Episode 46: W3ID #1 Philip, Adam, Distruption Joe | Gitcoin, Bright ID - Proof Of Personhoof & Sybil Resistance - Web3ID
Newsletter Copy?
Status
Timestampts:
2:19 - About Erick Pinos
6:09 - Blockchain Education Network
8:20 - Introduction into Decentralized Identity
13:22 - Blockchain Adoption
16:26 - Steps Orange Protocol is taking towards DID adoptions
21:09 - TalentDAO campaign
23:23 - Panvala Stamps Campaign
28:26 - Governance Tokens vs. Reputation NFT Voting
[00:00 - 00:46]
Intro
Humpty Calderon
Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative web3 builders, to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Etherum, Bitcoin, and DeFi. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO, a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system. BanklessDAO now will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
[00:46]
Humpty Calderon
Hello and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens, and today we are talking to Eric Pinos business development lead at Orange. Eric describes the start of his crypto journey while at MIT where he joined the MIT Bitcoin Club, eventually leading him to the blockchain education network where he serves as president. He also points to the seed for identity and on chain credentials being planted there too. Having his diploma issued on the Bitcoin network. Eric joined ontology soon after graduating college helping expand orange protocol. He says DAOs are interested in cybilresistance, proving that someone is unique and an active contributor. Orange is nurturing these use cases and providing ways for web3 projects to use reputation weighted voting and creating value aligned incentives through a variety of campaigns that measure social contributions, public goods, funding and governance activity. Orange enables Web3 contributors to build their on chain history. He also points to a recent campaign that Orange hosted with TalentDAO where Reputation NFTs were provisioned to contributors who had participated across a variety of web3 activities such as Snapshot POAP, Panvala stamps, Gitcoin Grants, Twitter and Discord. Lots to unpack here. So without further ado, let's get started.
[02:19]
Eric Pinos
At MIT we had a bitcoin airdrop. It was a cross campus initiative to get Bitcoin in the hands of every student. So it was, a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin was airdropped to every student at the time, and Bitcoin was $200. So every student got half a Bitcoin for free. And the initiative of that was to kind of kick off a Bitcoin economy on campus. The school store starting accepting Bitcoin, we got a Bitcoin atm. Some of the restaurants down on Mass Ave started accepting Bitcoin and we started the MIT Bitcoin Club for people to get together and, and to talk about it. , so then, you know, I was involved a little bit, mostly just like buying Bitcoin, holding it, working on Bitcoin payment technology. There wasn't really too much that you could do with it, besides either working on the bitcoin core development or working on infrastructure for accepting Bitcoin as payments. Then Etherem came out and so it became a lot more about the smart contracts and taking applications and decentralizing the way that it's run. So that got me very interested. Especially around 2017 when decentralized came out and we brought them to speak at the club a couple of times. So I became very interested in metaverse based projects and virtual reality based projects NFTs that represent virtual land and then assets and gaming items inside these worlds represented by those, by NFTs. So after graduating I got involved with an investment firm for a little bit, and then I joined Ontology, which does a decentralized identity. That was my interest in 2018, 2019, getting its decentralized identity. I also ran and still run blockchain education. Which is a global nonprofit that educates, so creates courses and videos, tutorials, resources for university and high school students to learn more about blockchain.
Now working with Humpty and Gloria on Orange, which focuses on the decentralized reputation element of decentralized identity. So we're focusing a lot on the use cases for decentralized reputation. Everything from credit scores to rewards, things like token gating, along with communities and reputation weighted voting.
[04:39]
Humpty Calderon
That's cool. Thanks for the intro. It sounds like an interesting path, but probably, you know, a path many of us take. You mentioned learning about Bitcoin, followed by Etherem and then eventually virtual land. I would consider myself probably a novice when it comes to that. Although I'm definitely still learning all of the above. In terms of your experience, the path you took, it seems there's been a focus in education, right? Especially from the lens of what you've been doing over at Ben, followed by then kind of a focus on identity and reputation from ontology and orange. Walk me through kind of the mindset, or really how you became a contributor, because I'm always really interested to learn from other people who value education in this space. What is the inspiration and really what was kind of the motivation or I guess the way that you were connected to that project?
[05:45]
Eric Pinos
So I became president of the MIT Bitcoin Club because I wanted, I wanted a way, like, honestly, I wanted something that would stand out, right?
Especially thinking about applying to blockchain based jobs or a leadership position I could take on in my local community that'll then stand out and help, help me with later job prospects. but then growing the community was really nice. And we were able to bring in big speakers and this was, this was actually, this was the bull market of 2017. So, you know, for years, the club would be five people, 10 people, 12 people. And then all of a sudden this year we would have 80, 90, a hundred people showing up to every meeting we had to get bigger rooms, we'd order more pizza. It was an interesting time to be a leader in the community because size and the growth and the budget and the agenda and the items you go over. When I was a student, I got to learn on the blockchain Education Network. So the blockchain education network had started back in 2014, as well as a coalition of different blockchain clubs at different universities. Through that network I was able to meet other presidents at other schools or other clubs. That was cool for me seeing other people going through the same experience. Before that, Aside from the six, seven people in the club, all of my friends in crypto were online or on Reddit. So being able to meet other people in person, especially going to conferences, and meeting other students and meeting general community members that are interested in blockchain in the real world, I think that left an impact on me. So that made me want to, after graduating, take on a position at the Blockchain education network, to keep that going right for the next generation of students.
[07:41]
Humpty Calderon
That's awesome. I think that that kind of speaks to something that I've noticed, in the web3 space, and that's emergent leadership, right? So something else that I've noticed is the value of in-person relationships. I think when it comes to web3, it's very much driven by these virtual connections, in terms of our relationships with people on Telegram, on Discord, Twitter, wherever. Certainly I think there's a lot to kind of say about that, in person connection. Having just come back myself from DenCon, I saw the kind of the value of those connections or the way that you can just, multiply the energy and the collaborations that may already be going on virtually, but when you meet up in person, it's just like, okay, what else can we do? So that's incredible, to see that these in-person experiences were both kind of supportive and played a role in your crypto journey, but also that you discovered kind of your role within. To kind of lead and keep that moving forward. So let's then talk about your introduction to ontology, you talk about how followed by Ben, you joined the ontology team. Why don't you describe to us a little bit about what is ontology, and some of the work that they're doing and your role in it?
Eric Pinos
So I think that my introduction to decentralized identity, MIT does this cool thing where when you graduate, you get your diploma signed on the Bitcoin blockchain. I think it's optional, and this was in 2017 for me. They did it a few years before, but I definitely opted in to get that. So I had to install this app called Block Certs, which was created as a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and then, some startup, which I can't remember the name of. They created this digital credentialing platform called Block Certs. So I got the MIT diploma signed on there. So that got me interested in the idea of decentralized identity and verifiable credentials.So I started looking at projects in the space that were working on that kind of technology. So that's when I got interested in ontology and all of these applications in it. What I also liked about ontology was that they were focused a lot on use cases for that kind of technology supply chain, healthcare, you know, medical records, academic credentialing, insurance title registry. So I thought that was really cool. So that's when I got involved and that's when I joined the team. These enterprises, half blockchain systems, sorry, permission ledgers, hyper ledgers solutions. They don't, they don't wanna just completely shift everything, which is kind of hard. You kinda have to go all the way if you really want to get the full benefits of a blockchain. So I think it's shifted to be more community focused. And that's also where my interest shifts is more like, grassroots, growing things from the ground and starting these up. New projects and new communities and new startups that adopt these principles of decentralization and decentralized credentialing from the get go.
[09:17]
Humpty Calderon
I think that's something that probably isn't so widely recognized about ontology is it's kind of breadth of work in the decentralized identity space. I should mention, you know, before we get too deep into here, as a disclaimer, I am also involved as a contributor at Ontology and at Orange Protocol, which are the two projects, or at least the projects that we're discussing now.
It's really interesting to kind of see at least some of the reactions that the community receives when they hear about the kind of different types of work that Ontology has done in terms of technical development. Both in terms of development of DIDs, but also in terms of applications that use DIDs.
I am curious to hear from you, as someone that I know has been for a long time involved in development of products at ontology, what are the interesting use cases of DID at ontology? I heard you mention some of the challenges at the institutional adoption level, but maybe more generally talk about some of the challenges for you, creating some of these products around decentralized.
[12:43]
Eric Pinos
I think that the challenges are always in the last mile, right? The entry at some point that external data has to enter the blockchain. That's solved through Oracles, Oracles kind of take care of that. Before they got really big people didn't really know how to do that. If you look at it for supply chain, if you have a supply chain blockchain, everything's tracked on the blockchain, how do you register something onto the chain? If you're, if you're transporting, Louis Vuitton bags, sure you put the serial number on the chain, but then somebody somewhere could type in the serial number and then imprint it, right? Or minted as a credential on chain. So that's still a point of failure, right? you could bribe that person that doesn't solve the issue at hand. Then what if you have something sand where you're transporting sand or water, and it's like, how do you, you can't, you don't have serial number, I guess you have serial number for the jars, but it's just a very difficult problem of figuring out for things that exist in the real world. Or if you have a title registry for land. You know, and you have a house deed and you put that on the blockchain, somebody still has to go and put that in. Somebody has to have write permissions to go and do that. The use cases more that are entirely blockchain native, like, a credential that comes from the blockchain, on chain activity. Issuing out a reputation credential based off of your on chain activity or credit scores, which is all digital. I kind of think that those use cases will happen more or will happen first before we can really have the robustness needed to solve these problems of how do you write real world things.
[14:35]
Humpty Calderon
So what do you think, is keeping the adoption of some of these things that you've described? Is it the technology, the accessibility of it? Is it at the application layer? What do you think is, maybe holding back some adoption? What do you think is facilitating some of the recent attention and maybe increased adoption of this?
[15:05]
Eric Pinos
It's interesting for Enterprise because a lot of projects have already adopted it. Walmart uses blockchain already. You know, if you go on DocuSign, you sign a legal docent, you can enable the blockchain option to sign your DocuSign docent on a blockchain, but people don't really use it, right? I think that it's interesting because if we want people to know that they're using blockchain front and center, then the tools definitely have to be easier, right? There's a lot of great services and decentralized alternatives to centralized services signing legal docents or managing communities. Streaming payments, payroll platforms all on chain, those all exist today, but it's very difficult to use them because you need to know how to use metamask and you need to have your own private key and you have to keep your private keys safe. People aren't used to that. People are used to username, password, right? Most people don't even have chrome extensions installed besides ad blockers. So I think that there's a big barrier. Because to use blockchain stuff is very different from just how people regularly browse the internet or interact with day to day services. I think the UIs need to get easier. Then two, I don't know if it solves through education or through changing the way that, you know, having insurance services, because I think people want decentralization as a principal, but then when something goes wrong, people either want their money back or they, they want someone to blame, or they want customer support. Which you don't really get in blockchain. I have, I have friends that work at MetaMask. And they say the worst job in the world is to work in MetaMask support because people call them all the time demanding their money back. And it's like, we don't have it. So, I think that there's a big education gap in understanding how these blockchain services work. So for adoption to happen, we definitely need to close the gap there. We need to make the UI. For the most part, I think blockchain should just be a background technology, right? We should make these services easy to use that people don't even realize if they're using a blockchain. They're just experiencing the benefits of it.
[16:54]
Humpty Calderon
Yeah. I tend to agree with you there. I think we do a great job at talking about the technology and the protocols and the different standards, but we don't do an equally good job talking about the applications and the use case. Let’s use Facebook as an example. Facebook was talking about how it leverages TC P I P and HTTPS and all of these different protocols in order to allow you to make connections with people online. They're really just talking about the social layer and how you can connect with people and friends around the world and, you know, kind of build these connections. So, yeah, I think that there's definitely still a lot of room for improvement in terms of how we communicate, and the value of the technology we're building. But doing so through these narratives of their actual use case and how they're really helping people do things better than they already do now. So it's truly interesting looking at the ownership economy, versus where we are, the product and, that gets monetized on the back end. So maybe now is a good time to kind of lean into some of the other work that you're doing over at Orange Protocol and how, Orange sees the evolution of web3 through the ownership of our identities, and then building out our reputation on these identities on chain, or off chain Why don't you give us an introduction to Orange generally, and then maybe talk about some of the things that are happening there now.
[17:38]
Eric Pinos
So Orange is a decentralized reputation protocol that focuses a lot on creating a platform where people can come and create models or plug in data sources and design their own reputation system, for a community or for their user base. It could be for a variety of different use cases, but I think like, so it's a general purpose platform, right? Anybody can come and create a model for whatever it is that they want to measure, and then, Orange is adding in all these different data sources, both on chain and off chain stuff on chain activity, history, off chain voting history, even social media interactions that can be used to create more robust, reputation scores. Now, the use case is something that we're very focused on. I think initially, it started out as just a general idea. This is something that should exist, people should have their reputation decentralized and they should have their credentials decentralized. I think what we've seen over the years is that people aren't so interested in that. You know, a diploma and you mint it on chain, you can do that now, but what employers are looking at that, most employers are happy just to look at your LinkedIn or they, they want you to send it over in a pdf. So the other thing about what are the use cases where people want to decentralize identity now. What we've seen is in these DAOs, in these communities, people want to recognize, especially for cybil resistance, where you wanna prove someone's unique and when someone's interacting with you on chain from Moala address, there's only so many ways you can do that. Either through a mix of social verification where people are verifying each other or you do a hard KYC where someone uploads a passport. But if you do that, then we don't want to recreate the old systems where people are just emailing photocopies of passports back and forth, right? We want to use these decentralized identities to make that more robust. So you're just sharing the proofs and that way everyone's data stays safe. So our focus at At Orange has been on nurturing these use cases. Everything from reputation weighted voting to just rewards for the community members. We've done a couple of campaigns now where you qualify based on a certain reputation model, which measures things such as your social contribution, your donations to the web3 space, how active you are in voting on snapshot proposals. You can earn these different badges that kind of build up your web3 contributor history, almost like a GitHub, where you can see your contribution history.
We have projects interested in using badges for token gating communities. We have projects interested in using those badges for reputation weighted voting. We have projects interested in using those badges for extra rewards and future airdrops. So that's what we're excited to work with the community on is more ideas for what the use cases for these things are.
[23:09]
Humpty Calderon
Yeah, that's a good point, really framing these discussions, especially just because I personally have been, at least for over a year now, supporting projects that are building the space of decentralized identity and now reputation. Why don't you describe to us, maybe some of these campaigns that have opened recently or are open now, and share with us maybe some of the ways that these use cases are kind of executed on. So if someone joins a campaign, you said, has met some sort of, minimum kind of reputation based on the models. What is it that they can do afterwards with that?
[24:08]
Eric Pinos
The campaign that we're doing right now is with Talent DAO. Talent DAO is a decentralized science community of academics, researchers, thought leaders, contributors and writers. They are one of the forefront of the Desci space and we're very excited to work with them. The drop that we're doing now is three different badges that we designed and refined the models, and we did data analysis on these models over the past few months to create these models that represent three key contribution areas in the web3 space. So the first one is on discord activity. DAOs use Discord to manage their communities. So joining the Discord gives you a boost. Cause the score starts at zero, and you work your way up. So if you join the Discord, that's bonus points. If you retweet a link to the Discord, that's bonus points. If you help promote the discord, you know the model outlines what all the parameters are. But if you reach above a certain score, much like a credit score, then you become eligible for that batch. So you can go and mince that NFT batch, based on that score.
The other model is the voter model. For a voter batch. So that your activity on snapshot is measured. So are you an active, are you an active citizen? Do you turn out for votes? Do you, do you vote a lot on snapshot proposals across all the different snapshot spaces? And do you create proposals too?
So if you create proposals then you are active in the fors. We integrated POAPS. So the more POAPS you have, the more active you've been in the web3 community. So that'll bring your score up to be eligible for that batch. And the last badge is the donor badge. So that one, we recognize people that have donated to Gitcoin. Gitcoin is doing Gitcoin grants round 15 right now. So the more rounds you've participated in, the higher score is for that batch, the donor batch. So it doesn't matter, you know, how much you've donated. We don't want to measure just a pure amount because different people can donate different amounts. We wanna measure how often you turn up. Do you, do you come each time? Have you been a part of this for a while? have you been actively participating each time they've done a round? Then we also included Palavala stamps. So Panvala is another community of web3 projects that are creating public goods and they do it through Panvala stamps where you can collect stamps by completing tasks for different projects and then get them redeemed, to donate to, to projects. So we measure how many Panvala stamps you have. So it's three badges based off of three models that we worked and refined. This is just the first season of it. I wanna do more and we wanna make the models more complex and take into account more factors and create new types of models and create new types of badges. Right now they're just collectibles, but the idea is to start using them for token gating. So we have a collaboration with collab land. We have an integration where you can use those badges to create discord channels and then lock access to the discord channels unless you have those badges in your wallet. So we're creating one in the talent DAO discord, where if you have these badges, you'll get access to a special. So you can see that you can network and connect with the other people that have also reached the same level as you.
[28:00]
Humpty Calderon
I'm personally very excited about these web3 data driven applications. At orange with these campaigns and these drops, more so than the social stuff. I agree, there's value in the social, contributorship in terms of either attending some sort of event or getting some sort of pull out from that attendance. I really like the idea of really digging deep into one's reputation in an organization based on meaningful interactions. Obviously, meaningful is very much a subjective point of view. Looking at someone's support through Gitcoin grants for instance, I think that's a really deep and meaningful connection with an organization because you are helping to support that public good if you will, through that platform. You are basically providing some sort of funding for that project to continue to grow and develop. Take Panvala stamps, another project that is very much building around communities.
So it’s facilitating that type of marketing, as Neron, who we recently had on the show, described to us, right? Like boxtops on top of the cereal box. But instead of for schools, you're doing it for DAOs, though, their vision is certainly to go beyond web3 projects, but for now, looking at that data to be able to support, some sort of like, recognition and maybe even, remuneration of individual contributors in a DAO. Even if that means something as non-financial as opening up access to different channels within a discord. Personally I'm very fond of the idea of reducing the financialization of crypto and building out these less financial elements and ways to engage communities. So what are your thoughts on that in terms of crypto, web3 and how identity and reputation can evolve that, or do you think that we need something else in order to create a more robust ecosystem beyond just kind of the financialization of it?
[30:40]
Eric Pinos
I mean, I think that we need robust tools, for the whole system to work. I think one is that the financialization at the end of the day is what makes something really take off. And I've seen that, I mean, I wrote a whole post about that as part of the ontology, an ontology identity series. Take NFT’s, you can make them and you can use them and you can do what you want with them. But, until it became very easy to just mint them at scale and people started buying them and the tools and infrastructure was in place, these marketplaces and these no code mentors. That's when it really took off because people saw the money you could make from it. Same with Defi, right? You could use Uniswap swap, you can use, you can go on lend on Aave and you can use the service for what it's intended for. Then yield farming came and then that's when it really took off in terms of liquidity and people getting their interest in it. It's the same with DAOs and decentralized identity. when you figure out how to monetize DAOs, that's when everybody's gonna create a DAO, right? You're gonna see everyone making those, but I think it's, it is good in some ways. That's what makes things investible. We'll probably see funding for DAO tooling go up a lot, and that'll help fund the creation of this infrastructure. I think it also makes it more sustainable internally because, you know, with NFTs, there's a way you can expect to support the team through NFT sales. There's a way you can expect to support the team through the protocol. With DAOs, revenue is coming to a DAO. That can then be used to pay contributors and to pay the bounties and to pay the infrastructure to maintain the infrastructure. So I think that still needs to be figured out. A lot of DAOs use their tokens as governance tokens, their whole value prop is that you can vote with them. But there should be more robust voting infrastructure, right? voting is still, or at least for a long time, voting was just set up a snapshot page and then it is token weighted voting, right?
But there's billions of dollars of value in these governance tokens held and there's multi billions of dollars in liquidity locked in these protocols. So, we need a more robust infrastructure to manage voting, for people to set up meritocracies or set up whatever kind of government they want and then being able to allocate voting based on different weights. So I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen outside of just the financialization of it, to just create a more robust system.
[34:00]
Humpty Calderon
This idea, that you mentioned here at the very end in terms of governance not necessarily being driven by financial kind of value. Looking at that from the perspective of being able to participate in governance based on your activity in a DAO versus your token holdings because there is a cost to that. And while I think that there should be a cost to governance, I think that there should also be a sense of how we can govern based on someone's reputation activity, contributions in an organization and being able to build on that, right? I think some projects have developed systems through the governance, governor model. They have stewards where other communities or community members vote through delegates. So at that point there is, A level of non financialization, where the community then votes for you to lead that project in governance. I think even then there's this opportunity to recognize the stewards who are actively participating in a community, whether that is through conversation or other soft governance, through Discord, for instance, and even their governance participation on platform snapshots. How regularly active are you, are you connecting with your constituency? Should this be taken into consideration when you are increasing someone's reputation so that they can then have a bigger voice outside of maybe even the token delegation? Just a lot of interesting experiments that can happen, and certainly maybe through or outside of Snapshot. It's a continuously evolving system. I can think some of the current stewardship models ends up being popularity contests, right? Where the biggest social media presence is able to garner the most votes, and you don't even, you don't even need the most votes people wise because it's still token weighted. So you just need a couple of rich actors to delegate to. So I think there's more that can be done in the direction of having tangible ways of recognizing contribution besides capital and voice, or capital and influence, I guess recognizing labor, right? Recognizing consistency of stewards by those metrics. I think that would be a healthier way to choose or to identify who you want to delegate your funds to. I think that there's still so much there to kind of experiment with, which is personally one of the more exciting reasons why I show up every day. Whether it is to have people and learn from you, here on crypto sapiens or building out products, in the space of identity and reputation over at Ontology or Orange or even just being a DAO contributor across the web through ecosystem, there is just so much, yet to be discovered and contributed to and to help evolve that ecosystem. I guess to maybe wrap up, if you wouldn't mind giving us a projection or kind of your thoughts in terms of what you think the future of web3 could potentially look like. Maybe framed from the idea of identity and reputation or as started this conversation, talking about from virtual, since I believe that's kind of a space that you really are passionate about and occupy. What is your vision for the future? And if it's ideally a vision that you could control, what would that look like?
[38:29]
Eric Pinos
I think that web3 is kind of the infrastructure and the backbone, maybe the intangibles of, of society. Whereas Metaverse is more of the physical. The virtual, physical manifestation of society in the Metaverse, I think of it mainly as you have buildings and you have geographic locations that are virtual. You have community spaces. You have avatars that you can interact with, and it's very different from just virtual reality, even though I think visual. The easiest way to think about it, is just like adding a more geographical layer to the internet. Whereas the internet right now is very search engine heavy. You search for what you need and there it is. Metaverse kind of brings more of a discovery element into the internet where you can browse and you can virtually walk around and you can, you can interact with different things. But in order for it to not just be owned by corporations, we need a strong web3 backbone where people can come and contribute. So I think that both, I think that both, it's cool that both revolutions are happening around the same time because I think that both help each other be more successful. If it was just one or the other, it wouldn't be as good. I see technology being adopted more, but I think it's gonna be led a lot by the new companies and these new projects because I think these old companies are coming out and they're announcing Metaverse initiatives. They're coming out and announcing web3 initiatives, but I don't think they fully adopt them the way that I see it, or we envision it. We see it being more free and open. I don't wanna get too philosophical. I want to stay practical, but I do think that we're building these systems now and we're more forward thinking because we're starting from scratch. So our business models are not tied to acquiring and selling users' data. So we have the freedom to think, how can we design a system where the user makes money off of their data and we find a different way to be sustainable? So those are the experiments that I'm most excited about. Seeing these new business models that can arise and these new interactions that can take place inside of the metaverse.
[41:02]
Humpty Calderon
Yeah, I see the Metaverse more as the world, whereas the web3 is the economic structure and the societal structure of that world. Inside of Metaverse you'll be able to transact in crypto, buy and sell NFTs that represent your land, represent your clothes, and represent your avatar and, and what, whatever it is you'd want to do. And then that way creators can also get paid for that. So I think that all of these things work together. Kind of, some sort of relationship between the two, I suppose. The metaverse and web3 and hopefully how each facilitates the other, right? How the adoption of one or the other is kind of, increasing the adoption, equally on the other side. One other thing that I to ask to our guests, and this is the last question, as we are a podcast that is positioned as kind of, you know, featuring or amplifying these voices of people in web3, we to learn about what, who other people, what other people have been influential, you know, in our guest crypto journey. So it could be someone on crypto, Twitter, it could be a book that you read. Who has been influential to you in helping you along your crypto journey and really maybe even framing some of your own philosophies in how you build this ecosystem?
[42:02]
Eric Pinos
Compound finance. So I think that, seeing the project of compound when they came out with the c tokens, that really changed the way that I think about crypto. Robert Leshner when I met him at East San Francisco, I think in 2018, he was walking around and he was like, Check this out, you can earn interest on your crypto. And we're like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Celsius or whatever. You give it to a bank. He's like, No, no, no, no, no, no. It's all on chain. I'm like, What do you mean? It's all on chain? What, how? And he shows us and it works. So I looked into it and it was really mind blowing, the idea of using blockchain to create a system where you get access, instant access to liquidity, opposed to a peer to peer marketplace. So that was the first time that it blew my mind. The second time that it blew my mind was a year later when they came out with the c token. So now not only are you lending and borrowing and locking them in, but you get the receipt, right? So you can give that receipt to somebody else, and now they have it. At all times it is earning interest, which I think is that was how I started to understand the money Legos concept of defi where all money should be earning interest at all times, and you can only do that in a blockchain. That's something we talk about, what are blockchain native use cases? When the internet started out, it was just newspapers, right? People would think, Oh, let me take a newspaper and put it online. So my website is as if it was a newspaper or an ad. What does an ad look like? A billboard or a magazine or a phone book? It wasn't until social media came out that we really started coming up with these minternet native use cases. So I think it's the same with blockchain. Defi is a blockchain native use case. It's not just lending and borrowing, recreated onchain. It's these new concepts peer to protocol or these, the money legos that really, change everything.So yeah, I think that was the most influential project in the space for me to learn.
[46:26]
Humpty Calderon
That's a great answer, and thank you for that. The way that I'm taking that is, I think Compound did something innovative, at the time, revolutionary, and then it definitely influenced the way that other projects, that developed in the defi space, started to operate. And the cool thing to see is that compound still keeps going strong today. So, I think, for anyone who is developing anything that's innovative, novel in this space, if you come up with something, you know, I think to the point that Eric was making in terms of, you know, having it be, taken advantage, full advantage of that blockchain native application, but also building something that is of value to your community, it could potentially influence the way the other projects that are coming behind you develop. So I think that's really cool and amazing to kind of hear. Your experience with that early on and the projects that you work on, you bring that same sense of innovation and determination, to hopefully influence the ecosystem in positive ways as I know you do. I appreciate your friendship and I appreciate you, also contributing to the many projects that you do. I encourage everyone if at any point when you're interacting with the system, if you have any ideas for like, other cool models or things, things that, that could be measured, that should be measured, that would be interesting to see in the form of a model or a, or an orange reputation at a sea drop, let us know because I, we wanna do more and more interesting drops that expand the way we think about Reputation NFTs and what they can be used for. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Eric. I know I did. If you'd like to connect with Eric, you can find him on Twitter at Eric Pens. To learn more about Orange Protocol, go to orangeprotocol.io and on Twitter at Orange Protocol.
You can also find more conversations like this one by visiting our website at Cryptosapiens.xyz I look forward to reconnecting with you at our next discussion.