Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Carl Bennetts & Jarrad Hope: Status – The Mobile Ethereum Client

Episode Date: May 2, 2017

The road to mainstream adoption of blockchain technologies is a long one. Although the user experience of wallets has greatly improved since the dark days of command-line only interfaces, decentralized applications continue to struggle with onboarding non-technical users. Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, join us to discuss Status, a mobile Ethereum client which aims to turn the standard wallet experience on its head. At its core, Status is a mobile instant messenger client that leverages the Whisper protocol for secure peer-to-peer communication. Through its familiar messaging interface and elegant design, users can chat and send Ether directly in the app. As the first implementation of Ethereum’s Light Client Protocol, users may also use decentralized applications such as uPort, Gnosis and Aragon on their mobile phones. Built as an open source project, Status’ developer platform also allows developers to easily port their Dapps to the app. Topics covered in this episode: Jarrad and Carl’s background and journey to the Ethereum space Status’ vision for a friendly, mobile Dapp client Status’ technical architecture How Status leverages Ethereum’s Light Client and Whisper protocols The Status user experience and feature set Jarrad and Carl’s views on privacy and how Status fulfils their goal of privacy by default The long term vision for a Status Network The project’s roadmap and business model Episode links: Status: The Mobile Ethereum Client Status Reddit This episode is hosted by Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/181

This is Epicenter, episode 181 with guests Jared Hope and Carl Bennett's. This episode of Epicenter is brought you by the Ledger NanoS, the hardware wallet which sets the new standard in security and usability. Get it today at ledger wallet.com and use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your order. Hi, welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Sebastink with you. I'm Mayor Roy. Today we are talking to the co-founders of status. Status is one of the applications, mobile applications,

that is pushing the boundaries of how the user interface to the DAP world should ought to look like. So let's get going and have an intro from Carl and Jared, starting with Jared. Jared, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to be into the crypto space. Sure, okay. Yeah, I'm Jared. I've been kind of following the crypto space for a long time. I got into Bitcoin around 2011 and ultimately Ethereum. How I got into it is kind of a long story.

But there's many parts that kind of all connect. One of them is particularly around sort of virtual reality and this idea of these sort of companies owning, like owning these head-mounted displays, which will ultimately turn into mixed reality devices. And so I view that our smartphones will eventually turn into these sort of wearable headsets. What's kind of scary to about that to me is that companies are essentially going to own your eyes and your ears and ultimately what you see here think and believe.

What's really interesting about sort of blockchains is this whole idea of being able to organize socially and unique and interesting ways and have users being able to not only own the software that have a stake within the direction of the software that can be created. And that hasn't been able to be done in a possible way without trust before of some kind of intermediary. So that's what really excites me. Okay, cool. And Carl, something about your background. Yeah, I guess I kind of took a fascination to Bitcoin. very early on as well, around the same time as Jared.

And I've always been very fascinated with organizational structures. And then I first read the Ethereum white paper. I think that was one aspect that really piqued my interest. And then that coupled with sort of being exposed to a lot of Jared's thinking, just because we've known each other for such a long time is kind of what sent me down the rabbit hole. And so what led you to want to build a messaging app essentially on top of

Ethereum more, I should say a wallet as a messaging app. Sure, so I guess it's really about how can we kind of begin to onboard non-technical people into using decentralized applications and we spend a lot of time thinking about what the UX should look like

and how that's actually going to play out. And so like, first of all, it just makes sense to focus on mobile in my opinion. That's where most of the users are today. And in terms of interface, if you actually look at how people are using their phones right now, it's very, very social. And most of that is training towards messengers. So I think it's just if you're trying to cast sort of the widest net and begin onboarding people into the blockchain

and still have this very flexible sort of user interface, I think messaging makes sense. If you contrast that with just a wallet, I think just opening up your wallet many times a day, doesn't make a lot of sense, whereas I might open something like Facebook Messenger over and over again. And I mean, getting to that point, there's actually like a whole journey behind that. I mean, first off, status isn't really a wallet on its own. It does like account management, but like a wallet is like a DAP within status. We originally had the idea for an unreleased product back in 2013.

It was a sort of side project while we're focusing on our main project. It was going to be called Coin Hero and it was going to be essentially a Bitcoin-based browser for mobile. But a lot of the things we wanted to do wasn't also possible. Like I were looking at things like Mastercoin and Counterparty a little bit later on. And like color coins were sure how interesting. But you couldn't really do them in an SPV way on the device itself. And then like later when Ethereum came along, I was just like, wouldn't this be so awesome to have smart contracts on your phone? And so we got a small dev grant from the foundation to port the Java version to Android,

since coding in Java is the sort of default there. And at the time, we were sinking the full blockchain, which was kind of crazy. We even got it running on a smart watch at one point, but ultimately wasn't super practical until the Light Client Protocol came along. Cool. I mean, I agree with you, Carl, that there's a tendency right now for, a lot of applications and sort of user interfaces to be built on top of chat. It's sort of like when you think about it,

if you look at sort of the progression of user interfaces, it seems so counterintuitive, but then again, it's just so natural to want to use a chat interface because you're so used to having a textual dialogue with people. I mean, we text all day long. Why not have that same sort of interface for dialogue with, you know, an application such as such as a DAP or a wallet or something of that nature.

And and also, you know, I think you're, to your point, it's, um, it's much more pleasurable to be looking at this type of application than a wallet. I mean, I personally kind of, you know, try to stay away from my banking applications, this sort of stuff, because it's just so unpleasant. Um, so yeah, I, I, I think that it's a very unique approach, uh, that is, that sort of speaks to people, right? People are used to these interfaces. Yeah, I think there's an interesting example of this is WeChat.

He's basically already done this in a centralized fashion across China. They released this really fascinating report a couple of days ago. It's basically just looking at sort of different trends of users with inside the application. And you can see something like, for example, the number of people that spend above two hours a day inside of WeChat has doubled since last year. The number of people spending two hours a day

has doubled to four hours. It's like the sheer number of people that are spending all of their time inside of this application is really fascinating. Now with WeChat, it's very tightly sort of integrated with all these local services around China. So you can do things like book all your public transport, you can book taxis, you can pay at a restaurant,

you can order your food on your phone we'll add a restaurant. And I think this is the sort of direction that we'd eventually like to see status head. But for now we need to focus on getting the basics, right? No, absolutely. You know, with the advent of AI as well, I have friends of mine who are working on chat and AI,

and it seems that it's going in that direction. Many years ago, there was another project that did something similar to what you're doing, which was GEMS. Of course, that project was built on totally different network was built on counterparty and I think the you know the objectives of the projects were of the project were much different they were building a chat application in which you had a wallet have you have you sort of pulled

inspiration from other projects such as gems or perhaps like we chat oh yeah definitely we chat once like once I started using it and saw the potential of it was definitely or inspiring we didn't become aware of gems until much later on. I think it's kind of interesting, but maybe the sort of incentivization structures around that don't necessarily line up. Maybe it's kind of hard to onboard users into a new sort of token that not too many people are invested in in the first place. Yeah, I guess I'm not, I'm not so familiar with GEMS, but I think what's the real value proposition that status is providing is really access to decentralized applications. And I'm not sure what,

what Jim's was doing exactly, but I don't think it was really aiming to provide a window into that sort of ecosystem. Yeah, I think they were doing something completely different. I mean, like I said, they were building more of a chat application in which you had a wallet where you could easily send funds from people with people in your contact list. And now years later, they've sort haven't really delivered on what their initial vision was. But I think it was an interesting, perhaps precursor to what we're seeing now in terms of interfaces and to what you guys are doing, which is obviously much more of a broader vision into how decentralized applications can live in chat interfaces. Last year when I was DevCon, I saw a talk from Jared, and he mentioned that Stater started off

trying to pour to a mist to mobile, right? like we did old Dab browser concept and then it ended up changing to a chat chat based interface so I think like you are one of the teams that are you that have analyzed what would happen if you would have like a normal Dab browser like MIST on mobile versus chat based BAP interface so what's what's the what's the key difference between these two and what are the strengths and disadvantages of each I think what's important to note that status still tries to be this sort of missed for mobile. Right now, like, we have like a browser within status, and we actually treat the, even though we have a primarily chat interface, each chat can also be considered like a tab in a browser.

So the idea is that you have this sort of browser interface, but you can pull it down, and in the chat history, you'll be able to see these sort of transactions that that particular DAP has been performing on your behalf. And maybe later on that can be expanded to have like customer support for the particular DAP, that sort of thing. So, so yeah, like we're definitely still striving to be missed for mobile. We couldn't port like MIS directly to mobile because it's primarily developed in an electron sort of environment. Electron itself is kind of sort of basically a chromium wrapper around some HTML and JavaScripts. And when you're in a resource-constricted environment, that becomes very, very difficult to get a high-performance,

high-performance user experience that's sort of smooth and running really well. And we're already running, like we run Go-Etherium directly on the device, and it's syncing directly with the Ethereum network, which is already quite taxing in of itself with proof of work. when we get to proof a stake that changes, but we basically had to opt for a better sort of library for doing user interface, which is React Native, and it's working out really well. And to your question of sort of a browser versus Messenger, I think it really just comes down to the way that people use their different devices. Like Mess has done really, really incredible job on desktop, and I think for, or at least in our opinion, for mobile, just the way we use our phones is a little bit different. So we're taking this sort of hybrid approach.

Yeah, absolutely. Like when you look at how the app breakdowns are in terms of monthly active users, it's just that messengers dwarf mobile browser usage by almost like a factor of three. It's just people are literally spending their lives communicating on their smartphones within some kind of messenger environment. And if you want to maximize the surface area of Ethereum to use, is really you need to kind of bring this familiarity to them and then kind of slowly or slowly kind of onboard them into the sort of world of blockchain without that being too intimidating and too forceful or even necessary to just use the application itself.

So coming back to the chat application space, I wanted to ask you one question. I mean, there are just a ton of chat applications. So you've got, I mean, obviously like Facebook Messenger. WhatsApp, like WeChat, and there's signal and telegram, and a lot of these are often then geographically sort of, you know, specific based on your country or region. I mean, personally, and SMS, obviously, and the different SMS protocols. So you've got like, you know, Apple Messenger protocol. Like, it's just a mess of protocols and applications that are not interoperable for the most part. I just found out recently actually that WhatsApp is using the signal protocol, which I guess is

a thing and but for some reason is not compatible with the signal application. But so, you know, person, I use like at least three or four, maybe five different applications to chat with different people. You know, where, where do you see this evolving? Do you see the, this space is, you know, just burgeoning with other applications and people are using like 10 different messaging applications based on specific use cases or the types of people they have on their list or do these converge into some, you know, major platforms where

you don't have to use all these apps, but just one? The ecosystem for messengers is quite interesting. We actually looked into that originally because it's a similar question that comes up is, well, why don't you just integrate with some other kind of

messenger? And there's a couple of reasons for that. One, a lot of them just essentially closed platforms. basically if you develop for that particular platform, one, you have to start acquiring users for your plug-in to that, but at that point, it's centralized to start off with because users have to have permission to go through your particular service to be able to use the cryptocurrency, and one that can just be kind of taken away from you very quickly, which is kind of a problematic. The other part of that is with status, we think that the messenger's protocols can be now peer-to-peer. I think really Skype was the only people who were doing that a long time ago.

I mean, there's some other interesting ones like U-Tox that are kind of doing this sort of peer-to-peer sort of stuff. But apart from that, a lot of them are still using this sort of client-server methodology. And maybe that's not necessarily anymore. And so we'd like to experiment and see how far we can push that with Whisper, which is really fascinating sort of protocol. In terms of answering the question of where this sort of ecosystem is going, I think that the idea of messages and chat interface is going to, like on a much broader timeline, like be five or ten years out, we're going to see more socially aware computing and contextually aware of computing. and right now we're just being bombarded with information. Like if I open up my emails, it's just filled with tons of emails. If I open up, like, I mean, if I'm on Reddit, it's just a whole bunch of stuff that's kind of not relevant to me.

If I open up Slack, there's a whole bunch of messages. We're just getting bombarded with information. And I think the way that we're going to have to start curbing that is by making our computing very contextually aware. And that becomes really fascinating how you kind of do that. and then you start having to think about things like attention to be able to solve that. And attention is going to become like a real kind of valuable asset that we have where our time and what we think and what we think about, it has value because it's bound to time.

We only have a certain amount of hours per day. And if it's kind of being bombarded with advertisements and that sort of thing, that gets more and more problematic in our current Web 2.0 kind of. of world. So I mean ultimately I think messengers will continue to branch out I had mentioned sort of mixed reality devices. I think ultimately messengers will kind of merge or converge with the sort of desktop environments of our these augmented reality devices and they will be contextually aware of the environment we're in and they will be displaying things that are relevant to us to to help us navigate our new worlds.

Will we even have messengers when we have like augmented reality or I guess like augmented reality will have its own kind of messengers, right? Yeah, I think so. I think the kind of key parallel there is that when you're in a chat, like it's a context. And Carl alluded to how WeChat is kind of used. If you think about how it's used in China, like you can order sort of an Uber equivalent or a car to go to a restaurant. You can be in a group chat and organize that place and the location. You can both see your progress on getting to that location.

But then when you're in the restaurant, then you can also order, like within that group chat, you can order at the restaurant and share the menu with your friend who can also order, even though he may be running 10 minutes late. So this is like a whole sort of social context that you're in. And if you can imagine where that social context is going to go into, that's going to start blurring this line between our digital lives and reality a lot more. And so I think there's going to be a very natural progression between the messages we see on our smartphones today and these sort of mixed reality devices where that then becomes part of your, essentially your awareness and this sort of context that's around your field of vision at the time. So let's move on to kind of understanding what the technology behind status is now. So you mentioned that you use the whisper protocol in order to facilitate your chat. Tell us what whisper is. Wispers are a really cool sort of communication protocol.

It's originally invented by Gavin Woods in the early days. It's something between like UDP and a sort of distributed hash table. in the sense that it has some interesting properties on how you try to get messages from one place to another. It has essentially dark routing and it doesn't reveal endpoints so easily. So for example, if I want to send a message to you, I would have your public key, which is a reference. I encrypt the message with your public key, and then I'll send it out into the network. Now this message will essentially bounce around the notes for a specific TTL or time to live, and then it will die. Now, basically, there's no guarantee of message delivery in this, so even though you may receive your message, you still pass it on, and if you don't receive it, well, then tough biscuits, right?

But there's this other ideas of doing dark routing. And so it's not implemented today, but it will be this idea of bloom filters, where you kind of create this sort of bloom filter that you can share with the nodes that you connect to, basically letting them know what kind of information you're interested in. And so basically these messages will bounce. This note will receive it and see if it matches that balloon filter. And if it does, it will send it your way. maybe or maybe not.

It's all probabilistic. And another part of that is the network is supposed to learn what kind of nodes are servicing your messages better. So over time, the network topology should change to be able to service your messages faster given your length of time within the network and understanding what kind of nodes are good for you. And to combat the sort of no guarantees on the message, essentially, we've implemented an application protocol in status, which allows you to send an acknowledgement or an ACC.

And so basically you re-transmit the message until you have gotten a receipt back from the peer that you're talking to. And then there's some other, there's in Whisper version 5, which is now being kind of rolled out. There's some other interesting things like offline inboxing, but they're all quite experimental. And of course, we're experimenting with them. In fact, we're using it to do push notifications later on down the line. So I'm not super familiar with Whisper, but what type of latency could we expect then? So if I send you a message and then you presumably receive it and then you send me back the AC. Are we looking at the same type of latency as with like a message?

traditional centralized client server type of scenario or would it be some of a little longer? That's a really good question. I guess it kind of really depends on the network topology that you enter in at the time. The idea is that it'll be like a couple of seconds, but it could be more, it could be less. In terms of scalability, it's kind of like the biggest concern with Whisper at the moment. And we have a couple of other tracks that still keep it decentralized. We're talking with the swarm team, and they're rewriting their network stack at the moment, and they're doing another protocol called PSS, which essentially has, they're doing it to service sort of swarm message transmission, but it'll also have a whisper-like API. So within status, if you're finding

that the sort of privacy features of whisper aren't servicing you well, it's becoming too lag, you can choose between privacy and convenience and switch over, hopefully in the future you'll be able to switch over to PSS, which will give you unicast and multi-cast, and it should be blistering fast. So Visp's big advantage is, like, normally like, I think, you know, lots of messaging protocols and you generally have some form of messaging broker that is going to aggregate the messages that come and then deliver them to the devices that they need to go to, right? and this is like a central party.

So from your description, Whispers strength seems to be that there's no central broker of messages at all. It's a pure P2P network. Yeah. And then because it's a P2P network, there has to be public key crypto in it. Exactly. So there's not really a centralization point,

which is fantastic. That way sort of metadata collection is somewhat mitigated or it's non-trivial to do Dragnet. surveillance on it as easily. And yeah, there's asynchronous encryption, which is the sort of public key stuff, but there's also this, sorry, asymmetric encryption to do the public key stuff, but there's also symmetric encryption as well for sort of forward secrecy and that sort of thing. But Whisper doesn't specify that.

You have to do, you have to roll it yourself or do it yourself. And we'll be essentially implementing parts of the, what's called the noise protocol. to do forward secrecy, which is a variant of the Diffy-Hellman encryption scheme. I think last January or something, I actually downloaded status, and I was surprised to find that status was actually syncing the whole blockchain, and it was super fast, and I was wondering how, like, how do you actually interface with the blockchain, and how do you make all of these mobile devices sync with it?

Sure. I mean, so when you're running status, you're actually running an Ethereum node. It is literally Go-Etherium on your device. What's really great about it is you're not sinking the full blockchain. You're sinking just the blockchain headers. And that's because of the like-client protocol that's being developed short for LES. So what's really cool about that is it's, you know, you're essentially doing all the same sort of cryptographly verifiable stuff just in a very light way, and you're not running all the smart contracts and you're not doing all the heavy lifting. But it's still quite secure because of the data structure. So yeah, like you basically connect to a couple of bootstrap nodes, then you connect to peers just like you would running Geth or like a normal sort of node on the network. We've now implemented this sort of, with every release, we now update what's called the CHT or the CAN. hashtag tray and that allows us to essentially put in a checkpoint in the blockchain.

So you only have to sync like a week's worth or a month's worth of blocks to be able to catch up. So you don't have to go and sync the entire blockchain headers. That saves on that bandwidth and it saves on disk space and it's still quite secure. And the LEA, like even though we're doing that with every release, there's a whole, there's a research topic around doing a dynamic CHT for LightCliant. for light clients. And so hopefully that will be dynamic in the future. And when we switch to proof of stake,

the story changes as well, but for the better. So are you then sort of the first application that is set to go live that is implementing in a real world production scenario, this light client implementation? Yeah, I mean, so far, we're the only ones that are actually treating decentralized stations seriously on mobile. And we were using the like client before there was even an API for GIF on Java or Objective C.

So if you look at it, like if you look at our library status go, which consumes Goatherium, we have our own sort of set of APIs to connect to the network. It's kind of interesting. So quite recently, Coinbase released this mobile app called Token. And as soon as it was released, on our slash Ethereum, there was a conversation that token is very similar to status. So could you give us a like a rundown of how token differs from status in the same, in delivering their similar looking capabilities? Sure. I mean, so I think what's really cool about token is it's great for the ecosystem, the Ethereum ecosystem. I think the technology stack differs somewhat.

They do use the signal protocol and that's somewhat centralized. I don't believe they support Web 3 at the moment. And to interact with the network, you essentially go through a trusted server of theirs. So your strength on this side is because you use Whisper, you don't have that central point of messaging trust at all, unless the user opts in for convenience over privacy. Yeah, and that doesn't even exist yet. We're still waiting for the swamp guys to catch up and work on that.

So that probably won't even happen this year. Okay. So in general, tell us about your approach to privacy and like what kinds of data on your users do you collect? We take a hard stance towards decentralization. We essentially don't want to see any of. your data. At the moment, nothing is shared with our servers except for the phones. If you choose to, it's completely optional, you can opt to have sort of contact synchronization. And the reason why that has to go through a server is because we have to send you an

SMS to verify that your phone number is actually yours. Like to do that in a decentralized way, it becomes awfully complex. I actually had some lengthy discussions about this, but you up creating these crazy markets, then you're sharing this sort of private information on the network, which is like your phone number, which you probably don't want to do. The good news is, in terms of contact sharing itself, is we've got a, we've basically got a plan or a proposal to essentially do this in a trustless and zero-knowledge way, well, somewhat not, basically zero-knowledge way, with the exception of creating some hash-collar, illusions. But the idea is that you'll be able to share contacts, but not be able to,

you'll be able to, like, upload that sort of data onto Swarm, and it won't matter because it's almost meaningless to anybody else, except for you and your friends. And, yeah, it's very interesting, but we'll still ultimately have to send you some kind of SMS. Yeah. Let's take a break to talk about the Ledger NanoS, the new flagship, hardware wallet by Ledger. I'll let Ledger's CEO, Eric Larchavec, tell you all about how simple the NanoS makes it to securely store all your private keys. The Ledger NanoS is our latest generation hardware wallet. This is a multi-currency hardware wallet. It has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen. You can generate a new seed,

restore a seed, or set up your pin on the device. Your seed will never be exposed to the host computer. On the nano-s, you have different apps. You have the Bitcoin app, you have the Ethereum app, and you have the Fido U2F app for strong authentication, for instance with Google, Dropbox or GitHub. You can manage your cryptocurrencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome app or the ledger wallet Ethereum Chrome app. With the nanoS, all your Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses are derived from one unique seed. With one seed you can have in the same seed.

you can have in the same time Bitcoin, Ethereum, ETHERM, classic balances, and also, if you restore your seed, you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as Fido U2F, SSH, GPG. So it's very simple, just one seed,

and multiple applications. The NanoS sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability. You can get yours today at ledgerWallet.com. And when you do, be sure to use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your first order. We'd like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter. So moving on then to status itself and sort of the user interface.

So I tried to get status on my phone. I wasn't signed up for the beta, so I couldn't install it. Alpha. Or sorry, the Alpha. Yeah, I couldn't install it. But I did look at the screen grabs on the website and sort of got an idea for, you know, what the interface was going to look like and one of the types of things that you could do with it. And mayor, I know that mayor's been using it.

So maybe he can give some more insights as to what types of functionalities are in there. But it looks like you guys spent a lot of time on design and user experience and just getting that really polished so that when somebody on boards this, like he's not thinking this is an Ethereum client or something like that. like this is an actual application that serves a purpose, and that purpose is being able to interact with other members of the community, sending ether, and then using applications, right? So using applications like Uport. And so walk us through what, you know, what is the experience on status? What types of things can you do once you've downloaded and installed the application?

Sure. So, I mean, once you download, and install the application, you go straight into onboarding session, which is essentially a chat session with your first contact, which is called console. It's called console because it tries to emulate the JavaScript environment of Goetherium. So you can actually type in JavaScript commands into there if you want to. You have full access to Web 3, so if you're a developer, you can kind of just muck around in that. But what's great about it for just the average user is that it essentially tries to teach you the basics of interacting the status. So you learn how to touch on messages, you type in your password, set up your first account, that sort of thing. Once you're done with that, then you kind of move into the rest of the application.

And you can go over to your contacts, and you will find a whole bunch of DAPs that are ready to go. So, like, I mean, you can access Augur, you can access BeChat, you can access Ethelance, no sense, flight delays suck, first blood, auction house, blah, blah, blah, blah. So these are all HTML sort of webdaps that you can literally just tap on and automatically start using on your mobile phone wherever you are. And of course, if you've done these sort of phone contact synchronization, you can chat with your friends and you can send and receive Ether, you have like a wallet that you can use as well.

That's pretty much it to start off with. The other feature that we've been working on is the one, called Discover. And Discover is sort of this idea of, actually it's where the name status is kind of coming from, but we haven't really kind of publicized it too much. But the idea is that we want the Ethereum community or anyone using status to be able to find each other quite easily, but we want to do it through your friend network. So if you decide you want to advertise like a good or service, you can essentially change your status to have these sort of hashtags in it. and these hashtags will publicize your status amongst your friends.

And that will propagate out from your friends to your friends of friends, et cetera, et cetera. And everyone will start sharing their basically a top list of 100 public statuses with their friends themselves. Ultimately, what this means is you'll see this sort of life feed of different hashtag-based sort of statuses pop up within Discover. And you'll be able to find cool new people to chat with, offering different services. versus nearby you and this sort of thing. And we're actually going to be evolving this to turn it into more of like a maps-based layer system. So other third-party DAPs can start adding more information into this particular

Discover feature as well. Yeah, that sounds really cool. So then this Discover feature would basically be sort of like a trending topics list of hashtags in that people have less in their status, in their sort of circle of friends? Yep. And it's kind of, it's like weighted by like how recently it was done, how Ika, if you're online or not,

if that user has actually interacted with that person, that sort of thing. Okay. So coming back to the applications. So you mentioned, you mentioned Auger as one of the applications that is currently compatible with status. So first, I want to ask you what does onboarding, so I'm an application developer.

I've got the cool new DAP, you know, that just raised $150 million in Ether. And, you know, I want to integrate into Status. What do I need to do? Is it a development platform there or how do I onboard there? Sure. I mean, so status tries to be a browser. So in terms of integrations, it's just a matter of just like browsing to a website. That's it.

We do have plans for ADAP directory, but we want to do it right because there's a lot of sort of subtleties to that. App stores themselves actually are riddled with a whole bunch of problems, and that sort of initial screen real estate is very highly valuable, and so there's a very strong incentive to be gamed on that. And so we're looking at things like community curation, and things like attention to be able to solve that. But ultimately, you'll essentially be able to kind of just deploy your DAP on Swarm or IPFS, that sort of thing, or just on a normal server.

And if it works in Mist or Metamask, it should work in status. If you want to do some more interesting things like decentralized chatbots or whatever, then you will have to go through a username system, which we haven't, which is not yet implemented, but it's on a do-list or very long to-do list. And then so that's how you'll essentially access these sort of chatbots and other users. So you said if it's compatible with Mist or MetaMask, it should be compatible with status. Yep. So then I presume that, so if I launch into Auger, I'm being served an interface, which is sort of an application interface

and not necessarily like a native chat. Like I'm not chatting with a sort of augur bot and saying like I want to predict, you know, I want to enter this prediction market and I want to bet this much on this prediction by sending text messages, basically. You're saying it's more of an application interface

that's more sort of classic to, or native to that application. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, if you can think of like the sort of chat interface as being like a hybrid between a chat and a browser tab, that's probably the best way to start, like wrapping your head around this idea. So, and the reason for that is because you, you as a user, you want to make sure that you can kind of see the transactions that a particular DAP is doing within that context.

So basically, like if you look at the, I don't know if you can see it here, but you can see that this sort of, it's a terrible example, but there's a NOSOS website actually on the screen. But if you can kind of pull this down, then there's this sort of chat context behind it, which will end up showing a bunch of transactions. transactions. It doesn't right now, but it will in the future. Okay. So you're you interact with, um, sort of native application interface. As an application developer, you may want to tweak that a little bit so that works, you know, it's, it's, it's, um, uh, easy to use on in a mobile phone. Uh, but then you're, it's coupled with a chat, um, feed that is sending you some, some transaction, like, sort of basic confirmations for transactions?

Yeah, pretty much. So any sort of like transactions that that DAP will make will end up in that sort of chat history. So it's kind of like a per DAP transaction history. That's how we intend to have that ultimately. It doesn't exist like that exactly today, but that's the sort of direction we're going. Okay.

And then there might be certain instances where it's just a chatbot. So the idea is that there's a lot of flexibility. So we can have both web DAPs and chatbots. and then there will be use cases that kind of combine the two. Yeah, so exactly, and there'll be like hybrids. So, for example, our next iteration of the wallets, which is a DAP, and it loads up in a web page, but it also has a whole bunch of commands that you can use within the chat context itself. So it's kind of like this combination between the suit.

So another example of that would be just shown NOSIS, perhaps at some point when they have a chat bot on the platform, I could be chatting with Jared, and I could put atnosis, and then I could place some kind of social bet with Jared. So there's going to be these really interesting ways that these different DAPs sort of operate on the platform within social context as well. And that's like what's really interesting about all these DAPs being on top of like the single blockchain is you get all these different synergies. So later on, maybe in the distant future, you can have compositions of DAPs sort of kind of chatting amongst themselves. within chat context making very complex interactions which would be really fascinating to see. Yeah, and these kinds of interactions are just not there in most of the other messaging apps, right? Because I think the most that's there is like you can pay using a chat app, but

prediction market using chat and I guess at some level like when the technology advances a lot, for you, integrating the next DAP is just going to be very easy. Yes. So basically, like, in some senses, it's like, yes, status from the outside looks like a messenger app, but behind status, there's this Ethereum network that keeps improving as more and more daps develop, and status basically inherits all of those capabilities like, of cost. So ultimately,

ultimately, like, it's like your application is just getting capability after capability after capability, while you personally don't incur much cost

in developing all these. And because your sense of, your capabilities are rising much faster than the other chat-based apps, that kind of triggers adoption of some kind.

Yeah, much like a web page, like I could be using Firefox for many years and just reaping the benefits of how the incidents evolving. Cool, cool. So that's really cool. Recently I was at your Reddit

and I came across this one of these posts where somebody was mentioning that you're going to launch a network of your own, the status network. Can you tell us what this network is, what the plans for it would be? It's still on the Ethereum. public bot chain. Let's make that very clear. It's an ERC 20 token and it's going to be modular.

But Carl has some more details I'd like to talk about. Sure. So we're just kind of thinking about these new sort of economic models that we can create through this token issuance. So there are very simple examples of how you could use a token within the context of status. So for one, just registering your username, for instance, could be done with the status network token. But there are these other problems that we're trying to solve as well. So one of which, and we've been in conversation with Machet from user feeds about, is this idea of content ranking. And if you look at content ranking in Web 2, there's some clear problems exist. So one of which is that there is a

monopoly on the way in which your content is organized. So if I don't like the way that Twitter is ranking the information that I see, there's not really much I can do about it. And so we think this sort of monopoly isn't really in the spirit of decentralization. And if I don't like the algorithms that's being used to sort the information that I see, I should be able to switch it very easily. So that's one component. What's a running theme within status is we've been open source from the beginning. We've always, like everything is open source.

We've also built out this other other application called commit F, which acts as a sort of bounty bot for GitHub repositories, and any sort of GitHub user can use it. But the idea is that if an issue is created, you can assign a bounty to that, and commiteth will come along and leave a comment with a QR code and a particular bounty address. Then anyone can kind of contribute to that.

The idea is to incentivize open source development, and that development can be paid out once a pool request satisfies that particular issue has been merged into the developed branch by the project maintainer or whatever the situation is. And really what's behind that is this idea of doing decentralized governance. Now, decentralized governance is like a really hard problem. We don't believe that anyone has really solved that perfectly well. But what we can do is we can make steps to go towards that.

So you can do things like carbon vote style voting schemes on particular proposals or particular issues. And the idea is to that when you look at social networks today, like things like Facebook, they're essentially social, like these sort of

huge networks of users, but they have an owner, and it's not them. Like, it's some entity, and they act as this sort of gatekeeper, and they control this sort of walled garden. And what's really interesting to us is, like,

like you can have these users essentially operate a network and literally guide how the software they use is developed if they can't even contribute it to it directly themselves. And that's sort of the path we're looking to go down. And I think that's going to be really fascinating for this network of users to essentially operate themselves. And Carl touched upon this idea of using a token to essentially use. hold a username within status. And that's kind of fascinating when you look at how other sort of social networks have these sort of bots and spamming problems. Like I believe it was some, I can't remember the figure off the top of my head, but it's a very large amount of Twitter users are essentially

bots. And they don't really have any sort of financial stake against them. It's quite cheap to generate all these different accounts. And so in a way, you can kind of think about this as like Twitter verified accounts, but there's some kind of value attached to that. And so the more value you have to that, the more stake they have in the network, the more influential they are in the network, and therefore the more valuable that particular user is in the network, and the more reputable they are, in a sense.

The reputation itself is also quite subjective and quite hard, but this is like a sort of small step towards that kind of thing. And then you can imagine later on, like there's going to be public chat groups, which may be governed that only allow people of a certain sort of value amount to be able to enter. And there's this idea of doing this sort of tributes towards other people. Instead of blocking people within status, you can essentially require some kind of deposit to even chat with you. So someone could deposit a certain amount and then if you message with them that sort of deposits released and So you can if you want to block somebody you can just set that value limit to be like nine

nine nine nine or something some value that's ridiculously high One part of that they would add is if you think of the sort of incentive alignment of a lot of these business models and web two Where you have the owners of the network you have the users on the network and then more often than not you have advertisers and and each of these different groups have very different interests and then the result often isn't the best user experience and if you can have more unified sort of stakeholders hopefully the outcome would be much better. Yeah, it would appear at least on paper

these incentives become a lot more aligned. So basically like what owning the status token could allow me to do is it would give me access to some features, right, like being able to register my name or being able to chat with another user by making a deposit or things like that. So these are like feature-based, right? So you have a token and you link the ownership of this token

to unlocking some features in your application, right? That's one use. And the other uses that I could participate in some form of governance of the application itself. Yep. And so we kind of touched upon this idea of attention and community curation as well. So being a token holder, you essentially be able to curate the sort of content that is displayed in status as well. Okay. So I can also curate content displayed in status. That's very interesting. And that is where this idea of merging with user feeds come in. Right? So I'm a content, I'm a token owner. I can curate content. And based on how all the token owners curate this content, status is going to display a feed of some form or something like that.

Yep. So things like the DAP directory can be community curated as opposed to essentially being purely this gaming of an algorithm necessarily. that happens very often in Google Play, for example. Another part of that is if a particular algorithm is no longer serving your user, you can then fall back to a market of algorithms. So you can then swap them out and it becomes very Darwinian. So hopefully it will keep these sort of algorithms honest and competitive as well. Status is a unique application, right? Like even in the chat, there isn't a central server that is either collecting the data or,

and you want to make things that are totally decentralized. So what is your business model, assuming that it is not the coin itself? Sure. So status, once we get the foundation right, the status, we will end up start working on these default gaps, basically things that we think are required for the best user experience to onboard into. And so one of those is a fiat to crypto exchange, which is kind of tackling remittances in a way. The idea is that it's essentially a listing of buyers and sellers who are nearby, so you can exchange your cash for crypto and meet up at a cafe or find some kind of booth to do this for.

There's going to be a sticker market as well later on, which sounds somewhat trivial, but if you look at the line messenger, it made up a quarter of their entire revenues for the last year. So once you start looking at users outside of the crypto space, that becomes very, very interesting as well. I think like a lot of the sort of financial instruments are going to be very interesting. very interesting, but for now it's important that we just have a very, very solid base platform, so we don't want to spread out stuff to the thing. So we just want solid developer tools, really nice messaging experience, ability to send social payments and a wallet, and then we can begin by focusing on these other models later. So before we wrap up, this is, so this is

your moment where you can rally the community and get the to join the project and ask them to do whatever you want. So what are you looking for today in terms of community outreach? I mean, are you looking for developers? Are you looking for, you know, testers? Are you looking for application developers? Yeah, I mean, like we're always looking for developers. If you're interesting like closure scripts and React Native,

and of course Ethereum and cryptocurrencies, definitely hit us up. We need to expand our team quite aggressively soon. We definitely need testers. I mean, we've kind of maxed out our test flight invites because I don't know that you got to 2000. But if you're on Android, it's a lot easier to try out the alpha. You just need to go to test.status.im and give us your feedback. Giving the feedback is really easy. If you just see a bug or you have some kind of feature suggestion, just shake your phone and send it in.

And yeah, I think I'm... Yeah, all I add to that is, yeah, we're actively hiring. The way we hire just because we're open source is we really value contributions to the project. We also have this really lovely community of people having to support us. And if you go to Slack.Statist.am, you can come on our Slack and come say hi. Yeah, I was impressed by just the size of good community. there's like 1,600 people in your Slack channel or more, I guess. I mean, how long have you, what do you, how did you do this?

How did you get all these people to, to have such interest in your project? If you can give any advice to other open source projects out there. That's a good question. That's kind of a mystery to me. I think we do sometimes do these interviews with different apps that we're interested in integrating with and maybe people discover us that way. Perhaps just the vision for what we're trying to build is exciting for people and they jump on us like through that.

Yeah, not so sure. Yeah, I think I make an effort as much as possible to chat to almost everyone at least once who is in the community just to say hi and thank us for supporting us. And we're very a very ethereal community focus. I think it's probably one of the best spaces like I've ever been in. in my adult life. Well, that says a lot. Cool.

Well, guys, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about it says. We're looking forward to hearing the developments and looking forward to the official release. Thank you very much for having us. And thank you once again to our listeners for tuning in. Episcenter as part of the Let's Stock Bitcoin Network.

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