bulb moment. I went out and I bought slow.eth. And the moment I bought Slow Without ETH, I went to OpenSea because everybody was degenning, and I noticed how my name, which is really my name and no one else's, got carried over. And I realized in that moment that this is the future, and I just became totally obsessed. I did what I think a lot of us do, which is I read everything, I watched all the videos, I watched Bankless, and right away I noticed a couple of holes in the product categories that no one could actually chat. From Slobo.eth. So that led me down the path where I founded a decentralized Discord called Nifty Chat. And then because I was such an ENS maxi, I did not allow anyone to have a username unless it was ENS. And I think that was probably okay in the bull market. But as the bear market set in, I realized that 70% of the people who are in Nifty Chat did not have an ENS name. And I think everybody should have an ENS name, but it's not really fair when it's costing you $50 or $100 to register it. So I created this technology, or I should say I popularized this technology that Coinbase has used and other folks have used that lets anyone claim a subdomain from their ENS name. So I let people claim bob.nfty.eth. And that was so incredibly popular that in the span of 24 hours, I got 500 new users. And I realized right there and then that this is the product that the market has been wanting that they didn't know they needed. And that led to me funding Namestone, which basically allows anybody from small brands like Wasi's and PoolTogether to wallets to issue gasless subdomains from their ENS name or from any imported DNS. So I know that was a long kind of intro, but hopefully I set the stage well. And then maybe one last thing. Through the last 2 years while building these various products, I've continued to contribute to ENS, the protocol, as a steward, which is an elected position. That's always kind of my pleasure to give back to the community as well.

Yeah, it's been really cool to know you from Nifty Chat days. Got to hang out with you as you moved to New York and, and then got to talk to you about like, wow, that was really cool claiming the gasless subdomain through Nifty Chat, that was really great. And, you know, going through the modal and seeing all of that and then talking to you about like, you know, could PoolTogether get on that? Could Wasis get on that? Can we do more with this? And so, uh, it's been, it's been really cool to see. And you've, you've taken it beyond what I thought it could be. Cause I'm just like, oh yeah, it's a gasless ENS. Right. I just felt the friction as a user of like having to come up with gas, especially when gas is pretty high. of like, I, I did not understand how to put my Twitter name into my ENS profile. And so when you scan my little nifty card thing or Nimi card, that's what it is.

Yeah.

It redirects you to a bad link because I put it in wrong. My Twitter, I think I just did like@— I needed to put in the link or whatever. And so, so I had to go pay like, you know, $20 to fix that. And I'm just like, this is This is poopy. This is not fun. So I was just pumped that I get to like edit my profile gaslessly now with my subdomain, which is really cool. But then you've done, you've done even more than all I could have asked or imagined. You created this directory. So for PoolTogether and for Wossies now, I can see all of my friends who have claimed their subdomain and I can go through and just like, I have like Now this is going to date me, but I have like a white pages. I have like a directory, like a phone book of my peeps. And I can talk to them. I can click on their Twitter. I can click on their, their website. I can click on their wallet, all, all in one interface. So it's cool to see you go from like gasless subdomains to also like, what else can you do with them?

Yeah. And I think from a dating perspective, all you have to do is add the word Web3 in front of old tech and it becomes instantly new. New. So it's, it's nice. Web3 white pages. And you're like, well, actually it's white papers. You know, you can just blend these words together and all of a sudden it'll sound good. And then like, you know, and if people are like young enough, they don't even know what white pages are. So if you didn't say it, they'll be like, oh, well, that's interesting. I wonder why. You know, maybe it's like a white paper.

Wait, there was a book with everyone's address and phone number in it and you were just like all public like that? And you had to pay people to get delisted. What, what kind of time did you live in where the doctors use leeches? Anyway.

So yeah.

So as you're building, as you're building with this, like, how do you, how do you like prioritize? Like, how do you, cause there's so much you can do with these gasless subdomains, but, but as a, as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a builder, how do you, how do you decide what moves to make in your product?

Yeah, so I think I kind of— I almost want to say I cheat, because if you kind of get lucky with a product that actually has demand, which Namestone does, your users will tell you what to build. And as long as you're not over-indexing on a single user and you're kind of thinking about, hey, is this an idiosyncratic ask from a customer, or is this a generalizable ask? So one example to make my point a little bit clearer is that several people wanted to revoke names or manage names. So it became very easy that I should probably create an admin panel where anyone can manage their names for their community, because sometimes people might register names that aren't brand aligned or community aligned. And the users, you know, the customers told me that. And that's how I've been, you know, fortunate enough where the The customers are telling me the roadmap, and the only kind of quote unquote hard thing I have to do is sometimes they'll ask for things that are like five weeks worth of work, and sometimes they'll ask for things that are like thirty seconds worth of work at the right time. So you know, you just kind of mix value versus difficulty, and then you rank order it, and you pick. And for now, that's that's how I've been prioritizing my roadmap.

Now I full disclosure, I. was so excited in the product that I was like, let me help you sell this thing. Like, let me help you bring this project to other projects. And so I've been doing that. And, uh, it's been really cool to have all these different conversations and to, and to meet different representatives from different communities and find out everyone has their unique needs. Everybody has their unique, um, working styles. Everyone has their unique ways they go about this bear market. And so I don't know, I would love to hear from you, Alex, just like as you're talking to different projects, what you're learning as a founder, you know, as you're, as you're gaining adoption with Namestone.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing I've experienced is that so much of it is in contrast to my experience with Nifty Chat, where predominantly I was talking to protocols and communities. And here I'm actually talking to agencies. I'm talking to a lot of companies that help bigger companies in a way like my client is 3 steps away and, you know, figuring out what part they should be selling to the end user has been the biggest learning for me. So for example, a direct client like PoolTogether, you know, they're just going to tell me it's like, hey, I want my community to see other folks. But if you're talking to a marketing agency or a technology agency, they're solving a problem, but you're actually not speaking to the end user, so you can't hear their problem. You're hearing it through a filter and getting really good at listening to like what they're actually trying to solve has become so important because sometimes, you know, bigger brands, they want to experiment with Web3. They don't necessarily have a goal besides I want to be here and I want to be ready and I don't want to be caught off guard. Let me try this new technology and they don't need to have a very crisp, clean value proposition. But if you're talking to the end consumer, sometimes they will want that. They will want like, hey, what am I going to get for this? Am I going to get more engagement? Am I going to get more sales? So kind of being able to bucket the person that you're talking to quickly into, are they a KPI, you know, a key performance indicator focused individual, or are they more vibes focused? So, and it's, it's actually, you know, Vibes is a little bit overdone, but it is actually important to structure your pitch to whoever you're talking to.

That's right. Vibes and lore, you know, like what's the namestone lore? Apparently that's like the, you know, you gotta have a good, gotta have a good story. And really lore is just like your pitch, but, but, uh, you know, it's gotta be entertaining and memey. Memes also have crazy value. Yeah. So I, I have encountered, as I talk about ENS, a lot of assumptions that I make. I just assume everybody knows ENS. I assume assume that people know exactly the value that an ENS address brings and how convenient it is and how it's kind of like a standard, right? If you're in crypto, you need to have an ENS address. But as I talk to NFT communities, as I talk to people in DeFi, as I, I'm realizing that crypto is very much more siloed than I thought it was, just because like for me in learning and going across and talking to all these different, I'm not as siloed 'cause I'm more exploratory, but I feel like people get in their niche and they're just like, I'm in this and this is where I live. And so for me, like one of the challenges has been just even explaining the value of ENS to somebody in crypto. And so I would love to hear like from the ENS steward, a pitch for ENS and like, if you could just, you know, tie it into what Namestone is providing with gasless subdomains.

Yeah. So that's absolutely true that people live in their silos. And I have noticed that sometimes the value proposition of ENS is counter to what some silos might like. So for example, and I'll get to your question, in the DeFi world, privacy is very important. And, and with ENS, it's like, well, now you're tied, right, to a specific name. So like the way I think about it, or what I think is the biggest value prop of ENS, it is your one-stop shop for a global identity. And the reason why a global identity is important is that we are all kind of tired of managing passwords and all these things. And we already got used to using MetaMask to log into applications. But why do I need to provide my email address to the 4th, 5th, or 6th DeFi application? Why do I need to verify my Twitter on another application where I already did it 4 times through things like Git Passport, for example, ENS? And because like ENS is not a domain, I think this is where the confusion It kind of stems is that people kind of associate it with a .com. But if you think of it as an identity and you think of it as your global user profile, everything starts to make sense. That means you could put the data that you feel comfortable being public into your little profile and then carry that with you to any of your applications. And as other implications— applications start integrating ENS, which many have done, you won't have to retype all that tedious information. And that's the real big value of ENS, is that you have this global username so you can take away those rough edges from 0x53451 and turn it into slobo.eth. And Namestone basically allows anyone to now have that because it removes the final barrier, which is the cost. Because especially as you're coming into Web3, you might not have ETH and you want to just experiment. And Through our product, brands are able to onboard the crypto curious because without us, without them costing it any money.

That's great. And then, and something else I've discovered that I didn't know about is like the other— it enables like, yes, it's your identity, it's your— you don't have to remember your email, your preferences come with you, all this other stuff. But it's also a way to like communicate So XMTP is one of these messaging protocols. And I'm looking at their site right now. It's like, yeah, you can do messaging. You can do decentralized social. You can do marketing. You can do DeFi. There's automation. There's, there's these different things that you can do. And like, you blew my mind last week when you showed me that I can even do email. I can do like through MailChain, I can use my subdomains. I can use my ENS domains. I can use all of it and have like a centralized Web3 inbox. Now I don't have any messages in there right now, or I do because you like sent me one and you were, we were doing testing and me and Pop Tones messaged back and forth a little bit, but it's like, oh, this is like, this is really cool. Like this is, you can also, you can also use as a, you know, as a messaging, we can start using this. And so as adoption grows, as people are using this more and more, there's, there's other things that are really cool to do. But like, as you said, like baseline. Yeah. It is your— it's your identity. I love that.

Yeah. And I think I do want to go back to this privacy thing specifically because the one drawback of ENS is that everything is on-chain. And I think there are some times where you want to be on-chain and you want to be fully visible and fully public. And there are other times where, you know, I might have a degen wallet. I don't want to have a spreadsheet where I'm keeping track of my degen wallets. Not saying that I have hundreds of them because that would be Bad to tell people, but this way I can have degen wallet, you know, like my degen wallet. And the only person who knows it is me because I'll call it degen.slowdaddy. That doesn't exist. So you can try to resolve it. But, but through NameStone, it won't be anywhere on chain and only I will know. So it allows a very convenient way to have this semi-private mechanism where as long as you don't reveal your ENS name, you can manage dozens, if not even hundreds of wallets for whatever purposes, and you can use it as mechanism. This is the other kind of use case, which I'm not even sure if I talked to you about. You know, we were talking to like payroll providers, right? And no one in their right mind would want all their payroll information public. So what you could do is you could give everybody a subdomain and then automatically rotate your wallet. So the payment only goes into this wallet once. And because no one knows the ENS name that's associated with it, you would just see all of these one-time transactions into all of these different wallets. But from the brand perspective, they only have bob.pooledtogether.eth to manage, and you can retain some privacy and allow for easier wallet rotation if that's, if that's something that you care about.

That's really interesting. So I'm, I need, I might need you to restate that for me in a way. So there, it's not, there's not resolving on one, like there's only one way resolving, meaning like a private resolving or something. So like I could have, But I could have my tim.pooltogether.eth and I want it to not show up. Say, re-explain that. Sorry.

Yeah. So for example, your tim.pooltogether.eth, but let's say you never shared that. That is tim.pooltogether.eth.

Yeah.

With anyone else.

Right.

Then no one would know that tim.pooltogether resolves to your address.

Got it. Got it. Okay. So it's private just because I haven't shared it. It still resolves, but, but it's, and then I can change the wallet that it resolves to. At any sort of frequency I would like that I want. That's a, that's a potential use for these. And, and, and specifically, I think it's really interesting. I love that I have a Pull Together subdomain and I love that I have a Wasi subdomain because these are 2 communities I really care about. And I want to collect all of the communities I care about subdomains. I would love to own tim.all, whatever, whatever community I love at the moment or forever and always. And, uh, but I also never thought about using it as, um, like work identities, right? So I could have, like, if I'm working for 3 different protocols, I could have my own one for each protocol, not because I love and cherish them forever, but also because I'm doing work with them. And so I can manage work profiles as well in that way. So that connects to the messaging that connects to email. So yeah, it just kind of, I never went there with ENS. I went, I did the identity thing. I can, I think I can think about that, but I didn't realize how much identity spreads across our work lives. and our community lives. So very, very exciting stuff.

Yeah. And to kind of expand on that. So for example, I used to be before Web3, I used to be a consultant and I would have different clients. And the thing is that when you have a different client, sometimes a client will pay you, and I'm just gonna make up these numbers. Sometimes they'll pay you $5 and sometimes they'll pay you $1,000. So if they're going to pay you $5, it's really not worth your effort to set up, you know, a dedicated email box or dedicated billing. But if you're working for a protocol, the beauty of it is let's say you're working for PoolTogether so you can be pool.payme.eth and then you could be wasi.payme.eth and you can have all those addresses resolve to kind of your main wallet. But as your income grows, you can then swap out the address that's underneath, but they'll be invisible or it'll effectively be invisible to whoever's paying you. They'll keep paying you. And like there is power in having the same like multiple names. resolve to one address that then you can change as the situation changes, especially for like governance and other, other things like that where you might want it to be all in the same wallet, but then later on you want to change it. If you're giving them a wallet address, you can never change that. You give them your ENS name, you could change your wallet address. And as long as they're counting on that ENS instead of your wallet address, it actually gives both parties a lot more flexibility.

And it's like another thing to automate too. This is so— I mean, this is the thing about Web3, right? We're building, we're building it. and we're flying it at the same time. And so we're seeing this with WalletConnect, like all these services that use WalletConnect. Now v2 came out and so it broke a lot of things. And so we're going through and seeing what has been broken and what needs to be updated. I think the same thing with ENS, like with this, you know, whenever I'm using subdomains and stuff doesn't resolve the way I want it to, it's really— I mean, it's really because like people need to upgrade their stuff, right? And so not only with ENS, there's like this desire to propagate, right? To have adoption widely. But there's also a secondary biz dev partnership growth goal, which is also, hey, please update your code to make it work because we have new features and stuff. Is that, is that right? Am I— I'm not technical, so that's just my grasp of the situation.

Yeah, I think, I think the way I look at Ethereum is I love the Lego analogy, right? There's all these little building blocks And you might have like the greatest protocol in the world, but until it's integrated into kind of technical libraries that other builders can use to build on top, it's, it's just very hard to popularize it and use it. Right. Very few of us are probably very comfortable of going to a smart contract and interacting with it directly. That requires a level of sophistication that, quite frankly, would always hamper the adoption. That's why people create really pretty front ends like Uniswap did over their smart contracts. And there's this levels of this stuff where there's these Legos that you can build. And they— it is unfortunate sometimes, like, like, for example, Uniswap and Rainbow Wallet, they all work perfectly with ENS CCIP, which is the kind of the more technical way of creating what we created. But not all wallets are doing that. But at times, like, I've been having conversations and I don't want to name and shame them. But I'm like, hey, maybe you should implement this technology because more and more users are having this. Because as more people are creating these CCIP-enabled names or names that are resolving on layer 2s, you need to update your libraries and you need to stay up to date. And it's hard, but it's something that, you know, that's just how technology works. And I'm sure this actually happens in the Web2 world too. If you don't update your JavaScript libraries, eventually things will start breaking. I'm going to really date myself, but there was a reason why technology and web and it was held back for so long, it was because the dominance of Internet Explorer was so great and it didn't follow standards. So everybody was forced to design around a browser that was just not well-behaved. And that's why it took years and eventually Chrome took over to make kind of the standards of how web browsers interact better. And I think the same kind of evolution is in process of happening. And you have these great libraries like Ethers.js by Rick Mu. You have the Paradigm library by With the— I'm going to mispronounce it. So there's all these people who are devoting a decent number of resources to making these libraries progressively easier to implement, or the WalletConnects or the RainbowKit that's making it progressively easier for builders to build on top.

I was on a Twitter Spaces last week with Earnify, with Dawson from Bankless, the CTO of Bankless, and we were talking about PoolTogether's new features. And so V5, the hyperstructure of PoolTogether now allows you to deposit any token into any yield source. And it uses ERC-4626 vaults. And so Dawson's like, and Dawson's like the most technical person I know. And Dawson's like, hey, uh, what's an ERC-4626 vault? And I'm like, I should totally know what that is, but I have no clue. And it turns out like, as we were talking and as we had these questions going and people were dropping like their responses, Really, it's just like with yield sources, there really wasn't a standard. There wasn't— it was the Wild West. Anybody could make any type of yield source and there was really not one yield source to build. And so now this new version of PoolTogether is going to use ERC-4626 vaults. And that's great because we're using the standard. The problem is, and this is that Internet Explorer problem, is that everyone's still using the old school whatever they want. And we're in this adoption kind of aligning phase, like the Chrome browser establishing dominance phase. And so this new version of PoolTogether is going to have— is going to create a bunch of ERC-4626 vaults just out of the, out of the need to do it. And so there's a lot of like, you kind of have to be the change you want to see in the world. And you just drop this standards thing in here. Also, I'm just kind of blown away that Internet Explorer is dating yourself. I didn't know that. I would say Netscape, but I guess that's right. And then also, like, even thinking about Microsoft Edge, I have like a little, oh, oh, that's, that's rough for me.

I mean, I think saying that, I think saying Netscape Navigator is sort of like, that's no longer dating, that's just vintage.

So what did you drop here in the chat? The standards? Explain.

Yeah. So this, this is like the most famous like comic XKCD. Basically it says like, hey, there's all these like standards. Wouldn't it be great if there was just one universal standard? So then you go on and you create it. And now, now there's 15 of them. And it's, you know, standards are hard, right? That's why it's like, you know, if, if OpenSea didn't have its dominance, you wouldn't be able to create Seaport. Right. And sometimes it's like you almost need one, you know, like Uniswap obviously is the standard and they're able to drive the adoption because they kind of just own the market for a while where, you know, everybody would just follow them. But if you have a more fragmented market, you're going to have all of these competing standards like right now, like 721s. 21s for NFTs, most people would say they are not the best, but it has so much dominance that you're kind of stuck with it. And people keep coming out with new things that are better. But then, like, people coming into the space, the tooling isn't quite there to use the new standards, even though they are, like, objectively better. And I think, unfortunately, it's just going to take time. And unless you're creating something totally new, it's kind of hard to become the standard. Setter. Otherwise it just takes time.

And then also like, I'm a hipster, right? So like, if everybody's using it, I don't want to use it anymore. And I want to go use the new thing. And then like, it's the shiny object syndrome, but that doesn't help with adoption either. So, uh, yeah, we're just living in it. Yeah. And then it's easy to hate on the dominant, like it's easy to hate on OpenSea. It's easy to hate on Uniswap. Well, no, I love Uniswap anyway, but everybody loves Yeah, that's great. But I don't use them. I use, I use a DEX, but, but it's great. Um, so, so, uh, tell me about this whole on-chain versus off-chain debate that's happening, because like with gasless subdomains, there's the off-chain, right? There it's, we're, we're, we're using the cool part of off-chain, which is we don't have to pay gas for it, but then there's these trade-offs and this is kind of similar to disco.xyz. They're, they're talking about credentialing. And users can make things public or private. It's based on their consent. But again, you can do credentialing off-chain. Not everything has to be on-chain, which I think a lot of on-chain maxis are like, no, that must be. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on the whole on-chain, off-chain, especially since Namestone is pioneering in the off-chain ENS department.

Yeah, I have a ton of thoughts because I think You know, it's just important that we drive adoption, and there are certain things that need to be on-chain. But I also think that like on-chain versus off-chain—is that really binary? Because what are people trying to communicate when they're talking about on-chain? Usually, usually they—it implies like fully decentralized. But everybody know—or I shouldn't say everybody. Many people understand that there's different forms of decentralization. So like I'm a huge fan of optimism, but optimism as a layer two. Is less decentralized and in a way you could say is maybe less on-chain depending on how people are trying to use that word than like something on Ethereum. So you already have this kind of, you know, continuum of trustlessness. And then there are people talking about L3s that are being kind of developed and then that's controlled by a single entity. And at that point, if it's controlled by a single entity, is that really any different than someone holding a server? But what if my server now puts all that data that is, you know, that the people have submitted to me, but I put it on IPFS? Now, that's kind of on-chain. Or what if I mint an NFT on Optimism? Well, now I'm like hybrid on-chain, off-chain. So I think having these black and white views, these binary views, it's on-chain, off-chain, doesn't really make sense for our world. And what we should be doing, or what I believe we should be doing, and what I am doing is I'm trying to look at the user problem. And the user problem is many people are coming into Web3 and they have no money because they don't want to invest money into this thing that, at least currently in the media, it doesn't have the best reputation. How do we show them the benefits without exposing them to costs? Because not everybody is a decentralized maxi. Not everyone is all about censorship resistance. They just want to come in and they want to have fun. And sometimes to have fun, you don't want to pay up for something that you don't know the value of. So I think as more things become hybrid on-chain, off-chain like Namestone, you'll actually grow the adoption curve. And some of the people who come in, they might actually become the ones that drive decentralization on the base level. So what we really need to do, or what I believe crypto needs to do, we need to be as welcoming as possible and we give the on-ramps that are right for those people that are ready and then we promote them. For example, Namestone, and this is my plan, is that for any user that starts out on this kind of quote unquote off-chain world, we can port them to Optimism and make them a little bit more on-chain. Or later on when Name Wrapper, which is a feature of ENS, becomes— comes to Layer 2s, we can make that fully trustless. And what I like to say is that you can't become— you can't go in the opposite direction. You can go from not being on-chain to being on-chain, but you can't go the other way because once it's on-chain, it's forever. So our product basically gives people training wheels to experiment with subdomains and their own identity. Where we can still change things if needed, and then we can promote them to a more trustless solution if and only if that is what they actually need. Because a lot of times they don't, and people don't realize that they don't want that permanence. There are certain things you want to be permanent, like, I don't know, how much ETH I have. That I always want to be on-chain. But for, you know, my Twitter account, do I really want that to be on-chain forever? No, I want it to be on-chain for now. And that's where products like Namestone come in, where we give you a pointer from this ENS, which is this on-chain component, and it points to something you have fully full control over. I know there was quite a bit of there, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on what I just said.

No, that's good. I, well, I'm going to take it a step further or take it to a new place, which is just if it is to onboard, which I think that's everyone's goal is like, hey, this is wonderful technology, this is awesome. It's still very difficult to do things and we're working on it. And this is one way that we're working on it, like using Namestone, editing your ENS profile, claiming a name. All of that is very easy. It's very nice. It's, it's, it's got confetti that happens. There's a nice feeling when you, when you actually claim your, your subdomain. But, but there's a lot of work to do in Web3 generally. And it's, and it's that on-chain, off-chain argument is one of them. Account abstraction is another. Seed phrases. There's a lot, there's a lot going on. So my question though is why? So there's, there's 2 ways that Namestone can go about, I think, maybe you see more. One is going after getting adoption from protocols, from communities, from projects. And the other one is to go primarily consumer-based. So, so far you're approaching projects and I just want to know, like, What's the reasoning behind that? What are your thoughts behind that? Any plans for consumer-facing stuff?

Yeah. So I think it basically just comes down to leverage and market size of why I'm focused on projects. I think a lot of people who are currently interested in Web3 who are surviving through the bear market, many of them already have ENS names. And so for those people, the value proposition is a little bit less. But for brands that have crypto-curious people who are kind of sitting on the sidelines, There's just so much value for them to get any kind of ENS name. And that value is like smack dab in the face that like, hey, I can better manage, you know, my identity. And because like, here's the world that I see. I want to be able to go to a conference that is— that's a technology conference, not a Web3 conference. I want people— I want to hand them a code and that code is going to automatically generate a wallet. That wallet is going to have an ENS name assigned to it. It's going to have a Polygon NFT preset, and it's going to have all their social information. So then when they start interacting with apps, they're not starting from zero. And I think if we're able to provide that experience, which I think is much closer than many people think, because we have things like Magic Link and these wallets as a service, or even the stuff that Coinbase is doing with— yeah, it's called like a wallet as a service that like other companies can integrate. Once you start combining these Lego pieces, all of a sudden you can go and you can onboard your mother. To crypto without having to be like, okay, go through all this KYC on Coinbase, then you have to buy this thing, then you have to set up your MetaMask, then you have to send money. Oh, and here's the seed phrase. I think once you remove 5 or 6 of those steps, which we're actually very close to doing, you can go to a conference and say, hey, here's a piece of paper, you now have a wallet, play around with it. Don't worry about it. There's not too much of value here. Just experience Web3. And I think that's the eye-opening Or you play a game for, you know, it's a subscription service, right? You play a game for 30 days and you keep— you have this temporary identity that you have as you explore whatever game you have. So that— and so going back to the reason I'm not targeting those end people is because we haven't built enough infrastructure and I have to work through these partner companies with leverage because I think all the people that I'm able to reach currently outside of them managing like 3 or 4 wallets, I don't know if there's enough value for them to start paying me hundreds of dollars a month and I can't fully automate it at this time. So I've kind of always focused on brands with leverage who can kind of keep the money in the ecosystem, if you will.

Yeah, because I'm excited to like, I never got into the ENS prospecting, you know, like of, of like finding that sweet name. But, but Namestone gets me excited. Like, I'm like, oh wait, I could go find some like clever, funny meme type ENS address, go get it because no one thought of it yet, even now. And, and then like, you know, issue subdomains to my friends. friends or like that sort of thing. Like I would love to do that, but I understand, I understand you're running a business. Right. And I'm not like your target, but, uh, I could see that. I love that. And I could make the case for how that could be more maybe adoption friendly, but, but this ties into my next question, which is how can you do, like, you, you kind of dropped a little alpha here where these subdomains could be ported over into Optimism, but yet there is still some sort, sort of centralization because we have this ability. of the ENS owner, which is true, right? This is, this would be the way, gasless or not, that the ENS owner can revoke the subdomains. So how does that work when you're like issuing an NFT? I think that's what you were saying is like subdomain holders could potentially in the future have like an NFT on Optimism where they could transfer it to somebody else, that sort of thing. But ultimately the original ENS holder would have the revoke abilities still, right? Could you, could you explain that a little bit more? Dream dreams with me.

Yeah. So in terms of dreaming dreams, like, yeah, the, the way I outlined it, there would still be some of that centralized power of the brand to revoke it. But what I, what I mentioned is Name Wrapper, and I'll explain what Name Wrapper is. So Name Wrapper is a way for you to take your ENS name and add a bunch of what they internally call fuses, or basically switches, light switches. Some of those light switches, you can't— you can only turn them off. And once you turn them off, you can never turn them on, which is a, like, an analogy for trustlessness that currently exists on Layer 2. You can make your subdomains fully trustless, tradable as 1155 tokens. My understanding of the ENS roadmap is that that is coming to Layer 2. Is that coming this year? No. Is it coming next year? I think so. And therefore there is this path where— and, you know, the people who work on ENS, like the people who work on the protocol, They are literal geniuses, right? So they figure it out. And I like— this is where it's outside of my technical expertise. I just, you know, they tell me like, hey, we built this resolver and this is the way it interacts. There's some kind of Merkle proof. And then my eyes glaze over and then they say it's kind of trustless. And I'm like, okay, these people have made their reputations on like calling things that are trustless trustless and calling things that aren't aren't. So I believe there's a trustless future going to layer 2s. But I would be— it would be inappropriate for me to try to describe it because it is quite technical and I'm just waiting. But my understanding, it is possible to do so, but by people a lot smarter than I

am. And what— for some reason my brain went here is just like, so I have my CBD, my CBD, CB.ID. I have my CB.ID. I have my Argent.xyz. I have, I will go claim whatever those are. But there is a world where you can connect those to wallets. Like there is a world where I can actually like send, because centralization is gonna, is the best for the user, at least for me. I want a one-stop shop. I want to, I want to be able to like have a command center, my dashboard, right? Where I can have everything where at my fingertips. Yeah. And I'm seeing like more and more as we're talking like, oh wait, yeah, I could put all that to the same wallet and I could do this and I can do that. But, but again, it's just like, uh, there we got it. Maybe that's not going to happen, but at least it could partially happen. I don't know. I don't know.

Yeah. I think there's something I just want to make sure to clarify, like things like CB.ID and, uh, the Argent.xyz. If it is on, if it is not a .ETH, I don't think actually I'm going to make a stronger statement that maybe I'll get quoted on. It will never be trustless, and the reason for that is that if it's a imported DNS name, it is still in the control of ICANN. ICANN is this international body that manages the .com, .org, .id. So the only thing that could ever be fully trustless is .eth because of the way it's designed. But the moment you import something, even if you have trustless aspects to it, it's not fully trustless because it's in the real world, it's in the legal world, and ICANN. Is ultimately, you know, they have ultimate power to do whatever they want. And for many businesses, that's okay. And I think the end user for— I suspect for 98% of the world, they're not going to need a fully trustless solution. But for a small percentage, the fact that it exists is going to be extremely important. And it's more that Ethereum needs to build the right mix to you know, get that $8 billion in, and you're not going to get there if you are too hardcore on the application layer or the protocols that kind of build on top of it, because there's different levels of trustlessness that make sense.

That's, that's really an interesting point with ICANN. And even with, even with gasless subdomains using ENS, right, using a .eth address, it's still more decentralized because each of the ENS owners issuing these gasless subdomains, that's where the control, you know, ultimately resolves to, right? Because they're the ones who can change the resolver and break Namestone's connection and seize control again. So that's really interesting to think. Yes, with the .xyzs, with these other non-.eth addresses, you, the power is ICANN's. With The power is still in the DOT holder. It's pretty, that's pretty impressive.

And that's, that's the beauty, right? You have the right solution for the right problem, right? And that's it. And I think this is the thing that makes me excited about Ethereum is that something like Facebook, they have like the EU and the American government basically had to enact laws to let you have your own data. Like, I almost want to repeat that.

Yeah,

they have to be laws to let them have your own data. I'm not talking about somebody else's data or, you know, just your own data to get this like expert functionality. With, with like, uh, Ethereum, we basically get that for free. And like, for me, like me putting the data, like I was just on a call, this is actually very real. I was just on a call and they're like, well, you're putting this information into your database, can you put it into IPFS? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely, if you want. And the moment I put into IPFS, even if my service goes down, you have all the data and you can be up and running the moment. You know, like you could basically there's like a constant backup of all your data that is fully fully trustless or as trustless as you want to say IPFS is. I don't want to speak. You know, I'm sure there's some people who would give me too much nuance there. So and and and the thing is that there's this culture of not holding your data hostage, right? Like the reason why I think NameStone's gonna. win is because I plan to provide the best service in the business. And ultimately, that's where companies should compete. They shouldn't compete because they're— hopefully, I never have to work for Oracle, so I'll just kind of shit on them. Like, I'm not Oracle here that has your database technology, and basically, you can't port it off because it will be so painful. I'm going to make that all completely easy because that is not my business model, and that is not the kind of ethos of Ethereum. Like, I want the data to be free if that's what the client wants, and I'm never going to lock you in. I'm going to lock you in just because any other alternative is going to look pretty shitty compared to what we can offer at NameStuff.

That's great. Okay, so you're going after— you're going after these projects. You've got, you know, pricing for this, for the service that people, uh, it's, it's very cost-effective compared to them building it themselves. You know, the, the devs are doing building protocols, and this is a really cool service that you offer. So can you give me, just, just gimme the pitch to, to different people that you're approaching? Like, let's, let's do pitch me as an NFT project, pitch me as a DeFi protocol, and then pitch me as like, let's say a wallet.

Yeah. So the NFT projects is the best or the simplest use case. You want community identity and you want to spread Your brand and your meme virally. For example, I know people with PoolTogether such as yourself. You're Tim.PoolTogether. That means every single person you interact with on Twitter, they see that you're Tim.PoolTogether. You're showing that brand affinity, and that is brand accretive. That is adding so much value to everyone. All your users become advertising. It's sort of like. Like Lazy Lions historically had this thing where if you put your avatar and your name in Twitter, you would get benefits from it. To me, it's like a no-brainer. And like our pricing starts low enough that it's not a problem. And I'll be— I'm public about it. It's, you know, the first 250 names that you want to give away to your community, it's only $500 a year. But the value of getting free advertising, like I'm not going to say that's priceless because that's an oversell, but there's just so much value of people seeing you on Twitter and kind of repping the brand that you have a stake in. So, and then the last part is a lot of NFT projects' websites, they're not the strongest, but now you have this directory where you can connect and you can do the follow, you know, like Lazy Lions follow Lazy Lions or Wasis follow Wasis. And we make that so easy with our community page. So that's the NFT project pitch. I think for protocols, I think some of them have a strong community component. And I think putting information into your global profile to maybe compete of saying something like, oh, I've done these number of trades, or I have this community profile that I now don't have to build on my side. You know, they can use our API product to create these profiles on, you know, you log in and all your information is there. And again, it's this advertising and brand value that is being spread as a meme because for every protocol that, you know, that exists, getting awareness is very hard and getting even 1 or 2 users who really love your product, who do the marketing for you. Again, like that is very valuable and that's another way for you to test it and see how well it works. And then the last part, which is not only wallets, but I think it's almost any brand that wants to deeply enable their users to communicate with one another or provide value to one another. They can use our API product to embed, embed our service into their product. So like I think Coinbase used, spent like millions of dollars developing CB.ID. If you're in a wallet and there's probably 15 or 20 wallets that are all trying to be something. Do you really want to be behind Coinbase? You know, they issued 2 million names, which is another form of lock-in. But you can do that for something much cheaper and give a reason to people to rep their favorite wallet. And the other thing that people might not know is that you can add a Bitcoin address, you could add a Litecoin address to your ENS profile, and we support all of that. So for wallets that are trying to be more than just Ethereum, there's a way to enhance the capabilities for your users by using these ENS names. Because as long as the other L1 is integrating ENS, which is rare, but it does happen, we're there to support them. Actually, give me— I'm going to do one more. Yeah, do it. So basically, conferences, temporary usernames for conferences seems to be pretty clutch because you don't always want to be walking around with your forever wallet. So many conferences are giving away your wallet, like they're giving you burner wallets, but it would be nice if you can keep a temporary identity for that wallet. That's another kind of use case that I've been exploring where you can really onboard users, give them something that like you have this, you know, you collect all these little treats on your temporary wallet, but now it's not just an 0x wallet. And then at the end of it, if you really care your accomplishment, you can port it to your main wallet. And that's like an instant value add. It's temporary. It doesn't need to be trustless and it doesn't cost that much, but it gives another— it gives everybody in that community a sense of bonding. And by default, now there's a list of all these wallets that can be messaged on something like Converse app or these other applications or Mailchimp where you can start email communicating with them as a follow-up to whatever you've done.

And using like the WeLook NFC card at ETH Denver was so clutch for me. It just like a light bulb went off. It's like, oh, it's so easy to connect. But it's the same thing. It's like, oh, I'm tim.ethdenver.eth or something like that. And then you can, you could just see all my socials and everything right there. It's so easy to connect. It just makes sense. It's really cool. You're saying stuff and I'm like going into Namestone and be like, wait, is that available yet? So I'm like, wait, I can add my Bitcoin, Litecoin stuff. And I'm like going into my edit profile page.

Yeah. And that's the thing is that like, that's, that's the stuff that's available programmatically because unfortunately my experience is the vast majority of people, they only add their Ethereum wallet. So, so it's like, I can do it, I can add it, ENS supports it. It's just like, you know, I need 5 customers to be like, oh, I really want this. And then we can just build it out.

Okay. So how do we get customers for you? What do, what do they do? How do they contact you? What's, what's What's your preferred method?

Honestly, you can direct message me on Twitter or Telegram. I'm super slow, bro. You can— like, I keep all my DMs open and I actually check every one of the spams. I've been doing that ever since I've been running Nifty Chat. And if I can handle 1,000 people, I've like looked through 1,000 messages before and found the right ones. So like, if you message me, I will get to you. My DMs are even open on Discord. You know, I live dangerously. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, I'm not, uh, you know, kind of bring it. Like, I'm, I'm usually pretty good. I won't click any of the links you send me, but, uh, you know, yeah, I'm pretty reachable. Like, follow me @alexlabodnik on Twitter, uh, and then I, I guess I'm slowwithouteth now on Discord because they're new, uh, usernames. And that's what I, that's what I claimed. I claimed slowwithouteth.

Nice. I did the same. I claimed my ENS on Discord as my username. Yeah. And I just encourage you to message Alex because he's He's great. So it's a good time when you get to hang out with Alex. So it's been a great podcast hanging out with Alex. I'm pumped about Namestone and I'm just excited about like all the potential. And I'm just, I'm like the feature request, you know, person, the annoying like scope creep guy that's like, let's do that. Let's do that. Because there's so much you can do with it. There's so many cool things with the community page you can do. So anyways, I'm pumped about it. I'm glad that we got to hang out and talk about it, Alex. And I'm I'm I'm pumped about where NameStone's going and that you're leading it. So thanks for being here.

Yes, always my pleasure. And make sure you check out namestone.xyz.

All right, cool man.

See ya.

Did you did you hit everything? Was there anything else you want to talk about?

I unless you think I'm missing anything, I think maybe if anyone wants to write a question, I'm happy to answer a question in the chat if someone has. I guess. And yeah, yeah, that, that, that's it. I think I, I think I hit it, you know, reach out to me and happy to talk about ENS stuff as well.

Cool. Well, thanks everybody. Thanks for, for being here and listening and, and just supporting us emotionally. It was great. All right.

Ta-ta. 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 Pulled Together Discord and let us know. Thank you.