Nine years of POAP in EthCC. A founder's journey.

Transcript

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for coming. I see some familiar faces. Uh this is a little awkward for me at the beginning because I have committed to this speaking a lot like last year and many things have happened since then and the content I had planned Actually I had no content planned but whatever I could have had planned at the time is no longer current because important things have happened in my environment and at POAP. So I last minute decided that we're going to use this a space for explaining what happened on the last 6 months and maybe on the last 10 years but more importantly in the last 6 months.

And what we are up to and how we are doing some interesting things we are doing and we have plenty of time. They gave me 40 minutes a slot so hopefully we will take some questions too. Um The questions can be related to POAP, the new thing or anything else. So maybe when we are I'm going to check the timer. Um it's not this one. Is this one? Uh so maybe when we are halfway there I open for questions and depending um how many questions we have and how complex they are um how many we answer.

Um a little context um I doubt someone doesn't know me and is interested in what I'm saying but I will make a little So anyways, I am Patricio Worthalter. I am 39. I have been full-time in the Ethereum ecosystem for more than 10 years now and doing different things. Um but the most relevant um it started in 2018 when trying to legitimize Ethereum I started POAP. Um when I say trying to legitimize it is because in 2018 Ethereum was a three-year-old network that had promised a lot like life humanity changing uh implementations of commerce and

coordination and identity and finance. And the truth is that in 2018 it almost did nothing. There were no dapps as we know them. DeFi didn't exist. Um we have had CryptoKitties which was a little speculative publication that had some traction but more or less any external observer would say that Ethereum did nothing um relevant for humanity beyond some experiments. So with some friends um we started asking ourselves what can we build that uses Ethereum for the right way uh in the right way for the right

reasons. So whoever is observing it could feel yeah this programmable blockchain thing this database with consensus and immutability and all the qualities that we can have is something that's useful. And to make it harder to make the um legitimacy be greater we also said whatever we build um has to be non-speculative or non-financial. Um it has to be legal because there were plenty of things you could do with uh programmable blockchains like darknet markets or uh permissionless uh financial markets like normal markets

but that wouldn't be regulatory compliant in some context so that wasn't fully legitimizing. Um in that quest of finding what we could build I bring up um a long time passion of mine. Um since I was a teenager I was very interested in preservation of digital items um because I figured that the pictures we took and the software we used and and the content in our computers was very hard to preserve. Um before the internet uh you needed to have equipment at home and it was very hard to share to maintain to organize and even when the

internet comes around um we discovered cloud computing and cloud computing is awesome but the cloud is someone else's computer. So it wasn't a good way of preserving memories. Um Preservation of culture is something that all societies seem to be very concerned about like all all museums that you see um all the libraries they are all about uh preserving what we humans have done. Um at the time and kind of today too we don't have easy ways of preserving memories. It's a massive challenge. Um as we were

thinking what can we build this is in 2018 as I said I proposed why don't we build a platform that runs on a blockchain and when you go to a place a cultural event or a ceremony or something that's historically relevant for someone you can mint a blockchain asset. Um so we think a little further um we check how Foursquare was doing. Foursquare was a web two application out of Silicon Valley or New York actually.

Um that you use for checking at bars and other social gatherings and we see this is something humans love. Um Foursquare was an extremely popular application. So we started building POAP and long story short we succeeded um because POAP did legitimize blockchains in a way that was very useful for anyone that needed to answer what Ethereum is useful for beyond a speculation. You could easily say I go to an event or I make my own event. I create this little NFT thing and then every person can get one and this little asset it's an immutable asset meaning that

will exist in the blockchain forever and it cannot be counterfeited and it's tied to who has it and I can also see who others has it. For doing this we use the ERC-721 standard. This was an early implementation of NFTs. We knew that it wasn't optimal it actually left a lot to be desired. Um you couldn't have private collectibles um the collectibles were somewhat expensive to mint because this was minted only at the time in 2018 there were no layer twos or side chains.

Um so I was saying it couldn't be made private so anyone could see your POAPs and that was fun but it was also highly limiting. Um >> [clears throat] >> Creating them could cost as high as $1 when there were gas congestions. We also had to be very careful about the tech because if someone created a POAP accidentally or did something wrong the thing would be on chain forever. So we had to be very careful about who could use the platform for doing what. Um we also had to child to face some challenges regarding censorship because we didn't want the platform to have illegal content like pornography or or things that weren't safe.

Um because we were on a blockchain and the blockchain people are extremely opinionated and they love permissionlessness they hated POAP. Um this was a fight that we had for years. But we were so excited and optimistic about using NFTs for preserving memories that we continued chatting and we continued trying to make this work. And now I'm going to drink some water. We launched in February of 2019 during December and things go pretty well.

We go to December back the next year during the pandemic almost in February of 2020 and things continue to go very well. We are exciting with the little adoption that we had. Um when we were one year old there were 4,000 POAPs around. Um the pandemic hits and at the beginning it looked like the pandemic could kill POAP because POAP was only for um in-person events the way we designed it and we used it. Um I was at home locked down in Buenos Aires we had like military enforced lockdown so we couldn't do anything.

And we started doing POAP for um virtual events like Zoom meetings and virtual conferences. And then we do an integration with Decentraland which was a metaverse like a virtual world of the time and adoption starts to pick up. At the same time um there is a growing market on artistic NFTs. Um these are digital artists that were tokenizing their uh creations and selling them for numbers in the low tens of dollars maybe hundreds of dollars.

Um that growing market makes us very excited because it validates our thesis. Um our thesis at the time we weren't too serious about this but our rough thesis was that humans would have a blockchain identity. It could be one or multiple accounts or wallets. Um they would get a DNS with their name or their pseudonym and they would get POAPs and maybe they get in-game items in Decentraland and maybe they do some financial activity. Um there was a very popular concept called token gating that was useful for getting utility depending on the tokens that you had. And those were popular, so depending on the POAPs you had, you

could do things in DAOs. And DAOs at that time were a highly promising coordination system. They continue to be highly promising. Not too highly delivering, but hopefully one day. Um, so that validation of the thesis made us double down. And beyond the Ethereum legitimization goal, we also uh start a new goal because also during the pandemic and later um, mainnet legitimization itself with very heavy DeFi activity. And and and great crazy amount of DeFi products emerged for things like lending and borrowing, of course, and trading and

perpetuals and other crazy derivatives and rehypothecation of those things. So, the utility of a programmable blockchain was far confirmed by everyone who was observing. So, we didn't feel that we needed to continue doing it just for that. But we honestly feel this is a very nice way of tokenizing memories and it opens up doors for a superior type of collective experience than any other even physical collective experience. So, we continue working extremely hard. We ride the wave of NFT summer. NFT summer was this period of time between '21 and '22 where the market activity in the art NFT space and

in the 10K PFP space, to call it somehow. 10K PFPs were collection of 10,000 NFTs. A little like CryptoPunks and people would put them on their social media. Um, and the market grows from a few thousand um, users, collectors as we used to, to hundreds of thousands. It probably exceeded the low millions at a point. And we get extremely excited. We even get the illusion that maybe we can build a global-scale ecosystem. Um, a platform that the whole humanity more or less uses for tokenizing their memories. And it wasn't just us that we that believed this. Um,

hundreds of large and small companies and communities all around the world believe it. They supported us. They started using POAP with them POAP with many of the brands that you have either in your wallets, your pockets, your fridge kitchens cars. Um, they were all using POAP. We accelerated our growth a lot. Our team at a point had over 100 people and nobody was wasting time um, because there was so much work to do. Um, that lasted for a while.

We struggled with the classical startup challenges, but things kept going more or less upward and forward. Now, in 2022, um, there is a market crash because of a bunch of reasons, mostly related to exchange exchange collapsing and some criminal activity regarding centralized exchanges and decentralized, too. Um, most of the activity on the NFT market and community vanishes. Those hundred thousand hundreds of thousands of people go do something else.

Um, we believed that our value proposition and the things we were doing um, were so exciting, were so useful for humanity that it made sense to continue doing it. Um, we saw when people went to a concert or a racetrack or some in-person activity like a multitude activity, they were all with their phones like this recording the musician or whoever was performing and they were mostly very shitty videos. What they were doing was kind of a makeshift POAP. They just wanted to have a little record

to remember that they were there and the easiest thing they could do was a picture. And that made us feel when these people learn about POAP, they will love it because why are they taking these pictures? To remember that they were there and also to show it to their friends on Instagram or wherever they were showing it. So, we continue charging in '22 and '23 and struggling with different challenges. We had to let go lots of people because we didn't have the activity that justified their work when they were hired. Um, and we continue making our platform better, seeking more and more partnerships of the kind that brought us adoption.

But by the end of 2023, um, we feel the mainstream market is not interested on what we have to offer. Um, we have tried everything we could try. We had eliminated the friction. Um, most of many most of the times the the main blocker for blockchain applications to be adopted were the friction of having to have a wallet. Um, POAP had solved more or less that very early because we let people uh collect with an email and we have paid the gas for them for a long time and we've done some clever decisions, so friction wasn't a problem. So, what was the problem at the time? Um, there were

two are easier to identify and present now at the time um, it wasn't so easy, so we had some false starts. Um, one of them was education. Um, explaining people why these blockchain assets were good for them, they were superior collectibles, why they should still continue taking pictures of their favorite artists, but they should upload the upload them as moments to the POAP so they could have all these benefits. So, education was a challenge. But after working extremely hard trying to educate people, doing diff- different kinds of onboarding, I personally gave a POAP to over 7,000

people. I have explained how to use NFTs on POAP to almost one out of two people in the industry. And that wasn't enough. It wasn't just an education problem. Um, we discovered um, that there was a huge blocker for getting non-crypto people to use uh POAP and NFTs in general, which was the stigma that all NFTs were speculative assets. And we have tried to explain that ours had nothing to do with money or speculation, but the population had been burned and traumatized in a way that we couldn't revert the

trend. So, we keep building for the um, crypto-native throughout 2024 and 2025. And we made the platform the best it could be. Um, we fixed plenty of problems that it always had. Uh, we made a better mobile app. We add several pretty exciting implementations like the airports campaign, so in over 100 airports around the world, you can do a little click on the POAP app and you get a little collectible to remember that you are there, which is like why people buy magnets at airports, so they remember this exotic location they have visited.

And that works. Uh, we are very excited about the adoption by the crypto community of those implementations. But they confirm that it's absolutely impossible to get someone that's not on crypto um, to understand and enjoy it. When Devconnect comes to Buenos Aires in November of '25, we do our best work. Um, it was my home city. Lots of our team members were there.

Um, we had a huge amount of partnerships. And we had all the success we could have desired and more. Um, it was awesome. But when it wraps up, we retreat to analyze how we move forward and we feel like we have won the battle, but we lost the war because nothing of all this value, of all this adoption, of all this traction can be configured or leveraged for growth of the kind the platform needs to be relevant.

Um, we start thinking um, what's the best we can do with what we have. Um, we have an extremely well-loved system in the Ethereum community, some good ideas, some partners some ideas and opportunities to do stuff, but nobody believes that they are going to take us anywhere. Um, most of the ecosystem institutions or products that kept our belief that one day we would get there disappear.

Like Lens and Farcaster conclude their chapters the way they've done it. Um, plenty of who were our best partners fully shut down or pivot. And we even see that the standard we were using, the ERC-721 token, wasn't even being integrated into new products. Like wallets don't support it. Nobody cares about it. They don't show up in the new blockchain explorers. Um that was enough of a signal for us to say um this might be the end of it.

Um we took a few more weeks during 2026 to think what we can do next. And after um some heavy brainstorming and and we got some external help um that was very timely. Um we feel yeah we need to build something new um that's fully designed for the average consumer not for the crypto native. Um this idea of designing for the crypto native um as opposed to it of the regular consumer was kind of a weird thing that was talked and discussed for a while.

Um but it was never fully defensible because if we were after global adoption we couldn't separate a small a very small group of people from the whole population. Um that was a very stupid thing to do, but on the desperation of getting any adoption um I guess that for most of us getting crypto natives adoption was better than getting no adoption. But then we start thinking how do we design for the average consumer who ultimately includes the crypto native. The crypto native also belongs to societies out of taking aside a few weirdos of you.

Um that that are so deep into crypto that cannot fully conform uh a society membership. >> [snorts] >> Um After exploring different opportunities um we decide taking a shot at a few. Um as we start developing them we see um legacy POAP, the way we call it now it's a massive drain of resources. We can't build anything new if we have to keep maintaining POAP and going to all these events and especially me putting on this show with my red jacket and giving a POAP to every person.

So we decide let's put legacy POAP into maintenance mode, meaning it keeps working. We can all use it. Um we have commercial commitments and people want to continue use it. But let's put it in a shape that we don't have to be on top of it 24/7. So we do that. Um that gives us some fresh air. And we start thinking what else we can build next. Um we are already building new stuff. Um we are not in a position to disclose exactly what that is, but we can say enough so you feel this makes sense. This is worth staying on the lookout. By the way, for

staying on the lookout you should follow us on Twitter or you join our Telegram, which is POAP.xyz all together no spaces. Um as we assess the different things we can build what seems so obvious is that we have to um identify and and leverage the main lessons we got on these nearly 10 years of running POAP. Um we have learned huge amount of knowledge about digital collectibles, experiences, connection communities.

Um we also learned about how to build blockchain applications though that was mostly like anti-lessons, how to not do things. Um we also have a pretty solid brand equity. People associate POAP with preservation of memories. People love POAP. Um some of you here were somewhat saddened um to learn that POAP was going to maintenance mode. And what I want to explain is we put it in maintenance mode to be able to build a better POAP. Um a product for preserving your memories, for doing digital collectibles but that is not constrained to the limitations of blockchains. Those that we knew we had to deal with

that emanate from the 721 standard or even from our platform's platform. We were a platform, but we were built on top of another platform with what is Ethereum blockchain. And the Ethereum blockchain had made decisions that were very hard for us to accommodate like the lack of privacy at the main layer and some others. Um so this new ecosystem for the preservation of memories that we are building hopefully will have enough privacy features that anyone can feel comfortable using it. It should have way lower cost of implementation because you don't have to pay gas and you don't have uh different shenanigans classical of blockchains.

Hopefully it won't have curation um because curation has also been um a very constraining and expensive system to maintain. Um it should be our best work. And this is why I have been stopped um using the red jacket and lowering my exposure because I need to use my energy. Everyone in the POAP team, some of them are here um has to focus on how to build um the best ecosystem for the preservation of memories for the whole humanity.

Um it's not a given that we will succeed. Um this is something that hasn't been tried. But something that I like and that we all like is that this is something that in the age of AI is sorely needed because it's going to be impossible to tell whether something happened and someone was part of that or whatever record is being used to attest that is fake. Um so hopefully in the longer run in a few decades we will look back and we will say good thing that NFTs died kind of the way they died so

we would be forced to build a system that actually scales. Legacy POAP couldn't have ever scaled to support the whole humanity with all those design constraints and the lack of coming up with a business model. Um in this new POAP um we are hoping that somehow we have a feedback loop on which part of the value that is created is captured so it can be reinvested on the ecosystem. Um which was something we didn't do in POAP on the first half of it and then it was kind of too late to do.

Um so that was pretty much it superficially. Now we seem to have like 15 minutes left. Um so I can try to take some questions and we see how that goes. Oh there's there's already someone with their hands up. Okay. Uh did you talk about several ways that you are thinking about uh changing POAP, but my question is about the vision. You you talk about you start to building this to create a way to people can preserve memories

and that was your original vision, but what what I can infer from on how you talk is that now uh the focus is more on verifica on verification of um of a memory or something is happening related to the new world that is coming with AI. I think this is where the new product is going to be. Am I wrong or right? Um thank you for the question. I like it a lot. Um the new platform is way less opinionated. Um so in legacy POAP um you had to comply with the way we thought things should be. And that was good because all the POAPs were very high quality and they are all pretty and they

all offer a cohesive experience because we had all these strong opinions that were enforced either by the protocol or by us. Um in the new platform we want to be the least opinionated we can. So if you are using it because you are taking your dog for a walk and you want to make a POAP every time you do that and put pictures on it whether they are verifiable or not doesn't matter we don't charge you. That's all fine. And maybe it's something you do in private. Maybe those POAPs never become public.

Um another consumer or user of this product might be a conference like ETHCC. And if ETHCC wants to use that uh POAP for people to attest that they were here and give them a benefit in the future for whatever reason, maybe those need a stronger verifiability mechanisms and we expect those to exist and they use the issuer to be able to leverage. Um but the short answer is um it is right that you don't totally understand whether the new focus is verifiability because it's not. Um verifiability may be one of the reasons why people use

this but we feel right now humanity doesn't have a protocol for digital collectibles. There's no system anyone can use for creating a record of something that happened for people to get. For us to be the one that's adopted at global scale the least opinions it has the greatest chances the that someone Um, I'm sorry. The lower the chances that someone cannot use it for whatever they want to do. So, they want it to be maximally flexible, also because we believe that the collectibles of the future many of them won't be made by humans.

You will just tell your AI agent, "Hey, make a POAP for my wedding." So, the system has to be AI-ready, and this is one of the main things that we are busy with. Um, so it's the protocol of choice of any normal AI model. And this is very exciting, but it's also a major challenge because everything is so early. And this is an edge that we think we have. The fact that we are alive um, when AI is becoming consumer, feels an edge as good as the one that we had when I started POAP, when NFTs were invented. Um, so this is why we are so optimistic. Um, some people again were

like, "Yeah, I am very sad that POAP is happening this year." And I was like, "Don't be sad. This is great." We were there when NFTs started. I literally was there. Um, we have leveraged that invention, that humanity's invention, to the furthest we could. And now we are augmenting its reach by leveraging this other creation of humanity that's going to disrupt everything upside down. Um, so again, this is um, the answer for what's the new POAP for. Hopefully, it is for preservation of memories, it is

for verification, and it is for anything um, digital collectibles could be useful. First of all, Patricio, uh, thank you for this talk, and it's very brave what you are doing here today. Um, as a fan and and a contributor of POAP um I have a question for you. Uh, what are your plans for the people who use POAP because they really care of having collectibles on chain, and not uh, about having collectibles that are verifiable or or whatever.

So, is there any plan to um, I don't know, uh, provide a community chapter or a way for these people, your clients, currently, your fans? Um, good question, thank you. And and thank you for your support over the years. Nowadays the cost of building software is the lowest it's ever been. Anyone can can do quality software and put it out there for people to use um, with minimal efforts, for free, maybe.

Um, the challenge that all those creating software for con- for consumers is distribution. It's getting consumers to learn that such software exists and use it for its intended purposes. And and this is only going to get harder, um, because distribution at large scale is monopolized by some platforms like Meta and and Apple and Amazon and Google and Netflix and others. And and they charge a pretty penny for their distribution channels, and and good for them.

Um, when we think about this new ecosystem for the creation and enjoyment of digital collectibles the existing POAP collector user base is fundamental because without it it would be impossible to get distribution. We don't have enough cash. Um, almost nobody has enough cash to bootstrap a platform from the ground for a concept that doesn't exist and it's so hard to explain and install.

Um, so somehow whatever we build next has to accommodate our existing few thousands of passionate collectors. We don't know how that's going to be. Um, how blockchains will be used is still unknown. Um, most of many of us use blockchains, but things are changing fast. And the concept of wallet will disappear because you won't longer need a wallet. You will express your intent, whatever you want to do, whatever you would have done with your wallet, you would tell it to an AI,

whether it's I want to send cash, or I want to know how much cash I have, or I want to see my collectibles collection. Whatever you would have done with a wallet, um, you won't do it with wallets as you know them today anymore. And this will probably happen soonish. Um, we don't want to make a strong opinions about which blockchain to use, which standard to use. That sounds all premature. Um, so we will allow ourselves to try different models. I don't even know what those models are. I'm not the only person designing this, and I've been so busy

um, with preparing the maintenance protocol that I haven't been working on that a lot, so I don't have a more precise answer. But certainly, we understand that the passionate collector we have today it's the reason why we have a chance at adoption in the future. So, somehow we will have to make you happy, or at least to keep you around so you help us spread the new product. Do we have more questions?

Um, oh, we don't have time for questions. Okay, good to know. Sorry. Thank you. Um, I hope I am around. Again, showing our social media channels, and stay on the lookout, and be optimistic. Hopefully, what we will build is much greater and impactful that we what we have built. Thank you. >> [music]