Epsiode 49: Erick Pinos | Orange Protocol - Business Development Lead
Newsletter Copy?
Status
Timestamps:
2:19 - About Erick
6:09 - Blockchain Education Network
8:20 - Introduction into Decentralized Idenity
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
Orange Protocol
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 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 BanklessDAO, a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system. BanklessDAO 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 Eric Pinos business development lead at Orange Protocol. 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 where he cut his teeth and decentralized identity and data, helping to expand their ecosystem. About orange protocol he says DAOs are interested in Sybil resistance, 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 Talent DAO where Reputation NFTs were provisioned to contributors who had participated across a variety of web3 activities such as Snapshot, POAP, Gitcoin grants, Pola stamps, and Twitter and Discord. Lots to unpack here. So without further ado, let's get started.
Erick Pinos: MIT we had the MIT 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 started accepting Bitcoin, and we got a Bitcoin ATM, some of the restaurants down mass half started accepting Bitcoin and we started the MIT Bitcoin Club for people to get together and to talk about it. So then, I was involved a little bit, mostly as just like buying Bitcoin, holding it, like 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 Ethereum 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's got me very interested in. Especially around 2017 when Decentraland 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 like NFTs that represent virtual land and then assets and wearables 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 and that was my interest in 2018 2019, getting its decentralized identity. I also ran or still run the Blockchain Education Network, 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 and 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 con. For rewards, things like token gain, communities and reputation-weighted voting.
Humpty Calderon: That's cool. Thanks for the intro. Sounds like an interesting path, but probably a path many of us take when you mentioned learning about Bitcoin followed by Ethereum and then eventually virtual land, I would consider myself probably a novice when it comes to the latter although definitely still learning all of the above and then also in terms of your experience, the path you took, it seems like there's been a focus in education, right? Especially from the lens of what you've been doing over at BEN followed by then a focus on identity and reputation from ontology and orange. Walk me through the mindset, or really how you were you became that contributor to BEN because I'm always really interested to learn from other people who value education in this space. What is that inspiration and really what was the motivation, or I guess the way that you were connected to that project?
Erick Pinos: Yeah, so I became president of the MIT Bitcoin Club because I wanted a way honestly, like I wanted something that would stand out, right? Especially like thinking about applying to blockchain-based jobs or here's a leadership position I could take on in my local community that'll then stand out and help me with like later job prospects. But then growing the community was really nice and we were able to bring in big speakers, and this was actually, this was the bull market of 2017. So for years, like the club would be five people, 10 people, 12 people and then all of a sudden this year we would have like 80, 90, a hundred people showing up to every meeting we had to get bigger rooms. We had to order more pizza and so it was a, it was an interesting time to be a leader in the community because of size and the growth and the budget and the agenda and the items you go over. And When I was a student, I got to lean 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 and so through that network I was able to meet other presidents at other schools or other clubs and so that was cool for me seeing other people going through the same experience cause 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 just like 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.
Humpty Calderon: That's awesome. And I think that kind of speaks to something that I've noticed in the web3 space. And that's like emergent leadership, right? But also 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, right? In terms of like our relationships with people on Telegram, on Discord, Twitter, wherever but certainly, I think there's a lot to say about like that in-person connection and having just come back myself from MCON I saw 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 okay, what else can we do? So that's incredible to see that these in-person experiences were both supportive or, played a role in your crypto journey, but also that you discovered kind of your role within.
To lead and keep that moving forward. So let's then talk about your introduction to ontology, cuz 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?
Erick Pinos: Yeah, 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 and 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 and 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, but they created, this digital credentialing platform called Block Certs. And so, I got the MIT diploma signed on there. So that got me interested in the idea of like 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 because of OND and all of these like applications in it. But what I also liked about ontology was that they were focused a lot on enterprise use cases for that kind of technology stuff like supply chain, stuff like healthcare, medical records, academic credentialing, insurance title registry. So, I thought that was really cool so that's kinda when I got involved and that's when I joined the team and I think what our learnings has been over the years has been that one like I think those use cases are still valid, but I think the enterprises are also very slow to adoption and it's very difficult to roll out a full blockchain system at an enterprise level. That's why these enterprises prefer like half blockchain systems, sorry, like permission ledgers, like Hyperledger Solutions, they don't wanna just completely shift everything which is 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 like community focused and that's also where my interest shifts is more like, okay, grassroots, like 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, like from the get-go.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, I think that's something that probably isn't so widely recognized about ontology is its breadth of work in the decentralized identity space. And I should mention, 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.
Yeah it's really interesting to see at least some of the reactions that the community receives when they hear about the different types of work that Ontology has done in terms of technical development, both in terms of development of like DIDs but also in terms of like applications that use DIDs.
I am curious to hear from you as someone that I know has been for a long time involved in the development of products at ontology, what are some of the interesting use cases of DID at ontology and I heard you mention kind of some of the challenges at the institutional adoption level, but maybe more generally talk about some of the challenges for creating some of these products around decentralized identity.
Erick Pinos: I think that the challenges are always the last-mile problem, right? Like the entry, like at some point, external data has to enter the blockchain. And so that's solved through Oracles, right? Oracles take care of that but before they got really big people didn't really know how to do that. If you look at it for like supply chain, right? And if somebody, if you have a supply chain blockchain, everything's tracked on the blockchain, how do you register something onto the chain? If you're transporting Louis Vuitton bags, sure you put the serial number on the chain, but then somebody somewhere, Type in that serial number and then imprints it, right? or minted as a credential on chain so that's still a point of failure, right? Like you could bribe that person that doesn't solve the issue at hand and then what if you have something like sand where you're transporting like sand or like water, and it's like, how do you can't, you don't have like serial number, like I guess you have serial numbers for the jars, but it's just like a very difficult problem of figuring out for things that exist in the real world or if you have a title registry for like land and you have a house deed and you put that on the blockchain like somebody still has to go and put that in. Somebody has to have write permission, to go and do that so I tend to, I like the use cases more that are entirely blockchain native a credential that comes from the blockchain, right? Like on-chain activity. Issuing out a reputation credential based off of your on-chain activity or like credit scores, which is all like digital, I 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 onto the chain.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. So, what do you think is keeping maybe the adoption of some of these things that you've described? Is it the technology, like the accessibility of it? Is it at the application layer? What do you think is maybe holding back some adoption or maybe even what do you think is facilitating some of the recent attention and maybe increased adoption of this technology
Erick Pinos: yeah, it's interesting for Enterprise because a lot of projects have already adopted it, Blockchain, right? Walmart uses blockchain already, If you go on DocuSign, you sign a legal document, you can enable the blockchain option to sign your DocuSign document on a blockchain, but people don't really use it, right? I think that it's interesting because there's. 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 centralize services like signing legal documents or managing communities, Streaming payments and payroll platforms all on chain, like 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 and people aren't used to that. People are used to usernames, passwords, right? Most people don't even have chrome extensions installed besides like ad blockers, So I think that there's a big barrier because to use blockchain stuff is very different from just regular, how people regularly browse the internet or interact with day-to-day services, so the UIs have to get easier and we might have to revert back to that's why people like custodians cuz it's simple, It's like a username, password and then so yeah, so I think the UIs needs to get easier. And then two, I don't know if it solves through education or through changing the way that, having like insurance services, because I think a lot of people, I think people want decentralization as like a principal, but then when something goes wrong, people either want their money back or they want someone to blame or they want customer support right? Which you don't really get in blockchain. Like I have friends that work at Meta Mask and they say to 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 and so for adoption to happen, we definitely need to close the gap there. We need to make the UI easier and 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.
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, I don't think do as equal a good job about talking about the applications on the use case. It's as if, we were talking about using Facebook, but Facebook was talking about how it leverages TCP-IP 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 like the social layer and how you can connect with people and friends around the world and, build these connections. So yeah, I think that there's definitely still a lot of I guess room for improvement in terms of how we communicate the value of the technology we're building but doing so through kind of these narratives of their actual use case and how they're really helping people do things better than they already do it now. So it's truly interested in looking at that, especially as we look at the ownership economy, right? Versus, where we are, the product and that gets monetized on the back end. So maybe now is a good time to lean into some of the other work that you're doing over at Orange Protocol and how Orange sees the kind of the, evolution of web3 through the ownership of our identities, and then building out our reputation on these identities on chain or off-chain as orange also uses different technologies to do that. 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.
Erick Pinos: Okay. 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, right? And design their own reputation system for a community or for their user base. And it's for a, it could be for a variety of different use cases, but I think 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 like on-chain activity, history, off-chain voting history, even like social media interactions that can be used to create more robust reputation scores.
Now, for the use case is something I think is like you said, that we're very like focused on the use case,like what is the use of these? I think initially it started out as just like a general it started out as as a general like idea Like this is something that should exist, right? Like people should have their reputation decent, decentralized, and they should have their credentials decentralized. But I think what we've seen over the years is that people aren't so interested in that. If you have a diploma and you mint it on chain, like you can do that now, but then what employers are looking at that, most employers are happy just to look at your LinkedIn they want you to send it over in a pdf, right? So, you have to think about what the use cases where people want to decentralize identity now and what we've seen is in these DAOs, in these communities, like people want to recognize, especially for things like civil resistance, where you wanna prove someone's unique and when someone's interacting with you on chain from a wallet 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 this centralized identity to make that more robust so you're just sharing the proofs and that way everyone's data stays safe. So, I think, our focus at Orange has been on nurturing these use cases. Everything from reputation-weighted voting to just rewards for the community members. Like we've done a couple of campaigns now where, if you qualify based off of a certain reputation model, which measures things like your social contribution to a particular DAO, to your donations to the web3 space, to how active you are in voting on snapshot proposals you can earn these different guides that kind of build up your web3 contributor history, almost like a GitHub where you can see like your contribution history. And that can go many ways, like we have projects interested in using those badges for token gating communities, we have projects interested in using those badges for reputation weighted voting, we have interest projects interested in using those badges for extra rewards and like 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.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, that's a good point. I really like framing 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. I'd like to frame this from, I guess things that are more accessible in terms of like the use case as you've described it. Why don't you describe to us maybe some of these campaigns that maybe have opened recently or are open now and share with us maybe some of the ways that these use case then are executed on. So, if someone joins a campaign Like 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?
Erick 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, writers one of the like the forefront of the deci space, We're very excited to work with them and so the drop that we're doing now is three different badges that we designed, and we designed the models and we 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, right? So, like you know that everyone uses discord, DAOs use Discord to manage their communities. So, we want to reward users that contribute a lot to grow a discord. So, joining the Discord gives you a boost cause the score starts at zero, right? 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 like 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 off of that score.
The other model is the voter model and so that's for a voter batch. So that one measures your activity on snapshot. So, are you an active, are you an active citizen? Do you turn out for votes? Do you vote a lot on snapshot proposals across all the different snapshot spaces? And do you create proposals too, right? So, if you create proposals and then also are you active in the forums? The forums in this case, as in like these Twitter spaces or, basically the way we measure that is through POAPs right? So, 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. So Gitcoin is doing Gitcoin grants round 15 right now. So, the more rounds you've participated in, the higher your score is for that batch, the donor batch. So, it doesn't matter, how much you've donated cause we don't wanna measure just pure amount cuz different people can donate different amounts. But we do wanna measure, we did wanna measure, How often do you turn up? you, Do you come each time? Have you been a part of this for a while? Have you been active participating each time they've done around?
And then we also included Panvala stamps. So Panvala is another community of supporting web3 projects that are creating public goods, and they do it through Panvala stamps where you can collect Panvala stamps by completing tasks for different projects and then getting them redeemed to donate to projects. So we measure how many Panvala stamps you have. So it was three badges based off of three models that we worked and refined. And this is just the first season of it. We wanna do more and we wanna make the models more complex and more taken into account more factors and create new types of models and create new types of badge.
And 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.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. I'm personally very excited about this like model-driven or, Yeah,
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 like the social contributorship in terms of either attending some sort of event or getting some sort of pull-out from that attendance. But I really like the idea of like really digging deep into one's reputation in an organization based on meaningful interactions and obviously meaningful is very much a subjective point of view but I like looking at someone's support through, like 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 panbola stamps just another project that is very much building around communities and so facilitating that type of marketing spend as Niran who we recently had on the show described to us, right? The 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-financialize 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.
What are your thoughts, on that in terms of, crypto web3 and how identity and reputation can help to evolve that? Or do you think that's, we need something else in order to create a more robust ecosystem beyond just kind of the financialization of it?
Erick Pinos: I think we need the robust tools for the whole system to work Like I think that it's funny cuz I, Okay. I think it works both ways. 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 wrote a whole post about that for as part of the ontology, an ontology identity series.
Financial is like NFTs were around for many years, right? And you can make 'em and you can use 'em and you can do what you want with them. But until it became like very easy to just mint them at scale and people started buying them and the tools and infrastructure was in place, right? Like 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, you can use, you can go on Lend on Aave and you can do the service for what it's intended for but the Yield Farming came and then that's when it really took off in terms of like liquidity and people getting their interest in it. And so, I think that it for better or for worse It's the same with like DAOs and decentralized identity. Like 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 is good in some ways because that's what makes things investible in. And we'll probably see, like funding for DAO tooling go up a lot, and that'll help fund the creation of this infrastructure and then also I think it makes it more sustainable internally because, like with NFTs, there's a way you can expect to support the team through NFT sales and with DeFi there's a way you can expect to support the team through in-protocol revenue, with DAO it's still a little tricky, is you know what? 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 main maintain the infrastructure, So I think that still needs to be figured out and really that comes down to some kind of financialization where the DAO makes revenue in some way and then it can use that to pay everything. But then it's also, so the second thing is that it is the other way around too, is that the financialization doesn't matter if there's nothing to do with it, right? A lot of these governance tokens, their whole value prop is that you can vote with them but so there should be more robust voting infrastructure, right? Like voting is still, or at least for a long time, voting was just set up a snapshot page and then do token-weighted voting right? But there's like billions of dollars of value in these governance tokens held in these governance tokens. And there's billion, multi-billions of dollars in liquidity locked in these protocols. So, we need more robust infrastructure to manage voting, to like for people to set up meritocracies or set up whatever kind of government they want, and then being able to allocate voting based off of different weights So I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen outside of just like the financialization of it, to just create like a more robust system
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. I like 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 maybe 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 that sense of how can we govern based on someone's reputation activity, contributions in an organization and being able to like, build on that, right? I think some projects have developed systems like through the governance governor model, right? They have stewards where other communities or community members, excuse me stake their vote onto their delegates. So at that point there is a, I guess a level of non-financialization where you don't have to have that, but the community then votes for you to lead that project in governance but 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 these forums and Discord, for instance, and even their governance participation on platforms like Snapshot. It's like how regularly active Are you connecting with your constituency? And 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 platforms like Snapshot.
Erick Pinos: Yeah, I think that there's cause I think it's a continuously evolving system cause I can think of some like the current stewardship models, like a lot of times I think it ends up being popularity contests, right? Where 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 you their stake and now you're one of the top stewards already, right? So I think there's like you said, 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? Like recognizing, like consistency, I think that those if you could sort Stewards by those metrics, I think that would be a healthier way to choose or to identify who you, what delegate you'd like to, or what steward you like to delegate your funds to.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think that there's still so much there to experiment with, which is personally one of the more exciting reasons why I show up every day. Whether it is to hoax people and learn from you here on Crypto Sapiens or building out products in that space of identity and reputation like over at Ontology or Orange or even just being a DAO contributor across the web3 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 like 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 you started this conversation, talking about from virtual land since I believe that's 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
Erick Pinos: So, I think yeah, cause I think that the, I think that the web3 is like the infrastructure and the backbone like maybe the intangibles of society whereas Metaverse is more of like the physical, the virtual physical manifestation of society where you have, like in the Metaverse, I think of it mainly, you have like buildings, and you have like geographic locations that are virtual, you have like community spaces, you have avatars that you can interact with, and it's very different than just like virtual reality, even though I think virtual is the easiest way to think about it, but I think that it is just like, is adding a more geographical layer to the internet. Whereas the internet right now is very search engine heavy Like you search for what you need and there it is. Like metaverse brings more of a discovery element into the internet where you can like browse, you can virtually walk around, and you can interact with different things. But in order for it to not just be like owned by corporations, right? Like we do need like a strong web3 backbone where people can come and contribute and there's ways to like, recognize contribution and track contributions. So I think that 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, right? Like it wouldn't be as good but I do imagine. Yeah I see the 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 the current incumbents, they're 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 we see it, or we envision it, we see it being more like free and open. And I don't wanna get too philosophical, I like to stay practical, but I do think that yeah, 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, right? So we have the freedom to think, okay, 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 kinds of, those are the experiments that I'm most excited about is seeing like these new business models that can arise and these new interactions that can take place inside of the metaverse. Yeah, I see the Metaverse more as like the world, whereas the web3 is like the economic structure and the societal structure of that world, like inside of Metaverse you'll be able to transact in crypto, buy and sell NFTs that represent your land, represent your clothes, and represent like your avatar and whatever it is like 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.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah. That's good. Thank you for that. I like the idea of thinking of kind of some sort of relationship between the two I suppose the metaverse and web3 and hopefully how each facilitates the other, how each of the adoption one or the other is kind of increasing the adoption equally on the other side. One other thing that I like to ask to our guests, and this is the last question, is, as we are a podcast that is positioned as, featuring or amplifying these voices of people in Web3, we like to learn about what, who other people, what other people have been influential In our guest crypto journey, so it could be someone on crypto, Twitter, it could be a book that you read, but certainly like 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?
Erick Pinos: That's a good question. Oh. Maybe you could asked me this question before so I could, come up with a really good answer. I guess it's more like genuine if it's just off the top of my head, but I think that so my favorite project in this space is like the decentraland, sandbox-type projects because I think that they think about things very differently. Actually, I would say okay I have my answer. So, my answer is compound finance, So I think that seeing the project of compound when they came out with the seed tokens, that really changed the way that I even think about crypto. So, Robert Leshner when I met him at ETH San Francisco. I think in 2018, and he was walking around, and he was like, Check this out, Like you can earn interest on your crypto. And we're like yeah. Celsius or whatever you give it like a bank. He's 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's it works. And it's like this is some kind of scale. No, it works. You lend it. And then it's pure to protocol. It's like you, it's like, what? Okay. Oh, actually I remember it was like, oh, is it like ETH Lend where you like find a lender, or you find a borrower for your land? He’s like Nope, you put it in a pool, and then you could make money off of right now. And we're like, What? So I looked into it and I was that really was like mind-blowing, like the idea of using blockchain to create a system where you get instant access to liquidity, as opposed to a peer-to-peer marketplace. So that was the first time that he blew my mind. Second time that it blew my mind was a year later when they came out with the sea tokens. So now not only are you lending and borrowing and locking them in, but you get the receipt, right? The receipt token that is like this token is a kind of like a loan, right? Like you lend it, it represents your loan, you lend it in there, and it's earning interest, and then it's a receipt, right? So, you can give that receipt to somebody else and now they have it. And so now it's I was like, this was, I think at Eth Denver, and I was like, Oh, if I have a hundred or if I have $25 of sea tokens, it's earning interest and if someone buys me a burger and I have to pay them for it, I'll give them the seed tokens, right? Cuz that's worth $25. Meanwhile, everybody at all times is earning interest, which I think is that was really like, that was how I started to understand like the money Legos concept of defi. Yeah. Like all money should be earning interest at all times. And you can only do that in a blockchain Like that's something we talk about, like what are blockchain native use cases? When the internet started out, it was just like newspapers, right? Like people would think Oh, let me take a newspaper and put it online. So, my website is just as if it was a newspaper or like an ad, What does an ad look like? Like a billboard or like a magazine or like a phone book on the internet. It wasn't until like social media came out that we really started coming up with these oh, these like internet native use cases. So I think it's the same with blockchain, like Defi is a blockchain native use case.
It's not just like lending and borrowing like recreated on chain, but it's like these new concepts like peer to protocol or like 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 about.
Humpty Calderon: I like that. 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 I think to the point that Eric was making in terms of having it be taken advantage, full advantage of that like 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 hear about your experience with that early on and then hopefully that also means that the works, that the projects that you work on you bring that same sense of like 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.
Erick Pinos: Thank you. Yeah. I encourage everyone to go and check or mint your model and see if you qualify for the drops. And if at any point when you're interacting with the system, if you have any ideas for other cool models or things that could be measured, that should be measured, that would be interesting to see in the form of a model or an orange like reputation NFT drop let us know because I, we wanna do more and more interesting drops that expand the way we think about what reputation NFTs can be used for. And how do you measure reputation? Expanding the way you think of how reputation is measured.
Humpty Calderon: And that's a wrap. 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 Pinos and 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.