Web2 to Web3: Understanding the Shift with Bradley Miles, Co-Founder and CEO of Roll

Speaker A: This is Tim Dalhouse and you're listening to the Dao Talks podcast. In each episode you hear me talk to builders and makers of Web3. Together we'll be exploring our multi chain future, share personal stories and discuss how we're investing, experimenting and failing with the startups that define the future. So join me on this journey of discovery as a chat with these leaders, change makers and misfits about tech, life, the universe and everything. Today I'm talking to Bradley, co founder of ROL is a platform to release and manage social tokens and creating communities. Bradley is an economist from background with a strong, strong passion about building the web 2.5. We're going to be talking about building Communities in Web 2.5 and Web 3 what the difference is and some hands on adv advice if you want to launch your own one. Bradley, welcome. How are you and where are you?

Speaker B: Hey Tim, great to connect, doing really well. I'm in New, uh, York City right now.

Speaker A: Okay. So hi from Bali. Big time difference. Appreciate your time jumping on. Want to talk with you about role, obviously your project, a lot of stuff happening there. I think it's very interesting. I want to dive into this. But first, as far as I know you are a um, big believer or uh, advocate of what I think yourself and others call like web 2.5 rather than hey, you know, it's going to be all Web three or it's Web one and this is never going to work and the Americans and the Chinese are going to prohibit it. So what is it? It's web 2.5 is the future what is about.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think you could really break this down into just users. Right. So the, on average there's about 5 billion, let's say uh, monthly active users of the Internet on web 2. Web 3 collectively can just look at wallet growth. You know, there's around 20 to 30 million monthly active users around. That's a big gap in terms of users and growth. To get to something like a billion Web three users, you know, there's going to need to be some sort of bridge that, you know, the 5 billion folks in Web2 are pretty familiar. Likely you'll have to meet them where they are. So likely you'll have to meet them on the platforms they use, uh, and integrate uh, crypto assets in ways they understand and we consider this web 2.5. So the only iteration, the only difference is bringing crypto assets to the mainstream by incorporating them into Web2 technologies. Uh, and so in a nutshell this is web 2.5. So it seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but yeah, that's the uh, thesis on which we've kind of built ROL and our infrastructure.

Speaker A: Just that before we go into roll further. But what do you think is like, or has been the best example of this kind of like web 2.5 that we have seen where you would go, hey, this is the example that kind of underlies the case that we're trying to make here that you know, can be related to your own project, other project. But what do you think? What, what have we seen in the past that everyone kind of relate to?

Speaker B: Yeah. So we call like coinbase a web 2.5 company, uh, in terms of crypto assets, things like stablecoins. So everyone's, you know, in the world is familia with a dollar. Having a digital dollar isn't too much of a stretch. So things like that. And um, yeah, just infrastructure uh, around custodial wallets, which is something really focus on, uh, that you know, your cousin, your niece, your aunt, your grandma can uh, just kind of use. If they could use something like Facebook or Twitter, uh, they could use crypto kind of plug in and start playing with these tools.

Speaker A: I think that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it this way, but you know, you just said it, you know, like, take Coinbase as a, uh, you know, kind of Web 2.5 company. You also mentioned, you know, stable Coins and I imag you're thinking, you know, collateralized, whatever. USDC BUSD as 2.5, would you say? Hey, USDC as an example, really is a Web 2.5 technology. I mean it's not that I don't buy into it, but it's the first time I think about it this way. Is that how you're thinking about it?

Speaker B: Sort of, yeah. You could argue either point. The idea is it can just. It, um, sort of, uh, thematically it can be incorporated into people's lives. You know, you could draw a clear line between uh, something that's in their pocket or in their bank account and like nusdc.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean just by the fact that it's collateralized with the fiat currency, kind of is this kind of reality of, you know, being between the old world and, you know, the, the new world. What do you think? You know, let's jump forward, you know, five or 10 years and somebody writes history and you know, kind of describes how we went from Web one to forward to three. What do you think history is going to say? What made the big difference? Like, you know, hey, There was this early days was Bitcoin, Ethereum that. And then what happened really was this. And um, this is really that. This was the game changer. What are you going forward and then projecting backward. What do you think is that going to be?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I suppose two analogies here. You could think of web one as maybe like you know, read access to content and web two is like, you know, read and write access to content so I could publish my own, you know, content there. And we've had this, you know, content's now ubiquitous across the Internet. And uh, Web three brings this sort of, you know, read and write access to capital, which is interesting. And so uh, this is where something like role becomes very interesting. If you have like right access to money, if you can create your own currency just historically throughout technology, why wouldn't it be as big or bigger than content as long as the infrastructure is there? So uh, ROL is infrastructure that allows people to create their own fungible tokens as we call them, in the form of online communities. You could also think about this term that became really popular in Web2, this idea of user generated content as a bucket. And so the things in user generated content, like videos, likes, everything we're familiar with kind of fits into that bucket. Now that you have a uh, backend that can give read and write access to QT to capitalize, uh, this sort of shifts uh, from user generated content to the next phase which you can call user generated capital. And so in the phase of user generated capital, you know there's, you know we're seeing two kinds of capital emerge which are interesting. Capital around things like uh, you know, art, music, blogs, you know, different sorts of things. And this is taking the form of NFTs. And then we're seeing capital uh, around community and largely we're seeing this as sort of a more fungible, you know, the community represents value in the sameness through whether it's a DAO or something like this. And so this has taken the form of digital currency or uh, erc, 20s or kind of whatever equivalent on another chain. And then you have NFTs. And so we're, we're very excited about this, this trend and being the infrastructure there. So I think web3 will be remembered as you know really the first time you have like right access to capital and just making these concepts ubiquitous. So in five, ten years uh, people won't think twice about having an online presence and a token as well.

Speaker A: You think the tokens and the kind of community building around tokens will become you know, kind of what, in a positive way, you know, what kind of social media made Web two? Do you think it's going to be the most important, the main driver, or how do you look at it?

Speaker B: Old enough to remember when, when Instagram came out and people originally thought it was crazy, or even before, like post what you're eating or kind of different things, this idea of having your own channel about, like, here's everything that's happening in my life was a crazy thing. And then people started getting, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of followers and it just became how the Internet worked. And this happened because the economics of that now made sense. So where, if you subtract the economics from, hey guys, you know, here's what I'm doing today, it doesn't really work. Uh, but once you add the economics in through brands or advertising or whatever, it starts to work. Yeah, I mean, once the proper economics are in place for everyone to have a token, it makes a lot of sense for them to have a token.

Speaker A: If the economics in social networks, better social media, was all about advertising and everything that came with it. Right. Which is highly controversial, what is the economics for communities when you use tokens?

Speaker B: That's a really good question. So Web three automatically having. Right. Access to capital is the idea of really owning the things that you put out onto the Internet. So that's a fundamental difference between Web two and Web three. And so that is a feature and not a bug. So ownership as a feature allows the community to have way more things. So if we're having this conversation and I'm, um, on Tim's YouTube channel following and subscribing, you don't, uh, you don't own the relationship that, uh, you know, I have with you. The platform owns that. Fundamentally, if you have a Web3 framework in this world, if I'm getting Tim coins for listening, you know, hanging out or maybe subscribing or, you know, I'm m on your Patreon or some sort of subscription model and I receive tokens for this, you start to begin to own that relationship, uh, a lot more. And uh, that can evolve, of course, in a financial way as well, through all the Web3 financial tools we're seeing, uh, uh, so ownership as a feature becomes super important and interesting to sort of grow a community. Communities don't naturally have their own capital. Uh, that's sort of an alien concept that we're moving to the forefront. Historically. You can think of things like social capital and social currency. All we're really Doing is like rendering that real in the next few years.

Speaker A: This is great that you brought this up with the tin coin and I got to come back to that in just a minute but give us a rundown on role and you know, how it got started. So particularly interested in, you know, I'm also interested in what are the latest features that are rolling out and use cases. But I'm really interested you know, from you in a uh, kind of founder perspective to you know, how did it get started? Like what was the idea? What did you see? How did you get into Web3 and what, how did you, what happened or what did you see was missing that drove you to hey, I'm going to start this thing.

Speaker B: Yeah. So uh, one, I just have a background in economics and one of my favorite books is a book called Rethinking Money. I would highly recommend that it's by Bernard Leiter. He's the co creator of the euro and they talk about 100 year plus history of things like supplementary currencies. So in Japan there's a currency called uh, the Furiai kipu and it's an elder care currency, uh, so elders can give it to young folks to help them wash dishes or cross the street or kind of do things. And what you start to see is these are alternative currencies to drive incentives within local communities. In Belgium there's a currency called the Tareki and uh, you know it's given to other populations to kind of help them move along almost, uh, you know just sort of clean um, up neighborhoods or go to movies or get food or kind of things like this. The idea of like supplementary currencies is interesting uh because it's something uh, blockchain has enabled us to do and also uh, just kind of grew up looking at things like the creator economy and how that emerged from 2010 to 2020 and just also kind of changed the Internet and Internet economics as well. Uh, so there's this wave of people uh, coming on the Internet starting uh, communities. And you know the question is, uh, the first question was do they want a supplementary currency, uh, that can exist not only in the platforms that they use, but also outside of the platforms they use. And so the answer to that first question was a resounding yes. And so once we had our first you know, 10 or so folks that were like I want my own digital currency. This became very interesting.

Speaker A: Was that Rome M give us a date to that like around like uh,

Speaker B: it's around like 2019, 2020. We launched on Ethereum mainnet around like 2020 from there. Uh, this was like before the NFT boom, but we had a few NFT creators and then once the NFT boom happened, uh, it just kind of scaled. Folks just started having tokens along with their NFT collections and things like this and we started to have massive creators. And then um, we launched at the same time Uniswap V1 launched. Uh, so the first thing we did was fork their front end and made these things valuable for people that wanted to do that. So we have tokens with markets and more valuable and some of my friends, startups and companies and eight figure range and nine figure range and uh, all that's very cool. We'll see a lot of those in the future. But we're more obsessed with the infrastructure that allows us to reach hundreds of millions of users. We're interested in those types of numbers and, and plugging into networks and chains uh, that also make that possible. So our underlying thesis if you will in a simple sentence is plug any token on any chain into any platform.

Speaker A: Perfect. So what's the, you know, you just said that you know, got a bunch of you know, projects that you know, have a higher market cap than you know, the startups of your friends. Very likely give me like one or two like really good examples from the past that have been very successful in what they have done and how the tokens create value there. And then you know, you mentioned this, you know, maybe some of the most recent examples from you know, last few weeks. What has happened there be very, very interesting now.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll tell you how the company has evolved a little bit. So originally a uh, roll token meant you know, Tim comes uh, to roll and mints a token through Rolls, smart contracts and infrastructure. It then gets plugged into Rolls app which has a bunch of features that allows Tim to create links and plug into applications and can send tokens to people on the 5 billion web2 side of the Internet. So this was how we originally started. So a roll token is people kind of coming into roll and kind of minting tokens. So some of the really cool tokens that are out there, Shepard uh, Fairy has a token. So the big uh, American uh, TD artist, um, called Obey after his Obey giant group. That's very interesting. Once things kind of reach that scale. Whale Shark is kind of uh, one of the biggest uh, NFT collectors in the world and he very famously has uh, a vault of NFT collections, uh, valued very heavily or valued very greatly in sort of like the high eight to nine Figure range. And he has a token to kind of represent the, the community around the vault. I'll say. And so that community has grown substantially. Uh, people get to kind of choose things now that can enter or exit, uh, this vault. And, uh, he and many others have popularized this idea of community, uh, as a digital asset. So if you're on YouTube, if you're the founder or CEO of YouTube, you may think of Community as a channel. If you're on, if you're the. If you run Twitch, you may think of Community as a stream discord, Community as the server. Uh, we think of community as a digital asset that can plug into all of those things and have, uh, its own value built around all those networks. So folks like Whale Shark and very popular NFT creators like X Copy has, uh, a token unroll called Doom. And just, uh, the list goes on. So a lot of these folks have, uh, made their tokens available, uh, on Uniswap and have built markets and trading volume, uh, the same way you've seen with, um, other tokens in the space.

Speaker A: Very interesting, Very interesting. Okay, so run me, you know, through this and I got to be totally selfless here and ask you to, you know, for anyone that's listening to this, I think I'm a perfect example in many ways, especially with these podcasts of like, being involved in Web3 but not being, you know, extremely socially active online. Okay, so, you know, there's a few tweets about. There's a, uh, website for the podcast, but putting some stuff on YouTube group. There is really no other conversation happening. A part of the conversations that I have with people like yourself and that goes out and, you know, media on the Internet, what would be, uh, you know, from your experience, a real use case and more importantly, a roadmap, uh, that makes sense where, you know, you introduce a token here. If it makes any sense at all, run me through it. What, you would be my Web3 community consultant. For anyone like myself that has like, you know, a small, very specific audience. Just how would you go about it? What can you do? What is of value, you know, for the people that are, you know, today listening and as well as value to people involved in the production. What would you do? What's a good example here?

Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. So in our world, tokens are for anyone online that wants to build a community. Uh, so we'll, we'll kind of start there. So if Tim wants to build a community, uh, with his podcast, do all the things you're normally doing, um, you know, start building A community doing podcasts, you know, and let's say all of a sudden, you know, you have tens of users, you know, tens of listeners and people are starting to tune in, et cetera. Role is, uh, functionality that can begin to plug uh, into those applications that people use to listen to your podcast. So one of the first things that you could do with Roll, uh, so we'll debut this later this year is you can plug into podcast apps and you can start to deposit tokens into those pieces of media. So you could say, hey, the first, you know, I know we have tens of listeners right now, but I'm going to make a big broadcast this next, uh, podcast that I'm doing or this, this next season of 10 podcast episodes. If, uh, you listen on this particular streaming app, you will receive tokens, uh, for just listening to this podcast. And so all of a sudden there's this law, you know, that people kind of talk about or idea of like top 100 or top 1000 fans and sort of kind of bifurcates there kind of. That's all you need to build a community. So all of a sudden there's people that believe in you and now they can represent their belief in you in a new way that they couldn't previously to listen. They couldn't even show off those listens in a peer to peer way. Brad and David, as fans of Tim's podcast, we really can't differentiate how much we like that podcast, how much David likes that podcast more than me, or vice versa. Uh, with tokens that you begin to do that in a very interesting way. So plugging those tokens in, uh, distributing them, that becomes very exciting. Uh, let's say you want to set up a Discord as well. And so there's another existence of sort of your community in Discord, as sort of many folks do. So, you know, Roll has features to plug into Discord. Uh, so if you want to airdrop or tip, uh, you know, Tim tokens every podcast Friday, or have listening, you know, sessions on Discord, uh, you could start to do that as well. So you start to see the distribution of tokens as a way to drive and incentivize listenership and community, as a real way to build a community. And uh, the folks that I mentioned have done real case studies on this. And so it's really driven us to build specific tools around driving community through tokens and we've become very proficient at this specific.

Speaker A: So how would the integration with the podcast stuff work? Like this would be like very specific apps Because I guess you can't just integrate grade in any form with something like Spotify or Apple Podcasts or how

Speaker B: would this actually work in a very fun way? You know we kind of like uh, the name role because it just simplifies a very fun way to move stuff from A to B. Uh, it's kind of a name that represents the moving of something from one point to another. And so role is really generalized unopinionated infrastructure uh, for the transfer or transaction of tokens. And so what that means is we don't have an opinion on how those tokens are moved. If there are platforms that can plug into our APIs, that's when it starts. And uh, for platforms that are at scale, uh, we can do things like Chrome Extensions, you know, for something like let's say YouTube or Spotify. Let's say if we didn't have relationships there, we would create something like a Chrome Extension. And so you know, when you hop on uh, your uh, Spotify, you can say hey guys, I'm going to be giving out some Tim tokens. Download this Chrome Extension. Uh, it's in the show notes and you guys will receive Tim tokens at the end of um, the week. Uh, and so that could be a very easy way. Uh, you start to do this and we'll have some natural integrations with platforms as well and more native with things like Discord, Telegram and uh, other things like that.

Speaker A: Um, what is one of the like you know, examples of like content producers that are not natively in Web3, you know, whatever, an NFT artist and so on this I see they're very like kind of native relationship to what you're doing. What do you think is like you know, a non obvious case of things that you've seen that has been very offline or has been you know, very Web one or web two that you know, has experienced, you know, with your project, a significant uh, transformation into this web 2.5.

Speaker B: You know concepts like fungible tokens are. There's applications of this, some that you know, we can understand and fathom and some that you know, we can't fathom fathom for many years. You know, this could represent digital citizenship in the future or kind of many other things. Uh, but you know, one cool thing we haven't hit the button on this but things like loyalty, the M idea of getting you know, airline miles or uh, loyalty points. Uh, we've seen folks sort of replace uh, this uh, as well. Um, so when you're, you can think of eco, any sort of Like E commerce, you know, post purchase, reward experience. So instead of that being these you know, rinky dink points that you can't exchange or you can't give to your friends or anything like that, you could start to reimagine a world where uh, the back end for that is blockchain based and works seamlessly in you know, a Shopify or any sort of E commerce environment. But it could also plug into you know, wacky web3 stuff like you know, staking and derivatives and many other things. And this kind of reinvents, you know, if you could plug loyalty into a derivatives uh, you know, market you could start to uh, you know, short an airline program.

Speaker A: Do you know just what is the biggest or you know what, what are the most prominent cases today for like the reward points that are actually brought on chain? Do you, do you have a clear picture on that? I'm just curious.

Speaker B: There's a few companies trying to think through it. We uh, as infrastructure won't probably have a loyalty based application. We'll power that, right? So this is the beauty of Roll. So like we won't be a streaming company but we'll power the folks that want to bring tokens into streaming. Right now there's probably some, an express loyalty person who's been working in loyalty for 20 years and is watching what's going on and has all the connections and can get thousands of brands involved. Um, but they're not technical and Web3 is kind of new to them and it's really hard to build that infrastructure that's kind of a separate business. That's why PayPal exists and Stripe and uh, all these sorts of things so they can come to roll, build loyalty 3 their new application and they can get a bunch of brands involved and those brands uh, get on a minting schedule with Roll and connect those tokens into that loyalty3 app and um, you know, start from there. And so Roll is very excited to start powering applications like that in the future. And that that application we just you know uh, made up Loyalty three, like that's a very valuable company. It's an eight figure, nine figure business that can start to really plug in and plug into brands and kind of upgrade what loyalty is on the Internet.

Speaker A: Two follow up questions on that which also very interested in. First of all like from the end user perspective, that's actually three questions. Who's your, who who's under your definition, kind of your customer Persona? Like from anyone who's listening to this now, who would you say hey, if you Are this kind of person or this kind of business or doing this, then you should definitely look at what we're doing. So who's like the Persona and or business or organization that you think you have the highest, you know, you provide the highest value to? Who should be in this, who if they're not. And then second, you know, what problem does this Persona, you know user usually encounter when trying to go into this direction and you know, how do you solve it? Like what's the biggest or the three biggest problems and you know, one, two or three like cool solutions that you bring with role to the table here?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I guess I'll answer that, that second question. I'll start with the first one. So you know, in terms of the roll apps, uh, online communities that want to upgrade their community and start to think about ownership as a feature and sort of have these tools that create ownership in the community.

Speaker A: What size is somebody ideal that has like a community of ten or a hundred or a thousand? And what does community actually mean? Like that uh, you have them already on a discord or you have followers and whatever subscribers in YouTube. Give me an idea who is like deal?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's never too early. You could think of something like YouTube is a great example. It's like YouTube has folks uh, with one subscriber and zero subscribers, uh, and then has folks with uh, you know, hundreds of millions. It's sort of along that scale. All you need to do is want to build a community on the Internet and we could think about community as digital asset for you. So on the roll app, uh, that'd be where it starts. And with our developer tools it's platforms. You know there's so many founders in our networks that are building the next Spotify or the next hbo. And so we're talking to them and just developing a timetable. We want to integrate tokens into uh, game shows and racing games and you know uh, and loyalty and all these sorts of things that we'll be able to power and um, really, really upgrade the Internet in this way. That's where I spend a lot of my time just talking to founders, helping them integrate uh, tokens into their platforms.

Speaker A: So you have a very strong focus on projects and you know their founders that are building again projects and applications for the future that are trying to incorporate this capabilities is this way you spend a lot of time on you

Speaker B: know roll would grow something like PayPal where they're consumer facing and where Tim's sending tokens to, you know his now his millions of users that Are kind of very excited about, you know, your podcast, your community. Maybe you started something else. And Tim Tokens represent that too. But also, you know, your podcast is on a streaming app and Roll works with that streaming app as well. So you could put some Tim Tokens into that, set it and forget it. And people are just getting Tim Tokens for listening to episodes, doing a bunch of stuff. And so that relationship we have with you is really important. And the relationship we have with the platform is really important as well. So some comparables there that a lot of people know maybe like, you know, PayPal and Stripe. So in those interfaces, uh, Tim can go there and create a store or create an e commerce, uh, you know, angle, and people can just work with you directly or, uh, receive that dollar value directly. But those platforms also, you know, work with Stripe powers, things like, uh, Shopify, etcetera, Things like that. So we'll have that relationship as well.

Speaker A: You know, I had a, uh, hundred thousand people listening to the podcast and you know, somebody would throw a million dollars at the podcast, an investor, and I would go like, now it's really the moment to, you know, launch a token. I'm oversimplifying this, right? What are the things that, you know, me as a content producer then that I would like to do and that are going to be much more difficult than what I expect them m to be? And what are the specific solutions that you guys bring to the table there?

Speaker B: Whenever you want to create a token is, uh, fine. We have folks that are creating tokens for things they haven't built yet. And we have folks with, you know, millions of followers on the Internet that are, that have tokens as well. At any point, you know, in your life, uh, cycle as a creator or digital community, you can, you can start to do this.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The first thing you just want to figure out, and it doesn't really matter, it's just the, uh, max supply of your token. You know, we have a simple mental math kind of, um, 10 million number that uh, vests over a year period. But, uh, we've kind of turned into this like, uh, Chipotle of money monetary policy, fast casual way. So you can go in and kind of choose your monetary policy. If you want a trillion Tim tokens, you can do that kind, uh, of whatever you do. So you want to arrange how you want that, uh, Tim Token to exist in the world, then you can just. Any platform that role is connected to, you could use. We have tools, tools for discord. You can be like, hey guys, join the discord. Every Friday I'm going to give out thousand Tim tokens. What we're excited about is this is really interesting. When people receive tokens through roll, it's usually the first tokens they receive that they care about. And that's been true for a really long time. And if you think about that, there's people, you know, that uh, you are probably their only connection to Web3. They've heard about Bitcoin and Ethereum, but they're just wacky things that are out there. But they love Tim. If Tim creates uh, a podcast and has a token and they really like your podcast and you give them Tim tokens, maybe they've never held Bitcoin or Ethereum and maybe you're the gateway, uh, for them to get into the space. And that's something we see time again and something that we're really excited about. So yeah, that would be the basic way to start. So create a token, uh, decide the tokenomics if you will, and then from there start dispersing it to the people in your community and using our tools to do that.

Speaker A: I want to pick up something that you kind of touched on earlier in the conversation and you talked about infrastructure and tokens on multiple chains and different chains. And I'd mentioned to you this on off, uh, before we started, but I've been talking and spending quite a bit of time over thinking and Talking through the web 3Web 2.5 Blockchain multi chain future will look like and obviously there's you know, Bitcoin maximalists and Ethereum maximalists and you know, people are saying there's going to be thousands of chains, right? What do you think is the, the future going to look like? Are we going to just have, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum or we're going to have like, you know, a lot of chains and what are these chains could be for? What about evm? What about non evm? Um, how do you imagine the blockchain future? No matter if it Web 3 or Web 2.5, I think it's going to

Speaker B: be pretty irrational for the next 10 years. So you know, if you wanted to create Tim Chain and raise a hundred million dollars, you could probably do that. You know, Tim Chain may not be sustainable in five years because there's, there's Bradley Chain and all these other chains that exist. Eventually it'll start to become more rational and just, just reach a steady state and then it'll have little blips and things like this. So the things that make sense. A boring answer but, and this means that eventually something will surpass Ethereum, inevitably. But in the meantime, lots of other chains make sense. Uh, roles. Very. Uh, right now we're on Ethereum and Polygon, but our journey is going to be multi chain and non EVM as well. Things like Bitcoin are really interesting to us. Uh, some of your viewers are probably familiar with the concept of BRC 20s. Those are interesting. So sort of these, um, semifung assets on Bitcoin that are now getting listed on exchanges and kind of things like this. And so we believe in a multi chain world, but we'll kind of see where it comes out. Role is going to go anywhere. People want to think about community as digital assets. So immediately that's all chains. And then we'll uh, work with the best ones and connect them into more

Speaker A: web two platforms and two questions. You said, you know, there's something that will surpass Ethereum or will not surpass Ethereum. Clarify that. What are you thinking there?

Speaker B: Oh, it's just inevitable. You know, um, if you look into the 90s, some of the biggest computers, uh, at that time, you know, Compaq, Galaxy, like these were like the biggest, you know, kind of kind of sellers of the time. And you know, you can go back to any sort of, uh, technology paradigm and kind of think about who were the big players back then and things just change. Ethereum, uh, um, has sort of a great background and foundation in popularizing a lot of these concepts that we work in. Defi daos, decentralized exchanges, et cetera. It all started basic on Ethereum. Um, eventually technology is meant to be disrupted. So I don't think anything currently can sort of surpass, uh, what Ethereum is. But maybe there's some combination of other technology like AI or something that can uh, develop some other form of a chain that can be useful for everyone. And I could, uh, telepathically send you money in the future.

Speaker A: It makes us all rich.

Speaker B: There's uh, a lot of possibilities, you know, but, um, it's just sort of the inevitable creative disruption.

Speaker A: That's an interesting perspective, you know, like this idea of inevitable disruption, uh, like that. Because, you know, I would say that, you know, a lot of the opinions that I've heard over the last few weeks and months vary a lot. An opinion about, you know, is it how many chains they're going to be? But I think I've somewhat seen kind of a predominant opinion or bias maybe that tends to say, you know, Ethereum is going to be the backbone or settlement layer for this web3 and inevitably somewhat contradictory. Right. Like inevitably be the largest chain. Right. With the most economic power. And you're saying, you know, there's going to be inevitably some disruption happening. So I think that's uh, an interesting perspective. So you would hold to this. I mean, you know, we can talk again in five to 10 years and say, hey, you know, it was the inevitable backbone or it's the inevitable disruption. You're a firm believer in this idea of disruption.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. I mean this isn't me. This is, you know, kind of a Schumpeter economist kind of, you know, uh, this is creative destruction and sort of all that. There are things that are really cool too. Like, like Layer zero is a project that allows, you know, protocols to uh, deploy on different chains and sort of things like that. But um, yeah, I mean it's going to be a multi chain world that it'll continue to grow. You know, web three will become old at some point and there'll be a web four and a web five and so it's hard to kind of see where things will land.

Speaker A: It's a good perspective.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So do you think, you know, fast forward five years there's going to be 100 chains, 10 chains, a thousand chains. What's your best guess?

Speaker B: As many as in that sense. So I think the next 10 years will be pretty irrational. So you know, you're kind of seeing a meme coin moment. And so there's this like lag between the first meme coins and now you know, and, and you saw that with um, for any older listeners like ah, things like Defi. And So in like 2021 it was like everyone was creating a defi project to do these certain things. Now meme coins are the hot thing. So yeah, you'll just continue to kind uh, of, kind of see that evolution.

Speaker A: And you said I think going back to rock, you're currently only on Ethereum and Polygon, is that correct?

Speaker B: Yeah. And so we'll start to um, think where else makes sense around the evm. So we just want to go where the space is growing. So if things are growing on Solana or uh, Binance, uh, we'll be there. We want to work with projects and games and communities that are growing and have tokens and we could help scale their communities.

Speaker A: Me, um, the top three chains, like you know, I would go, hey, I give you money and the development team, you can implement three chains. Would you choose and why?

Speaker B: I think just the chains with uh, projects that are growing and kind of Interesting. There's a project that I like a lot. They kind of started thinking about this concept of like move to earn. So they just connected to like your phones and they started to think about it as people move. Can we give them our token? Like that project called sweatcoins have been following them a while and they have a bunch of users they're on near right now, so they're doing a bunch of stuff there. Uh, the Binance ecosystem is really interesting. Um, they have their own terminology. Uh, social fi is what they call it. And gamefi has become more of a used term there. But there's some really big simple apps like quiz apps, have millions of users and their own tokens. And so plugging into that atmosphere and integrating roll into those quizzes and making that transfer more seamless and allowing it to be the infrastructure for other games and things like. That's interesting. So realistically, wherever there's big projects, uh, we kind of want to work with them and just connect them to the rest of the Internet.

Speaker A: Plan for a next chain in the works or not yet.

Speaker B: Nothing to announce, but really excited about Polygon. Great team there. There's a lot of projects that are building specifically on Poly and it makes a ton of sense with gas and everything. So we'll stay there and we'll continue to, like, survey the EVM world and see what makes sense.

Speaker A: Bradley, it's going to be inevitable. Future of change and innovation that seems to be completely unpredictable. Thank you so much for your time. Any last words?

Speaker B: No, Have a great one. Enjoy Bali. Wish I was there. And, uh, yeah, we'll talk again soon.

Speaker A: Dao Talks is brought to you by Grindery. If you enjoyed this podcast, consider subscribing to Dao Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google or any other platform you fancy. To find out more about Grindery, visit Grindery IO. Thanks for joining me, Tim. Out.