#19: Ben Yu - NFTs, soulbound tokens, and ADHD

And then Vitalik has this amazing— I still have it— like, um, intro post I made in 2014, like May, to all the Teal fellows, just like introducing who he was, what he's doing. He's like, hey, yeah, I'm Vitalik, I'm working on Ethereum. And the crazy thing is, I look back on those messages, I'm like, still today it's so hard to tell the legitimate from like the like fake like hypey thing, right? And I was like reading it, I'm like, wow, this really Sounds like a shitcoin.

Hello, welcome to another episode of Cyber Patterns. Today we've got Ben Yuan. He dropped out of Harvard, did the Thiel Fellowship, started a company, and now he's on to Curious Addies, an NFT collection. Through Curious Addies, he runs Curious.xyz, which is basically a Web3 Q&A platform. Think about the Quora of Web3. Super cool. We had a great discussion, wide-ranging on a bunch of topics, not just NFTs and Web3. So I hope you enjoy. Dude, it's good to have you on. I have, I have so many questions. I actually just, um, tweeted I stumbled upon your, uh, the Big Book of Evil Scams. Um, yeah, so what was the, what was the methodology when looking for that, or what was the thought process? I think it's really cool.

Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, man. Um, yeah, yeah, the whole thought process was like, we, we started off as one of the first educational NFT projects in the space, and so we get a lot of people who are coming in that are new to the space, learning things. And just like, the number one problem in the space for NFTs specifically is scams. It's just like every project— when we launched, they— we, we saw this firsthand. There's, um, there's this one scammer group that goes around and they have their they in some ways are like more effective than like real projects because they can just fake the numbers. They can fake the FOMO and all that. And so they made this brilliant like website, which just like would trick anyone. Like I felt the FOMO, like looking at this thing, you go to it, it's a perfect copy of our site. And it has the numbers like just minting out like every second, right? It's like, you know, there's 400 left, there's 300 left, there's 200 left. And you just feel all this FOMO and you're just like, all right, I have to mint it. And you go and like, yeah, you're not checking everything carefully. And the sad thing is, you know, it plays perfectly on the nature of even genuine projects in the space where real mints, the reason that people fall for these is like real mints also mint out in the same way, right? You're going to like a real hype thing. And it's like, all right, you have like 10 seconds to decide what you do before it mints out. And so they got, you know, 6 figures, even after we put out so much stuff on, you know, like how to protect yourself in the space and all that. And we're just, yeah, it just felt to us like, you know, we have to try to compile every single thing that people do in the space. To, to scam people and try to educate them so that, you know, we can avoid it as much as possible because there's so much money kind of getting lost to that. And it's really devastating seeing people who come in here, even if you make the right moves, you can still lose it all, right? Just—

yeah, yeah, facts. I, uh, that happened to me with memes. Um, I got scammed, uh, on a clone website and minted 2, which sent 2 to their wallet. And then because I was trying to like get— find their website before they announced it because it started at 12, but they like said they'd announce it like in 20 minutes, and then they were delaying it. So I was trying to be smart and then cost me $400, but I ended up getting a real one, flipping it, it was all good. But yeah, it was wacky. But yeah, how'd you— how'd you get into crypto? Um, I mean, you've obviously developed a reputation now teaching classes and everything, but how'd you get into crypto and NFTs in the first place?

Appreciate it. Yeah. 2013 actually was when I first heard about Bitcoin. And I had a friend who just had— it's a really common thing. There were a lot of poker players, I don't know if you know, in the crypto world. So he'd been a professional poker player. And then he was like, "Hey, Bitcoin is the next big thing. You have to get on this." It was like $40 at the time. This is April or March 2013. And then 2 weeks later, I'd never heard of Bitcoin before, didn't really think of it too much, but then front page, like on some like newspapers, like Bitcoin hits like $100, right? I'm like, well, it's obviously a bubble, super hyped, like definitely falling from there if it like went up 2.5x in like, you know, 2 weeks. So didn't really pay attention to that. And then like everyone else, you know, that was a huge bull market year, late November 2013, basically got into it just because of the price. It went up to like $1,000 and I'm like, all right, time to YOLO all my money into this, right? Even though I ignored that like $40 and $100, Yeah, I was a poor college student back then. So I remember this is like over Thanksgiving break. I didn't sleep for like 2 days, just like degening hardcore, put in like $10K, didn't have that much money and then immediately lost like 80% of it. And like the Mt. Gox got hacked. And then I remember Bitcoin went down from like $1,200, whatever the top was to like $200 at the bottom, but then everything else, like I got into Litecoin at the time. I got into Namecoin, all these other altcoins, shitcoins. They all went down to 99.5% loss, just this crazy drop. And then I was like, all right, I'm totally off all shitcoins besides Bitcoin. But also I'm like, all right, I just did the dumbest thing in my life. I dropped so much money into this thing that I had no idea about just because everyone else was like, the price is going up. And yeah, people are Talking about it, I should probably actually learn what I got into and read up on the stuff. And so was super lucky, the bear market was actually the best thing that happened to me because I read up on the Bitcoin whitepaper and was like, "Actually, this sounds really promising. This actually does seem like it has legs behind it." And then Coinbase at the same time had been doing— this is 2015 now. They had raised a ton of money in these bull markets where Basically every 4 years Coinbase just raises like a crap ton of money when they can, and then they survive for the rest of the time. And then they were like, what do we do with all this money? And they had a referral program where they decided if you buy $100 of Bitcoin and you refer someone who buys $100 of Bitcoin, they charge a 1% transaction fee. So they'll take $1, but then they'll give you $75 back in Bitcoin, which at the time was about a third of a Bitcoin that they're giving you for free just for signing up to Coinbase. So I'm looking at this, I'm just like, I think this is unlimited free money. I think like literally, you know, you just like sign up one person and they give you $75 and you pay them $1. So you make $74 free. I'm like, I could make like a million dollars just like referring people doing this. I should totally just go ham on this. And then I did. And then I partnered with some friends who were running a company to kind of send it out to their newsletter. We got a bunch of people to sign up and then Coinbase really quickly shut down, but we made like 16 Bitcoins like doing that. And so At some point now the bear market has made it drop a lot, but that was like a million dollars that we got for free, like from, uh, from just doing the Coinbase referral. And then there I'm like, man, this is, this is it. Like I should really just pay attention to crypto. And then, um, I was lucky to be a Thiel Fellow a year or two before Vitalik became a Fellow. And the sad thing is I missed out on Ethereum at first because I had this whole mentality that everything was just shitcoin besides Bitcoin. I was total Bitcoin maximalist, right? Because I'm like, Bitcoin fell 80%, everything else fell like 99.5%, right? Like screw everything else in the world. And then Vitalik has this amazing, I still have it, like intro post I made in 2014, like May, to all the Teal fellows, just like introducing who he was, what he's doing. He's like, hey, yeah, I'm Vitalik. I'm working on Ethereum. And the crazy thing is I look back on those messages. I'm like, still today, it's so hard to tell the legitimate from like the like fake, like hypey thing, right? And I was like reading it. I'm like, wow, this really sounds like a shitcoin. Like, it just sounds like, you know, they're like, it's gonna be like the, you know, you're gonna have the Ether browser, which is like your browser for the blockchain. Like, you know, compared to, you know, the web browser for the internet. And then like, you're gonna be able to build all this stuff on top of it and it's gonna be this amazing world. I'm like, that sounds so unrealistic. And so the funny thing is most of the Teal fellows did not actually get into the Ethereum ICO. Where it was what, like you could get 2,000 Ether for 1 Bitcoin, which at the time was $660. And so now 2,000 Ether would be, even at like the depressed prices, like you had 3.8 million that you could get for $660 back then. Missed that. Ultimately turned around 2017, started getting into Ethereum for $7, and then started my first company in the space to try decentralized streaming. 2017. And, um, yeah, since then have just been totally sold on crypto as a future.

Got you, got you. So why do you think people are still Bitcoin maximalists? I've been like trying to understand the philosophy.

Is it— that's so funny.

Yeah, I don't really understand it, but yeah, I'm curious how you feel.

Like, what's, uh, what's your personal take on the space? Whether you, uh, where you most bullish on, uh, personally Ethereum.

Yeah, I, I just think I can use Ethereum and use it for things in my life, whether I'm minting NFTs or buying NFTs or getting into Discords or whatever. So personally, it has a real use case in my life. I write about this stuff and I have to be in this world. I don't really see a big use case for Bitcoin personally in my life. I see it for others for investing and a store of value and everything. But I'm in it. Yeah, I'm more in it for the use case, but I don't really understand people still, how can you ignore Ethereum at this point? Yeah, dude.

I mean, I'm totally with you. I'm also an ETH maximalist basically right now. And so yeah, that's how I feel too. I think the funny thing is Vitalik actually had this April Fools post. I don't know if you saw that one in defense of Bitcoin maximalism. That was funny. But But yeah, no, if I were to channel that, I feel the same way to you. Ethereum is the most promising thing because it captures so much more than just— it's everything that Bitcoin kind of is, right? Plus it's this entire smart contract layer. It has the gates wide open for Web3, for all of kind of the applications that we actually use on a day-to-day basis. I think Bitcoin, The reason that people find it valuable, and the reason why I still hold some Bitcoin, though I have been transferring most of it to Ethereum over time, is the fact that it is by far the most stable and historically long chain. Unlike Ethereum, it doesn't have this plan to infinitely scale its tokens and issue more supply over time, whatever it is. Bitcoin just has— derives its value from the pure stability of it, of where everything else doesn't change. This, you can just guarantee that it's going to work like gold. And I guess if you think of it as just the best digital gold, which is what it's trying to be, the way I think of it is Ethereum is like digital oil and Bitcoin is like digital gold. Where Ethereum— oil is valuable in and of itself, right? We have made countries for oil, whatever it is, but it's valuable because of its utility. It's not just like oil is a beautiful substance that you want to collect and treasure by itself. It's like, no, you use it to drive your cars and power basically the industrial economy. And that's kind of how I see Ethereum is like, why do you want to keep Ether? It's because you need Ether to basically transact and do any of this stuff that has so much utility that we're seeing in Web3 and all that. Why do you keep Bitcoin? It's kind of the same reason why do we use gold. And it's like gold is like, it has like 10% of its value comes from industrial use cases, but then the rest is purely just its tangible asset value or intangible asset value that we perceive from its scarcity and the fact that it's this immutable thing that to date we have no way of making more of or discovering more, whatever it is. It's just totally there, set in stone, scarce. I think that's what Bitcoin is for a lot of people is like, if it is able to hit what gold's market cap It still has at least almost a 10x to go, I think, from here is like, yeah, to meet the market cap. It still has a lot of appreciation. And so people are like, yeah, best store of value is kind of the best argument that I've heard from it. And I buy that. But for me, it's like, yeah, definitely something that can capture all the value from making apps that eat. It's like if Web3 eats Web2, then It's like Ethereum eating the internet, and that seems like a lot more value than— [Speaker:JASON_LEVIN] Yeah.

It seems more fun too. I did just read a paper from a couple of Yale professors about Bitcoin usage in El Salvador, and only 4% of all sales in the economy are in Bitcoin right now. Everybody got $30 free Bitcoin. They got a free app where no transaction fees, the government subsidized and everything. It's kind of weird to think that They're not using it too much, but I'm trying to dig more into that, into the whys. Yeah. But back to poker players, why is that so common in crypto? I feel like I've seen so many, it's kind of ridiculous. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it attracts the same kind of person. And I have a hot take on this where I think a lot of people in Web3 are definitely neurodivergent. And so this kind of goes into our, our story of like Curious Addies is it's named after my, myself both being very ADHD. And so there's, there's a story that we can tell of like neurodivergence, but just in the broad sense of, I think the personality traits that people have in the space, I like, so specifically for people who are ADHD like ourselves, we tend to be all these things that can be positive and negative. One of the core traits is hyperfixation, which is that counter to the popular thought of like, you know, ADHD people are just very distracted all the time. And like, yeah, you can't really focus on something. When there is something that gets our focus, we have the opposite problem where we get super focused and like to the detriment of everything else, which is kind of where that distracted, like, yeah, don't pay attention to anything except the things we're interested comes from. And so this, this comes out in a lot of different fields and they all have some interesting correlations where one is video gaming. It's like, you know, the kind of person who just like can play a game straight. I don't know if you've experienced this for like 14 hours, right. And you just like play it, you forget to like eat whatever it is. And then, you know, programming, it's quite common as well, where it, and rock climbing is another random, like adjacent thing. And then poker. Games like that, and then Web3 and crypto and all those, those, those are all things that are like intrinsically appealing to a specific subset of people where I think you have very high risk tolerance for sure, where poker is just like crypto where like you're losing like half your bankroll, I don't know, like in a single, like, you know, all in that you do whatever it is. And you just have to like understand that, like, you know, you have such like emotional volatility, I think with this thing. But you can play all your cards right. You do everything the right way. And then like the results are still down to some statistical variation, probability, whatever it is. And so, you know, it's just, I think the kind of person who would be okay being able to be hyper-focused for like, you know, 10 hours, just like playing this game and like being tolerant with that kind of risk and being very open to kind of this like high risk, high reward kind of like lifestyle. I think lends itself just really well to both crypto and to, um, to, to poker and things like that. And then I think the other, the other thing that both of these kinds of domains, uh, require is, uh, real open-mindedness to just very non-traditional paths in life, where like being a professional poker player is just something that no parent is like, you should grow up and be like a professional poker player, right? Like just Drop out of school and do this. And like a ton of my friends who are in crypto, who did poker and all that, are people who like dropped out of school. Right. And like, you know, they very quickly went down this non-traditional path. And I think it's like, just like you said, right. I think this goes into the whole El Salvador, why only 4% of people have used this is because it sounds insane. Like on its premise, it's like, why do I need to use this random, like digital currency thing, right. On the blockchain that like, is so much more cumbersome to use. I have to understand how to install my wallet. I have to protect this private key. I need to memorize or just copy this giant hexadecimal address or whatever it is and send it to someone else. And then I need to wait an hour for the transaction to go through. And there are just so many pain points to this thing that to a normal person, it really sounds insane that anyone would adopt this system unless you're extremely open-minded. Unless you're open-minded to a point where you can like approach something from first principles and be like, all right, there's absolutely no adoption for this thing whatsoever right now.

Right.

It's 4% of people when like a country literally has tried to like force it to like, oh, it's like, you know, constituents is still 4% of the population, but we still believe that. Yeah, we can see a future, which takes a huge leap of imagination that, you know, 5, 10, 20 years from now, like most of the world might be using the same. And I think it's just like, that's, that's a really hard stretch, a hard leap, but it's the same kinds of people who were early on the internet, on computers. One of my favorite articles is Newsweek 1995. I don't know if you've seen this one, Why the Internet Won't Be Nirvana. I think you'd like this. It's by this early like internet pioneer. And he's just like, you know, I've been on the internet for a while now and it's nice, it's fun, but people are just having these batshit crazy proclamations about how the internet is going to replace our brick and mortar stores. You're going to be able to buy everything on the internet. You're going to be able to learn on the internet. There's going to be telecommuting workers, right? And all this stuff. And he's like, that's totally impossible, right? It's insane. And to be honest, he was totally right. In 1995, it was insane that people would believe that because it was totally untrue, right? There's nothing you could do. And it took 20 years until we really got to a point where we now have remote work, right? We conduct these interviews, these podcasts, whatever it is, all over the internet. And it's like, I think it will take that much time really for like blockchain adoption to really be a thing. And it's just very small niche people who just happen to have the right personality matrix of being extremely risk tolerant, very open to new experiences and establishing, evaluating things on first principles. Probably impulsive, able to like make decisions very quickly and like, you know, 5 seconds of let me mint this random NFT that looks like a piece of crap that, you know, I just saw like right now. And someone who is willing to go down the rabbit hole and like, you know, explore things much more deeply than the average person. I think you need to do all those things to kind of find yourself in all these domains, which yeah, I'm curious how you got into the space.

What got you? That was an excellent explanation. Yeah. So I guess tying everything together, definitely neurodivergent, ADHD, kind of either all over the place or like when I'm writing, just like zoned in and it pisses my girlfriend off. Cause like, I don't want to talk and I just want to focus and read and write. And so I guess 2015, 2016-ish, I was at University of Michigan and like I had very like entrepreneurial kind of techy friends. And so some either, I don't know, my friend told me about it or we, I don't know, but I bought some, held it for the next few years, fortunately. And didn't, yeah. And I didn't get involved with the space or like start anything or like write for it until last year. And I guess that was just via being on Twitter. Like I started on Twitter with some like health tech stuff, That's what I was mostly focused on. And then I kind of just got like really obsessed with NFTs and the potential of Web3 and started writing and freelancing for an NFT collection and Web3 product studio and everything. And just the idea that Web3 media makes me so excited, just thinking about like how characters can be used in TV shows or like Super Smash Bros with like doodles and CryptoPunks and shit. Like the idea of that is just— to me, super exciting. And, you know, I was talking to a screenwriter the other day about it and just ideas of owning the content and IP and that is then used in a show and, and everything. So yeah, yeah, that's, that's kind of how I got into it. And I definitely agree with the neurodivergent thing. I find a lot of people are not open-minded enough to even consider it. It's like they've, they've never thought like, why do we use money? Or what, like, what's the history of money? And if you're not like open to understand the history of money, you're definitely not open to understanding the future of it. But yeah, back to Curious Addie. So how is the project going? I was looking, checking it out earlier. Looks very cool. And tell me also about, it's Curious.xyz, right? The Web3 Q&A platform.

Curious.xyz, yeah, yeah. Thanks so much. Wait, so you're also ADHD? Is that what I'm— Yeah.

That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love it. Of course, yeah. Hot take. I'm just like, everyone in NFTs is ADHD. It's like, yeah, to me, it's like, it's such a, it's such a stressful space for a normal person. Right. Everything goes at light speed. Like every week it's like completely different meta, right. Everything's changed. And like, it's just one pro— and I'm like, oh my gosh, this explains the entire space. It's just like people who get like super stimulated, they're excited about one thing, they mint it. And then like, you know, they have like a 2-week time horizon, right. They're like, all right, it's onto the next thing. Right. Let's mint this other thing. And like, I'm like, yeah, ADHD explains this entire space. But that's awesome. I'm so glad. It's great. I love meeting other ADHD people. But, um, yeah, yeah. So Curious Abbeys, you know, it's, um, we really wanted to create a community for supporting everyone just like us, right? And like, we wanted to create an inclusive way to get more people into crypto and Web3, NFTs, and all that. And what we saw was the same thing as you, like, NFTs. I never thought that this would be the thing that got me into like this would be a thing that would build like, you know, a project around because I've never collected art in my life. I have aphantasia. I can't even see images in my head. So I'm like the least like artistic person in the world. And still NFTs, just like it was for you, is like the most compelling thing I've ever done in crypto and Web3, right? And it's like before this, really you just buy and hold things. And that was all that anyone really did. And this is the first time that there's like culture coming into the space and all that. And like, We're like, holy crap, maybe this is the way that crypto finally goes mainstream is now we have this thing that intuitively makes sense to people, right? People who are coming in for the first time, who have never touched crypto in any other regard, understand the intrinsic value behind what's kind of happening here in some ways. You have still tiny minority people, but like, you know, it's, it really appeals to a lot of creative people, a lot of artists, whatever it is that have never touched crypto before. And so we're like, okay, you know, maybe we can make an educational community around this. And then our goal is to basically just create the best way to help people come into the space where it's— what we've seen is everyone takes a random walk, really, when you come in. It's like, you know, you hear about it almost always from a friend and it's, you know, some friends tell you about it. 95% of people that we know, like, have come into space because some friend told them about it. And then like, if you have that friend, if you're lucky, you have good friends and then they like sit you down and then they walk you through all these steps. But then we're like, wow, we realized, you know, with people like us, the neurodivergent kind of like early adopters of this stuff, like I can't help but just tell all my friends about it, right? This is all I talk about like 24/7. It's like, you know, what else are we gonna talk about but NFTs and Web3? And so, you know, I get all my friends and like, you know, maybe 10% of them are also interested and they come in and then they're like, all right, then like, what do I do? I'm like, oh shit. Now I have to sit down with you for like 3 hours, right? And like walk you through how to set up your MetaMask, walk you through how to keep your seed phrase safe. I'm like, I have no faith that like I can translate all this knowledge I've built over time to you. Definitely it's not scalable one-to-one, but even just translating once, like I'm terrified that if I get you into this, you're gonna like one, like get scammed immediately, right? Like two, just mint like a bad project. Three, like lose your seed phrase. It's like, there are just so many pitfalls that I'm like, It's super scary to like bring anyone into space. So I like find myself holding back just because there's not a trusted place that they can go to get all that information, to feel safe and all that. And we're like, okay, maybe we can create this with both a community and with just products that can actually help them. And so that's why we made the NAS Academy course to kind of like walk people through how to get into NFTs, into Web3. And then we made our interactive tutorial adventure.curiousities.com where anyone can go, you can mint your first NFT for free. Free and you can learn by doing where our whole thesis is like the only way to really learn is to actually do it yourself. But doing it is like, you know, you're, you just have to kind of accept right now that you're going to lose a couple hundred bucks or thousands of bucks, right? Like doing mistakes before you make it, which is like totally crazy. It's like insane that you have to like, you know, that's the only way to kind of get in. We're like, maybe we can make that better. So we made that tutorial. And then Curious XYZ is the, the main thing that we, we found from the projects where we see the, the, NFT, the Curious Addies, as basically being this like membership pass to everything that we make in the space and this community, you know, access to just the people who are most passionate about learning and all that. And right now what we're trying to do is basically find what is that like scalable product that allows everyone to come into the space, get everything that they need, to thrive and succeed in space and then hopefully grow our community, the entire Curiosity Sites community from there. And we made 4 initial products. We have a portfolio tracker, we have a virtual trading platform, we had a Discord Q&A bot, and then we had this interactive tutorial and then we had our courses. So we figured we'd start out, just throw everything at the wall, you know, see what sticks. And then the thing that really stuck out of all of those was a Q&A platform on Discord where people come into Discord, they keep asking questions over and over again, but you know, they get buried, right? And like, you know, most questions don't get answered. The ones that get answered, some people keep asking the same question over and over. The people who are answering kind of get burned out. Like, okay, maybe we can just do a quick MVP in our Discord where we have a bot where you do /question and then you can ask a question. They're all searchable. And then like anyone can get notified as an expert to answer these questions. And we had huge traction over that just in a few weeks. We had hundreds of questions that got asked and like almost all of them got answered. And we're like, okay, Discord's UX in and of itself has a lot of limitations. It's very difficult to like have good threading. You can't search things over time after they get archived, whatever it is. And so let's make a full-fledged website, which can be basically like Quora or Stack Overflow for Web3, where people can ask any question on any Web3 subject and then get it answered. And like, yeah, so we put it out there and it's been amazing so far. Out of all the questions, every single one gets answered. Our experts are like super engaged. And that's the most powerful thing that we've seen from NFT projects in general is it's the most powerful community bootstrapping tool where it's nice that you can get funding. Sure, it's great that you have this path to be able to fund the project through grassroots option. But the most powerful thing is now you have all these people who so strongly believe in what you're doing, who are behind your project and want to help, see anything succeed. And so all the experts on Curious XYZ come from Curious Addies. And like, we just had all those people who want to help teach other people and all that in our community. They came over, they answer every single question. And so now, yeah, we're looking for basically, um, yeah, anyone who has any question basically, you know, anytime on anything is like, feel free to come to, you know, Curious XYZ, ask that question. And then, uh, we're also starting partnerships with different communities to help get their questions answered, where we, uh, where some of our partners are Zeneca in NFTs, Alchemy, the infrastructure company, and then, uh, Nas Academy, where we do our courses. And so we've partnered with all of them. We're rolling this out in the next week or two, is, um, a way for all their communities to ask questions through Discord integration inside of Discord, Telegram, all their different channels. Those questions get populated over to curious, and then our experts answer them. And then the hope is over time we can become like almost decentralized customer support for Web3, where you can think of a lot of these products are very difficult to use. And like, because they're decentralized, there's no customer support. There's no real team beyond them. Everything like DeFi, right? They just like put out some smart contracts and it's like, all right, good luck. You know, hope you figure out how to use this thing. Right. And we're like, yeah, maybe there's a way where we can help empower everyone else who has knowledge in Web3 to share it with all these other people. You know, uh, get rewarded for doing so over time. Yeah.

Nice. Nice. No, that's, that's amazing. Um, first off, aphantasia. I also have that, by the way.

Really?

Um, yeah, basically, dude, I haven't met many people who have aphantasia and it's such a weird experience. Like, like I can't, I can't imagine like my mom's face. Like, I know what she looks like.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it feels so like, I feel heartless when I say it.

I know, right?

Yes. And like my girlfriend, like when I, like when I told her like, yeah, I can't really imagine your face. She was just like, look so hard. I was like, sorry, sorry, dude. Yeah, sorry. But, um, yeah, no, I, I think, yeah, having Curious in the name, uh, it's just like so perfect. It's what you guys are, what, like, it just, uh, it's perfect for Web3 and it really captures everything. And that's how I was describing your project actually earlier to, to my girlfriend, was saying, um, it's like a Quora for Web3 or it's a Yahoo Answers or whatever. And, um, no, I think it's cool. And so you correct me if I'm wrong, you're, you're going to be releasing soulbound tokens for the token, uh, for the platform and everything?

Yeah, yeah. No, it's so funny, uh, just going back to the Amphantasia. Yeah, I'm curious what other overlaps— this is, this is the kind of thing where like, you know, being in NFTs is like very small fraction of the population, right? Being like, I don't know, a poker player is a small population. Being ADHD whatever it is. But it's like, if you have one of these things, your odds of like having all these other check marks are like surprisingly high. And it's like, yeah, I'm sure we're quite similar in a lot of ways. No, I feel so bad too. Just like, I literally would say the same thing. I'm like, if you put a gun to my head and like ask me to draw my mom, like I like couldn't do it, right? Like, yeah, you sound terrible, right? It's like, you don't care about your mom. It's like, no, it's just, yeah. And this, this, like, I'm so curious about how you, you have this like Extreme superpower of like diving deep and reading all the 37-page papers, right? In Web3. Like I, yeah, I love that. I'm curious if like that you think lends your, to like the fact that you're in writing, that you like reading and all that, maybe the implementation, like. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not sure. Definitely. I just love reading and writing. And so diving into papers is fun, but like for me personally, Like, because I think because of aphantasia, like biology and chemistry, and where I have to like imagine things and I can't see shit, and I can't just like— like words I understand, metaphors understand, analogies, like I'm very good with all that stuff. But when it comes to actually visualizing like biology or even, uh, some of the computer stuff, like what's going on inside a computer, I find that very difficult. So, um, for me, like understanding some of like the Soulbound tokens, like I could— that was all like English person shit, liberal arts shit. It made sense imagining that future and I could get that. And yeah, dude, it's weird. 37 pages. I swear. They both swear. This next one I'm looking at is 50 though. So that's the El Salvador one. So we'll see what happens with that.

How are you finding all these papers that you read?

Yeah. So I linked the website at the end of each thread. It's like SRSN or something. I don't know what it stands for, but I just go on there like every couple of days and type in crypto and see what new papers are posted.

It's really it.

Yeah. No fancy way or anything.

No, that's so cool, man. Yeah. I love people who just like dive in and do the primary resource research. But yeah, yeah. To answer your question, yes, exactly. We're coming out with Soulbound tokens and super appreciate you giving us a shout out on your your article about it, but, um, Soulbound tokens are super exciting to us because it, for everything that you said in your viral tweet thread, right? And it's like, yeah, it really feels like the future in NFTs allow digital assets to have value, right? But the transferability makes it very difficult for you to basically have things that you can only earn, not like kind of buy your way into or scam your way into, or, you know, steal someone else's or whatever it is, you know? And it's just like, there's so much stuff in the real world, which just isn't analog to just things that you can only earn. Like you can't sell your college diploma to someone else and be like, all right, now they have officially gone to, you know, University of Michigan. Yeah. And like, makes no sense. Right. And so like all this social proof that we build up in real life over time should be non-transferable. It's not like you should be able to give your reputation to someone else, Unless through the application of like, in the past, before we had real credit scores or like, you know, the standardized system, apparently people did just like vouch for other people, right? Like what you need to do is like, I have high reputation. I say this person also is trustworthy. They get that reputation, which still you need soulbound tokens to kind of do, right? Yeah. You can say I have a lot of reputation. And so now this person does too. And so for all these reasons, soulbound tokens makes a ton of sense. And it just made a ton of sense for us specifically with Uh, curious because what we were trying to do in a sense is to showcase and highlight all these people who are sharing so much, contributing so much to space, and allow their reputation to be most, uh, first, like, public to everyone, just, you know, on the blockchain itself so that everyone can see it, anyone can plug into it. But then two, just, um, help them aggregate and accumulate all the work that they've done over time where you we've seen so many people in our community who've just gone so far and above. They're so selfless. They spend hundreds of hours just helping other people. And maybe you build up huge reputation in one project and all that, but then, you know, you go somewhere else and like, no one knows, I mean, anything that you've done in Discord, right. For the past, you know, like 6 months or any of that. And that's just all kind of lost. And so what we really love to see is a way that we can start tracking and quantifying and making public all the different contributions, all the different expertise, the skills that people have built up in Web3, and essentially turn that into a sort of resume or CV that you've had of all the different things you've done, and then be able to translate that very easily into if you want to get a job, you can just point to this and be like, hey, check out my credentials through the Soulbound token that proves that I'm the one who got all this reputation, all this expertise. And clearly I know what I'm talking about when it comes to NFTs, smart contracts, DeFi, whatever it is. And so that's what we're trying to bootstrap with, um, uh, with Curious is, uh, basically having one NFT that shows all your reputation that you've gained on the site from answering, asking all these different questions. Uh, and then we break it up into each different category. So you're an expert in Solidity, you're an expert in DeFi and so forth, DAOs. And then hopefully we can, uh, we can do two things from there. We can offer people clear benefits from being one of the top people on this platform alone, where we can go to other projects and we can say every project, you know, has say a whitelist and they're trying to get the most engaged people that they can trust that aren't just going to flip this thing, right? They're in there for the long term and all that. But how do you really tell that right now? It's like, you know, you have these, like in the past it was like, you know, you have to grind, right? To get into NFT projects was the term. And it's like, you just, say hi, like, you know, every 5 seconds in like Discord until you get to like level 10 and like, you know, V6 or whatever it is. And then, you know, you have to like invite 10 people and all that. But yeah, those, those are all fairly like bad heuristics for like, is this a real person who's in it for just the actual mission or, you know, they actually care about Web3 or are they just here to flip? And so with this, hopefully we can say, hey, look, if you want the people in your project who are clearly the most helpful, who are going to help your members answer their questions. Like they know their stuff, they're in there for the right reasons. They've been here contributing during the bear market, whatever it is. Right. We can show all these different stats. We can say, you know, you can just give these people your white— your like allowlist spots, right? If you have 500 spots and you want to give those out, things like that, that's like kind of some of the utility, some of the things that we're hoping to be able to translate. And then, you know, far, far down the line, that's like, you know, these things become your credit score of sorts. Where you can prove that you're a reputable person. Maybe we can even tie this to like, are you someone who does just like mint projects and then hold them, you support them, or are you someone who flips them immediately, right? Like all this information you can just like kind of collate and then have and then show. And then like over time, you know, other projects, other people can use that reputation to decide if you're someone that, you know, they want to offer special benefits to. It's like, you know, you get the pre-approved papers when you have a high credit score in the mail. Everyone just junk mails you, right? And it's like, hey, we want you to sign up for our credit card and all that because they trust that, you know, you're someone that they want inside their fold. And so that's one idea. And then the other hope is that we can kind of start kickstarting a standardized platform around NFTs, where SBTs, where people would be able to all plug in where other projects where people are earning expertise, people are helping, helping out and contributing. We can all plug those in either into a single SBT that then there's an easy way for people to query and fetch, or just a standardized format for all the SBTs where people can do the same thing and query and fetch it. Just like OpenSea, because there's the ERC-721 standard, ERC-1155, it's very easy for them to automatically import every new project. That's what we're hoping for too with Soulbound tokens is there's a really easy way to collate and display all your SPTs, get data from them in the right standardized format so that any employer, any project, any of that, they can just query this information, filter, find all the people who fit a certain criteria and then reward them or shortlist them, whatever it is.

Yeah, no, this is super exciting. And I know like, you know, the qualities that it takes to answer questions like on Curious.xyz are the same or similar to what a community manager is for for some, uh, discourse, for some companies in general. And, and, uh, that as a position is just growing. So, so people being able to develop their resumes and be able to come to a, a job or a potential job offer and, and tell them what they've done. And, um, it's, it's crazy how much the idea of a community manager is growing. Like I never heard the words before this year. And now, like I was, I was looking at NYU classes this summer, just like screw around. And, uh, just you know, take a one-off class and they have a how to be a community manager class. I was like, wow.

Wow.

This shit's okay. All right. They are hopping in there.

That's wild. That's really surprising to me. Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

It was surprising, but dude, this has been great. I gotta, I gotta head out, but this, this has been great, man. I really appreciate your time.

No, really, really appreciate you having me on here, but yeah. Thank you so much for talking. If there's anything else I can help with. Anytime, just, uh, just let me know for sure.

All right, stay well.

Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Jason Levin.