PoolTogether Community Podcast #39 with Raz from Guild

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. It's Merge Day. It's Merge Day today. And I'm your host, Hot Mike, aka Tim, aka I've got so many cats that I'm becoming one myself. And I'm here with Raz, co-founder of Guild. Co-founder, right? There's other founders, but you're, you're one of the founders. You're one of the OG Guild peeps.

The originator.

You're the originator. That's right.

Yeah.

So, uh, thanks so much for making time for us, especially on, on a day like today.

Yeah, super, super excited these days. And yeah, thanks for— thanks. Thank you for having me. I'm in Berlin, by the way, for the ETH Blockchain Week or like for the ETH Berlin and DAppCon events. And we are going to celebrate the Merge tonight. And let's see what happens, what we wake up to tomorrow. I'm super, super excited.

That's so good. Celebrating the Merge in Berlin. Altogether. I'm so just so much FOMO. So everybody at that party has to be risk-on, right? It's all risk-on.

100%. Yeah.

That's right. That's cool. Well, Raz, could you just go ahead and let's kick it off by hearing your origin story? I love hearing how people got into crypto, how they got involved, and then tie that into how Guild got Okay,

cool. Yeah, we have time, right? Like, we— this podcast will last like 1 hour.

Yeah, we can— it'll last as long as we want. But yes, generally it's an hour.

I can give you the long intro then, or at least like the detailed one. So I'm Raz. My full name is Robert, or like Robert Zaviasa. That's, that's why I use Raz. Like, that's just a shortened version. And I grew up in Hungary as a children, like first children of one of the co-founders of one of the biggest one of the first Hungarian internet provider companies. So essentially my father was the DevOps guy at this company in like '93, where they started providing internet to Hungarian institutions. And I essentially, I was born into this. Like, I was learning programming even before I was able to just read, which is kind of awkward and sounds silly, but still, that's what my father did to me. And yeah, like, looking, like, taking a look back, it was the very right decision because essentially I was able to, I was able to learn a bunch of programming languages at ease, essentially. I learned like a bunch of them, but I started with very difficult ones, actually, like Lisp, and then like with a bunch of parentheses and then like functional programming and Immutable data structures. So even the blockchain was in concept nothing new to me because of the immutable data structures I learned before. But the point is, I grew up on the internet. I learned a lot of these, like I learned a lot about the programming languages and just the internet culture in general. I became part of the internet culture online and I also started playing games and I was Particularly obsessed with a game called RuneScape, where where I first started learning English words, and that's also the place where I started learning about trading and how the economy works. And I ended up starting a merchant clan at the age of like eleven or something like that. And yeah, it all starts with RuneScape. I really really love that game, and that gave give me the insight. that virtual economies can exist, like they can be legit and they can be super, super fun. But they also like— I even got the insight into like how could they turn into something terrible if people start using it for online games, for illicit activities and stuff like that. So yeah, I faced this challenge in my life and became a huge fan of everything that's like digital goodies. Digital tradable items and anything essentially that I was able to trade on the internet. And my younger brother did that too. Like when he discovered CS:GO, like the skins and stuff, like he immediately started turning huge profits on that. So essentially, me and my brother, we are like pretty much into these online economies since even before the blockchain. But I heard About Bitcoin, maybe at first at like eleven, but then only only joined the space in two thousand thirteen. That was my entry point, and that was when I started buying Dogecoin, which was like one week old at that time, or like just a couple of days old. And I also started mining, started getting involved with the community, started running little like chat. Groups on IRC because back then, like, we only had the BitcoinTalk forum and IRC, like no Discord, no Telegram, not even Twitter was really used at that point in the crypto community especially. But later on, like, yeah, I learned my lessons very early. So like in the first, like essentially I became a dropout because of Dogecoin and I became like a full-time trader in cryptocurrencies. And I really enjoyed that, but I learned my lessons very early because in just like a matter of months, I went from 0 to like 25x and then almost lose everything in just a blink of an eye, like overnight. Because I also like started investing in like early token projects and like we called them coin IPOs back then. Even before the ICO craze, which was in like '17, in '14, actually, like very few people know about this, but in '14, there was a very similar hype cycle that we called the coin IPOs. And I participated in most of these coin IPOs, and that's how I lost my money in early '14. But that was the lesson. I quickly realized that I don't care about money that much. I care more about like these opportunities in this space. So I stuck. I started working, I started educating myself and my like peers and my friends more. And yeah, that's, that's how I became a part of this new emerging culture and movement called the crypto or like—

What a great story. I love that you're like, well, I was 11 and I knew about Bitcoin. Like, but I didn't, it was until 2013, then I really started getting into it. But I feel like RuneScape is always, it all comes back to RuneScape. And we've got Oldboy in the chat talking about how they didn't take their RuneScape 2D version of party hats into classic or 3D self-rugged. That sounds bad. I

didn't know that actually, but pretty fun. I mean, RuneScape, when they banned the wild, the wilderness, and then also banned free free trade, and that was a huge, like, probably one of my biggest childhood traumas that like RuneScape banned free trading because then I obviously like had to stop doing all the trading and stuff. And that's, that's why I was looking for all the opportunities to trade something online because I really enjoyed it as a child in RuneScape. And then because they ruined that, I was looking for something to continue the adventure, like continue amassing a digital wealth, even if it like in, in the game it didn't really worth anything. Like, you Obviously, like, you were able to sell it to friends and stuff like that. But that's not how we looked at it at that point. And we were very, very excited with my brother when we realized that, like, NFTs are coming and all this new wave of digital collectibles. It meant the world for us. And yeah, and basically after the 14th, like the hype cycle in '14, I stick to the community. I didn't really make it in '17 because I was like very, very suspicious of every ICO and every investment opportunity. That's because I already experienced the hype cycle and I knew a lot about its nature. So I almost stayed away from most of the opportunities in '17. But then I realized later on that this is starting to become my expertise. Like, I know a bunch of stuff about cryptocurrencies, their histories, and these communities around them. And the organizations around them, and also like the new ways of how people can organize themselves on the blockchain. Like, I became a huge fan of the idea of DAO. I started investing in DAO-related products like Aragon, DAO House, DAOstack, Colony.io. And I was very, very excited about them. But then, like, obviously, like, future had a different idea and Eventually, like, DeFi was what picked on, or like picked up first. And I was fortunate enough to start my family office right before the DeFi summer. And yeah, that's what allowed us to scale operations and start taking this space really seriously and start building out some interesting projects as well.

And so, okay, that's interesting. So you were into DAOs. And I remember looking at, in 2019, using my Status wallet, which had a dApp browser. It had— it's the one way I could hook up a wallet on my phone to things. And I remember going through the top apps and seeing the different— the DeFi stuff I could do or whatever, and then learning about DAOs, and then showing up with DAOs and being like, okay, this hasn't really hit yet. So that's interesting. So you like the DAOs, DAOs really appealed to you, Raz, but they didn't hit yet. So you're in DeFi. So how did you go from DeFi to Guild?

Oh yeah. So essentially the DeFi Summer allowed me to experience the community in an entirely different way because maybe it's just because I was also getting a little bit older and a little bit more experienced, but I was able to, like, at that point I realized that I can reach out to founders. I can reach out to these builders of these projects and I can talk to them and I can collaborate with them. And yeah, that got me very interested and also got me in early stage, like venture capital essentially. So I started investing as an angel investor, but I also was part of a bunch of venture DAOs. Because actually, like, the DAO space was flourishing for a while before, or like meanwhile the DeFi summer, because a bunch of venture DAOs formed. And most of these were like syndicates before. Like during '17, there were a bunch of like these private chat groups where people shared investment opportunities and like pooled capital together and then invested in certain projects. And most of these groups eventually turned into venture DAOs. And I was participating in a bunch of them as just a participant. So I didn't really want to get involved with this project, but I was very interested in spectating them and participating and learning from them because these guys amassed a bunch of knowledge on how venture capital works in crypto. Because initially when projects raised in 2014, for example, we raised in Bitcoin. Then a little bit later on during the ICOs, we started raising in Ethereum. Then a little bit later on, we started raising in tokens and like stablecoins. And now we are at a point when like venture capital almost starting to work like the same exact way how it works in the traditional world. So we raise for SAFEs again and we raise in dollars and we raise with like regular contracts. It had its evolution in crypto and I was able to experience this. And most of these experiences are coming from venture DAOs and I participated at least like 10 of them. And yeah, that's how I realized that these venture DAOs are actually like using pretty shitty tooling and like they had to build out everything themselves. Like they They had to raise money like the venture DAOs themselves to just build out some tooling for their communities, some like portfolio tracking, but also token gating for the channels they used and for the different tiers inside the venture DAOs. And because I was sort of close to some of them because I participated, I wanted to start building something that's open source and like totally capable to to open up these investment opportunities to way more people. And the way I was thinking about that it's going to be possible is to make the DAO tooling way more user-friendly. And if it's possible, make it off-chain. So that was very, very important for us. My way of thinking was that these on-chain DAO frameworks are great for certain, Use cases, but at the end of the day, most of the DAO frameworks were just like fancy multisigs. Like most of the DAOs really just needed like a multisig, and then besides that, they had something like token gating to organize themselves on on certain platforms like Discord and Telegram. And yeah, we wanted to build something that can be used for off-chain actions for DAOs. So like Eventually for voting and so forth, for all sorts of stuff that DAOs do, but make it off-chain and then only make the settlement on-chain. So that was, that was our idea. And we started experimenting with oracles, discovered Witnet, the decentralized oracle network, and, and started playing with that and started building an off-chain trustless DAO framework that can have like the same security layer that most of the on-chain DAOs have. And yeah, that's how it started. And we also wanted to provide this as an open source toolkit for the venture rounds I participated in. But eventually we realized that we wanted to achieve too many things at the same time. And because we thought that access management is the most critical part, essentially token gating, how they called it then, that was the most essential part to To all of this. And because we didn't want to get involved in multisig, because Gnosis Safe is just perfect for multisig, like you don't need anything more, maybe just a better, like maybe just another UI. And that's already happening too. But we wanted to build something for access management, access control. And yeah, that's how Guild started out. When we, like, I had a very long list of ideas for how could we improve the life of DAOs. And how could we build out very interesting experimental tools. But then there was one particular tool that just stood out. And this tool was Guild. And the idea behind Guild initially was to— and it was also like inspired the Loot project. That's also very important to say because now we are talking about like 2020 September. So that's where than Guildborn. And, uh, we got inspired by the Loot project by, by its simplicity, by its community-driven approach. And, uh, also we got inspired by Loot because the Loot guilds are starting to form around certain like custom abilities, like custom, uh, custom attributes of the, the Loot NFTs. So like they were divined out, they were like Kotonodao and some others. And we wanted to create, like, we got inspired by this and wanted to create a tool that can be used for creating a party chat for those people who went to ETHCC and got the ETHCC PoAP, but they also have like a bearded punk. So you can combine these things and like meet very interesting people online based on these on-chain credentials.

Yeah. And that's actually what blew my mind about Guild was just exploring the product and then, and then like creating logic, just thinking about, okay, who's got this NFT and who holds this coin? Just thinking about it with PoolTogether, who, who has, who's been to a community call recently, uh, with a PO app, and then who also has deposited, you know, $20 or more into PoolTogether. And you can easily pull this stuff up from Guild, which I'm noticing, I don't know if you still do this, but you at one point, the pro— even just that whole selection process had its own name, like Balancy, I think was what you called it. And I thought like, oh, this is like the killer app within Guild is like the ability to just, you know, comb through on-chain and now even off-chain stuff to give a role and access specifically to different people. And it updates live. It's just, it's been the main feature that's blown me away. Maybe I'm missing something, Raz, but that's—

You are right. I mean, there's serious technology behind Guild and the story of that specific part of the product, like Balancy, as we call it. It started out as an open source library that we wanted to create to like very easily query the, like the balances, like the token balances associated to certain wallet addresses. And we had to do this because during the DeFi summer, we got involved in some market making. We essentially, we were just running all sorts of different experiments. Like, how could we— like, yeah, we wanted to be more active in DeFi. So we run like— before that, we also run like nodes for a bunch of proof-of-stake networks. But then when DeFi started happening, we obviously like provided liquidity for a bunch of platforms, like a bunch of protocols. And we wanted to automate that. We wanted to optimize the yield. We wanted to optimize the yield cross-chain and the analytics cross-chain. Actually, we built a cross-chain analytics tool in-house during the beginning of DeFi services. So still in '19, we built our own analytics tool that was able to monitor multiple chains. And I think that's where it started. And then we also got involved with the market making. And then we realized that market making is not the biggest opportunity. here, it is MEV. And we started building some MEV bots. And probably, you know, but like MEV, to make proper MEV, you have, you need the fastest like infrastructure possible. So we started building out like a very much optimized way to query data from the blockchain. And we used some very like, yeah, some even some like secretive stuff for that. Like we did some very, very smart, very clever tricks to do that. And this is where Balancer was born. So we started building this tool to query the blockchain. And later on, when we stopped doing any MEV, because we realized that there are far bigger galaxy brains out there in Web3 who are just beating us in every single game. And it was very difficult to turn a profit at some point with MEV. We just put it into the, into the So basically, we didn't use it for a while. But then when Guild come to the play— come to the picture, we realized that actually this tool Balancy can be used to improve the performance of Guild, the capabilities of Guild, and all sorts of other stuff. And yeah, essentially, it became a crucial part of the Guild infrastructure.

Have you— and I'm finding more and more that business development is about just like It's not even about building necessarily, building integrations or even linking, but just it's partnering with. And I feel like you're one of the kings of partnership. Like, I talk to people and I mention Raz and they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we've talked to like, I, you know, Wasi, you know, just, just talking to like Ved from the Wasis and he knows you and you're just a, maybe it's just because you've been in the, in the space for so long, but I also think you're a mover and a shaker. And you talk to people and you, you're a sponge for information and, and that sort of thing. So have you talked to Rook? Do you know about Rook, the product?

Sure.

We—

Sure. Why?

Yeah, just because you said MEV.

MEV is not always scary. Like most of the MEV that we did is like liquidations and, and then some, some like methods that are like doesn't hurt anyone. Like most of the MEV stuff is actually like built into the protocols by design. They build this kind of stuff into the protocols to make them function properly. So we like, we didn't do any like sandwich attacks and like the less ethical ones. We were focusing clearly on just the like the ethical part of like MEV. Yeah. But yeah, we didn't get too much involved because at some point it just like became too competitive, like obviously. But yeah, like regarding like how we started out the business development and stuff like this, I didn't think we really did like business development. We just, like, at some point I decided to reveal my identity and not to be an anon in the space anymore because, yeah, I've been in the space for a very long time, but I only revealed my face first like 2 years ago or— Yeah, around like 2 years ago. And even last year when we started out Guild, If you look at the page of Agora Space, which is like the studio DAO behind Yield Guild XYZ, all the names and all the profiles are like pseudo-anonymous. So we still wanted to stay like unknown because that was not our— like it was always about the product and not about us. And yeah, our approach was a little bit different compared to most of the DAOs that already existed in the space because of my involvement with this community for a very long time. I knew that the core values of cryptocurrencies and Web3 now is transparency and inclusivity. So like permissionless, the permissionless nature of the tools and the inclusive nature of the communities. And I was honestly kind of annoyed that most of the other projects have different approaches and like trying to be very exclusive and then like trying to tease people all the time and like hiding stuff. And we didn't want to do that. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to reach out to everyone and talk to everyone and meet them and understand them better and like deliver something for their needs and deliver something that can be actually useful for them like today. And yeah, that was our approach. And I took the Like, I decided to just make it happen and like started scheduling infinite amount of calls. Like, I've been in hundreds and hundreds of calls, maybe even 1,000 calls during the last year. So yeah, I met a bunch of people and most of them I met during the last 12 months because of Guild, because we wanted to reach out to people. Ask for their advice, to hear out their problems, and also just to know them, just to know the community better and to better understand it. And just to make it possible to fine-tune our long-term vision and to be well aligned with the community of Ethereum. Because we were also purposefully wanted to be part of the Ethereum community. I've been part of the Ethereum community since like 2015. But still, like, it was very important for me to be very focused on just one community. Like, we didn't want to focus on like Binance Smart Chain, even if it was like super, super hyped, and neither other chains. We just wanted to know the Ethereum community. And I took the time to know as many people as possible personally.

So then what's the goal with that? Raz, like as you're meeting everybody, you're in all of these calls, community calls even, like just listening, being the sponge that you are. Like, what's the business model for Guild? Are you trying to become profitable? Are you just trying to like acquire users? Are you trying to be useful? What's the deal here?

Yeah, like when we started out these calls, and I remember when we had like, we had a community round, like a small investment round. And Seed Club and some of the fine folks at Seed Club participated in that. And they were actually like quite skeptical about our approach initially. And I remember when the last reason that I gave Jess, the founder of Seed Club, why they should invest in us is that like, because honestly, what we really want to do here is just to build dope shit and build something that's being used. Because I have a different background than most of the founders. I initially was a developer. I initially built many, many different stuff during my life. But then I became an investor and thank God I was able to become a relatively successful investor first. And that was my origin story. And then I decided to stop focusing on investment alone and then start getting involved in like giving back and like start building something useful and something interesting that, yeah, that's, that's actually going to change the state of DAOs and the state of Web3 communities. And because I had a clear vision, had a clear vision of like prioritizing user experience, prioritizing security over like necessarily like making decentralization always the first thing. We wanted to really be well aligned with the longer vision of this whole space and somehow influence the community to come with us and also prioritize these things instead of being very idealistic and trying to build everything decentralized out of the box and all sorts of crazy ideas that people Usually have when they get into the space or like when they pivot into this space. Because like I still honestly believe that according to my technical knowledge, some of the only decentralized things in this space are just like Ethereum and Bitcoin. And there are not many other like decentralized, even just layer ones out there. And when you look at the protocols, like for example on Ethereum, obviously they are decentralized. If they don't have a proxy contract because they live on Ethereum. But when it comes to infrastructure, when it comes to tooling, when it comes to wallets, when it comes to RPC nodes, when it comes— or like RPC providers, and when it comes to like data storage, when it comes to a bunch of other things, those things are actually not decentralized. Those things are just part of the stack that we have today. And it's okay that way for now. Like it's okay to have a very decentralized Ethereum and And just to support everything with that goal. And instead of trying to challenge ourselves with impossible or very, very difficult problems, instead we just build certain things that actually can be used and can be used to— and not just can be used, but can be scaled. And yeah, I got obsessed with this idea. Also with providing better security for, I mean, with our tooling. Because that's another point, like when you desperately trying to decentralize every part of your infrastructure, you will probably run into serious security leaks and security issues. So yeah, in short, we wanted to change the community and we wanted to change the future of crypto. in a little bit, in a way that like we wanted to add at least like one piece to the puzzle and that piece is access management.

So what's the next play for Guild? What's the future for, you know, right now it's Discord roles, it's rewarding users, it's, you know, it's this really cool organization of the space, of the community. And all these requests come to you, right? Like, Tjark would be here if he could. He's taken off today for special reasons. But like, I know he just like sends feature requests all the time. So I know that you have a bunch of all these avid users who love the product because you've prioritized user experience and you prioritize security. And they're asking you to do all of the things because there's so many things that Guild unlocks in the imagination, like, oh, we could do this, or, oh, we could do that. And I know I've been one of the, one of the people like, hey, here's my list of things that'd be awesome if you could do. So how do you prioritize what to do next and like limit scope creep, keep to your vision and still be innovative and, and still kind of appease those users all while giving us alpha? Give us that Guild alpha, please.

Okay. So like in short, there is not much alpha in a way that we will continue to do what we do today. Like I grinded over the last 12 months because I wanted to get into a state where we get enough feedback from enthusiastic users and friends and community to gather enough data always to see what's really needed from people. And essentially that's what we do now. Obviously, besides strengthening our infrastructure and scaling up it now, We also want to focus on like what are the emerging use cases because exactly as as you mentioned, like guild can be used for so many different things and whenever like somebody asks me like okay so this is token gating and and you you connect Discord with Ethereum okay and and then you do Telegram as well and okay now you have now you have Google Drive but what's next like what what else like what else you can do with guild and I like to say, like, you tell me. Like, it's you tell me what should we do next. Like, really, like, what are the emerging use cases that we should implement when it comes to access management? And that's what's happening right now. We are running, like, a massive operation to gather all the feature requests, gather all the insights, gather all the emerging use cases. And then start rolling out all of them one by one and make them available. And because of the simplistic nature of Guild, that there are only 3 things in Guild, like there are requirements, there are roles, and then there are rewards, it is relatively easy to essentially categorize all these feature requests together and then just play like draw out a roadmap and follow that and one by one implement all the exciting new reward types, like new platforms that people want to see in connection with Guild, but also like the new requirement types. On the requirement types, like obviously like verifiable credentials are coming. A bunch of identity-related projects are coming to Guild in the next couple of months. Also, for like, we are about to start some partnerships for like Sybil attack resistance. And also we continue to improve the anti-bot protection of Guild. And yeah, these are very important issues and we want to focus on these more. And on the distribution side, because you mentioned that too, we still focus on PoAP. Because we, we like Guild became the, like the officially supported distribution method for PoAPs in Discord. And that's, that's actually a great honor for us. And we want to make sure that this distributed method will last and it's going to satisfy all the needs and all the requests of the community. So we continue to focus on PoAP. We continue to focus on adding additional requirement types like verifiable credentials, other off-chain platforms. Even some gaming related. So like, maybe this is an alpha that you will be able to verify if somebody bought all the games from a gaming studio and like achieved very difficult achievements in a game. And this is all going to be so much fun when you start combining like achievements in your Steam library with your on-chain assets and like activities on social media. Meanwhile, we also add like obviously more reward types. And because we have an SDK, now we are a little bit in a different position when like it's not entirely just on us, like what's going to be possible with Guild, because with the SDK, developers can build out any new experiences, any new token-gated solutions, or like any new exclusive access to any platforms that they have access to, or like where they are developers. So we work with a bunch of developers and trying to fine-tune the SDK further on. And yeah, as I said, we just continue this development process.

Yeah, and I mean, as you're talking about games, we hear this, that Starbucks and Polygon are now doing a thing with NFTs. So my community can now extend into IRL if I'm going to get a latte at Starbucks. There's so many possibilities, But I love that your users are going to tell you. And then hopefully, I mean, what you said with the SDK is that people will start building, will be able to build into that. So how do you, how do you manage security with getting more people using it, right? Like more developers developing products with the SDK. How do you keep things secure?

Oh yeah. So on our backend, like the different services are all separated. So like, for example, the Discord runner, is separated from the database handler, and the database handler is separated from the query engine. So like each of them have like separate boxes and these boxes communicate together. And this— but this is just an example. Like we use multiple like best practices that we can like use to secure the backend more. But also The idea is to keep everything as simple as possible. And also, there is a huge alpha in security. Because if you can minimize the reward for any attackers in an attack scenario, then the attack will most probably never going to happen. Because if they can't gain basically anything from the attack, and because Our database is essentially accessible through the SDK. You don't have to hack into our database. You get the data anyway. Why would you hack our database? Obviously, you can do that if you want to modify something and you want to do some stuff. But still, the idea is to minimize the rewards for any attackers and also to keep everything as simple as possible. And separate it from each other.

And then also with security, I think about PoApps. And I've gone through the— it's not easy to get a PoApp. You apply, you put it up, the community gives you a thumbs up and thumbs down. There's only a certain amount that you can get. It helps if you know somebody to help you with it. But all of that is actually good because you're not going to have Sybil attacks. And I've also used Project Galaxy, now Galaxy, has like an OAT, um, and that one is very easy to get, but it's also like very Sybilable. And so it's just, it's, you know, just like what you were talking about, uh, Raz, with decentralization. Really, the chains— the only thing that's decentralized is the chains. Everything else has to have some sort of centralization for security purposes and for, you know, user experience purposes. But it's just finding that, like, how can we actually find that optimal space? where it's easier to get POAPs. And I love what you just said about like minimizing the reward for attackers. And like a new thing with POAP is that you can actually pay for POAPs now. You can actually like, which is really cool because that minimizes the POAP farmers. Now you got to pay for all the POAPs. So like, why are you going to farm them if you have to pay for them?

The same applies to token gating as well. Like when you set up certain requirements for people to claim the POAP, That also can make like the claiming, or like not just the claiming, but any attack scenario like financially inviable. Because if you want to like farm out PoAPs and you want to farm out like 100 PoAPs, but they sell it only for like $3, then you're probably not going to spend like $300 just on farming out a random PoAP after a community call. So yeah, these are clever things. And these are— these could be good for like some sort of anti-bot protection. But the civil attack is a beast. Civil attack rate, defending against civil attacks is an academic-level problem currently. And if you have a fully distributed network, like a decentralized network, which is anonymous and you want to defend that against a civil attack, you're most probably going to fail in any ways. Because it's just not possible. Even in a even even even a conceptual level to to actually do that. So like to defend against civil attacks, and and and for those who don't really like who who don't know the like the the exact difference between the two, like the difference between anti-bot protection and civil attack is that actually civil attack is most of the times is executed by by people not by bots but people. Who hide behind pseudonym identities and they use multiple identities to gain certain advantages for their own. So essentially setting up a bunch of fake profiles to vote on a decision. If you have a democratic decision and every person can just vote once, then if you set up a bunch of fake profiles to participate in this democratic voting, you are essentially Sybil attacking that voting because that's not how it should work. Like you are faking that you are also like another person. And that specific thing is very, very difficult to solve if you want to protect privacy of the users. And one particular way that maybe can be a solution is like biometric identification. Some sort of biometric analysis. It could be based on your voice in combination with your face, but it could be even just based on your typing habits. Like, how do you type something into your computer? So it could be many different things. That's one particular solution. And the other solution is obviously KYC. When you fully dox someone, they can't fake that they are multiple people. then they have to grab their parents and little brothers and everyone else, and then they are going to Sybil attack that way, essentially. So even then, if you apply KYC to defense against Sybil attack, then even then people can attack and abuse like airdrops and voting mechanisms and stuff like this.

Yeah, it's such an interesting problem. There's like proof of humanity. ways. But then there's also like what you just said, you can get, you can collude. There's collusion. And I'm a big fan of ice poker. And that generally with online poker or online games, collusion is like also a very difficult problem to fully nip, to fully solve. And I guess a lot of it's done by IPs, but you can do via like ghosting IP, like VPN stuff, different things like that. But it's just like you said, an academic security problem.

Yeah, and on that front, we decided not to focus on solving the problem itself on our own, but instead to collaborate with some experts out in the world who are really focusing on just this problem, like just providing biometric identification or just providing KYC. And we will make a partnership with them and integrate their solutions and make them available for every guild. So that's the idea. We are not going to push for any default solution. There is not going to be any time like a solution that's required to use Guild, but there is going to be the optionality of all these different solutions. And it's up to the community operators and like the Guild operators which solutions they want to apply to their community. And that decision really depends on the seriousness of the community and like how much money is involved or like How serious are the decisions that are being made inside the community and stuff like this?

Okay, I gotta ask this question because it's in the chat. When token? Is there gonna be a Guild token?

Yeah, I would love to never have a token, but I'm afraid, like, for real decentralization, the only way we know today is through issuing a token. That can be staked and that stake you can like get access to certain things like the basic idea of proof of stake. Like for a permissionless decentralized network, the only way that I'm aware of to make it like really decentralized and self-sustaining is through a token. So, and because we are building Guild not to build out like a SaaS company or like a startup or something like that, we build Guild to create a critical piece of infrastructure for communities in Web3. The idea is to make it fully decentralized at some point, and for that, a token would be necessary.

I love that. Basically, now every time I'm going to ask somebody when token, if they're like, oh, we're not going to release a token, I'll be like, well, then you're not truly decentralized. Raz told me that you're not decentralized. Sorry. That's really good. I love that comeback. So really, if you're not going to release a token, then you're not truly Web3. That's what you're saying.

Exactly. I completely agree on that. So that's why we will release a token at some point. But it's gonna have a purpose, like it's gonna have a clear— and not just one, but actually my— because I've been in this space, I've seen countless possible utilities for a token. And I also know from just from Guild that varies We need to apply a token. So it's gonna be a token with many utilities.

So Raz, you built some— oh, go ahead, go ahead.

No, I mean, just that was also like an idea when we left the DeFi craze behind. One of my biggest frustrations was that I had huge bags of like tokens without any significant utility. Like most of the tokens didn't provide like real utilities. And we also wanted to focus on access management and like these exclusive like token-gated solutions. because I believe that this could be a core utility for most of the tokens that are now worthless or like lack of utility. So yeah, I think this is a general, like a general huge problem in the space. And I will make sure that I implement like all my good ideas regarding that and make a token that's really meaningful.

I love what you— I just got an idea, or maybe you said this and this is what I heard you say. But like, what if there were a junkyard, a token junkyard? This is probably a thing where like you revive all of the old tokens that don't have utility anymore and suddenly you add like a little bit of utility to them or a little bit of like, you know, RuneScape-ness. If you're like, oh, if you have that party hat, you're going to be able to just for funsies, you know.

We can do that. Yeah. I mean, blockchain and all these protocols and the ERC-20 contract is permissionless. So if it's out there distributed and can be used for like further on, then why not? Like we can do that totally.

And PoolTogether has TWAB rewards. So it's time with a balance. You can go to tools.pooltogether.com and drop tokens on people if you want. Like you can actually distribute it based on their time that they have a balance. So we have a very famous within the PoolTogether community Bronder token. So one of the, one of our community members made a token just for PoolTogether depositors and it's based on a, I don't know if it's got like waffles or a pancake or something, but it's Bronder tokens. It's very cool. All it does is nothing, but it could do something eventually.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's how DAOs should start in some ways. I think like that's a very interesting experiment and essentially it already happened multiple times. Like there, there was a project or like there's still a project called Alchemy, maybe, or like the icon of the project is like an icon, like an alchemy glass or something like that. And they exactly do that. They just airdrop the token to some of their friends and then shout it out that this is a DAO and let's make things happen. And the token should be the utility. Well, I mean, the token should like own the utility of of these new projects anyway.

So Raz, you are— and we can end with this question because I want you to have as much time for this one as possible because you've started, you've built something beautiful. You've done a lot in the crypto space and with Guild, I feel like it's your crowning achievement. It's this really beautiful thing that's very useful and tons of communities are rallying around the product. Do you have any advice for me as someone who's doing biz dev, who's trying to grow PoolTogether and talk to different protocols and partner with people, even if it doesn't make sense, just to partner and build something beautiful together? What's your biz dev advice? What's your advice for builders in the space right now? Today's Merge Day, big things are happening, the market's down. Give us some hope, please, sir.

So like this kind of work is actually very difficult. So like it's not just about scheduling a call and then like talk about anything. It's— you need to be very well organized and prepared for everything. And that takes practice. Like that takes a lot of time. So the best advice for usually everything is just to try until you succeed. But it applies here as well. Like, you should make it a lot of— you should do this a lot of time and eventually you will figure out your own way how you are really effective on this front. Little things that help is having friends because then these friends can have casual conversations with you and also can help with a bunch of stuff. And the best way to make meaningful relationships like friends is to go to the events and that's why we are in Berlin as well now. Like, we came meeting our friends and not to— like, we didn't come this week to make any new leads or like new business development. We came this week because we just want to like care about our friends and meet them and party together. And yeah, the organic way is the only way in my opinion.

I love that. How do you— do you just go to the events that your friends go to? That's how you make the decision?

Yeah, yeah. Yesterday when I realized that, like, almost like a lot of my friends at DEF CON, I didn't have an RSVP to DEF CON, but I just immediately bumped into an Uber, go to the— I went to the event and it took me like 15 minutes to convince the bouncers to get me in because all my friends are in and I brought a bunch of Lego. And eventually they let me in. So yeah, that's how it works.

Wait, you brought a bunch of Lego, would you say?

Yeah, yeah, because for Guild, for every Ethereum event, we prepare a new limited edition Lego that we distribute to our friends. And some of our friends are already collectors, so they collect the different editions. And we had now a Berlin edition. I'm going to reserve one for you. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, proper LEGO, like proper LEGO sets and everything is homemade. Like our frontend engineer, Kovjonas, he's a huge brickhead. He comes up with the LEGO ideas. He models the LEGOs in his tool. And then another guy, he orders all the LEGO. Like this is recycled LEGO, obviously. And then we like separate the parts by hand together and then pack them together. And this time we brought like 50 packages of high-quality Guild LEGO merch.

That is incredible. So what are these? I got to find like a link or a picture to it. But what are the models? Like, what's the Berlin model?

So it's like a DJ booth on top of the, like, this big bridge in Berlin. I'm really sorry, but I don't remember the name of it. I'm very bad with names.

Yeah, so it's like different scenes or something, or like a character or something.

Yeah, like the rarest one was from New York. And in New York, we modeled the Empire State Building in a way that the Guild logo was built into the Empire State Building at the bottom.

I had this dream once, like, where I get on these kicks, right? So I, like, obsess about rock climbing or pinball or— And, and, and like you said, they just, some of them stick around my whole adult life, but one of them that has not stuck, but I still dream about it is becoming a Lego, like a, what is it? A master builder. Even though I don't have the attention span for it and it's way easier to just follow the directions, I just have this idea in my mind that someday I'm going to be a master builder and create my own creations. But it's so difficult. It's so difficult.

Not really. Lego is, is such a beautiful thing. I grew up on LEGO still, like I played a bunch of LEGO. It's one of the most creative things. And also like low-key, LEGO is our merge because it symbolizes composability for us.

That's right.

Yeah, that's just low-key fun fact.

Well, Raz, thank you so much for the time that you've given us here at Pull Together. We love you. We've got, I think, 10 10 roles plus for our pool together right now. We've got 1,600 users, our member— yeah, members that have signed up for Guild. We've been distributing our POAPs via Guild now. It's a beautiful experience. We love your product. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your time today.

I mean, I'm— thank you. Like, you— this is really awesome. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm always happy to come on stage and talk with you guys. And, uh, yeah, great time.

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.