#DappCon22 : Day 1 - Reputation In Web3, Adam Beaudoin

Transcript

okay so hi I'm Adam I'm one of the co-founders of digent's core and today we're going to be talking about on-chain refutation and specifically around on-chain reputation we're going to be talking about user acquisition why it's broken right now in crypto and how dugent score makes it a lot better for users and for protocols so first I want to you know take a step back two years and go back to the story behind decent score and why it even exists today so the team back then was working on something called Atomic blue which was uh Dex that centralized exchange Dex which was used to you know swap tokens with the best liquidity from one token to another for users kind of like one inch and the team Works super hard on having a great user experience on

having really secure smart contracts on making sure you know the product made sense and it was going to be offer great rates to users but they had this problem they didn't have a great Community to to launch to they wanted to launch the best users in ethereum at the time but it's really difficult to kind of find those users and reach out to them and communicate with them you know you just have etherscan and telegram DMS but there's kind of problems with with both of those you know telegram you're just dming people you don't actually know if they're even good um and then on etherscan sure you can find a cool wallet but can you find 100 wallets like that and can you communicate with them to let them know you've been launched not really

so this is not working so the team launched Degen score can I get some assistance yeah let's try and fix it doesn't work so the team launched Degen score as a side project to bring on the great users onto Atomic blue so it's okay uh do we manually do it can I just tell you when to change slides oh no

no problem oh no um didn't pay for the license huh yeah it's okay do you have a cool story for us I don't know um [Music] I don't know I think I think we're gonna tell you a really cool story right now um so I think next slide next slide it's not working yeah uh yeah I do have something I also have a URL I can just send you uh what's your um maybe telegram or your telegram

telegram sure so one second guys what is it was it uh Celine Dion or which one was it another team I don't have Wi-Fi yeah this one I also know my phone or maybe on Euros it's working right yeah you can just plug that in it totally happens all the time guys right

it's fine we'll survive this honestly just do this then just go like that and I'll just tell you when it seems sorry guys just one second I spent a lot of time on the slide so I would like to come to light um yeah that should be fine is he gonna fire yeah that's cool I.T guy is under a lot of pressure at the moment

um yeah so I'm just gonna kind of start walking through it and then we'll just pick up the slides when when they come so we take you back we had Atomic blue this this one inch like product we worked really hard on it and it was time to launch that product but we had no community and so they built this side project called Degen score which was just kind of packed together and the way DJ score worked was we looked at and we thought of the coolest actions you could do in D5 at that time so maybe it was like uh algorithmic stable coin that you were advancing the epochs to make sure the thing worked or maybe it was an early curve farmer or early Wi-Fi farmer um you know those are really interesting actions at the time or maybe you got rugged by one of Andre's you know many

experiments on chain and these are all things that we thought made a great user and someone who really understood defy at a deeper level so they put together all these actions and launched students um and they initially you know sent the URL division score out to to crypto influencers to get some feedback and one of them was Andre cronje and while the team was asleep um you know in Berlin Andre decided to tweet the link on Twitter and Andre at the time had a big Twitter following so thousands of people started to rush into decent score uh which was totally not ready for launch it was just a beta and immediately crashed a site

so Angelo one of the co-founders of Duty score started you know woke up in the middle of the night to look at his phone flooded with Twitter notifications explaining you know why season score down it's broken what the heck is this product I want to get my DJ score and you know there's a bit of like a dream come true and a curse at the same time for you know a Founder who just launched their first kind of project and so he gets in the car and starts driving through the middle of the night to Adrian while calling him every five minutes and Adrian's kind of a devops guy on the team and Adrian finally wakes up and you know realizes what's going on Kick starts the surface again and by you know the DJ score starts working again and by the end of the week thousands of

users from all over the Internet had come to Degen score to get their score for the first time and kind of see how they measure up with their on-chain skills [Music] um and this was like a super cool thing because it gave us a lot of insights so one of them was you know every team needs good users whether you're launching an nft project whether you're launching a Perpetual swap project it doesn't matter if you're building something in crypto you need good users who are relevant to your product to come check you out it's really hard to find them on chain right now like there was no way for us to message these users there's no way for us to even unless we build decent score there's no way to kind of like find the perfect user and then find 100

of the same archetypes or cohort of that type of user um and so we felt like that kind of user acquisition Journey right now was was really broken and you know one way to solve this is by looking at a user's on-chain history because that on chain history tells a story that can form their reputation which can do a bunch of stuff which we're just kind of just discovering right now so with these kind of three insights we we went into the next phase of Duty score so now I want to take a step back and kind of talk about current solutions for user acquisition in crypto so before a project has a token they're going to use you know telegram Twitter General kind

of communities to try and bootstrap a community and this is actually really inefficient because you are manually trying to create great content interesting insights if you don't already have a reputation as a builder in crypto it's going to be really hard to get credibility and to get you know draw demand and traffic to your product into your to your communities and you're also going to get like random people Shilling dog tokens and asking for seed phrases all the time um and so this is you know challenging to to deal with and have a really high signal good quality Community from from the get-go once you have a token out there you can do something called liquidity mining

which basically means you are rewarding actions that are happening on your project with your native token basically paying users to do good things on your project like provide liquidity um or other core actions but this is super expensive for protocols to do it's like selling Equity at a massive discount to thousands of people generally it's it's very large investors that don't really care about your project who will end up kind of dumping your token and it becomes very difficult to run like a proper governance process down the road if the liquidity mining process is not managed super well no problem um okay and so there's clearly some you know inefficiencies in in the way user

acquisition currently Works in crypto and the tools that we currently have if we look at what has happened in the last kind of 10 years in user acquisition in the internet you know before crypto people would often run like Google AdWords or Facebook ads to to run like a targeted campaign so if I was launching like a dog treat I would set up a cohort of people who love dog treats of this certain type that are searching for it actively and would put together a Google campaign and and that works and those those businesses are worth billions of dollars now but we think there's a better way to to kind of run run you know user acquisition and we don't want to run like spammy ads that's that we don't believe that should be the future of

crypto we think a user's kind of reputation should unlock uh opportunities for them um and it's in a really targeted way based off kind of what's happening on chain because the whole Landscapes changed because we all you know live on ethereum or at your blockchain of choice which is really exciting okay I'm just going to use these for myself no worries okay um so we saw that users you know really needed to find good projects and good protocols to invest in and explore we I was the team was a very small team but we were all like on Twitter following our favorite developers our favorite projects looking for Alpha

looking for cool Investments during defy summer and but it's a super unstructured way to to generate information on the other side you have protocols that really need good quality users to launch with and right now it's super difficult to build a good quality community and when I say good quality Community I mean users that are relevant to you based off their on-chain activity from from day one from when you launch and so we saw this kind of two-sided problem and we decided to build something called the Degen score Cafe which is a place where protocols can come and projects can come and list the project and then gate their project in the smart contracts by the user's Degen score which is basically like the first

reputational application we've developed so you know users if they have a certain dution score can apply to a an opportunity and then enter enter you know the new product launch on on the allow list or or maybe it's uh better Financial incentives in the product or there's so many different ways that a protocol can kind of incentivize good usage but the core thing to remember here is that we are able to gate access to Opportunities by a user's reputation and that user's reputation on chain unlocks opportunity for them so I want to talk about one case study that we've done with gearbox so gearbox is a cool protocol that's being developed right now they're currently

working on their V2 and what they do is kind of on-chain Leverage that's composable so you can go on gearbox you can create a little account and then go to your favorite protocols and get instant leverage which is super cool to run different strategies on so they built the V1 and they wanted to build the V2 but they wanted to really keep it exclusive they only have the best users in ethereum be able to try out their V2 and deposit significant amounts of capital and during the beta period to really test the the plumbing in the smart contracts and so they came to Degen score and they said we want you know you're the best users you can find in ethereum beyond your own Community just in general in ethereum and um and work

with us to to bring them onto the V2 so we can give them you know a great product experience and make them basically Capital make them you know allow them to run really cool strategies and so we put together this campaign we set the Degen score at a thousand which is very high it's a lot higher than mine and we we attracted 100 users who submitted addresses and now those users are projected to deposit five million US Dollars usdc into gearbox to really test the process out and this kind of user experience both on the protocol side and on the user side would not really be possible people without that reputational peace from their own chain Identity or on chain history so that's just one example of you know the cafe kind of working in a cool way

for more for a more exclusive launch so you know the cafe is just one application that we've kind of decided to build from Dina score because we saw this cool demand that we could start solving right away for protocols and for users but what's next for Degen score so we really we see ourselves as a reputational layer in ethereum so we want decent score at someone's decent score to pop up in a bunch of different places to kind of enrich the the user experience for for that individual or that that address and allow them to access opportunities whether it's a job whether it's a investment opportunity whether it's Community have that pop up in a lot of places across different protocols and so we're working right now to make that more possible

we want to make also the cafe experience way better because it's still just a few months old and there's so much we can do there to make it scale to bring on to make it easier for users to access opportunities to know about opportunities that are relevant to them and to allow for more Protocols of different types to come in and and work with us and we actually have a really cool opportunity launching in like an hour and a half which I can't talk about yet but once it live you should check it out if you're eligible um and lastly you know accessible on-chain reputation and this is something we've thought about since kind of the Inception of digital score um is how to make you know what is

students first place on chain and what is that going to look like to make the score more accessible um because ultimately if our goal and our mission is to make to be the the reputation level layer in ethereum there has to be some sort of permissionless way for protocols and projects to interact and integrate with teaching score so I can't talk more about that right now but it's something we're working on um and it should be live in the next few weeks so if you want to work with Degen score and leverage what we've built so far you can launch with us in the cafe cafe it's super easy you just have to DM us on Twitter um or you can talk to me after the the conference or at the conference and we can get something going it's it's super

easy to launch in the cafe and it's always amazing to me how well it works for protocols to get um a lot of users there's always demand from good on-chain users to come and try out new projects and deposit capital or try out uh the new feature that they've launched and also if you're looking to integrate if you're built if you're a builder and you're looking to integrate more reputational systems into your product maybe you're an nft project and you want to launch your nft but have it only for like the best nft mentors the people that minted all the top projects we can do that for you really easily and so you should chat with us if you want to have more kind of reputational elements in your product because we believe you know it's going to create a

more enriching experience for users across crypto if there's more context for for each kind of user as they kind of interact on projects and protocols so that felt really fast but that's the talk that I have so far um so uh thanks so much for bearing with us during the the slide Challenge and we definitely think you know reputation and ethereum and crypto is in its early stages um it's just starting to get I think really interesting right now um with some of the kind of thought pieces that are coming out from metallic and another kind of research groups and we're super excited to be building uh in this space so if you have any questions about Degen score or anything that we're building feel free to reach out and

thanks so much for listening today will you send us your amazing slides that you spend so much time preparing of course yeah no problem we should tweet about it or something questions here one do you have already a solution uh to the problem that or of course some people use multiple addresses yeah multiple addresses yeah for good reasons also yes um so do you already have for foresee a solution kind of how you on the one hand can combine your addresses and say you have the emerged but without ideally yeah without doxing your addresses yeah

so currently so with the V1 that we launched two years ago you can only go in with one address and get your score with the V2 that we released um a few months ago now you can group several addresses together and create your profile um we obviously would like like zero knowledge proofs and things like that to come a little bit farther to integrate to allow for maybe more more privacy um but that's currently where the status quo is one thing we've really realized which has been interesting is that we definitely think in like a multi-address future for a user like a power user in crypto will have multiple addresses because you can't you know go into an nft mint with your big wallet because it might you know drain your funds but the

way crypto is built right now is it's very address Centric it's not profile based more multi-drase multi-address you know for one user so we're gonna we're kind of at a fork in the road right now which which is like whether to go down the the single address route or whether to stick to like the profile base where a user has multiple addresses um to do to do Integrations with but with the way that we've decided to build for the next few months we've been able to mitigate kind of a lot of the challenges there um but yeah that's a good point I understood that it's only for ethereum are you thinking about multi-chain yeah reputation yeah so I think we started with ethereum just because that was the

home base and at the time that's when it was popular we would love to go multi-chain and especially up to like optimism and arbitrum and um I personally see like DJ score kind of being across all great ecosystems ideally it's just challenging from an infrastructure point of view to build and for us it's really just about prioritization so we feel like we've kind of touched on something really interesting in ethereum and we're seeing some kind of you know some some demand there some some interesting kind of sparkles going off and right now our focus is kind of building out applications or making kind of Degen score more usable and then once we see that kind of like really start to click and scale in ethereum then we'll start to kind of you know grow and expand

across chains but it's definitely something that we'd like to go into in the future uh yeah can I ask you how do you see the the alignment uh to like you know this kind of uh web free ideology of uh inclusiveness with your Cafe stuff uh because essentially yeah I understand like from the from a general point of view it's perfect especially coming from web 2 you need to have the users who do like the good private Alpha Testing of the product but at the same time you you probably get the question right you essentially making it super exclusive for like for the participants of uh like the whole uh

ecosystem to test the product on the early stages because if they don't have like enough of the addition score like they kind of out of the game right there yeah I think it's a good question I think there's this kind of balance between like having an exclusive um threshold or gate to the opportunity to make sure that you're not having you know everyone get in there and having kind of a lot of the same problems that we currently see in the space which is like just lots of bots and civil attacks and everything like that but also you want to be inclusive enough depending on the opportunity to allow kind of people who are pretty new to ethereum and just starting out who've maybe done a few few swaps on unit Swap and maybe deposit on Ave to to be able to try out an

opportunity um and I think for it really depends honestly on what the the partner that we're working with in the cafe wants so with gearbox they really just wanted a lot of the best users because you know it was really been a testing phase and they also needed quite a lot of capital from each user but for other projects like depop which is like a one-inch like product that we launched with we you know kept that really inclusive and as long as you kind of had swapped on one on uniswap V3 uh matcha or one inch before you could try out the the product so it's it really just depends on kind of the the application of the partner that we're kind of looking at and it's a balance right yeah thanks more questions over there a little bit

in the back I really love the talk and great what you did without the slides I noticed my Degen score is going lower yeah over time and since you're not counting other chains uh it's going lower and lower yes uh so yeah maybe one thing is like it's based on like the total number of users and like the more kind of like parameters you include in the scoring system uh do you have a way to also reward maybe a bit meta but like early digital score users or like is there like a way like as a user if I want to filter out uh I don't know the first 1000 digital users is there a way for me to do that

or if I want to filter out like everyone that got hacked on Eminence for example yeah or things like that yeah do you have like an API that you can use to to do something like that yeah so we do we do have an API that's very much in development so we were really exploring like how that can be used to different partners and exploring also if that's really the route we want to go down um but I think in the future um we'd like to have a ability ability for like you know protocols to kind of be more specific around who they're they're querying for there's a little bit of a balance around you know you don't want to maybe dock someone if you can do like if you know three Eminence of things way back and you have like five of them you know that can only be

so many addresses um so we are careful around privacy and kind of what we're making available but um yeah to answer your question a few different parts some of the actions in DJ score you get to keep forever so like using unit swap you've done that once it's 100 binary great some actions we have that are like monthly active user so if you use unit swap in the last 30 days then you get 10 points for example or if you haven't then it disappears um and so there's kind of a bit of a balance of of that so if you're super active in ethereum um for for like a few months you're going to get more points for that month than not um but we're we I think there's so much cool stuff you can do around segmentation into cohorts and groups that and we've only just started really

with that we're really just only done decent score as like a metric instead of like you know all of yeah like the early Eminence people who got hacked or all the curved Farmers um and it's a bit of a balance of kind of yeah it's cool to do that but is it actually useful for the partner because often we've seen the partner just once good good defy users um and so so it's a bit of a a bit of an exploration there but um yeah we're still we'd like to do more segmentation and we're still developing tools to make that more widely accessible thank you someone else uh there's one two questions okay thanks for your presentation so you

talked about combining addresses to a profile so how does the cafe look like like have you some account abstractation how do you bind the use of information to the addresses are you keeping it completely anonymous yeah so it's we don't attach any metadata to an address so it's literally just the address and then they give us permission to score the address based off kind of our queries and when a user sets up a profile or comes to DJ score for the first time they have to set up a profile and when you set up a profile you can submit how many dresses you'd like to be scored and they'll be all be summed together and so for some users that's just one address for for other users Like Me Maybe it's five addresses and so that kind of is your well we all

be counted towards your total score which then you can now take into the cafe and apply for different opportunities address to profile information kept like if you are creating a profile it's it's kept we just keep this the the addresses for like just to do the score and then it's it's uh taken away oh okay yeah there was a question over here and uh yeah um thank you for the for the presentation and the great slides the the question I have is related to to the roadmap somewhat you have yeah um so there's a lot of I think a lot of web 3 somewhat holds into what we're

also going to do related with you know the governance questions and development and particularly also you know governance participation and so I think a lot of you know projects that have decentralized their governance models are right now looking for people to actively participate in their own you know in the governance setup that they've created um and I wonder whether you know you have any idea for how to tackle that maybe you know that profiling mechanism because for me looking up you know defy activity specifically uh to try and like you know create clusters of users Etc uh is maybe more looking at Proficiency in web 3 and related to D5 rather than

maybe you know what looking at reputation per se because what is reputation you know in the first place what is uh what is a reputable user for say you know a new governance framework of a you know could be anything we have dials now for um uh you know Farm projects Etc so I wonder what kind of yeah if you have a roadmap or how you think in terms of reputation for governance so to speak and how do you think that on-chain data can be can be used to um to do that triage yeah so I think governance is super interesting because basically you know it's still very much evolving I think some of the most

advanced stuff I've seen is in maker with with that kind of delegates and people kind to like set up their reputation to be more of a governance player governance is something that we wanted to track for Degen score V2 and we do that through snapshot so if someone votes for in a governance um project they can you know we store that stuff and we store that what their activity is done in snapshot and then they get points for that we haven't done you know any Partnerships around governance yet I definitely think it's an interesting area to to explore with the right kind of protocols that really have um a demand for it um yeah I think you touched on an interesting point which we think about all the time time is like what is a good user in D5 and there's kind of like

three different kind of pillars we look at when we think about like how we built our reputation system so one of them is kind of depth of knowledge so a user that really understands a protocol and has gone into detail and done a bunch of actions around you know what you can do inside that protocol that's going to be someone that really understands how the thing works and and be really an expert the other one is you know being early and taking risks so these are people that are open to trying new protocols maybe they've been rugged a few times but that's just life and crypto right now and uh that's you know a sign that someone's really on the edge and exploring new protocols and then the other pillar is kind of people and that are willing to give back to the space so

maybe that's a donation or doing lots of governance work or we'd like to do stuff with Bitcoin in the future but these are kind of the the pillars that we look at when we think of reputation and and on the governance angle we've kind of touched on the surface of it with snapshot but we've liked to go a lot deeper and work with protocols and there should be some opportunities to do that and in the next few kind of months with our building cool thank you thank you Adam thank you so much okay cool now the round of applause that was a great presentation