PoolTogether Community Podcast #54 with Katya from MEW

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. Please show some respect. And I'm Katya from MyEtherWallet. Thanks for making time for us. This is fun. I'm excited.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's great.

So we got the PoolTogether community in the Discord. And if you're listening to us, like, post, like, in a podcast app or something, try to make it to one of these in the Discord. We talk on Wednesdays at 1:30 Eastern time, which is like, what, 6:30 30 UTC, international global citizen. Okay. And we got the chat going. So, Katya, thanks for making time for us. I would love to hear your crypto origin story. And the reason I like to hear crypto origin stories is because it helps me with mine, understand mine. And we have a lot of people who are listening who are new to crypto, so it helps them in their story. So tell us. How'd you get into this wild, crazy place?

Uh, so, um, I got into crypto like almost 5 years ago now in early 2018, which, you know, doesn't seem early to me because by that time so much had happened, but I guess it may be early to someone who's just getting in. But, um, um, in early 2018, I had just moved to LA where my Ether wallet is based. And I was just looking for some freelance writing work online. And I saw something for like crypto publication, online publication, nothing super famous, but, you know, just they were putting articles about news and stuff. And I was intrigued. I hadn't looked into crypto at all before then. And I responded to them and I was like, you know, I don't know anything about this. And the editor said, Well, I like your writing, and I like that you're in LA. You can cover some events in California, so and you'll figure it out. You'll be fine. And I was like, okay. And he was right. Like I started by going to conferences and covering them for the publication, interviewing some people. I tried to see as many talks as I could. You know, researched online, obviously. And over a couple months, like I was fine. I was doing okay, understanding like. what I was looking at, what I was writing about. And yeah, and then a little bit later, maybe a year into that, I thought that I wanted something more permanent, like work for a project instead of writing about projects to really get into it. And I found NEW. Like I said, they're based in LA. The office is in downtown LA. And No, I went for an interview and it happened and I've been with them ever since for 4 years now. So, that's how it happened.

A couple of interesting things about your story. One, like 2018, I said you're basically Gandalf. Like you are basically like, that's awesome. I dabbled in 2019 and in 2020, but I didn't get full-time until November 2021. And when I talk to people, some people are just like, wow, all right. You're like established. I'm like, really? It reminds me of like, when are you officially a New Yorker? And like, I've been in New York for 13 years and I still don't feel like a New Yorker. But I think most people who have been here less than that think so. That's, that's just interesting to me. And then the second thing is that you're, you're with the same peers in crypto. That also seems like you can retire now, right? Like you have—

Pretty awesome. You know, yeah, you know, it's funny that you mentioned New York and stuff. Like, I'm, you know, in California now, but I grew up in New Jersey, like right across the George Washington Bridge. And it's like, you know, like you're in that cohort of people who like, I don't consider myself a New Yorker, but like when you go somewhere, you say, well, I'm from like near New York, from the tri-state area. So like I'm a sort of New Yorker. But yeah.

Love that because there's like this social pressure that you're feeling even in a context where there is no social pressure anymore. You can totally say you're a New Yorker, but you're afraid that like some New Yorker is actually listening to you and they'll wander over and be like, where are you from? Where do you live? Exactly. Yeah. Jersey City. That's not New Yorker, you know?

No, no. You know, bridge and tunnel for you. Yeah. But But with crypto, it's interesting because I think it's great that everyone is a beginner. Nobody can really say that they've been in crypto for 20 years hardcore. And I think that's kind of what made it easier for me to get into it because I didn't feel intimidated. I went to school, I went to Stanford, but I didn't go to Stanford for tech. Like, I went for psychology, you know, so I, you know, the programming that I did in my life was, you know, CS 101, which was an HTML site back then. And, um, but I wasn't intimidated by the industry by the fact that I didn't know anything about programming or tech because it was so new and everyone was learning. So, um, yeah, so, um, I think just being able to search things online and find your way was was okay. Wasn't scary. And, um, about staying at MEW for 4 years. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people move around a lot, you know, hopping from project to project. But the thing about MEW is that they've been around since 2015. Like literally since the beginning of Ethereum, it was the first, um, client-side, like in, in interface for Ethereum that was not a command line interface. Ethereum launched in August, I believe, in 2015 or something. And then Mu was started like literally weeks after. Oh, I think maybe just their commitment to certain things in the space and their longevity kind of rubs off on you when you start working with them. And, you know, you, you see the continuity, the sustainability of the project, and you don't feel the need to hop over anywhere else.

So I would love to know just how have things changed at Mu over your 4 years? Like when you started, what were you doing? What's your role? How did it— How did that morph? How did everything, how was it built out? You know, how are, how did you get to the place that you're in now?

Sure. Yeah. So my work at Mew, I'm the content and community lead. So from the beginning, when I first started, they didn't have anyone else in the department, so to speak. So all of the socials, blogging, if any, there was no blog when I started. And then, you know, I founded it. And educational materials. So anything like user-facing, I would deal with, except for support, of course. We knew we always had a dedicated support team. But I did do some support on socials. And when I started, it was mostly the web, the web wallet, the web interface, and the mobile app just started. Uh, in 2018. Um, and it was, you know, completely Ethereum-focused. Um, um, and, um, you know, so it was less products, uh, less chains. Um, and, um, you know, um, the space was smaller than it is today. And over these 4 years, MEW, um, launched a full-fledged mobile app, which, you know, does everything— swaps, browser, everything you would expect nowadays. On Ethereum, the web interface changed a lot. Um, and, uh, most recently we launched Encrypt, our browser, Web3 browser wallet, uh, which is multi-chain now. So it's not just Ethereum, but, um, like all EVM chains, Polkadot, even Bitcoin, you can hold Bitcoin on it. There's, you know, there's no dApps with Bitcoin to speak of, but you can hold Bitcoin there. And so, yeah, so there's been so much change. The space has expanded. Mu has expanded with it. But at the same time, what I like to see is that some of the legacy things that, you know, people could do with Mu are still there for, for, for, you know, old users, hardcore users. Like you can still interact directly with contracts on Mu Web. We still support access with hardware wallets, like 5 or 6 hardware wallets more than I think any other interface. So it's kind Kind of, we aim to expand with the space to serve users where they need to be served, but also to keep some of the old services that people are used to so they can always return to Mu if they need to do something they used to do, you know, 4 years ago or 5 years ago, they can still do it.

Question from Taliskai, pulled together community member extraordinaire. Expansion and contraction of communities through this year's ups and downs, what are the challenges and solutions for communicating all the Mu changes to your community and That was my Talisker impression.

I don't know if it's good or not since I don't know the person, but, um, but it sounded like it might be a great one. Um, so, um, I mean, definitely, um, communicating with users is some— as the wallet, right? We are the entry point for users into the space. So many things that are important when you get into crypto happen right at the wallet stage, right? Like custody, your phases, things like security, you know, which networks are you interacting with, what's the difference between the networks, etc. A lot of this happens right at the wallet stage. And, um, it's always, you know, we, we put out so much educational material and we try to put it everywhere we can, right? We are active on Twitter and, and Reddit, uh, and we have Our help center, we have a blog, we have in our mobile app, we have an education center right in the app, like the guides directly in there with the screenshots so you can do everything in the app. But I also understand that, you know, you can write as much as you want. You have to get people to consume that information to make it more palatable, more understandable, to deliver it to where they are as opposed to, you know, like making them click a link. So that's always the challenge. Like we can create the information, the content, But how do we get people to want to read it and to receive it where it's most convenient for them? Oh yeah, we, we get asked, this is not exactly the question that was asked, but we also get asked like, how do you deal with like the markets, bear market and whatever, you know, the community gets smaller, the community gets bigger. With MEW, we kind of try not to pay attention to that and stick to building and to doing what we're doing. And not to worry too much about whether people are onboarding or offboarding. And since we are not like a short-term rug project, we don't have to worry too much about that. We have like across our products, we have about 3 million individual users and we, you know, our community has stuck with us through the years more or less. We've got a lot of new users recently as well. And, you know, we just try to put information everywhere and hope that at some point the person will, you know, get it and consume it. And whether it's through Twitter, whether it's through Reddit, we have a channel on Telegram, whether it's through our help center, so, or, you know, right in the app by having links right in the app, notifications in the app. So we just try to cover a lot of ground and hope that our community will know, and keep them up to date on everything. I don't know if that answers it.

Great. And Taliskai says, preach, you're getting below the surface of the question. Love it. Nailed that. I just nailed that Taliskai impression. So, uh, but where are these people coming from? Like, where are your users? Uh, do you have any information on that? I know this is Web3 and I know we like to stay anon, but, you know, like you can have anonymous data. Where, where, you know, where, how are you flying? How do you know who you're talking to? How do you identify like a, your, your key, your target audience, which I would love to know more about them too.

So, uh, I mean, there's been, this is now a sensitive subject because there's a lot of conversation online about data. You know, the, if I can say it, MetaMask, the MetaMask, um, scandal, I guess, lately. But what with Mu, all we really have is Cloudflare data. So we have a general idea where our users are based, but, you know, not individuals. Like, we don't know anything about an individual user, but generally, like, how many people are based in different geographic regions. So there's a limited amount. And with, if you're like truly non-custodial and Decentralized and whatever, it's hard to you know get data on your users, and we make peace with that. You know, we are unable to, and we don't do like any super targeted marketing because of that, because we don't you know collect the information. But we also get some information about our users through support, obviously. So whenever we get support queries, we can see like what languages are coming in. If people are asking questions and they say, you know, I'm based here, and you know. This is not working for me, or, or it is working for me. Um, and that's, that's kind of how we get the idea, right, about who our users are, or through socials, obviously. And, um, uh, I guess it's harder, uh, than it is for like a regular project, a Web2 project, uh, that can target like minuscule, you know, pockets of audiences because they, they can get all that data. But I think it's worth it because we're, you know, kind of trying to do a different thing here. We're pursuing a different goal. I think it's gratifying to see that our products may be useful for people in third world countries that don't necessarily have access to banking the way we do in the US, who have issues like You know, runaway inflation and things like that with currencies, or, you know, like wars, like in Ukraine. I'm originally from Ukraine a long time ago. My family is from Ukraine. And, you know, to see that crypto can work in situations like that, maybe better, maybe more efficiently than fiat, is gratifying to see. So, yeah, so we just, we try to listen to the people who speak to us through support, through socials. And we have, like I said, a general idea of where the users are. But we don't mind not having specific particular data because like I said, like we are, you know, on a different mission here.

Totally. But when you said you've got a spike in new users lately, I'm like, ooh, where? Who? You know, thinking about Pull Together, of course.

Well, when we release new products, right, like they may have different features and efficiencies that would Real useful for a different group of users, right? So when we released our new wallet app, a full-fledged app, this has been a couple of years now, but it's it's so targeted towards newbies. Like the onboarding, it's it's got like a comic about Ethereum. We've got a mascot, Peggy, who is named for Margaret Hamilton, who was a NASA engineer. So like she's like a space girl, and it's it's very targeted toward newbies. Like the onboarding is very easy. We try to get And we have integrations with like buying ETH from, um, providers, you know, so that buying ETH is super simple, like one click and all that. Obviously that's a more centralized option, but for now there's like not a really good decentralized onboarding option unless it's like, you know, a white truck and somebody, but like, we don't do that anymore. We do not recommend doing sketchy things. But so, and we see when people, you know, from downloads of the app, some of them are probably our old users who had— who used Mew Web and found out about the app and are trying it out. But again, from support and from how people speak to us, we know that a lot of the users who got the app are completely new to the space, and so they're learning about it through us. Which is a big responsibility and a big privilege to get people onboarded. And we try to do our best for them. With Encrypt, we worked actually on the extension together with the Web3 Foundation and Polkadot. So Encrypt supports Polkadot and all parachains. And so we extended into the Polkadot space, you know, so they onboarded onto Encrypt for Polkadot and hopefully they're exploring Ethereum as well and all the other chains that that Encrypt supports, which is like, you know, Optimism and Polygon. And, um, so with new products, we get new users and, um, a lot of them are beginners because of the questions that we get. That's how we know.

Like that. I like building for new users, creating products that, uh, people are like, ooh, of course, crypto people, they're going to go back for the new stuff. Oh wait, they got a new thing that does this. Now let me go check it out. So new feature, new users or, or returning users. So I love that. And Katya, you said that you're doing content, right? You've been doing content for, for Mew and Encrypt and, well, for Mew for 4 years and Encrypt. You're running the blog, right? On the Encrypt site. How is that? Listen, content is a black hole. There's never enough. You can all, you know, you just, you're always going to have a job unless ChatGPT takes over, but then you just use ChatGPT to outdo Just a regular ChatGPT, right? You know, humans plus AI beat AI every time. Uh, so then it's just gonna be—

I'm not gonna lie, that scared me a little when I first tried it. I was like, oh no, I'm gonna be out of job, like, you know, in a week.

It's like you got a new employee. I mean, right? Like, it's just really cool. It's like, oh hey, you know, and then you just gotta tweak it, right? So our podcast, this podcast description will be written by ChatGPT. Or assisted by, believe it or not, that's what we do. We, uh, Denisio del Toro produces our podcast. He, uh, writes a— he's nervous about his podcast description, so he writes it and then he puts it in ChatGPT and says, make this more interesting. And then it becomes more interesting. Then we use it and then we ship it. I

see. That's, uh, I like that approach.

I'm giving alpha here. Yeah. But, but, um, back to, back to content and how it's an insatiable black hole. That like, no, like it's always going to be there. How do you, how do you create content that's zingy or that like is fresh or that isn't just like checking a box, but like these people are actually like, or what content have you done that you've been like, that was actually a really successful piece. This is really good content for crypto, for the internet.

Well, I take A user-centric approach, unsurprisingly, I guess, because, you know, Mew is a very user-based company, user-focused company. And, you know, my position specifically is user-facing. And I guess I'm not trying to break the internet. I'm just trying to create useful stuff for users, right? Something that will actually be useful for them as they make this journey. For Encrypt, Encrypt hasn't been around that long. It's been a couple months since it launched. And so we are, because it supports so many chains, which is the purpose, like we created it for a multi-chain Web3. And we are excited about providing this easy, like, tool that works with the chains just built in for, like, all these new communities building, right? You know, Polkadot is one and they have all these parachains that are both Substrate, you know, the Polkadot base and EVM. And a lot of them have these like great communities, small but very active. And we've been making guides to how to use Encrypt specifically with that chain. It's nothing complicated. You know, you choose the chain, like Encrypt makes it easy. But having a dedicated guide allows these communities to post it on their pages, you know, and kind of help new users along. So it's something simple, but it turned out to be popular with these chains to have us just make these guides because they, you know, they make use of it. They find it helpful. Some things that I've written recently for users. Obviously self-custody is a big thing right now because of FTX and all that. And I find it frustrating as a content creator that like with mainstream media coverage, everything is conflated together. So there's very little nuance in terms of like that there are different ways of doing things in crypto and not everything is a centralized platform. And if you do it decentralized way, non-custodial way, can be a different experience. And you can specifically avoid the kind of problems that are being highlighted now with FTX. So I tried to write about that, you know, um, how to move from an exchange, how to get into self-custody. What are the caveats? What do you have to look out for? Um, another thing that I'm working on currently, a piece of content is about, um, signing, um, you know, when you interact with, um, dApps, Have to sign messages and sign contracts. And sometimes you don't really know what you're signing. And a lot of users kind of like are scared about that. So I'm researching even for myself, because I don't know everything about it. I'm researching about the ways to avoid like getting into a malicious contract and how to revoke signatures, et cetera, you know, things like that. So I look a lot at our support. I look at what people are asking about on socials, not just us, but, you know, other wallets as well. And I just, I just want to create content that people can find useful. Um, even if, you know, even if it helps like 100 people not get scammed, it's, it's, that's good content per my judgment. You know, that's how I judge what is good and what isn't.

Appreciate you sharing with us your secrets. There's this, um, app called Jo— Fire, and it, uh, if you minimize an NFT, uh, I think you have to mint, like you have to try to mint a fire NFT, but you can get like a wrecked NFT. It's like a kind of a random mint, but if you get the fire one, then you get to use their app. It's kind of a cool dynamic, but the app actually like gives you a summary of what this transaction's trying to have you sign. Mm-hmm. Um, not sure if you've heard of it, uh, but I just heard of it and I've been using it. And it's really cool. Cause it like, hey, you're about to transfer this NFT. Do you want to do that? Is that like cool? So anyway, that's, that's very fun. But—

No, yeah, I mean, I see other people in the space like, uh, explorers, you know. Um, one of the things that Mu is also working on, um, is, um, an Ethereum explorer, EVM. Um, EthVM, because it sounds like EVM. Uh, but, um, and one of the things that we are working on with EthVM Is trying to make it as clear as possible for you, for user, any kind of user, individual users, corporate users, you know, companies that are working in the space. What exactly happened with transactions? Like in plain human language, like what was signed, what was transferred, where, because sometimes even on Etherscan, which is great, it's an amazing company. Also one of the real, real OGs, right? Even sometimes on Etherscan for a regular user, it's hard to tell, like when you look at the transaction information, like Because when it goes through a contract, it kind of looks like it went to that address instead of the address that you actually sent it to. And then they're like internal transactions. Um, I don't know if they still have them, but they used to, and people would be confused. Like, what is this? Is this a separate transaction? And it's actually part of a transaction that's in the other list. So things like that, I think, um, should really, if we're trying to get people to use our products, to use blockchains, not just Ethereum, But other smart chains, and to really engage and not be afraid to engage. I think it's really important to make those things clear, like what is happening in the transaction, what you are allowing and not allowing, and to for wallets and you know chains to to make it easier for people to kind of control what is what what the transaction will or will not do with their wallet because that's what it's all about, right? Like more. direct control over your financial transactions, which is, you know, the point of crypto more or less.

And I love that creating content for education, but you're also like promoting protocols, chains, layers, and people love when you promote their stuff, right? So they're going to share your stuff as well. Like when you share their stuff, like if you, if, if Mew wrote a blog post on PoolTogether, we would totally share it because we'd be so excited that That there's a blog post on PoolTogether. Now there's this, our goal. We have this goal at PoolTogether of— I have this goal that I made up is that I want every wallet, every EVM wallet, every wallet that exists to have a PoolTogether deposit, just any amount. Like, and I'm not talking bots, right? I'm talking like people with wallets, just everybody have a little bit in PoolTogether just because PoolTogether is a prize savings account and you could win. You can have outsized gains on a $10 deposit, a $1 deposit on Avalanche, on Polygon, on Optimism, on mainnet, soon to be Arbitrum, soon to be zkSync, you know, wherever we are. And, and I don't know, is that a weird goal to like want every wallet to have one? It's not TVL, which I feel like is what everybody wants. I think that's like the common DeFi goal is to have as much money as possible. And I don't think that's our goal. I think that goal is to have as many people as possible be part of the PoolTogether family with like a little deposit.

Well,

I do biz dev, I do podcasting. Yeah. What can I do?

Well, so, um, um, to address the first part, um, of what you said, um, yeah, I mean, definitely, um, allowing chains that, you know, have not a lot of usage yet or dApps, you know, to give them a little more exposure is definitely one of the things that like, I think all companies, Web3, decentralized companies in the space can do for each other. In Encrypt, uh, we have, um, in the extension, like when you choose a chain and then there's a tab that, that has like dApps, right? So like featured dApps. So we work with dApps and different, uh, chains to kind of feature them. And when a person, you know, clicks on that chain and they maybe don't know what's going on, they at least have a couple of dApps to look at. Right. And for something like PoolTogether, because you guys are in Polygon and we support Polygon, it could be in the Polygon featured dApps and also the Optimism featured dApps, because, you know, Encrypt supports Optimism as well and Ethereum. So, and it gives users choice, which is very important because not everybody wants to play with live ammo, extremely live ammo on Ethereum and, you know, pay extremely high fees for something like that. And so, yeah, that's definitely something that we are happy to do for chains and dApps in Encrypt. And, you know, to the other part of your, of what you said about like a little deposit for every wallet, I've been thinking about this and, you know, like we say DeFi, DeFi, and DeFi is complicated for a newbie user, you know, like when yield farming was a thing. And if you try to explain it to anyone, like, you deposit this for collateral, and then you take out this other coin and you deposit it in a different protocol, and then you take out this other coin and you deposit it in a third protocol. And meanwhile, you have to watch that you don't get liquidated on the first and second protocol. And, you know, it turns into this, like, like that murder board meme, you know, like with lines going everywhere and people are intimidated. I know I'm intimidated. But things that are more simple, like PoolTogether, I think it's great to have these apps that people can like enter into easily, not get overleveraged, not have a risk of being liquidated somehow, but still participate in DeFi and in this, in the ecosystem and kind of watch it work in a simple way, but beneficial way. I think that's really important for like onboarding people. Um, to make it not scary, but you, you actually see it working for you. You see what it does.

Maria and my questions in one, were you able to sort both of them? And, uh, but now I want to go back to your first response from my first question, which is, uh, pull together against this too, is like, you, you want to work with wallets and, um, you know, everybody wants to scratch each other's backs. We want to help each other. What's the win-win? How can we work together and partner together with as many wallets as possible? But also not, you know, make them all feel valuable because they are valuable. And, and so like one of the common requests is like, hey, can we get a link? Can we get our wallet on the connect wallet button on PoolTogether? Now PoolTogether uses Wagmi connector, I'm told. And apparently like your wallets show up if They have the Wagmi connector, you know what I'm saying? So like if you have the browser extension installed, those will show up. Only the ones that are installed will show up so that you don't have that clutter. And I'm wondering about for you with featuring apps, featuring dApps, there could be clutter. So what's the strategy for how to do that? Because yes, pull together, let's get us on there. But, uh, but also if you put everybody on there, then no one's on there. So. So what does that look like?

Uh, so, uh, I mean, we, again, this just, Encrypt has been out for a couple of months, so we are just starting to play with it, but we are looking obviously at rotating. So yeah, you're right. We don't want to have like 100 in there because then that doesn't mean anything. Uh, but, um, we want to highlight dApps, um, you know, on some kind of cyclical basis. Uh, to be honest, we haven't figured it out yet because like I said, we just started doing this and on some of the chains that we are, we feature in Encrypt, you know, there's not that much going on. So, you know, we asked them like, what are your stars? And they give us like 2 or 3 dApps that are really doing well in the chain. But for something like Polygon or, you know, like there's a lot going on. So it's a work in progress and, you know, it's a tricky thing because you take kind of responsibility for leading the user to this dApp. And you wanna make sure that they're gonna be safe and that it's something that can be trusted and not something that you just throw on there because it's an ad, which, you know, it's not at this point. We're directly talking to every project that we are featuring on there. We know the team or at least someone from the team. And yeah, so it's a great question. It's something that we are gonna have to figure out and we hope we are gonna have cause to figure out because many dApps are going to want to be on there and many people are going to be using Encrypt.

And we have a chat comment from Ncookie who, uh, has— is, is one of our developer front end, has made really cool tools for PoolTogether, including like a prize calculator where you can just put in the amount that you want to deposit into PoolTogether and it'll give you your odds of winning. But then you can also like split it up for delegation. So you could deposit $10,000 and give 10 of your friends, because you totally have more than 10 friends, you can give 10 friends $1,000. You can delegate them your prizes and it'll tell you how many, like what the odds are of your friends winning. So it's a really cool tool by nCookie, unrelated to what they're saying. But what he's saying is that like, it'd be really cool to see wallets that have opinionated approaches to DeFi where Like you have to click into advanced mode or something to get like the actual yield farming, you know, peer-to-peer lending or collateralization stuff. But where like initially it's like a savings account and you have investments and you have trades. And specifically with that, I've been talking with Juno, which is an neobank, and they're really innovative in the space. And with PoolTogether, you can actually like access a smart contract and go from USDC to a PoolTogether ticket, right, through the smart contract. So you actually don't need liquidity to do that. And we're working with them and others about like, what if it— what would it look like if you wanted to hit like, save this money? Like, I want to put this money in my savings account. And then like, you can pick— like, if you wanted to pick which savings account you put it into, whether that's like AAVE for a certain percentage or, you know, or PoolTogether. Anyway, so we're just thinking about like other ways to think about— interacting with dApps rather than, you know, just like, you know, a featured space where you have to then go to their site and their front end. Because eventually PoolTogether doesn't even have to have a front end. Like ideally we're, we are the protocol that is being used, like the Lego piece that's being used in wallets and other things. Uh, that's, we've been abstracted away. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. So it's, um,

I just wanted to, yeah. If you have any responses.

Um, no, I do for sure. Uh, so, so like there are, like you say, um, you can, you know, for a lot of browser wallets, um, um, it's basically like, here's the tool to connect to dApps and then you're on your own, you know, like do your thing. Um, and, um, with, um, for now, like our step in the, in this direction that you mentioned is, you know, having these featured dApps, but our approach elsewhere in Mu, generally in Mu, is exactly that, to kind of deliver the experience right into the wallet in a way that the user doesn't have to go searching for something else. So in our Mu Wallet app, which, you know, is an older product, has been around for a few years, we have this tab, uh, you know, there's swaps in there obviously, but like we have this tab called Earn. And it offers some staking opportunities, right? Which staking, I think, is also a good way to kind of introduce someone to DeFi. It's a less complicated process and it's kind of easier to explain, like, you're, it's like an investment into the blockchain almost, or like, you know, stock from the blockchain. And it doesn't take as much, a lot of it is liquid now, right? So we have, Lido, obviously, and, uh, StakeWise in our, um, products. Um, so you don't have to stake the full 32 ETH if it's Ethereum. And, uh, you know, you don't, you can get liquid tokens back and it doesn't have to be stuck there. So, and we, the way we do that is an integration, you know, it's a little app or widget right in the interface that is easy to operate and is worded, you know, a little differently than you would if you just go directly to their dApp on the web or whatever. So. It's simpler, you know, like earn this much over this much time. And you have your own little dashboard in the interface, which says, you know, this is what's happening. This is when you stake, this is how much you've earned, you know, et cetera. Um, and, um, I agree with you that that's definitely more approachable than just saying, you know, well, here's the wallet that will work with these dApps and go to this dApp and then read up on it, you know, figure it out. Um, and, uh, uh, Definitely. Like, and we've thought about it this way for a while, like in, in MuWallet, you can generate like multiple accounts from the same phrase, you know, as many as you want. And when, when we have the little like page where it says, you know, name your account and it says like, it offers you like different things, you know, and then savings or like personal savings is one of the examples we give in terms of how people can think of it. So. We're already thinking ourselves and trying to guide the user towards thinking like, this can be a structure that's similar to the traditional finance that I'm used to, but better because I'm controlling my finance. And, you know, this is like, I have full control over it and it's transparent. It's not a black box like a bank or a centralized exchange or, you know, the market. So, um, I agree with you. I agree that that's probably the direction that would make, uh, crypto and DeFi much more approachable for users.

Another idea that Starbucks is so popular is because of the sugar. They put so many pumps of that dang vanilla syrup or caramel or whatever, and you can get as much as you want. You can go crazy and you can do it in, in the app. So it's private. Right. No one knows, but sugar's addicting. And, uh, I'm thinking that where is the, what's the sugar for a wallet, right? Like you want people to use it. And obviously, uh, I'm thinking that there's gamification that can be done. And so, uh, an idea that was posed by the Pull Together community, you know, Tamagotchis, those little like keychains, they're like little digital animals. You got to feed them, you know? Yeah. gotta take care of them. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm old enough. Yeah.

I know. I have to ask now because I'm like, I'm 40 and I talk to people and no one's over 30. I'm like, what? Oh, I am a true boomer. I'm a true boomer. Um, but, but so we are thinking, or the community member is thinking, uh, Midpoint is the name of the community member. What if we had a Pooley Gachi? And so to avoid any sort of lawsuit or something in the naming of the thing, Thinking about a pocket poolie, you know, like a little pot, like a little poolie birb in your pocket that you have to feed with your savings. And so thinking about that, like gamification within wallets, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I don't know of it happening, but I'm also, you know, I could be living under the DeFi Wasi rock, you know, because I do Wasi stuff and I do PoolTogether stuff. So I don't know. What are your thoughts on creating a gamification on wallets? Similar to sugar in drinks?

Uh, well, um, so, uh, there are a couple of things. Um, one thing that, uh, as a non-custodial wallet, right, that, and you don't gather any data on users, you have to be very creative, uh, with something like that because you are not collecting their emails or phones or, you know, Twitter handles even. Um, so How do you, you know, reward people for doing things when you don't know who they are and you intend to not know who they are? Like, that's, you know, that's your mission. So, um, we've seen other projects, non-custodial projects, try to do it, but then they like, they give you a Google form and you have to put in your Twitter handle if you want to participate, which is like, like, now you're gathering, you're not gathering data in the wallet or in the, like, in the platform, but you're gathering data, you know, outside. So, um, so these are things that you have to consider as a non-custodial wallet. So maybe a better way is to let, you know, other platforms do their gamification. Like if PoolTogether has the pooly whatever, um, and, you know, you can use PoolTogether with MuWallet, um, maybe that's something that, um, works better than the wallet itself. doing gamification, right? Because we still do see ourselves as a tool that gives users access to things in the best possible way, as opposed to like a gamified product itself. That being said, I mean, it's like you say, it's the sugar, right? Like whether it's good news or bad news for humanity, but it's the sugar that draws people in. People want rewards. They're very used to it in Web2 and traditional finance. I'm a little bit of an idealist myself, so I do sometimes think, well, they, you know, it should be enough that the product is great, that it's not using you, that it's not using your— that it's not selling you should already be a selling point. But of course, It doesn't always work that way. We haven't felt the need to gamify to attract users. We, we do okay, I think, because it's a reliable and friendly and simple product that does what it should and doesn't collect or sell your information. But we do look, note what other people are trying to do. And so far, we haven't seen anything that is convincingly non-custodial that retains the user's privacy and is kind of worth it, uh, for the wallet. I don't know if that answers the question.

It's really helpful. That's really helpful. Um, I appreciate that. And I really also think that I feel that social media and the attention economy is, you know, destroying our lives and humanity. So I totally agree that like, uh, I joke about sugar and stuff, but I appreciate you, you being like, hey, we don't want to like command. We don't want to like, people are people. They need to live their lives. They need to touch grass. We don't want them to be on our app all day long. So I appreciate that. That was really good. Well said.

Yeah. Don't be evil, right?

Yeah. Don't be evil. That's right. So I think in, in the spirit of not being evil, I think one of the things that can be seen as evil is just how difficult crypto is to interact with it. Signing transactions. There's just, it's super highly technical. I still, when I try to explain it to my friends, they don't want to hear anything about it. They burn out after like 10 minutes. And maybe that's on me for my explanation, my explaining, my teaching abilities, whatever. But I think that for crypto to be successful, we have to abstract away crypto, right? We have to. So an example of this is I used a service called Crossmint where I was trying to buy a Solana NFT, enough SOL, and I could pay with credit card or I could connect my Ethereum wallet. And I could use ETH to buy, like it would do the whole swapping bridging for me. And then I'd be able to buy the thing. And I was just like really impressed. And I didn't care that I was probably getting jacked on, on the rates. I just was like, this is so convenient. This is a brilliant idea. But, but you could do that all over the place. And I feel like the wallets can do that. Like, I feel like a wallet's job could be to do all the bridging and swapping for you, but also not being evil. Also not taking a little piece here, a little piece there, a little piece there, give you a horrible exchange rate. Great. You know, so anyway, uh, what, yeah, any ideas on how to, how to make it abstract away, like how to make it so user-friendly that you're not even thinking the chain or you're thinking, you know, bridging that sort of thing. Any plans for that? Any thoughts on that?

So, um, I mean, uh, we, we definitely at MEW, we see, we believe, we know that, uh, the future is multi-chain. So all like, only recently people were still talking about like, which is going to be the chain to kill them all. And is it going to be Ethereum or is it going to be an Ethereum killer, et cetera? Um, I think now everyone is coming to the realization that it will be multi-chain, different chains for different purposes. And, um, um, a logical, you know, kind of continuation from that is that a user shouldn't have to understand, um, like the million chains, right? Like then always know which chain they're transacting on at this moment. With Encrypt, with, you know, our Web3 browser wallet, we, it connects to chains automatically. Like if you go to a dApp that is, you know, on Polygon, it will pull up your Polygon address and all the chains are built in. So you don't have to like install it, you know, to know like its parameters and install it specifically. They're supported there automatically and we are adding them all the time. So we try for that, for like a seamless experience where the user can move between chains, um, and, um, connect automatically to the appropriate chain and not have to kind of think about that cognizantly, you know, like, what is it that I'm doing right now? Um, and, um, like I said, uh, our user, um, user interface team always thinks about like, how can we make this More seamless, you know, without having to put the user through like all these hoops that will discourage them very quickly. On the other hand, again, as a non-custodial wallet, you're always facing this challenge of like, you are offering self-custody. That is one of your main value propositions as a non-custodial wallet. That necessitates the user taking responsibility for their phrase and understanding the extent of that responsibility. So you can't really make it like one click because the security rests with the user's understanding of like how it works. And that's always a struggle. Like, how can you make it as simple as possible without compromising the user's understanding of like that they are taking self-custody, self-responsibility. Um, right now, a lot of, um, you know, there are smart contract wallets, social recovery wallets. A lot of people are working on a solution to that problem, you know, how to make self-custody less scary. Um, and we are, you know, following that conversation very closely, um, to see what— whether there's something that we will want to or able to implement in the future. Um, you know, things like Gnosis and, you know, like vaults, um, things that provide recovery without having to like be the only one in charge. And, um, I don't know, I don't know what the answer is because I think, uh, at this point we still can't make it one-click and still maintain the integrity. You know, you can make it one click like Amazon or Coinbase, but again, that's not what we are doing in our corner, right? Like it's a different mission.

Question from the chat. Can users still access a testnet should they need to or want to?

Yeah, we, on MuWeb, we support testnets. On Encrypt, we support testnets. So Encrypt will support shortly, just imminently, like in a couple of days, is starting to support custom networks. Yeah. Users can still do all that with MuWeb and—

Question, favorite taco spot in LA?

I don't have a favorite taco spot because I'm not really a taco eater. I'm not into, I'm, I don't know if I'm like, this is like just ruining my entire interview for everyone that I'm not into Mexican cuisine, but—

Just, just LA people, right? Or, yeah. Uh, so then what cuisine are you into? Like, do you have a, a favorite go-to spot? Um,

not really. Like, I don't, I don't know. I'm like, I'm giving away a lot of unfortunate information about myself. I don't eat out that much. So I don't.

It's very financially responsible of you.

I know. You know, working in crypto and thinking about, you know, like the bear market every day kind of like helps you out with that.

Well, it's, it's both, right? So it's like the market's tanking or you found an edge somewhere, right, for investing or for trading or whatever. And you're like, I could spend $10 on that burrito or I could go make, you know, 200x on it or something.

Well, so, you know, I'm actually— I myself am, uh, kind of a conservative and cautious, uh, user of, uh, crypto. And I mean, I think it helps to zoom out. Like, it really helps to zoom out and realize that it goes up and down. And, you know, all those things that are so cliché, like don't invest more than you're prepared to lose, etc. Like, I'm slipping into my, like, crypto mom mode. And, you know, like, even though they're cliché and they sound stupid, but they're true. You know, like, if you don't want to, like, end up with a problem, you know, just, you know, do your research and don't jump into things with more money than you can play with, you know, decide how much you can play with and then play with that. Um, and, uh, just, um, and, you know, do self-custody, um, and all that. So crypto mom speech over.

Awesome. Thanks so much for hanging out with us here on the PoolTogether Community Podcast. It was so great to talk. content and wallets and chains and security and responsibility. And it was also fun to not talk about taco spots. So thank you so much for being here. And I look forward to talking about getting, you know, PoolTogether on the featured thing. We'll, we'll do, we'll schmooze. We'll talk. We'll talk.

Yep. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This was fun.

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 Pool Together Discord and let us know.