Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Prakhar from Metasky.ai. Metasky is a B2C, B2B platform. Basically for companies they post campaigns to improve engagement in the communities and for the users themselves it creates a safe space for users to discover these campaigns and actively engage in these communities.
They are actively working on utility-based NFTs as well and we touched a lot upon that in this conversation. If you’re somebody who’s working on the next big NFT project, which is rooted in utility, then this is a conversation for you. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this.
Let’s deep dive right in. Prakhar, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? Hey Tarusha, I’m good.
Thanks for having me today. Awesome. For our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself and how you got in this space, your journey so far in Web3? Yes.
So yeah, just to start off, my name is Prakhar Sharma. I have been in crypto blockchain Web3 space for eight years now. So the journey for me started while I was in college and I took a couple of courses in economics while I was in college and during the classes, I used to study that there are different monetary and fiscal policies with which different central banks designed their policies and other things.
And on the other hand, I saw that there is this sort of a new currency that is coming in where the monetary and fiscal policies are something which is baked into it as a code. So this was back in 2014 and I got to know about bitcoins. So that was something that caught my attention.
From there, I did a sort of a healthcare tech startup, ran it for three years. In 2017, it got acquired by Enter Health, which is a Canadian healthcare PRM company. After that, I briefly worked for Deutsche Bank, where I was trading in different OTC derivative instruments like IR swaps, inflation swaps, futures options and other things.
So there, I got a firsthand experience of getting to know the nuances of what goes behind an investment bank. And at that time, I authored a white paper on internal trade reconciliation and settlement using blockchains. But just because financial services is an industry which is very heavily guarded by rules and regulations, I didn’t get an opportunity to deploy it.
So at that particular time, I also got to know that there are a couple of guys in Bangalore who are trying to build a sort of Indian stable coin. So this was a sort of a bizarre idea in 2018. But it was intriguing enough to see that there are people who are thinking about this particular approach.
So even though that particular idea didn’t flew by, but I ended up joining Coin as one of the early members in their engineering team, when the company was just four or five people. So Coinswitch started more like a global cryptocurrency exchange aggregator. And then the 2019 video market came, Bitcoin was again down to $4,000.
And like there was no volume in the market. So we tried out a couple of different products, we made something which is called CruxPay, that you can say that was a very highly inspired from UPI, because like the main focus was at that particular time, doing transactions was very difficult. So what UPI did for doing bank to bank transactions, we wanted to do it for crypto so that the ease of transaction become more seamless.
So we did it for a while then in 2020, when the market started recovering, we started seeing volume going up across the exchanges. Then we thought that instead of spreading out ourselves thin across multiple geographies, why not just concentrate in India. So then launched Coinswitch, which was like an India specific exchange, scaled it to 12 million users within a span of 10 months.
So yeah, that was one of the great learning cycles for me to develop a particular product, which is very native to the industry and scaling up with a rapid pace. Then it started looking more like a casino, where people were coming in buying cryptocurrencies without even getting to know what those things are. And so at that time, I thought of stepping out and start Metasky.
In Metasky, one of the core premise and the focus is to be more technology first, as opposed to financialization first. So maybe one of the good or bad thing about blockchain as a technology is that here, the financialization of the technology happened way more quicker. Like here, the technologies was still not in the correct place.
Still, the sort of financialization that happened around this particular technology was very rapid. If we draw parallels to AI as a technology, the technology took like 25, 30 years to build it. And now it is the time when retailers are coming in and putting their money.
But in blockchain and in crypto, the story was exact opposite. So in Metasky, we thought of building those crucial infrastructure, which very well meant the point that why we need Web3 as a technology, and later on bring the financialization part. So technically, in Metasky, we have developed infrastructure that helps communities, brands to run interoperable sort of loyalty programs.
Through this, brands, creators, like develop different sort of tactics to monetize onto their fan base or the communities that they have formed around their offering or around their products. Okay, this is very interesting. Your journey has been quite extensive as well.
So you know, you’re very organically got into perhaps the fintech space first and then into Web3. And now you’re building something on your own. So can you, for somebody perhaps has never used Metasky, can you perhaps give a flow of how the user experience looks like? Yeah, so it’s a, it’s a two-faceted sort of a user experience.
One, like on one side, we have brands as well as, you know, creators who can use, come to a platform and develop certain experiences for their community. So this particular piece is called Metasky Studio. So this is the place where a brand or a creator comes in.
And if let’s say they already have different sort of socials like Instagram or Twitter, or maybe if they’ve already launched sort of NFT collection, they can come in and import these existing collections or plug in their socials directly. The first thing that we do is like populate the whole sort of a user base that these creators or the brands have across these different social networking sites. And through this, we give them a view of their community that how is their engagement looking like, right? Like who are their top 1% of the most engaging user than the 5% and then 20%.
Then the next step is that based on this particular information, they either end up launching an NFT collection or maybe a membership pass, or maybe a sort of a ticketing of their IRL event. There are a multitude of experiences that can be created by them. And once these things, so all of these things, like even though these are called a membership card or a ticket, these are NFTs behind the scene.
It’s up to the brand, whether they want to open it up to their audience that, hey, there is a crypto or NFT play behind the scene. Or if they choose that, you know, they still want to call it a membership pass, it will work very seamlessly. The second thing that we have sort of innovated in this particular space is build something which is called a utility marketplace.
So utility is something which in turn is going to drive the valuation of NFTs going forward. The first sort of a wave of NFTs that we saw where we saw a lot of PFP collections, you know, going out for millions of dollars and a lot of sort of scams going around these particular collections as well. I think in my opinion, that particular market won’t return ever.
But definitely there will be some premium PFP collections coming up from strong brands, celebrity creators, and all these things. But the sort of craziness that we saw last to last year, it’s difficult to, you know, it’s difficult to expect that sort of market will come in. The next wave of NFTs would be very much utility driven.
So we have developed something which is called a utility marketplace. So this is a sort of a B2B marketplace where the cross collaboration when it comes to utilities can happen. So in this particular utility marketplace, we have Web3 IPs like Goblins, like even a sort of a couple of IPs who are derivatives of board APR club.
Those are listed onto a marketplace. And on the other side of the spectrum, we have a Web2 brands like KFC, Marriott, Starbucks, which come in and do collaboration with these Web3 creators or Web3 brands around it. So anyone who is coming in creating their NFT collection can with a couple of clicks integrate these utilities onto their offering.
So that is the part where, you know, in a way you sort of create a sort of a product which has a really good utility, very easy to use. And the third part is now the distribution, like how you take this particular sort of offering and give it to your users across socials, and all these other places. So this is where we have launched something called Bounties.
So Bounties is a place where you can design small gamification loops that work on socials. By socials, I mean, like you can have a certain sort of a mini gamification loop on Twitter, on Instagram, we have discord bots, where you can do any sort of a, like a mini game tournament within your discord and the sort of engagement and the distribution that you want to do of the assets that you have created can be done within discord itself. So this is the first part, which is called the studio sort of orchestration place for where the creators as well as brands come in and design their whole campaign as well as execute and monitor it.
On to the other side, we have something which is called SkyClub. So SkyClub is the place where the end users come in and ingest all the experiences that are created by the club. So on and on, it looks like that if let’s say your brand is giving out a sort of a bounty campaign or maybe a sort of a raffle in which you can get NFT tickets or certain sort of experience that unlocks stores using the NFTs, then SkyClub becomes a sort of an interface through which these things can be can be done really easily.
Wow. Okay. So this is interesting, because your platform has both a B2B side as well as a B2C side.
And you know, you’ve kind of covered how the next wave of NFTs would be more utility driven. So now I have two questions. And I’ll take it one at a time when you have a platform which is B2B driven, as well as B2C driven, that kind of creates a chicken and an egg problem.
Right? Like, you know, you’ll get these platforms to create perhaps bounties and all of these journeys on your platform. And how do you perhaps encourage the users to engage with those bounties that kind of creates a loop? So A, how has MetaSky in terms of creating a community of engaged users as well as making sure that the businesses are getting a, you know, good result after creating a campaign here? Yeah. So in terms of our go to market strategy, till now, we have taken a more of a B2B to C approach, where the brands who come in and make the experience using a studio, they are the one who go out and distribute these things within their communities.
Right? So it is not like where someone discovers a Sky Club and come in and look for that, hey, what are the bounties that are given out? It is more about that you are already a part of a community or a sort of engagement loop of a particular brand. And through this particular brand, they discover Sky Club. So currently, we have close to around 282,000 monthly active users.
So all these users span across 32 brands that are currently using our services. Wow, that’s brilliant. So now coming to the second part of, you know, what you had said earlier, and I wanted to ask about was how you feel strongly that NFTs with a utility would be part of the next wave.
So can you give us some good examples of, you know, some projects doing that who have successfully been able to do that so far? Yeah, so, see, like, I think, like, if you start from the top, one necessity with most of the startups, as well as even the big brands have is to have a healthy tech to LTV ratio, right? And when it comes to LTV, loyalty programs have been something which has been, I think, there for the last 10-15 years, some of them are performing brilliantly, like, you know, most of the airlines, they have a sort of a program, which works really well. But on the other end of the spectrum, around, like 90 to 95% of these loyalty programs are not working anymore. And this is just because that there is an abundance of loyalty programs that are out there in the market.
Right? So for a normal user perspective, it is that they are exposed to around 17 different loyalty programs at the moment, right, a single user exposed to 17 different loyalty programs. And most of the time, it is that, that they themselves forget that they have to go and maybe they have a coupon code that could be applied in a particular situation. So the engagement rate for most of these loyalty programs are below 50% at the moment, right? And this is mostly happening, because most of these loyalty programs are pretty much fragmented, right? And they have a sort of a long tail of low activity users.
So these are the users who just sign up, and then they are just over there, but not interacting with the program anymore. Most of them are not most, I think all of them are in a closed ecosystem. And just because they are a part of a closed ecosystem, they have thought of, they face a lot of complexity when they want to scale these particular partnerships, right? So what we have to offer is a sort of a very eased out interoperability across this.
So I’ll take an example of a couple of brands that are working with us. So in India, we work with a couple of record labels. And over here, I’ll mention this record label called Azadi Records.
So last, I think last to last year, they launched a new album, which is called Nyab. And this whole particular experience was done through a sort of a NFT based ticketing, NFT based sort of a community engagement and all these other things. So even till date, like one and a half years after the launch of the album, we are seeing a very healthy sort of a secondary market of these NFTs, right? And the reason why there is a very healthy secondary market is because these are the artists who in turn, now know that what the top 1% of their community looks like, right? So they know that these are the people who have, you know, done something extra to get in front of them by, you know, buying these NFTs, engaging with the community and all these other things.
So these people get a very sort of a great and in depth experience whenever they attend any of these concerts or after party or if they have any specific brand deals. So very recently, this same record label, they tied up with a Nike and dropped Air Force One shoes labeled with the music label specifically for these audience, right? So from a brand perspective, they know that hey, these are the top by brand, I mean, brands like Nike, Louis Vuitton and the top end brands, they know that hey, these are the top 1% of the user who in turn are willing to pay for an extra and exclusive experience around this particular IP, right? So from a Nike or a Louis Vuitton perspective, they see a 60% or a 70% conversion rate coming out from the top 1%, which is sort of unheard for these sort of brands in a market like India, right? So this is sort of a monetization opportunity, which is not just for the brand, but even for the artists who are, you know, the part of the record label, as well as the end audience. So one another sort of a piece over here is that in whenever there is a secondary trade happens 15% of the proceeding or the principal value of the secondary trade group goes back to the artist, right? And in the in the last one, one year, this particular collection has done a secondary market trade of around 1.2 crore rupees.
So from an artist perspective, it is like getting an additional income of 2025 lakh rupees, just by spending some extra time with those people who really like their art and music and all these other things. So like this is one of the example that we saw in India. We also work with a lot of like animation houses in Japan.
So these are the studios who in turn are sitting on really good IPs, which are like 40, 50, 60 years old. And you know, it contains like animation houses like Dory animation, the one which is behind one piece, a Bandai Namco, which is behind a Pokemon. So what we have seen so so we went over there and like had the launch of a one another IP, which is called Tanuki.
So it’s a sort of a whole ecosystem called Tanuki wars build around this animal, which is called Tanuki, which is also sort of a god in Japanese folklore. So this particular IP got built up very organically, they launched a membership pass for their community. And there is a particular shrine in Yamanashi region, where you know, which is dedicated to Tanukis.
And what we saw were there that one of the local breweries, which was in a sort of relevant in that particular region itself, just because they in turn, recognize Tanuki as a, as a figure, they launched a beer with sort of a Tanuki IP label around it. And all of a sudden, they saw their distribution in Singapore, in South Korea, in in Japan, in Japan, in Australia, and for a small sort of a brewery sitting in a village in Japan getting this sort of a global exposure, just because they in turn tied up with this particular IP. This is like one another example where the cross collaboration across brands towards using a particular distribution mechanics of NFTs becomes very, very prevalent.
So this becomes more like a win win scenario, not just for the IP, but also for the peripheral businesses who in turn, you know, want to engage with this sort of community around these IPs. So yeah, like, these are some of the examples. And like, I’ll just highlight a couple of points that why this mechanics work really well in a web 3 scenario and not it because like, most of these things can be done in a web 2 fashion as well.
And it has been happening as well, like the cross brand collaborations and other things. But what specifically happens in web 3 is that for an end user, there is an exit scenario as well. So it means that if let’s say, I’m buying an NFT and maybe six months down the line, I see that, hey, this is not the community where I belong, or maybe I don’t have time to, you know, spend and go and engage with the community, then I get an option to make an exit by listing my NFT onto a marketplace, right? So I get as a buyer, I get an immediate liquidity.
And from a community or a brand perspective, the top 1%, 5% of the tier always remain fresh. So it means that whenever this top 1% needs to get a good activation, they see activation rate of 80-85% coming from the top tier of 1%, 5% of any community. So this in turn, gives a much more dynamic feedback on to the cross brand collaborations that happen in this scenario.
Wow, this is very, very interesting. And you know, you’ve been able to successfully basically carve out new shares and get the brands engaged in this entire process. And these are web 2 brands traditionally, how much of a challenge was it to, you know, get them on board? Yeah, see, like, I think just because the industry is new, there are two levels that I think anyone who is operating in the industry has to go through.
One is like putting a case for web 3 and blockchain as a technology, right? So what we have seen that, like, currently, the market has been much better, but especially in the last year, as well as a bit of a year before, the first challenge was to defend blockchain as a technology and its utility to the brands which are very traditional in their thinking. Right? So that is the face like, I think in most of the first meetings that I’ve gone through, it was more about defending blockchain and web 3 as a technology. And after that, maybe you get a chance to pitch your product.
Right? So one thing that worked for us is that we focused on KPIs, which in turn, is something that all of these brands recognize. So we own KPIs, like increasing, increasing the LTV, or maybe like cutting down on cost of running their existing loyalty programs, cutting down the time in terms of closing cross brand deals. So these are the things, you know, where we learn to speak in their language, right? And after that, maybe we can put in the proposition that, hey, this is the longer roadmap that you can go through in terms of the interoperability and all these other things.
So in that respect, the whole industry is pretty new at the moment. And even though we have seen certain success stories coming from big brands, but in terms of the utility experienced, it will be mostly the mid tier going brand growing brands that will see the most utility coming out. So even though like the loyalty program of Starbucks made the most use, but when it comes to the numbers, I think last year, the whole Starbucks Odyssey program made a revenue of around $1.6 million.
And if we look at the total revenue generated by Starbucks, it’s like $32 billion. So from a brand perspective, someone making a $32 billion in revenue, trying to put a case for an experiment, which has done $1.6 billion is something that they won’t take it seriously. But when it comes to the small or maybe a mid size growing brands, where they see an immediate push in the distribution, like in our case, we were successfully able to put a local brewery onto a global map.
So, and this happened within a matter of three to four months. So this is something which was sort of a life changing sort of a growth for this particular brand. So in our experience, it will be more like the new age, mid tier growing brands that in turn will adopt the second generation of these loyalty programs.
And after that, when this particular sort of a market will become much more stronger and streamlined, then we will see a sort of a mass adoption from big brands. Right. I do agree about how you know, you have to sort of speak their language to make sure that the value proposition is being conveyed clearly.
What happens is that this is just my perspective, I think web two and web three, ultimately, you know, you’re building a business and the principles and the fundamentals of running a business, they remain the same across the spectrum, no matter what, what your niche is, what your space is. And as long as you’re able to convey the value, there’s no reason why these brands perhaps wouldn’t utilize a service that’s only going to help them. Yes, that’s right.
So now that brings me to another interesting, you know, a side of your platform called sky wallet. Can you tell us a little more about that? Yes. So sky wallet is the user interfacing part.
So okay. So in this one thing that I think this is a playbook that I learned from point switch that if we make the user interface so easy, that you know, the end user don’t even get to know that what’s the technology play behind the scene. That is where the magic happens.
Right. So in point switch, also, we were able to onboard a lot of users from tier two and tier three cities. Right.
So and this is, and this was, this was just happening, because we were able to build an infrastructure or a user experience, which was very near to the already existing app that these users are using, like like Swiggy and Amazon and all these things. So the same thing that we did it for Metasky as well. And I think one of the big challenges in web three at the moment is to develop a sort of a secure and easy to use wallet.
Right, even though there have been so many, like, I think more than 2000 wallets out there. But still, there is a problem. Yeah, problem remains like nobody wants to, like write down a 12 word or a 24 word speed phase, just in their logging in for the first time.
So when we started tackling this particular challenge, we took a approach, where for the advanced users, we give them an option to log in with their existing wallets. So it means that if let’s say that you are already in the web three space holding a couple of NFTs holding a couple of tokens, then you don’t need to create a new token, it’s just about you plug in your existing wallet. And then the whole skywalk becomes a sort of a new sort of user interface around it.
For those users who are getting in for the very first time, we give them experience, which is very, very close to like making an account on WhatsApp or something like that. Like you’re just putting your phone number or email ID that OTP setup in and you’re good to go. Right.
And another thing that is to abstract out the complexities when it comes to multiple blockchains. Right. So nobody wants nobody currently in our experience, says that, hey, I don’t want to buy this NFT, because this is on this XYZ blockchain.
Or, you know, I want to buy this NFT, because this is on this blockchain. So I think the choice of blockchain would become more of a developer’s choice, that you know, based on the use case and other things, they will figure it out. And I think going forward, it won’t be the concern of the end user, that we are the end settlement layers.
Right. So, absolutely. So what we did is that with a single login interface, we had this exposure to multiple blockchains.
And we kept the user interface exactly the same across these blockchains. So, so we have done campaigns on near on Ethereum on polygon, on a star and so many different blockchains. And most of the users don’t even get to know that, there is a shift in blockchain and all these other things.
So that was one. Second, we may be very consciously made the UX in such a way that it attracts those people who want to drive a utility out of NFTs, instead of you know, those users who want to come in and flip the NFTs. So we very consciously didn’t put any sort of a, like a green or a red label that whether your portfolio is up or down and all these things, but be more focused on the utilities or the benefits that you get out of the NFT collection that you have at the moment.
So as soon as you log in, the first sort of ribbon that you will see is that out of all the NFTs that you are holding, what are the total number of benefits that are available to you at the moment? Right? The second thing is that you go with an NFT and then you see all the different benefits that are listed, particularly to that particular NFT. And this is not just the viewing layer, but this is also a sort of a redemption layer. Right? And the main focus was again, to make this experience so seamless that most people won’t even get to know that there is a sort of a blockchain or NFT play behind the scene.
And to test out this particular hypothesis that whether you know, we have made it, you know, easy enough or not. We recently did a campaign with a government of Madhya Pradesh, where it was like a government’s government scheme where like government distributed certificates for certain students who graduated from a particular program. So they were, I think, around like 60,000 students across 22 districts in Madhya Pradesh.
And we gave them digital certificates, which are essentially NFTs using this infrastructure. And we were successful, able to, you know, get a really good sort of numbers from this particular campaign. So this gives us a sort of a validation that if we can go towards like the district area or a block area in India, and if we are able to get the user set up the wallet, go claim NFT and go and interact with the utilities, then I think we have abstracted out the complexity when it comes to setting up the wallets and engaging with it.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is the way forward, like the user experience has to be decluttered to an extent that like you said, they don’t even know that there is there is an NFT or a blockchain play here and they’re using it because it solves a problem for them. Yes.
So moving on from perhaps and zooming out from your product a little bit, and talking a little about the industry at large. Yesterday, I was very excited for the entire community with the Bitcoin ETF and the SPOT ETF getting approved, like 12 of them got approved by the SEC. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think this is a great move.
And I think it is going to benefit the whole industry in the long run. First of all, it will give confidence for the retailers to invest into this asset class with much more confidence. And now as I think the biggest brands in the globe are behind running these ETFs.
So this in turn will like, I think make the whole space much more secure. So all these exchanges and other things which were like not legal or maybe like, they were not secure enough, those sort of exchanges will weed out. And for most of the retailers, as well as I think institutional investors, now they have a very clear cut approach of getting an exposure to Bitcoin as an asset class.
And what is going to be interesting going forward is how the liquidity is going to be managed. Like, if you see that, like behind most of these ETFs, Coinbase is the one which is going to do the finality in terms of providing liquidity in Bitcoin. So definitely there will be like, if not in this particular week, in near future, there will be days where billions of dollars will in a single day to buy the Bitcoins.
So like, because of the construct, there is a t plus two settlement date, but it will be really interesting to see that how this sort of liquidity in Bitcoin is going to be available. And I think another interesting thing is that now we are seeing a couple of stepping solutions that are coming on top of Bitcoin. So how these staking solutions will face the externalities that will emerge from the liquidity demand of Bitcoins.
So definitely on and on, it has made the whole ecosystem much more vibrant, as well as much more exciting and open for everyone to join in. Absolutely. I think it seems like a long time coming and everybody’s pretty jazzed about how it has come through.
Everything has its pros and cons, and we are happy to watch it play it out. But it seems like, you know, just a step forward, a massive leap forward, perhaps. And that is what is interesting to me.
Yes. Exciting days ahead. Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, this has been such a wonderful conversation, and I don’t want it to end, but obviously we’re short on time. So I would love to ask you, what is the next big milestone for Metasky? What are you looking at in terms of your product or in terms of revenues? What is that big milestone that you’re looking at? Yeah, so I’ll, you know, like answer this in two steps. One is more on the product side, another is on the market side.
So in product side, we are going to launch a sort of MPC version of a wallet. So definitely from a user experience, it’s not going to change a lot of things. But from an internal management perspective, it is going to make the whole backend much more clearer.
And it is going to give a lot of control to the end users in which in the way in which they want to live their journey within the Metasky infrastructure. The second part is that currently we have around 22 different brands on utility marketplace. We have in line a couple of really exciting partnerships coming in.
So we will be looking at somewhere around 100 different brand partnerships by the end of this particular quarter. So as we grow on the utility marketplace side, even on the demand side, we will see a lot more usability coming from the new brands creators who will launch an NFT collection, membership passes to us. So these are the two things on the market side.
Like we have got a sort of a good year in Japanese market last year. So we want to have a much more better, stronger position in that market, as well as from there expanded to South Korea, because like these two markets have a sort of things in common when it comes to the user adoption, as well as the sort of sentiments that these markets hold. On India side, I would be very happy if from a regulation perspective, it becomes more friendly towards the crypto companies, as well as the people who are operating in this particular space, because the more confidence the regulators provide, the better it will be for the brands to go out and accept blockchain as a technology and Web3 as a technology.
So yeah, so these are the, from a market standpoint, these are the two areas that I’m really excited about. Wow. Brilliant.
This is, you know, MPC Wallet is obviously a leap forward in your tech and it’ll enhance the user experience without them really knowing it. So that is wonderful to know. And in terms of your partnerships, I think that is a formidable number that you’ve mentioned.
So honestly, like more power to you guys and what you’re building, I think everybody should be excited about what you guys are building simply because you’re able to acquire the users as well as the brand. And that is intensely valuable, I think. So now before I wrap this up, and believe me, I really don’t want to because this has been a very insightful conversation, a very clear, concise way that you put your thoughts forward is interesting.
But we do have to wrap this up. So I would like to ask you the last question that I ask everybody who comes on the show. You know, you’ve made a journey yourself from Web2 to Web3.
And if somebody was perhaps ruminating on a similar dilemma, what would be your two suggestions to them for them to start living on blockchain? First of all, read a lot. Like this is a space where, you know, even if I miss out on my reading for two weeks, I feel that I’m so left behind. So I think reading is something which is a sort of, I would say the most sorted out skill needed in this particular ecosystem.
And and one another thing is when you read also write, because it’s the best thing that Web3 as a technology has produced are the really helpful and warm communities that are, you know, around the protocols. And in general, in totality, because if we, if you honestly see, like, we have came a long way to launch Bitcoin as a ETF. But like, I think governments across the globe, in some or the other way, try to shut it down.
Like, I think the people who are operating in this particular space have been, you know, sort of labeled as a scamster or criminals and all these places, but still, the collective strength of the community is something which, you know, made Bitcoin as an ETF possible. So that is where writing is important to give it back to the community. And I think there is space for everyone in this community.
So no matter what your background is, you should definitely try to get a foot into this particular technology or a revolution or a community, whatever you want to call it, because there is a space for everyone over here. So I think like, first of all, I keep the things very simple, like there will be jargons that that in turn, will be sort of scary to tackle in the first first first stance, but on and on, like from a first principle perspective, the things that are going on over here is something that can be like understood pretty quickly. So just to sum it up, read and write.
These are the things which are very, very important in this particular industry. Absolutely. Are there any recommendations for what they should these guys should be reading like that you would like to drop right now? Yeah, so I think one place to start is the blog section of a 16 z crypto.
So one thing that I really, really like about the writings over there is that they start from a very sort of a general observation that I think most of us will in a way get in line with and then they go in depth to such a extent that they also talk about the nitty gritties of the technical details and everything. So it provides a spectrum for the readers to read to an extent where they feel comfortable and find a space where you know, they can look at this particular spectrum and go deeper into it. So that is one another is multi coin.
Multi coin is one another VC, which writes really well in this particular domain. And like, yeah, yeah, I think and also like some when I started my journey, one book that really was introduction to Bitcoin, like which was more of a sort of a, I will not call it a social, social political book with a technical angle, but it was a really great read, which in a way, converted me. But the thing about books in web three is that they get outdated really fast.
So the next set of books that are currently in my reading list that on 23rd of January, there are two books that are being launched or published by a 16z. One is on specifically on NFTs. And another is by Chris Dixon himself, which is like more of a general commentary of what is going on in the ecosystem.
So yeah, so anyone who is planning to start this particular year, I think these two books will give you a really good head start about what is all going on in the ecosystem. Absolutely, I think those are wonderful recommendations and meaty recommendations. So I’m glad that you mentioned those.
But thank you so much once again for making the time to speak to me before we wrap this up. Any last thoughts? Yeah, so from a last thought perspective, I think one thing that we all have to learn as a community is that even though web three is exciting, like that is not solution to everything. Right? So like, right.
Before, before starting off any sort of product or service in this particular industry, there needs to be a very honest conversation with your team, also with yourself, in terms of whether there is a need of web three in this particular solution or not. Right. And absolutely.
And also whether the time is correct to introduce this as a technology because this in turn will make the space much more clearer and it will make space for those projects which are really adding value. So yeah, I think these are the only things. This is good advice to close this particular episode.
Thank you so much for making time to speak to me today. This has been a lovely conversation. Likewise, Tarusha.
Thanks for having me.