PoolTogether Community Podcast #32 with Optimism Deployoooors McOso and Kames

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 the Pool Together Community Podcast. I'm your host, Tim, aka Hot Mike, A-T-A-A-A-K-A, there we go. To dream the impossible dream. To go, I don't know the words to the song. And I'm here with Kames and two staunch pull together community members, contributors, and just all around good people. Welcome to the podcast, my friends.

Hey, hey, hey!

Yeah, hey! What a what an introduction.

Yeah, I don't got an intro like that, but I love it.

So I thought today, being being the day that pull together is. on Optimism and taking names, just climbing the charts right now. I thought, I thought we could talk about how we got here. Like, how did this even happen? So, so what are we at? We're at $13 million TVL on Optimism right now, which is over half of what AAVE's got. Over— so you can look at AAVE's numbers. AAVE right now has $23.35 million on Optimism TVL, and they're 4th, they're ranked 4th. Over half of that is thanks to PoolTogether. So, uh, Mikoso and Kames, you've, you've been a part of this deployment, so congratulations on the success. It's quite, quite impressive.

Yeah, yeah, thanks.

No, it's— go ahead, Kames.

I was just going to start by saying thanks for shouting us out, but it was a big group of people, you know, it was a lot of PoolTogether community, so I just want to say that.

Yeah, so let's, let's talk about that. How did it happen? How did we, how did we find ourselves as Pooltogethers, as poolers on Optimism?

Um, so if I remember correctly, I think it started with DrCPU. He originally had, um, like made a post on the forums and then brought it up in the Discord discussion because it wasn't— just for a little context, it wasn't something that Pooltogether Inc. at the time had, had put forward. It wasn't even on our roadmap. It wasn't on our thinking. So it started completely just from the community saying, hey, here's an opportunity, kind of let's go get it.

So you went for this opportunity. How did you go about going for it? How did you go get it?

I mean, from— okay, yeah, good point. I should just continue the story, right? Yeah, I mean, from there it just built up excitement. I think it was obvious to, you know, PoolTogether Inc. that like people wanted to do it. And then Brandon really rallied behind it. He saw that people were interested and he said, okay, let's go. And he said, um, all right, we'll spec it out, you know, because up until that point, PoolTogether Inc. had been primarily responsible for pushing to all the networks. We hadn't really publicized, you know, all that. Like, we didn't really push how to do it, you know, and, and show the community. So up until that point, it had just, just been us. Um, so we basically, we wrote out bounties that spec'd, uh, the different kind of verticals that you need to think about in terms of like deploying the contracts Setting up the indexers, pushing it to the front end. And then from there, we, we put it out on the, on the bounties channel. And it, I mean, I mean, I, you know, I was not assuming people would be so quick to jump on it, even with the excitement from the community, but instantly people just got on the tickets and signed up. And I think, I mean, Makosa could probably speak to that better because, you know, he helped deploy it and signed up for that bounty. So I'll hand it off actually.

Yeah, for sure. That's a, that's a good point, James. So James comes from the bounties team building the bounties and whatnot. So we wouldn't have gotten anywhere if we didn't have the bounties team to start. But then once I think the community ratified behind it, like the kind of the bounties being out there and when they were live on Dwork, personally saw that and I was like, oh, this is, this will be really fun. I like to contribute. I like pool together. I like optimism. Why not give a crack at this? Um, and so I just dove in and, and read the spec of the bounty, which was really, uh, well-written. So they made that pretty easy for the community as far as knocking out the tasks and whatnot. And it was really straightforward. They, so, so a lot of credit to the bounties team. They made it really easy to, uh, get involved and, um, start the work. And I think so a lot of us, well, I'll speak for myself. I'm, I was new to Dwork. I didn't know the process of Dwork, but they integrate really well into Discord and I was really excited. I think a lot of the community members were really excited. And so what ended up happening was I saw the work and pretty much like just started deploying it and like actually deployed the contracts to Optimism testnet before I was even like assigned that task, which, uh, we didn't even, we, we were all, all the community members were all excited. We didn't even know we were supposed to wait to be assigned to it or approved for it. You know, we just started knocking the work out. So I think we definitely had a lot of like, uh, wind in the sails and a lot of motivation to get this work done.

Start to finish, how long did it take?

I'll speak to that. I'll just speak to that a little bit, 'cause I'll just say, yeah, we put our, our estimate at like 2 months. And just, it was a really long time horizon. We didn't know, and it was a lot quicker. Yeah. I just want, so our deadline, yeah, we, we thought it was gonna be a lot longer, but because if you wanna speak to just kind of how quick it got, you know, put up.

For sure. So I was gonna say, I've never seen something move this fast before. Uh, it was like, in, it was like, to me, it was like on testnet in a week. It seemed like it could have been like longer, but it definitely seemed like that. And then there was complications. So we were planning on going to mainnet, but there was different outside events that we couldn't like synchronize behind, like NFT NYC. So there's stuff like that to even delay us more. But even with those, like Kame said, we deployed everything really fast and got everything live. Really fast.

Yeah, just to speak to that a little bit more, I think it was in about a month that, you know, we got up to speed, that the community kind of understood what the pull-together architecture was like, what are the pieces, you know, we use Defender, you know, we use Bridges. And yeah, just the speed, it was impressive to see the speed in which kind of the community rallied behind and to see all the communication. So it happened, yeah, really quick. And for the amount of information that needed to be processed, it's even more impressive, I think.

So what was the secret to getting the success, like, to getting everybody on board? Was it like offering tons of money for each of these bounties or what? Like, what do you think motivated people?

It's probably a mixture, right? Like, the bounties, I think, were pretty, you know, pretty, pretty well priced. So it was pretty competitive. But I think first and foremost, like, that was actually, in my opinion, maybe secondary. I think, you know, Under the Sea has led the charge in a lot of ways in my mind of just like getting people excited, rallying. And I didn't see him as motivated for money, nor do I see, you know, DrCPU and other core members. I think it's nice that, you know, we make that available, the bounties. But I think it was more of a motivation of just wanting to help the protocol, help it grow, kind of see this opportunity and do it and then, you know, get experience too for yourself. So I think it's a balance, obviously, of the money you want to pay people Well, but it seemed much more culturally aligned that people wanted it, in my opinion.

What's next then? Are, I mean, what are we going to Arbitrum next? Is that like 2 more weeks? Now you're going to do it in a week and a half.

So that, this is a funny story. So during this kind of like what some of the members would say, kind of like the, not a, it's not a delay of deploying to Optimism, but during that time, Under the sea and some of the DrCPU and some of the others kind of took it upon themselves just to take what they learned in the Optimism deployment and extend that to Arbitrum. And so they actually already deployed the contracts to Arbitrum testnet and they just took that upon themselves to continue that. There's actually a governance post that they posted about that in the forum about continuing that. I think that we kind of put the brakes on that because we do want to let the Optimism kind of deployment sink in. We have incentives, we want to market it, we want to do that. But yeah, they, I mean, expediency is definitely a keyword.

Oh, what's, I, so with Optimism, this is, this is really great to just see the, the snowball rolling? And obviously the Optimism rewards are huge, right? I mean, that's a big reason why people are depositing into PoolTogether. But what, what in your mind is the way to keep people in PoolTogether on Optimism even after the rewards are distributed? How do, how do we, how do we welcome them into their home, their savings home?

I'll speak to this one a little bit. So obviously, I think that the protocol in and of itself is very powerful. You know, we're all here familiar with the price savings concept. But I think for me, the real juice and the real, like, kind of, you know, rocket fuel for PoolTogether is actually more of like the community aspect, the people aspect, onboarding friends, bringing people onto DeFi. You know, I've spoken to you before, Hot Mike, about this, like the multi-delegator. So, you know, I think it's great to continue these incentives and bring people onto Optimism, but I think the real growth is kind of using these— the scalability that we now have to do the fun and interesting things we've been talking about for years, right? Which is building, bringing more people into the ecosystem, letting smaller deposits actually, you know, make sense economically. Um, and then, and I think build kind of these more interesting games, quote unquote, kind of on top of Pool together. So I think that's what optimism kind of brings, and that's personally what I'm excited for. But, um, yeah.

And Tim, I want to turn that around on you maybe to Give some insight into that question. I feel like you could speak well to that as well. And also a question for you, didn't you ha— didn't you take part in some sort of direct deposit onto Optimism, some app or something?

Meaning the fiat on-ramp?

Yeah.

Is that what you're talking about? Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so I did a little tutorial on how to use Juno if you're living in the United States to feelessly move, move money from your checking account into Optimism, both a little bit of ETH and USDC. It's really smooth. It was beautiful. It was really cool to make the tutorial because I was just impressed as I was, as I was doing it. Juno is a great product, so it was really fun. And yeah, I, you know, I really, I still think onboarding is very difficult. It's the main problem. It's the main challenge for crypto. And so I think that as we market, We're marketing to people who are in DeFi but haven't done pooled together stuff, or NFT people who are scared of DeFi. I think those are kind of like my two, in my brain, my two main business-to-consumer audiences that we're going after. And then I haven't solved the B2B part of it yet. I think a lot of communities, a lot of protocols hear multi-delegator and get really excited about it. They get really— yeah, On Juno is now Juno, Talus Guy. They've changed their name. But yes, that's it, Juno. But, but people love the idea of multi-delegator and it's just getting those first movers in to deposit. I think Optimism is actually a really great opportunity. Someone or a group of people in control of a lot of stables to move them into pool together. And have fun with it. Start delegating it to community members, contributors. There's so many different ways to do it. Delegate your prizes to causes, see what you can do with it. I think there's— we just need some people to get in there and start experimenting. So I've been having conversations with protocols. My most exciting one right now is with Guild.xyz. It would be really cool to integrate PoolTogether directly into Guild.xyz. when you're making these lists of roles for your Discord based on what NFTs or tokens people have, what if you could immediately have like delegate to that role through Guild.xyz? So I think the future for that is how do we get multi-delegator on other protocols and not make people come to us, but from Zapper or from a Guild dashboard, be able to use the tool right there. But that takes devs like you two.

I love that. That's a really exciting idea.

Yes, it does. But I just want to speak to that a little bit, just more, you know, because you talked about, you know, these big players depositing. And I would just want to say, I think that is ultimately one long-term benefit of Optimism. And like, not to shit on Polygon or say it's bad, but I think there's a lot of— like, a lot of whales maybe did not move their money over to Polygon, maybe because it did not share the security, you know, of the Ethereum mainnet chain, where this— that's what these rollups do. They inherit the security. Like, that's what Optimism will do eventually. You know, that's what Arbitrum does with their, you know, whitelisted addresses who can kind of submit these fraud proofs. You're inheriting that security. So I think eventually, you know, because that can be offered, some of it is more enticing to these bigger players. I guess right now we have these rewards, but eventually if we have a multi-delegator on Optimism and it inherits that security, I think that does signal to like big players that your money will be safe. It's Layer 2, therefore come and deposit. And so like, that's not right now the conversation happening, but I think it definitely can evolve towards that. Just to your point of like, how do we, you know, bring that, those bigger deposits here? I think that was kind of one showstopper on Polygon, that there was that ceiling because of that.

That is a really good point. And as a caveat, a quick caveat to that, we just had on Optimism pooled together $2.3 million deposit. So just to kind of correlate with what James is saying.

Yeah, there you go. There's one example. Yeah.

I bet you that wallet has some pulleys, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I get it.

So tell me, tell me what's the difference between, you know, why these rollups like zkSync, there's Optimism, there's Arbitrum, and then, and then you have like Avalanche and Polygon. Why are Optimism, Arbitrum the new frontier? Why is it— why are people more excited about those rather than maybe an Avalanche or a Polygon?

Yeah. So I think maybe the easiest talking point to kind of illustrate it is just like these new frontiers, as you put it, inherit, like fundamentally inherit their security from Ethereum mainnet as opposed to just using bridges, right, where you like lock up tokens and move it. And so what I mean by that is there's 2 flavors of these rollups. And it's like, it's in the name, right? There's optimistic rollups and there's like these ZK-proof zero-knowledge rollups. And the 2 differences, like optimistic usually has a long week, multiple weeks time horizon, but it's much easier to implement. Where these zero-knowledge proofs, you can basically submit a fraud proof within seconds, but it's much harder to implement because you need these Zero-knowledge, like logic operators. But it's this new frontier because you can submit these fraud proofs. You basically, you know, conduct all these transactions off-chain, but you can then prove like if someone's lying using Ethereum mainnet. They almost like wrote basically an EVM in the EVM, right? So it's like the smart contract can basically like— it's like it runs parts of the EVM. So I think that's kind of the easiest, or maybe that's not an easy way to think about it, but That's kind of, you know, how I think about it in terms of, you know, what are the benefits and what's a good way to reason about it.

So, Ryan, anything to add?

Yeah, nothing. James is awesome. James is the man. So yeah, that was really well said.

I had another question that was floating out there. So then riddle me this, because I think a lot of, a lot of hesitancy is in moving money and I'm all about reducing friction. So we have a prize calc website, which is Freaking killer from Ncookie. It's chef's kiss every time I see it. And there's a deposit button now. You can, you can figure out how the multi-delegator works for you as far as like you want to deposit $5 million over 52 weeks spread across 1,000 wallets and see how— what that could do for your community. But there's a deposit button right there. It'll take you right to the pool together to deposit that $5 million, or you can even multi-delegator tool. Like, I'm like, how do I make it less clicks? How can we make PoolTogether less clicks as far as moving money? And I know that Aave v3 has portals. Am I just dreaming that portals will solve that? You can keep your USDC on mainnet and then delegate elsewhere. Is that possible? Can the devs do something? Is that cliché? I shouldn't say that anymore. Listen, I'm sorry. That's like playing— that's like playing like a really annoying guitar lick in Guitar Center now. Saying don't do something. I apologize.

I feel like that's like Wagme. Wagme is getting there too. Like, God, okay. We played that one out.

Yeah, that was the hot week, a hot meme 2 weeks ago. Um, but yeah, so I mean, to answer your question, I, I think this is twofold because, right, like one, you mentioned this button clicking and like that stems from one PoolTogether Inc. building the core, like this core interface, and then a community builds it. Member building this tool because they, you know, they see a problem and people had asked for it, but they're not, they're not really integrated. So I think one thing moving forward is just, you know, DAOs have to figure out how to like make these tools that everybody builds more integrated. Because I think for us power users, it's okay, we'll kind of spend the time. It's like for your average user, I don't think they're going to do that, right? They're not going to hop around to these tools. So that's one, like we just need to I think spend the time to really figure out what are these optimal flows for new users. And then to your point is like, yes, I think the Aave portals and like, you know, Hop and these other bridge tools will eventually make it a lot easier. So you can just kind of click whatever button you want when you're on that single page that shows you all the information. So I think it really is twofold at this point. And I, you know, I think for many apps, but PoolTogether in particular, Because we're so, you know, user-focused. Yeah, it would really benefit from figuring out like those user flows of, okay, if I go to the calculator, what's the fastest way, you know, to deposit on Polygon and spending that time. So yeah, that's my long-winded answer.

Yeah, I think, I think Kames has 2 long-winded answers in a row, so you have to, you know, compete with him. You now need to have one.

Let me, let me tell a joke or something to at least, you know, like, no, I think like to Kames's

point— Now you have to tell a joke though. No, now you have to tell a joke.

God. Oh man. I'll come back to that, I promise. But real quick while I have it on my, while I have it on my head, like to James's point, like one example would be like these aggregators, like Zapper. Like if I can quickly get in, like what Tark shared in the chat is if I can quickly get in like one bet, one button and go zap into PoolTogether on Optimism, that's where we're going to have player flows. The other things is like, Like what Dharma used to do, which, RIP Dharma, but is one button straight to the bank, straight into pool together. Like if we could limit those flows, like what we, like what we were talking about, that will really help the, the player onboarding, the user onboarding, the depositors. If we can get rid of that friction.

That was good. Now the joke.

What did the ghost say to the bee?

Ooh, that's good. James, you got a joke?

I don't. I wish I could compete. Sorry.

So I was— I'm at trivia at this brewery next to my apartment. They do this thing. If you tie on one of the questions, you have to tell a joke. And so Karen, my wife, she— I always have stories that I want to tell. And she says that that doesn't count as a joke. You can't tell a story that's funny. You have to say a joke. So what is your opinion on that?

How long are these stories? Because, I mean, when someone says a joke, I think like a one-liner.

Oh, so you are— no, no, no, that's okay. I can make them pretty quick. But, but, you know, you know, it's like it's probably take 30 seconds to a minute.

30 seconds isn't bad. Is it like what this guy walked in the bar and that kind of stuff?

Yeah. No.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I don't want to tell that story because it's not appropriate, but like, So yeah, it's just basically like a funny thing that happened. And, you know, and it's, and it's got a zinger. It's got its own punchline. But my go-to joke is, how to— what do mathematicians do when they're constipated? They work it out with a pencil.

Yeah, that one's appropriate. But the other one's not.

Yes, actually. Yes.

I got to hear. So what's an example of one of these story jokes? Like, it got me really You piqued my interest.

Okay. All right, listen, I'll edit this out unless you guys tell me I don't have to. But so this is an actual thing that happened to me. I was in a group of people at a church event, actually, and we were introducing ourselves, probably like 40 people, and we were going around the room introducing ourselves. And I always, without fail, am asked to spell my last name, to spell my surname. My name is Tim Cox, and people say, People ask me how to spell my surname. So, I introduce myself as, hi. Of course, Smart Investor tells me to edit out the mathematician joke. So, I say, it comes to my turn, 40 people in this big conference room. And I'm like, hi, my name is Tim Cox. Please don't ask me how to spell my surname. And, you know, giggle, giggle, giggle. And then next to me, I'm done introducing and the person next to me is like, hi, my name's Virginia Cox. That's my joke. But that actually happened and I felt really— so what should I do at trivia? Should I tell the story or should I tell the mathematician joke or other or find something else?

I would say other or the story.

So that counts as a joke then? That would work, right? That's short enough for a joke.

That would work. I mean, you kept me engaged the whole time, so I would say yeah.

Okay. And I flail my arms and stuff IRL.

Oh yeah, the more movement, the better.

Smart Invest— Smart Investor, do I need to delete the story from the podcast though? Do you think I should? And Cames, now you need to tell us a joke. Cames is on like another community call right now.

I'm finding my mic. I don't have jokes, man. I'm not good on the spot like that. Sorry, I'd flop.

If you need like on-the-spot technical analysis, that's my boy Cames right there.

Yeah, I'm your guy, but a joke is not going to work.

Yeah, you're funny. Kames is funny. Kames is stylish. Kames has his own style. So if you get to meet Kames at a conference, everybody's zigging one way and Kames goes a different way with the fashion. It's very, it's very, it's like on brand. It's very interesting. So developers, my friends, I was so— I'm so enamored with the ability to ship that you had with this Optimism deployment. But it really feels difficult, or I feel like in this space, devs are very valued and you know you got to ship it. But for marketing, for marketing and for other things that are non-technical-ish, I feel like there's— it's more difficult. So do you have any tips, as you both are shippers, to somebody who's a non-dev to be able to ship in the DAO community environment in, say, marketing campaigns or other sorts of things? What tips do you have? For me in Web3.

So I actually maybe want to even speak a little bit just about the structure of the bounties, because we actually originally kind of discussed a way that we could try to encourage this. And I think next season that's going to be a big focus. So like right now we have this idea of basically passive and active bounties. So active were all the Optimism ones, like we had a very specific goal. Um, we need this outcome, please do it. But also what we started out with bounties was, was asking the question, um, how can we unlock pull-together growth? And then we just did another one yesterday, which was, hey, just make a video about what are you optimistic about in Web3, right? And that's this idea of a passive bounty. And so why I think we chose that route, so, you know, how, how I got into the space was through Gitcoin, like many, many years ago. And so before, you know, Gitcoin blew up and it was as big as it was today, it was really just Kevin and a few others. But I really just saw Kevin, he threw, I think, so many bounties against the wall that were very passive. It was just like, hey, make a meme or tell a story or just interpret kind of what's going on in your own way. And for me, I just saw that work really, really well to just get people excited, to get them motivated. And to kind of build the Gitcoin lore over time. And so, you know, I picked that up from, from Kevin and watching him be so successful was me. I think the marketing ones and anything like that, you have to really make it an invitation. And if you do the more complicated ones, it's a lot of handholding, right? Because anything large is just going to take, you know, coordination and management. But in my experience, the successful ones were always kind of that, that open invitation. Um, that did really, really well in my mind. Yeah, and to that note, we want to, you know, do more next season too. Final pitch. Go ahead.

We're in the next season now, or we're not with the bounties?

Yeah, so I think we're kind of— we're figuring out that right now. We just had our big retro 2 weeks ago. Tejark helped a lot with that. We did, you know, you were there as well, Mikoso. Um, and I think now we're just, you know, the seasons aren't really official in PoolTogether yet. Like, you know, they've been discussed and talked about, but Um, excuse me. So we're, we're just now kind of, I think, rolling into season 2 of the bounty. So yes, things are getting started now, but we gotta kind of ramp them up. So long story short, yeah, we're focusing on that, that now kind of things are getting ready.

Friends of Pooley, friends of Pooley.

That's definitely gonna get more contributors.

So, uh, what else should we talk about? Because I could go, we could keep going. I, I would love to hear more about, um, Friends of Pooley and nouns. And just what's going on, what, what else is going on in your building lives? Build.

Yeah, that'd be fun. So with the Noun stuff, the, the Friends of Pooly Discord, which if anyone listening's not in, we're just like some community members who might own Poolys. You don't have to, to get involved, but most do. And we're just trying to come together and possibly create a community and create a DAO maybe, and that kind of stuff and just trying to get the feelers out and build and see what happens. And we submitted a frontend proposal for the Nouns, 'cause the Nouns had this like Prop House round of 4 people getting rewarded for their proposals and we submitted it. And long story short, we didn't win, but it was really cool coming together as a community, Making that proposal, Kames did a lot of heavy lifting. And so, what's next? Like, what's next in store? And I want to just plug before I forget, we have our biweekly Friends of Pooly Pooly DAO meeting tomorrow, 9 AM Eastern in the Pooly, the Friends of Pooly Discord. So join us.

What is Friends of Pooly trying to do?

Good, good question. I think we're

good.

Yeah, we're good question. It's in the process of figuring it out. I think the hypothesis a little bit right now of just, you know, I think how do we replicate the success that Pooled Together Inc. had with their NFT campaign? You know, if I look at that, I think there was a lot of things that went really right in a lot of ways, just some of the basics, right? Just the tiers and the month and the timing. And then I think, you know, what you referenced, you know, Hot Mike, was this Nouns project that we unfortunately did not win, right? We submitted the proposal, we ended up in like 7th or 8th. So out of the money, but you know, the thinking was, I think Nouns, what they do really well is they, they hit the top level tier, which was like sponsors, right? They're selling these really, uh, high-priced NFTs every day, once a day. And for me, I kind of matched that to what we did with our judges, right? It was like this really high, high-priced NFT, 75 ETH, close to what, you know, Nouns are doing. So I look at Nouns and like I see that they're, they're hitting that market really successfully, that, that model works. And our model worked really well, I think, for like the base and the supporters. You know, a lot of the, the Pooley NFT campaign, that's where a lot of the funds came from. And I think that was, you know, a lot from signaling from Lens and a few other and from Bankless and like really using, uh, the social network to help. But I think, you know, those 2 models, what's interesting about them is that they cover kind of both ends. And I think for me, what's interesting and what could be done maybe is kind of combining the, this, the 2 to have a public goods platform. So like other projects in the future who may be going through a similar situation can kind of have an off-the-shelf Friends of Poolie ready-to-go kind of app that lets you do something similar, right? You have a— it's like a Kickstarter for a public goods in a way, but using these models that I think exist. That's kind of the ideas that have been rattling in my mind and about what we can do with, you know, Friends of Poolie and what happened with, you know, the nouns, which we didn't get, but I'm still going to, you know, I think rally hopefully to build more around that. But yeah, that's the, I think some of the thinking so far.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And perhaps if anyone, if you join the talk tomorrow, the community call tomorrow, you get more in-depth insight into where we're possibly headed or what we might kind of Stand up next, who knows? But yeah, the, the real end goal, I think, for Pooly DAO, Friends of Pooly, that kind of stuff, is to be this all-encompassing kind of like defender of DeFi. And we kind of ratify and go to anyone who's, any protocol or any DAO that's kind of facing legal trouble or needs help, that kind of stuff. The, DeFi defenders, the pooly supporters will be there. You know, that's kind of the endgame that I would like to get to. Now, how we get there is more like what James was talking

about. Defenders of DeFi. What is a public good? People talk about public goods all the time. What's your definition?

It's a good one. I actually looked this up the other day because I wanted a reminder, but I think the keyword that I use or latch onto is non-rivalrous. So it's like, you know, a resource that everybody can use that, you know, everybody benefits from. And yeah, by all contributing to it, it's like you don't all lose. And so I think there's a— there's other really good definitions, but that keyword for me sticks out, non-rivalrous, in terms of when I think of like, you know, a public good on-chain. I

think hot mic's a public good.

That's so sweet of you. I recently referred to it as touching grass. I'm not saying that this is what a public good is, but I think this is what crypto needs to do and Web3 in general. Touching grass generally means go outside and stop looking at a screen. But when I say Web3 or crypto needs to touch grass, I'm saying that it needs to connect with the real world and real life. And that does— that means not everything is like financialized. So how do we actually, you know, have real-world integration? It's not something, you know, I know this is like a common challenge that we're all trying to work through. But as soon as we make more and more difference IRL, I think that then Web3, one, it has to be more accessible to have like IRL innovation and good happening. But yeah, I like that. I like the thing I just forgot you said, Kamesh, which is non-competition, non-competitive. What is it? Non-rivalrous, adversarial.

Non-rivalrous. Yeah, I can't even say it well, but yeah, that's the word. I think it was in Scott— was it one of Scott Moore's articles, or I believe one of Kevin's, uh, just about what is a public good. But, um, yeah, they probably have much better ways of describing it than I ever could.

So we all— we always like to talk about what are your predictions on the podcast. I always like to, to ask guests to predict the future, and, and certain people attend and listen just to— just for that alpha. And there is alpha in the podcast. I'm proud to say there is some really good advice. It's not financial advice. No, there's no financial advice here. But what are you thinking, Ryan? What are you thinking, James, about the future of 2022 and the slump that we're in with the market, this deep slump? What can we look forward to? What are you excited about? What are you watching?

Ryan, go ahead.

I'm so bad at this. Yeah. Tim asked me this last time. I'm like, I don't know, man. I'm just worried about today. I, you know, I'm really excited about the— so one thing, I had a talk with some college kids today and one of the things that we got on a tangent of is like how amazing the communities are in DeFi and how there's like this like fellowship or, you know, like there's this camaraderie, you know, that you can't really get anywhere else. So I mean, that's active today, so that's not really like a future-looking thing, but that was just on the top of my mind that I really enjoy about Web3 and DeFi and that kind of stuff is just having this kind of like fellowship in the communities and whatnot. Now, what I'm looking forward to is like Tames is working on, well, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but hey, this Web3 citizen stuff and this, like these DIDs, and I'm really excited about where that's going to end up and where like decentralized identifiers are heading towards and how they can be used and how they can be extended and how DAO structures will be implemented and better kind of refactored and whatnot. One thing I was looking at was like exploring more of that Orca protocol, the pods and whatnot. And I know LynxDAO is kind kind of implementing a version of the pods with their contributors. So something that kind of energizes me is like the structuring of DAOs and then how can we implement that on-chain kind of thing. So yeah.

How do I sign up? Because I'm here now, this Web Citizen, Web3 Citizen thing, and it's asking me for a delegation and an invocation.

Yeah, you have to be—

And then it says claim citizenship.

You have to be invited. Why

am I not invited? Why are you guys keeping me out of this?

You didn't, you didn't retweet.

This is not very— this is very non-rivalrous of you.

Yeah, it's, it's the first experiment.

Sorry, Kames. Yeah, I probably wasn't supposed to say anything, so.

Oh no, it's all good. It's all public. It's all good. Um, you'll have to retweet though next time, Hot Mike, and, uh, get on the list, the early beta.

Oh, there we go. Okay. All right.

Get on the early beta access. Um, Yeah,

notifications on.

Yeah, yeah, there you go. Gotta get the alpha that way. Um, yeah, just, just to that point, I'm, I'm similarly excited for all of that, but I, I think for a couple of reasons. I think one, the general trend— like, there's two, there's the technical side of it and then the more application side. But one, I think the trend is moving towards, um, stateless kind of architectures. And so what I mean by that is like you have stateless clients that are part of the merge where it's like you don't manage the entire history of the blockchain. You kind of just manage the state that you need and then you can consume the data that way. And then Optimism is another great example of where it's like all the state is kind of off-chain, but then you use the main chain as kind of just to identify stuff or to verify the cryptography. And so this idea of like state living off-chain but using it, but then using on-chain contracts to verify, I think is going to be a bigger and bigger trend. And I think You know, the next kind of one, as Ryan mentioned, is this idea of DID, so decentralized identifiers. And I think you saw, you know, Aave take a big bet with Lens in terms of like, okay, we're going to do identity on-chain and we're going to be— everything's an NFT and you got to pay for everything. Whether that bet plays out, I don't know. But like, I'm seeing a trend towards where it's like statelessness. And I think, you know, decentralized identifiers that root themselves on Ethereum mainnet, right? Like with your public key or maybe a smart contract, but a lot of the data lives off-chain, um, but then can be verified on-chain, is probably going to be in my mind a big trend for the, the next year or so, just because, you know, gas prices are going to get more expensive. Cross-chain is here to stay. Like, data is going to live cross-chain. So if my social is just on Polygon, but I want to go do things other places, It's a real showstopper. And so I think, how do we figure out like what's seamless between these chains, right? And how does that work? I think a lot of that's going to look off-chain. So my big prediction is one, obviously, like DAOs and DIDs. I think that'll be the application level, but just more towards this trend of architectures using this statelessness idea will kind of be the winners. And these people who put everything on-chain probably will not. And just to like one more example of this, I think is LlamaPay. So LlamaPay has a really interesting architecture where they use their events, they emit events, and then they use the data in the events to basically prove that you have a stream on-chain. That's different from like, say, Superfluid or Sabler, where all the data is on-chain, but it's more expensive. And so here's this app that's using this really novel way to basically like, you know, prove some event happened on-chain, but not really have to store that data on-chain. And so that's this idea of statelessness and then, you know, verifying data. So I think we'll just see a trend towards that in multiple layers of the architecture, both on like the low-level protocol and then apps as developers start to understand, I think, more of this complexity, which, because it's really hard to do like this off-chain state verification and then submitting it back on-chain as a proof, it's just like, you know, super complicated. But I think as more people get comfortable with that, the natural trend will be towards apps that kind of So I know that that's a long-winded answer, but that's just from the dev side. That's kind of, you know, what I see forecasting into the future.

But Vitalik said that the future is multi-chain, not cross-chain, specifically because of security. Right. So why is everybody just doing what Vitalik says not to?

I mean, I don't know if he has all the answers, but yeah, I think people just have to make bets today. You got to build today and then maybe evolve for tomorrow. Like, that's in my mind. Maybe that's what Optimism is doing, right? Because Optimistic rollups were the fastest way to get to market. ZK rollups are harder. I don't know the market, but you have to deal with reality and then, you know, pragmatism and then, you know, what you want to do. So yeah, I think that's just the best answer.

Well, I don't understand like how— I mean, what is multichain? I know what multichain is, meaning like you're on different chains, but you still need them to talk to each other, which means that you go into cross-chain. Is there a way to do multichain where they're able to interact with each other?

Yeah, so I mean, this is all kind of new language and it's even confusing for myself, honestly. But like, the best way I think about it, like right now PoolTogether is multi-chain because we generate a random number on Ethereum mainnet and push that out to the sidechains and the L2s, right? So they require data from our mainnet and that it's multi-chain. Whereas like cross-chain is maybe just I launch Uniswap on L1 and L2 and and they don't communicate with each other. So I think depending if your app needs that type of complexity, yes, you will need that, what's considered like multi-chain, right? Where it's like that data dependency, as opposed to cross-chain where I'm just like replicating the protocol. And to be honest, I don't totally know at all really what that's gonna look like, but I know that's kind of how people are starting to think about that.

Okay, well, we've come to the end of our time 'cause I'm out of questions, but I don't know if you have anything else we wanna talk about. Maybe thinking about the whole point of this was like, hey, PoolTogether is on Optimism now. It's awesome how it happened because it happened through these bounties. We were able to spin it up real fast. Apparently Arbitrum is in the wings, which is really exciting as well. You know, we thought through how do we keep people on Optimism? How do we promote this thing? How do we keep growing PoolTogether? on all of the chains, all of the layers. What else, what else is needed? Here you go. Here's a question from the chat. What else do we need to scale PT? And by PT, I mean pull together.

Brian, I've done enough long answers. Do you want to take one?

What do we need to do to scale PT? Oh man, I don't know. Just, that one's a doozy. I do want to mention real quick, I don't know if we dove into like, or mentioning for people listening, the Optimism incentives and rewards and OP tokens. So I just want to highlight that one.

Yeah, explain that. What's, what's going on with those?

Yeah, so, so we were awarded these OP tokens for PoolTogether depositors on Optimism. And so we were rewarded, I, I feel like we were rewarded 450,000 OP tokens over the course of certain, a certain timeline. But right now we're just releasing, I think it's like 100,000 tokens for the first month or 2. And then we are, there's a snapshot vote actually, I think it's still going on. It's definitely a forum discussion on governance to create a separate kind of like prize team who's gonna be in charge of allocation and prize distribution and that kind of stuff. a more agile team, a team of probably, I think it was like 5 core contributors, 4, 5 community members. So they're going to be in charge of kind of like adjustments and that kind of stuff. So, but the total amount we got was 450,000 OP tokens. So those are active right now. Those are active as of Yesterday, I think, or the day before. So those are active right now, and anyone who's deposited in PoolTogether protocol on Optimism is eligible for those rewards. So I'm looking at my rewards right now and there's, they're already, I already can claim some OP tokens. Super exciting.

That's great.

Yeah. So claim,

this is great. Claimable on Tuesday. So once a week, every Tuesday.

Is that how it's working? Every Tuesday? Shouldn't it be continuous?

Once a week.

Oh, interesting.

No, no, no, we're doing once a week. Yeah. And I've already got, uh, I don't want to brag or anything, but I got 4 OP tokens already, 4.47. So that's gonna up my vote in the governance.

Nice.

Oh man, I love that.

Um, but I actually really want to answer this question, uh, Hot Mike, because I think this is actually highly related to, you know, work that you've done in the past. So, you know, the question of how do we scale the protocol or how do we scale PoolTogether? So for me, I think a little bit of like the protocol is pretty good, right? We— it's available now, everybody can claim that, that's, that's fine, that's working. But I think, you know, the work that you did in terms of like reaching out to Ledger and reaching out to these other DAOs and these other NFT projects and making it interesting to basically gamify pool together where they deposit in the— into the protocol and then they can delegate, you know, I think we differ on, on how much or to who, you know. I think they should do a little more individual. I know you've talked about to everybody, but regardless, I think, you know, if you have these organizations kind of deposit and then gamify being part of their community, whether it's an NFT or a DAO, and you get, you know, given, you know, half a million dollars chance for, you know, a couple of weeks or a week or whatever it is, you know, that's a pretty big incentive to, I think, get involved in a DAO or an NFT project. And I think, you know, for me, PoolTogether has that opportunity. To be that layer on top of like many other kind of coordination efforts and have it be a big no-loss kind of incentive, right? Just continue with that focus. And so for me, I really see the growth next being this product level and really kind of, I think, focusing on kind of that work you've done and building out those partnerships and those protocols and showing them kind of what can be done with that. And I think for me, that's how we, you know, get the next $50 million or Or the you know maybe even the next hundred million. I don't know, but yeah, definitely. I think the easiest next step is that

billion

one billion.

I love how I've I've really tricked you both in here so that I can just ask you all my pull together questions. So if you look at this page tools.pulltogether.com, you've got the beautiful deposit delegator button, but then right below it is something that's been grayed out for a long long long long time, but now it's up and active. It's these promotional rewards. Do explain what this button does. What is this? Right now there's no interface for claiming promotions, but what can I do with these new promotions?

Yeah, this uses the, the TWAB rewards, right, Kamesh?

Yes, I believe that is the case. Yes.

Yeah, for sure. So you can create your own promotion and put in like the token you want to distribute and it's based on The time-weighted average. So it's like if you have your tokens deposited over the course of a month, that's going to get more rewards than, say, a larger deposit that's only been deposited for 2 days. I mean, it would depend on how large that deposit is, but that's the general kind of theory of the TWAB rewards. And it can be any ERC-20 token. As well, as far as I understand. So that's actually pretty cool. I didn't, I didn't even know that was not grayed out anymore. So that's pretty cool.

So anyone can come. And so does this mean we're going to get spammers now? So like anybody can spam poolers with like, with their coins or how would, how would like Trains of the Century use this? Or what are some ideas for, for protocols or people to use this?

Yeah, this would be really cool. So say instead, I want to do an airdrop to just random people or something, I can then do this kind of like TWAB delegation, TWAB rewards over this kind of promotional PoolTogether kind of thing, just like how the OP rewards are done, the Optimism rewards. So instead of me having this airdrop, this random airdrop or something, I can bring that to PoolTogether and PoolTogether can become this kind of We are the protocol to distribute tokens and the best way to distribute tokens as well. So there would be a pretty good market fit for that in all of Web3, I think. I think we could get it to that point.

Yeah, it's like rewarding savers. You're, you know, hey, these are the fiscally responsible ones. the recovered degens, right? And so we want to, we want to, we want to encourage them in their, their recovery from being degens. And so we will shower them with our tokens. But in the chat, there needs to be like some sort of approval going on, or, uh, and we're not being able to do this with, uh, with NFTs right now. It's only tokens, right? You said ERC-20?

That's how I believe.

Yes.

Okay, cool. All right, but I'm sure that we can improve upon this and do other things, but this is exciting. So that That time with a balance. And it's right now— excuse me— I think you can pick your chain too. So it's on Optimism, Polygon, Ethereum, or Avalanche, anywhere PoolTogether is. And you can create a promotion right now. No one can claim it yet, but you can at least get it, get it started. This is exciting. It's the future of pool.

It really is. Yeah.

Okay. Well, thanks, Ryan. Thanks, James, for coming on the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm so pumped about Optimism. I just— those numbers are astounding to see. the growth of PoolTogether within a couple days and the fact that we were able to get that spun up real fast. I'm excited about the future of Arbitrum. I'm excited about this, this thing that Kames is doing with the Web3. What is it called? Web3. I got it. Citizenship. I'm excited to be a citizen and I'm always excited about trains of the century. So thanks for coming on.

Boys. Hey, thanks, Tim.

Yeah, thank you. Happy to.

This was good. That was, that was fun.

That was great.

Okay, now let's all work on our, let's work on our jokes for next time.

Deal.

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.