PoolTogether Community Podcast #24 with Seb from Zapper

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. This is Hot Mike, aka Cat Daddy, and I'm here with— I can't even believe it. I can't even believe the words. that are gonna come outta my mouth right now. I'm here with Seb, head of Zapper, founder, Zeus of Zapper. What's your title at Zapper, Seb?

Yeah.

Leaker, chief alpha leaker. I love that. I love that. And I'm just so pumped that you're here. Chiarch's speaking too. Chiarch, do you have anything to say? No, you're just muted and just on? Cool, sounds good. First question, Seb, and I know the answer to this, but I want, I want to give you a softball. Did you get your pulley yet?

Yes, I got 4.

Up on the leaderboard with that one.

Yeah, that's so good. There was a leaderboard.

Yeah, there's a leaderboard. We got it. Well, maybe we'll drop, somebody will drop a link in the chat. But there is a leaderboard. I think you're on it. And, and you've got it even as your profile picture. On the tweets, which is so good.

Of course. Of course.

That's so good. So thanks for representing. And, uh, and it's really, you know, a unique kind of landmark case that's going on, um, against Layton and Pool Together. So thank you so much for your support, uh, from the Zapper fam, for sure. We feel a kindred spiritness, a oneness with the Zapper fam. So it's so good to see your support. Thanks for that.

Yeah. I mean, likewise on our community, I think there's a lot of overlap. Like there's, I know there's a few people here that's also in the Zapier community and vice versa. So yeah, we're also kind of 2 products that are, I'd say among the most accessible to people entering the space. And so, you know, there's quite the overlap in the audience.

For sure. And I know that Zapier's mission or their vision of like what the product is, and correct me if if I'm wrong, but this is what I've gotten from just the vibe of Zapper, is to be the front end of Web3. Am I right? Am I close?

Yep. Yep. You're close.

Close. What is the actual word, the phrase, so I can mint it in my memory? Yeah.

Yeah. So our mission is to make Web3 accessible to everyone. And by doing so, How we're gonna do it is basically surface everything that happens on-chain, like everything on-chain in an easy-to-consume way to people. So whether that's DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, our goal is to really surface everything. Like, I guess the analogy you can make is kind of Google, their mission was to organize the internet. In a similar way, we're doing the same thing, but for Web3.

Well, that's so interesting because like my experience with Zapper, I'm probably a secondary audience then. I filled out your Zapper survey form and it was asking me what my primary use for Zapper was. And me being, you know, a fresh, a fresh crypto not, or, you know, I'm not a normie, but I'm close. I, I love Zapper for swapping and bridging. Nice. I just love it. I even like, I compare the, I compare the prices with all the bridges and the, all the, all the stuff. And not only do you allow me to creep on people with your, with the, you know, I can look at wallets in a very nice and attractive way. I could tag them, I can follow them, I can notes, I could take notes on 'em and stuff. But like, I love the bridging and the swapping and you make it so easy and you got the good rates. I don't know how you do it. So secondary goal achieved or something like you're surfacing, I guess the best rates for me, but maybe somebody can tell me where to get better rates, but I don't even care anymore 'cause I'll pay for the, Zapper service, I love it.

Yeah, well, like our, the way we kind of see ourselves is initially we want Zapper to be as top of funnel as possible. And when you really think about it, most of your time spent in crypto isn't purely transactional. You'll view your portfolio, you'll look at the trending NFTs, you know, you'll hang out in crypto Twitter. And so if you look at like time spent in crypto, right, it would be like a thin slice to look at just the transactions, right? And so the way we're kind of strategizing our product is that we want to make it as the top of funnel as big as possible. So have people be able to explore accounts, explore, you know, the trending NFTs, be able to, you know, explore different DeFi apps as well. And so that captures kind of like how we spend most of our time in Web3. And then after that, really enabling those transactional features like bridging, swapping, investing in different DeFi protocols, potentially also buying some NFTs. Like another, like I really like to do analogies. It's like you go in, you go in the store based on what you see on the window, right? Or, you know, based on what you know is inside. You don't go in a store without any context, or you don't like, you don't go on OpenSea and without any context of knowing what you're gonna buy. You're not like, or you go like on the Uniswap swap page and you go on the dropdown, you're like, oh, what token am I gonna buy? Like often you have this, an intent that was built up based on discovery, based on, you know, whatever happened in crypto Twitter. And that's like, has been a very large area of focus for us because that's like the pre-transaction experience. And it's a kind of an area that's been, I like, I think is definitely overlooked because a lot of crypto is obviously transactional. But counterintuitively, we believe that by focusing on the best kind of pre-purchase experience, you get the Best purchase experience.

I remember you telling me when I, we've, we met at ETH Denver and you were telling me that you love to spy on wallets. Like you love to do deep dives on wallets. Yes. And so I was minting, I love NARS, which is a Nouns derivative and they fund extreme sports athletes, especially like when their contract runs out because they got injured. And like Red Bull abandons them. So then NARS wants to come in and like keep funding them while they're on the mend and, you know, just get— so I love that mission and I love Skate or Die, which is a video game in the Nintendo. And so they were doing that kind of vibe. So I was on these mints and the mints are like, it's like, I don't know if it's a Dutch auction or whatever it's called, but it like starts at 0.11 and every 666 blocks it comes up a new one. And I kept getting sniped by this one person. They would keep snatching the auction from me. And I don't like paying, I don't have the money for mainnet fees. I'm a normie, I'm new. So I'm like trying to conserve ETH and whatever. So I start using, I start using Zapper to like spy on them and see what kind of shady dark transactions that I can feel better about myself, you know, that they're doing. And I happened upon, they like swapped 10 ETH for something to this, they like sent 10 ETH to a wallet. I'm like, what is this? And then I look into that and I'm like going down and I send it right to you. This is before like you connected like who I was or anything, probably just some random rando in your DMs on Twitter being like, Seb, I found a shady wallet and look at this. And it turned out to be wrapped ETH. I just found the contract for wrapped ETH.

That's funny.

And I, and I thought I had made a discovery and then I felt so bad and I was like, oh, how do I delete DMs? I can't do this. Oh no.

Well, I mean, that's what you just said is actually like one of the problems is that it's hard. So you have things that are on-chain, right? There's smart contract, then there's addresses like EOAs. So externally owned accounts that are just regular addresses like I have and you have. But it's very hard to know what's what. So one of our goals is kind of to help surface these things and make it easier to know that, oh, okay, this is actually like a smart contract. I'm not like spying on someone. It's normal that there's like 1 billion in this like Zapper profile. And so these are things that we want to surface better so that people actually don't have to kind of do the math or do the work themselves. Like a lot of it, like a lot of the time you have to like, okay, we're on Etherscan and we kind of have to do the work in figuring out what this actually is because the things aren't surfaced properly.

Well, thank you. That was very gracious of you. I felt very sheepish. I felt very foolish about it, but you're saying it's Zapper's problem and I love that. Thank you so much for that.

That means there's an opportunity for us.

That's right. And like, what a perfect match, Seb. I mean, you, you created Zapper, but it's based off of like your passion, which is doing this kind of detective work. And you just had a tweet today about Like, this is where it's at, is like actually using the products and getting your hands dirty and discovering and exploring. Like, you're an explorer. Yeah. Whereas others might be, and you might invest and you might educate people and you might, and you definitely build, but primarily your role in crypto and Web3 is an explorer. And Zapper is that exploration gateway. It's like the binoculars or the telescope or whatever, the way how whatever tools explorers use, that's what Zapper is. that toolkit, I feel. And so it's really cool. What a great match for you to be able to build a product that is like based on your passions and values.

Yeah, well, you know, there's, that's like the fundamental thing that most people overlook when building a product. They tend to try to find ideas versus looking at, you know, what things they use, what the problems they have. And it's crazy how often we kind of trap ourselves into looking at trends and just building for trends versus just looking at, you know, in crypto, what am I actually using? What problems am I having? And you might stumble on problems or markets that like the, everyone is overlooking. Like examples like that are NFTs a year ago. DeFi 2 years ago before like the big boom, the big like DeFi yield farming craze. Like these were markets that weren't really like the trend. They're just, there were people that were actually using them, finding them super useful. And the general trend in crypto was very different. It wasn't about DeFi. I don't even remember what the trend was, but When you get to actually use the product, you get to kind of gain that insider advantage. You also, you get to, one thing too is like, if you find a product useful, most likely you're not the only one to find it useful unless like you're a super weirdo that really has like this really weird interest. Most likely, even then, like most likely you're gonna find quite a few people that also have that same problem or same need. But where it's really interesting is to look at one thing that's a great insight about building products and especially building products with a lot of potential is you want to identify markets, like very small markets that have a big problem that are gonna be big in the future. And so one example is with Zapper, so tracking your assets. Was a very big problem in a super small market. Like 2 years ago, DeFi had maybe 10 protocols, I don't know, maybe $50 million TVL. And, but it was a very big problem. And what happened was the market got bigger and bigger and bigger. And as it got bigger, that problem also got bigger. There's more and more protocols. And so you get to have the advantage of kind of surfing the wave of this growing market. And also you get to kind of have some, like some sort of first mover advantage, 'cause someone like trying to do a Zapper right now would have a lot of, would have a tough time. Like all our competitors started around the same time as us. And it's interesting because a lot of people that start new projects will look at You know, they'll think, oh, I'm just gonna do a better OpenSea, like on our other NFT marketplace. But they don't look at like these small markets that people are overlooking that probably, you know, gonna become very big in the future.

Okay. Oh, Alpha Leaker, what, what is one that you're seeing right now that's a small market but big upside?

That's a really good question.

I only ask questions that pump my bags.

Yeah, I, it's a, it's a good question. Areas that are underlooked, like I would tend to say DAOs, but at the same time, like they're pretty, like it was pretty trendy about 6 months ago. Like there's so many DAO tool projects that were popping left and right. One thing is it's really hard in bull markets to find these things 'cause there's so much noise. Yeah. So I'm kind of, Like, you know, not happy that it's a bear market. Obviously it's shitty. Like a lot of people lost their money, but for identifying these new markets, it is much easier because there's less noise. I have to think about that. I actually don't, like, one of them is like the exploration. So Zappr, we kind of, what we're building is kind of like this Etherscan for everyone. That is, in my opinion, something that a lot of people are overlooking. They're overlooking like the exploration aspect of crypto. Exploring in crypto is something that is very like, everyone has a crypto rabbit hole story, but not a lot of products focus on building rabbit hole experiences. Like, you know, when you go on Wikipedia and you start with, I don't know, an article on COVID and end up with, you know, reading about dinosaurs. Well, you went on like this Wikipedia journey, but something that's really interesting with crypto is like this rabbit hole experience of exploring. And right now the tools that exist don't really support that. Like Etherscan is way too hard for most people to use. For

sure. And I think like The, I'm just, the 2 big problems are Twitter and Discord, but those aren't small problems, right? Those aren't like the ones that you're trying to do. And then a question from the chat is, how do you know it's actually a problem? Or, or are you just in an echo chamber or do you think it's crypto Twitter and it's actually not? 'Cause this is the thing is that like people don't know what they want, right? This is Apple design theory is like people say what they want and how to fix it and stuff, but that's actually not what they want. They want an iPad when no one was thinking iPad and they made fun of the name. Yeah. Or they want, you know, so, so that's the thing is like, how do you, how do you find that sweet spot?

Yeah, well, users, what's interesting is they will tell you what they think they want, but they won't tell you what they actually want. And you want to kind of gain that kind of, like, gain that advantage or reduce that gap between the two. But the most effective way of doing it is by being a user yourself. I was so annoyed by not being able to track my assets in DeFi. Like, it was painful, like really, really annoyed. And so I had to do something. It was like a hair on fire problem. I didn't care about what investors were saying. Like, I just wanted to solve the problem for myself 'cause I was just extremely annoyed. That's like this framework.

I just went through a coaching session because I'm all over the place and I need a coach. And so I, and my coach was like, Hey, any, what's, let's talk about one of your complaints that you just said. What is the vision, the latent vision within the complaint that you just had? Like, what is that? The thing that I love that we've said, I love these. You're really good at these metaphors. Like what's the hair on fire problem? What's the thing that you're just like bumming about, but where's the potential and the vision in there that you can actually move forward and create something? For that? Because your complaint might, is probably not unique to you.

Yeah. The, uh, like tracking your assets, like at that point.

Well, for me, no, for me, this is a coaching session and it was just like, uh, you, yeah, yeah. It was just like, hey, what's like spread out about, like, like for example, a, a complaint, um, could be, um, you know, working in the DAO structure and it's, everything's all over the place, or at least it feels that way. And so that's the complaint. Why is everything all over the place all the time? And the vision in that is, okay, let's specifically think about what is the item that is all over the place and how can I create clarity there? Yeah. How can I actually like create something and move forward there? But, uh, this is, this is a great question.

Yeah. Well, the thing of like, say your example of like Dowsers, everything's all over the place. That in itself isn't really a problem. It's like, why? So why do you find it annoying that everything's all over the place? Like you can actually dig down to something. Maybe, I don't know, it's hard to find a DAO that you'd be interested in. Maybe it's really hard to, like, there's so many tools for DAOs and you just want one that does everything. And like, usually you can dig a layer. It's like an onion, right? You could dig a layer deeper to try to identify root problems.

What are the What are the challenges of Zapper right now? What are the root problems?

That our users face or some challenges in building Zapper?

You know, that's a great question. I would love to know internal struggle. I want to know the dirty secrets.

Well, I mean, a lot of stuff that we're building is completely novel. Like, it's not like you can look on Google as how to build X or Y. There's nothing, it's not like we're building like another e-commerce marketplace and there's like a playbook to build marketplaces. There's infra already made for that. Like we have to, we're like the first to have, like we have very unique problems and problems at like a very large scale. It's, you know, you can imagine, you know, we have about 40,000 daily active users, and each of them will maybe do, I don't know, 10 to 100,000, 10 to maybe 10,000 like on-chain requests because like you're invested in a bunch of different protocols. And so like the amount of nodes that we call is completely ridiculous. Like we're probably, if not the most like expensive caller of on-chain data. We're just effectively like we're spamming nodes and there's no others that we can go to to ask, hey, how do you solve it? So we have to be really try something. Sometimes it's like, oh shit, we did something and now Zapper's down. And so we have to experiment and we have to experiment quickly, but also while kind of maintaining a reliable and, you know, Strong product. That's challenging. There's also like some cool problems we're solving around blockchain indexing. So for those that don't know what blockchain indexing is, is, so I use this metaphor quite a lot, is imagine the blockchain is a film. It's like a movie, right? And it's composed of a bunch of scenes. So every block is a scene. And in every scene there's actors, You know, they're placed in some way. Some are there, some aren't there. And right now when you go on Zapper, so you, you, you view your balances, we look at the current scene and we look like, okay, you're in this place, you're in this place, you're invested here and there. And we do that for every user. It's like we have to rewatch the same movie for every time someone goes on Zapper. And so someone, something we're doing, and we did that with NFTs, is Let's actually just watch the movie once. So we go from block 0 and every time we see something, we dispatch it. We're like, oh, actor A went into the coffee shop and we dispatch this event, these events. So, oh, there's a new NFT collection appearing. Let's create this collection. And then on the side, we start fetching all the traits. And so we're able to have a strategy where You go on Zapper and we already know in advance what you are because we watched this, the movie once. And so we're doing a lot of things to make it much more automated. What's cool is also turns Zapper in kind of like this search engine, the blockchain, which is very interesting as well. But yeah, those are some of like the big challenges. But what's really fun is that they're completely novel. Like there's nobody There's nobody that have them. And so we have to, you know, we have to figure it out. There's no, no, there, there's no way.

And then with the merge, with the merge, you can go back, right? There can be like multiple, um, blocks at the same time. And then like the authority, I guess maybe you can have that now, but that's what you're saying, right? You scan blocks once, you only need to do it once and you've got it.

Yeah, exactly. And if say there was a new DeFi protocol, We go from its inception point and then we look at, okay, so this protocol appeared here and let's start looking at, okay, this block, this user invested this, this user did this, and we kind of stay in sync.

So can you tell me, Seb, a little bit about Merbitons? Because I'm learning about this just right now, but they have their own like Twitter account.

No. What?

I know I'm, I'm, I'm a Zapper user, but I'm just like, I feel so bad. I feel so bad. But yeah, they're, I'm getting Discord instructions.

I think it's Mermaidens. Mermaidens. I'll say Mermaidens.

Okay, cool.

Uh, so, uh, it's a, like our awesome, uh, like S-tier part of our community. Um, they're like, I don't know exactly how many they are. They're like the, not quite on our team, but very close. Like, like they're really our flagbearers for Zapper. We're like really happy to have them. They've been amazing. They help a lot with community, with education, like organizing stuff around the community. But like above everything, injecting good vibes, which is probably the most important thing. Community. And yeah, no, it's been something I, I think is like one of the most successful thing, things that have come out of our community is the Mermaidens. It made me much more bullish on communities generally and thinking about them in the future. 'Cause yeah, I honestly wasn't expecting it and definitely with the help of Oops and Hanaya, our community builders, we're able to I don't know, actually it's Oops that initially kind of seeded the idea for Mermidons. I think so. But yeah, then we had like, I think it's around between 10 and 20. I'm not sure. Sorry, Mermidons. I don't know exactly how many you are. Yeah, they're like our staunch flagbearers and community representatives.

Are they all explorers like you, Seb, or are they, do they vary?

I'm sure they are.

I love that. I love that. So I do know about Volts. And I do know about season 2, and I think I got in on like the tail end of season 2, but I still got the volts in, in my wallet as well. So what's going on with that? What's going on with, with, is there season 3 coming up? I, I know that NFT holders, I, I actually didn't get any NFTs, but I do have the volts. I know that NFT holders got exclusive beta access to the phenomenal Zapper mobile app, which in the beta had the AR, but in the iOS current release that I have on my phone, I don't have the AR right now, but maybe that's 'cause I have an iPhone 12 mini or something, but I'm looking forward to posting my NFTs in augmented reality, like on my cats and stuff. But what's the plan for that moving forward? They got beta access, season 3, extra special stuff. The Myrmidons, are they have season? I'm sure they all have season NFTs and stuff, of course.

They do. So I can't speak too much about it, but I can say that there's definitely something.

Um, yeah. I'll take it. There's something. Okay. And then another question that's related to season 3, maybe, is when token?

Can't say. No leaking for me today.

But just the fact that you said you can't say means that there's something that you cannot say. So I love that.

Maybe. Maybe I'm playing 5D chess.

I only play 4D chess. And, and in the chat is asking, is asking, bro, when token?

Probably the question I get asked the most with when season 3. Oh, season 3. I think it's, uh, I mean, pretty close. I'd say when token, definitely more than when season 3. Um, I don't know if there's a, like a third place when something else, but no, when mobile, when Android app. That's, that's when, um, when

wallet, when wallet,

when wallet. Yeah. I mean, that would be, no, not that often. Um, we do get when Android quite a, quite a lot.

For sure.

When Droid first, when Season 3, and then when Android.

Not gonna answer any of 'em. Could you rank them in your favorite of questions?

I can answer when Android, uh, probably next month. End of June with our launch of V2.

Okay. I love that. Soggy Apple Pie's in the chat saying that, um, Myrmidons are essentially flagbearers for Zapper, but they also do so much more. They can be deployed into other servers to quickly and effectively secure the server and clear it of bots, spam, and other things during raids and other exploits. They're like a little group of warriors who keep the Discord server secure. And other servers too. Well, thank you, Myrmidons, for your work in keeping us safe from all that is nefarious in Discord, cuz there's like a lot that's nefarious.

Yeah, and they've been quite help— helpful in season, during season 3, we had quite a lot of bots. Um, and I'd say like maybe users that weren't there necessarily for the right reasons and they were super helpful. Um, then dealing with it.

So, Seb, if you were to talk to somebody, I mean, you are in Pull Together. We got, we got 400 people in here listening. Um, if you were to suggest how can somebody get involved with Zapper and have, has only just visited the site, but haven't, hasn't actually like become involved. Where's a good place to, to get to go deeper with the Zapper community and the, and the app and such?

I mean, definitely Discord. 100%. You'll see our amazing community. You might be able to join the ranks of our Hoplites and maybe eventually our Myrmidons. But I think, so for Myrmidons, you have to be nominated by a Myrmidon. I don't know if like there's a vote, internal vote to nominate someone else. Like, I dunno if there's a Myrmidon that can answer that, but yeah. It's like,

sounds like it's a secret society. Yeah. The Zapper secret. Yeah. Do you have to get a tattoo?

The DeFi Mafia.

Nice. So Seb, you're an explorer and you have scoured the grounds of Web3, the lands, the oceans, the seas, the mountains, the skies, and you know more than a lot of us here about what to look for in 2022. what you're excited about, NFTs, what's being built. So can you give me kind of your predictions for the rest of 2022 in this bear market? What should we be looking for? What are you excited about? What are some themes that you see manifesting?

Really sorry, I was busy asking my Uber Eats.

That's all right. So side note, is there like a Benefer Name for you? Like a, you know, like a, um, a crypto power couple name. Saban and Seb.

And Seb. I like and Seb. We should probably get that ENS. Oh boy. It sounds like someone's going to snipe it.

No, do it. Do it right now. Take your time. It sounds like unsub on Criminal Minds. I watch Criminal Minds a lot. So unsub, but and Seb anyway.

And Seb.

Saban.

Saban. Saban.

Yeah. Saban. Okay. Well, maybe something in French. So,

maybe.

So the question I had was, you're an explorer. What are you exploring? What are you excited about? Especially in a bear market, there's not a lot to be excited about, but what are you seeing? What kind of piques your interest? You know, what, what can you share with us? What's the alpha? Outside of Zapper?

Well, the point of exploring is kind of that you don't know exactly what you're gonna find, which is always fun. You kind of end up on this journey that you don't know, like the exploration is the journey. Like there's no destination exactly. But something that I do like is definitely exploring accounts. Like, I'm really curious about what others are doing, what they're investing in. Like, I have lists of like NFT collectors and DeFi people that I think they're, you know, they have sound judgment. And so I like to look at what they're doing and kind of like the realizations made from that. It's like, it's really hard for everyone to do that. Like, I can do it because, I mean, I've been in the space for a long time. I'm very used to all the tools. Even myself, like I kind of want to have a tool that makes it easier for me to do that. And I think like in terms of exploration or like, so like it, if you look at your reason to do something, it's usually a simple equation of your motivation to do it and the perceived difficulty of doing that thing. And so like, let's take exploration for example. You might be super motivated to do it, but if it's too hard or like you don't know how to, there's too much friction, like going through Etherscan and you're not used to it or you don't want to start learning it, well, you won't do it. But it doesn't mean that people don't want to explore, right? It's just that the perceived task of doing it, the perceived difficulty of doing it is larger than the motivation. And so hopefully by making it much easier, we get more people to start doing that because I think people are very curious. People are curious about what the hell's going on on chain, but there's no tool that allow you to easily know what the hell, you know, is there. It's like we all met, like if the blockchain is a city and there's the town center where we do all our transactions, it's like if we all go to the town center, we do our transactions, we go to like the The, you know, the grocery store, you know, we could buy some clothes. We all know we're there, but we don't talk to each other. We don't see each other. And then we end up at like later in the evening at like the Twitter bar and we talk about what we did. But a lot of people lie. Like they'll say, oh, you know, this new collection will, you know, is gonna pump, but they actually sold it. Right. Or like they're dumping it on you or they'll just lie about things they did or investments they made. And so it's actually how can we put people closer to their interaction or closer to the actual town center? And we think that exploration is very needed to actually have like, know what the hell like people are investing in right now, what the trending NFTs are, what the different DeFi, newest DeFi apps are. Instead of relying on, you know, other parties, other products like Twitter.

Okay. But like, what are you excited about?

When exploring?

Yeah. Like what, what's the alpha of, you know, what are the projects that you're like looking at and that you're, that you're pumped about? That's what, that's really what we want is the alpha.

No, I have no alpha. I'm sorry.

It's okay.

I mean, you can look up my account and see what I've invested recently. But I have no alpha.

Nice. What do you, what do you think about music NFTs?

I like them. I think they're cool. That might be an area that's underlooked.

Yeah.

It's also, it's the same thing with NFTs initially. Like people said, oh, I could just right-click, right-click save. Like people can, like, I can listen to the song for free. And so those are the kind of comments that they're like, oh, that means there's actually potentially an opportunity here because there's like this thing, this idea that might be completely false or premised, like, oh, you can just right-click save a JPEG, that people are stopping there and not pursuing further, like their curiosity or looking at it more. So usually there, when that happens, there's a lot of asymmetry of information and an advantage you can gain. But That said, like, yeah, I have bought a few music NFTs. I think they're cool. I definitely think they're a new way of being closer to your— the artist and forming a community around it without relying on like publishers or middlemen. So I think there's definitely something interesting. I think we haven't quite figured it out yet, what the model should be. But yeah, I think they're very interesting.

I love the idea. I feel like it's, there's kind of some skeuomorphism that happens with music NFTs specifically, but like, you know, when you get your iPhone and then they had paper with the paper texture on it and they wanted to make it feel like more IRL, you know, and the same thing, like music NFTs, it's like track and album. It's still the same. So I'm like, no, no, no, but what else can you do with a music NFT? So there's like stems and there's like, people are talking about, well, the artist has an NFT. which allows you to then unlock and listen to. So then like the utility conversation, and I guess that's what you were saying about the right-click save. It's like suddenly it's like, well, no, there's way more you can do with an NFT than right-click save a JPEG. So it kind of gives you, it opens that up. So what is that for music NFTs? I like live shows. I wanna go to a live show and get a guitar solo where you can hear me wooing in the background. And I just want the 5 seconds of me going, woo! Just because I'm, I'm full of myself or something, you know, but that'd be fun. That'd be fun to do. So there's a question in the chat, Seb. What addresses can you, like, even if you like don't say it, but can you like drop some addresses or interesting accounts into the chat on, in the Discord? Or you can say it like, who's, what wallets are fun to follow?

If you want, you can look at the wallets I follow on Zapper.

Okay. So if somebody can drop Seb's address into the chat and then we will all, we will all creep on Seb and then creep on the people he's creeping on or the, we don't know if they're people, they could be robots. So Seb, one, another question, uh, you had is everybody wants to, everybody needs to hire people, right? Zapper's no different, right? You're hiring. I just imagine, right?

Right now we have 2 open roles, I think. Uh, so we have a product role and a Front-end developer role.

And I don't want to get too spicy here, but with, from my experience, not going to an Ivy League school and not working in big tech, I think to work in big tech, having an Ivy League degree is like thumbs up. Like that's a really good way to get into big tech, to work for Google or Facebook or Meta or whatever it is. Now, I think for Web3, there's this, like, if you worked in big tech, there's kind of an in for you with crypto and Web3. However, I feel like there are downsides to that as well. Can you gimme some insight into like who Zapper's looking for in their hiring practices and what you're looking for in a resume?

Look at, uh, like first, number one thing is their ex— like, I think kind of not like their on-chain activity, but like their Web3 identity is very important. Like what Discords they're part of, what communities, what they did, what things they're interested in, what NFTs they hold. Not because like you want to get alpha, but because you want to know that they're actual, an actual user interested in the space. And you also get to have some insight also like on, on the person way more than just looking at their CV. Like a CV is like the least personal thing ever. It's like, oh, everyone has the same one with like from the same boring templates. And so getting a bit of their journey in Web3 is much more, much better indicator. And I'd say like, we, if someone worked in big tech before, it's, it really depends on what type of things they built there. If they built like big infra at like large scale, well, definitely for us it'll be interesting. Um, because we're looking for people that previously built things like that were large scale. Um, but it doesn't mean that we just look for that. Um, a lot of the people at Zapier, like, you know, didn't go to Ivy, like most people, I think like almost everyone didn't go to Ivy Leagues or worked in big tech. Like I didn't go, I didn't work in big tech. I didn't study to be a software engineer. Um, and so—

Can you tell me what your origin story real quick before we have to let you go? I want to, I want to be Mindful of your time, but hey, I remember seeing a picture of you serving beer at like a ballgame or something.

Yeah, that was a previous startup. Yeah. So quick intro is I studied in finance, but quickly became disillusioned a bit with finance itself. I had an internship that was super boring and also saw a huge conflict of interest between my supervisor. He was like managing People's money and a huge conflict of interest. Like he would often go for things where he had the highest commission, kind of like brushing it off. So didn't really like the vibes. So I decided to learn how to code during college. And so right after college, started to work as a developer, like a weird developer/designer hybrid. I also built 2 startups too, which failed for very different reasons. One of them was the— one of them was a chatbot where you could order food and beverages from your seat at like, say, a baseball game. And so that photo in particular was me delivering the food on top of building the software itself, was delivering the food to one, get a better understanding of how we should kind of build the app and get some feedback from the people. But right after that startup, we had a few ideas actually. That was in 2017, 2018 with NFTs. Like we thought of building a Pokémon game, like Pokémon-ish type game with NFTs, but really kind of didn't go that far. We were all also like, badly in debt. Well, I was badly in debt. And so I found another job at a crypto company in Montreal called Shakepay. And it was during my time there that I stumbled on DeFi. And when I started building—

Well, let me get— that was awesome. Thanks, Seb. I want to give you— I know I want you to go. I want to let you go 'cause you gotta go. But real quick, let me give you a pitch because you're so good with metaphor. And so I wanted to pitch the, the, PoolTogether multi-delegator tool to you. So what I'm doing is I'm going around to different communities and NFT projects and PoolTogether, those projects can put their stables into PoolTogether and then delegate their prizes to their NFT holders, their community members, anybody, anyone that they want to do, nonprofits if they want. So how would you, well, first of all, is Zapper interested? And second of all, how would you, Have, have you heard of this? Is there any, did I pitch it right? Do you have any questions for me before I let you go?

It's like a, you're giving away like a raffle ticket for a lottery. Well, not the lottery, but like to split the winnings.

Yeah. So you could put $5 million of stables of USDC into pool together on Polygon and then all, and then split it up against like 1,000 wallets or 500 wallets and they get all the prizes, they get all the tickets from that $5 million. And then at any point you can pull your $5 million out and you still have it. And then your people got rewarded. They got the prizes and pulled together daily. Come on now.

Yeah, that's cool. All right. That is cool. Definitely for like community engagement, there's a lot of potential. I like it.

Okay. Well, Seb likes it, everyone. Cheers to that.

Yeah.

Thanks for, thanks for being here, Seb. This is so good. I'm glad it happened. And also thanks for like giving, you gave, because we missed the last podcast, you gave us beta access to the, The mobile app, PoolTogether Peeps. So it was really fun. So thank you for that as well. Love it. Giving the PoolTogether that love, that Zapper love. But thanks for joining us.

Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me. Uh, always a pleasure. Love the community here. And yeah, thank you.

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.