PoolTogether Community Podcast #34 with Josh from Opolis

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, and this is your boy Tim, aka Hot Mike, aka I Call Seltzer spicy water. And I'm here with Joshua from Opalus. Josh, thanks for being here today with us.

Thanks for having me. What's your favorite flavor of spicy water?

I don't— well, I always go for black cherry, but I don't think I've discovered it yet. What I really want is like a spicy, like a spicy marg, uh, bubble seltzer, like a non-alcoholic spicy marg seltzer. That's what I would do. What about you?

Yeah, I also go for black cherry. Man after my own heart right there.

Do you do that? What's your brand? Who are you sponsored by?

LaCroix.

Nice.

And I hate, I hate grapefruit. I can't eat it. I don't like grapefruit juice. But Pamplemousse is my favorite flavor of LaCroix. I can't explain it.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Remember there was like that time when you found out about LaCroix and you called it LaCroix?

No. But yes, I do remember. Because people were like correcting us. They're like, no, it's pronounced LaCroix. It's like, no, no, I think it is.

That's right. Oh, pronunciation. Well, hey, we have a cool origin story. At least I think it's cool. We met in West Palm Beach, Florida, my hometown. And we met at Permissionless. And I was in a bathing suit and a Hawaiian shirt wrapped in a pulled-together towel. And you asked me for the shirt off my back. And I said, I'm not allowed to give this shirt to you. But I gave you a towel instead. But you really wanted the shirt. Props to you for the persistence. And, and then like, you know, and then, and then we like connected on Telegram. And now you're on the podcast. That's how it went. What's your side of the story?

That's how I remember it as well. I don't remember being that persistent. What was the shirt you were wearing? That I would have wanted that badly.

It was obviously wasn't memorable. It was a purple Hawaiian shirt and it—

Oh, I do remember it. Yeah, it was like a special, like, staff one you guys had for the conference.

But on the back it says like, go to winmoneydaily.com to see how you can win $10,000. And I, and I had like a 13-year-old girl at a climbing gym come up to me and ask me about it. And I was like, you have to have an NFT. And she's like, ah, never mind, and walks away.

That's funny. I didn't know that that was your hometown. I actually, I was born in Chicago, but I grew up down in like Boca.

Oh, my dad was a firefighter in Boca. I grew up in Wellington. Nice.

Cool. Yeah.

Now where are you? If you can tell me, we can delete it if you want.

No, I'm not an anon. We— so right now I'm in Toronto actually at ETH Toronto and the Futurist Conference.

Yeah.

So they're, they're doing the presentations right now on like who the hackathon winners are going to be. So I'm pretty excited to see what comes out of that. They had, I think, like 5,000 people attend this conference.

Wow.

That's good numbers. Yeah, it's been a, it's been a great conference so far. I actually live in the Dallas area.

Okay, I've heard of it. Do you— you're such a Chad for being on the, on the podcast during the conference. Like, you commit, you commit to something and then you stick with it and you show up.

You know what? You booked me first.

That's a good pod— pull together podcast shirt. You booked me first. You had me, you had me come on my podcast. Okay.

Yeah, we decided to announce— well, so Opulus is here at ETH Toronto because we're announcing that we're going to be going live in Canada January 1st. And so we're collecting interest, but we didn't decide to go to Canada until after we'd booked this. And, um, I keep my appointments.

That is also—

I really wanted to be here.

Yeah, well, no, thank you for that. But that congratulations on that. That's like a whole nother country. Congratulations. Wow. Yeah, we are.

We are doubling our country size. That's I mean that's great.

I see the vision. I see the vision. And one of the things that we did actually was we when when we when we I love this is when you you're like hey listen, I will use the pull together multi-delegator tool with Opalus. And we will like delegate if you give me that shirt. And I was like, I should have given him the shirt. So I will totally mail you a shirt, Josh, if you, if you multi— if you delegate to Opalus people, Opalus users, some exorbitant amount of money. That'd be awesome. Cool. The deal's still on, right?

You lost me, but sure. Yeah.

I sold you. So PoolTogether is a price savings account. You know this, you're OG PoolTogether Discord member. You know, we, we have fun saving and winning. And but what you can do is you can put, uh, like you can put your stables, like a treasury could put their USDC into pool together and then delegate all the prizes to their community or to certain members of the community to encourage such behavior or to encourage loyalty or to reward whatever, uh, or to give to a cause or something like that. So like Opulus, you got, you got people you want to reward, right? And you've probably got some stables. Absolutely. You're going to Canada and You gotta have stables for Canada, so put them in the pool and then delegate them to your peeps.

That is, that is certainly a thing that we could do. Yeah.

That's good. I like that. Yeah, I feel affirmed and you didn't commit to anything. It's great. I love that.

Um, yeah, well, so I've been, I've been enjoying PoolTogether since like V1. Um, I'm also a steward of ETHDenver where PoolTogether is from, so like I'm always going to be on Team PoolTogether. So

dude, you're like a, you're like a SporkDAO treasurer.

That is, yes, one of my titles. So my job is—

Yeah, go ahead, tell me. Can you, can you tell me your origin story with crypto and all your titles?

Yeah, it's like Daenerys. There's a— I have a funny tweet somewhere in the, in the last year that was like, it's just because you get— you, you're in all these different communities and you get these weird titles from each of them. Like, in DAO House, I was a Paladin, and in Raid Guild, I was a Hunter. And so it's just, you just like list all these titles. It's like Hunter of Raid Guild, Paladin. It's First of His Name. Yeah. So I wanted to build a decentralized rideshare. That was the thing. And where did that idea come from? I was working at Lyft. And watching, you know, uh, well, I, I met thousands and thousands of drivers through, through my job and lots of complaints about the amount of money that the companies were taking. And then, you know, back in those days it was closer to 25%. And then Uber and Lyft figured out that if you— the drivers are gonna make the same amount, they're gonna stay on the road regardless. But if you just start charging passengers whatever you want, they're still gonna pay it. So the drivers are still getting paid a fixed Dollar per, dollar per mile and dollar per— but that was no longer correlated to what passengers were paying. So passengers could pay $50 for a ride, a driver could walk away with $15, and that's not the company taking 25%, that's the driver ending up with only 25%. Um, so I'm like, all right, this is terrible. Um, I met this guy Tommy who was building Chaser. Out of Austin, which was a for the OGs in the room, a thing that came out of a fork of Arcade City, which was the first kind of. We don't need to get into the politics of why that didn't work. But he we we met and he tells me his idea and I was like, "This isn't gonna work. None of this is gonna work. You guys don't understand rideshare." And so he's like, "All right, well let's talk about it." So We kept meeting and he like brought me into the community and I was like, all right, let's, let's write a white paper. So I wrote this white paper, um, and about how a decentralized rideshare could work from like the rideshare perspective. And I showed it to a few people and they're like, yeah, this is— you understand rideshare, but you don't understand crypto. You should, you should like take a ConsenSys Academy class or something. Um, so I took the class. And I understood, I mean, I figured out that I didn't really understand anything before. It was a huge leap forward in education, understanding like how Ethereum, just Ethereum blocks work and like how tokens, and there was this new token standard. And like when we, when we started, when we started building this, like Uniswap didn't exist. It was, the questions were like, how do you get people who are, how do you get the network size to be big enough? To where, you know, people from the 0x community and people from the Stellar community could like spend the tokens that they have on rideshare. So it's like instead of using fiat, and it was like, no, drivers aren't going to work for a volatile thing. Nobody wants to pay $5 for their commute today and $50 for their commute tomorrow if there's volatility in the markets. Man, this is a rabbit hole I haven't been down in a long while. So, hot mic, I answered your question in a very—

I'm getting so many different, like, good subtitles for this episode. This is what we're all about, is having guests go down rabbit holes that they've not been down in a while.

I appreciate it. So, shit, where are we? We're at the point where basically Lyft, my job was being moved. The, um, they basically said to us, your department can't exist after the IPO, so you can find another job at the company or, you know, put it before off. Um, and so I was, you know, I've— they offered me $105K to sit on a desk in San Francisco, and I'm like, I'm not. I asked some people who in this crypto stuff was getting real interesting, and my friend Jacob was like, no, don't do that. Like, come work at ConsenSys. So I ended up at ConsenSys. 6 months later, I have the same conversation. You can find another job at the company.

Yeehaw.

Fuck off. It was much nicer. It was, you could, you can go with the team that you're going, that you're on, or you can try to find another job at the company. I was not successful, but this is February 2020. This is like one of the great cullings of ConsenSys. Oh, we gotta bleep out the F? Sorry. All right, I'll stop swearing. That's

news to me. I didn't even know that. Okay, that's cool.

Okay. Yeah, I should have asked before.

No, it's all right. Oh, I didn't know what to tell you. And plus I have editing. I have computers. I have softwares.

Oh, so this isn't— we can edit out the bad stuff? Oh

yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I use Descript. Shout out Descript. It's like it turns it into a document and then I can just find when you say things. And then I'm going to do like, remember Craig Ferguson? The late night host.

Oh,

for his, he would go like he would have like someone like he would always do unique bleeps for every time he cussed. It was so good. We'll do that.

Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. All right. I'm on board. That sounds fun. Yeah, we can turn this like long meandering 5-minute story into a crisp 45 seconds.

Well, no, the other thing, the other secret I do is I delete any word, any gaps that are longer than a second. So it speeds it up, you know? So like any pause you take will be gone and it'll look like you just threaded together this brilliant story without any thinking. It's so good.

That's— yeah, thank you. You're gonna make me sound much smarter than I am. So I heard somebody told me, this is about 3 weeks ago, for the first time I learned this, um, Gen Z doesn't like Google stuff. When they need to look something up, they YouTube it. And then they watch the YouTube video of the answer they're looking for at like 1.7 to 2x speed. I'm like, this is some like big brain shit. Like, what? They don't Google things. And now, now the kids are TikToking and they search on TikTok. That's just wild. I saw— I just say this, sound like I'm old. I'm like 32, which is not, it's not super old. Like when I say that to anybody else, they're like, no, you're not old. And like in crypto, it's like I'm a grandfather. All right. Where, where are we in the story?

Consensus. Consensus. You had to either leave or you could stay and find a new job. But about YouTube, listen, I actually think that's wrong. I think Gen Z is wrong. You don't search YouTube, you search Google and YouTube results show up in your search results. But why would one do that?

No, that's what we do because we're millennials. They literally just go to YouTube and search.

Yeah, but I want— there's better answers outside. Whatever, that's fine.

Well, because we know how to read. It's like, you know, it's—

Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yes. I do listen to stuff on 2x, uh, all my, all my audio stuff. But yeah, okay, continue.

I've, I've, I've gotten there. Um, it took me a while. I'm listening to Snow Crash on Audible right now, and like, it's just his pauses, they're just long. And so I was like, all right, I wanna— I'm gonna try this 2x thing. And so I started at 1.2, 1.3, 1.4. I've been working it up. I actually, I listen at 1.6 right now. I'm getting used to it. Yeah. Yeah, dude.

Snow Crash is such— I love the audio. I mean, I haven't read the audiobook. So parts of Williamsburg are Snow Crash to me because I'm riding my Citi Bike around Williamsburg, Brooklyn, listening to Snow Crash. And so now when I like drive through it, I get that Snow Crash vibe. Such a great— it's a must-read. Snow Crash is must-read, everyone. Okay, continue.

It's funny that like when you said Williamsburg, like I'm thinking that you're just like in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Like, it didn't even cross my mind that you could be living in New York.

I've got my pantaloons on. Yeah, my chalky wig. Okay.

Yeah, you walk around Colonial Williamsburg with like an Ethereum shirt on, it's like, this isn't, this isn't right for the period.

No, no, we're staying with the ADD-ness of this. I seriously wear my Opulous shirt all over Brooklyn.

Yes, I do. Yeah, it's— I'm sure it's a good— it's a good style for their—

it's the stained glass window.

Stained glass window. Yeah.

Dark gray shirt. Yep. And yeah, I'm waiting for somebody to, to note it, to be like, yo, what's up? But everybody's still like not crypto in Williamsburg, really. It's all big tech still.

Yeah. So there's like, um, and this is a— this is another interesting thread to pull on of like, do you like— how loud do you want to be when signaling to just like random like normies on the street? Like, you don't want to put a target on your back, like with the giant orange shirt. It's like Bitcoin is like, I mean, those are obnoxious, but, um, where like I, I wear a PoAP on my hat. It's, it's, it's an Ethereum PoAP and it's a, it's an old one. It's one of the pins that Patricio had made like back in, like he gave me it in 2020 at ETHDenver actually. Um, but it's like, it's a really subtle nod. Like most people are like, oh, it's just a thing on a hat. But, but then like some people will be like, oh, hey man, that's, that's Ethereum. And then they'll ask me about Ethereum and a layer deeper than that, someone who's like, they know, and this is somebody that I want to be friends with. And I make a point to trade info and be like, we're friends now. It's when they're like, hey, is that a PoAP? Yes, it is, my friend. Yes, it is a PoAP. And like at the bank, uh, in an elevator once, it's just, it's great meeting people out on the Like in that, like, little subtlety on the streets.

Well, see, right there you actually went from like, I don't know if you want to broadcast that you're into crypto, to I love it when people reach out to me because of crypto.

Yes. Yeah, it's a different brand of person. Like, it's a signal. It's a signal-to-noise, like, filter where if you, you know, if you, if you put the word Bitcoin or the word Ethereum or the word crypto on your shirt, it's like very easy. So anyone can read that, be like, oh, I know this crypto stuff. Should I buy Doge? But like no one's looking at a PoApp, and like if they don't know, they don't know. But if they do know, they do know, and they're not going to ask you about Dogecoin or Shiba or whatever the hell. Yes, it's a deep cut signal. Thank you, Taliskay.

Nailed it.

Is that? Did I get that right on the first try?

Yeah, you did.

Yes.

I mean, I mean, you you stuttered when you first said it, and then you said it wrong, but then you quickly recouped, and you were fine. But also, I thought you were saying that you don't want to broadcast it because you'll get wrench attacked. That's why I thought— no, you just didn't want the tourists. You didn't want the crypto tourists.

Yeah, I'm under—

who knew where the pizza was?

Yeah. Yeah, you can hit me as many times as you want. I don't know where my keys are. Like, it's fine. You can have my hardware wallet. There's nothing you can do with it. That wasn't a challenge. Like, don't come and like wrench me. Like, you just be hitting me a bunch of times. You're not getting anything from it.

Yeah. Yeah, see, I don't— I haven't figured out because I'm laughing, but I'm on mute because I don't want to like talk. I don't want to laugh over you with the kind of— no, definitely.

No, I am laughing. The give and take. Good.

Okay. Okay. So back to Consensus.

Yeah, it's 2020, February. I was, I was kind of not like depressed, but I was like really down. I was like, I was— I'm really getting into this industry. I'm getting a feel for it. I was doing BD for Panvala. which was the first like grants-giving DAO. They're still around. They're still doing some great stuff with stamps. We actually have an Opulus stamp out for referrals. But I didn't want to stay with the team because I wanted to build decentralized rideshare. So like they were my way into ConsenSys. They were my way to like learn Web3 more. Like my second week on the job, I get dumped into like DevCon 5 was happening. And so my second week on the job, I'm in Osaka. Like meeting all these historically very important people who are just like hanging out, walking around. Like, like Afso was one of the first people I met, Alex Vandasanda, and like just the nicest guy. And like then you go, you read the books and you're like, this guy was really important at the time. I had no idea who he was. I walked up to the Ave booth and was just like casually chatting with Stani. And then like I have a, I have a Telegram chat from way back then was like, hey, remind me, like, what was your— what's your email and your role at Aave? It's like, man, 2018 was a different— yeah.

Can you add me to that chat? Is that cool?

It's a DM. I could send a screenshot, but no. So, but like, I got really good advice. And this is the advice that I would give to anybody who's coming off of a Web3 job or something is like, go to the next conference that's coming up. And like walk around, ask questions, meet people. Like you will get a job offer in the room. And that's what happened. So I went to Denver to find a job and I found like 10 and had to figure out like what did I wanted to do. Bill Warren was one of the ones who I met. This is Peeps Democracy, which we actually rebranded to Pool Party. And we were in the process of launching a pool token. This would have been like six months before the pool airdrop, and so like kind of glad we didn't because like we we knew that you guys were going to end up using the pool moniker, but it's like this fits so perfectly for what we want to do. The the long story short there is pool. Pool Party or People's Democracy actually got Aqua hired by Opelousas. And the the other job that I got because I was walking around East Denver going like because I just got my my Cobra packet, which for the U.S. for the non-U.S. folks is is like a government administered way for you to still access your previous health insurance plan, but at like a ridiculously higher price tag. No subsidies. And so I got my COBRA packet. I was going to go from $400 a month in healthcare premium costs to $2,400. And so I lost my job and got a 6x price tag on just health insurance premiums, not care, just the premium. And so I'm walking around Denver, both looking for work and saying, does anybody have a Web3 solution to this ridiculous problem? And everyone's like, you should go talk to Opalus. So I went and talked to Opalus. And I asked John for like, I was like, hey, I come from Lyft, like referrals. I love— they actually signed me up to be the first employee member of the product. And I was like, hey, can I make money like referring people? Because this sounds awesome. And he's like, well, it's free and we don't take a lot because it's only 1% in commission after the 1 year free we were offering. So there's not a lot of commission to like support a salary. But like, I could make you an advisor, we can give you a really small amount of equity. And if there is eventually ever a token, like you would be earning the token, here's how this might work. And I was like, all right, cool. This sounds fine. Like, just for context of where we were, like spring 2020, nobody was doing tokens. There were no tokens. There were no new tokens. I need to reiterate that, like, right now we are in this like frenzy of like everything in the world has a token, everything needs a token, um, every DAO needs a token or shares or whatever. But this is, this is the era where everyone was still like really allergic to the ICOs, and it was like Ethereum is your token, you don't need another token, just use it. Ethereum is your utility, you don't need your own thing. And so when he was like Yeah, you could work for maybe a token that will eventually come out. I'm like, there's never gonna be a token because Ethereum's gonna be the token. And, uh, well, the winds shifted, the cycles changed entirely. Uh, DeFi summer kicks off, literally everybody needs a token. Um, we— I'm not saying that we were not part of DeFi summer. We, uh, did our launch like well calculated and with 4 years of research. in spring 2021. Well, after the hype, but this is— I'm just trying to set the scene of where we were at the time. Yeah. So that was— that's the origin for like how I went from working in Web2 to Web3. Sorry, Web2 into crypto into Web3. Do

you think that it's still like that with the hiring? Because like, you sound very hireable, you know, and I don't know if we're setting up like unrealistic expectations for folks who show up to the next ETH Denver. Like, are you saying in ETH Denver 2023, when is that, February, in the middle of winter in Denver? Because somebody thought that was a good idea. And then you go to ETH Denver, which is great. Yeah. That's what I did. I did that same thing in 2022. I got into crypto in November. I mean, I was in it in 2019, 2020, like dabbled, but like I actually went to my first conference, ETH Denver 2022, and no one hired me. But I also was like, I was— it was my first anyway, so whatever. So you're saying in February 2023, people can go to an ETH Denver conference and get hired? What do you think the success rate would be like? 50% now? 90%?

Okay, so listen, I come from politics and I'm trained in media and how to answer questions. And the answer to these questions is always, it depends, right? If anybody tells you yes or no, they're wrong. Because it's— it depends. It's a very strong it depends in favor of yes, I do still think that. So ETH Denver, just for like— ETH Denver's never been during a bull market. Like, we've had, we've had like uptick weeks during bear markets, um, but every February is usually like a downtick in a crab or a bear market. Um, you mean go back and check the charts? The sentiment at ETH Denver has always been All right, so you know how there's like this, uh, this cross between where people— all right, um, where people go, it's Biddle season, and like when people start saying it's Biddle season, we're getting toward the bottom. You know that sentiment?

No, Biddle? What's the word?

U-I-D-L.

Oh, oh, oh, Biddle, like build. Yeah, yeah, Biddle. Yeah, I got it. It's building season. Yeah, yeah, totally. I know this. I'm crypto.

Yeah, ETH Denver is always during Biddle season, and it's not just because Or ETHDenver was the birthplace of Biddle. It's because it actually is always, it has always been Biddle season in February, like where the market sentiment's like, oh no. But Denver's not about hype. It's about the builders. We focus on the hackathon. We focus on inviting students and Web2 folks to like come hack on these bounties and like win 'em. I mean, we have like $2 million in prizes. last year, this year, 2022. It's always, it's always biddle, um, which means there's always bidders in the room. So, and I'm also not technical, and I thank you for saying that I'm hireable. Um, it's always nice to, to hear that. Um, but like, if you— I mean, there are non-technical jobs, there are technical jobs, there's so many community manager things, um, like product managers, UI/UX testing. Um, I think that the age of The for devs, by devs is ending. And while like a lot of these DAOs don't have maybe the ability to support a full-time salary for you, we're moving toward, and this fits nicely into this like Opulus narrative of we're moving toward an independent worker-focused society. Where you own your employment. And instead of having a full-time job where like, you're like, oh, I work for PoolTogether 50, 60 hours, right? You're an independent worker. You are a contributor to PoolTogether. You're a contributor to whatever else you're contributing to in DAOs and Web3. Maybe you're driving for Uber part-time. I don't, I don't care. Like, you're so— you, you To have security. We talk about decentralization and why decentralization matters, right? But you, we, everyone in the audience has a single point of failure in terms of where their salary comes from. That's not decentralized, right? So if you think about yourself in that sense, like you should have multiple streams of income to be secure, to maintain your personal security. And this is kind of the setup that Opulus enables, where we help you set up an LLC. You are the owner of your single-person LLC that then contracts to whatever DAOs you're contributing to, whatever companies. We invoice your LLC for your paycheck, and this can be crypto. So like a lot of, I think, I don't know, somewhere between 40 and 45, I think, percent of our members like fund their paychecks with crypto. So it's like DAI, USDC, USDT. RAI. And then you get a direct deposit on the first and third Friday of each month. I dream of a world where I work part-time for 2 to 5 different protocols. Didn't realize Opulus helps set the LLC. That's amazing. Yes, that is exactly what we do. Yeah, I can— here, let me drop the link of where you can go to request an LLC. It's $300. If you can find a place to get a Wyoming LLC for cheaper than $300, take it. We don't make any money on this. It's just a cheaper rate we've negotiated with this law firm, Cloud Peak. And you, you own the LLC. We don't own any of it. So while we're helping you set it up, it's just, it's yours. It's, we don't have any part of your LLC. Your LLC is joining the cooperative as a member. It costs $20 to become a member of the co-op. And this is a legal distinction that gives you like rights. So Similar to REI. You guys familiar with REI? It's like an outdoor store. Yeah. You know, you buy stuff from REI. At the end of the year, you're going to get some cash in the mail and you're going to get a check in the mail for a dividend, your share of the profits based off of your consumption. Opulus is very similar to this. We're probably a year or so at least away from this like profitability where we're, you know, cash will just be going out to work holders. But that is the model. That's how we've designed it. I'm trying to knock out a few questions all at once. I think I'm doing it.

You're doing it. I mean, I like— here, let me give you a— let me pop in with a question. So I'm in New York City. Yeah. And it's one of the most taxed places in the United States.

Sure.

And I am scared to death to incorporate because of Um, the corporate tax in New York City.

Yeah. So you're not going to have to worry about that. Here's the revenue. No, I don't want to go that way. All right. Here's why. The paycheck that you are processing through Opalus is an expenditure on your business. And that expenditure on your business offsets the income. And when the expenditures equal or exceed the income, you have a net loss, not a profit. And so corporations are only taxed on profit, not revenue. It's revenue minus expenses equals profit. This is your tax liability.

Gotcha.

So let's say PoolTogether pays you $150K a year. Shot in the dark, I have no idea, doesn't matter. PoolTogether pays you $150K a year, that goes into your business. If you run, let's say you run $120K or $130K through Opulus, and then you spend the other $20K on hardware, new computer, software, Um, your fancy editing software, uh, traveling to conferences, hotels, flights, conference tickets, et cetera. All that's gonna add up to $150,000. At the end of the year, you're gonna have books to file. And it says, I'm— my company made $150,000. It spent $150,000. My tax liability is zero. Your— whatever your CPA charges you to file, somewhere between $100 and $300. New York is probably— Yeah, $300, $350, whatever. But it's very simple. And then on the personal side, you're also filing a personal set of books, but it's easier to reconcile because you're not spending personal money— or sorry, you're not spending business money from your person and trying to do all this reconciliation. It's like, oh well, I kind of work from home, and like, what part of my percentage is my office? And I bought this thing on my personal credit card, so like You like, you can still, I mean, you can get reimbursed by your company the way, but the way you used to, but it's also, it streamlines everything, makes, makes your books much cleaner. You're going to get a W-2 from Opulus and you just hand that W-2 over to your CPA. And yeah, you've got 2 sets of books, but they're much cleaner. And you are de-risked because when you contribute to a DAO as an individual and there's not a specific operating agreement that you're entering into, It's generally considered a general partnership, which opens you up to unlimited liability. This is not ideal. When you contribute to a DAO through an LLC, it's the LLC's assets that are at risk.

I mean, there's that. That was so good. Thank you.

Yeah, no problem.

So we've got a huge community here of just really good, wholesome people at PoolTogether. and they're working it in the Web3 world. Do you, do you suggest for the community to each person go off on their own and kind of like do their own thing? Or like, do we need to like band together and, you know, start up a few different ones? Or like, what, what do you think? What is generally best practices here for the Web3?

Not sure I understood the framing of the question.

Meaning like, like we could go like, so Richard in the chat was just offering like, hey, let's do this. Like, let's do Uh, let's start something up together. And so that's my question is just like—

Oh, okay. I see the question now. So yeah, it's not a thing that you do together. It's an individual thing. So each, each person forms their own LLC and that is their self-sovereign employment vehicle. If, if you form an LLC with another person, you are not self-sovereign because that other person is able to make decisions on your behalf or things that they do affect your, your personal situation. You may not always want to be partners with this person. There is an exception, and that is with a C corp, if you're both the owners of the C corp. So we've done this for like startup founders who like for legal reasons have to still be employees of the the C corp, that is the thing that you could do. There's not particularly a value other than saving some money on the $300 incorporation, but that is something that we from time to time will reimburse for special partners for like limited times. So I guess I could do that. Let's do— yeah, you know what, let's do that. So the PoolTogether community For anybody who wants to join starting September 1st, we will reimburse your LLC.

Didn't even have to ask for it, guy. Just, just boom. You just had to make it happen. Wow. So Josh, what you were saying though, like, I, I, that, yeah, thank you so much. That's great. I'm sure we're gonna have some people take advantage of that for sure. Um, but we like to do stuff together, and you just said it, you have helped people Do stuff together. And then, and then, like, what's the paperwork like as an LLC owner for somebody who's not, who's not familiar with any of this and has just been 1099-ing it for their life? And yeah, it's, it's everything is a business expense, blah, blah, blah, not financial advice, to where now you got to, like, segregate and such.

Yeah, I mean, so you as the owner of an LLC have You know, significant discretion over these, like, what is a business expense, what is not. There are IRS guidelines that are like, this is a business expense, this is not a business expense. They're pretty intuitive and easy to follow. And like, it's like, should I be buying drugs on my company dime? It's like, probably not. Like, how much alcohol is appropriate to, you know, like, is it— we don't have to get into all that stuff because I, I mean, I'm not particularly able to give this legal financial advice. Nobody really should. Your CPA will, to say like, yes, this is how it works for expensing part of your office. This is how it works for hardware, software. There's like 15 major categories. And if it fits into one of those, like, great, use your corporate credit card. What was the original question? The, like the—

It's all the paperwork. Oh, the paperwork.

Yeah. There's no, Yeah, there's no, it's not, there's one annual thing you have to do for a registered agent and like, that's kind of it.

And what about CPAs? Do you provide those?

I wish. So we actually, we have a, we have like an open call out for like, we have members of our commons who are CPAs. A lot of them are full and we're looking for more CPAs to join because, um, like CPAs are often independent workers who manage their own books, who are not able to access high-quality employment benefits because they work for themselves and they are too busy. So they're just like, oh, I'm going to go off. Uh, I'm going to go off on the exchange. You pay a little bit of money extra for the convenience. Um, we, we've been talking to some firms that will provide extra CPA. We haven't like, we haven't landed. We haven't found somebody that we like. We haven't found anybody who's got a decent API, like And, and as Taliskaya is saying, there's, there is a CPA shortage right now, probably 'cause it's really damn boring. Like every, there's like the, the trope in Hollywood where it's like, oh, accountants are boring. CPAs don't get girls. Like Hollywood needs to make more movies like The Accountant where like the accountant's like the coolest guy in the world. And then just, you know, we'll have in 4 years, we'll have a bunch of new CPAs, but it's. Yeah, Ozark, exactly. Yeah, you can, you can be like, you can be like Michael. You can be like Michael Bluth if you, uh, but in Ozark.

That's so funny. I've never seen it, but I, I, of course Jason Bateman's an accountant. And, uh, how long would it take to become an accountant? Can I just go quick, spin that right up real quick?

No, you, it's like a, so, okay. There's being an accountant and then there's being a CPA and there's different levels. I think it's like 2 years. associate's degree level thing. CPA, I think, like takes 4. It's not easy. Like, it's like, it's so we, you know, I think we're getting used to people being able to like acquire technical skills quickly because you can, you can go through like Crypto Zombies and all of a sudden in 3 months you're like, I'm a Solidity developer. Like accounting is not the same. It's, it's, it's a lot of, a lot of coursework.

Wait, I can do that Crypto Zombies and I'll be a Solidity developer.

You want to take it with me? Dude, yeah, let's do it together. All right. Yeah, I keep talking about how like this is, this is a major miss in my skill set. I went to a coding boot camp and like I can read code, but like I kind of want to just ship some code. I think that'd be fun.

Yeah, I can. I'm a big fan of no-code stuff and I can do like HTML, CSS stuff, but, uh, but code— and I have like a math minor, so I've got, I feel like I got a little foundation, but But yeah, I'm non-technical. And back to the thing you were saying about ETH Denver, I really think pitches need non-technical people to pitch. It's very rare to see a good pitcher, you know what I'm saying? And the same thing for like, yeah, like with, with protocols or with people repping Web3 companies. Like a lot of times the founder does it, but like sometimes that's not so—

so dry, so boring. And it's like, don't, don't put an introvert who just coded a masterpiece, like, like so far outside their comfort zone that they're just blowing it on stage. And it's like, this isn't comfortable for anyone.

Yeah.

Like, like, like there are so many people, so many great talented people I'm meeting at these conferences who are like, I don't know how to get involved. I'm not, I don't have any technical skills. It's like, Go to a hackathon, you know, you've got ideas, go talk to the hackers during these like meet and greets where it's like team formation and try to convince somebody to work on your thing.

But see, I didn't even know that that existed where like, it's like, I didn't think a non-technical person could go to a hackathon and get like any sort of cred. But apparently that's the case. And I've been missing out. So it's just a marketing messaging thing. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. I will say that like, if you're I mean, because hackathons are a lot of new people too, right? So there's, I mean, nobody has cred. I mean, you're going to get the teams where like, you know, Joe DeLonge shows up to ETH Denver and he's like, I'm hacking, who wants to be on my team? Like, yeah, he's probably not going to take some random marketing guy off the street, but like most hackers at a thing are not like that. They're just, maybe they're a Web2 dev and they're like, oh, I kind of want to see if I can win some of this prize money. Yeah. And they, they don't really know what's going on. And like, you, you, you are, I don't know, maybe biz dev minded or you're fine at public speaking, but you're also a DeFi Chad who you're like, you know what, I've been playing with this. I wish that this thing, like, I wish that there was a Snap for, for this, like a MetaMask Snap to, to help, you know, move my money to, you know, Solana or something. I, I— that was a terrible example. Um, yeah, cut that out. I don't want to mention any of the—

All right, cool. I've got 2 things I'm cutting out so far. Got it. Keep going.

Yeah, an F-word and a— yeah. Um, so, um, yeah, you're like, you know what, there's this, this needs to exist. I, I need, I need a way to, um, uh, let's say, all right, I've got 141 Buffalocorns and I'd like to, without a ridiculous amount of gas, send them randomly to, I don't know, whoever, right? And I get a smart contract for this. And it's like, hmm, that there's probably wide applications for the mass distribution of like an NFT airdrop type thing. I don't know. That probably exists already.

No, but what you're saying is like, hey, being a DeFi Chad, you're going to have ideas that, you know, somebody who's in the weeds, in the technicals, in the Solidity isn't going to see, or you could vibe off of it and provide that. So hackathons are for non-technical people. I just don't get that message, and that needs to be shouted from the rooftops, maybe in February 2023 at ETH Denver.

Yeah, we, and we've built out kind of, or building out a robust system of like mentorship and like pre-hackathon training. And I think this is one of the things that we struggle with as an entire ecosystem. And that's the pre-hackathon. Like, I don't know. This is Moloch. There's no other word for it than Moloch, where it's like none of this is particularly well coordinated. The hackathon's like— so there's this decentralization versus centralization issue where it's like, yes, you want things to be from the community up. There should be kind of a standards set of like, this is the minimum quality that a thing should be. But then like, how do you How do you get the community behind going to a random city and dropping in? And so there's this push and pull where you see with ETH Global, it would be like, hey, we want to do a thing in a city, and then they'll throw a thing in a city and it sometimes won't involve as many locals as you'd hope. And then you've got the ETH Denver model where it was just a meetup group for years. And You know, the same thing happens with all meetups where you've got a ton of people who show up during the bull and then significantly less people show up during the bear. The people who keep coming back become like really good friends. Some of my best friends are just people who continue to go to meetups through bear markets. Just like, who did I see at conferences the past few months? Like when, you know, the wells have run dry. These are people who years from now are going to be like, we go way back. What was the— oh, ETHDenver, the lost— yeah, goes to conferences even today. Do you? Are you at ETH Toronto?

No, I don't have the budget, the personal or business budget to do that. But I've been to ETHDenver, I've been to Permissionless and NFT NYC. I found that I need to present at conferences and then I get comp tickets. So that's my new strategy.

So this is, this is the industry secret here. Here's the real alpha. The best way to go to conferences is just to apply to speak.

Yeah. And they'll put you back in a closet somewhere and it's fine if you're not, if you're not a big name like Hot Mike, but if you're a big name like Joshua, boom, main stage.

I've only been on the main stage twice ever.

You're such a name dropper or whatever. That's, that's such a humble brag. That's so good. Main stage twice. You deserve it.

Well, the first one was— well, you're saying you and Stani, right? I'm not a— I'm not a big name. No, no. Um, no, that was my point. The— so I got main stage on Monday. I was on a panel for, uh, like the opening of ETH Toronto. And the only other time I was on main stage was at ETH Denver. This is a— this is a funny story. So, um, I was supposed to go on at 6 to talk about the Buffcorn Beetle Brigade, which is our, our NFT for ETH Denver. Um, we're, you know, we're introducing like, uh, rarity, um, like, uh, like our own rarity leaderboard and, uh, trait swapping where you can actually like, if you don't like the thing that your, that your Buffcorn's holding, you can swap it with another person. Like, this is, these are contracts we're working on. Um, but we hadn't announced that this was on the roadmap yet. And so I'm supposed to go on at 6 o'clock. Uh, Governor Polis had to like rearrange the, the schedule. Because Governor Polis, the governor of Colorado, is always the keynote speaker of Eat Denver. And we got moved around. And so John tells me, he goes, you're going on at 8:40 or something. I'm like, what? No. What? No. It's like, yeah, you are. This is the time slot. And so the time slot was between the keynote of Kimbal Musk announcing like Big Green Dow and like how, you know, Ethereum and environmentalism and DAOs are going to fix, save the world. And then immediately after my presentation is Vitalik giving his keynote on like the state of the world. And in between these 2 keynotes is 10 minutes where Josh gets to talk about Buffalocorns. And like, it's, it's the lightest subject in, in the history of the world. I'm like, this is— I was so nervous. I had to— we have these Buffcorn plushies, and I had to like hold on to a Buffcorn plushie as like a support animal.

How'd you do? How would you rate yourself on that performance?

The first 2 minutes were absolutely terrifying. And then I saw Manu Alzuru sitting in the front row, like give me a thumbs up. He's like, bro, you're doing great. And then just like, my world just like calmed and I was able to like just get through the presentation without, without freaking out. Um, it was, it was nice. Um, and then actually ETH Barcelona, which, which he and like Doing Good hosted, um, they did this thing where the stages had actual grass, like they had sod, and you were as a speaker to take off your shoes and go up barefoot and like be grounded with the grass. And like, I was nervous to give my talk and I get up there and I feel the grass and it was literally just like the world just changed. It was like, you know, like in Stranger Things, like the Upside Down, like the scenery just poof. And like, you're just, you're here just hanging out, talking with your friends. Totally like no apprehension. The only people who struggled were like the corporate guys who went up and talked with suits.

So you were like grounded. I've never seen Stranger Things. I refuse to watch it because it got too popular and I only like to like things that no one knows about. But you should carry on.

That's why I put off— that's why I put off watching it for a while. But like, yeah, it's good. I recommend it.

The other thing is I was very sheltered as a child and I wasn't allowed to watch like movies that everyone had watched, like Goonies and things like that. And so it kind of— it references a lot of that '80s, '90s nostalgia that I missed out on. And so I probably don't listen to watch it because of the hurt.

Um, that's why it's one of the reasons I put off watching Stranger Things for a long time. But like, it's actually fantastic.

Okay.

I highly recommend.

All right. I'm not— I might— I probably won't watch it. But maybe I'll watch like half of an episode.

Why didn't you give it a whole episode? It's only 45 minutes.

Okay. Yeah, I've got that time. Okay, I'll do 45 minutes. Hey, but so here's the thing. So you did such a great job. I mean, you sold I mean, you sold Opalus. It's— I mean, we're all buying it. I mean, it's so good. We're going off in the chat. Thank you for the promotion, the special PoolTogether deal. Sure. This is great. I'm sure poolers are going to take advantage of it, including, you know, yours truly. I need that. You're giving me what I need. But let me— let me— one of my use cases for PoolTogether that I like to talk about is freelancers putting money away for taxes. It's that savings. And I feel like Opulous just like vibes with that, like the saving, you know, mentality of that small business owner, that Web3 person, that maybe the trader that needs to take profits. The— you got to take the profits, you got to put it in stables, and you got to keep it away. What is it? Uh, knurl it away? What am I— uh, hustle it away? What do squirrels do? They whatever, store it. For the taxes. Nestle. Yes, we'll say it's Nestling.

Yeah, so you don't, you don't need to do that as much because— and, and you don't need to pay quarterly taxes because what we do is we pay— we take part of your paycheck, we take out withholding to send the money that you owe to the state, local, and federal governments, uh, each paycheck. Standard withholding like on a W-2. So you get your paycheck and it says You know, X amount went to Medicare and X amount went to your federal and your state and whatever.

Okay, so, but could you put that— how about Opulus puts all that into pool together?

There, um, I, I mean, I guess there, there could be a way.

Because the winning, right? If you, if you're storing money away to pay to the big bad government, the big bad state.

So I don't know. But you might as well know the legal ramifications of like, all right, so let's say you join, you join Opulus and you're paying in USDC, which is— I'm probably going to have to come up with a new example if USDC becomes the thing that none of us use because of the, you know, Circle and Tornado Cash stuff. But what? FUD alert? Yeah. FUD alert.

Yeah.

Is it? I don't. I, I mean, we're getting real here.

We're getting real.

I guess it is. I guess it is. Well, I don't know. I kind of like whatever. Um, sure. So for now, so USCC. And when we collect that USCC, it's usually 4 or 5 days before your paycheck. I'm not sure what day it is that we're actually sending— we liquidate it and send it to the government. So you're saying Do you think that like the 1 to 2 days between when we convert it, we should just have it sit in a PoolTogether pool to see if it could win? Like, I thought you had to keep it in for a while.

Well, no, no. So this is— I wasn't thinking that you sent it off. And generally, like, I'm not an accountant and I'm not a financial advisor, tax advisor, or anything like that. But generally, my strategy has been as a non-LLC 1099 freelancer has been to use PoolTogether to like put all the money that I'm gonna owe the government, uh, or, or that I'm like, you know, like I'm working out my business expenses and things, like whatever that pool is of money that I get it. You see what I'm saying? I might as well win some prizes and stuff and have some fun in PoolTogether or delegate it out to my friends while as a freelancer I also need to pay my taxes.

Yeah, so you're saying that like, you know, as a freelancer You're probably going to owe 25% of your income. And so you squirrel some away and you're like, well, I'm not spending it. I'm using PoolTogether as my savings account. And then eventually I'll have to pull it out, money intact and not degened away. That's right. To be able to pay the government. That's right. I imagine that there's a way we could— I don't— it doesn't particularly fit with our flow, but I bet there's something that we could figure out where the The commons itself is, is using, is using PoolTogether.

Okay. I love that.

Rather than this individual.

We're going to keep talking. It's that biz dev, baby. We're going to keep talking.

Yeah, absolutely. Did you want me to like rapid fire and knock out these questions at the top that we neglected?

Well, yeah, I actually have more questions. Well, the thing I want to say is I got 2, I got 2 more. One is, um, you said you were in politics. What is that about? You didn't include that in your—

Um, yeah, I spent about 10 years working in Democratic politics. Almost exclusively against DNC candidates or like inside. So I was on Obama in '08 and then Maryland State House race in '10. I was on Elizabeth Warren's Senate in '12 as a GOTV Western Mass. That was— people didn't know that we were going to win that. That was a tough one against like the ballplayers, Scott Brown. And then My big win was in 2016 when we got Governor Bullock reelected in Montana, like a Democratic governor in like the reddest state when Trump won by 100,000 votes. We were, we were able to do it by 2019. We were able to win by 19,000 votes.

What was your role?

So I field and data organizing on this side of the house. For Montana, I was the— I ran statewide unpaid— or sorry, statewide paid operations.

What, what are you thinking about, like the crypto politician role that's, that's emerging through, for example, Optimism governance, Aave governance, Uniswap governance, all these big protocols? Billions and billions of dollars and delegation and all of that. Like, what any thoughts or alpha on?

Really, it's really interesting.

A crypto politician.

So I was talking to Left Harris at um at ETH Barcelona, and he was like stressed out by the amount of like work that he has to do as a delegate for these protocols. He's like, "It's so much reading," and I was like, "You know." That we, you know, we're reinventing the wheel here when like, you know, this system has existed. Like, you are the candidate, you're the member, right? You should have a staff that helps you to do research. Like, you shouldn't have to read everything yourself. You should have a staff that like, or volunteers or whoever, who, whose job it is, is to read, get, get a beat on like, is in favor of what and why for this proposal. And then make a recommendation to you, and then you just trust your staff. And like, I mean, we're, we're literally building out like a Web3 decentralized version of Congress, kind of, but it's, it's fluid and it's just, and it's global. It's, it's, it's a fascinating model that we're— but people still don't— he's like, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna read my own stuff, or limit where he's a protocol politician.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's interesting because like your address becomes your reputation, or, or does it? Are you, are you valued regardless of what address you're from? This is a— yeah, it's a very, it's a very complicated thing that people much smarter than me are trying to figure out right now.

Right. And then it's, and it's also like you showing up in written form and like as far as governance posts and like proposals and such, but then also showing up in, uh, you know, Twitter Spaces form or in podcast form. And again, those are vastly different skill sets, right? So you need teams. Yeah.

And we've replicated a lot of the problems or we haven't solved. So the loudest voice in the room is usually the winner. So, I mean, not to like call out, so specifically with like the Gitcoin DAO folks, like there's a ton of stuff to get through. They've got a lot of delegates, a lot of reps, and The loudest people are generally going to have the strongest influence. And then some people are more well-spoken on Twitter Spaces. Yeah, like you just said. And some people are better writing, which is problematic because most people don't like reading. And so you get like influencers. I don't like calling them influencers. They're influencers. It's a flu. Influencers who are able to control Like how, like all of what our policy will end up being because they're able to corral the most people most eloquently. It's all, it's all, it's all shills. I don't know how to—

No, it's good. It's good. I like your style. I have one more question before we close up, before we wrap up. Because you're so OG. Yeah. Because you're so OG, what's the alpha for us? Like, what are you seeing in 2022? in this, you know, horribly sideways market right now? Um, I mean, we had a little pump today, but just what are you seeing as far as NFTs, coins, anything that you're excited about in the crypto space? What's the alpha for us? Smart Investor says, please just give us that. What's that 1,000x return or greater?

Well, I'll preface it with, I don't give financial advice. Not like In the in the in the same way. No, not in the same way that influencers will be like this isn't financial advice. Like I legitimately try not to give actual financial advice. Even just like when you say a thing and then just adding NFA doesn't make it not financial advice. It's like oh my god these idiots. Okay, we're all going to jail. It's just yeah between friends. I I am a terrible investor. I'm a terrible trader. But what I do with my angel checks is I invest in like friends, in things that like are public goods focused, things that are DAOs, DAO tooling that's actually built by people who work in DAOs and not like the Ivy League assholes in my LinkedIn who it's like, I'm building DAO toolings, I'd love to pick your brain and da da da. It's like, bro, you don't work in DAOs, stop building DAO tooling. I don't, I can't, I don't know how to help you. But like, there are a great number of projects that are money Legos that are going to be the, like the Apple, the Intel, the whatever, those, these picks from the '90s that like blew up those. So like we're in the dot-com boom right now where these like blue chips are being built, these money Legos, like Aave, for example. Like, this could— I mean, it has the potential to be the, like, the, I don't know, Amazon. Who knows? There's— without, without saying, like, there's a coin you should buy, like, look at the things that are actually useful, the things that will be around, the things that we all rely on. A lot of, a lot of DeFi doesn't necessarily need to exist. It's kind of there for fun, and it's there I don't know, there's a lot of Ponzi-nomics and I, there's a thing I go off on about like Moloch and there being a finite number of resources and devs. And we don't particularly have the incentive mechanisms to get people to coordinate on building money Legos that, and maybe that's good because if we have a vision, then the future is, is restricted by whatever that vision is instead of being whatever, whatever else. Could be like the people that the people that are not even in the industry now, they're going to come around in a few years and be like, "Hey, you should do it this different way," and we'll be like, "Wow, that we never thought about that way." Like groupthink, tunnel vision, all this stuff is a problem. But the stuff that's like what I would say picks and shovels. So just to do a quick show for like for Opalus, it's it's wild when I'll get these invites to do. to do angel checks and they'll be like, we're raising this amount of money at this valuation. It's like, you don't have a product, you don't have any customers. How do you, how are you worth $100 million? Get the F outta here. What are you doing? And, and then like you look at Opalus where like we run almost $50 million in payroll a year. We have 400-ish like paying customers and customers are, I mean, they're members, they own the protocol. Like it's picks and shovels. Like during a gold rush, you don't try to go get gold, you sell picks and shovels. That's the analogy. And like, it's kind of bear-proof. Like we've seen a little bit, like growth has slowed a little bit, but not much. Like new members are still joining every month. Um, and it's just, there's no ridiculous valuation. Like, we're playing a long game. There's not like, there's not, um, you know how like, uh, those like, uh, on the curves where like it'll start, there'll be that initial sell-off, it'll moon, and then it'll, it'll drop down below and then slowly crawl? You know what I'm talking about? Um, it's the same curve that like every DeFi thing has had. Um, how, Mike, you know what I'm talking

about? Say the curve again.

It's like where it'll get released, there'll be initial sell-off, and then it'll— oh

yeah,

yeah, yeah. And like everything follows that same curve. Like, we, we didn't have one of those because we don't shill the token, we don't sell the token, we don't— I mean, I don't really talk about it much at all, um, because there's not utility to it right now. Once we have 1,000 members, the WORK token becomes a governance token. And once we have profits to distribute, which should be between like 3,000 and 10,000 members, like there will be profits, the dividends that'll be going to like, like actual revenue from people running payroll, which is a real-world problem that needs to be solved.

Yeah.

Yes. So buy picks and shovels, but like the digital non-metaverse kinds.

Oh dang. Oh dang.

That wasn't a That wasn't a dang. That wasn't— I'm not, I'm not shitting on the metaverse. I like the metaverse.

That's good. So there's a question here. Do you know if a custodial wallet is considered the property of the user or what legally? Any custodial wallet?

I'm not a lawyer. I would say not your keys, not your coins. Like, that's—

yeah,

just there's only one answer to that.

Okay. Any questions that you've seen, Josh, that you have not answered that you want to answer that I have not asked you?

There was a question about Collabland and Coordinate. Um, we, we use Collabland for like our Discord and our tipping bot, and, um, we were experimenting with Coordinate for our ambassadors. I don't know if we're still using that. I like both of those projects. Those are great. Um, what is your view on 2023? What are the major changes I expect? In Web3. I don't know if there's— nah, I don't know. I was there. Does anybody want to type in a question real quick?

There's, there's typing. People are typing. Um, we'll just wait for that one.

What is— oh, what is Opulus's partner stack?

Yeah,

that's it. So we use, uh, Magic Wallet for the log. Um, actually, the, the long list of them is, is somewhere on our website. I think it's like opulus.co/coalition. We use a lot of, I mean, we're members of a lot of DAOs like the Panvala League. We use Raid Guild and D-ORG for freelance work. I don't know. We've put our treasury in a bunch of different places like Aave and the one that starts with an I. Why can't I remember the name right now? ElementFi. ElementFi. We put our treasury in there for a little bit. There's, there are too many without me to pull together. Yeah, I joined the Coalition.

Oh, there you go. They both— yeah, cool.

Yeah, there's this other PenX, which is this company that we're working on, like adding pensions, which would be— that'll be, that'll be cool. But I think they serve a similar thing to a similar goal to, to pull together where what you could do is you put aside A percentage of everyone's paycheck and you just plop it into a pool together pool. And that could be a pension that people eventually draw on. I mean, if we're looking at like 30, 40 years out, the contracts are all still going to be there. We have a 401 through a Slavic 401 that you can— so it's employment-based. And so part of your paycheck gets diverted to it. If you participate in any solo 401 stuff or solo IRA, That's not through our product. And so that would be just— it would come off of your business together. Is there— do we have a position in PoolTogether? Not right now. I do. My PoolTogether origin story is hilarious. I put in like 50 DAI one of the first days it came out because I was like, I really— I want to, you know, I mean, you're an ETHDenver project, so I'm always going to support it, right? So I was like, I want to play with this. And 50 DAI was a lot of money to me back when it launched. I remember trying to join like MetaGammaDelta, it was 100 DAI. And I was like, this is really expensive. And now I'm like, oh, it's 100 DAI, no big deal. This is just how the— I don't know if that's inflation or just the times have changed. But yeah, so I put 50 DAI in and I never won. I never expected to win. The pool won all the time. And I was like, I should probably just redelegate to the pool. But gas was so expensive that I couldn't move it. And then gas was so expensive that it didn't make sense to withdraw it. So I'm just like, I've written off this 50, this 50 DAI. And I was just like, I'm just going to be here forever in V1. And I started getting like, you know, migrate to V2 stuff. And I'm like, nah, this is too expensive to migrate. So I just left it there and like then got a relatively large airdrop. Because, because I couldn't afford to move $50. Oh man, I love this space.

That's so good. The same, same story here. That's that. I think a lot of us can relate to that question. Are there Opal tokens?

Yeah, the Opal token is the work token. It's an ERC-20 that was minted on Ethereum that we bridged over to Polygon. So all of our, all of our, like our dashboard and drops all happen on On Polygon. The way our tokenomics work, briefly, is when we as a payroll company grow by 10%, 5 million WORK are minted. 30% go to the employee members who run their payroll pro rata. So if you run 1% of all the payroll that we run, you're going to earn 15,000 WORK. It's 1% of 1.5 million. 30% go to the referrer. So let's say You heard about Opalus from this podcast. You would say, I heard about it from PoolTogether. You run $100K in payroll, you earn, let's say, $50K work for the year. PoolTogether is also going to earn about $50K work. They're going to earn the same amount you do because both earn 30% from this pool. It's pro rata. And there are less referrers than, um, there are employee members. So it's— I Uh, it's a larger kind of pro rata amount, um, ish. Uh, 20% goes into a staking contract, 10% goes into, um, the Opulus treasury, 10% goes into the Employment Commons treasury. Uh, Smart Investor has accurately noted that it is down from all-time high. Um, Opulus never listed the token. Uh, there was a group of investors and early employee members who just wanted to create a liquidity pool, and so they did it on their own. There's no— there's never been incentives for the pool, and there's not really a reason to hold the token right now other than if you'd like the staking rewards, or if you understand this long-term vision for supporting self-sovereign workers and the global public utility infrastructure for employment that we are building. Then, you know, it's, it's a pretty easy decision to— I've never sold any of mine. Um, I'm waiting for, I'm waiting for those profit sharing rewards to kick in.

So, uh, if you missed, if you joined us late in the podcast, you need to listen to the beginning when Josh talked about the, the profit sharing stuff. So, uh, Josh, I want to let you go because you got big announcements at ETH Toronto, as I pronounce it, Toronto, or sometimes I do Toronto, like Toronto? No idea. You got, you got a big Canadian announcement for Opulus. Congratulations on the launch of country number 2. And, uh, thanks for joining us on the PoolTogether Community Podcast. We'll be in touch about how we can do more work together and get that referral page and stuff going.

Of course. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

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 Pulled Together Discord and let us know.