PoolTogether Community Podcast #30 with Anne and Charles from Project Galaxy

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to Pool Together Community Podcast. I'm your host, Hot Mike, aka Tim, aka I had mango pineapple salsa and it And it was very garlicky as well. So TMI, but be glad that— well, I got Altoids here. It's fine. We're fine. And I'm here with Project Galaxy. I'm here with Project Galaxy and In The Business, Wayne Business, joining us for the PoolTogether Community Podcast. Thank you so much for being here, Project Galaxy.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for the invite.

It's a party. It's a party. And are you both, are you both in Montreal?

No. Um, here, I can do a little intro on myself and then Charles, uh, can I don't know if you wanna go after, but I'm CMO at Project Galaxy, also a member of the PoolTogether DAO, whatever that might mean. So contributing where I can and helping where I can, but also working at Project Galaxy to make beautiful, you know, task-based campaigns for different projects and protocols. So that's a little bit about myself, based in Canada, Montreal. Charles, what about you?

Yeah, my name is Charles Hui. I'm the co-founder of Project Galaxy. I'm based in California, actually Bay Area, Silicon Valley, California. It's great to be here. Well, and just cover a little bit about Project Galaxy. So yeah, I guess we can get started.

Story of Project Galaxy. And then Charles, I'd love to hear a little bit about you and how you got into crypto. And then, uh, Ann, if you could finish, finish this off, I would love to hear your origin story as well. I love hearing these origin stories because so many people are like now getting into crypto and it's really fun to hear how people have done it. And as the, as listeners chart their own path, their own Web3 path.

Um, so a little bit background about myself. Um, I graduated from UC Berkeley. in 2017. And then right after that, I started, I co-founded a company called DLive, a live streaming platform initially built on Steem blockchain. But later we migrated over and built our separate layer 1 based on Cosmos, it's Collino blockchain. But I've been running DLive for From 2017 to actually to 2021, to last year, the company initially built a concept of live streaming on blockchain or utilizing the token and also decentralized the revenue share. We were Growing very fast. At its peak, it has a million monthly active users. And in 2019, we also signed PewDiePie as exclusively streaming on DLive at that time. But in late December 2019, the company were acquired by BitTorrent. And then after that, I'm still in charge. I'm still I was still the CEO of DLive as a subsidiary of BitTorrent until last year. Yeah. And early last year, me and my co-founder Harry, we started Project Galaxy. The idea of this is, you know, we wanted to build, at the very beginning, we wanted to build a plug-and-play. At that time, we invented a world called NFT as a service. So we wanted to build a plug-and-play NFT as a service solution for brands to easily build their NFT programs, no matter you're a DeFi community, you're a DAO, you're any organizations. And it can have different purposes. It can be used for loyalty, for membership, for growth hacking. But yeah, that was a very original idea and the proof of concept. At that time, the first one who supported the idea was from SushiSwap. And in fact, SushiSwap was one of the earliest, one of the very first campaigns we built was for SushiSwap. But eventually, and after that, we also worked with Yearn team. We talked to Ben Tech, Trank from Yearn Finance team, and Yearn Finance quickly built their first campaign to reward all UFI token holders with this interesting loyalty program, NFT-based loyalty programs. But basically the idea was brands, projects, partners, they can use Galaxy to reward users NFT based on what they have done on-chain. And quickly, we also supported off-chain credentials. So for any activities you have done on-chain or off-chain, you will be rewarded with the NFT. This NFT can be collected, you know, as one of the gamified module and say you collect the different pieces and later you can forge them into ultimate NFT. which will give you further utilities in their community or something. So that was the idea. And it turns out it works very well. I remember that case study, the campaign we did with Woofy, we grow Woofy token holders 35%, which is the number of token holders, 35% more within 72 hours. I still, you can still see that Dune Analytics dashboard. But that was early last year, last year, I think April or May sometime. But yeah, and then we quickly expanded to other protocols, right? Other ecosystem. And turns out it actually works for every single community. And in fact, this really becomes an effective tool for community to build their community or they want to build some NFT-based feature based on users' past activities, right? So that's earlier this year, Metallic introd— but actually, in fact, last year we had this feature. I think it was back in April. We had that feature enabled in our Project Galaxy dashboard for partners, which, you know, they can easily choose if they want this NFT program to be transferable or non-transferable. And at the very beginning, a lot of partners actually choose to make their NFT rewards to be non-transferable, so attached to the user address. But it turns out now it has a new name, which is called Soulbound Token, which is quite interesting. But yeah, over the past year, we've been building, we've been developing the ecosystem, we've been talking to different partners. And we also keep improving the product. And now Project Galaxy is growing to a stage where we have over 550 brands using Project Galaxy every day. And in total, we have a product called Galaxy ID, which accumulates or displays your achievements and the badge and NFT collected on Project Galaxy. And so far, we have over 2.8 million registered Galaxy ID users. And yeah, it went pretty well and looks like the Web3 community loved the concept.

Great. And if you could share your story, your origin story as well, which it's pretty cool how things all kind of work together here.

Yeah, well, this is my second time on this podcast. Lucky me. So I did give my villain crypto backstory last time, so I don't know if you, how far are you back you want me to start?

Um, do it again. Do it again. But yes, you gave me my start, Anne. You were like podcast number 2, I think that I did. And now I'm still doing it. Still going. But you gave me the fuel to keep going, Anne. It was such a great episode, which listener, you must go back and listen to the origin, our, our first episode. And we were, it was funny. We like talked about some controversial stuff that like blew up right after we, we did the interview. So anyway,

we did. Oh my goodness. It's almost like for That's So Raven, we didn't see it coming, but we were talking about things that ended up happening like a, a week after. Um, okay, so I'll go quickly this time. Look at us now. Um, Mike, Hot Mike doing it, doing it for, for the fans. So quickly, my partner was in DeFi, uh, a long time before me. Um, and then I didn't quite get it. I tried, I've had a wallet, I've had a little bit of cryptocurrencies, you know, just basic DeFi stuff since 2020, but I didn't really get it. Being a marketer myself and being a non-technical, proud non-technical, I didn't really grasp the technology behind the blockchain, you know. I was one of those people who only understood like, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I didn't get it. I didn't get why. Fast forward to October of last year, I went to a conference with said partner, And then I learned more about NFTs and the power behind NFTs. There was a few talks, one from People Pleaser who was kind of showing how she had crowdfunded the poster for the Ethereum documentary and the way that she had did that and showing how like different NFT holders were different tiered level producers of the documentary. So all of this got me thinking, understood, finally understood a little bit more about blockchain and that open ledger showing all of these things. and the power behind like engaging brands and engaging audiences to brands with NFTs. Quit my job as soon as I came back from that conference, quite literally the Monday after. That was a very fun exit interview because we only talked about NFTs for the whole walk. And then started just freelancing. And then how I got into Project Galaxy was thanks to my friends at PoolTogether. Since I was freelancing for PoolTogether, helping with a different, a few different initiatives like the Valentine's Day campaign where we Uh, gave out free NFTs and one of those NFTs had a lucky, uh, delegation worth $25,000, if I'm not mistaken, uh, that we gave away to 4 people. And then we did another huge campaign, which was the Pool Together Season 1 campaign on Project Galaxy as well. And then Project Galaxy came to recruit me. So I'm now on this podcast with, with my boss, Charles, so he can tell you all about how he came to, to poach me. But that's the story.

You tell me, can you tell us about the Permissionless event? What happened at Permissionless?

So me and you, Mike, uh, Hot Mike, we tore up the dance floor. That's basically what happened.

Oh, okay. But I mean, there was a promotion that happened.

Yeah. The promotion.

I just remember you tweeted this, so that's why I'm like, I think it's public, but if I need to edit this from the podcast, that's fine. I could totally do it. But you got promoted in a unique way.

Oh, the promotion. Okay. I thought you meant. Oh yes. So after Permissionless, well, we threw our, we actually launched our token in April, which was a pretty successful token launch. Obviously we're in a bear market now, so we won't touch on that too much. But the launch itself, which was on Binance, did quite well. So we decided to celebrate in Permissionless. We had a party there where we tore up the dance floor. And then after Permissionless was done, while we had breakfast, Charles took a straw. And, um, knighted me with the CMO position and then changed my Twitter bio to CMO. So, Charles, am I getting that right? Or?

Exactly. Yeah, that was a, that was a true story. Um, and did a great job. I demonstrated how, how, um, how marketing can be, um, can be done. And, uh, it was, it was great and, and, and deserved the, the, the position. So yeah, but the way we promote it is a little bit different. Yeah.

The party was awesome. We had a blast. I got so crazy on the dance floor. I think I like fell down and stuff, but it was like people were, it was really fun. It was a good time. Great token launch. It was really great. And we actually at PoolTogether have been partnering with Project Galaxy on various projects, the latest of which was our NFT NYC OAT distribution campaign where we all had QR codes and we were going through NFT NYC parties and we had a competition and we were seeing who could distribute the most OATs at NFT NYC. And it got heated. Like, people took it seriously. There was some like edges, people were trying to find that edge and And so there were different strategies that happened and we were able to like, at Permissionless, I was basically the only one distributing. We were using POAPs at that event. And then we had like 5 people compete to distribute Oats and we nearly doubled our distribution with that competition. And our very own Gustavo won the competition. He distributed 12, the most Oats, but also had the most depositors who had an Oat and he wins a championship belt. And so I will share that championship belt or a preview of that in the chat today for everyone. But I think this is probably the first OAT campaign that has a championship belt. So we are making history, Project Galaxy history here.

We are. And maybe if we backtrack a little bit, do you mind if I go ahead and give a little 101 on what is an OAT?

Yes. Yes. Love

it. So Project Galaxy, we have a lot of different, you know, applications and modules that we use, like Charles mentioned at first. So one thing that we do is we help brands and protocols with like growth campaigns. So basically NFT modules that can go anywhere from like a mystery box campaign where the user doesn't know what NFT they're gonna claim or get, you know, to, you know, a single drop or an airdrop campaign. And we have other things like Galaxy ID, which we mentioned, which is all about building your credential, your on-chain digital profile with your credentials. And then we also have OATS. So Galaxy OATS are what we call on-chain achievement tokens. These are little badges that, um, you know, showcase that someone participated to an event or, or did a specific action. They're gasless minting. They're on Polygon and Binance. Um, and with a QR code, we can get people to, to claim and scan them. And the beautiful thing about these is that we can make them non-transferable. And because they're on EVM chains, you know, I don't wanna compare to our competitors, so I won't mention names, but because these are on Polygon and Binance, they do appear on your OpenSea or on your NFT marketplaces because they are on EVM chains. So yeah, so that's a little bit about Oats. So that's, it was a really fun competition. I'm sorry for the people who are against me. I got a little bit heated there. I do enjoy winning. Um, but I'm very glad that Gustavo won this one. He well deserved.

Yeah. So the, we, what we did was we chose, uh, 3 random winners to get a $10,000 delegation for the month, uh, for this month of the month of July. And then the person that won the competition got a $10,000 delegation as well. So they are currently winning prizes in PoolTogether, which is great. And something that we didn't access, but I felt like is like super powerful within Project Galaxy. is the ability to have basically like cron jobs running or things that are monitoring on-chain activity and being able to filter and do that sort of thing. So I was able to access a dashboard and now that dashboard is integrated into my profile on Project Galaxy. But I wonder what's the future of Project Galaxy? What are some new features that we can look forward to down the line? And primarily, I think one thing that dazzled me was just that ability to like look at deposit, like look at that on-chain activity and then filter for it and then be able to airdrop or give people NFTs regarding that. Is that going to be, or is that currently like user accessible?

Good question. So I'll start with some recent updates we had. So the idea for Project Axie working with different partners is, you know, what kind of features, what kind of products we can offer to our partners that keep them engaging with the Product Galaxy infrastructure and also help them keep engaging with their audience, right? So the plug-and-play modules, what we build for loyalty campaigns, for growth hacking campaign, the old feature for gasless minting, easy access for users. The on-chain badges, all of this feature as well as mystery box. We have a mystery box feature. All of this already demonstrated that, you know, this is an effective tool or platform for bands to interact with their audience. And recently we launched 2 new products. One is our Discord bot. The Discord bot basically help you say, for example, for this stage, You know, whoever listened to the stage at this time, if you have the Galaxy Bot installed in this Discord server, then you can set the rules in the admin settings, say people who tune in for more than 15 minutes or 30 minutes, they will be automatically eligible for an vote. And then If you have this bot set up in your Discord, then users can claim it, can just tune in in the previous way. But after the AMA, they can go to Galaxy campaign page to claim with their Discord handle directly and automatically. So that's the Discord bot feature. And in the future, this bot can also reward users NFT badges owed based on the roles they have in the Discord server. So we'll have more Discord features coming soon to this Discord bot. But essentially, we've already seen, I think so far we have almost 100 partners installed the Discord bot in their Discord server and it works very well. It helps them run better AMA chats. It helps them You help them run, yeah, better interact with their community on this. Also, we had a feature coming soon, which is called Bounty. This is a feature built on top of our existing modules because, you know, say you have already rewarded your users 1,000 different badges to 1,000 different users. Now you want to select the winner, right? Select one random winner or 10 random winners from this. Badge holders or credential holders. How do you do that? Well, we just build a— we're building a tool that easily help you select the winners that you want, which we call the bounty feature. And we believe this will be very helpful. It's exactly what community, what a lot of our partner community have been requested. the feature. Yeah, but those are 2 features we recently shipped. For the long— from the longer term, we want to make sure our campaign modules stay, you know, can be the most helpful tool for brands, communities, and organizations to build their community and build a better product. Build a better product. But in the longer term, as you just mentioned, right, the credentials. So what we've been calling ourselves, one of the leading credential data networks in the world, because the NFT rewards, the badges, or, you know, the bounty modules, in the future, we're probably going to have an airdrop feature, whatever. But those are features based on the credential that you earned from the from the community, right? You get this badge because you visit my booth. You get this badge because you spend $10 on PoolTogether, play the game, right? So those are different rewards and we're adding more and more rewards modules. But essentially what you have done or your your behaviors, we call them credentials, Web3 credentials are the key parts. We started to introduce these words, you know, it was last year, May, I remember. And this on-chain credential term was actually invented by us and Mabel from Multicoin Capital together. And at that time when we announced our seed fundraise, we introduced this term on-chain credentials. And now we've seen a lot of projects claiming that they're building off-chain credentials infrastructure, which is great. That means we're on the right direction. A lot of competitors join, but essentially from building this Project Galaxy infrastructure, you've seen a lot of users left their Web3 footprints here already, right? What you have done in PoolTogether, what you have done on Yearn Finance, what you have done in maybe PancakeSwap on BNB chain, right? On different blockchains in different protocols, different apps. Those are all on-chain credentials or Web3 credentials. How can we better help our partners utilize these credentials to do something really helpful for their community or for their product, right? So That's actually going to be the focus. Well, we've been focusing on this, but we will be focused more, which will be on identity layer to see not just the Project Axie, the campaign module as the product itself, but also as an identity suite. How can we better interact with developers? How can we help developers utilizing this data from API, from on-chain oracles? to utilize this data and integrate it in their own app and build some features that really help them build a better product.

Yeah. So this directly applies to what I'm trying to do with PoolTogether. I do the podcast here and then I also try my hand at a little biz dev where we have at PoolTogether a multi-delegator tool. So protocols can deposit, or DAOs or NFT communities can deposit stables from their treasury into PoolTogether and delegate prizes, delegate basically portions of that treasury to holders. And which is really powerful. You can instantly build utility, do an NFT, you can encourage people who are participating. And that's exactly what Project Galaxy is doing is identifying those credentials, like who's doing what, where's the activity coming. But what I'm seeing is, is there's kind of this, there's a need to cross-reference. Like I want to know somebody who has done this, And who holds this token and at this amount. And there is this basically logic that specifically for NFTs, I don't know, like there's basically coding that you have to do to be able to get a list. I can't just go to Etherscan and get a list of NFT holders right now, to my knowledge. I have to like go, you like code something to get those holders and then I have to pop it into Excel and then I get all the holders who have a Pool token and who have a Pooly NFT. And I have to put it all together and manually do it to get a list of people who hold both so that now I can delegate, you know, prizes to them. So I know that there's, I'm actually seeing as I'm going through the dashboard in Project Galaxy, that there's the beginning of that sort of thing happening there. I still think I need to be pretty technical to map that out, but I'm seeing it becoming more and more and more user-friendly where I can pick Hey, anybody holds, who holds the Optimism token, like, like let's say 100 or more and has a Pooly NFT, I want to airdrop them this or something like that. Is that, is that on the radar? Is that something coming down the line? Can I already do that now and I'm just missing it with Project Galaxy?

Yeah, actually you can already try it out. We, you can, you can now in from, from Project Galaxy, you can select existing credentials, say, Users who hold more than 10 ETH in their Ethereum wallet address. Okay, this is one condition, and then you can plus, you can add another condition, and then you can choose if it's and or or condition, right? So if users have to meet both requirements or they have to meet either of the requirement, we already have this logic building in dashboard. So you just need to select different credentials and make sure.

I see it. I thought these were all NFTs, but they're not. They're like, these are all created, previously created credentials.

Credentials. Yes. And if there's new credentials that, you know, you couldn't find in the data network, you can actually, for a token holder, you can directly get that data from Etherscan, just download it. There is an export CSV option. You download that CSV file, upload it to the dashboard, create a new static credential, and then you can combine it, you know, pair them up with other credentials, set the conditions, and good to go. And users, when users go to the campaign page, they will see, you know, if they have to meet all the requirements, or if they just meet one of the requirements or two of the requirements. We have different combinations of logic built in already.

But say specifically for some like weird NFT that no one's ever heard of, I would still need to be like, I could create my own query and it's an EVM address credential, and then I would need to still put in some like code there for now. Like I can't just like drop a contract address in and pick an NFT out of the blue, correct?

So, so, okay. So for this we call it credential curation, right? Basically users who upload or create new credentials in the dashboard. Now we support different types. The first type is static, which is a CSV file. You upload the list of address, you name it, you give a description, good to go. That's a static file. Secondly, we also support a Google Sheet. So the Google Sheet can be dynamically updated if you have a way, you know, if you're running your own campaign, say your referral campaign, you're using third-party tool to track those eligible participants, you can use those tools and then automatically plug in the data to the Google Sheet and then Google Sheet API will connect to our dashboard to automatically update it. So Google Sheet as a dynamic data source, We also support subgraph. So if you say, if you are a dev, I'm building, if you're building Uniswap, okay, you can use Uniswap subgraph directly plug in to the dashboard. You can select the subgraph format there and then just import the correct subgraph and the system will read the data and then find the qualified ones. We also support I think recently we also started to support Duo Analytics dashboard. So if you can, you know, if you already have this data running, if you already built a dashboard on Duo Analytics, I think you can maybe plug in that dashboard to the Project Galaxy dashboard and then use it as one of the credentials.

This is so great. I'm so excited. And you guys have great customer service too. So I think as If anybody's getting lost or whatever, they can hit you up in the Discord or there's a support channel here on your website that you can, but it's just so powerful the ways that you can use this. This is really exciting.

Thank you. Yes, that's a, we want to make this credential accessible to everyone. So essentially in the future, for example, there will be some users who are not, you know, here to create any campaigns, but I'm a good data expert. I know how to do the data. I can create credentials on Project Galaxy for other projects to use it. And potentially it can, you know, that's how our GAL token played a role here. If you curate data, you can earn the revenue share of this credential. And in the future, developers who use this credential for their campaign, for their own app integration, they will need to pay some Token, pay the fee in GAL token or not, and then the revenue will go to some of the revenue. The majority of the revenue will go to the curator of the credential. That's the idea of how this curation and then you know credential utilization works.

So how do we how do we continue to build in a bear market? How do we market in a bear market when everybody's so down bad, and when crypto Twitter It's very quiet. What's the strategy here? I would love to hear Project Galaxy's thinking as we're navigating this environment.

Yeah, I think actually bear market is a perfect opportunity for builders, right? It's actually the best timing. You don't have so many distractions from the token prices and you know, and so much noises and hypes. But, and yes, you know, it's not easy for every builders to survive in the bear market. But on Galaxy, at Project Galaxy, we've seen actually more and more user growth because builders, you know, when token price is not It's not the big selling point for their product. They want to focus on building, and then also they want to focus on growing their community. So we actually see more and more partners start— started to use Project Galaxy, and more and more partners, you know, started to— also existing partners came back to start to run their loyalty campaign because they want to figure out a way to retain their users. And, you know, try out our new product, which is going to really going to be helpful for them to interact with their audience. Also, you know, users, user performance, you know, product data performance is going down. They want to figure out a way to how to better attract new audience. This is how we can help. Exactly right. As you say, help them identify target audience, you know, or, you know, targeting new audience to use their product and help them find new users. So this is actually good for Project Galaxy. And, but we've been joking, you know, if one day we see less users on Project Galaxy, that means, you know, people don't even want to do this task for this rewards or badges. That means really the bottom of the bear market because literally everyone lost the interest of learning and staying in crypto. But yeah, for us, we've seen everything goes well. I don't know, Andy, if you have anything you want to add.

Yeah, well, you did a really good overview of it, but I actually have a great use case to share. In this case, that was before the bear market, way before, but we actually have one of our partners Hashflow, which is a DEX. When they first did a campaign with us back in September or October of 2021, everyone was asking them the infamous question of when token, right? When token, when token. And they had all these early adopters, people who, you know, were really invested, were really doing a lot of actions. And Hashflow just wasn't ready to launch a token yet, but they launched a campaign with Project Galaxy, which, you know, on-chain task, a weekly on-chain task. And then what they said is that people who participate and accumulate these specific NFTs to this specific campaign will be eligible for a future, you know, token drop eventually. So just doing a parallel with what's going on right now, not saying that everyone should promise some token drops, but if you wanna keep your communities engaged and want to keep them coming back and kind of saying like, hey, we can do these things. And if you're a holder of these NFTs, of these campaigns in the future, when things do, you know, when budgets come back up, when things are better, we will, we can reward. You can, you can reward them now, or you can promise these rewards in the future for accumulating these. So I just thought that was an interesting, uh, a parallel to make because it's time. It's time to build. It's time to engage your communities and it's time to just like, Everyone get together and, and then stay put during this bear market because what comes down must come up eventually. So yeah, there's a fun, a lot of fun things we can do.

PoolTogether has been known to, you know, have a great community, so much so that people get hired out of the community to work in Web3. And so I'm wondering, is, is that, is it a hiring time for projects? Flexi right now? Are you still building team? Is it still growing right now? Or are you guys good and you're maintaining? What's the story there?

Yeah, we, to be honest, we're not freezing any headcounts right now. And actually all teams are still hiring. We actually can share, I don't know if it's a good place to share, but we can share the link to our job board later after the podcast. But yeah, we're hiring in every team. We're still growing in different regions just because we, like I mentioned, we see actually more and more user growth. Last month was actually our all-time high performance so far since launch last year in March. But yeah, I think we're doing good. And in terms of the runway for the team, We've reserved enough for the team to survive. But yeah, and actually it's a great opportunity. Honestly, I feel like it's a great opportunity for all the startups. Now, you know, a lot of talents, more and more talents, they're looking for opportunities. And, you know, as a Web3 startup, it's perfect timing. So yeah, we're doing a good job.

So I can pick Why you should come work for Project Galaxy within a sentence or two is that, I'll say why I love to work here, but personally, a lot of, you know, these DeFi projects or these NFT projects, you're working on one specific thing, right? But at Project Galaxy, our job is literally to know what is coming up, what is new. Every day is a new day because we're almost, you know, almost like a service company because we work with all these different protocols, all these different DeFi projects that come to us. So every day people are coming to you and they're saying, okay, we wanna engage your community. And then you have to understand who they are, what they do. We're on 7, 7 or 8 blockchains at the moment, and that's still growing. So for me, as someone who hates getting bored, this is a place where you will never be bored. You just get to learn and you get to meet a lot of peo— a lot of people from across Around the world, across different kind of projects and different kind of branches within the Web3 ecosystem. So my pitch was a little bit longer than a sentence or two, but it's a really great company to work for.

Pitch. And then I would love to know how, how do you, in this remote, I mean, your team is spread off, I, or spread around the world. I see China, Singapore, and then remote as the, as the 3 locations here. San Francisco Bay Area is another one. Um, Canada, United States, just locations you're looking to hire. How do you, how do you improve culture? Like, how do you keep that morale up when everybody's spread around the world working remotely using Discord or whatever you use? Please tell me you don't use Slack. Do you use Slack? Oh, you use Slack. Well, no, that's, I get it. It's more pro. It's more pro. Sorry. Yeah.

Before switching to Slack, we actually used, we actually been using Telegram for work for over a year. But now at the point, you know, imagine you have one group chat, at least one group chat with every partner on Project Galaxy. We have our client relations team, they have at least 500+ group chats. It's hard to manage, start to become really, really hard to manage. So we decided to move our internal conversation to Slack, which is, I think from some perspective, it's similar to Discord. But it can be, it's just a dedicated app for our company chat. So yeah, and in terms of, we recently started to have HR finance folks joining us, even before, I would say before last month, we didn't have any HR or finance team members. Now we're hiring this. Maybe started to become more and more helpful for the remote team building culture, right? And we're so distributed in Canada, US, Singapore, China. We also have some folks in Eastern Europe. Yeah. And then it's just so, everyone is in different time zones. So it's actually even harder to find a proper time for team meeting. But we've been trying and everyone kind of like adjusted their work schedule and make sure we find a good time. We are minimizing our group team meeting because we are now having around 45 or 50 people in the company. So we're lowering the frequency for the entire team meeting, company team meeting, but we're dividing the— meetings into different departments, which become more and more effective, and a lot of communications will be done on Notion and Slack. This also helps a lot.

As an employee, maybe I can speak to the company culture a little bit. So, one thing that's really great is, example, that famous permissionless party, you know, Charles was nice enough to have everyone from the North America team fly in. Regardless of the role. So community, from community managers to marketers to BD to dev, the dev team flew in for that party and that week. So obviously this is not an every conference occurrence. We wouldn't be able to live if we were flying everyone at the same time, but we did do that. And then a few weeks before, the Asia team, they had a week or a weekend of like team bonding. So they all flew in somewhere and then had like a weekend there. So we really do try to incorporate that. A funny story is that when Charles first hired me, I was the only one in Eastern time zone. So I get hired, I'm very excited to start my first day, and then I get my agenda, and then I open my agenda for work this Monday morning, and I have meetings every night from Sunday to Thursday at 8:00 PM. And then being a new employee and having, you know, not being very assertive and being shy, I was like, oh no, I'm gonna have to work every night. I'm, I'm, you know, kind of freaking out there. Had a discussion with Charles. He was right away like, okay, let's, let's make this work. So now I only have one meeting every 2 weeks at night on a Monday night, uh, where the whole team gets together. But as Charles said, we divided the meetings. We're, you know, trying to work, uh, better on that. And so we are working on company culture and making sure that everyone, you know, is having a good time. Um, So yeah, that's a little bit about company, a little bit about our company culture. So, and we'll be, the next place we will be together is in Token2049 in Singapore. So if anyone's there, please hit us up because we will be there as a sponsor. So yeah, the company culture is good for remote. I think we're doing a good job.

I wanna go to Singapore. That's awesome. Anne, I would love to hear some, you know, you've been doing Web3 marketing for Project Galaxy, any learnings? You do this great thing where you occasionally tweet Web3 marketing tips, and I love it so much. So I wonder if you could do a version of that right now for the Pull Together community.

All right. Web3 marketing tips. Whatever you knew from Web2, throw it out the window. More on the technical and tactical part of it. The ways to reach out to people are much different. Again, it goes back to, you know, stick to your good storytelling, stick to a good brand. That's going to work. But, you know, obviously we, as we see, like Instagram or Twitter posts or sponsored posts aren't really the way to go. So one thing that I've seen that has worked well for us is, you know, a PR team. So if I can shout out to that, to them, they're helping us a lot. Educational content. And if you're looking for a great way to engage your community, Come and do some campaigns with Project Galaxy. That would be my little message there.

Yeah, I think it's like the partnerships are so key. It's like highly relational for something that's very anonymous-based and something that's very Discord. Like, I actually had 2 weeks ago a dream where I was disembodied. Like, it was just a Discord chat dream. And I was like, oh my gosh, I need to stop looking at a screen and touch grass. But for that kind of industry, the, the in-person events are so huge. The connections and like the, the, you know, meeting people is ironically the most important or a very important thing. Uh, and it's, I, that's where I see the most traction as a marketer is just the conversations that I'm having and like how the podcast actually opens those conversations up for me, uh, is in the partnership business development realm.

I think it's 100%. Um, I'm, I'm eager to see like in 3 years and 5 years where we're at. And once it's a bit more mass adopted, maybe my speech that I gave today won't hold up. Maybe we will be doing Instagram ads or TikTok ads by then, and that's gonna be the next way to interact. But as of now, it's a little bit about, um, I wouldn't say who you know, because I think that if you go to these conferences, even if you, you know no one, just show up, be there, go to the Discords, go to the online events, and you will. I know, Tim, you've, you've kind of lived the same thing as me. It's very quick, right? As soon as you put yourself out there. Yeah. You're gonna meet the right people, ask around, but partnerships are definitely key. And I know for us at Project Galaxy, that's been key. Like we've had huge campaigns. Let's say when we introduced the Solana chain on Project Galaxy, we had a campaign with over 20 protocols from the Solana chain. So that was a huge boost for us, right? So par— and then also partnering with the right people, which I know sounds maybe obvious and a little You know, stupid, but that's, don't partner with anyone, partner with the ones that make sense to you. So.

I'm already thinking about like, I mean, how, how do, like, I mean, Project Galaxy's the perfect tool in the Web3 marketer's toolbox because, I mean, first of all, Project Galaxy's a trusted name now, been in the industry. Oats have been distributed there, people are familiar with them. And I would, I would love to see like an oat dropping campaign, like using visual ads, like Accessing somebody's basically OpenSea profile to allow them to, to like ship. I know this might go against what you're trying to do, but I'm like, ooh, how can I drop PulseOats on people, you know, in some other community in a way where they're like knowing that I'm not trying to hack their wallet or anything, but I'm like sending them a cute message, or how can you take this OAT and then redeem it for something else? So there, it's, it's not, it's not like collecting emails and private information and spamming people anymore. It's Telegram and it's Discord and it's, and yeah, this is my common question, especially for companies that hire so much from FAANG, from the Facebooks, the Netflixes, and the Googles into Web3 is how do we prevent Web3 from just becoming Web2 again? And so yeah, this is, Project Galaxy is one of those tools in the toolbox of a Web3 marketer. that Google's not thinking of, right? Because they're Google or they're Web2. So this has been great. Any other things that we should talk about before we shut this down?

Yes. Also, another thing is stop spamming via email. I receive, and I think those might be because of the conferences, I guess they leak out the email lists a lot. And it's just, if you've sent me 3 emails in a row to shill a project or something, most likely I'm not reading. It's the 3rd email in 2 days. Um, I don't know, Tim and Charles, if you have the same thing, but it's, it's crazy. I feel like these conferences just leak all of our info and then we get spammed. And that is a turnoff for me personally.

That's gonna change. We're gonna change it. Yeah. So what, so you said there's, uh, what's the, where can we see Project Galaxy on the road? What are the, what are the big events?

Token2049, that is for sure. In Singapore, and then we'll go from, we'll go from there. I'm not sure. I think we're gonna skip Paris just 'cause we've hit everything else so far. But then after that, we'll keep you guys posted. I don't know, Charles, if you have any alpha on where we're going next, I would love to know as well.

Yeah, the next one is Token2049 in Singapore. Yeah, I don't know what's the, what's on the schedule, but I feel like after enough people start to show up less, in conferences. And I feel like it's a good time to really start to focus on building. You see, in the past 2 years, there are literally so many new conference names that pop up every day. Originally, it only had East Stanford. Now it has East everywhere. I live in a city called Cupertino, so I sometimes joke with my team, say, maybe someday we should host the East Cupertino. But yeah, that was a, yeah, we're only going to Singapore this year. That was the plan.

Okay. So you guys need to, I want to see photos on the Project Galaxy Twitter of the whole team eating durian. That's what I want to see. I want to see Project Galaxy durian fest.

Can maybe, can I give some alpha about what we'll be doing at Token2049, Charles? At the event? Oh, sure. Okay. Are you ready for the alpha? This might give other people ideas. So one thing that we wanted to really showcase— showcase, not show kiss. My goodness. I'm thinking of something else, I guess. Um, is to have people try out how easy it is to create campaigns on Project Galaxy. Um, Tim, I know you've tried it a few times, so we're actually going to have people create their own Oats on site. And basically these Oats, what will be kind of like business cards, right? So we're going to take a picture of the person, have them upload it, and then, uh, create their own Oat. with their contact information, whatever they want that to be, right? Obviously we don't, we're not, you know, leaking information 'cause this will be linked to a private QR code and they can share it who they want. But it's really about having people trying out and creating their own Oats very easily. So that is the alpha on what we're gonna be doing in Token24/9. So no one steal our idea. And if you wanna steal it, contact us. We can help you with your booth ideas. We can do that as well.

There was another thing that I saw at Permissionless that was really interesting. And that's like RFID claiming of OATs or something like that. Was that, is that a thing? And then there's, there's like, I don't know, is that—

Yep. We can,

rather than doing—

we can support that feature. Yes. Um, um, RFID, QR code, um, uh, or, you know, text messages. Um, now, um, I think, yeah, people will have a chance to try out the QR code and RFID. In Token2049, we'll bring it up to the community.

Well, thanks so much for joining us on the PoolTogether Community Podcast. Project Galaxy, we love you. You're such a great partner with PoolTogether. It's so great that you gave us an hour out of your day to share that alpha. Good luck in Singapore. This is gonna be awesome at Token2049. And Charles, thanks so much Thank

you. Love you guys.

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.