Why onchain social media beats online social media: DeSo

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird and I believe that on-chain social media is going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. what's up y'all welcome back to another episode today we have joining us Ash Gammy from DSO to talk all about on-chain social media web3 social media decentralized social media whatever you want to call it we've talked a lot about this on the show throughout the past you know few years we've talked about lens we've

talked about far caster and Diesel is the other big player in this space that is really focused on bringing our content on chain this episode is amazing because Ash talks about why we need on-chain social media which I think we all get but he points it out in and Frames it in a way that I haven't heard before that I think is really helpful he also talks about why diesel decided to build their own layer one blockchain this is a really interesting conversation when you're building in web 3 one of the first questions is what chain do we build on and when diesel launched there was the only choice at that time was ethereum for a well-networked programmable smart

contract blockchain which is what social needed and ethereum was not right quite frankly for social so diesel decided to build their own layer one and I directly ask ask the question would you consider moving to an L2 and he talks about why they wouldn't move to L2 which is very interesting because lens and forecaster are both on l2s so we see how there's different ways to build in order to achieve the same objective we also talk in this episode about what are the top apps that are being used on diesel and in decent socialize social right now there's obviously we're not going to start to use decentralized social we're not going to move off Twitter we're not going to move off Instagram until there is apps that allow us to do things that

we can't do in web 2 and we talk about what those apps are and what they do and there's some great examples of real use apps that are happening over on DSO right now the last thing we talk about in this episode which was super cool is what's next for DSO diesel right now is moving from a proof of work to a proof of stake blockchain and Ash breaks down how once they moved proof of stake they are looking at creating a new reward system basically using proof of stake where if you stake your diesel and then you also go and use the social side so you post then you can gain yield

well isn't that an interesting retention mechanism that any business should be thinking about it totally opened up my mind to proof of stake not just being a tool for yield for defy and for tokens but proof of stake or I should say staking a token actually being something that any Builder could build in order to create more retention and do reward users in a new way very very cool very enlightening and then finally we break down block explorers and why block explorers are going to solve a lot of the problems with web 2 social this episode must listen social media is a part of all of our lives and moving it

on chain is the future so you want to make sure you understand how that's going to happen and how that's going to work the this episode is going to be a great one get ready buckle up everybody first let's just hear a word from our sponsor modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level where paragraph readers can mint collect and show off quotes from their favorite newsletter this

opens new possibilities like creators sharing Revenue with fans I also love their new feature paragraph AI this integrates gpt4 natively in paragraphs create edit and improve your writing effortlessly with one click and guess what we at web3 Academy are on board and have already moved our content over to paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletters because of profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early GM Ash welcome to Webster Academy

what's up Jay thanks for having me man I am excited for this conversation for many reasons one always excited to have a guy with a smile like you on the show you drink the energy and I love that but also really excited to talk about Unchained social we've talked Lots about lens forecaster and Diesel over the past two years of this show and you're the first person from DSO that we've had on to really break down what you guys are building in on chain social so let's let's start sort of zoom out what's the vision for diesel yeah that's a really good question Jay so our mission is to decentralize social media the same way that Bitcoin and ethereum are

decentralizing Finance so completely open social network open the world's information and we thought the best way to do that was to create a custom built layer one blockchain designed specifically for decentralized social media applications that's what the founder natural al-nagi that's his mission and um the reason he kind of decided to build custom was because at the time really I mean I think it's still kind of a problem too is a lot of layer ones were built for financial applications which is we call finite state blockchains you only need a certain type or amount of data

for financial applications you need the starting ballots and the ending balance what matter has built is uh infinite State blockchain because with a social network the state is always changing okay so you need different storage and data capabilities to scale social networks so that's essentially why he built diesel custom versus trying to build on ethereum or some other layer one very interesting I want to dive more into that decision in a second but before we do we brought up that the mission is decentralized social and we all interact on social media every day quite frankly it's like really one

of the best things that the internet gave us right like the online World gave us this ability to connect with our family our parents our friends and strangers all around the world now up until now that has been done in a centralized way I think that I just want people to understand why do we need decentralized social like we already have great social media we already have this ability to connect what is it about on-chain social or decentralized social that's different and solves some problems that we have with the current model yeah it's a really really good and big question I think there are new examples to why we need it every single day but

some of the ones you want to start with are content ownership social graph ownership New monetization Opportunities basically and innovation in social media some of the dark stuff we'll talk about like manipulative algorithms and dark patterns enough we'll talk about but the main ones are what I just listed right now so we don't know what we're missing Jay basically imagine you're in a world where the only three restaurants or McDonald's Burger King and Wendy's and that's all you ate day in and day out you went to the store and your baby formula was made out of mayonnaise you know like McDonald's baby formula yeah yeah I mean you can imagine all the

sorts of problems that that would bring you know and that's the world we live in basically we have lived in for the last 20 years for social media and we don't own any of our content or anything and they monetize and monopolize their data and I don't think people really appreciate like how much they take from us data wise and how much they make off of it like we spend a lot of time like you said they've monopolized our day-to-day social interactions completely digitally and in return we get the opportunity to maybe go viral one day we don't make any money off of it up front that's really why we need to decentralize it then go into the dark

parts of it the manipulative algorithms I have this coloring book I don't know if I'll show it it's called The Coloring Book of social manipulation okay okay looks like for those listening it looks like a giant textbook yeah okay it's a coloring book of like graphs and charts it looks very nerdy yeah yeah it's uh typical nerd stuff but it's like it shows all the uis the user interfaces of like what they build to kind of like manipulate the masses to do certain things a certain way serve an underlying agenda I I think we've seen a lot of that happen over the last four years and now it's proven that there's government

collusion and social media and we're mostly unaware of it you know they've spent the last 20 years with these well-funded user experience teams understanding how we think and creating you know addictive patterns to get us to act a certain way and we've seen this story play out in our favorite movies Star Wars Lord of the Rings absolute power always corrupts right we've seen it in finance Bitcoin came around sort of leveling a playing field now we're seeing it in social media so decentralizing that we we basically have to decentralize that power to unlock Innovation and unlock new use cases so

the masses can have a little bit better of an opportunity to monetize and own their content like they own their Bitcoin and their houses and gold and stuff like that yeah yeah just to name a few hey like you answer that question so well why we need on-chain social decentralized social and you could pick one of those topics and have that alone be the reason but there's so so many reasons and one thing I think I think everybody understands the the content ownership we're starting to understand that more because they're used to their data being sold for ads and everybody knows the feeling of I just said to my wife that I wanted a new pair

of shoes and then Nike gives me a new pair of shoes I'm and I'm not suggesting our phones are listening to you the algorithms are just that freaking good with your data right so everyone knows that but I think that the we don't think a lot about the dark side you know because I think a lot of us are like whoa whoa whoa take your you know tinfoil hat off come on man but it's like no this is really happening there is like a manipulation happening behind the scenes at the government level at the corporate level in ways that quite frankly are not none of us would agree to right but I think the the thing that I get the most excited about is the Innovation side and we're going to get into that later in the show when we talk about what you guys are planning in the

future and some of the upcoming apps or the apps that you're most excited about that are being built on diesel and that is the thing I think I get the power of composability and interoperability like I can't explain express enough that like if you're in web3 or in crypto or if just you're a business person and you want to understand like Innovation that scales at an incredible rate just wrap your head around those two concepts and you'll see that when you have a platform like DSO where you're building this chain then you can enable Innovation across so many different businesses because they can all come in and they can composably build something on top of

what you're already building it's a lightning ball that's going to lead to exponential growth in ways that we never really understood before I mean it kind of goes back to when Twitter did have an open API and there were people building on top of Twitter and there was cool stuff happening and then Twitter rugged us all and took the API away absolutely fine yeah 100 okay I want to go back to what you were saying about your choice to build an l your own layer one rather than what lens and forecasters are doing lens is built on top of polygon they're building their own layer three in the mocha and then far Caster I don't think they're on optimism yet but I know they're moving

over to the op stack so we have two examples of others social players that are using l2s and what's interesting I think about diesel is like you said you guys chose to build your own L1 and you you mentioned that definitely one of the the reasons for that is that like l1's like ethereum are not made for social use of social apps so there's way too much data if social was built on eth I don't even know how it would cost us like you know probably five bucks just to like make a post or something like that right it would be ridiculous yeah we did a an analysis just to give you an a different example we did an analysis

of friend Tech recently and friendtech to date has the cost to users to use friendtech has been around 750 000 in total gas all right and that's for about a hundred and fifty thousand users over the course of the last month and about 150 million in volume that's happened so like that's scalable you know what I mean like that's pre whereas had friend Tech been built on ethereum that cost would have been over 20 million dollars yeah like it just wouldn't be possible right so maybe you can just tell us a little bit

about if you could go back like do you think I know it's not you Nader do you think that like a team would they consider building an L2 because I know that there's some other elements to why you guys built your own chain at that were sort of key to the foundational beliefs of building D cell yeah definitely and just going back to cost I think what's that Mev bot or whatever Jared from Subway spent like it's yeah 70 million in gas or something and ethereum and all these chains have their place like obviously you can't deny the disruptiveness of ethereum and the success of ethereum but I think we like to think of ourselves as ux Maxis I think that comes from natter especially

and the thing is like if you're building on all these different chains one like you mentioned we've covered cost enough but there's a lot of context switching it's money Legos as they call them so you have I mean there's like 300 different Wallets on ethereum you know and then you have to like it creates additional friction points you have to log in with one wallet it's got to connect and then you gotta sign this transaction and then you got to pay this fee and then you get to like hey I gotta bridge over to this layer two and then it's going to take seven days to bridge back and just a ux disaster well we're all trying to you know everybody says ux is the key to mass adoption we're

creating more steps we're creating more context switching and if you're a big ux person you understand it's the small positive ux changes over time that compound that lead to you know people there's this book the ux book it's very famous Stephen Krug I believe it's called don't make me think that's like the fundamental number one in ux don't make me think if I have to think that I'm gonna lose my money bridging over and I also have to think about the gas fees to and from you failed as a ux that's why natter built his own custom layer one is because it's faster cheaper better ux no contact switching and you

can kind of like everything comes out of the box with diesel it's like reputation identity the wallet is built on chain right it's everything stored on chain on D7 it goes back to the storage stuff and the finite State blockchain versus infinite state well everything on on DSO is stored on chain I mean besides like the videos and stuff which we're going to solve that with decentralized storage we'll have our own we'll talk so can anybody who judges you for not just like not being able to store videos on chain yet can just chill out like we'll get there yeah yeah I mean obviously we have to work towards some stuff and I get that approach with like ethereum and other layer ones like you build it and then you build towards something better right

but you know again it's all about ux creating a smooth user experience across the entire ecosystem and when you do use our apps it a lot of it feels very instant in our first prototype app was when like the VCS and the investors and people who would post on bitcloud basically everybody said It felt instant it felt like Twitter you know you'd post something versus on another blockchain you would have to sign a transaction and it would create more friction and stuff like that so it's such a good point it's there we we will literally never achieve Mass adoption if you have to sign a transaction every time you want to

interact with the chain it will not work which is why account abstraction is such a big topic right now yeah and we don't need to go down that rabbit hole that's another podcast for another time but I think everybody understands that that need and the way you guys are solving that is by having your own layer one and then as you said everything's built from the foundation up and it's much easier to use it as opposed to having to deal with all this bridging and cross-chain it's I mean that's a ux nightmare so I totally respect the way you guys went after that okay let's just take a pause and give everybody for those who don't know do so well maybe some of our

listeners haven't you had experience using diesel can you give us sort of the high level numbers where are you guys at how many people are in the ecosystem system yeah so diesel has like 2.5 million Wallets on chain that have signed up so far on any given day we've had anywhere from 500 to 10 000 daily active users right now it's pretty low I think it's around like a thousand or two thousand so don't worry that's that's the truth for everybody right as it gets to like 500 to 700 and stuff like that I think that's crypto right now um and there's been 80 million transactions and just for some context like there's

way more transactions on DSO versus ethereum so it's like every like post follow repost minting nfts and stuff like that that counts as a transaction so there's a decent amount of activity on the Chain um that and Diesel raised uh 200 million during the bull market as well from our first prototype app yeah so wow so you guys have done an incredible job so far and I think you have a very similar story to a lot of builders in this space which is built in the bowl everybody was super excited got a big raise although you

guys got a really really big raise yeah and then the bear hit and now it's like okay let's figure out some real product Market fit let's figure out how we can continue to grow when there's a challenge right now is there's just not a lot of new users coming into the space there's actually the opposite of where there's a lot of users that are leaving the space or just not being as active basically as they were before so I think that it's LED you guys to this focus on you know building great apps so I want to talk about some of the apps that are built on top of DSO so let's just you know there's 2.4 million wallets that

have interacted with diesel yeah how many apps are there we had hundreds at one point yeah we have a couple dozen now that are actively building but that's just going back to the mindset and the game that everybody should be playing in crypto right now is trying to build the killer app because if you build one killer app which we proved with bitcloud it can get enough attention to bring more Builders and liquidity to the ecosystem so people will you know teams will build other apps right when the bear Market hits you know attention goes away projects get abandoned everything like that what we learned

at the time was we lacked retention I think a lot of crypto apps outside of Finance well even in finance to lack retention there's no reason to stick around if there's no speculative you know there's no way to make a bunch of money you know I think you see friendtech there's a way to make money there's speculation and stuff so people are playing it even playing that game even in a bear market so what we set out to do since that point and ever since the bear Market hit was you know improve and Optimizer infrastructure to the point where we've built so many retentive features that when we launch again and we launch our new apps people will stick around and play around

in the ecosystem now going back to some of the apps in the ecosystem we do have a few dozen really good apps and I also like to think we have some I don't want to bash other change I think we have more legit users because it's virtual there's a reason to log in every day and post like you would on Twitter versus just logging in and boating on a dow Vote or a proposal or trading mean coins or something like that it's true yes social is much more part of a deeper Connection in your life it matters to your day-to-day yeah whereas you know speculative Finance does not matter to your days hey exactly they express you out more but it doesn't fill your soul yeah yeah it can it definitely doesn't fill your soul so we do have a few dozen

teams still building we got some cool apps I can jump into them if you'd like yeah yeah and it definitely oh we have the social world is a pretty cool app it's the socialworld.com and it's basically like blockchain based Twitter and you know it converts the network into different languages so Spanish Russia and all these different languages because decentralized social media is a worldwide need right and it has like a bunch of different features like you can get instead of just likes and follows you can get diamonds you can give people Diamond showers so that's like one of the Innovative things where you don't have to wait for a lawn to pay you ad Revenue dust like people can

just pay you up front you know tip you directly as a Creator and stuff like that so I think that's a really cool app yeah so sorry I just want to understand this this language conversion because this is super interesting so where is the content from is the content from Diamond app so it all the con so it's like diesel is the the social layer right and then the social world like diamond diamond is a similar app to this the social world right Diamond's another app right yeah it's like a node and like if you post on the social world or Diamond that's how you interact with the content on chain right so it's like a user interface right right the cool thing

about DSO is if you post on the social World it shows up on all the apps and it's amazing yeah yeah so imagine like if you were on Twitter and you posted and then you went on YouTube and your posts were there or yeah you want a LinkedIn or Facebook you'd only need to build one audience one time and then you could monetize that audience over and over and over again or you could amplify your engagements instead as a Creator and you know this Jay scaling a podcast and stuff like that you have to learn the algorithm and the dark patterns or whatever for every new platform and then you have to learn their moderation

policies so you don't get banned or anything like that yeah and it's a grind man it takes a lot of energy it's a full-time job you know so so I I just want to paint a picture for our listeners here because I think this is we're experiences experiencing this right now with paragraph which is the our newsletter platform which is integrated with farcaster and whenever somebody posts our newsletter on farcaster or they comment on our newsletter and forecaster it automatically feeds into a comment thread underneath the newsletter and I think this is why I'm so excited about this interoperable connection of

being able to just post once is it's this concept of being a like one conversation so as you said the most difficult thing right now as a content creator is we have to manage multiple platforms so this podcast for example right we're gonna publish this podcast on all these different podcast platforms if anybody likes or comments on those podcast platforms it stays there this will also be called published on YouTube and then we're also going to promote this on Twitter well it's like having like 10 different conversations that are all disconnected nobody knows that there's all these different whereas if we could

connect these all in one feed like it's amazing for Content creators but it's also amazing for people that are learning and using this content and want to have a conversation I want to meet people want to meet the community meet others that are involved just because maybe you you choose to log in in this way and somebody else logs into this way why can't we all connect yeah plus Twitter doesn't like you posting links and he advertise me insane the algorithm ding too and then you have to find a way around that or pour your content into bite-sized content and then strategically place your link and oh my God man we every day we have a conversation in our team Channel about

it don't post that link or hey you didn't post a link how are supposed to be people supposed to know about the next step in joining our community and then somebody's like well if we post the link think we're gonna get screwed by the alpha Rhythm exactly it sucks yeah so instead what we do is we have to wait until we hit a certain amount of likes basically we post on Twitter we wait until we hit 20 likes and then we Auto post the link we know like what a stupid game yeah it's ridiculous it's crazy and then you see all the different rules that were invisible to us now that Twitter open source the algorithm yeah imagine all the rules we don't know about on YouTube

and Facebook and all tick tock or whatever else so it's crazy okay tell us about a few other apps oh yeah so open fund so this is a big one on chain like Capital formation and on chain fundraising Brian Armstrong just came out from coinbase and he said it like the number one number four most important thing that he wants people to build basically it's just frictionless Capital formation and fundraising instead of going the VC route and playing their game what if you could just raise funds from any cross chain ecosystem in any currency Solana ethereum Bitcoin sui diesel all that what if you could do that and that's exactly what

openfun does and the cool thing about open fund is it's for anything so we've had a content creator fund his YouTube channel for like three to five k we've had this node bits down basically it's like uh infrastructure to set up nodes and if you buy the token on open fund they give you yield every month basically for owning their token and they manage all their node farm and stuff like that we had like a AI game that raised money on there it was like trying to merge Ai and social but it's like if you want to raise a thousand bucks for your project if you want to raise you know half a million or something it's just an alternate route of uh keep fundraising so I think I

think that this model of decentralized fundraising it's still so new and I loved that Brian Armstrong called it out and any listeners if you guys want to we wrote an article highlighting the 10 things that Brian Armstrong listed this was a week or two ago so you can go back and check that out on our newsletter on paragraph link is in the show notes but this is why whenever I talk to like my family or people that aren't in crypto I get so excited and I don't know what to talk about because I'm like you don't understand like blockchain is going to change everything yeah it's gonna change everything and so you can go down so many different rabbit holes and open fun is super cool and people should

definitely go check it out we'll throw the link in the show notes but I feel like there's some ways where we're just not quite ready yet and this is why I think Brian Armstrong called out what he called out in his 10 things that we should focus on is he's trying to push the areas that are a bit slow right now yeah and that that one is a little bit slow because there's a there's a lot of sort of historic or traditional ways to raise capital and we're kind of stuck in those and I mean no offense but middle finger up to some organizations that are regulating the out of us in poor ways and not allowing us and scaring everybody from from innovating so great to see that there is somebody in the

diesel ecosystem that's pushing that one so definitely absolutely yeah tell us about a few other uh um so then we got we have um dsify.app it's like the first web3 social app in the app store so you could download dsify interact with the diesel blockchain and experience on chain social you still own your content and social graph it's kind of a stripped down version because it's a mobile app in the app store which as we all know the App Store does not allow crypto nfps well it kind of does in any how did they get around this you tell us how they go around this so unfortunately your DSO identity and content and stuff is still stored on the DSO blockchain you just

don't have the monetization features not to say that you can still post on on desify and people can tip you and you can make money but you don't have those features on the app so it's just like it's like having a web free version of Twitter on your phone where people can still pay you but you can't really do anything with the money unless you go to the desktop because that's that's the issue that the App Store presents is uh they'll let you do any sales of anything in the app but the rule is they take a 30 tax and nobody in crypto wants to pay that and I gotta say respect because the easy way to get around this is you could just be like fine we'll pay the 30

tax but everybody in crypto is so anti the old establishment and that's amazing when we all stand together in that way yeah I mean look at crypto's history we've literally bootstrapped an entire Financial system with people like throwing constant hurdles in our face and Regulatory fear and stuff like that to a trillion and at 1.3 trillion dollar market cap so we're used to like pulling ourselves up by our bootstrap you know I love it oh yeah okay one more nap hero swap you had mention that before we started recording yeah this is an interesting one so it's a cross chain it's incident Anonymous cross-chain swapper like I said we're ux Maxis we're trying to make it easy and part of our

strategy is building cross chains so hero swap you can embed in any crypto app on any chain that it supports so supports Solana ethereum Bitcoin um sui Ava Avalanche a usdt and usdc and the cool thing about that is their apps on Solana and sui using it so for example hyperspace.xyz embedded it into their nft Marketplace and it allows ethereum holders to buy salon nfts so if you're holding Bitcoin ethereum sui dieso you can buy Salata nfts versus having to go through a centralized exchange login transfer your money and stuff like that now with hero swap it's just like one

basically one or two clicks and you can engage in that nft market the other cool thing is the leading sui wallet ethos wallet embedded hero swap so it's like if you want to try some sui app I know they do a lot of games so if you want to play a game you can instantly swap into sui and then engage in that game versus again like all those different steps where you have to transfer money it's just one click you got Suey in your wallet you play that game amazing there's I mean so so essential for users to actually be able to invest in web 3 is we need these and we need the way to operate cross chain because

one thing that I I just want I always want to repeat it again and again is like there's so much tribalism from the chain level you know like everybody's like oh I'm an East Maxima I'm a Bitcoin Maxi or I'm a Solana Maxine it's like yo drop it a a that is the opposite of innovation right yeah we all need to support each other and B There is literally so much open space like there is enough open space for all of us to win for all chains to exist for them all to serve a purpose and they all can work with much better ux because of things like account extraction and hero Swap

and these that will make it much easier to you won't have to think about there will be the day when you don't have to think like oh do I have the token in my wallet that I need to go do this thing oh wait I don't okay that's just I mean we've so many times on web3 Academy we did a uh a free mint when we launched our new brand about a month ago and uh we did it on Zora and because Zora is just a great Simple app to uh mint open editions but we did it on Zora chain when you do when you launch something on Zora you can pick the chain you want to do it on and we didn't pick eth because we knew if we picked East it would cost you know it's a free mint but it would bring gas would

have been like five dollars and then it's not a free mint anymore right Zora chain it still costs like cents but anyways right but the problem is you need Zora in your wallet and nobody's got sore on their wallet so yeah we lost you know how many people didn't mint that right because the ux was so it sucks yeah and that's that's what hero swaps solves like you might not have it in your wallet but you can swap right into it you know yeah no login instantly in and honestly Anonymous but yeah I think like someday people aren't gonna matter the Chain's not gonna matter it's like if you think about the like video game Wars you know like Nintendo had the big lead right then PlayStation and Xbox

came around right there were Die Hard Nintendo people but people bought PlayStation and Xbox because they wanted to play that game they didn't care if you know it was a fun game that's the phase we're entering now with crypto is the killer app face whoever builds the killer apps that scale they're gonna get all the attention and everything and that's the game we're playing at diesel that's what we're building hey hey you know what you know what I love about this point is what that means is the chains that will I'm going to say win in terms of will receive the most activity are the chains that have the biggest apps built on top of them so not necessarily the chains that you know

you're a maxi about not necessarily the chain with the best tech right like right there's a reason I I'm not gonna I don't say this to slam on polygon at all I think polygon is great but there is a reason that polygon has gotten as big as they have where they're I think the fifth Chain by market cap I can't remember but they're they're up there and the reason is because they have such a good business development team that they got Starbucks they got Reddit they got Nike they got all of these large Brands to build on top of their chain and so it's shows that yeah it's it's the apps that make the different friend Tech same thing everyone's so stoked about bass well one of the reasons that bass has been so successful is because

friendtech the hottest app right now was built on top of Base so and I think there's going to be great apps I think oh I always say yeah there's going to be probably thousands and probably millions of apps that are built on chain that are successful I mean right now I think there's over 2 million apps in the app store right now those are built online well why wouldn't there be two million built on chain one thing I just want to highlight quickly is the way the diesel ecosystem works because I know some of these apps are built by you and your core team and then others are built by outside teams how does funding work if somebody has an app idea how do they get involved yeah it's a really good idea so in the

early days we we did fun several different apps that are still building in the ecosystem some of them are some of them are it's part of the bear Market but we did fund some early apps uh like nft Marketplace the social world is one we funded as well and then basically a lot of the apps that we create are basically problems we run into to solve ux issues like that's how we built hero swap that's essentially what we built with open phone Bond we were planning ahead so once we build a few killer apps and the attention of liquidity comes back it's going to draw in more Builders they can go to open fund and raise funds as far as the fundraising right now and and

grants and stuff like that we pause that but anybody who's interested in building on diesel should definitely reach out to us for sure because there you know could come a point in time in the near future that we're going to open funding back up and possibly got tons of VC and investor connection so if we don't fund you directly and you have an awesome app idea and you want to follow it through open fund we'll connect you with investors for sure all right so uh Ash what's your Twitter yeah at invest in digital yeah okay is that actually your Twitter yeah yeah so I didn't know that I feel like because I've been checking out your

stuff on diesel on diamond I know your handle there yeah your Twitter is the best in Disney that's amazing I was just like I don't care about stocks or anything I'm only gonna invest in digital things that's okay and I was like invest in digital so okay cool cool I love it uh okay we've talked a little bit about the swings of building in crypto building on chain really is a result of the market swings you know unfortunately I wouldn't say this is unfortunate but one of the tough things I think everybody in crypto knows whether you're a builder whether you're an investor is that you are tied to the market swings and markets swing big in crypto up 500x up a thousand X and then

down right like that's something that obviously affects teams what are the challenges that you guys face how do you decide I know you've you know you've you've got sort of diesel the next stage of diesel coming up soon and I want to talk about what's involved in that but before we do just what are the challenges that you guys sort of are focused on fixing your facing every day yeah so I mean liquidity is number one yeah obviously I think everybody's dealing with that but combating Network effects of not only uh you know other layer ones like ethereum or Solana but also of social networks like Twitter right so they have a 20-year head start

on building habit forming kind of like uis and stuff like that like people are used to logging into Twitter every single day to post it's very very easy you don't think about it goes back to don't make me think beating those Network effects and then building retention so people stick around is very very difficult to do it's one of the biggest challenges and we do have like kind of like a small Die Hard Community that's building on chain there's some that post every single day some of them come back every few months and you know see what's going on and stuff but um the way you solve that and again I don't want to sound like a broken record but it's all about building ux better user experiences and

better retention to kind of beat down those Network effects and then once we get our chain optimized and we have these other releases coming up it it turns into Innovation how are we going to build the next Innovative Social Network that has features that aren't out there yet right and that's how we beat the network of facts is we have to build something that no one's seen before and the ux has to be so good that they don't have to worry about signing a transaction or you know paying too much money or losing or bridging or anything like that you guys have been heads down building through the bear versus yeah to you and your team uh I

know you guys are a small But Mighty team and there's some big launches coming out in the next few months can you give us sort of uh what are the top big launches that you guys have coming in the next month and let's dive into each of them yeah so our biggest one that's coming just around the corner is Revolution proof of stake so believe it or not we're still a proof of work blockchain because natter is a huge Bitcoin like Maxi he loves Bitcoin so believe it or not diesel is inspired by Bitcoin so that's why we want proof of work originally but we're moving to proof of stake which is going to introduce all sorts of like fun new Innovative features making Diesel and

one of the coolest ones we can kind of start talking about right now is staking and to get your yield you have to post regularly so that solves the retention issue okay yeah okay so I walk me through this so imagine that Revolution proof of stake is live and we launched one of our new apps and you stake your DSO right and then if you wanted to get your yield you had to log in once a day you know for x amount of days and you had to post or do some sort of social action to get your yield and otherwise if you didn't post then you would lose it or you wouldn't get your

yield that round and that's kind of what we're building right now so yeah it's an early concept so I don't have all the details just yet but that is something we're definitely working on and I think we'll solve retention in a big way yeah yeah and it's it makes a nice connection between you know staking is just like an incredible mechanism that I I I think this is such a foundational concept that all businesses can use in really unique ways that we haven't I think most people think about just you know stake in order to get a APR you know three percent four percent most people I hope their listeners podcasts are staking eat if

you're not sticky go start staking something don't stick all your but stake some of it because it's just the obvious thing to do but this idea of staking and then also posting or taking an activity doing something on chain or in an app and I think it's possible with Innovation that you know somebody could say maybe you stake and you like like something 10 times well then you get yield it's just another mechanism for rewarding people who take action in your ecosystem I love that super cool yeah yeah so that's going to be an exciting feature it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out but yeah I mean

Revolution proof of stake's gonna make diesel faster arguably a little bit cheaper too it's going to be actually make the chain smoother more stable things are going to feel even more instant than they already are but yeah that's one of the Innovative cool Innovative new features that could come when when what's the timeline for revolution proof of stake so it should be up on testnet in the next couple months and then we're aiming for live by the end of the year so Fully live so we're going to test it make sure everything is super smooth and then we're going to go live for it so yeah well good luck to you and your team I think that people don't understand the challenges of moving a chain from proof of work to prove sake we've just seen it

a few times now that everyone's just like oh yeah no problem like everybody can do that it's like no no the engineering that goes into this is massive so you shout out to your engineering team well he's man yeah for sure okay what are the other focuses of the upcoming launches so we've talked about this a bunch at least I've hinted at it is focusing on infrastructure basically to pave the way to play the killer app game and then we have basically we want to launch up to five killer apps we have three proposals right now if you go to proposals.diso.com that's where you can kind of see the app underneath are they proposed by your team or yeah external

teams they're going to be us first so basically it's kind of like going back to the video game analogy it's like Nintendo's notorious for launching creating their own Games first and then the community kind of makes it so first party games versus third-party games right yeah so we just launched like imagine we launched all this new technology and how are we gonna inspire people to build their own killer apps right we have to drink our own Kool-Aid build the killer apps ourselves show you exactly how to build them and then hopefully get attention in other teams on the platform so these are all first party apps we're going to

build ourselves cool yeah cool I really like that analogy of the gaming console because it shows you that really what you need to make it and I mean not just in crypto and blockchain but like to make it in any technology is yeah sure you can have great infrastructure but you need a killer app and we're sort of at that point you guys are clearly at that point it feels like the whole of crypto watching web 3 the whole Space is at that point where everyone's like Hey we're finally ready for like Mass consumer apps because we weren't really ready for it before and I just feel like

man there's there's going to be a collision I think of the bull market it's going to come back whether it comes back in three months whether it comes back in 12 months I don't know I'm not gonna go and make a prediction like that on air and then somebody's gonna come back and bite me but it's going to come there's no doubt about that and I think that there's an opportunity come coming if you Collide that and you have that killer app combined with the bull market which is going to bring a whole bunch of people on chain there's going to be there's going to be a lot of reward to be had so excited for the timing of that from you guys yeah and this Playbook is it's not completely unique it's happened on ethereum several times the killer apps on ethereum were icos I know people

say icos are a scam but it captured attention yeah it brought liquidity to ethereum then people had to build apps to manage that liquidity then it happened with defy you've had that Loop going then it happened with nfts right diesel is just doing it with consumer facing apps it's yeah it's not yeah so it's a Playbook that's worked many times before cool yeah I know one other thing you guys are watching is a new block Explorer which block explorers are fascinating we actually did an episode with sad but the founder of zapper who's building a block Explorer on top of ethereum and I think this it's tough to sort of wrap your head around block explorers because there is no web 2

equivalent of a block Explorer and I think the only current most of us think blocks were we think etherscan which if you've ever gone and looked at etherscan good luck like unless you're like a real blockchain nerd right that like understands how to navigate either scan most people myself included look at the user scan I'm like what you know like numbers what is this right so can you tell us a little bit about the block explorer that you guys are planning and how it's different than maybe ether scan and what it'll allow you to do yeah so to put it simply we're building a human readable block Explorer thank you so in the block Explorer to understand the impact you got to kind of understand

web 2 social media which is a closed off ecosystem a Walled Garden where they monopolize all our data what if there was a social network which there is like diesel that was completely open source where everybody could look and see what's happening on chain or on and what if you could peek behind Zuckerberg server farm and see like what he's doing with our data you know that's essentially what we're building with DSO and the block Explorer you can interact with the diesel Block Chain and see exactly what's going on you can see all the interactions and one thing iOS point to is I think there's more scams in web 2 social media than there are in web 3 social media you just can't see the

scams so they'll always Point their finger at crypto and be like oh yeah you rug this rug that but we don't know all the bot stuff that's going on in web 2 we just see the outside of it and they hide it they're always using misdirection and stuff like that so imagine the block Explorer we could look into Twitter and uh that's kind of what we're building with with the diesel block Explorer so a hot take there's more scans in web 2 than there are in web 3 Val clip that we need to push that message more because from the outside thanks to uh our friend Sam bankman freed and a few others we look like the ones that are building scams

yeah one two but it's so true I don't remember what the number was but didn't the eat when Elon initially made the offer to buy Twitter he almost renegged on the offer because he when he got the numbers and was allowed to look wasn't it something like I don't remember I don't want to miss misquote this but it was like a large percentage of Twitter user were Bots and he basically said that they were not worth what they said they were worth because such it was something like 30 percent yeah that's crazy I might be wrong but it was crazy yeah yeah I think it was that high honestly I don't think you were that far off but yeah you didn't want to buy it because there are so many there were so

many Bots I don't know and I think there's still Bots you know it's like you see all these uh accounts that have like a hundred thousand followers and like 36 likes what's going on there so well and that's another thing that decentralized social can solve because I mean a few ways a with on-chain identity which we we're not really diving into in this episode but that is part of it but also there's this potential Innovation I don't know if anybody in the diesel ecosystem is doing this but there's a lot of people talking about how you know the current way so Twitter solves that apparently by you have to pay eight dollars a month right or a thousand dollars a month in your Enterprise you

have to pay this fee fee to get the blue check mark and then it's like well I'm official well even a bot can pay a fee right but if if you had to pay a very small fee to interact or to use it well then you can't have scalable Bots right so like I saw one person talk about how the solution or email spam was well let's just make it so it costs one cent basically to send every email and then all of a sudden Bots don't work anymore because Bots don't work if there's one bot a bot is a good business I hate to call bots of business but it's only a business if you can manage millions of them and then get conversions so there's interesting things that could happen

there as well as a result of blockchain which are possible yeah that's the thing is like with our block Explorer you could go on chain and see who's scamming people or not scamming right well because your reputation is fully on chain your identities on chain and you can see that on the Block Explorer you can't see that on Twitter you there's no way to tell we need Zack xbt and like these these investigative basically block Explorer investigators yeah going and doing this research well imagine we didn't need that mesh we didn't need him we could just find that ourselves super easily wouldn't that be a safer world what if there was a community of Zach xbts maybe there's like 30 of them you know that were like teamed up together

and yeah you know we do actually have an account on DSO called like I think it's DSO scams or something in there their community that calls out any sort of scams on chain so that's like kind of forming up on a small scale on DSO right now it's it's so interesting working with internet strangers that can happen as a result of basically tokens and this token economy you could have communities in the past and we've had communities forever but there could it was really in the web too or the the old world to call it that seems to be ridiculous Henry

better term right now pop into my head but it's really hard to work with a bunch of strangers if you want to involve money you can do it if you don't want to involve money but let's be real we all need to make money most of us when we put in effort we like to receive monetary gain in return as we should for our time well now there's there's these ways that are so fascinating where you can have a DSO scams Community where they can put out content and now maybe a whole bunch of people start tipping them because they're like wow I really like this content this is helping me I value this and now they have some money flowing in and they can distribute that on chain very easily for anybody who contributes they could even create a

leaderboard where you get distributed based upon how much you contribute to that Community it's just there's so much yeah it's mind-blowing I mean that's the thing that's why dso's here is like we're unlocking Innovation and social media yeah we're creating a social layer for crypto and web3 but we're like the subtle differences is bringing in Innovation back to social media at scale so I think you just came up with the title for today's show unlocking innovation in social media uh I was still going to go with the uh the social layer of crypto but you nailed it there Ashley well done before we jump into a speed round a couple personal questions I I want to

give the floor to you to Shell people listening if they want you already mentioned your Twitter but if they want to get in touch with you or if they want to learn more about diesel how do they go about that yeah a couple things I wanted to highlight is like we're doing a lot of innovative stuff not only in crypto but in social media so like if you go to DSO apps right now Diamond app or D Social world you can directly monetize you know on chain without having to go viral we have creators on the platform already making thousands of bucks over you know the last year or two just posting and they don't have that many followers they might have like five ten fifteen thousand followers so you don't have to necessarily play that super grindy game on web to social media

so if you want to you know try diesel apps go to Diamond app that's a good starter app if you want to find us on Twitter web 2 social media diesel protocol at DSO protocol you can reach out to directly to me at invest in digital on Twitter as well and yeah I think friend Tech is essentially a fork of our first prototype app bigcloud you know we've had these features for a couple years so yeah so I would love to see more people on chain try our apps and everything yeah we didn't even talk about that we actually when friendtech first came out yeah and we did an episode about it we talked about how it was basically just bit Cloud yeah but it was a bit cloud of the moment it is so interesting how similar

it is and big cloud had its day did really well but was not a long-term sustainable business and for everybody on friendtech neither is friendtech in its current form it doesn't mean look I'm not saying that printech can't make make it they've already made over seven and a half million dollars just off of fees for activity on friendtech plus they've raised from paradigms so like similar to you guys well funded and in a good position to build something but those apps in their current form where you're basically just speculating on your friend and there's a benefit to more people jumping in and speculating

and it just drives up prices like that's not long-term sustainable business it's kind of like bull market Vibes which is funny because it's bear market right now but it's like the only thing that's getting the Vibes right now because there's just not a lot of liquidity and it's all gone in that direction yeah yeah there's no retention yet no there could be they could build it that's the thing the first yeah it's the first killer app on base let's just you know that's yeah well said yeah yeah well said okay well look forward to seeing the next killer app on DSO when you guys launch your five killer apps in the coming months all the links that you mentioned will be in the show notes so anybody who wants to go check out diamond or any of the other apps that we mentioned those will be in the show

notes so make sure you check those out okay quick speed run before we wrap here Ash favorite person to follow on Twitter maybe I should ask your favorite person to follow on diesel but commonly this question is on Twitter yeah so Ryan sulcus of massari you know I really love his posts and he really he shoots it straight with people you know he doesn't really BS that much so he's definitely my favorite follow I have a lot of respect for him as well so yeah yeah me too yeah these straight shooter as well said that guy does not mess around okay a must-read book so reframe your brain by Scott Adams this book I just started reading it I

was gonna say ha when Friends and Influence People That's a classic but reframe your brain is it's like mind-blowing it just like teaches you like how to look at reality in a different way to spin it in a positive light and he breaks down all these different examples of everyday interactions with people and it definitely helps man you know it's easy to get Negative in the bear market so I think I needed this one so totally totally yeah I mean it's easy to get Negative at any time negativity is a stronger feeling than positivity unfortunately you know guilt and shame which we all feel a lot of guilt and shame in these bear markets when we had

so much wealth at one point and yeah we don't and we're all like well I should have sold it I should have done this That's Heavy and that can wailing big time yeah cool good that's good yeah and that's important if you're struggling with that read that book for sure man I I'm struggling that I'm gonna check that book out for sure okay last question our favorite question on the show if you had a bill board that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it not your keys not your content so okay yeah if you're posting on web 2 social media platforms or just running space You Don't Own your keys you know your content you don't have any right over

your content I like what elon's doing but ultimately he owns your contents and his server Farms but web3 social media crypto social media social fi whatever you want to call it you own your keys you own your content you own your assets you can monetize it however you want I love it I always go now your keys not your coins but yeah you know what there's another line a lot of people aren't going to come into crypto for the money so they're not going to care about not your keys not your coin a lot of people are going to come in for better social media and they're going to Care to own their content so that's a good one awesome yeah I love that one Ash this has been a pleasure man really

appreciate the time really appreciate your insights just incredible to speak to somebody who's so deep building in the space and really excited to watch the future of diesel you guys have got exciting things ahead yeah thank you so much for having me on allowing me to chill diesel talk social media I love talking about this stuff so even you know off the podcast I'd love to chat more but I really do appreciate you letting us amplify diesel no for sure man you guys are doing a great job respect to the whole team at DSO high fives all around I was gonna say all around the office but I'm sure you guys aren't in an office I don't think any crypto team other than maybe coinbase I'm sure has an office but the rest of us are all remote so shout out we'll

have to get you guys back on in yeah the next maybe six to 12 months after you've done gone through this big launch that you have coming out that maybe in a bit of a bull market we'll yeah we'll check in on numbers again until then yeah wish you guys all the best everybody for listening in thanks so much make sure yet remember not your keys not your content if you're not on some form of decentralized social you should be on it definitely go check out Diesel and get involved have a great week everybody thank you so much yeah have a good day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you

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