Episode 42: Niran | Panvala - Connecting Communities
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Status
Timestamps
2:16 - 8:35 - Niran’s Introduction and Entry into the World of Crypto
8:35 - 19:10 - The Games People Play as a Society with Capitalism, and Extraction
19:10 - 25:29 - How DAOs can ‘unlock’ a better value system for communities and for people when it comes to making chnage.
25:29 - 36:54 - Indepth introduction to Panvala, and an introduction to Panvala Stamps
36:54 - 38:24 - How to utilize Panvala Stamps after purchase
38.24 - 41:42 - What is Pan Token, and how does it work in conjunction with Panvala Stamps?
41:42 - 44:58 - How do Panvala Stamps look in the long term? What are the long term goals for Panvala Stamps?
44:58 - end - Niran’s Crypto Inspiration
Transcriptions
Panvala
Humpty: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative Web3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Defi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with Bankless DAO, A movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
Bankless DAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens and today we are talking to Niran founder of Panvala. We began our conversation with a brief introduction to Niran and his crypto journey thus far. He recalls his initial thoughts of Ethereum and Crypto as a whole were not very positive. It wasn't until he learned of Auger that he began to understand the possibilities of crypto and began to contribute to it.
This eventually let him down the Ethereum rabbithole as he realized that Ethereum was a tool that allows for, as he says, it rules to be written for any interaction between individuals or groups of people. Like the rules for a board game, except this game does not need an intermediary or game master because a network, the computers around the world are promising to be an impartial game master for any rules you publish on the network.
This made him wonder, what should we do with the technology? If we have this toolkit for economic and social coordination that unlocks better cooperation for all of mankind. Eventually this led him to develop Panvala and set its mission as a mass movement to reshape the way value flows in the economy, to improve this stuff that we share. There are very few people that ask the types of questions that Niran does or are able to dissect topics so precisely. I'm excited to share this conversation with you, so let's get started.
Niran: Sounds good. So again, my name is Niran I am the founder of Panvala. Before I became the founder of Panvala I was really like like my background is in software engineering, so that's what I, that's what I do professionally. I was working at different startups. Doing different apps, like I do try to now you know how in the post Covid world, everybody like scans a QR code and pays their check with their phone. I was working on a company that did that sort of thing and they still do it. So like seeing that actually become real post Covid is refreshing to see. For me, the, I think the best way to understand who I am is to understand how I got into crypto in the first place because I don't think my path is normal. So like I came across a Bitcoin and the whole digital goal thing seemed pretty straightforward to me but I didn't believe it at first. I thought it was like these crazy nerds think they could make money from nothing. And then one of my friends was like, Hey, have you read about this Bitcoin thing? So I was like, I guess I have to do some more research. And by then of the stuff that I read, I was like, Oh, nerds can make money from nothing. That's That's what this technology is. You can create new forms of money. Okay, cool, i get that. Couple years later came across these guys, they said, Hey, we're gonna put a programming language in our money. And I'm like, Ah, that sounds like a scam coin. Like why would you want a programming language in your money? I Don't see how that makes it worth anymore. I don't see how that makes it better, Gold. These guys are just trying to do some sort of scam. So I kind of ignored it, but I ended up coming across a project called Auger, and at the time I was really excited about prediction markets. This idea that if you let people bet on the outcomes of future actions, then you can get forecast for anything the same way you have a weather forecast. Imagine every news article about a future event had a forecast for those future events. That's the vision that was in my head. I'm no longer as excited about that. I don't think it's gonna pan out that way, but I was excited at the time, so I was like, Hey, I'm gonna contribute to this decentralized prediction market platform can never be shut down. All these forecasts will proliferate because all these different events will be able to be bet on “this is the future”. So I started contributing and then they were using Ethereum behind the scenes. Auger was really one of the first dApps on Ethereum, but I didn't start contributing because I was excited about Ethereum and I was excited about Auger. They happened to be using Ethereum behind the scenes, and it was really using it. That made it click for me what this technology was for what it could do, what it meant, what Ethereum means is that you can write down the rules for any interaction between individuals or groups of people. Just write down those rules, like it's the rules to a board. And instead of needing like a game master for your board game, like many board games need, you don't need any middle man, any intermediary to enforce the rules of these themes that you write. Because the Ethereum Network, these thousands of computers around the world are promising to be an impartial game master for any rules you publish to the network. Impartial Game master for anything. If you can come up with rules for people to interact, that's better than the way we cooperate out in the real world today. If you can write down those rules, publish them, get other people to opt into them, and it actually produces a better experience for people, then you can literally improve the world just by coming up with better rules and writing them down.
So that to me was a mind blown moment. I definitely think we can do way better At cooperating with one another than the world outside. It's a garbage fire and I don't think that's anything to do with human nature. I think the problems are really due to the games that we play with one another, the games that can be corrupted, the games that require these partial middlemen that you can't really trust At the end of the day, the more that we can come up with better rules for cooperation, I think mankind is much better, then people give us credit for, I think we're pretty amazing. And when we have these better ways to interact, I think everyone's gonna see what I see that we're capable of incredible things. That to me is why I really started getting into crypto. I quit my job at that point. I started to try to find a place to work in Web3 full time. I came across Consensys one of the earliest companies building on Web3 and worked there for four years that's really where Panvala came out of. I did some security auditing there as well, worked on a couple other prediction market things. But yeah, like Panvala was really the third in a series of ideas about like what you should, what should you do with this technology if you have this new tool for economic and social coordination that can unlock better cooperation for all of mankind, what should you build with that? So to me, I'm like, okay, the hardest problem we face is the stuff that we share. The stuff that we don't share gets better all the time. Our phones get better at an incredibly rapid rate because all these companies are computing and they know exactly who's gonna pay for it. The person who uses the phone is gonna pay for it. So I can make that person happier. I'm gonna get more money. So Apple does that all the time. Google does that all the time. Samsung, they all are making everything better cuz they have a clear way to be rewarded for it. But imagine that a phone didn't benefit one person. Imagine it benefited two people or five people, or like a million people like a whole city. If one phone benefited a whole, who's gonna pay for it? Maybe you charge some people taxes to pay for it, and then you have an election to determine the features of the phone. And then every phone company is I have to like ab bribe this politician to make my phone the city phone. And everybody gets the city phone. And then it sucks because it doesn't do what you want. It does what could get through a democracy but that's the situation that we're in for all the stuff that we share. Like If we can come up with a better way that produces some of these self-improving effects that market economies have on the stuff that we don't share, the stuff that just benefits me. If we can get as good as that, when it comes to the stuff that we share, that to me is the pathway for massive improvement of all life on Earth. So that's really what I was trying to figure out. These kinds of decentralized non-profits are the first kind of framing that I used to think about what needed to be built. So Panvala is the third in the series of those prototypes and really I think of it less as a decentralized nonprofit now, and really more of a mass movement to reshape the way value flows in our economy so we can dramatically improve the stuff that we share. So that's really how I got to hear. That doesn't tell you what Panvala is yet, but I'll pause for a second there.
Humpty: Yeah. Thank you so much. I think it, for me at least, it positions it nicely in terms of What it represents and we can certainly jump into what it is in a moment, but it's really exciting to, you know hear both of your introduction to crypto, blockchain and even your initial reactions to what Ethereum was, but through the actual application use of the blockchain Perhaps sounds like you saw it a little bit differently, so that's really interesting and really a nice, fun story. Thank you for that. I really am interested, maybe before we get too deep into talking about Panvala hearing about your thoughts of, you know these games that we play and changing the rules. You know Certainly I think there have been these games that we've played for decades which affect the way that we work, the way that we earn, the way that we invest, et cetera. And you know a lot of it is definitely fundamentally based on rules that someone else has created that maybe benefit them or a few, but definitely not the many. And so curious as to your experience now, Web3 and maybe even through the work that's happening at Panvala as how you see the rules changing and how those rules are starting to benefit more people, maybe through a single organization or just generally through a movement like Panvala
Niran: Yeah, that's a great question. So like, when it comes to the games that we play as a society when it comes to making money when it comes to allocating power and resources in our society. Like some of the, there's some places where the rules are obviously biased in one way or another, and then everyone's like Oh, I wish we could change the way those words somehow but we don't have the power to do that. There's a lot of places like that. What's more interesting to me is when the rules aren't biased That is like assume if for in the American context, assume that the founding father sat down to write perfect rules that were actually embedded with the values that all men are created equal and endowed at these alienable rights. Like literally trying to create a society of equal. Just pretend that the fairytale version of this, pretend that's what was happening . So if you write down these rules and people start to play this game, like even in the early days like it, it could start to work fine, but at the end of the day it's impossible, in my opinion, to write perfect rules. Inevitably, people are gonna find the corner cases, the ways they can extract more value for the, for themselves and the system will start to decay. If you go further in American history, you see people start to point out the themes that are going wrong. Eisenhower and his far farewell speech, it's like this whole military industrial complex thing They seem to have captured our democracy. You might wanna watch out for these guys, peace out I'm gone. Like the, he was pointing out a place where the perfect ideal system had kind of decayed and that happens all over the place. And the foundings all themselves were like, Hey, this should get you, The system that we put together should give you a couple decades, couple hundred years of, peace and prosperity. But eventually you're probably gonna need another revolution. Like that's the context of what they were putting out there. They didn't expect the rules that they were putting in place to last forever. This pattern of decay and extraction happens all over the place. And to me, extraction is the core problem that we need to organize against as a society, as a movement in a web3 all over the place. Like the ability for people to get money for doing nothing by extracting value from me and you and other people and put it in their pockets. It is the core problem Of our society right now because the better we get at doing technology, the easier it is for more and more people to find new ways to extract value from people.
So many of the problems that people see are caused by this when people are like oh, like we should be getting dramatically, increases in like our, the quality of our health, our life expectancy that should all be getting better, the quality of the homes that we live in should be going up, like we're getting better at everything. The quality of everything should be going up, but instead, the prices of everything are going up, the prices of education, the prices of housing, the prices of all these different things just seems to be going up even as our society is progressing. And the problem, the core problem that people see, they have different, they, everyone has a different lens on it. They're like, Oh, it's the landlords are a problem. The big tech companies are a problem. Wear spy on all of this. Like the, everyone has a different lens, but the core problem is extraction. Like you literally just should not be able to get money for nothing by extracting value from other people. And that's what this decay looks like in different systems of rules. If you put together a set of rules that looks fair, people find ways to finagle the rules and extract value from themselves. That's happening all over the place. So in Web3, the general ethos that people have been putting out there is just, decentralized, eliminate the middle men all together so they can't extract from you. And that's great. That approach can work for a lot of things. If you've traded on Uniswap There is no middleman extracting value from you other than maybe the miners who are extracting a little bit of value that happens here and there. But generally speaking, it's a system designed to eliminate the middleman of the exchange that could extract value from you in that sort of scenario.
There's different kind of decentralized protocols that you can build that kind of solve the problem in that way, but the, that approach. For solving the problem of extraction, it's very narrow. There's only certain kinds of systems that you can actually design in a decentralized way that completely eliminates middlemen. Like you can't apply that to our whole society to solve the problem, but you can apply that analysis That is a middlemen. Extracting value is a giant problem. You can apply that analysis to our whole society, but to solve it everywhere, I believe it's not a technical architecture that can do that. It's a mass movement that can do that. We have to organize as human beings against extraction and end that forever, that is, you should not be able to propose to start a business or an effort where the core value that you'll be getting for you and your investors, it's value extracted from other people. But that is literally the default advice in Silicon Valley to every entrepreneur. If you go try to get funding for a business, they'll ask you where is your moat? And what they mean by your moat is like, how are you trapping your customers so they cannot escape your grasps. How are you making sure that no one else can compete with you so you can extract value and get money for nothing? Like it is great business advice, but the fact that has become normalized is a sign at how far themes have gone that should not be good business advice. The good business advice should be, how can you make your customers as happy as possible? How can you serve them better than anybody else? So they'll continue to pay you. That's the fairytale version of capitalism that we tell every kid growing up. Every business is trying to serve customers as good as they can, and the ones that do the best, make the most money. That's the story that we tell. But capitalism in practice, again I am pro capitalism in general. I'm not anti, but what we've arrived at is, Extractive capitalism, it's starting businesses to extract as much value from each other as possible. And I don't wanna extract any value from you ever. Like I want to serve you and have you pay me for serving you. That's what the economy is supposed to be, but that's literally not what it is. And we have to do something about it, like the, this is our society. Nobody is gonna solve the problem for us, but it is a big problem that we have to solve. And it comes to the biggest things like climate change, that's fundamentally a problem of extraction. People trying to get value for doing very little work by selling energy that they get outta the ground for free. And then we burn it, get put it into the air. Nobody pays the costs we're extracting from each other by just polluting each other's climate. And then we can't solve that problem. Like how do we stop setting earth on fire? Well If you stop, maybe I'll stop, but you have to stop first. That's the situation that we're in. And now where I live in the Austin, Texas, having the hottest Summer ever since we've been starting and keeping records and we can't stop, we , like we literally can't stop.
So that's a huge problem And to me, the way we solve it is by organizing against extraction. Anywhere you see somebody just getting money for doing nothing taking no risk, putting in no effort, putting in no labor, they should stop doing that. So when you see Facebook collecting all this money from selling us as a product to business, That's got to stop, when you see Google doing the same thing, that's got a stop, like when you see people getting people addicted to different kinds of, whether it's a media or a substance or whatever. So they have to keep paying you forever to be able to solve that problem that they caused for you. That's gotta stop. It's all gotta stop anytime extraction is happening, so we can get out of these bad corners that we're in, whether it's climate, whether it's housing, whether it's education. All the problems are caused by extraction and we need to organize against it
Humpty: That's extremely powerful and thank you for sharing that. I think that there's a couple of things here that you touched on that I think are worth revisiting and maybe even expanding on. And I think some of the points you were making in terms of, extraction and you know the, just generally the way that we perceive capitalism, And maybe where it started and where it's at today. Very different places and certainly affecting the world very differently, both in terms of our climate, but also in terms of our, humanity. You know Is it fair? Is it, is it being distributed in a, in a fair manner. The other one that I think that you touched on, and maybe we can build on to also start talking about Panvala is these rules of decay and just generally maybe some of the things that are important to create better organizations and better systems. It's interesting that you bring that up because I think that when we talk about How we're, think through processes or building organizations. We think of these systems that, yes, maybe they're iterative, maybe they, they can evolve over time, but we don't necessarily see them as something that should decompose, die and decompose and maybe be recycled and reused and comes back in some other way. We just see them as maybe forever lasting. I guess What are your thoughts in terms of maybe how processes in the Web3 ecosystem have been defined so far, and maybe even how DAOs have been thought of and developed in terms of their long lasting existence And, and maybe should we consider decay as part of this natural, I guess occurring process within everything, including the organizations that we build.
Niran: Yes, I absolutely think that we should see decay as a core thing that's gonna happen and cause of that lens, Like when I think of what's gonna actually unlock value for many people, it's not necessarily a particular DAO a particular structure or anything like that. It's really the ecosystem of DAOs the ecosystem of choices for you to choose from. So when something begins to decay and you see something, You can opt into something else and leave the decay behind. And that's the core theme that's missing in many parts of our society. It exists when it comes to the marketplace. Like Let's say Blackberry, the phone company stops innovating fast enough, stops serving people fast enough, like people will just switch in by iPhones and they did that. Like you, When it comes to things that you buy on the market, we are not trapped decay at all. It's, and it's great. But Like we have a release valve, but when it comes to things that we share, we are trapped into decay because we tend to want to put institutions at this base layer of things that live forever. And that's good. I don't like, I don't think we want our government to be, to dissolve and be switched out completely by something else periodically Like I think that would suck. I like having a stable, long-lasting military to you know, provide the peace, all that stuff. I think that's pretty good. But the problem is tying so much of what we do to things that live forever and cannot be changed. For instance, like when it comes to US in the United States, like a lot of the, a lot of healthcare stuff is tied to the federal government. A lot of education is tied to federal and state governments.
A lot of things are tied to things that you can't actually opt out of. So instead, when we feel the decay happening, we just get mad at each other. The decay is happening because of our political opponents. Who are your sworn mortal enemies, and you should hate them with every fiber of your being. That's the nonsense that's being spewed in every corner of our society today. And the decay is not the fault of your fellow citizens. The decay is you know, guaranteed. But the problem is that the problem is a problem of monopoly. Like we can't opt out of the things that are decaying and make a different. So to me, building systems where more of the base layer has an element of choice to it, is the key to exiting our stagnation. Some people think the key to exiting our stagnation is again, defeating your opponents and the making sure that they never gain power again. But I think that it's just, choosing something that works for you, letting them choose something that works for them, and that's how we iteratively get progressed. So if you think of the, again, the more social systems that we're trapped in, the reason that I'm so focused on community life is because I think thinking of the way to solve problems as through your community first, rather than through a government or through a corporation. Is the way to get choice as a baked in feature of the landscape that's emerging. The more that things are done on a community basis, the more when you see that decay start to happen, you can say, Hey, we, we need our, we need to get our shit together and fix our community. Or my, my community doesn't want to do what I want do, so I'm gonna leave and join another community. That, that needs to be the process at work For so many of the problems that we face, and really the reason that it's not, It's because communities don't have control over flows of resources and our society, we've given those flows of resources away. We've given them to the state and we've given them to corporations. And when it comes time to do something with our community, we dig in our pockets and we see what's left over and we give some there and it can work. There's a lot vibrant communities that exist, whether they're civic organizations, arts organizations, churches, parent teacher associations, there's lots of community organizations that work. But for them to be able to solve problems on the scale that is necessary, they need to have access to more resources than they do today.
So that to me is the key. Whether If we can both, if we can solve two problems at one, That is if we can end extraction by organizing a mass movement to push back against any time someone is trying to extract value from me or you. And if we can use the value that we shift away from people extracting to communities to solve the problems that we face, that gives us an economy where no one is trying to extract value from you, and it gives you a framework in which You can choose the community that you wanna solve problems with dramatically more resources than communities had available to them. So when I think about the broader DAO ecosystem that's happening, I don't think in terms of what any innovation that any particular DAO is doing. I want all the DAOs to grow. I, as long as people are participating in a DAO, I love it Because that to me is a community and they, that's gonna be one of the options on the table for people to choose from. And the work that I want to do is giving every DAO vastly more resources than they have every a Web3 community of vastly more resources than they have. And once we demonstrate that, going to every community and every city you and I are in, and making sure that they have vastly more resources to work with so they can solve the problems in front of them. And If we can do that to me is the path to a dramatically better, a dramatically more prosperous and a dramatically happier world for All people, not just techy people, not just people who share my political beliefs. Like I want everybody to get what they want. And the path to doing that is organizing against extraction and shifting values to communities that you can choose. So instead of having being locked into stagnation, you make choices all the time about the people you wanna work with the resources that have been freed up for you to allocate.
Humpty: Wow. Yeah that's wonderfully said and I think beautiful segue into some of the more recent initiatives that are happening over at Panvala so maybe we could introduce just generally Panvala and some of the work that was being done there early and maybe some of how it's evolved and introduce some of the new initiatives like stamps.
Niran: Sounds good. So Panvala is a mass movement to drive every single dollar spent on marketing in our economy into the budgets of communities. That is the framing that we're using to, again, shift value away from people who are extracting it today, these advertising middlemen, and shift it into the budget of communities to dramatically increase the resources they have to do what they want, Solve the problems they see. If you see every dollar spent on marketing to get your attention, to get your business, that is a dollar spent to change your behavior. The dollar spent to get you to go in the door of a specific business, to go to a certain website online to buy a certain food. Whatever it is, they're trying to change your behavior and at the end of the day, you control your own individual. So if you and I organized to make sure that we're controlling our own behaviors in ways that drive value to our communities, that seems like a very straightforward thing and like it doesn't seem like anything impossible, maybe hard but it should be under our control. If marketing dollars are spent to change our behavior, we should be able to control where those dollars go. I can't do that alone. I can't change where the marketing dollars spent to change my behavior. Go. I can't just say, Oh, I'm only going to go shop at businesses that give me more money. That's just shopping at the cheapest store. It's like that's already something you can do alone and it doesn't work that well. But if we use our combined power, if we organize as a mass movement to shift where marketing dollars go, then we can all work to shift where those dollars are spent so that when a business wants to get more customers in the door, the default thing they do is fund to the communities their customers are in. That's the world that we're working to build.
So the mechanism that we use to do that is Panvala stamps. And before I get into what Panvala stamps are, I want talk to you about the analog version of Panvala stamps that already exists that you've probably already used yourself, especially if you grew up in the US. And what I'm talking about is box tops for education.
Box Tops for Education is a marketing program from a cereal company called General Mills. They have dozens of brands of cereal and on the shelf in the grocery store, there are several dozen cereals to choose from. So General Mills a cereal company. They want you to buy their cereal. When you see all those choices on the shelf and you're trying to buy cereal for your kids, they want you to ignore all the other options and only buy General Mill Cereal. So the way they get you to do that as a parent is they say, Hey parents, if you buy our cereal and you keep the top of the box, cut off the cardboard, top of the box, take it to your kid's school, we'll fund your kid's school based on how many box tops you collect. So what they're doing is they're literally giving control of their marketing budget cuz that's what they're spending to parents to spend in a community they want to support. That to me is revolutionary. That to me is the way every single marketing dollar should be spent in our economy. And that to me is what we can aggressively grow and scale to apply to not just every school, but To every community, including schools, not just to serial, but literally every company you interact with in our economy, and not just cardboard box tops, but maybe NFTs that represent something that value that you can take to your community. So that's what Panvala stamps are. It's just like that box top that you collect when you make a purchase from that serial company Except it's from any company. Any company that wants to get you to do anything, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a mailing list subscribing to a podcast, whatever it is they want you to do. Instead of buying an ad and making Mark Zuckerberg richer so he can buy more land in Hawaii, instead of doing that, they mint a stamp and that stamp is worth money that the collector of the stamp can take to literally any community they want to fund.
So instead of just going to the businesses that are putting ads in front of your face, what you do is you go to businesses that are offering the highest value steps, the ones that are giving the most value back to you, to take to your community. Those are the businesses that you need to do business with to make this change happen. Because literally every time you're collecting a Panvala stamp, you're doing work that shift Value in our economy. You're shifting marketing dollars to be spent in businesses, and the more we all collect stamps, that's our leverage. That's what this movement feels like. That's the pressure that we're putting on our current economy to shift the way that it works. Whenever you collect a stamp, that's the pressure that you're putting on. So that's why we go from community to community to show them how and why to collect these stamps, to show them that they can fund the events that they put on, the grants that they give out, whatever it is they do, that they can fund By collecting stamps and that when they collect stamps, they're not just getting that dollar value on the stamp that's there today. They're also building power because again, the more the expectation is that you're doing business with companies that fund your community, the more money you unlock to actually come to your community in the first place. We have to shift where those marketing dollars are spent to go not to these middlemen in the advertising economy. But into every community starting in Web3 but then going out to all those real world communities, those parent teacher associations, those homeowners associations the clubs that you might be a part of, Then local nonprofit, like all of those communities should be collecting stamps and shifting the dollar spent on marketing economy. In our marketing economy, to communities that you and I are part of. That's how these stamps work, and that's what they do. So to see the stamps that are available today, you can go to panvala.com/stamps and again the early part of this movement is specifically in Web3. Most of our communities in the Panvala Network are Web3 communities, and most of our sponsors are Web3 sponsors. So there's some live campaigns from Logos, from Index Co-op and from Opolis. So Logos is basically an exchange for DAOs, They're trying to bring together people who wanna work in DAOs, people who want to interact between DAOs, They wanna be basically a clearing house for economic activity in the DAO space and they what they want you to do is subscribe to their newsletter. They want you to subscribe to their podcast and they want you to listen to an episode. And if you do those things, you earn stamps each time. Each of their stamps are worth a dollar 50, and you can earn up to seven of them for $10 and 50 cents total. Again, you can take to any community you wanna fund, so you collect those stamps or you're earning money for the communities that you support.
Those stamps aren't worth anything to you. You can't redeem them for values for yourself. But when you choose the community, you wanna support, that community gets the value. Index Co-op produces basically index funds, if you're familiar with index funds in the traditional investment world indexes for crypto assets. So instead of having to buy all these different individual crypto assets, if you wanna buy a index of crypto assets, That's what Index Coop allows you to do. And again, they want you to subscribe to their newsletter and subscribe to their YouTube channel to earn their stamps that are worth $3 a piece.
And then lastly, opolis is basically an employment benefits organization for the decentralized world. If you're working for DAOs, you're not getting those tax forms you need, Probably not getting health insurance. Opolis is the way you get those benefits by becoming a member and to earn the stamps that they're giving out, You refer people to join Opolis one referral, get to a stamp worth $5 and 28 cents And then if you get up to what was it, five referrals? I think it's five referrals, Gives you the $52 and 80 cents stamp. So those are the currently active stance that people are collecting. And again, that's how people are funding their communities. The communities that build up the most of the robust stamp collecting culture are the ones that end up being the most successful in this model and are really the core of this movement. And Especially if you're familiar with Boxtops for education, you already know what a culture of stamp collecting looks like. It's that culture of boxtops collecting. It's where the parents are saying, Hey, let's make sure we get this cereal and Make sure you cut off the top of the box and take it to your school, and It's where the Parent Teacher Association, it's highlighting the people who are collecting the most box tops to make sure that they're getting the most funding. It's very much a cultural thing. It's a, at the end of the day, Panvala is social movement, and I think Web3 as a whole is a social movement, but Panvala in particular is about changing the culture of each and every community to make sure that we can push back against middle men By collecting stamps. That's what it's all about. So it's really about teaching people what that looks like, how to be successful, and encouraging the communities that are succeeding to keep on going, because at the end of the day, this is a movement that goes step by step. Maybe a year from now, we've proved that every dollar in Web3 should stay in Web3. So it becomes the default way to market within one three. But maybe after that we go to New York City, we go to San Francisco, we go here in Austin, and we show, hey every marketing dollar that's spent in our city should stay in communities and in our city. And we prove that can work for the normal kinds of communities that people are a part of. And then we go everywhere and say, Hey, like this is how it should work. Every single place in the world, like all marketing dollars should go to communities. Here's how you do it. Here's how communities online have been successful. Here's how local communities have been successful. This is what you need to do to reclaim that value, that at the end of the day already it belongs to you. It's just being extracted by middlemen that's what we're here to do. We're trying to build a world where every time you make a purchase and you get a receipt today, you're also getting a stamp that funds your community. That value is already there. It's just going to middlemen, and we wanna put it back in your hands to be able to take to the communities you want to be a part of so you can solve the problems That you see in our world and the ways that you wanna solve it with the people you like. You don't have to defeat your opponents anymore. If we can dramatically increase the budgets of every community across our society, so people can solve problems in their own way, and we don't have to deal with decay and stagnation anymore, we can see progress and prosperity instead.
Humpty: Yeah that's really lovely. I really like this idea of building out a platform, an ecosystem that is kind of feeds itself through the support of one another in terms of the way that stamps operates and brings people together both through their activity and actions I suppose, within these communities and platforms like Opolis and Index Panvala? Most recently with logos. I think that's really cool. I like the idea too that you can take this and use that same funding to support other projects within that ecosystem. So that's really fun. So in terms of like when someone wants to take these funds or the amounts from these stamps to another community, do these communities then need to subscribe or are they free to cash the funds that are backing that stamp or, you know without necessarily needing to subscribe to the, to tip Panvala
Niran: Yeah. So they're totally free to cash it out. The, again, the Panvala runs on its own currency but it's not something that you have to hold. So once your community collects stamps and each quarter gets the payouts from the stamps that you've collected, you can sell that instantly if you want, and fund all the stuff that you care about. The people who hold onto the pan tokens and stake the pan tokens, what they're effectively doing is earning dues credits because eventually, The way this network operates itself is that there's gonna be a cut from the stamps that can go to fund the common needs of the network, again, governed by the communities themselves. It's not a cut coming from some third party. The network is governed by the communities that are part of it. So when people say, Hey, we need to have 10% of what's coming in, To fund these operational costs for our network. That's the general way it'll work. But right now we're in a state of surplus where there aren't any dues being taken out. So everybody is zeroed out for dues. But when there's the surplus available, the communities that get benefit from the surplus are the communities that are staking. The ones that actually own a part of the network. Those are the ones that get the surplus. Communities don't need to stake, They don't need to hold pan in order to collect stance and cash them out. It's just that while we're in a state of surplus the communities that are holding and staking are gonna get more resources. And at the end of the day, in the future, when there's no surplus remaining and the communities are charged dues out of the stamp state collect, the communities at stake are gonna pay less dues because staking earns dues credits.
Humpty: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And now, I mean you've introduced the pan token here, and I don't think we even had a chance to talk about that. So would you like to briefly just talk a little bit about that token and how that connects with the ecosystem as a whole?
Niran: Absolutely. Okay. So the deal with the Pan token is that we like to think of it as the most boring part of what we do. Again, the core of what we do is people focused. It's literally collecting stamps, teaching communities how to collect stamps, and getting more and more communities building up that culture that allows 'em to capture more of the marketing value that they create in our economy. The token exists to basically bootstrap this network. To provide that surplus that I was talking about so that when people are collecting stamps, they actually have more value than the stamps have available. And then at the end of the day, if we can build up a flow of value, if we shift the marketing expenses in our economy to flow to communities, the token allows people to actually store value In that flow because Panvala's token works differently than any DAO you've heard of. We don't think of it as a treasury. We think of it as literally a flow of resources that's coming in from sponsors and going out to communities. If if you imagine that nobody is holding the Pan token, which is totally possible, imagine everybody sells it. The flow going into the system is from the sponsors who mint stamps and the face value of the stamps that they're minting is the pan that they're buying off the market and putting back into the token supply. The value that's coming out of the token supply is programmed into the system like Bitcoin's inflation curve. It's a life of four years for whatever's in the system. So again, it's not correct to think of it as the treasury of the system. It's better to think of it as a gizmo, that if people want to store value in pan and the flow of sponsorship payments, they hold onto pan. And then the flow of value continues. But basically the design of the contract that holds the pan when it's been spent by the sponsors, basically they're depositing tokens back into the system. The reason that half life of four years is there is to basically stabilize The flow of value through the system that is, imagine everybody wanted to sell at once, but the sponsorship value is still continuing Basically, the market would drop, the price would drop dramatically, but the sponsors would buy up the tokens on the market. Put them back into the, to the token supply and then the process would continue so that, that makes dumping the token not a sensible thing to do if there is a stable flow of sponsorship payments flowing to the system. So the way to think about it is the logic of the contract that locks up the tokens, counteracts changes in price of the system in both directions and makes it hard for the price to go up and makes it hard for the price to go down. To make it easier for people to store value in the flow of sponsorship payments if they want to do that. But again, it works. If nobody does that, it works better if lots of people want to do it, but that's how the system is designed.
Humpty: Okay, that makes sense. So what is the vision, I guess long term, I know Stamps is an initiative that just launched recently and with the support of these really meaningful projects in the web3 ecosystem, what is the long term goals in terms of how stamps will continue to grow within this ecosystem and anything else on the horizon?
Niran: So stamps are the main event of Panvala again, our mass movement is about shifting where marketing dollars flow and the way to shift where marketing dollars flow is to collect stamps. So stamps are the main theme. We want each and every one of you to be stamped collectors, both for the communities that you're part of in Web3, and again, when we start bringing on communities out of Web3, Showing the communities that you're a part of in the city that you live in, how to collect stamps. That's gonna be a core part of this movement. So we want to continue to have more stand campaigns going within Web3, and so we can prove to each and every community that dollars spent to market in Web3 Can and should stay in Web3 communities. That's not happening today. That's the change that you and I are gonna make happen, and we're gonna make it stamps basically the default way to market in Web3, so that all of those dollars stay in Web3 communities. That's what we're doing. That's the current phase of our movement. So that looks like many more sponsorship campaigns, many more stamp campaigns by Web3 companies, and it means many more communities in Web3 collecting stamps. That is the core focus of what we're doing, right? We're gonna prove that works. We're gonna prove that stamps are a better marketing tool than everything else out there that people are doing to market their businesses Because again, spending money in the communities that your customers are in is obviously the best way to spend marketing dollars and we're gonna prove that. Once we've proven that within Web3, then again we need to go out into the real world. This is not a technological movement. This is not about giving techy hipsters more resources to do everything they want, although it includes a lot of that. What it's about is dramatically increasing the budgets of every community across our society. So to do that, we have to go to the parent teacher associations. You have to go to the homeowners associations. We have to go to the non-profits in your city. We have to go to all the kinds of clubs and communities that you could think of and show them how they're gonna dramatically increase the budgets that they have by collecting stamps. So we'll go city by city, we'll show people how this works. We'll show people how the dollar spent in marketing in each and every one of those cities can and should stay in the communities, in those cities. And then we're gonna show the whole world how to do that same thing. We're gonna like literally, every marketing dollar in our economy Going to communities. That is not an exaggeration of what we're trying to do. That is literally what we're trying to do, and our work isn't done until every marketing dollar spent in our economy goes to fund the communities that customers are in.
Humpty: Yeah, That's great. I can see how some of these events, especially like in the real world as we're coming out of working from home and we're feeling more comfortable traveling and connecting with one another like we did recently, at ETH Denver and then DAO NYC. How we can start building out these more meaningful interactions that support each other and these projects through these marketing spend in ways that are regenerative, and not, extractive as we described earlier.
As we wrap up here, There's one question that I've begun to ask all my guests so that I can learn from you a little bit more, is, it doesn't have to be crypto Twitter, but a anywhere where you learn and learn from others. Who is the one person that has helped you out tremendously in learning more about the space of Web3 and really leveling up your own crypto journey
Niran: So this is gonna be adjacent to Web3, so not exactly within it, but one thing that I would very strongly recommend to as many people who think about communities and Web3, as possible is this book called Mutualism By Sarah Horowitz, and again her background, it has nothing to do with technology, has nothing to do with crypto, but what she's talking about is how communities who see themselves as the way to solve problems. Actually organized to get it done, and her background is in labor organizing. She started a union called the Freelancers Union to provide benefits for freelancers who had been written out of all the labor laws in our society. Like they basically had no benefits. There were carve outs for freelancers all over the place. So really, if they wanted to be able to have anything like that kind of stability that people are used to, then to organize and get it done, and they did. So like that's her background and actual people work, helping people come together to solve the problems that they face. And I think that context is so useful to bring to Web3 because again, the bias that people have in Web3 is seeing protocols as the solution to our problems. But I see people as a solution to our problems. And the lens that Sarah Horowitz has to talk about that, I think it's very valuable for as many people to be able to see as possible. Cause I, I don't think where we're at right now in crypto is where we will end up. I do believe that Web3 is the start of a giant social movement that will reinvigorate communities across our society, but for people to be able to execute on that, like we, I think we are the people who will do it, but we don't necessarily have the knowledge to do it yet, and we need to learn from as many people adjacent to Web3 as aspect.
Humpty: That's wonderful. I couldn't agree more with you. I think sometimes we may look too much inwardly and not outwardly and look at, these other systems maybe parallel systems, maybe not, but certainly that can inform the way that we build better organizations, the way that we build with people, better in the way that we create value and definitely move away from these extractive systems. So thank you so much for that recommendation. We'll be adding it to my personal list and definitely we'll be recommending it to the community to also, Follow up on Anything else you wanted to add that you think we missed?
Niran: I think that's it. I just want people to be able to see like if you come across friends or people on Twitter who talk about the problems that are going on in our society and they seem defeated, they seem despondent because they don't see any way that we're gonna solve them. like I hope that you can get a sense of agency from the work that lies ahead of us, because I fundamentally believe that we will solve the problems that they face, that we face, whether they're political problems, social problems, like people just hating each other for no good reason. I think we're gonna power through that. When it comes to climate problems, I do believe that we're gonna solve them, and I believe that the people who will be responsible for that solution are you and me. Like If you can see a past to actually solving the problems that seem the biggest, the most problematic to you. Like I, I think it gives life more meaning you're not trapped in a corner anymore where everything just sucks. It's just Oh, there's work to do, so let me get to my to-do list and just start knocking things off and see slowly progress happen like that is Life on Earth looks like it's about problems being solved by human beings, and there's not a single one that we haven't solved yet. The ones that we face, we're gonna solve too. So I hope at least that if I could leave anybody with anything I hope it's with a sense of agency that the problems that we face are within our graphs to solve, and that you're gonna be the people who solve them
Humpty: And that's a wrap. I really enjoyed my chat with Niran and I hope you did. The Panvala movement is a crucial one, not just for the success of Web3, but in my opinion, the success of humanity as a whole.
If you'd like to connect with Niran, you can find him on Twitter @Niran and to learn more about palla, go to Panvala.com and on Twitter @PanvalaHQ. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens if you enjoy this episode, please give us a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcast. It costs $0, means the world to us, and helps others discover this content too.
You can also find more conversations like this one by visiting our website @cryptosapiens.xyz. I look forward to reconnecting with you at our next discuss.