Episode 58: Mike | GM.xyz - Building Web3 Social Platforms
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Timestamps
00:11 - 01:19 – Crypto Sapiens Introduction
00:20 - 04:59 – Mike's introduction and his journey into Crypto and Web3
18:35 - 19;47 – Mike describes the 3 step processes of gm.xyz, compares them to Twitter and Discord processes, and how it is possible to build a platform that is powered by decentralization.
20:28 - 22:02 – Mike explains how everyone can do things differently with GM.XYZ?
23:07 - 25:02 – Discussion on the value of owning a composable and versatile identity on platforms like gm.xyz.
33:22 - 34:57 – Mike's thoughts on the transitions from Web2 applications to Web3 native applications in the social space
37:22 - 41:19 – Discussion on what Mike hopes to achieve with gm.xyz in the nearest future.
41:20 - 43:01 – Conclusion.
Transcript
(00:00:11) Humpty: Hello, and welcome back to Crypto Sapiens. I am your host, Humpty Caldron, and today we are chatting with Michael McGuiness, cofounder of gm.xyz. In our conversation, we discuss the different schools of thought on building decentralized social platforms, protocols versus apps. We also talk about how we can help the society at large learn and care about the value of decentralization. We also talk about decentralized social and the ways that it improves connections in Web3 and how we govern communities. There has been a lot of attention given recently to decentralized social platforms, and much of this is accelerated by the acquisition of Twitter.
(00:00:57) This conversation highlights some of the reasons we're having these conversations, as well as featuring how decentralized social can improve the way that we make connections, find value alignment within communities, share content, and retain the value of the work that we're putting into these social platforms. There's a lot to unpack here. So without further ado, let's get started.
(00:01:20) Michael: Yeah. So my name is Michael McGuinness. Before Web3, I worked in two different industries. First, I worked as a hedge fund analyst at a long-short high-yield hedge fund. So that's where I got exposed to Bitcoin, right? Just from a macroeconomics perspective, I had thought the store value use case was pretty interesting. I Googled the best book on Bitcoin to learn more about it. I came across the Bitcoin standard, read that, and I was pretty all in on Bitcoin. I think that was in early 2018, and, it kind of pains me to say this, I was a bit of a Bitcoin maxi. I left my hedge fund job, went to work as a software engineer at this company called CommonStock, which is based out in San Francisco.
(00:02:09) It's like Twitter, but you link your brokerage account. It's an investing social app. I worked as a software engineer there, and it was still very web2 stock focused. And I was going farther down the Ethereum rabbithole, and just got super excited. And since I started at Comic Tech, I was thinking about ways to build this space, what the space needs and the problems that you could solve with it. And I got excited about this idea of decentralized social media. If you think about social media as something that touches pretty much every person in the world, and you have a handful of large tech companies that own all the world's data, they get to censor what people see and do not see.
(00:02:54) It stifles innovation because if you have a different view of a feed algorithm for Twitter for example, you can't express that view, right? Unless you build Twitter from scratch, which is hard to do. Actually, building the Twitter app isn't that hard. Like, a lot of really smart people could build it, in a couple of months. So I thought that was a really interesting problem to go after, and there were a couple of other solutions in the space, but I kind of disagreed with their approach. A lot of people are starting like, protocol first, or building their L1 and saying, hey, we'll create this decentralized social media protocol, and then everybody builds on top of us. I think the problem with that is that it's really hard to build on a decentralized architecture, right?
(00:33:36) Like, we're kind of in the 1960s of decentralized architecture. It just hasn't benefited from the same 50-plus years of investment that web2 architecture has benefited from. So my view was , hey, speed and the number of iteration cycles you have is probably your biggest advantage as a startup and trying to compete against these incumbents. It makes sense to start centralized first and then progressively decentralize over time, right? Because if you don't build something useful, then decentralization doesn't matter, in my view. And then it's only once you build something useful that you want to decentralize the data layer. For example, before 2012, Twitter to have open APIs and a bunch of people built on top of those APIs.
(00:04:19) And then all of a sudden, when they started eating into Twitter's ad revenue, they pulled out the rug from underneath these developers that were building on top of them. So that's where decentralization can be useful, because it allows you to make these kinds of credible commitments. Like Chris Dixon praise instead of don't be evil, it can't be evil, right? You can't change it, and people have strong guarantees when they're building on top of you. So I thought that was interesting. I quit my job in September of last year with my brother, who's also a software engineer. We're kind of like, talking about this idea for months, and normally I have a million ideas, and he's a little more measured and reserved and thoughtful, and he's like, this one's a good idea. Let's do it.
(00:04:59) We quit our jobs in September of last year, and we've kind of been off to the races since.
(00:05:04) Humpty: I want to start from this idea of your first exposure to any decentralized system, and it sounds like that was bitcoin. You called yourself a maximalist. What changed? Right. First of all, I'll agree with you that Bitcoin tends to be that introduction to Web3 and crypto for a lot of people. That's personally how I discovered it. I discovered Bitcoin before I heard about anything else, and all the other crypto projects that were happening out there. That was my gateway. And of course, soon after, going into the rabbit hole through local meetups and Reddit on crypto Twitter, I learned there was a much wider ecosystem. But I wonder for you what changed from being a maximalist to everything else that you are today?
(00:05:58) Michael: Yeah, and I just want to clarify. I wasn't a very harsh maximalist. I was very open to other people building cool and interesting things. I was just like, I don't understand those use cases right now, but I understand Bitcoin, right? Like, it's very simple. The store value use case and why that's necessary in today's world of central banks' earning money and the properties of money, that made a lot of sense to me, and Bitcoin's scalability and permissionlessness was very interesting. What changed was I have a really smart friend who told me – you got to look into Ethereum. Just buy a little bit. And I was like, okay. So I bought a little bit. And then once you buy something, even if it's just a little bit, you start paying more attention.
(00:06:45) It's like, what's going on here? What's going on here? And then I think when it really clicked was when I listened to Justin Drake's Ultrasound Money podcast in March of 2021. And up until that point, I've been listening to a lot. By that time, I was already listening to Bankless and trying to learn more about Ethereum and all these other non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. And the way Justin Drake put it with the development, and this was before the EIP 1559 — the transition of proof of stake – and how it was going to make Ethereum a superior form of money to Bitcoin. Within a week of that, I sold half of my Bitcoin and put it all into Ethereum. And then I wrote an essay called – Why ETH Will Store Value?
(00:07:36) That helped me organize my thoughts. If you think about it, Ethereum, and this is solely money from a money perspective, not like all the cool things you could accomplish with Ethereum. a) it's more scarce after EIP 1559 and the transition to proof of stake. I mean, on-chain activities and transaction fees are pretty low right now, and it's still more scarce than Bitcoin in terms of a lower inflation rate than Bitcoin. And also, it made sense, more secure, because when you think about Bitcoin, they have this issue where the block subsidies have every four years, and transaction fees aren't growing because nothing is being built on top of it. Right? So you run into this security issue where the kind of security spend for bitcoin scales linearly, right?
(00:08:29) Whereas Ethereum, the security spend because of proof of stake will always be in proportion to the market value of the network. Right? So I think Justin Drake did the math, and it's roughly like ten with proof of stake, the cost to attack the network would be roughly 10%. You'd have to acquire 10% of the supply, right? So if Ethereum has a 100 billion dollar market cap, you'd have to spend $10 billion. Right now people say Bitcoin is fine because it's X billion dollars to attack it. But the italic made this great point on the subreddit, he's like once Ethereum or Bitcoin becomes a $10 trillion asset, the people you have to protect against are larger, like larger threats. Right? So the security aspect made sense to me.
(00:09:17) And then the real yield from proof of stake, the ability to have 4% or 6% risk-free yield after the merge is compelling, and it creates this real yield dynamic. And then there's organic demand. And I compared it to how the petrodollar system cemented the US dollar as the global reserve asset. You could see something similar developed around that where people need to pay for decentralized computing and you pay for that with ETH.
(00:09:44) Humpty: So I thank you so much for that description. I think that's been wonderful. I think what you've proven is you have put a lot of thought into this and your background, you know, in markets, right? and being able to apply this type of thinking both to decentralize money. How does someone with that background, with that level of understanding think about decentralized social. Like what is the transition? Were you building something in the social space or was this just something that you saw as a user of a social application saying this is a problem. And I understand the technology behind decentralized technology, I'm going to merge the two.
(00:10:28) Michael: Yeah, well, I did work at a consumer social app before this as a software engineer. So at CommonStock I learned a lot about building a social network and building community and stuff like that, and the technical architecture behind that to a lesser extent. But I think it clicked. So once I went all in on Ethereum, I was trying to learn more about the potential use cases. And you have DeFi, NFTs, I think they are cool, but it's hard to see. I think a lot of DeFi stuff will be abstracted away and used behind the scenes by larger institutions. It's tough to see my parents using Uniswap or Compound or Aabe. Right.
(00:11:14) And then NFT has expanded a bit beyond that and then I was wondering what else can this technology be used for. And then I forgot where I first heard it. But I think as Belogi who was talking about – if you have this source of truth and this permissionless data layer, how that allows for permissionless innovation on top of that. And I thought that was a really powerful idea. It's very clear how these kinds of data monopolies are affecting the public discourse. It's very clear how they're cycling innovation because it's very hard. If you think about it, in the last 20 or so years, there have been hundreds of social media startups every year, and maybe ten have had a pretty big impact.
(00:12:04) Ideally there should be a lot of teams experimenting with different ideas because this is something that touches the entire world. There should be teams on everything from censorship and moderation to different feed algorithms and making use of new primitives. For example, Discord worked back their Ethereum wallet integration. And if somebody wanted to build that, there are ways around it, you can use Collab Led and stuff like that through their bots. But it's very hard to build a crypto-native version of Discord. I mean, that's exactly what we're trying to do right now. So I thought it was a super massive problem and it made sense why crypto would be useful there.
(00:12:47) I think a lot of times people will talk about use cases that may exist in the future, but it's very fuzzy on how it'll work, particularly around real world assets. For instance, put real estate on the blockchain and there's a lot that goes into that. You need legal recourse and a lot of interaction with the physical world, and it's unclear how blockchains work there unless everybody views it as sovereign. So maybe those cases will come eventually. But social media is something that lives in the digital realm and it's a massive problem. It makes sense why a commercial and data layer would help a lot there.
(00:13:23) Humpty: Yeah. So it sounds like everything from your background. Well, first of all, understanding the power behind Ethereum and understanding what was broken in Web2 social really drove you and your brother to start up gm.xyz. There's something else that you said at the beginning of this conversation that I want to also see if we can explore a bit before we dive into the nuts and bolts of gm.xyz. And that is the comparison to other social projects that are starting at the protocol layer, and how building on top of decentralized architecture is hard. There's one thing that I've seen other people talking about, and I tend to agree, and that is, we also tend to focus a lot on the protocol level of development and not so much on the application level of development.
(00:14:22) And it is at the application layer that we can increase demand and adoption for the technology because people don't need to know how something works. Decentralization is a means, not an end, as I think I've heard other people saying as well. Maybe describe a little bit more about your thoughts on building these social platforms from a protocol perspective and how building at the application layer is better for either the ability to onboard people to use this application, or for other applications to collaborate with what you're building at gm.xyz.
(00:15:03) Michael: So my brother and I talk about this a lot. I don't think the majority of the world cares about decentralization or privacy. You don't care about these things until you need them. But we care about them. So for something that is good for the society, how do you get everybody to adopt this thing? And the answer is – if you want to build more than a niche social network for only people who are fanatical about decentralization, you have to solve real problems and build something that's hopefully ten times better than the current solutions. And that's where we started with Gm. So our view was if you don't build something useful, decentralization doesn't matter. So let's solve a real problem
(00:15:46) And right now, there's a massive problem that a lot of web3 communities are widely under-served by Discord. Discord is like the status quo, but if you think about Discord, it's a gaming chat platform that was never intended to be used by more than a thousand people in NFT communities or DAOs. Soa hundred people talking over each other in a Discord channel is a nightmare because everything's in chronological order, it's not sorted, and there's no signal. Like if you're in 50 Discord servers and each one has 20 channels, that is a thousand places that you have to click every day just to get caught up on all of your communities. And it was just never built up for what it's being used for today. So we saw that as a problem that we could start with and solve.
(00:16:26) So our goal, and the way we're thinking about it, is to solve a real problem for people, and build the absolute best home for Web3 communities. And right now, there are millions of people in these web3 communities, right? So if you could get millions of people to kind of bootstrap the network, then you can start building more broadcast use cases, right? So think like Twitter or Reddit. We're not trying to compete with Twitter or Reddit right now, because if you post something on Gm versus Twitter or Reddit, you'll always get more likes and responses from Twitter or Reddit just because we're way smaller than them. But what we can do is we can build a scalable communication platform that is web3 native.
(00:17:10) It builds in things like token gaming and reputation system and governance, voting and stuff like that, and all the things these communities need in a very intuitive and easy-to-use way that's easy to stay on top of. So that's our goal. And then eventually, once you have millions of people on there, you can start building those broadcast use cases. And then we start putting our data on-chain and decentralizing it, while making it permissionless for anybody to build on top of us. Hopefully, open source our clients. And let's encourage people to fork us because all we care about is growing that underlying data layer. And then people can fork our web app or react to our native app and build apps of their own for different use cases. So let's just say you don't care about the community abstraction.
(00:17:54) You care more about the Twitter use case. You can like no have communities at all on your app, and only just follow people and post to each other and build a Twitter-style use case. So that's how we're thinking about it. So basically build something useful, decentralize the data layer and decentralize the governance layer as well. So that's kind of our three-step process
(00:18:15) Humpty: So maybe describe a little bit about those processes themselves. So you're talking about decentralizing the data layer. Compare that for us to something like Twitter or Discord and how you're able to build something different powered by decentralized technology. And why is that important
(00:18:35) Michael: Yes, I know Twitter and Discord have some open API endpoints, but you can't access Twitter's database and build a Twitter application yourself. That's just as good as Twitter using their data. So what we want to do is make it permissionless to build on top of us, to read and write to that underlying data layer and not have control that. So that's where I think the value is. The best example would honestly be Twitter, prior to 2012 when there were all these different types of Twitter applications. Everybody had access to the underlying data layer and they built all these cool use cases. And that's how you had a ton of innovation. I'm pretty sure quote tweets were invented by a third-party client as well as replies and stuff that Twitter didn't think of, right?
(0019;30) Like some entrepreneur who was building for a selected group of users thought of that, and that's like the world we want to facilitate, so we think decentralized. What decentralizing does is it allows us to make that hard commitment – that you can build on top of us and we're not going to pull the rug from under you.
(00:19:49) Humpty: Yeah, that's a good point. I like that. So we were talking about Discord also a little bit, and in terms of the current use of that application for communities to come together and also not just to communicate, but to govern themselves, right? We do see a lot of soft governance happening at the Discord level. And you were talking about how currently, while there is no native way to make sense of that, there are tools like CollabLand that may allow you to bridge some of that data over, and create some meaningful interactions with that data. How would someone do something differently with gm.xyz?
(00:20:38) Michael: Yeah, so in Gm currently, everybody signs in with a wallet. Everybody has a wallet link to their account, and that enables us to do cool things. Where you don't have to stitch this third-party bot that people have to click on and go attach their wallets to, it just happens automatically. So for your community, if you want to token gate it by your NFT project, you just paste the contract address in there. How many you need to own a certain role in your community, and then you can use that role to permission access to certain channels and voting rights and stuff like that. So it's just native to the platform and people don't have to link their wallet externally, which is generally not a great security practice.
(00:21:17) And also, yeah like you said, there's a lot of soft consensus being reached on discord via a poll. It's also a nightmare for a lot of community managers, because if you look at the way the governance process works today, it's like, hey I just submitted a proposal on Discourse. And then they paste it on Discord, and it's like hurting cats. They go, hey! go comment on this, and then go vote on this. And then Discourse isn't web3 native, so it's not token-weighted when you vote. So you're running into issues there where your Discourse voting isn't matching up with your snapshot voting,a and there are a ton of issues there that are not Web3 native, and not having these particular communities in mind when you're building the platform
(00:22:01) So those are a few of the problems we want to solve.
(00:22:04) Humpty: Yeah, that's very good. There are also these conversations happening around identity, and I know one of the challenges that are commonly discussed in Web3 and Web2 platforms, in general, when it comes to web3 social is that any identity that you create on these platforms are not self-sovereign, right? So they're owned by these platforms. Any identity you create on the Facebook platform is owned by Facebook, and any identity you create on Google is owned by Google. Any data associated to that, is also owned by these organizations. What are some of the benefits? And I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
(00:22:47) Right
(00:22:47) As someone who is developing a social platform that is very much built on top of this decentralized technology, what are your thoughts about the ability for people to join a platform like gm.xyz, and generate an identity that may be composable, that functions outside of that platform? What's the value of that?
(00:23:07) Michael: Yes. Okay, two things on identity. First on composability. I think composability is one of the most under-discussed aspects of web3. I think it's going to be so important. Things that we want to enable are putting your community reputation on-chain, right? So if you think about it there's a lot of people doing a lot of great work in these discord communities and they're getting no credit for that. It would be nice to have something similar to Reddit karma, but just for your community, where people have points. And there are a lot of cool and interesting projects going after this and trying to put a reputation on‐chain. Source credit is one that I know has attempted this. If you have that community reputation on-chain, it becomes really useful because you can use it across the web.
(00:23:53) So if you go into your website and you do a giveaway specifying that only people who have X reputation within our community will be eligible for this giveaway. You can imagine people baking these identities into things like lending platforms and unsecured lending, which is a big problem that a lot of people are trying to address right now. So yeah, I think that composability is huge to be able to take where your wallet address is, your username or your name, and you use it across all these apps in the crypto ecosystem. So I think that's like the first part of identity, and then the second part which is more web2 focused, but I think it's really important, particularly as it relates to Discord on Gm. I mean you have a rich identity.
(00:24:41) So what I mean by that is you have followers, you have post history, you have your NFT collection, and it's really useful for safety. So if you think about Discord, all you have to go off of is a picture and a bio that people can kind of change to whatever they want. They can impersonate all these types of people or like these community moderators, DM people, and scam people, and it's become a massive problem. I mean, I personally just have all my Discord DMs turned off and all my servers on mute just because spam has become such a mass problem. But with a rich identity, you can make more informed decisions around things like, oh this person sent me a link.
(00:25:22) And then there's a big difference between somebody who has zero followers and zero posts and then somebody who has 2000 followers and a rich post history and all these great NFT collections. And it's helpful for connecting with other people, right? Because you can see what subject people are interested in, or people who are a holder of a particular NFT or Token, and this can help facilitate that connection as well. So yeah, those are the two; composability and the rich identity, things that we're focused on at GM.
(00:25:54) Humpty: Yeah, I like that. One thing that I've been thinking about and that I've shared with other projects that are building social platforms and I'll share with you, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts. One thing that I think; web3 identities, these rich identities that are self-sovereign, that are composable and reusable across a variety of applications, like gm.xyz, I think presents an interesting opportunity that isn't available in the traditional web3 space. And that is, when you go to Facebook or Google Plus or Google Circles, whatever they used to be called, if they still exist, the discoverability of like-minded individuals isn't really good because it isn't comprehensive or acknowledging the extension of your identity beyond just a single platform. With web identities like my own,
(00:26:51) For instance, if I have an ENS and if I have certain NFTs in that wallet, if I hold certain governance tokens of a DAO, if I've participated in governance in those DAOs, if I've supported public funding through platforms like Gitcoin, all of this is building up a very rich identity of who I am, who I choose to represent myself as in Web3. It's interesting to consider how all of these different metrics or touch points in my Web3 identity could be used within a social application to help with the discoverability of other like-minded individuals. Are you at gm.xyz considering how you can organize or recommend people to one another to organize amongst themselves based on these variables or metrics of their identity?
(00:27:48) Michael: Yeah. So right now, our focus has been mostly to get communities onboarded, so that there are a ton of really awesome communities that you can join when you sign up for GM. So our focus is more on that now. And then once we have this critical mass of communities, our focus will probably turn towards helping to funnel people into those communities. Right, so you own a Bored ape NFT, then you should join the Yuga Labs community. Then you should follow these other ten, eight and connect with them and shoot them a DM. And yeah, that's our goal, and that's what we think it should look like because like exactly what you said, you have all this rich data that lives on the blockchain and not a lot of people are making use of right now.
(00:28:33) And you can do it in interesting ways. Another interesting way that we've been discussing internally is that you can make your DMs more open by not having to turn them off. And what I mean by that is, for instance, if you think about somebody like Kevin Rose who has a million followers on Twitter. I don't know if his DMs are open, but I imagine his DMs are very hard to go through. But if you start bringing tokens into the equation, you could say only proof holders or moon birds can DM me. So what it does is it allows him to connect with his project holders. And that's another kind of selling point for communities too.
(00:29:20) If you launch an NFT project, it's very opaque into who's holding your tokens. But if you go on Gm, you could find those people and help bring them together into a community and rally against your cause and your mission.
(00:29:38) Humpty: Yeah, well, I mean, there are two things you touched on there and I think both are super incredible feats when we get the opportunity to build our communities in that way. And one of them, like this idea of, ape follows ape, but in a much more web3 native way, where it's not like we have to do a hashtag and discover other people that are using that hashtag. And really, how can we verify ownership on a web2 platform? Well, maybe they paid for Twitter Blue to be able to show that PFP and show the provenance of it. But on a web3 native platform like gm.xyz, these all happen natively. It's just the way that it's programmed.
(00:30:18) The other thing that you were talking about just now is this interaction between communities or individuals of shared value. This idea of DMs that are restricted to certain communities based on ownership of certain assets, it'd be interesting to take it a step further and be like, I want to curate this community based on early adoption of this asset. If you hold that asset today and you paid 15 ETH for it, well, great, I still want to hear from you. But there is a certain level of reputation, if you came in early, if you believed in this project early and you joined when it was like 0.05 ETH. It1p'd be interesting to start seeing the different opportunities when you segment communities in that way or when you curate communities in that way.
(00:31:12) Michael: Yeah. And I honestly think we're so early in what NFTs can be. If you think of what you said, like cryptofugs, a lot of those people were super early, and they're very cool people in crypto. But at the same time, the fact that anybody who has $100,000 to spend can go out and buy one, it feels somewhat suboptimal. And I had a tweet on this pretty recently. I bet that you won't be able to buy a lot of NFT projects, particularly super high-status ones. There will be a very curated list of people who it will be given to based on their reputation within that community. And I think that's a more accurate way of going about it because it's no longer capital based.
(00:32:02) It's like the social capital element where if you're a fossil writer or if you help out a lot in the community, you can earn these assets because when you're talking about assets and you're only letting people connect with it, right now it's mostly just kind of money based, right? It's based on what you bought rather than what you've done. And hopefully, I think NFTs will trend towards that and then it creates an even richer surface area to innovate on. And honestly, up until this point, we've been more focused on building a lot of table stakes, the kind of features that go into it takes a lot to build a chat platform and innovate on design. And we've been more focused on allowing people to kind of the communication platform aspect of it.
(00:32:25) But I'm excited to start using these web3 primitives in really unique and interesting ways.
(00:33:00) Humpty: What are your thoughts in terms of the transition from web two to web three native applications in the social space? Obviously, you're building one and you're kind of staked to the success of web3 social. What are we missing right now? Just generally in terms of like, adoption by not the small niche community that we are, but outside of it?
(00:33:22) Michael: Yeah, honestly, I think a lot of things need to be abstracted away. People don't even realize what's going on behind the scenes. Like a wall setting, whatever asset and having to check Etherscan to make sure it went through. A lot of that just needs to be checked away and the equivalent of using Venmo rather than Metamask to send ETH, right? And I think that's honestly one of the reasons I'm most excited about web3 social. So it is what we are talking about earlier. If you think DeFi is super important, it only appeals to a very small subset of the global population.
(00:34:04) NFTs definitely appeal to more people than DeFi, but there are still lots of people who don't quite get it. They'll never be interested in buying a monkey PFP, and they'll always be against it. But honestly, social is something that touches everybody in the world and it could be a way, if done buffaloing, to show people why these web3 primitives are extremely useful. What happens when everybody has essentially a bank account linked to Facebook where you could receive payments and you can connect based on the assets you own or the things you've done with POAPS. You can prove that you've actually done something and you can take your identity to other places on the web. It's really interesting.
(00:34:49) And honestly, it's one of the things I'm most excited about with social, because it can onboard the next billion users into Web3
(00:34:57) Humpty: I like how you framed that. You brought it together and talked about the distance from the average user in the web2 space, even to the types of interactions with finance. For instance, in the population of the world, what percentage is participating in TradFi. Not talking about owning a bank account because even though there is a small part of the population, a lot more are unbanked. But even the ones that have bank accounts, how many of those are investing? How many of those are actively investing? Not just putting into some sort of yield fund and hoping that it gains enough interest over time. Going into the NFT, how many people are collecting art?
(00:35:44) How many people are supporting their artists by going to their concerts and buying their music? but then going to the social aspect of it and seeing the rapid growth of social spaces, and how many people that use the internet are using social applications. It's quite a large swamp of the population. So we start looking at different ways to engage communities who are interested in these applications, in the traditional space, and then carry that over into the Web3 space by powering it up using this decentralized technology. And I agree with you. I think, firstly, we're social beings by nature. So being able to engage with other like-minded individuals, talking about our common interests, doing it over chat, doing it over the video, just all of these social elements are hugely important to us as human beings.
(00:36:38) To then transcend that and talk about social from an ownership perspective, from this more equitable perspective, I think that's interesting. And so I'm personally very much interested and fascinated by the work that's being done in decentralized social.
(00:26:59) Michael: Yeah, I think you said it perfectly. Those things that you touched on, we're super excited about it all.
(00:37:06) Humpty: Yeah. So I guess maybe to wrap it up, why don't you give us, like, the next 30 days, six months, one year for gm.xyz? What are you hoping to achieve in the near future and the long term?
(00:37:22) Michael: Yeah, so in the near term, what we're focused on is building a great product. Because, like I said in the beginning, you need to build a great product if you're going to be serious about competing with Discord and other Web2 software platforms. So right now, we're focused on building a great product. What we have is a waitlist of communities looking to launch on Gm, we onboard them and talk with them, learning about their problems. They're giving us lots of feedback and we're iterating and making the product. It's honestly getting better every week. So if you could, follow our weekly updates on Gm as we ship new things. We have a goal of making the product 5 - 10% better every week.
(00:38:04) So we're just shipping. There are lots of things that we need to build. Voice is one. Twitter spaces or Discord pages is something that a lot of communities need. We're innovating on some things that Discord doesn't do. So if I think about one thing that drives me nuts about Discord is you can't leave channels. You can only mute them, and you can hide those muted channels. But still it's annoying. It should be more like slack in my view, where you join a community or server and there are a few default channels that apply to everyone. Because if you jump into a Discord server, all 70 channels are not relevant to you. There are probably like two or three in each community.
(00:38:48) And then what it also does by having opt-in channels is, it allows you to create more channels because you don't have to worry about cluttering the channel main space. So if you're a thousand-person community and five people want to create a book club, you can create a channel for that book club without having to worry about it bothering everybody else. And then new people can find it, and it allows for all these interesting changes in community structure. We're honestly focused on you. So that's something that we plan on shipping in the next two weeks or so, which should be pretty exciting. But stuff like that, voice and building all this cool functionality is our focus now. So building a great product and then onboarding more communities.
(00:39:31) Well, right now you have to go through us and do this waitlist process so that we could build personal relationships with all these community managers, and learn more about their problems. But once we feel like we have a truly great product, we're going to open up the platform more. So we're going to allow anybody to just create a community and allow for this serendipitous community creation. Once you have this critical mass of communities, you can start building more of those broadcast use cases. And then as we're doing that, we want to start, hopefully in the next year or so, productionizing our APIs, and getting more serious about decentralizing the data layer when the product isn't changing as much. So right now the product is changing every day. We're shipping code every day.
(00:40:21) And it'd be a nightmare if we had to migrate our data models to decentralized architecture. It's really hard. I don't even know how to build a voice in a decentralized way. There are a lot of really brilliant people building awesome things like ceramic and tools like Are We even File Coin. They're building all these interesting things, and we hope that they'll be much better, even twelve months from now. That's another advantage of focusing on the product first. That best practices for decentralizing your data layer are probably going to look dramatically different in the next six months, twelve or twenty four months. So that's another advantage of focusing on the product first, and then hopefully we can contribute to that too.
(00:41:12) Once we're not iterating on the product as much, we can start decentralizing the data layer, and after that, decentralizing the governance layer.
(00:41:20) Humpty: All right. That's amazing. So the last question that I normally ask is this could be someone on Crypto Twitter, this could be someone that you read a book from, but who has been the most influential in your crypto journey?
(00:41:38) Michael: Tough Question. I would say a lot of Bloggy Ideas I found interesting, particularly are the ideas around Social. I don't have that many original ideas. I steal a lot from really smart people like Bloggy. So I would probably say I read Bloggy's book on Network stake. He likes talking about really interesting ideas, and his imagination is just wild in terms of what he's thinking about. So I'd probably say Bloggy impacted my views on crypto the most.
(00:42:16) Humpty: Okay, that's wonderful. So I'm trying to get a number of people's recommendations, and this also helps us to be able to reach out to different individuals to come on the show. So thank you for that. It's been wonderful chatting with you. Love to learn both about you and about gm.xyz. Didn't know this was a family Venture. I think that's rad.
(00:42:39) Michael: I think my brother is right over there. He's coding right now.
(00:42:42) Humpty: There he is.
(00:42:44) Michael: He's locked in.
(00:42:45) Humpty: Yeah. So, yeah, this has been wonderful. I look forward to being able to continue chatting about what you're building and maybe even seeing if there are additional ways that we can collaborate in the future too. So thank you for your time.
(00:42:58) Michael: That sounds great. Thank you for having me.
(00:43:01) Humpty: And that's a wrap. Thanks so much for sticking all the way to the end with us. If you'd like to learn more about Michael and gm.xyz, you can find them on Twitter. Michael at Mikemcgzero and gm.xyz at gm.xyz. Please don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast. It truly means a lot to us. And give us a five-star review too, that helps extend the reach of this content and connect to more people like you. And if you enjoyed this Conversation, you can check out our Archive at Crypto Sapons.xyz. Until next time, stay rainy.