PoolTogether Community Podcast #29 with Links from Bankless

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 I've got a head cold, AKA I swear it's not COVID, AKA JK, it's probably COVID. And you're safe though, because you are— you are behind the screen of technology that prevents you from microbials. And I'm here with Lynx from Bankless. Lynx, thanks so much for your time today on the pod. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So this is really cool. Community member LivesEU was like, hey, you totally should interview Bankless and you got to talk to Lynx and they've got this card thing, so let's do it. This was like a couple months ago, booked out a couple months. We're popular. And, and we, this is happening now. It's so exciting. I, I'm excited to learn more about Bankless, the Bankless card, get some Bankless alpha for the pool, the poolies. We're big Bankless fans over here. Bankless is the OG DeFi cheerleader, cheerleading squad. And, but first I thought, Lynx, we could start out with your journey into crypto. How's it going? How's it been? How'd you get here?

Yeah, no problem. Thanks. And, you know, thanks for giving me that background. Liviu is an incredible contributor. Did not realize that he could get out to as many places as he can, but I guess that's the beauty of Web3. Yeah, so I mean, it's going great to answer your first question. I think that it's hard for it not to go great even in this bear market for me at least. But I guess you're asking where I came from. Is that right?

So the joke is most people just say, oh, well, my mom and dad met at a hot dog stand on Coney Island, you know, and they think it, you know, but no, I just mean like, you know, how did you get into crypto? How did you get into Bankless? What's your role currently? That sort of thing.

So I first got into crypto in like 2011, and that was just after my, a startup that I had founded went bust, and I was looking for something new. And, you know, blockchain was the new technology at the time, and it was really exciting. And so I built a few, like, kind of like arbitrage bots for the central exchanges. And it was cool, it was interesting, but ultimately it didn't really keep my interest. And right around that time, Mt. Gox imploded and all this stuff happened. So The technology was interesting, but at the time, I just thought it was too speculative for me. Like the currency aspect of it was intellectually interesting, but it like didn't actually fill a need that I had. And then recently, again, like last year, when my most current startup went under, you can see a pattern here, I got back into it because I heard about these decentralized autonomous organization And I was just so interested in that concept because at the startups that I had been working up into that space, I'm very much like a Web2 startup guy. The idea of ownership was just, I was just not happy with the way that, you know, kind of stock options were working and ownership was working and ultimately how authority was working. So, you know, DAOs for me were kind of interesting. So I signed up for 6 DAOs, I joined the Discords, I tried contributing, and Bankless is the only one of those 6 that I continued to, to contribute to just because I absolutely love the vibe. It was very— it's a very welcoming community. It's a really cross-functional community. We have 14 guilds of different disciplines. So, you know, if you're a project manager, if you're a designer, if you're a video producer, if you're a developer, you know, there's guilds for you. So.

Okay. Yeah, I got to stop you right there. So this is my experience. When was this? What year did you join?

Last year.

Okay. So, so like when? 'Cause that, that's the same story for me.

September.

September. Okay. So I, I, I tried, that was the, everybody, when I was like, I need to get into crypto again, blah, blah, blah. People were like, you gotta join Bankless, get into Bankless. And so I did. And it was just such a massive Discord. So massive. Yeah. It, it was like, you know, it's, I, I was just like scrolling for days just for the channels. I wasn't even in a channel scrolling. I was scrolling through the channels and, and so I, I was just like lost. And then, and then, so I joined Coordinate Circle and then people started giving me Bank and like, I tried to get a badge. I got the badge, I subscribed to the Bankless newsletter, I got a badge, but I needed to take it from xDai and put it on mainnet. And that was like a ton of fees at the time. Yeah. And I didn't have that yet. So I was like, well, I can't do that. So then I didn't get certain privileges that the badge Bad should have given me. And then like I got into PoolTogether and PoolTogether, I didn't have to scroll through the channels. So, you know, like it was easier to, because it was smaller. So I got in and I pitched in and now I'm running the podcast. So my question is, do you have any tips for somebody who is interested in Bankless and see, is looking from the outside? What's a, what's, you know, the secret alpha on how to get involved in Bankless? Because like, I had to quit Coordinate because I was just getting banked for no reason. I wasn't even doing anything and I felt bad. So I like shut it down. But I just, how can, how could somebody actually pitch in and get involved in Bankless right now? And then I would love for you to continue your story.

Yeah. So I mean, the best way to do it I found is to just join one of the weekly calls. There are like, I was looking at the events in PoolTogether and I think you have like, you know, 4 upcoming events. If you look at the Bankless calendar, there are like probably like 40 upcoming events. So, you know, you're definitely going to find some sort of weekly call that you're going to be able to attend. And then just check the vibe. That's what I did for the first 2 weeks. I just attended these calls and started talking to people. I reached out to community members, just making that first one-to-one connection. That's how you start contributing at BanklessDAO. And I think that the great thing about BanklessDAO is that people are so welcoming. I mean, this is in Web3 in general, but at BanklessDAO, there are talent coordinators for every guild. For some projects, that's true as well. But in In general, if you make that first one-to-one connection with a member, they were gonna help you figure out your way. And so that's what happened to me. I was lucky enough to fall into the Writers Guild and I met the talent coordinator at the time, Samantha Jay, and she just basically got me started. I'm the kind of person as well who tries to like learn all the rules and everything. So I like read the Notion for the entire Bankless DAO when I joined. And that's how I kind of figured out what I wanted to do. Um, and, uh, being an editor was at the time the fastest way for me to, um, accumulate bank. So, so that's exactly what I did.

You would edit, uh, and then I love that you slide into the DMs. The problem is, especially with Discord, that's where the scammers live. So you gotta like, hey, you know, be public in the channels, be in the community calls, you know, and then, and then like work your way into DMs of people who are actually like heavily involved, like actually contributing. And then finding— I like that. Okay. That's good. Now, what would you say current— that is that this the, is that the strategy currently for Bankless? Is it being an editor? What's, what do you think the current need is?

Yeah, I, I don't, I don't know if that's the only way to do it. There's, there's a lot going on more than I can keep track of, but I mean, if I was, uh, if I was starting again, how would I do it? Hmm. That's a good question. You know what, actually editing bounties have gone up, so that might be a good way to do it. Writing is also, uh, even more, uh, bounties have gone up. Even further. So if you want to, if you're a writer, if you're an editor, join the Writers Guild at Bankless and you'll definitely make the bank that you need to proceed. The writing and media at Bankless is just like kind of our rock. That's kind of where we, we're shipping every week. We're shipping newsletters and, and, and, you know, long-form posts and we're shipping podcasts and everything. So like any kind of media that you're interested in, you can get involved there. Yeah, so that's probably a really good way for you to get your level 1 status to accumulate your bank.

I love this alpha. Okay, so continue with your story. So now you're with Bankless and now you're doing a card. Yeah, exactly right.

Is this a greeting card series? Yeah.

Greeting card series for Bankless?

I mean, go back to when you first joined Bankless and how confused and how confused you were just like, 'cause it was like so much and also just like how difficult it was. You were talking about like bridging from xDai to mainnet and how expensive it was. So the idea from Bankless Card came from just the idea that the UX of Web3 in general is the biggest barrier to adoption. All of these things that you're talking about, gas fees, trying to join a community and learning what you're going to do. If you have the time, if you have the gumption, if you have the technical ability, yeah, no problem. You can figure out how to do that. But I think the vast majority of people who are around today who could benefit from Web3 don't have either the time, the ability, or the desire to do that, or, you know, the sustained desire to do that. So that's where the card comes in. The card is basically supposed to be a bridge from the real world to Web3. You know, like a credit card itself is this kind of half physical, half digital asset. It allows you to kind of have a digital touch in the real world. And using that card and an associated app, you can start accumulating, You can start accumulating social tokens from your favorite DAO and you can start interacting with Web3 in a way that is easy and hopefully feels safe. I think like safety is a big issue. Everyone's worried about getting rugged. They don't know what getting rugged is when they first join, but it's a constant issue. So just like an easy and safe way to engage with Web3.

Well, now like getting rugged means you're in a stablecoin and you could totally get rugged. You know? Yeah. So how, how do you provide that safety? How do you, how do you, how do you make sure it's a hardwood floor house with no rugs?

I mean, I like to, I like to call Bankless Card a wading pool. It's not like a, it's not like a walled garden. It's a, it's a wading pool into the rest of the, the broad ocean of DeFi. It's a place for you to, to, to start getting your feet wet. So the app itself is a way for you, I mean, first of all, I'll, I'll tell you like the, the baseline feature is you swipe the card, like you swipe at any other place and you start accumulating tokens. Maybe it's bank, maybe it's pool, whatever it is, but you start accumulating tokens. Those are your rewards. And in addition to that, and I should mention, every time you swipe a card, there is a transaction fee. And part of that goes to the card issuer, part of that goes to the transaction processor, part of it goes to the network. In general, it's going to a bank. So instead, because of new technologies and these like fancy fintechs, you can take some of that transaction revenue and you can aim it towards a DAO. And so that's what the card does. When you swipe, part of that transaction revenue either goes to buying you a social token or it can be direct on-chain revenue to a DAO. You know, for PoolTogether, which kind of has a revenue stream, maybe not so interesting, but for a DAO like BanklessDAO, where we are still trying to figure out how this is gonna work, it's more of a social DAO. that's pretty compelling. And for users who are trying to figure out how they can join this community, just using a card like you would use anywhere else to help you get into that community, I think that that's also something that people are pretty interested in. Now, I didn't answer your original question, which was how are people actually engaging? Once you have these governance tokens, you can start voting, you can start engaging yourself in governance, and the app is going to surface those kind of action items that you can take in a really easy way so that you can do it, you know, you could scroll on Facebook or Insta, or you could take a few minutes and read a governance proposal and vote on something that's maybe going to change the way that PoolTogether works or that BanklessDAO works. So that's some of the early functionality, but in the future, I mean, think of it as potentially we're talking about PoolTogether as it's one of those apps that gets people into DeFi. Imagine Bankless Card, which had an easy access to the PoolTogether contracts so that you could do PoolTogether right within the app itself. That helps PoolTogether because they're using the smart contracts you deployed. It helps Bankless Card because we're making it easier for people to get in. And it helps the users themselves because they can basically trust what's going on there because we're going to be ensuring that it's safe for them.

You're talking a lot of like compatibility here, Lynx. You're, you're talking about bridges, which Vitalik is like, no, no, no bridges. But I know what you mean. You don't mean like those bridges, but the metaphorical ones, not the ones that get destroyed. But what about, what about, you're saying like it can connect with other communities, so it's not just earning bank tokens?

Yeah.

You could like hook it up to earn, like, like you're doing this partnership kind of thing, 'cause you could totally just make it for yourself, right? But that's not the case.

I mean, we could make it for ourselves. Yeah. But I mean, the point is to bridge the gap from the real world to Web3. And Web3 is, I think, pillared by these DAOs, pillared by communities. At the end of the day, what we're talking about is bridging people to communities. And, you know, Bankless DAO is just one community. What we're going to do with Bankless Card is find some launch partners, that are DAOs to originally, so when you get the app on day 1, you'll be able to select which DAO you want to accumulate tokens for. So that's, you know, your kind of reward tokens you get for using the card. And through that, that's how we're going to be creating these partnerships. And we can create even deeper partnerships as we start getting more users. You know, the intent is for the users, we're creating a streamlined process. And for the DAOs, we're creating a way for them to get contributors, get engagement, get people holding their token. So hopefully it's, it's a situation where everyone wins. All the incentives are aligned. At least that's what we're hoping.

Oh, I love that. I'm all about that. PoolTogether wants to be a partner. I'm only one contributor in the PoolTogether community, but I'm sure we all agree we would love to get, get on board. So let's keep talking about that, Lynx. But I want to share with you a new feature at PoolTogether that not a lot of people know about. But I think there creates this, some interesting dynamics when you talk about a bankless card. So we have a multi-delegator tool and what we're encouraging people to do, like any individual depositor can deposit into PoolTogether and PoolTogether is a prize savings account. You put your money into whatever the, you know, massive pool is, $40 million. Hopefully it'll be $100, I mean, it's going to be like $150 million at the end of this year. Not financial advice. But you're, but you put your money into the pool and then you win prizes daily. Yeah. That prize amount can change and all of that. But like, it's like the fun you put, you're saving money, that's a bonus. You're winning money, also a bonus potentially. And then, so that's great. But you can also like delegate your winnings to other people. So I love to onboard my normie friends. You know, they don't want to, they don't want to think through how to do a fiat on-ramp and such. So I can actually just delegate to them and then they get USDC prizes. On Polygon. And that then allows them to go do other things in DeFi or NFT land. Now, let me take that one step further. You have all these treasuries, you have all of these, you have, you know, all these stables that are just sitting there from communities and from protocols and from projects. And you can delegate those stables to many people for a variety of different reasons. So I'm thinking, especially with Bankless Card, like, what if I could be delegated money from some either PoolTogether or Bankless or some other community and my prizes go right onto my Bankless Card so that I can just spend those prizes first? So I'm just trying to think like, how can we use that multi-delegator tool hand in hand with Bankless Card so that like the prizes are actually what I'm spending and not like my actual money that I'm trying to save and such. 'Cause no loss is a big value here at PoolTogether. What do you think? You wanna vibe off that? Got any other ideas?

I mean, I think that makes total sense and that whole, so the thing that we have to, that we're really concerned with at Bankless Card is, is making it so that regular people, people who don't have a lot of time, people who are crypto curious, I don't like to call 'em normies, I like to call them crypto curious, have a path into this world without, without all these barriers that are in their way. So when you talk about this multi-delegator function, it makes perfect sense. And the difficult part of it is going to be how do we show that in a way that a normal user can understand? How do we allow people to learn these kind of DeFi concepts just by virtue of using this app? So using the app teaches you about these DeFi concepts. And, you know, when we launch the card, it's going to be pretty bare bones. It's really just going to be swipe the card, get the rewards. But we're going to be starting to add things like swaps, stakes, delegations, voting, all this kind of stuff over time. but we have to do it in a way that's gonna allow our users to learn how to do it. Because then when they're ready, they can jump into the big wide ocean of Web3. You know, that waiting pool is just a pit stop for some people. And I think like your multi-delegator method makes a lot of sense because when you have someone who could benefit from Web3, let's say an artist friend, a musician friend who, I was trying to do the Spotify game, but it just doesn't make sense. They're not gonna hit 10 million people. Their music's not like that. But if they have 100 fans, a music NFT could be life-changing. They could quit their job. So, you know, just getting them started in some way, delegating them some funds, making it easy to get their music from their computer into an NFT that allows them to distribute it in a way that gets them paid, Exactly what Bankless Card is for.

How do you get money on a bankless card? Is there an account that you have to— can you explain the mechanics of it?

Yeah, so it's a card like a lot of other credit cards. And in the last 10 years, there's been a lot of fintechs who've created technology around card issuing. So you don't have to go to one of these kind of traditional entrenched banks, Citibank, Bank of America. Here in Canada, we have some big ones as well. But instead, you're using these kind of like new banks. And so you still have to do a KYC, you still have to get issued a card, and for compliance reasons, Visa has to know who you are. We still have to work with Visa, but the difference with our card is we are going to be— so I'll take you through the mechanics first, and then I'll tell you the difference. But yeah, so you do KYC, you get onto the app, you get a digital card immediately, you get a physical card shipped to you. Hopefully that physical card has the branding of the DAO of your choice on, I like to think that DAOs are the new brands. And so could you imagine having a credit card that has your Pooly on it? I think that would be amazing. It allows you to rep your DAO in real life. So taking that card, you swipe it, and in the app, you see that you got some rewards. And that app itself is also a wallet. So you can take that wallet, you could use it to collect all your, All your funds from that you're getting from the Bankless Coord Napes or anything like that. Or you could just let it accumulate until you become an L1 member, or you could get your pool. And that's how you— that's kind of the basic mechanics of it. So you can send and receive crypto as you would anywhere else. The way that you get money onto it is by connecting your bank account. So basically you connect your bank account as you do with many other credit card apps right now. You get some funds, you put it in, And that's how you spend the balance on there.

Is this going to be fully in action?

So one of the things I like to say is that we're not in a rush. We like to work sustainably. We were hoping to have it by the end of this year. I think that that's possible. But if that doesn't happen, I'm not going to cry. I'm just going to keep working. And that's the way that we work. So yeah, I mean, tentatively, it would be great if we could get it out before the Christmas season, because that is a season when a lot of people are using credit cards and it would be amazing. But if not, we'll get it out next year.

How do we get pooled together to be on launch with the Bankless card? How do we get pooled cards?

Well, I just need to figure out how to work with you. But in general, what we're going to do, the way we're going to do it is we're going to buy the tokens that we give off for rewards. We're going to buy them with that interchange revenue I talked to you about earlier. And we're going to buy them off of like a DeFi exchange. So like Uniswap, SushiSwap, whatever, wherever your liquidity is. And then we're going to give it to users. Now, so are you guys on— I think you guys are on Uniswap, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah.

The answer is yes. Yes.

So it's pretty easy for us to do it permissionlessly, but it would be even better for us to work with you guys to make it happen so that you can actually have your community get the card at launch and start accumulating pool. So yeah, I mean, short answer is just keep in contact with me.

You're speaking my language, Lynx. I'm so pumped. This is how we do deals right here. We do 'em on podcasts. We make deals on podcasts. Yes.

Very public deal right now. Here, we're doing it now.

That's right. Okay. So we'll work together on that. And then, and then I wonder, so, so, okay. So there's the main mechanic is spending and earning, right? So you're get, you're spending and then you're getting governance tokens. It could be anything though, right? It could be NFTs, it could be other stuff. I mean, uh, it, and there's also, it sounds like an app. There's an app that you would like interact with the protocol with.

Yeah.

You're connecting your smart wallet. You're connecting your wallet.

So we want to get to the point where you are connecting your wallet, but at first we're going to do, we're going to do that the app itself is a wallet. And the reason for that is as we're doing, as we're teaching users how to use blockchain, there are some big barriers that stop people from being able to use it. One of them is gas fees. So we want inside the app, this is why I call it a waiting pool. We want the whole experience inside the app to be gasless. So they're going to be custodial wallets at first, but we also want it not to just be people's end stop into Web3. We want it to be the beginning for them. So as we start teaching them some of these concepts, you know, what is, how do you swap, how do you stake, how do you delegate? How do you vote? Then all of a sudden, someone's like, I want to get— I want to learn more. Well, luckily, Bankless has an amazing product called Bankless Academy, which teaches you all about non-custodial wallets. And so we can start sending our users over there. And that's the point where we really want users to be able to enter their own wallet. Now, it's something that is going to probably come quickly after launch, but because we like to be super focused, it's probably not going to be a launch feature. But the wallet itself, sorry, the app itself will be your wallet at first. And then shortly after, we'll allow people to attach their custodial wallets. But no matter what happens, because the app is a wallet, you can send your gains to a wallet of your choice regardless.

And you could also delegate to that wallet through PoolTogether. Yes. So you'd be able to— Oh, oh, I saw. I smell, yeah, anybody who has a bankless card, we gotta get them hooked up with delegation on PoolTogether. It just has to happen. We need to get some chunk of money in, in PoolTogether that is delegated to every bankless cardholder. So the winning starts right when they get the card.

Let's do it. And that's, that's a great way to get people excited. And I'm all about excitement.

I mean, I think we're all excited right here. Leighton's excited. Talisker's excited. Link's excited. This is so cool. And then you said, Link, I mean, Link, you're dreaming dreams. You're obviously a visionary. You're just giving out possible features, all the alpha, all this stuff. But it sounds like there's customizable cards as well, potentially, like that would be built-in features. Totally. But what's kind of cool is like put your favorite NFT in a card. And then a lot of times we don't even need actual cards anymore. Yeah, get the Birb on the card, baby. Get that pussy on the card. But then also you don't even need, the digital card is actually really fun. Like you could customize that baby anytime when you tap to pay and then Puli shows up and gives you like a little wink every time you pay. It'd be so cute. It'd be so cute, Puli.

I think the possibilities are pretty endless. Yeah, so it's pretty exciting because at the end of the day, this is gonna be a platform upon which we're gonna be building. We wanna build, I think a lot of people who are creating crypto cards right now, they're either centralized or they're building that bridge to Web3 from the fiat side. We're doing the opposite. We are a DAO. We're building it within Bankless DAO. We're building in public. You can see pretty much everything that we do. And we are building that bridge from the Web3 side to the fiat side. And the advantage of that is, well, first of all, there's shared ownership. That's the whole point of Web3, in my opinion, is shared ownership. So you're not giving your money to some bank. You're giving your money to a DAO you actually care about. And if you want You can roll up your sleeves and get involved. You can't say that for a lot of these other cards. And the second advantage is that when you when when we do successfully build that bridge, because we're building it from the Web Three side, there's actually going to be something interesting at the other side. Whereas all the people who are building it from the fiat side, they're going to build it into crypto into what? There's they don't have connections with the communities. They don't understand the DAO ethos. They're just building it because they want to make a bunch of money. And I totally understand that instinct, but that's not what we're about. We're about chasing your bliss.

What's that from? You didn't make that up. That's from something.

It's got to be from something, but I'm not really sure what.

I feel like it's Oprah or something. You got the chat. The chat's going to— Joseph Campbell. Is that a

Joseph Campbell?

Oh, follow your bliss. Okay. Smart investor pulling through. So sorry, one more link. There's so much and my brain is running, but I want to get clarity on this. What is the fiat on— is there a fiat on-ramp with Bankless Card?

So the fiat on-ramp is something that we're probably going to have to build. I mean, it's the fiat on-ramp right now is connect Bankless Card to your— connect the app to your bank account, put some money in, spend it as you would spend fiat money, and you're going to get some rewards. So that's kind of like the baseline feature. But quickly after launch, we're going to want to be building an on-ramp. So basically swap your fiat for ETH. So it's going to be swap functionality. We want to do it. We're still figuring out the best way to do it. You know, there's the fast way to do it. There's the, there's the like kind of like value-aligned way to do it. And then there's kind of like this middle ground where we are, where we are actually going to be playing because we want to get it out quick enough that it's useful, but in a way that we can actually get to our long-term vision of this being like a decentralized tool for everyone. So, I mean, short answer to your question is we're probably going to build it. You— we may be the, the Coinbase, the decentralized Coinbase eventually. But, you know, that's going to take some work, which we're figuring out.

How does it feel being bankless and working with Visa? Yeah, so I was at Permissionless, which is bankless, was a sponsor, was one of the main hosts of the event. And there's a massive Visa booth. And I was just, it just blew my mind. I'm like, oh my gosh, Visa's here. It was the first time I'd seen that. So I just, anyway, but yeah, I mean, there's this like cognitive dissonance for bankless, like, you know.

Well, you know what, I think like the beauty of what, you know, Bankless HQ did in creating Bankless DAO is that they took this idea of being bankless and they put it to the community. And so the community's still figuring out what that truly means, what it means to be bankless. You know, I know that David and Ryan have a certain view of what it means to be bankless. But for me, bankless can also just mean less banks, and I'm okay with that. I think that some people say, oh, a bankless card, that's crazy. That's like, that doesn't make any sense. For me, I think what Visa has built is a network that allows people to pay almost anywhere. And if you think about it, that's very similar to what blockchain is. So they have built something of value, and you could say that they're a big bad bank, but in truth, they actually participate— sorry, they actually partner with a lot of these big bad banks to make things happen. And they're also investing heavily into the crypto space. So for them, they want their network to be used. It's not about the way that banks make money. It's not about that. They just want to get usage on their network. And for me, I'm certainly happy to use the devil's tools to do God's work, if that makes sense. I'm totally fine to make these kinds of partnerships knowing that in the long term, we're going to have to do something different than all of these kind of traditional providers. But in the short term, if it allows us to get adoption without really without, without going against our values, then I will absolutely use any tool that we can do to do that, as long as we're still aligned with our values. And I think partnering with Visa is definitely a way that we can do that.

You've got this like, bankless can mean less banks, using the devil's tool to use God's work. Are you in marketing? Do you do marketing?

I've just been in startups too long and I read a lot of comic books and, you know, they tend to be cheesy, but sometimes they give me some cool lines to say.

That's it. You gotta get, you gotta live with the zingers. The zingers are where it's at. That's how you break through. I love that. So Lynx, tell me how, so there is, there's a Bankless Card division in Bankless DAO. How can we help? What, what, what's your needs right now? How can, you know, I'm working with a coach right now who's talking to me about like being, moving from disempowered language to empowered language. Yeah. Like, like moving from like, oh, the, you know, the world is hard. I mean, you know, obviously that could be abuse and whatever. So if that's— I'm not saying that, I'm just saying like instead of like make, you know, making excuses, like seeing opportunities and seizing the day, that sort of thing. So how can the PoolTogether community help Bankless get this over the line? What are the things that you need to get that goal by the end of the year?

We're always looking for contributors. I think that that's something that, you know, every DAO is looking for. So if you're interested, hop onto the BanklessDAO Discord or DM me if you like. I'm on the PoolTogether Discord and we can get you started. And it's, we're looking for contributors in marketing, in communication, in development, in operations, whatever you do, we'll put you to work. And we hope that we'll put you to work in a way that you actually enjoy what you're doing. So if you're interested in what we're trying to build, then reach out to us. You know, that baseline of interest is really important. The second thing is just get the word out. We have our Twitter, Bankless Card, @BanklessCard, I should say. And if you share it, it's going to help us a lot because we're going to be able to get that word out. That's going to allow us to get some more grants, get some more funding. We're going to need to push this across the line. We're going to need funding for sure. So, you know, first we have to show that there's interest. And at the same time, we're doing a lot of validation on the technology side, on the legal side, on the partnership side. So Once we get that done, we are going to be needing to fund this to get this done. So, get the word out and you'll be helping us.

Okay. Now we've moved to the portion of the podcast where you explain DAOs and how to make them successful to us, Lynx. What are the ingredients for a successful DAO?

I like to say that the baseline of, like, the baseline currency of a DAO is contribution. At the end of the day, all DAOs are is just a group of like-minded people working towards some shared purpose. And I think like when you understand that contribution is everything, then you realize that to make a successful DAO, you have to incentivize people to contribute. And I think that blockchain has allowed us to do that by giving us these tokens, which we can use to give fractional shares of ownership to people. And also that these tokens are fungible. We can spend them, we can trade them, we can trade them for fiat money that we can use to buy groceries or our rent. So the difference between DAOs DAOs and traditional Web2 startups is just the ability to deploy effort and capital. And that comes from that core idea of a DAO is about contribution. So if you want to make a successful DAO, figure out how you can get other people to contribute because they care, because there's some sort of financial incentive or some sort of other incentive, because at the end of the day, they are building something that they're going to need in the future. And I think that that is, I mean, that's very high-level view. If you want to get into tactics, we can talk tactics too. But yeah. Yes,

let's talk tactics. So you, I know you use Coordinate. Do you have multiple circles for Bankless? Like each division, each like group has their own circle. And then you also talked about bounties. What are ways for DAO contributors to see that reward for their contributions?

Yeah. So Every— so the wonderful thing about Bankless is that the decentralized ethos is alive in everyone. So it means that there is, you know, every DAO has a centralized treasury, but that treasury, we're in the middle of our seasonal funding process now where we take our kind of seasonal funds and we distribute it across to projects, guilds, and other organizations within the DAO that then decide what they do with that bank. For the— now the good part is that since we're decentralized, we're resilient. If one guild implodes, there's still 13 more that can stand up and pick up the slack. If one project goes down, there are any number of contributors who are willing to step up and either pull that project across the finish line or start a new project. That's the beauty of decentralization. The difficult part is that each one of those groups has their own way of doing things. And, you know, there have been some efforts to create kind of DAO-wide culture, DAO-wide tools. So the way that we do it in Bankless DAO for Coordinate is we have a monthly DAO-wide Coordinate, and this is usually at least 200 to 300 people who are participating in this Coordinate. And there's 1.5 million BANK up for grabs every month. So that's a really good way, just by contributing, you get a lot of BANK. And each of the individual guilds as well usually has at least a seasonal Coordinate, if not a monthly Coordinate. And it depends kind of on the maturity of the guild and how good their operations are. But that's a good way to do it if you want to get into Bankless. Basically, if you contribute, people are going to award you in the Coordinate round. Beyond that, there are lots of different bounty systems that people use. A lot of people are using Dwork. I'm on a project called the Bounty Board, and we post centralized bounties on our Discord. This is something that you can also do as well. If you're in Bankless, you can check out the Bounty Board channel and see what's on there at any given time to gain some bank. But if you really want to, if you really want to get bank, the best way is to find a group that has been around for a while, because usually what they've done is they've, they've created a process. Which bounties the kind of work that needs to be done. I think that the newsletter squad in Bankless is the absolute best example of this. They ship like, I think, 4 or 5 newsletters. You know, some of them are weekly. I think most of them are weekly. But for each of the, you know, for writing, for art, for copy, for research, for summarizing, each one of those has a bounty associated with it. And so for a new contributor to get plugged in is extremely easy. You just pop in, you put up your hand, they put you to work, you do the deed and you get paid in bank at the end of the month. And you can keep doing that over and over and over again because they're just always shipping.

So Lynx, you're a startup person. You've had experience with the Wild West that it is. And there's this, you know, you read all these business books or whatever and they talk about strategy and mission and vision and heading. direction. And I've experienced this, you know, at PoolTogether with marketing. You know, there's a way to do marketing, like traditional marketing that can be read. You know, the marketing principles are still marketing principles no matter if you're on Web2 or Web3. But DAOs don't, it's like herding cats, as you know, it's like there's so much execution, there's so much tactics, but there's not Um, you know, as much like top-down, here's our goal, we've all decided on this, now let's do this. Now there's a lot of experimentation, there's a lot of, you know, like I said, herding cats, and I also love cats. So, um, what, any suggestions on how to optimize that where you are allowing for innovation, you're allowing for iteration, you're allowing for execution, but you're still tweaking strategy and having this kind of organic thing that, that, um, you know, I guess optimizes your returns. Like ideally everybody would start, I don't know, this is the conundrum that I feel like I wrestle with at PoolTogether. It's just, I want to get everybody on the same page and have the same strategy and the same vision in the same direction, which there is, but I want to make sure everybody has that, but that's just not possible. So any suggestions? What are you thinking?

Yeah, and I think like what I said before around decentralization, the point of it is resilience. I think like that's the big draw of decentralization. Everything else is kind of, Secondary, and you know I'll say one thing that we don't do as good as centralized organization is the kind of speed that you can act in a centralized organization. And you see that in Web two. You say it's the Wild West, but there's like really a standard operating procedure that a lot of the investors will will kind of enforce upon you as they're investing inside in in your company. So I truly do believe that having a strong aligned culture around your purpose, your mission, your values—that's probably the best the the best thing you can start with. But really. Really understanding strategy and communicating that strategy around your organization, you can make that a centralized effort, but it's something that has to be pull, not push. So you have to make that strategy so good that people won't ignore it. And that is the tough part because in centralized organizations, you're used to a boss saying, here's the strategy, do this, Go and do it. And, you know, I'm the boss. So that's that. I say what goes. But in decentralized organizations where people are choosing whether or not to work on what you're doing, you have to be— you have to make it so that it stands up to scrutiny. So probably you're going to have to do more upfront work to ensure that that strategy is actually good and holds up when people are starting to question it. And if it does that, you're going to start getting people, you know, slowly, one by one. It's a game of consensus where people start buying into your strategy. And then as they do that, the nice thing is after you have like a few, as long as you keep topping up that kind of alignment to the strategy, people can figure it out themselves. And I think that the decentralized way of working is also very much like the agile way of working. And agile has kind of been a buzzword over the last 10 years and in startups and in software development in general. But all of the philosophies of agile apply very well to working in decentralized organizations. And, you know, I'll give a pitch to a guild that I'm a member of, the Project Management Guild over at BanklessDAO. We are exploring the best ways to manage projects over in Web3, and it's really based upon agile principles. And I think that if you really want to organize a group of disparate People, you know, if you really want to herd cats, project management skills are going to be the number one thing you can do, the number one thing you can pick up to figure out how to herd those cats. So if you're really learning how, if you really want to learn how to do it, you can join us over at the PM Guild at BanklessDAO and you'll learn firsthand.

Do you have any thoughts on long governance posts? I know that Amazon, they were talking about their executives How they write 6-page briefs and meet around 6-page briefs. And I'm convinced as a marketer that people don't read. And then I look at governance posts and I'm like, oh dear God, there's so much, there's so many words here right now. And, uh, and you know, having ADD, you know, not being as detail-oriented as I would like, I miss stuff. And I feel like, you know, as zingy as possible, how can we communicate as clearly, as zingy, as Quickly, I think that applies to strategy, but I also think it could apply to governance. So any thoughts on governance in such a massive behemoth organization such as Bankless?

Full disclosure, I am a source of many of these super long governance posts. If you hop on the Bankless DAO, you can see that I'm a prime offender, let's say. But I'll also say that there are ways to reduce this kind of burden of strategy, burden of understanding. And we're working on that at the Bankless DAO Grants Committee. So I happen to be on the Bankless DAO Grants Committee as well. And we are working on systematizing the way that we have some kind of like visibility or accountability across the DAO so that you can see what individual projects are working on, you know, what individual projects' priorities are without necessarily needing to delve down into details. And the way that we do that is is we have like 2 to 3 KPIs, key performance indicators, numbers per project. And those, those numbers tell a story. One thing I said when we started on this effort to do it is that bad KPIs are worse than no KPIs at all. So really understanding how to construct a narrative around those numbers, it can be difficult, but when you do it right, it means that you can scan a single page and see where all of the different groups in the DAO are going, how they're doing, and what their strategies are. To answer your original question of how can we engage people with governance, you didn't ask exactly that, but it seemed like kind of what you were alluding to. The short answer is bridge the gap. You have to go to, you have to communicate people in a way that they care. So for some people, that's extremely long forum posts where you talk about every single detail and you go back and forth in the comments on the details. Getting in deep. And for other people, it's just 3 numbers. I just want to know the 3 numbers. Tell me what this— tell me what you're trying to accomplish with this governance proposal and tell me, you know, how I can know that you're being successful. And if I think it's a good effort, I'll vote for it. And for some people, it is a video. And for some people, it is to get on a podcast. And for some people, it's a tweet. So the nice thing about DAOs is that you can find people who have all of these skills. And people who care. So at the end of the day, your media or your ability to communicate— well, because we are working in this kind of like information-based medium, your ability to communicate to as many different kinds of people as possible is going to show how successful you are. So if you're looking to get your governance idea across, say it in lots of different ways, in lots of different mediums, in whatever way it's going to take for people to listen to what you're saying.

Yeah. And don't let me sway you. I mean, maybe it is better to have long missives. on governance posts, you know, because I mean, I think writing is a skill and being able to clearly communicate an idea is a skill and also being able to form an argument or a, you know, rationally explain is a skill and it's necessary. I battle within myself of like, maybe I need to learn this skill to survive in Web3 because I need to be able to put stuff up on governance. But I also want to do it in my own way to where like I'm using all caps and I'm like, you know, being funny and those sorts of things. So I'm just trying to find my way in Web3 governance posts. And I also don't like to read 7 pages, but maybe I just need to do that. Or maybe we need, you know what we need? We need audiobook governance. I need to just be able to like, what, you know, like I gotta drive an hour today. Let me pop on Pull Together Governance and just listen to that at 2.5x speed.

Exactly. I was gonna say, I mean, you're doing the podcast, you're hosting the podcast, you like the podcast. So what you do is, You put your governance ideas in your podcast, and then you have someone who likes writing come in and take all those ideas out, put 'em into a forum proposal, and then boom, you're both authors.

Delegation. And also, I mean, hey, I already, I, I, I use Descript, which is an app that auto-transcribes this stuff. So the work is, is halfway done right there. It's so good. Thank you, AI.

There you go. AI for the win.

Okay, Lynx, before I let you go, I need to know your, your calls for 2022. I always like people to try to predict the future. So that we can berate them online when they're wrong, or we can praise them as gods when they're right. So, Lynx, what are your predictions for the rest of 2022?

Oh man, you're really putting me on the spot here. You know what? I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say you're going to see the launch of Bankless Card to great fanfare and utility, and it's going to have pooled together as a launch DAO. And that is, I don't know how to, I don't know, If I want to go beyond that. But yeah, I would really like to see that happen.

I love that. We are manifesting that right now on this podcast. It's the secret and that's what we're doing. We're manifesting it. We're going to speak it into existence. But so, but Lynx, would you go outside of PoolTogether and Bankless and just things, even just things that you are interested in, things that like have piqued your curiosity in that NFT space, in the crypto space? You know, just anything that you're like, hmm, that's—

I mean, I guess that I just truly believe that Web3, like, I don't wanna, I guess like the idea of Web3, that ownership economy, I believe it's gonna start attracting more people, different kinds of people. I think the best way, and I'm not sure if it's gonna be 2022 or 2023, but I think like the best way to start a startup actually is as a DAO. And you know, there are a lot of legal issues related to it and there are a lot of compliance issues and there's a lot of like little things that need to be solved. But when those things are solved, the new way to start a startup is going to be online on blockchain because it just makes so much more sense in the way that they're doing it right now.

I love that. I noticed on Twitter there's like a DAO that actually allows DAOs to form, but I forgot what it was. It's like starts with a K. There you go, KaliDAO. And so they actually have, you then become, they're like an umbrella LLC for all these LLCs. I guess it's in the, in North America or in the United States at least. But, but oh, that brings up a question. Bankless DAO or the Bankless card is US only? You're passing them out in Barcelona.

Yeah. I mean, we're going to, we're going to launch in the USA because that is where, well, so we did a bunch of, did a bunch of surveys and that's where about 50% of the people who are on our pre-launch list want to live. They live in the US and Canada. So we're going to launch in North America. I think like the order of launching is going to be North America, Europe, and then Asia. But, and, you know, we want to get into Africa as well, because we actually have a lot of contributors in Africa. The intent with this card is for it to be a worldwide asset for anyone who is on blockchain to use. So for it to be easy for our users to use, we're going to have to do some hard work. So we're working on that, but we believe in the iterative approach. So we're going to start somewhere and that place is going to be the, the, uh, uh, that place is going to be North America and we will expand, uh, as quickly as we can.

Well, Lynx, thanks so much for spending time with us at Pull Together. And, uh, I'm really excited about this new venture that you're doing and that I just kind of glommed Pull Together on just on this podcast, but we're— it's going to happen. We're so excited.

I really enjoyed myself. So I want to thank you for, uh, for having me on here, Hot Mike. It's a, it's a pleasure.

All right. Well, that was the Pull Together Community Podcast. Thanks for listening. You can deposit at pooltogether.com. Now on Optimism. 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.