Pioneering Chat Ownership with Converse.xyz

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, listen, I'm back from ETHCC and it was crazy, but I'm drained. You know what I'm saying? I'm drained. I got that post-conference blues, but not blues, like more like purples. And I'm here with Paul from converse.xyz, your favorite and my favorite Web3 messaging platform. Welcome, sir.

Thank you very much for hosting me.

All right, all right. So as we start with every PoolTogether community podcast, I would love to know, how did you get into this crazy mixed up world of crypto?

It was actually not so long ago. I'm quite new in the space, to be honest. It's been about 2 years. So like, I cannot be considered as an OG, to be honest. I've read a lot of things about like the archaeology of crypto in order to like seem to know more, but like, I'm quite new. The thing is like, you know, I was at university in 2014 and there were like, I was an engineering student and there were these like, you know, very geek people in the campus and they were watching videos of this very young person called Vitalik. And they were saying, I couldn't understand, to be honest, at the time, like they were talking about like someone building some sort of like decentralized computer, et cetera, et cetera. And I must say that at the time, I didn't really get it. Well, these people actually put a little bit of money in the Ethereum sale, so I guess it's good for them now. But I didn't really look into it. And then, like, you know, I went into Web2, I did a lot of product and marketing, and like, I've been very interested in technology as a whole from the beginning. And well, you know, when the NFTs came out, I kind of saw that this very interesting technology was not about finance only. Well, it's obviously about finance, but like, I was not aiming at building something around finance. So that's when, you know, the NFT wave came out that I thought, okay, this is interesting because the technology and the principles are amazing, that's for sure. But like, there are use cases in which I believe I can take part. And, you know, I started to dig into all of this. One of the first technologies I discovered was actually XMTP. So that's interesting. XMTP as a protocol was kind of my first understanding of what could be powerful in like, you know, Web3 communication in general. And then with my co-founder Noé, we chose to take a few months in order to discover what Web3 was all about. So as builders, we chose to ship a lot of different experiments. Like it was mostly like weird experiments. Like we've been doing on-chain collaborative art on the StarkNet blockchain, Pixels, that what the fuck, which is an interesting project. We've been working on like token gating, communication, identity, etc. And like the goal for us was to say, okay, well, in terms of communication, Web3 can be an amazing tool for communication between people, make communication much safer, smoother, and owned by people. But we need to understand what it's all about. So this is why we spent so much, so much time doing that. And then back in December, we had this idea of a website that actually still exists that was Wallet Roulette. So Wallet Roulette was Chatroulette, but with no video, no dick, and you actually own the conversations that you have with people. And so you would go to this website and get randomly connected with another person, another wallet, but like there's a person there, and you would talk to this person and get context on like, you know, The wallet activity, et cetera, et cetera. And then that way you can make new friends on the Web3, in the Web3 industry. And that's kind of how we started to build that. And a few months later, we were doing Converse.

So, so many questions here. What is the name of that site? I know you said Wallet Roulette, but I want to get like the specific URL because you said it still exists. It's still up and about.

So you can subscribe. I will put it in the chat actually. It's walletroulette.xyz. And so, to be honest, we— these are like 30-minute sessions in which people can just like come and say hi to a whole bunch of people. To be honest, we are not doing that many 30-minute sessions these days. But, you know, I would go like directly into the topic. This is why, to me, we are working on a technology that is amazing. So because Wallet Roulette is built on top of XMTP, it's a website. JavaScript, nothing to do with a native app. But the beauty of it is if you start a conversation with a total stranger, like someone you've never heard about before, and like, you know, you are matched with this person, they have interesting things in their wallet, they have interesting on-chain activity, and you start talking. And so you're on this website and let's say you talk for like 15 minutes. If you were in a Web2 website, you would like, this would be good 15 minutes and then it's done. Like you need to, Take the Telegram handle of the person or whatever and try and like bridge it into another app in order to continue the conversation. With Wallet Roulette, the beautiful thing about it is that you can start the conversation there, and because it's on XMTP and you use the same wallet, this conversation is actually also on Converse. So the way I see it is that, you know, thanks to open technologies like XMTP, And weird or even more serious experiments like Wallet Roulette, what we are going to see is a lot of new ways to actually meet people. And, you know, like compared to WhatsApp in which like you need to have the telephone number of the person, we have like a field of opportunity that is much, much, much bigger in order to connect identities and people with each other. And this is like, this is actually great. And this was kind of the very first approach with World at Roulette. Let's build something that is very specific, that will help people connect with each other in a playful way. But actually, this conversation can be not only just like having fun for 15 minutes, but also like the very beginning of a real digital relationship, but a real relationship with someone who has common interests with you. That was the whole idea. Well, I can go further in the podcast afterwards if you want, but like, this is kind of one of the principles of what we are doing.

Okay. So when you, you said that XMTP stood out to you when you were doing research and figuring out what you wanted to do. And by the way, 2 years, I know that, like you said, time-based, you're not an OG, but I saw a post today, dang it, from somebody on Twitter who is an OG who said that to be an OG, you need to have over What was it? I think like 100 PoApps and over like 500 transactions on mainnet or something like that. So anyway, I was like, okay, that seems more doable than like, you know, the number of years. But 2 years, I mean, I'm same, I'm the same. Okay. So back to my question, XMTP. Well, how did it stand out to you? How did you learn about it? How did you— how did that kind of like— I know you like the social aspect of it, but how did it really Changed the course of your direction in crypto?

Yeah, so, well, very basic, but we heard about them because we were reading articles about a lot of different companies in Web3, and they did a very big seed round back about a year and a half ago. And this is how we heard about them. But at the time, we were already saying, When you land in an industry and you say, oh, let's do WhatsApp for Web3. This was something like we love to communicate. We already built like, you know, social applications. So we were just interested in doing something in the space. And, but the very first approach was very dumb. Like we say, we said, well, let's do WhatsApp for Web3, which doesn't really make sense. Like, well, it doesn't really mean anything. So when we heard about XMTP, what we thought, was that it sounds like the right way to approach things. So, you know, like there have been a lot of messaging services on Web3 before XMP, before Convert. Like we are definitely not the only ones, but like what happens is that most of the attempts before were done kind of even in a Web2 way because like, you know, these services were like connecting wallet to wallet, but then everything was centralized. So there was no decentralization, no interoperability between the apps. And so some of the best primitives of Web3, which you can find in Ethereum, etc., they were not there. And actually, people were doing applications before doing the protocol. And when we saw XMTP, we said, okay, they are doing it the right way. We should have Well, in the Web3 industry, at least, we should have the protocols first. Well, it's just weird because sometimes you have a protocol and you don't know what to use it for. But we saw it as a great opportunity to actually then build an app on top of this network. And the reason why we thought it was great was that when you are building a social application, the most important thing, well, one of the most important things is to manage to get the network effect. So you need to have enough people in your network so that it makes sense for someone to actually enter the network. Because if you land here and there is absolutely no one that you know or no one that is close to you, it doesn't really make sense. So basically what XMTP is doing, amongst other things, is making sure that the network effect is at the protocol level and not at the application level. And to us, that was a game changer. When you think about it, you know, like, and this is the power. Like, so this is what XMTP is doing for private networks. Forecaster and Lens, for example, are doing it for like open networks. So if you're a builder tomorrow in a world in which like these networks are successful, they are going to be, you're a developer, you don't have to try and like, you know, build things from scratch and try and gather a community around it, et cetera. You have potentially millions of people who are already there. And then what you have to do is provide them with a better service than what they already have. But this changes a lot of things. And actually, what's interesting about XMTP is that it's very similar to email in a way. It's weird because email is from the '90s, but this was a period in which You would create open protocols and then you would create applications on top of it. And it actually made sense. The biggest social network in the world today is not Facebook, it's email when you think about it. And so what XMTP is building is something that will connect us all at the network level. And then what we are doing is trying to create the universal client that you will use on a daily basis to access this protocol, but you will be able to also use other apps And it's already the case with Coinbase Wallet or Lens, for example, in order to access these messages. And this is what for the user is amazing.

Okay, so you went from Wallet Roulette to Converse.xyz. How did that happen? How has it been so far developing this app?

So we actually built Converse because we built Wallet Roulette, to be honest. So we had these conversations on Wallet Roulette with people who I actually Well, the people that I met there, I still talk to them, actually. And so we thought, okay, that's cool, but like, the messages are sort of stuck on a website, which we cannot really go back to. Well, not in an easy way, actually. So let's build an app in which we will find all of these conversations again. And so what's interesting is that the very first version of Converse, was just a messaging app in which you find the conversations that you had on other apps, but there was no new conversation button. And I think it's, well, now there is, and like, I can talk about it after, but like, to me, that highlights what it's all about. So you start a conversation on a dedicated client, can be Lens, Coinbase Wallet, Wallet Roulette, or like tomorrow, thousands of applications. And then the goal for our Converse is to be this place that is reassuring, that you know well, that is on your phone, and that you can use on a daily basis in order to continue all of these conversations. And when you think about it, there are potentially tens or hundreds of apps in which you can start new conversations. It can be on marketplaces, games, well, social networks such as Lens, Wallet Roulette, weird experiments such as Wallet Roulette. And then You start the conversation there and you don't want to go back to like 25 different apps every day in order to continue these conversations. And Converse is about that, like having this safe place in which you can continue the conversations that you started elsewhere. And so we did it as a very, very, very early product with very few functionalities. It was back in January. And then Well, actually, we kept on doing the exact same thing, which is like, continue with the vision that I just— well, actually, the principle that I just told you about, and keep on enhancing, improving the experience of our users. So we launched 2 months ago, I think. And now what we are doing is mostly like, taking care of all of the core messaging features that you expect from an application, because like, You know, some people love Converse, but like sometimes they tell me, well, you have like half the functionalities of Telegram, for example. So we have this weird dilemma, which is that we want to, of course, offer you all of the basic features that you can expect from a messaging perspective. And we are building them. Reactions are going to come live in the next few days, for example, et cetera, et cetera. And on the side, we are building features that are Web3-specific and that can definitely enhance your experience. Compared to, well, let's say normal Web2 services.

So when you were talking about Wallet Roulette, my favorite feature of Converse is, and it blew me away. So we're on a, we're in a meeting and we're just talking after ECC because like ECC was all about this Web3 messaging. There were people like Maggie Love from SheFi was like, don't, don't gimme your Telegram, only Web3 message me. So use like XMTP or Push to message me. Coinbase Cafe, uh, had their Coinbase messaging, which is, uses XMTP. And so to get, you know, a coffee or to get a snack or to get merch or to get the Po app, you had to, you had to DM these bots or people. I couldn't decide if they were bots or people. They passed the Turing test, I guess. And so everybody on people,

like,

it was totally, it was totally people. Yeah. But, but, uh, but, you know, ECC was all about this messaging stuff. So I'm like super pumped and like, We have this, we have this podcast coming up. And so we had a meeting and I open up Converse and I'm, and I go to like message, and this is my favorite feature. It shows me suggested people, suggested wallets to message based on, you know, similarities of POAPs we held, if we follow each other on Lens, if we've transacted. And so I've got like Pedro, We've got like, it's, I have to scroll like 3 different screens just to get through all of the ways that Pedro and I are similar. And then there's Scotrepreneur and then there's, then we got, uh, C. Petter who's in the chat right now. What up? What up? We got Carson. We got, you know, and I'm scrolling through and it's like, oh my gosh. And it shows all the people that I could chat with because of stuff we have in common with the chat button. And that is awesome. Awesome. That is like killer app stuff that like melted my face. So anyways, everybody's got to download converse.xyz onto their mobile device and try it out because it's pretty awesome. And you should totally message me when doing so at millimonthly.eth if you wanted to. So talk about that. How awesome is that? Is that not Wallet Roulette related?

Yeah, definitely it is. So there is another website that I can actually put in the chat. It was iwasthere.lol. That was something else that we built at the time. And, you know, we thought deep about what drives people to talk to each other. And, you know, there can be like a lot of different reasons, but some of them are very simple. It's some sort of like connection in past events. It just drives the conversation. You know, like if you want to, if you meet someone in the street and like you were at the same concert as this person 3 years ago for your favorite artist, this will be a good driver of conversation. And these are similarities that actually drive both like very first conversations, but also like friendship at some point. And this is how we thought about it. The I Was There, the Talar website was Just, you can actually try it out. Like, it's still live, but like, it was just a way for people to remember together iconic events that happened on Feint. For example, all of the, yeah, thank you very much, David. All of the people who took part in the ConstitutionDAO events, like, they could actually input their wallet and actually access a gated Telegram group with only people from this group. And there were like more than 25 criteria, one of them being participated in the sale of Ethereum, but also like I minted a CryptoPunk, etc., etc. And we thought about it as ways to actually get signals that would drive people to be willing to communicate with each other. And this is— we used these signals in order to connect people on Wallet Roulette. It actually worked pretty well. And then we thought, okay, so we are a messaging app and we are doing some sort of like normal Web2, very simple messaging with like all of the good Web3 primitives. And the question was, how can we make this, you know, like feature that is, that couldn't have been done before and that is really mind-blowing? So Basically, we are trying to— it's a private network. So all of the private conversations that you have with people, the fact that you talk to someone, everything is private and encrypted and no one can know. But what we can know is, you know, what are the unseen things that happen to you as a wallet and as a person? And we can actually put all of this in a shaker in order to connect people and find people with similarities. So what's funny with this matchmaker, we call it that way, is that it will generally actually make you rediscover people that you already know because like you actually participated in the same events with PoAP or you maintained the same Dora collections or you follow each other on Lens or Farcaster. And so like it's a good way to actually start the conversation with them on an app that is on top of a decentralized network, which is already good. But then if you scroll down, as you said, you will actually discover people that you never talked to. And these people are maybe more likely to be, you know, good relationship with you than like the average person that you see in the street. So this is definitely the way we envision the future. You will keep seeing things private on Converse and XMTP. So there is absolutely no doubt about it. But what we can do is enhance your messaging experience by connecting you with the right people because, you know, like Messaging is about sending texts and reactions and photos, et cetera. But the real revolution is how can you connect people a better way? And this is what we are working on. And so we can do it at different stages. The first one is one-to-one conversations. And this is exactly what you mentioned. So this is live. If you click on the new conversation tab, you will see people who are recommended to you. But also, if someone reaches out to you, In the beginning of the conversation, you will see the common activity that you have with this person on chain. It gives you context about someone. You know, when a Telegram person just like chats with you, you don't know who this person is and you have to trust the fact that this person is who they pretend to be, etc. And on Converse, if someone comes and talks to you, if you have things in common with your wallet and theirs, you will see these things. So it's like, again, for trust. Safety, it can be something that is really huge. So this is for one-to-one conversations. And then when you think about it, it's not the only type of communication that we can enhance thanks to untrained information. We have 2 other sort of verticals that we are working on. The first one is broadcast. What's interesting about some of the untrained information that exists is that people already have already built and sometimes It's very hard, but they built audiences. You know, when you are an artist and you have an NFT collection of like the things that you did yourself with like love, et cetera, and people mint your art, these people, if there are like, let's say 20 people who actually buy your art, this is somehow an audience. And because things are compatible, you should be able to broadcast a message to these people if you want. and actually tell them in their wallet, well, you bought this piece of art, what do you think about it? Give me feedback, et cetera, et cetera. And this could be a good way for creators to be closer to their audience. And we actually already built this tool, but it's very beta, the very, very first version of it. It's on the broadcast.converse.xyz website. Again, I'm gonna put the URL here. Oh, thank you. You're much faster than I

am. Yeah, yeah. As you were talking about it, I'm pulling it up.

Yeah. That's so cool. Thank you very much. And actually this website, so it's only whitelisted for now. So you need to like talk to me on Converse and I will whitelist you. What is it, right? But when you think, yeah, again, when you think about it, you don't need to have to build an audience on Converse. What you can do is use existing audience in order to broadcast messages to people. Of course, these people can then opt out to these messages if they don't want to receive them anymore. But when you But when you actually build an audience, you should be able to port it into a safe place, which is Converse, or like, well, which is XMTP, and Converse is the way to access it. And so we have 3 ways to access your audience for now, and we are very open to actually building some more. The first one is NFT creators with their like NFT holders. You have Lens creators for people who collect their posts. and mirror writers for people who collect their posts. And again, what we are trying to build for these people is a place, a safe place that is not linked, that is actually not platform dependent. So let's say that tomorrow Convert decides to shut something down, to shut this feature down. Because you built on top of XMTP, Another app will be able to actually make you reuse the network in order to reach out to your audience. So you don't have anymore to go and try and build an audience on Substack and another one on Twitter and another one on Instagram. It's all open and it can work also as a broadcast on private network. And the second thing is, you know, because it's messaging and because the UX of messaging works that way, what you can do is have this digital real estate just for you. Because one of the problems that creators face a lot is that they mostly rely on algorithms in order for people to see their content. You know what's crazy is that when I hit subscribe or follow on most of the websites, if the person that I actually actively follow sends a message, well, sends a post, there is a very little chance that I see it, even if I follow these people, which doesn't really make sense. I understand why it happens, but it's weird. And the way we want to do it with Converse is if people choose to follow you or to subscribe to your broadcast, you have your digital real estate with them. And this is the conversation that actually is there and people will actually see the content. So this is something that is very important for creators and we want to help them with that. And then the left— sorry, yeah, you were— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I gotta, I gotta talk about a couple things. I'm peaking here. Let me just change my volume a little bit. There you go. Okay. So DDT, gotta respect the audio. So let me go back real quick before we keep going, 'cause this is awesome. There's so many, so many cool things. And while you're talking, I just did a cool thing too that I also have to talk about. Okay. So, uh, one thing is, is like, yes, there's on-chain activity that you can associate people with, which is awesome. There's also now we're talking about like the value of on-chain and off-chain. And not everything has to be on-chain. In fact, only the things that should be and need to be on-chain should be on-chain so that, so as to not clutter the chain. And, and so we have this digital ID conversation. We have these certifications that I think they're called certifications. I'm blanking on the name, but for example, like disco.xyz, you can, you can get these like different— somebody in the chat helped me with the name of the thing. It's not a certification, it's a thing like a— Yeah. Like you can send DMs to people.

I don't know. I'm sorry. No,

that's okay. That's okay. The chat will help. The chat will help. But, but, uh, you can also like pick your t-shirt size and you can choose like your pronouns and you can choose your favorite color and you can choose like all of these preferences or things, ways that you want to be associated, ways that you might even want people to reach out to you. And then you can make them public or private, right? You can keep them private just to have them for your own self. your own person. And then if you wanted to allow others to see it, you can make them public. So there's this whole thing about consent, which brings me into this whole marketing. Like, what does Web3 marketing look like? And this broadcast is, is the thing. And I just, as you're talking, I pulled it up and now I can see all my Lens posts that have been collected. I can see Mirror posts now. And my wife and I feed feral cats in Brooklyn. And I posted a video of, of like, uh, we use like this stop-motion camera that would take pictures of all the cats. And so I had all these patches and I turned them into a GIF and I posted it on Lens. And I said, and I charged, I did like a, you know, uh, give me a MATIC or 2 MATIC for everyone to collect this post. And it ended up raising, and I was like, hey, any money that goes to collect this post, I'll go buy cat food with it. And you get to help feed these cats. I got $30 off of this Lens Collect, and that bought a big bag of dry cat food that we used. And so I just messaged them right now and I was like, thanks so much for— so, and just the fact that I got to like, everybody, everybody collected, right? They paid for a bag of cat food and I let them know like that I was so thankful privately, right? They got like a little message. And what's interesting is that everybody who collected are also on XMTP. Which is not the case. Like, I think more and more you'll see the case, but I also love that you show that too. It's like, hey, not everybody has signed up for XMTP, so they can't really participate yet. So it's really interesting. Okay. Continue. Keep going. Oh, but, but I guess my question in that, in that long diatribe there is, yeah, what is, what is acceptable marketing and private messaging and spam in Web3? Right? What does that even look like?

Yeah, that's, we could talk about this question for ages, I would say. So I don't even know where to start, but like the way I see it is Web3 is a great opportunity to rethink consent actually, because again, with Web2, when you send an email to someone, you have this, you know, like Not very clear Gmail algorithms that says it's spam or it's not spam. And this is a problem because like sometimes, and it happened, it actually happened with my DePIN ticket last week at ECC. I wanted to have this ticket, of course, but the problem was that it went to my spam and I had no way to sort of say, I, by default, I accept communications from these people because I'm actually going to a wonderful party and it's thanks to them. And when you think about it, Web3, as you can choose to put information on chain, or even like you can even put the consent not on chain if you want to hide it somehow. But like, you know, with Web3, you can rethink consent in a way that like weakens If we can see if there is a link between you and a person, and if this person actually sends a message to you, whether it's a person or an organization or this sort of thing, if we manage to see a link between you and this person, well, you're more likely to be okay with the fact that this person connects with you rather than like there is no link at all and you don't know each other and there is no common activity. So we have a great opportunity there to say that if I own An NFT, if I bought an NFT from one of your collections, there's a good chance that I'm happy with you sending me a message. Of course, I could opt out or this sort of thing, but like, first principle is there is a relationship between these people or like this organization and these people. And then if someone just created a wallet and sends a bunch of messages out of the blue, There is also a good chance that this person is not really connected to the people they are sending the messages to. So we can actually, and we could go a little bit deeper even with, like, we could make sure that there are connections between people and you could give back the power to people. So as a wallet, I could say, for example, I'm okay with the fact that all of the NFTs that I own, all of the creators, they can send me messages. I could say that any of the people that I follow on Lens or Farcaster, they can send me messages, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't have to become a burden for users. Like, the UX needs to be very good, and we will get there. But consent, there can be, you know, like, it's not A or B, you know, well, on and off. With Web2, it's more like on and off. Like, I consent and I say that I consent, or I don't consent. It works that way. And then there is everything in between, but it's just a mess. Like, you will have, like, you know, random people emailing you even if you don't want to. And because they have good phrases, the email will come up in your inbox. And that's not good. But with Web3, the notion of consent can become much more subtle and much more interesting and much more user-controlled. So this is one of the ways that we can think about spam. And then there are other, like, 2 other pillars that we can actually work on as an app and as a network for XMTP that can be interesting. For example, XMTP is meant to be a network that has economics, you know, and so they can— they cannot do everything, but they can at least try and prevent the fact that people will actually broadcast messages to every wallet in the world twice a day because it would be too, too expensive to do. So there is some sort of game theory that we have to have there. In order to make sure that the network itself is somehow safe because you're prevented from doing dumb stuff. And the last thing is about UX. That's how a lot of services actually do that today. If someone tries to message you on WhatsApp, you can easily say, okay, I do not accept this sort of request. And so we will also use UX in order to make your experience better. But like, in the end, we have to be— let's not be too naive about that. With every single open network in the world, and even with closed networks, there are good people and there are bad people, just if I'm being naive. And so there will be bad people that will try and hack the system for sure. And the role that we have both at XMTP and Converse and with other actors of the ecosystem is to say, okay, we have to choose our side. And our side is, of course, the side of the users in the end. And as sort of like the friends of users, we have to take care of that, not for them, but we have to help them under that. And this is the way we think about it.

Okay. Because we're in crypto, we have to financialize everything. So We don't have to, but let's be real. Let's do it. I'm thinking, when am I going to get paid to get spammed? You know what I'm saying? Like, like, sure, you can spam me if you give me a little cha-ching, cha-ching, and then, you know, that's fine. And then I can understand, like, you know, people can take cuts, like, right? So if an NFT— if I'm an NFT holder and people can message any of the NFT holders, I can opt in, but you have to pay me. And then maybe like I get a cut and the NFT project gets a cut. Because that's the list that's there. How far away are we from that? Is that even a good idea? State your case, sir.

I think it's a good idea, and I think we have to get there somehow. I also believe that we don't have to rush that because, you know, messaging relationships are different from finance. And a lot of relationships are not about like finance per se. It's about like people being willing to connect with each other. So I think we have to be very careful with that. What I'm 100% sure about is, yeah, about 2 things. The first one is we have an amazing opportunity to make the value be much more well shared by people than Web2. When you, well, email, you know, like Mailchimp and all of their like CRM friends, they are taking Most of the value. That's crazy. Like, email just fuels the communication of the world for like, it's been nearly 30 years. And like, CRMs are just the ones to make money. There are others, but it's a bit weird to think about it that way. And so with XMTP and networks like XMTP, you can dream of a world in which We all share the value. So it can be, of course, the networks, the nodes. It's obvious. The CRM providers as well, like they will keep on being here and it's good for the ecosystem. The clients, well, you know, in a way, Converse is providing value to the network by trying to make the best experience possible in order to access this network. And then last but not least, the users. So the way we see it is that we should all be rewarded in a way because we are participating in the system. The question then is when and how, because we don't want people to, you know, like, they are already airdrop hunters, like, like they are already too many airdrop hunters. So you don't want people to actually message other people because of financialization of the network. So Yes, my answer would be definitely we have to go that way. And we have just to, we just have to be careful about the steps in order to reach that goal because we want people to communicate with each other for the right reasons, which is like human connection and not finance. That's at least the way I see it. And that's because, and that's how we are building Converse. And that's also one of the reasons why, sorry guys, there will never ever be a token on Converse. Because it doesn't make sense. Like, we don't want to financialize the communication between people, but then at the network level, it will for sure make sense at some point.

We just lost half our listeners because you said there's no token, but that's fine. That's fine. No, I totally get it. It's very refreshing. You know, everybody's zigging with their token and you're zagging. You know, I love that. I love that. So, so what's the, what's the future for Converse? And I say Converse, like people could say Converse, like the popular shoe brand, but like, it's like a conversation, like a converse. That's, that's what I do. But you can say whatever you want. It's, it's the Web3 messaging app. Yeah. But what's the future for Converse?

Well, we, we, if I say it in a few words, we want to be this, well, our vision, it might be a bit like naive, but like our vision is to help people create and nurture relationships. And this is what we do every day. And so I would even say, like, we want to help people nurture and create relationships because actually, well, what we want to be is this universal app for people to use in order to connect to the XMTP network. And we want to be the default app that you go to every single day, even every single hour, because That's the place where you have all of these connections that you didn't even, like, didn't obviously start on Converse, but you started them elsewhere thanks to the XMTP network. And then Converse is the best way, the best place to actually continue these conversations. And then talking about, like, creating relationships, well, that's what we already mentioned, the matchmaker, the recommended profiles. Once you are there, once you are on Converse, we want to help you connect with people. in a meaningful way. And so there are 3 streams in which we are going to work like every day for like the next years. The first one is we want to be fast as hell. And, you know, in messaging, it's something that people take for granted. But when you are building a messaging app on top of a decentralized network, that's something that is a little bit more complicated. So we are working a lot on performance. And we want to be the fastest app ever on top of the decentralized networks. That's the first thing. The second thing is we want to help you have the core messaging experience that you expect from us, you know, from any messaging service. So it includes like, well, you know, like sending texts, photos, videos, vocals, reactions, replies, group conversations, desktop application. You know, we want to be there for you. In a safe way with the core messaging features. And the third thing, which might be actually the most exciting in terms of innovation, is enhance your experience thanks to Web3 technologies. And so, you know, we are going to like— and the way we approach that is through meaningful social interactions. And so one-to-one, we talked about it, recommended profiles. One-to-many, we talked about it, broadcast, like making broadcast meaningful And safe with a real digital real estate for creators. And the third thing is groups. We didn't talk about groups yet, but groups are like, most of the time that we spend on messaging apps now is on groups. And the way we see it is, again, of course, on Converse, in a very short amount of time, you will be able to start group conversations. And the very basic feature will be like, hey, I invite you and Noé, my co-founder, and we do a group, a group, group, the 3 of us in order to talk about anything. But then when you think about it, groups are about, you know, meaningful social connections and similarities. So tomorrow when you mint a collection on Dora, for example, you will be prompted, you will not have to, but like we will invite you to actually join the group that is auto-generated for this Dorsora collection so that you can talk about it if you want. And just to give you one example, and this is how we believe that we can make a 10x experience on each of the types of communication that exist thanks to Converse. And then if you look even a little bit further, when you connect people in a meaningful virtual way, then then you can go back to finance or any sort of contract between people because you are the place where people actually connect with each other. Tomorrow, well, you could, of course, send coins or transactions to people. You could send NFTs to people, and you can even go further by letting people, for example, manage syndicates together right from the app. and this sort of thing. But this is for a bit further. I know that a lot of like social applications in Web3 are taking the finance angle first. We don't want to do that. We are going to keep being social for a while. But in the end, when you are there, for you in your life, we'll let you access financial services with your friends, with your family, and maybe tomorrow with like other actors.

Okay. So to wrap up, I would love to hear your prediction For crypto? Like, what else, what else in crypto interests you outside of the messaging space that you're really excited about this year? And then please address like anything, Paul, that you've like forgot or that you wanted to talk about that we haven't talked about. I would love to hear about that as well.

Yeah, well, what I'm very excited about in crypto is composability in general. What's, what's incredible with smart contracts and crypto in general is that you can The value that we exchange can be exchanged in a much, much, much more efficient way than before. And I don't think we are like, we are maybe like 5% of the way, you know, like it's going to be so interesting to see. Again, like you're an artist. I'm taking an example here, but like, I think it could be You know, it can happen in so many different situations, but like, you're a creator, you're an artist. Today, like, people go, like, in the real world, they go and they buy something in your shop and it's okay, but like, they leave and then that's done. Like, they don't even like remember you and they have your piece of art, which is cool, but like, that's it. Now, when you think of it the Web3 way, They are buying something from you because they think it's cool. And then automatically you can turn it into, again, a broadcast, like go back to XMTP, but like you could also airdrop things to them. You could like, you know, let them buy, have like, you know, better access to the next artworks that you just like shipped, et cetera, et cetera. And this is just an example of how the composability is actually incredible. And if you think about social networks, this is to me the most interesting part of the next few years, like how social interactions are going to be revolutionized thanks to crypto. This is what I really envision as something that is very powerful. And when you think about it, again, I will go back to this, network notion. When you have a network in which the connections already exist, for builders, it's so cool. Like, you know, that's why also, like, you know, we are very limited by our own imagination here, because thanks to the fact that these networks will be open and you will be able to access it as a developer and as a builder, Well, there will be so much innovation. That's what I'm so excited about. Like, that's why we are building on top of a protocol that is decentralized and that is XMP. But like tomorrow, you know, if you go back into like the Web2 gold rush around data, again, like there were drawbacks. So we have to be very careful about that. But when the Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, etc., APIs were open, That's when innovation was there. Actually, you know, like these companies stopped innovating when they closed their APIs. Well, someone told me, I couldn't remember that, but like on Twitter, the retweets, quote tweets, and some of the major innovations of Twitter were not done by Twitter. They were done by other clients that were actually connected to their APIs. And that's what being the ones to actually innovate. And then, well, Twitter integrated with that, but, and then they closed their API and then like everyone's fucked. So as a developer, if the API that you are using is not based on, you know, decentralized network, you should run like as fast as you can. And there are already, there are still thousands of developers who actually build on top of OpenAI, et cetera, et cetera. This doesn't make sense. In a few months, these people will get rugged. This is important to say. Like, every single builder in the world should know that if the API is sort of like not decentralized, it will be closed in a few months. That's the history repeats itself. It's been like ages now. And so the reason why I'm so excited about all of this is that we have the composability. We have the easiness of the contractualization of life between people and the fact that you can actually, you know, have this smart contract that, that makes the relationship much more efficient between people or between organizations. So this is a playground that is, to me, the most exciting that has ever been for developers and builders. And this is why— this is why I don't know, I have to be honest, I have a very strong intuition on where the messaging and social networks will be in 5 years. And I tried to tell you about it in Web3. I don't know about the whole Web3 industry, but what I'm pretty sure about is that if we keep on having these principles, builders will innovate much faster than in any other industry.

I love it. I love it. I'm so pumped. I had a buddy who was like, crypto's going to zero. And I'm like, even if the token prices go to zero, the technology is still going to keep going. The, like, we're seeing, you know, the benefits of decentralization by looking at the, the injury of centralization with Twitter and Reddit and these APIs going private and stuff. So I love your passion and I'm pumped about this messaging. I'm pumped about your, about your app, converse.xyz. Pick it up, everybody. Message me, millimonthly.eth, if you want to talk. And, uh, Paul, thanks so much. And we're rooting for you here at the PoolTogether community.

Thank you very much for hosting me. And thank you very much for all, like, are there maybe like, we might have like 4 minutes left. Uh, if there are questions, uh, that, that could be a good way to end. What do you think?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Community, get to, get to typing. If you got any questions, it's totally fine if you don't have any, but I know you're not bots. They're definitely not bots. There we go, MS1.

You know, like, and again, an example of what's happening now, this chat, we should be able to continue this chat on Convert. This is what's amazing. Like, there is a history with this chat. Like, we put links there. There are people, we are sort of like, I'm not saying that we will all be best friends for life, even if like, that could be cool actually, but like, We can, maybe, maybe you will think about it, about something in 2 hours and you will say, oh, I would love to actually continue the conversation. It's just not possible. Well, it's possible on Discord, but like everyone has to go back to Discord. Like it's not very smooth. We can go to Converse.

Yeah. I would have to give out a pull-up, wouldn't I?

We are, that could be a way that could definitely be a way. For now it's not that smooth, but like, Tomorrow, we'll have to use platforms that are done for that. And I know that, I can't remember its name, LensTube or similar apps, sorry if I'm misspelling it, they're already working on something like that. When you stream, there is a chat on the end, and Lonely on Forecaster is also working on that. There is a chat on the right side that is actually on XMPP so that you watch the stream, You talk about the stream, et cetera, et cetera. And when the stream ends, then you can continue on. Well, I'm talking about Converse every time because like, of course, it's my app. But like any messaging, any XMTP message app, that's going to happen. So again, this compatibility is— the main problem today is that there are not enough apps on XMTP. So we need builders to actually start doing that. Coinbase Wallet is a good signal to say like, They are here to stay. Let's build on top of XMTP. And once it's there, when you have thousands of apps on top of XMTP, you will like, you can never go back. Like there will be so much magic in this world that we'll all be there and happily be there.

There's a, C. Petter has a question. Can the connections of the recommended profiles be collapsed if the list is too long? So basically all pulled together, we get, we get POAPs or we go to those community calls. That's where the hype is. You know, and so we've got these massive lists of, of, uh, POAPs we have in common.

So we will, we'll definitely work on that. Thank you for asking the question. Actually, I think, Tim, you were the one to make me realize that, like, there were too many of them. So I guess you, you, you kind of passed by far the 100 POAP test or whatever.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. OG, baby.

Yeah, you're an OG. That's official. And so, yeah, we'll do that. We will make sure that the list is a bit more like, you know, smooth. And then if you click on a profile, you will be able to explore much more what this person and you have in common. But yeah, we'll get there. And we'll also work on scoring in order to make sure that the most relevant profiles come up first. That's the idea.

And subdomains so that we can all use our pulled together subdomains like that they're visible or whatever. That's interesting though.

We are working on it.

Yeah, you're totally working on it. But, and then also like, Having basically, I want to, I want to put like multiple, like I want to delegate my messaging abilities from my like hardware wallet to my hot wallet so that I can, you know, do anyway, there, there's so much to do in this, in this industry. So,

um, yeah, that's, that's for sure. Uh, it can be done in 2 ways. The protocol can help you delegate messages from one wallet to the other. It's not possible yet, but I know that this is something that they are thinking about. And also, like, well, you can also connect your wallet to Convert. Like, a Ledger, for example, can be connected to XMP. And the good thing about it, like, of course, like, do only what you feel safe. I don't want to rush people on, like, you know, doing this kind of thing because I know it's a very important topic to them. Like I connected my ledger to Converse, and the beautiful thing is like I of course like there is no private key they send. It's just a signature in order to create your account on on on XMTP, and then it's done, and then you're connected, and then you can talk from this wallet. So that's also something that is interesting.

Nice. Okay, I got another meeting, so I gotta go. But this has been awesome.

Yeah.

And and then I'll see you. See you on the XMTP. See you on Converse.

Definitely.

Bye everybody.

Talk to you soon. Bye 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.