Sahil Lavingia and the Fweb3 team review their Web3 onboarding game's launch day, which drew 151 winners. They discuss immediate fixes like ENS display and faucet integration, then map out growth plans: Product Hunt, YouTube contests, Layer3 bounties, and eventual multi-chain support with soulbound NFTs.
Chapters
Awesome. So what time is it? March 1st. March 1st.
We did it.
It exists. It's— that's pretty, pretty awesome. Uh, how's everyone feeling?
Great.
Good, good. Ready to keep going.
I think it's really impressive.
Yeah, more to come.
I'm excited.
It's cool. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how today goes. Um, I sort of spend most of my time looking at this thing. Is this real time, by the way? Does this update automatically?
I don't think so. I think I can update the queries, each of them immediately, but I think they update every 30 minutes or so. I'm not really sure. Don't quote me on that.
Gotcha. Awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to see how things go. I thought it would be good to kind of— yeah. Yeah, just do a checkpoint and sort of get a sense of just, I also wanted a timestamp that we actually built the game in time, proof that we did it. So I'm just gonna log in and show everybody that it works. Everything works. You can share this. It all works. And this kind of acts as a gallery, I guess. We don't necessarily need one. So we have 151 winners so far. And I guess someone's trying to make money off theirs. Let's see. Actually, you know, this is, this is, I guess, what pump and dumping is, right? Is I'm just like, I'll buy it for like 1 ETH and try to like trigger the—
okay, okay. I, I encouraged him to say, hey, no one put it on OpenSea, why don't you go and learn how to do that? So I know who this is doing this.
Oh, that's funny. Um, awesome.
Yeah, it's a learning opportunity.
It is. Yeah, I, I mean, I assume that's Some people will buy and sell them just because, you know, kind of people do stuff. Uh, so we'll see. It was kind of— it'll be interesting to see. Even, even like the diamond ones, in which there is effectively an unlimited mint, you know, people are like— people have asked me like, do you think these are going to go up in value? And I'm like, what? You can mint— there's an infinite amount. I don't—
let me tell you, when the supply exhausts, when we hit UN-250, you know, UN-256, then I think the price is going to go up.
Exactly, yeah, exactly. I do— I am interested though in like, so we have 151 of these, there are 333 gold trophies and 3,000, I believe, silver ones. Um, so yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens when like scarcity kicks in for gold trophies, you know, in around 182 trophies. It'll be interesting to see if there, if there is a dynamic and we can totally, like, we should create it. I don't know if Collabland will allow us to do it. We might have to build our own thing. But it would be cool. It would be cool to kind of have a room only for gold winners and kind of have some, some functionality that comes with them and see what, see what happens. Yeah. I also wanna do stuff like I want to, the next time I do a course, I want to allow people to pay with. All of these kinds of things. So you can either pay in US dollars or you can pay with a trophy or whatnot. So yeah, it'll be fun. Anyway, I thought it'd be good to kind of go through just what we want to do next. It's March 1st. We did a lot in a month, but it's just the beginning. I think a lot of projects, you know, have a lot of energy and then die, basically. So I thought it would be good to kind of like start dumping all the ideas that people have had in Discord. And then we have kind of— we can create like a kind of a to-do list for everybody.
Is that open? Is that have open permissions to edit or like some restricted so we can as well to add some?
Yeah, I mean, ideally anyone like— I don't know what the best way to do it. I think what might be good is like maybe I'll start a Google Doc and this can be kind of like a trash can of stuff. And then, and then like as things get finalized, I'll move it in. And, and yeah, Mark, for example, if you want access to the Notion itself, I can just give you— now I spun it out into its own thing. Mm-hmm. So, you know, sort of trusted people can get added and then can make changes directly as well. Mm-hmm. But I'll start with this.
Hey, good morning everybody.
Hey, how's it going? Hi, good.
I'm just catching up with the Discord. I hadn't, hadn't, uh, checked in until now. Oh yeah, a lot of new players, huh?
Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting day and week, I think. Um, yeah, we're just, we're just kind of catch you up. We're just going through kind of our month the month of March, what we want to do. I'm going to start compiling all these things and then I just— did I share the link? No, I did not. I'm going to share the link so people can start dumping. I did share dumping things in here, but I think the kind of goal would be to kind of exhaust as many gold trophies as soon as possible. So let me change these. I think this is probably a relatively good indication that the game is fun and the game is being played and people are sending it to other people and all that good stuff. I'll just say that. Oh, and then awesome. And then I'll take these ideas and I'll move them into Google Docs for now.
What do you think about my idea for a hackathon that somehow involves the tokens?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great idea. Are you thinking of it like involving tokens as in the game? Like people will build things that use the token and, and sort of use the smart contracts that already exist and kind of extend them in terms of you, right?
Like, I mean, or so you don't— I mean, they might not necessarily end up being like an official part of the game, but it's just kind of to grow the ecosystem and just have people experiment a bit and, you know, using the, the Web3 token somehow.
Yeah, no, I think that's an awesome idea. I think that's awesome. Totally. Yeah, we could do like a weekend hackathon or a week hackathon. Yeah. Prizes. And I still have like a good chunk of tokens. I mean, they're, they're going to get exhausted pretty quickly as people win the game, but I definitely have like enough to incentivize people to build stuff and design stuff and things like that. So yeah. Oh man, there's so much in here. When I start adding to it, the tech women.
Actually, if you want like a list of all of these, I aggregated them in my own Notion that I created for the web.
Oh, you do?
I can have the link. And then I did see that I have a bunch of names, uh, because it's gonna be much easier. I've been tracking everything and there's so much going on.
Oh yeah, well, I mean, if you've already been doing this, then I think we can just use this and we can probably merge this into the same one.
Um, um, I sent it in the Zoom chat.
Yeah, awesome, awesome.
I mean, I maybe have left something out, but yeah, you have the—
you have, I think, the The big ones. I mean, there's, I mean, this is already like an insane amount. Like if you think about if each one of these drives like 100 players of the game, like this is like 2,000 players. Yeah. Maybe even more. Yeah. And one of them will drive potentially a lot more. Like I know, like I know, I know a good chunk of these actually pretty well. And I'm pretty sure like BuildSpace, for example, like we could do something with them and that's like 1,000 people, you know, by itself.
Yeah.
So yeah, I'm gonna start doing a lot of the outreach probably next week. I want to, I want this week, like I want, ideally I want as many trophies to go to people within, you know, like one degree out. Right. And so like, I wanna make sure that all my friends get them. And then I wanna start doing more reach to like more broad kind of communities and get the game in front of other people. I think generally being a part of curriculum is going to be like really important. I think getting both in terms of distribution. And, you know, like, for example, when you publish books, like, the number one thing people say if you want your book to do well in a long-term way is to basically become part of curriculum for colleges and high schools. Like, every book that sells a million copies, basically, like, the way they get there is by becoming part of, uh, sort of established curriculum. Uh, so if we can— and I think that's a good test of, is the game good enough, right? Because for that to happen, it has to be like really fluid, really easy, really simple. Very, really scalable too, right? Like people should be able to complete the game on their own time instead of maybe waiting 6 hours for somebody on Discord or something. And so I think that's generally like a good goal to aim to. I think starting with like Balaji, I know him pretty well and doing something there, I think it'll be like a hybrid, like talking about building the thing and what went into actually building the thing. I think people will be curious about that, but then also like, And then it's kind of at the end, it's like, you know, if you want to build something like this, I think the best way to get familiar is to actually just play the game and kind of deconstruct the game yourself of what went into it and then build whatever you want. So yeah. I also think I would— oh yeah, Milk Road. I will combine this at the end. Oh yeah, ConsenSys I can talk to.
Sorry to pause you. Aneer, are you there?
Or somebody?
Would you mind muting yourself?
And also, Sahil, you can mute people as well. Also, would you mind pasting your Notion doc again in the chat? I can't seem to find it. I thought I bookmarked it.
Uh, hi everybody.
Hey, what's up? Are you looking for something?
Uh, uh, it was just— okay, I'm, uh, okay, I'll just say it.
I'll just boot him. Um, cool. Oh, sorry, you're saying you want the Notion doc again? Oh, someone pasted it. Awesome. Yeah, thanks. Always funny to see who shows up in random Zooms with zero social awareness. What else did I want to do? Oh yeah. Everyone should upload this thing on Product Hunt and stuff. Oh yeah. Well, one thing I would, I think would be great to do, it'd be good if anyone has names, is to effectively do a sort of competition to get a lot of content created about Web3, of Web3, sorry. So for example, what I was thinking was doing some sort of prize for like the best walkthrough. Like if there's like a sort of, you know, anyone can create a 10-minute YouTube video where they walk through playing the game from beginning to end and then we give, you know, 10,000 or 33,000 or whatever tokens to the winner. Or maybe there's like a, you know, Gold, silver, bronze sort of. And I think that could potentially do quite a bit in terms of getting the brand in front of many, many people. We could do that with YouTubers. We could do that even with Twitter influencers potentially, because that to me seems like the trifecta of— the places in which people learn about crypto, I think, are 3 places. There's Twitter and Discord and then YouTube. I think are kind of like the big 3. So if we can cover those, I think that's probably pretty good. So do, do people have names of individuals that they follow? Just individual people. Like we've been kind of making a list of a lot of like brands effectively. Right. But I'd be interested to see if people have names of YouTubers that they, that they like.
If you make it public, I can add some names cuz I know it's too many to list here, but I have names and people I could do. I could add to this. I'll add a note to myself.
Awesome. Yeah, I'll put the— I'll make this doc public, and then it would be great if people could just like jump in with folks.
You got it.
And yeah, I'm also just— I would love to have a video that I could send people, because I think a lot of people, even if the game isn't that hard, it looks really hard. Like, I think it could look pretty scary to a lot of people. That I really want to play the game. And like, that's the goal is to reach these people who are scared by this stuff. And so if we can have a video that we can, you know, like we can send along with like sharing this thing, like, hey, you can watch this 5, 10 minute video, follow along. And even the Notion walkthrough, I think is scary to people. There's still some amount of like people will, yeah, get scared and don't wanna do it.
Fully. I think that a good place to do that is Layer 3. So Layer 3 have— they collaborate with different kinds of projects and they have bounties. So precisely what you described. So for instance, if someone writes an article about how to use their site or upload a YouTube video about the project, then they will pay them, I don't know how many tokens or something like that. So maybe I can reach out because I'm on their Discord. So We could also use that or just reach out to see how it works. And maybe we could use that because I know that a lot of people are checking Layer 3 for these kind of bounties and discovered lots of projects in there.
Interesting. Gotcha. So basically they put tasks like, hey, there's a competition happening. And if you do— is it a bounty in the sense that everyone who finishes it gets some, or is it winners that get some?
I think only the winners, but But I would have to check. Maybe we can make it so that, you know, there's like, you know, maybe the first 10 people who make this, you know, I can reach out and ask.
Yeah, there's a couple philosophies on how it works, on what you could do. If you make it open, it could just be anyone, because I think the thing here, Sahil, is that if you get multiple people put it in videos but they all have slightly different bends on it and slightly different audiences, that's not a bad thing. So you might say 1,000 there, you might bound it out. You could just give the bounding to say, okay, the first top 3 people to apply get a chance to go after it, and then, you know, after a week if they don't do it, we can just throw it back out there and do 3 more. So there's a couple of ways we can do that, just depends on how automated you want it to be.
Gotcha. Yeah, I think it would be cool to maybe do something where like anyone who reasonably meets the qualifications gets some tokens. And then there's winners as well. So maybe like anyone who enters within reason gets like 100 tokens each or something like that, or 1,000. And then the winners get 10,000 or something, or the winner gets 33,000 and something like that. Because yeah, I don't want people to do a bunch of work and then get zero reward for it. Like if they did really do the work and their effort is halfway good, then I think it's fine to give I think the more holders, right, the better generally. Like the more people are going to be incentivized to kind of spread the word about the game. Yeah, awesome. So anyway, this link exists. I also wanted to know if people had ideas for what we should think about shipping next. There's a couple of things in here. Like there's a UI sort of jumpiness issue that happens. Like if you refresh, you'll see it. Or that's just because I'm not very good at, at Next.js and React. Um, there's probably a better, like a loader or something like we can have so that doesn't happen. So if anyone knows Next.js, uh, React, would love help with that. ENS names also would be awesome. Right now we use the wallet address everywhere. We just show this long thing. Um, it would be cool if we said, you know, Sahil Lavingia.
Are these marked in issues in GitHub?
Yeah, so these are issues in GitHub currently. Also, we have this faucet.
Yeah, I was going to say— oh, sorry, go ahead.
For the ENS, I thought there was a pull request for that already, or someone was discussing it on Discord.
Yeah, I think it's pretty much ready. I'll submit it a little later today.
Oh, awesome. Awesome. Yeah. By the way, is it Jovan or Jovan?
So I'm Mexican, and it's a Serbian name, but In the US, I always pronounce it Jovan. So it's supposed to be pronounced Jovan, but interesting.
It's Serbian name, but you're Mexican. Yeah. Great.
I was going to add to that, we can move the faucet into the main app and unify the UI and stuff like that.
I can start working on that. Oh yeah, that would be awesome. I'm also happy to help with that. We could all— I mean, depending on how integrated we can make it, just like fosset.web3.xyz or something.
Yeah. If you want to point the domain to the Netlify app, I can give you access to it.
Yeah. That would be all. At least that way we can start there and then we can slowly, like, if, if the aesthetic lines up, then I think it's probably good enough.
Um, I tried to use the same kind of colors that you did, but I kind of went animations and shit to it.
No, it's fun. It's, it's, it's cool. I like the fact that it's different as well. We don't have to make it like all the same.
Sahil, do we need to take the code base that I did, like the two faucets I have, and have it located in your, in your repository as well? Or can those just exist elsewhere?
I think they can exist elsewhere. I mean, if we want to bring everything in over time, we can totally do that. Like, I might create a Web3 organization on GitHub, uh, and then move this over there, and then at least everything can live under there. Um, I think that might be a good step, uh, to do. Um, Yeah, I also think it'd be interesting if people have thoughts on like the next version of the game. Uh, what I'm thinking is, I mean, this is kind of dependent on exhausting the 10,000 trophies, um, but we'll probably start working on it in parallel. Either we can do expansion packs, so basically anyone who's— either anyone who has Web3 tokens or you would have to have won the first game can basically, for example, you could have a Solana version of Web3. I think that's a relatively low-hanging fruit. And depending on how my conversation goes with Polygon, I have a conversation with Polygon tonight. Mostly, it started mostly because I was like, can I have more MATIC for free? But we'll see what their— they just raised a gazillion dollars, so who knows what their priorities are right now. But I assume Solana will— all these chains, all these L1s will basically want similar, they want usage, right? If we can say, hey, there's 1,000 people who've deployed smart contracts, I think that's pretty compelling. But I think what really would be interesting is if we can start to think about, and this is just kind of homework for everybody, I think, but start to think about what would a 10x version of Web3 look like broadly? If we could build, let's say we had a team, like a AAA gaming studio team, We currently don't, though Jack, I think, does work for— what is he? I think he works for Fortnite, Epic, which is why he's pretty good. So we can get some good talent in, I think, over time, especially as this game works and gets traction. I think more and more people will want to work, especially if the token has real value over time and we could actually use it to pay people. Right now we're paying people and it's like you get paid in tokens, but it's valueless. But I think Hopefully that changes as we get to exhaustion of supply and real scarcity. But it would be awesome if people could start to think about what does that look like? Does it look like— what is that game, Candyland, or Snakes and Ladders, or what does this new game look like and what are the other things that we can make people do? I think one thing that when I first built the game, I was really worried about, one, could I even build it? Could we finish anything interesting in a month? And then two, would we be able to do it on-chain enough? And then three, I guess, would it be free basically for people to play? Otherwise, if we did this all on ETH, no one would probably be playing the game right now. But now that those things are all figured out, I think we can— and I think we have this cool mechanic where, because we have these verification, this off-chain verification thing, we can effectively expand the game to infinity, right? Because as long as we have a way for judges to check whatever that is, we could in theory do all sorts of other stuff, as long as we make it scalable so that we can actually check that they've done things. So for example, one idea I had initially was it would be cool to allow people to take Fueb3, turn it into USDC, and then stake it and get some yield. Even if tiny, I think that's pretty interesting, kind of exploring more DeFi stuff. But I just wasn't able to figure out a way to do that with the on-chain sort of validation. But now that we have the basics figured out, I think we can be more ambitious, I think, in terms of what do we want people to be able to do. So yeah. Also DAO, treasury, all that stuff, I think is relatively obvious. And I think If there is true demand, then I think that stuff's pretty easy because everyone— that stuff I think has a pretty clear workflow with Snapshot and Gnosis Safes and all that stuff. I think we can figure out pretty easily. But I think the game becoming— I think if we can present people by the end of the month like, hey, we built this thing, a couple thousand people have played it so far, we're working on the new game, that can be the north star that I think gets people to remain excited a month or two from now when the initial buzz and launch kind of goes away, right? So yeah.
Any thoughts or concerns? I had a thought, Sahil. So one way to look at it would be, you mentioned as the game grows, I thought like now it's a 3x3 grid, so later on it can, I don't know, increase, you know, a 4x4, but probably you were talking about 10x, 100x. But one way would be if you do, you know, leveling up could be, you know, a higher number of tasks. That's one. But we also have to keep in mind like what is your focus? Like, is this gonna be a dev-focused game? Because if there's gonna be more and more dev-related tasks, then that might deter non-tech people from playing the game. So we, So maybe there could be different paths to this game, which is, you know, a dev path, a design path, something else, but just, you know, something to keep in mind.
Yeah, no, that's a good point. Maybe there's definitely, if we decide to kind of maybe pursue like DeFi, let's say there's like level 2 and level, let's say Web3 is level 1 and then there's like 3 more games and there's like a DeFi track, a dev track, and like a, artist smart contract track or something. Maybe it's like you just have to complete one of the— maybe one of three or two of three, you know, to kind of get the next level of whatever that means, right? Um, because I do think it's— it is important for me that people build and actually ship, uh, because yeah, it's just a pet peeve of mine that like there's so much stuff, people doing stuff in Web3, and then like It's just people tweeting. It's not real. In my mind, I don't care about tweeting and investing. I care about building and learning. So I don't intend for everyone to be a dev, but I do think I won't shy away from making it— Even deploying a smart contract, I think, is advanced, quote unquote. Some people would consider that advanced because it requires writing to the blockchain, I think, not just reading. There's just too many tasks and too many games that are just click these buttons, you know, uh, and it's like, that's, that's not enough. I think it needs to be a little bit more than that. Like, I think, for example, for the NFT module, I think definitely like getting artists to write some sort of, you know, random function where like the mint is different, you know, like the— for at least token ID 1 and token ID 2 or something like that, right, where there's some level of customizability. Because I just, I don't believe, I don't really buy the non-technical word. Like I think saying non-technical is kind of like saying non-literate. Like I just don't, it's not binary, you know? Everyone can build stuff and write stuff. Everyone has that capacity in my opinion.
Sure. Then we do need, like in this case, like we had like, you know, good either docs or walkthroughs where, you know, even if somebody doesn't know how to do they can still follow along and do it. Definitely.
Yeah. I mean, even like, I think every engineer spends like half their time Googling for the answer. That never stops. Like you just get slightly better at Googling over time, right? So I mean, building this game, like I had to learn so much to build it. So yeah, I think any time there is a task, there should always be a walkthrough or something where they can effectively just like copy paste lines of code and they can complete the task. But hopefully, a few people will decide to go above and beyond and do something crazy. Most people probably minted this smart contract. I assume the final smart contract was like 10,000 or 10 million tokens, or just that's it, which is totally fine. But it required— I assume the video that Brian did, I assume that Most people need to watch that video to complete that task. I'd be very surprised. I certainly would, I would not be able to do it without that video. So I think as long as we have content and that, you know, I think the, I think in a way that creates more opportunity for non-technical quote people to build and stuff, right. Is because if there are these more complicated tasks, then that's room to create more content and have more resources for people. Yeah, like we could have like, these are 5 different examples of smart contracts and like, you know, things like that. But ultimately, like I do think it's important that like ultimately we want to onboard people into Web3, but the goal is not just purely onboarding people into Web3, but actually like onboarding the people who will build like more stuff in the ecosystem. 'Cause in its current state, Web3 is not mainstream and will not be mainstream. Like there needs to be real work to make that happen. And so—
Not until it's much more accessible for—
Yeah, it's probably, I would say it's another 5 to 10 years out. Like we're not really that close. The price doesn't really reflect that, but that's fine. Market can pay whatever it wants to pay, but we're probably in like 1996 or something like that is kind of my guess.
Still using PHP.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're, we're definitely in PHP land, you know? Uh, yeah, we're definitely there. Uh, maybe even earlier in term. Yeah. I mean, probably, I remember I was talking to Naval and he's, and he said, you know, deploying, building a website in 1997 cost $5 million, like to deploy a website to the internet was roughly $5 million to build anything. And then it, you know, like roughly now is probably, you know, $50,000 to build an app, or maybe 10 years ago, in 2007, it was $50,000. Now it's like $50 or something. So Moore's Law has definitely worked in that way. If you just liken it to crypto, crypto is still at basically— we're not at 5 million anymore maybe, but we're still at 50,000, where if you really want to do anything on ETH mainnet, You basically have to be rich. Everyone who's doing stuff on ETH mainnet is rich. Why do people hate crypto on Twitter? It's because most people are not rich, and they cannot participate, and they feel excluded. That's the real reason. Any reason they give you about the environment is BS. The real reason is they feel excluded, and they don't get to participate in this thing. It's fear-based more than anything else, I think. Um, anyway, sorry, Brian, you're saying—
No, no, I was just going to say, like, and that's the thing, we're doing a relatively simple project here to contract. Like, if you wanted to get into things like staking and things like that, like, I'm thinking what, you know, using Cosmos, for example, which is probably the quickest line to getting that whole ecosystem up and running, that's massive. I mean, that is literally across your entire network, millions of dollars of infrastructure to be able to go and run that. Now it's decentralized because you're not bringing your own, you know, we're not all going to be running this hardware here. We'd have to contract with partners. But yeah, it does scale. We are still in that like million-dollar range, you know, to make something that's effective, you know, to do that.
Yeah, you are even just like providing enough liquidity to the pools and stuff like that, right? Like there's— and I mean, even, even if, if, if you just added up all, you know, all the work that went into this project multiplied by, you know, the average hourly rate for someone in tech, let's say $50 an hour, $75 an hour, like that's, you know, we've spent probably $50,000 to $100,000 on this so far. But yeah, in terms of just pure economics, I think that definitely there needs to be— and it's not like people play the game and they're going to invent the new cryptocurrency that solves everything. It's unlikely that— but I think they will be able to help the companies that get founded by those people. They can go get a job at Uniswap, As a developer evangelist or as a support engineer or as a documentation person or, or, you know, social media person or support or whatever. Right. Like there needs to be like, there, there are a lot of those kinds of jobs as well. Or even like doing like the analytics. I think analytics will totally be a huge, like a huge, I mean, there's like SQL analysts, you know, like all they do is write SQL queries, like effectively. So like what are they? Data person does, right? Like data scientists, I guess it's like pretty defined role in Web2, but Web3 probably needs its own version of that.
And that Dune project is freaking awesome, man.
Dune is good. Yeah. It's, and it's built on Vercel, I think. It's so fast. It's yeah, it's definitely building on Vercel is one of the best things that I think I've done in the last like year. I really don't want to go back to like Rails land anymore. It's just so much, so much more, it's, it's very magical and, and it hurts my head cuz the code is not as intuitive for me as Rails, but it's just crazy. The amount of stuff, the fact that I can do, I can like approve a deployment, you know, on my phone and then it can get deployed to a preview URL and I can test it and then I merge it without having to ever go onto my laptop and like run Visual Studio Code or anything. It's just amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely, I'm very excited to see what happens with like Figma, Notion, Webflow. All these things are gonna start to like talk to each other more and more over the next few years. And it's gonna like, at some point you will be able to basically say this chest, like for example, like the chest component on the left of the website, just like points to a Figma URL, like a prototype Figma URL. And then like the whole, UX basically just lives in Figma. I think that, and basically the hooks for clicks, what happens when you interact, probably just exists in the React code, but all the UX, all the design and stuff, I think will basically start to exist in Figma. That's my hope anyway. I think that would be pretty dope. What are people excited about in crypto land? I do have to run in a sec, but I'm curious just generally as the next few months as things develop, and I start to design a Chutes and Ladders game, and I'd love for other ideas as well. I'd be very interested to see what currently in the ecosystem is exciting to people. For me personally, I'll start, I think, zero-knowledge proofs and starting to see that really, and soulbound NFTs. I think there's a lot of design opportunity there in terms of what you'll be able to do with those sorts of things. Starkware, I think, as a company is very interesting to me, Zcash, and Iron Fish, like privacy kind of coins, are also quite compelling to me, especially with what's happening with the stuff in Canada and Russia even. Like, it's going to be pretty interesting, I think, to see play out. Um, but yeah, I'd be curious what other people are paying attention to and interested in.
Honestly, just DAOs in general and just seeing those structures get more set over time. I think the— I mean, I think what you have here with Web3 is kind of like a prototype of what I think organizations like that would look like, where there's a defined purpose there's a set of tokens, a bunch of people come together and build something, and now it's kind of off and running. I'm looking forward to seeing that scale out to where it doesn't have to necessarily be just like a dozen people or so, you know, because like there's kind of a lot of people here, but there's kind of a smaller core team and groups of people working together, um, to make it happen. But I'd like to see a structure like this be able to elegantly scale out to like 100 people, and for us to actually have the ability to do that, like We have the technology, like the blockchain technology, to make it work, but now we need like the human technology, you know, the organizational tech between us to actually make that work, you know, the way we communicate back and forth, the way we do protocols, things like that. I am just super excited to see that working.
Awesome. DAOs, I'll make a note. Yeah, I think, I think we will likely have a DAO for, uh Web3 seems inevitable.
I'm super excited about the identity management part of it and like tracking people's progress over time, like, and being able to just the verification of like, this happened, right. Instead of somebody just, you know, maybe in the example of like resumes and stuff, right. It's like somebody just says they did something, right. But you have like tangible proof that is verified by some authority of some sort. That's like, yeah. You know, they are competent in this. That's just one realm, right? But that sort of thing is really cool. And I think that's super useful for a lot of stuff. I'd like to see the current, like, authentication system kind of reworked to have true identity and true holding of your own data.
Yeah, I think that kind of fits kind of with zero knowledge as well, because effectively, a One of these like POAPs, for example, is kind of a zero-knowledge in the sense that like something happened off-chain and this is just a representation of it on-chain, right? But you're kind of trusting whoever issued those to kind of with that information. Yeah.
Yeah, I think I'd be excited just to see like these NFTs that we like, you know, got throughout the game, just like used as a token gating for something, or like you said, for your next course or whatever it will be more in terms of feedback. I mean, The, the last part, the smart contract development part, was definitely my favorite part of the game. And so it will be, you know, fun to see how, how we can do more stuff around smart contracts. I think the whole staking thing and like providing liquidity, I think that's like a, a big learning opportunity for people. So it would be cool to, to see stuff go on, on there. And then like, as far as like the artist side, like NFTs, maybe we, you know, say like mint your own NFT and maybe we create this thing where the Web3 tokens that people, you know, got through the game, you know, we say, hey, you know, sell your NFT that you made for Web3 tokens. And that's some, you know, part of it. But yeah, just some, you know, ideas.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
I mean, I love the idea. Like one thing that I really enjoyed doing with the game was building, writing like really basic smart contracts, like the poll smart contract and with Schuster's help, the game one. To me, they're so simple. They're only dozens of lines of code or so. They're like CS, when you take computer science in high school or something, you're writing these very basic, like a GPA calculator, very basic apps. But because you have to wrap your head around smart contracts in order to do it, I think it makes it pretty fun and interesting. So if we could, like, it would be interesting to say, like, if you ever do those, like, you know, like those, like, online coding challenges, right? Where you have to, like, it kind of says, you know, with these inputs, these are the answers. And then you have to kind of create the function or fix the line of code that, like, fixes the program or something like that.
That's driven for sure. That would be a huge thing to do.
Yeah. Kind of a, yeah. Test-driven is a good, uh, WhatsApp. WhatsApp?
No. Oh, he needs to be on mute.
Oh, hi David.
I kicked David out. Okay, zero tolerance policy. But, uh, it would be interesting. Yeah, test-driven sort of development, right? Where it would be interesting if you could have a task that is like copy-paste a smart contract, you know, that you've deployed, like put the address into this, you know, and then we're going to verify if you did If it does what it, you know, or yeah.
Or like you were saying with the code challenges, write the tests first and then have them write the contract to make the test pass. Like have them in a hidden, you know, exactly like I can do that. One of those code fights kind of things.
Right.
You have like, and then some hidden tests, you know, that are extra credit or whatever.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. You could have it in the, well, I wonder if the whole thing is open source. I don't know. Like there might be. But yeah, there's probably a way to do it.
Yeah, there, there would be. But actually, Gio, there's one thing that you mentioned that I think is really like the hidden— as I've been watching teams, like what the real hidden power of this is, and that's that yield farming, that whole aspect and being able to create your own ecosystem of your own liquidity pools, your own staking pools, your own way to pull in. That's like the engine. That's the thing that as soon as I got into and realized that now my money is now making me money, and it's pulling it back in and I'm able to live off this. That's the thing that makes us super powerful. It's too small right now for you to really see it. Like, you know, for these doing— there's two to spare because there's a whole bunch of other problems, like the scaling problems with the AOs are going to hide it for a while. But that single aspect of just being able to create your own liquidity pools, your own engine, and your own economy, that's going to just wreck shit in the next few years. That is just so powerful to be able to—
I mean, I've I've thought about this a little bit. One idea, probably the next sort of real big project that I want to do in Web3 will be to— So I have like 5 million Gumroad shares that I've had since the beginning of the company, never sold one, and can't very easily because generally you have to go public or you have to go through this annoying process of tender offers and things. But I was thinking, I was thinking that I could potentially build a— to your point, Juicer, basically the engine is like the NASDAQ. It's like you have to work with these external parties, and they have to approve you. And I can't just go say, hey, I want to go take on Republic tomorrow. There's a long, drawn-out process in order to do that. But if I can build my own NASDAQ, which is effectively what Uniswap is in theory, then I could potentially just build like a Gumroad stock marketplace, uh, except instead of buying and selling NFTs like on OpenSea, all you're doing is buying and selling Gumroad shares. Um, and then I could potentially even charge like the fee— like I could make money not only on just selling the shares themselves, but then on every secondary I could potentially like build that into the, into the ecosystem too, right? Where like all of a sudden, like anytime there's a transfer, I get 1%. Or 0.3% or whatever it is. So yeah, and then all of a sudden that's its own revenue-generating thing. And it's very interesting because all of a sudden you're earning money off of money velocity, which is a very weird concept, at least for me, because I'm not— I guess if you work for the federal government, you're used to earning money off money velocity. But if I give someone a dollar and they give me a dollar back, I think of it as a zero, but actually if you make money on money velocity, you've made money twice, which is why OpenSea is such a crazy business is because they're effectively monetizing every single secondary transaction, which Amazon doesn't do. Amazon gets the first and then goodwill gets the second, but OpenSea gets every single one forever, as long as they keep their monopoly. So anyway, that's one idea I would love to to figure out. And as, as I experiment, I'll probably learn like, oh, I need to learn this. And that'll be part of the game that we decide to build next time.
Well, just wait for me to come out with the first version of Comrade token, because that's kind of what I'm building in for the last—
Yeah.
Comrade token is an awesome idea too. There's so many, there's so many fun, fun ideas to mess around. Like once, once, like once you know, like once you have deployed a smart contract and you can sort of do simple, like if else statements that I feel like it starts to open up. Yeah. The brain to like, hmm, what else could you, you know, like market on Polygon or a lottery on Polygon or like all of these businesses that already exist in real life. Like, can we rebuild them in, you know, for this ecosystem? And the nice thing is we have like a, hopefully by the end of the week we'll have a couple thousand people. So every project that you ship to this ecosystem will have traction basically immediately. Like at least in the sense of a few hundred, you know, people will probably mess around with it, which is pretty, pretty nice. I think most, most projects I assume get almost zero traction.
You were just mentioning like Gumroad in the context of fWeb3. Do you think there's some overlap? Are you kind of planning on having some overlap there?
Probably not. Probably, yeah. The way I think about it is like totally separate projects. Uh, Gumroad may do NFT or crypto stuff, but like, it's not really worth it, to be honest. Like the tech stack is like completely different. It's almost better if we just, if Gumroad did it, we would probably still spin out a new thing anyway, just a new brand for it. But yeah, currently like Web3, part of, part of the fun of it for me is that it's so different. Like there's not even a company structure, you know, like everyone gets paid in tokens. Like I, I just think like, It's crypto native in that way where it like took a totally different open source from the beginning. Like, so yeah, I think, I think of them as like developing totally, totally separately. And then this Gumroad stock thing, I don't know if it'll be part of Gumroad or if it'll be totally separate as well. Like I guess every project basically I decide like, is this a new thing or is this part of something already existing? But yeah, yeah, there is a new Gumroad project hopefully we'll announce in the next month or two. But that will be it.
Awesome.
Well, the game is done. It's March, March onwards. Um, yeah, tell your friends. Um, and hopefully we can get, uh, all the tokens and all the trophies allocated to people, and then we can start to, uh, in parallel to that, start to build Web3 V1, V2. Fab 3 V2. All right, see y'all, everybody. Later, later.
See you guys.
