Episode 56: Henry Lee | Noox - Contextualizing User Data in Web3
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Timestamps
0:00 - 1:23 - Crypto Sapiens Episode Introduction
1:23 - 2:45 - Henry’s Introduction
2:45 - 5:08 - Decentralized Identity Interest in Web3, versus Traditional Institutions and Organizations
5:08 - 7:45 - Discussing the Transition between the work Henry was doing prior to Noox, and the Inspiration to create Noox
7:45 -10:43 - Comparison between the Value Connection of Tokenization of Project to the Value Connection of Reputation building for projects
10:43 - 19:03 - Discussion of how a person can perceive the most valuable thing in their wallet. and how Noox gives a different angle on the idea
19:03 - 21:42 - Discussion on the Background of Web3 Collaboration, and the Comparison of how collaboration in Web3 works versus Collaboration in Web2
21:42 - 25:51 - Social Legos - How we an utilize tools like Noox in web3 to establish the connections that we’ve been able to create in Web2, and improve on those relationships.
25:51 - 28:44 - Lens, MCON, and Henry’s Current Crypto Inspiration.
Transcriptions
Noox
Humpty: Hello and welcome to Crypto Sapiens, and today we are talking to Henry Lee, co-founder of Noox - a platform where you collect achievement badges as Soulbound NFTs, and build your reputation. We briefly explore Henry's crypto journey starting with a layer one blockchain that he helped to launch that was focused on interoperability, where he also worked on decentralized identity and verifiable credentials.
In 2021, Noox was born and as Henry recalls, the landscape was very much focused on NFTs at that time with a few projects using user transaction history to reward users, gate communities and provide airdrops. The vision of Noox was to add more context, to understand users in a more high dimensional way and evolve user tiering. They set out to find a way to contextualize user interactions and transaction data. While the MVP may have looked different than what the product looks like today, the vision was always the same to enable data as a composable piece of the web3 ecosystem. There's lots to unpack here, so let's get started..
Henry: Hi everyone listening. Thanks for listening. My name is Henry and I'm one of the co-founder of a project called Noox so little bit of my personal background I guess, so I started building in crypto around 2016 focusing on Enterprise blockchain similar to IBM's Hyperledger project or R3 Quota helping governments or enterprises implement private blockchains or help them to create consortium of private networks among interested parties. This start up and we ended up launching a layer one project in 2017 that was focusing specifically on interoperability. And since we were, we had experience in building in creating private networks and consortium of private networks. We had the right experience and focus on interoperability. And I've been leading the strategy in business until summer of 2021. But around, but after around five years of working in the protocol I decided that I wanted to start a new startup. I left the company and founded Noox. And also during those times, I worked around two years on DID and Verifiable credentials to enable self-sovereign identity and working closely with enterprises private companies, universities but also governments because there were some privacy or regulatory issues that we needed to work with government entities. That's, that kind of sums up my crypto years I guess.
Humpty: Yeah, no, thank you for that. Let's touch a little bit on that experience that you had in the DID and VC space. Cause I think for anyone who's been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, they realize that there's interest in this space for us as Crypto Sapiens and for me personally. One thing that I think we've seen happen over the course of the last year or so has been this renewed interest in digital identity, right? And some of that was driven by Vitaliks writings on Soulbound tokens but some of that also inspired by the development by several projects like Disco and Ontology and Ceramic in the space of DIDs and VCs. One thing that we don't hear a lot about though, I think is how traditional organizations, institutions, like you were talking about you know schools and you were talking about a government. What is the interest in DID and VC and is there a difference in the way that is applied in that space versus the way that it's being considered in the web3 space?
Henry: Oh, that's a really good question. I think personally I've been, I'm a huge fan of just digital identity or how can we improve the system that we have whether we use blockchain technologies. I was just traditionally just interested in improving digital identity. And when I worked with different traditional organization as you mentioned, I think the difficulties that I faced in, in, in trying to convince them was they're much more focused on creating value for themselves rather than creating like a public infrastructure that could benefit internet as a whole. If you start having those self-interested in building public goods like digital identity, then you start to detach yourself from the core fundamentals and the core kind of ideologies and philosophies which enables the creation of the decentralized identity so to speak. That was the difficult difficulties that, like everyday difficulties that I faced. Just trying to convince organizations that, you know this is the right way to do. If you go in that route that you are explaining you, you'll be able to create use cases for yourself and you'll be able to say that you're, you created decentralized identity and you are using verifiable credentials but you know that's very far apart from creating an open standards and creating an a next generation identity for the web in general I guess.
Humpty: No, I think I follow. So I guess transitioning to the work that you're doing now at Noox like what was the parallel right? between that work and how did that like moment of inspiration come to you and your co-founders When you thought of Noox
Henry: Ever since I started crypto, ever since I you know read the early white papers I really liked and I was really intrigued about the idea that composable data is fueling permissionless innovation. That the idea that, the open data database functionality allows for any decentralized applications to be built on the same infrastructure. And the data of users interacting with these applications are stored under their wallets their EOAs. And we just thought that no one was actually addressing this issue that we thought is very valuable, which is utilizing this data is going to be of a paramount importance for the web3 in the future. And I think to give a little context, I think that when we started the project in 2021 and everybody was talking about NFTs and we started to see some projects use some sort of some sort of transaction history as a way to build reputation or as a way to create gated communities or as a way to reward users through a where through like an airdrop. Projects and communities have been trying to come up with a user tiering and try to provide some sort of those additional rewards or or return for higher engagements. And we've seen this mostly through the use of white listing through airdrops offering different access and permissioning to additional contacts. But so far, back then we thought these were very early tiering attempts mainly center around tokens. In the long term, the idea that user tiering will evolve into much more complex ones will be allowed to understand users in a more high dimensional manner. And in order to do that we thought we needed to find a way to contextualize these interaction data these transactional data that is being compiled under someone's wallet addresses. That was kind of the genesis of the Noox project. And we still are focusing, currently focusing more on allowing users to prove what they did on chain. So proof of achievements rather than saying that we're creating the next generation digital identity or crypto identity. Because I think what we're doing right now is not the solution or the identity solution for the future, but rather all the datas that we create help create better identity, better reputation for a user in the future.
Humpty: That's quite comprehensive and thank you for that. You mentioned a few things here that I wanna unpack. One of the first thing you were talking about was this comparison between the tokens, the tokenization of projects, right? and how that was perceived as the value connection between the project and the individual right? Whereas now maybe the positioning of Noox is, it's really not about the tokenization, but it's actually that reputation. It's that achievement unlock that's the connection between the project and the individual. Can you maybe dive a little deeper and maybe do a comparison of the two?Might be a bit philosophical, but it might be a fun exercise. Like how is it that a token in the traditional sense is lacking in terms of like bridging that relationship between the two where achievements and Noox through the form of SBTs are able to more fully capture them.
Henry: I guess like in trying to answering that trying to think about answering that, I guess maybe we could I could share a little bit more about what Noox is doing conceptually, and then that will help the audiences understand like where I'm coming from. What Noox is currently doing is allowing users to prove what they did on chain by verifying it on Noox and if once they're verified, they could actually claim Noox NFT like badges that are non-transferable. And I think as you mentioned also people now understand this concept as Soulbound tokens but previously when we found the, founded the project we just needed to find a way to deliver this metadata and NFT was, we thought the NFT form of NFT ERC 1155 was the best kind of medium to deliver this information. And because you shouldn't be able to buy an achievement we just added a transferability to the smart contracts. But I think now people are very excited about this Soulbound token concept and we're loving it also. And and I mentioned that we allow people to prove what they did on-chain but by making users action into like credentials we can now start to formulate like high dimensional understanding around the users. Loke the NFT that we help mint, the NFT badges that people own will be like a unique fingerprints that identifies them based on their past activities. I, I don't think there's a like a good or bad, like pros and cons between like tokens and maybe soulbound tokens. But They all they all just are part of your identity. They are, all components that helps to identify who you are, help other users, help other applications understand you better I guess. We still love, we still, like all the interesting use, use cases that token based identity or token based reputation system offers. But We thought there were a lot more valuable data points that are very much under underutilized. And we thought contextualizing those data will unlock many more new opportunities and many more ways of understanding users and many more ways of creating communities around around those, I guess value graph so to speak.
Humpty: Yeah. When you talk about what you hold in your wallet, I mean that just reminds me of something that I don't know if you're familiar with Chase Chapman. She's also a host of another podcast. It's called On the Other Side. Really great. I think she asked really interesting questions, a big fan of her as a content creator, but also in terms of the work that she's doing in the space of web3, working with Orca and I only reference this because she asked a question in the end to her guests and it's what's the favorite thing that you have in your wallet right? And most people tend to gravitate towards a token of a project that they hold that maybe they use for governance, right? And they're like, I'm an active governor and that's why I'm a big fan of of this token that I hold, right? Or other people are like, You know what, this was my first NFT and I'm not a Degen, but this just kind of my entry point and it means something because of it Or I am a degen and but this still is like the provenance of where it all began right? before I fell through the degen at Rabbit Hole. But I kind of liked the idea of looking at this from a context of like achievement. It's like, it isn't something that's financial in terms of the token that I had to buy right? Whether that's a traditional ERC 20 or a NFT with a pfp, right? Attached to that, it's more this was a contribution that I made into the ecosystem and I was able to unlock that through Noox. I think that's really interesting, and I'm actually looking at my account on open sea and i was only able to mint three. I'm not a degenerate . I was hoping that I was gonna be able to unlock an Ethereum kind of user attribute, but I think I got the rare user which is 200 plus transactions. I was like, Okay, it's not bad, but I, it, I am, I'm able to visualize you know my relationship to the network, but I'm also able to visualize my relationship to a project. I'm also holding an ENS serial register, which I like that because to me that represented a value that I found within the ENS community, right? And that project to be able to register these domains that I can associate to the projects that I'm building, whether that's Crypto Sapiens, the podcast, or whether that's just me and my personal identity in the Web3 Ecosystem. I think that the there's something there that is enjoyable. When it comes to visualizing and I think you mentioned this previously where it's something human readable, right? And not just this like contract interaction in your wallet.
Henry: Yeah, a hundred percent. That's really an interesting question. I'm currently thinking about I've been thinking about what's the most valuable thing in my wallet. Like to me like personally, but that's really interesting questions.
Humpty: You should check out her podcast. She has had some really wonderful people on it, and the answers usually are surprising. They don't always necessarily gravitate towards a token. Sometimes it's a transaction, right? But like now you can actually create some meaning from that transaction through Noox, you know the, that favorite thing in your wallet. If Chase were to interview me, I might say, Oh, it's my Ethereum or not My ENS zero register because I'm able to visualize the fact that I used ENS regularly and I also have the airdrop one which means that because of that I was able to accumulate. Some tokens that then I was able to delegate to someone to vote on my behalf. It's all kind of connected and I really do enjoy that. So Bravo
Henry: Yeah.
Humpty: on the visualization piece.
Henry: Yeah Thank you. And I think when we look at these badges, I think there are two aspect to it. There's like a vanity aspect to it, and then there's like a utility aspect to it. And vanity aspect is certainly something that we think it's going to that we as a Noox is going to improve a lot in the future. But Like you said, being able to visualize something that you've done and it's like a, it's like a diploma for you. For, it could be like a diploma certificate for you, or like a, just like a nice memory for you. Like maybe like a PoAP like Value could be delivered as well. But also like utility wise, I think there are a lot of interesting cases, something that are more short term oriented, and then also some long term oriented use cases that we could think about. But one of the use cases of Noox badges today is creating, making these badges into roles within a discord channel. So If you come into Noox Disco Channel depending on the number of badges you claimed we give out different kind of tiers of levels for you. I'm like a Noox shark. It could be like Noox whale. If someone have claimed more then we give out like these crowns to them. And this is just like a fun kind of experiment, but it allows community to acknowledge contributions amongst themselves so we know who are like the heavy contributors and we could identify really easily because we gave out these roles and we gave out these small emojis next to their username.
So now when people are discussing about some community aspect of the project, or just in general about Web3 I guess. It provides a little bit more credibility, a little bit more context because not only that we give out the main roles. We also allow people to designate roles For all the badges that they have. Let's say I'm Henry Lee and I have a shark emoji next to it. Once you click my ID, you could see that I'm like a uniswap for example, that I donated on Bitcoin, that I, reregistered, my ENS several times. All those things that I'm a fan of Arbitrum. All these, like on chain interaction are now a credential under my Discord identity. So it gives a little bit more context of where this person is coming from, what experience this person has and I think that's like a really good kind of social experiment for us right now. And we've been using, we've been working closely with Guild that xyz and they've been really very supportive of making that experience a little bit more seamless and easy for People who want to, do the same thing for their communities.
Humpty: Yeah. You know I think maybe what you're describing is the gamification of our interactions, right? Make this fun, make this enjoyable, right? the crypto, Web3, it's very complicated. I mean just getting a wallet is a bit of a headache. And to be able to kind of protect yourself, it's a heavy lift. I think that we just need to do better as a, as an ecosystem to make better entry points for anybody who wishes to engage with a community, a project, right? Like Say I just wanna come in here because I wanna, be a board ape, or, I want to come in here because I want to be an ENS member because I love this idea of owning identities as a domain, building up some sort of like decentralized website like That's why I came in here. But there are, It's very difficult, there's a lot of kind of trip falls for people as they're entering this space. I think that we need to do better in, in the way that we create applications now. That's personally one of the reasons why I like Noox, is I can go to the website It's actually a very fun experience. Once I've signed in, I can just go in there and look at all of the different badges that I may be eligible for, and then kind of just start triggering the button, seeing what I'm eligible for, and then minting whichever ones I want to, I have associated to me, right? as a proof of achievement as you've mentioned. I think that's really an excellent kind of way of framing how we can create these, like better applications engagement points for our community and how we can gamify just the space of Web3, which absolutely has a lot of opportunity to do so comparatively to web2.
Henry: Yeah yeah, a hundred percent. I thought, one other thing that I wanted to a message that I wanted to send out to the world was, I feel like a lot of things in crypto are transactional and people don't look, be look behind what they did. These are all like instant transactions. But I feel like, we should, we could do a lot more than just that. And like you mentioned there's like a fun aspect to Noox. There's like a serendipity to it. Once you like connect your wallet, you do check eligibility, Then you start to find things that you didn't know about yourself, like how many times you used certain applications, how long have you been using certain applications, how long have you been holding certain NFTs. These are all interesting things about yourself that you didn't even know about yourself. And by offering, you could say gamification to it or you could say Serendipity to it, but whatever it is I think it offers a very new way of looking about crypto. And you know I think that's the start of web3 social
Humpty: Yeah. I'd be curious if you could kind of maybe lend a bit of background in terms of these collaborations and really just to frame a discussion around Web3 versus Web2 right? Maybe looking at it from. The competitive nature of how Web2 works versus the collaborative nature of how Web3 works. At least that's what I aspire to. Maybe I'm wrong, but you just mentioned this collaboration between Noox and Guild xyz. Walk me through, you know, the idea behind that and really the opportunities that Noox has in this space to collaborate across the entire ecosystem with other projects that seek to do so and use Noox for instance
Henry: So we, we launched our MVP December of last year and the product was a little bit different back then. So How it was different is now you connect your wallet and you check for eligibility and you have to opt in to claim these badges as a non-transfer NFT. But previously for the MVP when you click your, when you connect your wallet, then we just showed you these predefined badges that you were eligible on the website. Instantly you'll get like a automated auto-generated crypto LinkedIn profile for you. And we thought that was pretty cool. But the reason why we pivoted from that model was that we wanted this data To be back on-chain so that it was permissionlessly used by other people to be act as an act as a social lego so to speak, to ensure composability of the data that we create back to the ecosystem so that anyone can actually use it. I think the beauty with our collaboration with projects like guild is that once a user have claimed these badges on Noox whether or not you're trying to you know do it for Noox discord, whether you wanna do it for Uniswap, Sushi swap, whether uni you wanna do it for Gitcoin communities, you already have claimed it and the data is on chain so you don't have to redo it for Gitcoin or for Uniswap. But like traditionally, like Web2 identity, as you would know very much. Like your eBay ratings is not going to be transferred to your you know, craiglist ratings. Is that your identity or is that like eBay's identity? That's, I think where the siloed identity system, I think fails very much for traditional kind of identity systems and you know, so yeah yeah, I'm very much enjoying other projects using Noox badges in a way that you know, we never thought is was possible. I think giving the creative parts back to community is the right way to build products in my perspective.
Humpty: Yeah, no that's 100% spot on And certainly my take on that as well in terms of ownership of our identities in the space of Web3, and certainly the freedom or ability to be able to like create these new experiences using our data, right? And it seems like Noox is like right in the center of facilitating both the ownership of these achievements through our digital identities that are now self sovereign right? I think that's really wonderful. You also mentioned a word here and maybe we can close on this in terms of the social lego, I think these social aspect of Web3 is still missing. A lot of the social activities in Web three happen in Web3 platforms, right? So we go to Twitter. In fact, we were trying to host this recording on Twitter, and Twitter failed us right? And so we had to go to another Web2 platform and that's fine. I think that's just true for crypto. Like it's, whether it's Twitter or Discord or Telegram, we're kinda leveraging these like Web2 platforms to develop these social connections. And because of that, there is no interoperability between our Web3 identities and our Web2 selves right? what we connect with other communities. I'm personally very excited for projects like Lens right? For the vision that they have for creating this like social network, right? Like at the protocol layer that then projects can build on top of. I wonder if you could describe to me, maybe without having to say, oh, Lens is the where I'd like to go, more so from the social aspect, What do you think is needed? And if Lens or anybody else, what is it that they need to do in order to be able to bridge these connections that we're making or just be able to assimilate these connections that we're making in the Web2 space to create rich dynamic experiences for us in the Web3 space socially.
Henry: Yeah, that's a very multifaceted, complicated question but, I love it. I love the question. I love thinking about all the things that you mentioned, but I guess like to start I'm generally super excited about Lens, Farcaster their approach to web through social is a bit different, but I'm a huge fan of both projects and the projects alike. I think one of the early kind of ideas for me about this topic was the idea of value graph. At least that was the terminology that we use internally within the team. But in like traditional Web2, like social, we talk about like social graph that a network created by social connections I guess, but one of the things, if you go into Twitter you see people using designated certain PFPs as their profile pictures and that kind of act as a starting point for building connections right? But that's very kind of limited and you're already starting to see Improved version of that in, in platforms like Lens and Farcaster where because you are able to understand the crypto side of these users in a more native manner without going to like Rainbow, without going to like Etherscan game to try to type in someone's ENS name to figure this person out, you are able to do that now natively on these platforms. And that allows you to that, that creates lot more things that could start, that could act as a enabler for creating new connections and creating new communities. The concept of value graph that we had internally was whether you are connected through holding a same tokens or same NFTs or on our case, same achievements. These are all something that could spark up a new community, new connection, new net network. And I think that's really the interesting part about Web3 social, at least to me. And I think up to 2021, maybe 2020, most of the Web3 social projects were, was focusing on decentralizing the actual kind of social network itself. Like the social graph a bit and things like that. But I think moving forward, I think now people are going to think more about the actual, you know, social aspect of it rather than the actual infrastructure aspect of it. Does that make sense?
Humpty: No. 100% makes sense to me. And thank you for that. How do you think Noox will play into that?
Henry: Yeah, so
Humpty: fired it back at you. Sorry
Henry: No. This is good. This is good. We are thinking about this a lot. But as projects like Lens projects like Farcast or any other Web3 social platforms or even any other identity platforms we need to find the best way to deliver our you know, credential data, our user's credential data, right? And showing like an actual NFT with badge images and with like texts written on it may not be the best medium to deliver this information about someone. Maybe in the future. Right now, we would love to integrate just natively with those platforms and given that our badges are just ERC 1155, that's like a no problem. But we want to think beyond that and to try to find what's the best crypto native ways of delivering these crypto native credential information. I don't have a good answer for that right now but We would, if anyone from Lens or Farcaster is listening, we would love to collaborate. I think we add a very interesting kind of social socially aspect to your community. So you know Let's chat.
Humpty: I'll tell you, they're listening. I actually connected with Lens at MCON a few weeks ago, two weeks ago, when that was happening. And they're hungry for these types of social experiences on their platform. So yeah, just definitely shot 'em out. Let's connect them because I think that like what Noox is building can bring a lot of value to the lens community. My last question, and I normally reserve this and I don't let people know what it is I'm gonna ask so that they can ask as honestly as possible. The question is, it doesn't have to be on Crypto Twitter, but it could be a book. What or who has been most influential to you in your crypto Journey?
Henry: That's really interesting questions. I would like to kind of two things I guess, one of the greatest kind of inspiration for me obviously was all the papers written around soulbound tokens. That, you know reading that was like a reading, like a third white paper to me. That's, that has been the quickest inspiration of of for the Noox. But for just crypto, crypto journey in general, I don't know if you know him, but his name Issan he's also part of the MetaCartel Ventures. Maybe you might have crossed by him on MCON but we started crypto together, way back when we started in 2016. And he's been a true inspiration for me. And Just all things crypto and recently on, on DAOs as well. I guess those two ideas, those two individuals those are my greatest inspiration so far into my crypto rabbit journey.
Humpty: And that's a wrap. If you wanna learn more about Henry, you can follow him on Twitter @hiHenryLee and for Noox @Noox_World. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. If you enjoyed this podcast, please don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you are listening to us, and you can find more conversations like this one on our website @cryptosapiens.xyz.
Until next time, stay brainy.