Episode 17: Supriyo | Hyype - Express Yourself
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A discussion and Q&A session with Supriyo of Hyype. Recorded on December 21, 2021.
Live Attendees: 20 + speakers
Timestamps:
1:11 - 2:12 - Supriyo’s introduction
2:12 - 6:27 - Web2 work that lead to Web3 inspiration
6:27 - 10:21 - Supriyo’s ascent form Web2 to Web3
10:21 - 11:04 - The Social Experience of NFTs
11:04 - 15:22 - How Hyype’s social experience differentiates itself from the crowd
15:22 - 25:52 - Hyype’s User Experience
25:52 - 33:42 - How NFTs get listed on Hyype
33:42 - End - Future road map for Hyype
Transcription
supriyo
Humpty: [00:00:00] Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts lively discussions with innovative Web3 builders to help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Defi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice. Crypto Sapiens is presented in partnership with BanklessDAO, A movement for pioneer seeking freedom from the limitations of the traditional financial system.
BanklessDAO will help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly on-ramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello everyone. We are back with another episode of Crypto Sapiens and today we are talking with Supriyo founder and CEO of Hyype to learn about the NFT social network that enables collectors and curators to connect stories to NFTs and [00:01:00] their collections. And we discuss providing a space tailored to the uniqueness of NFT communities and creating the culture history and lower of the NFT universe.
Let's get started
Supriyo: My name is Supiryo I am the founder and CEO for our hype with a social storytelling platform for NFTs. I have been in tech for the last 12 years and before Hype I was leading the product and design team at a smart home for Alexa. And before that been the product design team at, in Boston and before that led the product design team at Flip Card. So I had been in similar sort of roles in, in, in the traditional Web2 world. And while I was doing that I also come from a software engineering background and have been mostly tinkering through Web3 things for the last couple of years and I'll bite more passively. I would say since 2017 and yeah, my, my first exposure to NFTs were through Crypto kitties [00:02:00] back in 2019. And yeah, that, that's how, I started getting embedded into the community and kept ramping up on side of contributions and just learning.
Humpty: Wow, that's great. For me, I'm always fascinated by stories of people who have jobs, not just in traditional Web2 space, but like in these leading fang companies. So Amazon being an example, of that type of type of business. How do you feel that Web2 either inspired your transition and also kind of fed into how you approach development in the Web3.
Supriyo: I think a lot of times Web2 has been looking into building services or building platforms or products which onboard the next billion people onto the internet, right? That's how Web2 products and platforms have [00:03:00] approached things, right? I, coming from a developing nation, grew up in India and then moved away. I think personally there are still a lot of people who don't know how to use basic internet services and like it's just about varying degree of digital literacy. And I think approaching with that mindset of how we can like really open up the gates to like internet revolution for people had been something Web2 companies generally aspire inspire to some degree, right? And I think the same philosophy applies on Web3 where we are now, like a few more steps ahead where we are thinking that, hey, okay, Web3 is built by developers for developer, it's a pretty niche space still, how do we really cross the chasm-an and bring the rest of the traditional vector cloud, right? So we, we are even further out in terms of adoption and I think some of that thought process is really necessary where [00:04:00] we are not trying to build super niche small little products here and there, which just don't scale out after some time, right? We, the only way adoption for Web3 really happens is when you approach from a billion people scale mindset and that's when you know you are really looking at a really, at a big wide spectrum of people with waiting degree of digital literacy and seeing that are the things you are building really easy enough for everybody to understand? or is it like still super complex for an average internet user.
Humpty: Yeah. For me, and not to get too far away because I think these are all wonderful talking points, so I do want to address them, but for me, one of the interesting things or questions is how is Web2 owning that onboarding experience for the next billing users, right? To bring them, bring 'em onto the internet and Where are the difficulties or the challenges really that they can't [00:05:00] scale or that they can't really take that next step so clearly as maybe Web3 is Web3 able to do that more easily? because of just in, because of how it works and what are the challenges then conversely in how it's creating those onboarding experiences
Supriyo: Right, I think fundamentally here because Web3 is a lot more participative in theory you are looking at products which are truly built for inclusion. A lot of times, Web2 essentially is clouded by human bias, right? If You are looking at people building products for someone in like a developing country, and they're building it from their mindset of sitting here in US and this user psyche is very different. The circumstances of where people live in and how they would use products are very different, and I think that's where having things really decentralized and not [00:06:00] by not, like being restricted by boundaries is something which I really love about Web3.
Web3, you was built on top of a remote culture, right? It was built on top of abolishing boundaries in that sense. So I think that way Web3 is a natural progression in terms of building inclusive experiences. And I think like that if done right, it, it'll really open up all of those artificial boundaries we like to put in otherwise.
Humpty: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And actually, so there, there's so much more I wanna explore there but I, before we do, I do want to make sure we talk about Hyype, right? Because I know that these meta discussions these really high level philosophical conversations are very interesting and definitely a big part of this show, what we do here.
But we do want to talk about that transition from your Web2 job to Web3 and how that became Hyype. Like what, how did you get from all of what you were doing before to dabbling in [00:07:00] Web3, discovering crypto kitties early and then saying, You know what, We need to create some sort of like social layer for NFTs, and then having that become Hyype.
Supriyo: Absolutely. Yeah. There, there's a lot to unpack there, take taking a step back I think when I first got introduced to Crypto kitties, I really liked the idea of like actually owning something for what I was doing it anyway. Like I had been playing games since ages and like with crypto kitties, even though the experience at that time was very rudimentary based on what the Ethereum chain at that time provided.
But the fact that I could sort of Independently own what came out of my decision making during, in terms of reading or buying and things like that was really fascinating to me. And I think as a collector that sort of really extended at that time, I thought could be applied to like other sorts of artifacts, not just in game items like just a regular art or maybe music [00:08:00] assets or real estate or whatever, whatnot, any kind artifact which people own today. So I think fast forward, NFTs were still like a very two handful of people, even till 2020, I think in the mid when it was just a few people who were still exploring the ecosystem. In 2021, when everything sort of just catapulted into popularity, what I realized was majority of the NFT ecosystem still had been over indexed about the user journey of buying and selling, right? That was what was making news like Hey, Crypto punks was being sold for so much money and this buddies is being sold for so much money and everything was about value accrual, but something which was overlooked was that what makes and an NFT community or cna, but a cat or out a punk today, right? And what that means is that punks are punks today because of the community and the context and the history and all the artifacts which have been created around it, which really creates iconic moments [00:09:00] through those points in time which eventually make them a living brand, right?
So when we are looking at NFTs themselves, they are also a slow evolution of a brand It's itself, and that's what Hyype is about. Hype allows platform or an opportunity for people who own NFTs to build out their own sort of brand around the NFT itself. So today, if you talk about when you are looking at your DAOpunk or when you are looking at your ape, right? What is it that makes your ape special? What is it that you know makes it stand out among other 10,000 apes, right? And that's what you would want to express as an identity artifact using Hyype. And when you do that what we do through the platform is we attach it permanently to your NFT. So unlike you sending out a tweet about it and then it disappearing after a few months, or you boasting it on Discord and then that disappearing in it must thread. It just gets [00:10:00] permanently attached to the NFT itself, and then it lives there forever. And as you grow that NFT brand, your low is so much more rich and diverse that it is bound to come under higher premium over the ones which are not load. So that's generally the broad thesis of how Hyype came to be and what we want intend to build around it.
Humpty: So walk me through social experience of NFTs because I think you, you touched on a few interesting things here, but and many that I personally agree with. I mean I think a lot of the value of NFTs really comes from their communities. The people you know that iden either identify with the individual NFT that they purchased or with just the general community, right?
The vibe, the mission what they're trying to do in this space, right? So I think that there's definitely a lot of truth in like creating platforms or a lot of value, I should say, creating platforms that are representative of those truths of that mission, of that [00:11:00] brand, of that identity of those NFTs and of your own personal collection. So walk me through maybe how Hyype differentiates itself, maybe without having to name some of the other platforms that are being developed in the social NFT space from those that are being created.
Supriyo: Yeah, sure. So I, I would say that the way Hyype differentiates itself is it's a platform where, it doesn't matter you have one NFT or 10,000 NFTs, you still have the same degree of importance or uniqueness among others and what that means is that to contribute on Hyype you don't need to keep buying NFTs right? Even if you have one, you could still build out a pretty creative experience around it. And the way it ties back to like social experiences or movements today is but an example, right?
Like CC-Zero, right? Where we people have been talking about it recently and CC zero is more sort of an [00:12:00] ideology in terms of how art is collected, what you do with IP rights and things like that. And Crypto Toads for example, is a manifestation of that idea, and a community rallying around it and what Hyype really does is, gives those ideas a common form beyond a discord server for other people to look at. And when you do that it gets associated always with that common manifestation which is a Toad NFT and people are able to, like rally around it and wrap around it, talk around it and that eventually all comes down to active or how creative you are around the NFT itself, You could talk about it once a year or you could talk about it every day. And Hyype allows both sort of sides of this spectrum in that sense.
Humpty: That's interesting. So for anyone who's listening and doesn't know what CC-Zero is, a C zero is just the Creative Commons license, which basically is [00:13:00] no rights reserved, right?So I believe that means that anyone could use either the yard form its story in its complete sense, commercialize it, et cetera. With that having been clarified, I find it truly interesting what you've just said in terms of both the discussions happening around CC zero. But also in terms of laws, while perhaps there isn't a way to have full ownership in every project because some do reserve rights for the NFTs that you purchase some do not ha give you any rights at all but others do.
Regardless of that, there is an opportunity for someone to cr add value to the NFT that they own through storytelling I think that's a really powerful thing.
Supriyo: Yeah. So I think, just to touch on that, I think when you when we say par storytelling, it's also about really building out an expansive universe around the NFT itself and Like you could look [00:14:00] at NFT as just being pixelated image of a person, right? You can let your imagination run wild that okay what is this person up to? What are their likes and dislikes? What do they stand for? And things like that. And that's how you really build out a better presence for them Especially in an increasingly digital world where, you know those digital personas are slowly like building out and blending in with the real people out there. You can look at Twitter accounts today and there are so many of them, which are just NFTs. They, you don't know the person behind them, but you know what, they're up to, what they talk about and what they stand for.
Humpty: Yeah. For me and obviously not just for me, this is just generally truth, storytelling has been the way that we've kept a historical record going back to before we could write. So I find it just super interesting that we're bringing this like very I guess for lack of a better word native primitive way of informing [00:15:00] our NFTs, which are incredibly complex digital beings in terms of their programmatic, they exist on a blockchain. All of these things that too many people doesn't really make sense, but we really bring it back to something that is recognizable by many of us which is like look at the story, read the story. There's value here beyond just the technology and like you were saying in an increasingly digital world. That's refreshing.
So I do want to touch on something that you talked about early which I think Hyype is doing really good at and that's user experience, right? And so when we were first talking about your experience in the traditional Web2 space and that transition into the Web3 space, one of the things that I feel needs a lot of attention is user experience and user interfaces, right?
I think Web2 because of the amount of experience that they have and number of people that they have building in it, and the funds to support development over time and iterate, et [00:16:00] cetera. They really for the most part have done a really good job at creating good experiences for a user to manage whether it's their bank account or whatever, but they can use these applications in a friendly way whereas in Web3 usually that's not the case. It's really complicated. Wh where did that sit in terms of the development of Hyype and how do you think that can improve just overall in the Web3 space?
Supriyo: Yeah. I think for us I, when we were building the platform, I would like to say we attempt building Hyype as three equal important pillars.
We look at product, we look at design as well as we look at tech. So all three are equally important, right? It's like a stool. If you have one of the leg smaller than the others, the stool is gonna stick. So I think that what's really important with Hyype right now is [00:17:00] we, instead of us shipping fast and building a bandaid experience, What we want to do is we want to take a holistic look at whether it's something which people understand, Is it working well for them? Do they like it or not? And when I say really people it's about harnessing how Web3 development is approached differently, right?
Like at the moment like instead of us being on a Slack channel closed away from the community who's using it, we made it a point that the entire team just sits on discord and like they are able to interact with everybody on the community and they're able to look into feedback and we are actively using that to make sure that workflows make sense. And what we also want to do is we want to make sure that when we are designing something, when it comes to user interfaces it's extremely convenient within the bounds of what constraints we have to work with when consumer, right? So [00:18:00] if you take those constraints away, how can we make all the user flows as simple as possible, as delightful as possible, so that when you are using it, it doesn't feel like a job, It doesn't feel like a chore, It's something where you would want to spend time on. So that's generally like our product philosophy of how we would want to build it and how we are continuing to build.
I think on Web3, my, my big, my biggest pet peeve with Web3 experiences is that it's still really far from being convenient and easy to use. So like simple examples like MetaMask, right? which your primary gateway to Web3 world, like making a transaction through MetaMask or making a something as simple as swap right? It's like really hard and understanding gas and explaining it to somebody without you really getting into nitty gritties of how it really works. It's hard like its not as simple as just picking up your phone and when [00:19:00] mowing something to someone. So I think we are we are far away from that level of convenience, but I think things are getting a lot better. Interfaces are getting a lot better and we are getting into a spot where we are really considering good, delightful experiences beyond desktop. I think that's really important. Like most people on the planet today do not own a really good laptop, right? And can not be only desktop experiences. We have to be like really cognizant about building equally good first class and experiences on mobile and other sort of device.
Humpty: Yeah. No, that, that's really good. And to your point, in terms of MetaMask, I mean even managing your gas which is crucial to anything you do on the blockchain is so difficult. Like honestly, yes, I appreciate the many different ways that I can adjust my gas. A lot of times I think that just enables people to make mistakes. I know I [00:20:00] personally have in the past where I ended up paying $700 for gas for something and didn't get anything because I didn't know what the heck I was doing.
And so I think that is just something that is, needs tremendous improvement as we are building technology that is meant to be accessible to be facilitating the onboard Of everyone, a billion people, many to your point, who don't have the technology that they need to support it. And if they did, don't have the experience or maybe even the access to the information to learn how to use that.
Supriyo: And I think it also goes back to like con bringing in some of those Points of convenience from Web2 to the Web3 world. I know that it's another meta discussion of how centralized or decentralized certain things need to be, right?
So for instance, when you look at MetaMask, it's truly use a custodial, right? So if you [00:21:00] make, make a user error, too bad, like you are on your own. But that's why things are so complicated and if you compare it to something which is a little bit more centralized like Coinbase, they are in that position of making it easier and more convenient for user because they're taking some of those complexity away in exchange of custody. So that's something which I think is an important discussion. Like as a whole, the community needs to have that what is that fine line? Where do you want to draw the line? where bringing in mainstream convenience is important enough that you know there are some tradeoffs you would be willing to make and who what are the degree degrees of tradeoffs you would be want?
Humpty: Yeah, absolutely. I think so I, I think I you're doing a fantastic job right now at directing us to the next point that maybe we should be talking about. But before I do, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep pulling on that thread in terms of centralization versus decentralization. I think definitely, I think [00:22:00] as we fall deeper and deeper in the rabbit hole after discovering our first token or our first NFT. I think that there is definitely many of us who will continue to seek out that decentralization, right? That self sovereignty, that ownership in this space. But when we're getting started, do we, should we be expecting that of everyone? And personally to me, the answer is absolutely not because there are many different things that someone needs to learn. Where if they are not mindful of or careful of learning them in the right way, they can end up getting wrecked, having assets stolen. So it is, it's important for us to recognize the value also of these custodians, if you will. Which is the reason why I think exchanges are popular, especially for someone just getting started. And so with that, we can talk some of the integrations that Hyype has recently done [00:23:00] in order to facilitate that
Supriyo: Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, what we really wanted to build out, even at right from the onset of our MVP was that we would want to make things which are confirming to the best of both worlds in terms of Web2 as well as Web3.
Now, when it comes to that we had to make a choice that, hey, do we want to keep going for just hex addresses and just use that as people's identity or introduce the concept of username which people are used to. And we decided to go for having usernames because end of the day a Hyype profile at its core is just your own curation layer of the wallet, of the assets you own in your wallet and that, that, that's what makes your profile unique and as long as you have full custody of that, like there is no reason you wouldn't want another sort of user friendly [00:24:00] abstraction on top of that, having your username, having a brand, how you are used to on the world of Twitter and things like that. That was one of the things. Another thing was that when it comes to storage or load itself, there was a question of whether we want to be fully on chain right now, or do we want to make that choice of getting there progressively and looking at the on chain sort of storage infrastructure and the kind of flexibility we wanted to give people and where the network is today, right? When it costs so many dollars to do basic things on the network. And it, we realize that, like when it comes to telling stories, We don't want you to pay 20, 30 bucks every time you want to write a story about your NFT. And that's why we went for a hybrid approach where at Hyype, when you go and write a load or write a story, backstory about your NFT, we come at it on IPFS but we also keep a local cache copy so that we have multiple points of redundancy. [00:25:00] And that way your load is committed on IPFS. It's not something which is stored on Hyype servers or something like that. But we do keep a local cash so that the app itself is performing and that goes back to the point of convenience. And eventually what we would want to do is when the on-chain storage infrastructure is diverse enough and cost efficient enough. We would want to be fully on-chain and eventually move the associations of NFTs as well as the lower two on-chain. And then, like we'll be completely redundant as a middle there, in the middle there. But until that point I think we as a platform could be pretty open in terms of accessibility to the lower, in terms of how people would wanna build on top of that content as well as, making sure that it's something which is useful enough for an average user without costing money.
Humpty: Yeah. That's incredible. Okay let's dive into the nuts and bolts of the product. So how do projects get listed, if you will, or [00:26:00] communities get access to Hyype and then how do communities then build out those laws, So maybe we'll start with the,
Supriyo: Yeah, sure. So right now I think it it's a temporary state. So we launched early in November, so we are still pretty new. And if you compare it to overall Ethereum, there are about 32.7 million tokens I'm counting on Ethereum, like alone. And that accounts for almost 23,000 collections. So out of those, we support about 40 collections today. And that's a really small number when it comes to who has access to Hyype yet. But we are planning to open up to entirety of Etheruem by January. So it's pretty close And what that would mean is anyone who has an Ethereum an NFT at that point will be able to sign up on Hyype and use it. Up until that point, I think right now the communities is part of Hyype are, you like we adopters are the users and any community who wants to come and [00:27:00] integrate with Hyype like they're happy to just reach out to us. And the integration just takes about a day or two, mostly because when we integrate, we make sure that we have all the information indexed so that the community members, when they sign up are all of their information related to metadata, which is still of centralized for the most parts coming in from project servers or community service or IPFS, it's all on there already on Hyype and then, that's it. That's when the integration goes alive. And all you need to do is just connect your wallet, sign to show that you are the owner of the wallet and you're good to go.
Humpty: And so what how do communities participate in that process? Because I remember, like I mentioned earlier when I first discovered the product was when I was when DAO Punks, there was a community engagement for us to vote them in. How does that work? How do communities get involved in that once they, the projects have come to you?
Supriyo: Yeah. [00:28:00] Once, once they come to us, I think so far we had been introducing to communities as individual cohorts of 10 to 12 communities at a time, and DAO Punks as part of the second cohort. So when the onboarding actually happens, like all you need to do is just go in and start building out load for yourself and essentially it comes down to individual communities. Like Hyype is a blank canvas. So if it's building out a fictional universe for your characters, you could go and do it on Hyype and use that as a thematic for rest of your community to make sure like the communities coming together to build around a common theme. And then there could be projects who just want to, keep it as an archive of collector statements. So something which comes to mind is curio cards, for example, CU cards that are about like 34 cards, It started a project that it existed [00:29:00] technically before crypto kitties and the way they had been using Hyype is there are 32 cards and not everybody knows why a certain card is preferable for others. So what the card collectors had been doing, they had been going on Hyype and talk about why the purchase their first card, how was it important to them, what made them pick a card over other card? and that way every card becomes like this evolving wikipedias on Hyype and that has been really interesting to see and compare that to say a project like our Stars or DAO Punks we had been seeing really expansive, fictional backstories being written for every character. And that brings the character to life. They're not just a great artwork piece anymore. They are actually actual personalities which people are conjuring up using their
Humpty: That's really cool. I think that there, that, that's really interesting because there are lot value, I guess just [00:30:00] in a, these, the individuals being able to own their assets beyond just having them in a wallet but owning their assets in terms of their ip right? and creating content for that. And I like the identity goes beyond just an image, and the identity really goes deeply into a story that then can transcend maybe even some of what the creators of these projects had intended. And you yeah, you create more valuable experiences over time, I think one of the things in branding is you want to have something that's truly sticky, that people keep coming back for, and I think if you can have communities building out stories that way, creating that stickiness to your product, to your project, I think, yeah, that's just a fantastic tool for both communities and individuals long term.
Supriyo: Yep. And that, like that really gives communities way more diverse tools to like really build relationship with the NFTs they own and like really explore that [00:31:00] frontier instead of just waiting and waiting for floor to go up, right?You've gotta work to make that happen.
Humpty: Yeah. No, I personally, I don't mind the floor going up, but anything that I've personally bought into honestly is because of the art first and because of the community second and everything else last, I mean the art to me, if it's original, if it's interesting, if it's colorful in the case of certain NFTs I really appreciate that, especially because personally I'm not a very colorful character. Black and white are the colors I wear all the time. Gray would be like bright color for me. But in Web3 I definitely appreciate the colorfulness. So yeah, certainly those are some of the things I look for.
Supriyo: I agree. And like to that point, just wanted to clarify as well, right? That absolutely like folks who are buying in for the vibes of the community, what the artist stands for, the community stands for. That's a great start but like a lot of times I personally have seen [00:32:00] communities really building up expectations which can pull the artists down with this, this overbearing this, that, can artists do something right? And it's not on the artist to always keep giving beyond what they have given already. And it also becomes like this bidirectional relationship where the communities now having ownership of an asset is basically contributing to that process of that creative process of evolving it further beyond what was there in the first start. And I think that's where something like Hyype really comes in. And look, I keep talking about Hyype in that sense, but yeah I think it's a position where, you could go in and not only just talk about it like as text, but also really use it as a repository or being creative and imaginative about just about anything.
So for example, I personally go and commission [00:33:00] artwork from artists I really admire and their art style I admire for the NFTs I own. And then, I go in and post about it on Hyype knowing that those artworks, because they're now tagged attached to these NFTs are going to always be that rich sort of encyclopedia if you will for every NFT I own and those artworks are going to be in one place. They're not just going to be laying in my hardware somewhere awaiting to be forgotten, man
Humpty: That is, that's incredible. So now you're talking about Hyype also It's a tool for incentivizing commissioned art. That's a powerful statement. Well, so let's talk about, beyond where Hyype is today. Where is Hyype going into the future? What can we expect In terms of development, both creative and technical development into the future from Hyype
Supriyo: So I think like it goes without saying that, we know that the future is multi chained, so we absolutely want to bring that aspect in it [00:34:00] soon enough, and once, once we are available for the entire of Ethe maintenance, we would want to expand into other L2s, we would want to kinda build out through optimism, polygon, immutable and whatnot. Like every other place where you have NFTs, we would want bring those communities in and because the same principle applies regardless of the technology that’s on. And another thing which we would want to really build out on is storytelling is going to be the core part of our platform almost always. But what we would want to do is we would want to keep building out our infrastructure as well for others to build on top of it. If you have seen it we already have APIs available for people to just come in and use it for free to like really build out experiences on top of the content which people have been committing through Hyype to showcase on their website or on their AR VR experience or wherever they would want and [00:35:00] eventually, what we want to do is we would want Hyype to be a sort of one stop shop for everything related to a community.
So right now it's about storytelling. We would want to build out automated feeds like what your community is buying and selling at the moment, right? Which NFT is the most lured, who are the most active writers in your community and things like that. And all of that information is going to be available in one place. So you are not only going to be seeing just one facet of the NFT, you are going to be seeing multiple sort of BirdEye view analysis of what the community is up to when it comes to content.
Humpty: And that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you'd like to learn more about Hyype please go to Hyy.pe and on Twitter @hyypeHQ. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens. Please give us a follow like and a five star [00:36:00] review wherever you enjoy your podcast. And stay tuned for our next discussion.