PoolTogether Community Podcast #43 with Andy from Eco

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. I'm your host, Hot Mike, AKA Tim, AKA Gnarly Mullen. Did you know that? And I'm here today with Andy. from Eco. So excited to talk to you, Andy, about your product, this startup that you're doing, the round of funding you just closed. That's exciting. And what's on the docket for you. So welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

So, Andy, you're at Stanford. Is that a thing?

I was. I was back in the day. You were? Okay.

But always, right? You totally just rep the brand. You got your Stanford sweatshirt on right now, right?

I don't think I have a single piece of Stanford gear, unfortunately, but maybe I should. I'll try and pick some up.

Well, see, my strategy is I just— every Ivy League school I go to, I just like pick up their stuff and I wear it, and then people try to talk to me, and then—

Smart.

Oh yeah, I was in Sigma Kappa Pi Alpha. Yeah.

Okay.

Uh, it never works. No, even with crypto gear, uh, I don't get stopped a lot. But, um, but Andy, I would love to hear just your origin story. How did you back your way into crypto? How did you get here? And then I would love to hear the origin story of Eco, if I could.

Yeah, sure thing. Yeah. With crypto, I got really lucky. I was studying at Stanford, studying math and computer science, and I took this class taught by a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, who you might know. He was the co-founder and CEO of Earn.com, CTO of Coinbase after they bought Earn. who's a GP at Andreessen Horowitz, and he's now kind of an author, philosopher, investor. He wrote a book called The Network State, and he's amazing. So I took a class from him. He was a professor at the time, and it was about startups and technology and all sorts of things. It was really interesting. But a group of us who were really into that class, 7 of us wanted to keep hanging out after. Balaji wanted to keep hanging out too. And so just kept spending time together, and Balaji came to us and said, hey guys, this Bitcoin thing is going to be a big deal. This was in 2012. He's like, this Bitcoin thing is going to be a big deal. We should start the Stanford Bitcoin Group. That should be what we do as a group to keep spending time together and do interesting stuff. And we at first were a little skeptical. We weren't totally bought in yet, but seemed interesting. It seemed worth the time. We wanted to keep hanging out, and Balaji was awesome. And so we did it. He convinced us, and obviously we all ended up going deep down the rabbit hole. And so, yeah, we started that group, and for a couple of years while we were still in school, we did a bunch of advocacy work for Bitcoin. We built a bunch of cool projects, did a bunch of research work, kind of academic research on Bitcoin. So we just really spent time working on on Bitcoin. And that was how I got into the space. That's how I met a lot of the first people that I ended up spending a lot of time with and got into crypto then. Obviously haven't been able to leave. It's been almost 10 years now, which is cool.

I was going to say, what year was this? So this is 2010? This is— no, 2012.

2012. Yeah, it's actually 10 years. Yeah, it's been 10 years. So that's pretty cool. And there was back in the day, When we were getting started, we were the Stanford Bitcoin Group. There were other groups just getting started now, and it's cool to see everyone is still around the space. One of the other kind of first group in the US that got started was the MIT Bitcoin Group. And the 2 leads of that you all may be familiar with were Ryan Selkis, who runs Messari now, 2 Bit Idiot, and Dan Ellitzer, Who's an investor at Nascent and was an investor at IDEO Collab, and I'm pretty sure invested in PoolTogether a couple of years ago. And yeah, and so those guys were based

too. So what's the Stanford Bitcoin Group now? Like, is that Cal State Fullerton has got something going on? Like, what's the new it place? I guess MIT, Stanford, but where do you think that is now? Or is it still at Stanford? Is it still at MIT?

It's a good question. I don't know. I'm a little bit out of the university scene now. Stanford still has a group. It's not actually called the Stanford Bitcoin Group anymore. I think it's called the Stanford Blockchain Club or something like that. We started the Bitcoin group in 2012, and then in 2014, 6 of the 7 members of the group, myself included, all dropped out of school. And so the group kind of died because there was really no one left. And so there were a couple of years where Stanford didn't have a group, and then some, some new folks picked up the mantle and set up the Stanford Blockchain Club. And so that's now what they're running. But I think that's going really well. And I think many other schools now have programs too, which is really great.

Yeah, that's really great. I would think though that academia would be a little bit behind the curve. Maybe in the, at least in the, I mean, especially because you all dropped out, like the momentum, you know, shifted to the G train. I seriously had, I met 2 devs on the G train just hearing them overhearing their conversation. And so stuff was happening. So maybe Brooklyn, maybe at least in the United States, maybe Brooklyn, maybe, maybe, I don't know, Miami or something.

Yeah. Brooklyn's, Brooklyn has in the United States, I think probably the strongest strongest crypto community these days.

Oh, I love that endorsement. Okay, so then, then how— ECO, how'd you get there?

Yeah, so ECO got started in, in 2017, and I actually wasn't full-time at ECO when it got started. I was just starting CoinList at the time, and we can talk about the CoinList story. So I was getting CoinList started, but so was ECO at the same time. And I started as a founding advisor to ECO, so I knew the team really well. was really involved from early on, just helping them and participating and trying to assist as I could while I was off running CoinList. And ran CoinList for 3 years until— and was a co-founder there. And then in October 2020, I ended up leaving CoinList and came over full-time to Eco as CEO, and I've been running it for the last couple of years. And so we can talk about that. We can talk about how that decision came about. CoinList obviously is an incredible business.

Well, tell me about starting CoinList. I would love to hear that because that's just like, I mean, right. It's keeping track of all the token offerings, the ICOs.

Yeah. And actually running the token offerings and build communities and now also as an exchange and a bunch of other business lines too. But yeah, the way CoinList got started was in 2017, Protocol Labs was just about to launch Filecoin. And they wanted to do a big sale for Filecoin, a big public sale. And so they were going to do that and they realized that they really needed some help on kind of the compliance side of running a token sale. And so they called some friends at AngelList, which is a huge startup funding platform in the United States, and said, hey, we're going to launch this token. You guys have lots of compliance and and kind of fundraising expertise. Let's work together. And what they realized really quickly was that that collaboration was something that every single crypto project needed. Every single project was going to launch a token, run a sale, and they all needed the same set of infrastructure. How do you compliantly sell, distribute these tokens, wallet infrastructure, kind of investor communications, all of these things? And so they ended up saying, well, this should really be its own independent business. Every token project is going to need this. And so let's spin out this company, CoinList. And so CoinList spun out of AngelList from that collaboration. I was really close with the Angels team and the Protocol Labs team, and they were looking for someone to run it, this kind of new spin-out entity. And I happened to be available and so stepped up to the plate and took the reins there and had a couple other co-founders, 5 of us total. And ran that for 3 years.

And is this in NorCal? All of this is like happening, all the connections and stuff are all happening in NorCal?

Yeah, a lot, a lot in San Francisco. Also, CoinList was also in New York, so it was split SF-New York. So there's a lot of back and forth, but, but the very beginning was in San Francisco.

Gotcha. Okay. All right. And then, so from CoinList then to Eco?

Yeah, well, you know, CoinList was, was going really well. 2020, we'd kind of made it through winter, we'd survived, and token sales were picking back up. The business was going well. So I wasn't trying to leave CoinList. The company was doing great and everything was really good. But I had this extremely unlikely set of circumstances that led me to say, all right, I should leave CoinList, this company that is my baby and that I've been running for 3 years and that I care deeply about. and come and join Eco. And it was this combination of a few things. I think one big one was the mission of Eco, which is to put people's money back to work for them and try and rebuild the financial system from the ground up and create something better, is, I think, the highest and best use of crypto. It's exactly what I want to be working on. And so there was this mission that I cared deeply about, plus a team that I thought was absolutely incredible, world-class. And I had looked at 4,000 crypto projects during my time at CoinList. Literally, during my time, we'd seen 4,000 crypto projects try and apply to work with CoinList. So I had seen a lot of them, and I could tell that ECO is something special. And that was true. And then 2 other things happened. One was that At that time, I could just tell that Eco was going to succeed. It had been in kind of an R&D phase for the first couple of years where it was, it might work, it might not. But then in 2020, got a bunch of early signals from the market. Things started to shift and we started to say, wow, this thing is going to work. It's really going to go. And I can tell that it's going to after looking at all these projects at CoinList. I have a pretty good sense for this and I can tell that this is going to work. So All of a sudden, mission I cared about, team I thought was incredible, and just clear evidence that the thing was going to work. And then the last piece that came into play was that at that point, the Eco team needed a new set of skills, and that new set of skills just happened to be the stuff that I'm really good at. The team that existed was the perfect team to get through the R&D phase and build out the initial product and get those initial proof points. But there was kind of a next phase coming up where we'd be going to market, commercializing, building community, fundraising, doing all of these things. That stuff I'm really good at. And there was just kind of a hole in the team for that skill set. And so it was just this unique moment where there's this thing I could tell was going to work that I cared deeply about. I'd been involved since the beginning, and they needed my exact set of skills. And that was just too good to pass up. So it was a really tough decision. It was a really tough decision because I cared and still care deeply about CoinList. But in hindsight, I think it was absolutely the right one.

So can you give me, like, what were those qualities? Like, totally understand that you had a gut feeling, right? Like, we all go with our gut. Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, definitely Gut is good, but you also need like evidence. But you just said you looked through 4,000 projects, 4,000, you know, different competitors, and you saw what was good, you saw what was bad. But what were those things that really stood out like this is a perfect storm?

Yeah, it was, it was a couple of things. You know, one, we had just kind of launched the early version of the Eco app at that point. The app is, is not our entire vision, but it's an important part of it. And it's this single financial product for your whole financial life— saving, spending, spending, making money all in one place. And the product was working. So we were getting initial traction. We could tell we had product market fit, and we could just tell that this product was going to take off. And so that was really important. And then really what had happened was we had finished the deep R&D work of researching the future path of Eco and what would need to be built and how it would be built. And there was a clear plan in place that I could just see from A to B or from A to Z what was going to need to happen for it to really take off. And so the combination of product market fit on the app plus clear plan having emerged after a couple of years of kind of wandering around in the desert and feeling around to try and find out what to do, that's what made me really confident in

What stage would you say Eco's in? When you were telling your story, I was thinking about this book, Crossing the Chasm, which is like old school book. It's very funny to read and like hear the technology. They had to update it and still it's outdated. But there's like this whole like moving from startup to like mass market or find like creating your niche. And when you said they were missing the skillset, they're building, they're R&Ding. And I was able to come on and kind of like fill that, fill that gap. But there's also like, you know, depending on your stage, like a whole team, team change or other things that need to happen. So where would you say that Eco is in, in the, in the phase, the phases?

Yeah, we are. We're still early. I would say we're definitively early because, you know, when you think about how far along something is, you have to measure it against the size of outcome that it's chasing after. Right. So just to give a simple example, if you say, you know, I want to build the best— I want to open the best pizza restaurant in Brooklyn, right? By the time you've opened a pizza restaurant in Brooklyn and people are showing up and you're getting, you know, good attendance, you've kind of crossed the chasm. You've got a little further to go to actually reach your goal, but you've kind of crossed the chasm. But if instead you say, hey, my goal is to create the best nationwide pizza, shop and you open yours in Brooklyn and people start to come and it's getting pretty good attendance, you're actually still just at the very beginning, right? Because the scale of your ambition has changed. And so the fact that you've got a well-trafficked shop in Brooklyn doesn't mean you're almost at the end. It doesn't mean you've crossed the chasm. It means you've kind of hit your first milestone. And so you always have to put projects in context of how ambitious they are when you think about how to measure them. Eco is insanely ambitious. We're trying to rebuild this financial system from the ground up, which I said before and is what we're trying to do. That's such a crazy idea and such a crazy outcome if it works that it's going to take a long time to get there. And that means that in the scope of things, we're still early. Now, do we have amazing traction on the Eco consumer app? We certainly do. Do we have, from my perspective, the best community in crypto? I think we do. I see a bunch of people in this, in this, in this stage right now.

Shout out. Yes, very nice.

Who are part of that. So we've done a lot, but I still think it's early relative to the scale of our ambitions.

I love that you contextualized to me with your, your metaphor of building a pizza shop in Brooklyn. By the way, the best pizza ever, right, in Brooklyn. It's very tough, very highly competitive market. But if you're able to reach Brooklyn, You're going to be able to reach Fort Worth, IMHO. However, I understand like people with different pizzas, like you want some people like casserole, which they call pizza in Chicago for some reason. You know, there are different tastes and such. But, but it sounds like from me looking at Eco and just kind of like snooping around, looking at Twitter and stuff, I really think that your customer is not crypto native or that's like the ideal customer that you're heading to. And maybe your pizza shop in Brooklyn is getting the crypto natives to then be evangelists to the normies. I'm not really sure. So, so how do you grow your platform? Who's your current target market? And then who, who is the future target market?

Yeah. So it's really, it's a really interesting question. The way we think about it at Eco is that we actually have 2 audiences, 2, 2 sets of people we want to speak to. One of them is the mainstream, just like you said. everyday people, first in the US, then all around the world, who are not super crypto savvy, who don't have deep crypto expertise, but who just want better financial services, who feel like their money is not working for them and it could be. And when you go to eco.com, when you read about us in the press or whatever, it's all very focused on that mainstream audience. But we have this kind of secret second audience, which is the ECO community, which is the people who are really savvy, who know what's going on, and who want to go deeper, and who will be the earliest members of this movement, and who are the earliest members of this movement. And so it's actually interesting if you go to eco.com and you start watching, there's a video that plays on the homepage that kind of walks you through how the financial system works. That's great. And everyone, mainstream users love that. It explains a lot for them. It's really excellent. But there's a secret. If you go to eco.com in a browser that has MetaMask installed or any crypto wallet, we detect that and we notice that you're crypto savvy. We say, listen, this person has MetaMask installed. They're clearly savvy. They know what's going on. Let's give them a different experience. And so a couple slides into that video, Giving away the secret here. A couple slides into that video, the screen kind of changes. It goes into sort of X-ray mode and additional information starts coming up. And it's only once that's happened that we will actually give you access to the Eco Discord. You can't get into the Eco Discord just from going to eco.com. You can only get in if we assess that you're crypto savvy, that you know what you're talking about. And that's how we segment these 2 different audiences. And it's a really interesting and challenging messaging problem because the mainstream users, if you talk to them too much about crypto and what's going on, they'll get scared, right? They aren't ready for that yet. But for these deeply crypto savvy, really intelligent people, they need more. And so we have to find ways to kind of speak to both audiences in their own way and give them what they each need. So yeah, a big part of our work is is driving this mainstream adoption because we think that's what the future will be. But we think the earliest stages of Eco will be really bootstrapped by the earliest members of the movement, which is the very crypto-savvy community that we have.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, going to the site and looking at the language, it's not necessarily like— now I'm like, I got Safari up and I've got Brave up and I'm like, one of my sites is darker blue and now I'm all fascinated, but I'm doing a podcast. So I can't really explore, but I will. But, but yeah, there's this, especially with normies, with the crypto curious or not even crypto curious in adoption, it's like, do we even need to onboard people to crypto? Ideally, we're abstracting away a lot of the, the, the tussle of crypto. An example of which is like no one really thinks about connecting to the internet anymore. You don't click dial or you don't have to wait and make sure the phone line is open. You just Find a Wi-Fi. It's been abstracted away in a certain amount. And so with Eco, I think that at least from my experience is that the points are a very key mechanic in this. So what you're doing is you're trying to move away from big banks, you're trying to move away from everybody getting a percentage and everybody trying to— taking money away from you, which is a really great selling point. And people feel that. I feel that. And then, and then trying to, you know, go give back, give to the user, like, hey, you're going to, you're going to retain this value instead of get it sponged away from you, sucked away from you. So that's my impression. Is that correct? Like, ECO's points is like a key mechanic. This is why you want to be a part of this, is the return that you get back.

Yeah. So, so when you use the Eco app, if you're a mainstream user in the US using the Eco app, you get a bunch of benefits in fiat. You get cash back, you earn APY rewards. And so that's why people use that product at its core. But they also earn Eco points. And those points, yeah, are, are the thing we— one thing we say a lot is the points are the point. And that's kind of one of our mantras, is this idea that what we're actually building towards is making these points as useful as possible. And we have some big stuff coming out in the next very soon window on that in particular, which the community knows. And so the points are the point. And really what we've built is this consumer financial product, this app, that offers people amazing benefits in fiat, in dollars, which convinces normal mainstream people to go over and use this product. But what we're secretly doing as they use it is giving them these points. We're onboarding them into the points ecosystem, to the points economy. And we're doing that in kind of a subtle way and almost like a Trojan horse way by You know, not, you know, the, the eco community in, in Discord, the crypto-savvy people, they know that points are interesting. They know points are going to be something. Um, but the more mainstream normal people don't know that, right? And so what we need to do with them is give them an experience in fiat that gets them really excited and then use that as a way to onboard them into this points economy as well. Um, And so that's the kind of dual-track strategy that we follow there.

And I believe you. Listen, points are the point. I love that. But I also seen that work in my own life or in my mom's life. I talk about my mom a lot on the show. I don't know why. But Starbucks rewards points, I mean, those things are basically currency. They're their own fiat. But there also is Every— there's a lot of points noise out there. So if the points are the point, how do you differentiate eco points as being the points? Like, those are the points that you want rather than everyone else with their, with their points or their, you know, carrots that they're dangling.

Yeah, well, that's, that's a lot of what we have coming out over the next couple months that, uh, I can't say too much on quite yet. But the way we talk about it is that these points are what we call an open rewards currency. So they're an open system. And I think the big difference here is that Starbucks points and American Airlines miles and all of these point systems, they're all closed systems. You can't take your points out of the system. They're stuck there. They're stuck in the walled garden. And the companies that run these programs, can devalue those points whenever they want, and they do, right? The number of points you needed to book a flight on American Airlines 5 years ago is much lower than it is today, and they can just arbitrarily do that. And we don't think that's right. We think that once you earn something, it should be yours. You should own it. You should be able to take it away if you want to take it away, and it shouldn't be managed and devalued by a single entity. We think something better can exist there. And so that's what these points are building towards, is this open rewards currency that's not controlled by us, that's not, you know, our thing that we can devalue at will, but is actually managed and governed by the people who hold it, the people who actually are the owners of the points. And creating that as a paradigm for the future, and one where you can take them anywhere, where it's open, where anyone can accept points or integrate points or get involved with points. And so that's what we're trying to build out is this idea of an open rewards currency and what kind of comes after that as well and what the future could look like based on that.

So then is it— so I'm battling within myself being somewhat up on the crypto game, the DeFi game, the NFT flavors, the chains, the layers, but then also there's points and then there's my Starbucks app and there's my, you know, Amex points. Mm-hmm. And that sort of thing in the closed system. So as soon as you open it, and I know doing play-to-earn, anytime you go through these rewards, there's a lot of like inflation that happens. And so if you open it up, are there like a set amount of points? Is it deflationary? Is it inflationary? And who cares? Because that's fine. Like, can you explain that for me, sir?

I can't explain all of that yet. I mean, I could, but in the vein of sequencing, can't give all the secrets away quite yet. I think that what I would say is that these things, if you want to build them for the long term— so actually, there's a first premise to talk about here, which is that a lot of crypto projects, and this is fine, a lot of crypto projects are built for the short term. They're meant to be short-term projects. They may not say that, but people want to get in and out and that's it. And it's a short-term thing. And ECO is built for the long term. We think this thing could be around for generations and centuries. I think it could be around forever. And so we have to build it with that premise in mind. And massive constant inflation doesn't seem like a good premise to base something that's going to be around for Decades, generations, centuries. That seems wrong. And I think the better heuristic is, well, what if kind of supply of something matched up against the economy that it represented? What if there were enough to support the economy that it represents rather than just minting more and more to incentivize new people to show up and, you know, see who the last fool in is? That's not the model that we think makes a lot of sense. So, so for us, it's more about matching the growth of the system to, to the economy that it supports rather than just arbitrarily incentivizing people to show up and get in.

When you were looking at ECO, were the points there? The points were the point still?

The points were the point. The points have always been the point.

Always been the point. Jinx. Yeah, that was great. Immutable points even. Like, as you're talking, I'm writing down notes and I'm like, ooh, that's, that's anyway, like, yeah, what if something that stands the test of time when they unearth civilizations and eco points are there on a flickering iPhone screen or something. Yes,

I don't see

why not. So, Andy, I'm— part of my role here at PoolTogether is I started doing the podcast. I've been like full-time in crypto since November 2021, but I dabbled in 2019 and 2020 and I got, I got mad about like the fees. I just want to do stuff with tech. I like to be on the bleeding edge. I like to, you know, buy stuff and immediately get it outdated because a new version of hardware came out. I love that because I get to do cool new things and have fun with it. And that was my— what I wanted to do with crypto. But then I put $200 in and see it whittled down to $30 on mainnet because of fees. And that really like cooked my noodle. I was just like, what are you doing? Why is this? And then my friend Layton, who is co-founder of PoolTogether, he got me back in November 2021 and told me about airdrops. Drops. And it was a new dynamic that I was like, oh, I got rewarded. Like that $200 that I put in and I flipped it around on Uniswap and deposited it in PoolTogether got me Uniswap tokens and got me PoolTogether tokens. And so, but these eco points are not governance, which is generally what people are thinking, right? This is not a governance thing. It's a I'm really intrigued. You've really got me excited about like, ooh, what could you do with points? Are we buying Buicks? Are Buicks still around? Are we— what, like—

Why, why should there be any boundaries as to what you could do with points? I don't, I don't know that there should be. And I think if you're trying to, to build something totally new that can stick around for a long time, I think it has to be able to, to serve basically every use case. You know, we've got a really interesting challenge going on in the, in the ECO community right now. For those ECO community members in the audience, I'm talking about DAO Challenge 5. And it's this challenge talking about, you know, let's imagine a world of points in a couple of different scenarios down the road and let's think about what use cases might develop for those points. And it's amazing to see there's a wide range of, of ideas, but it could really be anything. You know, I think exactly what you're, what you're saying is, is spot on that your mind starts to go crazy with the possibilities. You're like, wait, these could be used for anything. And, you know, why don't we just keep enabling more and more use cases like that? Why would it have to be single purpose or narrowly focused when instead it could, it could serve a much bigger economy? Um, and so yeah, I think there's, there's a lot that points can do.

I love how I got wooed off track because I was just like, as I was talking, I, my brain started, you know, it's the ADD, it's fine. Um, but But back to where I was going with that was I got into PoolTogether and I started helping with the community and started taking notes because no one was taking notes. So then, I started doing that. And then, the podcast was here and Smart Investor handed me the podcast and I'm able to run with that. And then, I started naturally finding out that I'm a business developer, that I like to schmooze. I like to talk to people. I like to find win-win-win-win-wins, even really complex ones. And I understand that partnerships are messy. Yeah. But I really believe in the power of them, especially as we try to onboard people to crypto, to this thing. If at some point we don't lock arms, we're not going to— it's not going to work, right? So what is ECO's business development strategy or the partnership strategy, right? Because you're building a product, you don't want to creep. But then there's also, like, as we just mentioned, all these big brands, but then there's also crypto brands that I could see ECO partnering with as well. So what's your strategy with biz dev and partnerships?

Yeah, we call it economic development is what we call it, because at the end of the day, what we're trying to build here is an economy. And so what we need to do is develop that economy. And so, yeah, for us, you can't do it alone. You have to do these things together. And one of the things I love most about crypto as an industry is how collaborative people are by default. Everyone generally has this idea. We say this all the time in the eco community, that we all win together. And I think that attitude is pretty widespread, that we only win if we all win together. And so for us, partnering with other projects, other companies, other protocols, all of those things are totally on the table and something that we are actively working on. And especially after some of the big changes coming in the next couple of months, for the eco community, we'll have even more kind of reason to go out and be doing that. So that's a key part of our strategy. We can't do it alone.

I've also noticed on this call, like we had— let me see if she's still here. Was it Lilia? Lelishka came up and sang for us. And English is not Lelishka's first language. And so I know that there's a very— you had mentioned this first in the US, but globally, I do feel like there's an international community out there. There's a strong community outside of the US. How do you manage that as well? Like creating the— making sure that the community experience for somebody living in North America, for an English speaker, uh, and somebody whose English isn't the first language, like how do you manage a community and make sure the experience is still top-notch?

Yeah, well, you know, for us the US thing doesn't really matter. Yeah, if you're in the US, you happen to be able to use the ECO app and get these benefits in, in, in fiat, in dollars. And, you know, would I like everyone to be able to do that? I certainly would. Uh, and, you know, that's something we want to work towards. But at the end of the day, the points are the point, not the app. The app's not the point. The points are the point. And, you know, the points, uh, don't care what country you're in or what language you speak or anything like that. Unfortunately, for regulatory reasons, the app has to. But it's fine because the app's not the point. The points are the point. And, and so for us, you know, the Eco community, it's built out to just be this amazing place, everyone communicating, collaborating. We run a ton of challenges and bounties and everything. Shout out both Dave and Rob, our 2 world-class community managers are in here, plus a whole bunch of other people from the community who run their own bounties. and challenges. And I, I would, I would name them, but there's too many in here for me to even nail down. Ildar, uh, runs a lot of challenges in the community. Prefects, Valerini and Salo and, and others. Who else is in here? There's a whole bunch of people. Uh, Doctim with the memes. Um, and so we've got this amazing— Sad Head Crab with the memes. We've got this amazing group of people that do all of their own projects and work on things, and no one really cares where they're from. what their first language is. The community is mostly in English, although we do have foreign language channels just because, you know, there's value to having everyone talking together rather than segmented into, into kind of like different places for different languages. But, but the activities that we do and, and bounties that happen and challenges that happen, they don't care where you are. Anyone can do those, those anywhere.

I think that's going to be a huge unlock. I work with a nonprofit in Japan with Japanese speakers primarily, and just even in the Discord to see like real-time translation happening. We're so close, like in the next 12 months, I'm going to— I'm so pumped to see, you know, live captions on Zooms or Discord or, you know, we're so close. So we're even seeing this very much so in Facebook and Instagram where I can just immediately— I don't have to click anything. I'm able to read someone else's post and connect with them, and they can read my comment in real time. And I'm so pumped to see that unlock happen. But let me, let me try my BD, my BD skills with you, sir. I, I want— when you talk about points, Pull Together is a prize savings account. So we want to see people save. And we want to see them win. And we want to enable small fish to win outsized prizes. We want to, you know, the whales, the whales are whales, whales are going to whale, but we want to encourage everyone, whatever that savings amount is, we want them to save, not lose anything, and then be able to see the potential of outsized returns. And so PoolTogether is super simple. It's got to be USDC. You can pick mainnet, you can pick Avalanche, Polygon, or Optimism. Optimism, you're getting rewards right now. And then the cool thing is, and this has been a hump that's difficult for me to get over, I want to see treasuries. I want to see communities with large sums of money deposit that into PoolTogether, and then you can delegate the prizes to your contributors or your NFT holders. It's no-loss marketing. It's no-loss, you know, prizes. It's, it's, it's really a cool mechanic. But I do feel like there— it's been, it's been difficult to get even mainnet people off of mainnet or even to change ETH. Like, Nouns, Nouns are so ETH maxi that they won't convert it to USDC. Um, and so as my wheels are spinning hearing about this, I'm like, oh, so if points are the point, it's not the app, it's the points. Um, maybe there's a world where points can be saved on PoolTogether. And then, you know, like there's even that kind of mechanic. And I don't know if that's like, because it's open, right? These are open points where PoolTogether could assign, use ECO, or can use these points as rewards. So I'm just trying to think of ways that ECO and PoolTogether could partner, uh, just even just right off the top of the dome.

Totally. I mean, I think those are both great ones. I think I would love to see points, especially over the next couple months as things start to shift, end up on PoolTogether and let people participate in that way. Because I do think for us, points end up being a lot like other assets like USDC. They're not a dollar. It's not like that. It's not a stablecoin, but they're an asset that people should use to think of for participating in economies the same way you think of dollars or USDC. And so yeah, the idea that PoolTogether could do that, I think would be really cool. Getting the PoolTogether community to be able to earn some points, I think would be awesome. You know, we actually have in the ECO Discord a— we call it the sweepstakes bot. So it's not PoolTogether, it's not No Loss, but it's a way for people to run sweepstakes. People can buy tickets with points, and then, you know, someone wins a big pile of points on the other side of that. Or you can— people can give their tickets to each other and move them around. And so that is interesting. I think no-loss mechanisms are probably even more interesting. So yeah, we're all ears for ways to work together.

And in V5, which is soon TM, always, the idea is like, Sure, we can take no loss and you don't have to have a stablecoin to be no loss. You can have whatever you want to save. You can put it into PoolTogether and you're not going to lose that thing. Now, if you know, if it's Luna or something, you're going to— but, but generally, you know, you get in what you— you get to withdraw what you put in. Yeah. So we're—

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Cool. So what's the future, Andy? What's the great unknown primarily for ECO? And I know that you've talked about it. You've been able to say like, okay, points are the point. Can't really tell you stuff because of sequencing, but that's short-term, right? Yeah. Let's talk longer-term, which I feel like you're able to be more free with. And I would love to hear it for ECO, and then I would love to hear it for the crypto landscape. Especially from somebody from the Stanford Bitcoin Group.

Yeah. For Eco, I've said it a couple of times already and I'll say it again. We want to rebuild the financial system from the ground up. We want to build up a new type of economy, one that is working in our best interests. Not ours in the Eco team, ours in all of us, this community together, and something that's actually incentive aligned and is creating a better world through reimagining how value flows around. One thing we say sometimes is that money isn't just about value, it's about values. Money has built into it a set of values, a value system. And the monies that we use today, these fiat currencies for most things, they have a certain value system built into them. And that's not good or bad, it just is what it is. But there could be something different with a different value system, with a different set of of base beliefs. And that's what we're building towards is creating that future. So that's what we're really excited about is reimagining everything about how we move value and how we represent value changing and trying to see if we can build something better that is more aligned with all of our best interests together. And so that's the dream there. With respect to crypto more broadly, there's tons of interesting stuff. And if I've learned one thing in 10 years of being in crypto, it is that I can basically never predict what's coming next or what's going to matter, but I will say some things that I'm really interested in. I remain super excited about Bitcoin, and I think I always will be. And so I think that one's sticking around, and really excited about some of the stuff happening on Ethereum too, and also many other networks. But I remain very excited about both of those kind of top 2 Beyond that, some other things I'm excited about. I feel like we're getting to the point where things are starting to go from theory to practice. Now, I would actually point to PoolTogether as a really good example of that. It's like a real use case, a real reason for someone to use the thing. And I don't know that there are all that many projects out there with real use cases. So that's something I'm really excited about is the development of that. On the technology side, a couple things I'm kind of excited about that I'm looking towards here. One is that it feels like zero-knowledge proofs have crossed a chasm and we can now start to develop actual really interesting use cases with ZKPs and zero-knowledge mechanisms. For a couple years there, they were slow and also kind of in their nascent stage. So it was more in the in the theory realm than it was in practice. But I'm starting to see some things based on zero-knowledge proofs that I think could be really compelling. And so that's something I'm excited about. And then also very excited about the idea of decentralized reputation primitives and identity primitives. And what does on-chain identity and reputation look like? I think the spoiler alert on that is that it will not look much like off-chain identity. And I think where that kind of space has struggled is in trying to replicate everything from the traditional world on-chain. I don't think that's the way to go. And I think there's going to be new forms of identity and reputation that begin to emerge over the next couple of years. That's something I'm really excited about too.

Yeah, I mean, we talk about this as far as peer-to-peer lending, not collateralized, like the collateral would be your reputation in the crypto space. And like, even as you're talking about this, I'm like, oh yeah, but then somebody could be nefarious with not their main. I'm always, I'm always looking for the scam now. So it's like, yeah, somebody could be like really buttoned up in their main, in their main and just have a bunch of nefarious things running around. But generally you would, you would deal with somebody on their main account with the built-up trust to be able to lend very similar to like how you would use an ENS. I'm timcox.eth. And I could put that out for collateral. I could collateralize that because if that goes away, then my reputation is— so yeah, that's very interesting. But listen, Andy, Bitcoin maxi, you didn't say that, but you're very excited about Bitcoin. But I got to ask in my ignorance, in my ETH, my EVM ignorance or whatever, what's exciting about Bitcoin? What are you excited? Other than just sitting there?

Yeah, I actually— so a lot of things, it's a great question. A lot of things out there are exciting because there are lots of developments happening. So I think Ethereum is exciting because of how fast it's evolving and how many new developments are coming out and all the EIPs floating around and there's just a lot of innovation happening. So that's a reason something could be really exciting. I think the reason I'm most excited about Bitcoin is that it's not exciting. And another reason to be excited about something is that it just works for what it's meant to do. Bitcoin, I don't think, is going to do everything. I don't think Bitcoin is the platform on which the next big decentralized computation platform is going to exist. I don't think that's true. I don't think it'll ever compete as a world-class smart contract platform or L1. But I do think it's really good at what it does, which is basically just sitting there. And it has proven resistant and slow to change, which I think is its greatest advantage in what it's trying to do in this kind of creation of a new asset. So I'm not suggesting that I wish every asset was like that, or that's the only thing that's valuable, but I do think there's a place for it. And Bitcoin's immobility, I think, is one of its greatest strengths for what it is trying to accomplish.

So if you could onboard me as a Bitcoin-curious person, what would you— what were the steps for me to experience or, I don't know, thinking like wet my palate for Bitcoin?

Yeah. Unfortunately, it's boring. It's probably buying some Bitcoin and then letting it sit there for 10 years. And that's the Bitcoin experience. And it's not fun, it's not exciting, it's not thrilling, it doesn't feel like you're using some crazy technology, but it just works for what it's meant to do. And I think that's really appealing. If you want a great experience, there are a million other things that you can go off and do. And I just don't think Bitcoin is one of those necessarily.

So don't go to McDonald's and spend Bitcoin is what you're saying. That is a bastardization of Bitcoin.

I would skip that.

Okay. I love it. Well, Andy, we are coming to the end of our time together, Single Tier, but do you have anything else that you wanted to talk about that you wanted to cover in this beautiful podcast? I have to say, this has shaped up to be a really great conversation, IMHO, but anything that we haven't covered that you were hoping to cover with the PoolTogether community?

No, we covered a lot of ground. I think we pretty much hit it. I'm super excited about PoolTogether. I have been for years and it's just been cool to see it steadily progress. So I am excited for V5. I know soon TM, I've been hearing that. So I'm looking forward to seeing that come out. And I think it's just cool to see a true financial primitive. I think this idea of no-loss lotteries is a core financial primitive and one that is useful in many different circumstances for everything from direct consumer savings incentivization to, yeah, like you were saying, DAO treasury management and contributor incentivization. And I think one of the most interesting and exciting things about crypto and DeFi is this idea of composability and being able to put these building blocks together. And I just think Yeah, no-loss lotteries are a core primitive, a core building block. And so I'm excited to see what happens there over the next couple of years.

And we got a question in the Discord chat basically about how can we work together. And I think we discussed a little bit about this earlier, but I think that the way that our communities can work together specifically is in the community sense, just hopping into each other's Discords. You're all over You're all over here. We all, we all need to go over there and, and maybe get a couple of points in our pockets and just try it out. And then, yeah, I think V5 is going to unlock a lot. So excited about the future. It looks bright. So thank you so much, Andy, for, for joining us here today.

Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.

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