S4. Ep. - 10 Future Of On-Chain Capital Allocation W/ Austin Griffith

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it we publish a season of about a dozen episodes every couple months this season is all about lean mean Capital allocation machines what are the ways in which we're going to do Capital allocation in a different way than was possible before we had The onchain Primitives that we now have and we are exploring the possibilities of capital allocation in an onchain World in this season one special thing we are doing this season is we are allowing you to collect this episode all episodes during the season are available on chain if you go to pods. medgreen pill to find the

episodes and start collecting you can do that today thank you to JT nickel dth how D eth zerox Lucas Simon SD Sky James D eth and MMA onchain for being our top collectors this season if you want to learn more about the green pill podcast you can visit our website at the Green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local chapter all right my guest today is Austin Griffith he is a builder a bidler in the ethereum ecosystem and the founder of build Guild which you can kind of think of as a developer Collective that is helping onboard more developers into the web 3 space so Austin is behind a bunch of prolific things in the space he built Punk wallet

he built scaffold eth he built speedrun ethereum he built e. build and uh he is known for his bow tii Fridays which is where he live streams all of the re recent builds he's working with on Friday wearing a bow tie that's what bow tie Friday is Austin is also a getcoin alumni him and I worked together back in the 2018 and 2019 cycle and uh we've just been friends ever since I think he's on the frontier he's one of my favorite people to talk to in the space about what's going on and and what are the cool new interesting things that are happening and uh also just a fun nice guy to know so this was a fun episode to talk to Austin Griffith about build Guild and I

think you're going to enjoy it hi Austin what's up Happy bow tie Friday thanks for having me happy bow tie Friday for those of us who are watching on video Austin's wearing a bow tie and on screen he's flexing his validator behind him which is looks like validating blocks no that's just a ref node this one so the one at home is but it's kind of like you know uh scops I don't know if I should say where my actual validator is and where it is not but there's always a node in the background at least that's great keeping track of the chain and sharing it with others peer-to-peer that's great and then the other thing that's on screen right now and you and I have a tradition

is that you like to bring the energy by doing some sort of arm movement on chain yes and we okay so that's how awkwardly I can't quite do no no no it's more like this yeah yeah yeah no more more like this yeah I can't explain to the audio listeners what's going on on screen right now it's awkward you guys gotta trust us all right so we're we're here to talk about Capital allocation you're one of my favorite Capital allocation machine builders in the space Austin so um the the the framing of this season of green pills Capital allocation machines we're going to do more scalable precise and Democratic Capital allocation that's ever than than was possible offchain we're going to do more scalable

precise Capital allocation onchain and so I want to talk about some of the stuff that you and I have built together Capital allocation machines and then also what's in the Vanguard at the build Guild so maybe we'll just start with what's the build Guild and and what are you all focused on yeah so the build Guild is uh Wyoming Dow LLC officially uh but technically it's a multisig and that money so money com in from large organizations like the EF and optimism retr pgf and we reallocate that money in small chunks to developers that are upand cominging high impact on the edge uh we do that through speedrun ethereum which is our developer onboarding and education kind of our

curriculum scaffold eth is like our prototyping and app building tool and then grants. build Guild and build Guild as a whole is kind of like our Capital allocation mechanism I can kind of think of what you're building as a capital allocation machine that brings more developers into crypto so the meme is speedrun ethereum go to speedrun ethereum.org [Music] channels and at the advanced levels they're actually helping you build speedrun ethereum like they're laying the tracks as they're coming in and so you're you're like kind of like the pi Piper of software Developers in

space yeah good good reference yeah I yeah I don't know if any gen zers will know what the pi Piper middle middle out uh middle out compression yeah so did I get that right about so speedrun ethereum is like the front door and then build Guild is is the people who are building speedrun ethereum but they've all come through speedrun ethereum or a lot of them have come through you know just like your your social presence also but mostly speedrun ethereum there there's this weird so speedrun ethereum really helps you figure out how to build but also what to build like kind of goes through the things that you would build but there's still this kind of Tour of Duty you have to do after you understand what to build and how to build it there's just this kind of valley of

Despair that you just have to ship a bunch of things on the tech tree to really understand what's going to work and get more context for the space and figure out what people want and kind of where the moving Target is in terms of what the ux has to be on the app and things like that so there's this middle territory where we're really trying to nurture this just get in a routine get in a rhythm of shipping small apps and trying things and something fun will come from that and and we try to just you know nurture that and incentivize that a little bit kind of in the middle after they're done with the curriculum and I think that like a lot of the developers that I come across have been in that sort of like Lial space with you and that's like part of their journey

into the space yeah I mean I'm curious I'm curious how y all are rewarding the developers that are coming in through build Guild you all just launched build build Guild grants maybe that's the the thread to pull heck yeah yeah no grants is you know first and foremost a product we need inhouse because we have folks coming through the speedrun and then eventually getting into these build Guild batches we have this batch program you know each every few weeks everybody that finished the speedrun that wants to be part of this is kind of part of this we we Circle up around a repo and we work on this repo and that helps with with a lot of things there but the there was this there was this Gap basically in build Guild where if I found you and I saw that you were building awesome things and I had a good

gut feeling about you I would just like allocate a stream of eth to you and then from then on you would build things and withdraw from that thing from that stream and turn in the things you're building but that's a heck of a commitment to to set up with someone and we we needed some middle territory and that was our grants program so it's sort of like as you finish the curriculum you're getting in the mode of shipping we want to just incentivize that with tiny eth grants so 0.1 25 eth to start and 0.125 eth when you ship and we do that a couple times with folks getting them just in the in the routine of shipping and then if you keep doing that for a long time maybe there's a stream in there also but that's the like the main allocation mechanism I think is now

moving toward this grant system because it allows us to build a feedback loop up without having a huge commitment to to funding a builder full-time yeah what I think is interesting here is is that you're pioneering a different way of hiring people than we're going to do a bunch of job interviews and then maybe a challenge program and then I'm going to do a reference checks and then we're going Z to 60 you're hired full- time you're more like hey I had a good a call with you I I like your Vibe here's a stream uh you're welcome to withdraw the stream but you're gonna have to self-report what you're what you're building in order to get the stream and then you're kind of like emergently building up trust over time by doing work together instead of like talking

for a long time about what it would be like to do work together and then going 0 to 60 really quick so I I've just sort of admired the the emergence how you're embracing emergence in your Capital allocation in the bill Guild that's a great way to frame it and you make it sound really good but obviously there's a lot of messy things here there's lots of like people working nights and weekends and people getting things 80% of the way done right there's a lot of like you're on your own educational Journey here and I'm gonna give you this like I need this Merkel tree and this other project could you build this and it would be a sweet combo move for something else but like you know it's a dice rle whether or not I'm going to get that thing delivered the way I need to

so if so we can't just be like we're not a typical Dev shop it just doesn't work that way because too many things go on the shelf and we're about education and building but there is kind of this weird combo move where things do get shipped now and then which is pretty fun yeah and and you know I'm curious what are the numbers that you're putting up here how many people are coming through speedrun ethereum how many people do you have on these on these drip uh these drip campaigns you know what sort of scale is this Capital allocation machine working at it it's pretty rad that all of this stuff is on chain and we can go look at it but I don't look at it as regularly as I should for 2023 we had 10,000 people do uh start speedrun ethereum I think we had a thousand

people finish speedrun ethereum and joined build Guild and then uh with our whole budget we funded 150 total people within the year of 2023 so that kind of gives you the the scale down to you know the the funnel but remember a lot of these folks are just learning everything they need quietly and anonymously and ejecting out and we never have any clue they came through and I just see them at a hackathon one day and they're like hey I just built this dii protocol I got into the space because of this stuff and I have no idea so this is only the people that are kind of like really sticking around they're making it through this funnel and it's okay if people don't make it through this funnel yeah I think that's that's sort of

interesting is that so the mechanism is that you stream them money but they have to withdraw the stream a week or once a month or that's what it used to be is that is that no this is a really good thing to get into for sure yes uh especially when we're talking about Capital allocation mechanisms because there is something that we did differently sorry did you want to get into that first or should I no you explain it you're the Mastermind behind it so the smart contract Works in a really interesting way where when I deploy you a stream the money's there from the start and it's basically your money because only your address can withdraw from it but if you think of it like a battery that's that just basically gets full and stays full and then as you withdraw from it it'll go down and then charge back up

to the full State again it's kind of a weird pattern but what this creates is both I trust you and there's money here for you from the getco but on a on a second piece your nights and weekends you're maybe not working for full-time stuff here you're going to disappear and you're allowed to disappear and you're that's okay and so some of these streams will fill up and Stay full and be paused full and it's kind of a weird if you think about it like that's not totally like a stream because the stream pauses and it's not streaming to me when I'm not doing something but that's kind of the key mechanism I wanted here is people can check out for a few months and then the stream is waiting for you when you get back but I'm not constantly streaming to you when you're not

building things so it's it's it's not like a trustless system that you've built it's almost like a trust minimized system if people want to take the cookie out of the cookie jar they got to leave a note what they did and they know they're going to have to face you and you're kind of like a hero to them whether you'll admit it or not and so this creates a mechanism where people will only withdraw the cookie from the cookie jar if if they have something to show for it has that been something that's like enforced socially is there anyone that's taken advantage of that because I just want to address like the absolute trust minimalization zealots that are out there that think that oh this will be abused like here's all the different ways it could be abused oh yeah it can be abused in a lot of ways uh but I

think this is as much dog fooding as it is anything right like the the allocation mechanism here is is working in a lot of good ways but of course you could game it and I think since allocation mechanisms are something that you you really geek out on I think that it should be kind of noted here that this mechanism sort of is rewarding the bad people and kind of leaving the good people behind because the really best people don't want to get in and turn in their work they're terrible at price things it's it's almost like this social filter for me figuring out how someone goes about using their stream in the first place of kind of like what kind of a builder they are and what kind of personality they are and you can see it

in the mechanism and I just like I totally view this as like dang it like I keep building these fun little mechanisms but then like this is obviously something that a bad person would take advantage of and a good person would have a hard time using and that's something to really kind of face and sit with I I feel like we've we're kind of in this Sun canany Valley where we know that the whole job interview reference check zero to full-time thing doesn't work there's been so many examples for me of times in which that's not worked out and um we're trying to invent new mechanisms for hiring people that can do better than that but it it feels like you've not yet reached the place where this is serious enough where someone can be full-time at build Guild this is more just kind of like a fun

cute way of pushing them down the funnel getting them interested in web 3 they probably stick around a whole lot more when they get one of these streams but it's not like they're going to work full-time for build Guild forever like with the with these streams that it seems like the life cycle of a lot of these people is that they end up working in the ecosystem either on their own projects or getting hired full-time so we're in this uncanny valley where we know traditional hiring is broken and there's probably a better way to do it and you figured out a way to do Capital allocation that pulls people down the funnel of doing web 3 Capital allocation but you haven't really fully replaced the whole elephant of of hire any response to that is that fair yeah sure I think that there is like if we

look at people build Guild Fund in 2023 or whatever if we look at that 150 people there's for sure like a longtail of people that didn't get very much money and there's for sure like a body of people that made part-time but I think there may be six seven people that are like full-time build Guild now and that's from you know all of our grants and all of our budget has to fund those folks and the middle folks and the long T of folks and one person at the head means you know 20 people at the tail and so it's it's hard to justify sometimes having full-time people but I do have like I would say maybe like five or six full-time folks this not like paper contracts drawn out but there's a smart contract drawn out that that lays that

out and you can see what they're making annually and it's a close is it is it just a salary it's a salary it's not like a Fang salary but it's a salary all right oh man I brought you on CH or uh on the episode talk about onchain Capital allocation you just brought salaries on sh I yeah I think and this is a new way of doing it doing it uh withdrawal based for a while but then you I think you got to switch you got to switch over to okay I trust you this needs to be full-time if you're full-time full-time I'm gonna turn on like a llama stream or sablier and it's gonna just flow to you and probably in a stable coin I think is what we're seeing yeah I mean I think there's there's sort of like when I think about the full-time space you

obviously at that point you've vetted their cultur or fit you've Ed their ability to contribute and there there's also sort of like a it's not only how are you doing Capital allocation to them but it's who are you competing against and if you're competing against all the other web three orgs that are offering salaries and benefits then there's sort of a different Dynamic there once you get to that high trust level and so the market sets the expectation there for you um but you know uh I'll be curious to see we'll have you back in 2025 and and see how your team has grown and and how many people are at the mid late and early stages of the build field funnel I need better numbers too I I'll come with I'll come with graphs next time we did have you on green pill a year ago and um

one difference I'll note between then and now is that back then I think y'all were being funded primarily by the EF but now you're getting retroactive public goods funding so just diversifying the sources of funding at the top of the funnel is is something that I think is neat yeah it's definitely uh a stress reliever for me it's kind of an existential thing to have a one big Grant be the thing that controls your entire organization and your ability to fund 150 people and so it's scary but it's you know the I was doing it with my own money right up until I ran out of money and that's when the EF like helped out so without that big Grant from the EF to start like I would not be here but yes it's so uh it's

so relaxing to not have that existential dread of a single actor funding you at least if it's like two or three different actors and even the Retro pgf round was just like one round and we'll see from here but that's it's enough to run on for for a year plus well um I'd love to just open up the aperture of the episode to ask what you're excited about um and again the hypothesis behind season four of green pill is capital allocation machines how can we do weird fun interesting Capital allocation but like the general hypothesis is more precise more scalable Capital allocation probably more democratic than was possible offchain what are you excited about in the ecosystem what do you want to mess around with and yeah where's your head at when you when when I bounce

that hypothesis off you so yeah I mean first of all things I'm excited about we have a lot of cool things happening l2s Bobs getting cheaper account abstraction uh basically we're we're setting up for a new era of blockchain users that are spending pennies and they're coming out of their like American coinbase wallet to go spend pennies to buy Deen or something like that and that's really exciting because a lot of those folks will also you know dip into the developer life a little bit and understand what deploying a contract is and all of that stuff so I'm really excited about that I'm really excited for the new set of users but specifically in terms of capital allocation and funding I go back to the the early Kevin auke who is dinking

around with GitHub and tokens and stuff like that I think that we will have lots of new developers enter the space that will go oh open source incentives like open source incentives ether ethereum open source incentives and we see support programs baked into GitHub but I don't know if they're the best yet and I think way more Capital will flow in when a good mechanism is created yeah and I think any old developer can pull scaffold eth off the shelf or pull some scripts off the shelf and build something that can go read GitHub and figure out who the contributors are and meant a token to those people you need you know a few weeks of learning about

ethereum to be able to get to build a script that deploys a token to contributors to your repo and I think that's coming and I think more developers are going to find that and I think that's really exciting yeah early gitcoin was all about open source software sustainability and the vision was because I was an open source software developer and wasn't getting paid for it what if we could use crypto to fund it and um you know gitcoin sort of moved into this other space of public goods funding and quadratic funding and it's neat to see that space be occupied by a bunch of new entrances the space that like T doxyz and radical I'm really excited about optimism is it is interesting just for yeah drips uh optimism is interesting just for the

sheer amount of money that're plowing into open source Builders and uh and then of course like around optimism you get this this network of impact measurers like Carl and open source Observer that are actually measuring it and um you know the last thing I'll say is that vital vitalic when I did an interview with him in December said focus on open source software not only because it's it's one of the most underfunded public goods governments aren't typically funding Global public goods like open source but also it's the foundation upon which crypto ecosystems rely open source software and also it's kind of a trojan horse into the mainstream if you can figure out a way to fund traditional open source Builders so yeah just curious to see what happens this cycle with people building oh and

it's it's also completely digital so as opposed to the Oracle problem you have with funding like climate public goods with with open source you have all this data on on GitHub and and git repositories you can use so yeah it's a very fruitful place and um yeah I'll be curious to see who moves into that space and and really becomes the like web 3 GitHub um I think that there's a lot of opportunity there because of all the reasons that we just listed yeah I mean like and the obvious person is Microsoft and I don't know if they want to do like there's booms and busts and nft Bros and so much garbage in the space that it's hard even if you were Microsoft and you did have a way of doing token funding on an L2 when do you

launch it and how much do you get from all the turds about it I don't you're gonna it's gonna come from Microsoft a like I went to GitHub Universe back in like 2018 back when getcoin was trying to enter this space and I remember open source sustainability just felt like it was a side quest for them they were locked into this like Goliath versus Goliath battle with gitlab for Enterprise adoption and they couldn't like you know open source sustainability was good for The Virtue signaling for them but I didn't get a sense that it was like they were plowing a ton of money into it and also these days when I think Microsoft I think oh they're plowing money into Ai and that's that's where they're playing so I think that who like the the the next open source funding model is going to come from web 3 in a Bottoms Up

organic way it's going to come from the t. xyz's or the radicals or the optimism or maybe the getcoins I don't know but um I think it's going to be like more Bottoms Up and or it's going to look more like David than than Goliath would be my Counterpoint to that great and we're building the tools for those people the tools and the education for any developer to come in and like figure out how to build these kinds of systems like it's doable if you're an intelligent person you can land on speedrun ethereum and technically get the AHA moments very quickly and get to writing scripts and apps and finding these funding mechanisms yeah and you know I'm curious to see is there going to be one killer app is it is it going to be bounties or is it going to be grants uh or is it going to be t doxyz

or is it going to be a summation of a bunch of small tools unix's philosophy style that all compos together and will an open source software developers income stream come from one big airdrop or one big income stream or is it going to come from a bunch of different small places I'm I'm feeling like this the cleanest solution the one I want it to be as someone who wants to earn money here is like the one big thing but the the solution I think is actually going to happen is a bunch of small cryptoeconomic rewards coming from a bunch of different places that might be a little bit of a headache to track in in manage but I I feel like that pluralistic thing is way is is more realistic but also more antifragile I think about an nishe and I think he's tweeted famously that he got in to the

Space by like civil attacking some airdrop or something like that and he was likeor the from Paradigm yeah yep and he he he like literally moved up the hierarchy of needs because of crypto and stuck around because of it and he even came and worked with you guys for a while like you tricked him into building a few things uh at gitcoin for a while before he was a big deal he was doing builds he's like on my list of like builders that I'm really proud to have helped discovered it's like you and Carl Kone and and Anish are like ear early gitcoin ecosystem contributors that are now on to bigger and greater things but uh yeah discovering upand cominging Talent it was was sort of like one of the side effect blessings of being

involved in getcoin early but this this idea that like onboarding isn't going to come through through this obvious like come work here because of the incentives it's more like do something slightly shady and go up the high move up the hierarchy of needs and then realize how cool that is and then build more things and then you get in you know there there is this like I I could program money so I should certainly be able to make money doing that that kind of draws people in but then once they're here the ethos and the technology and so much so many other things you almost feel bad that you came in with such a economic mind I guess but or yeah with that with those uh incentives but you stick around and you stay and there's a lot of really

interesting things along with all of these griffs there's this um this concept called schorm which is basically like how much does the digital resemble the analog um and and I think that like this is an example of the non-or ism of jobs which is like it's not going to just be a salary onchain it's going to be earning in a whole bunch of weird onchain mechanisms that didn't couldn't have existed in the old world and and that's the Horizon that like this season of green pill I'm trying to peek over and take the whole audience with with me is like peeking over that Horizon of what is onchain capital allocation going to look like and yeah maybe there's a clue in last Cycles Frontiers men Frontiers women like the anas and the U

like the PE the people who are who are really doing the stuff that's that's in the frontier and um and it's about scaling that or like pushing the frontier of that in a way that wasn't possible before we had l2s and account abstraction I don't know you can like reason about what's over the frontier but until we go over it it's hard to say for sure it's crazy like we build all these tools and all these things and maybe the thing that gets Mass adoption is not something that's going to use any of these current wallets that were all dog fooding and it'll be something else and that could happen that's you know likely probably um what else what else are you excited about wof that's tough I that's like Builders like the ability to build so I was uh on stage at uh eth

Global London and I built an app in 25 minutes or something like that start to finish built an app that was like a delegator smart contract that you can control with an ownership pattern first of all the fact that you can do that with tooling these days is really cool like you can go from zero to one so fast but when I hit deploy and it cost two cents the room lit up and that was really neat to be able to pay two cents to deploy a smart contract to uh blockchain secured by ethereum is really cool that was base and it actually just cost me$ n to deploy to Bas just like 30 minutes ago so it the blob scription stuff has come in and priced the blob Market higher so it's a lot more

expensive but as we scale th those prices will go back down yeah so so here's one way to reason about what's over that Frontier is that before you could only do transactions that were like 10 or like $50 and we've all seen the memes of people complaining about that because they didn't know about l2s and uh and now that the median transaction is like a couple cents then not only does that make it web 3 more accessible to people who are not as privileged as as some of the first world Builders are but also it enables a whole bunch of other use cases that are lower price points and one of the things that I'm I'm sort of interesting and I'd love to get your take on this is what happens when social networks build in for real I mean mechanisms like imagine a a Twitter

where every like you get is worth a dollar and and and it's like an onchain signal that and and and maybe we can even add quadratic funding so that each like can be added up quadratic funding and like all of a sudden you're earning from your social media I feel like stany and lens are really pushing the frontier of what happens when you take calal allocation mechanisms and put them onto social networks and obviously foraster blew up in the last few months and so there's stuff like that's that's going to be possible that that wasn't possible before does that bring up anything for you no for real I I think that like when we talk about web 3 and the internet all I was seeing was meme coins uh to see something like farcaster or warp cter the app take off and not just take off

but there's new paradigms even within these apps like forecaster frames which is just like the Twitter card like when you paste a link that a to speedrun ethereum like a little Twitter card comes down and it's a nice little picture this is speedrun ethereum but in forecaster frames they unfurl that and they give you a little bit more metadata you can put some buttons in there you can control the car cards it's almost like this little hypercard thing if if you from way back in the day and so it allows you to make a little yeah it is it is yes yes for 1990s multimedia kids older Millennials like me and Austin hypercard was a way that if you couldn't code you could compose these little like RPG games by just editing the text on the screen and hooking up little logical

circuits to them and that's what fram like a card yeah go ahead sorry yeah yeah so basically now there's the ability to do like really basic coding mechanisms really basic Capital allocation mechanisms without doing any coding and you know what kind of stuff are people going to invent now that it's not just the privileged people who can code that are doing it but it's anyone yeah and social is showing that and we're seeing uh people come on chain and build cool things and use these frames in a new way uh thanks to the farcaster protocol being open-ended and being permissionless extensible and all of the you know things that make web 3 and going on chain cool the composability layer and so just by enabling that extra special little unfurl a whole like you

know Market of things took off of weird things where people were were oneclick ordering Girl Scout cookies and stuff like that like using a wallet like a coinbase Commerce wallet to buy Girl Scout cookies from a single frame with a single clip and you could I as the Builder I could make the frame and then you could take the frame and add things to it and unfurl it on your page and it would show things C to you so there was just like tons of composability and it was just an unfer it's just a Twitter card it's just the unfer it's the simplest mechanism but by putting the web 3 framing on it where anybody can build anything then it got really interesting and we saw lots of cool contributions come in and that's what this new web is going to be about yeah so it feels like by lowering the

transaction cost of each transaction in these l2s there's going to be this Lial space of cap of casual social interactions through which we can attach cap capit allocation that would be my distillation of the of the thesis here is in casual spaces exchanging a couple dollars in that Lial space will now be possible heck yeah and and like a few pennies to your Downstream dependencies add up to millions of dollars sometimes if we think about the one developer from Nebraska and how we fund them you know some mechanism some some developer from Nebraska will deploy a smart contract system that will have all the dependencies funded correctly somehow through uh you know these organizations that give out money and then dist

different distribution mechanisms and funding that person who is building all the open source stuff that's getting used by everyone and not getting paid for so like your Nebraska example it raise you plus one which is what if that person is in Hyderabad it's if youve ever tried to send International wire it is a nightmare uh so I I'll just one up you by saying you don't even have to be in America to use these things which we just take for granted in web 3 that you could send money but uh I recently tried to send an international wire to a contributor from India and we're still trying to trace where went yeah that's so that's another thing with these streams is it's like completely hands off for me I find you I connect you to the stream you work on it and withdraw from it and the money gets to

you and it's like very hands-off from me and we have worldwide builders that 150 people would you know cover the map pretty well yeah well it's too bad web 3 doesn't have a use case we're still working on it we still don't know no no no I think I think that is there is a truth to that is we still don't know exactly what this new type of computing is going to be like what the final form of the application in the use case is of this new type of computing but that happens with every new type of computing when we first got a personal computer and we first got mobile phones when we first got the internet we dinked around with it a lot and did a lot of weird things and we didn't know exactly what it was for and I think we're in that same stage

with ethereum and blockchains um another space that I'd love to explore with you is we talked about that like sort of casual Lial space of like hey I just met you I'm going to put you on a stream or hey we're in a social network together and I'm G to give you a dollar or two um but I'm interested in exploring the opposite of that Spectrum which is like multi-year relationships so you know the evolution of trust I I think is like really possible when there's positive sum games and low miscommunication and people have repeated interactions with each other right if I you over then you're not going to do work with me and there's no repeat interactions but you know in these spaces where people have multi-year relationships there's going to be a lot of opportunities for three three to to coordinate with each other

and um you know you and I have been through a couple cycles and and I'm wondering like you know is there anything you see opportunities for in as people build up more reputation over time to leverage that and I guess the thing that comes to mind for me is you know one of the things we talked about is like what if there was like a getcoin Alumni network where people could do token swaps with each other I mean billg could do this also um what if Dallas could do token swaps with each other what are the ways in which um My Success can be your success after we've both you know our the the relationship starts with more of like the Casual social thing but then it progresses over time as we just like don't each other over over the course of multiple years like is there anything in in that design

space that you've got your eye on I think that long-term relationships for me onchain sort of get get as far as like the Llama stream or something and we don't go any farther than that like that's the that's the highest tier relationship you can have with me is that I'm streaming you money from llama pay but I think that there's this obvious thing that you're pulling at here that every single developer that comes through the build Guild should have some token representing them and their success in some way and and the batch that they were in that batch should have a token and there should be some shared success within the batch of people and then the build Guild itself should have a token and all of these should be like interrelated in some way economically and as some random person is helped by three build Guild members

and they make their way through and they end up building something awesome and then contributing some retr pgf funding back to build Guild that should be split to those people somehow so I think it's like there's something obvious there and and something awesome that could happen but I I don't know we'll see I think that you've got all the components to explore that you've got the 150 people in build Guild you're all messing around with stuff on chain and there's a lot of positive some relationship so curious to see where that goes yeah we'll see hopefully it's 300 next year but got to double the budget somehow some figure something out well it's a bow Market you can do better than right then double you go exponential that's right you can fund the build Guild the build Guild is funding developers on the edge hit us up

with a grant and we will regive that Grant out in small pieces to awesome people that need it and are building awesome things on the edge we only have a few minutes left so I'll move to my final question which is uh in a world in which you're maximally successful over the next five or 10 years besides fist bumps what uh what is it what does it look like us a picture of a world Maxum sucess Max yeah I think maximum success so so there's this interesting thing where no matter how hard I work only certain amount of users or Builders or developers are going to come into ethereum and if I'm trying to onboard developers I'm sort of at the mercy of this flow of people in a way and what I've tried to frame is that the bull market will cause people to come in and

it's my job to bring them down the rabbit hole as fast as possible because what we find at the gitcoin thing the electric coin Capital Maria Shen showed this off right it was like basically developers that are in stay in and developers that are kind of on the surface they leave when when the price goes down and I would say there's a few key moments there that have to happen you've got to give them some eth you've got to give them the education you've got to kind of get them deploying something on mainnet and figuring it out but I think my job is to make that happen and get more people in and have more people stick so I think 10 years from now would be the people who came to learn more about ethereum found out about it and built a bunch of really

cool products and now it's there's mainstream users using ethereum whether they know it or not and it's more of like a settlement layer and we have l2s and l3s and people are all on chain and things like uh censorship and things like inflation lots of these things that like blockchain should probably fix I don't know a ton about but I'm assuming that they will you know Global geopolitical things perhaps we're talking about nation states playing some of these coordination games that we're building there's there's a lot of interesting things there uh and I want to help the next generation of builders that are going to build those apps be successful and learn and create and ship

yeah it feels like what you've kind of built is this onboarding shelling point where maybe you come into crypto for your own reasons but you find Austin you start following his pod Piper and he leads you down a regen rabbit hole but also gives you the skills that you need to provide value and one of the things that that I think that's coolest about build Guild is the fact that it's like a self-building machine these Builders are helping you build speedrun ethereum but also its positive ripples propagate outwards because you're just onboarding developers in the space that are that are building cool new stuff and they also have this network of relationships with each other so I think the second order effects of build go are going to be quite well they could be quite massive over the 10year time time frame

hope so all right well that's that's all the questions I have to is there anything you didn't ask didn't ask that you want to say oh yeah what are the questions we should be asking what what are the next onchain apps going to look like I think social was close I think uh like prediction markets are getting a little hotter right you got anything uh that you're excited about token curated Registries anything like that yeah know my secret is that I'm I'm not that smart I just surround myself with people ask myc and they tell me um yeah I mean I I don't know like I I think that every cycle it it doesn't repeat but it Rhymes right and what I'm interested in doing is is drawing a line from what happened last cycle and you can kind of like look linearly outwards but then you can reason from first

principles about okay now we have l2s so cheaper transactions and now we have account abstraction and also lrts and social are happening and so you can draw like it becomes a bunch of data points and then you sort of draw linear trend lines from each of them but every once in a while there's something that that comes out of the Merc that just surprises you like meme coins like I guess I'm just not left curve enough or right curve enough to have anticipated meme coins so so yeah I mean every once in a while you get surprise but then you update your model right all all models are wrong or some are useful so I'm just hanging out in listening and observing and in in trying to build value and and that's my formula but I don't know what's next if I knew what's next I uh

uh I probably would have been grinding on this whole like public goods Capital allocation thing for seven years but we kind of know where it's going with account abstraction people can use it like my mom can use it with uh with l2s it's cheap enough that a lot more things can come on chain so a lot of games and digital things and all sorts of like Registries are big right now right like a a registry on ethereum makes a lot of sense ens is a good starting point but EAS and lots of attestation services and stuff are pretty cool too and those are popping up and then all the social stuff yeah one thing that I see as like a commonality with you is like kind of like serving the people who are on the frontier there's there's this whole thing about you know when you're going

west don't like actually try to mine gold but sell pickaxes to the gold the gold miners and like I kind of think build G is doing that because like everyone's going to need developers right um and in a way gitcoin is doing that also because gitcoin grants is now available for any evm based ecosystem so regardless of whether the meta is like meme coins or lrts or lsts people are any grants programs and quadratic funding is a really cool way to run a a grants program of course getcoin is now doing retr pgf and a bunch of other stuff too now but like you kind of don't have to be on like the frontier of the latest meme coin meta when you're selling the tools to the people who are are in the frontier and and I see that that as a commonality between my work

and your work I like to use the tools and show them off anyways just a little bit so I imagine me as like uh like I bought a plot of land just outside of town where everyone has to walk by when they're headed to their good plot of land and I sit there with my really nice tool and I chop chop chop but then like I sprinkle some fake gold on it now and then as people walk by so like I'm not really building like production level stuff but you can with this tool and that's what I'm trying to show people as they they're walking by so I do a little bit of Knucklehead building but not production level I don't think yeah and the other meta that that I'm sort of seeing between me and you is like when getcoin 1.0 I built a lot of the tech

myself and I was like really r coding my way through a lot of the problems in the 2019 bare Market but this time around it's about building an organization which in some ways is a lot more fun because you're dealing with people but it's also sucks way more because like people are that deterministic the way code is but it's building the organization that's building the product uh and and I think that that's that's a fun Frontier especially for me as a software engineer and um organizations are are way different and more complex but also more powerful than than code can be so in a way that's that's your product not not just your product for sure yep I I like that a lot all right should we close it out by doing some some hand movements and a little bit of

bow tie stuff yeah yeah you should see it Anan you should see it all right well thanks for coming on the podcast Austin this was fun thanks for having me always let's do it again in another year all right we just heard from Austin Griffith I am excited about build Guild because I think it is onboarding a lot of developers into the space and also doing some weird fun Capital allocation mechanisms to them thanks for listening to the green pill. Network podcast again we are featuring the people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world people like Austin Griffith and his gagle of builders in the build Guild if you value our work please remember to subscribe rate and review it really helps us build the regen crypto

movement in the green pill movement thanks again see you next time