PoolTogether Community Podcast #47 with Masha from Celo

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, Sir Hot Mike, aka Spooky Tim, aka It's After Midnight, and I'm here with Masha. Masha Healy from Cello. Masha, what is up? Thanks for joining the Pull Together community. I mean, you are the embodiment of the Pull Together community, the Friends of Pooley community. I mean, you've got a Pooley passport, don't ya? Welcome.

Wow, what an intro. I am so honored to have all those titles and just feel fortunate to be around and associated with such a great crowd of people. I think PoolTogether is the very best of crypto, and that speaks to both the project itself and the people. So pumped to be here.

And listener, I just want to comfort you with this. If you've been to any crypto conference in the past 2 years, maybe, let's say, maybe a year, and you've seen somebody with the cutest dog you've ever did see, then you've met Masha and her puppy, right?

What's your— what's your

dog's name? I forget.

My dog's name is Leroy. He's a little Brussels Griffon, a shorthaired Brussels Griffon. And he was at Permissionless. That was his first and so far only crypto conference. Actually, he was— he was partially at NFT New York City, but And actively attend at the venue.

Made an appearance. Got it. Got it. So, listener, I'm sorry you're— but if you were at Permissionless and you saw Leroy, then yes, you've also seen Masha. There's, there's a game called Stray. It's— you're a stray cat and you go through the city with like a backpack and they like sell cat accoutrements now for Stray. But Leroy needs his own game as well. And Leroy, that's the name of it.

His favorite thing to do is I have— I do yoga on my balcony and I use the Pool Together towel. And his favorite thing is curling up in a little circle on the Pool Together towel. That's his spot. Loves it.

Curling up. Sorry, there was a little Discord cutting out and it sounded like throwing up in a circle for a second. But curling.

No, here, I'll put a picture of him Curling up. Yes. Curling up. And then I'll see if I can get a photo of him at a permissionless in the chat. So that's him on the—

Now we've said curling so much, I'm imagining Leroy curling like the sport. Like the kid, you know, that's also cool. Cool, okay, so we got that, we got the pic, the sweet pics of Leroy. Oh my gosh, on the trophy no less. Perfect, perfect placement.

You can't make this up.

So good. So good. Well, hey, can you just tell us about how you got here to the status, like the level that you are in crypto Twitter and in the space? How'd you— how'd you get here? What got you involved? What's your origin story?

It's been a journey. It all started with a class that I took my junior year of college. I was going to school in New York City at this really small school right on Wall Street, on Broadway and Exchange, essentially right by Wall Street. And I went to school there because, you know, I wanted to be at the center of the world, as we're told and taught. And I was— I started off as a finance major. Then I kind of became a business major. And I was taking a class about entrepreneurship with no intention of becoming an entrepreneur and with every intention of going to work on Wall Street. becoming an intern at Morgan Stanley and getting coffee for the first 3 years of my career. That was my image of life and what I was like really pumped and excited for. And then I took this class and we had this adjunct professor and his name was Leighton Cusack. And so Leighton, I feel like most people probably know, but Leighton is the Founder of Pool Together, one of the founders of Pool Together. So Professor Leighton now, he really did not like being called Professor Cusack. He wanted us all to call him Leighton. He was very, very adamant about that. And this class totally rocked my world because one, he didn't really teach it like any of the other classes we had. And it was a very practical class where he would send us like some pretty short brief readings, and then he would bring in people from the city who were working on startups, and they would come and they would share what part of the journey they were at, what they were working on, you know, what problems they were trying to solve. And throughout that class, like, we had an assignment of doing our own little startup project, and I just absolutely fell in love I was like, this is an option. Like, you can, you can create your own, like, you can find problems and solve them. I just didn't even know that this was an option. Me, it was always like, you have to go join, be a part of some great big institution and kind of just climb your way to the top as being like a little, little nobody and crawl into being a somebody. Yeah. So then by the end of that— well, during that class, he also talked about how he wanted to start a no-loss lottery, and he talked about crypto and he talked about Bitcoin, and that's where it all started. So I loved the class. I loved what he was saying about crypto, so much so that in one of my other classes, I ended up doing a project about crypto. And then Then after the class, like, I reached out to Leighton. I was like, dude, you gotta hook me up, get me into the startup game. He was like, yeah, like, let's, let's, let's make it happen. And he connected me to Natasha, who is one of the co-founders of Boys Club. So I interviewed with her on like a travel startup, but she wasn't ready to hire me. So she sent me to Dina. who also is the other co-founder of Boys Club. Dina was working on a crypto project at that time, so that's where I got my start, was with Dina working on a crypto project. And then just to speed things along here and get to the nitty-gritty and where I am now, I went to go work at The Giving Block, which helps nonprofits accept cryptocurrency donations. So I kind of came on as an early employee there and really helped them scale out and onboard a lot more nonprofits. And then I made the jump over to Celo because I wanted to be more directly involved in the crypto ecosystem itself. And what I love about what I do is I read a lot of grant applications, so I get to see the best and maybe the worst of what people are building, which is always fun. So yeah, that's, that's how I got to where I am now.

So many questions, but the first one is, what was the crypto startup project thing that you worked on that you want— that you blew right past in the effort to make things shorter? But now I'm asking you to make them longer.

No problem. So it was called Gracias, and it was a Bitcoin is supposed to be like a Venmo Bitcoin. And this was like in 2018. It was like right during the last bear market. And I think they wanted the— there were just like some tech things that weren't where they needed to be. So the project had to get retired, unfortunately. But it was so fun. I loved it. It was a great— it was a great start.

Yeah. And it wasn't like a hackathon thing. It was just like, hey, let's do a startup. Let's do something. And then you did it.

Yes. Well, I was not a founder. I was just kind of the scrappy college student that was there for iteration and getting shit done kind of vibage. That was me. It's like, hey, Masha, want to do this? And I'm like, yes, let me do it. It's like, hey, like, let's—

IRL. So could you go run and get coffees? No. So you didn't get— you haven't gotten the coffee running yet?

No. Nowhere in my career have I had to get anyone coffee, even though that was something that I had imagined for my life. So the only person I've been getting coffees for is myself and my buddies.

Sounds great, really. It's like there's exercise. You get to go outside, you get to like work on core because you're like balancing stuff. You get to be detail-oriented. You get to like interact with the baristas who are generally, in my experience, always nice people. So—

Next time I see you, I'm getting you a coffee. How

about that? Okay. All right. Yeah, deal. Deal. I'll get you— yeah, one day we'll trade off just so we can see, like, we can—

Mutual exchanges of coffee.

Do a performance review. Yes, exactly. So let's hear about these grant applications. So you see the best and the worst. And in my experience with PoolTogether grants and then with looking at NounsDAO stuff, looking at NARS stuff, looking at Wasi stuff, there's a lot out there, right? And generally grant applications are the way that innovation gets done, kind of, right? So like, for example, with Nouns, you have a bunch of Nouns holders and people propose to them either through like delegation or whatever, their ideas. And it's kind of one of those like you're pitching and that's how you're building and growing generally, but it's really incoming leads, right? There's also maybe like bounty boards would be the outgoing leads, like, like the team has decided this is what we want to do. So let's put a bounty up for that. And in both of them are kind of like building the airplane while flying kind of thing. Like coming from the nonprofit world myself, like What's the strategy behind that? The one-pager strategy is always desired. So when you're looking at these grant applications, it's not necessarily pertaining to Celo itself, but it's pertaining to businesses or protocols or apps or things that want to get started on Celo, right? Or is it also like marketing stuff for Celo? What are these grant applications? And please tell me your horror story since we're so close to Halloween.

So first of all, we have 2 different funnels for grants. One is our kind of more so strategic grants. So that's us reaching out to projects. So we're like, yo, pull together, you guys are so great. Like, we'd love for you guys to get a grant from us and to build something with us, right? And then the other option is like, together applies for a grant from Celo to build something. So mostly then, like, where you get a lot of different kinds of projects is within those, like, applications, right? So we have projects that don't have MVPs apply. We have projects that have MVPs that apply. We have content creators, like people who are looking for travel scholarships, people who want to be ambassadors. I mean, we had someone apply for a grant for a space data marketplace, which I thought was super interesting, but just doesn't fit like our current objectives. And it was primarily like a Research-based grants, so that wasn't necessarily the right fit for us. But it was just like I was reading it and I was like, wow, there's someone out there thinking about like space data mining. No, yeah, exactly. So yeah, all sorts of stuff. And you know that means grants of like a very small size to grants of a very, very large size. So it's. All depends. And then of course you have the bear market grants and then you have the bull market grants. And, you know, in the bull market, grants is a lovely place to be. You know, you're making everybody happy. Then in the bear market, you're just shredding hopes and dreams, usually, unfortunately.

By shredding hopes and dreams, you mean saying no a lot, or, you know, funding because you're still giving out grants right during a bear market. But I think it's just the trajectory of those grants would change to something that's more like necessary, not flashy, like integral is guaranteed for growth, something like that, rather than like the the frou frou fluffy stuff like Super Bowl ad.

Yes, absolutely. I think I have like a whole spiel about grants and how they are kind of like funding for a lot of projects right now in the ecosystem. And like one thing that we say is like this grant shouldn't replace you going to like raise money for your project. Right? This grant should be for you to build something specific or to go towards a specific project. And when there's a downturn in the market, that's when you see more projects really trying to help their funding through applying for grants and receiving grants. And like you said, we can't support every single project. And that's when we have to become more specific with the projects that we do support and what we're looking for in the ecosystem as well. So it just becomes a little bit more of a, in some ways, difficult decision because you can't say yes to everyone. And you know that for some people, this grant would make all the difference for their project, right?

Can you just tell me what Celo is in your own words? Because you're the official representative here from Celo. Like, you've got the full backing of legal and, you know, this is— you speak for the whole organization. And so one, I would just love to know like your elevator speech on Celo. But also, can you tell us as a community how we can right now go and get on Celo and do stuff? Please.

Wow. Okay. We got a lot there. One, none of this is financial, legal, or any other kind of advice. This is all my personal opinion. 2, Celo is a mission-driven layer 1 that its goal is to build a financial system that creates conditions of prosperity for everyone. Essentially, like, Celo's main focus is, is really to build out like financial accessibility and inclusion. So Celo is centralized, also like one of the first carbon-negative layer 1s to be proof of stake. And a huge focus for Celo is mobile first because we realized that most of the unbanked have access to mobile phones. And what really matters to us is that applications work on not the most flashy and newest iPhone, but can work on more affordable, basic mobile phones as well. So that's Celo elevator pitch. Feel like you have a good—

Love it.

A good image there. Do you have any follow-up questions?

I do. No. Well, I do have a follow-up thought is that I know Oops, our beloved Oops, did an onboarding clinic thing at DevCon in Bogotá, which you were there. Yeah, you were at DevCon, not necessarily on the onboarding thing, right?

I was at DEF CON, yes.

Okay, was Leroy there? Leroy was not there.

Leroy was not there.

We need a brand new Leroy.

Maybe next time I go to Columbia, I'll bring Leroy.

Okay, so yes, and Leroy would have slayed at this onboarding event that Oops did. And Oops's feedback was, not to put words in Oops's mouth, but my interpretation of Oops's feedback was, we're still so early with the mobile crypto game. Personally, I try to WalletConnect with MetaMask and stuff on my phone, and it goes to the App Store. I've been shut out of being able to connect my MetaMask to stuff on my mobile. So I guess I got to reinstall the app or all that, but it just is not fun. And so Celo is mobile first, like mobile only, right? And it's mobile only on most phones that you can throw at it. Which is so beautiful.

Yes, that is cool. That is the goal in and of itself, in short.

Okay, so how are we all getting on Celo right now?

So how are you guys all getting on Celo right now? As in, like, you want to get some Celo and get started? Yeah. Well, you can go ahead and purchase some Celo, and I can send you guys like a couple of places to do that. But I think it just depends if you want to go like the centralized exchange route or the decentralized exchange route. I

think we should go— why not do it from— can you just walk us through verbally through like you're deposited into PoolTogether on Optimism, right? And you want to take a little bit of your pooled-together deposit and pop it over to Celo.

You know, I actually don't necessarily have the answer to this, Tim.

Okay, so we'll edit this out if you want, or if you don't need to. It's just— this is real.

It's fine. I'm not— I'm not leading anyone down, down a path that I am not confident in.

Got it, got it. Okay, all right, okay, all right, okay. So it's, uh, okay, but, but generally just give the, like, how does somebody get involved in Celo? They get the Celo app on their phone and then they, they need to get a little bit of— so yeah, go for

it. So the easiest way to get started in the Celo ecosystem is to download Valora, which is our wallet. And within Valora, it's tied to your mobile phone number. And within the wallet, we have a dApp store which shows you a lot of the different dApps that you can use. And you can use those within the wallet, within the app itself. Valora wallet. Perfect. Download it right now. That's going to be like the easiest one-stop shop to get like a good image and capture of Celo.

Denicio del Toro says just, you can just use USDC to swap to Celo and then bridge it to the Celo network.

Yes,

that's how I think Denicio del Toro talks, speaks. Definitely. Maybe it's more like, you can just use USDC. Cool. All right, there you go. And then you just pop it over to your Valora wallet, pop it. And then what do you do once you have Some cello in your Valora wallet. What's your first action that you suggest? Not financial advice.

First action I suggest—not financial advice—be to go mint an impact card.

Oh, making the connections. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

I would tell

you what's an impact card, Masha.

So an impact card is. The first proof of impact-esque type. It's a dynamic NFT that shows up as a card. Let me see if I can throw in a picture. This is like what the impact card looks like.

Cool. There's quests too. Yeah.

So this was little fun project we did before DevCon. So we worked with the Friends of Pooly community. Shout out.

No noise.

The squad. And essentially, like, idea here is that right now we're hearing a lot more projects talk about going carbon negative or neutral, about how No, there's a lot of people talking about like the good that they're doing in the ecosystem, right? And the way that we see this card is like an opportunity to show some of that good that you're doing in a verifiable way. So this card was like— this was like a pilot where we just tested out 3 different projects that you can participate in. And then what happens is when you, for example, deposit into Impact Market, which is a UBI— it's like a UBI donation platform— then the Impact Market logo will light up like it is right now. So that's like a full— this is a fully activated card. And then same with like EthicHub. And then Gitcoin Grants was a way that we were showing that this card has like cross-chain abilities as well. So it's not just for things that are built on Celo, but can also be for things that don't happen in the Celo network. So yeah, it was a really cool project and excited to see where it goes from here. It's kind of like an OG hypercert. You heard about that?

Hypercert?

Gitcoin. Yeah. Bitcoin's rolling out hypercerts.

There we go. I know, I know about HyperCard. Throwback. But yes, hypercert. Cool. So that's from Gitcoin. It's going to be hypercertifications.

Yes.

Love it. What's Friends of Poolie?

Friends of Poolie is an advocacy community, like a crypto advocacy community. Are you joking with me right now, or you want me to roll the pitch?

No, I like hearing your pitches, but it's just funny that I'm just asking you all these gotcha questions, but I'm not trying to. But I'm like, hey, can you please be the The representative of Friends of Pooly right now?

I could try. Yeah. Friends of Pooly is like a crypto advocacy community that started from the concept of stepping up and supporting PoolTogether in their lawsuit. And it's kind of like an extension of that, of trying to bring people together To be informed and participate in what's going on in Capitol Hill. Yeah.

So it's basically anybody who has the—

not get wrecked.

Yes. If you have a Poolie NFT, that's basically the sign of a friend of Poolie is by holding a Poolie. You don't have to, to participate, but that's like if you want to get in the secret channels, I'm sure.

So if you care about like crypto advocacy or what's going on with legislation or just like grassroots movements, that's a great place to hang out. And the reason they helped us is because they are the stewards of ERC-721K framework, which is what built our impact cards and what is— What is that? Okay.

This one I prepped you on. Yeah. Yeah.

This one I was like, explain that.

I don't know. Yeah.

So ERC-721K are dynamic NFTs that allow for you to verify on-chain and cross-chain actions, and eventually it can also be built to verify off-chain transactions as well. Um, but yes, how do you feel about that? Where do you sit with that? Yeah, why are you in grants

when you

should be like, you know, content creator?

We've got Taliskai and we've got, uh, Kames in the, in the audience on the Discord right now, and they are 2 founding members of Friends of Bully as well as Jark. And others.

James, if I'm right, Richard, you could just or or Taliska, you guys can just jump in.

There's. I think they they're just supporting you with links. That's it. That's I think you've nailed it. So so what's the future? What's the future look like? Because right now, apparently everybody's super excited about a 20% bump in the market. But but that's not guaranteed. Nothing's guaranteed. So what's the future look like for for you, for Celo, for Friends of Pooly, for ERC-721s

for Leroy? I think that an area that really interests me is kind of that I've become pretty interested in is like grants just in general and like how grants are given. How we see like money distributed in our ecosystem, and so I'm excited to see more transparent grants, more grant tooling, more grants protocols. Maybe shout out to Gitcoin rolling something out. So I know that's maybe not like a particularly hot take or like, what does the future look like? But I would like to see a future where there's more accountability for grants that are given, right? So I think that— I don't know how many people listening have received a grant or have applied for a grant, but depending on where you apply for a grant and who you receive a grant from, Sometimes the process, like, you could just get like a really like fat stack, just like with almost no terms and no follow-ups and no anything. And so like what I'm excited to see is like more reputation-based kind of grant giving as well, right? Like, I give Tim a grant. Does Tim deliver on this grant? Like, if yes, reputation go up. If no, I don't know if I want to gift him another grant and whatnot. So that's what I'm excited for in the future.

So the development of on-chain granting and how Web3 influences that. I work with foundations where I do like Salesforce customizations and websites and stuff, but the group of these foundations is part of trust-based philanthropy. And typically in the philanthropy world, apparently grants are very oppressive to nonprofits and get in the way, especially for reporting, like to do the type of reporting that foundations want. It becomes costly. So they actually have to use like part of the grant to pay for the, the ways to be able to report back to the foundation, which is not ideally what the foundation wants. So trust-based philanthropy is kind of going the way of crypto. Meaning, hey, you're the experts in the field. We're going to fund you certain amounts, guaranteed amounts, and we're just going to have a check-in and that's it. Just kind of like a face-to-face check-in. Each foundation kind of figures out what they want to do trust-based-wise. But what's interesting is that crypto is the other way where it's just like, here's the money, go do it. Where'd you go? Why isn't the work done kind of thing? And so it's just interesting of like, how do we put more constraints or more checks and balances, but also like enable and make it easy for builders to build rather than report on what they're building? Or, you know, governance, like governance or applying for grants. There's a lot of like jockeying and, and DMing and other stuff that happens, which is kind of like not ideal, but it's still because it's the Wild West, it's the name of the game right now.

And for me, what I see grants on its best day is giving funding to projects that might not have as much visibility but are still working on something really incredible. And a great example of that right now has been Gitcoin grant rounds, right? So that's a great way for the community to signal what kind of projects they want to see and what kind of projects they support. And it's allowing, you know, like Celo can give a large amount of money to a Gitcoin grant round and then allow for like the community to vote and for Celo to match, um, and support in that way. So I like bringing more of a public-facing angle to supporting projects in an open ecosystem in that way. And especially quadratic funding, I think is super awesome. So I love that. Yeah.

There— anything with quadratic in the front of it sounds awesome. And apparently it's like going to be the— it's going to change the world. Like, so quadratic voting and quadratic funding seem to be nice answers where in my understanding, quadratic— the quadratic part is basically like It kind of evens the playing field between whales and fish, right? So if you have, you know, $100 to give, there's a pool of money that can also match and you basically get a little bit more oomph in the gift that you give. The same thing with voting. It's like if you vote and you have a smaller representation, you actually get a little bit more based on Math or something. How'd I do? See, that was me trying to explain something.

That was great. Yeah, and and I mean, Gitcoin's also trying to add in more reputation-based things as well, right? So if you verify certain things about yourself, then the amount that your contributions get matched becomes greater. So yeah,

there's always tying it to humans, right? The civil resistance, the proof of humanity. I know that Richard and the Pool Together. community really wants to see peer-to-peer lending, like true peer-to-peer lending where it's like reputation-based and it's like you basically have your own sort of on-chain credit score. But also just the fact that like, you know, you, you build up cred in crypto by, Masha, like going on podcasts, right? This is going to totally build up your cred and your exposure and your followers. And so you don't want to throw that away. by taking a loan out from somebody and then rugging them. Right. So there is this whole like, hey, how, how open and transparent and trustable are you? And then once you have that and that proven track record, then we can, then we can give you more money and more responsibility and trust you more.

This is my first podcast, so let me know how I'm doing, guys.

You're doing great. I was saying you need to say— it's funny, the people that have said that this is their first podcast, I'm like, you should actually do podcasts. But then I also don't want to tell people what to do with their lives because people do that to me sometimes, like, oh, you should do this. And then I'm like, I immediately feel like a failure and I miss my calling because I'm not doing the thing that the person said I should do. So I don't want to do that to you either, but I do think you'd be a great content creator. Especially with you and Leroy. Yeah,

I'll have to, I'll have to, to bring Leroy onto a podcast with me. He can do a little barking.

Oh, that's so good. We have a question from the chat. Uh, this is SS Kid Goku. They're from— oh, this is Goku from Push Protocol, which, um, is asking about notifications. I've had so many notifications conversations really as of late with Dispatch, with Push, with NiftyChat. What are you thinking about push notifications for grants? Like, hey, like maybe from the grantee point of view, hey, we did this deliverable, or from the grantor. No, wait, I did that wrong. The grantor would get like a deliverable completed push, or the grantee would get a, you've got cash, or, you know, please report, or other sorts of things. That's my imagination of how grants would work. How do you see notifications?

Yes. So that kind of reminds me of just overall grant tooling, like I had mentioned. So for example, if doing more on-chain grants, there's a project called Questbook, which is, I think, a little further along than Gitcoin is rolling out. And like they have like a portal where grantees can first of all put in an application. Their application gets reviewed and let's say it gets approved, then all within this like portal they can submit milestones. And then like the people who gave the grant can review it and say like, yes, like let's pay. So notifications could be used as a way to let them know that a payment is on the way, to let people know that Oh, something has been approved or let people know that their application was accepted or that their application was rejected if they, you know, a wallet address or something for their, their application or whatnot. Why not?

Okay. So this wouldn't be a PoolTogether podcast without me pitching something PoolTogether, but you already kind of pitched it with Friends of Pooly and you're— we're friends here. We're, we're part— we're both part of the same community. But what about no-loss grants? What about PoolTogether granting where you've got some sick, sick stack, right? We're talking $50 million. We're talking, we're talking Vitalik-type money, right? And you put it into no-loss, you put it into PoolTogether.

Okay.

You— there's— it's not— it's staking, right? And then you, and then you delegate it out to your grantees. Right? So you know generally what they're going to get thanks to pricecalc.com. You can see what they're, what they're actually going to make. I think it's pricecalc.com, you know, but then you don't lose it. And then at some point you got to reduce the size of the fund because the market or whatever, and people are getting no-loss grants. But you need technically for that kind of funding, you need like a lot of funding, but it's out there. Why not do that? It's evergreen, right? Regen. We got summer.

Refi summer. That's us. Refi summer. Okay, so your suggestion is we have a large amount of money deposited on PoolTogether and then we give grants. As an example, like we give grants from that amount or we delegate or you— Decapping this.

Yes, you delegate the amount and then they would win the prizes in the delegation. Which generally you can use pricecalc.com to see how much that would work out to, but it could be a little bit more, a little bit less, a lot more, a lot less. But generally it's going to be right on the money. I mean, I don't know. It's probability, right?

Yeah, I guess the one thing is like if you delegate an amount to someone, then they would have to like win winnings to actually get money, right? So Yeah, that's right. In terms of like giving a grant, that being a mechanism of giving grants. Yeah,

because you got to count on the money. Okay, how about this?

Yeah, new idea.

New

idea. Okay.

Yeah, go.

No, no, you go and then I'll go. Okay.

Though I was going to say you can delegate to grant funds. So you take a big lump of money, you delegate it to wallets that are then granting. And then you send the money out of those grants.

Delegate to a wallet that is granting, and then yes, that could work. Uh, I was thinking also it could kind of be just like, instead of like a mechanism of like giving grants, at least like from a Celo perspective, it could be a way of like supporting active community members, right? So it could just be like—

Yes, exactly. That's an easier way. So it's not necessarily grants or it is like grants, but it's like a, it's like a prize grant, a prize savings account grant or something.

Yeah. Like we just want to, we just want to sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle some goodness and let you know that we appreciate you.

Yes. Well, I've created poolmanager.eth, which is an account where I will manage for anybody who wants to delegate 50 milli out. to their project or their people. So we can get as many people who want to delegate and build up the delegation powers of poolmanager.eth and then point the laser beam of prizes at some lucky, unwilling individual. Unwitting, not unwilling. We want consent, but like unwitting. You know what I'm saying?

I got you. I got you. Like that. I don't know if I— I don't know if I should—

we got it.

Yeah, go for it. I don't know if I have $50 million for you. Maybe we can think about something.

But see, this is the secret, right? This is, this is projection, or what is it called? Where you— the secret is by saying it, we're saying that you have $50 million. At some point you will have $50 million. What is that called? Name it and claim it.

Are we talking about me personally, or are we talking about Solo?

I'm going to say you now. I'm going to say you personally. That's right. I'm going to do a— I'm going to do a— go ahead.

Every time there's like a big— there has been a big life happening of mine in terms of my crypto career and journey. Leighton has been somehow attached to that, whether he sent me a link of somewhere to apply to or he made an intro for me or something like that. So far with every job that I've had. So if anything great happens to me, it always comes back to— I always feel extra grateful for Leighton and for the PoolTogether community. Oh, yes,

that's so true. Yeah, many of us lately, a force.

If I get $50 million, maybe, maybe some of that can just come sit in the PoolTogether pool. Why not?

I love it. But what if it's, it's 50 milligrams of something now? We weren't specific enough for, for the face to know. Um, I'm still trying to think of that word. It's not— uh, anyways, it's gonna bother me. Oh, whatever, it's fine. Um, cool. So let's talk about the, the elephant in the room, Masha, which is why is Pool Together not on Celo?

So we Do you have something on, I think, V3? We have— Yes,

we have a solo pool.

Yeah, on V3. We want to get in on this, on the new versions, but we are waiting on Aave. And so that's a holdup on our end.

Oh, really? Well, yeah, I've been talking to Aave and just being like, hey, when solo? When solo? When solo? When is solo? The greatest people in crypto. Celo, Celo, Celo. Hello, Celo.

Wow, thank you. Um,

and they feel it. They know, they know it's on, it's on their radar. I know.

I do, I do think they know. Um, so all we can do is just shout it out into the universe. Oh my goodness, yes, we would love that. Yeah, call them up. All standing up. That's right.

So Richard, Richard got us our podcast with Stani, and then we'll now just we'll just by sheer force, by sheer Twitter force, get Stani to get Ave Ancelo, and then we're good to go. Masha, I heard you have some calendar pings. Do I need to let you go? You have a meeting, don't you? You have a hard stop at two thirty.

You want to see? You want to see? I'll tell you exactly what that ping was. for. It says Leroy, 2:30 to 2:45. So I usually, in the middle of my afternoon block, sometimes take Leroy out on a little stroll.

Aww.

I just like to, you know, not just like doom stare at the screen always. You gotta stretch the legs, gotta feel the sunshine. And love, appreciate the day for what it is. Yeah,

I have cats. And so if that were on my calendar, which I feel like a bad cat dad for not having that, but it would just be pets for them because I'm not really going to go walk them, right? They're not into that sort of thing. So isn't that— wouldn't that be so cute to have 15 minutes to remind yourself to pet your cats? Find someone that puts 15 minutes on their calendar for you. In the mid-afternoon to walk you like Masha walks Leroy.

I like to try to keep a structure to my day. You know, it doesn't mean I follow it. Doesn't mean I follow it always.

I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Well, yeah. So Pool Together will be on Celo. We are naming it. We are claiming it. It's the secret. We are projecting it. I still can't think of the word. But I'm going to put it in the podcast notes. It's killing me. But yeah, you know, like the whole idea when you walk into like a luxury car place and you test drive a car even though you can't afford it, and then one day you're going to— it's going to happen. But yeah, so it's going to happen. PoolTogether will be on Celo because Aave will be on Celo. And I love that Richard already is plugging. Richard's already tweeting at Aave to get that to happen. So podcast listener, you were here. This is where it started. This is

this is where it started.

Momentum has always been.

Yeah, for whoever wants to.

Right? It's it's always been boiling.

Whoever wants to.

Always been under the radar.

In touch with me. Sorry, I was interrupting you. I was just gonna let everyone know you can keep in touch with me here on Twitter at Masha Keely. It's me. I would love to connect with you guys, and I'm also gonna put some more photos of Leroy for those of you that wanna. Uh, this is Leroy at Permissionless, guys. And where are the photos of your cats?

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it kind of looks metaverse-y because of that background. It's like a purple background, so it looks like Leroy's in the metaverse. Oh, I've got cat photos, but this is about you, this isn't about me. Um, you got any more? One more. Let's have one more Leroy photo so we can put it in the, um, Put it in the podcast description. Yes. Is he a good protector?

Um, I don't think he's really had a chance to really protect me from anything. If he sees some things in the dark, yeah, he definitely is a good protector in that way. Like, he lets me know. He's like, there's some— there's something creeping over there.

Yeah. Those are my 3. Um, that's, that's, uh, Patty, Bella, and Violet. Bella is Violet's mom, from right to left.

I have a question for you.

Yes, yes, yes.

What is the hardest part of being a podcast host?

For me, I think my battle is going to be different than your battle because you're going to host podcasts that we're also going to be playing. I think for me, it's I don't like silence and I don't like space and I This is why I have trouble speaking to people who are older than me, because I think that people who are older and wiser are okay with silence and space and stuff. And for me, I always want to fill it up. So then my mind races to come up with other things to say and to speak into silence when it's probably good to just like allow some rest and take, take a beat, you know? So I was listening to Hasan Minhaj from Patriot Act, and he's a comedian. He was just talking about when he— he cringes watching his early comedy stuff because he just talks a million miles a minute. And so I think for me, it's just like holding back and being okay with silence and being okay with breaks and being okay with thinking about something rather than saying the thing that I'm thinking about, trying to fill in the space. So that's the hardest thing about for me on podcasting. What has been the hardest thing about you, for you on this podcast?

I was going to respond to the hardest part for you.

Sure.

And saying that you and I make a great podcast duo because I also just like to ramble sometimes. So I'm with you. I do agree that silence is golden and the best conversations that you can have are the ones where you can have a little silence, a little room for, for pause. For contemplation.

Yes, I do think that we are a dynamic duo here. This has been really fun to talk with you. It's always a pleasure getting to, like, see you. Oh, this is one thing I meant to ask you that I have not asked, but we got to talk about this. You travel a lot, which I'm so jealous of. Every time I have so much FOMO that you and Cames got to hang out in Bogotá and I was like, oh, But I mean, I had all my cats, which is great, but, but I didn't get to hang out. So, and then I asked you once, I think I asked you at NFT NYC at the Pool Together party at Thalia. I said, hey, are you ever sick of traveling? And you're like, no. You kind of looked at me like, why would you even ask me that?

I think for me it was an adjustment. I definitely Didn't expect to travel this much. That's why I moved to Miami because I wanted to live somewhere beautiful, and I told myself I wasn't going to go anywhere. I was going to stay in Miami this whole year is what I told myself. Little did I know that every month for probably two weeks I'd be out of the out of my apartment and out of the country sometimes. So it's really just been like an adjustment from. Traveling happens every once in a while to like you are going to go on a trip and you are going to travel. So build a structure and a way of keeping yourself accountable to the things you need to do to keep yourself mentally, physically, and otherwise in a good frame of mind. That's been the.

So it's not too much yet.

No. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. I love it. I think that shared experience and togetherness of people gathering in one place is where the magic happens and where the best ideas are born and relationships formed. So as much as it's feasible for me, I'm going to keep traveling and keep learning too, because I still feel like I don't know more than the next person. Which is, which is good. You know, I don't think I'd want to be someone who thinks that they know everything, but I find these like conferences are a great place to just sponge and listen if I can help it.

Totally with you. I, yeah, IRL, you, you face to face, you can never replace is my mantra. It's one of my mantras, my many mantras. And, uh, and so like, that's why I love Brooklyn because I put out a pool together towel at the climbing gym and I get people in crypto that come up to me and like, hey, and suddenly it's like such a better connection than like seeing them on Twitter or something like that. It's like being able to meet people and talk to them and be like, oh, you're a human. Like you have value because you're a human, not because of what you do. And like, you know, you are not your output kind of thing, which is really nice. But how do you pick the events that you go to? Because you don't go to all of them because that's impossible. You're only one person. Unless— are you only one person?

That's my secret. You figured me out. I've mostly just been going to the Ethereum conferences and then where Celo has had a presence as well. Then just being open to just whenever someone says like, oh, this is going to be a cool event, Should go, and being like, okay, can I go? Can I make it happen? So that was like MCon, and MCon was really one of my favorite conferences—the Meta Cartel Conference. I really liked that one. It was in Colorado. Yeah, I'm not—I'm not in Europe right now, so I am probably gonna miss all of those. And I didn't go to East Berlin or East Safari in Africa. So I haven't been to all of the conferences.

Okay. Yeah, I'm still working on my conference strategy. I mean, definitely there's like stuff in New York that's easy peasy to go to, but then you got to go to ETH Denver, right? You got to go to ETH Denver, especially this one, this one coming up. And then, you know, a sprinkling, a smattering of others. Apparently DEF CON needs to happen for me at some point. But yes, love that. We have a question from the chat.

Yeah.

DevCon was top. Yeah. And I missed it. I missed it. Leroy missed it too, though, so I feel better. What are your favorite protocols? This is from the chat. Richard wants to know top 5 protocols.

All right.

Don't you dare say Bitcoin.

We're throwing Celo. We're throwing Celo in. Near and dear to my heart. We're throwing in Pull together. Come on, gotta love it. We love a little bit of optimism. Love. I'm big on— I want to see Gitcoin protocol. Like, I'm just a fan of what's been happening, so I'm just interested. And then let's see more guys. I don't have one jumping at me right now. We will hit four.

Okay, four. Yeah, top four is good. Well, Masha, thank you so much for spending time with us, the Pull Together community, as a community member, as a representative of all things Cello, as a representative of all things Friends of Pooley, and as a representative of the goodness in humanity. So thank you for being here. It's been so fun. And we'll push this out next week. So every— all the podcast listeners have to wait a week. All the Discord attendees got to hear you. Thank you so much. Everybody give a clap, hand clap for Masha.

Thank you, everybody, for listening to my ramblings and for having me on. I love you guys, all of you. Seriously, the best, the best of crypto has is pulled together, pulled together community.

All right, there we go. Cool. All right, well, thanks so much. That's good. We're good. We'll, uh, we'll edit it up and, uh, and, uh, you know, do you have to get the Celo lawyers to approve?

This is all my personal opinion, so

great, perfect. Then we know.

No financial advice.

Thank you. Seriously, thanks for doing this. Really, really great. You have a future in content if you ever want to. And, uh, I'll see, you know, we'll see you around.

All right. Thank you so much, guys. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord And let us know.