Is web3 decentralized and censorship resistant?

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities this is jaybird and i'm here with my pal my buddy my co-founder my co-host kyle read head and we're here to keep you on the forefront of technology so you don't fall behind boy oh boy have we got a great episode for you today super stoked we're gonna be talking about how to decentralize everything and really what does that even mean why do

we need to decentralize everything what are the risks of centralization that we've seen what are the problems that we are seeing some problems that we've seen in the past and some problems that we're seeing right now and we're also going to talk about developer dao and the lessons learned in building what we have heard from many of our previous guests is one of the best daos out there and just recently launched their token code shout out to everybody who got in on that a lot of excitement happened on twitter the other day on that launch so lots to unpack and talk about there but before we get into this we need your help why do we need your help because we want to get simple web3 education out to millions of people billions of people

in order to do that we need to grow this podcast and you can help us do that with one small simple step all you need to do is follow or l or subscribe if you're listening on apple on spotify give us a follow if you're watching on youtube subscribe that would be a huge help we are so so grateful for you thanks so much couldn't do this without you all right let's get into it what is today it's the wednesday doer spotlight and we've got nader from developer dell and celestia here with us super stoked natter is the developer relations engineer at celestia

and the founder of developer dao natter welcome to the show hey thank you so much for having me did i say your name right you did perfectly okay sweet for a change i had to jump and check on that i like to just one name like like share i i feel like i feel like that's the that's the social media way these days you know with one name although i guess on the socials you you you don't go so much by that or do you or do you go more more by by your last name by dab it no i'll go i go by uh either but usually matter but there isn't there isn't a lot of people with my name so it makes it fairly easy to to not yeah to kind of

stand out i guess sweet all right well let's start as we always do with we would love to hear the rabbit whole story of our guests you know i think as we build this new technology it's really important to reflect back on what got us here and sometimes that's a funny story maybe there's a friend involved somebody pushed you down the rabbit hole sometimes it's just a natural story but would love to hear you know when did you first go down the rabbit hole why did you first go down the rabbit hole and what what really caught your imagination and your interest yeah i mean i'm a software developer of about 10 years so i've been working in the traditional tech world for about nine years at the time i had been

investing or just dabbling not really not not like a huge amount of money in crypto since around 2015 and never really looked further than just buying and selling and and once in a while maybe using tokens for international like transfers and international purchases um over those few years since 2000 yeah since 2015-ish and um from the perspective of a developer i never really kind of dove into why these protocols existed or you know what they were being used for beyond just sending cryptocurrencies because that's kind of the only thing that i knew existed for a long time actually i didn't uh understand or

know anything about some of the ideas beyond that with what we now are kind of like labeling as web 3. so in late 2020 early 2021 i heard about this token called the graph token and the graph token um just had a website and i just you know went and looked at it and they had they had this thing called the graph network and there's a word that kind of like stood out to me it's graphql and graphql is an api querying language that i would use at aws where i was currently working on and it kind of immediately just drew my attention because i was you know connected already with graphql and i was like okay why are they

using graphql and i just started diving into their documentation and i started seeing all the different applications that were like out there that were not just just sending cryptocurrencies so that was my first time to really be exposed to things like defy and gaming and people that were starting to experiment with like social networks and stuff and from that day like i spent the next week actually diving into like who were the founders of the graph and uh that's when i saw a talk from yaniv tau from uh graph day 2020 or something like that which is like one of the conferences that they put on and he was talking about web3 and and that was kind of really interesting

to me and then i started doing research on web3 and i came across this video from juan binet from protocol labs from like 2018 maybe around web3 and i just completely became just um 100 just enamored like by this whole idea you know like because i had been working in software for like i said like nine years at the time and i've been working amazon web services for a little over three years and it just seemed like the challenges and the problems that were trying to be solved and web 3 were so much more meaningful and a lot larger than

the the work that i was doing at aws and just more exciting so it was almost within just that maybe one week period-ish that i decided to just quit my job at aws and work in web 3. and i was actually like a senior level person at aws and i was actually on my like i was literally in the process of being promoted to principal principle is like like one of the higher levels at aws you get paid a lot and it's very good job security and all that and i essentially left to go work for the graph and edge of node um which was you know very very risky compared to where i was but um but it's been a really really great decision in

hindsight and i'm glad that i did that that's incredible and so the the reason that um we got you on the show is when the tornado cash um fiasco first came out uh via you know these sanctions from the u.s treasury um you know there was assault there's all this confusion about like okay well is this a decentralized protocol is it not um and you know why are we blacklisting some addresses and what's going on there and you put out a great tweet and you just kind of said like you got to decentralize everything in the tech stack essentially and you gave like a list of like all the different things that you need to decentralize and for me i didn't even necessarily know that this was all things so it seems to be very confusing to me i think a lot of people

in the space think oh we're building a web3 you know we're building decentralized stuff but in fact a lot of what we're building in web3 right now anyway is actually pretty centralized um would you agree with that in terms of just like most of the apps and things we use like not everything along the tech stack is actually decentralized yet um and i think that is why you know we can still have these issues in in what happens we're seeing with like tornado cache and that what are your thoughts on that yeah i think when you're building out applications and you want to kind of have experiences that are usable often in web 3 were kind of taking these decentralized protocols and we're often

kind of putting layers on top of them to make them more accessible and then therefore introducing points of like failure or points of centralization and i think that there's it's a pretty nuanced and complicated like topic for us to dive into and i think hopefully we can kind of make this we can distill this and make it understandable maybe for people that aren't so technical and that i can give my opinions around how some of this stuff can uh you know does work or and how we can kind of make this happen but but in in general i would say yeah a lot of the stuff that we use that we maybe call web3 um you know what does that even mean and like a lot of times like when you look at the original

description of what web3 like actually is it's um kind of described as maybe applications built on top of decentralized protocols but again a lot of these protocols are not 100 decentralized so therefore they have these points of um i don't know if you would call them you know weak weak points or points of that they can that can be attacked or yeah risk or points of risk um and and each one each each protocol is different and some of them some of them are really resilient some of them are not and i think we have that whole spectrum and as we build out applications that we want to make accessible and usable a lot of times you have to introduce centralized

um parts to them just to make the experience you know usable for people around the world especially you know um if we want to onboard a lot of new people but i think we need to focus on kind of making sure that the underlying infrastructure below that does remain uh decentralized even if we build out these more centralized layers on top so a good example of that might be something like lens protocol which is you know a set of smart contracts deployed on a network which is polygon but they've built out like this centralized api layer on top of it that makes it really easy for developers to use but the underlying data is still being stored on

the blockchain so if their api got attacked or it went down or something happened maybe it got censored because someone's storing some information you know and being it's being exposed on their api that is like illegal or something who knows what can happen even if they decided and to shut down the api the data like underlying the applications that are running on top of the api is still there and then people can kind of still surface that data and and all that so that's like you know an example of maybe a protocol that has both centralization and decentralization but um it's probably the direction that we're headed in the future it sounds like you got to start with the

foundation right and i would take ethereum is kind of the the main foundation for this space or one of them and the layer one blockchain let's say not just ethereum is sort of the main foundation to be built off of and then sort of like as you go up the tech stack we work to start decentralizing all those those levels i think before we jump into it let's just set a little bit of foundation no knowledge here of like decentralization gets thrown around all the time and i wonder like do people even really understand what that means or why it's even important um i just want to like when we think of technology um i think people need to understand that centralization of technology is a big problem and we've seen it be a big problem for a long time now because

one technology is like this exponential growth of amount of people that can be on a specific technology so like when you think of like a country like let's say the us most powerful country in the world there's 300 million but then you think of facebook it's only been around for what 10 15 years now it's got like almost 3 billion people on it right in 15 years like it's so fast it's so exponential that growth and there's one company that owns that and facebook is way more centralized than something like the us and there's businesses being built on top of it there are people that rely on it to speak to others and the fact that there's one centralized point of risk or whatever the word was that you wanted to call it um like that's a big problem and on a social platform like maybe people don't

care so much but like censoring you know what you say and censoring um you know the content you're posting like that that sucks you don't want that but it goes way bigger than that right like when there's a business being built on it like twitter when they all said just remove their api many years ago um like they just kind of rugged every business that was on there and then you think of what's happening with tornado cache right like the government just wants to decide that hey we don't like what they're doing you know there's a few bad actors on there we want to shut it down and they just want to shut it right off and thankfully tornado cash the protocol was not um completely centralized because they couldn't do that but it was a web 2 application they could they just shut down the business is done and away it

goes um but thankfully you know there was tornado cache as a protocol and so they couldn't shut it fully down but they could shut parts of it down um i just wonder is there any more you want to add on just like the importance of decentralizing and then maybe just kind of share like what does that actually mean to decentralize something that's what i'm trying to understand is like what it it like can you just talk us through what that means to someone yeah for sure there's a lot to what you just talked about so i'll kind of talk about it in a couple of different in a couple of different ways so when we think about building software when we think about centralization and the tech stack you often will kind of think about where the data is stored maybe when we build out almost

every application that we use today you know twitter or facebook or whatever or if someone builds out their own version maybe of a social network and they kind of just do it the traditional way they might go to aws and they create a database and then every time someone like does anything you know that information is stored on that database and for the most part unless you are a massive company like facebook that does what is called kind of like redundancy or backup or replication where you kind of like replicate all this data across a couple of databases um most of the time it's just stored in a single database so um and not only that but that database is is controlled by a person or someone with access so so a single person can go in there and make

updates to that information and you know they can change they can remove they can read it's not really something that um is you know secure you know in my opinion like when it comes to what uh we think of when we think about decentralized infrastructure so not only is this information stored in a single place but um and therefore you have the the vulnerabilities around the updates and stuff not being fully controlled by you but also there's a single point of failure so if that database goes down um you you'll you'll your application just won't work anymore um when we think about larger uh companies like facebook and stuff you know they're still centralized they

might have like a backup of of that information but um but it's also the controller centralized so you know i've i've talked to so many people um that have had things like really successful youtube channels and um one day someone like finds out their username and password or or they get hacked or maybe they live in a country where they said something wrong and they and their entire channel just literally gets deleted um even though they've spent years building up that audience and it might even be kind of like a source of them like being able to pay their bills or whatever you don't have any control over that so like the control uh is is kind of like kind of out of your hands and also that data isn't

persistent anywhere um if you haven't kind of decided to download each like video but but even if you did like your your your actual presence is is not downloaded anywhere it's gone so all those followers all that stuff is gone so there's a lot of um points to kind of like talk about and and how these things between the infrastructure overlap with the user experience and in how people experience building and their you know presence on these different platforms so there is definitely overlap between that but when we think about decentralized infrastructure on the other hand like ethereum is a great example of this if i create you know um a profile let's say somewhere on some

social network and that information is logged on chain either on ethereum or maybe some other like layer two then um that that that information is pretty much always gonna be there as long as the network exists it's always going to be there um if i build up a presence on a social graph or a social network like lens protocol then if i have a thousand followers then no one can ever really take that for me if the the only thing that could possibly happen maybe is if i get hacked on my wallet or something maybe that's definitely something that um can can still happen it's something to take into consideration it's kind of like a trade-off but like as long as i don't decide to kind of give that

um private key and that seed phrase away as long as i kind of am the only one controlling that then that profile exists and not only that but i can actually port that um entire group of followers to multiple platforms so when we build up a presence on twitter we don't have that same presence on youtube we don't have it on tik-tok we don't have it on facebook but with these web 3 protocols because all of the data is public and open you can actually just kind of build you could think of imagine building like a thousand followers on twitter and then someone builds like a youtube version on top of that same protocol then you now have all those followers so this is already like

starting to happen you have lens 2 that's built on lens protocol you have linser that's built on lens protocol and i think there's like a dozen or so now social networks that are kind of built on that protocol and the cool thing is like you just go to this new front end and you now have all these followers so if you create a video you now automatically have a bunch of built-in you know you have a built-in network that you've kind of like ported over so um yeah when we think of like decentralization you know a lot of times we think about decentralized decentralization of the infrastructure we also think about things like decentralization of the ownership decentralization of control um the whole theme of decentralization is definitely very strong and pretty

much everything we do i guess in web3 i think one of the key differentiators when you think about decentralization is in the non-so the centralized world the risk is that there's a third party that's controlling all of your stuff and so the risk is on them they can do whatever they want with it when we're talking decentralized stuff you said there is some risk like someone could hack our wallet or really we could give away our seed phrase or something but at least the risk is no longer that it's on someone else the risk is actually just on us not to screw it up and lose our seed phrase or like put our seed brace in the wrong space so it makes us responsible for the things that we own whether that's money whether that's data whatever that is um so i think that's one of the

well and the and it doesn't it doesn't go further than that right it stops you right it stops at you versus what you said i mean i think we all know digital privacy and digital security is a massive concern by the world now right i mean i think something like nine in 10 americans have fears of digital privacy and security but what they don't realize is as you said most of that is controlled by possibly one person in one data storage house right and so they're if if one breach gets made that point of weakness and i really like that line that point of weakness can

can i mean explode to affect millions of people as opposed to with blockchain there's a there's a limit it can only affect one it doesn't it doesn't go further than that unless unless they hack a dow or something that is everyone something that everyone owns so okay let's talk a little bit about what it means to then go and decentralize things so like right now we talk about people who are using let's say tornado cache or uniswap had some issues before um and you know the the protocol itself continues to work yet the front end for example in the tornado cache example all of a sudden you couldn't use the front end of tornado cache but if you're a

developer and you knew how you could still go and use tornado cache like i think you can still use it today and there are some people that are blocked from using like uniswap front end but they can just go and build their own front end if they want so currently we're seeing there are decentralized protocols that you can use but there are other parts of this tech stack that are not decentralized and so we still have that risk and like we've seen governments can sanction or shut it down and kind of block it and so the idea is well we need to start decentralizing every part of the tech stack um can you sort of walk us through what that means and what that looks like like i imagine cloud is something that needs to become decentralized and you said you were a big part of aws

but i know a lot of what we do is hosting things on on aws or on you know google or icloud or whatever and those are centralized cloud so i imagine there's just there's many components to the internet that we needed to centralize for us to really get to the point in the promise of like what web 3 really is can you sort of give your your thoughts on that yeah first of all i think it kind of just depends on the type of thing that you're building the type of application that you're building um i think that you're gonna continue to see people building out applications on the traditional tech stack forever because it just is actually a lot easier to kind of just spin up a database and like you know build in that way and i think that um while web 3 brings a lot of great you

know use cases and benefits for certain types of applications i kind of view it as more as like um an additional way that we can do things that might disrupt certain industries and it opens the door to additional use cases but doesn't completely like um overtake everything that we had before kind of how we see like machine learning and ai bring a lot of great use cases to the table and they have disrupted a few industries but they haven't kind of like replaced i don't know like everything that has come before it uh the mobile platform came around and we were able to build mobile apps that had better experiences but it's not like no one has a website anymore in fact we still see tons of mobile websites they still use email

look at web3 yeah yeah i mean so uh with web3 we now have new ways to build things and you know we have new types of financial applications that we can build we have news types of like social graphs and social media applications that we can build a lot of them have trade-offs a lot of them in my opinion are much better and um you know but there's still certain use cases that um that you probably wouldn't want to to build in web3 and i forgot what was the second part of the question well it was just trying to understand um there's all these different layers to a tech stack and really i guess what i'm trying to understand is like which ones do we need to decentralize right like i know right now we've decentralized the like sort of consensus layer that would

be the ethereum or the different layer ones and that um but you know and so the protocols that are built on top of it can be decentralized yet the front ends are not and so i'm wondering like is that a thing we need to start decentralizing is cloud something we need to decentralize like i'm just curious at how far along the tech stack we need to go yeah that's a good question it's a cool discussion too because when we think about the tech stack you have these primitives that you can kind of use as a developer to build out applications so that would be typically a database it would be something like a server to have business logic you know you would have something like like file storage to store videos and images and stuff and um and then maybe a way to kind of host your application and have

it accessible via like http and and using like this these set of primitives you can kind of say i want to build a social media app or i want to build i don't know like um this this application and you can typically combine those primitives and get like 95 of the way there so in web 2 we have very very um solid understanding what that looks like but in web through we're still kind of figuring that out but i think we're we're getting there and i think we we have um you know we don't really have the concept of a database instead we have kind of this concept of a blockchain and we're seeing like peer-to-peer databases that are trying to maybe um have like maybe

uh a new another maybe type of primitive that looks similar to a database but is also a little different than a blockchain so i think the three types of like yes data storage mechanisms that you have kind of out there right now will be a traditional database a peer-to-peer network peer-to-peer database or a blockchain um so in the in the web3 stack you would probably think of a place to store you know um data in the sense of like a social media application would be a very low cost network like polygon or something that would be the closest thing that you would have but at scale that's still probably like fairly expensive if you want to store every single interaction but um

but yeah so the tech stack in web3 uh to have it fully decentralized would be yeah something like a blockchain and then on the front end like most people are still deploying their front ends to places like aws and um and or or or i don't know netlify or vercell which is fine for a lot of use cases but for if you're building out like a financial application that is being used globally um any any country that you know in the whole world can maybe decide hey like we put on this new law and like this new restriction and we no longer want to like allow someone to kind of use that and um yeah they could they could probably find a way to block it or whatever or um that's that's the thing

though with like with these decentralized protocols um you're kind of like taking away the um middle person who might be the developer like maintaining these things and you're you're deploying them to these protocols that like um theoretically will last for our really the applications we'll be living on protocol is that the application will theoretically last forever as long as the protocol exists forever and if you can kind of understand how to build out applications in that way then you have what would be kind of considered an unstoppable application or you know an indestructible like uh front end if you were to deploy in that way so um a good example of this is like i think r weave

would be a really interesting uh piece of this tech stack because they originally kind of like launched as a file storage layer that allows you to store a video or an image or a text file you know forever for a single transaction fee which is kind of like a blockchain but for blockchains you never store like large pieces of data it's typically like very small pieces of data like a financial transaction or maybe a string of text but beyond that you're not going to store like a video on the blockchain so like where where is that video that file storage layer well ipfs exists but with ipfs you don't really have this guarantee of your data being available forever so if you store something on ipfs you have to do what's called

pinning meaning you have to kind of like pay this recurring fee to or you have to do this recurring thing and it's essentially paying like this fee to keep it alive on the network but with our weed you just pay like a single transaction fee and it's always available but they've they've continued kind of building out tooling and improving the protocol they have this idea of what's now the perma web which means you can kind of like launch an application and have it made accessible via http on the actual protocol forever so if you wanted to launch a front end that you wanted to make sure like never went down then you could launch it on rwev and um if you combined a front end on our weave with a protocol then you kind of have

now this indestructible application that literally cannot be taken down so that's already possible like we can already do that why why does tornado cash not do that or why does uniswap not do that like i don't understand why are people well uniswap is like they they put the black they they kind of like you know put the blacklisted addresses or whatever uh they denied them to be accessed because i think they have to conform with regulations and stuff so their their their companies might be based in you know parts of the world like in the united states or whatever where they have to kind of abide by these regulations but like what isn't stopping some anonymous person from forking like the old you know swap front end and just kind of

like deploying that on our weave and i'm sure that's already happened and i know that i've seen people you know deploying front ends on top of tornado cache that are uh you know on some of these protocols that enable that but um but like uniswap couldn't probably officially do that because if they did they would be kind of like going against the regulations and then they would therefore be vulnerable to some type of litigation and i guess either even if they did make it on our weave or something and decentralize the front end and by the way to those who don't know what a front end is that's just like the actual site that you would use when you type in like unisop dot i don't know what it is dot org or something like that like it's the page that you actually interact with

that's the front end and then behind that is like the thing that's actually making the swap or the transaction happen that's the protocol layer you can have many front ends which interact with that back end uh in that decentralized protocol but unisop i guess even if they did decentralize the front end they still own that and they are a us-based company so they just they have to follow the the the law regardless right so it doesn't really matter but some anonymous person could go spin up a front end and make that decentralized and that's fine the other interesting thing that came up from this tornado cache was that the and i don't exactly know how this works but with github the source code or the code from tornado cache that was then blacklisted and blocked what is can you kind of explain how

github works and i know there was a decentralized version already um so can you just sort of talk about that because that one kind of i didn't really understand yeah that was that was kind of strange because not only did they remove the repository they actually deleted the user's account for um the the person that had created the repo which is which to me was kind of weird for sure well and and to kind of take a step back github is just a website where people go and they they launch their source code for for the applications that they build for people that might not be you know uh have heard of it before so if i if i want to build an app and i want to have my source code made available for people to check out i can throw it on github or i can use

github to collaborate with other people privately around building an application so it's kind of this place where developers you know put their code now github was bought by microsoft a few years ago and microsoft works with the cia they work with the fbi they literally have ice contracts it's completely public and open so it's not really that surprising that that microsoft would would be very very compliant with whatever uh and you know take excessive action but that's the whole thing like um where we're what we're getting at is like tornado cash is viewed by a lot of people as not a

place for people to do illegal activity instead it's looked at as almost like the internet so anyone can use the internet to do illegal stuff people send child pornography they blackmail people they threaten people they literally have coordinated uh assassinations via the internet do we kind of hold the person that created the internet accountable for that or do we instead say you know the internet is essentially this this permissionless protocol that anyone can use for good or bad and that's kind of the way that tornado cash uh you know is viewed by by most people i think um you can use tornado cash to maybe uh donate to uh someone that is running for office that you don't want

everyone in the world to know that you're kind of like political or whatever maybe because you're in uh maybe you're in a public you know facing thing and you just don't want that to be out there or maybe you want to send uh donations to someone like you into ukraine or something i don't know there's there's all types of reasons i mean the reason there's a reason that everyone doesn't have their bank account publicly available for everyone to view because they have to be like that's kind of how tornado cash is just people use it to to hide you know things that they're doing just that they don't want open but the assumption made or kind of like the argument made by i guess people that wanted to shut it down is that oh this is only used for illegal activities and that that's just isn't true

so what happens around the world when you kind of have each of these individual governments making these laws and i think that's kind of where we're getting at with decentralization is that like what if we can build out protocols and companies and applications that are kind of above all these individual restrictions and and people can choose to build out maybe front ends that that take uh the experiences that they want to show to people and kind of like maybe filter out the things that they don't they don't want but coordinating financial regulation around the world is very very very complicated very hard and coordinating any types of rules globally is actually like really really tough but

these protocols kind of allow you to do that and i don't think we're ever going to get to a point where everyone in the whole world is like on the same page or agrees with everyone else so i think web3 allows developers and people to build out companies applications teams and stuff that are kind of um you know not really bound to these types of in my opinion you know that in particular was kind of like a dumb a dumb thing to do and to actually take that developer's account offline as well he's you know contributed to so much other open source and built so many other things um now he you know he lost all of his code instead you know we now are starting to see other protocols like pop up like radical radical is

essentially a hosted version of git just like github is except it's on a peer-to-peer network and you can also use um on-chain you can also kind of like anchor stuff on chain so therefore your code will theoretically you know always be available and it's not there's no centralized point of control for someone to go shut it down so if you put your code on on radical um the idea is that it's almost you know like a blockchain in in the sense that no one is in control of it you have the you know as the user that controls that key you have the ability to kind of like update that code um but it can't really be taken down or censored

this is why i feel like at some point we're gonna have to just decentralize all tools in all everything because they're just gonna keep poking at the things that are centralized you know what i mean like it's like they don't want us to build open source protocols so all of a sudden they go after github right and they don't let you create code i didn't even think that that was a thing they would do then it's like oh they don't want you to host you know whatever whatever it is something to do with defy or finance whatever so they go after the cloud that it's all hosted on right they go after amazon or something it's like every time there's something centralized in tech it's just another point that the government or whoever can sort of be like all right just shut that down and

they're just going to keep pushing until i feel like we just decentralized literally everything do you think we ever get to that point or how do you think we get through this because it seems like we have to keep doing it if we're going to keep fighting back essentially um because if we didn't have a would you call it radical was the other one against github then like maybe we don't have a playstation no radical just has yeah radical has has just been they've actually been building this for a long time it's been out for over a year for sure i'm not sure exactly but it's just kind of like a way for you to do github but in a web 3 decent flaws way and a more um you know way that could be

considered more censorship resistant and not vulnerable to kind of like someone just coming in and removing it um but like yeah i don't know i wouldn't say we're necessarily moving for everything to be to be decentralized but i think we are moving to a place where everything can be decentralized so like if you are wary that you're building out like a financial application that could be you know taken down by a certain like country around the world where one of your users might be you might say okay i'm gonna build this on the blockchain or something if you're building out like a really basic dating app or something for people in your city to use you probably might not use the blockchain so yeah i think

it just kind of depends on what you're building but i think like having the option to build in this way is is very important so we need radical we need blockchains we need um things like rwev so if someone does want to build something like that then they have the tools and the protocols available to them and and i and i do think that again like a lot of things are better using web3 technologies and blockchain so financial applications that are um you know made available to people around the world it just makes so much more sense to build them using these blockchain protocols because you kind of think about how every single country in the whole world has different

regulations around financial around finance so every bank and every country is different um every like country has different ways for people to get their identification and all the layers that are built on top of that just for someone to to send money between countries is so unbelievably tough like i can't like as a software developer i can't even start to begin to explain how much like waste and complexity is there and also it just it just kind of uh is a gatekeeping mechanism for for literally you know over a billion people that that don't have bank accounts because they don't have all these exact things in order uh with with

crypto you know or with blockchains you can literally just have a web browser and receive a payment within about one minute by installing an extension sending someone your address and getting that money that is revolutionary and i think like any financial application that's built in the future it just makes a lot more sense as crypto adoption increases to to have that as an option and i think like you know i'm not saying that everyone should use crypto and have blockchains as their payment mechanism but if you want to enable you know international interactions and you want to kind of give everyone the opportunity to kind of like interact on your application and it's a financial application it does

make sense to kind of move in that direction yeah heaven as an option yeah i think um it's it's a good point that not everything has to be decentralized but we should have the ability to decentralize in case you needed it to and maybe a dating app doesn't need it but probably anything financial should i like to think of web3 as sort of like a parallel financial system or a parallel internet to what currently exists like you said our financial systems and our internet really is very fragmented from country to country right especially the financial world like to try to send money from one country another is just the most insane thing i've ever seen uh and the fact that that exists in 2022 is wild um but it's all sort of it's

basically a parallel one where like if you want to just link into the global financial system you can do it over here on these crypto rails or you can stick to your sort of country one which is segmented from country to country and is a hassle and blah blah blah um so yeah i i like that point of like it just should be an option for anyone who is building i want to dive into developer dao in just a second but i just have one question um and this is nothing to do with decentralization really but because you're a developer and you're big in the space and i've done a lot i'm curious everyone complains about the ui and the ux of web3 and uh i know it's early so it's going to take time for this to improve and this is what i have to keep telling

people that ask me or that i try to introduce into the space like what's going on here how how long is it going to take until these apps and this space is actually like very user-friendly and just makes sense to everyone because we're to me it seems like we're still years away what do you think yeah i mean we've gotten a lot better than we were maybe a year and a half ago when i first started looking at all the stuff so we've we've definitely made improvements but we we have a like a lot longer of a way to go and i mean there's so many people that that i know that are in this developer community in web3 that are focused on this that are building out really great things that i think it's just a matter of time and if we look at the the early web versus

where it is today it's just not even comparable and um we've just now started really seeing this wave of adoption of people integrating crypto and web3 into web and mobile applications in the past couple years like it's existed you know crypto has existed but there hasn't really been a huge developer wave of adoption where people are building real applications on top of it really up until the last couple years so i think it really is still still early on and i think that what you're going to end up seeing is kind of this this idea of progressive decentralization kind of how i mentioned how lens has both a protocol that is on a blockchain and also a centralized indexer and querying layer for developers and to use um

them kind of going out of their way to to build out that additional layer for for developer experience i think we're going to see similar things happen for user experience and i think a great example of that is coinbase like you may or may not be a huge fan of coinbase but they've done more for crypto adoption maybe than any other company that exists and they didn't make that happen by building out the best uh you know version of unit swap or the best decentralized exchange they built that by building like a centralized exchange and enabling people to kind of take their money and like you know buy crypto and then they can all take that crypto and then go and use something like uniswap so unfortunately and and this is probably an unpopular opinion around among the decentralization maxis

i do think that um for user experience to improve a lot of times you have to have like these points of centralization temporarily until you kind of like get there and um and it just depends on what that looks like like a social media app is going to look much different than a financial application which is going to look much different than a game and uh reddit for example is a really great example of this they just adopted arbitrary nova which itself is kind of like a trade-off as a blockchain for this forced centralization um nova uses what's known as a data availability committee and this is kind of getting really technical but it's kind of like a centralized place to store the data versus um

the data availability being done on a blockchain but the trade-off there is that the transaction cost is extremely inexpensive and the transaction speed is very fast so it allows them to kind of take a block and integrate into their normal web application at scale and give users a good user experience and it makes it affordable for them and that's a perfect example like what reddit did is kind of what i think we're going to see more companies doing yeah completely agree and i think people need to be patient we still are like the the foundational layer of blockchains is still being researched and figured out and being built on right like we're we're about to do the big merge uh and so it's like we haven't even figured out decentralization yet

you know we're getting there but like you said it's gonna be a progressive thing and uh going to take some time to kind of figure all that out so in order to do any of this we need developers right uh we need a lot more developers in web3 if we're going to succeed in web3 kind of taking over the world um and so you started developer dao and i think uh i'm i'm interested to hear exactly what developer diaries and what you're doing but really it's trying to onboard more developers into the space um but you built it in a cool way you built it as a dao so not a centralized company and so we want to kind of just pick apart this process because we've heard from a lot of different people like this has been a really successful dow people have had

amazing experiences in there um we actually just had some members from our community that um just got into developer dao and they were super excited so walk us through like what what is developer dao and kind of why did you why did you start it this way yeah so developer dao is is meant to be a community of people that that kind of come together and network but also create educational content and help developers find jobs and you know just onboard people into developer jobs really in web 3 for the most part even though we have a lot of people from the traditional tech world that are all also kind of like coming in and experimenting there but yeah the main focus is to be kind of like a public good and a lot of the dows that

were around um when i created developer dial were financial facing or nfcs that were kind of focused on like maybe investing in nfts and like some some weird defy stuff um i wasn't too excited about any of that stuff to be honest what i was interested in though was like some of the more social communities so i thought friends with benefits was a cool experiment um you know just in general it was an idea and seeing them like have some fair amount of success early on was really kind of to me kind of interesting because it wasn't really focused on anything in particular like they weren't trying to you know build out anything they were just kind of getting together and trying to figure it out but the the bond that was there like within the community members was really strong and i thought

it would be really cool to kind of like take that ethos and apply it to just developer community and that's the only thing we're going to focus on is like building stuff and teaching each other and trying to help each other find jobs and network and um yeah so i thought i thought it would be a cool idea but i didn't think that i was going to be the one to build it but a few months after i had the idea no one had done it yet and i saw an opportunity to kind of create an nft that would be only interesting to like developers and maybe no one else to hopefully not get a lot of speculators like buying it or or interested in it yeah just one of the only onboard kind of engineers real people so i launched this yeah i launched the idea on a live

stream i deployed the smart contract live and uh we started just getting a steady stream of people over the course of like three months and then you know um at this point it's been about 11 months and we've landed literally countless people really great jobs a lot of times people are going from making you know minimum wage types of deals to like a hundred thousand dollars or more on people landing jobs at you know really great companies like polygon and the graph and um our main focus is still the same you know around uh onboarding people into web3 education you know for everything free so if we put on an event it's completely free and it's completely open to everyone like you literally don't have to be a member of developer dow to

benefit from the work that we're doing hopefully that's kind of like the goal is that we don't want to kind of make it to where oh you have to be in this community to benefit from it like everything we're doing should benefit everyone in the world as a public good um but the way we coordinate is within the dow and then then therefore there needs to be some type of mechanism for entry and stuff but we create free educational content for crete conferences and it's just been a really really cool experience and you know we just launched our own governance token which isn't going to enable us to be able to pay contributors with more governance and also enable a lot more people to come into the community and um and stuff like that so interesting and let's dive into a little

bit of this uh the token i think is called code is that right c-o-d-e yes um and so it's a governance token so is it go out to the community and now they can vote on how things are going to work or what's like walk us through some of the utility of this token it's always interesting to understand this when it comes to a dao yeah we we thought about this and and talked about it and we still are going to now continue to iterate on like how it's used but like to me governance should be done through a combination of maybe ownership into the community so tokens along with reputation along with maybe contribution along with you know all these other metrics and it's pretty complicated to kind of figure all that stuff out programmatically and in a fair way but i

think that's kind of like where we're headed with this token um right now we're strictly using it for governance and we've done the distribution in a way that kind of has rewarded hopefully the people that have helped get the community to where it is today so if you helped early on and created the discord or maybe you created a website for us or you did something then like we tried to kind of give the community a way to say hey i did this work and therefore i want to be you know given a portion of the governance so we did spend a long time trying to figure out the most fair way and obviously you're never going to make everyone happy but we spent a very long time and a lot of a

lot of going back and forth trying to figure out how to do this out figure out how to do this in the most fair way but essentially if you helped build the community then you were given some type of compensation in the form of of the the token and now in the future if you continue to help you'll get more compensation uh in that way and then we also want to find a way so we have like already a scholarship program that just gifts the memberships for free to anyone who uh who signs up but we can't really do that at scale because we have thousands of people on that list at this point um what we want to do instead is like give people a way to earn a membership by completing tasks that will help their own career so it's kind of

like a win-win situation if you want to become a developer you could like take this to 10 course this 10 part tutorial course finish it and not only do you kind of like gain education but you also gain interest into the community you can either sell those on the market if you want to or you can use them to join whatever we don't really care it's not about like the it's a non-profit like we literally have been scrapping by um as far as like money is concerned git coin early on really supported us and kind of gave us the um we did like a token swap so they gave us kind of like uh almost a feeling of oh we are a legit thing and a lot of confidence and also we're very aligned with bitcoin because

bitcoin is all about public goods and um we're all about public goods so yeah we're not kind of like again a financial like dow i remember like when we first started there was like these dials that were doing like um boarded yacht clubs and all these other nfts and they were you know had like 20 million dollars in the treasury and we're sitting here with like a few thousand in the treasury just trying to scrape bob but i think it's built a stronger community maybe than you would see in some of these because like we don't care what the market is like we literally don't care if it's up or down because everyone in our community is focused on landing a job that pays them regardless so what they do with that money it doesn't matter but if they can get a 200 000 a year job through the

community then the market you know it might matter if it just completely went to and like they got fired or something but but as long as the uh the company exists and they're getting paid that's kind of like more of our focus so i love that i think community first and everything you do in this space it's always community first and i actually love the idea of doing everything you can to like not to to make your nft or to make whatever it is that you're doing like not um you know not go out to speculate attractive a speculative track that's sort of attract speculators i love that idea it's actually super smart um i like to usually dive into sort of the business model of the dow it's like how do you plan to keep that token uh from

not going to zero like we see a lot downs but i don't think we really have time to do that right now because we're actually um just finishing up here i'm going to do a speed round of questions i think jay's internet is not so great so he's not going to be able to do it today i'm just curious is there anything else you want to mention on developer dow or anything you guys have plans to do before i get into that um give us kind of an update of what's going on next now that the the launch is done and then um also give us just your call to actions like if someone wants to join the developer down how do they do that where do we learn from you guys where do we find you um give me that spiel yeah so we're we're developer underscore

dao on twitter we have a link in our twitter bia for our website um i would check out our website it's uh developer dao i believe dot i should know this right you should but that's okay well either way developer dial oh it's developerdown.com okay so dover.com um you can join our discord there you can go to our notion doc which has a wiki wiki that explains exactly how to join and stuff like that so anyone can join um and you can kind of get more information there and we we really focused again on a very very decentralized token distribution we got we got uh a lot of interest from venture

capitalists to buy like three to five percent of our community we literally said no to everyone so we have no vc uh like investment at all so everyone that owns tokens right now have been early contributors essentially so like we don't really have in my opinion that much like worry about uh the token price at least right now right now but again it's less about the price and more about you know the other things that come out of being part of the community so right absolutely so we'll put the the links in the show notes as well so you can just click to them uh in case you didn't get the links there um okay i'm gonna do a a couple uh speed round questions is that okay with you sure

okay perfect so we're gonna start with what is an nft you'll never sell and the developer that one does not count [Laughter] i was gonna say the developer dial one but yeah i mean i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and look at my nfts right now because i don't have a ton right now are you a big collector um not really i mean i i kind of play around with them because they're kind of fun a little bit right um maybe my profile pic on twitter because i just meant it and it's and it's just you know the first time i i did meant my own you know nft to use in my profile so

yeah i would say my profile picture wait isn't that a picture of you yes it is you know cause like that's amazing i use it as my my picture on uh on social media and stuff and i like it i love that cool okay so speaking of twitter who's your favorite person to follow on twitter oh that's a very hard one for sure i guess one of the people i might have my notifications on for and let me see who all those people are this is really tough i would say maybe get coin because i'm just a huge fan of bitcoin interesting okay they got a good twitter um i just like that the community and

stuff i wouldn't say they have the most entertaining uh twitter but um because i'm a fan of kevin and scott and everything that they do it's just yeah love that cool uh which web 3 project are you most excited about other than developer dao definitely celestia i mean we didn't really get a chance to talk about celestia but i had the opportunity to pretty much do anything um when i left the graph to either start my own thing or work for pretty much any protocol but after kind of really understanding the space over the course of the last year and a half or so and understanding um the future of blockchains and where we're headed around architectures from the perspective of a developer celestia and their approach and their team

they're just to me the most exciting thing happening right now yeah i have to second that i mean i'm not a super techy but i do try to dive into this stuff as much as i can and try to understand like layer ones and layer twos and and all this and so anyone who's listening everyone i talk to in the space that like really gets this stuff is like they're really big on celestia so i highly recommend you look into them um okay last question um if you had a billboard okay that one billion people were going to see what would you put on it [Music] that's a really tough question um okay so i have

i i really enjoy reading about stoicism and also buddhism and i think that those principles have helped me a lot with my mental health and also with my career and stuff and i think there's this book that i read that's written by ryan holliday called the obstacle is the way and like everything in the book is just kind of talking about you know facing your challenges head on and and not kind of like beating around the bush so maybe maybe just the title of that book the obstacle is the way um i like that i like that a lot actually awesome thank you so much for joining us today it's a great conversation to sort of dive into tornado cache and and just you know what this all means for for this industry uh and great to learn about developer dow and congrats on

everything you're doing there and keep up the great work excited to kind of track that and see how that goes uh but thanks so much for taking the time to speak with myself and somewhat jay although i think his internet's not so not doing so well um but listen all the best and thanks for everything you're doing uh in the web3 space thank you kyle i appreciate it and it was great to be here 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 web3 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 in price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see in the next one