Tea Protocol: Rewarding Open-Source Heroes

Transcript

Intro

GM GM, welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of Dev Null. So, if you didn't know, Dev Null is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And I'm really excited for today's episode because we'll be welcoming Timothy Lewis, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tea Protocol. So, if you didn't know, Tea is the permissionless network powering the future of open source. So, Tea anchors open source and cryptography and turns every sign commit into part of the global economy. So, if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Timothy, learn all about Tea Protocol, and if you are a OG listener of the show, you will recall that we actually hosted Tea Protocol on

episode 20. So, you'll get a updated look at Tea Protocol 200 episodes later. So, let's have some fun and hope you enjoy. >> [music] >> GM GM, welcome to the show, Timothy. I'm really excited to have you on today, man. No, I'm really excited to be here, man. Been listening to this show for a while. You know, it's funny. I've known and I've seen the the evolution of the Dev Null since the beginnings of the Dev Null because at the same time the Dev Null was beginning, I began a Developers Null.

Developer DAO Origins

I began I have at Developers Null I have developersdao.org. It was one of many Nulls, but I ultimately you know, raised over I think over 50 million dollars at the time for distributing value to open source devs, but you guys crushed it. You guys crushed it with your community and you let an awesome community do it, but had this kind of Dev Null similar idea. Mine was right at that same time, 2018. We were doing all this like a lot of the same things together, but it's good to be here, good to connect with your audience.

Yeah, yeah, likewise, likewise. Yeah, I guess another another Dev Null, but the the creator of Developer Null, I guess he might have had like an early step on things, but yeah, I mean, the developer community here at Developer Null has been great. A lot of lifelong friends have been made and people have found jobs, make careers for themselves out of the out of the community. So, yeah, it's it's it's one like I said, it's wonderful to have you on and thank you for being a OG listener of the show. I really appreciate that. And yeah, like I mentioned, we we did have Tea Protocol and Max on the early very early version of the show, but um before we kind of get into all the

things Tea Protocol, I just like to ask you for an introduction in case folks aren't familiar. Sure, Timothy Lewis. I'm a lifelong hacker and engineer. I started running BBSs when I was six or seven years old. I turned that into a couple shotgun ISDNs and a little little little ISP out of my bedroom by the time I was 13. Really the internet raised me. You know, I've been fascinated at all times with with with with really distributed systems, computers, and networking. I turned that into a love for cryptography right as right right as PGP exploded. So, in the in like '91, '92, I started you know, signing all my emails, making

Timothy's Origin Story

sure that I was doing the things that I needed to do to to be a part of the communication networks and kind of leveraged that into a career in finance. So, so ultimately I was designing lowly latent networks for a lot of black box trading firms and and designing infrastructure and data centers for organizations like Societies Generale, Fimat, Calyon Financial, number of different organizations in the late '90s, early 2000s when speed was king for for trading platforms. Still is, but back when it was kind of an evolving science.

But you know, doing doing everything from the actual FPGA programming to help developing different routing better more efficient routing protocols for for for for trading. You know, got got super into that world. You know, loved the loved the idea of open source starting with the Cathedral and the Bazaar. You know, mid mid '90s seeing everything kind of explode. You know, got really into you know, kind of some of the heroes. Fell in love with guys like Larry Lessig from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Got to meet Aaron Swartz you know, as a as a younger man.

I mean, Aaron lived in Chicago. We'd go up to some meetups up there. Like such an inspiring you know, peer at that time and awesome guy. And you know, by by the late late late 2010 or early 2010, 2011 is when I was first exposed to Bitcoin and got to see what it was. Didn't understand Byzantine fault tolerance at the time, but you really was open to the radical ideas about you know, this what is value, what what is money. That had already kind of been enshrined in me. And you know, then you know, seeing seeing that evolve, I really got more involved in Bitcoin in 2012, 2013.

Crypto to Open Source

And then seeing what was going on with colored coins, Jimmy Song, all those guys and the evolution of Mastercoin. I had moved out to LA at the time and seeing as a JR Willett do what he did with Mastercoin. The idea of tokenized sales really evolved from Mastercoin. So, I was happened to be in that circle at that time. David Johnston and Michael Turpin and a number of other guys, Brock Pierce, Craig Sellers were all doing things around tokenization and kind of breaking some rules, but having fun with it. And so, you know, got very involved with those guys as Vitalik started making his rounds.

You know, I got super interested in this you know, this this this this this world general compute idea and you know, I got into the Ethereum crowd sale and then into the Olympic Network when it was you know, super super raw. And you know, by by 2015, 2016, it's you know, it's all I wanted to do. I dropped my you know, at the time I had been engineering with Kaiser Permanente, doing some data center development with them. You know, by the time 2015, 2016 shifted around, you know, all I wanted to do was was work in in crypto and helped a number of projects either through funding mechanisms or you know, helping them just kind of design tokenomics back then when no one had any idea what tokenomics was. So, that was a lot of fun,

but by 2017 when we had the ICO explosions, I was working with this really distributed group, this distributed network of advisors. And you know, we were helping fund a lot of the major projects. So, and I helped out with one of the largest rounds for Hashgraph. You know, found found my ability to not only be able to help raise capital, but also explain some of the ideas behind you know, how to create decentralized communities. And so, you know, my crypto career kind of took off from there. I did I created an asset management company called Ikigai Asset Management. Then I then I created the DevX Null, Developers Null in 2018, 2019.

You know, a lot of this was for my love. When when when I looked at the foundations and the model of how people were distributing value back then, it was just really kind of spray and pray. Not the best devs in the world were in the ecosystem at the time. You couldn't get the guys that were the the real the the the enterprise level guys. And and you know, it was tough to to to see through what the technology could provide. I had I had become friends with Max in 2013. You know, Max and I had worked together on a on a local music platform. Both of us have a real love for for indie music. And you know, we worked together for a couple years on that and just you know, remained friends, worked together on and off. But in because of my position, I

have such admiration for him and what he brought to open source. You know, my position in 2018 is when I decided like, "Hey, I can create some sort of foundation model to be able to give better value to developers, open source open source developers. Again, the idea of this Developers Null. And we we were successful with that in somewhat. I think by any record we we distributed over 18 million 18 million euros in in in grants to developers over about a three-year period, which is a real solid value.

And you know, we had our ups and downs, had our disagreements, some political battles like all Nulls do, but you know, enjoyed it. And it was one of those things. The first grant that we had given out was to Max for for Max to to to think about what he would do differently. I'd given him an assignment about what to do differently with what what he would do differently with Homebrew in you know, at that time in '22 or '21 what he would might do differently. And so, we started talking about it then. At the end of this paper, he and I kind of came together and collaborated on at the time what was going to be just a rewards protocol. And ultimately you know, we've spent the last four years, a lot of

blood, sweat, and tears and a lot of changes, a lot of pivots to to build out something that you know, we can believe in the primitives of and now very excited to get out to market and and introduce to everyone the what we're trying to do, what we hope to accomplish, and and where where it intersects with the crowd and community that we need. Wow, that that's that's an amazing intro and and background you have. You're basically like all over the place. And it seems like all of these experiences that you had kind of have come together and and and brought you here to to basically revolutionize the open source landscape here.

Why Open Source Matters

In today's world, especially open source is more important than ever. I think more and more people are understanding um how important some of these um these smaller packages that kind of go into building some of these bigger bigger uh apps from like enterprise to to startups. Um >> [clears throat] >> excuse me. Uh so I guess uh to kind of help set the scene for maybe some people who haven't had their toes dipped into the open source world. I mean, personally I I didn't get into open source until I joined Developer DAO.

Um and really started seeing the value of it. But just from your perspective and all you've seen um and perhaps I get to pick Max's mind as well. Like why why do you developers contribute to open source in the first place? Um a lot of people if if you do if the audience doesn't realize they don't get paid for that and a lot of like you said blood, sweat, and tears um from your guys working on T Protocol and other folks working on whatever open source uh project there is out there. Uh why do people do what they do in the open source community? Why do they keep sticking around? Yeah, I I I think I think that everyone has their own reasons for doing it. You know, some of some of it's social. Like for some people it's you know, that builds

community and it builds camaraderie, builds friendships, which is an awesome way to build. Uh for for some people it builds a resume. You know, some people just you know, don't have the the the the showable work. Uh so going into this public space and building in public uh you know, helps with that. For some people some people are driven to share knowledge. Like I you know, I do believe you know, if you want to go fast, go by yourself, but if you want to go far, do it with others, right? And so if we're going to build crazy things together, if we're going to build you know, big world-changing things, open it up. And and now, you know, for for for for me, you know, I think uh as you mentioned earlier, open source being more more important than ever. I mean, with with the types of

transactions that we're all involved with online now and the types of identities and the types of information that we have, it's it's more important than ever uh to uh be able to trust what you're running and not just uh you know, take for granted uh that that that trust from you know, an Apple App Store or from you know, a Google Play Store. You know, those those gates uh we've seen how fallible those gates can be. So, uh a lot of different reasons that people will have to to build open source, but you know, it's it's it's a changing world. Not not everyone doesn't get paid. You know, there are a lot of people who do. Some of the paychecks though come from people who are trying to change and steer projects, right? So, that's a different thing. Uh I mean, so so so that's so

that's made made it made it made you know, that kind of difficulty. And we do need to figure out how to value some of this stuff. You know, nine I'd say 98% uh it's somewhere around. We've had numbers before, but the large majority of open source truly doesn't never really had much value. Right? But the small percent of open source that you know, that this top 2% top 3% creates you know, some of the largest value of software in the world. And and most large enterprise systems are built on open source, as you said. And you know, we are we are moving into a different place now though, obviously. I mean, the the the developer world is is been flipped on its head for the last you know, year year year and a half or so and and continuing to evolve. Uh so there'll be different things that people

look into. There was a Karpathy statement recently talking about the the the the deep level dependencies and whether or not you know, those strictly will be used or whether or not you will yoink you know, the important aspects of it or your uh or or your your AI LLM assistant harness uh will go ahead and change that. But you know, for for me, you know, it's about valuing contribution uh and and original ideas. Uh you know, I very much am an AI you know, AI first developer now. That's what I do and uh so I I wouldn't go back for the world. Um but we do need to uh understand I I still believe that the ideas come from the edge. The ideas come from the experience and you know, doing those in a community uh in setting, um

you know, adds to understanding, adds to listening to to to the other people that are going to be using. Um but you know, open source has always been split and there's there's been different types of the ideas what is open source, right? So, you know, what whether or not it's uh you know, Foss model or Stallman's model, all these different kind of ways that we need to recognize. I mean, how many different licenses are there? There's like 200 plus primary licenses that people consider right now. Uh you know, so you know, we have to it's been it's been so decentralized for so long. Like open source hasn't recognized the parallelisms between its you know, origins and you know, blockchain networks and you know, there's so many people are so stuck

still in that you know, crypto is only for you know, scams and and and memes and and doggy coins, etc. Um so I'm excited to try to merge uh these these communities together and do it in a permissionless way. You know, this this is what's important, right? Like the the the the systems and the tools that we have, you know, allow us to build things uh permissionlessly and you know, I I very much a believer in uh decentralization and distributed compute and you know, making sure that people can still have their privacy, their anonymity and you know, can contribute to a greater good. Um so we're hoping that we're building some tools that help uh create better ways for people to be acknowledged for their work. Uh whether

they're doing it as a human typing syntax or whether they're they're you know, if they have an amazing agentic harness that's just plowing through uh and plowing through code bases. Um you know, there's there's a recognition of value that has to be exchanged. Uh and that will ever change more now I think from uh direct human uh syntax to uh AI generated, but there's also a whole host of problems uh when we're trying to battle maintaining a public project with you know, the uh the the outside AI pull request, you know, uh denial-of-service attack that's going on right now. Right? So, so you know, hopefully we have some solutions uh in in line for that. Uh and hopefully

we can get some people to experiment, right? So, you know, the the the the thing that I'm believe in firmly about when you try to create a community value that it is you know, it follows uh you know, the the the the principle the Metcalfe's principle the these laws of uh network value. And so ultimately uh you know, if we can get some really good people on in early contributing, building based on some of the primitives, uh then I think we'll have a shot of being something a little disruptive and a a little interesting for all people. Yeah. Well well said and uh I think this segues well into uh my next question for you. Uh which is I guess with all this experience um and and as you mentioned um trying to bring together community,

What Is Tea Protocol

uh blockchain, and open source. I guess uh all of this came together to become T uh T Protocol. Um for our audience who uh might not have heard of T Protocol, what is it and uh what what problems are you guys looking to solve around it? Yeah. So, originally T started off of as a rewards protocol for open source. So, our goal initially was to try to understand how to rank and value um the dependencies. You know, not try to not try to figure everything out, but you know, we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out a uh a ranking graph that could be interesting for dependencies. And I think we've done a fairly good job at that, but the dependencies aren't the only part of the puzzle, obviously. You know, you know, there's so many other uh

PKGX and Rewards Graph

applications that sit on top that need to be valued. Um so you know, the the the the project itself when it started, we headed out that direction. Uh we also had created at the time what was called TCLI, now called PKGX. So, PKGX is a package manager, package runner, not manager. Um but that that that at the time early on, uh you know, was very public about the uh crosshairs of where it would lie within uh the blockchain ecosystem and then kind of pulled back from that. And it's become a very interesting um a package runner. It's it's amazing for agentic work, right? So, it can you basically uh you know, create sandboxes at will. You're you're you're able to easily go and and and run

things, you know, kind of kind of dangerously in your sandbox without having to worry about the rest of your developer environment um by using PKGX. Um so, you know, but now now uh you know, at the first attempt to figure out how to bring it out. Again, um I had founded the company with Max. I I raised uh about $17 million for us back in '21, '22. And then I took a bit of a sabbatical. So, I was I was on the outside for about a year and a half and I came back um late 2024. So, August of '24. Uh and during that kind of run-up, there was a there was an attempt to try to figure out a testnet. There was an initial testnet that really was just a dapp that was going to require people to register

repositories and then based on their the T ranking, they would get a value back. And you know, this was done in a way you know, by uh someone who I kind of disagreed with the the directional pull towards it, but but it was done in a way to where uh I think we were probably the most um uh kind of airdrop farmed project probably in recent history. Uh you know, there were there were a lot of uh systematic um misunderstandings I think by the by the person who had been architecting at that time. Uh and and it basically caused this huge you know, overflow of spam uh not only to uh not only to GitHub with account creation, um but to

NPM. At one time, we had over 3% of the supply chain were fake packages that were derived to manipulate the uh the the the T rank, the T T Protocol, right? And that's crazy. 3% of NPM and and last year of a few months ago, probably about 8 months ago, there were a number of great security releases about that what happened. The fact that it is it's again it's a supply chain issue, right? It's a providence issue. The fact that these could get in, you know, these these these have been permissionless systems for a long time, but just like, you know, the problems with email, unless there are there is spam prevention, then you're just going to have absolute bloat. And a lot of

these types of systems that we all work on can't face the monetary pressure of those sorts of things, right? So so people will do. Somebody's Somebody's paying the server bill somewhere, right? And the more spam and slop that you put up on these things that the the weaker the systems are going to be. So when I had gotten back, I had to figure out what I was dealing with. We had some, you know, interesting primitives on the reward side. We we had most of the try protocol done, but we really didn't have anything the tokenomics in my eyes when I came back to really look at it was would have worked if token always go up, but everyone knows token doesn't always go up, right? So you know, when I when I when I when I looked at it, you know, I I kind of

took a pause, took a beat to think about, you know, what could we do? And at that time, a lot of the optimism and Arbitrum networks were starting to to to come alive and I had built I've been a part of building a lot of early layer ones and I've been a part been a part of like thinking about communities, you know, getting people to build, doing either business development or running foundation work for what tools were needed especially during like the 2016 to 2020 period. And so that that was kind of my bread and butter. And so when I thought about the tokenomics, you know, I like autonomy in in in being able to create our own our own kind of

our own future. And I wanted to be able to create something that we could, you know, no matter what blockchain that we ultimately ended up on, we could we we we we we could we could control where we were going to head. And so when I thought about the layer twos, I I thought about the things that we could make our layer two different, right? So I I I I started thinking about a blockchain for open source, a blockchain for software, right? And I started thinking about, you know, what would be what would be needed and and validating the different signatures, the different cryptographic signatures that have been used in development for the last 20 years was more than obvious to me. At the time,

Layer Two for Software

you know, Ethereum, which is, you know, been again, when I look at blockchains, the value of a blockchain, how much value is locked on a blockchain for the for the ability to transact and how much trust has to go into a system that has that much value unlocked, you know, that I've been a big fan of Ethereum since 2013. So you know, happy to be building on top of that, but you know, it didn't have these primitives that were available to us. The GPG, PGP at the time, P256 hadn't arrived yet. So this was pre-Fusaka, pre-7702. So you know, try try try to also look at X509 leaf certs and and trying to be able to verify those types of signatures.

So around the end of 2024, we started building out this layer two. You know, we we built it in a way to where, you know, we're very comfortable internal team being able to hack and slash at different uh abilities to make it faster, do all the things, but speed and cheapness doesn't make a layer two, right? Like that's not going to that's not going to get something to survive. You know, but our tokenomics are built in a way to where it rewards and not only those that are building on our own system, but more so those that are the the the the dependencies, the registered the registered repositories.

You know, every transaction that we have, the majority of fees goes to fund the that as open source. And so we're building out governance tools, we're building out different things, but you know, now we can do things like, you know, verify builds on chain. You know, use a use the package runner to to validate policy of of of of of built software. You know, go pay individual commits by their commit signature. So this was kind of the thing for me. When I looked at other systems that were trying to reward developers, everyone had to sign up. And two-sided marketplace never works, right? You you you can't, you know, you have to have people there before try to create you know, some some some business around or some some

Commit Payments and Bounties

opportunities around, you know, payments. And for us looking at the SSH and and and PGP GPG signatures that we have for some of the greatest software over the last, you know, 21 years now are are are all there publicly available. We can go, you know, historically and we can go in the future direct funding down to a commit. We can do things like bounty reward, which allows someone to create a bounty around an issue on on on GitHub and then once that issue is the pull request tags the issue that's pulled in, then we can permissionlessly verify that and a payment gets released. So we're doing a

couple really cool tricks, but we hope people come out and build using those using those precompile primitives to where we can build nicer, more fun, more interesting stuff along the way. Well, yeah, that that certainly sounds like quite the complex but I mean it it seems like it's necessary like protocol around open source. And I I believe me I know from experience how say interesting, difficult it is to run a testnet and and a rewards program and keeping everyone happy and You know, we had a very Yeah.

Anti Sybil ZK Verification

We had we had over 1.7 million like registrants emails. And and you know, I I you know, I'd say again a good 60% of that absolute spam. People were creating these incredibly intelligent, you know, networks of packets of packages to go get rewarded. And the worst part about that was trying to figure out how to clean up that slop. So so so I didn't want to sacrifice the the the token economy to a group that didn't didn't follow the rules. You know, I don't mind. I love the participation, but this is supposed to be one person, one one reward, not one person 10,000 rewards. So along the way, like last year when we were trying to cut through

the noise. Also, you know, when we were going up and trying to line up things with, you know, talking with exchanges. I've been I've known so many of the people at exchanges for many many years, but when we were lining up, you know, people would would would question like what is this? There's no like our our initial testnet, you know, we had more transactions. We were running it on Alchemy at the time. It was the most transactions on a testnet that Alchemy has ever seen by a, you know, by a country mile. So so we were getting a lot of a lot of activity, but it's easy to run transactions on a testnet. There's no value, right? There's there's no cost to it, right? So people were creating tools for that. And so everyone wanted me to, okay, prove that these there's some realness to these people.

And I didn't I didn't want to go the route of, you know, strict KYC. So we ended up working with ZK pass and a zero-knowledge proof on verifying and validating individuals by the ownership of exchange credentials. So we we used a number of different exchange credential verification things that we built in to where we were able to compress that, you know, 1.7 million individuals that could get rewards down to into a more manageable 165,000, 160,000 of the of the kind of this airdrop. I I refer a lot of them as on-chain natives. You know, because these these people, you know, from great communities, awesome like our

Global Communities and Fair Value

our Indonesia community, incredible, right? Like really awesome people. Our Korean community, fantastic. Turkey, you know, India, you know, there's there's so many so many parts of the world in in China that that have really showed up because a lot of people do care about open source. You know, a lot a lot of people especially now. Now open source is like such a measure of pride, national pride in in a lot of Asian countries, right? It is it is a way to break through and it's a way to participate. And I I love that the way that they've embraced that. And you know, I'm a huge proponent of of open source open weight LLM models and you know, really hope this this fight keeps coming because again, I think that this, you know, we need to go far together on a lot of this stuff. But we also need

to recognize that during the last turn, you know, the people that actually built the hard stuff or much of the the infrastructure didn't get rewarded, you know, struggled through it while, you know, some some people, you know, were able to extremely monetize that in in a way to where it didn't really fall back into kind of a recognition for value. And so, you know, we're hoping to be able to create systems that that that you know, people can easily use without much uh without much interference and and being able to smoothly just contribute you know, a subscription base to to all the greats of the things that you're using while you're plowing through your, you know, LLM or your

cursor you know, whatever it is that you're using. Right. Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. And I guess we we segued here naturally. And I did want to pick your brain around AI a bit. I know you're you're quite into the the agentic coding and whatnot. So um >> if you're not, you're on the wrong side of history right now. >> That's right. Indeed. Like this this this this is this is a new form of compute. And you know, simple English is is is really the syntax, right? But, you know, you have to do it in a in a you have to understand your your contacts. There was a study, I think by UCL a couple weeks back talking about, you

Harnesses and Tooling Evolution

know, after the Claude code leak happened, they were able to go do deep research on, you know, what the what percentage of like the completion of of a thing was really being driven by LLM making full decision versus properly tuned harness making that decision. And it was I I believe that number that they had come up with was 98.4% the harness. Right? So, you know, that that that that tells you about like when you when we think about these individual knowledge worker you know, pillars that come up, it's going to be all the other tools that we can build around them to let the LLM work, right? To let the LLM do what it does best as it goes into ASI and then it's going to have everything,

right? So, fine. I I I will submit to that. But, but along the way it's going to have to use the tool sets. And, you know, it's been it's been great to watch these tool sets mature. You know, from doing the simple API calls to GPT before, you know, the the chat interface is launched and and then then the moment that Auto GPT and Baby AGI came out, it was a it was like a lightbulb moment for for myself and and like seeing with but they the models just weren't ready and the harnesses weren't ready and the tool calls weren't ready and MCP didn't exist, right? So, all all the things that are that get that are getting built up and they're really getting built, you know, collaboratively by the edges like it always happens, like the stuff always does, right?

Um so, it's been great to see that. And, you know, I had I don't think you know, I really have not been so dedicated to a terminal in, you know, probably 15 years, you know, like you know, I I I I had done tremendous amount of work from the the early '90s to, you know, kind of the 2010 period and then I was doing architecture stuff and you know, doing doing low latent you know, network design and FPGA programming stuff like that, but I wasn't you know, I didn't get into you know, I wasn't I wasn't designing mobile apps and I wasn't doing you know, cloud-based SaaS you know, development, right? And then, you know, I got involved in crypto so you're doing other things. I was doing contracts writing and things like that, but not nearly as dedicated and now I just can't stop. And, you know, it it is

Context Engineering Obsession

it is so much fun. There's so much to build and, you know, building out and now as you're progressing from like a prompt engineering to a context engineering to an environment engineering and harness engineering and orchestration. So many parallels exist in like any well-engineered distributed systems architecture, right? Because you're looking for a for ways to reduce latency. You're looking looking for ways to provide, you know, reliable execution, right? And and and and what I call I like to call, you know, turning the harnesses into more probabilistic determinist, you know, determinism, right? So, it's like it's not true deterministic software,

but the higher probability that you have that it will outcome in that determined way, that's what we're going for. And and you have to manage things across the board. So, you know, I've been obsessed with those harnesses and and building out agentic systems myself, but when I look at those systems, you know, what is required in the back? You know, what's important for me when I when I go out and I use say homebrew MP MP PNPM, the the those things are are are you know, the systems right now are generally grabbing you know, you know, a latest a latest package, you know, I'm generally not not pinning any particular thing. We've seen all the supply chain issues that these things just have had.

Supply Chain Security on Chain

So so we need better supply chain security. So we need to understand these tools as they're grabbing things, how can we figure out some other way to to to to to create a more reliable, you know, distribution of software on the on the dependency level. So, you know, excited about the way that we can use the blockchain in that way. You know, since we can have since we can validate build hashes and signatures on the chain on chain directly, people can contribute to understanding the value or or reliability of those things as it gets built out.

So, you know, that that's one of the things I'm really excited about. You know, I think also, you know, agents need identity and ideally it's it is an immutable global decentralized identity that we all that we all move towards. and agents need to be able to to reliably spend assets or or trade or transfer or do things. And, you know, I think as as all RWAs come over as the tokenization eats the world, you know, that the that that although I love the new link product by Stripe and I think it's incredible, I'll still go I'm hoping that the decentralized networks provide the the asset transfer, you know, cost you know, savings and

Agent Identity and Payments

expectations that we'll all need to get to as it progresses. But, yeah, if if you're not if you're if you Honestly, the last 3 months, you know, I I try to look at syntax as little as possible. I try to make sure that I have a number of not only the development harnesses, but audit harnesses as well, agents as well. And, you know, really I passed passed it off to my team to do any of the final review, but I I I don't think I'll I think I'm happy here. I don't need to go back.

Yeah, I personally I I I feel the same since I think late December when Anthropic had their their Claude promo where yeah, I got >> 4.7 had just come out. I mean, that was you know, that that was a you know, that that that was the time, right? Like everything kind of moved in that area. Or was it it was it 4.6 then or 4.7? Was it 4.6? When when did it when did it come out? >> Uh I think it was I I I I honestly don't don't remember. They they come out so frequently now it's hard to keep up.

Um but, yeah, like I I couldn't imagine myself living without it now. It's it's it's so powerful. It's such a productivity booster. Um and I guess on this point, um where do you think software engineering in general is going to go like for the mid to like senior level engineers? Like how do you think um these agents these harnesses are going to kind of change the role? Yeah, you know, I I again I I think that it's it's a it's a question of alignment and and governance.

Future of Engineering Roles

And especially when it comes to like community software. You know, I think when when cuz I again I spent 4 years building a DAO, working in DAOs, trying to understand DAOs. You know, and I that wasn't the first I mean, I'd been working on different DAOs since like 2015. And I loved the premise, but you know, still we need to make the tools easier, right? And I think AI is going to make using blockchain easier cuz AI is going to make user experience better. AI is going to get all that you know, and especially now with the P256 passkey stuff, everyone can securely log in from an iPhone, you know, and and be able to access these tools in a way that's not clunky when when they're interfacing with it. But, what I expect is you know, again the developers need to govern and and

and and and make sure their systems are aligned, right? They need to obviously spec-driven development, test-driven development all day these days, right? Like it's clearly defining, making sure you don't go over too much. That's that's a big part of it, right? And then then then obviously the the audit side of it will still be there, right? But, now you're going to get overwhelmed with how much if you've got critical software. But, when I look at public software, when I look at communities of software, you know, some of the big pillars I think are going to start to shake, right? Like I think GitHub is going to start to shake. It's just not built Git Git itself is just not built really wasn't designed really well to be built for humans, you know, it was it was kind of the the Linux core team and the way that

Open Source Governance Shakeup

they were kind of distributing patches at the time and, you know, it kind of expanded and then when the team took it in 2008 to turn into GitHub, it's you know, it's it's it's okay. I never loved it. I mean, I it's probably like to get better than Subversion, but you know, that's not saying much, right? But, some of these big pillars are are are are going to be going to be changing. And, when I look now at a big public projects, you know, there are so there's so much activity from both sides. I I kind of think about the participation in in that, you know, it's kind of like proof of work, but you know, I call it kind of proof of inference, right? And you're going to need people to to pay to to to to try to excel or push forward

your project. You you might have things that maybe you don't want to spend the inference on. Maybe someone else has got a Claude, you know, you know, Claude Max account they can go max out after, you know, 5 hours of work rather than you, right? Um but, you know, there's also going to be those that are using it for bad, right? So, so we need to encourage the participation of those that are using inference for good to negate the the principles of those that are using inference for for for evil. And, we need to come up with better systems to do that. And and and for me it's, you know, you know, evaluating, doing the audits, you know, on anything that comes in that there's an extreme cost to that. So, really in the world that we exist in now, it's kind of like this radical denial of service to these

maintainers. And, I I I had mentioned this before, you know, the mid-level and senior-level engineers that have been so enshrined and embedded in like a this is the way of life, this is this is the world, and they've built a a fantastic career on that. Some of the them are going to be more reluctant to to move because, you know, the tooling takes a long time. And, you know, we didn't used to live in a world where, you know, you change your tooling often. You know, there's people out there still using Vim all day every day and that's just, you know, what they're doing, right? But, you know, now you have to change your tool set, you know, to to be able to to accelerate every time something radical comes out.

You know, you weren't only mentioning that the models changing. And yeah, I think it was 4.6 cuz you know, 4.7 only came out a couple couple weeks ago or whatever. Um but you know, you don't only have to pay attention to the nuances of the model, you know, how they were trained, uh but then also, you know, the the tools that you can call. And and there's there's a lot of as these emerge, there's there's there's there's there's safe tools there's unsafe tools, but the existing developers need to find their their peace with that, right? You know, you still need to sharpen your tool. We still need to have humans that can understand code, but honestly, the code's going to start getting so complex that humans can't can't read it. That's just what it's going to be. Uh you know, and and that's awesome. But we we have

to we have to, you know, build better tools to to go audit and go validate and to to to to to make sure that we're we're we're we're in a safe situation. But, you know, excited to build some of the the the anchor some of the primitives of of what we're doing uh in the cryptographies that have been used around development uh for the last 20 years and support, you know, the historical view, uh be able to create, uh you know, identity uh from from the providence of of your code commits over the last publicly over the last, you know, two decades. Um but, you know, excited for the future where, you know, policy can dictate, you know, uh packages uh that that that you might want to use and that you can trust, you know, based on a you know, ideally uh

systems of of of value that are being directed at those that are creating uh those tools that we're going to be using anyway. Amazing. Uh yeah, and it's certainly very exciting uh to see kind of all of this come together and evolve. Um yeah, it's moving so fast. It's hard to keep up. Um but, uh you you kind of alluded to it. I I was going to ask you a um kind of bringing this back to um uh T Protocol. Uh just uh curious to hear what your uh North Star vision is for the protocol and um what the road map looks like uh the the rest of this year and if there's any uh alpha uh you can share with us >> Sure. Sure. For sure. Absolutely. Um so so again, we we started this in 20 late

Tea Protocol Vision and Timeline

'21. Um we kind of mentioned it first publicly sometime around uh March of of '22. We had a nice TechCrunch article. And uh then we released the T CLI in November of '22. And um you know, we we got a lot of people again. This is when we caused this massive and shortly after we caused this massive spam flood for both NPM and um and uh and GitHub. And um you know, what we did the one thing that we did do was a mass a massive community. And we through that ZK KYC uh application that we did, we were able to really confidently break that into to to about 165,000 people, uh which is great.

Um all different types of people, which is important in a in a in a in a in a blockchain community. Right? So so you some of the the highest level open source engineers, some, you know, people that are just there to, you know, spread the vibes, uh some people that are just there to, you know, disrupt uh call out scam token scam token scam token cuz they want their free money, right? This this is the war that they wage is is via via Twitter, right? Um but we're very excited now after after uh trying to figure out and again, you're not trying to time the market, but you are trying to catch or race, uh you know, at a evolving field uh you know, at the at the speed of, you know, an exponential knowledge machines at this point, right?

So you have to so much software lost their mode over the last 6 months, right? So, you know, I I believe uh firmly that we, you know, one of the things that that can create value is community. So we have this large community that's there that knows about us. We don't have to play the games with our tokenomics um that get that. Uh so we haven't had to, you know, forfeit a lot of our tokenomics for exposure in in any way. Um and so we've been trying to figure out the best way to launch. Uh our community knows this now, but I'm a big believer in in DEXes. I'm a huge proponent of Aerodrome and the team at at Dromos Labs uh and Arrow. So back start last November, we had already you know, agreed with them that we were

going to go to um a launch with them, an ignition launch with them. Uh and uh you know, we are finalizing uh the the the final details of it. Um I I don't think anything's going to disrupt it. So I will say here and uh wait for the actual official comms on Twitter. Um but, uh the voting period for this is going to start on uh May 28th. And then the actual token and mainnet launch are coming on June 4th. Um so, you know, even in this period, we've got about 5 weeks left, 4 weeks left it to go, uh you know, wrap everything up and and and get everything there, which means I mean, our our website hadn't been touched in about 2 years. I've got, you know, this is a complete overhaul like complete new stuff. So, you know, we've

Launch Details and Retro Grants

had a lot of things converging, but you know, getting this out is going to be a lot of fun. Uh you know, hoping that we can that we've done the right things. You know, it's a mixture between is the technology useful? Do you have a a a crowd that that believes in what this is and where it's evolving towards? Uh and and do you have the attention and awareness? And also, you know, have you not sacrificed your token economy uh for uh the mixture of those things? And you know, I think that we've done a great job all the way around. I know we're in, you know, headed into summer where you have kind of a low low liquidity period across all markets. Um but I also am a big believer in the you kind of the Bitcoin supercycle. You know, I've been around this for a long time. And

um you know, I think that uh if you look at historic historically and the way that things kind of are when the things are launched and when things are where where things are at, I think we're in a good time. You know, that's it is the market right now is in a place to where it's not noisy. Uh there's not a lot of nonsense going on. Um so hopefully it'll be easier to get the word out, show people what we're doing. You know, as we as we do launch, uh you know, we're going to be talking about the the the exact recipients, but we have a large number of projects that we're doing uh these retroactive uh grants to early on. We've, you know, with our Chai Oracle, which kind of validates T rank, which is similar to pagerank for dependencies. Um you know, we have over 20,000 developers that are

going to be getting very handsome rewards uh for it. And again, this is permissionless. Don't need them to sign up. Hey guys, you hope you hope you still have your GPG key uh because if you do, you know, it can you know, it has this on it, right? So, um you know, hope hopefully that hits well. You know, when when Linus Torvalds gets uh gets gets his portion of tea, hopefully he doesn't just dismiss it. Um but, uh you know, that's that's going to be fun. But also the other projects like I'm I'm I'm a huge fan of libp2p. Uh that's one of many that's going to be getting this uh direct uh direct uh distribution uh around right around our genesis.

Uh and and there are others. And we've got ways for people to participate and and and have them kind of push towards their value towards these projects and you know, show their you know, show their excitement about them. And you know, we've done our best there. You know, we think we've got some gates in there that's going to prevent a lot of the spam attacks that we did have. That was my number one thing. I don't want to be just I don't want to don't want to cause more spam. That's the you know, bottom line. Just do in life. Don't don't do more spam. But, you know, we we're excited for this to come out. Um you know, we'll be releasing different information about what it is that we're building on top.

We've got some cool primitives early on. You know, again, you can send directly to any GPG, SSH, PGP, uh X.509 cert. So, you know, you you'll be able to identify developers. And if you want to just contribute for the things that they're doing, you're going to just be able to do it. You're not going to have to look and see whether or not uh you have to buy them a coffee or send their Patreon money or whatever the hell it is. Um but this this will be a you know, as long as the developers have been signing their their their code, you will be able to go send them send them value. And we've also done it in a way to where uh you know, it can have basically a timeout on it. Um because again, some of these things are lost, right? Some of these

some of these and we you know, I don't want to you know, invest in enterprises wouldn't want to invest a lot of money in giving someone something if it was going to be lost, right? Uh so we've got some really cool systems for uh that verification so the capital isn't lost. Um but we also have these bounties. So so the issues, taking issues, contri you know, uh contributing towards issues. And it's easy also just to contribute towards any of the repositories themselves. So, we'll come out with those features first. Uh and then uh it all it will be MCP you know, accessible. Uh we have this chain.md uh file that we've been working on to make sure that, you know, these things really are understood uh agentically.

You know, I I expect especially as we're driving forward into the first month, everyone's going to see uh what our agentic plans look like uh between uh T and PKGX. And uh you know, really it's about other people building here though. And and people trying to come in and figure out governance, right? So, you know, a lot of projects start off as this, you know, association. It's kind of this old model where you have uh the Swiss association that that launches the asset, American uh Puerto Rican entity that created the developer team that's created the development, Swiss association that launches it, nonprofit association. But, that needs to move to progressive decentralization. Uh you know, I'm a I'm a decentralist. You know, I I hope that that's there. You know, we we are looking for people all around to go get involved. Uh we've got

some governance systems up, but I expect the per pure per project governance things to be awesome. And my goal and hope is that these projects when they come and register, they'll start to understand what their own community value is. Uh and they they'll they'll start to understand that crypto assets and and and crypto can mean lots of different things. It's not just uh you know, uh financial instrument, uh you know, voting power and, you know, access rights to different things, etc. You know, we're we're hoping that different tools get built on, but the obvious one to me is governance. You know, and as you contribute your inference, you should probably get some governance.

So, you can probably you know, try to you know, try to have a larger voice in different communities. So, June 4th, we're going to be Arrows the the the location of my choice for that. They're going to be going through their big meta decks convergence. You know, we'll we'll have a hopefully a a large pool by that time during that convergence, but a bunch of other sexes as well. Um Excited, man. It's been about 4 years in the making. Wow. Yeah, and congratulations. I guess early congratulations for that. And thank you for dropping that alpha here. Get your alpha on on the bleeding edge as as always.

And Timothy, I know we're we're over time here. I wanted put in one more question to to help send us off. Um for the aspiring founders watching today in the audience or or even developers, I guess over your tenured experience building and founding companies helping raise money, what have you? Is there any key piece of advice that you'd be willing to to offer our audience today to help them Yeah. Honestly, I'd say first that like health is wealth, right? Like you know, making sure you take care of yourself.

Founder Advice

It's it's tough now. Like I I've been personally over the last 4 months, 5 months, I'm averaging like 4 hours of sleep a night and I can't keep that up forever. Um but you know, primarily you know, all of us treating ourselves and and and having that healthy body, healthy mind matters so much. And I've gone through ups and downs in my own health and you getting to that, you know, is really important. But you staying curious and and that the only constant is change. Right? So, everything can get flipped on its head. You know, the the the the tomorrow wasn't promised. You know, we're all here. So, you know, go build your hearts out. Like go build some stuff. Go do be disruptive. You know, go go do things that you know, that that that you didn't think would change. And you know, ideally make some friends

along the way. And then enjoy it. So, this is this is this is a marathon. It is not a sprint. And the technologies will always change. So, be willing and able to change with the technologies. Beautifully said. And I think that's no no better way to to cap things off here. Timothy, thank you so much. Really really appreciate you coming on the show today taking the time out of your busy day, your your Friday evening to come chat with us. Everything you explained T is looking really exciting.

And wish you guys the best of luck on on your TGE, your launch. And yeah, looking forward to to seeing it all come together. You know, whenever this happens, we we always over we seem to always over perform. You know, we had this crazy air drop period, this air farmer explosion, but we also did a coin list sale last year. We were the the most over subscribed sale of the year. And you know, we're trying to get things right. Nothing will ever be perfect, but we're very excited. Thank you for having us here trying to get the word out and you come check us out on on on Telegram or really Discord. We really really need to bring more of the developer minds into into some of the conversations, especially those on the web three side that have governance, an understanding

of governance and the problems with it. So, very excited to to get the word out to to your audience and looking forward to seeing you all on the other side. Excellent. Excellent. And def and all the details around everything we discussed today will be in the description below. So, if it interests definitely give it a look see. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. We'll catch you back here for another great episode of Dev Intel next week. Till then, have a good one, folks. Cheers.