Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Jenil. Jenil is a trailblazer in decentralized space.
He’s the founder and CEO of Coinwise, a platform that empowers creators and communities by enabling them to launch and manage their own social tokens and NFTs. His mission is to simplify and democratize the access to blockchain technology, allowing creators to build economies around their work, connect with their communities in a more meaningful way. With a strong vision for how Web3 can redefine ownership and community management, he’s been kind of at the forefront of helping creators tap into the potential of decentralized tech.
His work is not just about technology but also about creating and empowering these creators. So today, you know, we’ll deep dive into this journey of Coinwise, the evolution of social tokens, his journey, and this was a very interesting conversation as always. It is when I speak to a fellow builder who’s been around for a while and who is enamored by the technology and that is why, you know, he’s still at it.
So I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Jenil, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today.
How are you doing? I’m doing great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Pleasure is all mine.
So for our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself and your journey so far? Yeah, sure. So I’m the founder and CEO of Coinwise. I started my journey in 2016, where this was my second year of college where I studied software engineering and I was doing research under my professor, Dr. Yaghi Parkhan Thomas Austin.
I was a research assistant where we were interested in exploring problems and early in the Ethereum ecosystem. So I published three papers during my time in college, all on crypto. One of them was on security to management on the blockchain mining pool security.
And I also built a consensus algorithm from scratch that was published as part of the Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. After graduation, I worked as a software engineer at Zerochain, which is again a company that was building delegated proof of stake blockchain and they were trying to solve sort of AWS for crypto. And after working there, I joined, I essentially came back from the U.S. and started working on different projects, but eventually landed on Coinwise, which was a way for people to launch tokens, whether it was community tokens or individual tokens.
And we gave them a really simple way to do it. We went through this accelerator called Pioneer and ended up winning it and eventually we raised about 2.6, 2.7 million dollars in funding. And kind of today we are one of the leading places where people create and distribute these tokens through campaigns.
And we’ve worked with people like BASE, CoinDesk, The Block, some of the leading brands in crypto. So that’s kind of like a snapshot of my journey. Wonderful.
So, you know, you’ve been interested in the Web3 space since your college days because you mentioned that you’ve written a few papers there during your college time. So can you tell us a little about those publications? Yeah, sure. So we started with like exploring like Stack and Ethereum.
Like that was the original, you know, plan on understanding like how we can figure out a way to have some kind of a distributed storage. So I spent a lot of time in understanding like how we can have like a very powerful mechanism for storing data across different nodes. And what we ended up building is this sort of challenge where you can store data in different nodes on a molecule tree and you can randomly ask these nodes to sort of prove that they actually own it and the contents of it through a molecule proof, which is like a really essentially a very effective way to like generate and store data and reward people for storing data.
And that was like the first like approach at decentralized storage. And it was kind of inspired from the original Filecoin paper, but we wanted to sort of eliminate any kind of DDoS attacks. So that was like my sort of experience in building that research paper.
In the consensus algorithm, I studied the Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. Again, anyone who sort of starts their journey in crypto, they start with Byzantine fault tolerance. And for those who don’t know, I highly recommend you check it out.
But that’s sort of the origination of understanding what a blockchain or what is all about or security is all about and why we need these consensus algorithms. So that’s kind of where we started. And we added basically a threshold based consensus mechanism where we add a threshold purely for sort of preventing any kind of like 51% attacks on the network while still being able to prove that you know, you are sort of like submitting any kind of stake and we can establish a consensus based on it.
So that was sort of my another paper that we did. And another one was the third one was on data management, which is how can we sort of make the data so lightweight that we can we can store it on chain and on these different devices locally. And that was, again, an interesting challenge.
But yeah, that was kind of my early work. This is awesome. I think, you know, you mentioned the West Indian problem.
I think that is very basic and foundational. If somebody really wants to understand the importance of why decentralized technology is important, and why it’s going to be relevant, even say, you know, in the next era of tech, they need to sort of start from there. I would love to actually link up your papers as well in the podcast description once we do put the episode live.
So I’ll ask you for those so that people can go through it. And I think it general.com, you can find all of them there. Awesome.
Awesome. I’m sure to link it up. I think it’s very refreshing to talk to founders who get the foundation right and who are actually working very closely with the tech.
They understand the importance and they’re not just building for the sake of building in this space. So kudos to you. Now, you know, a little bit more about Coinwise.
Can you tell me, say, a user journey or somebody who perhaps wants to potentially utilize your platform? How can they go about it? If you could give us the flow, I think that would be very insightful for others. Yeah. So Coinwise can be used by anyone with a wallet.
You can go ahead and you can connect your wallet and you can create a token or you can use your existing any kind of token that you have to distribute it to people. You can distribute it to people with like certain requirements. Those requirements can be, you know, either social ones you can set, say, hey, maybe you follow me on X or if you follow me on Forecaster, I will reward you with 100 tokens.
You can set these campaigns up for essentially just a gas fee, which is quite small. So anyone with a wallet can get started with any kind of tokens they have in their wallet. They can start distributing it by creating this page with requirements that if people sort of meet these sort of goals that you have, maybe it’s social goals or maybe it is goals that they help you, you know, mint your work or buy your NFT or something like that.
We support any kind of essentially requirements that you can think of. I think we have about 200, 250 plus possibilities that you can explore. You can set it up like almost within like two minutes.
And that is that is sort of why a lot of people use it is because it’s so simple and quick to get access and start using it. So you can go to Coinwise.co and just connect your wallet and get started right away. So this would be more useful for obviously for creators, for digital artists, as well as for startups.
Yeah, this would be so a lot of projects use it to distribute maybe their marketing budget or maybe their own protocol token. And they sort of use it as a growth sort of boost growth solution where if there’s certain metrics that they want to get to, maybe they want more people to sign up. They set the requirement to go sign up on our platform and get a reward.
These kinds of reward systems are otherwise very complicated and might require some time to set up. But we’ve made it so no code and easy to set up that people just launch these sort of campaigns as a way to like promote some kind of some sort of work or maybe some kind of growth metric that they’re looking for. Maybe creators launch these campaigns for people who hold their token for 30 days or maybe they mint their artwork on Zora or these kinds of sort of different goals that individuals have, projects have that they can accomplish with these incentives or distributions.
And that’s kind of what they use it for. Okay, so how is your platform different, say, from like a Zilly or a Gleek? So Zilly and a lot of these platforms are very targeted to like a large set of maybe bots or the user experience is quite horrible, in my opinion. And I would obviously come from like a bias sense here.
We often like are like compared to a lot of these questing platforms. But what most people forget is most end users are looking for a great platform experience and they’re looking for valuable reward. If there’s like some kind of end of farming happening or like the experience is quite poor, it is almost a recipe for failure in that sense.
And we tried like really hard in making sure that the quality of users coming to our platform is high by setting these requirements, by setting certain design like on protocol level, as well as giving like maybe an unmatched like platform experience that isn’t available. And it kind of speaks, you know, like the kind of quality of projects we’ve partnered with. A lot of these projects are, again, looking for quality users to onboard and Zilly and a lot of these other like sort of low level questing platforms kind of give you the numbers, but it’s just a very, very, very like farmed like marketplace of like end of farmers.
And that’s often the users you shouldn’t be looking for. So you’re giving the user an easy experience of getting on board, say into Web3 and exploring these newer tools and these newer campaigns. And for the businesses themselves, you are giving them perhaps users that are not bots and they are high level users would actually end up using their product.
Absolutely. So now that we’ve understood what can you can you tell me a little about who are your who is your target audience? Are you a more B2B facing platform or B2C? So, yeah, we at this point are like mostly I would say B2C. We sort of like want to give ourselves like, you know, focus on like essentially building a strong network of users through different kinds of experiences.
So a lot of these campaigns that are launched, we also like curate them. We launch them ourselves. We put in a lot of effort into like, you know, thinking about what it should look like, because ultimately it is like it is about the end network of users that use your platform that differentiate like coinwise from some of the other like platforms you named earlier.
And that makes all the difference. So we are B2C. We are actually in the process of launching and launching an agent on top of this and some kind of a different approach that people haven’t seen yet.
And yeah, we are like focused highly on like figuring out what group of users are like the highest value, highest active users on certain blockchains. We research into these user groups and make sure like strategies on how to attract them, which kind of gives us an edge over other people. Okay, so because we’ve talked a little about the evolution of the platform and we’ll get to it in a minute.
Can you tell me about the most perhaps rewarding aspect of building coinwise and how has it evolved since its inception, you know, in 2020? Yeah, so we initially started with this idea of like social tokens and social tokens was this phenomena where a lot of social coins were created for people, for communities like DAOs and things like that. We eventually evolved into like more general purpose tokens where they could stand for multiple things. And that was, again, like, again, not any of our competitors like provided.
So our focus was a lot on these tokens. We evolved into like more, you know, project-based tokens and tokens that had some utility. So we ended up sort of building this infrastructure around it where like we could launch campaigns, we could have like a filter on what tokens were valuable, what were not.
We could have warnings, we could have like safety flags, all these kinds of things. So it has evolved quite a bit. Our strategies also evolved, you know, like back in the day in 2021, like some of the ecosystems that were popular then aren’t any more popular like today.
And today we have like new ecosystems and new L2s like base and what have you that attract a lot of like active users today on chain. And you can look at some of these metrics and you can see how those like have changed over the last two, three years. So we’ve also had to change with all of those metrics because, you know, that’s how we kind of had to keep evolving.
Even some of the features we entirely deleted because they were no longer relevant. So there were all these changes over time. Yeah.
Yeah. I think, you know, because the space is so deeply dynamic and things, the user experience, the tech, the kind of expectation, I think, of the user as well changes. So you would have to be, I would imagine you would have to be very dynamic and all of these years, like four years, three, four years in crypto is a long time.
What are, you know, I think you’ve kind of touched upon the challenges that, you know, you faced by building it that, you know, you have to be a little bit on your toes at the edge of your seat to make sure that you are keeping the platform updated in a way that the user still finds it very relevant. But what kind of challenges did you face transitioning, say, these creators from traditional platforms to decentralized ones? Like, was there any resistance there? How did you go about creating a community around these tokens around your platform? Yeah, we’ve been intentional from day one of like maybe working with more crypto native people. I mean, I’ve always said that the mainstream getting to crypto might take might take a long time and it might actually even like not not happen as as in a great way, as most people think it’s actually the existing like obsessive people that there are in crypto and in DeFi and all these ecosystems, they themselves have multiple identities and they might be the first billion users of crypto.
All the other like remaining mainstream that, you know, a lot of these ecosystems are onboarding. This might take some time and it is it will remain somewhat volatile and kind of like a different market. So we’ve we’ve intentionally like targeted highly crypto native users and understood what their problems are.
We spent a lot of time in understanding their workflows, understanding what their problems were and building products for them. And that was kind of like the differentiator, which was we had like a pulse on what the user problems were. Most founders, most companies don’t have that.
And we spent a lot of time talking to these users and building something, you know, eventually like they’ll just tell you what they want and understanding when to listen, when to do that. That was that was like an opinionated decision we took. So we’ve always marketed and kind of build something for crypto native people.
And that has been like highly rewarding for us. Right. Yeah, I think that is a good approach to take rather than trying to change the diet.
You know, you go for the folks who are already perhaps entrenched in the space who understand it, who are already sold on the idea. I think that’s a good strategy to have a lot of builders get stuck, you know, in that rut, perhaps where they want to change the user behavior. And that happens slowly.
It cannot happen overnight. That’s right. So when, you know, you mentioned that, you know, you kind of targeted these crypto natives, but how did you go about doing that? What is your secret sauce when it comes to marketing and what kind of support can the creators and the startups who are utilizing your platform? What is the kind of support that you provide them? I mean, that was like a lot of work that undertook, but like maybe the generalized sort of macro overview perhaps.
Yeah, macro overview of this, I would say is like we sort of categorized these sort of user groups. I mean, first and foremost, we had to like define who the user is. And that itself is like for most people like underestimate this, but understanding exactly who the user is in a very specific way, not vaguely is itself a task.
But once you understand that, like categorizing them into like different groups of like, you know, where they are, like where they tend to operate, maybe, you know, what their sentiment is, we understood like, this is how we can reach them. And once we are able to do that, then we could like sort of have a more targeted strategic approach on what the marketing should be, what the strategy, who should we partner with specifically to capture these users. Yeah, so that was maybe the early approach, but maybe like a more macro like strategy here that could be like, you know, maybe your secret sauce or maybe not depending on your platform is you could figure out maybe in a specific category that this type of users are like operating.
And if you can test your platform on maybe three to four of these like user groups, the assumption is that if all the other user groups have a similar sort of like characteristics, it would also work on all of those user groups. So the testing that we did was like, you know, the testing really matters. But that’s how we sort of understood that if it works on like these three or four like sort of users in this particular user group, it should work on all other users in this user group.
And that’s how we could get like some early feedback and validation on like whether we were solving like real problem or not. So that’s how we did it like early on is understanding exactly who the user is defining them into groups, understanding how to like contact or partner with relevant projects, and then testing it rigorously on these user groups. And, you know, then sort of mapping it out that, you know, how this scales over time with within that user group.
Right. I think that is very important because, you know, you mentioned that interactively user groups actually inform the entrepreneur whether their vision aligns with the user’s problem. Because a lot of solutions are built and you know that they are not the user mind, you know, it is okay to build for a problem that the user is facing, but they don’t perhaps consciously recognize it.
But it is still important to get like the feedback to see if it is making sense at all to the potential user that you’re targeting. Yeah, absolutely. Can you tell me a little about the team behind Coinbase? So we’re a very small team.
I again, I don’t believe in big teams at all. They’re a team of six to seven people. Everybody here is like either from like, I think two or three of them are from a crypto background.
All else are like maybe web2 background. We actually look for very high agency, smart people like across a lot of dimensions that we interview people on. But yeah, the ideal team scenario here is like extremely talented A-plus people who can solve really hard problems, really have a good track record.
Web3 experience is not necessary. If you find like really like, you know, smart people who are eager to learn, they will eventually pick it up. It’s not that difficult, but having the fundamentals right is important.
So if their fundamental skill is really high, you know, the conceptual like idea of crypto or web3 can be learned, you know, over a short period of time. So we’ve assembled like this team of really smart people who are very high bias on action and like come from different backgrounds. So they don’t have like a, they come from like maybe like a fresh slate.
So I think that really helps. And they do have like a strong grasp on web3 now. So yeah, we have a pretty small team.
I think that’s a good thing. So you know, having a like really huge team, especially when you’re in the initial stages of your startup can be a double edged sword. And having a small team is good.
And especially this particular baseline that you have that we’re getting in high agency folks, they don’t necessarily have to come from web3. But you know, like you said, they can be familiarized with the ideas enshrined in the web3 source and you know, they can go for it. So that is wonderful to hear as well.
Now, can you shed light on, you know, you mentioned that you guys are integrating AI in some way. Can you tell us a little about that? Yeah, we’re essentially like seeing AI agent as like, as like two things. It is like a significant UX improvement.
And it is also maybe easing up some of the decisions that the user has to take and can take those decisions quickly in a more predictable way. So we’re incorporating that into Coinwise. So some of the friction points of users today on creating tokens, creating these campaigns, who to target, all of those decisions and the experience of using it can be much, much easier.
So that’s something we’re aiming to launch in January. Wonderful. I think it’s great to hear you guys are utilizing AI to improve the process.
That is very important. So I look forward to the launch in January. You kind of obviously mentioned that that that would be like perhaps the new milestone for you guys.
But is there any other milestones you guys are looking forward to for the platform? Yeah, we’re actually building like a like a new sort of platform, which is an SDK for building this AI that we’re building. So what we’re building on Coinwise is like maybe one aspect of the larger AI algorithm that we’re building in-house to run this not just on Coinwise, but other platforms. So that’s something that I’m excited to launch next year.
Awesome. Awesome. I think that is again, that’s great.
You’re creating a cohesive ecosystem around the platform. So that kind of increases the ways in which you can scale it. Wonderful.
How do you see Web3 fundamentally transforming the creator economy? Yeah, I think it creates multiple ways. One is complete ownership of their content, which is basically, I would say the answer is more straightforward than it is complicated, which is like if you get deplatformed or get suspended on Twitch or YouTube or what have you, that doesn’t quite happen on a blockchain. And that sort of ownership of content is really important.
Like you, you basically like if you get suspended, you lose all your subscribers, followers, but you also lose your content. And that sort of is, it’s like something you built over two, three years or like a long period of time, and then you instantly don’t have access to it. That’s like a single point of failure that is not right.
In my opinion, like people use these, creators use these like platforms as distribution channels, but like little do they know that that can be taken away in like a snap. And that’s something that is exciting. So ownership is one, again, like payments is a huge one, which is you can accept payments across the globe. So if you have like your community or subscribers all across the world, payments is like really, really fast and smooth. We’ve seen like micro payments happening on YouTube, but like you not only have micro payments, but you can also do micro trades and different ways of interacting with the creator in a financial sense than if they have a token than just like sending them payments.
So I think these relationships with creator and their audience are improving a lot. And it is very fitting to me that crypto has financial use cases. It has use cases around ownership.
It has, you know, these different mechanisms where creators can personalize what kind of access they give to their fans. And all those things are like really easily enabled by Web3. And that’s something I’m excited for it is in this economy.
Right. I think it completely, truly democratizes the process as well as for the creators. I think there is a gap right now.
They don’t truly understand how can they, how they can be perhaps de-platformed by decentralized entities and how decentralized tech is actually empowering them. But obviously, platforms like yours would create more awareness around this issue and perhaps get more creators to join the Web3 family. That’s awesome.
Yeah, that’s kind of like how I see it. And I think like AI will inevitably merge here, making these processes of creation easier. And it will make the sort of financial and access management like really, really simple.
So we’re already seeing like AI and crypto like sort of overlap very, very much so now. But it will happen even more so once we see a lot of AI agents happening. Great.
So social tokens and NFTs again are gaining traction. So are meme coins. And we’ll talk about meme coins in one minute.
But I would love to know a little more about, you must have seen a lot of use cases, obviously, on Coinbase. But can you name like two or three very compelling use cases that you have seen so far on the platform? I think generally speaking, what we have seen is tokens represent markets. Each token is a market once it does have some kind of value.
And the market can be for entertainment purposes only, or it could be a market for attention or belief on something. Right. So earlier, we had projects that had tokens and you basically bought a token for a project if you were optimistic about it and had like a reasonable idea that it will succeed and its value will go up in the future.
That kind of evolved where instead of projects, then people like you could do the same thing for people, you could do the same thing for communities, which kind of, again, evolved into now you could do the same thing for media, which is meme coins and all kinds of content. Essentially anything where there can be a public belief or opinion on how the sentiment or attention is going to change over time and how what that virality is going to look like for every single project, person, community or content. I is creating these like media or information markets where it just makes it very explicit on how the attention of people is going up and down over time.
And it just makes it hyper financialized. And people can participate in these markets if they think that something is going to get more attention than the other. And this could be purely entertainment.
It doesn’t always have any utility. But that’s how I’m seeing is like market creation is the ultimate, like, you know, use case. That is absolutely true.
And that kind of brings me to meme coins. What is your take on these meme coins? Your personal opinion, perhaps, and how do you see this having an impact on the Web3 ecosystem as a whole? Yeah, so meme coins are essentially like you could you could think of them as purely like, you know, hyper viral content where you’re betting on its entertainment value and virality. And that’s just what it is.
It doesn’t have any utility whatsoever. It’s purely public sentiment. It’s purely like, you know, how long it’s going to stay relevant.
And as long as it does, as long as the trajectory of that relevance is going up or down, the market will continue to exist. And it’s really short term because everything on the Internet has a fame of 15 minutes, as they say. So it’s really short term markets that are created around entertainment or media that people can participate in and quickly get out.
And there’s going to be many, many more markets created like this. And that’s just how I see it. Like you mentioned it with any token, it automatically, you know, create a market.
It exists because there is a certain demand there. And yeah, I think that just becomes like though that that is the truth. You know, you can like it or you can hate it, but it is there and there is a demand for it.
So there is obviously, you know, there are many ways in which we can look at community engagement and how to sort of build the community, because the backbone of Web3 projects are communities, are these communities that are created by entrepreneurs, by these creators. And that becomes the very foundation. So there are arguments where, you know, people would say that, OK, financial incentives are perhaps not the best way of going about creating a true community or a really vibrant community.
What is your take on this particular argument that people have? Yeah, it’s true. Like you always have a token reward like much, much later. Once you’ve found a like, you know, community, maybe you solve a problem for people.
People like it’s just you think about yourself, like you maybe interact or connect with people on an emotional level. If they are like, you know, contributing to you in some way, maybe they are like, you know, you are in a relationship with them, maybe you’re friends with them. Maybe your values are the same.
There’s there’s different things why someone would connect to someone. Maybe you’re following a creator because you like what they’re providing to you and you want to subscribe to it. People never like invest in anyone because they give them money for it.
So if you if you sort of give somebody money, they would just it’s kind of like a job. It doesn’t actually bring any sense of connection. And that’s just how community is.
Community is formed naturally when you either solve a problem for them or you can connect with them in some way or some mission, some values, or maybe some some product or project that you’ve built that everybody uses and they really love it. And eventually, once you know you have like a really strong community or in a startup sense, have product market fit, then you can introduce a token and have these rewards for people that kind of stuck around. And that’s how I see is like the right way to do it.
I think that is very, very important. If your community is just going to be relying on the financial incentives and no, there is no common ground between the founder’s vision as well as the, you know, the folks who are a part of that community. If there’s no alignment there, then it’s a very short term game that you’re playing.
Exactly. Yeah. If you’re going to be really building for the long term, and if you’re building a sustainable business, then those values that are enshrined in your product need to align with the users or the potential users in your community.
The financial incentives are only going to take you so far. Yeah, that’s true. It’s just financial incentives give you attention and yeah, you want it from the right people.
Yeah, absolutely. So now let’s talk a little about, you know, how Coinvice is making web-free tools perhaps more accessible for creators with limited technical knowledge. Can you shed some light on that? I generally think technical knowledge is like getting less and less as a requirement.
Like with AI and all kinds of information that’s available online, people are picking up really quickly on how to get up to speed with web 3 and how to build them, you know, using AI to like ship software and apps really quickly. And I just think like, if you just follow this trend and this trajectory of improvement, like more people will just, the technical requirement will just eventually evaporate. I think this is true.
And as the tech is growing, especially with the advent of AI, I think that has changed considerably. What are the kind of trends that you foresee shaping the web-free economy, creator economy specifically in the next 3 to 5 years? Yeah, like I wrote about this earlier about this is like one of them is very clear, which is like the UX is significantly improving of like, you know, interacting with different cross-chain protocols. And overall, the experience looks a lot like using the web 2 app, even better than the web 2 app.
So you can see that the trajectory is sort of going in the direction of making crypto or web 3 entirely invisible. And, you know, like DeFi or finance will almost be baked into every product, like every account will have a balance. And, you know, we’re sort of going in this direction where the lines between DeFi and social and gaming is like blurring out.
People are having like sort of pseudo anonymous identities, not just their own main identity. All of these things have been happening for four or five years. We can already see that it’s going to happen even more in the future.
And there’s going to be different structures that enable payment, not just one. You can see Stripe introducing stable coin payments. There’s all these ways where crypto is evolving, evolving to be hyper degenerate, hyper easy to use, you know, like not just onboarding the mainstream, but making the existing audience really, really even more powerful with like AI agents and all sorts of things.
And on the other hand, we have clear regulations and hopefully, you know, better environment for new companies to form, new ownership structures to form, you know, in the AI version of this, like code generation or building software is getting easier, creating new images or content, any kind of AI generation is getting much, much smarter. So if you sort of see all of this together, like I think directionally, that’s where crypto is moving in the next five years. I think that’s fairly insightful.
I mean, it’s very cruel. I think a lot of folks who are in the ecosystem, they have similar thoughts, but obviously, we have to wait and watch. You know, this is something that has come out of my own personal curiosity and after listening to your answers, but how do you think social tokens foster like a deeper connection between creators and communities as compared to traditional fan engagement tools? Can you shed some light on that? And can you talk a little about what your take is there? Yeah, I think like social tokens in general, like were on the rise in 2021, where, you know, people sort of created them to like have other like followers or people in their lives to like invest in them and kind of invest in their future success.
I think that trend sort of goes on and off. Like from what I’ve seen, like there was Bitcloud, then there was FriendTech, there were all these sort of ways where social tokens were created. Social tokens is like a very broad term.
Again, it could be for communities, it could also be for content. And content is something we’ve seen a lot of like, a lot of like activity happening this year. I just think like tokens itself are a way of making like these financial, I guess, like relationships between multiple people more explicit, where you could have ownership in each other’s lives, you could have ownership in each other’s projects, you could have ownership in the creation.
So if I created some content, you could maybe have ownership in its success, everything becomes very explicit and financialized. And that’s just what it is. Maybe it’s debatable whether it should be a token or not.
And that’s like always an ongoing debate. But yeah, parasocial relationships are on the rise. So I would say like, token creation is likely going to increase.
If you look at like the, I don’t know if you read any of these like research reports that go out every year, but I think the highest amount of tokens were created in both Solana and Base ecosystem this year. So it seems that it’s going there. Yeah, yeah, that is true.
I think Base and Solana has seen quite a surge in especially last two quarters of this year. So that has changed. And it’s good to see that.
Do you think that decentralized platforms can coexist with the Web2 platforms doing something similar in terms of fan engagement? Or do you feel that Web3 will permeate and replace them or at least have a component of Web3 as a part of those Web2 platforms in the coming years? Yeah, I think like the lines will blur between them. So it might not be coexisting. It might be that the Web2 platforms itself might adopt maybe crypto payments or different like mechanisms in which Web3 is incorporated into their infrastructure.
And it would be extremely competitive. I just see for the end user, like there’s a saying, right? Like we learned this like very early on. I learned this in college, which is you never sell the technology, you sell what you get out of it.
And it’s just, people love to talk about Web2, Web3, this technology and all this sort of jargon. But like the end user does not care. They care what benefits they’re getting out of it.
And it’s just going to be very competitive. It’s going to be a choice where Web3 apps are going to be much, much more powerful. Web2 apps are going to incorporate Web3 and it’s just going to be highly, highly competitive environment.
Yeah, I think what you said is very wonderful that you never really sell the technology, you sell what users will derive from it. It’s very similar to, you don’t really sell the features, but you sell the value that you’re creating as a product. So yeah, that is very insightful.
Now, you know, let’s zoom out a little bit and perhaps talk a little about the kind of advice you would want to perhaps give creators who are hesitant to explore Web3. Yeah, like the general thing I always say is like the speed of the crypto itself as an industry is highly, like it’s going through a lot of innovation. It’s moving very quickly.
And when that happens, like things change very quickly, which means that what you’re building today might not be relevant in some time because things are changing so, so quickly. So I would say like the best way is one is understanding the fundamentals. There’s lots of resources online.
You can watch YouTube videos also. Second is experimenting. So build something because without building it, you won’t have an idea how this thing works.
And try really like to find ways to experiment over and over again. The more you experiment, the more you realize what works, what doesn’t work, maybe what you need to work on, areas of strength or weakness. And generally that’s how you’ll figure out like, you know, which areas you can solve problems and build products out of and startups out of.
You can also be a user, like you can use different crypto apps. And that’s another way to understand where the infrastructure or technology needs improvement. And maybe you can build that.
But again, building things and like, you know, really quickly experimenting and testing it is the best way to understand and get a pulse on what’s happening. So I would say those are like some general like things that anyone can do. Yeah, just try it out.
Give it a shot. Like, what do you have to lose? Yeah, you know, hesitant. Exactly.
Might open up some new avenues for you that you know, might not, you might not have really even thought about. So I think that is good advice to give creators. What kind of influenced your entrepreneurial journey the most? And what are like the top lessons that you’ve learned so far? I think like, I always wanted to solve really difficult problems and build, enjoyed building things.
In college, I started this organization called Network for Environment and Energy Development, where we built like, it was like a nonprofit student organization I led, where we built like random apps and projects that was fun to us. We built like a piece of electric tile. And I also like built like a rocket from scratch that went almost up to 100,000 feet, which broke the Guinness Book of World Record.
And all those things that were interesting to me, I was sort of was naturally motivated around these things. So yeah, that like, I don’t know, maybe it was just me. Like, I guess like, I will say one thing around this, which is people who you surround yourself with, they have a great influence in what you want to do.
And I naturally always surrounded myself with like very smart, highly ambitious people. You know, that that kind of motivated me a lot. I was fortunate that I could spend a lot of time with really smart people, and I could learn from them.
And that was motivating. So a lot of people like discourage or maybe ignore it as their friends or who they surround themselves with, like just maybe average, above average people, maybe not even that. And that tends to have a lot of influence on what you do.
Maybe you stop growing or you push yourself. So that’s the one thing I would say is choose very wisely who your friends are, who you surround yourself with. Yeah, like I would say like, some of the lessons I’ve learned, like one of the lessons I’ve learned is consumer startups have a much shorter lifespan than it did before.
Like maybe the lifespan of a startup before was like maybe six, seven years. I think it’s now down to maybe less than a year. And it’s starting to look a lot like maybe very quick software drops, at least on the consumer side.
If you’re building a protocol, that’s a different thing. But consumer startup lifespan has decreased quite a lot. I think like just general operating lessons I’ve learned is solving a very specific problem, talking to users, really listening to them and understanding ways of how to execute and how to package it because ultimately packaging and execution makes all the difference.
And all these sort of little, little things I’ve learned over time of what not to do and how to build and how to focus on, how to get revenue, all these things that typically if I knew on day one, it would serve me really well. But I’m glad that I learned throughout the process and I can use it today. So yeah.
Wonderful. I think you had quite a track record of somebody who’s been trying to solve problems. And I think that kind of shows a certain sense of perseverance, a certain sense of curiosity that I think is definitely essential for the entrepreneurial journey.
I just saw the time. I think we are almost out of time, but I will ask you two more questions before we wrap this up. I would love to know what are the kind of trends that you would bet on in the Web3 space or what are some exciting trends that you are going to be able to serve well in the test design? I think the general trend I’d say is I would bet on is the scope of market creation across different assets is going to increase exponentially.
What I always say is there’s going to be an abundance of markets and there’s nearly not enough markets for users to participate in. This applies across deep end, across energy, across all these sort of different ways we can represent assets on chain. And that’s going to be really fascinating to see.
Yeah, that is true. That is something that I think will stand the test time. So this has been a great conversation.
And thank you so much for making the time to speak to me. But I’ll be remiss if I don’t ask you this one question that I ask everybody who comes on the show. You are somebody who was very organically drawn to decentralized tech and you went into the foundations, you learned, you wrote about it.
But if there is somebody who’s still dealing with that dilemma of whether they should be building in Web3 or these new age technologies at all, what would be your suggestions to them so that they can truly start living on blockchain? I would say maybe like, I think like I’ll give like a controversial thing. I would say like spend a lot of time, like put in like maybe two, three dollars and spend a lot of time just trying different apps, connect your wallet and set up your wallet and fund it with a little bit and just experiment with it. Even if like put something that you’re willing to use, maybe four or five dollars and try out different apps.
I learned a lot by just being a consumer and using these apps and understanding how they built it this well. So that’s what I would do. My job initially when we were launching these campaigns was to try out these platforms.
And I think at the time I tried out like 100, 150 platforms just because we were doing this research and I got to learn a lot from that. If you’re just starting out, there’s a good website where I took a course on blockchain and cryptocurrencies in college that is open source, that is available and you can get all the slides from all the lectures available online, which is another great way to get your fundamentals right. And maybe I can share that to you later, but that’s also a good way to sort of get started.
Sure, please do share the link with us so that we can take a look at it and we can link it up for our listeners. So thank you so much once again for taking out the time to speak to me today. Any parting words before we wrap this up? Yeah, no, I really appreciate you having me on.
You can reach me at 0xgeneral on x and if you have any questions, any way I can help, please feel free to reach out. Wonderful. I’ll link that up as well in the description.
Thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. Awesome. Thank you.