How NFTs can power interoperable memberships

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] welcome to web3 academy it's the spotlight the doer spotlight and today we have with us julian genes2 i hope i said that right julian you can correct me if i said it wrong uh and as always i'm here with my co-host kyle read head what's up guys how are you uh and just a quick intro on julian before uh we lead you in we had a great chat leading up to this and uh julian's got some funny stories he might share throughout this podcast um but julian

has been a software engineer for 20-plus years uh he founded superfeeder which he then sold to medium in 2016. uh he then joined the medium team as the lead engineer for a few years and then left medium to found unlock protocol which we are super stoked that he did uh because if you guys out there have read our web 3 report that we produced at the beginning of 2022 you would have seen that we called that 2022 would be the year for nft memberships uh as we believe that that is a a big part of the systemic change that web 3 is allowing uh so really excited to have julian on the

podcast today i also just want to mention one more thing that i pulled together in my research that i loved is that uh julie and i heard say uh at a um presentation that he did that he believes that the open web is the best invention that mankind has ever put out which we fully agree with as well and web 3 is really going to allow us to uh build on the open web again in a way that we haven't for the past 20 years julian welcome to the podcast yeah thanks for having me guys and you did a great job with my name so thank you thank you for this thank you we're canadian so we got a little bit of the french and you have to right every time i fly air canada i'm just amazed by how much work gets into making sure that

everybody has at least a french version which is great so let's let's jump right into unlocked protocol i mean we're so excited about the potential of this protocol so for the listeners julian why don't you just walk them through what is unlocked protocol and maybe focus a little bit on the problem that it solves absolutely um i mean you said it right unlock protocol is actually a protocol for memberships as nfts so that's kind of the the two second pitch the problem that it solves is something that is very close to my heart and you mentioned earlier i i did say and i will repeat that the the web the internet is uh man's great greatest invention uh for one reason i think uh and if i mean i'm

sure a lot of people have read um i've read the book called sapiens where basically the point that the author makes yuval makes is the idea that what makes humans different from other species is our ability to collaborate and i feel like any invention that allows us to collaborate better is obviously going to make us you know better all together and for me the internet is clearly at this point the invention that allows us to collaborate more and better than anything we've done so far this is i think pretty obvious for anyone who's lived through the pandemic and kept their work were able to feed themselves get food in some cases like our like us we live in the us away from home i'd say stay in touch with our families and friends it is pretty obvious that the internet is in

that way magic as the again the way for people uh to keep working and keep collaborating i don't want to say working but like um living together uh as a collaboration tool and the one thing though that i've realized over the years you mentioned superhero before and medium then is that the the business model of that collective brain of that invention that we share which is mostly attention is detrimental it's creating the wrong incentives around what kind of content gets produced what kind of content gets promoted uh what kind of information gets out there i don't have to go full politics but like it's pretty obvious that when there's a lot of misinformation on the web uh our um democracies or not so much democracies like the countries in which there is uh you know autocrats is not

getting better like it's hard to find accurate information and the reason why it's hard to find sometimes accurate information is because the unaccurate information has a economic advantage over the accurate one because it creates more you know outrage and is basically more easily monetizable so i do think that this internet has a business model a business model problem because it uses attention but i'm convinced that over the last 10 plus years we've slowly moved to what i call the membership economy where now it's not so much that creators are being paid based on how much attention they're able to steal but how much value they're creating for their fans their members you know the people in their communities and that's pretty obvious if you think it's if you think about stuff like patreon like sub stack medium but even like brands like you think the new york

times for example is something that is kind of mind-blowing they're going i think close to 10 million subscribers uh which means that they actually serve these people rather than serving advertisers and i haven't looked at the latest numbers but like they now make less than 30 in ads which completely changes the dynamic of how content is being produced and for whom for whom content is being produced so that was kind of a long tangent but yeah the goal the reason here for why doing unlock is like i do think memberships are becoming the main business model for the internet um and as a software engineer as somebody who really values the idea of open standards in the open web i think we need an open protocol for memberships and that's what unlock is aiming to be thank you for sharing that and i want to

get more into unlock protocol itself and um and like how it all works and and what this looks like first though i was reading your website um and i think you guys redid your website it looks like well done by the way yeah uh yeah thanks and one of the things he said is your members aren't a commodity stop allowing platforms to treat them like one um i thought that was a very interesting line can you just explain a little bit further on like what that means and i guess sort of touch on how unlock changes that yeah absolutely um for web 3 in general yeah so if you think about membership on platforms right like um on facebook it'd be somebody who likes your page is a member of your community practice though you don't actually know who these people are you just know that they're a number

oh there's like 572 people that like my page i have no idea who they are i actually don't have a relationship with them i just know that someplace inside the giant facebook database there is 572 rows that say hey these user ids like that page that's what i call a commodity inventories like it's there is no actual relationship there is no there is no actual um interaction between these two these two entities and all of the interactions that are possible are mediated by facebook so for example if i got that many page fans on my page i post a story well there's no guarantee that all of these people that have liked me or like my page will ever see that story that's kind of the thing that we're trying to solve with unlock and we'll talk about how actually technically that works the idea here is

like as a creator i deploy my contract and then all of my members have an nft in their wallet it doesn't go through a platform it doesn't go through something else i know that they have an nft in their wallet and they know that they have my nft in their wallet as well and so that's kind of that relationship now is is is i mean tangible i guess we're to say this about like nfts but like it is actually practical in the sense that it's a members card in their wallet and that is represented here and i know this exists and i know now i can go anywhere on the web or even in the physical space and if somebody can show me their nft i know they're a member of my committee i don't have to go through you know facebook twitter or whatever apple

google or any of these things does that make sense completely yeah yeah absolutely and so basically what it is is instead of purchasing through i don't know stripe or something on a newsletter and then i mean if anyone's ever tried to have a membership site and try to connect across multiple platforms it's the biggest pain we run a marketing agency we work with only memberships and newsletters and it is insane to try to do this in the web 2 world so this is why we're so excited about unlocked protocol you basically you buy a set of t and it can just integrate into any application uh on the internet now not any yet but eventually so can you just sort of talk about yeah definitely and i want to give an example here because you guys are on the call and you see my screen unfortunately not everybody sees

this but like i'll tell you this i've got a membership on my little blog uh technical it's using gatsby which is a static site generator um and you can go there that membership is five dollar a year you don't have to buy this but it's just to explain uh some background here what i do with these members and i have about 150 or 160 members at this point what i do with these members like if you have the nft in your wallet well you can read the full post so think of it as a paywall at the same time that nft itself exists outside of my blog so here on that video call uh people pre don't see me doing this but you have to imagine at the bottom of the screen i've got all of these little icons here and so think of this as kind of a bunch of stamps each

of these icons is one of my members so the members that are on my blog now exist if you want outside of my blog they have the nfm wallet and i can actually bring them with me whenever or wherever i go online so i go on a video call i use a virtual webcam and i kind of overlay their icons here so if you're looking for an energy at home and listening to this on on the podcast like think of it kind of a weather guy and i'm able to actually overlay some icons on my calls and these icons are just the you know the what we call the um uh the emoji ah there's a word for this anyway the blockies sorry it's it's uh the blockies of their ethereum addresses because i actually know who these addresses are and i can actually create that little

little interface here does that make sense yeah so so what does that allow for the members so for them it doesn't allow much specifically in that context except that if one of them is really proud to be on my call they know that they're going to be on my calls uh because any time i have a call with my webcam i use this virtual webcam and i overlay all of my members so it doesn't do much for them but it's kind of think of it as like yeah when you go to the museum and you see you know the donors wall you see all of the big donors you see their names doesn't do much for them it's kind of the idea here like that's not the donors world but it's like my my fans i don't their fans but like the members of my

community are here and so what's really cool about this is the idea of the cross-platform thing so now i can actually also have a little uh discord server just for my members and they can come and basically the only thing that they need to be able to do is connect their wallet and then the discord but will say hey do they own a membership to uh julian's blog yes they do i'll give them access no they don't i'll kick them out and one of the go for it i'll ask my next you go ahead okay so one of the one of the things that i'm thinking about here is typically when someone signs up for a membership and then they want to go into let's say a discord server you can give them a link because they've purchased and then they can join in but now

there's when they cancel discord never knows that they cancel how does this work with unlock let's say i cancel my membership does it all of a sudden like remove that nft then from their wallet and now all of a sudden they can't access discord and all the paywall content yeah so there's actually two different things so if they cancel so first by default each membership in with unlock has an expiration date so when you become a member of my blog it's for a year 365 days from the minute you purchase so if you get it now you're going to get it for a year if you got it a month ago you only have 11 months left what happens is that you could also cancel your machine hey i don't want this anymore and at that time what you end up doing is not quite burn the nft but basically bring

the time off of the nft to zero and say the nft does is not valid anymore same if it happens if it expires because it's the normal life then it it is still on training still in a membership but it has a timestamp of zero that means that it's actually not usable anymore to connect to website and now each website each application would do something different my blog basically will not give you access to the content if it's expired this i would not show your icon if you're there but if there's a discord box the discord board could say hey okay i know there is they have what nft i know their nfc is expired so i'm not going to give them access i'll remove the role or maybe they will actually keep you in it based on on the fact that you had the membership once you're

you're fine keeping that role for for some time does that make sense so each application decides of how it want to enforce i'd say the benefits uh to people right so what's the let's let's let's dive into some examples of how other than you mentioned interoperability you mentioned i mean this ability to acknowledge your members um i think that the core of this creating a better relationship with customers right exactly right exactly so how else does an nft allow a business or a creator or an artist to create better relationship with their members yeah so you can imagine all kinds of different benefits that uh an artist a business could offer one

thing that i think is going to take off and be massive is uh commerce benefits so i mean the biggest membership of all in the us is it's called amazon prime it's a membership people pay for this every month it has pretty clear uh uh you know commercial benefits like you get free shipping on all of your things um i do think that you know my local butcher shop uh that i love here they don't have one yet but i do think at some point they'll have a membership and say hey you know what you pay you know 50 dollar a year whatever that is you support your local business which i think a lot of us want to do and you get you know uh once a month you get a free sausage i don't know if that makes sense but that would be the thing uh and in

creating that local economy and say hey the people in my community that are members of my butcher community are supporting me with that you know payments uh that they do for the membership but also they they get some benefits and then you can imagine something like pretty cool where it's like oh now the baker next door say you know what if you're a member of the butchers i'm gonna give you a free baguette or i'm gonna you know uh once a month uh you're gonna be able to come taste my new kind of bread and so you kind of create these as you said better relationship with the people that you care about not just these randos on the internet in some way uh which is what we've been basically with the attention economy and the other thing that comes to mind for me is uh is access because

access is such a big part of creating loyalty right you know your earliest fans your earlier supporters deserve access so you know in your in your butcher example maybe only members have access to a certain inventory that he has or future eggs on the weekend it's actually a real thing like there's a market up there and they have ostrich eggs and and every time they went out like at 9 30 bc it opens at nine and a half hour later there's no more it's just like it would be a great thing to do like you know what yeah just for the people that actually support me well i've got ostrich eggs i'm still selling them but it's only for the people that are close to my community and i think maybe it's an incentive here yeah now is there okay so there's definitely

ways that nfts can provide a better relationship with the customers is there also a way that it generates additional revenues like in the web 2 world you sign up for a membership and it's just plug in your credit card and you're paying whatever it is 10 bucks a month that's kind of it it's your only option nfts definitely have a different way here because it's also an asset how does that work can you kind of dive into that absolutely so as you said nfcs are assets uh and we've unlocked they're actually programmable assets so there's a ton of things that you can do with the nfts themselves my assumption is like some of them will pretty appreciate in value so for example example you can have a scenario where the on my blog i could say hey right now it's unlimited but i could have like the

og membership only 100 people or 120 people and these will get some benefits on top of the other guys and so if it's limited if there's kind of a fixed supply you could it comes from scarcity that would incentivize people to say you know what yeah i definitely want to get that one because it gives me access to x and y z i don't know if there's something valuable for my blog but you can imagine a business can say hey you know what if you got one of these 100 ogs uh you know once a month for the lifetime of your membership you can access that or this which could be actually a great valuable thing another reason why i mean another point of about the fact that they're programmable is the fact that we've built in a royalties system so a lot of people

think oh and if these are cool because there's royalties it's kind of a lie though because the nft contracts don't have anything to do with royalties it's just you know there's just a transfer function but in the context of unlock we've added the time i said earlier each membership has time attached to this so if i transfer my netflix membership to kyle and i've got 25 days on my membership well i my membership gets expired or i don't have it anymore and then kyle gets bumped by 20 minutes 20 days i think i said on this membership what the creator can do in that center and say hey cool people can transfer the memberships back and forth for the time off of their membership but every time they do so we burn a little bit of time so say julian has 20 days we burn 10 so kyle

only gets 18 days because there's two days that have been lost and so if we go back and forth enough times we're gonna have to renew i mean even if we did just one we're gonna have to renew earlier the membership which means that it creates actually an additional income for the creator in that scenario uh creating incentives um um on that front that makes sense it does very interesting well i think one of the best examples i've seen of someone using unlock protocol is um his name is croissant on twitter i don't know what his actual name is but yeah they have bakery dow and they have two tiers of nfts one is like you said scarce there's only a limited amount the the other one's unlimited and the scarce one they actually receive some of the revenue from the unlimited ones and so

they they actually can can um er by being a member of that tier you can actually earn revenue and so that is an asset that i can see increasing plus they get dividends from the unlimited one plus then you know they had to pay for something to get access to this membership and get all the benefits of that too so it's like it unlocks which is why i love the name unlock protocol so many different levels and like yes uh capabilities in a membership which is super super interesting let me tell you another one that i think is really cool that i haven't seen implemented actually somebody gave me the idea last week so i'm hoping that somebody uh takes it and runs with it uh instead of the the uh public smart contract we have the concept of hooks and for anyone who's a software engineer the hook is

the idea that you can alter the behavior of something when something happens right um and so one of the idea that the person gave me is like could there be a referral program where once i remember i got the key we call that i think the key to the lock so i've got the key to the lock if i send a link to kyle and a link that is special let's say hey kyle can purchase a membership from that link but if he does julian's going to get a little bit of time as a reward off of the lock so basically i've got 30 days of something i'm inviting you kyle to join kyle purchases the 30 days now the lock could automatically maybe give me back money but more maybe more interestingly in some way give me one or two days worth of access on top of my

existing 30 days and so that creates kind of an incentive now for me the member to convince the next members to join because now my membership is going to be extended in time and maybe i'm going to earn enough time that it's worth now selling my time to j in that scenario that makes sense right it does um okay so a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs marketers creators probably people that could use this a lot of our clients as well by the way um let's work on this together yeah absolutely how does so is this like a protocol that is like no code so someone who's not a developer can come in and use this or do you need to have a developer that like plugs this in or is it kind of a combination it's a combination of i mean it's basically we're in the middle state

right like it's it the goal is to make it so that it's it's no code in the vast majority of cases is like for example we have a wordpress plugin today if you have a wordpress blog which is the biggest cms of all i'm sure your listeners know of wordpress you can deploy the lock through our dashboard no code to write you have to have a crypto on it but it's fairly straightforward and i'm happy to make things easier and better if people have feedback on how to make it better and easier and then you get what we call the lock address or smart contract address that you can hook into a plugin on your wordpress page and then that's it you don't have to actually write code you hook it in the wordpress page and now you can actually on every page or post you can actually even point

to blocks and say this block is going to be available for everyone and this block is members only and you can actually easily do that without having to write code the wordpress integration is one that is pretty deep it's not perfect but it's pretty deep in some other context you say hey i'm a software engineer i want to create kind of a custom application and that's now you might have to write some code our goal is to have you know plugins uh apps or how you each platform has these uh concepts into every single piece of software that you make my dream would be that at some point you know instagram says you know what you want to post that picture post it for everyone or post it just for the people that have the membership to that blog put your lock address save publish and then

instagram does the token gating in that scenario so you almost want to be like the the zapier you know zapier just integrating projects with everything that's i think through apis but that sort of idea that's sort of idea exactly so it's not about publishing content like zpr is good at like you know uh triggering events and stuff it's like getting like membership right it's like how can we identify i was a member of the community and it was not and then give them access based on the fact that they have a membership token in their wallet and who are you seeing more of your customers be right now are you seeing it more as the entrepreneur creator or more as the app creator who wants to build their own app on top of online so it's interesting we're definitely seeing a lot of creators come to us hey i'd love to use

unlock i'm myself not technical how can i do this so our goal this year is actually to build a developer community a bunch of you know community of like say our goal i think is 100 but i don't know if it's a large enough of a software engineer developer that have created a little piece of code that integrates unlock into an existing kind of application or an application that they created themselves so our goal is to create that kind of developer ecosystem in the same way that you know you want to create a website uh there's a million people that can do uh react or many people that can do you know wordpress and can do this for you so our goal is to get a point where there is uh i'd say a game at the end of the year 100 developers that are using unlock

have used unlock um to deploy memberships into existing application or creating plugins okay so this way we can have so actually a good example of this we have uh somebody a couple weeks ago and i should mention we have a grants program we'll talk about this a bit later but somebody a couple weeks ago say hey i'm going to build a slack integration so slack is this i mean i'm sure everybody knows of slack at this point but basically quitting say hey i'd love to be able to have slack channels where only members of my community can actually post content and so they're creating a using the slack api creating a little it's not a bot but it's a little integration that allows you to token gate to um you know a slack um channel just to people that have the right membership in their wallets

interesting are bigger platforms like i don't know facebook instagram twitter do they have an open api enough to do this or those some do have things and i can't tell too much but some do have things um that we can work with some have stuff that they're actually working on uh and hopefully integrating unlocked directly we actually had a bunch of very very cool discussion with large tech platforms that are like yeah this is cool we'd love to support that uh one way or another so we're gonna look at we haven't talked about governance yet and that's maybe one of the next discussions but like yeah uh our goal is really to be everywhere we're not trying to own the thing like maybe that's one of the difference with you know web 3 and web 2 is the idea that you can move away from

platforms to work protocol or back to protocols um right and so in practice if you deploy your lock today and you put it on on your site or on your podcast actually there's a bunch of people that use unlock for podcast creating you know episodes that are have a free version and a premium version in some in some way if you do that today you can do it and i or anyone would never be able to shut you down like that's the point of it's like http right you create your website nobody can shut it down here's the same idea like you create your membership well you know what i i cannot prevent you from doing it or i cannot force you to do anything with that interesting i have one more feature question and then i want to zoom out a bit and pick

your brain as like as a founder entrepreneur building in web 3. i want to zoom out a bit but first one of the best things about memberships is automated payments right you plug your credit card in and then users just like it just takes it off every month and i don't know what percent but a large percent definitely don't even know that it's happening yeah which like i don't know if that's the best thing but like as a entrepreneur as a business side yeah you know actually it's funny because i i agree with you that it's kind of sometimes challenging and there is definitely a bunch of companies that abuse this like oh you put your credit card and then it's impossible to cancel you have to call them and it's just like right uh hard um but i also know that from a user perspective there's a ton of

people like hey i want to support that for me i want to support that creator i i'm not going to show up every day i'm not it's okay that i that they charge my card every month even if i don't go there and there's a ton of these like in my i mean if i look at my stack subscription it's most of them i guess at this point and it's fine because i care about the supporting that creator and then maybe i'm going to read a story a month and we're talking about like you know five dollar a month like i i mean you guys are in canada in the us five dollar a month uh you know it's like a coffee at starbucks at this point it's not much so many right we have so many subscriptions now i don't want to deal with like going and going yeah let's

keep spending on that one my netflix and my amazon prime and my cable bill and what i mean i don't have a cable but most people do uh so like yeah that's frustrating so or that would be frustrating so to be clear yeah going back to your question about like uh recurring because right now in the in the state of things and i shouldn't say right now because it's actually not the case anymore as of a couple hours ago the core protocol doesn't have automatically recurring memberships so basically you get a membership for a month a week a year depending on what the creator decides as the base period and then you have to show up and click again to purchase we are currently upgrading the smart contract to the next situation and that's going to include a function to support automatically recurring memberships and so without

going too deep into technical details because i don't know how your audience how technical your audience is but like as a user i'd be able to approve a lock a smart contract say hey go spend 12 times 5 on my account so i approve the contract to spend that much and then the contract itself has inside of it the logic of being able to withdraw from my balance five dollar for 30 days and then it has also the economic incentives for someone else in the ecosystem anyone to submit this hey i know that you're going to prove that thing to to withdraw from their balance i'm going to trigger it so julian gets fired or withdrawn from his balance that goes to the lock julian gets the

membership but me as the person who submitted transaction get a little reward either in the form of a little kickback in gas or even governor's token and we'll talk about this a bit later that allows now people to ins to be incentivized and we say people it's probably going to be bots to incentivize these uh you know we call this mining india because it's mining right this uh transaction execution to renew everyone else's memberships interesting have you ever looked into superfluid or diagonal finance yeah streaming payments yes is that something you guys are looking to build on yeah absolutely so super food and i uh and i and us have an ongoing project to actually make it easy for people to integrate a super food and a lock the idea would be you start the the

the stream uh super food at that time that grants you a membership to the lock and then when the stream ends when it's shut down the membership is taken from your wire so that would actually be a perfect way of doing this thing in this kind of things cool we have tony from diagonal finance who's they've built on top of superfood coming on in in a few weeks in the podcast as well um but yeah thanks for clarifying that um that's that's super interesting and glad you i've been in your dad's discord for weeks or actually months saying we need automated payments we need to uh it's coming it's coming it's literally coming like i we're on winky we're live on mainnet i think we're going to be live later today i need to approve one of the multi-transactions and then polygon and and uh and uh gnosis chain are next and

then optimism um by the end of the week i think we'll be live as well there we go there's the announcement you heard it here first i think huge news to be killed this the smart contract upgrade we'll still have to build the infrastructure around it like on the checkout room to make sure that it's but you know step by step we're getting there and that's really exciting cool i love that jay any other questions on the features if not i want to zoom out a little bit no let's uh let's yeah let's let's keep moving forward i think everybody just listening can tell how excited kyle and i are we keep interrupting each other because we both have so many questions and i'm glad to answer these and we can definitely do a second follow-up episode if you guys want like it's yeah we may

need to um okay so you actually just mentioned a few different chains you mentioned optimism i think you mentioned polygon i think you're built on mainnet like ethereum and i think you said osmosis chain um so just a quick question there like first of all what blockchains have you built on and like what what made you decide on where you want to build or like what did you think about you and your team what did you guys think about and what were like the things that made you decide here or not going here like can you just walk us through that process absolutely so first we started building unlock about three and a half years ago so a long time ago uh i mean technically we shoot the first version about three years ago um on mainnet because two years ago yes it's cheap on maintenance um at the same time

um if you i mean we're building smart contracts three years ago there was not like five different platforms on which you could actually build smart contract that had a developer ecosystem ethereum was pretty much the only one pesos was kind of around the block uh didn't have as big of a developer ecosystem despite its french roots and i'm you know rooting for for the french people but it's it's this um um so ethereal maintenance was the first one that we went for and then about a year and a half ago while gas prices became oh actually almost two years ago gas prices started to be wild and that's where it was like okay well clearly the use case of a membership that's you know one two five dollar on main net is not going to work much if people have to pay five dollar in gas 10 yes 50 in gas uh

for the for execution of that transaction so that's when we start looking at other chains we quickly shipped on a gnosis chain which is uh used to be called x-die which is a nice little evm compatible chain and one of the benefits also of sticking to the evm ecosystem is like the same smart contract can actually run on both chains later on we've added polygon um this fall i mean last fall sorry we added binance chain which is you know uh evm comfortable and that's pretty much the only thing it has for it but don't tell that and then we've added optimism as the first l2 that we want to support we're adding more and more our goal is to be anywhere that is evm compatible because it's i'm going to say easy but you know we we have a clear way of doing this

we'd love to be able to add other ecosystems as well like solana like you know near like cosmos like block stack it's challenging though because we would have to rewrite our contracts and our goal is to make it so that as a creator i don't have to think i can just deploy on any chain that i want but it works the same anywhere and so as much as it would be really cool to be able to say hey i'm going to deploy this on you know on solana it has to work the same for both evm users people that have a metamask and people that are native to the solenoid environment across the board and for now we don't have a solution to this hopefully we'll get there because again our goal is to be everywhere but it's it's tricky to say the least

and right for for our listeners out there who are who are builders and who are thinking about building on a chain i would love to just sort of get your insight into what what influenced your decision your team's decision or how how do you recommend that a builder approaches thinking about which chains to build on and what order and you know it's i think it's a tough question a lot of people are facing absolutely it's definitely a tough one and one that we're trying to uh be more uh thoughtful about so to be clear i think the first point is to think about like what are you trying to sell like a membership that is gonna be you know a thousand dollar a month or are you trying to sell you know a little membership to a media site

if you talk about a thousand dollar a month then it's high enough that you might want to have something kind of i don't say secure because the rest is not not secure but you know bet on the fort knox of dvm custom which is mainnet and it's fine in a scenario that people are going to spend you know 10 20 50 in gas because that's nothing compared to the thousand dollars that you're gonna spend for the membership itself so i'd say you go there um similarly if you're trying to do something where i should mention this like all of the memberships are nfts if you're looking to optimize for something that oh i want the nfts to be visible in nft platform like open c well you need to pick something that is supported by open c and so in that scenario you might pick mainnet but you can also pick

polygon polygons i think a decent alternative to mainnet gas is much much cheaper like in that you know it's not even a cent worth of gas to get a membership uh it has other interesting characteristics one of them is proof-of-stake which makes it a bit better on the environment i mean significantly better on the environment than mainnet minute will be proof-of-stake um i don't say any day but hopefully any week now which is really exciting um because it's going to be better for the planet at the same time it's not going to get cheaper it feels like if anything is actually going to get more expensive because it's going to increase demand for it but in practice picking polygons that you have something that's proof of stake much cheaper again don't want to say not highly secure but a little bit more centralized at least

uh than uh what ethereum mainnet is i mentioned gnosis chain i think it's actually a great option as well unfortunately openc doesn't support it but it's a great option maybe more reliable than than than than than polygon probably because polygon is also in high high demand right now so it's kind of a bit harder to uh to do certain things but gnosis is definitely a good option the last one which i think is the only real long-term option i'd say is the so-called l2s because i mean i again don't know how technical people are but like you think about gnosis or polygon there's side chains they're not l2's in the sense that they don't share states with the mainnet but optimism arbitram zk sync and a bunch of others are so called l2 so technically they are

sharing the data space if you want with your mainnet so you actually get the security of mainnet while at the same time get much cheaper costs because basically a bunch of transactions are again i'm not using the right technical term but like bundled together um rolled up i guess is the right term uh to make them a bit cheaper um um on chain the challenge with these l2s for now is like they're still not as popular people don't actually have the currencies to pay for gas on these things um and also they are a fair bit centralized at this point there are only uh one sequencer which is only one entity that actually submits the transaction not ideal uh my bet is that these are things that are going to i mean my bet my hope and bet i think

that everything will be fully decentralized uh and i think both of the you know at least arbitrary optimism which is the one that i know a bit more of have clear path uh toward this uh but obviously we're we're definitely at the edge of the technology uh when it comes to uh you know adoption and things like this so long i mean short long long story short i'd say mass membership these days would pretty live on on glasses chain or polygon uh very expensive ones um uh could go on mainnet uh and if you really want to kind of be forward thinking and looking at like the future uh for looking at optimism or arbitrage might actually be the way to go make sense interesting yeah thank you for sharing that i think it's uh you see so much on twitter of people

just fighting over where should we deploy on this should we do this on this chain and it's so frustrating to watch it on twitter but that's some great and great insight for everyone one thing that actually one thing that should clarify like um even though we're on a lot of these networks and our goal is to be on all of them we really want to abstract away the complexity i should also mention cello i think it's a good alternative and that's one of the network that we're going to focus on next um one thing that we're thinking a lot about is like how can we make it easy for a creator who has deployed a membership on a chain to still have members that are connected to another chain so basically you end up on my blog it's using gnosis chain or xdi and you have your wallet configured

to polygon is there a way to make it that you pay from your polygon connected wallet where you have some medic for membership on my blog even though my blog is in a different chain and and i think there's a way um that we're going to work on in the second half of the year but like and if there's a way how can we make this as decentralized as possible because obviously there's going to be an intermediate a bridge of some kind something that's going to pass a message from a change to another and then there's going to be people that have economic incentives to actually pass these messages around but like how can we build a system that now abstracts away the complexity of having multiple trains so that users can easily get memberships on one chain even though they're connected to another one because

it doesn't matter to them what chain they're on or they should be on does does that provide a lot of risk like smart contract risk or bridge like obviously bridge risk from chain to chain is risky from l1 to l2 like ethereum like to roll ups to arbor trim to optimism not so risky exactly um that's also the same thing for this yes exactly so the idea would be uh there would be a significant we'll talk about this maybe a significant risk on like mainnet two side chains because as you said the bridge has to be in some way trusted in the middle and yet we have ideas on how to make this a bit secure but then in the l1 to l2 world or l2 l2 we might actually be able to do that in a in a way that would be not risky at

all or at least significantly risked the way to think about this though uh the risk on the bridges oftentimes is the fact that the um that they host where we see this they they hold assets while they're on the other chain you know the energy that i think all that is like this uh little toy that people have where there's like you know um how you call these like uh a little bowl on both sides and then you put yeah it says it's cold but basically it's like think of it like like two uh little balls with a string and then when one moves it stops uh and then the other one is pushed and then it comes back and so that's how bridges work right basically right the asset is on one side it comes back to the middle to the bridge and then yes it is the other side it's

actually still on the bridge with what we're thinking as a design is actually it wouldn't be like this like you would get the nft on on on the other chain it's just that you pass a message saying hey i allow someone to get money from my on the one side so that they actually can mint the nft on the other side on my behalf and so there's actually no money sitting on the bridge in that scenario it's just a message being passed uh the money would actually be stored in some other contract where it's not a bridge uh technically speaking i don't understand camp bridges why don't they just burn it on this side and then re-mint it on this side and now you're not holding anything over here in this bridge uh i mean it's like the question is like usually you can't burn

it because the bridge doesn't have the the right to burn a thing right like it doesn't actually actually doesn't have the right to mint on on the side so it would have to hold it and then transfer it back to an address when it goes back so that's the challenge okay we're getting we're getting into the weeds of this yeah we're getting into the woods it's like we've thought about bridges is wrong this way we're thinking about a bridge as uh for example like the way we think about bridge collectively right now is like all the erc20s go to the same bridge i think in the end we're gonna have each erc20 is gonna have its own bridge it's gonna manage its own balances on the website and then it can do exactly what you're describing which is like minting and burning on either side and not have

to hold anything in the middle right doesn't make sense yeah yeah it does i mean i hope someone figures it out because there's so many bridge hacks right now it's just insane yes um okay let's pull out of the tech side of things for a second and you've mentioned governance a couple times and i think this plays into the question that i have on your website it says we're building a public good together our mission is to create a protocol that belongs to the users creators and builders not unlock inc can you explain what that means and how that's possible or or what you guys are trying to do there yeah absolutely uh putting back my open web hats and i did work a bit with the w3c i actually wrote a specification called web sub which is way before crypto

governance of protocol is hard uh and protocols are they're not platforms let's say earlier like the platform is facebook there's apis in terms of service and facebook can any dates change how things work and they do right as a matter of fact protocols are different in a sense that they're collectively agreed upon like nobody can arbitrarily change http tomorrow and say hey this is how things work now and if you don't agree with this too bad for you this is something that is kind of collectively agreed upon by many many people through a governance body and the governance body in the context of http is w3c right it's the world wide web consortium that's where people have discussions about how the web works one thing that crypto gives us is actually a new way to do these governance um a new way to say hey this

is how a smart contract works and julian or nobody can change it arbitrarily it has to be agreed upon by all of the collective users of the protocol in that way so what we have inside of unlock is pretty simple is we have a governance token that actually gets minted on every transaction so every time somebody purchases a membership there is new governance token that are minted i'm simplifying things a little bit but that's the idea think of it as airline mice new flight new miles new membership new governance token the amount of token being minted is using a bunch of uh thing like a log curve so even though there is more and more there's fewer and fewer more i guess it's the way to describe this then everybody actually receive these airline mics these government second can show up

and submit proposals there's actually currently one on the on the dow to say hey i want the protocol to evolve to support x and y and z i myself cannot force an upgrade to the protocol without the agreement of the community does that make sense so that's the end goal we also have a little bit of a treasury that the dao can spend based on what the community wants and so it really is the idea that unlock inc like anybody else will just be a token holder with some tokens to vote on the governance on the dow but will not have the majority of votes and will not have the ability to force or prevent a decision from from happening it has to be collectively agreed upon by the users of the protocol so is there an unlock token i haven't

seen it unlocked yeah there is okay there is one and it's on public markets it's on uni swap uh at this point um this is not uh you know investment advice or anything like this uh it's it's really our governor's token it's it's it has you know no i mean what's wrong i don't say no value because it's extremely valuable in the sense that it allows you to govern the protocol but it doesn't have any expectation of profit i should say in that scenario it's a way to join the governance and help the ecosystem of people that are care about unlock make decisions and improve how some things work in the ecosystem and who are those that are earning these tokens you said after every transaction every time someone like buys a membership is it the

people that created that lock they get the token or yeah so we have the concept of what we call a referrer which is basically the person that implements the protocol on their website can decide what that is so basically in most cases you would say hey it's me i implemented on my website it's me but i can also say hey you know what um the developer who did this is jay i'm gonna put jay's address and so even though john purchased a membership on jane's blog jay is going to get a little bit of tokens in that scenario so it's kind of a third-party address that you can actually pass on the purchase transaction the front-line will actually just hide that for you to make sure that the reward goes to the implementer of the protocol in that scenario so you're sort of like delegating your voting rights to

x person that you want to have them kind of thing exactly right and you think that ex-person in my idea but it could be a new one is the person where she created the the implementation of the protocol on the specific website so the wordpress plugin says hey this is the guy who did the wordpress plugin or it's customizable i could change it when i use the plugin myself but like by default it would be the guys who created a wordpress plugin as a way to say hey you did this you should have a say in how this thing works right and you said that unlock dao i don't know if it's called unlock do you call it yeah it's actually called it out yeah unlocked okay it has a bit of a treasury how does it earn from the treasure does that just unlock inc gave it something

exactly yeah unlocking when we when we created the protocol we minted a bunch of tokens and our goal is to distribute about 80 of these tokens keep for ourselves 20 persons so even though there's always more we also minted a bunch so that we can give away as grants i mentioned earlier like you know the guy who does the slack plug-in um actually he's a grantee there's about a 20-ish grantees at this point people that are building integrations uh for platforms that they care about that they know that they use you know the web flows at the wall the uh the wordpress i mentioned the drupal the ruby on rails like anything that you think would should have an easy way to have unlock in it apply for a grant uh receive a grant and the idea is like now you've got these tokens you can do these things we also

allocated a bunch of the token to the dow directly say hey it's it's kind of you know the dow now has a budget i guess that it can spend for things that they that it wants to uh spend for cool so let's just take a step back before we wrap up here because i know we're almost at the end of time i hope you have time for one more question here okay great um let's let's zoom into the future um what do you think the future of nft memberships looks like five 10 20 years you picked a timeline you know once the ux and the technology stack is significantly approved where do you think we're going yeah i think we're going to go in a world where there's memberships for

everything uh whereas i mentioned you know the local butcher your favorite musician uh your conferences that you attend to the piece of software that you play like the game actually has a membership um that's what we're going for in the same way that there's a website for everything at this point i do think that soon there's gonna be memberships for everything once there's membership for everything that's also how a lot of creators a lot of communities brands actually make money i mentioned amazon prime is the biggest membership of all it's not the case anymore but it used to be the case that the amazon profit was exactly the amazon prime revenues it's kind of fascinating it's like amazon as a company is a membership company that's how they make money they happen to sell goods with the membership but in practice they just make money off of

amazon prime um so in the long i mean in long term like not too long like two five ten years i do think we'll be in a world where there's gonna be memberships for everything you'll have easy interfaces to manage them all the same way that you have a web browser and a search engine to actually manage websites in some way you'll have an easy way to manage all of these membership we call that a keychain basically because it's like keys to locks so you'll have a little ui where you say oh i can see all of these things you can easily cancel swap you know i say oh i don't want this uh netflix membership anymore i'm going to swipe for uh for hbo plus membership for a couple days well you can do that so that interface allows you to do these things in that way

you so you're saying you'll be able to swap your membership with you mean someone else like there's a marketplace for memberships absolutely that's really cool i never thought about that before yeah of course interesting i think and what's interesting is i think a lot of creators will actually enjoy that they'll say hey you know what i'm going to create a membership that's fairly expensive because i don't want to be selling memberships every day i'd rather have like you know 100 patrons that each pay me a thousand dollar a month uh and there's going to be corporations there's going to be businesses i know i'm getting a hundred thousand dollar budget every month and these are the ones going to resell my membership in smaller bits to other people that want to access my content and so you end up in a world like now as a creator i work

for my end community but i've got these people that are selling my membership on my behalf in that way but what's really interesting is because these memberships also can go up in value because they're an asset yeah people are going to want to get in on memberships early and then ideally they they learn or doing whatever they're doing in that membership and then the value goes up and now they want to sell it because it was like an investment so the value goes up or the benefits actually increase like one thing that i i think is like oh you know my blog right you get my blog maybe at some point i'll do a party and say hey you show up at my party in my place if you have the mnft membership you can come in otherwise you're going to pay five dollars like you can imagine a music

band it's like you know there are musicians they have the membership you can access the streaming music on their website but now they do a big show next year in central park and they say you know what anyone that is the membership we didn't plan ahead for this but anyone that has membership can actually come backstage with us so can you think of this membership that i keep on giving it's like oh cool and you benefit that i really like i didn't expect this for me that's how the value comes from it's like i trust you guys as as as a creator i mean i trust you guys as creators as brands i want to be part of this because i know i'm going to get more and more benefits over the over the years rather than just like oh this is a one-off thing i've unlocked that content and

then i have it and it's not worth anything anymore to me anymore and both sides win then right both the the creator wins and the member wins because it's it comes back to that relationship that you talked about at the beginning it's not our current relationship where our relationship with the web is purely based on attention now our relationship is directly to the person that we care about and we can support them and then they can support us and give us opportunities absolutely yes it's uh it's an exciting future you're building absolutely and it's a lot of work so come join us i mean you guys but everybody else like come join us uh we have work to do but we do think that it's actually a a very um exciting endeavor i'd say

yeah i'd say i'd say a really noble cause uh let's uh let's wrap up with uh just an opportunity for you to give your show you know you mentioned come join us anywhere that uh people should be looking finding you finding unlock protocol anything coming up that you want to tell people about uh absolutely so unlock protocol.com is the right place we have a discord you're more than welcome to join um github if you care about looking at our code we all work in the open so pretty much all of our issues and pull requests are there for you to open some we always always love when somebody submits a bug fix even if it's a small typo it's always very cool uh follow us on twitter i guess uh unlocked protocol.i mean sorry twitter.com unlock protocol one world one word i am myself at uh ubra

but o u v r e boit.com you can get the membership on me what's fun though about that membership i didn't mention earlier you don't have to pay for the full year if you follow me on twitter you can get 30 minutes worth of membership for free so just follow me on twitter and then claim the 30 minutes and that lets you read one or two articles and you can do that again uh every time you want to read more uh but yeah so that's me and then julian51 on twitter because all of the other ones were taken it's not true but june 51. we'll we'll put all those all those links in the show notes uh for everybody uh i i just have to call out there i've never heard of the 30 minute free trial that's uh that's a new one there yeah

the 30 minute trial it's that's great i think that's actually a way of i mean the way i when i when i came up with that idea was like the membership itself cool the base has like this much time but there's nothing that actually prevents me from giving away a little bit of time to people who do something for me so if you follow me on twitter i'll give you 30 minutes um if i mean at some point i'll have other ideas of stuff to do but i don't i don't want to you know spill any secret yet cool fantastic well thanks so much julian really appreciate the time uh and uh yeah hopefully we can get you back on and do a part two uh in the next six months and talk more about memberships when uh when we see uh more use cases

and yeah i mean what an incredible roadmap you guys have in front of you absolutely and really excited to do one for the you know the web feeders uh i if you guys are interested let's let's chat about this because i think it can be fun and we haven't talked about all of the cool things that are possible but there's a million really fun things that are possible to do so i'd love to do that with you guys awesome thanks so much julian thanks julian thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions

where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one