PoolTogether Community Podcast #6: Crypto Texan of Index Coop

PoolTogether is the world's number one prize-saving lottery, and this is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. Visit pooltogether.com to deposit. Thanks for joining us on the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Tim. And listen, PoolTogether is a prize savings lottery. It's really fun to get in. To join us, go to pooltogether.com to deposit. And none of that what we talk about today is financial advice. We're just having fun here and we are having so much fun talking to Crypto Texan. Crypto Texan, welcome to the PoolTogether Community Podcast.

Thanks everyone. Happy to be here. Big fan of PoolTogether and looking forward to get started.

Yeah, so I'd love to hear your journey, Crypto Texan. If you could just talk about crypto in general and then how did you find PoolTogether?

That's a great question. So I got into crypto in around 2017. Uh, I bought my first little bit of Bitcoin, I think, in December of 2017. And I don't know if y'all remember correctly, but that was the top for Bitcoin, and then it, it tanked, right? It crashed after, uh, like beginning of 2018, I think. But I, you know, I the more I dug into the technology and just, you know, did more and more research, and I, you know, I stayed involved, uh, through that crash and through the bear market, and I just kind of, you know, realized that this is just a really innovative technology that does have the potential to change the way that we just interact with each other. And at that time, just, you know, exchange value on a peer-to-peer basis, right? That was like the main thing With Bitcoin. And then, you know, I think especially back then, you know, you start to dig into, you know, Litecoin, and then you dig into, you know, what's Bitcoin Cash? And then you think, oh, these are, these are way better, these are improvements over the Bitcoin protocol because it's bigger. And, you know, you don't really get into the, you know, what does it mean to have a bigger block time and faster transactions and lower transaction fees? And The longer I stayed in it, the more, you know, you start to understand, you know, what decentralization means, what security of the blockchain means, why it's important. And yeah, then eventually I, I think I was listening to Andreas Antonopoulos on the Joe Rogan podcast, and he started talking about smart contracts on the blockchain and And he was talking about basically code that automatically executes based on just data sets, you know, if, if, and, and then statements. And that really was fascinating to me. And that's kind of where I got turned on to Ethereum and started doing research there and kind of saw all the, all the projects, you know. I mean, I knew about Ethereum like during the ICO craze in like 2017, 2018. But I really started, you know, understanding the technology back then, uh, you know, after all that time had passed. And then I just, you know, I started getting into DeFi. I've got a traditional finance background, and so DeFi was obviously very interesting to me. Just the fact that you can have, you know, what Brian Brooks calls a self-driving bank, in the sense that, you know, I can deposit assets into a protocol and people can borrow those assets. I can borrow assets and there's no centralized intermediary or custodian taking custody of those assets. And it just blew my mind of the efficiency and the potential there. And then I really started digging into DeFi and, you know, that's kind of how I got into the Index Co-op. We can touch on that a little bit later. And yeah, I eventually found PoolTogether, and I, you know, I think the idea of, you know, it— I don't know if y'all call it a no-loss lottery anymore. I think y'all might call it like a price savings account now, or maybe you use both interchangeably. But I thought that idea was really fascinating, and so I kind of started getting involved on mainnet. You know, I put some into V3 of the PoolTogether protocol with Compound. I think I still have some Sushi in there. And then more recently with the deployment of v4 on Polygon, I've put, you know, a pretty sizable chunk in there. And I did that probably 2 months ago, right before this huge market downturn. And so, you know, I converted some assets into USDC and I'm getting a pretty good return over there. And And so, and then I don't know if y'all know this, but I also had Leighton on my podcast not that long ago. And I'm just fascinated by the protocol. I'm a huge fan of PullTogether's, you know, view of just like gamifying savings for, and I feel like it's more of a retail-facing protocol, which I feel like we don't have a lot of true retail-facing protocols right now. Like, I think, well, we can get into all that a little bit later, maybe too. But yeah, that's, that's kind of my background and how I found PoolTogether. Definitely.

Now, I realize this, this podcast is not about PoolTogether specifically. It's about the community around PoolTogether. And side note, just for those of you with CryptoTexan bingo cards, you can mark off Joe Rogan. Okay? You can mark off Joe Rogan. That's on your bingo card. But, but what do you think, CryptoTexan, your is PoolTogether's strength? Like, what do you think it's like makes it a killer app? Or like, what do you think the— is the— is the money thing behind PoolTogether?

Yeah, that's interesting. I actually— and I talked to Leighton about this, you know, on the podcast, uh, a couple months ago too. And I think, you know, when PoolTogether first came around, I think, you know, you had— it's been around for almost as long as Aave and Compound and all those other OGs. And PoolTogether is truly an OG DeFi protocol, but I think that maybe PoolTogether was a little bit too early in the sense that this feels like a true retail-facing protocol. And I think that the true value of PoolTogether the protocol and, and the Pool token to go along with that has not truly been realized yet. And I think with the onboarding of the masses of like true retail, like not like DeFi degens where you've got a MetaMask wallet and you've got assets on Avalanche and Arbitrum and Optimism and zkSync and Polygon, but just the people who want to just do banking on their phone. I think that together has a huge potential that with the right integrations with wallets, you know, non-crypto-native-friendly retail wallets, I think that is where you can really start to find the value. And it's just, it's more fun, right? I think that there's a bunch of different communities that can be formed around protocols, and I feel like your community is, is one of the more special ones in the sense that, you know, you go into all these Discords and especially during the bull market, you see a lot of people that are just saying, you know, when is the price going to go up more? Can devs do something? You know, why is the price down? And I think that, um, and then the Index Co-op has this as well, is that you just have like a different feel and a different vibe in our Discords. I mean, we still get those moon boys that want to know about the price, but I feel like the pulled-together community what I've experienced, it's, it's around, you know, when someone wins a prize, everyone's high-fiving each other, you know, virtually, I guess, and everyone's excited. And it's just, it's just a very cool and strong community that Jeff built. And I, I think that's really exciting. And I feel like the Index Co-op has that too, in the sense that, yeah, we definitely get a lot of questions about price of our products or our INDEX token, um, but a lot of times people just want to understand how the technology works, and that's really exciting. You know, how does the rebalancing work? How do you decide what goes into which index? And I think that's, you know, if you can find communities that kind of set themselves apart from the masses, I think that's a really valuable attribute to have in a community and in a protocol.

Yeah, it was cool to— I love that you guys have at Index Co-op, the podcast, you have everything transcribed. So I was able to like, you know, read through, blow through the interview with you and Leighton. And that concept of having a protocol, having— it's not an app or a platform that people have to go to necessarily. That's what it is now. But we're also working on becoming a protocol and being in kind of like being that Lego block in other things. And hopefully those things are onboarding more people to crypto. And if that's the secret sauce, that's the sweet spot for PoolTogether for sure. And we haven't been there yet. We haven't gotten there yet, but we're getting there. But I want to talk about Index Co-op or Index Coop, which is more fun to say, but I understand incorrect. So how'd you get involved with Index Co-op? And I would love to hear your story and what you're excited about there.

Well, no, you're not wrong in saying coop. I think we all use it interchangeably. It's technically called the Index Cooperative. So Index Co-op, that fits. But also our mascot is an owl. So Index Coop just kind of feels fitting there. But yeah, we use those interchangeably. If you want to sound more professional, say co-op, I guess. I don't know if you want to, if you want to seem smarter than you really are, which is what I try to do most of the time. But Yeah, the way that I got involved is kind of going back to what I was saying earlier. I was really just, you know, with my traditional finance background, learning about DeFi, and it kind of got a little overwhelming, right? Like, I do have this traditional finance background, but there's so much going on. The technology is so new. You've got Aave, Compound, Yearn, SushiSwap, you know, Cream, all these wild food token protocols like YAMM and Pickle Finance, Popsicle Finance. And I was just, you know, I wanted to invest in all of them. And, you know, it's not gas efficient, it's research intensive. And I came across the DeFi Pulse Index, which is an IndexCoop product, and it's just a basket of DeFi tokens that is weighted by market cap, automatically rebalances monthly. And I just kind of saw that as my solution there. I said, this just, you know, this outsources the research that I have to do. This outsources the rebalancing that I might do if I'm rebalancing my positions. And on top of that, you know, you kind of have socialized gas costs in the sense that, you know, these index, you know, DPI, DeFi Pulse Index token holders are splitting the gas costs with the rebalancing gas costs with each other, right? Because it costs the same amount of gas to send a $10 million transaction as it does to send a $1 transaction, right? Because really all the blockchain cares about is the amount of data that's going into the block, which is why NFTs are obviously more expensive to send because there's just a lot more data that's involved in that transaction. So yeah, when you're, you know, when you're rebalancing once a month, you're effectively splitting that cost between all of the token holders of DPI. And so yeah, I said this is fascinating. And so I went into the Discord. The NXCOOP Discord was my first Discord to ever join because that's where all the magic happens. And I just started getting a little bit more involved. and saw that the Index Coop has this tweeting program, this thing called Impression Mining Program, where you can get compensated for certain tweets that you tweet, and you get paid an INDEX token to do that. There's a lot of stipulations to it, and you kind of have to have like somewhat of a decent following to get started. And, um, and there's a lot of rules around it too, but that's really how I got started. And you know, I just kind of started learning out in public about how the Index Coop worked. So I would do research on DPI and the assets within, and then I would make, you know, a long tweet thread about it. And, you know, on Twitter, people can be pretty quick to tell you, uh, if you got something wrong or if you got something right. And but on top of that, you know, I would create posts about the Index Coop on Twitter, and people would ask me questions. And I just thought I should just answer every single question that everyone asks me on my tweets. And that kind of helped me do even more and more research. So kind of learning out in the open, getting paid to learn by doing the impression mining. And then, you know, the DeFi Pulse Index is, you know, we have a methodologist on that who is the DeFi— who's DeFi Pulse, which is one of the leading DeFi analytics organizations in the space. And they also have a Discord. And then, so I basically, I was in their Discord and they were doing this AMA with one of the DeFi protocols, just a text AMA in the Discord. And the NX Coop didn't have anything like that quite yet. So I reached out to 2 of some of the more core contributors, that was Lemonade Alpha and Pepperoni Joe. Um, you gotta love the names in DeFi. And I said, hey, This is a great idea. The Index Coop should do this, but we should do it live recording that drives people to the Discord and then publish it to gain more exposure. And they basically said, yeah, that's a good idea. Why don't you just go ahead and run with that? And I said, okay. And that's kind of cemented my position in the Index Co-op community as tweeting and doing the podcast. And I'll do a little business development here or there to try to get our products onto different protocols. But those are the main 2 aspects of my contributions at the Index Co-op.

Well, I'm a new podcast host in the crypto space, so I wonder if you have any advice for me as I move forward, or even criticism. You know, I'm fine, I could take it.

I mean, so far you're doing great. I mean, I don't have any advice at the moment. I would just say I do have a checklist that I use and I check it off every time because there was one time where, man, I forgot to record the first like 10 minutes of an interview and there was so much good content in there. It was with Alex Svanovic from Nansen and I was so bummed. I was like, I can't let that happen again. So I don't know, you just kind of get caught up in the moment sometimes and you forget to hit the record button. So. I don't know, just be mindful of that. That's my only advice that I have right now.

No, I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, the checklist is good. There's a whole book on checklists and how that works out. I forgot the title of it, but I'm sure if you Google checklist book, it's really great. It's about— yeah, anyway. But so you have a GMI token, right? So if I just invest in GMI, that means I'm going to make it? Is that correct?

Absolutely, absolutely. That means you're going to make it. Um, yeah, that's one of our newest index products actually. That is called the Bankless DeFi Innovation Index. And lately, I guess we've been getting a little bit more creative with the token symbol. So the token symbol for that one is GMI, which is obviously a popular meme that means gonna make it. And this was actually our second partnership with the Bankless DAO. You know, the Bankless DAO and the Index Coop, we kind of joined forces because, you know, we have the DeFi Pulse Index and these are the blue-chip DeFi protocols. And we kept getting, you know, all these questions, you know, why isn't OHM in there? Why isn't TOKE in there? MIM, you know, all these DeFi protocols that were really considered DeFi 2.0. Or yeah, and that's what GMI is here to do. It kind of seeks to capture the performance of more emergent DeFi application themes. And what it also does, it relaxes the inclusion criteria of, you know, our flagship product, the DeFi Pulse Index. And so it's really there to provide a little bit more exposure to experimental DeFi products which maybe haven't been completely proven yet, or maybe are a little bit further out on the risk curve. And yeah, these are, these are tokens that, um, yeah, they just haven't become or haven't achieved that label as a blue-chip, uh, DeFi protocol quite yet. And the reason we partner with Bankless on this, and I think this is one of the ways that The Indexed Co-op, you know, we set ourselves apart from our competitors because there are other competitors out there like PiDAO and Indexed Finance who do something similar. But one of the main ways we differentiate ourselves is through our partnerships. So, you know, we're partnering with the DeFi Pulse Index, who is very well known in the, you know, from a DeFi analytics space. The Bankless DAO, you know, everyone knows David and Ryan and listens to the podcasts. And Who else? We're working with Notional Finance on a new protocol. We're looking for— looking at partnering with Llama or DeFi Llama. And, you know, we've got the Titans of Data for our Data Economy Index. We've got the guys from MetaPortal for the Metaverse Index. And but yeah, if you invest in GMI, you're gonna make it. It feels more to me like leveraged DeFi exposure, as these are typically more smaller-capped DeFi protocols. So, you know, do your own research, not financial advice, but I love that product. I think it's really cool.

Yeah, gonna make it, it can mean so many things. Doesn't mean you're gonna make it financially. It just means that you're gonna make it. Could you explain other products that you have at Index Co-op? So you got the MVI, you got the DPI, you get the BED. We'd love to hear just kind of the portfolio run-through.

Yeah. So, and if I'm, you know, forgive me if I miss one off the top of my head, but yeah, we've got the DeFi Pulse Index, which gives you exposure to blue-chip DeFi protocols. We've got the Metaverse Index, which gives you exposure to the metaverse. And I think more specifically, it's there to capture the trend of, you know, NFTs, entertainment, sports, music, and business just kind of all shifting into a more virtual environment. That's what the Metaverse Index is there to do. And in that one, we've got Decentraland, Sandbox, Decentral Games, NFTX is another really cool one there, Axie Infinity is included there. And then like some other one like RARI, or not RARI, uh, Rarible is another one. And there's, I think there's 17 tokens in the Metaverse Index right now, uh, which yeah, it's worth just kind of digging in there and doing the research on these, you know. Uh, and that's kind of getting off topic a little bit, but when I've got friends that ask me about DeFi, I usually just point them, I say, hey, here's the DeFi Pulse Index. Start at the top with Uniswap, learn that, understand how it works, and just make your way down the list. And that kind of gives you a pretty good idea from just like a learning perspective, like a roadmap on which DeFi protocols, you know, what they do, what they are, what an AMM is, what a DEX is. That's kind of where I direct people. But anyway, so DeFi Pulse Index, Metaverse Index, the Bankless BED Index, BED, which stands for Bitcoin, Ether, and DPI. And we partnered with Bankless on that one too. That was just kind of a portfolio allocation that kind of memed itself into existence because we kind of been talking about, you know, this is kind of, you know, where you start. You start with Bitcoin, you eventually make your way to Ethereum, and then you make your way towards DeFi. And we thought it would be interesting to have just a 1/3 allocation to all 3. And Bankless is a great partner on that because now we have the power of 2 DAOs who are incentivized to promote and hold this token. So what we're trying to do with BED is, you know, with Bitcoin, you know, you kind of get the— you're getting the store of value aspect there. You know, Bitcoin is the largest Cap crypto money and currently the reserve asset for most crypto banks. And you know, some exposure to Bitcoin is essential, but probably not too much because then you're going to be a little underweight in you know DeFi positions, which might have more potential upside. Ethereum is there for like the economic bandwidth and the reserve asset for decentralized finance. So heavy focus on ETH. is, in my opinion, important for any crypto investment. And then DPI, which as we talked about earlier, gives you exposure to blue chips. So that's kind of what we were looking at, just kind of something that you could tell your friends about if they're interested in investing in crypto, is, you know, look at the BED index. You know, you get your store of value with Bitcoin, you get your programmable money with Ether, and then you get decentralized finance with DeFi. And, you know, up to when the metaverse became really popular, those were the 3 major themes in the crypto space. Um, we also have the Data Economy Index, which focuses on protocols like Chainlink, The Graph, um, Brave, you know, the Basic Attention Token, Filecoin, and The idea there, and we're partnering with the titans of data there, Thomas and Kiba are the methodologists behind that one, is while DeFi is disrupting the traditional banking and financial services system, the data economy on the blockchain aims to disrupt the data monopolies built in big tech over the past 20 years. You know, your Amazons, your Googles, your Facebooks. And I think we— I think there's 7 or 8 tokens in that, uh, index. And then what else do we have here? Uh, we talked about GMI, and we also have our leveraged products. So you've got the Bitcoin 2x FLY product, and you've got your Ethereum 2x FLY. And the FLY stands for Flexible Leverage index. And what that does is it is a fully collateralized leveraged token in the sense that we use the Aave protocol. It's either Aave or Compound. I'd have to go back and look, but we use one of these borrowing and lending protocols, Aave or Compound, to borrow against the Ethereum that we put in there. And this all happens on, on the smart contract to leverage up and then delever accordingly to attempt to achieve a 2x exposure to either Bitcoin or Ethereum. And so those are the main ones at the moment. We've got tons of stuff in the pipeline right now as well, and if I missed any that you catch, let me know.

This brings me to a tweet that I found on January 21st. where you said, well, this is probably the spot for me. ETH 2x FLI, here I come. So on January 21st, you tweeted that you hopped into a little leverage position on ETH. How'd that work out for you?

It looks like we're about $2,600 on the ETH price right now. So yeah, it worked out okay. I'd have to go back and double-check the position. But yeah, I mean, I'm going to say stuff like that on Twitter. Again, not financial advice. I'm not a big fan of leverage, actually, personally. So, you know, I didn't take a major position at that moment because leverage, even when it's automatically governed by a smart contract, dangerous thing, right? Yes, you're getting 2x the upside, but you're getting the 2x the downside as well. So, you know, if that's your risk tolerance, that's fine. I just felt like You know, I don't feel like this bull market, this bull cycle is completely over yet. I feel like there's just too much innovation and growth going on in the space, and I felt like this was probably about the right time for me to hop in and just, you know, gamble a little bit on that, uh, Ethereum price action.

Well, I'm looking at the daily candle. I thought I got you there because I'm like, well, January 21st was, was garbage for ETH, but But you bought it at the bottom of the candle, I guess, at the end of the day for the next one, for the next day.

Yeah. I mean, I either bought it that day or the next day, but I think I remember getting in at like $22, if I remember correctly.

Dang. Wow. Well, congratulations. I'm glad you didn't get wrecked. I don't wish wrecked on anyone. But when you were talking about this CryptoTex and you were talking about Metaverse Index and And I mean, you could really index anything, right? I mean, you could put a bundle of stuff together and it's an index. And I know that both of us are really into Ice Poker. In fact, you're into like 17,000 things because yesterday, you had 3 mints, one of them being the Ice Poker mint, which failed miserably for me. And I'm still upset about it. I hope it went well for you. Would love to hear about that. But But with specifically Ice Poker, I love the product. I love it because I love playing poker. It's really fun for me. I can involve my friends. I can delegate to them. So, I really am invested in this space just emotionally. And I would love to, but I don't know what specifically I need to do with Ice Poker to really make it in this life. You know what I'm saying? If I want to just ride that train track to the moon, Do I get DG? Do I get XG? Do I get staked DG? Do I get ICE? Do I get the NFTs? I want it all. So an index would work well for me, but there's really not an index right now for something that includes NFTs, correct?

Yeah, that's true. And to your point about you could index almost anything, I will say that there are some technical limitations on some of the products that we can make. And, you know, we have been working on for a while, and when it finally does come out, I'm going to be really excited because I'm— this is probably the product I'm most excited about. It's the NFT Blue Chip Index, which we're going to call JPG or JPEG. And what that's doing, that's leveraging the technology of Nifty Museum and NFTX and how they have their, you know, NFT collateral vaults that they use. I guess it's called a collateral vault. Maybe it's just called a vault. And, uh, you can mint tokens that represent the price or the floor price of a specific NFT. And so we were looking into that, you know, looking at blue-chip NFTs and if we could leverage the minting of tokens that are backed by the floor price of those NFTs and put that into an index, and it would be— it will be wildly popular. But the thing we run into is the illiquidity of those assets, even though, uh, it's— we've tokenized those assets through NFTX and Nifty Museum. Because some issues that you run into on a lot of small-cap Uh, protocols is, you know, low DEX liquidity or low depth, right? So what you don't want to do during a rebalance is, uh, get into an issue with slippage, right? If you make too big of a trade on a DEX, you're going to run into slippage, which is going to hurt the token holder, right? And Yeah, that's kind of the issue we're running into. So yeah, you can tokenize pretty much anything. Um, once we find a way to get through these technical limitations of the liquidity depth for the NFT or the NFT Blue Chip Index, I think it's going to be huge. Um, but yeah, on the subject of Ice Poker, it's a great story actually. The, the way that I got into Ice Poker is I have this friend, right? I'm Crypto Texan here, but Some people in my real life know who Crypto Texan is in real life, and he was just like, hey, I've got this friend, he's really into Decentral Games Ice Poker, you should talk to him. And I said, okay, that, you know, I know DG, um, they're, you know, a constituent of the Metaverse Index. So I went and had a drink with this guy, and, you know, he brought his computer and he was showing me how it all worked. And I just noticed that— and he was all about the metaverse and NFTs. He was doing like Axie Infinity for a while, and he had like scholars for, you know, he was buying Axies and, you know, renting them out to people in the Philippines to, you know— I'm not completely technical on how all that works, but he was telling me all about this. And, um, He was making a trade and he was using the MetaMask swap function on his MetaMask browser. And I said, what are you doing? You know what, that you're getting screwed on fees with the MetaMask browser extension. And he goes, well, where else do I do it? I was like, go to SushiSwap. He had never heard of SushiSwap before in his life. And I just had this moment where I was like, wow, the metaverse really is bringing in new people. to the crypto DeFi space. And this was like a real-life realization for me where obviously, like, I used SushiSwap 100 times before I ever bought an NFT, right? And here he— I'm showing him how to use it for the first time, and he's got, you know, he's done Axie Infinity, and he's got 5 wearables on Decentral Games, and he's teaching me Decentral Games, and Yeah, it was just like a pretty, you know, you hear about this all the time that the metaverse and NFTs and art and blockchain gaming is gonna bring more people to the space. And I saw that happen in real life and I saw, I thought, man, this is great. I gotta get a little bit more involved with DG and the metaverse. And so yeah, I've, the mint yesterday did not go well for me, unfortunately. I didn't, I didn't get to mint anything, but yeah, I've got 2. Nice. wearables, and I'm currently delegating both those out, one to some random person in Texas that I met on Discord and one to someone in the Philippines. And right, I— in so many words, you delegate these wearables out, um, they keep 70%, you get 30% of their winnings each day. And it's a pretty interesting and fascinating system out there. But yeah, if you want— I mean, and I'm not an expert on Decentral Games or the DG token or staked DG, but if you want exposure to the metaverse in general, in the trend that we're seeing in the metaverse, in the mainstream media, and on the blockchain, then I think the Metaverse Index would be the right play there. And DG is— and Decentraland are both in the Metaverse Index to note.

Okay, bingo card. We talked about poker now so that you can mark the poker square. But yeah, I really saw the power. I have a friend who is just— he thinks everything in life is a scam, my friend Steve. But I showed him this poker and he's kind of an obsessive personality. So, his life was dedicated to World of Warcraft. But I see this happening now where I delegated him my ICE poker wearable, And he's like all in. Like, he's the first person to check in out of my— I have 5 wearables and I play one of them, but he's always number one to check in. And I'm like, wow, if this got Steve, if they get it— and it's so— his computer really struggles to run the Meta, you know, Decentraland and all this stuff. And he just keeps fighting through because he really likes the experience of it. So it's quite an incredible, impressive product. Yeah. So it's good to know that we both share that together.

Yeah, it's fun. I'm a big fan. And, you know, there's people who I talk to who are just like, I don't get NFTs. They're stupid. They're JPEGs. You can right-click save them. But Decentral Games has given me a way to explain— better explain this to people where their eyes open up and they say, oh, that's how this works. Because you say, okay, look, I own an NFT. that gains me exclusive access to a poker room in the metaverse. And this NFT is a wearable that goes on top of your avatar. And because I own this NFT, I can play poker in this exclusive poker room. And they're like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And I say, but on top of that, you know, I can still custody this wearable, this asset in my wallet, but I can Delegate the responsibility, you know, the, I guess, abilities of this to anyone. And then I tell them I'm delegating this to someone, you know, the powers, the entrance into this poker room to someone in the Philippines. And they're happy to do it because the money they make playing poker by me delegating is more than the average wage in the Philippines, or that's what my delegator tells me, at least. And it kind of opens their eyes and say, wow, this, you know, this is something way different than just, you know, buying JPEGs and making them your PFP, right? So yeah, I think that the PFP run-up earlier this year might start to fizzle out a little bit, I think, you know, but probably a lot of those are just— might go to zero. I'm a big fan of mine. I say like, buy things that you like. I don't speculate on NFTs. But I think soon in the next year, we're probably going to see, just like we saw DeFi 2.0, I think we're going to see NFTs 2.0. And I think there's a lot of very cool stuff being built out utilizing that NFT technology that goes far beyond the scope of NFT wearables and just profile pictures.

So imagine if Candy Crush had the same play-to-earn NFT delegation function and you could equip millions, if not billions of grandmas to play Candy Crush, it would— I mean, talk about onboarding, am I right? And then you talked about MetaMask swapping. They actually have a pop-up right now that says we're the lowest rates. You'll save the most money with MetaMask. I saw this pop-up yesterday and actually I'm finding that Zapper is giving me that sweet, juicy I don't know. It's not yield. It's just the best exchange rate so far. Although yesterday, I think with the mint, there was a Polygon hiccup or there was crazy traffic. So all that to say, I had to get that out as you were talking because that's what stirred up in my brain. But CryptoTexan, you were starting to give us the future. You were starting to foresee and foreshadow what we can expect in 2022. And you have You have a very wide radar. You have a good view of the space. I would love to see, or I would love to hear your predictions for 2022. So you said more, less profile pictures, more utility with the NFTs. What else you got for us?

Yeah, I think, you know, a major theme that you'll see on Twitter is Layer 2. And I think that's obviously going to be a major theme later on this year. And focusing on things like Arbitrum, Optimism, those optimistic rollups. And then I think zkSync is very interesting, very cool technology. And StarkWare is great too. And there's so many other Layer 2 projects coming on board. And it's just going to help if we can just onboard those people and onboard retail. To those layer 2s. It's going to be a better user experience for everybody, lower transaction fees, because that, that's the way that the majority of these layer 2s work. You know, I'm not like a huge— I'm not an engineer, I'm not a developer, but you know, you listen to the Daily Guay with Anthony Sassano every single day and you start to pick up a couple things. But the way they do it, in the way that these layer 2s batch their transactions down to mainnet, the more people that use those layer 2s the less expensive the gas fees are, which is opposite of what happens on mainnet, right? The more people that are using mainnet, the higher the transaction fees are. And so I think that's going to be a great way to just lower gas fees. I think lower gas fees is going to be huge, you know, utilizing that technology. What else for—

Well, let me, let me interrupt you here because With Vitalik talking about how the future is cross-chain— wait, no, it's not cross-chain, but it is multi-chain and the vulnerabilities with bridges. Listen, I'm a noob. That's why I'm hosting this podcast, because this podcast is for noobs, for people new to crypto. That's what PoolTogether's sweet spot is, is onboarding people to crypto. So let's speculate together. I mean, what do you think that means with Arbitrum, Optimism, all these Layer 2s, all these, all these like other protocols or something. But right now, we need them to all talk to each other. So then how do we have all those things but honor the godfather Vitalik's vision of multi-chain but not cross-chain?

I think when he's saying cross-chain, I think he means the EVM-compatible chains that are not layer 2s. Avalanche's C-Chain, which pulled together is deployed to Plon. That's an EVM-compatible sidechain. That's not a Layer 2. You know, Binance Smart Chain, EVM-compatible sidechain, not a Layer 2. And I think so what you're doing there is there is a bridge where, you know, when you bridge your Ethereum to Avalanche, you're essentially doing is you're sending that Ethereum to us to a contract on the Ethereum blockchain, and then you're essentially minting new Ethereum on Avalanche, right? So, and I, I don't know how that contract is managed, if it's managed by a multisig. Um, I think those are some of the risks. Like, if your bridge— if the bridge that you're using is managed by a multisig Um, that, you know, raises some questions from a decentralization standpoint. And if you're not following Chris Bleck on Twitter, he is a great contrarian to follow in the crypto space because, yeah, you can listen to people who talk your bags on Twitter all day, but it's also important to listen to people and understand where other people are coming from. Chris Bleck is one of those people who's really good at pushing buttons And pushing the security side. And is this really decentralized or not? So I think that might be the risk that Vitalik is talking about, right? And even Polygon for that matter. I'm not too keen on how all of that works, but, you know, I don't have— like, the majority of my assets are on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism, right? Because those are true layer 2s that inherit the security of the main chain versus EVM-compatible sidechains, which do pose a little bit of a greater risk. Again, I'm not a developer. That's just my broad general understanding of how all of that works. So yeah, if you and I were just to speculate on that, I think that is, uh, that might be what he's talking about.

Now, I appreciate the clarification. There's a question from the chat: how would a single control wallet be more secure, or do you mean that the bridge is just a smart contract with burned keys?

Yeah, I'm not sure about that, actually. My understanding is that it's managed by a multisig, or, you know, I really don't know. I can't get too technical on that because I don't have that knowledge, unfortunately.

So you were predicting the future. Do you have any more, any other things that you're curious about? I know that, like, specifically with PoolTogether, we're exploring the way that this delegation feature. So, it's really cool. You can have a— like you, Crypto Texan, you just said that you have a good amount of money on PoolTogether and you're winning prizes. You're enjoying watching your stablecoin bring you in some of that sweet, juicy prize money, and it's safe. There's no loss there. So, that's great. But you could delegate that. You could be generous, and you could point that laser beam of prizes toward any wallet that you choose through the feature of delegation. What we're exploring at PoolTogether is something that's pretty cool is like NFT collection delegation. So, you've got a massive collection, like say Ice Poker of NFTs, and you can actually— Decentral Games could choose to put $100K into the pool and delegate it to Ice Poker owners, delegators, people who have those NFTs. And they could just randomly pick a couple NFTs that would receive delegation and then get more chances to win that sweet, sweet prize money. So that's really exciting as a feature for PoolTogether. I don't know if you had any thoughts on that or any other future, uh, future predictions as you gaze into your crypto crystal ball.

No, I think that is fascinating, and I think it's a very interesting way to add value to token holders or NFT holders. Um, that, that's something that I never would have thought about. Um, I, you know, I did have a tweet like a few months back where I thought it would be interesting if PoolTogether were to somehow leverage, you know, the NFTX technology in the sense that, you know, you could deposit, you know, $1,000 of USDC into a pool and then maybe like over the span of like a week or a month, uh, you have a chance to win like a CryptoPunk that gets pulled out of the NFTX vault, right? Because when you are staking assets or Ether in the NFTX vault, you're also generating a yield, and eventually that yield goes all the way up to 1 token, and you can redeem that 1 token to pull an asset out of that NFTX vault. So I thought that would be really interesting, but I feel like this delegating, uh, prizes is also very fascinating. Is that going to be like a V5 thing, or is that just a modification to V4? How would that work?

No, yeah, it's V4. We've got— you can actually— yeah, I mean, you could do this manually if you wanted to, just using smart contract on PolygonScan. But we wanted to— we're looking into building it into the interface. So we're testing that. This is a Chris K special. It was his idea. And so we're going through user stories and stuff right now to try to build that out.

Chris K is also a big Decentral Games guy.

Yeah, he got me into it. I went through his DeFi Bible and, uh, and I really love poker and it— I was like, wait, I could be a professional poker player? I mean, a play-to-earn professional poker player, but it's the same thing, right?

I mean, yeah, probably. Yeah, it's the same thing.

Okay, so Crypto Texan, say I'm excited about Index Co-op. I want to get involved. What would your advice be to me, the host of the Pull Together Community Podcast, on how I should get involved knowing my passions and desires in this crypto space?

Yeah. So I would say that you would join the Discord, introduce yourself into the introductions place, give us a little bit about your background, and make sure you get signed up for the new joiners call. I think we have 1 or 2 of those a week, possibly more now. And that's kind of— the new joiners call is there to kind of onboard people, you know, what is the NX Co-op? What do we do? How does it work? How can I get involved? And you kind of get up to speed in that sense. But that's kind of the thing, you know, I think— and this is just advice for anybody getting involved in any DAO whatsoever— is that A lot of times we see people who want to get involved in the DAO and they join and, you know, they're in the Discord and they're just kind of waiting to be told what to do. And I think that works in a traditional finance or like a traditional organization standpoint in the meatspace, but I don't think the organizational structure of a DAO really lends itself to that. I think you really have to be a self-starter in the DAO. And just start doing things. That's that's the best way to get involved in any DAO whatsoever, right? That's what I did. I I just you know started tweeting and you know started started getting noticed that way, and then I just kind of took on this initiative with the podcast, and then it just kind of spiraled into this thing where you know I'm I'm I'm a contributor now for the Index Cooperative, and I love it. And it's, it's, it's super exciting. But that's the thing, it's like you, you guys get out there and just do something. Just like take initiative and get out there and do it. Because I think that is, you know, DAOs are just a brand new organizational, you know, blockchain and DAOs are just changing the way in which humans organize themselves just in general. And I think DAOs, yeah, they just kind of That's what you have to do to get involved is just get in there, start talking to people, be a self-starter, take initiative, and it's going to work out for you.

Yeah, I think there's this like shedding of centralization that needs to happen. Like, I know that when I joined the PoolTogether community, the Discord, and I wanted to get involved, but I also wanted to be sensitive to the history that came before me, you know. So, but I see partnership opportunities and I wanted to reach out to people, but I also wanted to respect the brand. And I also wanted to respect, like, maybe somebody else is already talking to it, talking to this platform. But it's really cool to see, like, the emphasis of, like, no, no, keep doing that, keep doing that. We'll bring you back if you need to be brought back. But it really doesn't happen. So it's very encouraging. And I think that I definitely believe that in this space, community is how you win, especially on, like, if that Discord, I can tell within, like, 5 minutes whether or not I want community or not, basically scanning through the Discord or even like a Twitter account or the conversations that happen. And I think the warmest Discords are the ones where people are encouraged to participate. But there is this waiting to be told what to do that happens with new people, especially me. And I think that shedding of centralization needs to happen. Cool. So let's see here. Let me look through my questions. I have some kind of off the off-the-beaten-path questions if you're into it. The first one being, if you could onboard a celebrity into crypto, who would it be and why?

That, sir, is a great question. And let me see, like, who would— I'm just kind of thinking, like, who would have, like, a really good effect? Who would be effective at onboarding new people? I'm going to go with Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs. Right. This is more American. Football related. So for, for those of you in, in Europe, you might not know who this person is, but he is a huge celebrity, uh, from a National Football League standpoint. And I think that there are a lot of, uh, younger people who, you know, they look up to these sports celebrities, especially those like Patrick Mahomes, who's a quarterback. And, you know, he married his high school sweetheart and he's won a Super Bowl and he's might be on his way to win another Super Bowl. I think if you can get someone like that involved in the crypto space and kind of get that new wave of the younger generation involved, I think that it would be a pretty good one. I think anyone where, you know, there's a celebrity that a lot of people looked up to, especially younger generations I think that is someone who would should be a pretty good focus. You know, like I know like you see Matt Damon on TV for the Crypto.com commercial, but I don't know how effective he really is. I mean, for maybe older generations, millennials like myself, sure. But I think someone more from like a Gen Z standpoint might want someone a little younger to be involved, and that that would. probably lead to onboarding more people. Otherwise, I would say Snoop Dogg, but he's already hopping on board. I love that guy.

What's your biggest win and craziest getting wrecked situation thus far?

Wow, that's a tough one, man. I've got to say the biggest win for me, probably for a lot of people in the space too, was that ENS airdrop. You know, not necessarily a calculated— like I said, like, I don't take on a lot of risk. Um, I don't do a lot of leverage trades. I would say that the ENS airdrop was huge. You know, I'm, I'm a pretty big, uh, proponent of Ethereum, and I believe in the value proposition that it holds. And so I did sell my ENS and convert it to Ethereum. But yeah, that, that was a huge win, right? I think anyone who had an ENS name that was ready for that airdrop— also the LOOKS token, um, I sold that too when I got it, and I kind of wish that I would have staked it because it looks like people are generating a lot of ETH on that yield that they're getting on the LOOKS token. So, but yeah, I converted that as well. You know, that— I feel like that was a big one too. The airdrops are huge, and I think that You know, that incentivizes people to try new things, try new protocols that don't have a token yet. And I think that's good for the ecosystem as a whole. So those are my 2 big wins, airdrop related, and finding the Index Co-op, of course. Um, getting wrecked, man. I did ape into some OHM forks. Um, I'm not gonna say which ones, but But I aped into a few of them. It just seemed like the thing that everybody was doing, and I don't know, I, I didn't do a lot of research, didn't do my due diligence on it. That's my fault, shouldn't have done it. Also, there was another protocol, and again, I'm not going to name names about getting wrecked, but I was— there's this protocol that was just doing this automatic, you know, yield reinvesting on Polygon, and I thought, you know, this is an incredible product, and I'm using the product, and I still use the product to this day. And I purchased the token at about $30 a token, and I think it's down to like 60 cents now, right? And I think, you know, that's another thing, like, I didn't focus on the tokenomics of that protocol, which is important, right? What are the emissions? What's the total supply? And I just saw that, you know, this is a great protocol that everybody should use, and I didn't take into account, you know, just because you're using a protocol and you're generating a lot of yield on that protocol doesn't necessarily mean that you need to own the token, right? You have to focus on the tokenomics as well, and that's something I didn't do on the, on the second one that I got wrecked on. But yeah, I try to keep it pretty conservative, uh, typically.

So stablecoins, I don't really understand them, but there's this— I mean, I know how they're pegged and such, but there's like this fixed thing that you got, right? Stablecoin yield indexes. Could you explain that? Could you go into that for a second?

Yeah. This is a new product that's being proposed in a partnership between the INX Co-op and Notional Finance, which is another DeFi protocol. And what the Index Co-op is trying to achieve as of recently is, you know, we've got protocol— or we've got index products that do very well in bull markets. That's being DPI, BED, MVI, DATA, the 2x leveraged ETH, the 2x leveraged Bitcoin products. Those do well in bull markets, right? And when people hold those, you know, the Index Co-op generates fees off of that, which drives revenues to the Treasury. But what about more risk-averse investors? What about DAOs and the Treasuries of the DAOs? What are they going to invest in? And, uh, you know, what about bear markets, um, as well? What kind of products are people interested in there? And that's where the concept of Notional, or this partnership with Notional came into effect. And then also we're looking at there's another proposed index called PAY, which is just more of like a variable stable or a variable yield aggregator index. So on the fixed part, they have— Notional has this technology where you can lock in a fixed rate on your stablecoin in the form of, you know, it's a lending and borrowing protocol, right? And it's still like a really new product, and I haven't dug in too much on Notional. I'm actually interviewing one of the co-founders of Notional on Friday, so I need to do my research. But that's effectively what we do, is that we are going to lend, you know, take the— tokenize these loans, put them in a product so that holders of this product can then generate a fixed yield on their assets, right? And that's, that's difficult to achieve in the DeFi space just by the nature of how the blockchain works and how consensus works and how, you know, supply and demand works on the blockchain. And then, so that's, that's a product we're working at. So there's, there's 3 steps to going through a pro— uh, product approval. One is just a temperature check, and it's just kind of like, is this a good idea, something the Indexed Co-op might want to do? And that's just like a yes/no, pretty simple. Pretty much everyone gets through, you know, the first temperature check process. And then you have Decision Gate 1, where it's like a little bit more of a fleshed-out proposal, and that's where it starts to maybe get like a little bit more contentious in the governance forum and You're gonna have a lot more questions. And then, you know, that's if it votes yes based on our quorum, you know, people voting with the INDEX token, it moves forward to Decision Gate 2. And between Decision Gate 1 and Decision Gate 2 is where things are really starting to work. Like, we're working with the engineering team, like, is this feasible technically? And then we're working with like growth and marketing. Is this good product-market fit? Are there other products like this out in the space? And then once you reach decision gate 2 and that passes it, it becomes a product. So with the fixed products, you know, this product that we're working on with Notional, we just did the temperature check, but I thought it was like a really fascinating new and innovative product. So I did a long tweet thread about it to say, hey, you know, here's some innovative products that can come out. Of DeFi when DAOs partner together and protocols partner together. And then another one we're working on from like a stablecoin standpoint is, uh, it's called PAY, which is— I think it's called the Pulse Aggregated Yield Index. This was proposed by DeFi Pulse Index, or the DeFi Pulse team. And what this does, you know, it takes USDC, DAI, Tether too, I think. And it spreads those out through Aave, Compound, maybe Idle Finance I think may have been in there as well. Don't quote me on that. And that's just a way to just diversify and gain yield on different types of stablecoin assets. So you're diversifying your stablecoins, you're diversifying the protocols that you're lending those stablecoins on, and you're just tokenizing all of that into one token that's automatically managed by the methodologists in the Index Cooperative. So we feel like that would be good for maybe more risk-averse investors, or even DAOs that want to put their USDC to work for them in a more Diversified way, diversifying between the stablecoin assets and the protocols that you're utilizing.

So, I want to end our time here, Crypto Texan, one, with if you want to mention anything that you want to mention, it's your time. We're here to listen to you and we're learning a lot. So, I really appreciate you giving the PoolTogether community an hour out of your day, but would love to hear about what your thoughts are on the Pool token and how do we get into one of these indexes? How do we get the Pool token where it rightfully needs to be in the center of one of these, like, probably the Gonna Make It Index, right? Because we're gonna make it. We know, we know we are.

There's no doubt in my mind that Pool, the PoolTogether community, the protocol are all gonna make it. There's no doubt in my mind. When it comes to the inclusion criteria, honestly, like, if I, if I had to guess, if y'all were going to be in the Gonna Make It Index versus like the DeFi Pulse Index. I feel like the PoolTogether protocol is an OG. It's a blue chip in my mind. I would think that it's probably a better fit just in the DeFi Pulse Index. But you know, that, that's really up to the methodologists of the DeFi Pulse Index, which is DeFi Pulse, right? They've got their own inclusion criteria that they take into account. Um, right. And there's also, like, like I said, technical limitations. Like, what does the liquidity look like on the Ethereum blockchain? Because we use the version 2 of the token sets infrastructure to rebalance these contracts. That's why, you know, you need to have liquidity on, on Ethereum. And I'm not, you know, that well versed in what the tokenomics or liquidity makeup of the PoolTogether token are, but I mean, we get people all the time in the Discord that just say, hey, um, have you looked at this token for inclusion in this index or this index? And, you know, we love having those conversations. We're happy to have them. So I would love to see the POOL token included in the DeFi Pulse Index or any of our indices for that matter, but it's really just up to the methodologists and their transparent strict inclusion criteria that they have to follow because that inclusion criteria was approved by the Index Coop and that's what they need to abide by.

One more question from the chat, and I think you talked about this, but I want to make sure that people who are participating in Discord get their say. But when you tokenize investments, how are people assured that the profit from those investments Are distributed to the token holders, or that the token value reflects the investment?

That's a great question. I would say that it's because everything that we are doing is on-chain, right? So DeFi Pulse token sets, the INX Co-op, nobody is taking custody of your assets. You know, these assets are held in a smart contract. You hold the DPI token in your wallet. You are the custodian of these assets. And I think it's worth just explaining real quickly, like, how does— like, how does the DeFi Pulse token come into existence, right? So there's like, you know, there's 18 different DeFi assets. So, you know, the— this DeFi Pulse token is fully collateralized by those assets, right? Those tokens are in the smart contract. And what you can do is if you have all those assets in your wallet, you can send all those assets to the DeFi Pulse Index contract on TokenSets, and in return you will receive your DPI token in return. And so it's— I think you can think of it in a way as like the DPI token is your claim on those share— your claim on your share of the assets within that smart contract. So conversely, you can send the DPI token to the smart contract and receive your allocation back in those assets, right, if that makes sense. And all— yeah, all this is, is on-chain. You know, the DeFi Pulse Index has a smart contract address that you can look up on Etherscan, and you can see all of the assets that are held, right? It's like 100,000 AAVE and like a lot of SUSHI. And you know, it's just all the assets that are held, and it's rebalanced by utilizing market cap. So yeah, we publish that. Uh, the thing is, you know, we try to make things as transparent as possible to add trust and validity to our processes at the Index Co-op. So I think that answers your question. If it doesn't, I'm open for a follow-up question as well on that.

I think that's great. Well, Crypto Texan, thank you so much for joining us here on this highly edited PoolTogether community podcast. If you want the full raw recording, you got to join us on Discord. You can get there at pooltogether.com. You can deposit at pooltogether.com. You can join that sweet prize yield pool with your no-loss lottery. Crypto Texas, thank you for making time for us and just enlightening us to the Index Co-op product suite of products and community. It's really exciting to hear about that and learn from you today.

Yeah, absolutely. And one more thing that I'll say is if you want to get involved, like I said, join the Discord, follow us on Twitter @IndexCoop, follow me on Twitter @CryptoTexas. Crypto underscore Texan, and yeah, pop in the Discord, ask us questions. Yeah, we're looking forward to it. Happy to be here. I really appreciate you having this and putting this on. Love Pull Together, and y'all got a great community here.

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