PoolTogether Community Podcast #62 with nftychat

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast, and I'm your host, Sir Hot Mike, AKA Tim, AKA Millie Monthly, because that's our goal now is a million-dollar prize. Every month I pull together. We're not there yet. We're not close, but we're going to get there. And you watch, it's all because I changed my name. And I'm here with Slobo.eth from Nifty Chat, from ENS, from Twitter, from the interwebs. Slobo, thanks for being here.

Oh man, that is such a high energy intro. I love it. I love it. I love the energy. I like that it's December. We were just like chatting before you started recording about how cold it is, but it is smoking hot here. So Happy to be here.

Nice. Nice. Yes. The Discord is steamy right now. We got the building vibes going on. So, Slobo, you're actually my first podcast guest where I think this is true. I really think this is true, whom I have met in IRL before they've been on the podcast. Maybe that's not true because of like conferences and stuff, but we, it started with a tweet, right? I saw a tweet thread that you were talking about killer apps for onboarding people to crypto, ENS being one of those, PoolTogether being another one of those. Then we had a Twitter Spaces where we talked about it with Superfluid as well. And then we hung out, you came out to Brooklyn. So, we went and played some pinball, had some great pizza. That was fun. And now, we're doing a podcast. So, it's just— when are you moving out here full-time?

Well, this is actually a great story. I am looking for places, and I am now applying for places or let's say January in Williamsburg. And so ENS actually pays me and it's all public. So if you want to wallet dive, you can go ahead, but you might be surprised to learn, but no one believes the money that I make that is made through crypto. And it's actually a real problem because like as a founder, I don't pay myself that much. So I don't really qualify for a lot of apartments based on W-2 income. And I'm like, well, I make this ENS money. Does that count? And they look at me like I'm from Mars. So, I thought that was just— that's just what's happening right now. And maybe that's TMI, but everything's public, so you guys get to see it.

I mean, it's in your name, right? We can just wallet sleuth right now. But that's— I was just having a conversation with Dimple from Pwn yesterday, and she was talking about how the same thing with mortgages, banks aren't going to— hey, I have all this crypto. I want to take out a mortgage based on this asset. And banks are like, We want to help you, but we cannot help you. So yeah, you know, I mean, basically you're just gonna have to pay multiple months. Somebody's gonna cave. Somebody's gonna want your money, Slobo.

You know, that's, you know, that's the thing that I like about money. It's green and everybody wants it.

Is crypto green?

I guess it's because it's USDC, so you can convert it into real, you know, you can convert it into this inflationable away money. So I mean, like the, you know, for the people who are listening, it's not really a problem because There's all these third-party services that you pay like half a month's worth of rent or one month's worth of rent, and you can like get a guarantor and it's not a problem, but it's more like annoying thing of when you're doing something that's a little bit on the forefront, a little bit non-traditional, all the world kind of doesn't really serve you really well.

Well, if you need a place, if you want to get a place in Park Slope, it's going to be really tiny, but it's going to be right next to Prospect Park. I've got the Berman Realty. They'll hook you up. I'm sure they will. I think probably recognize crypto in some way, shape, or form. But Williamsburg is where it's at. That's where the party is, right? That's like the— that's the new— that's the crypto center of New York City. Let's be real.

I hope— I hope you're right. It's, it's, uh, eye-watering pricey, but, uh, it's, it's worth it. But maybe it'll be good for me to give an introduction for those that know— don't know me. Uh, does that make sense?

You know, it's my podcast, but it's fine. You can just run it. It's fine. Go for it.

Okay. Yeah, I'm just like, okay, we got an agenda we got to cover. First it's intros, then it's—

No, you're right.

Yeah, you're right.

I need that. I need that. Go for it. Yeah. So who are you, Slobo? How'd you get into crypto? What are you doing with Nifty Chat? What's going on? Give us a scoop.

Well, yeah, such a great question. I appreciate it. Thanks for setting me up so well. So I'm Slobo.eth. I am the founder of Nifty Chat, which is a Discord alternative replacement. I encourage everybody to try it. Basically, it's safer, better. You can do gating. You can do all the things you can do on Discord except doing these types of voice things. And it's definitely growing. And it's the thing that got me into crypto. I'm also an ENS steward, which is the Ethereum Name Service. I've been elected now 3 times, and I help run the ecosystem working group, which basically distributes grants to all sorts of projects and all sorts of builders in the ecosystem. And ultimately, I'm a small, pulled-together user. I think I have $60 of USDC, that I've put in, I think, on Optimism, and I'm not quite sure where to find it, but I haven't won anything because I'm pretty sure if I did, I would know about it. But I only put $60, so that's really more on me than anybody.

That's all you need, really. And whenever somebody says that they don't win, that they haven't won yet, we delegate to them. So we're going to get you a delegation, Slobo, and we're going to make sure that you taste the rainbow, the prize rainbow. of pool together ASAP on Optimism, really. And then also you are winning because you are getting a little bit of OP Drip with that $60. I think you got some, a little bit of OP.

Yeah, I'm just, I logged into my account. Yeah, it looks like I have 0.27 Drip of Optimism. So like, and it's actually $80 and I don't know, I think it's the branding of Optimism that just makes me want to do everything layer 2 on Optimism. Hopefully it doesn't bite me later, but I just, I don't know, I just love Optimism is my favorite branded layer 2, even though the other ones are great.

I mean, brand really, I mean, it's how people experience you, right? And so a lot of that is visual. And so I guess you like red, you must like the red color or something. Who's, who's the worst branded crypto protocol or exchange?

I don't think we should be throwing, you know what, there's a, I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of bad things in crypto. So if we start focusing on like the top worst ones, we'll just be here all day, just like I don't know if this is a PG-friendly podcast or not. I always try to, because I swear like a sailor, so I never know.

Yeah, try not to swear, but if you do, I understand. We have special bleeps that we can do.

Okay, good. Okay. Yeah, because there's so much crap out there and so much of it's being exposed that I just like to talk about the good stuff. I like Polygon. I like Arbitrum. You know, I like, I like all of them because they're doing something really important. And like some of the more innovative stuff is always happening on layer 2s versus necessarily layer 1s. So I'm like, I don't want to do anything that discourages that. I just, I like Optimism and I like the founder. I think he's the one who played like a ukulele at like Permissionless. And I think that might be enough of like, just sold me on, on Optimism just because, because of the ukulele.

Yeah. I will say that like a lot of branding is purposely bad, like Curve. They just like, it looked like Windows 3.1, right? Or 3.0 or something, Windows 95 even. And that was on purpose. So they're, they're, I would say Curve, but you can say that because it's Curve and they're fine now. They're fine. They'll be fine. So, hey, you've, you've, you've been in crypto for a short amount of time and done so much. So what's your secret?

Oh, well, all my friends are crypto and I don't have any other like social obligations outside of crypto. That's actually I wish there was a better secret than that, but it's— I'm all crypto all the time for the last 300, 400 days. Like, I haven't really taken a break, but I will be because that's what we all should do. We should take a break and reconnect with our real non-crypto friends. But yeah, I just didn't take a break. And all I do is whenever I'm not working on ENS or Nifty Chat, I am just reading anything I can get my hands on. Sometimes it's really technical. Sometimes it's just like, you know, like trying that Phil Island game that just came out. I'm probably butchering it. Do you know what I'm talking about or no?

Yeah, no, we're talking to them actually. Tarek is talking to them a little bit alpha, but yeah, that's the thing that you hook up your wallet and you get like little, little like boats and stuff depending on what you've done on chain.

Yeah. So like I would spend an evening. So like 2 weeks ago before I went live on mainnet, I was on testnet just like creating my little island. And it's like, does that really work or not? I'm just like, that's my secret is just like whenever I see anything, I look at it and I try to explore. I buy like random, relatively cheap NFT projects just to kind of get in, just to like feel it and use crypto because I think that's just the easiest way to learn. And I think the secret is I just love this stuff and honestly just so much better than anything I've ever done in the traditional world.

Okay, so step 1, actually get friends. Step 2, make sure that they're only in crypto. And then Step 3, don't take breaks. And then step 4, when you do take a break, read technical stuff, but eventually you can take a real break, right? When's your, when's your real, real break coming, Slobo?

I'm hoping to uninstall Telegram at like 10 PM this Friday. That's going to be my like way. I'm going to uninstall Telegram. I'm going to uninstall Farcaster. I'm going to uninstall Twitter. Obviously Discord gets uninstalled as well. And then I'm going to go to Panama and hopefully completely disconnect. I want to be completely unreachable. I'm debating of just being reachable on Nifty Chat, but even that seems wrong. But the brand opportunity is just too good.

That's true. Wow. Panama, huh? How long are you going?

I'm going there for about a week. I have friends who've lived there for a long time, and it's a great part of the country. Great part of the world. It's warm. And I'm in Chicago, for those listening. It's really cold and I love to get away to the tropics when I can.

Yeah, I grew up in South Florida and then when I moved to New York City and I saw the ads for Florida, I'm like, why? I'm like, why are there ads for Florida? Why would you? It's just so weird to grow up in a place that people see as a tourist destination. But now I totally understand it, especially in February. And it's like, oh dear God, let me go to Florida. It's so cold. Help me.

And you don't, you don't even care where it is. It's, you're like, is it at least 45 degrees? You're like, yes, this is great. I don't have to put on 3 coats to get there.

Well, thank you for using Fahrenheit for me. Um, uh, you know, contextualizing, I appreciate that. But hey, you're a, you're a founder and you made Nifty Chat. And, uh, how'd that, how's it going? Like how'd, how'd that whole process go? Can you walk us through it?

Yeah, absolutely. So You know, Nifty Chat and ENS are like intrinsically tied to me. On September 11th, 2021, I bought Slobo.eth. Slobo.eth comes from the fact that my last name is Slobodnik. My friends have always called me Slobo, so it made sense that my Web3 name would be Slobo.eth. I bought it and then I connected it on OpenSea, you know, just to look around some NFTs to buy and whatever. And I saw that experience of Slobo.eth Kind of bridging to OpenSea without me having to create my own username. And I'm like, oh, this is magical. And first of all, that converted me to crypto because I'm— this is so much better than anything that's possible in the Web2 world. And 2, the moment I was slow with that ETH, I wanted to chat from it. And it was a very simple— it's a very simple idea. You want to chat from your ENS name. And I Googled, and back then there was like no options for this. So I built a prototype. My roommate at the time, who's more technical than I am, he actually helped construct it in like one weekend, created a pitch deck, and then just started raising. And I think because it was the bull market, because it was the right idea at the right time, I was able to raise some funding, hire a team, and here I am. It was like from registering slowwith.eth to like getting funding was less, like was about 90 days, which I think is because the idea was the right idea at the right time. And the market was very conducive to that particular viewpoint.

Do you have any like hackathon advice for people? Like, I mean, right from 0 to 60 in 90 days, like ready to go. What's the secret? Yeah. Can you— I know you said the timing's right, but say we don't have timing. I mean, right now we're in the build bear market. What's— how would you start up something right now? And what would you start up right now?

Oh, those are good questions. I think I would, I would actually do what I'm doing right now, which is try as much of this stuff as you can to see what the problems are. Like, I'll give one idea more just to put it out there in case someone wants to do it. I was, I was doing this, how do I pronounce this project? Uh, the, the Filand? Is it Filand? How do I pronounce it correctly? Uh,

I don't know. Filand? Filand? Filand? Yeah, something. I don't know.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Good that I, you don't know either. So like I was playing with it and it's a great project, it's fun, but every single time I placed something on the property, I had to approve a transaction. And I didn't really care because it's Polygon, it's not that expensive. But that means that like every action I did, I had to place a transaction. It's kind of obvious to me that a better way of doing that is that you have like a mini smart contract wallet that you deposit, I don't know, 5 MATIC in, And then all the clicks are kind of like the UX of the original. I can see that being something. And like, if I wasn't building Nifty Chat or busy with other things, I'd be like, oh, why isn't that all like, why isn't there this like UX improvement where there's a little pocket of money that you kind of authorize that is like a smart contract that lets you do all these things that are still on the blockchain, but the user experience is better where you pre-funded. Yeah. So like, that's how I would find ideas and source ideas of what to build on. I don't think what I'm articulating is actually technologically hard, but then if you believe that this is the future and you have that kind of conviction, I think that's really what's important is that I have an unquestionable belief that like a, you know, a crypto-based login chat system is the future. And that's what makes people want to work with you. So I would just find a problem that you can truly believe yourself versus trying to like You know, see something that makes sense to you and then just go all in on it. I think that's, that's been my, like, secret to success is that I— and success is the wrong word, but it's like I have so much conviction and so much belief, and the only way I can get it is because it's my own experience that kind of got me there. So that's what I would recommend other people to do is just find that problem that you actually have that then you can believe, and then no one can actually, like, make you question your belief because it's self-evident to you. And once it's self-evident, you'll be able to, like, you know, gather the team and gather the resources that you need around you.

Yeah. So basically find something that pisses you off so much so that you decide to dedicate your life to eradicating that annoyance. Right. But maybe Nifty Chat's not that. I don't know. I mean, you could— I mean, Discord's frustrating, like, you know, the chat and Web3 chat needs improvement. So what is, what are you thinking about? Like when you're, what are the needs of Nifty Chat? Are you in user acquisition mode? Are you in protocol use mode? How do you do biz dev? What does growth look like for you?

Yeah, those are, those are great questions. And to kind of jump back for a second, I think the best thing is you find something that is frustrating, but it's also something that you love. Because I think like building just out of like irritation is not enough and building something that's just you really love. It needs to have like both, because one is a problem and the other one is something that you're passionate about.

No, I think that's, that's the definition of love itself is like, you know, if you love something truly, you're going to get mad when that thing is, is attacked or, you know, or when you like the love comes out of like, this could be so much better. And, and so, yes, it's from a positive place, not just hatred and, and darkness.

That's great. Okay. You know, it's Wednesday. This is great. So

Sorry, keep

going. It sounds good. I mean, this is, this is, this shows that like we met in real life, so there's just like a little bit more like context and a little bit more depth. And like, people are like, oh man, these people are really off their rockers.

I mean, I was gonna take it to God and I was gonna like, people want a loving God, but then they don't want an angry God, but then God has to be angry to be loving. And, but so yeah, I didn't go there. I didn't go there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. You did not go there. Um, so, uh, From like a NiftyChats perspective, what I'm thinking about is I've, we've deployed like a couple of like fundamental features over the last, I don't know, 2 months. And there's 2 more that are kind of coming before January. So like for the last 3 to 6 months, I've been solely in build mode and I take meetings with, you know, with people where like, hey, I want to partner with them and things like that. But I've been so focused on making sure I kind of release the right feature sets that I have been trying to get new users, even though I'm getting like 300 users a month just organically coming just by— I don't know if it's because of Sogo.eth and ENS and me being barely active on Twitter or even things like this. I'm sure 5 people are going to try it just by listening to this podcast, or 50 people are going to try it. But really in January, that's where the push is going to kind of start.

That's awesome. And the listeners better try it. You better. You better try it, especially the people in the Discord. We got, we got, we got 16 people in here that are all right now booting up Nifty Chat right now. You're going to see the influx of the users and they're not bots. None of these are bots except for Craig and Jark who are recording.

Yeah, I should, I should just log in. I'm like one of those people that I cannot do more than one thing at a time, but I should probably log in to see if, uh, who's joining, uh, Nifty Chat as we speak.

Well, when we, when we release this next week, there'll be obviously a rush of people to join Nifty Chat as well. So what are your goals? Like, what do you— what's the vision for it? Like, what, you know, I saw a tweet, I keep talking about this, but I think it's so good. It's like, you plan in crypto, you plan for 5 days and 5 years, and that's it. And then you kind of vibrate between the two of like, what's our 5— so what's the 5-year plan for Nifty Chat?

Oh, like, All of crypto is is like like no one uses Discord anymore. It's gone. It's dead. Everybody is on Nifty Chat, and people are empowering their day-to-day lives through Nifty Chat. So like give me any like give you an example. Everybody talks about empowered users of Discord. They love those bots, right? The positive bots, not the scam bots. And to me, it's just so silly that those aren't like full-blown GUIs. Like if you paste a link. Into Nifty Chat? Why can't it, like, for your, like, NFT project that you're trying to, like, sell, right? It's like a one-on-one artist. Why can't you just buy it right there in the UI? Just a click buy button. Or let's say you and I are talking about PoolTogether and we have a PoolTogether community. You click, like, the most recent pool. Why can't I just stake into it right away? That way I and Nifty Chat become a bundler of the best of Web3. Right? I am not going to build all these things, but I want to expose like more UIs. That's the power of all these smart contracts. Like in a way, PoolTogether is great because you deposit money and then you check back and then you win. Those are the things that I want to make it easy and integrated. Discord is the best they can do is bots, which I think expose you from a risk perspective. On Nifty Chat, you'll be able to use it as a first class citizen and natively. So like we talk about a pool, we deposit, and then you win, and then it becomes a social thing and you know which part of your communities have deposited and maybe you reward 'em and then you can run like contests. But all the nice features, whether it's staking, pool together, or buying NFTs, it all should be native to the platform. And you're never, and that's a really strong statement, you're never going to get it on a platform like Discord that's going to rely on third-party bots to give you that integration. So that's my 5-year vision. That's the vision.

Yeah. And I think, I think abstraction, like abstracting away the technical stuff, the signing, the switching between layers, the even, even as you were saying, like moving app to app, like if you could be on any app or even just a handful of apps that give you access to everything else and make it social and make it like, hey, we're building together and we're also buying NFTs together and we're saving together and we're yield farming together. That's great. I just noticed, though, that I'm on Nifty Chat. And here's the thing. I don't use my ENS in my hot wallet. And so I'm not allowed to create a community right now on Nifty Chat because of my hot wallet doesn't have my ENS because I don't want to lose timcox.eth because that's me. That's my brand, baby. I got to keep that in the cold, in the vault. So there's this platform called EPS. It's made by Omnis and the Wassis are using it and it's Eternal Proxy. But the way that it works is you actually have like 1,000. Everybody has these like tokens from EPS. You get 1,000 of them and you send one wallet, one token from your cold wallet to your hot wallet. And then you send 2 tokens, you know, 2 tokens from your hot wallet to your cold wallet or whatever. But one, you have to do that. And then it like links them. perpetually, which is really cool. And then if you want to cancel it, if you want to break that connection, you just send 4 tokens from one wallet to another. It's a really interesting thing. It scares me also because like these, there are these random tokens in every EVM wallet that you could just, that you're like, what are these? Is this going to rug me if I move these tokens out of my wallet? But anyway, what do you think about that? What do you think about that idea or that problem challenge?

Yeah. So I think So there's a very simple answer because like I like slow with that ETH is is a hot wallet. I probably keep more than I should, but I'm more than like I'm ready to lose every like every bit of assets that I have in slow with that ETH. I'm I'm you know I'd be sad, but I'm okay losing that. I am not okay losing slow with that ETH. So if you look at slow with that ETH, it's actually not like it's not registered to my hot wallet, but because the way ENS works. I set the owner to a more secure, to a more secure wallet.

Yeah. Yep. Got it. And then your like resolve address or something goes to your hot wallet.

Exactly. Exactly. So as long as where you're, and that's how like I see it. So that's like the simple solution that I would do it. And I, a lot of people in ENS and in the DAO, they put their registrant either to their cold wallet or like some kind of other secure feature. Like, I'm very bullish on Argent, right? So— Me too. Yeah. So I have Soba.eth. The owner of that is my Argent wallet. And again, I keep everything public and I just assume that I'm just saving people time. They can kind of see where the transactions go. But yeah, so like Soba.eth is owned by, you know, my Argent wallet and because I fully trust it and that way I don't expose my hot wallet. Which I don't know how people look at Argent and whether it's hot. It's definitely not hot, but it's definitely not cold. So, but yeah, so that's that solution.

You're talking about Argent Vault. So it's their smart contract wallet. It's like a Gnosis Safe, but you can have social guardians of it. So, Slobo, I could add you as a guardian of my vault in case I get hit by a beer truck, or you can hook up your smart— you could do a host of hardware wallets that are the guardians of yours. So that's how I have mine set up. I'm not really using it yet, but I love the idea of it. And it's very simple because you don't need a seed phrase. Like you don't need, you just need guardians. So it's, I like the socialness of it, even though I have robots protecting mine with nothing in it.

But, and no, I, and I think I like that, right? You could have a hardware wallet as one of your guardians, so you can kind of mix and match and then you can have that social recovery. Um, so I'm very bullish on it and I'm bullish on it from like, uh, you know, another like tech that I am going to be surprised if in like 5 years, the majority of like actions aren't through some kind of smart contract wallet. Right. And like with the account abstraction, EIP coming, I forgot what the number is. Like, it's clear that like, it's clear to me that it's going to be smart contracts because there's just so much risk in like basically having hot wallets that we all do. And that's why people keep getting scammed.

Yeah, totally. And there's another thing called Fire, which is really cool, where every time I have a transaction, it gives me a new tab and tells me, gives me a little bit more information as to what I'm about to do with the contract, which is very nice to have. And it's also, I like that to get the service, you have to mint an NFT. And I think you have like a 50/50 chance of minting a Fire NFT or a Wrecked one. So, and the REC is poop, which is fun. Poop is— anyway, it's very funny. So tell me more about, uh, ENS, sir steward. Oh, oh, oh, worthy steward. So you, you are in charge of grants with ENS, and how, how can PoolTogether take advantage of that?

Yeah, so the way I tell people is that if you do something that directly helps the ENS ecosystem, there's usually some retroactive grant. And the best way to describe it is There's a page where all the grants that we've done retroactively, and I say we, 'cause it's not just me, it's like a slew of people who kind of assess and determine who gets funding. Like NIMI, have you heard of NIMI before? So NIMI is basically anyone who has an ENS name. If you type in like slowo.eth.limo, even if you've never like, even if you've never like Set this up, it'll automatically direct you to your private page, like to not private, to your public, like profile page that is made by this company called Nimmi.

Got it. Yeah, I knew about it. I knew I, but in my head I registered it as .limo. So I knew that you could do that, but I didn't realize it was Nimmi. Got it.

Yeah. So that .limo is another company that, or organization, I should say, that we supported. They actually had like one of our biggest grants because they provide the infrastructure And then Nimmi built on top of that.

Oh, got it. Got it.

So, and then you have like things like Planitable and all these other things. So if anyone in your community or your community is like, you know, it's more than just having an integration, right? I would think that people should integrate ENS for free because that is a direct value add to your customer base. So like when I log in, I should take a look. I'm pretty sure you guys are doing this. That like, if you log into a pool together, I'm sure you've resolved to your ENS name. Yep. It's slow without you. So I just, I just logged in and I'm— Got it.

So it shows it. Yeah. And then if you, you're saying like, if I wanted to delegate to somebody, then I should be able to just put their ENS, things like that. Like just making sure that ENS is throughout the protocol.

Absolutely. And then like the other thing that gets kind of interesting, you know, we have this like TXT record data where like I store my Twitter information. So if anyone wants to email me, they go to my ENS records and they see my email, but those are arbitrary. Like I have a, I have a category on my TXT records of my ENS name that says Greg is awesome. And then the value for that is true, just because there's a contributor in the ENS ecosystem that's really talented. So I kind of tattooed my own name saying that this person is cool. I can actually see innovative ways for like something like pooled together to use those TXT records. I don't know what is off the top of my head to kind of say like, oh, these are the winners or these people support, or like, I don't know exactly how you've done your delegation process, but you could potentially like piggyback on the decentralized nature of ENS to like add extra features to, you know, pull together, even though, you know, it's mainnet. So there's probably a couple of issues there, but those are the kinds of ideas that I think are very exciting.

Yeah, for sure. So what is ENS's plan for non-mainnet things?

Yes. So there's this thing called CCIP read, which is, this is where I'm going to start speaking a little bit out of, out of school, but there's active work being done to allow like cross, you know, layer 2, like resolution and names going through. But I think the biggest thing, I'm going to just change it, is that like everybody in the audience should be excited for is the name wrapper that's going to come out soon that's going to let you and anyone else to create like trustless subdomains effectively for free. And then you can rent 'em, you could sell them, you could do whatever you want with them through these concepts of fuses. And it's a whole big thing that the ENS community has been just super excited for a very long time. And it's, it's definitely coming next year.

You also showed me a, a really cool thing, a Telegram bot where you can just purchase ENS directly from Telegram. How do I get access to that? That was, that was really cool.

Yeah. So I think we should probably make the bot open source. So right now it's a white, you know, it's an allowlist-based system where the person who built it, you know, there's a few, like I have access to it. So when I'm at a conference and I want to give someone the name, I don't want to go through the entire process to register it. I just want to do it. That bot's, you know, account is funded by the DAO. So, you know, it's only handed off to like, You know, the people in the DAO who are kind of, you know, are going to do it for promotional reasons. But I think you're right. We should make that, we should make that open source and then let anyone kind of spin up a bot so they can start giving their friends or use it for their own kind of management ability. So that's a good point.

Is there a way to see on-chain activity of people? Like, there's a lot of speculators on ENS, right? There's people who hear somebody in the zeitgeist, they see a phrase or something, and they immediately go get it. You know, lots of speculation, lots of purchases for ENS that where there's, you know, trying to flip it, things like that. But then there are also people like you, slobo.eth or timcox.eth, people who use it as their brand and use it as like, this is my, this is my name, this is my ENS, and they use it as such. And so I wonder if there's a way— What was I thinking here? To reward those ENS people who are active with their ENS with like pooled together delegation. So kind of reward the people that are actually using their— I just don't know how you would do that. If there's a way to see, I can see a wallet's on-chain activity, but I wonder if there's a way to see that they're actually— their on-chain activity is powered by ENS in some way. Do you know what I'm saying? That makes

sense. You're basically saying— so the way I would think about it is that there's a If you think about like onboarding to crypto, you know, there are people who are, I was going to say no-coiners, which is like so bad, but you know, so you basically have people who have no crypto, no financial exposure. Then you have people who have like, you know, crypto in their Coinbase or Kraken or other accounts that are no longer liquid. And so that, that, that's like, that's like step one, right? You need to have ETH in some kind of, even if it's a custodial account, I think that's better than nothing. Then you have people who put their money into MetaMask or some other kind of solution, and then you buy .eth. But the people who buy .eth, that's just the first step. You got to set your primary name, just like you said, you didn't set your primary name so you don't show up on the apps that are deeply ingrained in the system. Step 2 is to, like, for example, I own King Lear .eth just because that's my favorite Shakespeare play. And there's this service called ENS Redirect, which basically lets you, you know, now if you go into your browser and you type in kinglear.eth.limo, it'll redirect you to King Lear, the Shakespeare play. That activity is actually on-chain. Like, you can see who have set up a redirect or a content hash. So I can actually see, you know, like, there's only like 15,000 of these people, so it's not even that many. You can see the 15,000 ENS holders who have modified their content hash. And I would say those are the biggest power users or like real users. They're not just speculating, they're actually using it. Either their name redirects or they're doing something or they're blogging where they have like a NIMI website or something like that. That's how I would identify the greatest usage. And it's called, you know, to be very technical, the content hash. And then when it's combined with the other parts of the ecosystem, it'll redirect and give you all these features.

Yeah. How does one become a power user of ENS? Is there like a tutorial or some sort of rabbit hole or layer 3 thing that will walk you through like making sure you have your content hash populated?

Oh, you know what? This is good. Let's see. I'm— this is funny because like so much of my work, it's like ENS is just like part of my time and I'm aware of all the things, but I never am ever in a position where I'm kind of the educator about it. So let me see if I can find this link in like 30 Basically, we just released, or I should say, ENS has just released better documentation, and I just want to call it the right thing. Totally. Because I think it's called ENS support, and there's all these docs to do all these different things. Yep. So there's, this is like literally fresh off the presses. It's called support.ens.domains, which will redirect you to, it'll give you the different use cases. So for example, all the things I've been talking about, It'll show you how to do it, how to put your social media on it, how to update your custom records, and it'll actually link you to a bunch of sites that are deeply integrated in the ecosystem. And I'll also drop that link in the chat right now as well.

Nice. So when is— is there an ENS conference coming? Is that going to happen? We're doing Poolicon, by the way, at ENS Denver. Haha, twinsies. You got it.

I'll delete mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't— you know what? There's been There's been some chatter, and I mean that like, you know, as much as I do, like, I've seen Twitter channel and like the desire for it. I don't know if we're quite ready for it. Maybe this is the year, but I definitely see that when, I definitely see like at least a day or a side channel where you're— side channel, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. But I can see like a side conference where it's all ENRS all the time for maybe like a one-day event, not committing to anything. But I definitely see there's enough demand and enough builders, especially with the tech that's coming from. I think it just kind of needs to be, it needs to be there.

And then we got to give a shout out to Rainbow Wallet because of their ENS integration is just second to none. IMHO, I haven't seen such a nice graphic user interface to interact with ENS, but maybe you know of a better one, Slobo. Not, not, not like it's a competition.

You know what? I think Rainbow is in its class of its own, but I will, I'm going to just drop a couple of resources that are just like, that I personally use all the time. One is called, I'm trying to find, it's funny. I'm actually not a great user of Discord because I don't spend that much time on here.

Has it changed? Has it changed since the last time you were on here?

I've been using Discord less and less and like all of, I would say as I've gotten more into the community, Or like, as I've done more work in the DAO, this is actually interesting to note. Most of the DAO work, it actually happens over Telegram or Twitter.

Gotcha.

So

you're getting more resources, links, you're posting those in the chat. ENS Fairy. Nice.

Yeah, it's like the best way for you to gift an ENS. And then this other one, which is a site that I made, It's called EasyENS. It basically lets you set your primary name just because a lot of people don't have it. And instead of going to the ENS app, you can just have a single source, a website where you can just type in, like, I want, let's say I want it to become kinglear.eth. I can just type in that as long as I own it, it'll set it and it'll work, interacts with the official smart contracts. So those are the 2 things that I use personally. I use ENS Fairy. And I use EasyENS as well.

That's really great. So after this call, I'm going to go and change my— the owner's the same, but I'm just going to change the resolve, I guess, like where it points to, to my hot wallet. So then I can then go make a PoolTogether community on NiftyChat and we can hang out there. What about Lens? Are you doing anything with Lens? Any connections there?

Yeah. So on the ENS side, like for example, I'm slobo.lens.xyz and slobo.lens.xyz is actually an ENS name because they imported their domain into the ENS community. So for example, I could set my name, my primary name, and you could, if you have a Lens name, to instead of being whatever name you were planning on, to your Lens name. And then when you log into Nifty Chat, your Lens name would actually show up. So we're like fully, we're like fully integrated from that perspective.

How do I do that?

You would have to use ezens.xyz. And as long as the wallet that you're connected to Like, I'll basically what it does is it confirms that you own that name, that it resolves correctly on the, what is it, Polygon? Yeah, on Polygon, it will let you set it. That's all it'll take. Just like if you have a Lens name, just go to EasyENS and then just type in, you know, what is it, poolie.lens.xyz, if that's your name. And then you'd be able to set it if you actually own it on the Lens network.

So I need to be on— so if I go to EasyENS and then if I go to Polygon or I need to be on mainnet to do this?

You need to be on mainnet.

On mainnet.

Even though it's Polygon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just type it in and it'll work. Yeah.

Oh, cool.

And then when you log— yeah. And then when you log into NiftyChat, you'll get all the privileges of having your .eth or your ENS name, because like everybody thinks that ENS is just .eth, but it's just so much bigger than that. That's like, 15% of like the world where like you can import any .com, uh, into the ecosystem. And then like platforms such as Nifty Chat are going to use it and utilize it and gives you all sorts of different things there.

Oh, that's great. But then now I'm like, well, shoot, now I need to have my Lens protected as well. So I need to put that in my cold wallet. Well, what's my wallet strategy? And then, you know, but I guess I can, now that it's set as the, now that it resolves, I can send it to my cold wallet. Or my hardware wallet or whatever. And then it still has those settings, I think, right? The owner just changes or no. So like, I gotta figure that out.

Well, this is where it's like, it's just, it's, I would say it's superficially complicated. It's more that most of the world of like Web3 is driven by where your address resolves to and the stuff that's like control or registering. That's all like the technical stuff that eventually is going to get abstracted away. As long as your name is resolved to the address that you want it to, you could put the ownership wherever it makes sense. And to be honest, like, I actually don't know how the Lens ecosystem works well enough to even talk about it, but I know that as long as your name resolves, you can set it as primary. And as long as you set it as primary, then apps like Nifty Chat and a bunch of other ones would actually resolve it correctly.

Got it, man. I'm learning so much, Slobo. When are we hanging out again? When you come, when you find that place in Williamsburg? Hey, listen, I'll help you move in if you need help. I'm happy to help. I can climb up flights of stairs with heavy things.

So the funny thing is I've been a digital nomad for about 6+ months now because I knew I was going to move to New York. I just didn't know when. And I didn't want to put my, like, I had a bunch of old furniture and I was just like, you know what? I'm just going to start completely over. So I sold all my furniture. I currently own absolutely nothing. So when I move, like, you know how it is for me to move in? I just got to sign the lease. And then hopefully the bed that I order from Overstock is going to arrive. So I don't sleep on the floor, but I definitely see myself sleep.

I love your strategy. That's so good. And then I mean, I have a friend, my friend Nick LaPara. He has a podcast called Let's Give a Damn. And he like, no joke, lived out of a backpack, a single backpack. And he's got 3 kids, married, 3 kids, lives in Harlem. But he, yeah, he was just like, all of my possessions are going to fit into this backpack. And he did it for 3 years. I think now he has like maybe 2 backpacks worth of stuff, but, but that's his whole strategy. Is it freeing? Do you feel free, Slobodan?

I do feel free, but I definitely know that that's not the lifestyle for me because it's— I kind of, I like having that coffee shop I go to and people know my name, you know, or I like to have that local gym. And as exciting, like I was in Estonia for a month, by the way, which was like a super awesome country. But like, I had to develop like new friendships and all that kind of stuff. And I just want to like, here I am, you know, I'm here. I get these habits going. I get to eat well. Like everything's been great about crypto. I've been public about this, but I did gain whatever the crypto 20 pounds just because, you know, like it's been so all over the place. And that's, that's why I don't want to be the backpack guy because I think it just, it's just not great for certain of those personal habits.

Oh, that's what that is. The Crypto20. I didn't know about that. Okay. Well, that's—

Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. Right. Everybody does it.

Yeah. Smart Investor is talking about Vitalik, who has a single backpack strategy and also just travels around and goes to all these conferences and stuff. By the way, we have— this is another manifest moment besides wanting a million-dollar monthly prize for PoolTogether. And then also we want to see every EVM wallet have deposit in PoolTogether because it's table stakes, right? You're in crypto, you got to have like something in PoolTogether. And then we also want to see every protocol integrate with PoolTogether in their own fun way. Anyway, so yeah, you're moving here, you're going to get— you're going to order your bed from overstock.com. Thanks for that, Alpha. I'll look at the beds on there. Check that out. And so what does the future of crypto look like for you, Slobo? What do you think? Let's end with this. I want to hear your predictions for— The next, you know, year to 5 years?

You know, like on a personal level, I try not to predict like any, any kind of timeframe. I am fully convinced, like people talk to me about Web2, Web3. To me, there's no Web2, Web3. It's all going to be crypto. It's very clear to me that public key, like pair encryption, login with your wallet, that is the future. That is a better way. Like the big, big companies like only exist because, you know, those walled gardens of like Google because they were there to stop spam. things that happen on-chain is going to allow like the stopping of spam to be much easier and won't require as much machine learning to do so. So this is a technological revolution that is here to stay. I can't tell you, or at least I don't know, I don't have any special insight of when, but it's definitely happening. I know that I'm going to be using crypto for the rest of my life as long as I'm alive, which I guess makes sense. So the future of it is that you're going to have these smart contract wallets. The user experience is going to improve. And whenever, like, the world settles down again, ENS, Nifty Chat, we're all going to be around to, like, support a better, safer, more usable environment. If I knew when, I'd probably be an investor in a VC, but I don't. So I'm just like a technology person. I just know this is the future because this is better. This is just sort of like, I remember when, like, SSDs came out, that was better. I remember when the iPhone came out, that was better. There's a few things that kind of happen that are just so obvious. And I'm always very, I'm always like pretty early. And even though I came to crypto, in my opinion, late, I know I'm early because I'm always early. So like, that's, that's like anyone who's here today is also very early. So that's, that's kind of my predictions for the future is like, you're going to get to 10,000, you're going to get to 10 million ENS names. You're going to have more of these products where you log in. And with Apple potentially opening up a new store, it's going to be the thing that's going to let like new apps and crypto apps really take the phone by storm. So that was like a rambly thing, but I'm very bullish on crypto and I'm very bullish on the people who are building in crypto because I've met some of the best people in this space, some of the smartest, most passionate and compassionate people, especially compared to fintech. And any of my friends, I try to get 'em into crypto, not because they're necessarily going to get rich. It's just because it's selecting to a more compassionate and more interesting set of people that I've ever had the pleasure of working with. So that's, that's my spiel.

That's a good spiel. Love it. I love it. Well, Slobo, thanks so much for your time here on the Pull Together Community Podcast. It's been a pleasure. Everybody go sign up for Nifty Chat. Let's take Nifty Chat by storm. Make sure your ENS is all set up with your— so we can create communities and, and just flood with— flood Nifty Chat with that Pull Together traffic. Thanks so much for your time, sir. See you soon. IRL. I'll see you soon.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been great. You're like a wonderful host and I love everything you're doing for the community.

Oh, thank you so much. All right. Well, see you soon.

Bye. See you.

Bye. All right, great. 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.