Turning onchain activity into a social network

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jay bird joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead and we believe that on-chain block explorers are going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web3 you know what Jay I think you're pushing on that one I don't know that block Explorer is a change in the world all right maybe I was pushing but I will say they're pretty freaking sweet and so we have the founder of zapper who's on the show today and we're talking all things on chain which I think is really cool and interesting zapper is a tool that I

used way back in the day when they first launched it was kind of an eye opener to me to really like see like to visualize what was happening on chain at that point it was mainly just like my portfolio but now if you look at zapper you can visualize a lot of things there's a news feed it's almost turning to like a social media platform which we talk about a lot in this episode so I've been watching kind of the Journey of zapper for many years and it gave me my first aha moment of looking on chain and it's interesting that you know years later now we have a an analysis service with Webster Academy Pro where that's what we do is eyes on chain but zapper's just bringing in a totally different way and I think that's the thing I like about this conversation with Seb is you

know he's thinking very far out there very meta about the space and he's thinking far far ahead on where the space is going and trying to bring the on-chain world to life for us all to visualize and see and so that was really the base of this conversation and really interesting in my opinion yeah I think Seb brings his financial his true tradfy experience was really where he started his career worked at some big Banks and then he went into sort of early web 3 worked at Shake pay which is one of the largest centralized exchanges in Canada he worked at small which is a sort of a d-gen nft game community and then he founded zapper yeah thing I don't even

know you know it's a game yeah metaverse you know so Seb brings like that traffic experience but then he's also like a pure web3 native d-gen and so he is really constantly as a Founder trying not to get stuck in the okay let's just build what exists in web 2. he is trying constantly to think about okay what do we build that is something new that's different that doesn't even exist yet which is like as a Founder to have a vision for that is so difficult which is why Seb just spends all this time on chain and allows the users to tell him where things are headed and he talks about how they

manage that as a team strategically through from the origin story of zapper which is fascinating from its initial use case to what it is today and then we lead into this conversation of on-chain Social and on chain literacy and what is a block Explorer and the future of box Wars just a fascinating conversation and one that you know really I think opens your eyes to like not where we are necessary right now but where we will be in the future and so maybe at the end of this episode you'll also be along with Jay and thinking that blockchain explorers are going to change the world who knows but you can be the judge of that as you listen this episode but before you listen this episode we've got to take a quick second to wait but before we do this hang on I got a quick

announcement Kyle it's web3 Academy 2.0 long we're in week two right now we're in week two of web3 Academy 2.0 if you don't know what web3 Academy 2.0 is you're missing out make sure you go to our Twitter where you're going to be able to see what is going on this is a multi-week road map where we are launching our new brand and we're moving our business and our content on chain and there's an opportunity every week to collect and to participate and if you do that there might be some things coming to you at the end week two is all about something is happening on lens so you're going to want to see what is happening

on lens we are launching our new basically we got fish we lost our lens handle and our new lens handle is now live and you can go and interact and collect and if you do that as I said some things might be coming your way at the end so don't miss out on the second week of the roadmap and please participate all the way through with that let's hear from our sponsors before we jump into the show the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially Robin creators of their

worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to the profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing a us from Banks web 3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-soverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web3 Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we've

partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today did you know that web3 users lose billions of dollars every year due to phishing attacks if you've been in the space long enough then you or someone you know has probably Fallen victim to one of these scams this is why we've partnered with wag your guardian in this digital Wilderness wag is a tool designed to help you spot the difference between malicious links and legit ones with wag you can rest easy knowing that every link you click on is safe this is an absolute game changer for web 3. as part of our partnership with wag we'll be using their platform to create verifiable links to our community feels safe knowing that what they're clicking on is the real deal if you don't have a

community to protect and you're just looking to protect yourself wake has you covered with safe stops which tell you exactly who created the link you're clicking on head to the link in description click it see that it's verified by web Theory Academy and start protecting yourself today just use the code free 1000 when signing up and if you're among the first 1000 users you'll get free access for life Seb what's up welcome to web3 Academy podcast stoked to have you here today thank you I I'm pretty excited thank you for having me today is the the all Canada show we got three Canadian d-gens all on the show Kai and I mean obviously are always repping Canada but it's always nice to have a fellow Builder and founder from Canada from Montreal

french-speaking part what's the better City Montreal Toronto oh in Whistler man Whistler in the winter I'd say Toronto although they both kind of suck in the winter because Montreal is just like next level cold like trauma's cold but Montreal is even colder but in the summer I don't know they're both they're both good cities but you're right probably wester's better I think I can agree to that we need a web 3 Whistler it's just got such a ring to it I can imagine like a logo w3w we were at a conference out here we get all the builders together we're gonna make it happen but that's not what we're talking about today today we are talking about zapper we're gonna dive into really you're gonna start off with the origin story of how you built

zapper but I'm going to give a little context zappers today is 25 people on the team they've raised 17.5 million dollars you got over 200 000 monthly active users one of the best apps in web 3 that I think a lot of us who are active in the space are using on a daily basis to really understand what's going on in our wallets and what's going on in other people's wallets you guys are supporting 11 chains so kudos to everything you've built over the last three or four years I think since you started zap or Seb but let's go back to the beginning what was the origin story how did you first why did you first start zapper and I know that you started to solve a problem what was that problem

you were initially solving said it all started so I on board in crypto or got converted I'd say in 2017. with the discovery of Ethan I didn't even know there was another crypto currency aside from Bitcoin and so learning that there was this other cryptocurrency that you can build stuff on top of really excited me and it kind of completely changed my view on what it was like I I knew what Bitcoin was was and I heard about it before but it wasn't particularly interested in like the whole political and monetary aspect I do think it's really interesting and important but as a individual it's not something that I'm passionate about so when I I discovered ethereum I kind of really couldn't stop thinking about it after and in 2019 I was working at chickpe you know one of

the first employees and helped build the mobile app and while I was there I was really kind of just diving into the ethereum ecosystem and started hearing about this thing called D5 it's probably in mid-2019 that it really started researching and playing around with my metamask wallet and hopping into different protocols and investing in at the time you know there's the main website that people will go to to kind of get their front page view of D5 was D5 pulse and it was a ranking of all the different V5 protocols by total value locked and honestly at the time there's probably like 10 protocols the total value lock was maybe like 10 or 15 million it was

really like nothing it was like maybe the VC's money that would help power like the early versions of these protocols I know I was kind of playing around with them and yeah putting my money into the apps the different apps and the first kind of problem I stumbled with was how do I see my assets like I know this is on a blockchain that's fully transparent but I have to individually go to Every website be able to track my balances and it was something that was like really annoying and honestly was pretty mild if if I even talk at that point to another you know anchen user defy user it was a pretty mild problem there's only 10 protocols so you had to be in all those 10 protocols or you know to really have

that problem and most people were using maybe one or two and does it justify building an entire app to surface your balances into Apps when you can have a spreadsheet or something probably not so it seemed very mild and not super important as a problem to solve but to me it was pretty important because I was spread out across a ton of different apps and what's interesting is like I had startups before and to me it's always been about identifying a big problem a market that is very small but has very large potential and back back in those days like to me it was obvious that D5 would be bigger and so knowing that you know there's we're super early and default

get bigger there would be more protocols there'd be more depths there'd be more places where people can put their money and to me in fact like gave me all like the kind of confidence and to building this and building like the first MVP and so that's what I did like during the fall and that was why I was still employed at chick bait I started building the MVP and in early 2020 that's when I I launched it so maybe like a month later like I didn't spend too much time basically my point was like am I using it myself was it help me and then if yes then why don't I just share it with other people and so that's what I did so in January shared it in the synthetics Discord Ave I believe and then began talking to people and and

seeing how much how much of the things that this this was and I think one thing that was really important at the time is finding an angle that you can help users with and the first angle that I could sell zapper through was as there was a pool on unisog V1 that you could pull into and earn snx rewards so there was one area where you had this composability between two protocols so uniswap and synthetics and to me that was the angle it was like all these people on synthetics that put their money in uniswap and stake it you know it kind of disappears and then you have these rewards on top so being able to see those rewards occur in real time that was like the entire angle and that's how I kind of leveraged it early

on and it worked people that started using it and when I say it worked it was like five people and that that's enough like honestly that is enough like if those five people come back every day and use it like that's the best thing that can happen yeah versus having like a thousand people on one day and then never using it again like to me that was the biggest thing and yeah I knew I hit a nerve and I had never experienced the feeling of being pulled like as if the market was pulling me instead of me pushing the market for something to happen and that's like the biggest kind of change that happened from my previous startups it felt like I was always pushing and

pushing and pushing and trying to force something into the market here was like the market just pulling me it's like people were suddenly asking me for new Integrations you know this new protocol and as they were popping it was very kind of organic what really helped us in the early days of defy was how come like how composable Defy is like users are not users of a specific protocol there are users of multiple protocols because all these Legos are connected together and so as you have these Define Network effects kind of grow so did the network effects on zapper too because you know all these Integrations are all kind of connected and so it's kind of like this perfect storm brewing that we have the

right product for the right Market at the right time right before like that big D5 yield summer and everything well I never expected to happen so quickly but it did it must have been pretty cool for you to go East I mean you said there was 10 apps at the time and you're like but I think there's going to be a lot more I mean now that we speak there's like I don't know how many defy apps there are like hundreds if not thousands at this point across many different chains and so like you nailed that thesis right and that's not something that Founders typically do and so it must feel really good to been like yeah I had this idea it was super early like you said small Mark at a time but potential to grow bigger you just went and built something and it worked for those 10 apps but then

your real thesis of like this thing really only works out if we have thousands of apps like that came true over the next couple years like that's got to feel pretty good no it did feel good the fact that it was kind of obvious to me at the time didn't make it feel as good because I kind of knew it was going to happen right right you'd be like Oh I'm 80 sure and oh yeah I was right that feels good one thing in particular and it's something that Sam Altman talked about in y combinator is look at the users and those like there's those early power users and you can extrapolate a lot of behavior in that market and to me like the early D5 users were like addicted to DFI to a point where they abandoned their entire traditional Finance kind of life like

they merged their life on chain and even if it was like a very few amount of users you could see it like play out and through the behavior of those early users you can see a lot of things where it's you see it's not necessarily hype and you can kind of see these these growth areas and then more people kind of getting the virus if I can phrase it that way yeah the virus that spreads so fast and defy did spread so fast and your timing was amazing and I want to get later on in the show if we have time I'd love to talk about some founder advice of maybe touch on how do you set yourself up to find product Market fit like you did some of his uh for sure luck but you mentioned a few things we

might touch on those later but right now okay so the first version of zapper was this defy use case right as you said you had this need but then zapper grew and changed into more of a general block Explorer so I want to talk now about what are the most popular use cases now on zapper and then let's lead into a conversation of like understanding block explorers and what's happening on chain and where do you see that going in the future because we get so excited about you know it's so early like it's so so early and so I'm actually curious let me ask this question is there a comparable

in web 2 of what a block Explorer is like I don't even think there's a comparable yeah that's what's exciting is that there's no comparable just like there was no comparable to Google or you had to kind of pull or like you know it's a library but really is that like analytics is kind of the comparable in web 2 sort of sort of yeah like for data that's like the closest thing I can think of but that's the marketing exclusively right like let's go on about some of the other zapper use cases but there is no comparable there is no I think that's the point right which what's you're building in such a new space so okay Seb tell us about the current use cases well I can talk about kind of the transition into like this D5 portfolio

tracker into the the block Explorer because in the early days I was doing all the Integrations and interpretation and so I got to be like on channels read the chain very early on and see what was there and see like what the fabric of the chain is one arid to me that kind of became more interesting is how all these categories all these boxes that we create don't really matter in the launching world there's no concept of defy on chain there's no concept of a digital collectible like directly on chain we kind of build these abstractions or categories but there's a lot of depths that and assets that sit weirdly in the kind of overlap or in the in between

like nft fi one thing that was surprising while to meet early on like I was 100 in the web 2 mindset this is like a mint.com that Aggregates all in your way your bank accounts and you have one place to track your portfolio and realized it was kind of like an anti-pattern to what blockchains are because one of the number one things people did is there was a feature where you can manually add addresses and look at your portfolio people were using it to watch other wallets and it's not something you can do in web 2 you can't plug in someone else's bank account and see what they're doing and so almost like immediately people were using it for a more social angles like looking at you know someone

else's Facebook profile in a way like looking at their account profile and it became a lot of identity early on rather than personal portfolio tracking and with time a lot of people started investing in other different things aside from D5 and you know the defy user base kind of shifted a lot of people started investing in nfts some people just never listening at these but like the variety of people started increasing and the shift of zapper became that you're it's not actually a portfolio tracker it's your profile page that's how people use it and we're surfacing your identity and just so happened that our first use case is

surfacing your portfolio tracker but like the common thing across all that stuff whether it's surfacing nfts Dows following people looking at other accounts it's all about making the blockchain readable like when you look at an address what is the reputation what are the nfts what is the history what that what are the mistakes that I counted that what are the good things it all becomes about enabling people to read the blockchain in a more easier way and then once that shift happened it became like the path forward became much clearer because you know zapper could Branch out and two directions and one being like the pro portfolio tracker for D5 finance

and the other one being a retail block Explorer and then I was like well okay hypothetically what if we pursue like the pro D5 portfolio tracker route then I started thinking about the different features that would go into there and you'd be like oh you'd have taxes so so you have to have your transaction history but that transaction history needs to be interpreted and then you need to understand more about the different apps you're a part of you could add nfts you could have be a part of you know and so building that kind of became also building a retail block Explorer and so that's why you'll see like you know even some are of our competitors kind of realized this like a portfolio tracker in web3 and never

leave becomes a block Explorer because it what it does is enabling to read the chain and why would you get keep reading the chain to just your account if in one feature or one little setting you can allow it to view others and view nft our review and assets so the whole single player quickly kind of crumbled out as we were thinking about zapper long term and so 200 000 people every month using zapper what percentage do you think are using it for the portfolio tracker versus what are the other buckets of main uses that people are using it for two main buckets I'd say and I would say like 2.5 number one is checking how you're doing so

how's my portfolio doing second one is more of like the discovery side and the number one feature that people do on zapper is actually not look at their own portfolios look at other portfolios and so that's the side that's being increasing with time and the other one is more of the user agnostic way of exploring so oh no I guess it's pretty user driven but everything related to the feed or the traffic or what's happening currently that's another book if that I know it's still a relatively small but you know we're working on different features but the whole angle like I'd say the two things is how am I doing so enabling people to read their assets and their Pro file and then being able to see other accounts and what's interesting is you I kind of you know

was thinking about it there's a lot of like interesting history repeats itself and I saw a lot of like commonalities with Facebook early on where you know it's like you build your own photo album for yourself and you know you build I went to this University so you build up your identity and then you also look at other profiles there's no wall there is no all the other things and in a similar way right you know it doesn't repeat but Rhymes there's a lot of this kind of happening currently too well and it makes sense because I think especially when you compare it to social like something like Facebook because originally when it was just D5 stuff you wouldn't really think of that as a social thing right you look at your portfolio you look at something else

before and it kind of leaves it there when nfts came along in Social tokens and all these other things that give you access to communities or like are just you buying a product whether it be via an nft or something else but all these things can happen on chain now it becomes something social because these are all interactions that the way that I think of this I love when you guys launched the feed so for those listeners that have a new zapper the feed is like think of like your Facebook feed where you just like scroll and you can see your Twitter they've done that but for blockchain and so you can start to see the interactions that people are doing on chain which now that we do a lot more on chain than just Financial things it kind of makes sense because like when I

think of what happens on social media today you buy something you generally then take a picture of it then you go share it on Twitter or on Instagram or whatever what this is doing is it's just literally taking that transaction it's showing the image of whatever the nft is and automatically goes on the feed and then I don't know if you guys are going to put like commenting and all that kind of stuff where it actually becomes a social thing around that transaction but I think that is is definitely where the space is going and I'm assuming that's what you guys are thinking and seeing it as as well yeah 100 you know there's two sides of like reading the blockchain it was like the photograph aspect like what does it look like right now what does my account look like and then there's all like the kind of

traffic part of it where it's not necessarily of like what this building looks like if I take a Sydney analogy and the blockchain is a city it's not necessarily what this building looks like it's what's the traffic around this building or this restaurant looks like how many people are going in going out who's going in who's going out that I think is is really interesting taking your example of like web 2 one thing that excites me about blockchains and transparency is we've kind of lost the concept of tangibleness and permanence of the traditional web when you know I'm scrolling through Twitter I get kind of uneasy when I scroll I refresh my my Twitter and I get a whole bunch of other posts it's like what am I

actually getting and right now we have this hyper generative super personalized you know feeds that were presented with and so it's a bit like everyone has their own personalized City and so you lose that sense of reality like what is actually happening what is the actual truth everyone has a different truth whereas the blockchain you have this one Foundation that everyone can look at to any Observer it looks the same just like how when you walk down in downtown Toronto you don't see something fundamentally different than I do but when we translate those experience to Facebook and Twitter I have a whole different experience of crypto Twitter than probably YouTube like you see different things that is kind of scary because we haven't parted that sense of

permanence and intangible kind of reality into the visual world and I think like blockchain blockchains bring that back and so it brings more of like that City like feel where you have this feeling of being in a town center and walking you know in downtown Toronto and meeting people and see what they do versus being in your own Echo chamber and not actually being able to tether that or anchor it to something else when you see yourself or when you see zapper now on what it is it used to be this thing that would just kind of track portfolios you thought maybe we'd do kind of the pro trading type portfolio Management Service instead you've almost gone this like social route do you see your competition in the future like social media

companies if I'm thinking future five years down the road 10 years down the road as everything goes Unchained is zapper trying to be a social media platform essentially or where do you guys see it going I'd say like yes and no no in the sense that probably looks drastically different than what we expect of social media yes in the sense that like ethereum is a social network it's people doing things and coordinating around different things and so if you make the blockchain readable to everyone you kind of make those things or make the intrinsic attributes of it they're more obvious like more out there transparency is more obvious because now it's readable you literally see what other people are doing you understand

transparency you aren't told that it's transparent and so you make these things obvious you make the people that are doing things obvious and so to me it does become a social network just because ethereum is social network right but I could see it even becoming a network of content like we are used to today because for example we're starting to use a newsletter service that puts everything on chain right like things like paragraph and mirror you have things like lens which is all your social content is now on chain you have podcasts nfts everywhere now is becoming a thing so it's like all of our content it looks like Anyway is trending towards all going on chain but we have to go in a different platform to see all that

content whereas and again I don't know if zapper does this yet or will eventually it could all aggregate into our zapper feed and now all of a sudden you're scrolling in your zapper feed and you see an nft article you see a podcast you see a post from lens you see you know whatever and so like I could see it starting to morph into a social media like feed for sure yeah I don't know if it looks like a social media like feed but definitely along those lines where there's a sense of there's things happening on on chain and then there's like discussion about those things that happen on chain like one one of the things that I see and I think about you know when one thing about like our vision long term and like what upon it looks like is how do people

hack products to serve a purpose that they weren't like intended specifically for and one of them is like people use Twitter or you know crypto Twitter as this town center to talk about things happening on chain they push ether scan links open C sales and ft sales to gather there's the city of things happening and then we push what happened to a place where we can gather and talk about it and so I don't know if long term it looks like a traditional social media feed or it looks more like a you know what you'd expect in a city where you kind of gather in a more kind of I want to say permanent way but there's this sense of of tangibleness versus kind of personalization what's so

interesting is most of what we have brought on chain is financial assets so most of the activity that we are interested in looking at on chain and also a result of who's in the space right now everyone in the space is an investor by default basically even if you're not trying to be so what that means is what you're interested in is like okay you're interested in what are people buying what are they selling right and that's where everybody if we were in a town center we'd all be gathering around a store basically hey this store is really hot right now or this store is really hot right what is going to happen is like that's just a financial economy that's been brought on chain what is going to happen is the attention economy is also going to be brought on chain and that will happen

through social media and as we'll be able to start to see okay maybe it's not what people are buying in selling but we can see where is the attention currently and we'll be able to start to see okay everybody's attention is on this podcast or this newsletter or this movie or this piece of content because they're all engaging with it on chain right so we're going to start to be able to as you said Seb I love the analogy of a town center and the way a town center flows is it's not just monetary and buying and purchases it's also where is our attention going it's also where are we spending our time are we going to this bar are we doing this activity if all of our tickets are on chain of going to a

concert well then we're going to start to be able to see oh wow here's all the people that went to that concert so it is very difficult to think about what does that look like from a social perspective like how do you bring that all into a social World it does feel it's not something that exists right now it's something being totally new so what do you guys do do you guys go do mushrooms in the woods once a year and like try to figure out like something that we don't know like I'm really curious like strategically how do you plan for something that does not exist yeah there's so much to unbundle there I'll start first and perhaps this is a

contrarian opinion but to me everything is a financial asset we're trending towards hyper financialization and I think it's just not in the way we expect it I think Finance tend to associate too much of what traditional Finance is to me what Finance is it's the language of value and risk and that's something that's intrinsic to everyone everyone can talk that language a kid can you know trade complex narratives on Pokemon cards without even realizing it I mean it's our way that we broadcast value and speculate and we speculate because there's part you know we want to see things in the future and so we speculate about things that we want to bring in the future to me that's that's something that like blockchains enable like in in the sense that

speculation has a bad rep in the sense that often It's associated with you know these flipping and but I think like there's like long-term speculation where you can align people with a similar you know say for example I'm very passionate about AI art I like to speculate on it because I think long-term it should be important and I think it will be important so I can find other people and so my actions on chain represent me broadcasting value to the world that I think this is something that's important and I think that's something we'll see more of and so what are the shapes that that can take I think it can take like multiple shapes but you know what one part too is the stock market is exactly a mechanism to allow people to speculate

about what they want to see and what they believe should exist in the future whether that's you know that being through companies humans coordinating to accomplish a specific goal right and so the stock market is a way for us to publicly Express as humans what we want to see what we think is going to happen in the future I think that's an important mechanism that we'll see translate in the blockchain world and what's really empowering is that now more people are will be able to broadcast and their value and what they think and what's important versus it being get kept by most of the population can't even participate and I think it's like it's a moment where I want to take you know some of these analogies or you have like the printing press or like you

know the internet they democratize an important aspect of like of humans that are that is in it and to me like this is like enabling everyone to be able to speculate freely and talk about what they the value they want to broadcast in the world and see in the world and be able to coordinate around that and to me that's really interesting because now anyone can become a pacemaker and nfts or bring up a movement when they find other people on chain through that versus before like the art sector is super gay like a few people could dictate what art is important or isn't and the same thing applies to you know the stock market as well or like the tech industry like you know what's important can flip on a dime depending on what some powerful people

or VCS decide and so enabling that like people to onboard the on-chain economy is important so circling back to your question I think that's like the social angle like to me that's like the foundation and so how is how can we Express that via zapper where people can find these things that matter to them and what they want to invest in and what they want to speculate on what they want to see in the future like to me that's the the important part because if you take the example of say generative art like it started as a small community of very passionate people that came through on chain and speculation help bring it into the kind of like public right like I remember seeing a chart on generative art and you

can sit coincide perfectly with nfts which I think shows the power of like a small group of people to move an entire Market because they're able to broadcast that value and that value can now be captured and so that's where I think there's like a part of finance that is actually important if you think about it through the base or fundamental layer of how we communicate you know value and risk well and I think like one example that comes up for me is this show is going to come out a week from when we're recording the earlier this week oppen which is a popular nft project using generative art released an open Mint for I think it was .001 eth to support thread guy a popular Persona in crypto

Twitter and over 48 000 people have minted that raising about ninety thousand dollars that's going towards thread guy basically saying hey this guy's a big part of our culture he deserves some money he's a Creator let's all support him right that wouldn't have been possible before and that's a a great example of what you're talking about a signal of people coordinating around hey we believe in this we all want to support this and because of crypto we can do it in a micropayment way where we can each just give like two dollars basically and 50 000 of us can come together in like a few days and raise almost a hundred thousand dollars none of that is possible in web 2 or the

physical world yeah 100 you've talked before in how you rode defy Summer and the network effects of being early and something that grew so fast I'm curious where do you see using a Canadian analogy of where is the puck going let's talk hockey for a second I know you focused on bringing Dows into zapper and so you made it a a way that people could see what activity is happening with endows and what activities happen within nfts what's next what is your if you look into your crystal ball what do you guys focused on as the next thing that you think will be big on chain and we

brought on chain that you want to make sure people can discover and explore through zapper the answer is pretty simple is we don't know and we expressly like built it around not knowing so we don't have to guess what it is and so we've built software to be an interpretation engine in the sense that it could support any new industry or new thing in the future because now we've built our Tech to be able to interpret versus being oh now there's defying so now we need to you know top down now we need to integrate other things in D5 oh there's nfcus now we need to interpret all the things and nfts we switch our strategy to be bottom up versus top down and so it's like you think of there's information on chain

data on chain so we pull it and then we allow users to interpret it to fit whatever use case will exist in the future and that's been an entire strategy because it's we'll take more bad guesses than as anyone else on on that topic like we don't know and we've built it expressly for not knowing but the thing that we do know is there's data on Jane that represents these use cases and that can be interpreted what about in terms of your journey of you know back in 2021 let's say a bunch of other chains became popular and so a lot of app strategies were let's go multi-chain and you had things like uniswap and Ave that were like we're going to just go on every single app or sorry every single chain

you guys did the same you're at like 11 chains now I think what are you guys thinking through on that one are you guys still trying to go to additional chains are you consolidating somewhere or like what's your thought process on that we've decided to consolidate around a smaller number of chains and having really good coverage over those chains versus offering the most chains possible there's a few like a few reasons for it one is you know there's trade-offs and everything if you had a magic one we'd have all the chains in the world but one of the main reasons is that there's clusters of users and some of these clusters don't overlap very much where optimism user is for example very likely to also be an ethereum user right or Beyond Main and

be active or have something on arbitrum and polygon and so like those four networks it's a bit of the same people and so it's like there's New York and then there's like all the New York boroughs and then you have other chains like I'd say like BSC doesn't have that much overlap with it there it does have but not quite as big as ethereum and it's Altus and I mean it's quite obvious because when it's ethereum l2s but that's kind of shifted our strategy is like let's focus on those user clusters because after that every new chain that we add when there's a cost and it's also like if we add a new chain it's like are we going to add the feed for that chain are we going to index nfts for that chain are we going to integrate all the

defy apps for that chain and so if those benefits are incremental like it's hard to argue that it's not good to add any other change it's obviously good but once you you look at like the incremental benefits that equation kind of falls apart and so we've decided to really focus first on those networks and figure out how to say a strategy that can help us scale to a bunch of networks after well and you probably want to start on the ones that have Network effects already like something like ethereum like you said the additional chains that have now come along with it I guess another question then is obviously l2s are the kind of hot thing at the moment and they are launching like crazy like I think over the last two weeks there's probably been like five new l2s that have launched with

mantle and Aura and bass and I don't even know there's been so many and now there's about to be like L2 as a service with like what the op stack has done and ARB is done so there I mean a lot of people are saying there's going to be thousands or millions of l2s in the future how do you guys solve that one because I don't think a lot of activity is going to happen on ethereum L1 in the future right I think it's it's quite obvious at this point that the goal of ethereum is to move users to these l2s but if there's tons of l2s because we have app chains and we we have general ones like you guys are just going to integrate every L2 that comes in and try to find a way to index that or how's that going to work

yeah well the way I I kind of see it is the moment you make something like permissionless you're gonna have like a [ __ ] ton of those things say for example tokens on ethereum not everyone can create a token you can have a ridiculous amount of them and I see that's going to play out with l2s there's going to be so many Altos that it's going to be impossible to keep up with and it's that's a good thing a lot of them won't have any activity but some of them like well it'll be kind of like a pareto's distribution or ish in the sense of how in terms of activity so that kind of helps us like prioritize the other thing is I think there's a point where there's going to be zapper the main Hub and let's go so it's going to make ethereum and its main l2s

readable and perhaps in the future we allow people to play other hubs like a zapper but specifically for and we don't need to like the the costs are offset to whatever you know the people that want to run it do but it's kind of like a you know a key in hand I wouldn't say like a white label service probably a bit like what etherscan does but that's a potential way of scaling it and then building in those Network effects for interpretation and all that stuff what an interesting day-to-day you must have the space evolves so fast and you're trying to keep up I think you nailed it when you said earlier that you don't know where the future is so rather than trying to guess you have planned for not

knowing by being and building in that way that allow allows you to you know be like water and flow in whatever Direction the use cases come up when we talk about not knowing I think another thing that always comes up for us at web3 Academy is on chain literacy and just understanding what it means to be an on-chain user what it means to interact with all these things on chain and the the path that one must take right now to just be part of web3 and participate the analogy that I've often used is it's like you have to be a car mechanic right now to understand web3 you gotta

understand what's underneath the hood you can't just be driving the car the car is not quite there yet if you want to drive the car you'd get [ __ ] by some Bridge you'd lose some money here or there you might get fished like you know things would go wrong so you need to be a bit of a mechanic right now I'm curious for you what do you think about in terms of on-chain literacy is there something you wish everybody understands stood more is there things that you're doing at zapper that you think will lead in the direction of helping people be more literate on chain or are we all just screwed where it's just going to be a bunch of us like almost like our parents watching our parents use like my parents are actually just here because I have a newborn and watching my mom use

an iPhone why does she tap the touch screen as if it's like ramming the screen I'm like it's it it's sensitive mom you don't need to you know like is that are we just stuck in that world forever yeah well it's a pretty good analogy because a lot of how we experience web3 is through our expectations and our built-in behaviors from web 2 and web one like and sometimes that doesn't align at all right I've had so many users early on using zapper that were like how do I send money from metamask to zapper and that like as a behavior it's something you'd expect in web 2 you

bounce money from a website to another or you you have your Facebook things and you have your YouTube things there's no concept of a shared entity between all of those and so to me it's kind of like the same thing where previously you'd expect to press a button for an interaction to pop versus now it's like well if you gently tap the technology is completely different yeah our behavior and our expectation out of technology is still based on a lot of what we're used to and I think one thing about online literacy is how does that behavior shift right I think people that come directly on the on-chain world will have have a tremendous Advantage because they'll be kind of like born in this this will be like their default and so just thinking

about like through the entrepreneur lens like I'm excited for like all these new people coming in and then actually totally destroying us with all their creativity and Innovation because they were brought into that world kind of like with all these zuckerbergs and young people that built up the you know the web 2 world and so I think like on-chain literacy is is really about you know when you send an email it's under the standing how the email protocol Works without needing to understand how it works like from a technical perspective like there's CC and all this stuff and then there's all this behaviors of things you should do or shouldn't do just like online we have this kind of blueprint in our in our mind of what are bad things to do and what are good things to do like we've

built in behaviors to not like download a virus or be able to recognize things that look you know uh shady and we don't have that at all in web3 a lot of people get scammed you know we have so many issues that kind of went through with web22 with all the viruses and cookie stuff we're seeing here because people don't have those behaviors and and Native things that align it closer to what the text Tech actually is and so I think there's a few things I can help one is time but don't tell any Builder have to wait because that's never going to go well the second thing is abstracting it but not hiding it and so the worst thing

you could do is extract it to a level where it looks like a web 2 app like blockify all the stuff where it's defy stuff in the back but actually a user doesn't understand that and so you have so many issues when you fit two different Technologies and try to retrofit one into the other and the user will never understand or you know be able to to get it and then the part is like how you abstract it and you know a pattern we've seen in technology is then vs geomorphism like if you look at all the icons you have on your Mac or iPhone a lot of them are very skeuomorphic to represent what the intent of the technology or where the technology does is like your trash can

or your mailbox or your library this help us understand and relate to the technology behind and so in the context of blockchains is how can we abstract and not hide what blockchains are so if a blockchain is a city how do you express that through your experiences how do you make it that it feels like a city not necessarily like it looks like a city but your experiences feel like it so you can then map out better behaviors and better interactions in the future just like transparency for example telling people that blockchain is transparent is not enough they need to feel it through their interactions because then that informs a ton of behaviors like identity if people knew how transparent a blockchain is perhaps they take a widely

a wildly different decision about what they put on chain or the identity they decide to take maybe they don't have their first name last name in their DNS and so that's the really important part of you know informing better Behavior via abstraction and it's something that we're thinking a lot of is how do we shine light on these things without also shining like the complex things about them and when I started thinking like that there's so many things that kind of you see that I think become a bit more obvious in the sense that your experience of buying nft or buying a token on Amazon is very isolating in the sense that you're doing it single player

that's built on a web 2 kind of model where you go to a website and you do a thing you're completely lost in the concept of there's other people also doing these things and maybe there's another person that went in the uniswap store openc Museum and then you go on Twitter and maybe someone tagged me because you did something on chain right we're starting to see a side of that up here and yeah to me it it really changes the behavior once you make that stuff like once you make the blockchain readable to everyone and Abstract it and then its capabilities become much more obvious to me the the behavior will completely change it's as if we'll have like a pre-readability era and a post readability era because once you make those things obvious maybe people like

invest purely socially now like it's not about looking at the top yields in a percentage you base it off who does an investment who's the group who are the accounts do you trust them do you like them and that's that's risk 2.0 it's social risk and to me that's what makes it exciting maybe it accelerates a lot of good trends like maybe a race or an increase in pseudonymity or having a veil on anonymity and then transparency maybe Bad actors really can't do anything because now it's transparent people can see that they've read in the past or this account has zero history or reputation I think it accelerates and perhaps even like shines new use cases I was thinking the other day is like there's a point in the past where nft

sale was an obscure long tail on-chain event that was random like it wasn't something that it was like this weird thing uh same thing for D5 and so to me what's what's cool is once you make it readable it's like well those unique long tail use cases or events are now can be seen by by everyone and so there's probably a ton of them happening right now like these weird things happening on chain people experimenting that we just can't see it I like bet money on there being a nft sale type thing on chain that will become big in the future that we just don't see because we've built the blockchain very there's D5 there's NFD sales and there's

this and there's that versus from the ground up it's so interesting to think about like chicken and egg almost like what comes first is it the understanding of what is on chain what's happening on chain which then creates the behaviors which then leads people to build new apps or is it because right now we're coming from it as you said the other we're building the apps top down right right but that ground up is coming for sure yeah really interesting to think about I think about that okay before we wrap I want to talk a little bit of founder advice I always love asking Founders I think you learn the most from your mistakes your [ __ ] ups so I want to ask the direct question

any [ __ ] ups that you've had at zapper I [ __ ] it was a little bit strong you guys are doing great so don't take that the wrong way but what mistakes what missteps have you had that you can share with us and what have you learned from them a lot of fuck-ups one of them was hiring too quickly and firing too slowly I think a lot of Founders go into that route and it's something that yeah you need to flip it and one change is like when you realize you're thinking about someone for like three months Non-Stop and it's like well it's affecting me and it's affecting like my performance for all that time I don't spend anything on this I I should actually be spending on this other thing and I think like a lot of founder and like typically like the

more agreeable ones like I'm more on like the agreeable side and I don't like conflict and stuff like that I'll tend to like just and then eventually it just eats you from the inside right and you see the impact it has on you and so I think like that's probably one of one of the top things you know one of the the top mistakes I think another thing too is I default always is to optimism it's easy to be oh things will work out in the future because your default is being positive and optimistic and I'd say it's like catching you in when you're you're being too ah things will work out and it'll be fine you know it's probably this I'm probably wrong on that thing like catch you and if you see that you're thinking

that on repetitively then there's probably there's definitely a problem like no Founders regretted firing someone too quickly even just firing someone and so that that's definitely one of them another one was I think there's Parts initially where we forced a bit too much on users new features we change the UI so much so often that it disoriented a lot of people and that's something like I definitely think about more because as you scale early on I was always in the mindset of changing everything all the time and also with my previous experience as a startup founder I didn't have product Market fit so I needed to change things all the time but I brought

that behavior which is good when you don't have product Market fit in post-product Market Fit changing things all the time when I should have you know chilled on new UI changes or feature changes it's like going into your room and your mom changed everything and like cleaned it up and move things around and if it happens enough you know you'll be you'll be pretty annoyed mom where are my airpods where are my airpods mom yeah yeah I think one two is like probably communication or talking explaining more about our vision for zapper where it could be confusing to someone right now that's like been through or seen zapper

initially announcing it now like it could be like not super clear how it can in that way and and it's not that a lot of people will not be on Twitter or Discord and stuff like that like I'm more like there's people in our community that didn't understand that transition and then once you explain it it makes a lot of sense and then they're excited versus like a lot of people thought it was a pivot and I was very surprised to hear that people thought it was a pivot because I mean it was a more of the same or Evolution and so to explain that because and went through if there's anything more true than anything else is users and Community kind of blend together and you're more with them in the same team then you're not in the sense that it's not like there's a

product and a team and then there's the users and separate entities like those lines are kind of getting blurred and I could have like done that better well you're going to integrate xmtp as coinbase and so many others have done in the past few weeks and then you can message all of your users wallets yep I'll be in their DMs awesome okay before we go to a speed round Seb want to give you a chance to tell people where they can find out more about zapper how they can join in and use zapper how they can follow you online the floor is yours to show absolutely to learn more about zapper and see the upcoming features you can

follow our Twitter account at sapperunderscore.fi you can also follow me on Twitter I post leaks thoughts on product and the nfts I collect my username is Seb odd dead 26 if you want to follow me there and that if you want to track your portfolio look at what other accounts you're doing on chain zapper is the place for you I just got to say I was I remember back in I think it was 2021 when I was into D5 a little bit and I got I forget who told me about zapper but I connected my wallet into it and then all of a sudden it was the first time other than looking at etherscan and seeing what's in your wallet when I connected to zapper I connect my wall and also it just shows you like all the assets you have but then it also shows you what D5 protocols

you were using and all that it just like it displayed it all and I was just like whoa this is like it was an aha moment for me and I was like oh this is so cool so if anyone who's listening that has never connected their wallet to something like this do it because it really shows you so much and it's quite fascinating to see everything that's going on in there so there's no I'll have a moment for me so thanks for that you feel like that uh guy in A Beautiful Mind where like all of the things all of a sudden it's like on the chalkboard and you're like well especially now when there's so many chains like now that I go back and you look and you've got optimism and arbitrary and you connect one wall and it just shows all of it you're like whoa

and it totals them all up across each chain I'm like okay this is amazing so yeah super cool okay speed round before we wrap here set a couple fun questions coming at you since you're an nft collector what's an nft you'll never sell my punk and you're gonna say that is it the one on your hat yeah yeah nice yeah it's a sweet one a must read book ooh I forgot the name it's about Financial Risk and how a bit through my earlier point about how we humans to speculate and speculation is not something new to finance it's the behavior that existed forever I forgot the name but it's just like a a bunch of those examples and then everything makes

sense after that and blockchains make so much sense and it has a different spin on speculation otherwise I'd say a classic like sovereign individual I think is a pretty good book hmm nice look up you find out the name and share it with us and we'll make sure we share it with our community of the other book okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it I I need to write something or it could be anything you can show you could show it if you wanted yeah that'd be people I could do like a QR code like coin is the Superbook I don't know if you could do that what would it go to what would it link yeah but what would it go to whatever NFC I'm trying to get rid of

you got a billion people [Laughter] that's hilarious no probably something zap related what's the tagline for zapper we don't have one well we've been trying you know a few ones but I think right now we have like live the Unchained life you guys need the Emoji thing that we have for web3 Academy Pro we have like a pro level to our our newsletter and we look on chain and we do like on-chain analysis and so we have the Emojis of the like the eyes that are sideways there's an emoji that says on and then there's an emoji of the chains and so that's like our Emoji thing I was like man this is perfect for zapper you guys need this it is yeah well there's one that we like to use as like the chain emoji and the zap like Emoji like the

lighter because it's like you unlock these new super powers by being there you go nice awesome so it'll just be chain in the zap emoji on a billboard one million people and then a cure in the corner there you go yeah for anyone that wants to buy my NFC I want to get ready awesome Seth thanks so much for the time it's just been great chatting with you and learning all about zapper and the future of on-chain social absolutely thank you very much for having me thanks for listening everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you

don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and Webster are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one