Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - James Dyer & Jason Goldberg: Pepo & Decrypt – New Token Models for Media Engagement

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

In another of our bonus episodes recorded at EthCC in Paris, we caught up with Jason Goldberg, CEO and Founder of Pepo and Ost, and James Dyer, Co-founder and Head of Product at Decrypt. At the time of recording Decrypt were about to announce they were launching their own token that rewards audience engagement, built on Ost technology. We chatted to Jason and James about this relationship, the problems solved by these monetization models, the link between Pepo and Decrypt tokens, and DeFi, and what the future holds for media and tokens.Topics covered in this episode:Background of Jason and JamesDecrypt's affiiation with ConsenSysThe issues and problems being solved with the respective monetization modelsThe levers Pepo are using to ensure users trust the platform and promote growth in the ecosystemThe reasons Decrypt chose Ost to build their platform onThe different components of the Ost toolkit and how these are leveragedThe technology involved with getting tokens to sponsor a 'season'How Pepo and Decrypt market themselvesThe bridges between Pepo and Decrypt tokens, and DeFiHow good UX standards of the wallet are reached, in particular the recovery wallet featureOvercoming the challenges of civil attacks and malicious actsThe future of media and tokens and what the new models look likeEpisode links: PepoOstDecryptOst Powers Decrypt Token for Media EngagementPepo TwitterOst TwitterDecrypt TwitterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.

Do you work out in the morning? Work out in the morning? Yeah, every day, 6.30 or 7? Yeah. That's you or that's me? That's me? Every day. Six days a week.

And I eat like crazy. I eat probably seven meals a day. Just just grazing. Just 24-7 grazing. I can't eat enough. If I have like three meals a day, I lose a lot of weight. Especially with travel and work and everything. It's like most people get fat.

I just drop muscle weight. Sweet. Nice problem to have. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sibbassi-Sinkwchua. Today we have yet another interview from the Ethereum Ethereum Community Conference, which took place in Paris in early March. So today I bring you my conversation with Jason Goldberg, CEO of PEPO and OST, and James Dyer,

head of product at DECR. Now, if you hadn't figured it out already, Pepo is one of our sponsors, and I'm pretty active on the platform. And we actually partnered with them at the Ethereum Community Conference to put together this amazing podcast studio. And so if I'm able to bring you all this content from the conference, it's in large part thanks to them. And we do have quite a bit of content coming up in the next little while. Now, this was a really fascinating conversation because we discussed something that I'm deeply

interested in, and that is new monetization models in media. And the reason why we had Jason and James on together is because DeCrypt was announcing a new app that they've built on OST technologies. And with this new app that leverages OST, readers of DeCript will be able to earn tokens for reading content and interacting on the site. Now, these ideas have been around for a long time. Even in the early days of Epicenter on the LTV network, long-time listeners will remember the LTV token

and the magic word and the proof of listen and all these incentives to listen to the podcast. But they've never really been executed very well. And so I'm really interested to see the interesting things that DeCrypt will be doing with this app. And so with that, let's go straight through the interview. I'm here with Jason Goldberg, who's the CEO of OST, and Pepo, Pippo. Pippo.

As long as you're saying it, it's fine. And James Dyer, who's the co-founder at DECRIPT. And DECRT is a media property or media company. But I'll let you guys introduce yourselves in more detail. Yeah, please introduce yourselves and let our audience know how you got to involved in crypto. Sure. So Jason Goldberg and I've been serial entrepreneur for over 20 years. The first product that I worked on was AOL chat rooms back in 1990s. It's been working in community and internet for a long time. I fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2016 when I was

working on an app that I had launched called PIPO, which was we had this novel idea back in 2016 to enable influencers to earn money directly from sponsors, advertisers, fans without going through platforms. And it's been great. And realized back in 2016 that that would be a really hard thing to do. So we'd have to build a ton of technology to do so. And so that led us to building OST, open, simple token. So the idea for PEPO came before?

We had an app. It was first PIPO. Literally the app was PIPO way before OST, before Simple Token. OST stands for Open Simple Token. Right. And yeah, we launched an app in 2016. It was basically any influencer could create their own channel in the app. We had lots of foodies, travel bloggers, people could join their channels.

The idea was to build up kind of the web to, like the web to experience, like messaging to the influencers, and then layer on the economic model later. Okay. I mean, I didn't know the history of people. We had over 250,000 users. I mean, it was a real serious app. And we shut the whole thing down because we said, all right, we, we, I'm literally saying, you know, say go down the rabbit hole was I started getting obsessed with, how are we going to create this economic model inside the app and how we enable kind of peer-to-peer payments with micro transactions and all this stuff. And that like led me into Ethereum and my co-founder, Ben Bolin. And we started brainstorming. Like literally, we'd spend weekends just brainstorming how to do this.

Start diagramming how to create user experience we wanted. Like we had like on this whiteboard, it was like if you were to enable every Instagram user to be able to be able to. to earn when they post, have every like earn money, what kind of user experience would you have to enable? And the aha then was, okay, well, don't just do this for PIPO, build technology to do this for any app. And that's when we just basically said,

I basically made this tough call to say, let's turn off the app and focus the entire organization towards building the enabling technology. I just felt like it was a much bigger opportunity. Okay, yeah. It's interesting. So have any, I didn't know this about the history of PIPO. So have any of those people from sort of like before?

Do we see them on the app now? Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. So it wasn't until a couple days ago that we even started to let people know from the old people that we existed. Because we took a different approach this time. So we built all this technology to enable you to integrate these micro transactions into the app. And then we went out and spoke to people to try to figure out what was the right features the app to build. And that let us, we didn't have 30 second videos before, right? Before the app was just like chat.

rooms with like it was like you know kind of almost like a WhatsApp group with the influencer and now you we layer in the new version of the app that we launched you know a couple months ago it's entirely community driven community told us you know short form video real authentic and then every like transfers to value so we decided also to launch it into the crypto community to start and we haven't really market to anyone outside the community yet because we wanted to get it right within like a tight-knit kind of community and then expand out versus just going really broad and it wasn't until a couple of days ago where we

We actually went out to about 50 of the top influencers, not earners, but kind of creators in the original people and say, hey, you know, we launched this app. It's mainly used by crypto people now. Do you want to, you know, come on and check it out? And we've had a couple of them join. A couple of them. So we have this woman who's a food, two foodies in India, one Dubai. Okay.

I've seen her, yeah. Yeah. And they're like, hey, they'll love this and I can earn money from it. It's cool. So, well, and so when the time is right, we'll start to push out to the original user base of people, not yet. Okay. And I'll tell you, that means it takes a lot of patience and kind of, I don't know they're

word for it, but like to not just kind of say, hey, everyone join. You know, it's like, it's like, it's not ready yet. You know, it's not ready yet for have everyone join. You want to deliver a disappointing experience. Yeah. Okay. We'll come back. James, please, please talk about yourself.

It's funny, actually, because I guess my journey in terms of coming into the space, there's been a few different times of me and Mr. Goldberg have cross paths. So, I have university, I actually co-founded a video discovery product myself. It was called Swish. A lot of similarities. We were curating the best of the internet's 30 second video clips. We did it for about a year. Like Vine and these sorts of platforms.

Yeah, it was that time when all of those kind of stuff was going on. Initially, the premise was, you know, to really focus on quality of video and pull it in from other platforms. you know, focused on, I guess, like, the emotions that people really wanted to feel out of them, whether it was, like, excitement or amazement or intrigue. So I did that for about a year. Yeah, we got to, we got to, like, we got to a decent amount of users, but I think in about a year in, again, we were answering some of the monetization questions. There weren't really answers there.

And kind of at the same sort of time, a lot of my friends from university on the start, scene were, you know, getting in really interested in all this blockchain and cryptocurrency stuff. And it was about that time that I started, I decided to stop suing this video app, which was called Swish. And I set up an educational platform called Light Paper. So the general problem for that was, Evan was super excited about the promise of this technology. So back in what, tail end of 2017 start of 2018. No one, you know, apart from the super insiders could actually clearly articulate

what this stuff was and why it was exciting. So we built like a platform to break down the fundamentals into building blocks, make it simple, kind of the duer lingo for blockchain and cryptocurrency. That one pretty well. Six months in, we had an opportunity to join up with some other guys who were building

a media property called DeCrypt. We chat with those guys for a little bit, decided to join forces, and that's what I'm doing today. So I'm one of the co-founders of DeCrypt. We are a media platform covering the space. We do news, we do education, and we do collections. And yeah, that's fair by me. Maybe we can pick up a... You guys are growing pretty fast, too?

Yeah, yeah, we're doing pretty well. We're young. We've been publishing for just over 18 months. We've 20xed the size of our audience this year, so that's just over 55,000 readers. year ago to just over 1.1 million. So we're growing, but I don't know. I think it's important to say that, you know, along the way, we're trying to build a brand, which is, you know,

demystifying the space, putting back to the conversation a while ago. It's a truth bearer for the site. And, yeah, you know, one way we're telling compelling stories. I'm curious because, I mean, we're both in media. I mean, different types of media, I suppose. but what do you think is sort of lacking in this space where you felt that decrypt could fulfill or answer to sort of like a user demand

or like a community demand? Just in terms of, are you talking about business model in this case or are you just talking about the publication? The content, yeah, and our positioning. I can speak to my personal premise. I think it always comes back to this notion of, you know, making this world intelligible, helping people to understand what matters, you know, where the promise is. And, you know, by the same token, you know, I think would be

naive if we didn't call it out. But, you know, there's a lot of scams that I've taken place in this space. There's a lot of bad actors. So it's calling those out by the same token. So, yeah, I think it's about highlighting the genuine successes. I think it's a lot of about making the big ideas easy for the outsiders to understand. And I think that's, you know, an important role to play in broader awareness and adoption. And, you know, hopefully this space continuing to grow and have an impact, which we all want to see. Can you talk about your affiliation with consensus? Yeah. So, happy to talk about that. So we are a wholly owned subsidiary. We are editorially independent and technologically agnostic. Obviously, that's, you know,

critical pillar for a media company. We need to preserve our integrity. So that's something, you know, that we've really kind of focused on in terms of the foundations and setting ourselves up as a media property that's set up to succeed. How do you, what kind of things have you implemented to ensure this journalistic integrity? And I guess, I guess journalistic integrity is one thing, but the other is, you know, I think, I think we can all, we can very easily get into sort of into our own bubble, how do you ensure that decrypt is really agnostic in covering like, you know, a wide range of technologies from like Bitcoin to super experimental stuff to like everything in between? Sure. So, I mean, I'm not going to be able to answer in as much

fidelity as the people working on the editorial side who have, you know, taken a lot of steps to ensure that this is, this is in place. I work more with the guys on the tech and product side. But I can speak, I can speak a little bit in terms of ensuring, ensuring our independence. I think if you look back historically at other media publications, what they used to do is basically draw a line, I guess, between church and state, as it were, and that's, you know, the guys that are actually in the trenches,

writing the stories, and then, you know, the money-making part of the business where this content is effectively being monetized. Maybe we'll talk about some of these business models there today, but, you know, it's super important to kind of keep, those separate and that you know those incentives between the journalists and how the media company is looking to make money aren't those wires aren't crossed as it were they're they're they're not crossed okay yeah cool uh i mean yeah i mean i think i think that it's

i'm not i don't consider myself to be a journalist although some people on twitter sometimes you know put me in that category um but uh you know i think you know of course uh as a media property that accepts sponsorship, you know, over six years of doing Epicenter, I think I've had to make, you know, we've had to make choices and we've had to, yeah, be quite diligent. But, you know, I'm not going to say that there isn't sometimes biases that can, you know, surface. But, yeah, it's an interesting challenge.

But so today, I mean, I think this conversation should, you know, the reason why I wanted to get you guys in here was to talk a little bit more about, about the challenges and also the opportunities that exist in terms of monetization of media platforms. So both of you run very different media platforms, one being a social media platform, the other being a proper sort of like journalistic media company. But this question is to the both of you, generally what kind of issues and what kind of problems are you solved? with the different things that you're doing. So like with PEPO and we'll get to talk about this a little bit more in detail, but the monetization model that you're implementing in decrypt.

Yeah, I think from the PIPO side, you know, look, first and foremost, we're a technology company. And we built OST technology, open simple token technology, to enable any application to inject the Internet of money into their application. And that's basically our reason for existence. And so how do you do that? we enable smart contract wallets to be embedded in any app with an SDK that we've developed, and then everything that's needed in order to make sure that those transactions can happen

at almost zero cost on kind of scalable layer two chains. And we can go into deeper and deeper as to even lower down the protocol how that works. And PIPO as an app, you know, halfway through 2019, we looked at a, we were at a place where we felt like our technology platform was ready to be used by third parties. And we decided not to wait for others to adopt it. It's like, you know, trying to get people to adopt frontier technology that they don't know that they need yet is always complicated. And you can take a long time. And we said, what we really need to do is to prove some use cases and show everyone was possible.

And so we set out to see if we'd come up with a use case that was worthy of kind of being like a showcase to demonstrate into the world what our technology is capable of. And the process we went through was to just start by interviewing lots of people. And we had these, you know, a number of hypotheses early on. And as these things go, some of them, most of them were wrong. But the way we found out was by talking to people. And we started by just talking to people in general about their social media consumption, you know, how they were using sites, let's say, like Twitter, YouTube. We talked to podcasters and kind of what their frustrations and challenges were

and how they were, you know, monetizing their podcasts. We talked to people about their likes and dislikes with Patreon as an example. We talked to people about things like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. We went all the way around. And what we uncovered through all these conversations was that a few things stood out. One is we heard that increasingly everyone's a content creator, that every day we're creating tons of content and we're basically uploading that content to these large dominant Web2O platforms who are monetizing our content and our data

And most people, unless you're Kim Kardashian, are not making much money from it. We heard from a number of folks, podcasters in particular, that service like Patreon should work, but don't work as well as they should. If they don't shut you down. Yeah, yeah. So they're not sensor resistant, right? Totally not. But I had a cosmos newsletter and just like disappeared.

No reason. Was that a Mailchimp thing? No. It was on Patreon. Oh, on Patreon. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I gave me started about Patreon.

No, so we uncovered a lot of things around, so we found no matter where people were creating content, you know, with an abundance of content, you know, people feel like they're giving up their content for free and not very struggling to monetize. We found that it's hard for people to stand out and get noticed and recognized. There's a, the signal versus noise problems continue to, you know, to increase. And then we found that just the payment structure also made in Web2O made a lot of these problems insurmountable. So, for instance, pretty much every website app uses Stripe as a payment processor these days.

Stripes fees are 30 cents on every transaction plus 2.8% of the transaction because Visa MasterCard charge them 25 cents and 2.5%. And, you know, you can't have a one cent or five cent transaction, you know, if you're being charged 30 cents and 2.8%. So it makes micro transactions impossible. So that's where the internet money comes in. And we said, okay, well, we can solve this problem, right? We can have these transactions be person to person on a blockchain.

You have no value loss. You know, you don't have anyone in between collecting rents on it. And you don't have to pay the credit card processors as well. So there's an economic difference. And then use the fact that, you know, tokens are transferring or values transferring to make the experiences richer. And so, for instance, in PIPO, you know, every token not just earns money. You know, every like not just earns money.

But it also impacts the relevance engine, the personization. cutting down on the noise. And so, you know, it's like, how do you use kind of value and this internet value to actually make experiences better? Yeah, I was talking to Paul yesterday about this very thing.

And I think the challenge in podcasting, and particularly, I think, in the Western world, because, I mean, from what I've heard in my conversations with people and say China, for instance, is that the ecosystem is very different. But the particular challenge with, with sort of Western podcasting

is, you know, these platforms behind you, Apple, Podcast, Spotify, on YouTube and all of the others, none of them or nearly none of them have monetization built in or sort of frictionless payments.

So if you want to do any form of monetization, well, you've got to lock your users into this other platform like Patreon or whatever you choose to go through. And that's just not the way people consume. And it's not seamless, right?

So there are platforms to that allow you to monetize content. But it's not, it's not frictionless. There's not like a one click in my podcast player like Spotify where I can just tip, you know, whoever I like. Well, let me see so, you know, Patreon in the podcast is a great example. We went and spoke to, it must have been dozens of podcasters. And what we found was that...

You didn't talk to me. And it's funny because we didn't even start in crypto. We started just talking people we talked about. Religion, sports, politics. And, you know, frankly, we were. were just crawling Patreon and finding kind of, you know, we look for people I called them basically the grinders, basically people who were not yet the superstars, but you could tell that they were doing a lot of work to try to make money, but not that's what you're

yet. They said, let's talk to them because they would have pain points, right? So we'd find these people who are in that category. And here's what we heard. It was funny. So what we heard is that one is that because the, you call it tipping, but let's say the value transfer is not contextual, that most people didn't. don't do it. In fact, we found that only the podcast are super fans end up, you know,

clicking over to Patreon and signing up for a subscription. The other thing is the economic model that because of the Stripe thing I was talking about, you know, the 2.8% and 30 cents, that they can't allow you to just kind of give 10 cents, right? Or 20 cents. So you have to sign up for a subscription, which is usually two or three bucks a month with a recurring subscription that it's hard to cancel. And so the model doesn't lend itself towards this kind of like, wow, I really like what Seb said at minute 30, you know, and just click the button and say, okay, you know, great job, Seb. We also found, frankly, that people hate the word tipping. The whole idea of tipping is not something that people associate with online content,

but people are very open to showing appreciation with value transfers. And so that's, you know, that's, you know, kind of, that's received tokens of appreciation and earn more than just likes, right? And so it's like, and that's, so anyway, so, my point in all this is people has been developed through a lot of direct user research. I've done personally with our team over a thousand interviews in the last year. We're literally we spent 30 minutes just talking to people. We try to find pain points. We try to explore and discover kind of what are things that they're trying to get done that can't get done. What are the hacks they're doing to try to get it done and figure out how do we

build a better product to make it possible for them. With PIPO, we decided, and this was a, I guess the hardest, two big decisions we made. One was in, in, in, July of last year, I think it was July. We were like exploring all these things and we had like all these ideas of like, well, you could create a button that you could like tip people on Instagram with or on Twitter and we're like, no, we need a place to start. And we kept hearing from people what we need is an authentic connection to the content creators. So we said, all right, how do we create those authentic connections? That led us a 30 second videos because it was like you have to be yourself in a 30 second video. And then the hardest kind of decision we made up to lead up to the people

launch was we decided to narrow the focus just to the crypto community to start. And this was really controversial internally. We had so many arguments about this because we had been talking to people, as I said, in like politics and sports and religion and all these different topics. And we're like, we're going to focus just on crypto. And I was like, why? Like, why just crypto? And it was like, you know what?

Same reason why Airbnb launched in San Francisco before it took over the world. Same reason why, you know, you got to pick one market and figure out the density of it, get it right, before we expand it to others. The one thing. Yeah. Figure out the one thing. I'll just keep it for one second. It's funny, we also found out early on that crypto itself is not a narrow community.

There's so many different subcommittees inside of crypto. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think like people who has found, you know, at least one subset of the crypto community, I think, which is sort of like the defy community. There seems to be a lot of people, like, you know, a lot of people that you see here will be there. Not so much so, like other communities. A lot of Dowell people.

A lot of Dow people. Yeah. I mean, activists. Activists as well. And you're starting to see like, yeah, like this sort of new wave of people coming on. Like, so this is the whole food blogger. It's sort of foodies, which is kind of cool.

And it's an interesting use case, I think, like for a video app to be able to, you know, because people take pictures of their food in restaurants and things like that. So I think that it lends well to the application. So I want to talk a little bit about ecosystem growth. And, you know, what are the levers that allow a relatively new ecosystem to grow? Because the importance, I think, with any platform, is to have network effects. So once again, I'm pointing to the platforms behind us, you know, Apple, podcast, Spotify, etc. You know, if these platforms are successful, well, it's because there's a lot of people on there.

And, you know, as a podcaster, for instance, I'm glad that I've got a lot of people on Apple podcast listening to us or on Spotify or wherever. But if all of a sudden I have to move all my listeners to one platform because that's where I find the sort of marketing features or monetization features that I find, that's an enormous amount of work. In the case of PIPO, what kind of things are you experimenting with here so that people actually start using the platform and then content creators feel that, well, you know, this is a good platform where I can start creating content.

I mean, I think there's a few things going on here. One is a whole lot of patience and being trying to say like smart, not fast. Now, at the same time, we're moving fast, but like, I mean by smart, not just fast is, you know, what we've said is that we need to get it if you, we need to get it right for one community and one set of people and then expand out from there rather than trying to go conquer the whole world. And I also kind of, you know, I coach our team on patience and essentially is like, look, I have no idea if PIPO will be the next Snapchat, right, or the next Instagram. And the chances are one in a billion of it happening, of it having, you know, hundreds of millions or billions of users.

But what I do know is that if we get a loyal user base that is using PIPO, it's going to track lots of other companies who want to have that same Internet of value technology embedded in their apps as well. And you can get that snowball effect of like you start with PIPO and then you get to the next, you know, larger app and the next larger app. The next thing you know, you've got, whether it's a Snapchat or Instagram or TikTok or saying, okay, how do we use that technology in our application? So, for instance, in the podcasting world, you know, we wouldn't be able to go out and sell our technology today to Spotify or Apple. But you find some upstarts in the podcasting space who, you know, they make some inroads. And then, you know, the next level, the next level, the next level, the next level. So you can't cut corners.

You got to let these flywheels kind of build. Now, the key for us in terms of features in people is follow the users and make it useful for them. And we need to find, you know, we're constantly searching and the way we search by having conversations by talking to people and finding out what does it take to make the app essential. You don't want to be something that people are stacking is like you get just another thing in their toolkit. You want to be something that's one of the first things they think about when they're kind of have something in mind. And what we hit on in the last few weeks is communities. One thing that we found is as opposed to TikTok, which is entertainment kind of bite-sized content where people just want to have like a random bit of delight that they kind of sink into. With PIPO, people were using it for professional, for work kind of related purposes.

And with professional work related. It's like the, I like to call it the sort of crypto Twitter, TikTok, steam it. But also like a little bit of a little bit of link. in because it's kind of professional. And that's something with, so what is, so if it's professional, what does that mean? Well, so you talk to people, well, professional is more deliberate. You go searching for a particular topic or a particular community that you're kind of invested in. And so we went deep on launching these communities of Epicenter.

You guys, you know, host a community on people. We launched them at Eat, Denver. And then we've been rolling out of things about 50 communities on people now. And communities allow people to congregate their 30-second videos and conversations around topics to get almost like, you know, notifications and subscriptions and kind of followers for those topics. A lot of been event-based, but it's, you know, what we're doing is we're learning as we build the app and we're building it with the users.

And again, as I say, it's like, look, I think we're on to something. I think we're going to show over the next, you know, year that, you know, people is an app that on its own is very, very interesting and gains a huge following and shows that you can, you can earn more than just likes. I also think we're very rapidly proving the value of the technology. through people. And I can tell you we've had dozens of companies that come to us because they see what we've built with people and they say, I want that in my app. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I guess when I use the app, I don't really, I don't necessarily,

it doesn't necessarily come to mind that, you know, people could be used in other applications that, you know, you could find, you could find that, that, that, that, that people button, you know, in a podcast app or on a social network or something like that. But, yeah, It's about growing an ecosystem and the social media app is just one of those ecosystems. And then, you know, and we'll talk, we'll talk now a bit more about what you guys are doing at DeCrypt. But, you know, creating the bridges between those different communities where you might have a strong community over on PIPO and then sort of overlapping communities on DeCrypt. And then those tokens can flow also between those platforms. So I want to move now a little bit more on the sort of the OST.

model and what you guys are building on top of OST. Obviously, PIPO is built on top of OST. So my question to you, James, is what is it in the OSC technology that you found interesting and made you want to build

this sort of community payments platform on top of DECRIP? Yeah, sure. So I can pick up where Jason left off and why we're one of the companies that are looking to leverage this technology. So back at DevCon last year, I was at that conference and I saw people in action. And I guess for me it was one of the first times where I've actually looked at what is a Web Free product and it doesn't feel or look like a Web Free product. it meets those same user standards that some of the kind of best in class products more broadly in the in the tech space have been able to hit so super high level that's uh how are you guys how are you guys using using this tech and able to deliver this user experience um with blockchain technology so that was the hook for me um in terms of i guess the different component parts in terms of why it's been really fantastic for us to build on top of it

super fast it's cheap and I think for us as you know a fairly small company this technology that Jason and the guys at OST had been building you know it's a toolkit and you can configure that in different ways

our use case at DeCrypt is slightly different so we are looking at the intersection of us as the publisher the people that are consuming our content and then the brands that want to connect with that audience in a way which is completely non-intrusive. So we have a slightly different configuration. But having that toolkit, if we had to build all this stuff ourselves, it would take a long time and be incredibly resource intensive.

So the SDKs they offer allow us to build quickly. They allow us to iterate and ultimately answer the problems that our users have. So then let's talk about the technology a little bit and the SDK and, how you guys are leveraging that. So what are the different components that are part of the OST toolkit and how do you leverage it? I'll give you a high level. Maybe if Jason wants to jump in as well, he can give us a deep dive. So in our particularly use case, we're doing initially a lot more kind of company,

decrypt being in the company, two user interactions instead of user to user to use. user interactions. So example, on people in the community are sending value to each other. What we're looking to do is share value between companies and our users. So we'll talk about this a little bit later on today, which I'm excited about. But DeCrypt is launching what we're calling DeCriP Seasons. DeCripe Seasons are seasonal releases of our DeCrip-based token, which is brought to you by a brand. So it could be an epicenter season. It could be a Samsung season. And then in one of these

given seasons, there is a limited run of tokens, which users can earn. So users earn by reading the content, users earn by engaging with this content, by sharing it. And then, you know, once they're built up a number of these, they can, they can cash out for rewards that are valuable to them. Okay. Now, obviously, what the brand's getting from this side is they are co-sponsoring this token and they get to be, really immersed into the experience and their brand is front and center every time one of these interactions interactions take place. Can you give me an example? So let's say you have an exchange that wants to sponsor one of these seasons. What are the kinds of interactions that would allow readers or users of the platform to get those tokens? And where would the sponsor

find sort of like the connection. Yeah. I think one thing just to kind of kick this off is I think Web 3 is teaching a lot of people that their attention actually has value. I think users are becoming a lot more cognizant of that. You know, it's a bit of a hangover from all of these huge Web 2 monopolies

that have, you know, been able to make millions, billions of dollars from, you know, using user information and data. So I think we're trying to play a small part in kind of making a bit more of having a system with a bit more parity where users are rewarded from that. So your question, example, we're keeping it simple to begin with. Let's say our users are reading an article on the Epicenter podcast or they're reading an article talking about what the guys that people are doing. They read the article. Once they're with the article, they get an option to be able to complete it.

As soon as they complete that given piece, they'll give a reaction. They'll let them know user how they felt about that. So that's, this piece was great. This piece is bearish. This piece is bullish. And then as soon as they've completed it as a reward for them completing and obviously investing their time and attention in this content, they will instantly using the OST tech we've been talked about.

They'll get sent one of these co-branded tokens. They'll add to their wallet. and then you'll see in the wallet that they have one of these, one of these co-branded tokens brought to you by the brand partner for that particular season. Okay. And then all those tokens roll up to the DeCrip tokens. That's right. So I can talk a little about the enabling technology that makes that possible.

Okay. Is that good? Yeah. Okay. So OST is a layer two Ethereum smart contract solution. And so what we do basically is we enable brands like DeCrip to deploy tokens on layer two Ethereum chains, the value of those tokens are determined by locking value in contracts on layer one. So let's say you could take any ERC20 token, it could be ETH, it could be die, whatever it is,

and use it as the base for creating the token on layer two. And then you basically create a mapping of, let's say, one to one, or one to a 10, whatever you want the exchange rate to be, but that gets fixed in the smart contract so that whoever receives the layer two tokens, they know the value of that token is based on what's ever in layer one. And so for instance, in the PIPO app, you have a one-one mapping of PIPO to the OST token. And OST, you know, most recently trades in the range of, you know, let's say 0.9 cents to 1.5 cents. And users see the fluctuation of that. But you could also have the backing of the token on the layer two could also be backed by a stable coin like Dye or USD if you wanted to.

Okay, so you, for instance, like, you know, the decrypt token could be backed by Dye instead of the OST so that you would have like a stable coin. value. Totally up to them. We're acknowledging to that. Okay. So then they, you know, then the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, crypto token has in a secondary market. It can't be changed.

It can't be changed. It's, it's, and so, and the, in the, kind of what's, what's being staked on layer one. And so technically an owner of a decrypt token, if it was backed by die, let's say if it was one to one, would say, okay, I know this token is worth a dollar because there's die in a contract that backs that. And if they ever want to call on that, they could. Although the in-app experience of redemption we've created is more compliant, which is how do you cash out for gift cards, which is part of the SDK that we provide, same thing as in PIPO. And all of that is part of delivering a solution that actually speaks to what users want and need versus trying to just do. what is the best optimal solution that you might have, say, for a couple of years from now, which would be, you know, user can just use their own keys and just cash how far as they want,

let's say, right? But for now, gift cards work really, really well. So the next part of the enabling technology is that RSDK, which we're talking about, enables brands like DeCrip to embed a smart contract wallet, basically have a smart contract wallet that every one of their users can get. And we deploy a number of smart contracts for, on behalf of every user on the layer two chains, including basically a, what's called a token holder address, which is where the user's tokens live,

and they can access that from multiple devices. A recovery contract would allow them to recover using a six-digit pin with a delayed recovery module. And all of this is kind of the blockchain under the scenes being lower down than any user really needs to know about. That makes these, you know, basically, almost zero-cost token transfers, possible. Okay, interesting. I wasn't aware that there was like you could actually do like this

backing with dye and like that, you know, because I mean ultimately you could create a token that's word like a penny for instance. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And and how to be backed by die. Now the, at the moment though, you know, these tokens, you can use them in people to buy gift cards. But that's a regulatory. Yeah, essentially the issue at the moment. Yeah. So our approach has been, I call land and expand versus go for the optimal. And land and expand is, you know, like rather than trying to spend the next, let's say, several years getting regulatory clearance to do the entire optimal solution, which would be, let's say user can move whatever money they want into an app like PIPO

and then, you know, cash out any way they want to whether it's, you know, dollars or crypto or the bank, whatever it is. We said let's get in the app store first with something that is regulatory compliant and Apple component. Which is a challenging itself. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so it was the first crypto app approved by Apple.

Actually, the conversation there was really funny because we had, our lawyers were cool, basically the solution that we implemented because we architected with them for over, I guess, a year's worth of work with them. We brought to Apple, and Apple was like, hmm, interesting, but we're not the law. We're Apple. So we want to talk to you about this, and they dug into it, and then we got their clearance. But basically, what I'm getting at here is... How do you talk to Apple?

Like, a number you call? Well, I'll tell you, I'm actually, I was in Osaka at DevCon, and we really wanted to move the app out of Texas. flight and our lawyers are like we're clear we're good and so and the clearance I'm talking about here is basically we implement the solution where you can you can you can you can basically can you can you can buy more tokens using Apple Pay and Google pay so using their established means so relying on them to be the payment processor and then cashing out for anything that's a store of value like a gift card

that sort of that could be an Amazon Airbnb gift card it also could be an NFT it could be purchasing something a domain or whatever might be anything as a store of value, you don't need my transmission license for, for, uh, my transmitter license. Right. And so we got our lawyer sign up for it. And then I was like, all right, let's, let's get this thing to into the app store. Let's show during DevCon that we actually can get this live in the app store. So we submit this to Apple with a note basically saying, um, you know, we want to be first.

We want to show that this is possible to have a crypto powered in app, you know, blah, blah, blah. I sent them all the legal opinions. I sent a back channel, some folks I knew it at Apple said try to get someone that we can get attention on this. and they responded immediately. It was amazing. We had a woman on the app review team. I think she was a lawyer. I don't know if we're certain,

but based on her question, I think she was. She said, let's get on some calls. I was talking to three to four in the morning in Osaka time back in Cooper Tino where she was. And we went through three rounds of review and kind of some revisions

and they approved the app. Cool. That's really interesting. I'd like to bring it back to you, James. And what's, I mean, when you were speaking with advertisers, sponsors on the platform, what's, you know, what's that conversation look like? Where traditionally you're telling them like, hey, you know, buy this ad space or maybe you're not even having that conversation because you're going through some, some ad marketplace. How does that conversation now change that, you know, you guys are doing this, this co-briated token? Yeah.

So I think it's important to flag that I think these business models tend to move a lot more slowly than the technology itself. You guys probably both experienced that. And the platforms and the monetization methods that some of these advertisers are used to are, you know, what's been existing for a while. So this is your ad exchanges. This is your banner ads. These are your sponsorships that you might put on a product like a podcast. They're business models which have been kind of established for a little while and that these ad buyers are familiar with.

So, you know, I do think, and this relates to what Jason's been saying and, you know, looking for that beachhead market, the conversations that we're trying to have are with companies that are, you know, aware that they think there's a better way, that these business models are slightly out of date. They have, you know, a larger experimental ad budget, let us say, and that they're willing to, you know, try things which are not totally unfamiliar with what we've seen before, but, you know, introduce, you know, a bit of novel technology in our case and are happy to work with us and we play out those experiments.

I mean, I think similar to how we're starting people in the crypto community and building it out from there. I mean, I would see, like, you get some pretty awesome crypto brands to, crypto-native companies to prove some use cases that you can then build out and take that to mainstream companies. And they'll see the results first rather than just being sold on something that's pie in this guy. Very similar. One thing I just wanted to note, like, you know, nothing that I've mentioned at all in terms of, you know, modernization, whereas James has in terms of, you know, his model. is at all based on, let's say, validator economics or, you know, kind of sealing transactions on a blockchain or number go up.

And I think it's really important to emphasize that aspect of it that, you know, there's this sort of this, it's almost like the easy in crypto, easy ways to just go to try to appeal towards, you know, if enough people buy, it'll create demand that will increase the prices and everyone will make money. and I think, you know, having, you know, these apps can't be just all kind of everyone's going to make money through kind of usage and network kind of fees, that there needs to be more utility to them. And I think it's a important distinction because I think in terms of creating this Internet value, I think the first use cases we have today, mostly around Defi, is around kind of, let's say, upending the banking system and or maybe introducing that there could be an alternative form of banking or kind of, you know, kind of finance. the actual kind of injection of what does that mean for applications and products and monos, you know, whole new monization models, we've yet to see that yet, but I don't want to just fall back on while number go up. Yeah. Now, do you foresee any, I mean, and this is the question is for the both of you, but do you

foresee sort of bridges between the, the decrypt token, the PEPO token, and DFI, you know, what are some of the interesting things that? maybe you're brainstorming about that. Well, I'll speak on the PIPO side, and actually also from the OSD technology side, is so as part of the announcement we're doing today is we're also announcing the OSD redemption store SDK. So today we're powering the store inside of PIPO

where you can cash out for Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, gift cards. We also added unstoppable domains, which is crypto domain site today as well. And we're providing that also now in SDK. So the folks that decrypt are able to basically we power the cash had options for them. They don't have to build that themselves either. Now, next steps, we want to enable kind of crossover between the tokens.

So let's say you could take your PIPO coins and convert them to decrypt coins if you wanted to or to other partners we have. And, you know, it's like, you know, what we're looking for is just more ways to create this interoperability and kind of network effects across the system. Now, in terms of where we go with that, over time we want to enable people to take more control over what's in their wallets. Today, the wallet themselves is completely self-custody. So we, nor decrypt, nor any of our partners,

have any way of reaching into a user's wallet and taking their tokens or expiring them. It's you earn it, you own it. Now, the next step is we want people who are maybe more crypto-savvy to be able to say, okay, I'd like to participate in defy through that or I would like to maybe convert some of my tokens into crypto, or into other things they might want to do with their tokens,

we're taking an incremental step-by-step approach to that. It's like the number one reason why people aren't, let's say, adopting people faster is not that right now. It's, you know, how do they get more value from the video format or whatever it is? Right. So do you've got to work on these things? We prioritize them based on user interest. Yeah, I mean, I can add to that. I mean, I think it's the kind of holy grail of this space

that there's just this kind of seamless fluid transfer of value which can go kind of everywhere and anywhere. We're excited to see the interoperability options continue to evolve, you know, with OST, but also, you know, all these great technology companies in this space. I can just second what Jason said, and that's, you know, you've got to start somewhere. It's almost like Maslow's user hierarchy of needs. And I think it's looking to provide utility here and now and that interoperability and users completing the loop and getting value from these systems,

you know, there's things that we can do before looking at, you know, where these tokens can be sent, exchanged, and used elsewhere. Now, let's just like you say, if we were to say to users and people, you know, lock up your tokens for a period of time and earn interest on them, so you can't cash them out during that time. Yeah, you could totally do that, right? I mean, I'm tipping out a lot of tokens,

but a lot of them could be locked in defy, you know? Users could do that, which way, We'd want to make sure that, you look, we're in the app store. So we have a higher god. Her name is Apple, right? And so we had to make sure we do such things in a compliant manner. And today our wallet is self-custody. And we don't want to move to us being a custodian.

So we'd have to find a really slick U.S. for the user to understand what she's doing. And for her to decide, okay, I'm now defying my tokens and getting interest on it. And then obviously, you know, they didn't say, well, how am I earning 8% interest from my keep my tokens of people that could be interesting way to educate people and why people are willing to borrow die and that's a try rates but you know one step at a time that would be really cool i mean i think that's like a really interesting way to get people just regular people sort of like into defy and sort of understanding the the mechanics of defy who's on the other side of

that eight percent trade um so you know with regards to the SDK uh i think one of the things that has been on my mind recently. So we recently did an episode with Item Alou Streis of Argent. You're familiar with Argent. They built a great wallet. And I think a lot of the technology that sits behind Argent,

specifically with regards to the wallet and sort of the multi-sig wallet, et cetera, it's probably quite similar to that of OST. Now, you know, for an app like theirs, they're controlling the technology, but they also you know leverage basically

basically have control over the entire user interface now for something like OST you guys are a technology provider you're you know you're providing technology at the base layer but you're not you're not necessarily like sitting in design workshops with the client

sort of coaching them on what are the user experience best practices around things like maybe you are but like you know if you want to scale It's funny you say that, Sam. No, but I mean, just think, like, hypothetically, if you want to scale, you're providing an API, anybody can use it.

Now, you know, for a company like DeCrypt that's building this user interface, you know, there's a lot of really new and novel concepts in there. One of which is recovery. So, you know, if you take something like recovery, I don't know if OSCE has this at the moment, I presume you could have it where you would have maybe like one of your people friends

can help you recover your wallet. How do we create good user experience practices because it goes beyond just the technology. We need to create UX standards around things like recovery, key storage, where your keys are stored, how you recover them. And it's not super clear. So a couple things to unpack here. So this is a really great question.

The first is that, so huge admirers and fans and close to the guys at Argent, a really great team. Argent took the path of, yeah, they took the path of being a standalone wallet. and our kind of ethos at OST was to be ingredient technology. And so while they're under the, you know, like a lot of what makes OSC technology possible has some commonalities with Argent, they wanted to be a wallet product where people use the wallet. And we said we want to enable thousands of wallet products to be within apps using our technology.

Just a different approach to a similar kind of problem to solve. We said let's go to folks who already have distribution like DeCrypt and others rather than us trying to gain, you know, wallet downloads. And our also kind of philosophy there is that the, we call it like wallet as a platform, that wallet isn't out an app, wallet is just basically, while it's a number where tokens are held, and that can be embedded into all sorts of different places. It's a contract. Now, in terms of the SDK itself, and this is really important, we have created the OST wallet SDK in such a way that all of the kind of the core functionality of the wallet and the user experience around adding multiple devices, initiating recovery, going through the recovery process.

All of that is powered by the SDK in such a way where it's available on iOS and Android and React Native in such a way where the team at decrypt, they don't need to, for that part of their application, they don't need to adjust any of the UI at all. So basically it's like everything that's, it's in several layers of the wallet functionality,

they can basically just kind of take this and just plop it right into their application. And so, and we've optimized that UX based on our user research and feedback, so that they don't need to write any of that. I think, yeah, I mean, I can add to that. Like, zooming out, when we started to see UX coming out of the dawn of the internet, there were all these weird elements that people haven't seen before.

Like, this is a form, and I need to enter my information into a form. And obviously, there's been loads of research and best practices that have emerged out of these news. Years and years and years of a set. People are still figuring out forms. Anyway, so I mean, I think that all is to say that, you know, we're seeing these new patterns. We're seeing like a users being able to recover their keys. And over time, I think the more and more people work in this space, the more and more people use this technology. We see these best practices emerge.

And, you know, from our side, I think implementing these patterns starts with. with boring as it sounds, that's good documentation, that's good examples of what to follow. Yeah, and, you know, in terms of these recovery patterns and the other patterns that are more novel to Web 3, you know, being able to follow the practices that OST put out has been great. Interesting example of this.

So when we created the wallet recovery module for the OST, wallet SDK, we did this from two fronts. The one is we started with user research and we put, we called paper testing, We put different options in front of people, and we saw where they succeeded and where they failed. And these are mainstream users we started with, not with kind of say crypto-savvy people. And what we found was that a six-digit pin was the maximum that someone was able to remember again and again and again.

And so, you know, obviously writing down 12 words would be more optimal, but most people won't do it. You obviously can't remember 12 words. But six digits was something that people remember it every single time. And so we then went to our security experts and said, okay, we need to find a way to enable a six-digit wallet recovery from smart contract to be part of our wallet SDK. So we started with the experience, then we reversed engineered back to the technology, and then we figured out a way to make a six-digit pin recovery from smart contract. Now, we also tested what you mentioned, social recovery, and it failed miserably, right? And so it's one of these concepts where I think a lot of us, you know, crypto nerds, like we think, oh, it would be great. You can ask three of your friends to help you recover from smart contract.

your friends don't want to help you do that. And you don't want it either. Most people, they actually don't, they don't get it. It's not a viable solution. And so it's okay the fact that from a security standpoint, it would work, but it doesn't actually mean people are going to do it. So we focus on things that people actually can use. Interesting.

How do you overcome the challenges, I guess, that are linked, specifically with regards to the decrypt token? How do you overcome the challenges of, sort of civil attacks. I mean, with, I don't want to say it's harder on people, but, you know, on people, you need to have like a Twitter account. You need to, it's like on an app. But, you know, with, with, with a web browser, it's maybe easier to automate,

sort of identity creations and, and getting people to sort of like, sure. So, to begin with, we're launching on an app. security is obviously significantly easier on an app. It's much more, it's easier to exploit on the web. Looking to expand into the web later, but first and foremost, we're releasing the DeCripped app where we're introducing these tokens on our seasons.

I think when we're looking from a token design point of view when we're looking at all these different actions and incentivizing those actions, you've got to flick the coin and be like, okay, what's a malicious use? are going to actually do here to try and exploit this. So to start off with, confirming that a user has read an article, our kind of mechanic there to prevent, you know,

someone building some clever bot that's going to be reading thousands of articles a day and absolutely destroying our token reserve. That's, we put a sensible daily cap on the number of tokens that a reader can use. And we also attach a sensible kind of reading speed to our articles. So someone who's a really quick reader, what does that look like in terms of words per minute?

And we have a timeout. So that's just an example of how we're thinking about preventing abuse on that particular action. But the same applies to sharing and being able to validate that. I think, you know,

there's simple things you can do to guard against these kind of malicious actors. Yeah. The best thing is put some out there also and just, you know, you'll think that you come up with everything and then just watch the users

and fill the holes. Because users will find them and it's like, It's okay. These apps right now are not completely decentralized from the redemption standpoint. And so, as I said, the user has a self-custody wallet. It's a smart contract wallet. They own their own keys. We can't take money from them. But we do play a role right now in the cash-out. And so there's always this kind of this safety net that, well, if someone goes to cash-out and you saw that they were a malicious actor, we don't have to basically honor the cash-out in that instance. Now, if they did something that was our mistake that allowed them to, you know, to accumulate lots of tokens that, you know, then we should let them keep what they earn. What's the future? What does the future of media and tokens look like? I mean, this is the question that sort of like I've carried with me for the last six, over six years of doing a podcast is, you know, what are the new models look like and where is this space going to go?

and I think there's been a lot of experimentation. I mean, even in the early days of Epicenter, you know, we're part of the LTV network. And there were some early, early experimentations there even before Ethereum on counterparty with the LTV token. You know, other platforms have done this, like Steam it. Okay, let's not talk about the whole drama there. But, you know, what's the future here?

And where are we going to see the most innovation come from? Yeah. I mean, look, my perspective, on this is that we're at the very beginning days of injecting the internet of money into applications, websites, and enabling all new sorts of business models that are going to be aided by the fact that anything that you can do, anywhere you can transfer a piece of data or there's an API call or any kind of action a user can take online, whether it's a five-star review, a high five, an emoji, whatever might be, could have value attached to it. And that can have impact on consumer experiences, but also on...

business models and it can start to create new models of how individuals can monetize their data, their content, etc. And I think it's going to be, it's going to take longer at first than I think people wish to materialize. When it does, people are going to be like, whoa, where did that come from? It's huge. It's everywhere. And I think we're at right now is like, we're at least up to bat, right? So like, I think, you know, six months ago was like, will this ever happen? At least now we're in the game, right? And I think now that we're in the game, we're going to start to see some things moving pretty fast. So you think about defy as an example.

Like, you know, a year ago, no one was talking about defy. And suddenly it's everywhere, right? And we're at this, like, the beginnings of these kernels of, like, internet of value kind of percolating across. And it's going to be one app and the next app, the next app, and all of a sudden you're like, whoa, like, someone will create the next Snapchat or Instagram or something, maybe one, maybe the next media site or wherever it might be, that'll be completely, you know, token powered.

And people are like, a whole new business model isn't, you know. been invented here. I think it's a very good question. I wish I knew the answer. I wish I knew the answer to that one, Seb. I think ultimately all of these businesses largely shaped by the business models that emerged. You know, we've seen that start of the internet and media companies being completely

upended. We've seen that with the rise of social media. You know, I'm personally keeping my eye on this and I'm really excited to, what Jason's alluding to and you know if this kind of elusive business model emerges from web three I think people are aware that you know there's certainly a different toolkit now where we can start you know building a new business model but um what I come back to is just the notion of these web three tools being programmable trust and that's uh you know being able to good design good incentives um between between different groups and you know hopefully a system which

there's more equanimity between the parties. So I don't know, but I'm excited to find out. Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes, and I'll be following it very closely because it's a topic that's very near to me and where I'm really interested in seeing so of the progression. And, you know, I mean, with the epicenter, this could also be perhaps an area of experimentation.

And yeah, who knows? I mean, we could most certainly burn to some more over beers or something. Thanks, guys, for being on the podcast. That's it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, Seth.