PoolTogether Community Podcast #48 with Evgeny from Zerion

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, Spooky Tim, aka Hot Mike. AKA, so excited that I'm talking with Yevgeny from Zerion, who's the CEO and co-founder of yours and my favorite wallet explorer and now wallet. Thanks for being here, Yevgeny.

Thank you so much, Tim. Glad to be here. And I'm actually very glad that you even mentioned that Zerion is now a wallet, which is very much an important message that we're trying to push out. So yes, thank you so much for that.

I was so pumped when it came out because I'm like, I love Zerion just to like, just to do the exploration and stuff. And I'm like, of course, of course there's a wallet. So I've got my wallets, but then I've got the Zerion wallet and then I got like the DNA NFT thing that, that's also there, which is very fun. And I just love, I love like popping open Zerion and there's new stuff all the time. Always shipping in the bear.

That's what we are known for. We have been through like the 2 different bear markets already, so it's, uh, you know, not a surprise that we continue pushing.

That's right, like created in a bear market, survived another bear market, working through this and raising funding too. So congratulations on that. I saw the $12 million raise.

Thanks. That was actually the second time we've been raising. Yeah, second time raising through the bear market. So That's been, you know, still not as tough as the first fundraise when no one cared at all, I think, back in 2019.

Yeah. So it's nice that it gets easier, right? It's nice to just sit down and like, you know, certain hurdles that you think you might have to jump over, you didn't have to jump over this time. Or were there new unforeseen hurdles?

Definitely. I think like with each stage of the fundraise, obviously some parts are getting easier, but at the same time, it's like new challenges are being introduced, mainly like the I would say like the new requirements for raising at the valuation that you're targeting, at least. So that's always comes as a surprise. It's never, you know, a never-ending game of challenging yourself.

The pitch change. I'm already like way down the line in the podcast. It's fine because I'm going to ask you about the origin story of you and of Zerion. But I just want to know about like how the pitch changes from Series A to Series B funding rounds. Did the target audience change? The product? You got a wallet now. Like, what's— what were the differences there?

That's a great question. I wanted to first answer, did you even need a pitch in 2021? Like, 2021 fundraise, like the previous fundraise, was fairly easy, I would say, because I was so pumped about the DeFi and everything was exploding on the crypto market side. So that was like definitely an easy pull. Speaking of the pitch, I think to us we needed to show quite a lot of, I guess, like stickiness in the user base as well as the better, much better understanding on the monetization side of things. So how would that basically create value and not just by getting people to use it, but how is it going to actually start monetizing in some way? So that's been a big change, I guess. And in terms of the pitch itself, so for us, the big pivot was into becoming a wallet. Just this realization that the market is moving in the direction that like the portfolio aggregators themselves are kind of like squeezed between the 2 different categories of products. So some are more on the analytics front and the other ones are more on the wallet side. So wallets are actually getting bigger and more smarter over time. And analytics tools are also getting like more sophisticated and niche. And portfolio tracking is kind kind of like this layer in between. So we've decided that we want to go towards the user itself. So basically moving closer to the user rather than moving into like more niche analytics-like instruments. And hence like this move, and that made the change to our story and our pitch during the Series B such that becoming a wallet is the most important thing that we could be doing at this time.

Who is that user? Who are they?

Oh, what do they eat for breakfast?

What are their hopes and dreams?

Is this a marketing persona talk? That's right. We've actually came to define the user, like the Zerion user, as the Web3 citizen. This is not, I guess, like too common of a term, but we've defined it ourselves. And the idea is that Basically, it's the user who has been— we have very much strict criteria for on-chain information for these users. So basically, how long have they been in the space? Like the time between their first transaction and their last transaction, how many NFTs they hold, how many protocols they've used. So basically, the criteria for the Web3 citizen is someone who has been around for some time, is not a tourist, as we call them, like someone who just came and did something and left, but stayed and stick through, maybe participated in some governance and voting, maybe bought an NFT, or maybe used a few different DeFi protocols. So that's the user that we're targeting. And that group is, is not as big as you would imagine. So like, I think many wallets are trying to go after people who are new to the space. But we've taken a completely, I guess, the opposite approach. So we're targeting the people who are actually spending a lot of their time in space and are looking for a wallet that would satisfy their needs and basically, yeah, stop using MetaMask for, for that reason.

That's a picky bunch. It's a small bunch and it's a picky bunch, right? So like you've got the privacy maxis who like don't want to give, which is very much so, right? They don't want to give their email. They don't want to give their phone number for sure. They don't want to connect their wallet to their identity. They like ENS, you know, So that it's— how do you develop for those, that target audience, the Web3 citizen, the web is in, the 3 is in?

Yes, I think first off, it helps that a lot of the people who are building Zerion are Web3 citizens themselves. And we have actually different, 3 different personas for the Web3 citizen. So the first one is the creator, which is like people who are actually building something in the space. The second one is more like, we call them alpha seekers. So people who are looking for investing opportunities mainly. And the last one is an enthusiast. So an enthusiast is someone who is actually using different kinds, like say games, or like actually using the stuff in the space for the sake of using it, not for the sake of speculation. So for that is like what I started talking about. So we have within our team the examples of both alpha seekers as well as creators as well as enthusiasts. So it's kind of easy to start building for ourselves as the first step. And obviously this, like during the bear market, you only get to talk to people who are Web3 citizens. And that's why it's also pretty easy because you can just get raw information about what they actually need firsthand.

How did you come up with those personas? Did you, did you go to some slick agency that also serves Web2 companies or did you get a community member To just create a Google Doc or, you know, a decentralized version of a Google Doc?

That's purely the team effort, I would say. So it's based on the research that we've been doing, the conversations with users and feedback people write in our Discord. So yeah, all of that. No agency, I think, is capable of doing anything in Web3 at this point unless it's like, you know, very much native. Maybe DAO-based agency.

Well, that's very interesting because, I mean, I got my startup pulled together, taking notes for the nascent marketing workgroup, which is now the growth group, which is still forming and working on budget and things like that. But there's this, you know, distrust of anything outside of Web2. But we also have marketing people who are like, no, marketing is marketing no matter where you are. You take these same principles and you apply them. And whether it's Web3 or not, you just, you just kind of iterate. And, and I'm— I actually have a meeting with a Web3 marketing agency, uh, next week. And, you know, there's all these conversations. Nice. But I, I am getting some advice to that, like, whatever PoolTogether creates as far as marketing goes can also serve other DAOs. And the same thing, it's like, it's just how do you get that Lego piece of a marketing Web3 marketing DAO unit and then apply it to really maybe closely aligned protocols or apps, you know, and services. What does that look like to have like DAOs, like teams within DAOs serve other DAOs and kind of work together on all of this? So it's just interesting. Maybe that's the new agency, but I haven't seen it yet. I don't know what that looks like. And I guess you haven't seen it yet either, which is comforting.

Yeah, we haven't. Honestly, we haven't. I've only seen people trying to like do some service DAOs Only like, yeah, when it comes to treasury management and maybe some governance help, but I haven't seen much of an effort. Maybe just like a bit on the marketing side. But yeah, that's definitely a tricky problem. And I would love to see more of that effort to happen. And yeah, DAOs are basically like reusing at least some of that information and some of that insight between each other. So that would be great. Yeah, seems complicated though. Yeah.

BoysClub.eth is doing consulting thing. I know CPG is doing consulting, so we'll see something like that. But then I also think it's interesting to explore that sort of Lego piece of like, it's not necessarily, it's just, hey, we, we do marketing for PoolTogether and we do it for Zerion and we also do it for, you know, just thinking about that rather than that.

I think, right. I think on our side, we've been usually fairly conservative with using kind of like service-like consultancies. Maybe it was coming from the fact that there were no real like Web3-like consultancies. So like our experience previously working with some external is that they have a completely, I guess, missing understanding of the Web3 space and how the users like, and it's quite different. So we preferred to have a lot of this in-house.

Yeah, I think that's the other thing is everyone prefers in-house, right? 'Cause you have to get the, DNA, the core values of the thing. And it's so very much different than the other thing's core values. And you can't just plug and play. And you also have politics, right? You have to navigate very strong opinions from these Web3 citizens. And those opinions are different as you go from service to service, protocol to protocol, for sure.

Yeah, that's definitely the case. That's true. And that's, I think, what makes it hard to be building for the Web3 citizen per se, because as you were saying, the group is pretty picky and opinionated. And there are like, I think, all kinds of like on the spectrum, there are all kinds of folks within the Web3 citizen category. So it's, we still have to make some, I guess, compromise, or you can call it consensus instead. What is the right product for this group?

Nice consensus. But then also, I, you know, this is the other thing that compounds it, right? Everybody has all these Opinions, right? Very strong, very, very well-written opinions. But then we're also on the bleeding edge of technology and everything breaks all the time. So,

yeah,

you know, so it's okay, great, but just I want my PoApp from the community call. Can I just have my PoApp? Can I just get, you know, so it's, it's just really— Do

you have this issue as well?

I was just on the Zerion community call and I'm waiting for my PoApp.

Yeah, we've been having like a ton of people just waiting for their PoApps and we've actually made them paid and that's generated some money for the community itself, which is nice. There

you go.

So we've made like a few grand.

What is that in your raise? Oh, it's working for me now. I'm claiming my PoApp while I'm talking to you.

I'm kidding.

Yeah, but was that PoApp charging in your raise? Like, this is how we're going to monetize?

No, probably not. It was actually coming from the conversations with the PoAP team, like about basically what do we do with PoAP hunters?

Yes, totally. The farmers, the PoAP. There we go. Okay, cool. I got to pay for it. I'm happy to give you money for this. This is great.

Yeah, it's $1.

It says I don't satisfy the— listen, you don't need to troubleshoot my PoAP for me, but it does.

You can bug Noel about it. So he's going to—

Yeah, Noel is a community member at PoolTogether, which is great.

Nice.

Yeah, very cool. Okay, so we're deep down the road of the podcast, but oh, it's 0.001 ETH. But I want to know, are you just tell me how you got into this, Evgeny? Like, how did you where was your life going before crypto, and how did you get here, and how did Zarian come into being? I always love hearing this because I was I was meeting with a founder on Tuesday. We played pinball in Brooklyn, and founder of Nifty Chat. Dude's been in the game for a year and is like an ENF politician, like governor. I'm just like, oh my gosh, in 12 months you're doing more than people who have been. It's just so fascinating to me. So anyways, I would love to hear your story.

My story, you can call it an OG for crypto. So I've been around since roughly 2014 when I got really excited about Ethereum and started writing my own smart contracts. So I've been there. We've done like a bunch of hackathons. We've iterated on like many different ideas we were thinking of. So we were actually, as an example, we were building a DEX when like 0x was only getting started. So that's just like how far that goes. And I think I'm losing the memory already of all of that, what happened in the crypto space since then. So I've been around. We've been iterating on a bunch of ideas and like Zerion came to be originally just by us getting together and working on the product, which was very similar to CoinList in a way. So we were helping other people with their smart contracts for the tokens. And we've done all of the kind of the groundwork for that. And then obviously the bear market happened and anybody who was basically who did an ICO, they were in the business of like helping other people to do their ICOs. Their ICOs, and that's how it ended for us. That's the first iteration of Zerion. And since then, though, like I'm grateful that you know it happened. We went through obviously a pretty painful fundraise, as I mentioned previously in 2019. And afterwards, though, we've been on the I guess on the right track, you can say. So that's like a very very brief story, omitting a lot of the complexity. of going through the, you know, the initial crypto phases.

Okay. Do you have any tips for hackathons? Because we have ETH Denver before us and I've seen these hackathons. I'm not a technical person, but I want to participate in them. And I think that I could help with the pitch. I think on hackathons generally, the pitches are so rough. But then what do I do? Do I just get people coffee and, you know, while they're building and then like, and then like I'm crafting a pitch and I'm just cracking jokes? Am I going to entertain the devs while they're doing stuff? What do I do in a hackathon as a non-technical person?

This is actually a great question. I think there's a lot— you don't need like a lot of people who are doing the pitch, but I think if you are joining the team and you're working from the ground up basically on the presentation, it's kind of like go-to-market strategy in a way. So you're helping with the pitch that is going to get people hooked. And I think like In winning hackathons, it's maybe, let me say, 50% of the success. So we've been like our personal story. So we as 3 founders of Zerion, we've been on this YC hackathon back in 2019. And we were the only ones building something for DeFi. And it was just a bunch of, you know, Facebook and Uber and other engineers. And they basically did not know exactly what they want to do. And, and but we came in with a very firm idea that we're going to use Compound And like make a dead simple app to invest, to put money to start earning yield on Compound. And during the presentation itself, like we made it such that basically the demo was connected to the pitch. And while speaking, we were presenting all the flows and everything worked perfectly. So we had the UI as well written out. So even though you think that for the hackathon you wouldn't need you know, the presentation itself and the demo itself. Having that, I think, helped a lot, a lot to win the hackathon. And my other story was that we've been working on a project with a speaker, like a wireless speaker. And basically what we did is that we got one of our team members to start walking in slowly from like the other side of the room. And as he approached the speaker, the speaker started to play the music. And that was part of the whole idea basically for our app. And that won us again another place in the hackathon because the presentation is just very important. So yeah, kind of coming back, thinking of the presentation and what you're going to do, how you're going to, you know, make a statement or like be remembered basically after the hackathon is very important to winning.

Yeah, but, but still, when you in your examples, those are both tech. Basically you're saying the product needs to work in the presentation. Right. I mean, that's like the key, and that's 50% of it for sure. So if it doesn't work, then it's like, do you have good jokes while the devs are trying to get it to work? Or

if it doesn't work, you can still mock it such that it looks like it's working. So that's like completely like, yeah, for instance, like for this music example, you can just, you know, press a button on your phone behind the back.

Somebody turns up the volume, you know? That's all they did. Somebody just turned the knob.

Yes, but that's still going to make a stand, like, you know, make it— people would remember that as like an example of something that was impressive. So yeah.

Yeah, you just need a wow factor. You just need like the jaw drop. I mean, the iPhone presentation, the first iPhone, like there were wires coming out of it. It was hidden, you know, it wasn't truly wireless. It just looked like it worked. That's all you need. It's the minimum viable product.

Is this indeed? Like, I'm not— I haven't seen the wires. I've seen this video many times.

Yeah, no, they had, they had like wires. They— it was, uh, yeah, it wasn't fully— they had to, they had to rig it. Yeah, okay. Yeah,

that's a great example. See, this is exactly what you can, uh, contribute to the team.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, just, hey, let's use a Nerf blaster to— yeah, whatever. That's so good. So, okay, so there's a, there's a chit— the comment in the chat from, I think it was Shark, but Just like, this is a safe space for alpha, Evgeny. You know, like, if you wanted to just like leak something and whatever, that's fine. You know, I just want you to feel free to do that. And I was just on the Zerion community call and you have the classic when airdrop, you know, like when there's, there's always this. Yeah. But, but just what's the future for, for Zerion? Like, now that you have this raise, now that you have the wallet, like where more of the same, just do, do more for the Web3 citizen. Is there, is there some unique or novel direction that you might take the company or the protocol or the wallet, the app, the community that we don't know about? Anything that you would like to share with us is just like the near and long-term future of Zerion.

Sure. So first off, I think that might be boring, but we have a lot of things that have to be fixed with the wallet infrastructure and like the way wallets are perceived and the way wallets are You know, just come about. So to us, this heavy lifting on the wallet side is what we're going to be focusing on for at like short to medium term with 100% of our effort. And that basically includes, you know, again, the stuff like the transaction history on every chain that you have assets in, having access to all the NFTs across different chains as well, then having, you know, being able to verifiably transact and like proper labeling on all the dApps that you're using. So stuff like that to make just overall experience of the wallet usage much better than what any other wallet can provide. And I think there's a lot we can do here. On more exciting things is our move towards more, I guess, like multiplayer, as we call it, wallet experience. So Zerion has been historically used for tracking what other people are doing on-chain within, like, you follow them, you get push notifications whenever they transact. So stuff like that, and we are going to double down on this. And this is where the DNA also plays along, and our new design is going to feature the identity parts of your wallet experience. So basically aggregating all of the pieces, say like all the POAPs that you own, all the different like domain names, memberships, etc., under the same like a single roof. So all of that move into the social is something I think wallets are currently not really I guess, looking at as much. And to us, and within the Zerion team, we have this consensus that this is going to evolve as something really big. Wallets currently are very much single player, and in the future, it doesn't have to be the case, essentially.

Okay, so when you say social layer, are you talking like messaging? Can you expand on that?

Yeah, so I think it starts with just basic— it's kind of like the Twitter-like experience. So it's less about the DMs, but it's more about public posting. So every transaction that you do is, in a way, can be viewed as a tweet. And featuring that within the interface is something that we're going to focus on, and including the feed as well. And later, I think it includes— so basically there are people working on this communication channels through the wallet to the user base. So basically, for example, there's a company called Dispatch. So what they're working on is this ability for the brand, like NFT collection owners, to communicate to all of the holders of a certain collection directly through the wallet interfaces. And this is something that we're pretty excited about. So users would be able to see directly the messages in the form of NFTs. From the, you know, the owners of the communities that they are part of. And that can be like fully verified and decentralized. And this is kind of like, you know, decentralized posting of sorts. And I think that that wouldn't stop there. And I think it's going to grow further down the line. I'm not yet a big believer in messaging because I don't— I didn't— we didn't see really like a protocol that would be I guess kind of like Ethereum itself on the decentralization side of things. But I think that's at some point that's going to happen too.

So then I'm noticing this resistance for wallets to have dApp browsers like Rainbow still doesn't have a dApp browser and I'm just like, why? But, but I think there's a reason behind that. And I know Zerion doesn't have that either. And I'm just, I'm just trying to figure out the future of wallet interaction with protocols that's maybe— I guess it's either native or it's, or it's in the browser within the wallet. I don't think it's WalletConnect. I think, well, it's like WalletConnect is the, you know, the Band-Aid right now, uh, or, or like, you know, the easiest necessary thing that we have to do. But I still, like, on my MetaMask on mobile, somebody help me, it just, it just goes to the App Store when I try to connect my WalletConnect, my MetaMask. So anyways, yeah, how do we do this? What does this look like in my My follow-up question to this is, how do we get pooled together on Zerion? But yeah, go for it.

That's a very good question. We've been battling with that for a long time. So this UX with WalletConnect is completely broken. So having this interaction bit with Zerion as a dApp and having a wallet externally, that was one big reason why we wanted to have our own wallet, because it's just the flow is completely broken at this point. Speaking of the dApp browser, you just need to wait for maybe a week or so, and you'll get that in the Zerion, uh, app. So that's, that's coming. So we're— I don't know why Rainbow doesn't have the dApp browser. That's a, it's a mystery to me as well. But we do want to have the dApp browser experience, and, um, more so, we want to link all of the interactions that you would see in the feed with all of the dApps themselves, such that you can like quickly navigate to the dApp that, you know, say your friend used to start using it yourself. And this is connected to our, I guess, updated thinking on how protocol integrations should be shaped within the Zerion experience. So we've decided that like Zerion is going to take only the part that is covering tracking and like better labeling and showing that in transaction history, but not maintaining the native integration to a certain protocol directly, because that's Putting a lot of basically like that's risky in one way because we don't really know what protocols that we are integrating natively are going to deliver next, and like we cannot be basically researching and doing assessment of the security of each of the protocols. Then there's a lot of maintenance costs associated with that because like UI of these protocols is going to change depending on the smart contracts and like their new iterations and constantly updating a host of different. Use cases is just not feasible for a single team. And, uh, we've, we've seen kind of like a lack of, I guess, shared effort towards the goal. So basically, like, neither dBank nor Zapper wanted to collaborate on like something that would be shared across the board. So that's been a challenge. And I think for now, the dApp browser is the right solution for interacting with dApps and like different protocols. In the future, I think as we stabilize around the use cases, we would be integrating the most prominent ones more natively. Once it's kind of like with trading, right? Like we still have the trading ability and this is something that is not going anywhere. It's going to be part of the wallet experience forever, most likely. And having that makes a lot of sense. So similarly with other things, we'll be implementing the stuff that is only kind of evergreen, as we call it. So that goes Goes on forever as the use case. And yeah, pull together. Is it not supported? I'm confused.

No, no, I'm just saying, like, so when you get thank you for the alpha on the dApp browser, that's awesome. And then I assume there's going to be some featured apps or some ways the bookmark, you know, like there's some sort of link. That's really all it is, right? Is a link. It's a link to pull together. You know, I'm sure you have a DeFi section. You'll have a, you know, Trading section, DAO section, governance, that sort of thing.

Yes. I think there are some challenges with that. I think in the first version, it's not going to have any kind of like sections per se. It's going to have only the verified lists of dApps, and we should definitely get you on the verified list.

But I totally understand because at PoolTogether, I'm getting requests doing— I do biz dev for PoolTogether, and people are like, hey, can we get a link to Our, you know, fill-in-the-blank pay. Like, so for people who want to, you know, get crypto, use Coinbase Pay or whatever. And so you're going to have Juno Pay. Everybody wants a link. And it's like the old school website. I used to run a website for a nonprofit and every department wanted homepage links, right? And you're just like, no, I care about the user. I want the user to have the experience. And so me being like, hey, pull it together up there. It's not necessarily the best user experience, but yeah, thinking about who's the Web3 citizen, what are the things that they're going to want right at their fingertips for the dApp browser? Obviously they'll want to customize what that is because different strokes for different folks. But yeah, exactly. I imagine a world like, I live in New York City and I get parking tickets because that's New York City for you. And you just get tickets all the time. It's like a driving tax. But I can pay with Venmo now. I can just pay my parking tickets with Venmo. And I imagine a sort of world that it's just like, pay with your crypto wallet and whatever that is. There's this UX that we've not experienced yet.

Yeah, I would love to see that future. I think by this point, it's not too far off in my head, at least. So if maybe like a year ago, I would tell you that this is like years away, I think it's At least in some, in some cases, it's getting closer to reality. Yeah, because so many things are getting abstracted away. So it's, it's becoming, I guess, cheaper and more understandable to have that, uh, say like pay with your USDC for your ticket. Uh, so yeah, and having, I, I would honestly want to replace my Apple Wallet thing with having all the tickets stored in my Zerion wallet as an NFT. So that would be perfect, at least for starting with some crypto conferencing and then scaling that for other things as well.

Right. And I even think, I mean, I was having a conversation with Tjark, our brilliant community manager, and we were just talking about crypto onboarding and how it's just so early. And it's like, people are going to get— like, if we aren't on board, say we onboard a billion people, they're all going to get scammed. They're all going to lose their password keys. They're going to send ETH on Optimism to ETH on mainnet, or they're going to mess up their chains. Yeah. And so, for example, ETH Denver is coming up. I don't know if you have a— I also want to know what your favorite— what do you think the must-go-to world events are? Because this is like a burning question. I always have FOMO, but I also have to prioritize. I want to go to one event a quarter, probably. And ETH Denver is like a must-go-to, I think. But the whole city of Denver absorbs this ETH or the crypto community. And there's this like service industry people don't get any tips. And tips in the United States are very kind of crucial to the whole ecosystem of the service industry. Yeah. And so I don't know if it's just international crypto people that are like, I'm not tipping, I don't have to tip in my country, or if everybody's like all in crypto and so they don't have any They're not liquid, so they can't tip then, which is weird because they're buying stuff. So they have to be liquid. And then, or they're just, or they just are cheap. Like they don't want to, they're like, you should have a crypto wallet and I'll tip you if you have a crypto wallet. So I'm thinking—

How come they're not getting any fees?

Yeah, go for it.

Any tips? Like, how do you know that they're not getting any tips? I'm just so curious.

Because I asked them and they said that, I asked them, like I was at a barber and I was at a couple restaurants and every time I go somewhere in the service, I would ask them, If I wasn't surrounded by crypto people, I'd ask them, how's it going? And everyone said, no, really, I heard this multiple times, that NFT stands for no fucking tips. So that was just interesting to me. And I'm like, well, wow, this would be really cool to onboard Denver, the service industry for crypto. But then I'm also thinking, well, why? Because we're not there yet. We're not ready yet. So

yeah,

anyway,

that was my guy. My guess would be that it's mainly have to do with the international people coming to like not knowing the standards. So I think like in the US, we were cheap when we were students and when we were actually chased by one of the waiters when we tipped less than 10%. And basically they just ran after us. So that was a life learning experience for myself that like tipping less than 10% means that like you're actually offending a person, not, not complimenting them, which is not the case anywhere else in the world. So, uh, yeah, that's just something that you have to learn about the, the States. So yeah, I, I think, yeah, I'm hope— I'm hoping that this is not because people just don't want to tip because they're cheap or something, right?

I think it's something that I'm like, what if we did— so like, would Zerion be like— Zerion be like the Onboarding, like, could you have an onboarding session with Zerion and how would that go? Do you think it's ready? Because I mean, you said actually your audience is not, are not those people. Your audience is not my mom who like tells people I'm in finance because she's ashamed of the crypto apparently. But, but, but like, yeah, is, is that a thing? Like, are you, are you thinking about onboarding? Normies.

I mean, we were obviously thinking a lot about onboarding normies. To me, like, the way it's playing out in my head is that obviously focusing on the Web3 citizen does not mean having a complicated UI that is impossible to use basically for an outsider. So to me, that's like a different thing. So to me, having— I think coming from the Apple philosophy, your MacBook basically scales as your experience with your MacBook grows. So you can use like the most sophisticated tools on the MacBook. You can use the terminal as well. It's like a FreeBSD kernel. So basically you can do whatever you want, but it's still available to be used for anyone who is just starting out with a computer. So that's how we perceive to be building a product. And I think deriving inspiration and like building for the Web3 citizen is Mainly connected to the fact that these users are basically the ones who are using it on a daily basis, and they are the one the ones driving the future use cases that we should be building towards. So it's more about kind of shortcutting and understanding what's what's important for the user base versus onboarding normies is the step that comes kind of happens, I guess, as the the crypto space matures itself. So I I don't think you can drag someone to be using. Crypto if they don't really want it. So I think it's a hard pull, and usually it happens the opposite way. So once the crypto space is ready to a certain extent, then we have this massive influx of new people coming to the space. So from all of that to say is that we should have the best experience for the Web3 citizens, and at a certain level in the next bull run or something, we'll get an influx of people who would want to use the better tools No matter what. So yeah, and to connect that to the people who are, you know, just like in Denver, it would be a great experiment. I've been onboarding myself quite a few people to the Zerion wallet, and it takes, you know, just a few taps honestly to send them some money on, say, Polygon. But obviously there's a big barrier in terms of like them using that afterwards. And I guess this is like still kind of unsolved on our side at least.

Yeah. I mean, the other way to onboard people is just make it like the FOMO so heavy and so real. And that's— we saw that in November, right? Or we saw that right at the last all-time highs. Then it's people like, okay, I got to do it because if not, I'm going to be a serf in this new feudalism that's happening, feudal economy that's happening. on crypto. I got to get in at some point, you know?

Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, it was definitely helpful. Like we finally got people who were not like speculating on, you know, just like the altcoins. And we finally got different diverse groups who are interested in like different aspects of crypto. So, which I'm grateful for.

So, uh, we got Richard is asking a question. Can I, can I dollar cost average With the wallet,

that's a good request. You cannot at this point, but I'm sure there are a few dApps that do that. I forgot the name, but we've we've been pitched a few times like this dollar cost averaging applications. I think the the issue with that is is trust usually because you you'd have to give an allowance for some contract to be spending your whatever USDC every. You know, weak, but it's, it's something, you know, it's a great feature. We don't have it yet.

I wonder if I, I feel like— oh, oh, and then, uh, Richard is asking, asking, import/export watchlist for—

Oh yeah, you can do that.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, this is— you, you can do that. It's also encrypted, so it's, uh, it's not touching the server, like our server, uh, in an unencrypted way. So you can move your list from one device to the other using just by following a link. And yeah, you don't need to code that on the client side. So it's privacy preserving.

Well, I think he's saying from between different wallets, like to share with, oh, to share with other users. So Richard wants to have a list of stuff. Yeah. So then he can share that.

Yeah. If you're talking about the web, you can already create like a short link with a password that you can pay, you know, send to other people and they could import all of these wallets into their Zerion account. And we're actually thinking of, so like this is currently in the works, but looking at kind of like the lists that people create and share between each other in a more natural way. So it's, yeah, it's something that we're considering.

Okay, great.

I guess like you would need that.

That would be mobile maybe in the future. being able to do that within the app in that social thing that you were talking about. So Evgeny, what are you excited about in this, this hard to be excited about things world of crypto and Web3? You know, what, what are you, what are you spending your time outside of Zarian on if you have any?

I thought you're going to pause after, you know, in this depressing world. Dot. Yes. I think that, you know, Web3 is more exciting than many other things happening in the world right now. So that at least that's That's good. We are pretty excited, and like I've been looking a lot at different social protocols, and this is what I'm spending more of my time researching. Like different recommendation engines for social, how like different you know how can you build different feeds for the same data that that is on chain? What's going to be you know how the the identity is going to play out? So these kinds of questions, and this is something that we've been. Yeah, thinking a lot about. And after DEF CON, obviously there's a lot of talk about account abstraction and bridging and how like account abstraction works in the multi-chain context. So this is another really puzzling thing for for us because like EOAs are not optimal, obviously, and we have to make a leap at some point into something better. And the question is, what is better? And so far, it's been a challenge on both like the MPC-like wallets as well as for the just like say Gnosis Safe-like wallets from the UX standpoint. So we haven't seen a solution that is just working, you know, as great as the normal seed-phrased wallets like MetaMask or like Phantom, which were able to acquire a bunch of users even though they have significant flaws in the UX. So yeah, that's another topic that I've been, I've been thinking about quite a bit. Yeah, that's mainly it, I think.

I was actually on taking the G train in Brooklyn, and I heard 2 people start talking about wallets and normal people and how they would like interact with it. And I just started, I was like, oh, hey, crypto. And they're like, yeah. And they were, it turns out they were co-founders of this startup called Peasy, like easy peasy, P-E-A-Z-Y, something like that. And their whole goal was to basically create a Web3 experience for all Web2 stuff. And there's a number of these things, but basically that you would log into a store online, you would make purchases, and you could use your crypto or you could interact with an NFT and purchase an NFT by just logging into the site. typical email login with a phone number, 2-factor, whatever, if you wanted to set that up, or just a 2-factor app. But it's fully non-custodial wallet stuff where they're trying to abstract it away. And so as you're talking about security and talking to Argent, which they have this smart wallet, there's their way that they're doing it with private keys where I don't have to write a seed phrase down and they're encrypting it. Yes, there's like this whole, you know, there's something there. It's just like, what is that? What's— who's doing it? And there's so many things. So how do you— how do you— even with social, right? You got Lens, you got Farcaster. There's all these things popping up. How do you—

CyberConnect as well.

As a co-founder and a CEO, stay fresh, you know, stay abreast of all of this stuff and then also run Zerion. How do you do it? What's your secret?

I have no idea. That's the short answer. But I think so, this definitely was a challenge, especially last year, given that how many different use cases appear to be. So you just feel that you've been only like catching up on everything DeFi, and suddenly you have a bunch of different other things that you have to also stay on top of. So I think what helps me usually is help— is talking with the right people. So people who are building the exact, you know, new primitives, new use cases, because they usually just go into the depth of the why and they know a lot about the evolution of things. So you just get so much alpha speaking directly to the people actually building something. So that's been, I guess, the shortcut for me. And obviously going to a conference and having these chats in a very concentrated way. That also is a great way. But it's been hard and I can definitely admit, and I'm not obviously like previously, I remember the days when I knew like in and out pretty much about everything that was going on in the space. And these times are long gone now.

For sure. Well, let me do this then. I'll give you a little PoolTogether alpha or just tell you a quick bit about what's coming up. So, you know, right now with PoolTogether, it's a, you just put USDC into one big pool. This is version 4 of PoolTogether, and it can be on mainnet, it can be on Avalanche, Polygon, or Optimism. 77% of our TVL, which is around $50 million right now, is on Optimism because of the rewards and such. Wow. But you deposit your USDC, and the newest product that we've put out, or our newest tool, is that you can delegate your prizes to whomever you want. as many people as you want. So which is pretty cool for like treasuries and NFT projects, whales. You could put, you know, millions of dollars in a PoolTogether and then distribute it out to people. They win the prizes.

Oh, nice.

And then you can withdraw at any time. So it's a really cool thing. Or you can give to charity that way, right? You could direct your prizes to a charity wallet. So it's really cool. V5 of PoolTogether, which our UI just released, our new UI just came out this week, which is great. Props, Dylan. JTB, who's now head of product at Bankless, for making that. V5 is now what if we could take no loss, right? With USDC, you can withdraw at any time. You don't lose anything. You only win, hopefully. And then what if you could deposit whatever you want into PoolTogether? No loss, right? So you put 5 ETH in.

Any asset?

Any asset. Yeah. You put 5 ETH in, you take 5 ETH out. You didn't lose any ETH, right? And then you had the chance to win prizes. So what does that look like? And so that's like the main premise with V5. That plus then delegating, I mean, the powers, right? The secret sauce, there's so many things. So I think that's the main next direction for us. And then also larger prizes. So if we get to $250 million TVL, we're going to have like $100,000 a week prizes. Which is very, very juicy. What is it going to look like if we could have million-dollar-a-month prizes? What would it look like? You know, or those sorts of things. And can we create another—

Very exciting.

Great.

How are you currently— so where do you usually post the collateral to generate yield? So is it AAVE or— We're

AAVE maxis. Wherever AAVE goes, we go. Yeah.

That's right. Have you, have you thought of, uh, maybe doing some, some kind of collaboration with, uh, Gitcoin on, you know, matching the, the winning pool? So like if you, if you delegate to someone, for instance, uh, like your prize, it can be like matched if that's for a good cause or something. I don't know, like, or distributing part of the pool to say like the next Gitcoin grants thing.

Oh, so, so, um, So I think I've created the first step in that direction where I think one of the hurdles is for people don't want to manage the money. First of all, they're scared to move money, right? They don't want to move it. So wherever it is, like the trick for PoolTogether would be to go to where that money is so they don't have to like move it, right? That's scary to move millions of dollars anywhere, right? To do anything with it. So, but I've created poolmanager.eth. It's just like a regular address and you can elect someone to manage your funds, meaning just that all they can do is delegate. They can't withdraw, they can't— they're only pointing the delegation. So it's like kind of a concierge service, like, hey, whale, just deposit your money in a pool together and then tell me where you want it delegated and I'll figure that out. I want everyone who holds a WASSI to have a delegation. Okay. Poolmanager.eth would do that. But what if we had like a pool grants dot eth or a pool pool give or something like that where they would direct your charitable giving or and then that could be like a combo with the Gitcoin. That's interesting. I'm gonna take that back to the team. Think about how we can do that.

All right.

Yeah, charitable giving is so huge. This is a great way to do it.

Nice. Yeah, I mean exciting that you have like yeah during the bear market having such high TVLs. It's very impressive. So, yeah, it's actually another good point to like, kind of with the rise of the whole crypto space, we still have the use cases that are kind of outside of just pure speculation on the asset pricing. So, you know, for PoolTogether, it's like, you know, it will exist forever. And that's, and that's great, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for that. And so I hope I helped you. Thanks. You know, you've definitely helped the PoolTogether community with the alpha. We had a couple alpha posts with exclamation marks. in the chat, which is great. Uh, we're excited to see, uh, how things continue with Zarian and like ways that we can work together and, you know, see you IRL at a conference or something, you know. Was there anything else that you wanted to touch on that we weren't able to talk about, you know, that you, that you wanted to announce? Or—

I actually just had one question. So you, you've directed this question to myself, but I'm curious, where are you going next in terms of the conferencing?

Yeah, so ETH Denver is the main one that's, that's on the radar right now, uh, and, and it'd probably just be ramping up to that. I went to Permissionless this year, and so we were able to do a pull together, kind of get to— we just took over a brewery in West Palm Beach, which is where I grew up. And then NFT NYC, because we have a group of people who live in Brooklyn or in the New York City area. But that's all we did this year is East Denver, Permissionless, and NFT NYC. There were some people who went to DevCon. So Oops is a community member, but also with Zapper. Also was on the Zerion call earlier today who did like an onboarding thing. So there are other community members kind of dispersed throughout and at all these events, but those are the ones that I did. I don't know what next year will bring. I don't know what ones we should do. So.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking of going to ETHDenver. It's kind of funny that I have never been to ETHDenver ever. So I've been to like pretty much every DEF CON, maybe with like exception of one, but ETHDenver is another iconic one that I've missed. somehow the last 4 years. So yeah, hopefully I'll come there.

That's right. Yeah. So you go to ETH Denver this year and I'll go to— or this one, and I'll go to the next DevCon. All right, deal?

Sure. That sounds great.

Okay. All right, good. Yeah, see you soon. Thanks for joining the Pull Together Community Podcast. This has been so awesome. I'm glad we got to do it. I'm excited about the the new future that you're creating with your team. And let's continue to partner together as we bring crypto to the masses.

Thanks so much, Tim. Thanks for having me. And thanks, everybody. Enjoy your day.

Take care.

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.