#261 Ben Sharafian & Stefan Thomas: Coil - A New Business Model for the Web

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Dutch X the fair and secure decentralized exchange platform by kenosis to learn how you can build apps which leverage Dutch X is liquidity pool visit epicenter TV / Dutch X and by Microsoft Azure configure and deploy a consortium blockchain network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and enterprise-grade infrastructure spend less time on blockchain scaffolding and more time building your application to learn more visit akms / epicenter hi and

welcome to F Center my name is Frank rain my name is sonia agarwal today we're gonna speak with Stefan Tomas and venture off in about coil exciting new project built on intellect on the intellectual protocol yeah into lecture is something that you know Brian and I have been you know pretty familiar with for a while actually Stefan has been on epicenter in the past twice actually one time representing ripple but the second time actually presenting inter lecture protocol and like this is back when Stefan first created ILP along with Evan Schwartz from a triple and since then Stefan as well as number of his co-workers at ripple have left ripple

and have created a new company called coil in order to have you know a little bit decentralized the intellect your protocol like ecosystem and work on you know some cool stuff which we talk about in today's episode and so Sonny you mentioned you also kind of involved in in company doing something moving to ledger yeah so you know as many of you obviously know I'm very involved with like cosmos which is like an interoperability project and so we have our own interoperability protocol of types with recall inter blockchain communication or IBC and IBC is really used for moving assets between block chains you know moving a token from like a

coin from the Bitcoin blockchain onto another blockchain well I ope is sort of more similar to the atomic swaps and stuff you know moving value across blockchains and so I think there's a really cool interplay of like work between ILP and IBC that that goes on so I'm actually I actually advise a company called cava who's doing a lot of this like ILP development within the cosmos and other ecosystems like aetherium cool then let's get to the interview hi so we're here with Jeff on Tomas and bencher off in there to keep people at coil so Stefan has been on the podcast a bunch of times before actually the third time I think the first time we spoke about ripple the

last time maybe I were in inter ledger and so this is kind of a continuation of that work and and Ben is here for the first time yeah so thanks much for joining us guys thank you forever yeah thank you so you know probably probably many people don't remember the previous podcast so they didn't listen to represent her back then and chaerephon you have like an interesting in long history in the crypto space users mind giving us a very brief background about you know how you became involved and what the your journey has been through there yes world yeah sure so I've been a serial entrepreneur for about as long as I can remember I started my first company when I was 14 years old and so if you're a small entrepreneur like you

know that pain that there isn't payments and so what attracted me to Bitcoin when I found out about it was that it was the first time that you could just as a technical person you could help write some code and suddenly it would change how payments work and before that it was just always like the financial industry is this arcane beast and you can't really touch it and I think then after joined Bitcoin was like 2010 I started to get pretty involved in like making animated video about it starting to give a lot of talks about it and then I also wrote a JavaScript implementation of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Jess and all of that was kind of to try to get Bitcoin more into the mainstream and try to get kind of mainstream adoption and then in

late 2012 I get approached by jet McCaleb of Mount God's Fame and he has just started this new company called open coin better known now as ripple and so I joined them and then after jet left quickly became CTO and I've been there for six years until May of this year and for most of the last like four years my focus has been into ledger and IntelliJ is essentially like a an interoperability protocol for payments it's not necessarily exclusive to blockchain like you can't you can interoperate any kind of payment system you could even use something like you know handing cash to someone and doing two ledger over that so it's pretty

flexible and we get to a point where we're like intelligence it's a really big idea it's like a really important idea so we should really you know bring it out to the world somehow and what happened like in early this year was basically you know we got to a point where we would go to conferences we tell people in Taleggio to be super excited they'd be like what can I do with it like can i connect it right now and we'd be like well there aren't really any connectors for it yet there aren't really any companies you know that you can like interact with on it and so the impetus for starting coil is really to be like the first company that's actually doing stuff with with IntelliJ yeah and what about you Ben I know that you know I think me and you actually

have a little bit similar stories I believe we both dropped out to like join of lakhtin showed up so you tell us a little bit more about how your story how you got involved with ripple and like and how you jumped over to coil follow Stefan yeah yes I was a I used to be an intern at ripple and that was around the time when when inner Ledger was first being worked on and I don't know I found it sort of really interesting and and I kind of I felt like he was one of these things that's gonna become a big deal and and so there's obviously a lot of time pressure on those sorts of things and so I thought it was best to just you know leave the the school thing and just

and work on this inner lecher stuff and and now yeah a couple years later an your lecture was pretty much around and so it sort of I think it calls on us to sort of I don't know lead the way as a company building on inter election and your sunny you said you know follow me like I don't know who's following here like I would say that this muscle is his idea and that's definitely what I'm gonna say if it doesn't go well so okay so we mentioned in Taleggio right we did a podcast about this before of course we'll link to it in the show notes if people want to learn about you more in-depth but can you give a you know very high-level description about what is the intellectual protocol for sure so as the name implies it's a protocol to

connect different Ledger's together so imagine you I have one person who likes Bitcoin and so they have a Bitcoin account they have all their money in there someone else they are not into crypto at all they have an ally pay account and that's that's how they want to receive money intelligence is intended to solve the problem of like how does the money get from Bitcoin into ally pay and so in general like it's a largely inspired by internet protocols so we kind of observed that the internet was this really efficient like constantly getting faster and cheaper system and it seems to somehow be able to bridge the gap between totally different kinds of networking technology faster networking technology like fiber

and slower networking technology like mobile phones or satellite internet and it can just make that a totally seamless experience and we start thinking like why doesn't payment works like that you know like why is it so much so different in terms of trying to cross different payment networks and as we started working on it there are definitely differences and there are some things you have to do differently technically but yeah at the end of the day a lot of the same principles that apply to data also apply to money so we ended up doing things like sending tiny packets of money around and so if you're sending like a larger payment maybe that's split up into lots of small packets and we do things like routing to kind of find

between any source account and named destination account some paths that the money can take where there is actually quiddity available all these kinds of things and so intelligence basically just an open protocol that defines what some of the day formitz are for doing that and so how does this like you know compared to something like atomic swaps or like cross chain lightening networks yeah so atomic swaps I think are if you have one sort of large payment I think you want to get it through between two systems that's kind of what I think of as atomic swaps and with inter ledger it's a lot more about sort of having a like a

lightweight network that you can you can abstract away the actual details of the payment system so if I'm sending an atomic swap between between Bitcoin and aetherium then the time it's gonna take is at least a transaction on one of those but with Inter lecture you know if you want to pay several micro payments Wow you load a webpage then you can't wait very long and so you can't you need something that that sits on top and I think lightning is is something that does do that as well by using payment channels to make it instant but it does also rely on some pretty Bitcoin specific features and while you could implement payment channels and lightning

style payment channels in other blockchains it's it's not quite as it's not quite as general as saying like inter lecture works over any system where value can be sent yeah I think like my favorite example is this what I mentioned earlier which is just if Ben and I want to settle in cash we can still set up two intelligent connectors we can send intellectual packets all day and then at the end of the week you know been handled hands me a bundle of cash and that's a totally legitimate way to to settle into ledger connection mmm-hmm so and I've been Schwartz who was one of the other call founders or authors of inter ledger he published a blog post a few weeks ago

comparing into ledger or to like a layer three solution on top of like layer two solutions do you guys see this in like a similar way yeah I think that's a really good way of thinking about it because it alleges very much not focused on solving a lot of the problems involved with you know action moving the money or what the underlying units mean or what the economics are or how things like mining or consensus work and so even some of the things that lightning addresses where it's like about scalability and like how do we make more transactions through the system and so on it's not really what IntelliJ is designed to solve like what IntelliJ is designed to solve its interoperability it's like how do I get from one tech stack to a totally

different tech stack that might have built been built with something totally different in mind and so we actually think that lightning is a really good protocol to do in Taleggio on top of because it actually like some of the limitations of lightning like the limits on the transaction size don't really come into play with intellect rip because we split payments into smaller packets anyway and so let's say you sending like a $20 transaction over into ledger even if that goes through lightening and maybe like there's a you know like a five percent failure rate for $20 payments on lightning for that path that wouldn't matter because the money would be or the payment would be split up anyway so I think it kind of fits in nicely with some of the other

solutions out there and so you know I've been following along with the ILP roadmap for a while now actually I know it's actually like changed a lot especially since the last time you were on the episode what are some of like you know can you give a brief rundown of like how the ILP protocol is maybe adapted over time and maybe how the ILP ecosystem has adapted are there like you know two years ago that really the only player in the ILP ecosystem was ripple but has that really expanded as well yeah so I think on the ecosystem side like the biggest thing is we get to a point early in the year where we were going out to conferences we were telling people at ILP they thought it was great but there wasn't anything like real

anything life to tie into and when we would tell someone to go start your first like IntelliJ or connector company or something like that you know they'd be faced with this problem of like well who's gonna be my customer there's nobody using this yet you know and so what's happened since May which is you know only a few months but what's happened since then that we now have a company called strata that is like a professional and Taleggio service provider and Coyle uses them for for all of our uplink traffic and there are other companies they're built like if they're in plugins and lightning plug-in and you know there's a lot of other tokens that are interested in using it for interoperability and so I think the community has grown a lot

there's a lot more people now in the community group call so I think it's taken it from this like academic project that people were theoretically interested in to something that now Coyle and others are actually using in production and that really changes a lot of the conversation and like you know feels very different like we're now moving like 10 million packets in a day and so we have to think about scalability we have to think about you know how do you process that much and keeping track of everything and so on on the technical side I think the number one biggest change since I was on the show was around two things one is how we thought about the system so I think before we kind of thought of it as you

have Ledger's as these like payment networks and IntelliJ connects them together and if you draw on IntelliJ as a as a picture you know what does the intellection network look like you've probably you would have drawn the ledgers as the nodes and then they would be connected by what we call connectors that sit in between each network and since then we've had this what you know the community has termed the intelligent lighten meant which is basically flipping it on its head so rather than having looking at the ledgers out there as the nodes and then intelligent connects them together it's actually the participants the users the connectors

they are the nodes and then they settle their relationships over some ledger and so it really puts a lot less emphasis on the ledger and it came from without going too deep into the weeds but it came from a realization that the internet community had which was basically that the Internet is is by tying together networks it's duplicating some functionality because what does the switch do it routes packets from one place to another well what does a router do on layer three like it does the same thing it also sense packets from one place to another and so you can actually get rid of switches entirely and just have links between different nodes and then some nodes also route packets right and so we

basically took that same lesson that the Internet community has come to eventually and apply the two intellectually simplified the picture a lot again it gets a little technical but you know I guess some of the people listening might get a kick out of this realization the other thing was this concept of what we call penny switching so that's basically the idea that if you have a larger payment you can split it into smaller chunks and the reason that was significant is because before that we had a lot of difficulty with the variability of payment size and I'll explain why so one example one issue that people have been following lightning might be familiar with is the issue of liquidity so you have some

paths and you want to send a payment through that path now if that path doesn't have enough liquidity to do that payment all at once you're kind of out of luck you know you have to come up with some really complicated scheme and we actually went down really deep rat-holes trying to come up with a scheme like that to try to split up the payment and then recombine it but we thought we just think that it makes the whole thing way more complicated and so the other problem was when you're talking about exchange rates and you're trying to find the cheapest path in terms of exchange rates yeah also the exchange rates might be dependent on the amount right so you might have like a different exchange rate for a very large payment and a better or worse exchange rate for a very

small payment which then means that for some paths or for some different sizes you might have different paths so like small payments go this way large payments go this way so your routing table gets one dimension more complicated and so what I'm trying to get across is like this variability in the payment size gets really fricking complicated and so once we started to think about well what if we just have like a pretty consistently small packet size a lot of these problems go away you now have one exchange rate you can just assume it's like a fixed number because all the packets are small and you just right for that and liquidity becomes much less of an issue because if you exhaust a liquidity on some path it'll just the next packet will just take a

different path and also people that see a payment and progress so you see the money streaming through you slowly see the liquidity getting exhausted you can actually go and provision additional liquidity in real time to make sure that that link doesn't go down so it just became this like much simpler much more powerful way of thinking about it and once again it's taking a lot of inspiration from the Internet where you similarly you don't want to send a big file download as a single packet because what if that packet gets lost or rewards and so on so those are the two main technical changes I see and so you know so you mentioned that these packets are getting like very small these are that there's currently ILP is handling about ten million packets per day roughly how

much is that in like you know US dollar volume it's hard to say maybe not very many dollars probably on the order of ten to a hundred and way to eat a packet is like a millionth of a yeah the average packet size is about 40 micro dollars and so well you're actually sending an inter ledger packet for every single second sometimes more often than that that you're on a site and of course like you know that the rate at which you sent could be tuned for performance but basically what what you're getting at is that like in in real time the site is getting paid yeah that's like it sometimes people ask like what happens if you lose a packet or something like

that and when we designed the protocol we designed in such a way that the sender and receiver are never exposed to any risk number one number two that there is the Wrights incentive structure so no one has an incentive to fail but then number three that failures are almost like expected and tolerated and I think that's again something that you can learn from the internet it's like don't try to make failure a non-issue at every layer just handle it on into nth level and say like hey if this packet doesn't go through will resend it and just make it so that the failures don't matter commercially like they're not expensive enough to not to matter you know the Dutch have given us so much

orange carrots Bluetooth artificial hearts even donuts were invented by Dutch people but they also gave us Dutch auctions which as it turns out are great for decentralized exchanges Dutch X is a decentralized trading protocol for ERC 20 tokens and it's invented designed and built by kenosis current order boat based exchanges whether centralized or decentralized have a couple of issues miners and exchanges can frontrunner trade when they step in front of a large order to gain an economic advantage not to mention issues with securing funds high listing fees lack of liquidity and pricing efficiencies the Dutch tax exchange platform uses a Dutch auction mechanism to determine the fair value for a token and participants in a trade are encouraged to reveal their true

likeness to pay which eliminates front running as a permissionless Unchained protocol it's useful for BOTS and other smart contracts needing to exchange tokens and Dutch checks also acts as an oracle for - requiring a price feed so to learn more check out the documentation at epicentre TV slash Dutch X smart contracts are live on the etherion main net so you can start building today we'd like to thank gnosis and Dutch X for their support of epicenter this is very interesting I'm curious because you made this comparison to lightning as well is this something that could also make sense for Lightning Network to basically say that there's this you know standard you know size of like a tiny amount and and basically

things are always sent in kind of like packets of that amount also the way I would say it was like from a technical perspective that makes a lot of sense because I think the problems that you're seeing right now with lightning and I know that they have their own roadmap and their own solutions for it but I think they're fairly elegantly were very elegantly solved by the IntelliJ protocol stack and we have a plugin for lightning so if someone out there is like trying to build an app on top of lightning they're running into these issues they should definitely take a look at IntelliJ and see if that actually solves the issues that they're having whether the lightning community to the extent that is like an official decision-making body will officially use IntelliJ for those use cases I think

that's more of a political question I don't know it's gonna happen but just from a technical perspective I think it's a really good solution for those problems maybe one final question listen maybe this is dumb question I'm not sure but so you you mentioned for this amount payment amounts between your 10 and 100 dollars you sending 10 million packets I mean is that economically sensible or does that actually make it an expensive network to run because of the you know I guess some costs associated with bandwidth as well yeah I mean at the end of the day an IP packet is just a packet of data and there's no real reason why for a connector it should be much more

expensive than sending an Internet packet for instance and definitely you know it sounds crazy to say when I load this website I'm sending a hundred payments or something but to say I'm sending a hundred internet packets doesn't sound that weird okay cool well let's speak a bit about web monetization right because that's if he guess or the best thread that runs through a lot of work that you guys are doing today and nothing chef anh you have done over time so you mentioned before the episode that you started working on problems of rapmon ization like much before a Bitcoin can you run it through like what what was that early work and what would the mean lessons say you learned yeah so back in 2008 I

joined a company in in Switzerland which was basically selling ebooks and so ebooks you can think of it as like this little you know 14 to 25 page guide books on various like day-to-day tasks and they were they cost around like a one euro one year or 40 something like that and obviously it was very difficult to motivate motivate people to actually like take out their credit card and like a lot of people in german-speaking area don't even have credit cards more like their PayPal account like and try to go through this whole process just to buy this like one euro 40 cents ebook right and we eventually switched to a

subscription model which worked a lot better so a lot of people were actually willing to say instead of paying like 1 euro 50 for one a book I'll pay 10 euros for a monthly flat rate where I get access to all 5000 or whatever it was ebooks that that are in the catalog and so I had that sort of experience in the back of my mind for a long time like neither solution was like super elegant because even with a flat right if you're a smaller provider it's kind of hard to get people to sign up to your particular platform your particular flat rate after that company we actually built a a tool that so we built like a PDF to html5 converter so you like being able to look at PDF documents in your browser and it

was just part of making the ebooks easier to read for people but then we realized that that technology was actually independently useful and so we started selling it and spinning that company off to basically sell it to publishers who had these back catalogues of you know old magazines newspapers etc in PDF format and so they could convert that into HTML and then put contextual ads on that and so that gave me a bit more of an insight into how the publishing industry works especially at that time was a very tough industry like there's a it was kind of an industry in decline their revenues were shrinking you would go into an office and they would be like you know white sheets over some of the desks and you know all the remaining people were like yeah like a

lot of our colleagues just got let go and like it was very very tough environment and ever since then I've been thinking about like like why isn't their native built-in way on the web where you just go to a website and as as you make the request you also send some money and then they send back the data like why isn't data sorry why isn't money the same as data in terms of like efficiency to transfer it and turns out that like when you look at the HTTP standard and other people have to point this out but if you look at the HTTP standard there's actually an error code 402 that's reserved for this particular use case like if a website wants you to pay for a given page there's an error

code reserved for that in a description it just says reserved for future use and they just never after 30 years never got around to figuring out a protocol for that and so when we were looking intelligent rule like hey we want to take this from a theoretical idea to a practical protocol that's really being used we needed a use case and this seems like such a good fitting like such a natural fit because we kind of looked into the different criteria and then tried to figure out you know what was a good use case for that yeah like the by having it where you send two you know so many different websites in a day that's saying you couldn't do with with a manual process for payment and so we're

talking about like you know how can we apply this inter lecture technology that's basically making it as easy to send payments as it is to send internet packets then I think that sort of many to many scenarios are sort of the best in in the short term while still gaining adoption right and also like if you want to solve this problem for the web it needs to be an open protocol and so an example I often give us like we could have applied in Taleggio to remittance the problem with the remittance is that what users care about is the cost to them like if I'm sending money back to my family I care how much gets there I don't care if the protocol underlying it is like open source you know and so with

the web however if you were trying to get your protocol to be officially adopted by let's say browser vendors and like you know cannot be baked into the web standard stack it really needs to be an open protocol so we thought that in Taleggio just checks all those boxes really well it's like it's great as many senders too many receivers it's really scalable it's an open protocol and it's great at going across borders as well so it just fit that music is so well so does web monetization only like apply to this sort of like micro payment kind of thing where you're paying for data or is it also meant as a replacement for like you know payment api's themselves so like stripe and PayPal and all those guys yeah so we've already done a lot of

work over the last three years with the w3c we're colleague of mine adrian ho bailey who's now also here at coil he's been the chair or the co-chair of the of the web payments working group they've come up with two standards so far one is the web payment request API so this would be like a website is asking for payment from the browser this is what Apple pay uses for example when you go to like check out on on Shopify or some like that and like pops look at the nice little native UI so that's something we've already been involved with for three years and we've done some some interesting tests with that so for instance if you look at the chrome source code I don't know if it's still in there but they did a test where there was actually in Taleggio was one

of the white listed payment method identifiers and that was because we've been working with them on like experimenting with using IntelliJ for kind of retail payments if you dig it up there are like demos and blog posts and stuff like that about that topic I think for coil like web monetization we think is a new thing it's a it's a different standard and the main differentiator is that with web payments you are actively acknowledging it's each payment it's not automated right it's like you would like to check out which address what you like to use for shipping that kind of thing and so you go through like a checkout flow web monetization the amounts are so small that it's actually not worth it for the user to think about it at all so

it should be completely in the background completely automated now I think the way that web standards work it helps a lot if the standards going to build on each other so we actually think it's starting to think about how to make these things more similar and maybe you reuse some of the web payment standards for web monetization because that would get would it make would make it a lot easier to get browser support but right now from a use case perspective they're distinct use cases I'm curious if you could speak a little bit about you know what what are or would have been the higher order kind of bigger picture effects of this you know lack of web monetization I mean I guess that

probably ties into you know advertising being one of the prevalent ways of monetizing the internet but like how do you guys look at that yeah I mean the it's just I think the fact that the web doesn't have any built-in sort of business model for a web site is kind of what gets us into these situations because because yeah you it costs money to run a website and you know you kind of have to turn to ads and that then kind of goes back and modifies the nature of the site that you've enabled for ads to make it you know ad friendly or a focus on collecting your users data that kind of thing and I mean

also if you want to switch to a subscription model or have your users buy sing at the credit card that also requires quite a big change in in how your platform works or how your website or blog or any anything on the web yeah so I think but yeah well with inter ledger it's sort of I think you could have this as just here's here's my app and so long as you're using it you're paying me automatically and so it doesn't add friction for the user but it's still a sustainable business model for the operator of that website yeah I think that non plus ultra for us just like if I'm I made a useful app I made a useful tool I made a piece of content I shouldn't also have to come up with some business model like hey I'm gonna sell

you data that you put into this app or hey I'm going to inundate you with a bunch of ads or whatever like a lot of those are to me or workarounds it's kind of like the difference between going to a restaurant to have dinner and then you pay or going to a restaurant to have dinner and then you do the dishes for three hours in order to compensate them for the dinner you had you know it's like it's just barter it's not a very efficient way to pay for things and so we think that introducing actual payments is actually healthy and like there's no amount of ads you can look at that's gonna be worth more than whatever your actual job is and the money do you make with that it's just gonna be more efficient than than bartering yeah I mean that's a great point I recently

listened to a podcast and somebody was saying this was in the same Harris podcast who's done a lot of like experimentation around basically trying to get people to like pay for listening and donate and actually podcasting I think is a great example where we're kind of the native ways of podcast distribution through RSS makes it like very hard for people to you know for example paid directly for listening to a podcast but at the point he made there was basically that you know all of the bad things on the internet basically due to advertising and you know there's probably a decent amount of truth to that yeah I think it's a sort of something where like instead of having a one-on-one relationship where the website owner is

trying to provide a service to me I'm trying to reward them and it's a very simple straightforward relationship with advertising you're bringing in a third party and so you get things like on YouTube when when they do monetize a lot of content because advertisers weren't sure about types of content that their ads for being placed on so now you have content creators they have to modify maybe they have to use less coarse language or whatever which actually like their audience doesn't mind but it's like some advertiser that doesn't want it associated with their brand so it's just like an extra complication and I think that by having that direct reward you kind of align incentives a lot better yeah it's the fun I remember I think I remember you once telling me about like how like the advertisements

that are shipped right actually make up like a sizable percentage of like mobile data costs for users yeah so that was a statistic where I just took it from the New York Times where they basically looked at you know what is actually the cost to the user given a certain like mobile bandwidth cost to ship all these like ads on here onto your mobile phone and in some of the cases like it actually was more cost to the user to deliver the ads to their mobile again depending on their data plan whatnot then it was revenue to the website and it just was like okay well totally there's something pretty weird going on that is insane that's super interesting

yeah now that that sounds like a deeply broken people working thing well let's move a bit to to coil and get more def here I mean first of all you were both opposed I found you a triple four in a very long time what was the reason why I decided to start off in a different car we need suppose you know maybe continuing to work on interaction to let you use cases from within rip oh yeah so I mean I'm sure that your audience familiar with RuPaul I think they're very focused on use cases around the digital asset XRP as well as enterprise use cases so kind of making payments

more efficient for banks payment service providers their customers corporates and so on and so what I found with like working with some of those kinds of customers and this was sort of something that like I think was more of a mutual realization you know among the ripple team and myself a research team was that banks are I mean they're kind of interested in whatever their customers are interested in right and their customers the customers have mattered that most of them are probably like some of the larger corporates and that kind of thing and so if you think about intelligence this thing that you know we talked earlier but what are the things that Intel are just best at if you think of it as a thing that enables like a new class of use cases kind of how the

internet enabled like a new class of communication use cases it's unlikely that like large corporations are going to be necessarily be the very first to adopt that they're gonna be looking for cost savings on their existing use cases they're going to be looking for you know like ways to maybe scale their existing use cases better things like that they're not gonna be looking for like okay how can I send like a fraction of a cent to you know halfway around the world and so if you want to go out and you want to build like totally new products I think everyone felt that it was much better to do that as part of a new company and so I don't think it would have been possible to build into Ledger as coil because you kind of need

enough funding and and momentum to kind of put in all this like research and pay for like a whole team to do that but as far as like productizing it you kind of need something like a start-up that's just not doing anything else it's just going after this one opportunity so that's kind of what Coyle is intended to be if you want to anything to that yeah I think yeah we just really need to be creating the demand because somebody has to do it you know right so I mean one of the things that I like one thing I noticed what scintillator ecosystem is that there's still a lot of work to be done on the protocol layer side of things so like for example right now the only like kind of finished plug-in right now is 2 X RP or but and

there are some but you know cobblers building some on like aetherium and Bitcoin and stuff but what made you guys decide to focus on like going out to like start building and user applications instead of like still make it like working on the core protocol because I don't know in my opinion I see that actually has happened a lot of work left to do yeah so I think actually there's a little bit of leapfrogging going on the last community group call I've heard that some of the etherium plugins are actually starting to look pretty good and we need to go back and maybe update some of the extra P plugins I haven't looked at it myself but that's what I heard so I think those plugins are actually getting close to mature mm-hmm and I know a few evident yeah and and I think on on whether we should wait

until there's more on the core protocol level I think I think you really can't get in the core protocol to be ready or to be very good unless you're actively doing things on top of it like in production because now that we're actually kind of you know we're accountable to keeping the network up like our customers are going to be messaging us if if the inter lecture networks down that's a much higher those are much higher states than when it was purely for research yeah exactly I think the healthiest protocol it's one of the vaults with actual usage I think as far as like some of the core data formats like instance the ILP packet header which is the most important thing you really need to standardize I feel pretty strongly that those are actually done

and so it's more some of the the protocols below like you say like the ledger integrations so the protocols above like transport layer protocols where they're still like especially on the implementation site not even just on a protocol site but the implementation site there's a lot of room for improvement but there's enough there that you can go out and you can build an app and have it be rock-solid and like you know very usable and very performant and so on I don't know if it's like super yet I think it's you know the amount of throughput that we see per node but I mean you kind of heard like the volumes that we're doing I think certainly by blogs and standards it's pretty good yeah if you've listened to previous episodes

with Marley Grey and Matt Turner you know that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise-grade tools and infrastructure for blockchain developers well the azure blockchain workbench is perfect for organizations building consortium networks take the etherium proof of authority template for example it's ideal for permission networks for consensus participants are known and reputable etherium on Azure has on chain network governance that leverages parodies extensible proof Authority client each consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their consensus participants to a trusted operator and parodies webassembly support allows developers to write smart contracts and for many languages like C C++ and rust Azure blockchain workbench was created on the same principles that drive all

production services and Azure so you know you're relying on secure redundant infrastructure that can scale and with built-in services like authenticating api's off chain databases and secure key management services you can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours to learn more about Azure blockchain workbench and home Microsoft is advancing blockchain usability and enterprise check out akms slash epicenter and start building today we'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of epicenter so you must have read like the Union Square Ventures blog post from like last month about like the myth of the infrastructure faves and so that's kind of like you know you guys I'm so I guess you guys kind of a crew with that model and like believe that like you know you need this like

curvature path where like the demand and the infrastructure kind of like building off of each other yeah I mean that's exactly what we found with this idea of having a connector like I don't think that strata would be a commercial connector company if it wasn't for Coyle being their customer and I think it's you're kind of mutually creating the demand you're kind of solving that chicken-egg problem by Co evolving together and you're also kind of leading the way for other companies to get involved because I think there's so many other people that I've talked to before starting coil where they kind of look at it like yeah it sounds nice in theory but like you've got this cushy job at

ripple like you can do this all day you know I need to actually make money build my company and so they don't feel comfortable actually jumping in but now like I'm kind of percent dependent on it like my personal fortunes are all tied up in coils so like if this doesn't work you know and so if I talk to entrepreneurs now it's like oh you know like you're really gonna stand behind this you know like you're really going to make this work no matter what and so I think it totally like been said it really totally changes the tone of how you work on it and what people react to yeah where there are other ideas so you guys were thinking about besides this web monetization and micro payments that you felt like okay this could be an interesting company to build you know

around into ledger yeah we had the board of 49 ideas a lot been talk about that yeah I remember there is definitely there was a day when we were trying to think of I think it was what to do at the next conference we were attending and so we just started listing all the ideas we could think of on top of inner lecture and so now we've kind of you know now in the context of starting coil we've zoomed in more on the web monetization one but even within there I think we could definitely list another 50 things to do with web monetization and probably we're gonna have to zoom in somewhat there too right yeah I think like once you're in a startup suddenly like it's like okay well we got to focus and then once you

focus you got to focus more and I think one of the ideas that was a frontrunner for a long time was Koteas so that might be a name that's not your viewers recognized you know Evan and I worked on this project a long time ago a ripple and we kind of got it to a point where the only thing missing was the payments interoperability protocol because intelligent didn't exist back then and so when we started coil we actually went back and built a prototype of koteas because it was literally like I think how long did it take it as like three days first a couple weeks yeah yeah two or three weeks and so that actually kind of enough itself was exciting to me because like I think before you could go

and you could have an idea for the centralized application and it would take years to kind of put together like an ICO and like you want to create a token and you need to have a blockchain you'd have a consensus mechanism you need all these different components where it's like within Taleggio you can Laurie it's just like for koteas which was hosting using IntelliJ C we basically just took a piece of software that could already do like hosting and it would run like different containers and in their own virtual machines and then we just added an API and we made it like a paid API within two ledger and then we released it and then like couple weeks later we had four hundred people running koteas hosts and unfortunately that koteas isn't that core to what

we're doing right now so we can't devote too much time to it but it's just one of those ideas this was like it's so obviously useful that we just we just felt like we had to to give it at least like you know a bit more that they the light of day you know so I don't know and what I took away from is just like how easy it is to build stuff with intellectuals like all it's just like a way to solve incentive problems and you can almost like forget about how any of that works you don't have to worry about token economics and stuff like that you can just go and say well if you want to access my mesh network this node pays this note if you want to upload something to the server you pay if you want to you know whatever you're trying

to build with it's an incentive issue if you don't download from me you pay you know it's just like you just rely on intellect it feels a lot more like building things on the internet I think the cool thing about web monetization as well is that it gives you that inner lecture capability just in your browser and so and something is really anybody with a coil subscription could use any of the applications we build on inner lecture like you can actually you can upload a smart contract to koteas from a browser and pay for it from that's right yeah and so it's the plan to like get back it at some point down the future roadmap to get back into like the cosine of thing because I heard from someone I'm not sure if this is true that like the knit the name of the company coil

was actually like a amalgamation of code ES and Inter ledger yeah that's true it's a yeah it's sort of smush smush those together it also fits in with some of the other naming schemes that are floating around like for example spring a triple which is that that's the funding us basically right and so I think yeah those are definitely the two pieces that are very very important yeah we had like a lot of names like we have council which was a service selection protocol talked about that we had something called cog which was like how to pay for api's and so the CEO kind of meme was was around a lot

they came from Korea's mostly uh-huh so let's move to choreo and dive a bit more in debt there may be one good way of explaining coil to a listeners is if we can you know briefly run through what does my user experience look like you know ask somebody who's you know gonna use coil as a kind of end user and what about the user experience of core of using coil is it as a creator right so I mean our goal has been to make it as easy as humanly possible that sort of been the primary goal the other goal has

been I've always been after mainstream adoption so I'm looking at it from a perspective of a mainstream user not somebody who's already way knee-deep into crypto themselves right and so for the nth user perspective the way it works is you go to call calm right now we're in closed beta so we actually have a waiting list not we have to to let people on slowly onto the platform because we want to make sure that when they get on they have a decent experience and we can scale fast enough and so on and so right now there's a waiting list but eventually you'll be able to just sign up put in your credit card you pay five dollars a month and that gives you access to the entire platform one thing I think unique is

that we're not necessarily so we're not taking that five dollars and splitting it up in some way and then paying it out it's a it's a flat way it's a true flat weight so you can use more you can use less and Coyle makes up the difference the reason we think that's so important is because it kind of the ideas that gives the user peace of mind right like I used to use this cycle flat flat ER and basically what would happen is like flatter takes your monthly budget and they kind of split it up between all the websites do you go to and so what that means is that if you go to some website the initially get like all your budget and then as you go to other websites that gets subtracted from the first website you

went to so I remember I would go and think about like okay well if I go to these other sites now well then the website I really liked the most will get less and so suddenly I was thinking about it and it's really not a good way of doing it so we're trying to get more of an experience like you'd have on like Spotify or Netflix or something like that where like I have access to all this content to all these web sites and I can use as much as I want and so if I'm you know if I leave my Spotify running overnight you know sure it costs Spotify more and like licensing money but I as a user don't have to think about that I don't have to worry about it in fact I have a strong incentive to kind of use it as much as possible to

get like the value out and we think that that's a more engaging way of building an application anyway so to just to kind of wrap up that discussion of like what's the experience as a user I sign up I pay five dollars a month and now I can go to different websites and right now it's mostly about like supporting creators that I care about so right now there are a lot of people from the extra P community that are either blogging or making tools and so on that are web monetized and so if I sign up to coil I can like support those creators if I'm if I care about their particular content just by using just by reusing it reading it you know following them and so on we think that that same model could apply to other communities as well as well so

like let's say let's say you'd applied to the for tonight community and so suddenly people that are for tonight's streamers websites forums etc they can become web monetized and now users that want to use those websites they can be what monetize and they can get a call subscription and go to those sites so that's kind of the idea and then for the crater it's a also pretty simple experience although on that site there still crypto involved so if I'm a creator I have to sign up for an IP enabled wallet and as of recording this episode hopefully there'll be more option soon but as a recording this episode the only option is extra peat tip bot and so I have to go there after make an account

and then I receive extra P but what's cool is that the underlying technology is intelligence so if somebody wants if someone out there has like an a theorem wallet and they wanna integrate they can make it so that if your creators can earn their money and if your ether or in some ERC 20 token so it's like the technology allows you to receive and whatever you want as long as there's a provider that that gives access to that particular currency and so it's just a question briefly on that let's say now you know we I add my website I want to receive ether someone else's Sonny wants xop he has his own creator the idea is then that you as company coil will you

know basically buy whatever krupa assets for whatever creates want and paid him in in that token so will actually send it out on intelligence do you want to explain how that works yeah we we have our and Stephan briefly mentioned strata earlier there are inter ledger service provider and so essentially we just have an uplink to them where we send ILP packets and then later we settle them using XRP but due to the like multi-hop nature of the inter ledger network strata is then passing it on to to the next top and so on until eventually the Creator themselves gets whatever currency they wanted so coil doesn't need to worry about what payment methods

exist in the inter lecture network because that's sort of what the routing does for us but mister who didn't actually does that exchange from you know let's say from XRP into ether so that would be potentially strata or a peer of strata some some connector in the inter ledger network will hold both XRP and ether and so to one of their customers they'll be sending packets inter lecture packets which will be settled in there and there they've got money incoming that's that's being settled in some other asset and there could be like multiple or currency exchanges on a path as well like yeah I have to be direct so you mentioned about like Netflix and Spotify right and so there's Netflix and

Spotify pay they are their content producers so whether it's the movie studios or the artists do they pay them based off of like a number of views or a number of listens or do they is it or is it like a fixed fee that they pay the producers up the licensing fees up front I think that content licensing is a very deep and complex topic that I don't think I can do justice but I would say it's fair to say that by and large there's generally a relationship between like how many times the song is listened to or how many times the video is viewed and how much the content creator receives there's just a lot of other variables too like you know the negotiating position of like a large major label versus like you know a

smaller independent artist or something like that I think what's interesting about Coyle is that we're kind of we have this like fixed amount of money that the user is paying us right and sure somewhere we need to make a profit I think initially we'll probably operate at a loss just to help get the network going but eventually like let's say you know user pays us five dollars and we pay out like four ninety five on average like across all of our users right so now we have some profit that we're making 1% or whatever it is and our goal has to be to make sure that those four ninety five are spent as efficiently as humanly possible and when I say efficiently I mean like

our users probably don't care about how much money there's some clickbait website that they accidentally clicked on make but they might care about getting that HD video that they saw on that web monetized website where like you know you can only watch it with a certain amount of bandwidth or then one article that you can only read after you've paid a certain amount of money they don't want to wait for a long time to read that things like that so I think that we would optimize and we try to get really good at figuring out based on things like user Baggies are voting user behavior like how do we pay the just the right amount to give the user a good experience without overpaying which then gives them

like a worse experience on some other site that they go to later one of the things that I struggle a little bit with this model is that you know let's make an example let's say I have a video I do some live streaming video and you know this is like a high you know an activity that you know takes a lot of effort and now I want to offer that ok people can get the HD stream and then they should pay more and then they can have a lower resolution thing and they should pay less so it's just some way to kind of differentiate between your maybe high-value services and low value services that are being provided yeah I

think with with coil it's slightly different from how you would think of like buying different tiers of content today because with the web monetization standard the user is kind of you can think of us like the user is almost opening the negotiation on price because they have a certain amount of money that they can send per second and so it's kind of up to the site than to say this is good enough and I'll give you the content or to say this is not good enough and you have to watch out you're like a lower quality version of the stream or something like that with payment methods right now the site tells you how much the content costs and then that forces the user to interact with it

in order to pay which means most of the time the users not going to pay at all so so yeah the user could you can still differentiate into tiers but the user would need to then basically buy a more expensive web monetization subscription or or or turn up yeah they have to pay more exactly yeah so is there like a slider right now on the coil extension where I can like you know increase my payment bandwidth or decrease my payment bandwidth so we've thought about a bunch of different models so right now it's a single fixed fee with a single fixed bandwidth but obviously that's like our Minimum Viable Product that could get more sophisticated in the future I think one of the things that we thought about

is allowing the user to you know on medium there's like this clap feature where you could kind of say like hey I really enjoyed this article so you could ask something like that where the user can kind of signal that this is a creator that I particularly care about or this is a website at I keep going to and so we might be willing to pay more for website that the user has previously given us feedback that you know they like another thing could be like the opposite of that where it's like hey I really I think this website is clickbait I don't want you to pay them anymore you know and it's like funny because it doesn't cost these or anything but there's still websites where we get the feedback that like no I actually actively don't want you to pay them right because I don't want to reward

that kind of behavior so if we get a lot of feedback like that about a website then maybe we'll default to a lower bandwidth or even like no bandwidth at all if it's literally like a abusive website or whatever it is you know like they're just clickbait you know another I think differentiator in the future could be that we could have different tiers of subscriptions right so we have like an entry level subscription which gives you access to certain types of content and then there's like a premium subscription which has like you know if you really never want to worry about bandwidth ever again you can get that and then like everything will just be maximum tiered like HD and so on I think what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a certain amount of interplay between the publishers who are trying to set

their price levels and then the users as well as their providers like Coyle who are setting their bandwidth levels and so you know we might look out there and say like okay publishers have these kinds of features at this bandwidth level and then this kind of these kinds of features of this bandwidth level and so we're going to introduce a new subscription that has a higher bandwidth level or that lower bandwidth level and so both sides will kind of react to each other that's how we imagined it could could happen and and because there could be because you just built on on web modernization which is a jesting JavaScript API to redefine and Inter ledger which anybody can join you also would have the interplay between

different web zatia providers where maybe maybe users don't like a tiered system maybe they just want to like how about have a different provider where they just pay as they go and they're they're okay with that then that web monetization ecosystem could could fit that in as well now if if Coyle succeeds right and if this works at a large scale then I mean you guys alluded to a bit right then you could expect that I as a website developer as a creator I now say I customized my user experience and I give like a better user experience I know some premium content or some other preferential treatment to people who

have this activated and not paying me basically for the data I'm providing and you know to some otherwise I do less at the same time and from user perspective I may say oh I I want to now join this web monetization thing and I want to pay my you know a subscription not just because I wanna you know I agree with some of the ideals so maybe I don't like advertising business model but because you know I get a better you know better user experience right I my websites work better now so is that kind of where you see things going and what are so can you give some examples of things that you hope people will build out if a coil actually sees widespread adoption yeah I

think then you actually built some apps that they're kind of used web monetization maybe you can explain what someone yeah yeah so a few of the sort of I would almost think that it's like the low-hanging fruit of like some pretty useful applications you could build one of them was file upload which i think is interesting because the way the way I did it testing out was like what if you upload a file and then the downloader pays to the uploader and so that actually means you could you could throw some files up there and then embed maybe maybe that content in your website like a video or something and then even if you don't have any programming knowledge you could do that as a way to make premium content that web

monetization users can access another one was a live streaming site where basically you could you can tune into a stream and so long as your streaming payment you're also getting stream video so that that obviously has some obvious uses of like you know maybe you have a just a twitch streamer or something or other kinds of streaming that that want to make sure all of their users are paid one thing I would kind of highlight is that right now there's sort of a set of user experiences that we're sort of used to right there's the the premium experience where I have to sign up I have to put in my credit card I have to you know get on board it and then I can finally enjoy

the premium experience then there's the ad supported experience where it's like you know it's free and maybe I don't even have to sign up but it's kind of like there's ads in my face all the time I don't really know if their privacy policy is gonna be very much in my favor if it's more in favor of the advertisers and that's just kind of like take it or leave it you know that's that's how it is and this almost creates like a third class of website where it's like once I am web monetized once I've set this up once I can go to a website I've never been to I don't have to sign up I don't have to pay even if it's part of us a part of my call subscription right I don't have to look at ads it's just an

experience that's designed to be as frictionless as possible so imagine like for a file upload website today they have like these fairly horrible ads with like the fake download button that you click and then it installs malware on your computer or you can sign up for an easy payment of like $7.99 you know and I'm like I don't use the site that often I don't upload files that often and so we envision that coil subscription would just be something that you kind of get and then it supports a bunch of creators that you like it also gives you a bunch of services like that like a file upload service you just go to it lets you upload infinite size files because the launch of the files the longer you spend on the uploader so it's kind of paid for it lets you download at whatever speed

you want because you know once again the larger the file the longer you're going to spend on the download and then it doesn't show any ads it's a clean simple user interface and that and just imagine like you just have this like less BS web experience yeah and that's what coil gives you for 595 that's my pitch I think it has some implications for privacy as well because if you imagine sites right now if they want to charge payment they need to pretty much like you said you need to sign up first they need to have an idea of who you are so they can write number that you're a paid user with web monetization you're just streaming payments while you're actually on the site and so they can see oh this user who's completely anonymous is is sending

payment so give them the premium experience but then you can forget about them once they leave yeah no I do think that's a that is a very desirable thing one of the things that stands out to me here is the way we've been speaking about this is right web monetization as this you know almost like fundamental new way of you know economic relationship on the Internet and at the same time when we speak about the role of coil that it very much feels like the role of you know traditional startup right like you made the analogy of Spotify and I as a user I pace I give my credit card information to Coyle I pay

you the monthly amount you guys have some you know discretion on I guess you know that the rate at which you pay out to the different web sites so it feels like there is some almost misalignment here in terms of this is ambition of this you know big open fundamental revolutionary protocol but then at the same time also of building kind of a traditional web startup like how do you look at do you see a tension there yeah so we basically I think it's important that along the way we are offering an alternative so I mean obviously I think for people to actually sign up for Coyle if they don't understand kind of what

the web modernization standard is or if they're not familiar with the inter ledger and these kind of things then it's not a huge selling point to them but I think it's really important for just the evolution of how this sort of part of the web evolves that we have a non coil way to do web monetization so we actually have some software that you can download on your machine which basically connect to inter ledger and in your browser you can go to web monetize sites and this software you're running will pay the site instead of Coyle and so that kind of means that you don't need to it kind of gives you actual credibility that it's not it's not just

Coyle because it's easy to say like yeah anybody could come in and do this but yeah you can actually do it yeah right now but so this like what monetization stuff is like separate so the coil product is specifically this like subscription-based idea where I pay you five dollars and you guys do all of it for me if I wanted to I can use you said minute in order to like you know load my own wallet or something of some sort and I can do everything by myself that's kind of where the differences think of it as like the difference between like you know Gmail orgy suite versus like running your own email server and I think one of the reasons that that's significant is not just because you

could run your own server I think a lot of people not going to do that but someone could start a competitor to Coyle and we're actually totally ok with that because we think that we can provide a good enough user experience that people will want to use Coyle and we're totally comfortable competing with someone else on on that and I think also I think there could be a lot of variety in terms of the kinds of models that people could try so we talked to somebody the other day who is thinking about doing like a token based model where like you actually have like a dedicated token and then that's what you're spending through intellect or web monetize sites and so there's like a lot of token economics involved with that we talked to someone else who wants to incorporate this in their ad network and

so you might look at that ads in order to pay for your web monetization usage and so are those competitors in a certain sense short but a lot of their users wouldn't be the right users to pay like a five dollar subscription right or you could think of like different kind of content bundles right the provider can choose what they want to pay for so one example I have for that is imagine if you have like a company and they want to provide web monetization enabled browsers for all of their employees they probably don't want to pay for their employees to go to like Facebook all day or like watch twitch streamers but they might be okay with paying for things like educational content news things are going to make

their staff productive and so someone could come along they could say like our web monetization subscription is specifically for you know paying for like for corporate use case right and it's like again not really competitive to it with what we're doing I mean so these things we may not want to not do in the future but like my point is that I think the system is a lot bigger than just one platform we spoke before a little bit about you know in the end if we have like success of coil or success of web monetization right you'd have like websites that build around it and users that you know specifically sign up for it but of course in the short term right like right now there are very few coil users right so as a website it doesn't

you know it's probably not worth to integrate it and then at the same time as a user they all know probably hardly any website or maybe none at all that provide you know like a better user experience if I if I'm using a coil and web monetization so it feels like this is very tricky problem where you need to have like significant scale on both ends until you really have a kind of economics at work well what is your strategy for getting to that point well I mean I feel like I've gone through this like a bunch of times now like when we start out with Bitcoin in the early days it was like you know I would go to people and people be like well what websites can I pay on with this and like I'd be like well right now you can pay

for alpaca socks at this family farm it you know in the US and people like oh that's cool you know and I think what you do is you just like find the people that are excited by the technology and they're excited by like this vision and yeah maybe you like the first couple of people embedded like it doesn't make that much commercial sense but at the same time it's like you put a piece of JavaScript on your website it's not like it takes you you know weeks and weeks to to do this and you have pretty much nothing to lose like worst case you don't make any money with it but you're also not really losing anything and then as you get like some initial users and we have like about 5,000 people on the wait list right now that's enough to

kind of get some initial feedback and get a better sense of like you know what do people what are people looking for I think one of the biggest piece of feedback we're interested in right now is like which websites would people actually want to see web monetization enabled so we can actually go to those websites and say look how you use this really one your content our users are really interested in your website and then also like been that alluded to we we signed a financing deal with rebel so we do have a little bit of X or P that we can use to incentivize websites to you know support web monetization and that kind of stuff so once we get a good idea of what our users would like to see we can go to those websites and we can make it happen so I think we have enough

we have all the pieces in place but it is gonna take a while to to really take off I saw on your website that you know you quote the coil plug-in currently supports YouTube and twitch but as far as I'm as far as I'm aware like YouTube in twitch have an enabled web monetization on their platforms yet so how do you guys do this yeah so I think that's an interesting one because like you there are certain platforms that it just has that should dominating position in the market that a it's not gonna be they're not gonna be able to or it's not gonna be relevant for them for a very long time I think it's a good way to think about it but at the same time they have a lot of creators that are sort of captive on that platform that really

would like to use web monetization and so I think a lot of similar systems have done similar types of integrations where we just use a browser extension to say like okay well if somebody goes to a certain YouTube channel and that YouTube creator verifies with coil we can actually make that transaction happen I don't like it as much because it's not an open standard like unless YouTube actually goes and and becomes what one position enabled the open standard users I'm not going to be able to pay unless they talk to the default server etc but that's just a limitation of using these closed platforms like if it was up to me I would definitely say like people should move off of YouTube on to like a more open platform where they can

actually put like a piece of JavaScript themselves and have control over that but you know you got to deal with the world that you live in right I know YouTube doesn't have like a donate button already but I believe twitch does right that's right and so is there any thoughts of like you know maybe integrating twitch donate as an ILP plug-in we actually have already because that's actually how the integration to twitch works is that basically you can go to any channel and if they're a twitch partner then or a receiver on inner lecture is going to be accumulating these packets which they then settle out essentially to that twitch streamer by donating in their channel with however many bits it's

accumulated bits as twitch is Chris yeah that's the twitch that's really cool I guess that's a little bit confusing with the bit and Bitcoin but yeah and the interesting thing is that because it's it's done all over the top so we didn't it's not actually through twitch adding anything we've just basically done this over over what they expose to regular users yeah so what what happens from the streamers perspective is like let's say a bunch of qual users go watch their stream after a while this bot will join the chat because it'll be called coil underscore twitch underscore bot and it'll just donate bits and then pop out again oh yes it's almost like it's almost acting a little bit as like a marketing tool as well because people

like what the hell is a coil twitch bot is donating yeah we've definitely got a minimum limit to prevent spam yeah because I don't want it to be like the nuisance but yeah you could be dropping in you know one cent every couple of seconds that you maybe some people wouldn't appreciate yeah yeah just one point very briefly on this I did actually activate this on the episode and YouTube channel so if you if you're gonna if you go to coil comm I mean I guess there's a waitlist at the moment but if you do the you know get a Chrome browser extension then go to the any of the our epicenter videos that you should you should see it in the extension how it's donating tiny little bits of money to to epicenter

yeah and I know that a lot of some of you viewers might already be on the wait list so we actually just started working through the wait list and starting to invite people off the wait list actively so yeah if you've been on the wait list you know just give it a bit more time we are trying to get through it as quickly as we can yeah so I guess one more question before we start to close up you know in the web monetization like the intersection of web monetization with crypto I think the other big name that most people are very familiar with is the base of attention token and they seem to be kind of going for a similar product to you guys and you know Brendan Eich and everything everyone knows these people and so how do you see your platform I'm comparing

with break the attention coach Tim have you ever talked to them about like integrating with like the web monetization work and IOP work that you guys have already been working on yeah so obviously I can't talk about like the specifics but I have reached out to them I think that they also care a lot about the same things that we care about like privacy openness and so on so I have some hope that eventually both will use the same standard I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon I think they have a lot more traction at least in terms of like browser users so I don't know if they open to to working with us on on a standard I think ultimately long

term I think the standard is going to be more powerful I think with IntelliJ you're not tied to one particular token I think that that's gonna open it up to you know a lot of a lot more communities to get interested in this if you think of like ether a theorem community Bitcoin community like our proposal is something that is much more aligned with like hey if I just want to use Bitcoin I can just use Bitcoin and I can still use all the technology that that coil guys have bill so I think that's one aspect that that's the difference another aspect is that we should really try to make it a browser API so it's a direct communication between the website and the browser so it doesn't like with

with bright right now at least you verify with Bryce comm so it's like it's actually talking to that their their server and also of course it only works in the brave browser as opposed to any browser and so we think that it's a little bit more of a just a neutral standard a little bit lightweight of a standard I think it's the best way to say and I've tried to I try to be like you know nice because I hope that one day we can work together so maybe very final question what does a road map look like what you hope to you know at what point do you have to be 12-month so now and maybe two years from now yes so I think sort of next stop is is premium

content because that's saying it's obviously a very crucial part of making a coil subscription work and that's thing we haven't actually explored that much yeah actually just to add to what I was my previous point is we're actually able to pay out in real time thanks to IntelliJ which i think is another kind of big difference do or some of the other solutions out there is that if I'm a website I don't have to know like who is this provider that the user is using because I'm actually getting money through my provider in real time and so I can provide a premium content based on that and so if we want to obviously unlock that I think that is actually one flaw that may be brave and flatter approach of paying in and dividing up the subscription is that you don't

actually know who gets how much until the end of the month so in the time that you're actually browsing the site the site can't tell how much money it's getting right because it could be more or less yeah let's go so yeah so premium content is probably next up and we've done i I've also been working a lot on like tools for that and and developer tooling to to make more advanced sites with premium content but I think that's think pretty important and then also just letting more people off of the wait list getting more creators on there but at least people from a lot of different communities to see who's gonna who's going to be the most enthusiastic about

adopting this because could be maybe it'll happen to be like gaming or music or write or YouTube creators yeah if I think that's a big ass because it's like we want to have features on call comm where users can tell us like you know vote for websites and and like suggest websites that that should be what monetization enabled because we want to have that feedback of like where people's interest this interests are and then also I'm gonna personally be spending a lot of time trying to talk to different people about this so like I'm out in LA for the rest of this week I'm actually taking part of the team with me and then I'm gonna be in New York next week and I already had like a series of meetings here in SF and

the goal of all of these is to try to talk to as many different kinds of creators and people in the creative industry and and people involved with monetization as possible to really try to get a sense of you know where their pain points what's working what's not working and just trying to understand that that world up better I saw recently a partnership announcement or something or with like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that like something that he goes to see about that sure I mean that's a little bit of a personal like passion project of mine there's something that started while I was still a rebel we started talking to the Gates Foundation I would say like three years ago some like that and they were they

have to kind of identified a lot of the same things that we identified when we were doing research on into ledger basically around the real deep problem in payments is a lack of interoperability and the way that it manifested for them was they would go into a country and there would be these different payment providers and they could like help the incumbent the biggest provider but then they're kind of enabling a monopolist as soon as the project ends they might crank up their prices things like that or they could work with some of the smaller providers but now they're just helping to fragment the market and so now you've have like merchants that have like three phones and they're in their shops just to like accept different mobile payment methods and things like that and so they started to identify that like if you want to

have a frictionless easy user experience you want to have low cost and you want to have a high level of competition in of payments you really need interoperability it's really what's what the reason that data transfer has gotten orders and orders of magnitude cheaper while payments have actually gotten more expensive over the last 20 years is because that lack of competition around interoperability right and so we started doing a project with them called mojo loop which is basically again you know people's eyes might glaze over but it's a national payment switch it's an open source national payment switch so it's something that a country would deploy and then basically allow its banks and other payment providers to use it and so

long story short we've been involved in this project for three years it's gaining a lot of traction there's a lot of implementations there in discussion now unfortunately nothing announced yet so I won't spoil it yet but I think that I see a lot of potential in that project and so one of the things I wanted to do even though I have a new company you start up I wanted to continue to work on that project and so thanks to the Gates Foundation they made that possible so myself Adrian who I mentioned before and some other people here on the team and others are also helping with that project and continuing to drive that forward and it's just something that we like to do cool well thanks so much for joining us today of course we'll have

links people can learn more about Coyle and check it out and yeah I mean one of the cool things it's working already so right I set up the teapot and you know I was on there on a YouTube channel before and now there's a little bit of XRP that was received by the episode and teapot so yeah that's that's pretty cool that you know it's actually working yeah so thanks much for joining us today thanks so much for having us was a lot of fun yeah yeah so what do you faults on you how did you find this conversation honestly it was actually pretty interesting you know I guess like you know my first thing that I would really say is like you know it's kind of pretty brave in a way I would say that like you know they're kind of like

really jumping in to like building a product right away kind of like you know I'm like I mentioned during the episode the whole like Union Square Ventures blog post about like you know the myth of the infrastructure phase where you know you don't want to be stuck in a period for years where you're just building infrastructure well building products and I feel like oil just like it's kind of like an example of that like idea of really taken to heart where they're like yes we understand that the ILP ecosystem is kind of like very immature but like you know we're working on that but the same time we really want to just like jump in and like build a product to show like oh look this thing actually has like a real use case yeah and I mean the thing that just really stood out to me is that this

you know actual product you know life in a short time and the user experience pretty it was pretty neat and and easy you know that being said I do have sort of wander I do think there's a little bit of an awkward fit in a way where on the one hand you have this idea of almost like base layer Internet Protocol and infrastructure right so they they're talking about you know web 3 stand no not the w3c standard and in the browser and you know this fundamental fundamental ways of how the internet works and at the same time almost a sort of business model approach which you know it's more like disqualify or

Netflix type thing so I I do think there's some tension there and I'm really curious how that's gonna play out once coil you know moves ahead and gains a bit more traction and users yeah absolutely I also did think that like you know I think ILP is this like very very like broad protocol that has a variety of use cases like you know you could use it for interoperability in a way you could honestly just use ILP as a Dex of sorts you could use it for micro payments and they really seem to like homed in on the micro payments aspect which honestly to me seems to be like a interesting choice considering there's a lot of like projects in the space who are already

kind of like pushing this micro payments idea like lightning and write in and all like a lot of the layer 2 networks and I think I felt like what it really makes ILP unique from most of the layer 2 networks is its focus on interoperability and I kind of found it interesting that they chose not you make that the focus of their product yeah that's a great observation I didn't even think so much about that but I think it's really right but yeah in any case I think it will be exciting to see what what comes out of coil and certainly is very strong team so I'm looking forward to seeing what they built in the long term so you know we mentioned during the episode that like when we started we actually turned on the episode plug in on the hour

epicenter YouTube that was like I think 2 days ago so no you want to give the listeners an update on how that's going since hardly anybody uses coil I presume not much has happened right because you'd need to have a coil user and you know they have all these people on the wait list that goes on the episode a YouTube page and then we would start earning some small amounts of money but what was interesting was that you know when I turn all in coil and then I went to the the epicenter Channel and you see like all this like tiny tiny amounts of money going to our account and then I kind of leave it open and then you know like 2 minutes come back it's like Oh which made like 2 cents and and it's interesting to like notice you know even

instinctively the this almost desire to I kind of gain the system that then I realized oh I'm like basically kind of is this defrauding coil so I'm you know for an industry that thinks very much about you know having a game theoretic like strong incentives and stuff like that I think that's you know isn't such a could be an issue there down the line oh and I guess another actually one of the I think my big one of my biggest takeaways from this episode that I guess I didn't really didn't register to me maybe because I just didn't do enough reading but was this difference between like web monetization versus web payments so they talked about like web payments it's sort of like a pull where

like the content creator or like the website is requesting money from you and you're saying like you accept it and say like ok fine I want to pay you while the web monetization is almost like a push payment where like the user is the one that has this constant stream of money going and you know I just I was actually kind of super excited about like this like web payment stuff but I'm actually honestly a little bit skeptical about web monetization just cuz see what I see is like you know we talked about like you know what if like different content creators want different amounts of payment for different types of content right so what is the users supposed to do is there gonna be like a slider in the coil a brat like extension that allows you to like change the amount that's being

broadcasted but then if you haven't that then now you're kind of like from what I understood from the episode was like the one of the main benefits of web monetization was this lack of need for user interaction but it seems that now we're bringing back the user interaction and maybe it'll be easier if we just stick to like a singular web payment standard rather than like monetization plus payments ya know I think that's a good observation it is it is a very interesting and unusual concept this idea of basically extremum money to the you know the web and all the website you visit well yeah anyway let's let's follow a project and see what will happen spivot cool thank

you guys all for listening thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicentre podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you're there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us the guest or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps me behind the show and we're always happy to read them so thanks so much and we look forward to being back

next week [Music] [Music]