Web3 Talks: Stories & Tips from the Builders
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Web3 Talks is where founders of top web3 projects share the backstage perspective of their work and the lessons they learned along the way.
Join 1,500+ web3 founders, devs & operators who subscribe to Web3 Talks.
Hosted by Mac Budkowski.
Join 1,500+ web3 founders, devs & operators who subscribe to Web3 Talks.
Hosted by Mac Budkowski.
45 Episodes
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ANNOUNCEMENTS:
# 1: Episode's free NFT mint (just add your e-mail address there so I can reach you with info about NFT's utility :)):
https://mint.highlight.xyz/641213a0d86b3081aa51c5b7
# 2: EpicWeb3 conference ticket giveaway:
https://twitter.com/epicweb3/status/1635215372180770816
# 3: Web3 Talks Smoothie page (upvotes much appreciated!):
https://smoothie.so/project/21e8v93z
TIMESTAMPS:
0:44 Info about the EpicWeb3 conference
1:50 3 small announcements
3:18 Nat's lessons from working at Square & DoorDash and why he started working on Highlight
7:23 Why Square in 2015 was doing a lot of explorations and what Nat learned from Jack Dorsey
10:00 What was the Highlight MVP and why targeting non-crypto natives was a mistake
15:45 How they acquired their first users and how Product Hunt was surprisingly effective
16:58 Why token-gating was a hard problem for established creators and how they decided to solve it
25:00 Why is Nat not bothered about competing with Zora & Manifold
27:27 Favorite Nat's NFT use cases
30:00 Most interesting token-gating examples & bookclub 2.0
33:15 What kind of help can bigger creators expect from the Highlight team
35:57 What kind of partners are they looking for
38:00 Most important metrics they follow
39:35 What assumptions they had were proven wrong and why educating people about digital ownership is so important
42:25 Why new wallets might help to teach people about NFT ownership
44:35 What would Nat build if he wasn't building Highlight
45:10 Why would he make people focus more on use cases than tech
47:07 Where people can learn more about Highlight
48:34 Nat's guests' ideas
Mint "Genesis Talk" here:
https://zora.co/collections/0xf66f4e9667edb65fd7306c0711cb8fe66450419e
Alex has been building Rarible since 2019, when most people haven't even heard about NFTs. What were the industry's early days? Why slick design helped them to acquire the first users? How did issuing a token change how they operate (and why they weren't ready for that)? How do they plan to compete in a market dominated by OpenSea, Blur & LooksRare? Relax and listen to our in-depth conversation.
***
If you want to buy tickets for the EpicWeb3 conference in Lisbon, check out: https://www.epicweb3.com/ and use the WEB3TALKS promo code to get a 15% discount.
***
Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/web3talks
Follow Alex & Mac:
https://twitter.com/insider0x
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski
***
0:40 EpicWeb3 promo code
1:48 What's Rarible and what role they plan in the NFT space
2:46 How trading experiences & building exchange products inspired Alex to start Rarible with his Co-Founders in 2019
7:47 What were the early days of Rarible & how being specific helped them to design the first MVP - NFT form
10:42 How having a slick website & curating the best content helped them to acquire their first users back when NFTs were much less popular
14:00 Why from November 2019 to Summer 2020, growing Rarible was a smooth sailing
16:10 How NFT & DeFi summer resulted in 30X volume growth in 3 months
17:50 How issuing a $RARI token opened the company to a community and why they were not ready to operate that way
20:14 How they reorganized their community-centric operations in 3 iterations to focus and work more efficiently
23:34 How they plan to compete in an NFT market dominated by OpenSea, LooksRare & Blur
28:47 How Rarible acquires NFT marketplace users
29:47 Why Rarible is a strong promoter of creators' royalties
33:42 What metrics do they follow in trading & protocol businesses
34:55 How communities provide liquidity to their own NFT marketplaces
36:33 What are Alex’s favorite NFT collections
38:24 Why the web3 UX might be a feature, not a bug
41:57 Why having to learn something new can be fun!
42:52 Why would Alex build social apps if he wasn’t buildwasn'trible
46:33 Why Alex would fix coordination
47:20 Where to learn more about Rarible
48:05 Guests ideas from Alex
Huddle01 quickly became the leading web3 audio/video communication toolkit. How it all started? What helped them acquire 16k+ users? Why they're so excited about Stage 3 of their development plans? Ayush Ranjan, Co-Founder & CEO of Huddle01, shares a deep backstage perspective of their company.
***
If you want to buy tickets for the EpicWeb3 conference in Lisbon, check out: https://www.epicweb3.com/ and use the WEB3TALKS promo code to get a 15% discount.
***
Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/web3talks
Follow Ayush & Mac:
https://twitter.com/ranjan3118
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski
TIMESTAMPS:
00:38 Special announcement & promo code
2:13 What is Huddle01, what problems does it solve, and how it started thanks to a hackathon
6:58 Why the name "Huddle01"?
7:40 Why they wanted to target the education market, and why they pivoted to a crypto-native audience
9:28 How login via MetaMask & NFT avatars helped them to acquire their first users
12:50 How token-gated meetings helped them to accelerate growth
14:10 How Pudgy Penguins use Huddle01
15:29 What was the process for developing Android & iOS apps & why was the UX challenging
18:10 How long has it taken to build web & mobile apps, and what was the process
20:01 Why they started with a Huddle01 app and now expand to SDK that helps to integrate audio/video chat in other apps and the upcoming Real-Time Communications protocol
25:10 Why is documentation the cornerstone of DevRels, and what's their approach to hackathons, rewarding devs & building micro-communities
28:00 Why it's important to promote your own tech team among developers instead of giving the job to marketers
29:30 Why "minutes spent on meetings "is their most important metric, and what other things do they track
34:22 How Huddle01 Real-Time Communications Protocol can replace AWS & Google Cloud
39:05 Since Zoom is already facing strong competition from Google & Microsoft, how is Huddle01 planning to compete in the long run
42:40 What surprised Ayush the most during the development of Huddle01
45:45 What 4 layers of web3 projects would Ayush consider if he wasn't building Huddle01?
46:53 What are his favorite projects?
49:15 What would he fix with his web3 magic wand
49:48 Where people can learn more about Huddle01
Colin Armstrong has been in crypto since 2011 and has spent years working at Coinbase and Google. He built Paragraph to create a more neutral and web3-friendly alternative to Substack. The project has already amassed 5k+ creators and 100k+ subscribers, and Colin shares how they made it happen.
>>> Never miss an episode and check how Paragraph works in practice by subscribing to our newsletter: https://paragraph.xyz/@kanfa <<<
TIMESTAMP:
0:38 How to make sure you get info about the new web3 talks episodes
1:27 Why Paragraph is a great example of web2.5 Substack
2:22 How Colin’s experience at mining Bitcoin in 2011, building decentralized Kickstarter in 2014, working at Coinbase with the founder of Litecoin, spending 5 years at Google, and being dissatisfied with Substack led him to build Paragraph
13:37 What were the most interesting Paragraph use cases Colin has seen so far
16:24 How do they manage to ship features so fast, and why waitlist doesn’t make sense in most products
19:40 How do they decide what to include on their roadmap
21:12 Why they’ve been integrating with web3 social and how it works in practice
23:17 How they acquired their first 10 users via cold outreach on Twitter, and why they didn’t implement any crypto functionalities in v1
25:16 What they’ve been doing to acquire 5k+ users and how they used the market situation to their advantage
28:40 How do they measure success in their product and why just looking at the number of writers or readers wouldn’t work
30:34 What do they do to protect newsletters from landing in the spam box
33:09 What are their plans for integrating wallets and why is infra not ready for it yet
36:43How does wallets x Paragraph x Farcaster integration work technically and why do they use Searchcaster
39:20 How a developer built a streaming payment with Superfluid on top of Paragraph without needing any permission
40:51 How getting developers to build on top of their APIs was easier than he thought
44:13 Why choosing the right feature set for their niche was so hard and why web3 UX & e-mail limitations led to design challenges
47:10 What would Colin build if he wasn’t building Paragraph
50:00 Why would he get rid of airdrop hunters and speculators with his web3 magic wand and add new useful dapps with great UX
52:33 Colin’s favorite web3 projects (spoiler alert: he mentions Farcaster)
56:00 Where can you learn more about Paragraph
57:01 What other builders would be a great fit for the podcast
SimpleHash is one of the most powerful NFT APIs in the space. It's being used by wallets, portfolio trackers & web3 games. Olly Wilson came to the pod to share the backstage perspective of their ultra fast growth.
Timestamps:
0:38
What is SimpleHash
1:39
How their Co-Founder got tired of building back-end infra for an NFT project and decided to start SimpleHash
2:47
Why is indexing NFTs across many chains so hard?
5:25
How being in YC helped them to acquire first users
6:22
Why they ditched the idea of an NFT search tool
7:10
What's their process for supporting and integrating new chains
9:34
Why do they go very deep into NFT data and specialize to compete with other NFT APIs
11:40
How do they solve the corrupted media problems in NFTs
12:37
How they designed the NFT Spam Score to protect wallets from unsolicited and scammy airdrops
15:11
What are their most important metrics?
16:20
Why is everyone on their team involved in customer support, and how do they decide what features to implement?
19:20
Why Olly likes the OG NFT projects
20:50
Olly's thoughts on utility NFTs
21:55
Why joining YC was worth it
23:35
What growth & tech challenges do they see on the horizon?
24:49
How do they take care of their business's infra side, and why is 850M indexed NFTs still a small dataset?
26:00
What would he build if he weren't building SimpleHash?
26:20
Why removing the scams would be the target of his magic wand?
27:00
Why Ethereum Merge is the most mind-blowing project that Olly has seen
28:26
Why he likes the crypto twitter's dark humor
29:20
Where to find out more about SimpleHash
0xFrens is a matchmaking tool used by web3 communities such as: Developer DAO, Jericho & Skylab. Gilbert - Co-Founder of the project - spent almost a decade at Google, then started his social podcasting startup, and in 2022, he started working on 0xFrens with the rest of the AGMI team.
0:37 What’s 0xFrens, and how it helps communities to build relationships between members
1:40 How talking with communities & DAOs inspired them to start 0xFrens
4:30 What has Gilbert been doing at Google for almost ten years & what was his previous social podcasting startup about
5:25 How 0xFrens plays into web3 strengths, what was their MVP, and why they pivoted
7:17 What insights from users surprised them, and how they iterated based on this information
9:05 Why online coffee chats can be awkward and how 0xFrens addresses that
12:15 How they acquired their first users and how they do it (and why “web3 lunch club” wasn’t a good idea)
14:35 What metrics do they follow to track product engagement, and why does choosing the right community to work with matter the most
17:54 How Kudos might become important for building a reputation in a community
22:08 Which lessons from Google & previous startup are the most useful
25:30 Why the biggest growth & tech challenges on the horizon are related to web2 users
27:10 Why solving reputation-related challenges is omnipresent both in web2 and web3
28:08 Why it’s so hard to face market feedback and make decisions based on the data
31:45 Why would Gilbert build onboarding-related tools if he wasn’t building 0xFrens
33:08 Why would he fix seed phrases with his web3 magic wand
34:57 Why web3 ecosystem is so mind-blowing
38:24 What made him smile while using 0xFrens
39:33 Where you can learn more about 0xFrens
40:31 Guests ideas
PWN is a decentralized pawnshop where you can use any tokens as collateral. But it’s just the beginning. Their ultimate goal is to provide crypto loans for decades so that you will never need to sell your crypto. I spoke with Josef, PWN’s Co-Founder, who shared their story, challenges & growth strategies.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:38 PWN as a decentralized pawnshop
1:35 How not being able to get a mortgage & risk of DeFi liquidations inspired Josef to start PWN
9:30 Why they decided to give more protection to borrowers by not baking up loan liquidations from the start
13:43 How do they plan to implement filtering to protect the tool from SPAM offers while still keeping the platform open
17:31 How they designed their smart contract to support ERC20, ERC721 & ERC1155 tokens
19:16 Why it’s so hard to develop everything in a crypto-native manner, and they decided to make some shortcuts at this stage
21:10 How they acquired their first users and how they expanded from the friends & family stage by breaking the “stay focused” rule and cooperating with other communities
25:30 How will their tech let GameFi players borrow money on their in-game assets and still use them in the game
27:08 How they let you borrow money to buy NFT assets in a mortgage-like manner
29:19 Most interesting collaterals on PWN - Nation3 DAO, Aavegotchis & Beeple’s $250k art piece
31:40 Trade-offs: openness vs. niche, utilizing third parties vs. decentralized operations
32:50 Why would Josef stay at EF if he wasn’t building PWN
33:30 Why MakerDAO blew his mind
35:20 Why would he make all grifters disappear with his web3 magic wand
37:55 Where should people go to learn more about PWN
39:00 Guests ideas
Zerion is one of the OG crypto companies, operating since 2016. It started as a tool to do fundraising through token sales. Then it transformed into a DeFi exploration tool where you could track & invest in different assets. Then it expanded into NFTs & other web3 assets. And a few months ago, they also joined the wallet space and already got 80k+ users.
What inspired them to start? Why they made so many pivots? And why they're confident that they can compete in a hard wallet space? I spoke with Evgeny, Zerion's Co-Founder, who shared the backstage perspective of the last 6 years of running Zerion.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:38 What’s Zerion and why they pivoted a lot since 2016
2:20 Evgeny experience at Google, with chatbots and with a crypto trading app that got 1M+ downloads
3:59 Why meeting Vitalik inspired them to start Zerion
6:10 How they started as a smart contract developers’ team
7:10 Why the 2019 bear market prompted them to pivot to build a token tracking aggregator
8:30 How a blog post about fundraising inspired them to go to San Francisco to earn funding and get the first users
10:33 Why they entered the aggregators & wallets space, and why are these markets less crowded than Mac thinks
14:05 Why there are so few wallets on the market and why the timing is so important
16:45 Which use cases do they cover with their wallet
19:05 How they designed the wallet so it’s useful both for beginners and more advanced users (Web3 Citizens)
20:52 What was the hardest part about making the wallet multi-chain
21:47 How they want to battle MetaMask and why web3 helps them to do it
25:22 What web3-native marketing tactics such as NFT collections and community-building let them acquire tens of thousands of users
28:32 How does their NFT collection that changes based on your wallet activity work
30:45 Why on-chain information can be a goldmine for marketers
33:42 The vision behind their API, why it’s been used by Rainbow Wallet and StakeDAO, and why having it centralized might be okay
36:05 Why wallet can become an e-mail on steroids
38:19 Why open architecture of web3 makes it better for users
39:35 Why building the wallet was the hardest decision Evgeny had to make while running Zerion
40:45 What would Evgeny build if he wasn’t building Zerion
41:25 Why would he fix privacy with his magic web3 wand
42:25 Which web3 projects he found interesting
45:40 Where to learn more about Zerion
46:30 Ideas for other web3 builders
Moralis joined a pretty crowded web3 infra market in 2020, and it's already become an important player serving projects such as MetaMask and Polygon. How did they do it? I talk with Ivan, Moralis Co-Founder, who shares the backstage perspective of their last 2 years.
If you don't want to miss our episodes, subscribe to our Substack and get an e-mail whenever the new episode comes out: https://web3talks.substack.com/
TIMESTAMPS:
0:38 Who is Ivan & Moralis, and what got him interested in blockchain
3:52 How their web2 experience inspired them to start Moralis
4:40 Why they entered a crowded infrastructure space with many already established players such as Alchemy, Infura & QuickNode
7:25 Why it’s hard to bootstrap infrastructure business and how they leveraged their online education platform to grow it
9:29 How not thinking too much helped them to start and grow
11:29 How their SDK & APIs help developers to better understand on-chain events
14:51 Why their onboarding process has quite a lot of friction
17:50 How they build strong relations with developers via free education, hackathons & Discord
20:27 How their YouTube channel & hackathon helped to acquire their first users
21:30 How they managed to grow the 100% remote company from 0 to 90+ people in 2 years
24:44 How being upfront about their way of working helped them to recruit the right people
27:08 Why cutting down features was hard and what they learned on the way
28:44 How do they decide what to include in their SDKs
29:48 What does he think about centralization risks by using centralized infrastructure
34:03 Why team building was the biggest lesson he learned from running Moralis
37:45 What would he fix about web3 with the magic wand
39:40 What has been the most interesting project he has seen
42:26 Why craziness of the crypto industry makes Ivan laugh
44:14 Where to learn more about Moralis
44:32 Guest ideas
![Mac Budkowski, Host @ Web3 Talks | How to explain what your web3 product does and convince users to try it [Builder’s Guide]](https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/production/podcast_uploaded_episode400/19271842/19271842-1668367863325-59d3d1420c198.jpg "Mac Budkowski, Host @ Web3 Talks | How to explain what your web3 product does and convince users to try it [Builder’s Guide]")
Hey everyone, today I got the info about something I've been working on for a long time.
Twitter link (all Likes & RTs much appreciated!):
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski/status/1587525519398129665?s=20&t=6erYSQKMxrLJMJGD6POfXg
Website link:
https://macbudkowski.com/how-to-explain-web3-products/
Web3 Talks Substack:
https://web3talks.substack.com/
Dan Romero was employee #20 at Coinbase. After helping to build the company for 5 years, he left Coinbase in 2019 to build an alternative to Twitter with his Coinbase colleague, Varun Srinivasan. This idea transformed into Farcaster - a web3 social network that has become a go-to place for the crypto community in the last few months.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:38 What is Farcaster
1:20 How Dan Romero became employee #20 at Coinbase and what he learned about crypto, and why he left in 2019
4:32 Why RSS lost and how Farcaster started as RSS+
6:56 Farcaster as a Twitter for crypto people, sufficient decentralized social network, why it’s great for users and developers, and what are parallels to crypto exchanges
12:23 What’s so unique about their user onboarding process, and which parts have been inspired by Coinbase
19:00 How permissionless building inspired the community to build a bot to make onboarding greater
20:25 Why they went for slow growth… just like Facebook
22:44 Why are they more interested in Daily Active Users than sign-up growth
26:29 Special moments that Farcaster delivers and how they designed the app to facilitate them
30:00 Why they don’t have quote tweets
34:15 What apps have already been built on top of Farcaster
37:00 Why developers should be able to create new social experiences
38:39 History of pseudonymous co-creators of the US Constitution
40:00 Why does the growing amount of data inspire people to build apps on top of Farcaster
42:45 How web3 social makes it much easier to start a new social app
45:52 How does Farcaster works technically, and how it’s similar to Domain Name System
51:11 Why they gathered FC developers on Telegram instead of Discord
52:45 What’s the 6 months plan for Farcaster, and what’s their 3 years vision
55:50 How switching clients would help people to “build their own Facebook”
58:24 Where people can learn more about Farcaster
ZenGo has been the pioneer in MPC research and the most popular consumer MPC wallet in the world. Ouriel shares the backstage perspective of their early days, acquiring the first users, their product strategy, ClearSign wallet firewall, and marketing activities that led to over 700k users (which is a lot for a wallet!).
Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/web3talks
Follow Ouriel & Mac:
https://twitter.com/OurielOhayon
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski
0:37 Who’s Ouriel Ohayon and why ZenGo is special
1:03 How Ouriel transformed from a crypto skeptic to a crypto optimist by listening to a podcast episode in 2016
3:10 Ouriel’s story when he didn’t like any wallets on the market and decided to design his own
5:10 How they researched different options and learned they couldn’t get rid of private keys so started researching MPC (Multi Party Computation) and became one of the world’s leaders in that space
10:25 How does MPC work, why it’s different from a traditional wallet security, what trade-offs does it make and why it’s being used by Coinbase, Fireblocks & American banks
18:04 What would happen when ZenGo’s servers go down and how they protect the company from this kind of events
19:53 What’s the difference between MPC and Account Abstraction
23:38 Why Mac would recommend ZenGo to his father
25:13 How have they acquired their first wallet users by marketing cryptopgrahy before they started marketing the wallet and how do they promote it now
30:15 How do they take care of the user’s security & UX
32:46 How do they make money and what are their plans for new services
35:55 How does their ClearSign wallet firewall protects the users from attacks
44:10 Why Mac believes we can solve crypto security
45:10 Why Ouriel thinks of crypto as an early car industry and the story about Elon Musk’s driving McLaren F1 with Peter Thiel
51:15 What were some dead-end streets that they explored
56:06 Why would Ouriel fix gas with his web3 magic wand
59:22 What could be solved in the web3 mobile experience
1:02:40 What made Ouriel smile
1:04:50 Where people can learn more about ZenGo
1:06:09 Guest idea
If you don't want to miss our episodes, subscribe to our Substack and get an e-mail whenever the new one comes out: https://web3talks.substack.com/
PoolTogether is known as the #1 DeFi protocol that encourages saving. Depositors participate in a lottery-like process where their deposited money can win prizes. But contrary to a lottery - even if they don't win, they keep their money. The luckiest winner ever deposited $73 and won over $43k, reaching a 589X return.
How it's possible? How Leighton came up with the idea? How was PoolTogether built, how they got it secured, and how they dealt with the lawsuit?
Here's episode #30:
0:50 What is PoolTogether, and how it encourages saving
2:00 How PoolTogether started as the result of Leighton's research on TradFi tools that make people more wealthy
3:45 How blockchain makes the premium bonds model more transparent and scalable
5:40 How PoolTogether works technically: non-custodial design, integrations with yield sources, random numbers generation, price tiering contracts
9:19 How have they acquired the first users in May 2019?
12:10 Mitigating security risks via reducing attack surface area, no oracle dependencies, non-custodial design, internal testing, bug bounties, investing over $1M in third-party auditors
15:15 How have they educated the market about PoolTogether?
16:56 The story behind Poolies that raised over $1.5M for combating the lawsuit
24:11 At what stage is the lawsuit right now
26:00 What needs to happen for PoolTogether to reach a truly global adoption
21:30 How do they take care of the community
32:03 Why crowdfunding on the blockchain might be a killer app
34:22 What Leighton would fix with his web3 magic wand
36:35 Why MakerDAO & Gearbox blew his mind
38:42 Why was Uniswap airdrop such a magical moment for Leighton
41:20 Where people can learn more about PoolTogether
42:18 Leighton's guest ideas
If you don't want to miss our episodes, subscribe to our Substack and get an e-mail whenever the new one comes out: https://web3talks.substack.com/
LearnWeb3 in 9 months became one of the most popular places to become a web3 developer for free. In this episode, Haardik tells me about its beginnings, crazy growth, building a 50k+ members community & more.
Timestamps:
1:15 How Haardik feels running a 50k+ students course & how it all started
2:15 Does the bear market impact people’s interest in learning web3 development
3:24 How LearnWeb3 started in December 2021 as a way to help a friend learn web3 development
7:40 How they acquired their first users via Haardik’s Indian developer community friends & Kacie’s Twitter followers
10:20 What’s the difference between LearnWeb3 & other coding courses
14:59 How LearnWeb3DAO covers the whole path from beginner to finding a job as a developer
16:30 How their “no stupid questions” attitude & leading with an example helped to build a strong community
19:20 Activities that their community takes
22:03 Why hackathons are harder to organize than most people think
23:42 Why it was hard to integrate quizzes
28:17 Why, after working out Twitter, they started to add more events & other social media platforms
33:18 Why they wouldn’t change too much if they went back in time and started LW3 again
34:32 The reason they haven’t become a DAO yet
38:00 Why if Haardik had a magic wand, he would fix the web3 identity problem
42:36 The story when Haardik interviewed 5 North Korean hackers
51:22 Why he loves old-school projects such as Uniswap, Aave & Gitcoin
52:46 Where you can learn more about LearnWeb3
53:21 His guests' ideas
We are currently raising a Gitcoin Grant. If you'd like to support the podcast, please Like/Retweet/Donate via our link:
https://twitter.com/web3talks/status/1566864677983981569?s=20&t=hWEVjqQBvkrvfyF0-mkjWw
If you don't want to miss our episodes, subscribe to our Substack and get an e-mail whenever the new one comes out: https://web3talks.substack.com/
WalletConnect is one of the most omnipresent protocols in the web3 space. It’s used by Uniswap, OpenSea, Instagram & 450+ other apps. Today we welcome Pedro Gomes, Co-Founder of WalletConnect, who tells us about the protocol’s history, presence, and future.
1:27 How Pedro ended up in crypto thanks to his fintech experience
3:47 Why MetaMask was revolutionary and how Pedro got inspired to bet on the mobile experience
6:37 How have WalletConnect acquired its first users in 2018 & why was it both easier and harder than starting today
8:25 Why making WalletConnect a neutral brand was so important
9:59 What’s WalletConnect’s product design process?
14:18 How they decided to work on new WalletConnect features and why balancing security & convenience has been so challenging
20:25 How the way they set up WalletConnect let them acquire partners such as Instagram without a business development department
22:17 How Pedro needed to find a common denominator for WalletConnect to build a community around it
24:15 Why transforming WalletConnect into a venture let them speed up the development process & how they built new amazing features in WalletConnect v2
28:50 What’s WalletConnect plan for making money
30:18 What features do wallets miss
32:39 Why Pedro finds cross-chain projects amazing
36:37 His most pleasant web3 memories
38:02 Where to follow WalletConnect
38:40 Pedro’s ideas for guests
Code4rena is a project that disrupts the way web3 companies do smart contract audits. Their community-driven approach made them so well-known in the space that OpenSea ran a $1,000,000 security audit contest on their platform. How does their project work? How it started? And how do they grow it? Two out of five Code4rena Co-Founders came to the pod to answer all these questions.
Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/web3talks
Follow Sock, Picnic & Mac:
https://twitter.com/sockdrawermoney
https://twitter.com/realfakepicnic
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski
TIMESTAMPS:
1:55 How Sock & Picnic got into crypto from decentralization & security audit backgrounds
9:35 How is web3 security different than web1 & web2 security, and how does Code4rena help to tackle web3-specific challenges
17:14 How Sock got into Code4rena very early
19:40 How does their security audit contest mechanism makes it easy to get great auditors on board & what are the characteristics of the top auditors
25:23 How the community chooses the judges for the contests
27:45 How they arranged their DAO to work efficiently and not get lost in the chaos
35:34 How have they been acquiring their clients
37:00 Story of their OpenSea $1,000,000 security audit contest
39:04 Do they permit hackers to work on security audits
42:15 Why decentralized security audits might be less vulnerable to exploits than traditional ones
45:44 How they've been balancing their two-sided market
50:39 What would they fix about web3 with their magic wand
53:50 Most mind-blowing web3 projects they've seen
58:43 The funniest things that happened to them
1:02:30 Their guests' ideas
1:06:35 Where you can learn more about code4rena
We welcome Twitter anon legend - Bored Elon Musk - who shares his blockchain/web3 gaming expertise and gives a backstage perspective on his new project - BoredBox.
Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/web3talks
Follow BORED & Mac:
https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski
TIMESTAMPS:
2:38 How Hyperloop inspired him to start a Bored Elon Musk account
4:41 How money transfers & running an anon account got him into crypto
7:35 What BoredBox is and how it was inspired by old-school gaming experiences
11:20 What’s the BoredBox business model
13:05 What’s their process that helped to protect their product from NFT flippers
17:00 How game NFTs are similar to gaming experiences from the 90s and today
18:15 How choosing the right segment of gamers helped them acquire users despite the bear market
23:15 How do they curate the right games
25:58 Why so many blockchain gaming models are not sustainable
29:24 How is blockchain gaming evolving
31:30 What’s the most significant difference between regular gaming and blockchain gaming
34:10 Why making your NFT assets like a magic sword usable in multiple games makes more sense than it seems to
36:37 How NFTs unlock new gaming business models
38:39 What are the biggest mistakes and coolest things in web3 gaming
40:28 How games have been onboarding people to new technologies
41:50 What one thing would he fix in web3
44:00 Most mind-blowing web3 projects he has seen
46:51 Where people can learn more about BoredBox
47:35 Ideas for the guests
Zapper is one of the most popular crypto apps. And on Thursday, they published the v2, which transformed Zapper from a portfolio tracker into a web3 exploration tool. I talk with Seb about their early days, management & growth tactics, v2, and... art.
Follow the pod:
https://twitter.com/web3talks
Follow Seb & Mac:
https://twitter.com/sebaudet26
https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski
1:57 How Seb got disillusioned with finance and started building, which led him to Ethereum, DeFi, and the idea of Zapper
4:25 First days of Zapper and integrations with Uniswap and Synthetix
6:04 How hard it was to query information on-chain
7:13 How Seb came up with the idea of Zapper v2 and why they bet on it
10:54 Zapper as a social media for investors and a better exploration tool than Etherscan
14:27 What’s the process behind Zapper’s slick design
17:18 How they organized Zapper to ship fast
20:20 Why they don’t have QAs in Zapper
21:57 How have they chosen the market to build on
24:55 How networks effects helped them to grow
26:05 How they decided which protocol to integrate and what helped them grow the most
28:20 What NFT and DAO-related user acquisition strategies do they use right now
31:42 Why Seb thinks founders and DeFi protocols focus too much on marketing
33:33 Biggest fuckups they had
35:45 How does Zapper make money
37:58 What would Seb fix about crypto and web3
40:30 Why web3 builders develop a thick skin
41:42 How a metaverse billboard and generative arts inspire him
47:00 What was the most fun web3 thing that happened to Seb
48:20 Crypto Twitter making the Internet fun again
50:23 Where people can find more info about Zapper
51:00 Guest idea - Founder of Interface
52:30 How I found $500 in my Zapper account
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