Episode 20: John Paller and Joshua Lapidus | Opolis - A Digital Employment Cooperative
Newsletter Copy?
Status
A discussion and Q&A session with John Paller and 0xJoshua of Opolis. Premieres on January 18, 2022.
Audio Information
Timestamps:
1:23 - 3:28 - John Paller Introduction
3:28 - 4:28 - Joshua Lapidus Introduction
4:28 - 12:17 - thoughts on how Opolis started, why opolis started, and how it’s evolved in 2021
12:17 - 18:01 - Getting started in the new world of work while dealing with taxes, insurance, etc with with Web3, and self sovereign working.
18:01 - 23:19 - HR Tech, how they serve Corporations, and how Opolis is different.
23:19 - 28:52 - How Opolis helps with protecting the independent contractor
28:52 - 30:12 - Joshua’s take on being involved in Opolis/ETH Denver
30:12 - 33:47- The Opolis Experience at ETH Denver
33:47 - end - The WORK Token, Liquidity Mining, incentives for involvement in Opolis
Transcriptions
Opolis
Humpty: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative Web3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and DeFi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with Bankless DAO, A movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
Bankless DAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello everyone. We are back with another episode of Crypto Sapiens. Today we are talking with John Paller and Joshua Lapidus founder of Opolis and Executive Community Steward of Opolis, respectively. We discuss Opolis the Digital Employment Cooperative, starting with its inspiration founding back in 2017. We explore democratize employment and the need for turnkey solutions to support Web3 natives and contributors.
John is also the founder of ETH Denver, so we also touched on the largest and longest running ETH event in the world and it's intersection with Opolis. Let's get started.
[00:01:23] John: My name's John Paller I'm the founder and executive steward of Opolis I'm also the founder and executive steward of ETHDenver, which is coming up next month. I've been around the crypto space quite a long time. Feels a lifetime in some ways. I've been working in this space full time since 2016. In a previous life I built a big staffing company in the state of Colorado. I've been involved in HR tech for over a dozen years, built a few startups, and I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. My passion to fly and employment in HR tech employment ecosystem. I uttered the words democratized employments for the first time in 2008. So like a long time ago. Didn't really have a clue what the hell that meant at the time. It was the beginning, it was a marker I put down and just the beginning of a journey. The journey's been pretty crazy up to this point. So lots of learnings, I guess you could say the first, half dozen to eight years. And then, so getting calibrated and settled into understanding what we need to build in the form of Opolis. So just as a quick introduction, Opolis is a long view vision of Opolis is a public utility infrastructure for employment on a global basis. And right now we are in sort of our earlier stages of what we call digital employment cooperative or an employment DAO given this is a DAO friendly community, it's employment DAO is a little bit more accessible, but essentially what we do is we offer individual DAO contributors, digital workers, independent workers, whatever you wanna call yourself, Digital nomad The ability to tether into a traditional employment system without actually giving up their independence. The features that come along with that are Pretty rich, group healthcare, long term, short term disability, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, like the whole nine yards. So it's replicating the employment down to the T again without individuals having to give up their independence, so they're not being subjugated by any entity or anything. It's a member owned community. Just like any other DAO it's operated and owned by its members.
[00:03:28] Humpty: Awesome. Great. I think that's a wonderful introduction to yourself, and then leading into Opolis which we'll pick up after Joshua an introduction to yourself as well.
[00:03:37] Joshua: Cool. Thanks humpty. I came into Web3, I guess kind of similar way, similar to most I was on Coinbase just buying Bitcoin and ETH because a friend told me. And I was working full-time at Lyft doing driver growth user acquisition and a little bit of competitive intelligence. And I met Jacob Cantelli from at Consensys and he was like, Hey, you should come work at Consensys, so I ended up at Consensys they went through one of their typical to hired too many people. Now we have to fire more the great culling as it's called now from February, 2020. So got culled went to ETH Denver to find a job, to find a and try to avoid Consensys cobra, which was like $2,500 a month. And everyone there was like have you talked to Opolis have you, have you met the Opolis booth? She go talk to the Opolis so I went and talked to the Opolis booth and the rest is history. I'm a steward of Opolis and a steward of ETH Denver. It's been a, it's been a wild journey.
[00:04:28] Humpty: Oh, that's cool. So I like how there's a synergy here, I think, and it's gonna I think it's gonna happen throughout the conversation in terms of Opolis and ETH Denver but I also like excuse me, the idea of John, you having you know started having this discussion in terms of decentralized employment back in 2018. And slowly developing that into a project that we now know as Opolis. And then through that finding Joshua, you finding your way into the project through a little bit of both right? Going to ETH Denver checking out projects there, seeing what opportunities there were and Opolis popped into your radar. So I guess maybe now is a good time to, aside from that general introduction to Opolis that John you so eloquently shared with us, what is that like vision, that overarching mission of Opolis in terms of where it started and maybe give us a little bit of a how has it evolved as DAOs have become so prevalent, last year in 2021?
[00:05:23] John: Yeah. So you know As every great idea it starts with an idea democratized employment was the original idea, but then like even a few of my early startups were aimed at that but then didn't really for one reason or another they weren't scalable. Game designs were poor. Incentive alignment was not durable. But there are a lot of game theory problems that exist in existing models when it comes to creating mutualistic outcomes. There's a lot of, I, there's a lot of idealism that can exist in Web2, but like when you really look at the game design and they're not a lot, they're not designed to create synergistic outcomes.
Reciprocity is not really a part of the game. In 2017 the project started around really what I refer to as the market layer. So we had this project product called a smart op or a smart opportunity that basically was like it was like a smart contract escrow wallet that basically would curate like an open job to this. So think about like a job board, smart job board. And the idea was to create incentives for anyone and everyone to be participating in networking themselves and their friends to opportunities. The long story short on that is just the way that incentives work and the way that ownership exists and in the existing sort of recruiting world is pretty degenerate. And it's not, it doesn't really, it's designed around third party intermediary so if you're gonna build smart contract solutions that really just democratize, the third party intermediary world are you really solving anything? I don't know. It you're catering to the wrong customer. So we pretty quickly realized that in, as we were mapping the supply chain or the life cycle of recruitment we sort of, It came to the conclusion that look, the real problem here is this paternalistic, hierarchical employment relationship that people have with their companies. So the companies that they work for notice I use very common word, right? I work for this company, right? You don't ever say I work with this company. You say I work for, and so we picked up on a lot of this stuff and we started unpacking it and really considering the game design and input output and intensive alignment and what are people really doing here? And our conclusion was that like, look, if we're really gonna get to a Web3 future to really democratize the relationship of employment, it's a legal compliance thing. It's not a technology problem, it's a social relationship problem which is architected by regulatory requirements. And I mean that's really crazy conclusion to come to because at the end of the day it's its not something people think about.
It's like you just do it right? I gotta go get a job out of college, right? or I got outta high school, or whatever. And then, it, it just conditioned in us to assume that's what you do. But it's just conditioning It's not necessarily what you have to do. And we're saying okay, how do we get people a better pathway so that they can actually align their efforts and creativity with work that's meaningful to them. I mean Not just work that's convenient to them, but make work that's interesting to them convenient, right? So that's where we decided to come down the supply chain to the employment layer, the compliance layer, and build what is now Opolis as the employment Commons. So it's a decentralized employment organization or a DEO as we coined it back in 2018. And the DEO in employment co-op, what an employment DAO, whatever you wanna call it, doesn't really matter. Is squarely framed around giving individuals the ability to have the compliance tools and Shared services that they need features and benefits that they need to function in a commercial setting, but again without this sort of odd, paternalistic relationship that they usually have with a corporation who might provide those things to them. So in other words, you can have you kicking in two, you can have all the features and benefits and simplicity and automation that you're looking for and taking the leap into web3 Or even just any sort of independent work. It doesn't have to be just web3 work, but anybody working independently will tell you that. It basically takes a master's degree to figure out like how you deal with all this stuff, from accounting to compliance, to filing to taxes, to healthcare benefits to retirement plans, all this other stuff, like how many people on the call here know what a 941 is? Nobody knows what that is.
Joshua: Like I don't.
John: Yeah. And most people don't. And if you do know what it is then like I tell you that you have too much free time on your hands or you've spent a lot of time in the HR space. So we're compliance space. So the point being is like most people are something other than some administrator for their business. They're a creative, they're a developer, they're a a attorney. They're whatever, right? But they're not experts in this area Nor should it be a requirement that you are in order to part. Seems like an unfair requirement to just you know if I want to choose to be independent, all of a sudden I've gotta be really smart and really educated on things that aren't my core competence. And so Opolis is there to fill that void so that there is really there's an un path to Web3 because the future of work isn't gonna be corporate subjugation. And I use these words very intentionally. So if anybody's that seems really harsh, corporate subjugation is what we do. We are high paid mercenaries in a commercial setting. It's just different kind of warfare. It's commercial capitalistic warfare. It's competitive games, right? but it's, we're not trying to kill anybody necessarily. But it's, it, the highest bidder gets my time and attention I mean What is the definition of a mercenary. So I'm not saying any of this to judge anyone I'm saying this to lament that like we can do better and we can provide systems that actually give people the ability to work in a more egalitarian free way right? Where choice is core cause I think that's, I think that's really what, one of the hallmarks about crypto that I love is crypto's about creating choice, It's not about telling you that there's one way to do it. It's about choice. It's about opportunity. It's about creating systems that I gotta opt into, not that I'm forced to use, right? So Opolis is just a good example of one of those, but it's also at the benefit of those that build it, right? So it's a member owned community. So the bigger it gets and the more powerful it gets, the more benefit that it is to the memebers. It's not enriching anyone else except the people that are using it and the people that are building it.
[00:12:17] Humpty: Yeah. One of the things you mentioned, which I kind of keyed into just because I think it is aligned to my own personal mission in this space, and that is accessibility. I think in terms of just crypto in general, I think that while yes, there's tremendous opportunity, A lot of it is very inaccessible starting from you know non-custodial ownership of your assets, right? I It's very difficult for someone with no knowledge of that to get started. But once, once you've, educated yourself enough to understand how that works and falling down that rabbit hole, then you kind of start exploring the ecosystem and you discover what DAOs are. I think To your point in terms of people understanding what it means to, earn an income from these decentralized organizations and then being able to be responsible in terms of organizing all that information preparing it for doing their taxes at the end of the year. Like this may be very new and scary to people, and so making it inaccessible to people. So it's really interesting to see. There are tools like Opolis that are being created to facilitate some of that right? To remove some of that, like you said, which isn't someone's core competency so that they can do what they prefer to do, which is doing the work right?
John: Doing correct. [00:13:32] If you look at the HR tech space, You'll notice that there's a gazillion startups, like literally it's a big number. So I'm using that number like intentionally gazillion. There's just a, there's just so many, You probably even couldn't count 'em all. Most of them, when they consider their revenue models, they almost always default to corporations as their target audience. And mostly that's because unit cost economics make more sense to sell to corporations who have a larger user bid. It's much more difficult to scale a product to regular folks, right? So you get regular folks, you gotta scale one to one. And if you go to consumer, or that's consumer route, if you go to corporations, you can get 50 people at a time or 200 people at a time. Most, most sophisticated HR tools are squarely aimed at where the money is and that's with corporations. So money and unit cost economics of a cost acquisition of a user. So this has very little to do with anything around benevolence or like purpose or like creating better systems or helping people, has nothing to do with it. It has to do with. How do these companies grow? Even companies that start somewhat, you with their talking points being very benevolent and they wanna help people and they're really helping people find work or whatever. They always figure, they always find their way back talking to corporation and a lot of it turns into talent acquisition, right? So it turns into tools and marketplaces to find talent. And the people paying to operate the system are always the, the company. The candidates or the talent never pay so if you're not paying, guess what? You are. You're the product. Welcome to the show folks. So most HR Tech is designed for corporations to continue to subjugate and control talent. I mean For christ's sake we call it human capital. Could you get less human than that? Okay? It's, the whole thing has become MBA eyes. Okay, so I say that with love, but I mean it that like we can do better. So like decentralizing systems sometimes just isn't about tech. Sometimes it's about legal relationships and it's about frameworks. And so we had to take into consideration the whole recipe of how you create a legal decent decentralized legal relationship in combination with decentralized technology, centralized tool sets, like cryptocurrencies or whatever it might be to build this ecosystem. So it's a very complicated thing. And most people sitting outside like you said like they're not experts in this stuff, it's terrifying, Can be scary. No, it is scary. Like the first time you The leap into working independently, you're gonna do one of two things. Either you're gonna bite your fingernails off because you're terrified or you're just gonna yolo and yeet in and yolo and yeeting in is probably the best way to do it. But it comes with a lot of risk. If you ever get an audit or something like that, it could be really bad for you. So what Opolis is designing to do is making it so you don't have to do either one of. You could just exit stage left and just plug in to a compliance system and a platform that's member owned, member controlled and sustainably benevolent toward its members. And then you can basically just work from where with whom and how much you choose. Do it on your terms, choice, right? We're giving you employment choice. You wanna work with 10 DAOs? Cool. You wanna work with one? do fine do that. You wanna be a real estate agent, do that. You wanna be a twitch streamer or a YouTuber, fine. Do all of that. You do you. And Opolis is entirely agnostic to what you do, who you work with, from where and how much. There are exceptions to that given some of the risk that we have to take around employment, for example, Unfortunately we are unable to accept members right now who are Nuclear waste truck drivers as an example. Okay? There's certain high risk jobs that we can't do yet for compliance reasons, risk reasons, but I'm being a little dramatic with that. But the point is like for the most part, and even into the future, You can be and do whatever you want. Opolis doesnt care.
[00:18:01] Humpty: So one of the things you've mentioned that I maybe wanna circle back to, which I thought was very interesting, is in terms of these HR tech companies and them serving these corporations, right? And then what these decentralized employment technology companies like Opolis are aiming to do, right? Where their position is to serve Individuals really to empower them. I guess maybe I wanted to explore that a little bit more in terms of I guess how you feel, or I guess one of the reasons why you think that's been the case for any period of time in terms of these more like HR tech companies serving more of the global clients, or excuse me, the corporation clients and how we can start to scale up I guess and increase the visibility and empower these projects that are serving individuals instead and maybe what some of the challenges are there. And, but definitely I think the opportunity is probably one of the more easiest to see there. But yeah. What are some of those challenges there in terms of building a company?
[00:18:56] John: Well, Benevolence always goes out the door in HR Tech because they serve HR people, executives and corporations and not the ultimately, they don't serve the individual workers. They just don't. How many times have you worked for a corporation where they actually ask you about what features and benefits you want for your employment benefits? And very few even ask, And then of the things that you get do they really. The software that they, the softwares that they bring in, are they designed to like empower you or are they designed to kinda manage you? So It all, both, there's an old saying in game theory follow the money. Okay, so where's the money? The money is with the corporations. It's been tried over the years. There was an ecosystem called the Ladders at one point, which was aimed at high earning individuals over a 100K, right? So you had to make over a 100K and they charged people over a 100K to be on this job board. And at one point they opened the gate, they needed to scale, right? Cause there's only a certain amount of those people around and So they started letting everybody come in and it just ruined their differentiation. And nobody was interested in paying for this service, right? Like, why would I wanna pay for this? Like What do you mean pay for this? It's kinda can you imagine Facebook saying Hey, it's 20 bucks a month now. They would lose 80% of their user base, like overnight, because the way that they've built these products is it's freemium or free and no one wants to pay for it. So there's a social conditioning that exists in these types of software businesses that like everybody knows what the game is and if you're gonna charge me for it, I just don't wanna participate. So even if it's a benevolent thing, they don't wanna, they don't wanna deal with it. So what we believe about this is how do we get the word up as the crypto community, we have to be sensitive to this, that it's very difficult to scale a B to C product like what Opolis is building, for example. Any of these things that we think are cool are a 100% dependent on network effect kicking in. If we as communities do not support these tools in these communities, these, become communities of communities, if we don't do that, then we are signing our own death wish, and here's why. The new IP is community. BanklessDAO is powerful because of its community. Nothing to do with Ryan and David. I mean Yeah, of course They help build it and all that. Just as ETH Denver has nothing to do with me. Yes, I helped build it. Yes, I steward it, but it's not about me. Communities are about community. So if we don't for example, a lot of people in the early days of Opolis were like it's a business outsourcing service and like it's a service, right? Like I need to subscribe to this. And they're treating it like a web2 company. It's no, you need to sign up and then bring your friends, because the only way that we have the cost economics to scale this thing is to activate that network effect. And that only happens through us bringing our friends, telling everybody that we know about this wonderful benevolent. Next generation tool that's gonna usher in the future of work. Otherwise, we're gonna stand around and go why didn't that work? We only have ourselves to blame. That's the beauty of permissinlessness usually we're waiting around for other people to do it because centralized people are doing it for us, marketing departments and sales groups and all this kind of stuff. But That's old school. The next generation of networks of communities. And notice I'm not saying companies, I'm doing that very intentionally. It is because it has nothing to do with those centralized forces. It has to do with what do we wanna build? And if you're a member of Opolis, the first thing you should be doing to protect your own stake in the game is bringing a dozen of your own friends and telling them how wonderful it is. Is how many people have friends that are procuring health insurance from the state exchange and paying a lot for very little coverage. How many people have other friends that are independent that are what we call unprofessional? They don't have an entity, they don't have healthcare. They're just of, yolo everybody's got these friends.
[00:23:19] Humpty: I think that's actually I'm just gonna add this here because I think it's just in a question to expand on that right there. In terms of, you mentioned something earlier in terms of legal relationships. I think you're right to your point what you're making right now is there are a lot of people who are here because they do see the writing on the wall. They wanna be a part of this emerging future. But you know Many of us, we have never worked in this way before. Not just in a decentralized way, independently probably. And so to, to, to what you're saying now is there's a ton that needs to be understood in terms of what that means in with independent work, right?To be an independent contractor, and to protect oneself.
[00:24:00] John: We call it self sovereign worker, but
Humpty: Yeah, no, but the one thing I see a lot in this space going back to your point in terms of how many startups are popping up every day, there are a lot of these DAOs that are spitting up and yeah, I think a lot of the work that they aim to do is fantastic. [00:24:17] And obviously I think the kind of startup culture is, you What's that saying? I think it's Reid Hoffman who said, jump out the plane and build a parachute on the way down. You of figure it out as you go.
[00:24:26] John: Oh yeah, you have,
[00:24:27] Humpty: There isn't a lot of framework governance legal protections offered to, to, to members. I think for anyone I think, who is interested in participating in this space, it's important to understand that yes, we're early. Yes, we need to build in production but at the same time, we need to demand these type of protections, these type of frameworks that allow us to do the work in a compliant way right? So please continue. I just wanted to add to that because I think you've mentioned it once before already.
[00:24:59] John: Absolutely. So look, I'm all for let's be bankless, right? But There are things that will get you thrown in jail. Then you're not gonna be in good shape, okay? And you can, flip as many birds as you want at them and say, All right, remember the Alamo as you go down in flames, right? You could do whatever you want. Okay? But like my belief is that To usher in and really create mass adoption. Most, Let's be honest, most people don't care about Bitcoins. Most people will never care about Ethereum. Most people don't care about, layer2 and ZK Snarks and NFTs and all this stuff. Like we have to create paths for these things to become mainstream, we have to make it cheaper, better, and faster. That's how you win the hearts of the. and if you do they care about and look at data, right? Like why do people still use these platforms that are exploiting your data? It's cause it's convenient, it's entertaining and they don't really care. They don't see the direct impact. So like yeah, Opolis is a, The bridge between web2 and web3 we're two things where the great legitimizer of those are ethereally or I. And then secondly, we're creating a giant ramp and a giant bridge for those that the next million people or 10 million people that wanna come in. And we're creating the systems that help people comply with the things they need to comply with which most people don't even know and have the tools that they need at their disposal, simplify their lives, automate a bunch of things, and then basically give them the legitimacy to be doing what they're doing. For example, if somebody pays you in crypto, the organization might have its own compliance issues, but we're not concerned about that. Okay? I'm not here to talk about DAO compliance. I'm not here to talk about individuals because really indivi, the DAOs are made up of individuals. So if individuals are paying in taxes, how do you go after a DAO? Good luck. Okay? Have fun with that. What jurisdiction are they in? What kind of entity? Who are the citizens? Who are the people? They don't even. It's a really tough nut to crack, but they do know who you are. And if they're gonna come attacked outs, guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna come and attack the individuals. So what we're doing is creating systems and the tool sets so that people can actually keep their nose clean. So if anybody does, if any alpha that soups comes, sniffing around it stuff, it's all copesetic, I paid my taxes, I got my stuff in line, I'm doing the. and they go, Huh, cool. How do they fight that? Ah, they can come up with some boogeyman narrative if they want, if they really wanna attack, if they will. But the point is we're trying to say, Look, we're trying to play your game. We're doing our thing. We're checking all the boxes, and ultimately we're gonna show you a better way. We're gonna show by example And then when, when it does hit mainstream, it just becomes mainstream at some point if Opolis has 50,000 or a 100,000 members, what are they gonna do?Shut it down. Yeah. They're not gonna mess with the livelihoods of all those people. I really don't think they would do that. The backlash of that would be just too great and they, they don't have anything to say that we're not doing. If anything, we make it more likely that people are paying their taxes
Humpty: Yeah, it's setting that foundation for oneself, right? Just like anything else where you have the right footing to to explore and wander this ecosystem in a compliant way. I'm curious we have Joshua here, obviously, who's I believe, if not one of the first, or if not the first, one of the first people to have been onboarded to Opolis. I would love to hear your personal experience as you joined Opolis and what you use from that personal experience when you are, acting as an ambassador, maybe helping onboard other people onto the platform.
[00:28:52] Joshua: Sure. I think I, I don't know if I, I wasn't the first cuz there was a product that preceded the employment comments, but I I have invoice number one, which if I ever get around to creating the PoAPs for the invoices and stuff, that'll be a, a nice. PoAP number one. But yeah when you fill a role that's sales and we don't really even treat membership like sales because you, either Opolis works for you or it doesn't, There's not really a sale. It's complicated. And I, we have to explain this is what the product is and people immediately either they get it, they're like, Oh, this is for me, or it's not. So it's not really selling. But when I have these conversations it's much easier. Having been through the process myself, so it's not like trying to sell a Porsche I've never owned. It's you can do the exact same thing that I did to become compliant and avoid paying through the nose for Cobra, getting access to affordable benefits, getting paid out in crypto, or taking DAI that I earn for contributing to DAO House or Raid Guild and being able to just drop it right into the processor without having to go through a centralized exchange. I've been through it, I've done it. I, not the John Paller phrase, I've been through the Valley of Death. But They've been through the shadow, the Valley of Death. It's not quite that grim, but I've been there, done there, got a t-shirt and I'm writing a song about it right now.
[00:30:12] Humpty: There you go. So let's maybe circle this back to one of the things that we said right at the top in terms of Opolis, Have a new booth at ETH Denver, Joshua, your first experience being at ETH Denver, What is Opolis I guess planned experiences for this upcoming of Denver? Because it, like you said, it's coming right around the corner.
[00:30:33] Joshua: Opolis is a presenting sponsor for ETH Denver this year and we have been Every year since we've done this, but we're very big supporters of the support our community. The support our community is now community owned just like Opolis community owned. It's not something that Opolis owns. At one point it was for transparency, but that was just get it started and to stand it up.
[00:30:54] It's expensive and hard to ensure an event without any sort of operating history. So now that we've actually have operating history and event history and all of that, then we're now community owned we did that back in June where we spun out with the sport tokens and did the sport token sport out launch really cool stuff. So a lot of developments there. But in terms of Opolis, we are the main, maybe the name of the game right now to continue to add features and benefits and tools to the commons members. It's really about scaling so We've got some referral activations. We've got some member incentives. We got some other things that's gonna go on. You know We will have a booth in the chill zone and we will also be doing a site event leading up to ETH Denver called "How to Make the Leap to Web3". So there'll be a lot of tutorial stuff like this educational gap where it's I don't even know the things I need to do. We'll go through those things. We've simplified it and distilled it, so it's very consumable and yeah, we want you to join up and bring your friends. So like we're creating a bunch of incentives around that. There will be PoAPs, there will be NFTs, there will be swag. We are famous for our soft t-shirts that are very wearable and very functional. So we will have The new addition of the work token t-shirts that are beautiful. I actually got the the sample sent to my home before they would the pre-production sample. And I'm wearing them like as alpha leaks, but we'll be giving those out. And so there's gonna be a ton to do. Now for a lot of people who are at the beginning of their journey, I would suggest come to the site event that was doing lead, leading up this learn about what are the things you need to know and then, start joining the community. If you're not ready to join as a full blown employee member, you can join as a coalition member. We have the coalition for the self sovereign worker that we've built where you can become a member and you know refer people or participate in other ways. And then just, learn, meet people, ask around, see what's going on. I mean Don't feel any pressure there's no sales process for joining Opolis. There is a member onboarding process and there's some learnings that you gotta do, but most of it's checking boxes and doing compliance stuff. We don't have, there's nothing to sell you. The idea of what we're doing is already squarely in the sites of most people participating in web3.
So Bankless says, Go bankless. Tongue in cheek, we say go jobless. Because really working for yourself, being a self sovereign worker isn't a job. It's not to, it's not to mean be unemployed, it's to mean just like go Bankless doesn't mean, be poor. It means, we're unplugging from the matrix, so to speak. The Bankless community is doing it in terms of financial institution and we're doing it in terms of corporate subjugation.
[00:33:32] Humpty: That's fantastic. That's a wonderful call to action. So for anybody listening to this I think that's a wonderful explanation of you know some of the alignment synergy with some of the other decentralized ecosystems and how they're building out and how they're calling their communities to action. You mentioned, one thing that I don't think we covered during our discussion, you said the new work token. Can you describe that a bit for us in terms of what is it, how does it work? How does it integrate to the ecosystem? Yeah.
[00:33:58] John: So if you haven't heard of it about the use of cooperative in the land of DAO, you're gonna hear about it a lot. We, From a legal perspective, we have a legal wrapper of an LCA it's a limited cooperative association. So in co-ops, there's this concept called patronage. Patronage is the mechanism that cooperatives use to distribute profits back to the members if and when there is a profit. So for example, REI is a equipment co-op, right? For outdoor equipment, if you buy a bunch of skis and camping equipment, at the end of the year, they're gonna send you a patron's check. It's Profit sharing, right? For your contribution to, to creating that value. The same is true, we just use the work token for the unit of account to just determine how much of the profits you get. Now, the key is here, the token itself has no intrinsic value. It's a unit of account that only members only as a member, right? So you have to be a member of the community to do it. And it's in a legal sense, you have to be a member of the community, not just a centralized transaction or some sort of, a in and do whatever on a DAO. We're actually, yeah, we're bridging to world now. The membership requirements are very low. It's $20 to join, which is basically checking a compliance box. And from there's very limited risk activity restrictions that you have to have in order to be a member. So as a coalition member, you just refer people as an employee member running your payroll and consuming your health benefits. So it's, pretty low maintenance in terms of what you need to do. And the work token exists to not just distribute the bounty, should there become a harvest, but also you can earn more through a process called payroll mining. So what we did was we created a a scaling game that basically incentivizes our membership to refer their friends and to consume more payroll services. So as we hit different growth epochs in the ecosystem, there is an admission of tokens that comes to the community that basically rewards those who help build it. So we, again, we call this payroll mining. So it's like liquidity mining, but instead of being time based or something like that, it's growth based. So we created a game design that again aligns the selfish individual incentives with that of the community. So everybody wants growth, so I want my friends to come too, cuz it's also non-competitive If I bring 20 of my friends, it doesn't compete with anything I'm getting. It doesn't take away from me. It actually just reinforces the strength of the community and makes it stronger and stronger and more valuable. If you look at the way centralized payroll companies are valued. It's all based on payroll volume. So we've basically stolen some of the core metrics that are used in those kinds of corporations, and we've applied them to creating incentive for our community to help scale and grow the commons and reward them with tokens to do it.
[00:37:01] Humpty: And that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this convers. If you'd like to learn more about opolis, please go to opolis.co and on Twitter @Opolis. To learn about ETH Denver and its lineup of speakers and events starting next week, please go to ethdenver.com. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. Please give us a follow, and a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcasts. And stay tuned for our next discussion.