PoolTogether Community Podcast #57 with PWN

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast. Community Podcast! I'm your host, Tim the Pool Man, aka Millie Yearley. AKA Hot Mike. And I am so pumped to be here with Yosef from Pawn or Pwn or Poen, however you listener want to pronounce it. You do you, you pronounce it however you want to pronounce it, but listen, if you're going to pronounce it, you got to use it. Right. And, uh, and so I'm so pumped to talk to you, Yosef, today. In fact, I'm so pumped that I saw a Decentral Games Ice poker wearable asking for a loan, and I just made an offer on it on pawn.xyz right now. I made an offer. In fact, I tweeted at the person because I took their wallet address. I put it into Twitter. I saw they were tweeting, and I was like, "Hey, LMK, let me know. Let's talk about the terms." So I'm excited to see ice wearables on pawn. But welcome, Joseph. So glad to have you here, and thank you for your time. How'd you get into this thing? How'd you get into crypto?

Thank you so much for the invitation, Tim. First, it's a pleasure to be here. The last call we did with the PoolTogether community was amazing, so I'm really glad we have the chance to continue the conversation here. But yeah, so I guess starting right at the beginning, well, initially I got aware of crypto, or rather Bitcoin, essentially through Silk Road. And The story is quite easy. Like, I was just like trying to buy assets online and there was a Silk Road thing and there was this thing called Bitcoin that people were using to pay for the stuff. And this is essentially how I got introduced to cryptocurrencies. And I mean, not cryptocurrencies, but it was just Bitcoin at the time. And that's what kind of like triggered me into becoming a user. But in honesty, it took me, I didn't see Bitcoin or anything else Than the magic internet money that was used on Silk Road. And it was it. There was no like a, you know, like rabbit hole moment where I felt like, hey, this is ultimately changing how the financial markets will work eventually. It didn't trigger me from perspective of like how this can impact society or how this can be used by like people who don't have access to financial products. Nothing like that. So it was purely, you know, like funny thing on the internet that people are using. I think it was roughly around the time when Bitcoin was like $10, and I thought it was like a hell of an expensive experiment and thing to play around with. But I guess the reason why I'm mentioning it is that it wasn't really all that appealing to me. I didn't get into crypto, I didn't get into Bitcoin. I was just aware that thing exists. I used it and that was it. I didn't get rich on buying Bitcoin early. I didn't care about the thing. And it was first with Ethereum, literally 4 and a half years after, when I finally grasped what the technology actually enables and how blockchains and cryptocurrencies can be used in order to create these alternatives to the financial system or just general alternatives to web services and how we actually interact with each other. So With Ethereum, there was the time when I realized, hey, this is potentially the same impact as the internet itself. And this is something where we literally stand at ground zero, where the things that will make the difference needs to be built, and where I could actually see, hey, there's a whole lot of stuff that I can be building myself because it's literally nonexistent. And I also had this tremendous hype, right? You saw these communities emerge, you saw how quickly the community evolves and how essentially the topics, the very high-level visionary ideas get turned into tangible projects and attempts to actually change the status quo. So I started attending meetups. I was living in Prague at the time, and I took a chance and basically jumped on a train over to Berlin and attended my first meetup at the old foundation's office. I didn't know anyone in the whole space. This was early 2016 when I finally decided to actually start meeting people in the community. And I went to the meetup, got an idea about who the people are and how far the project actually is, and started getting interested in kind of the technical aspects. And when I got back to Prague, I was reaching out to this Bitcoin crowd, which was already quite vibrant in Prague, and figured that there is more people who are interested in Ethereum. Partly there was this backlash of kind of the OGs in the space basically dismissing the topic as such as literally a shitcoin. But it didn't repel me. And yeah, I figured there's roughly like 10 to 20 people who were interested in talking about the topic, and I was kind of expecting someone to take action and organize a meetup or just like a get-together or something, which didn't happen for about like a week or two. So I decided to do it myself, and that's how I started the Prague Ethereum Meetups, which I was essentially like running, and I was preparing meetups for or the content for. Eventually this turned into technical workshops. So I dived into Solidity and I wanted to actually be able to do things hands-on and I started developing a bunch of proof of concepts. And after, I don't know, it was quite quick. So roughly after 6 months of doing that, a bunch of people approached me and asked me to build a proof of concept of whatever arbitrary project for them. And initially I was doing that just for friends, just to actually learn and have a chance to build something interesting. I was running a startup. I was like a 3rd co-founder of a startup at the time, which was— I wasn't really a developer. I never had a job where someone would pay me to develop something, to code anything. But crypto was increasingly getting my attention. I was even trying to turn that startup into working with blockchains as like the certification ground. But it didn't work out. So I was doing all this on the side, and then eventually I was working on 3 side projects for friends and even some random people from the community I met. And then I got so much inbound interest in jumping on teams and building something for the people around that I literally started rejecting these and saying, I don't have time for this. And then there was the first person that said, I'll pay you for that. And at that point I realized you can actually, even me who literally had like few months of experience building Solidity, could get paid and could land a freelance job. So that's what got me into coding and into building smart contracts and working on a bunch of early on proofs of concepts that were even touching things like, what if we had a super Like super smooth microtransactional system, which obviously like turned out to be the worst idea ever because like we soon learned that crypto wasn't for anything like that with like gas prices like reaching heights and transactions costing like not cents, not dollars, but like hundreds of dollars. And yeah, I'm not sure where to stop, but I can, I guess, like run you through the whole thesis or like whole All flow into how Pongo started.

Yeah, let's go.

Yeah, take us there. Yeah, so yeah, so when I started working on these proof of concepts, I also basically decided to drop my startup and to leave the company and leave my unvested shares on the table. And basically I was saying that I want to pursue this different industry. And then I started nomading for a moment. I started going to hackathons and conferences. There was this first Ethereum-focused first hackathon, I believe. I'm not sure actually if it was the first. It was the first that I was aware, which was organized by Thomson Reuters in London in 2016. And there was like very few teams and like bunch of the nowadays like crypto OGs that were participating in the hackathon. We ended up winning security track of the hackathon, even though like I literally just like started with diving into the technological parts. And yeah, I left my apartment, I stopped paying rent, and I was literally living out of my suitcase for almost 2 years, going to the ETHCons and ETCs and Ethereum hackathons and basically just diving deeper and deeper into the community and basically having the freelance job to pay off these expenses and not really having any life besides that. And then finally, in 2018, I came across the Ethereum Foundation's team. I mean, like, I met them at earlier DEF CON, but I never actually, like, interacted much with the EF. And in 2018, I met Mimi, who was in charge of organizing DEF CON. I also met Aya at the same event and, yeah, basically had a plan to hold, like, a user experience and adoption-focused conference in Prague for roughly 100 people. And I was literally looking for for grants that I could get to facilitate the conference and basically just pay for food in Prague. And so I approached them, gave them the pitch. We didn't talk for a moment. And then finally we start talking about not only the, the unconference, but also DEF CON happening in Prague. So this was DEF CON 4. So I hosted the event in summer, and then obviously a few months later, DEF CON was happening in Prague. I was trying to be the local fixer for that. And then right after DEF CON, I got an offer from the Ethereum Foundation to potentially join full-time. The conference itself, it was also fun because there was a whole bunch of the people. This is like 2018, so it's like 4 years ago. And I believe that most of the people that actually participated in the conference being relatively unknown at the time, now run projects themselves or have successful projects behind them. So For instance, I'm not sure if like people here remember, but one of the projects that was used for registration of the, of the AI conference was a project called Block Party. So Block Party was this tool which basically you could use to make a deposit upon RSVPing into an event. And then if you showed up, or rather if you didn't show up, You would lose your deposit, and if you showed up, you would get your deposit back plus care of all of these other deposits that were left on the table. So if this sounds familiar, then it's very likely right because this project was later renamed to Thinkback, run by Makoto. And I think he recently dropped the project because he just focuses on ENS. But there were projects like WalletConnect being introduced. And I mean, like, even back then it was like the Party Designer, which like doesn't exist anymore, but definitely had its mark in the history, or the ETHFinex project by Dylan Ardmore and like many, many others that like now, you know, like after several years finally are getting their spotlight. And yeah, well, the EF story lasted 4 years and I literally got from a developer into doing operations and eventually handling the budgets and roadmaps or facilitating the roadmap planning for the R&D teams within the Ethereum Foundation. Yep, definitely runs much differently than companies. Well, yeah, it isn't a company per se, but yep, works in this mode of basically being this facilitator or just like a base support base for the teams that work fairly independently. So basically the teams are provided with budgets and then can do whatever. Nobody's telling them like, hey, you should be working on ABC. It's more of like the projects within the EF basically say like, this is the team, this is what we want to do next year, this is how much money we need. And then there's a discussion about like, hey, should the team get this much money or not? There isn't like any anyone telling them, hey, you should be working on this, or you're fired or something. So I was doing that within DEF, but I started with relatively high, I guess, technological confidence because I was literally freelancing and using all of the stack that was available at that moment. But I had zero confidence talking to these OGs, people like Christian from Solidity or or Peter and Martin Swinnett from also, I guess, like, Gettor, the security team, because these were my heroes. These were the folks that started the thing that ultimately changed my life and career for the years to come. And it took, I guess, like, a few years for me to get that social confidence to be able to talk to them and even give them feedback. But the more time I was spending on these higher-level things, the less technologically or technically confident I felt because like obviously wasn't using the stack anymore and there was this progression. So to, you know, not to lose my coding ability, I was like always working on a side project and just like coding something in a corner, like, or during hackathons and so on. And essentially in 2020, during the HackMoney hackathon organized by ETH, I signed up for it. I didn't really spend much time actually working on my contribution or even forming a team, but I was developing the side project. And the side project at the time was called— it was during the heated proc POW debates, and the project was called Proc POWN. And essentially it was the first version of POWN. That was before any NFT lending or anything like that existed. I didn't take inspiration from a particular project. I was just thinking about, hey, well, obviously there's a missing component here. I'll just try and write something useful. I didn't really have a business idea from that, right? So I wrote it, I didn't even submit it. I just created it and kept it on my shelf. And then every now and then when a new Solidity version would come out, I would just update it with the latest features and so on. I would iterate on that for roughly 6 to 9 months. And I eventually pitched it to a bunch of my colleagues who later became advisors and angels in the project. And some of them told me like, hey, this is a startup idea. Like, you should like take this and run with that. So essentially, beginning of like 2021, I decided like this should be the case. I wanted to become a founder again after like losing that label from my first startup. And I announced like within the EF that I'll be like handing over the responsibilities, that I'll be essentially just working on. So Beginning of 2021, I got to, I guess, convince my co-founder Steve Pau, who used to work at Diversify with one of my friends. And we started basically writing a white paper and just preparing the project as a business case. And we also got involved the first developer who now is our CTO, Simon. He was like, I don't know if it was like 19 or 20 at the time we started working with him. And yeah, it took us half a year to get things started, to write the first MVP with the super early version of the protocol, deploy it on a testnet. And basically we approached a couple angels and a couple VCs and basically got the pre-seed round. figured in like about 2 months during the summer. And then finally in September 2021, we got incorporated as a company and before the end of the year hired like 20 people and established like a full-blown team around Thorn. And yeah, well, it took us like 6 months to get the project into like an alpha stage. It took us another like 2 to 3 months to get it into the open beta, which is running right now. So since June. Basically the Art of Bond. We still consider it essentially the beta version because it's literally the most basic thing, like the MVP protocol that we drafted. And now we finally have actually the first version, the V1, which is much more open, has many more modules and many more ways to actually work with these loans, which is currently being audited. I think we already received a preliminary report of the audit. the first one should be done early next week. And that's also when the second company, second auditing firm should start for county audit. So hopefully within a month or two, the new version should be also out. So this is a bit of an alpha.

No, that's great. And I think when you tell the story of Pawn, you have to include the day that you met Richard, our Liriano, whose birthday is today and who has I have been a student of his as far as NFT collateralization goes, and he introduced me to Pawn. So happy birthday, Richard. He's on the call.

Oh, happy birthday.

Yeah. So, and I was, you know, it's, it's been really cool to use Pawn. I used it, a community member wanted to, I'm trying to think of the exact, I think I was like loan 1, 2, 3, 4 or something like that. It was like some easy to, or loan 1, 2, 3, but a community member wanted to borrow against their pool token. And I was able to give them, you know, I did a loan just because they're part of the PoolTogether community. And it was really cool to be able to like do peer-to-peer lending with like collateral being a token, which is fun. And then, and then we did the Twitter Spaces. We talked about the proper pronunciation of Pawn, which, which I was informed could be anything that you want. So then I made it Poen, and then I was like, Poen Wilson, and now there's a t-shirt. And so I'm currently wearing this Poen Wilson t-shirt. And if I see this, I'm just, I'm saying this for the podcast, 'cause I said this on Twitter and I'm making it official. If I see anyone wearing a Poe and Wilson shirt, that, uh, that it has utility and that utility is I will stop doing whatever I'm doing at ETH Denver or at PolyCon and sing an improvisational song for you right there based on just having that shirt on. So Anyway, you know, I don't know if we're still selling shirts. Are those shirts still— if you can get it, maybe you can even get it on secondary. You should get one. And also, I wonder if you could like take a loan out against that. Maybe I got to think about how I could do that too. Do like a little peer-to-peer loan for the Poe and Walsh shirt. Anyway, so thanks for that. I'm just like all in. I feel all in and Dimple and I are hanging out in a little bit after this call. So. I'm pwned out. I'm pwned out.

Well, thank you. And of course, thanks to Richard. I mean, he's a great example of how these communities get established. I mean, he's the thought leader who jumps into things where no one else has figured out what the hell the thing is, and he just runs with it and uncovers it for our people. So I'm super grateful for having Richard as part of our community. And like now, of course, like you as well, same, like we're wearing, wearing Pwn Wilson swag. That's like, you know, how, how better this can get.

It's so good. And shout out to Livester for designing it. She threw together like a quick design and I loved it. And then she just decided to like hand draw Owen Wilson. Wow. I got to do my own.

Oh my God.

Wow.

Nice.

Wow. So I want to talk about the future of Pwn because I, Richard and I have many requests, like what we want to see. And NFT collateralization world. And I think, so I would love to hear about, you gave us a little alpha there as far as like audits go and such. And, but I would love to just throw something out there for you, Joseph, and then you just give me your thoughts on it or things. So right now, I think a lot of NFT collateralization is over the counter. It's basically like, deals that are done in Discord. And like right now I put out a couple offers, but I'm pretty sure they're not going to get followed up with unless I like go hustle in Discord or find the person on Twitter and like, hey, I made this offer, that sort of thing. And kind of, you know, encourage it along. However, I do think that there is an opportunity for maybe like NFT loan aggregators, like a layer on top of Pawn and on top of Arcade or, you know, NFTFi or whatever, Nifty, whatever it's called, where you can like look at like what the landscape of like who's lending, who's borrowing, who needs, like what's out there across the different platforms. And then here's the other thing. I think that there needs to be a market for wholesaling. So, which is already happening basically by the biz devs of these sites, right? Like biz dev means you're actually like, oh, somebody's got a Cyberpunk. They want a loan. This person wants to provide liquidity. Let me put them together. You know, but I feel like there's like this whole market of wholesaling where you could go find the deal, you could go lock in the APY, and then you can go sell that immediately to somebody else who wants the majority of that interest. And then you get that small fee and instant yield for finding the deal, finding the loan that's available. So anyway, I'm just, that's the thing that Richard and I want to see is a site that aggregates and then also includes secondary market. What's What say you, sir?

I say absolutely. I mean, this is like even before we actually had a thing released, this was also mentioned in the Pawn whitepaper. And I believe this is a natural progression. So as far as I know, there are even projects that want to focus on these secondary sales. Well, obviously, because these loans are tokenized and we put more openness not only on Pawn, but now on all these other platforms as well, I believe we'll literally see a very similar behavior to the traditional lending market or mortgage market where you basically, as you described, you will have this layer of dealmakers who will be the people doing the appraisals and basically sizing the risk on these individual loans. And then you will see bigger pools of funds, aggregators, or even crowds that will be willing to take exposure against these particular asset classes. And let that be nowadays, we can see different markets being formed around different GameFi communities or digital parcels or collectible NFTs or DeFi derivatives in the future. And this is trying to look like 5, 10, 15 years ahead. I'm sure the same opportunities will be available for things like real-world assets, tokenized real estate, tokenized stocks, and these types of things. which already have all of these financial instruments in the TradFi world. We were just essentially trying to build up the layers now in crypto. So once these assets jump over, all of these things can be facilitated now without all of these intermediaries, just basically using smart contracts, being completely custodial.

Yeah. And I mean, this can even extend into, as you said, real estate. Like somebody who has all of these on-chain assets, which they could borrow against, right? They can collateralize. And could they turn that into like a real-world home, which is something like the PoolTogether community was able to do this for a community member who needed a car. We were able to, you know, put, put some ETH together and help them get a car. But this, in the same way, we could also like as a community help people get homes, even just through loans. So just another aspect of, of being able to legitimize. on-chain assets, right? Uh, that banks would not count as legitimate, those jerks. And, uh, and so that's, that's also another way. I mean, I think that's a huge win. And I just, by listening to this podcast, NFT collateralization, NFT loans is the alpha for 2023. And I'm seeing this on Twitter that many, many aren't even like looking at this. All right. And we're not even talking about NFT. We're talking about peer-to-peer lending. And we're talking about on-chain collateral. So this is the new frontier really that Pawn is leading us in.

Yeah, basically the parties that we've seen being interested in these types of setups, quite surprisingly, I mean, the very first set of user interviews and people who proactively reached out to us were coming from the traditional world. I mean, we talked to Guys at like several, several like banking institutions that are literally doing like something very similar or were doing something very similar in their previous careers, and now they jumped into crypto and are convinced that like the same is basically like coming to crypto, and they just want to be they just want to be in the in the front seats. We even talked to like large real estate developers that and I mean this is. Basically driving off the metaverse hype, but large real estate developers that literally have projects sized at several billion dollars, basically rebuilding entire districts, just wanting to do the same thing regarding financing these projects in metaverse as they do in the real world. So they were looking at buying parcels in the metaverse and basically developing those in the metaverse, using the same financial instruments. So it's literally like taking mortgages or like long-term loans that they could use to finance these projects, like even using those projects themselves or those assets associated with those projects, like those parcels as collateral while they built the thing. And later on, once they sell it, they can basically just close these loans and be off the thing with profit. So crypto is still tiny and I mean, Most people are looking at the market cap, but even that, I don't think it's the universal comparison tool. If you just look how much money is being spent on stuff, looking at revenues of these projects, this is still like a super tiny industry. But in my opinion, it's still super tiny industry which already has this 10x improvement against what we are seeing in the traditional world. And even though this is like a third 3rd hype cycle or a market cycle. Or nowadays, obviously this is a FUD cycle rather than a FOMO one. But we are still super early. The industry won't be formed in 10 years. It will take like a few decades. And this is the first one. So yeah, I'm just completely hyped about what's coming next. And even though we don't know what will happen in crypto in the next few years, I'm just Truly sold on essentially crypto being completely normal in the next decade.

And I love this. Anything is possible. I don't know, like blue skies, green fields, whatever the metaphor is, where we can just ask for features or we can just think about stuff and create it. And the Aavegotchi community has done this with Pawn, where not only can you collateralize your Aavegotchis, your assets in the game, you can still use them. You actually get to still continue to use them. And the same thing I would love to see with like Decentral Games with the Ice Poker wearables, just any sort of in-game thing, or, or even the option to choose whether or not, like, for example, with PoolTogether tickets, like if I wanted to collateralize my PoolTogether deposit, I could do that. But then like, I would also, there, there might be an option who gets to claim the prizes while the, you know, while the loan is in process, like while I'm borrowing. So there's just like interesting aspects of it that are being explored. And I think a lot of it, especially with the Aavegotchi community, comes down to social credit, like your social, your name within crypto. And, and, you know, people are able to give like outsized loans on assets that might not be worth even close to what the loan amount is, but it's a social loan. Like, it's like, oh, I'll do this because you are in the community and you're, you know, you're well-known and you don't want to sully your name. as well. So there's just this whole interesting aspect of on-chain credit and social capital and peer-to-peer lending. So I wonder, like, you know, what's the future? Is Pawn going— how can Pawn enable this social lending, even like uncollateralized peer-to-peer loans?

So there is like several things that we are looking into. And I think like some of those were touched on earlier during the The PoolTogether community call. One thing that we are currently looking into is utilizing the Lens protocol and basically trying to link these associated profiles with some kind of lending reputation, which, I mean, obviously there is always an iterative process behind building these features. So at first, we want to essentially just add the track on pawn. And then later on, adding several other components, even from these other platforms that are out there, literally utilizing the on-chain dataset. And I think that if someone has a good track record in being a lender or borrower on NiftyFi, then I think that also makes them eligible in getting reputational bond or something like that. Obviously, all of these things are interconnected. So why not use them? So this is one thing that we are looking into. Obviously, there's no concrete date because we don't even have the feature protocols scoped out. And again, this is a prompt to everybody who's listening to reach out to us. And if you have ideas or if this is something you would be interested in even working on, we'd love to get you involved somehow. So that's one way to look at Social reputation, basically just creating this like track record of like actions associated with a particular account. Another aspect, which I believe I mentioned during the previous community call, was, well, you already have some sort of like reputable assets that already exist and already have a lot of reputation bound to those. So even if you look at things like ENS names, well, you can look at the, you know, the DNS NFTs as something that in some cases is like bound to a particular person, like especially if you are like a public figure on Twitter and you have your ENS name associated with you strongly, then that item, the asset already is like a reputation-bearing thing. And like if you add it to a bundle with some sort of like other collateral, I think that in eyes of like many lenders, this will increase the loan-to-value that you'll be able to get. So in fact, this kind of works as a social reputation as well because like obviously the asset itself, like, you know, let that be like a long string DNS name, the value, the systemic value of that is fairly low. It was basically bought for a couple dollars, but the reputation that the person gives it, increases its value beyond, you know, like, I guess, a rational, like, process. So these things you can already do today. And we've seen people, I don't, I don't think we actually seen like a lot of deals being funded in that way, but we certainly saw a lot of conversations happening around like people leveraging their ENS names and putting them into bundles with other assets and basically creating like more appealing set of collateral that someone else could lend against.

By the way, I low— I threw a lowball offer to you on your Lens profile, but it's just what I had in my wallet. But I just, I just did that for fun. But no, I love that. We— Richard actually wants to come on stage. So I'm going to invite you, write you up, sir, sir, Richard, in case you have any questions, because Richard gets special treatment on the podcast. Normally we don't do this, but I wanted to let him on the stage. Welcome, Richard.

Thank you. Give me I'm gonna put this, um, on speaker. Can you guys hear me okay?

Yep,

absolutely.

Awesome. Joseph, thank you. Those were very kind words. Um, I wish there were the recording and I would actually just edit that part and replay that to my wife because I just kept hearing that, like, Richard's the leader, Richard's the leader, and I was just like, whoa, whoa.

Thank you for that. I'll get you the clips. I'll get you the clips,

baby. I'll actually make that my ringtone. No, um, you know, thank you, you know, for bringing me up here. We won't even mention the birthday unless there's gifts. Um, and I'll be giving gifts, so that's how crazy I am. But, um, yeah, no, Joseph, um, yeah, hearing your story, um, I commend you. I admire you. I really love hearing— and again, obviously, um, it's a very special story because it's yours. Um, not that we've heard it before, but I personally, you know, I enjoy people who've kind of like have seen the bottom, right? Have, have felt the bottom, have tasted the bottom. But have been able to climb. Most importantly, more than anything, I love people that have created something for others. So in a way, shape, and form, that's what I try to do. You know, like what I do, what I say is just me kind of like showing people like, look, you can be this way too. You know, like it's a copy and paste, you know, like listen to me, hear what I say, you know, try to do what I do. But just to kind of be on the subject with Pon, Yeah, like, I enjoy PON. I love PON. I want to see, you know, PON to, you know, continue to grow. You know, I want to, again, be kind of like a vessel or conduit, you know, however I can, just to kind of have others, you know, taste PON and fall in love with it as well. I know I mentioned this in the past, but I'm gonna try to stress it, and Tim, stop me at any point. You know, I don't want to like— Okay. Sky, that's— yeah, awesome. But it's amortized loans, you know. Um, I really feel again, and you know this as well, you know, having 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or 120 days, I really feel that when it comes to lending and borrowing, you know, obviously there's those 2 players, the lenders and borrowers, you know. And has, say for example, has a lender, you know, lender's okay with having that LTV, having that collateral, but just having that loan, you know, just kind of like exists, not having to worry about coming back, refinancing 30 days, 60 days. So seeing amortized loans, as banks do it, where it's 30 years, there's principal interest, it's fixed at this percentile. I'm more than anything am anxious to see that. I know Tim touched on something on managing. I know you guys are working on PondSafe. You know, which is something again, like I'm dying, you know, in anxious to try. But yeah, I want to, like I said, I want to be able to kind of see Pond, you know, continue to grow, continue to support the community, you know, listen to feedback and yeah, just, you know, be, you know, one of the biggest players, you know, within this NFT lending marketplace. But with all that being said, yeah.

Yeah. Well, you bring up a good point because, and Joseph, I know that like there's really a hard stop on these loans, right? So you, You pick a duration. So 14 days, 30 days, maybe even up to 60 days, depending on which site you're on. And then you pick an interest rate. But, but I know that Richard is in the business of like, hey, let, let me just pay you interest. Let me just like keep this baby rolling. And, and I think like, do, is that going to be an option soon? And then also like, is that like going, do you think that'll— I think it'll increase like volume, like TVL for, for these sites. But I wonder what the hitch in the giddyup is right now. Joseph?

Yeah. So first of all, just want to again repeat my appreciation of Richard. I think he's an amazing person. And without the personalities like you, man, we wouldn't have the communities around crypto being formed in such a beautiful way. So thank you again for participating in these sessions and being part of multiple communities and really really showing the Web3 and crypto spirit. So I just wanted to make sure to mention that before we jump into anything else.

Exactly.

So regarding the function set, well, so there's always so many things to talk about, right? So I don't want to drop all of these ideas and be like, hey, I just mentioned literally every single buzzword out there that's somewhere in our backlog. But ultimately what we want to grow Pawn into is is a solution for backing long-term mortgages with digital assets and then being able to do whatever with the mortgage. And these amortized loans that you're talking about, I believe that's a natural progression and natural part of these types of setups where you can literally keep these loans open for even a decade, which is, I believe, in crypto so far, that's something unheard of because all of these loans basically just are mostly used for leverage or are perpetual in the sense that where you basically get or keep constant exposure to getting liquidated on price spikes. In terms of like, how far are we from there? As I mentioned, the V1, now the V1 ultimately is built in a very, very much like different fashion than the current beta protocol. And what the V1 allows is like to create different In keeping the very same concept of allowing collateralization of whatever you want, like any star token, we are introducing new types of loans and new types of offers. So within these new types, utilizing still the same protocol, you will be able to specify further things like if you want to have installments, if you want to have special way the loan should get liquidated, or if you even want the loan to be liquidated according to a Particle oracle or not. And part of allowing these new loan types is exactly what you just mentioned, to be able to create these new setups and even experiment with new features and new loan durations, and obviously also unlock the possibility to crowdsource these loans. So I'm not saying there is one Particle product now that I would purchase as the first one. Because we'll have to get these things prototyped and obviously tested before we release them into the open space. But yeah, well, ultimately we'll get there and similar concepts will be allowed on Pond as a protocol. So please, I'm hoping, and if there is a recording, I'm going to listen to this later on as well. Unless that's already in our backlog, please someone from the team just write a note. And obviously this is super useful. user feedback as well. So we will obviously try to look into the different cases and the new types of loans and types of interactions that people will be able to do on a protocol.

Awesome. Awesome. No, that's great. I mean, this will be the last one that— so, yeah, no, I understand Pond. And again, you know, the competitors, they all operate, you know, with— how can I say— using an NFT as collateral. But so that's obviously collateralized loans. But I also, again, just in the spirit of lending and borrowing, you know, and being Web3, like, I love seeing uncollateralized loans. You know, where it's, I don't need collateral, you know, it's just like, let's do this smart contract based on these terms. And guess what? If you didn't pay, like, I know now to never lend you again. You know, so I've seen, you know, and again, you know, putting the names out there, like I've seen Union Finance, you know, kind of like see this task, right? Or this kind of like need, but I don't feel it's being provided. You know, I'd love to see again someday, you know, on the roadmap, you know, for Pond to kind of like offer that. Because again, the way I see pawn is more like, it's kind of, again, I use a lot of analogies. Like, pawn to me is more of like a space. Like, one side you have lenders, one side you have borrowers. So once you kind of have that community, there's always like, all right, I lend, I borrow. So it's like, all right, do I need something to use collateral? And it's like, guess what? We've done 20, 30 loans. Like, you don't, because you already established trust. You know, and what you've been able to do. So that already exists. So I, again, I love to see that as option. The second thing that I want to point out, which I'm, you know, we're seeing a lot of this and we kind of like history tends to repeat itself in a lot of different ways. So, you know, with the NFTs, we saw all these marketplaces, you know, but now we also saw like the aggregators, right? You know, like a Gem and then Uniswap now allows you to like auto purchase. you know, batch together, you know, purchases of these NFTs. Again, there's a lot of players within the NFT marketplace. Have you guys thought, and I don't know, this is alpha, you know, you don't have to answer if anything, but have you thought of creating like your own aggregator, you know, or something like that? Because I just see like, again, I see Pond has a store in the mall, but I also see Pond be in the mall. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, I mean, like we perhaps like didn't really look into like aggregating, aggregating like lending opportunities for certain like types of assets. What we are essentially trying to aggregate is the, is the data points that could help you price these assets. Right. So we, we literally, literally like have this for, or majority of the collectible NFTs with the asset pages. So now if you, if you like open up a loan request or a protocol asset, you can dig deeper. And this is where we aggregate price history and purchase offers on places like OpenSea or LooksRare for NFT. Gradually, we want to improve this. And yeah, I'm hoping that the feature itself will be, I guess, useful enough for other people to use it as well, even in different contexts, like even in places where it doesn't really relate to borrowing or lending, or just essentially looking at the asset from multiple perspectives. From a perspective of this other stuff, I mean, yeah, I guess that could be possible, but I'm not sure this would have high priority because it always feels like actually improving the core protocol and improving the service provided for that particular use case, leveraging the protocol, because ultimately that's our goal as a team, is making sure the protocol is being put to use. That's the primary goal. So I think it's a legit idea, and I definitely feel like there will be teams pursuing just that and aggregating this from multiple sources. I don't know if that's ultimately something that we should spend our time on now building Pond, because obviously our dedication is the protocol itself.

Sure. So I just want to end, and again, I don't want to take over this podcast or this call, but there's 2 things. So number one, I'd love to see similar to as you have OpenSea where you get offers on your NFTs, like automatically, that's dependent, you know, on the NFTs in your wallet and you get an email notification. Like, I would love to see, you know, Pawn have something similar, you know, in the sense of like, how can I tell you, here's my wallet address, here are my NFTs, have these lenders, you know, kind of pitch me, you know, offer me whatever they want, you know, on these NFTs and, you know, email me. Send me a Discord notification. I know you have it with, but what I'm trying to say is like instead of me creating the loan, let me at least see those offers, right? But also with like Discord notifications, you know Telegram, all bells and whistles. And then lastly, like I said, has a gift. I sent you a friend request on Discord. All I ask for you is to hopefully accept that. I know it's a pain for some time. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah. I mean all in all. And only reason why I have Discord.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, go ahead, go ahead.

My Discord is so cluttered that it's just like always super hard to spot notifications.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I hear you and I'm joking and I'm real about that, but take it as you please. Oh, here it is.

And thanks to your prompt, I actually figured I didn't even accept a friend request of a team member. Now I'm ashamed of that. There you go.

Yeah, except that one before mine. No, so the other thing is, again, I, you know, I do my research. I know Worth Laid, and, um, I can't remember his last name, but I know he's the founder of PoAP, and I know he's an investor, um, in, um, how can I say, in, in Pawn as well. You know, I don't know the relationship there, you know, on the involvement. You know, I'm not asking about that. Well, I am asking is I haven't had the pleasure of speaking with him, and, you know, I'd like to kind of, you know, through this call You know, and hopefully through you invite him, you know, hopefully to, you know, a pool community call as well. And obviously, yes, have the pleasure, you know, speaking of, you know, with him as well. Because, you know, I've said this, and, you know, I will always say this, you know, when I see someone like you, him, Leighton, Stani, to me, it's like people again, who had a dream, a vision, a goal, and they accomplished it, you know, and it's people again, that I admire, that I respect. So in communicating with them, I'm kind of like importing, exporting. So it's like we're exchanging USBs, you know, and that's what I'm saying, like, from afar, even though, you know, we've never spoken, like, again, I use your product, you know, I love your product. And I just want to continue to see, like, you know, you succeed, but at the same time, like all of us, you know, and just like, if you have growth, if you have, you know, more users, just like, look, we're doing this, like, you know, we're a part of this. So that's the thing to me, I think is the beauty of Web3, where we use the Facebooks, the Instagram, WhatsApp, but we don't have that one-on-one and direct communication with Mark Zuckerberg, right? So I really think that has a lot of value because you hear these ideas, you get the feedback and it shows again, like it's a real person and a very humble person and genuine person behind this company and this product. So, Tim, I'm gonna mute myself. I'll go back to the audience. You know, whoever's listening, again, this is me. I'm just like a humble user, you know, that may have knowledge, may have a certain skill set, but it's not mine. It's yours. You know, like, I always set myself to, you know, to be at the service and help of others. And yeah, like, I, you know, I, that's how I feel. How can I say that's how, that's what gives me power? Like, That's what kind of fulfills my day.

Well, thank you. Thank you, Richard, again. And yeah, happy birthday, man. And oh, and one more thing.

Thank

you. Thank you. Thank you. Definitely next time, next time I talk to Patricio, I'm going to, I'm going to prompt him about like him attending a pool together call. But I just want to say like he's one of the

most,

he's one of the most approachable people that I know in the ecosystem. And like whenever And he's like barely recognizable as well.

So yeah, with the red jacket, like the red suit.

Yeah, the orange jacket that he wears, like this is, that's his like signature move. And you can just spot him anywhere at a conference. I'm sure he'll be happy to talk to you. Like he's awesome. He's like always, he's always surrounded by a crowd, but he always talks to everybody.

Yeah, no, I'll take that. Like I said, all I need is that introduction. And Tim, I'll lay it out. Basically what I'm doing. So here's what's interesting about Patricio. Patricio. So let's call him Patrick in English just for the translation. So when no one gets confused. So he was a pull-together user from version one, you know, and version two and version three, he had like USDC deposited. And I know there's a wallet address again. I do a lot of research. So there's the wallet address with like USDC just sitting there, you know. So what I say is just like, look, let's do good with that. Right. Let's put that, you know, how can I say, like stake ETH? You know, there's stETHwin, Joseph, which is something, you know, a side project that was done, you know, from a community member of PoolTogether where the prizes, you know, it goes to the depositors, but also a certain percent goes to like a charity, you know, for good within crypto. So that's what I'm saying. Like at the end of the day, what I see crypto and the assets, the NFTs and the capital, It's like it's land and fruits, you know, like we can eat from them, but at the same time, like whatever we're not utilizing, like we can give to others, you know. So

that's, you know, it's that idle money.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there's that idle money and, you know, someone like me and it's just like, wait, it's there. How do we utilize that? You know, how do I utilize that? You know, utilize that, you know, to the benefit obviously of like all mutual parties. So I'm throwing that out there, you know, again, it's all public. You know, information, but it's things like that again, where I see, and it's just like, okay, I want to run with that. You know, like, I—

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm sorry, Joseph, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold you accountable for that. But again, thank you, you know, from my behalf, you know, again, for everything you do. Thank you, you know, for, you know, for befriending me. And thank you, you know, for being on this call. And like I said, you know, I look forward to more calls, you know, as you continue to build more features at it, you know, if you or your team You know, are welcome to kind of, you know, with Tim, with myself, you know, of getting on calls and again, educating people, you know, showing people, you know, these new options. But yeah, like, I'm, again, I'm always humbly in my corner, but like, I'm here to be of service however I can.

Thanks, Richard. Thank you. Yosef, last words, final words. What should PoolTogether, how can PoolTogether help Pawn? Like, what are we thinking here? Anything that you, that we haven't talked about that you wanted to mention on this podcast? How can PoolTogether help? What are you thinking?

I mean, like, already the fact that, like, you guys are interested in, like, what we built and, like, let us talk to you and the community, it's already super helpful. I guess I would just want to encourage people from the PoolTogether community to, like, maybe, like, pipe on out, like, give us feedback and even just, like, use the assets of PoolTogether. So the tickets, as collateral and maybe look at other people's requests and just fund them for fun and to get used to this type of DeFi service and essentially also to contribute back to your community. So I love what you did with helping out your community member and purchasing a car. And I feel like ultimately the same thing can be done on leveraging the assets of the Particle community Or even just being active within PoolTogether and knowing there are people, reputable people within your community who could leverage on in some way, and you being the person that helps them out in the situation they're in. So please just use it, try it out, and give us feedback. That's all I ask for. But ultimately, you've already changed so much in crypto, and I keep repeating this, but PoolTogether was literally one of the services that feel is a great example of like what wasn't possible before crypto and smart contracts. So for that, obviously you already have a lot of my appreciation.

Well, thanks so much, Josef, for being here. Happy birthday, Richard. Everybody give Pwn.xyz a try. It's super fun. It's cool to shop around on there and, you know, even just get your friends, like if you want to do a P2P loan, Use Pawn as like the escrow service and and try it out. It's really fun. And then also, again, I need to remind everyone to get your Poe and Wilson shirt and wear it at East Denver because it will put me to work at singing you a song right there on the spot and embarrass everyone, including myself. So that's it. Thanks so much.

Thank you, guys. That's great. Thanks, everybody.

All right. Thanks. 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.