Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Sid. He is the CTO and co-founder of Roll.
They are creating the infrastructure layer for social tokens. They are doing some very exciting things in the social fi space and I think this was a very interesting conversation, very insightful for perhaps federal builders who are building in the gamify and social fi space. So I can’t wait for you guys to hear this.
Let’s deep dive right in. Sid, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? Yeah, thanks for having me.
Always glad to speak with other builders in the space. Yes, this is going to be an interesting conversation. So can you tell us a little about your journey so far and how you got into Web3? Yeah, so my journey started a while ago.
So the first thing I did in the space was actually kind of on like a research and journalism role. So this was back in like 2013, 2014, pre-Ethereum days when you know Bitcoin was the dominant narrative. But then kind of, yeah, moved across from there.
I was working at, you know, Coindesk that you might be familiar with, you know, a few other publications as well. And then, yeah, I got together with my co-founder Bradley and we really started to hone in on the idea of having these distributed digital assets for communities. And then we started to roll with that thesis.
You know, we supported many communities. We’ve minted over, you know, 500 tokens for many different communities on Ethereum. And one of the big pain points, like with many other long tail of digital asset type of products that people were building was like just pain points around like gas fees and scalability and things.
And so, yeah, like for about the last year or so, we’ve really been focusing on a higher throughput layer two solution for doing more like mass social and social applications. Okay, that’s very interesting, because I think that is very required, especially for, you know, any kind of a social application, you need a higher throughput because users come in, you know, expecting the kind of experience they have in Web2 and for Web3, you know, the experience should be similar. Otherwise, they get bored very quickly and they wouldn’t want to like stay put and keep experimenting with the technology.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. You know, we started off in that route. In fact, one of our first creators were like very Web2 focused creators.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to retain them for too long because of some of these issues that you talked about. And this was also, you know, like 2019 or so when the general infrastructure and the space was not as mature as it is even today. And the other thing is just around like just gas fees being very unpredictable.
I remember we had like minted tokens for over a thousand dollars during the last peak of the market. And that’s obviously like very unsustainable, both from our perspective as well as from the creators and the users perspective. So definitely something that we really needed.
Right. Yes, I would imagine. So, you know, as from my research, I can see that, you know, you’re working on form as well as role.
So are these two connected in some way? Because I can see that obviously they are, you know, both social focused. So can you tell me the little connection between them? And then perhaps we can talk in a little detail about both of them individually as well. Yeah, absolutely.
So when we started, like again, we were generally always were close to building on Ethereum. So like we built role on Ethereum. So the idea with role was communities can create their own social tokens and then they get to capture a lot of the value that they generally generate instead of the value flowing to the underlying social platforms, which is generally what happens with the current like traditional Web2 social space.
And yeah, like with some of the issues that we generally like came about, we just wanted to make sure that there’s better ways to engage and interact with those communities, like again, like in a Web3 native way. And so we started building form as the layer two on Ethereum and just the general social and social space itself has evolved significantly. So I feel like we started role in like 2019, it was a very traditional DAO like structure with, you know, the fixed token supply.
You can like vest your token supply. We would use liquidity pools on Uniswap, like Uniswap V2 mostly and yeah, like some other tools in the space. But I think the more recent innovations that I would say, which instead of putting like two sided liquidity on a Uniswap, you generally have like one sided bonding curves that we’re seeing with some applications.
And so like what form really does is just provide all of these tools for builders and developers. So the people who are building the next roles will also migrate over to form, but also like people who are building these other social layer, like technologies here, will be able to use those underlying smart contracts, use those underlying frameworks that we have built to then be able to innovate and iterate faster at the consumer level. Instead of having to redo, let’s say like smart contracts and audit them for three minutes.
Okay, wonderful. So this provides like an additional mechanism and infrastructure, basically as helping hand perhaps for folks who are trying to build on the social side of things. So can you tell me now a little individually about both of these projects? Let’s talk a little about role first, and then we can talk about form.
If you had to explain it to a lay person, what both of these platforms do, obviously one is an L2. So how would you go about explaining it with the TOSP? So role is just a way for communities to issue their tokens. And the way we have seen that evolve over time is that you have different economic models for the tokens.
So role is very flexible in the sense that you are able to issue your own supply, you can have like a quote-unquote agent or a manager, have their share vest. We have like platform level support and like referral fees and all of that kind of things. What we didn’t have though, at least initially, was the idea of having liquidity for the tokens on day one.
So the liquidity side was always separate. So just to give you some stats, for example, I think around 15% of the tokens that we should unroll out of 550 plus have a liquidity pool on Uniswap. With some of the newer economic models that we’re building, so these come with inbuilt liquidity.
And that’s something that generally converges with a broader trend in the space about having markets for everything. So you’re seeing this generally with many other areas as well. So like sports, for example, sports betting is popular.
So people just want to belong to a community in a specific way. And markets is just like one way to do that. And it’s our job to provide for that.
And so like with some of these newer models, what you can do is essentially have the ability to price the tokens from day one. So meaning like from when it is issued. There’s different models like what you can do after.
So if a token does become successful, you can migrate the liquidity either to a DEX or to like more centralized exchange as well. One issue that SocialFi in general has faced is that it doesn’t interoperate well with other protocols. So we just should say that all of your liquidity essentially gets locked in on the bonding curve.
Right. And so like we have mechanisms that actually convert your what you might call like a SocialFi token into like a traditional ERC20. And then that just interoperates much better with the rest of the ecosystem in the space.
So we have all of these like tools and primitives already built on form, which is like layer two. And then, you know, we’re hoping that, you know, we’ll get many more like applications than just the first party application. So we can then use these primitives to build like much more innovative social protocols.
Excellent. So, you know, from what I understand, obviously, this is a platform that, you know, is enabling individuals and communities to sort of create a social token on the infrastructure that you guys have built. How would you say this is different as against say a Pump.Fun? There’s many differences generally.
First of all, like Pump.Fun is built on Solana. We’re generally Ethereum based. There’s also like fundamental, like philosophical differences in terms of like how we build that.
Right. So Pump.Fun has like one very specific model that’s also like massively successful. So I do have a lot of respect for that team in terms of like how the token evolved.
So, for example, like you have like a max supply of tokens. That wasn’t the case, for example, like with, you know, some other products like Frentech, for example, like when, you know, they’re a pretty successful product and launch as well. And then that sometimes does not play as well with certain types of like DAO structures.
And that doesn’t play well sometimes with many creators who sometimes want a token that essentially want to remove the idea of speculation from day one. That’s not something that Pump.Fun can deliver. There’s many reasons for doing that.
Right. It’s almost like, you know, imagine if you from the first day you found the company. I think that does drive people a little crazy.
And, you know, you generally want to focus on the long term here. So like some creators in some communities do prefer that. So just focus on distribution initially, for example, as opposed to markets and speculation.
So generally, like our philosophy is that we want to let the builders and users and creators try to pick the aspects of these token models that best suit their application. Okay. This is very, very interesting.
I think because Socialify, there’s a lot of innovation that is happening in Socialify at the moment. Is there any particular milestone that, you know, you guys are really excited about for form or for role? What is like the next big thing? Yeah, I think, you know, as an L2, it becomes different and interesting. You know, like everyone wants to, you know, for at least like a decade now that people have been talking about like mass adoption, you know, is it coming from the gaming side? Is it coming from the social side, et cetera? Obviously, like we have picked a lane.
So we do think general mass adoption will come from the social side of things. And then Socialify will play a big role in that. But definitely not something that we will be able to do ourselves.
I don’t think like we are the right team to build, let’s say, like the next TikTok, for example, right? But what we can do is like we can provide the economic substrate in which the next TikTok or the next Facebook can get built. So we’re like super excited about that. I think a lot of successes kind of become, you know, those outlier successes.
So it’s very hard to know, you know, like by one metric, for example, like I don’t think like number of dApps or something per se generally like makes sense. But we definitely want to see like five years from now. So like 50 to 100 million plus users on form.
That would definitely, I think that’s something that we can achieve. And we’ve done pretty well with Role. I think you need to check the numbers.
But with Role, we have at least like more than 100,000 users. And this was all on L1 where things are also like super expensive. So I think we can do that.
We just need to be, yeah, better support some of the builders who are building alongside us. Right. This is super exciting.
So, you know, in terms of any particular launch that might be coming up, can you share a little about that? I would love to talk a little bit more about the user base that you guys have so far, which is commendable, I think, directing people to a Web 3.0 social application and towards Web 3.0 social infrastructure, I know can be an uphill challenge. So first, let’s touch upon a little about, you know, a specific date or a timeline that you can give for this new substrate that you’re talking about. And then we can perhaps talk about this.
Yeah, I don’t want to front turn anything, but, you know, we have an announcement for a launch coming up very soon. It can be as early as this week. Wow.
So we’ll definitely have like a pretty exciting launch. And we’ve been working towards this for a while, just building up towards this. So, yeah, we’re very interested to have that.
We did launch like a very small pre-staking campaign on Ethereum just to get the word out. But like this would be like the actual launch of the L2 itself. And yeah, just working with all the partners trying to get our ducks in a row.
And then, yeah, just take it from there. It must be very exciting, I think, considering, you know, you guys are so close to announcing the launch and this must be a hectic time for you. Yeah, it’s a very exciting time to be building for sure.
Absolutely. OK, so now can you tell me a little about how did you go about driving all these users onto your platforms? Because like I mentioned earlier that I do think that it can be a bit of an uphill task to get people towards Web3 social protocols. And what is the secret sauce there? How did you go about building an engaged community? Yeah, it’s a good question.
I don’t think there is any secret sauce per se, to be honest. It’s like a very one-to-one battle, like every day of the week. So when we started roll, so this was, you know, got our contracts out like 2018, like first customers in 2019.
So pretty much like predated the entire scene of the traditional like Web3 social you see now. So this was before Lens and Forecaster, you know, before Frentech, like way before PumpFun and all that. It was just a different way to go about, right? Like we talked to hundreds of people, like very traditional creators, and some of them are open to the idea of, you know, having, using these types of like more crypto level primitives for their communities.
And then they try it and some of them work out, some of them don’t. We did learn over time that it was much easier for us to go to people who were either like Web3 or Web3 adjacent. So we had like a very large community of like NFT artists, for example, like NFT artists, NFT collectors, some of the biggest names in the space on the NFT art side, if you’d follow that space, were also on Roll, like with their social tokens.
So that was like just one, let’s say like a sub niche that we found success in. There were some very interesting like Web3 game streamers, for example, on Roll. Again, like with their social token, there were like some interesting people doing like access level protocols.
So this is something that you see with groups, for example, right now, where the token essentially becomes a membership in a group. So this was started by like a few Roll creators back in the day and kind of continues to this day. And so, yeah, I think it’s like a very iterative process, like very one-on-one from a user perspective and same from a product perspective as well.
Some applications like take off, like some don’t really take off as much. It’s very hard to know a priori which ones will be successful, but there’s some broad primitives that we have learned from and we also want to support that on form. So like access, for example, like in a group being just like one example of that, trading and exchange being another.
So yeah, these are just lessons learned. Sid, you’ve gone on mute. Oh, sorry.
That’s all I had to say. Okay. Okay.
So can you tell us, you did share some examples, but can you share some real world examples of how these communities and what kind of communities seem to be like doing really well in the last few months and what you think would do really well in this particular year, in this new year? Yeah. Again, we generally believe in like trying different primitives and like seeing which ones stick and which ones do well. And for that, you need like a bit more of a solid base, for example, to experiment on like economic primitives on your token side.
Things that are like have taken off, but I think like have much more potential as well is just like, yeah, things around like membership. So the idea is that people want or like the idea of belonging to certain groups and that can be gated with tokens. The interesting thing comes from like the fact that you can build on top of that primitive.
So for example, like even something which may sound trivial and may not be the best, you’re not going to be the biggest hedge fund, but the idea of like investing with friends, for example, this was kind of the idea of like so it’s a valid aspect of it, but like things go like much beyond that. So the idea of like having the sense of belonging in a community that gets solidified much better in like communities like with a token is something that I think we’ll see more of like this year and going forward as well. Right.
Yeah. I think owning a part of the community and having some, it’s very important, I think, obviously in Web 2, Web 3, just having that kind of onus that, you know, you belong and, you know, you have to, your success is in some way perhaps dependent on the communities as well. But I think in Web 3 more than ever, that does seem to be the case and empowering creators to be able to create social tokens, giving them that infrastructure.
I think it feels like the next thing you guys are building and you guys have, it’s a real problem to be cracked. And the fact that you guys are doing it as an L2 is even more wonderful because at times there are a lot of challenges, tech challenges, when, you know, especially when the platform perhaps is providing something that’s native or perhaps if it’s an L1. So more power to you guys.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the team behind these two platforms? Yeah, it’s essentially the same team. And just, yeah, thanks for that comment earlier. I think just, you know, like emphasizing that the idea of ownership just like makes people behave differently, right? It could be the difference between how you care for a rented house versus your own house kind of a situation.
So you’re not treating it as like the tragedy of the commons. It’s more like, you know, you are part of the success of that community. And we have seen people like really be able to like drive that home.
So you’ve seen, I mean, we have seen like power users emerge like within that community that you wouldn’t expect. And these wouldn’t be the power users that you would see like, or like a person who’s going to comment on every Instagram post, like it’s not that kind of a person. It’s going to be someone who’s truly invested in the success of that community, like we’ll put in the time, effort, and I mean, like educating new users and, you know, actually like doing things around that just like builds upon that success.
So then the onus of running the community is not just on the creator, but it’s also on just the rest of the group, which just naturally steps up, which is like a very interesting, like second level behavior change that we have generally seen. Yeah, just to team up, you know, we’re mostly like pretty heavy on the developer side of things. It’s me and Bradley as the co-founders, we met, you know, like way back in Coindesk.
So he was a researcher there. I was a little more on the journalism side. But there’s also like 10 of us in the space back then.
We kind of like knew each other. And yeah, we had similar ideas and vision about like where the space should be going. And yeah, we got together and started.
Okay, wonderful. So because you know, you’ve been doing this for a while, I would love to gather your insights about what do you see as perhaps the next big shift in the decentralized social landscape? Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, just in so many trends broadly, I think a lot of the things that you’re seeing on the crypto AI side, there’s a lot of fluff, but a lot of that is also real.
The idea of you being able to have almost a digital twin or like a social agent that’s able to engage with your community more or less like 24 seven is real. I’m not sure like how advanced or how well built all of those models like will be. But it’s, whatever we are seeing is the very early stages of something that’s very real.
One thing that we have generally seen on our side as well is, you know, sometimes the community is like really energized around the creator. And if the creator then, you know, like backs away from the community, it’s very hard to sustain that momentum. So we are like interested to see if, you know, some of the LLM tools can like help with that.
There’s like some smaller aspects of it, right? Like just helping with the UX side of things. So like, hey, can you mint a token doing blah, blah, blah kind of thing in like natural language? Those are obviously very nice on a UX level as well. But yeah, there’s something definitely much deeper on the artistic side, on the, yeah, just like having the general like agent side.
I think they complement the broader creator economy very well, at least for the short to medium term. Yes, I think that is a very exciting aspect here right now at the moment of your building in social fire that there is an AI element to it. And that is perhaps going to complement this entire, the way this space is going to evolve.
Are you guys utilizing AI agents or AI in any capacity as well? We’ll definitely have the infrastructure on our chain for being able to launch basic AI agents. But we are like definitely like looking deeper into that and how that integrates more seamlessly with social fire. We don’t really see that as like a very separate at all.
Like the day like let’s say if you have an AI agent in a chat or membership, it’s just another user in some ways, but a user with some additional like powers or features or things. And like even like way back in the day when I, like in the early days of Bitcoin, like people are really excited about the fact that Bitcoin is a very natural money for machines. And I think kind of a similar thing, because like if you’re like an autonomous machine or AI or whatever, like you can’t really get a social and legal structures, but something like Bitcoin can.
And so I think we kind of see those types of like similar ideas playing out. So like the really interesting things will come when some of these agents are truly autonomous in the sense that you can make decisions upon how you spend money, like how you’re paying for compute, how you’re paying for like datasets, inferences and things like that. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think that’s also like where the world is going.
And then the idea that, you know, if let’s say like you are an AI agent and you need humans to do something either in the real world or something in the cyber world, it’s something that you can pay for. So it becomes almost an economic actor on par with any other like human user that you see. Then things start to get like really, really interesting.
Yeah, I would imagine so. But you know, obviously all of this sounds very futuristic, but I don’t think it’s very far into the future that we’ll have to wait for something like this to see. What are the kind of what are the kind of perhaps dangers or do you feel that this can become perhaps in some way have its problems with, you know, AI being integrated or AI agents being integrated onto social networks? What kind of challenges do you feel it will pose for other users or the social network itself? Yeah, that’s a good question.
Like as with any technology, there will be pros and cons, and fortunately, there will be winners and losers as well. And just the general pace of AI development is much steeper technologically than some of the other technologies in the past. So that does make it feel a bit more jarring.
And, you know, and I think like just generally like other historically, like technology has been more on the labor saving side, but now we are kind of moving towards the intelligence side of things. So that does feel like qualitatively a little different. So again, like I’m sure there’s like pros and cons and winners and losers towards all these.
Like people who are using the tools early, I think like generally will always benefit and we are seeing some of those early adopters as well. Yeah, like longer term, I think it’s going to be more of a symbiotic relationship. I don’t think this, like you can’t wind the clock back right on most of the things.
And so I think given the fact that this is an inevitable future, like what we try to do is like steer this towards a place where it is maximally supportive and inclusive of all of the creators and the users. Right. What are your thoughts on the regulatory challenges and the tokenization of social and economic activities? I feel like every builder has some take on it, and I would love to get yours.
Yes. I think it’s very unfortunate, some of the regulatory aspect that has been going on in the US, it’s very like against the ethos of country and being like more freedom maximizing in that sense. And so that was generally been disappointing to see.
Definitely want to see if things change under the new administration. The issue is like if you look at some of the laws, so you’re essentially getting your, let’s say like when you talk about an agency like the SEC, you’re getting it from the how we test from, I don’t know, like 60 years ago. And even your securities act, which is from like 1932, 33, you’re talking about some law that was written about a hundred years ago and trying to apply it to this new realm.
And I think it only takes you so far, even though I’m sure the lawyers in your audience will disagree. So I think, I don’t know if jurisdictions are like that forward looking. I think we’ve seen like some smaller jurisdictions be friendlier to some of these innovations.
And so I think it’s like a time will tell type of a situation. In fact, like some of the larger countries, I don’t think have taken a very good stance on this. That includes in many, yeah, like, I mean, all the larger countries, honestly, like even US, China, India, I think they all have their own problems with how they read this tech.
But yeah, I’m hoping that some of the smaller jurisdictions, which do have more freedom that can have more of like visionary leaders who can lead the way. And then hopefully it leads itself into the inevitability of this towards some of the larger jurisdictional challenges as well. Right.
Yeah. You and me both. I think that is something that I’m hoping for as well.
That better sense perhaps would prevail and the larger jurisdictions can perhaps take a cue from the smaller ones in their innovation first approach that they seem to have taken when it comes to the policy around this tech. Now, you know, another perhaps a macro question, because, you know, you have worked at SocialFi, how do you feel that Web3 platforms can successfully encourage mass adoption without compromising on decentralization? Yeah, it’s a good question. And I think it’s like an evolving thing forever.
Like, you know, I think it goes both ways, honestly. So in the sense that, for example, just to give you an example, when we started, just the idea that you have to use a Chrome browser with an extension that you have never heard of called MetaMask. And then you try to onboard and it’ll give you like a list of 12 words that, you know, you put it in your fireproof state.
Like that’s an unfathomably high barrier to entry. And, you know, that just like was how it is. So when we started roll, we also had like, you know, custodial wallets for like smaller amounts and things like that, which, you know, we’re not even though it might seem being like against a decentralization space.
I think it’s about like the freedom of choice to the user. Like ultimately it’s completely up to you. Like you never have to use any of our custodial stuff.
Like if you don’t want to, and you know, in fact would encourage you not to. But if you’re trying to send like 0.01 of a token, that’s like one cent. It’s probably much cheaper and easier to do it through our tools.
I think you’ll kind of like see that almost, you know, what we used to call like Web2.5 kind of thing, like where it’s a combination of like, you know, Web2 and Web3. So you go back and forth. That was just like a bridging mechanism.
Like my ideal world would be something like either your computer or your browser kind of being able to natively spin up as many keys as you would like for, again, like a variety of networks. So far, you know, kind of similar to how I have my, you know, my passwords app. Let’s say like if my computer is able to, I can just ask it to create me a new Ethereum address for this application.
And then it just like creates it either by two passkeys or, you know, some other secure enclaves on the machine. Like I think that would be pretty well. I know like some browsers have done this, but it hasn’t gone as far as it works.
In the meantime, like there’s many stopgap solutions, right? Like you have things like social recovery, all of your multi-sig accounts, you know, like smart wallets and things like that. I think like those are good solutions in the interim. But end of the day, I think we kind of become like the ideal goal for mass adoption is always about like you don’t know what rails you are using, right? So if you go to a browser right now, I don’t think people are really like looking at the spec for what like an HTTP protocol mean.
Which type in an address. They don’t care about the tech stack, right? It’s more about the solution that you’re providing. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So that’s abstracted away from you. And, you know, sure, there’s some tech nerds who like really like to dive into them and that’s how it should be. So I think it’s all about the choice, right? Like you should be allowed or like you have the choice to go as deep as you want and not deeper than what you have to.
So I think that would be the ideal world. But yeah, we’re not there yet. Right.
Yeah, I do agree with you. I think we’re still very far away from there. But yes, freedom of choice is important.
I think rather than forcing a solution down everybody’s throat or taking like the approach that, you know, one solution kind of would fit everybody’s needs, giving that choice to the user is important. I think that’s a very nice and fresh perspective to have here, especially with builders listening in. I hope they can take some insights from you.
I think the other thing is also like the user side also is improving a lot, to be honest. Just the idea of like people are much more comfortable now, like even if you’re somewhat new to the space that, oh yeah, of course you download an extension or like a Chrome extension or something like that, or like an app on your computer or phone. So I think like it kind of goes both ways.
And, you know, like once people do get comfortable with the idea that, okay, these are private keys, these are custodial in the sense that, you know, you lose them, you know, just like your custodial bonds back in the day, you know, like a coupon, you literally tear off a coupon from your bond page and then give it to a bank. And if you lose the coupon, you have lost your money. That was just how things were.
And people are comfortable with that. I think we moved away from that towards like a much more centralized system now, everything from your traditional securities ownership, at least. And then crypto in some ways, like decentralizes that kind of like back to maybe how things were in, you know, 50s, 60s and before that.
Right. I think, you know, there has been evolution on both sides and there has been growth on both sides as well. So this is a very, very dynamic space, like we know.
And I think the fact that, you know, there are more people who are at least not completely alienated at the mention of, say, a wallet, I think that tells us that we’ve made some progress. I think that’s a really good point. Yes, because we’ve definitely talked to people who that’s definitely like a big turn off.
But now I think every cycle almost feels like, you know, you have a 10x, 200x number of people who get comfortable with the idea. And then it just makes them like when you’re building a dApp, it just makes it much easier to get your users as well. So now, you know, I would like to talk a little about your personal journey, your journey from ideation to execution for both role and form is is very fascinating, to say the least.
What are the kind of more significant challenges that you faced in this journey? And how did you overcome them? That’s interesting. We’re a very traditional, like startup VC funded kind of a startup. So I feel like one challenge generally was like just trying to explain to traditional VCs about the crypto space.
And like, as much as you see now, everyone’s a thought leader on Twitter about crypto. They were very, very skeptical. So it was a much harder fundraising journey for us, especially because we were building at the intersection of crypto and consumer.
So it was very challenging to have the consumer folks understand crypto or the crypto folk understanding consumer. So you know, like, end of the day, we got that done. But that was definitely always hard to like bridge some of those, some of those gaps.
The other thing just generally, I think like building in the space, which many people like will see is, you know, everything like moves in very sharp cycles. So, you know, you have these like very traditional booms and busts in every industry, like everything from your railroads to telegraph, like all the way back in the day. But those would be like, you know, booms that last for 20 years and a bust that lasts for 20 years, right? Like crypto, everything that’s like super exaggerated.
So you’ll have a trend lasting for six months and then kind of like goes away. Building that kind of framework is always hard because you do want to keep the long term vision of what you’re trying to do always front and center, not just chase trends or, you know, just like chase the new hot thing of the day. And that’s just, you know, realistically hard to do in the space, especially when you have like tokens trading like all day long, you know, you have prices.
And while it’s really good from a market efficiency perspective, it sometimes can be a distraction from, you know, like when you’re when you’re building in the space. Right. Yeah, I think that that is that is very, very interesting.
Can you tell me a little bit more? No, not me, perhaps, but, you know, just the listeners in general, because you’ve been so deep within tokenomics and, you know, how to sort of build better economies around your token. I would love to get your insights on perhaps the suggestions or advice that you would want to give an entrepreneur who’s just starting off, say, from today. Oh, interesting.
Yeah, I would generally say, like, keep the long term vision of the project in mind. It’s not just about the shortest term place. And then the second thing is like, you know, things like price, again, like they are important in a way.
It also, like, lets you, you know, you’re, let’s say, top hundred in CoinGecko. It lets you have access to partnerships or, you know, like talk to people that you normally, like, may not be able to. So in some ways, like, practically speaking, it does have its importance.
So like, I wouldn’t completely undermine that as either. So I think it’s like a very subtle mix of like how you think about like short term versus long term in terms of the economy themselves. I think you need to be clear on, like, where your vision for the product is and where your vision for the token is.
And sometimes those two can be very separate. Slightly complicating the fact will be like sometimes then you run into this issue of who are you building for end of the day? Is it for the shareholders? Because a lot of them are coming from a startup or for the token holders. And while their interests generally align, they don’t 100% align in 100% of the situations.
So things do get tricky. And I think like when you do run into a lot of these like edge case scenarios, I think it’s very helpful to have just like a vision towards like what you’re building for the long term. And like what then lets you like make decisions as opposed to, you know, like changing direction every two or three months.
Yeah, in terms of specific tokenomics, like I wouldn’t say like I have like one token model to rule them all. I think it like really depends on like, again, like what you’re doing and where you’re trying to go. But I would say you should give it a good amount of thought and not just go with some default setting.
Because tokenomics is something which is more or less like fixed. And yeah, I’m sure you can like kind of sort of get away from that over like a long term. But in the short term, things are like fixed.
So which means that once you make a decision, you really can’t realistically like go back. So the stakes are higher than you might imagine when you’re starting out. I think that is very sound advice to give if you’re going to be designing your tokenomics.
And we have the long term vision in mind, because it’s very easy to sort of give in to the various pressures that a builder faces and design tokenomics that perhaps would make everybody happy in the short term. But I think if you want to really, really create a sustainable business, then you need to think long term. And you need to remember that you cannot really make everybody happy in the short term.
And still stay true to your business. Yeah, absolutely. There’s also like different stakeholders for different businesses.
I would like to encourage people to like really think about that. So you have different kinds of users, you know, like again, you have investors, you have your team, you have the future users of your platform or chain or whatever. And then yeah, like balancing all of those definitely like need some thought from the founders.
Absolutely. Now, so this question just struck me and I would love to know if you had to launch the web3 project today, what problem would you tackle and perhaps why? That’s a good question. I would say like two things that have generally like struck me to be things that can like really move the space forward, but also like not just the crypto space, but like outside the world has always been kind of like defy and social, where I genuinely think that in like more decentralized like crypto like solutions can bring better outcomes for the world in general.
And I think like more recently, just like things around AI as well. When you think about like in a more decentralized like compute, like models, data, all that level of stuff, like the consumer stuff will keep changing. Of course, you know, you have like an agent today on Twitter, you know, there’ll be an agent tomorrow on some other social platform.
But I think like just that fundamentals of like how you are building the AI, like how you’re getting the data and all that stuff again, like, you know, kind of intersecting with the more open source ethos of some parts of AI and not others, I think is like a very strong net positive for this technology going forward. So it’s like something along those lines is what I would be rebuilding. Okay, that’s very interesting.
And I think I’m sure that this will give a few of the builders a few ideas and inspiration to start thinking on these lines. If you had to recommend perhaps some thought leaders or some resources to entrepreneurs in this space, or books, perhaps, what would be your recommendation? Oh, interesting. Yeah, it comes from both sides.
I would say like the philosophy side and the tech side. Just like when I was in the space, you know, Andreas Antonopoulos books were really good as like a very good combination of both the social side as well as the technical side. I’m sure like things have changed.
I think like had a really good book. Lynn Alden has, you know, broken money kind of giving more of a macro perspective. And I would encourage people to read like both sides of, I guess, like the Bitcoin side and the other Web3 side, because philosophically, even though they’re both part of crypto, they come from very different places.
And there’s like a very good and bad in both of those types of ideas. So I think, yeah, that’s probably like the places I would start. Yes, I think those are really good recommendations.
We’ll surely try to put them up in the description as well so that people can have a go and check out these books, these resources. I think I always end up like recommending Andreas Antonopoulos books to somebody who asked me, where should they begin? Because I think they give a very good perspective. And in case somebody doesn’t read them, you know, the videos are there as well on YouTube.
Yeah, he’s great. And also his books are free, I think, online. Yeah, like buy them.
And he’s been like an educator in the space for a very long time. And it comes from, yeah, you can see it coming from a pretty good place. And I would say like his resources were pretty much the only resources, like at least like way back when I started.
So he was like, yeah, like much more central figure in the space than he is today. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Okay.
So, you know, because I just saw the time and we are running short of time, I would perhaps end this with my last two questions. How do you perhaps balance innovation with scalability and, you know, just keeping compliance in mind in your projects? I think this is something that a lot of entrepreneurs that speak to me, they have the same dilemma. And, you know, I give them some advice, but I would love to know your perspective and see how it matches my own.
I mean, there’s a practical aspect to this. I’m not going to go into the philosophy of the role of the government and state. Practically speaking, I would suggest them to stay away from the regulated side of things, at least until you have a better product market fit.
And then you can expand into those markets as, you know, things change. And so like pre-product market, but I have definitely like seen many entrepreneurs, like also like way back in the day where like all you’re focused on is getting licenses and then you forget your product entirely. This is obviously like not to say that, you know, you should like break any regulatory rules or anything.
You shouldn’t. But I think you can structure your business in a way that you’re not catering to those markets at all when you’re starting. Once you have started and once you’ve established, I think, you know, having that longer term vision of like where you see the space and where you see your role in the space.
And if that does intersect with better financial models and, you know, if it means competing with JP Morgan, then I think you should. But just don’t start off with that. Yeah, I think that’s good advice.
I think it’s very similar to what I tell people pretty much the same that, you know, either do not really poke the sleeping giant, you know, if you don’t don’t have the readiness to tackle it, basically. And then I think that that is what you are saying with trying not to perhaps get into the side of things unless you have, you know, a solid PMM. Yeah.
And, you know, it’s very unfortunate. I know things have changed a little bit post elections, at least in the US. But, you know, like back in the day, the way to operate in the US is basically you sue the SEC or like you see the sue the federal government and then see what happens.
And, you know, like, yeah, I mean, if you’re coin based, like, sure, you should, you should absolutely, you know, sue the federal government of the US. But I don’t think like a very small startup starting out should be should be in that business. Yeah, no, absolutely.
It’s time consuming, and it’s a waste of energy, right? And, you know, the startups who are just starting off, they perhaps don’t even have the right resources to be able to do that. Yeah, 100%. Okay, so this has been such a wonderful conversation, had so much fun discussing form as well as role, I think, socialify, I think is something that that is very fascinating to me in general, because I feel that that is the next big wave, where we can see a lot of adoption coming through.
I think game fi and social fi, those are the two big niches, there are a lot of adoption will come through from. So thank you so much, once again, for giving me your time. But I’ll be remiss if I didn’t ask you this one question that I ask everybody who comes on the show, you know, you are somebody who obviously, very consciously made the decision to start building in web three, and you met the right people, and you took your chances and studied the market and decided to work on the social side of things.
But if you had to perhaps give advice to somebody who is still on the fence about diving into web three, because I know there are so many skeptics, what would be your advice to them for so that they can truly start living on blockchain? I would actually say don’t go into web three, unless you really believe in it. I’ve seen so many people pivot during the bull market and like leave during the bear market. If you’re here, because you saw a Bloomberg headline about how the price of Bitcoin is at all time high, I don’t think this is the right space for you.
I think like if you’re here for the longer term, and you believe in the vision and philosophy of like why people believe in web three, and like why that idea of having the user control over a lot of aspects of society is important, I think it’s a really good place to start building. Yeah, I think that that is one of the most sound advice that I’ve heard on this show. It’s important that you know, you get into this space, being fully committed to the ethos, and it is not just the price movement that is exciting for you.
Because if that is the case, then you know, perhaps you wouldn’t be able to really sustain yourself. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s very unfortunate, because I think like a lot of media coverage, it’s essentially all on the price.
Yeah, it’s not about the technology. It’s all about the speculation and the price. And that is all.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I think like you just have to like tune that out and then ask yourself if you still want to build in the space. Yeah, that is true.
Gives us something to think about. Thank you so much, Sid, once again for making the time to speak to me today. Before we wrap this up, any parting words? No, not really.
Like I’ve always like interested to connect with builders. So you know, I’m Sid Kahl. So that’s S-I-D-K-A-L on Twitter or X. So if you know, I would love to hear from from your listeners as well.
And yeah, thanks. That was a really nice chatting. And thanks for having me on.
Likewise. Thank you so much.