PoolTogether Community Podcast #55 with Rep3

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, and I'm your host, Hot Mike, AKA Millie Monthly, AKA Tim, AKA I've had a lot of caffeine today and my heart is fluttering and it's also fluttering 'cause I'm so excited that I'm here with Rep3 with Whipper and Avi. So thanks for being here, sirs, and pumped to learn about Web3 credentialing.

Nice. Well, first off, thank you so much for having us on the show. This is super exciting way to kick off the new year and I feel your vibes. I don't think I had as much coffee as you did, But I think I'm just generally super pumped about the new year and I'm just like, my heart's just racing about all of the different ideas and all of the different cool stuff that's happening in Web3. I know that 2022 was a hard year for many. Fortunately for Rep 3, 2022 was a really solid and positive year. A lot of building, a lot of like great connections being made. So just generally as an individual in this space, I'm like super pumped, really looking forward to like a strong 2023. And for those who are listening that had a hard '22 year, if that was your first time within crypto, please congratulate yourself. That was probably one of the harshest bear markets. I know that there'll be some sort of arguing which bear markets have been worse, but if you're still around and you're here, congratulations. There's so many cool and exciting things happening in this space, and I definitely encourage those to stick around. continue to learn more and to stay in tune with the latest happenings happening in Web3. Abhi, how's your heart doing? Is it fluttering too, or are you like pretty chill?

No, it's just price will go up and down. So for me, things are super simple. The technology, we have come a long way. We have had phenomenal success from a technological point of view and the space as a whole, like just The whole concept of DAO, tokenized communities, it take a massive step in terms of ZK technologies, a lot in terms of off-chain storage, a lot. Like stuff like Graph exists, Arweave exists, they've existed for a long time, but the sheer number of mass adoption, it's crazy. So a couple of days back, Graph was down and half the internet that I go to felt super slow. It's just the sheer amount of, just goes to show the sheer amount of adoption. of all these decentralized servers. So yeah, price can go up and down. The space, the principle, all these things are here to stay.

Well, price can go up and down and then like product projects can go off and on. So we, we just got news yesterday that Wire is done and why? That's a, that's a, that's a big, big blow to the space. And then, you know, there's some, some other You know, I guess tons of NFTs were stolen from an OG crypto NFT collector's wallet. And, you know, 2023, just starting off with the, with the zingers, you know, already first week we've got, you know, these stories in crypto. But yes, we're still building. We're still making stuff. We're still surviving. I might need to go find another crypto on-ramp. It's fine. It's fine. That's what you do. You just move. You bob and weave, baby. You bob and weave.

Sure, for sure. Are you also making reference to that Bitcoin OG developer that also, I, I know I saw some stuff on Twitter where there was talk—

That too. No, I wasn't even, no. So that's, that's the, one of the Bitcoin core devs. Bitcoin has core devs. What? Yeah. Lost all their Bitcoin. That too.

Yeah, I, I was actually really surprised when I saw that. And I think that that's just a healthy reminder to everyone that if that sort of thing can happen to a Bitcoin developer, Users that choose to self-custody need to be extremely careful. And, you know, I, it also just shows how early we are in the cycle with regards to the tools that are available when it comes to self-custody. I think that that's something that we're going to see being built out within 2023, 2024. I think that we're going to start to see much better tools start to You know, make their way into the hands of individual users. I think that's just like a must. I know that after all of the blowups of 2022, people are really starting to think about self-custody. Of course. I mean, and you should, I mean, that's why we're here. But of course it's a personal preference. But yeah, that, that was pretty strange and interesting to see that that was on my Twitter feed as well.

I mean, it even happens with this podcast where I'll book a guest You know, months out. We booked this a couple, a while back, and then, you know, by the time it's, by the time it's time to record the podcast, they're not, they don't exist anymore. So anyways, kudos to Rev3 for holding it down. I would love to hear how you got involved with this great big crazy world of crypto. Whipper, Avi, please do the honors.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Absolutely. So I got involved in crypto back in 2017, and funny enough, I was actually at the hospital. My sister-in-law was giving birth, and as some of the family members were just sitting around, the topic of Bitcoin came up. And because I have some previous knowledge within the traditional financial space, when I first heard this idea of Bitcoin, I'm like, man, where can I look and short this thing? I'm like, I'm not a believer at all. This is just bullshit. How can someone create their own money? Blah, blah, blah. And anyways, I think I had a very normal reaction to Bitcoin. When people generally hear about Bitcoin and this idea of like this new creation of money, most people just think right away, this is either a scam, some sort of Ponzi or whatever. And that's what actually led me into this space. And as I started to do research about Bitcoin, to my surprise, I was actually just utterly shocked that like, I was like, wow, this technology's actually really cool. And instead of shorting it, actually I started to research this and starting 2018, mid-2018 was pretty much when I decided to pivot and dedicate a large portion of my day and just research this space entirely. And since then, like I've been pretty much been full-time crypto ever since, just doing a mad amount of research. I've been volunteering for different projects, different DAOs. I've done work and consulting. for many different projects and it's just been exciting ever since then. So that's how I got involved in this space and I've had the fortunate pleasure of doing some work with Web3. We got involved in 2022 and it's been up and up only since then. So that's pretty much how I got in this space.

For me, it's a super funny story. I had a friend of mine, that friend used to sort of score, sort of score stuff from either Silk Road or some sort of, some platform similar to that. This was back in 2013, 2013, or maybe early 2014. That is when I was exposed to just the blockchain in general. 2017, this really cool, so I have a product design background, this really cool product that I used to follow. She joined ConsenSys, then I applied for internship there. I, that was when I, for the first time, sort of spent some time understanding blockchain and that was it. I had a bunch of people who were buying tons of Ethereum back in 2017, lost their money. But CFE in 2020, when the people I used to follow in the motion design space, Beeple, Liron, and all these folks who I'd been following for like longest time, They started venturing into NFTs. That was the first time where I actually sat down and just understand that what's happening when the OpenSea website looked like absolute garbage. Niftygate looked garbage back then. It was just, even people's art was super cheap. So that is when, like, for the first time to me, it was really absurd that how come these people are redefining the paradigm of ownership and this just The entire concept of you owning a digital art object seemed absurd. And then like over time, over the next 3 to 4 months in 2020 mid is when I actually understood that, hey, there is something going on here. There's something really big. And the way we understand the concept of ownership is going to change. And that was it for me. Post that, I just spent a lot of time just in the art space, NFT space. And mid-2021, like let's say the first half, Is when I was exposed to the whole DAO space. And then I started contributing a bit here and there. And that was that. After a while, it's just the problem of, as a product designer, there was only so much that I was contributing to these DAOs. I was not working with like massive ones. It's just sort of small to mid-level-ish. And there's only so much you can do. So I would sort of move from one company to the other. And then the problem, the experience was really bad for me. The ideal behavior that I would've expected was since it's all decentralized, it's all autonomous. If I have the creds, if I have the work backing, like I understand the space, things should be a bit more easier for me. But that wasn't the case. And that was a problem that sort of stuck to me. I did not like my experience and I thought that maybe if I had like irrefutable proof of the stuff that I had done, maybe life would be a bit easier. And that was sort of the start of Web3. But then since then it has evolved a lot more, but that was sort of the cusp. That was a tipping point for me that, hey, this is something that I want to fix. I do not like this experience.

So yeah, tell, let's, let's just talk about Rev3 then and what, what credentialing is, what, what's, what's cool about it, how DAOs can use it, and then like how PoolTogether can work with Rev3. That's what I'm always interested in.

Yes, please, my friend.

Yeah, so actually Avi sort of gave us a nice little precursor into, into Rep3 and sort of what his motivations were to, you know, essentially trying to figure out and to start something to better this space. But essentially Rep3 is a blockchain reputation tool that is allowing communities to find really interesting and creative ways to incentivize their communities and their user base. And so like, what, let's unpack that. So like, so like, what does that mean? So essentially, like, you know, it's hard to sort of encapsulate Rep 3 in like, you know, a quick little summary. And the reason for that is because the tool itself and what's happening down the, the, in the future with future versions that are coming down the pipelines, the tool is so powerful and it can literally do It's almost like a Swiss Army knife for Web3 communities in terms of what they can do and how they can incentivize their user base and how users can participate and build royalty programs. And essentially it's all packaged in one. But like there's sort of like 2 areas that I just want to focus on because I feel like people in the audience and people listening to the podcast will probably resonate well with this. So through the issuance of these sort of recognition badges or these social identities, Communities can give different responsibilities to these individuals holding these badges. But what's really interesting, and this is one idea that maybe we could focus on for a little bit, is this idea that admins of community can specifically give those individuals that have achieved this milestone and achieved this level of recognition, they can actually give them a boosted AP— sorry, a boosted governance voting weight. And we've always been very critical of how governance has worked within Web3 entirely. So imagine users who show up for community calls that are working on different tasks that are helping the community. Imagine these individuals, aside from their token weights, can actually get a boosted governance weighted power. So essentially what that means is those individuals can have a multiplier, essentially giving them a louder voice within the community. And I guess going back to my point about being critical about governance in DAOs in general is that like some people feel that it's just, you know, it's a whale's game. People who have the financial means are able to really throw around their weight, whereas people who are really engaged in the community don't necessarily get such a loud voice. But with the Web3 and utilizing some of those tools, you get to give those individuals the right to have a louder voice, to participate more, and to be rewarded as such. And the same thing goes with, you know, so that's just one aspect, but, and one area, but, you know, we're in talks with, you know, yield aggregators and instead of boosted governance weights, imagine being able to give specific individuals a boosted APY on their stake, or imagine bridge aggregators or DEX aggregators being able to reward their individual user base by offering them cheaper fees. Or, you know, people that are moving around, you know, assets from one bridge to another, certain recognition. So any facet of the community that requires, you know, recognition or the community that they want to incentivize their user base, they can actually utilize this tool. So, you know, to tie it back to sort of like PoolTogether, like imagine the PoolTogether community was able to distribute free lunch. I don't know if you do this or not, I'm just throwing out an example, but like Imagine being able to distribute free lottery tickets to individuals who show up on a daily basis or on a weekly basis, whether it's to these types of podcasts, whether it's community calls that you guys hold on your Fridays, or, you know, community events or whatnot. It's essentially a tool that allows the community to be empowered and to issue these badges, this recognition to the individuals to further incentivize specific user behavior. And it's so far beyond that. Abhi's a little bit more technical than I am. He can comment on those things, but like we have really interesting integration tool with Discord that allows the communities to essentially distribute these badges to their community already as is. So essentially most communities have Discord badging recognition already in place. And with our Discord integration bot, you can essentially have those recognitions mirrored one-to-one, but on the blockchain. And what's really, really nice, and Avi spoke about this a little bit earlier, is this idea that users themselves can start to take their work and their recognition with them and own it. So if you've done volunteer work before, if you've worked for a DAO, if you've done something, you can actually own a piece of that and hold true ownership and recognition in your wallet. And it's a nice way, it's kind of like this Web3 resume, if you will, that you could sort of showcase to other communities and other DAOs and, you know, take with you. And, you know, to tie it back to another way that you can use this is that there's, we're always in the Web3 looking for interesting ways to improve on tokenomics and airdrops. But imagine being able to utilize some of this information that is on the blockchain for future airdrops and being able to airdrop to specific individuals that hold these recognition and these badges. I know I said a lot there. There's a lot to unpack, but hopefully that sort of gives you like a little high-level overview of what Rep 3 is trying to achieve, what the tool can do, and of course we can get much deeper.

So is it, it's, is it on-chain? It sounds like if it's working with governance, it's gonna be, yeah, so it's on-chain. Is it, is it cross-chain? So for example, with Pull Together, our governance token is on Many chains, many meaning like Optimism, Polygon, and mainnet specifically. But the voting happens on mainnet, the on-chain voting, and then we have snapshot for other, but I'm just wondering if there's like a way for REP3 to cross-chain it, but on-chain it on mainnet. You know what I'm saying? Does that make sense?

So I can take that. So we can consume and mint. So right now our protocol is deployed on zkSync and on Polygon, but it's super easy to deploy it on anything EVM. Like for Arbitrum, it'll take a little over a day. For everything else, it's just gonna be under a day. So it's super simple, like anything EVM, it's, it'll be super easy to deploy. As for the stuff it can read, so for example, a snapshot is off-chain. So that's how you can use token from any, literally any and every chain over there. And the same thing could be done with the RIF3 protocol. So it works in 2 ways. One is the badge minting. The other one is something that, so the badge minting will depend on whichever chain you select on. If you want it to be on, right now it's possible on Polygon and zkSync. Polygon, it's all gasless. zkSync, you gotta pay the gas with the zkSync testnet tokens. But yeah, with whatever chain we launch with, that can very easily be done. It's just on 2 right now. And the other thing is just the consumption part of it. So this is something that Mr. Vipul touched upon that I find to be incredibly exciting. So these passes, right? We have like this intricate parent-child structure. And the thing is you can create rules for each and every tier essentially. So running a community requires tons of operations. And you have rules for each and every tier, each and every sum. Essentially you have responsibilities and you have expectations of people like a certain one. If you hold a certain level in a community, there are certain responsibilities you need to go through. So what you can do with our protocol is you can create these sort of rules that, hey, you need to do so-and-so stuff if you wanna ensure a particular tier. If you do better, you move up. If you do a little bit less, you move down. So this way, the roles that are a bit stagnant with the way it functions in Discord, and the only way to keep on updating them is to have like a massive spreadsheet somewhere where a person is keep on tallying and a person is responsible to just keep on updating the roles every now and then. All of this could be automated since the badges, it's being updated on-chain. So that means using tools like Collabland or Guild, you can have the actual roles in Discord. reflect the actual condition of their contribution, like the actual abstraction of their contribution. The reason why I'm getting to this for the on-chain stuff is these rules, they need not just be applied inside the protocol. They need not be on the lines of if you have done X amount of contributions, if you have attended X amount of calls, if you hold a certain role, they could literally be basis anything that exists on-chain. So let's say for PoolTogether, what is your on-chain activity? What is your activity on the on-chain governance? What is your activity on Snapshot? how active are you in governance forums? So Snapshot governance forum, both of these are off-chain, but the on-chain part can be consumed from anything that's EVM. So the consumption part is everything EVM, and the minting part right now is zkSync and Polygon, but could very easily be deployed in no time in most EVM chains. I hope that answers the question.

No, that definitely, that definitely gives me stuff to go off of. I think that You know, being a Swiss Army knife of a protocol, you have a lot of things you can do, but there's always the scissors, you know, like the coolest part of the Swiss Army knife in my opinion. And like, how'd they get scissors in there? But, but that, but, you know, and I think the scissors for PoolTogether, because there are things you can do like delegation, so you can do no loss rewards to people by like, say a treasury puts, you know, $100,000 into PoolTogether as a deposit. They can then delegate that $100,000 worth of tickets to Contributors, right? That's a cool thing. But really for PoolTogether, the scissors of the Swiss Army knife is that million-dollar monthly prize that we, we're going to get to at some point soon. You know, like that's the idea is the huge prize. The fact that you can no loss have a deposit in PoolTogether, you can withdraw at any time and you have a chance to win. It's like ideally anyone with an EVM wallet is going to have $10 in PoolTogether. Because you want a chance at the million, the milli-monthly, you know? So I'm wondering what that, 'cause looking, I mean, here what you guys are talking about is awesome. And it's really cool to, for example, give weighted governance to contributors, like people actually fighting in the arena rather than like, we need investors, right? We need people to, we need whales, but at the same time, you want to reward people with Who are actually working on the stuff with the say in the stuff that they're working on and the direction of. But I, but I also see this whole bounty thing for Rep 3. Like, you know, like this goes along with reputation, right? We, we want this project as a, as a DAO. We want to see this work done. Who's going to do it? Somebody does it, they get rewarded for doing that. And this whole like sort of bounty system happening. And, and the reason I bring this up is because I, I follow Nouns a lot. And Nouns has this, and from what I see, there's a bunch of holders that have these like unattainable nouns for a lot of people in crypto. They're unattainable, right? And those people don't want to, like, I don't know, they want people to pitch them ideas and come up with ways to nounify and creative things, but they're not necessarily the people, the Nouns holders having ideas. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, I'm just, So instead of, for Nouns, they're not creating bounties per se. They're actually just wanting people to come to them and pitch ideas. So anyway, I just bring all of that up to think like, I see bounties as like a problem to solve in crypto. And I see that Rep 3 has their hands in that. You have your hands in governance, you have your hands in compensation, right? For workers. What other tools in the Swiss Army knife have we not talked about yet that That could be the scissors.

So I'm happy to—

Yeah, please.

Oh, sorry, Abhi, do you want to go ahead?

Yeah, for sure. So then there are 2 ways to go about this. The one is sort of the short term and the other one would be sort of just the way the space is moving towards. So the short-term answer is going to be that as of now, just from a credentialing point of view, whatever people does. So for example, what all the cool things that you're doing in the PoolTogether community, Is there a way for a human to sort of, is there someplace where a human could go and figure out that what kind of person Tim is, what all stuff they've done, how valuable are they, how OG are they, what all sort of value adds have they had in different communities they've contributed to? And that answer is fairly limited. It's just available to, in most of the cases, yeah, like almost 100% of the cases, It's just the people who are familiar with you, people who have worked with you, essentially your sort of social attestations that you've built. So that is one part of it so that it's not just the value add that you do is not just tied up in the community that you're working with. It goes above and beyond a particular Discord community. The other thing is— Yeah. So that's just like super short-term. The other one is smart contract readability. That is where we get to governance. That is also where we can get to Staking, like, so if you read this paper by like the Decentralized Society or something that Vitalik came up with, I think in last Feb or March or something. So there, I forgot the name of the paper, is just a soulbound token with, I also forgot the other co-authors. Super sorry about that. But the idea was the staking of reputation. And now any single on-chain use case, like gating could also be on-chain, but that is still sort of like a lower-hanging use case that we can very easily solve. It's just smart contracts. Now the other stuff is the human-readable information was fine, but now do you have any sort of credential that a smart contract could read, that a smart contract could see and do stuff for you permissionless, in a permissionless manner, in a decentralized manner? The answer is absolutely nada. Now these credentials that have been created, so let's say you have a particular role, you do N amount of contributions, You have, there are things that are on-chain that a smart contract can read at any point of time. Let's say the tokens you have held, if you were holding the tokens. So back, how many tokens you had back in 2017, that information is not necessarily on-chain, like with a smart contract, but still can be figured out with Graphviz. But the idea is there is a really big aspect of the off-chain data that is not smart contract readable. Or even is available in a fashion where smart contracts can read, since we are working in this small, tiny ecosystem of DAOs where most of our operations happens on these centralized services. So that becomes a really important part. Governance is obviously one of the ways there, but this idea of undercollateralized lending, staking your reputation that you have accrued over time. So essentially you start from nothing, you just keep on working, you create a set of credentials, and now these credentials over time They themselves start to accrue value. They tell a smart contract that this person's reliable, and now you can do a lot of operations permissionlessly. So these are sort of the short-term game gains from something like this and from a longer-term point of view. So the off-chain aspect is just a sort of a small part of it. The other one is the on-chain. Now the automation stuff that I spoke of, that this is where it all sort of starts. starts to come together. Our community as of now, so let's say like the most common definition I've seen of membership, it's very, see, it's not multifaceted, it's super simple. It's like, what kind of member are you? I feel that you cannot define membership or community in one single aspect. PoolTogether community, there are multiple ways to be a part of it. You could be active in governance forum, you could be active on snapshot, you could be active on the actual governance, you could be active on the protocol itself, or you could be a part of the Discord community, right? Similarly, every single project out there, they have n number of facets, n number of touchpoints where people can interact. And every single interaction in most of the cases is a net positive value add. And lately I've seen personally like a lot of communities just coming up by themselves and saying that, hey, every single positive net value add is something we want to count as a part of our community. Maybe not contributors, but definitely a part of community. And we want to do something. So that was a big thing about DAOs is just shared ownership, right? So now in the way the current system is built, we cannot do that. So there are a lot of touchpoints where you're not able to do that. The most common thing is just to do airdrops based on, in a retroactive fashion, people keep on working. One fine day the protocol announces, hey, we'll have a token and they'll accordingly distribute token by some arbitrary methods. The methods have gotten really sophisticated. But the thing is, even in that case, there are a lot of things that you're just not able to touch upon. But with using these non-financialized tokens and with the protocol that we have built, so you can incentivize anything. The protocol can consume any API, will be a centralized solve. And the other thing is it can read any smart contract, any on-chain activity, and now you can create a gamified incentivization mechanism for anything and everything. So for example, the stuff that we are doing with CulDAO, which goes live next week. So for people on podcast, it'll go live in the second week of January. So stuff that is the most important contribution aspect for the community is how active you are in governance and how much staking you have done. So we just create a gamified, we have created a gamified non-financial token where everyone's badge is a visualization, like an abstract visualization of how they participate in governance and staking. So that is a part of it. The, and the same thing could be extrapolated to anything and everything. So for example, the stuff that we are experimenting to do with Ocean is they have marketplace, they have academy, they have ambassador program, they have physical events, they have TRS staking and bunch of other stuff to create an incentivization, like a gamified incentivization model for each and every one of those and for all of those credentials to come together. So now With a system like this, one, you will have credentials for each and every single aspect of the community, the way a person is interacting with them. And those credentials could be used for anything on-chain, the things that we have mentioned earlier. And now the definition of a member or a community moves from— so member is not just like single facet anymore. The definition of member moves from, are you a member binary to what aspect of the community you contribute to. Oh, cool. You are a person who does a lot of protocol participation. Oh, cool. This other person, they do a lot of contributions to Discord. This other person, they do a lot of staking and they do a lot of protocol interactions. So similar to how sort of an org or a city functions, there are multiple ways to interact with it. There are multiple places that the people are gonna inhabit, and all of that collectively creates a community. And that is sort of the long-term scissor, as to speak, is what something like this will unlock. And all of those credentials coming together, so you'll have an abstraction. So no 2 members will have the same badge. They'll not have the same experience. And using all this stuff, we'll actually be able to create context and contribution-based governance. So not just one token, one vote, not just decision-making based on what type of membership tier you have, stuff like that. It's gonna be decision-making, collective ownership based on your context. Cool. So we have a proposal that is gonna impact the way the prizes are given out. Have you ever interacted with the protocol? If not, then maybe you get a lower score. Maybe people who are super active, they get a higher governance say. So basis your activity in the community is how your ownership will vary, or rather your decision-making ability will vary, can possibly vary. from context to context, and the same information could be used throughout the Web3 space. So just signals of if you're a good act or a bad act. Let's say I want to do some sort of, I know, just a bad example, an airdrop per se, or rather I'm opening up a new community. I would want people who have a certain behavior similar to the Optimism airdrop. They did like really cool stuff. If you have done X amount of like on-chain governance, if you have Like some multisig thingy. I don't remember the exact parameters, but they had like 7 or 8 of them. So stuff like that, you will be able to do in a much, much more sophisticated fashion and in a way where it's human readable and smart contract readable. So that would be sort of the longer term scissor.

I've got so many directions to go from that, but Whitper, do you have any, anything to add there or notes?

No, that, I mean, that was very detailed. I think one area that Avi touched upon, which is really, really cool, is this idea of sort of staking your reputation for undercollateralized lending. I know that that's an area that many projects are trying to focus on for 2023, 2024. We just need to find a more capital-efficient way to borrow and lend within DeFi. And I know that there's quite a few projects that are trying to tackle this. And just undercollateralized lending in general is really, really cool. But this idea of being able to own your identity within Web3 and to stake that identity or to simply have this reputation that you could take with you is extremely powerful. So of course, Rep3 is enabling individuals, users of Web3, as well as communities, it's enabling them to find ways to build these reputations, build these identities, and at the same time find ways to incentivize them. There was one thing actually that I wanted to pop in before Abhi was talking about, and sort of, this is just rewinding a bit, but I did want to mention, 'cause we were talking about governance, we have a really interesting tool within Discord where you can actually hold votes directly in Discord itself by having users either thumb up or thumb down. And this will also impact snapshot as well. And the reason why we did this And why we think it's pretty cool within Discord is that number one, there could be votes that don't necessarily need to make it on Snapshot to begin with. Let's just say there's a vote happening within PoolTogether around specific winnings or pools or lotteries that you want to hold. Maybe you only want to select specific individuals within the community to have the right to even vote on that. You can do that utilizing the Web3 technology. You can have specific individuals vote on different topics only if they hold a specific badge. And then within those badges, they can have different weights or whatnot. But what I did think was cool is this idea where you can actually hold voting directly within Discord. I think that's super, super cool. So yeah, I did want to pop that in because it's definitely one of my favorite features. On top of the fact that like, there's all of these different automated features that you can actually do within Discord, one of them being for individuals who show up for community calls. So for example, I know there's a lot of communities out there who have to manually distribute some sort of reward or recognition for individuals who show up for calls. But with RepFree and our Discord integration tool, you can actually automate that whole process. So for example, right now we've got 8 people in the audience. Our bot knows who's been in the audience, how long they've been there for, and it would actually distribute automatically a recognition or a badge of sort to those individuals simply by coming. And it's all automated. So it's super, super cool. Sorry, I know I went off a little bit. We were talking about like the vision, but I did want to pop that in because we were talking about voting earlier.

No, hey, you can go any direction that you want here. That's what I'm about to do anyway. So yeah, feel, feel free to rewind or talk about something we talked about earlier, or totally change subject. It's great. By the way, no one's getting a PoE app today. Okay. For this, this is, this is, there's no POAP, sorry. But I, the way I'm thinking is I'm very, so I, I'm part of the growth team here at PoolTogether and I do business development and I meet with people and I schmooze and I have fun doing that. Like, I love meeting people. I love the humanness of Web3. Like, that we get to build together in community, which is really great. But I don't necessarily participate in a lot of Discords. I sure do have a bunch in the sidebar, but I really only go around to a couple. And the way that I really participate is through like DMs and like meeting people IRL and through hosting events, that sort of thing. And through those relationships, I feel affinity for communities. Even though I might not be on their community call, right? Like I, I know the founder of it, or I know their growth person and they're really great. I love what they're doing. And so I'm actually participating in their BD too. When I have conversations, I'm like, oh, you should talk to these people. I just talked to them. They're trying to do the same thing. I think that may make a really great partnership. And so when you talk about credentialing, there, yes, there is on-chain activity. There is like the The, you know, participation and like a lot of times the grunt work, right? Like the actual, the stuff that I guess people try to farm, but ideally I like this in a more organic way. But there is also these like tangential circles where you can really see the power of connection that the fact that I have 12 NARS, I love NARS and like I'm more of a NAR than a noun person, or I love the Lonely Alien Space Club. I just have these like different projects because I know the people involved. And so yeah, there's like this, there's this like on-chain credentialing, almost like your LinkedIn, but there's also like just the power of Web3 and humanity and connections and we're building together and that sort of thing. So I really, I love that. And I do think that a byproduct of that is what you were talking about, Avi, is the lending. And so I've recently gotten into NFT lending and borrowing and just kind of like learning about it just 'cause I've never thought in that space. I always thought debt was bad and now I'm like, oh wait, like you can do stuff with it. And anyway, but yes, there is this whole peer-to-peer market and I do, for lending and borrowing that remains largely untapped. It's very small and kind of like we're, everybody's getting their feet wet. And I do think like 2023 is the year of lending maybe. I know people have done it, but I think like as we're talking about undercollateralized lending, not talking about flash loans, we're talking about like, no, this person has a reputation. I'm going to lend them money because if they default, everybody's going to know about it or something, you know, like, right. They don't want to tarnish their, their whole reputation. So it's weird. It's like this, that's very non-anon, right? You can be, you can be anon, but you're still definitely not anon. So anyway, that's a, that's a whole new theme. So Rep 3, Rep 3 is in there, right? We're going to see like a loan aggregator from Rep 3 in 2023. Is that what you're saying?

No. So Tim, let me just clarify that a bit. So what we are doing is, so the way the protocol is built is that reputation—

By the way, Abhi, I was joking. I, I, but you know.

No, no, I just want to clarify. No, no, I completely get that. Like earlier I just said something, I just wanted to sort of add onto that. So all these credentials, so there, there are 2 types of stuff, the information that's already available on-chain. And I 100% believe that people, I know of projects who are doing incredible stuff. Like the sheer amount of analytics that goes into these undercollateralized loans, basically on-chain data, incredible stuff is happening on that end. Just the thing is the credentials that are coming out from Web3, from the community aspect of things, not the off-chain, not the on-chain stuff, because that's there already. That's already something that smart contracts can read or services can read. But the off-chain aspect of it that comes on-chain, that also becomes an important data point. into this entire equation. And that is where we fit in. And that inside of a community, and that is sort of on a global level where anyone can read any attestations and then they can, they can add a negative, an aspect of negative reputation as well if some on-chain contract is not done, but inside of a community. So let's say there is a person, they do a lot of good stuff. They move to a particular place, they have good governance weightage, they have good sort of access, they have good Access and all these things. And now when they participate in a loan sort of thing, like in a lending system inside of a community, then they can stake their reputation. And in that case, if they don't do it, the thing that they actually lose is the access, the weightage they have. So essentially every single thing that they have worked up to at this point of time can be staked. And if they do not honor the condition on-chain, then they tend to lose access, the governance, and all these other things. So that is sort of how we are building on a global scale. It's gonna be a data point that someone else will be consuming. Sort of think of it as an information infralayer where services are being built on top of. In case of just one community, that is where we can do a lot more. We can actually stake here a bit. Just wanted to add on to that.

No, I really appreciate that. And I've, I've thinking about like, oh, making the off-chain on-chain. And then I'm thinking about privacy. And then when you're talking about loans and like staking your reputation, then I'm like, well, what happens when, you know, the secondary market on loans where somebody— but yeah, we could keep talking about this. But, but I, I do want to ask before we enter time here, I want to talk to you about what's your event strategy for 2023? Are, are we going to see Rep 3 at East Denver? Because we're, I'm trying to think about this for PoolTogether. We're definitely going to be at ETH Denver. We're going to have our own PoolyCon on February 28th in Denver as well. So anybody going to Pool or going to ETH Denver can swing by the PoolTogether conference called PoolyCon on February 28th. That'll be pretty sweet. But we don't have any other plans past that. So I don't know if you have any insight into places like, what's your event strategy?

As of now, we don't really have one. Our goal is at least just try to make it there. That's the extent of it. Not the most organized list. Yeah. It's sort of, uh, just make it as it goes sort of a planning. I'm pretty sure I butchered that, but that is exactly what our strategy is. Same thing for ETH Dubai. I know there's this really cool, cool conference that's going to happen. In Tokyo. So I'm hoping that I'll be there as well. But yeah.

ETH Tokyo. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. ETH Tokyo. Exactly. So the, the absolute sort of the worst case scenario that is also pretty good is I'll just hit up people I already know and we can figure something out. Like even in ETH India, we were able to figure out something in a week and I'm pretty sure that should be possible everywhere else as well.

Oh, for sure. And I hear that ETH India is off the chain, so I want to, I want to do ETH India in 2023. I think we should all commit to that. I don't know the dates though. I gotta look that up.

Yeah, for sure. Like even, I don't know the dates, but this time around we had so many people. We had people from Ocean, we have people from Kaidao, LakeDAO, and just inside the space, right? It was sort of, so the side event that we hosted, it was sort of a smallish gathering of around 100, 120 people, and that was it. And it was super cool to see how many different DAOs people were contributing to just from those super small set of number. There was enough people, there were people who were working in Gitcoin, there were people who were working in n number of different stuff, like the coolest of the DAOs who had been contributing ever since sort of been the founding member event. So it was super cool to see the absurd amount of diversity of contributors, people who are participating in NFTs, people who are in DeFi. people who are in these other sort of social DAOs. It's super cool to see just the sheer amount of experience in a really small room. Would highly recommend you check it out. That was something that exceeded my expectations wildly. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm pumped about that. And I love your strategy of just showing up somewhere. You're like, you know, a week out being like, yeah, we're going to go there and then, you know, take over a brewery or something, get 100 people in a room and have a little fun, a little party. That's what we did for, for NFT NYC. We had like a pool party and it was really cool to see, like, just the, like, like it goes to show like the value of these relationships that we're building. And, you know, there's parties that I want to go to because of the people that I know that'll be there and we'll hang out and we talk and we do business and stuff. So it's great. Well, I got to go to a Rep 3 party. We got to, we got to do this. So for sure, for sure. Maybe in December we'll hang out and then I'll ETH India and ETH Tokyo. I think we got 3 events in a year is good. That's good.

100%. 100%. Actually, I wanted to pop in with an idea, Tim, actually, because you brought up poolies and I know how essential that is within the PoolTogether community, but something that we have, another piece within the Rep3 tool, which is really cool, is this idea of dynamic NFTs. So we talked about recognition, we talked about badging, but we have this technology that basically allows the NFT to morph. depending on the amount of work that one has contributed. So like, imagine this like poolie or this peffer, or like, how do you call them, by the way? Those MFers, the peffers. Yeah, peffers. Okay. Yeah, the peffers. So like, imagine like the peffers, like they just get more badass or something as like, you know, depending on like how many pool together, you know, tickets you purchase or like how many contributions you do. Like the actual NFT itself dynamically changes as you do more or less work itself, which is really, really cool. And I know that there's like a lot of like different memes within different communities of whether like images or whatnot, that's, or mascots or whatever. But communities have really warmed up to this idea of like this on-chain badge that sort of morphs depending on like how much or how little effort or contribution individuals have done. So yeah, you talked about poolies and like, I know how like You know, like everyone loves their poolies. I, man, I have a whole bunch of PFers, man. I really do. Like, I just like the whole cause. I like the idea, but like, I know that like everyone has them and like, I just wanted to bring out that point that like, it's a really cool aspect too, to have like these sort of dynamically changing NFTs that change on-chain.

Yeah, for sure. I love that. I love that. And I want to see more of it. I've seen like little bits and pieces of it here and there. But yeah, I think that just, this is a living space and to see PFers with like 4 cigarettes in their mouth. Just kidding. No, that's— Um, but, but let's, let's, uh, let's finish our time here then, uh, talking about how do we grow? How do we do growth and business development in Web3? What does it look like for Rep 3 to think about growth, think about BD? Um, you know, are you trying to grow users? Are you trying to grow TV? Well, it's not TVL, you're trying. Yeah. So just, just thinking about like, what does business development look like for Rep3?

So I think, um, I, you know, I think both Avi and I will sort of attack this both, but essentially I think that our game plan at this point is to introduce these technologies to many different communities within Web3. Um, what's very cool about our tool is that the basic features of our tool are essentially free to use. So like we cover all gas costs for minting and claiming, but we do have a side of our technology that we actually customize individually for specific communities. And at this point, we're just trying to build a name for ourselves, get out there, let people become aware of what's available and how you can utilize this technology to really impact the community. This is really a tool that's sort of like a net-net win for both communities as well as individual users. So at this point, it's just about like getting out there, letting people become aware of what's possible within Rep 3, having people play around with the tool, you know, create different badging systems and utilizing the free aspect. But once people start to use the basic functionality, that's where most communities really want to get very specific and start building specific strategies and find ways to really incentivize their community base and find ways to get user actions that ultimately benefit the overall community at large.

I guess I can add a little bit to this. So for us, just like Mr. Weber mentioned, and the other aspect of the growth for us, and that is something that is super close to me, is Just the adoption of the idea, and that this is something that we have seen organically from like a plethora of really big communities and the chatter around the same. But the idea of moving from sort of, from changing the definition of what counts as a community, what counts as a member, to something where every single positive net value add is something that is considered part of the community and where there is some sort of ownership sharing so that all these sort of credentials come together and then peer-to-peer attestation, community-to-community attestations for all these things to exist on-chain so that you can truly sort of start unlocking a lot of, we can start exploring new Web3 use cases for something like this. I mean, just like honestly credentialing as a space is something that is just getting started. Like we are making sticks and stones at this point of time. And for this to grow and for us to sort of discover tons of cool use cases and for us to work with like cool projects, do cool stuff. In terms of dynamic NFTs, since we touched upon that, so then the only reason why our NFTs aren't 1155 is because of this dynamic aspect of it. Because the way OpenSea treats 1155, they all plug them together. The thing about our NFTs and the thing that we are doing with sort of every single one of our communities is the idea that since you are, since everyone is not the same type of member, they have different experience, they have different sort of facet that they're contributing to, the same should be reflected, the same should be abstracted and reflected on the badge itself since it's a visual medium. And if these assets have that real estate, So what we have done is for each of these, let's say we, just to give you an example, just to give you an incredibly ridiculous example, we can create literally a character where the face size is determined by governance and the number of fingers are determined by the number of proposals they've done in the past 6 months. And then that to face size in the past 6 months, and then the Discord calls they attend, maybe number of feeds. Any sort of abstraction, like anything, any activity can be associated with any parameter. So the goal is for every single membership badge or whatever, like however many membership type badges you have, for all of them to abstract and to showcase what a member is in a community, as opposed to for all of them to look similar, for each and every one to look completely unique. basis of person's activity and participation in the background and for no 2 to look the same. That is something that just as a designer from a visual standpoint is something I'm incredibly excited about. Since every one of our journey is different, it should reflect, right? And that is sort of the base assumption that we have taken for, or that is sort of the foundation for the approach we have taken for dynamic NFTs. It's not just 2 or 3 parameters, it's just associate some variable with a particular activity so that everyone's visual looks different, as unique as possible to properly reflect what they mean to a community and what the community means to them. So yeah, that is like this whole part of dynamic NFT that is incredibly cool.

That's awesome. I can't wait till my dynamic NFT shows how many times I've Sung songs on our community call and just like the amount of notes around my head or something like that. As Andy Kaufman in the Pull Together community would say, as many nails on the chalkboard. So the more times I scream, I sing, the more nails cut that go across the chalkboard. But, uh, but I, I really agree that like, like I think that business development, especially for Pull Together, is just partnering, uh, with as many projects as possible. And using them and seeing how PoolTogether can be integrated with the thing. And I think, I think as PoolTogether advances as a protocol, the idea is that more people would build with PoolTogether, the primitive and the protocol, because like they love it and they want to build with it. And then we're facilitating the building. It's not us building stuff for other people. It's other stuff, other people integrating PoolTogether into their thing. So. Uh, it's just interesting. It's making it as easy as possible. It's making it no-code for people that, you know, everybody wants to build, but not everybody can code. So, you know, enabling those people. And I love that Rep 3 is usable, the free version at least. Like you can just, you can just go ahead and run, run with it as a community manager or as a, as a community member. So I'm excited to see how Pull Together and Rep 3 can work together on this. Yeah.

So

pumped about it.

Oh, so are we actually. We've been very fortunate to be able to present to the PoolTogether community. We're very thankful for that, by the way, that you gave us a platform where we can educate the PoolTogether community on our technology. And we've had multiple conversations with different core people within the PoolTogether community. And we'd love to see our technology being utilized, you know, within PoolTogether. And again, we're here to, you know, either demonstrate the technology again and to let people know how to use it, how to integrate it. But like, really, there are really powerful and wonderful tools that are available, like, you know, for community managers, you know, like yourself, and they're right there. They're right available, steadily available in your hands to use. And we'd love to see you guys integrate our technology. We think it would be mutually beneficial, not just for the PoolTogether community, but for the user base at large. So yeah, so speaking about partnerships, um, we're here, we're, we're here to support you guys and to hopefully try to see this tool being utilized, uh, within your own community.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Uh, it's been a pleasure. More conversations soon. See you at some parties, I'm sure.

Yeah, I can't believe, uh, we just finished the hour. It's crazy. We've, uh, had so much fun here. And, uh, once again, thank you so much for giving us a platform to chat. We really, really appreciate it and hopefully we can do this again.

Thanks, Avi. Thanks, Whipper. Likewise. Thank you

so much, guys. Have a great day. Thank you so much.

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.