Building CryptoStats and trustworthy onchain data with David Mihal

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode all right welcome to academy it is the tuesday weekly spotlight and today we are spotlighting david my hall super excited to have david on the podcast today david is a expert in everything data and analytics on the blockchain and he's going to be sharing with us uh what he's been working on uh he was one of the founders of crypto fees which i'm sure all of our listeners have spent

time on uh and has many other uh pages within there openorgs money printer ethburned i won't even list them all david you can tell us about them uh and more recently he started building uh a dao crypto stats uh which uh we're super excited to dive into because it's all focused on um making trustworthy crypto metrics available to all which is really uh fitting in with the ethos of web 3 and um making everything uh permissionless uh and available to the masses david welcome to the podcast hey guys uh excited to be here thanks for having me on we're excited to have you too my man uh

well i gave a brief intro but you can probably tell your story better than i can so uh why don't we just start out with uh you telling us a bit of your story yeah for sure so uh yeah my name's david i'm a software engineer been kind of working in the crypto space since uh since last cycle i got it like around 2017 2018 was when i really started diving head first uh into the space and you know i love it more and more every day it's just the coolest industry to work in you work on cool technology you meet kind of uh really cool people and i mean just the craziest stuff happens too it's exciting every day so um yeah so in terms of the stuff i've

worked on i've worked on all sorts of stuff uh throughout the years i've kind of done a few independent projects i've done a bunch of work for different dows big and small and the main thing i'm kind of focusing on now is yeah as you mentioned jay um you know crypto fees and especially crypto stats which is kind of the project that has evolved out of that so yeah that's my that's my main focus now i'm gonna film i kind of give the full background on on that or yeah why don't you dive dive deeper into kind of starting crypto fees why you started that first of all um i'd love to just kind of to understand that um what's interesting is these are all just like free web pages for anyone to use in

the space um so like where does that come from why did you get into analytics on the blockchain and then i think we'll dive a lot deeper into analytics because i think that's a super interesting conversation cool cool yeah so i'll start by kind of rewinding a couple years to you know kind of before before the pandemic hit before um you know d5 and everything really started kicking off you know we have a lot of these d5 primitives that we have today like you know maker dow exists we had like kind of decentralized stable coins and lending we had aven compound we had uniswap of course so there was you know i've been kind of working in the space and seeing these really amazing projects coming up but they hadn't really gotten

like the mind share yet people didn't really know what they were you know most people weren't thinking about crypto at all and if they were they're just thinking like oh there's like bitcoin and bitcoin cash and you know bitcoin gold and you know and there's ethereum but everyone just thought of ethereum as like oh it's probably just like a just another version of bitcoin um and so when people looked at kind of like metrics the metrics usually kind of reflected that perspective of the ecosystem you know even today you know this the main metric people look at is market cap so which coin is the biggest which coin is the smallest and they would look at you know other trading metrics you know what is the what is the vault trading volume of something what's the volatility you know

what's the unit price is still like kind of a big one like is it a dollar is it thirty thousand dollars stuff like that but the cool thing is like d5 started growing is you started to you know have a lot of these metrics that you know a lot of them are kind of more comparable to traditional metrics in traditional business um so you know the metric that kind of uh we got started with and built everything around is revenue and you know you can look at any company and you can look at their revenue people who work in traditional finance they're very comfortable looking at you know revenue and profit and you know doing kind of discounted cash flow models to evaluate the valuation of something so

you know i i did think it was interesting that uh or i felt like people were really missing out on how much cool stuff there was in crypto because they assumed everything was just something like bitcoin that was just some new asset that was not backed by anything you know didn't have any valuation against it um so i felt that way for a while and i think kind of the the thing that got me to build uh crypto fees was i saw a tweet from from hayden adams who's the creator and ceo of uniswap where he was talking about the fee the fees that uniswap was accruing um so if you don't know when you make a trade on uniswap there's uh you know you buy and sell some coin and

a small amount of that trade goes to the liquidity providers the people who you know have deposited assets into this pool and you know the amount of of uh fees that were being paid was was actually quite high and he had this tweet where he showed you know there's a lot of people paying transaction fees you know maybe the tens of thousands of dollars to transact on bitcoin ethereum was also pretty high maybe 10 000 you know dollars or something and then the next was uniswap was also had quite a bit and then he showed i think the tweet had like you know basically said like um you know then then there's like 400 or you know how many hot dogs like something about the price of hot dogs and then all these other blockchains saying um bitcoin cash and

litecoin and ripple and stuff like that which all had like tens of dollars in daily fees um now of course people at that time who probably like those products would go oh look you know the fees are so low on litecoin but when you kind of look at this aggregate fee metric you go ah like there's actually like nobody's nobody's paying very much to use this blockchain um and the great thing about this metric is it doesn't just work for blockchains you could take something like uniswap and you could compare the revenue of unisoft like how much are people paying to use uniswap against how much are people paying to use bitcoin how much are they paying to use ethereum so i saw that tweet i thought this was like a really really great metric that

was kind of um you know it intuitively like made sense to me that's like you know the the ones that are useful like bitcoin is useful ethereum is useful uniswap is useful i mean personally i don't think you know litecoin is that useful and i felt those numbers kind of reflected that so you know it took like an hour or two and i just built this like really really simple website uh that just kind of showed those fees and you know i still have a screenshot it looks pretty similar to the site today um and i just kind of built it for myself and then i think you know maybe a month later um you know unisoft fees were real really high i don't know something looked interesting to me so i

just decided to tweet it out and see if anyone else thought it was interesting and the site really caught on people started really sharing it a lot posting screenshots of it on twitter um and yeah it really surprised me because this was again something i just built for fun for myself and you know i kind of started like going like well maybe i'll i'll keep working on the site i'll add more i added a bunch of other protocols um i would add you know the other exchanges you know a couple months later sushi swap came out we could look at sushi swap first unit swap um and i started making other sites so i made one that was how much is being settled you know basically how much value is being transferred on bitcoin how much is values being

transferred on ethereum um you know again at that point like people were surprised that like yeah you know ethereum was flipping bitcoin at some points in time because i thought oh bitcoin is we use way more um what were the other ones i made at that time well you know i kind of started making these more and more info sites to try to show usually to try to show metrics that i felt were undervalued and could communicate a point so um you know market cap that's like a metric that people aren't really it's already everyone already knows about that metric so i'm not going to do things like that um and i want to do one where you could look at it you could really like you didn't need to be a data person or you know an analyst to understand

kind of what it meant if you look at crypto fees you go ah people are paying to use these protocols um and that kind of intuitively just gives you an idea of like oh how valuable are these protocols so yeah that's kind of the the crypto fee side was building that out what's what's really interesting is that all this data is is like fed into these sites and it's like it's basically real time right in the traditional world if you want to look at revenue of a business you got to wait like i don't know every quarter for them to put out their numbers um but what you kind of unlocked is like you can just literally go and refresh and see the revenues that ethereum is making every single day uh or bitcoin or uniswap or whatever um i feel like blockchain has a ton of data and i don't

really understand it or know what all the data is yet i think you're gonna have a much better idea of this can you just share like what data is like what data is possible to get out of these blockchains like i understand fees that make sense and transfers what else is there just for for those who are not really aware what all can you track and and yeah i mean i think that's the really cool part is what you can track is pretty limitless like any transaction that happens on chain you can you know any data you can derive from it like it's pretty pretty easy to derive for it from it so you know the ones we track are you know fee revenue as i mentioned um you can look at like the apy of like lending markets and kind of yield generating protocols

um you know you can look at how much are people what are the amounts that people are moving you know what are the amounts that they're trading what are the amounts that they're sending uh things like that but um yeah you can track pretty much anything and as you mentioned the really cool thing about uh crypto is that this stuff is all out in the public uh so yeah like traditionally you'd have to wait for like a quarterly earnings report for a company to come out and say like this is what we tell you our numbers are on crypto the data's just there um the flip side of it is in traditional uh you know businesses like the business is basically compelled by you know like the sec to put out a report that they're kind of giving their stamp of approval on and crypto like

there's no there's no bitcoin company there's no ethereum company that's going to come out with their quarterly earnings report so that's bank yeah it's kind of bad pretty much um yeah but it's basically up to the community to for someone to go oh you know i think it's valuable for people to know this information i'm gonna try to aggregate this data and and i'm also going to try to build trust in the community because you know if you're a website like mine or a bank or something like that like you can kind of just lie if you're if you if the quarterly earnings report comes out and you lie on it like you're going to go to jail with crypto people lie about stuff in crypto all the time so that trust is a really important thing to to build up around the data

one one of the interesting ones you have on the site i don't know what it's called but like dao's treasury and it's like you can just go and see all the different dows and see like how big their treasure is that to me is super super interesting because it's like you can literally go and see how much these these companies if you want to call them a company are essentially saving at any at any given time and it's just it makes the whole um you know economics of business just completely open to anyone and everyone uh which to me is super super interesting yeah yeah so that website is called openorgs.info and that site started in a really similar way to like crypto fees like i saw a tweet that was about uniswap um where at some point someone's like like do people

realize uniswap has like an 11 billion dollar treasury like that's an insane amount of money uh was i i can't remember yeah it must be billion yeah yeah um and you know again like if if dows are kind of the these like future companies in a sense um you know you want to know kind of like people talk a lot about how apple has this massive balance sheet that they have just a ton of like cash and other assets on their balance sheet and that's you know a really interesting asset for company to have um but nobody was talking about that uh these downside kind of emergence suddenly daos have so much money that they're they're bigger than a lot of businesses they're bigger than a lot of like venture capital funds that they

have this capital that they can deploy um so yeah it's the same idea i kind of put together a simple website so that people could kind of see that and talk about it and and also to kind of break down like what's in these treasuries is and this is something we we could actually do a bit better at showing but like you know a lot of trade like unit swaps treasury yeah they had like 11 billion dollars but it's 11 billion dollars of uni tokens which means it's not actually 11 billion dollars because you you flood the market like usually when you spend you know money out of a treasury if it's just some token people are going to sell it for for dollars for each or something so you basically start selling 11 billion dollars with the uni tokens like it's not going to be able to zero dollars

going to zero yeah uh but you can see some of these organizations have pretty well diversified treasuries they have stable coins they have e that wrap bitcoin some of them even have um you know like yearn had a bunch of debt for a while that they they got a little over a year ago there was some some hack someone stole a bunch of money from urine and the dow basically decided they were going to like reimburse users they were going to take a bunch of wi-fi tokens put it in maker dow and you know draw a bunch of dye out of that and give that diet back to the users who had been hacked so now you have you know protocol that has debt you know they have assets they have you know liabilities of debt like this is we're starting to get kind of complex balance

sheets just like any business has so i'm really if we can kind of show all that that's interesting for when nation states or governments uh start to use the blockchain and now we can openly see their their debts and and their spending and their treasury that'll be really cool well speaking of i mean we're kind of you know as of a couple weeks ago the ukrainian government is starting to use crypto a bit more um i'm sure a lot of people probably heard that they you know of course when as this warp broke out in ukraine ukrainian government kind of posted a a bitcoin address and a theorem address and said look if you'd like to contribute um just send crypto to these addresses they are got tons of money i know it was like over 50 million dollars which is more than like most there's more than the

un's and more than most countries then um and i even saw that they you know so of course they're using a lot of this money for kind of i think they said they're not using it on weapons but they're using it on like defense purchases and i think they said a lot of their suppliers were willing to accept crypto uh because it just makes things much smoother they probably saw oh here's a government that's got a lot of money if we you know just open like a corporate coinbase account you know they can send us money like today and we can make a sale so now we have a government that's not only receiving money in crypto but they're sending money in crypto and you know i haven't looked at the chain myself but theoretically that's all kind of public and viewable so that's super cool you're

going to need to make a a web page that sort of tracks the money of ukraine and what they're doing so like sir are you going to say something else let's say like it's a new website like crypto nation states or something yeah yeah that's right so okay most of this data is like value data right so like where's the money moving where's the money accumulating et cetera as marketers ourselves and as entrepreneurs we look a lot about like user data that's what i really care about i love user data is that something you've tapped into or like is that even possible yet with blockchains um i i feel like there might be something there with like wallets and tracking what's happening with users wallets and maybe what apps they're using or assets inside

of it i don't know but is this an area you've explored yet yeah i mean it's a great question a lot of people will ask about things like you know which blockchain has the most transactions you know the most wallets and things like that um and there's certainly like worthwhile metrics to track but the the ones that i've kind of tended to to really resonate with are the ones that are more financial because they partially they seem very um you can't fake money right like the amount people are paying you know 10 million dollars a day to use ethereum and most that money is just getting burned it's getting destroyed like there's no blockchain that can really fake that unless they have 10 million

that they're just willing to light on fire and that's just one day um whereas like number of transactions you know again i think like number of transactions on a blockchain is i'm sure you can derive some interesting information from it but uh the trend the blockchain that has the most transaction is just going to be the one that has the most block space so it's going to be solana or it's going to be nano or something like that um you know i kind of compared it to like if you're trying to evaluate blockchains and you're looking at which one has the most transactions that feels to me like looking at comparing stores by which one sells the most things like the store that sells the most things is probably like a dollar store where they send like sell you know

pieces of candy by the piece for a couple cents and the one that sells the least things is going to be like a car store where they only sell you know one car a day but that car is worth you know 30 000 so yeah there's definitely a lot i mean there's infinite metrics you can track but that's kind of why i've kind of tended to lean towards the more uh financial ones because they just you know really resonate with me and make a lot of sense but yeah i'm certainly open to kind of uh to other metrics about users and walls and stuff like that if uh if this makes sense one day one day um okay so the you've made all these websites uh and now you're looking to sort of um

form this into a dow or create something bigger i want to talk about the dao but first maybe to sort of wrap up the the analytics side unless jay you have any more questions can you sort of like zoom out and talk to us like what do analytics look like on a blockchain i don't know five ten years from now when like everyone is using it for everything like what what do you think and i don't know if you've thought about this stuff yet this is the kind of things that i like to do but like where do you think this goes and like what's going to be possible or how does this like change the way we think about business or e-commerce or whatever um but any insight into that of just like where this looks in 10 years from now let's say i mean for one thing i think the the

whole data ecosystem around crypto is going to be just so much more massive than it is today uh because if you think of any other you know industry especially financial industries like data is such a big part of it there are whole companies there you know so many people whose job is like just looking at the looking at wall street looking at the stock market and deriving data from that and now we have an industry where the data is all we have way more data because the data is all open in public as we said earlier and you know there's there's some sites tracking data there's some projects tracking it but i think there's so much room for it to grow both in terms of there will be companies that are providing data you know kind of to end users i think there's a lot to grow in

like the protocol space um you know we'll talk a bit about kind of what we're doing but you know we depend a lot on protocols like the graph which is an indexing service that kind of combs through all the data and can kind of like create new data based on the actual on-chain data so i think that's a space that's going to grow a lot and you know tools there's things like dune analytics which lets you kind of write sql queries on all this data i think you can kind of look at each of these spaces and go a lot of parts of the data ecosystem and crypto there's like one or two companies you know providing some service i think five years from now it's going to be a very big very competitive ecosystem and yeah we're hoping to have a big role in

that super cool jay any other questions you have on analytics or do you want to dive into the dao no let's dive into the dao i'm super excited to hear more about crypto stats awesome cool so uh yeah so as you said i kind of like built a bunch of these websites had kind of gathered a bunch of data you know was was working with projects all the time because you know projects are coming to me going hey like we want to get on crypto fees stuff like that and also talking to so a lot of my time is going into just working with projects that want to get listed and there's also a bunch of people who are coming to me and going like they're either going hey can you like show data in this way can you make a graph like this or a chart like this or

something or or some projects you're going like hey can you help make an api because we want to show this data on our website on our app or something like that uh so i kind of started to realize like the the data itself was like kind of really like the most valuable thing that we had tapped into like it wasn't this really simple website that's just like a very simple table like anybody can build one of those the thing that's hard is like looking at all these different protocols and they all you know if if you just pick one metric like fee revenue they all generate fees in different ways they all kind of the the on-chain data to see the fees is very different so it's a lot of work to just kind of aggravate that and

you know there's a few sites that are showing metrics and every website is like doing all the same work they're all trying to scrape all this data and process it and aggregate it and stuff like that and this would be something that'd be useful if there was just like one set of data that anybody could use that anybody could tap into and you know on one hand like if you're um if you're a d5 protocol and you want to get your data into the ecosystem so people could see it you could just put it in one place instead of working with ten different teams and on the other hand like if you're you know there's a lot of really great data visualization people or people who have really cool data websites for those people like they should be focused on how do i

communicate data to users how do i present it in a way that people will understand it they shouldn't be worried about like oh a new dex just launched now i have to write more code to get this to dax um so that's kind of what we decided to that's where crypto stats came from was the idea of we already had all all this data for crypto fees for a bunch of these websites what if we could make this like kind of one shared repository where anybody could contribute data to it and anybody could view that data from it and you know hopefully this data library would grow and grow over time as this like shared public good uh until you know the goal is for every website to you know every data website every data project to be using this data and and of

course that means you know every every d5 project every blockchain whatever is going to be incentivized to make sure that that one place has accurate data uh so that's kind of the goal and what we're trying to build and and we're especially trying to do it in this is what i think the thing is is really interesting is we're not trying to do this as like a company or as a you know like a free api or free database we're trying to do it as a decentralized protocol so that um yeah you mentioned bankless one idea they talk about a lot on bankless is the um the protocol sync thesis which is like if you're like a decentralized protocol those tend to like sink down the the tech stack and because people build on top of them

right if you build a company on top of ethereum you know like ethereum's not going anywhere ethereum's gonna be around for a while if you build a company on top of like twitter that company might do really well and then someday twitter might just like turn off their api and or you know there might be um you know we're talking about like kind of the geopolitics going on today like a lot of websites are getting blocked stuff like that if you build on protocols that aren't neutral and aren't like resilient your your company can just kind of fall apart one day if that gets pulled out from under you so the goal is to build this data protocol and build it in a way that it is kind of as trustless and decentralized as possible because that's what's really gonna get people to build on top of it and to

trust it i love that the protocol the protocol sync thesis is so damn important i think not enough people in this industry really understand that like the point in crypto and what we're doing with blockchains is to create decentralized things so they can't be shut down and this this industry is just too focused on just like i don't know making money right now so they just don't quite understand that but that's like one of the best takeaways that i got from vegas i feel like was the protocol sync thesis so i love that you just that you just brought that up so you're going to build this um crypto stats as a dow rather than a business um what what makes you choose that uh the dow way and and i guess talk about like how that's different than building it as

a business yeah so we're building as a dao um again kind of the goal of it is to be not really to be like a profitable company i mean of course we need we'll need kind of revenue to to pay for our expenses but for this to be a public good that everybody can you know extract value from and can provide value to and so the best way to do that like you know and i guess the traditional world you can do like kind of a non-profit organization to do those things but um you know providing public goods is something that crypto is really good at because crypto is all about kind of creating these new incentive models these new systems that can provide something uh and

provide an economic model where people just want to contribute to it you can say bitcoin and ethereum those are both public goods they provide a service uh you know it doesn't you know other than like transaction piece it doesn't really cost to use them but there's an incentive mechanism that has you know no you know miners and validators that are providing security and nodes that are providing access and and things like that so those are i think kind of very simple public goods the crypto space is moving towards exploring more complex public goods i think that put put us in that category of you know it's not something simple like a blockchain where you just need to run a computer like we actually kryptostats needs people to be writing code you know to kind of contribute to this thing but

um and the other side is that this is the only way something like this can scale um you know if you one of the main benefits that we provide is that when you have like a shared public good you have a bunch of people contributing to it um those things can if you build it right they can grow and they can scale so much better than a than any company can uh like one kind of comparison i like to look at is wikipedia like if you go back a couple decades kind of before the internet was much of a thing you go okay how do you build like a really comprehensive encyclopedia that has as much information as possible in it and everyone say well you know you build a big company you become like the

encyclopedia company you become like encyclopedia britannica and you just hire a lot of writers that's kind of like the brute force way of just like hire more writers and you can write more pages in your encyclopedia but kind of the crazy idea of the internet was to have something like wikipedia where you go oh we'll just make it so anybody can write an encyclopedia article and funny enough that like works way better than a company like uh encyclopedia britannica you just get all these people coming together and self-organizing and they build this you know wikipedia which is probably one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind it's this one source of all the world's information um so yeah with crypto stats like there's going to be more and more crypto

protocols like it's just going to go exponential if you have like if you're one data company and you're trying to like write the new code for every defy app that launches you're never going to be able to keep up but if you can build a system like if you know there was some guy who sat down and built wikipedia and then everyone contributed to it if we can build something kind of like wikipedia where anybody can come in and go like ah you know this is my favorite d5 protocol i want them to be on crypto fees to be in crypto stats they have the tools that they can really easily build it uh then that's how we can kind of scale to something that you know is much bigger than any you know individual entity could build i love the uh the focus on the public

good because that's such a you know big part of um of the crypto story that i don't think is being told enough right there's so much focus on web3 on you know the money making and you know lots of people talking about being rug pulled and fud and uh talking about you know in d gen is you know a word that gets thrown a lot around a lot but i really love you know the regenerative focus of crypto and the opportunity to make the world a better place so hats off to you david i'd love to hear about just take us to the sort of the origins of cryptostats in terms of you know one thing that i do think is difficult about starting a dao is organizing

humans right and i think we naturally have in our mind that well if i'm going to do work then i should be compensated for my work right so this we're flipping the model a little bit here with daos of you know coming together and giving work and giving time without necessary compensation in the beginning so can you just walk us through like how how did how did cryptostats start in the beginning you know who was on the team how did you guys form what were the steps you took yeah so one thing that uh first of all it's a tough problem right to to bring people together to find the incentive models especially if you're starting out without like you know crypto stats isn't some like venture-backed company we don't have like a big uh big pool of money that we

can just hire people with um one great thing about it was starting with something that is already that is already like a valuable public good you know so we had kind of crypto fees the website and you know crypto stats was kind of just an extension of that like it was the way to feed data in a lot of people came to the community just because they're like they said like i want my favorite uh app to be on crypto fees you know there was one guy who's like a good member of our community he was really big into the um oh what is the abracadabra community and so he kind of like hopped in our discord was like yeah like how do i get abracadabra and we kind of like gave him some directions on how to how to write the code how to build the adapter that

we call to you know he was motivated by helping abracadabra he was part of that community he wanted to have a cadaver data to be out there and through defeated by his things exactly exactly we're focusing on regen here come on well i mean that could be a great way to like to you know help public goods is like um yeah we were talking about the ukraine thing and like was it yeah ukraine was like here's our address like just donate money to us and then like a day or two later they're like there's gonna be an airdrop if you donate to uh donate to us and you saw the amount of donations just spike off what was gonna

like obviously be like a stupid valueless airdrop but like you know if you can leverage like d gens and to to do something good for the world like yeah i don't see the problem in that so um so yeah again like you know having something that's already valuable and that people already see the value in contributing to i think that makes it a little bit easier to bootstrap as opposed to a lot of dows will kind of just start with an idea and like hope people can come to build that idea so we're a bit ahead of that um and yeah again at some point we'll have you know a token um and one cool thing about crypto is to kind of like

token issuance can be really useful for bootstrapping network effects uh i i saw someone talking about how you know like social social networks have this problem of you know a big network effect problem like you kind of can't build a social network because you know facebook instagram tic tac tic tock whatever they're not valuable because they're like great pieces of software uh they're valuable because all your friends are there and then you have this big problem when you try to start something new that if it's if something's only valuable because a lot of people are there there's no incentive to use it until everybody's already there um with you know kind of leveraging the speculative nature of crypto you can kind of make a new project that has a token and people are incentivized to use say a web3

social network even if their friends aren't on it because they're like you know maybe they bought some bags or they got an airdrop or something so the early adopters do get rewarded uh for being an early adopter of something as time goes on let's you know let's say it's successful uh you know and the token appreciates whatever uh you know the early adopters are rewarded as time goes on there's less and less of a reward but it just becomes inherently valuable in and of itself so now it's now you don't need like two early adopters you don't need token incentives because you've got a lot of people um so i think that's another kind of mechanism that that you can use to to bootstrap any doubt any project in crypto is like you know this the speculative nature of

crypto lets you bootstrap the beginning uh the growth phase of a project and you know it's not something that's sustainable it's nothing that can last forever but if you leverage it right you can build something that's big enough and valuable enough that it that it can exist on its own even once those incentives run out how did you so i mean i guess you already have a decent following on twitter you have i mean the site that's super popular is that how you made your community so far like without a token because you haven't launched a token yet like one of the things that i find most people are struggling with is like how do i build up my community so that i can launch my nft or my token whatever what was it that worked for you to like get this community involved and like engage and

actually like active and working on this pre pre-token yeah i mean again that's like the million-dollar question of like how do you build a community um yeah some of it was again people already liked the site that they already liked some of the stuff we're doing so we were able to kind of just get some people by just talking about that or um you know a lot of the community comes together as i mentioned like to contribute to it they want to get projects listed on it um and some of us just trying to engage with the type of people that make sense in your community you know we have weekly calls where we you know these days we're talking a bit more about the doubt but a lot of the calls we just get together and we just talk about crypto and defy and which you know which

projects are doing well and which aren't yeah and you know the people who you know we're a data project so the people that we want in our community are people who like kind of like digging into the nitty-gritty of you know what are the what indicator is you know which metrics show that a protocol is doing well and stuff so like let's build some cool stuff but let's also like hang out and just talk about like you know what's your favorite project and you know how are they doing on the fee revenue charts or something like that um right so yeah those are kind of things we've done so far but uh you know certainly like growing growing as a community is still something that we're we're trying to figure out how to do uh how to get more people involved so yeah i think that's

uh something that every every down and community is working on right and so you you started the community off the back of crypto fees and these other free sources and then and then you start these weekly calls did the idea for creating a dow just pop out of one of these weekly calls was it something that you kind of came up with on your own or with somebody else like when can you sort of trace the origin i mean the the calls definitely started i mean for a while like this whole project was like a side project to me like you know i built crypto fees and stuff like just for something fun i was working on other stuff um so there was only like one point when i kind of realized like oh actually i

think i can build something really interesting and useful out of this uh which a dow is like a big part of that whole thing okay i need to start like engaging with the community um i kind of like built like a small community by accident like you know eventually i made like a telegram group because people wanted being a telegram group so i had put like very minimal effort into the community side then i was kind of like well no i need to like actively start getting people involved so that's kind of when i we started doing the community calls um but yeah most of the plans were already there at that point but but a lot of the stuff on the community call is like you know we'll chat about the website some people go oh you know it'd be great if we show could kind of

show a chart that does this we could do something like that so you get a lot of ideas uh contributions out of those calls just by kind of talking to people hearing what they're they're interested in you know it's interesting as i hear this people talking about dows is like they're completely community driven uh and you need the community to start everything to do everything i have this feeling that like the best way to do it is like you need the one leader that goes and builds something first and like people sort of kind of um get excited about that and then it's like then they start to contribute and help because not everybody is a entrepreneurial leader like the elon musk that's gonna just go and create everything and if you bring a thousand people together and go okay what should we start probably things don't really

get done but if one person takes the lead and starts the business or starts the product or the public good a bunch of like oh that's really cool and they start giving their feedback that to me is the best way to form a community i don't know if you see that but it looks like that's kind of what you did yeah i think kind of there's like some misconception around doubts that they're supposed to be like very flat like very like no rolls like everybody just kind of like puts in their part and you build something out of that uh i think we've also seen a lot of dowels that have completely failed like trying to follow that model so yeah what what makes it doubt to me is that it's you know everything is you know not everything but as much as possible it's

open and transparent and that anybody can just join at any time you don't need to like apply to join at least kind of like the entry level but you know humans humans need like some structure to organize under you need leaders you need teams and groups and things like that uh is that like i think a lot of doubts have learned the hard way that trying to be totally open and flat like i'm sure there's some a couple examples of it being successful but overall i think those are gonna like not not do well so yeah for ours you know i'm definitely like me along with kind of my my co-founders and a couple core uh parts of our team are kind of like leading the the project we're happy to do that but

you know again it's not something that we can do alone so i think it's kind of our job to at least kind of set the vision in the direction and do some of the core parts of it and then also to try to engage the community and get them to you know to build out the rest of it to be the important contributors to it i want to so i know that you've been a part so i mean that you're starting this down you haven't launched a token there yet but i know you have been involved in a lot of dows that do have tokens bankless dow i think you i don't know did you write the code for it or you helped you were a part of i wrote lunch yeah i helped launch it i wrote some of the um the code for it so i haven't been

super involved in bank list house since it's launched but uh you know before launch kind of it david hoffman like reached out while i was like okay we're looking at doing this out you know be interested and um and banklessthat was definitely like a really big inspiration for for crypto stats to kind of see something go from just like a bunch of passionate people to seeing the community kind of taking off and figuring out products to build like directions to take it and things like that uh definitely inspired me to like you know can we do something similar you know bank list i was very focused around communicating like kind of bringing people into crypto helping them understand it and can we do kind of what they've already done but do it for data

um and even like we've we've talked with bank list now a bunch of like even working with them to have them build some like data websites we give the data uh stuff like that so i think bankless does a great like kind of success story for does like that yeah i completely agree is there anything so i mean the big question everyone has is like how do i set up my tokenics how many tokens do i launch how do i distribute it how do i do all this stuff so i guess two questions here like anything that like stood out to you in the way that bankless dow did it um or other dials you've been a part of um and then like what's your plan or like maybe maybe it's very um all over the place right now but like what's your idea or what are the kind of

things you might do for crypto stats now um yeah yeah so the tokenomics stuff i mean i'll say we've thought about it a bunch we have a bunch of ideas but you know right now that's not uh the focus is not like kind of tokenomics or anything like that the focus will be just kind of getting the community involved uh one thing that i did really like about bank lists i'm not sure if other projects had done this first but the way bank list that launched is they you know they just kind of like airdrop token to the community they didn't take any themselves like there was no you know just like bank list alec you know we don't have investors a lot of projects launched and it's like you know

75 of the tokens go to like dc's co-founders and stuff like that like it's none of that um but uh you know we'll launch and then you know obviously like we will want some tokens for kind of the team that's built and stuff so to do a genesis proposal where you basically um you launch the dow but it's like someone else is that one and you come down and go like look like we've you know already kind of contributed a lot this ecosystem we have a lot of plans to continue further here's a proposal of how we think we can do it and we would like you know kind of a vested allocation of some of these tokens for that so i think the cool thing about that is um it's like you're setting the expectation

with the community up front you're not forcing the community to like accept your terms you're kind of coming presenting the community with some terms and if the community says oh you know we don't like um you know we want to refine kind of what some of your responsibilities or what you want to do are or you know you're asking for too many tokens or something like that that can kind of get negotiated with community and uh you know to me that feels much more fair and much more like you're you know the creators of the dow are kind of engaging with the community even from the outset they're not kind of enforcing any terms upon the doubt so i i like that idea a lot we're gonna do something very similar it's so interesting so they just launched all the tokens took zero and then we're like

hey guys can we actually can we grab like 10 please we want to do more work that's scary but i love that actually it's very fair and it makes sense i can see that being kind of the norm for sure yeah i mean i can see how like you can definitely look at it and go oh it's basically the same thing as just taking the tokens because it's like well you know who's gonna say no to that but i do think that there is some some kind of nuance there it's like you know the the community's probably not going to say no but they might they might ask you to tweak it they might say uh like you want this to be a little bit different and you know and it at least kind of establishes again that like the community did kind of consent to to

the creator's role in that ecosystem so yeah like that a lot yeah and even just by giving them the opportunity to have their say it's incredible what that does for for buying right i think that one thing that is so interesting is and you sort of alluded to this earlier david um is i think a lot of people have this misconception of doubts that there's something like completely different but really it's just a new way to operate a business right it is still a business in the end right um and what what you need when you have a business is you need you need your all your members to be bought in to your what you're doing right and your

mission and your vision uh and you you need them to believe in the leaders and so uh you're you're just taking a different approach at achieving the same thing that a business would look to achieve yeah yeah for sure and i guess one thing i'll i'll kind of add to that about uh you know getting buy-ins from potentially like pretty large groups of people one thing i think a lot of doubts that are really good taos are very focused in terms of like what they set the scope of their their mission their goal to be um which i think is different than a lot of businesses you look at a lot of like there's a lot of big corporations that just do everything right like they what it's like uh ge does everything from like jet engines to like like

switches to like all sorts of yeah all sorts of stuff like that and i think in in traditional business there's this uh this push to kind of like you know expand your to be like a walled kingdom to kind of keep expanding your territory to kind of claim as much territory as possible um and so far i hope this stays this way with kind of crypto endows it's much more of an open open kind of collaborative ecosystem where i think it's great if if thousand organizations are kind of more like focused on achieving one objective and having it be more of a network of a bunch of different dows operating with each other we were talking about kind of crypto stats and bank list like what we're trying to do with crypto stats

it's it's very like we're not trying to do much we're trying to we're trying to we're trying to be an mpi right like that's not a whole lot we're not trying to um you know there's a lot of different parts of like the data ecosystem there's like the we say kind of there's the indexing layer that's something like the graph that's like this is a very uh kind of resource intensive process and there's like the presentation layer which is you know communicating data to people we're we're not really trying to do either of those but i think you know we've worked with the graph foundation a bunch we've talked to bankless dao um so kind of all three of those dao's are kind of three very like tightly defined that can leverage each other a bunch to kind of build something that altogether

is much bigger that's interesting it reminds me of like so like d5 you hear d5 legos right where like yeah you know you build an exchange and then another company builds on top of that and like utilizes that exchange to do whatever they're going to do loans or whatever and it's like they all build on top of each other you're kind of talking the same thing but instead of d5 protocols it's like it's like doubts or like businesses that are just kind of like all building and relying on each other um that's super interesting i never thought of downs and that in that nature yeah that's why i think it's a really cool thing for dallas and just like with d5 it tends to be the like the simplest and the trustless most trustless ones that work really well you know you see like uniswap is a really

simple like you know the code behind uniswap is like especially like you know v1 v2 is like really simple code like anybody can build on top of uniswap and when you look at like say dow tooling the dow tooling that's taken off is usually the really simple ones it's like compounds framework and like moloch dao there's a lot of projects that try to build like really big governance systems and actually like people want like small like uh atomic little pieces of code or organizations or whatever that can right that can build off each other i don't know if you've seen this but what this makes you think of is like i understand the defy legos because it's there's no human really involved it's like you're just connecting code to code connecting doubt is there's trust because you're relying

on the humans of that dow have you seen any other dows that are doing this where like maybe they just exchanged tokens and now all of a sudden you hold some of cryptostats you know dow tokens in the treasury of you know i don't know whatever another graphs one or whatever like is that the way that they would connect or have you seen this at all or what were your thoughts there yeah uh i mean i know token swaps is like a thing that happens i don't have any like great examples off the top of my head but i know theoretically the idea is if you have two dowels that want to kind of like work together or you know they're kind of aligned that they'll do like a token swap where it's kind of the nice thing is you're kind of like you're not

selling your tokens like you you both give tokens the other one and neither one kind of sells but you have kind of some stake over each other um so that's something that a lot of people have kind of thought of at least um as i mentioned like we've worked with uh the graph foundation a bunch so you know we use the graph a ton we're very dependent on the graph and they've been very supportive of the project and so they've like given us a small grant basically towards like um signaling for some of our subgraphs to be there and also towards uh subsidizing you know with the with the decentralized version of the graph you have to pay for queries so they're basically going to subsidize you know our queries for a while with tokens and you know again the goal is like

hopefully once we become kind of a more sustainable organization we could just pay for them ourselves but i think that's a good example of right they're not really trying to give us like governance over the system but they're trying to um kind of provide some tokens to us in a way that we already find valuable and like strengthen that relationship and i'm sure it's value for them for like to really strengthen this relationship so that down you know in the future we're still like kind of using the graph for for as much of our indexing as possible so that's another good example super interesting um okay talking the token so like crypto stats dao you are eventually going to launch a token you just mentioned like governance or different like reasons you would use a token what is the plan like

utility like why does crypto stats need a needed token um and like what would be the purpose of it is just governance um is it some sort of like currency or utility token or what's the idea there it'll be yeah primarily governance token um so the goal of it will be i mean the goal of decentralizing the this whole system is to give the you know the trust in our data to the community uh so that it's not dependent on you know me it's not dependent on any individual to control what data gets included because there is some subjectivity of like choosing what is the right way to calculate you know unit swaps fees for example right um so to give that to the community and

i mean one way i think of it is like uh you know there's different ways of like evaluating you know getting the value of a token when you look at like d5 tokens a lot of people people will do like discounted cash flows um when we launch we're not going to have revenue but one thing you can think of is uh how many tokens do you need to to kind of change the governance in one way you can even think of it as i think it's a cool way of uh evaluating like kind of tokens in general is uh how much does it cost for you to like mess up the system uh so like if we look at like maker dow like if you control like a controlling stake of mkr tokens you can just print die you know you can print all the dye you

can potentially maybe steal some of the collateral stuff like that you can like really screw up make your doubt if you have a lot of these tokens um so with enough of the kind of cryptostats tokens you'll be able to put in bad data uh which doesn't have like economic damage but it has massive like reputational damage not only to crypto stats but to any um organization that's depending on cryptostats data like bloomberg is already using some of our fee revenue data for something so it's like you know how much do you need to i'm sure there's someone who'd be willing like if it was really easy someone would try to screw up the data that's listed on bloomberg just for fun so the question is uh like what is the what is the threshold

that you need to like screw up the data that's on bloomberg the data that's on the block like all these websites um and you know again like as it grows uh you know every dow in protocol kind of hopes to become more robust as it grows so as we grow and we have more you know websites that are using our data we want to make sure it's like harder and harder to kind of get bad data inside of it just like you know just like ave wants to make sure it's harder and harder to get bad collateral as into their system [Music] i want to touch on something you mentioned earlier david and just bring it back for a second too we talk a lot uh at web3 academy about

coordination within a dao uh and how to coordinate people uh and so i just wanna talk chat a little about how you've done that with crypto stats you mentioned the weekly call um what other methods or frameworks or activities have you guys done in order to coordinate the team or tools yeah so again this is definitely like an area we're still kind of sorting out um it's like definitely a transition to to go from you know kind of like doing everything as like just our core team like every upgrade every code change just like just just go yeah that's that's good um so we're trying to do you know now to like use the discord as much as possible um you see most most doubts kind of like

the the main component of a dao is obviously like the discord for those houses that's where everybody's communicating that's where they're talking that's where kind of proposals get kind of originally made with the head office right it's it's headquarters yeah exactly exactly it's like you know maybe the the core of the dow is like you know the the multi-sig or the on-chain contracts or something but you said like the the you know a company is not the ceo of a company like most of the companies the people who are walking around in the office like chatting with each other and doing work so yeah so a lot of you know just trying to put a lot of our process open on discord um trying to i guess one part of the transition is is trying to have that openness i think um

you know again like i i talk to a lot of different d5 projects that want to get something added or updated on crypto stats and trying to put like pull those conversations from a private conversation between me and some some team members to go like hey actually like can we talk on our discord because we have a bunch of community members that would be you know interested and can contribute um and i think that openness can be tough i have talked to some people at maker tao as make or down move like transition from a company into a dow i think that can be like a little bit of a like a a hard transition to like all of a sudden like all your your business activity is now out in the open um so so yeah just doing that in the open we have a forum um

you know we'll have kind of like on chain governance uh at some point but yeah that's that's where we're at so far but it's definitely uh something that we're still spending a lot of time thinking about like how to what processes to add how can we uh make things more organized and structured so that you know part of making things more ordered and structured is that you can pass off responsibilities to different people without them needing like a lot of experience right yeah so yeah still figuring it out so i think as we begin to wrap up i think we're going to do a speed round and ask a bunch of questions before we before we do wrap up jay will do that cool let's have another question um i think you're one of our one of the people that i know that are probably the most deep into crypto just

in general i think you just you live and breathe this stuff so i kind of want to get um your opinion here when you're thinking of building out crypto stats and continue to do this are you looking to build this and integrate with like every single blockchain every single application um or do you look at like only certain ones for some reason do you wait until something like a blockchain has enough adoption to be like okay this one's legit now i will go in there like how do you think about that or how does maybe the community think about that um and then also maybe you can apply that to like when you're going to build you're going to launch a dao with some tokens and stuff where are you going to do that and what makes you decide that as well um i mean

from a high level like 100 we want like every we want everything we want every blockchain every protocol every define whatever every d5 metric we want to have that and have it available uh now you know one thing you mentioned like there is there often does need to be some level of like spam prevention right if we if we listed every uniswap fork on crypto fees like there's thousands and thousands of unispot forks so you know we do have some criteria things like okay you must be at least six months old a lot of protocols if you know if a lot of profiles don't make it to six months uh so that that kind of like helps filter things out um the community will kind of have to like create this criteria

the other thing is you know because we do want you know crypto stats to be as neutral of a protocol as possible um you know trying to combine that neutrality with the need to do some curation you can have kind of different types of um you know different sets of criteria for different collections um let's say one example is um we've been working with the team behind the uh it's like the d the d3 no the d4 index um it's one of the like index tokens that are on index co-op and it's an index of like web three protocols so things like um you know i guess

file coin and um live peer and things like that things that are less financially oriented and more like web 3 infrastructure tokens and they wanted to have like a collection that's fee revenue but like kind of different criteria for being listed so we've kind of worked with them we've set up a separate collection that they can kind of manage they can set their own criteria things like that so you know i think that that is a good model for crypto stats going forward is this should be an open tool that anybody can kind of uh contribute to and kind of have their their criteria if you don't like the criteria that exists either you know you can talk to the community and see if we want to change it and if we don't maybe you can kind of fork it and and make it your way and

you know um and again forkability is a very underrated value and property of like things in crypto blockchains forkability is what let's uh it what let's what what's left what lets contentious issues kind of get sorted out by the market like we've seen that with like bitcoin and bitcoin cash it's like big disagreement so let's just have both and you know there's one kind of clear winner right yeah yeah so i think embracing that is uh is something that we want to to do and that lets us again kind of be as all-encompassing as possible while still having some levels of subjectivity super cool you ready for a speed round of questions

or is there anything i guess i guess before that is there anything else you want to say is there anything uh that i don't know is on your mind that you haven't expressed yet and or if people want to learn more about cryptostats or you where should they do such a thing yeah yeah i'll do the show um yes if you're if you're interested in the stuff we've talked about if you like data if you like d5 whatever come check out uh cryptostats.community is the website um cryptostats.community discord is our discord uh crypto stats underscore is our twitter so kind of check check all those out um yeah we would love to kind of have anybody be a part of our community and yourself where can they find you on twitter

yeah so i'm at d-m-i-h-a-l uh d-myhall on twitter so yeah come follow me there awesome uh okay well before we wrap up let's do a little uh speed round of questions uh okay i'm gonna i'm gonna start with um which which event are you most looking forward to in 2022 um this has been probably at devcon defcon in bogota not only because um i said i've been in you know crypto been in like the ethereum ecosystem for you know a number of years four or five years or something i've never been to a defcon and so this will be my first devcon and it's also defcon in one of my

favorite countries columbia which is where me and kyle actually met so i'm excited just to go back to columbia excited to go to con see everybody i think that's gonna be super fun nice i will also be going to that because columbia is amazing and i hear that kind of sweet we haven't had a devcon in like what two years so it'll probably be yes super sweet one it's gonna be a banger uh what's the best thing you've purchased for under a hundred dollars recently the best thing i've purchased for under 100 it doesn't need to be in crypto you got to specify everyone thinks it's not crazy it doesn't have to be yeah uh what did i buy i mean well again i was just in columbia a couple weeks ago and i think my flight ticket down

there was like 80 bucks so i don't know if that counts getting a little repetitive but that was definitely well worth the money um who's your favorite person to follow on twitter favorite person to follow on twitter um ah there's so many great you know trolls and posters out there um gabriel haynes is i think underappreciated there's a lot of goofy goofy funny videos about crypto it's good to have like some some good funny people i think crypto twitter can be a little too serious sometimes like the people who are willing to to not take it too seriously and to bring some positivity

nice uh weirdest dow or nft that you've heard about or seen most interesting funniest let's go on this theme of uh keeping it light um oh there's one i don't even know if i want to say it i don't know if this is like a i've been getting some like spam dms on twitter from like the pooping ladies section i got this too this guy's asked me so many times on twitter what's it called yeah pooping ladies down you know i didn't look very much but uh i don't really want to but at least got a good chuckle out of me so um

yeah that one um what are the other yeah i don't know that's that's the moment that's coming to mind for some reason of all the bad out of all the dumb dows and nfps out there that's that's the only one that stuck around uh favorite book favorite book um oh man i don't know if i have a good you know honestly i'm not reading too much these days i'm embarrassed to say it um okay yeah it can be can be can be an old uh an old book something that you uh the newsletter when you were younger yeah i mean let's say i really liked i robot when i was a kid um after i saw

the movie first then read the book book completely different so that's one that's kind of coming to mind um yeah i'll go with that one for now nice nice nice i love it awesome uh kyle unless you have any other speed round questions you want to add in no i didn't think of any but i wish i did now it's okay it's my job um well david it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast uh and to learn more about crypto stats so excited to see where you guys take it in the future it's uh amazing to see somebody so focused on public goods we need we need more of that yeah thank you guys so much it's been an awesome chat with you guys and uh i guess i'll see y'all in columbia

i will be there hope i'll see you in portugal the summer first actually that's true that's true all right thanks david take care everyone take care guys thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 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 and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one