PoolTogether Community Podcast #46 with Byron from Dispatch

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 your boy Hot Mike, AKA Tim, AKA, um, I was— I'm coming to you from the basement. It's fine, it's fine. I have Wi-Fi extender. And I am here with Byron from Dispatch, and we get to chat about this really cool app that's like analytics and messaging for DAOs, for communities on-chain. What? So Byron, thanks so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Now, we just had Stani on the stage, and I think we both can feel it. I think the aura on the— there's a warmness here. There's a lot. that we can see around us. And, uh, and so, but there's no pressure because I'm really excited. And I, I don't know, we just got this whole like collaboration vibe going. So really excited for that. Uh, could you tell me, Byron, how you even got into crypto? And then how did Dispatch start?

Yeah, first of all, no, no pressure at all. Um, I, I am not, not the founder of one of the most well-known protocols and a new decentralized social graph. Um, so So what have I done with my life? What are you doing? It's really a question I'm asking myself. I got into— there were sort of 2 waves for me. The first one, I used to work at Twitter. I was a software engineer. We had this thing once a quarter called Hack Week. And typically, you built a project that was in service of Twitter and our greater goals. You could win. There was voting. I think the executive team voted, and my team won once. The next quarter came around, and I was a lot less motivated to win because we had won and got some messenger bag. This was probably late 2012, early 2013. I started noodling with how could I mine Bitcoin? At the time, I think you could still do it. I was using— just EC2 machines through AWS. Someone listening is going to be like, that's not possible. I think it actually was. I don't think it was very efficient, but you could do it. So I opened up a Coinbase account. I think that existed at the time, and that was wave 1. I sort of got into the weeds with the hardware and whatnot. Wave 2, 2017, I think Decentraland had just launched and they sold their initial Plots of land. And someone I know who's an investor, she was like, my kids think I'm insane, but I just bought some plots of land, digital land, digital real estate. I was like, you are insane. I've never heard of such. But I went straight home, got a MetaMask wallet, logged in, checked it out, and then that That was the top of the rabbit hole and then just fell all the way to the bottom. Crypto Twitter made it worse, made it better, made it so much fun, and that was really it. So I started out surface level and then have since just continued to get deeper and deeper into the technology that's underneath it all. I do it for the tech.

I love that. I love AWS Bitcoin mining. Who would've thought that? I love that. Were they— hopefully— I did Alexa Skills, so they gave me a bunch of free space or whatever bandwidth on AWS for doing Alexa Skills. But I'm really haunted that at some point that free stuff's going to run out and then I'm just going to get wrecked. So hopefully my credit card hasn't expired.

Yeah, that ship may have sailed. On using AWS. At the time though, you didn't need such a crazy machine to do it.

Could you run an ETH validator node on AWS? Do you think that's possible?

Yes, I think it's possible.

Like a virtual machine? Yeah. Ooh.

Yeah.

Ooh. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, great. You know, I've done it for Secret, which is that I had to get bare metal for, but I just set up like an Algorand node. a few months ago, and I'm using a high-powered one for sure. It's not cheap. It's like $1,000 a month to run that Algorand node. It's a full archive node though. So you could do it on a lot of blockchains. Solana, definitely not the case. You need that heavy-duty stuff.

Okay. So tell me about Dispatch now. How'd you get there? How'd you make the jump?

How did I get there? Yeah. From

laughing at virtual land and Bitcoin mining in the cloud to analytics and messaging.

When I discovered virtual land, I was very far from that in my professional career. I was working on an investor communications product called Say. If anyone's bought stocks or funds of any sort, all that shit you get in the mail that you tend to throw away, or if it's email, you archive it and don't look at it. It's prospectuses, proxy statements, annual reports, all of that. We were building a competitor to the big player in that space, and I got way more familiar with that world than I ever thought I would and came to understand just sort of how the plumbing of all of that works. And so that company was called Sei. It sold to Robinhood last summer. It was around that time I started thinking, Won't all of this stuff somehow make its way to crypto at some point in time, some version of it? It may not be the exact same, but I got to think at some point, we're going to have these documents or disclosures or voting and initial and periodic updates that are going out for this space as well, whether they're just tokens or if the tokens turn into securities. Either way, I don't have strong opinions on that. People may think I do. Dispatch is being built inside of IEX, a well-known stock exchange that was written about in a book called Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. But it was less of an opinion about things being securities or not and more about just people having access to information. And in the crypto space, it's just shit everywhere. I used to use this screenshot of a Mac desktop that hadn't been cleaned up in 4 years. There are just thousands of files everywhere. It's like, where do I look for some information on this thing I'm thinking about investing in or this thing that I just bought? What are the underlying details of this thing? And I'm like everyone else, right? Sometimes you just got to ape in. Who gives a shit? what the underlying fundamentals are, but sometimes you might want to know. And I think that people should at least have access to it if they want it. And so with that, I started thinking, okay, well, in the old world, you have email addresses, you have phone numbers, you have mailing addresses, you KYC into a brokerage, and they've got all they need to know to get you stuff. But with self-custody, if I'm holding a token in my wallet, those things don't exist, and all you have is a wallet address. So how would you communicate to that wallet address? How can you speak to an address? How can you send it a document? How can you have a back and forth dialogue with a wallet address? So I was going to start a company, classic seed stage fundraising, Made a deck. A good friend, Greg Christian, helped me put that together. I actually met Leighton during that process, was bouncing some ideas off of him. And during the course of fundraising, came across an investor who was down, but he said, hey, why don't you chat with Brad at IEX? He's thinking about some of this stuff. And so we met, we connected on my vision, his vision for the future of digital assets and where he thought they were going. For a long list, a number of reasons, I did decide to build it inside of IEX. It's a separate legal entity, effectively a standalone entity, and we got going. What was called CryptoDox while I was out pitching the deck turned into Dispatch. investor comms on-chain just turned into messaging on-chain and messaging. I didn't know it at the time, but ultimately we would use NFTs as our message envelope. And so what it's turned into is a pretty amazing protocol that carries messages and can be interacted with in various ways, far beyond the investor comms idea that we started with that vertical, really a horizontal infrastructure protocol that can support multiple verticals on top of it. And so I've come a long way from the CryptoDox idea, but that, that is how Dispatch came into existence.

And I would love to just hear the elevator speech of Dispatch. Like, what is— when you go and talk to somebody who has no clue about Dispatch, what would you say?

Yeah, it's interesting because our website, which I think we put up in late March before we even had a version 0.1 out there, definitely doesn't feel like it does a job of conveying that elevator pitch, which is why we're actively working on redoing it. But I would tell them that we are able to send interactive messages on-chain through this protocol and have users interact with them. So executable NFTs, you know, the Solana space is talking about xNFTs, but mini apps as NFTs. And if you're the customer, it's sort of up to you what you want to send. We have a whole bunch of predefined templates. If you're a retailer, you want to use the Buy It Now card to drive sales, You can use that. If you are a brokerage and you want to acquire new customers, maybe you want to sponsor our new GM trivia project that we are just about to launch. If anybody remembers HQ trivia, imagine that on-chain. So I'm Brokerage X, I want more users, I'll sponsor GM trivia. Wallets are incentivized to render that, they get a little piece. users are incentivized to play and sign up for an account. They get their piece, and it's obviously, you know, the broker putting that up. That was not really an elevator pitch, was it? I started with an elevator pitch and then just launched into—

You had it though. You said send interactive messages on-chain, and then you said something like mini apps, which is intriguing to me, like that they're interactive in some way, shape, or form.

Yeah. Well, we actually work in World Trade Center, so on the 58th floor. So I might have fit it into that elevator pitch.

Ah, I like that. I like that.

That's what I was doing. That's what I was doing.

Are we talking space elevator? Because we got all day. We're going to the moon, baby.

Yeah, Willy Wonka one. Yeah, exactly.

That's right. Actually, you don't want a space elevator to the moon. That would be disastrous. But that's great. Yeah, so tell me about this trivia because I love games. I love HQ. And now I'm seeing this little— I like free money. And I'm looking at this, I'm looking at this little 4 days till the next— 4 days, 14 hours. What's this all about?

Yeah, so it's, you know, early days for us. This whole thing is what we launched in June. Polygon has sent a message to some grant recipients. There is a sort of, you know, basic version of Dispatch, which is, hey, I, I don't want to call it a glorified airdrop, but it's a glorified airdrop where you, you come to our UI, you type up a message, you send it, uh, audio, video, HTML, or just an image. Um, so that's that. But the, the more complicated version or complex version of the protocol, V1 of the app, uh, we really just wanted something to showcase it. So we thought, how could we do that? How about a trivia game? So connect your wallet, answer the question. If you're one of the first ones to answer it right, you get paid out in USDC. And I think those prizes will hopefully grow over time. We're starting small. We're funding this first season of trivia. I think you'll see some really interesting sponsors come after that. And wallets are starting to get involved too. You know, they're rendering the fully baked version of that interactive message. Right now, obviously wallets can show NFTs, but they— it's pretty nascent, right? They just show the image. Maybe they show the movie, the little GIF, but you've got to click out and sort of do the whole thing on our site. But we've got an integration with Ledger Live going soon, and you'll be able to play from right within Ledger Live. And that's the idea with all wallets. As we talk to them and as our SDK matures and as they drop that in and can render it, the idea is, hey, pop open MetaMask, pop open the new Robinhood wallet and be able to play right there instead of just a square JPEG. It's a square live tile where you can click, answer, bing, bang, bong, get paid in USDC.

I mean, I love that. That sounds great. Although I'm horrible at trivia. I played last night, my wife and I, and, uh, you know, we— she's like a music wizard, so there's not— yeah, anyway, I, I— we're— this isn't about me. So, uh, what is the primary audience for Dispatch? I, I feel like there's this B2B component obviously that you're building for. You're, you're trying to court, you're trying to get other communities to use the platform to message their peeps, and that's where the analytics comes in. It's kind of like a You know, a base layer is like who— it answers the question, who do you want to message? And you're able to kind of select based on on-chain information, right? Like who holds this token? You can whittle it down. And it's really cool to see like the descriptions, the traits that you have of these community members, so much so that I wanted to like find myself to see how I'm described amongst all of the pool holders. It was actually very cool to see. But yeah, so you're trying to message, you're trying to get business, right? You want to, it's like the B2B play, but then there's also this B2C, like you want people to use it. You want people to, so, so who are those primary audiences and how do you spend your time between the two?

Yeah, good question. I mean, in order to, this goes back to the investor comms stuff I was working on in order to know the universe that you can message, you've You've got to have that list. So, you know, every year, let's use Tesla as an example. Their annual meeting rolls around. If you held Tesla stock, even just one share on a certain date, you're going to get that package in the mail that says, hey, it's time for the meeting and it's time to vote. You can vote in our annual meeting. There is a list, you know, a mile long for someone like Tesla who All of their shareholders. Let's go, I don't know, 25 million. 25 million people get that in the mail. It's not much different on the blockchain. The cool thing about the blockchain is that it's all transparent. So we go out, if you look up Pool on Dispatch, you can see the entire list of people who are holding the POOL token. Looks like 8,264. Now, that's in self-custody. That does not include— inside of exchanges. So Leighton, I think, has his admin NFT. I'm sure he'll send a message at some point, or someone on your team will. Now—

I have one. I have one. I'm in the desk. Yeah, we both love it. We both tag team.

So you've got the power now to message that group. And so we obviously don't just hand that out to anyone. Could anyone build this and effectively message your 8,264 holders? Yes, of course, it's a blockchain, that's the whole idea. But we've built a powerful tool, so we only hand out access to certain people for certain groups. So you and Layton, you've got your admin NFT, acts as your username and password. You've got the power to message your communities or the poolie NFT holders. You cannot message The Uniswap holders. You cannot message the 1.5 million USDC holders on Ethereum. So there, there was sort of the first half of the equation is, all right, let's bring everything in. Let's know who owns what, when. And we were effectively just creating a graph. GM Trivia is another graph, but there's no token there, right? So we implemented Lens. Thank you, Stani. And we're sort of creating a graph on the fly. On day 1, it was 0 people. Now it's 450 people. Everybody who followed gets that follower NFT. So you're effectively creating a graph out of thin air, and we've got that admin NFT, so we can message that group and we'll message them with a trivia card. It's actually, it's pretty simple when you abstract out the parts. But as far as who we are targeting, we break it into 3. There's a customer partner and user. The customers are those who are going to send the message. It originates with them. It could be an issuer like Pool. It could be an issuer like Tesla. It could be Dispatch. We're issuing, you know, GM trivia. It could be Heineken. Maybe everybody who went to Coachella got the POAP, you know, that Heineken has sponsored. And Heineken's like, wait a second. I actually want to message those 75,000 people from weekend number 1. How can I do that? So ideally, you know, we wire that up with, with PoAP and make that happen. That's just another graph that is reflected on Dispatch. So you have senders, AKA customers, then you've got partners. Those are the blockchains and the wallets and anybody who's rendering in the middle. And then you've got the end user who is seeing that message and sometimes engaging with it. Sometimes things are just read-only. Hey, here's an update. But sometimes it's read-write and you want someone to vote or you want someone to buy or you want someone to RSVP or you want someone to take an action. And as the sender, you can incentivize that. Maybe pool together is hiring a designer. Maybe you're having trouble finding one. Maybe you want to incentivize 8,000 people to share that message out to their network so they can spread the good word and you can find your designer. You can include that incentive as part of the message. And so that's the idea between this fee distribution model where each actor in the equation can be rewarded for their part, right? The network gets rewarded because there's a gas fee, of course, but the wallet can get rewarded for rendering it in the right way and implementing the SDK. The user can get rewarded for sharing it. And that's how we break down like who we're talking to and how we segment our different customers.

So then who are you building for though?

In what sense? Yeah, I don't know. I'm just trying to prioritize it. No. Yeah, it's kind of marketplace-y in that sense. There's a little chicken and egg. We have a bunch of users, but no messages that feels somewhat useless. If we can't get the messages to the users, that's tricky. Our contract's deployed on Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche right now. And, you know, our total market grows each time we add a blockchain and we ingest holder information and create the smart contract message on. So we've got to transmit it. But then again, what are we transmitting if there's no one sending anything? And so that's why we really like focus in on being able to drive these KPIs for our customers, the message senders, like what are they trying to achieve? And we're helping them do that. There's a little ad tech in there in a way. That's a tricky phrase to use, but the nice thing is you're kind of flipping it on its head. It's transparent and multiple parties are rewarded and incentivized instead of just Google or Facebook getting the whole piece of that pie.

We have a question from the chat is where do you get the data? So for example, where you're pulling, you mentioned Lens a little bit, but where are you getting, where are you pulling from as far as like the communities and the breakdowns?

Yep, good question. It's a combination. Lens works when it's one of these I call them on-demand graphs. We're creating a group of people, a list out of thin air. GM trivia didn't exist, now it does. We also run our own nodes, and then we also use a couple of data vendors to back up what we're seeing with our nodes. And we are indexing really based on ownership, which is kind of uncommon if you look at all the different data providers out there. A lot of people can tell you a lot of information about transactions and pricing, but to index based on who owns what at any given time is a little different. And not every data provider is looking at it that way, but we definitely run our own nodes. It's not for the faint of heart. You know, you've got to set up that archive node, then you read it in. And even then at that point, you're still dealing a lot of times with raw data. So then you've got to normalize it and you've got to enrich it and you've got to make sure that's stays up and it's sort of its own, its own little project underneath everything we're doing.

Just answering a question in the chat. Knox, I think that we're talking about the chains. Got it. Yeah. So it's on ETH, Polygon, and AVAX right now. I mean, and it kills me. I can't— there's not a no-code way to get NFT holders right now. Like you gotta run, you gotta tap into some API, you gotta run some code to get a list of NFT holders. We're trying to do this contest where we want to see everybody who completed the Optimism Quest and got an NFT and who has deposited into PoolTogether. However, this NFT actually, it's like an ID, a specific ID of a whole family of NFTs. It's not even like a trait. It's like some sort of identifier. And it's just like Very difficult. It's very difficult.

You would think, you would think in 2022 after all these years, but I feel like we may be, we're taking a couple steps back to make some giant leaps forward, which generally sums up a lot of Web3 technology, especially when it comes to UI/UX.

Yeah, it reminds me of like, I forget which comedian said this, but like the first time people got Wi-Fi on an airplane, And yes, uh, and the first time it went— yeah, Louis C.K. Yeah, so, and then the first time it went down, everybody just like lost their minds in anger.

Yeah, you know, we're like, just, you've got internet in the sky, just like, come on,

give it a second, it's going to

space.

So anytime I have problem with technology, I always say, give it a second, it's going to space. But, uh, but wait, Byron, What you just said, though, you had mentioned like these brands, right? Super powerful. That's one of the things that we need for adoption is these big brands that everybody, these household names, right? Like Starbucks on Polygon is just massive. Come on now.

Totally.

But yeah, they have their own app. They have their own rewards points, which is its own little economy that you can't transfer and it's closed, but they're gonna have NFTs. And it's like, what does it mean to get Starbucks to start using blockchain more and more. And then you said something like Heineken or Starbucks would go, I want to hit people at Coachella. And you had said originally that PoolTogether, like, I have this admin thing. I can't go and message anybody else right now with the permissions I have. I can talk to PoolTogether communities, which means pool holders or Pool NFTs, Pooly NFT holders. Those are the 2 people, 2 groups I can message. But Heineken could go in potentially and find a PO app for some brand that they don't own, which is Coachella, and message them. So how do you navigate that? That right now you're not— it doesn't sound like you're doing that. You're kind of like creating like walled gardens or this is your pool. I can talk to pool people, but I'm not going to be able to talk to Uniswap people. At some point in the future, I could be able to do that, right? So how do you navigate that with permissions? Yes.

I'm going to answer these 2 questions in reverse because the second one is really interesting and something that we've been talking about a lot just the last few weeks. So right now, if you wanted to— I'm going to pick some random brands just for the record. These are not customers. But let's say you are a large bank and you want to reach everyone who owns a certain type of car. I won't even use brand names. We'll just use industries, right? What do you do? You go to the traditional channels and let's talk digital. So you're going to go to Google or Facebook and you're going to fill in the forms and say, I want to target people who own this thing. Who gets most of the money in that equation? Google or Facebook, Meta, whatever. Why can't you go directly to the brand who, with, you know, in not every case, but Web3 enables this, to go to the brand and say, hey, I'm willing to pay you directly for access to your users. So if Pool wants to message every UNI holder, Hayden, can I, can we do this thing? Can we do Pool x Uniswap? Here's what we want to do and here's why. Here's what's in it for you. Here's what's in it for us. So you have taken out a huge chunk in the middle, probably spend less ultimately to reach that user. You can incentivize the user, you can incentivize Uniswap, and probably pay less than you would going through a traditional channel. So I think it's a great way to sort of have brands work together directly. And brand doesn't always have access to their users, right? And a lot of outreach or advertising, to be fair, is— I always joke, it's like you're trying to sell someone something they don't know they want. So you're shoving something at them, display ads and commercials in general. But if there's a known entity, a known list, then I think you do open up some very, very cool options there. For direct access. For adoption, Starbucks, I mean, it's either Starbucks or Reddit or someone just launched, like they call them digital collectibles. They don't talk about blockchains. They don't talk about NFTs. Like, I love this shit, but it may be that the next big, big wave, whatever that is or whenever it is, it is simplified and people don't even know they're using it. I like to talk about what we're doing a lot of times, it's enabled by Web3, but the Web2 customers that we're working with, some of these absolute giants that we're working with, they've got to wire us money and then we've got to get it into the system for them, and then we've got to bridge it, and then we're shuttling it around to a multisig wallet. So We're abstracting it for them. And so of course we're going to also need to abstract it for their users. So we're also thinking about, you know, how do you play trivia if you just show up and you don't have a wallet already that you can connect? Can we get you up and running in just a few clicks without you really realizing it? And I know that might be sort of sacrilegious to some people. Not your keys, not your coin, not your keys, not your trivia. Not your keys, not your winnings. But not everybody, I think not everybody can go through the hurdles of setting up their wallet and storing their seed phrase in a safe place and whatnot. So it may be a little Web2, Web3 bridging. Pop your email here and you're off and running. So yes, obviously that's Web 2.5. It's not full Web3, but I think that's how we bridge that. And it's how the big brands, like you mentioned Starbucks, will treat this. They're not going to scare people away with UI hurdles and jargon.

Knox in the chat and me also, we want to define ourselves to see the traits and stuff. And it's not, easy to find yourself in Dispatch, but we're talking about how this isn't the product that Dispatch is. You're really just trying to hone in on a, on a population and then message them. And I just want to look at myself. I just want to say, yeah, how do I show up in the system?

I, I wish— we're like 22 people. I wish we were 122. It's coming. We call it Wallet Detail. You'll have a very nice interface built just for you. It'll feel Sort of like a read-only wallet. You'll see everything. Messages are interactive. You'll be able to search for yourself. There's all sorts of razzle dazzle coming. It's just sort of a, a byproduct of human resources and capacity at this point. But that is a very near-term, a near-term thing. So search again in the— Yes, exactly.

That's right. And it's also like a compliment to the product that it's like, oh, this is a really cool— this is really cool information. I want to see how I show up. And back to your point about like abstracting Web3 and crypto and just making it like, yeah, call it whatever you want, digital collectibles. But let's be real, I'm going to be so mad when my mom is like showing me her NFTs and calling them something else and thinking that she discovered it and not me. I'm going to be like, that's just an NFT. I've been talking about this for years. No, no, no, this is a digital collectible.

Candy Crush, they were literally crushing it with digital collectibles a long time ago. Yeah. I really do think there are times people are like, well, why do you need to use a blockchain for that? That's the voice they typically ask it in.

Yes. And I'm like, you know what?

The real answer is that a lot of times we do it because it's fun and it's new. And maybe there's a little speculation on the side. That's the truth a lot of times. But it's like, if you go back, why did we all start using MongoDB and NoSQL databases? Because it was fun and it was new and it was cool and it was like, something, a new toy to play with that wasn't MySQL or SQL Server or Oracle. But I really do believe that there are cases— proxy voting is a good example— where blockchain technology is superior to what we have, and there's just a better version of it. People are like, well, can't this be done with today's technology? And it's like, yes, it could, but this This protocol we've made, this programmable money that can do magical things without intermediaries, is very cool and powerful and transparent. And there are just times where it is superior. And so it'll be there, it'll be underneath it all, but we might be using different words for it in 10 years from now. But I suspect there's going to be a huge chunk of garbage that goes away, but there will be a lot that is still there, still left standing in 10 years.

And you gotta love Brooklyn, right? I mean, I'm on the G train and I hear 2 people talking about, do it, I could, they're just talking about how do they take Web3 and make it accessible and like email and password. And so I just started talking to them and they're founders, they're 2 founders that are doing this thing called Peaze, P-E-A-Z-E. And I know that there's a bunch of different things where they're trying to do email password login, but they're doing non-custodial wallets. So it's really cool that— I don't know, it's just really a huge problem to tackle is this crypto onboarding. And is it at the wallet level? Is it abstracting away the wallet? And this actually brings me to Dispatch. You provide the way to message, right? You're dropping NFTs, which itself is precarious. There's a lot of spamming already with nefarious NFTs on my Well, I'm scared to touch anything that I don't know about, right?

Oh yeah.

And then so dispatch enters and then you put like a dispatch official message in there, but then people need to look at it. And how do people look at their wallets, right? They look at their wallet app or they use like a wallet examiner or I don't know what they're called, but like Zapper or, you know, these sorts of things, right? That where you can do wallet sleuthing and those are the content providers really. So As you're pursuing, I mean, you know this, I'm not gonna give you, you're pursuing business, like your customer are businesses that you want to use this app, but then you also need it to be displayed at the mercy of either wallet apps or other like things like Zapper. So how does one do biz dev there? How do you partner? What's your strategy, sir?

You slog it out in Telegram. I'm only half joking. That's part, that's definitely part of it. No, that's right.

That's

right. You know, we will set the standard. We will be the, you know, premier version of rendering that you can see. You'll be able to— we'll be a version, you know, our Dispatch dApp, you'll connect, you'll see the messages rendered in all their glory. The SDK should help everyone implement that standard quite easily. We don't want everyone to do it from scratch. Why would they do it? Well, if you go back to the protocol and the incentive for displaying it, I say just like trivia, hey, do you like free money? So it will take time, but I do think you will see at some point, I know this is a bold statement, and we won't be the only one, to be fair. Oh, it's a Dispatch message. I can trust that. And we went through the process of getting whitelisted with Rainbow because our first contract was Polygon. And it's cheap and easy to send on Polygon, right? So there's so much garbage, and good for them for, for making that whitelist. So we had to sort of prove, hey, we're here, we're legit, trying to do a good thing, and can you whitelist our contract? And then Dispatch NFTs started showing up, and NFTs are the envelope that we use for now. And I'd say to some degree, yeah, we are at the mercy of wallets and the wallets want to be the new browsers. I've got a slide in one of my decks that says wallet addresses will be just as important as email addresses. And I think that's true. They could become more important than email addresses. What happens when you check out and you pay with crypto? What do you leave behind? A wallet address. That there's just so much that, that can be done and go, you know, the engagement channel that opens up, you know, when that relationship is established. People want us to connect Dispatch to their CRM. Why? Because it's ultimately probably a person behind there. So wallets are a big part of it for sure. The rendering aspect that will help us snowball faster and faster and faster. I, I don't know that it would ultimately be a blocker, but we've yet to meet one where they say, oh, this is a terrible idea. I, I don't, I don't want any part of this. Notifications are a little tricky because, you know, wallets want to control notifications, and we think that's the, the right move. Um, and ultimately, the user should control them via the wallet. But yeah, we want to make it easy. We want to set a standard. We want to publish that standard. We want to open source it. We want others to contribute to it. We want it to be easy for people to render, and we want it to be easy for users to interact with. So it is, you know, but we don't have like some biz dev machine. So it's conferences, dinner here and there. It's Telegram. It's getting lucky. It's knowing people from past lives who just so happen to be working at a wallet. It's been a funny combination of a lot of those things. And Porter, who's not here, I think, but Zach, who might be listening in, are just out there, out there shilling. Sean on our team, I've got a picture of Sean somewhere in Times Square during NFT NYC. He's got his laptop out on the street demoing to somebody, like live demo in the middle of Times Square. So I guess that's the short answer, is just constant shilling. But I think with an eye towards, we're here for the long run. This is a legit thing, and we've got some— some pretty epic brands and companies working with us so far who are, who are asking for this to be rendered in the wallet. And so that really helps the conversation, honestly. It's not just like, hey, we've got an idea, will you show this different type of NFT in your wallet? It's, we're coming with a very concrete use case that, that is, you know, alive and not just a hopeful Future state.

So besides slogging it out in Telegram, you also are a believer of the IRL. It's weird, right? It's like the anons are just though, right? But then the and and the events, right? So there's all this hate for crypto events. It's like, oh my gosh! Don't get the ticket. Just go to all the the parties and the things around the event rather than necessarily the expo or the presentations or something. Yeah. But yeah, definitely got to be there IRL. Is what you're saying.

Big fan of IRL. I'm IRL right now at an office. Sean, who I just mentioned, just walked by. How do we pick? We do what you just said. Sometimes we buy the ticket, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we all go. I think 18 of us went to Miami for Bitcoin Solana Miami. Solana had a little sideshow there. The original plan was to launch Solana at the same time as our EVM contracts, but we had to do that startup thing where you have to really focus. So we didn't do both of them at once. But yeah, I think, you know, Porter and Zach will be in Bogotá. One person went to Consensus in Austin, 6 or 7 went to ETHCC in Paris. And we have found that the, you know, the more you put in up front before that week, I think the more you get out of it. We all went to NFT NYC. We just kind of used that as an excuse for an onsite, which was fun. But again, I had the ticket. I think I went to one session. I went to go watch Spike Lee talk at Radio City Music Hall. I sat right up front in the front row like a nerd. Nice. And I was Awesome. But that was my NFT NYC experience. And we threw a party downtown where we had grapes for snacks, which was a hit and still funny to me this day. But that worked, right? The party for us was more effective than sitting in these sessions. So I don't know who those sessions are for. I think Sean was at Mainnet. I had COVID that week. Bummer. Bought the ticket, couldn't go. But yeah, I think that— I feel like the sessions are for like your big enterprises. They're like, oh, I'm going to come in here and learn about this space and see what we can do here. But the rest of us are just running around. People are out, you know, Ridgewood and Bushwick and somewhere far out in Queens. That's the funny thing about people coming to New York for events is there's like They're on the West Side, like Javits Center or something. Like, I'm going to pop over to this party in Ridgewood. I'm like, do you know where that is?

Exactly. Such an interesting dynamic versus the Manhattan parties versus the Brooklyn, Bushwick, Ridgewood stuff. Pull Together did one at Talia, which is a brewery in Williamsburg, and it was really fun.

Oh yeah, I was there.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh,

I was running around, you know, uh, with pool noodles and all that, but it was really a great time.

There were little, uh, poolie, uh, what do you call them? I don't know, thing on a stick, paper on a stick.

We had a face painter. Leighton was like, found a face painter that would come and paint poolies on people's faces, so that was fun. It was a good time.

I think—

but yeah, I don't know who those Oh yeah, it was. She was in the corner. She was there the whole time. But yeah, it, you know, very much an artiste. But, but I think with those presentations, I was actually one. I got to present at NFT NYC and I felt so special. But then I realized that apparently there was like 1,400 presenters. But I got on the stage with like 200 people in front of me and I did this weird, like, synthesizer. It was 10 minutes, but I did like a whole spiel about doing podcasts and doing silly songs for Wozzies. And then I made a song. on my synthesizer, and I ran out in the audience and people sang into the microphone. And I'm like, one guy was like shilling his project, singing into the microphone, and I recorded it. And I still have yet to make a music NFT, but it was super fun and I love that. But I'm like, none of the crypto people are here. Who are these people?

Right, right. Like, I would love to have seen that. But yeah, but like, so— What was the topic of the session? What was your talk track?

Mine was, it was improv. So it was improv music NFTs. So I wanted to see music NFTs go away from the track album kind of thing. And I centered it more on time and space experience. And so what would it make, what would it mean for us in this room to create our own music NFT right now?

It was like a workshop almost.

Yeah, in 10 minutes. And like the, the, the It was just a shit show. Like, I thought I was going on at 4:20, but it turns out, imagine that, 4:20 was the, we don't know what time you're going on, so we're going to tell you you're going on at 4:20. And then the sound guy at like 1 PM was like, where are you? And I'm like, I thought I was going on at 4:20. So I had to run to the Marriott and it was fine. No one checks tickets anyway. So yeah, it was, it was really fun. But the parties are where it's at and meeting people IRL is where it's at. But there are just so many conferences and there are so many, like, I, like, I feel like ETH Denver is a place that you would go to see sessions.

Yeah.

You know? And so it's like prioritizing. That's right.

Yeah. No, no, it's just that we went to that, but it was just a few of us. I mean, we were only a few people at that time. What was that, back in February? But it is, it is tricky to prioritize it. There's something in London. There's 2 things in London back to back, the Token2049 and the They call it NFT NYC, but in London.

NFT London. Yeah. NFT London. Yeah.

But brought to you by NFT NYC. That's right. You got to, got to use that, that brand, brand weight.

That's right. Greatest city in the world.

Yeah. One of our, one of our like key metrics for the year from, for the team, I was like, we've got to get to 10 conferences. That was an actual, you know, OKR, if you will, for the year was to get to 10. And I think, I think we'll make it.

That's awesome. Okay, well, maybe we can sync up on events in the future and see how we can, how we can, you know, collaborate and do like a pool towel. What's your Dispatch merch? Do you have anything?

Ooh. So it's been pretty straight ahead so far. Well done. Well designed. High quality. I think IEX, actually, I'll give them credit, set the bar for whatever the underlying thing is. It's nice, right? It's a very high-quality t-shirt. Greg's done some amazing design around the things. But he did one kind of as a joke, but I think it's going to not be a joke because I think we're going to do it, the Despatula. Nice. And he's like beveled the word dispatch and it kind of wraps around on the spatula. But it's like a— it's not like an indoor little plastic one. It's like the big outdoor grilling one.

Yeah.

With the wooden handle, you know, and the metal bottom.

That's perfect.

So I'm very down with the dispatchula. I think as of this morning, we're thinking about doing some GM trivia. I've also been joking, is GM Trivia just going to end up being the successful company and Dispatch is not really a thing? So we'll do some GM Trivia-specific stuff, but shirts, canteens, we've gone pretty straight and narrow on it so far, but we've got to get the dispatchula going.

I could just see people getting onto planes with a dispatchula sticking out of their backpacks.

Yeah, it's that, like, yeah, the supersized spatula with the really long handle and the little, like, silver thing hanging off the end so you can hang it on your grill.

You gotta do a grill. That's how you introduce it to the world, is you're doing, like, just a grill-off.

Yeah, I wish I could drop it into the chat if I could, but I think I'll be distracted for the next 2 minutes looking for it.

Yeah, right, right, right. No worries, no worries. So, uh, We can wrap up here. There's this theme that I'm seeing in— yeah, Knox is asking. Knox has actually done 2 merch stores now. He did one for PoolTogether and then did one for Layer 2 DAO. So if you ever need a quick merch store, Knox is your man. Noted. He can spin it up in a week. Yes, yes. We'll connect the folks.

Thanks, Knox.

Yeah, Knox pulling through. But it's this HQ trivia has been thrown around a lot as this thing that was just such a phenomenon where you would look around in bars in New York and at totally, I think it was 8 PM, 7 PM or 8 PM, everybody like, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. And Scott Rogalski would get on and like, you know, nailed it. Was just a perfect storm of he was so funny and the app like kind of worked most of the time and it was this phenomenon, but We're seeing this in crypto now with nouns want to do noun o'clock. They want at any noun o'clock is like every time the nouns auction ends and Pool Together wants to do like $100,000 to million dollar drawings and do and everybody stop lottery. Let's check it out. Right. We don't say the L word, but totally. Yes. Yes. And the same thing with, with, with this trivia. And, and then

I'm talking about the L word, but like the whatever happens after the 10 o'clock news, that thing. You know, where everybody is like watching together.

Yeah, yeah. You know, or I'm talking— or PleaserDAO is like doing— there's just these like, how do we get people to stop for one moment around the world for a thing? And so that's just interesting that this trivia could be that, or is one thing that contributes to that. And I wonder what partnership looks like, like if it's like a Crypto O'Clock. Or a, you know, what does it look like if it's like this hour? Uh, I don't know.

We better— yeah, go for it. We, we know, just we say sometimes it's GM somewhere. Uh, that's right. And it's just, yeah, it's a moment where everyone can stop and do this together. And it is another— in a way, HQ Trivia was a thing on your phone, but it became an IRL thing. Because everyone was doing it together. And that, that was the fun of it. And I— it's like a nice byproduct of this. And I think as we get more companies and brands to pile into this and they start sponsoring it, they start using it, you know, because it's just us doing it now. But when you add in, you know, 2 more, if it's Dispatch x GM Trivia x Pool x, you know, some, some brokerage where Pool is Like, that's fun. Um, and you get like 1+ 1+ 1 is 10 kind of thing.

Sponsored by Starbucks. I love it.

Sponsored by Starbucks and Polygon. See how many logos can we fit into one promo badge? Yeah.

And HQ was just the thing. Yeah, they were just like their own rogue thing. But yeah, I love this. So, well, Byron, thanks so much for joining us. Do you have anything else that you want to talk about or talk about with Dispatch that I might have not addressed in my questions, because I would love to hear any alpha you have for us.

The alpha is trivia prizes are going to get bigger and coming to a wallet near you very soon. But I love the question around brands collaborating directly with each other. I think very insightful. You sort of skipped 2 steps ahead there into where we're going and what that marketplace looks like. And your access to people outside of going through these traditional channels that we've had to use for the last 20, 25 years. I think it's going to be a really cool way for these different graphs to start connecting to each other.

Well, thank you so much, everybody. Sign up for Dispatch Trivia. It's really easy to do. Just connect your wallet and follow along, and I'll see you at the trivia tables. Or whatever they're called. I'll be there.

I'll see you at the table. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

All right, cool. Hey, that was great. Thanks so much. This is really fun for me. You got to— you got to keep doing these babies. You got that? Yeah. Yeah, we're done.

Okay. We're off. Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Can I go back to being an introvert now?

Yeah, right. Yeah, so I'll just, uh, we'll put this out in a week. Uh, I'll edit, you know, I edit the beginning and the end. I add the bumpers on and stuff. But if there's anything that you're like, ooh, I said something that I— could you take that out? Happy to do it. But I think it was, I think it was really tight. It was good stuff. Thank you so much.

Was it? Yes.

Yeah.

Um, that is first one I've done in a while, uh, post, post-COVID. Um, it's been a while. I did them a lot for Say, And met journalists all the time at a hotel and just had my story, had my lines. Yep. And did some podcasts, but it's been a while. So I was stoked when Zack mentioned this one and the connection to Greg and Leighton. I pitched, like I said, briefly alluded to it, but I was explaining CryptoDocs to Leighton. He was one of the first few people to hear the pitch.

Yeah.

And he was like, I could see that being a thing one day. Yeah.

Leighton's a straight shooter. He'll tell you. He'll let you know.

He was shooting straight, 100%.

Yeah. And this is— the podcast is what I use for my IRL, because I can't go to all these conferences. I'll probably do maybe 3 or 4 this year total. It's fun to have people come to me and I get to talk to them and meet and learn about their platform. And then, and then the next step is like going out and doing their podcasts. Leighton just did a Twitter Spaces with Optimism today and somebody was like, oh, the PoolTogether marketing team's killing it today. And I was like, oh, that's right. That's marketing. It's like going to other people's platforms and saying hi and, and schmoozing and, you know, that sort of thing. And then asking them to come to you. So, you know, that plus going to conferences or not going to them but being there is the play.

I prematurely clicked leave.

Yeah.

I was just saying this was awesome and thanks for having me.

Cool. Yeah, thanks so much. And we'll ship it out next week.

All right. Sounds good.

All right. Thanks, everybody.

See you.

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 Pool Together Discord and let us know.