alright what's up everyone dua phy here with vibetech again and i dude couldn't be more excited another one of my absolute favorite people from barcaster has agreed to join me on this weird experiment whereas i learn how to podcast and things we have devin aka not devin i think for the purposes of the podcast i'll just refer to you as devin if that's okay then
that is please that's fine we don't have to make it awkward
alright sounds good well devin i'm really excited to have you on we've got a really interesting story and a really interesting journey with backpack which you're working on with some other stuff in the past especially in terms of like upscaling yourself and and the vc journey but i think if you could just give yourself like a little bit of a background on who you are what you're working on and and maybe how how you found farcaster i find that you know the protocol's growing and we all knew each other at one point and we don't anymore and that's great but like yeah a little context helps before we dig into like the cool shit
for sure so let's start with the the farcaster i guess journey yeah
yeah whatever you
want man yeah a good a good friend of mine who had been part of a a much earlier experiment in blockchain stuff that we've started in early twenty twenty which ended up actually dovetailing into backpack stuff but he he anyway had gone to i think art basil or something like that i that event i haven't gone to that event so i'm not familiar with that event i know it's a prestigious event anyway he brad brad's my homie so he goes to that event and he's like yo dude have you seen this check it out and i i pull up forecaster docs and start reading through them online and i was looking at it i was like holy shit like this stuff is like familiar tech from like my early intro to blockchain days and kind of threw me for a loop because it was i don't know it was like a deja vu moment like you're like reading things that like you've worked on or worked around and that got me psyched because i was like alright i'm not used to seeing that and then go check it out shit this stuff works and it was like there was people in there and like it wasn't it was and they're always cheesy but it's like it's not cheesy like it was like working you know and i don't know i remember it anyway farcaster was just there was something special about it day one like i don't even know if i know how to like recount what was working and felt special about it but it definitely was different it was probably you guys you know it was like it was you it was you know it was kojo it was jack it was like it's like that whole that crew were fun to interact with so yeah
i feel you on that i think it's it's the people for sure it's funny that you went to the docs first i think you're actually the first person i didn't know that you went to the docs first you might be the first person that i've ever talked to that was like new new new exciting thing let me look at the docs right like i mean developers do it for like defy protocols and stuff like that i get it read the white paper but like for social protocol i feel like most of us were like ape did we're like oh cool someone to talk to we're like oh better than twitter like fucking low bar to clear right
low bar right
yeah so you opted to barcaster and are you working on backpack at that time already or
yeah yeah yeah that so backpack stuff started i guess like maybe some of my background then like my background in blockchain started 2011 and and that was that was by way of doing weather prediction and like probabilistic forecasting in 2010 and we were we were doing these models around extreme forecast or extreme heat and extreme cold events and we were trying to predict them out or model things out i keep saying prediction but it's it's all probabilistic so it's not a total prediction right it's just like trying to like model that distribution and no one else was doing this in 2010 there was one other company that had done it and sold to google which was the weather company and we had these large scale compute operations and they were expensive and so like operationally which is where my head is at a lot of time it's just like how do i build do accomplish this thing you know faster better more effectively whatever so operational efficiency is kinda like the thing that's rattling and and i was trying to figure out how to like manage our compute costs and started getting into like these concepts of distributed computing and there was two really like clear examples that existed out there in the market one of them was super new it was bitcoin and and it was what they were doing with compute and then it was the other one was seti at home which was the search for extraterrestrial information which has a movie about it with jodie foster called contact and and their whole thing with computing was taking the background radiation data that comes in through these you know array of radio telescopes and then process it for signal and and it's a highly parallelizable sort of dataset and and then so you could parcel this out and distribute it amongst a bunch of different computers with screensavers and so i took the seed of like those two ideas and started a company in 2012 called unoceros which was trying to do distributed computing off of people's mobile phones and the mobile phone was like this extra kick but anyway that had been like you know weather had given way to we've got this problem solving to go after and then that got me interested in this whole world of compute and protocols and how does data move and and that kind of infrastructure and then i followed that for from 2012 to 2018 effectively
yeah i didn't realize you're such an og honestly this is a part of the fun of even this podcast like i didn't actually realize how long people have been around like like i'll go look at like look at someone's linkedin like go look at like jack or koda's linkedin i'm like oh you have like real people before you show up at podcast or two like regular ass successful people that's it okay so then backpack backpack was the next thing after that like okay and this is just to be clear like this is one of the big reasons i wanted to have you on the pod because i think one of the interesting things about farcaster is it is sort of rewarding iconoclasts it's rewarding like orthogonal like thought processes it's rewarding a lot of like let's be different
yeah
and i think part of that's just like top down dan like we have to be different if we're gonna win like you can't compete against twitter being twitter like the exact same thing i think he understands that really deeply and like there's incentives around that like big deep into like the way that warcast and podcast was run but part of it i think is like people are fucking like tired right like people are really tired of like bang or whatever the acronym is now and i think your story's got a really interesting bet to it in terms of not that i suspect people will follow your exact path i think the idea here is that people are sort of trailblazing new ways and like you like dude all it like all in podcast like dude there's gonna be all these businesses that are only $10,000,000 businesses that are only three people and then like okay great like where are they and i feel like you're you're one of the few people actually like putting your money where your mouth isn't like trying to get it done so yeah i wanna hear that story well i wanna tell that story i want you to tell
this story when i walk it's funny it's funny too like it was funny to hear those things come out of the all in podcast mouth you know just any of that crude you know they take their background to begin with but in in my case like that was that was where i was at in 2020 i was looking around and going writing's on the wall we can do this we can do tiny teams that can produce huge amounts of revenues and returns and so much so that if you looked at them and then just carry them forward hey i'm gonna go build a good fucking business it's gonna be a great fucking business i give a shit about the tech i'm gonna support the product i'm gonna deliver it to people like i care about my customer set and i don't need to get the next billion customers i don't have to fucking think about a hundred million users to think about making something one hyper successful and two return a lot of fucking money right like yeah i have like this the way i think about it is lizard people called the lizard lizard people pattern right you there are there's there's 12,000,000 people out there that believe lizard people run the planet there's 12,000,000 people by us population by the way that's not the global i don't know what the fucking global number is and i don't want to know but there are 12,000,000 people in the us that buy this shit now that is the dumbest fucking product i can think of if i knock on your door and i'm like hey dewofi i've got a product for you here's what it is lizard people run the planet and like this is how they do it like this is my whole thesis i want you to buy into this whole thing and like let's go on this journey
yeah
no right no so what's the the whole point of this is though is that lizard people still has 12,000,000 users right yeah and this is fucking stupid but if you go all in on it and it's fucking stupid and you just do it better than someone else you still get 12,000,000 people if i build a banking solution you know my team and i put this together that makes self banking for you works the way you want it to and it's got opinions to how you do this right it's not like it's not generic vanilla shit i can't there's no way to make a perfect interface for everyone you can only make a really good interface for a really good use case and then there will be people who understand that use case and adopt it and like fall into that usage pattern and then there are people who won't and you can make that you can size that a little bit but if you go this wide it's for everyone and guess what it works for no one right so if i go all in on making self banking work pretty fucking well in like the ways that i understand it and the best ways that i can deliver it i i i gotta believe there's at least 12,000,000 users out there and if we have 12,000,000 users like we're doing fucking amazing
it's so funny it's i i don't know what this says about us but i have the exact same thesis except the number i use is like i think it's like a hundred million americans are young earth creationists so like i don't know perfect yeah everyone like everyone's got their own like number where like it's like okay this is reasonably ridiculous right like the alright
totally that's that's hilarious
i suppose it's the same for sure and it's funny you're talking about like the i'm i'm a big believer in like if it's worth if it's for everyone it's for no one right and like i've been i've been using this like this has like played out in a lot of different places in terms of like when people like ask me about like job hunting advice i'm like dude this isn't like tinder swiping right like paying premium for like as many like first dates as you can get yeah try to find the one you know what i mean right and like gauging like how much time you have what you're selling and who it's for especially in relation to the same thing for like protocols or like social networks right like it it doesn't have to be for everyone anymore or at least the product doesn't and we do in the same way messaging or your efforts get diluted as you go out further the product design is probably the same thing and i had not actually thought about that until you had brought it up but we're digressing a little bit and maybe getting out ahead of our skis
sure sure
what is backbanking
self banking yes so
self banking
so and i'm like what the hell is self banking too yeah because because you know previously we had bankless and i don't know i throw those those quotes up in there because for one you know crypto and its naming conventions or at least its first cut at naming conventions leave something to be desired like the whole go go off put on put on put on your marketing hat right is it better that we refer to the value in the negative or the positive should we call it trust less or should we call it trustful you know like should we call it permission less or should we should we give it a better you know better way i yeah i guess i just have like this gripe right that like we negatively named everything and then wanted to everyone to go yo take on this awesome new thing and and people psych psychologically don't like negatives all the time so you're just like you kinda prime them in a funny way
yeah so dude this is like that's like that midweek shit too right because it's like oh like whenever like i forget where it is there's some correlation between like intelligence and like depression right it's like when you know what's going on a little too much like it gets a little bit dicey for like your emotional like well-being right and it's like you gotta go down the curve and like i'm not calling myself a mid width but i do often say like like when i when i talk to people i'm like i'm not a dev i don't wanna be a dev and to be perfectly honest i think crypto would be a lot better with more people like me because because the only reason we have this crappy ux is because there's a bunch of really intelligent people all yes willing to figure it out and able to figure it out and everyone else is just like no i don't trust bankless and i don't trust yeah whatever whatever terrible naming conventions
it is
i want good stuff
yeah good stuff is good right exactly it it i i agree i agree so yes conventionally we just need a whole new you know facade on this thing but so to bring that to like then self banking which was one bank list was already taken which was great so i was like okay like not gonna i don't have to play with that and two what is this well it's like i am the bank i am the bank you know look at me do we i am the bank now right but i'm i'm taking
i'm taking notes but trust me i understand who the bank
so like how how then we had to accomplish that is like really like what i wanna do is put software into your hands that lets you affect all of the things that a bank can do with your money but you can just now do it for yourself but yeah that's that doesn't mean we take it and just give you crypto and go because that's the easiest answers like i can do that with bitcoin right now okay but no you can't right so it's like when you start a journey in finance you you don't just get handed a pile of cash and then you say go go out there good luck buy things sell things do you know do commerce and and such it's no go down to the bank open a bank account the bank account gives you this primitive it's an account right and like that lets you put stuff in it but we've started that we we've got that with like metamask and trust wallet and rainbow and all of them and like okay great but those interfaces are designed for you to interact with crypto they're like the aws consoles for the for the other side of the equation right it's like they're fine for what they do over there but we need something on like the on like the i am a normie side right i just wanna spend my money
yeah
i do not wanna go down to nike and buy a pair of shoes and pause in the middle of that shoe buying experience to have a conversation about currency ach transfer operations how credit works none of those i don't wanna hear about gas and fees and to i just i want i want buy shoe you give shoe i swipe card card gift number me say yes we done right like that's it so it that's it
walk walk away with you
walk away with you and have no conversation about like the cryptocurrency upside we could have had if there was arbitrage in between the thing with some fucking mev sequencer you're like no i don't none of the things don't care don't wanna know you know yeah
no i mean first principle is like what are we actually doing here right and this is something that i've been thinking about a lot especially with barcaster and i love degen i think tipping is interesting there's a lot of wealth being created which i think is fantastic especially for people who have dedicated themselves to like providing value back to the network
that's
i've benefited like personally i'm very happy about that i do think some people are telling on themselves about what their first principles are and what their real goals are if everyone starts adding a bunch of shit to their road map that has nothing to do with the vision was never in their pitch deck was never doing anything else right it's like okay that's fine like you everyone's willing you know able to do what they want that's part of like the big trustless network but i think but i think yeah there's there's a lot of sort of like not negative feedback in the sense like the feedback is like bad like it's like people saying something's bad but negative feedback or bad feedback in the sense of like you're you're losing the threat of the audience you're forgetting who your 12,000,000 lizard people are because you saw you saw 30,000 mole people and you're like i've only got 10 people right now and you get those 30,000 mole people and dude right you're more than the lizard people
well and how about like like you know one way to look at is like started the work and everyone was like yes let's replicate it as fast as possible they're just like carving that fucker up and then like spreading it all around you're like oh but there went the magic the magic wasn't for you to take and copy the magic was for you to start using this thing first
but yeah
that's one way to look at it i you know i think what's interesting about is like they solved a at least a first stage fundamental fundamental issue that clearly every meme coin except for doge had right there there's been a ceiling on every meme coin it goes up into the right crazy fucking fast hits the lid like reflects off of it and never recovers ever again because it's sort of just like the whole the whole feedback loop is hyper speed and like tipping tipping is interesting because like first principles right like what it does is says okay there's a there is a captured amount of value somewhere in this network and what we we don't actually know where it is or where it belongs algorithmically so instead the algorithm is we give it to you and then you distribute it and you have to distribute some share of it and there's like a there is a a i guess a enticed like feedback loop to it so we i think what we saw was okay if you're gonna start your your token brand first which is effectively all a meme token is right like let's say you're gonna start a project you're like i'm gonna build a new thing and you're like what's that new thing like i don't fucking know but its name is this and it looks like that that's a meme coin right so like yeah and like that's what a meme coin is just starting a business from the brand first which i to me i'll say this again it's like it seems like you're you're riding a rodeo like it seems like you're a bronco rider like that's like the like if you're gonna start a project from the from the meme first from the brand first
yeah
like really is like a rodeo ride because people jump in and they're like woo liquidity and they fuck with the fucking nuts and then they're like then they're then they're like who who's bag can i take and so it's like a game really quick right there like whose shit can we swipe and then and then you piece out right like that's that's just epic like like the surefire way to like have frustration so yeah super kudos to the team for like figuring out and hanging in there through the first push coming up with a mechanic and then like and then moving forward now we're at a whole another the episode of stage of like okay so you've created a meme coin that works now there there's this like there there's clear that you gotta put a mechanic of value sync and and distribution onto the individual users as part of kind of like a function that gets your meme coin further then and now how do you do that now what else has to go there is there more middleware you know like i always think like these new spaces are always kind of like create new primitive then try and understand if primitive is directly usable by consumer or if more middleware is required to like layer over that because it's still too raw you know
yeah it'll be interesting to watch i think
the the tipping as a sort of basically initial distribution mechanism is more than anything else right and it was handed out some sort of like it was rough around the edges but high single people right that was one very interesting way to get things done and there was a lot of it like a lot of people had a lot of it it was it was it was worthwhile it was fun i think he really tapped into that really well now it's clearly moving over to i wouldn't call it a closed ecosystem but because of the way the algo works like you know it's rewarding the people who are heavily involved in dgen not saying that's good or bad but it is there's been a massive shift in the audience right there's a massive shift from like broadcaster power users to like dgen power users and i think there's probably an in some interesting business motivation there that maybe is worth unpacking if you want to but it's definitely don't have to around like where where's the value here like have we accrued enough value that this ecosystem can sort of live on its own or were we piggy backing off dan and grun's efforts effectively like creating high single people in a high single environment there is that question i think exists for a lot of founders on farcaster
all of us that use it are gonna have that right but i think that's also so i i i feel like the answer is yes that yes that is what we we do that is what they did but then can you i mean look at what dan and dee had to do is they they were capitalizing on some twitter turmoil and that they were able to get some pull there but then look at the you know the peaks and valleys that they had to roll through too right because there's a few times where it was like oh yeah it's taken off and then like actually a few weeks later it's like oh it's pretty fucking quiet in here like i'm curious how long that can how last for you know like but but then obviously just you know the heads down team that they are grind grind grind push more shit out so i don't know i mean i hear the things that you know looks like dgen is shipping code fairly quickly too so at least yeah yassica
is yassica is sharp for sure i've had a chance to talk to him back when i was at air
stack and yeah
he's a he's a sharp individual for sure i think he's aligning a lot of the right people and understands how to get people to do interesting things with a meme coin i think you know probably the long term bull case for dgen is absolutely that it becomes sort of a partner to base in the sense of like where the casino happens it's where you know a lot of nft stuff happens that's like very like fast paced right and it sort of becomes the adrenaline version of base yeah where it's got that branding that that works well the bear cases of course the audience has shifted too far away from high signal people really strong builders are not interested in building on an l three because the audience like you know tvl great transaction sure if you're building self banking do you need a dgen integration today probably not right in the future maybe it's possible like who the fuck knows right but those are the questions that are that are still out there i wouldn't bet against jacek creating something interesting though
well i i will say well like what i think is super interesting and and broadly like the broad utility i see of a dgen or or any meme token that can impart this i suppose then is is the fact that i guess i guess where i read it i i read it as i can use this to incentivize the quality metrics that i care most about right so whatever user behaviors whatever whatever system behaviors are going on that have an interface with a customer or a merchant or community in some way shape or form that that meme token that just the concept of tipping tipping is like the a function of distributing the value in a way where you're trying to reinforce the behavior that's been taking place there and we have to control like you're building a project you have to control the feedback loops you have to design the feedback loops and then you have to manage the feedback loops right and i think we can accidentally you know spark feedback loops and not know it and and and not know that that was what we were going to do right
we yeah
you you can start like with unosiris we we did a thing where i i basically set up an ad this is like 2033 or something like that 2014 i set up an ad because our whole concept unosiris was we are gonna pay you for the time at which your device is charging because while you're char while your device is charging we can adequately run the resources across the network without draining your battery like impacting battery life mattered a lot then so anyway so there was like a whole thing around that so it was like hey pay you to charge us which is what you're gonna do every single night and and the way we see it was like tiny amounts right like fractions of penny per per unit sort of thing and our ads were just black circles so it was like i wanted to make the worst looking ad possible because i wanted to know how pure the interest was in the idea at least this was my way of like thinking i was finding a pure anyway and so we put that ad out there well i got 20,000 installs overnight it was like not at all prepared for that right so it's like sparking that level of interest is one thing and then trying to figure out how to ride that lightning all the way through now yeah
especially with fates because nothing's up into the right forever right because you're talking about even with farcaster and things like that's when it gets tough
i i mean you're almost guaranteed to get a 50% blow off right like if you wanna use like if you wanna use the market as a really great just massive heuristic like all it's doing is like resembling human behavior in a lot of different ways you know if we can like we can know that that peak's coming and we know that the blow off's coming and the you know and the tail off or the neutral area is gonna come but we can't say exactly when so that's why we can't really make money on it right but like but like those patterns really are fairly consistent which is why we're constantly like looking at them and and trading on them anyway but the same is gonna be true of your audience you're gonna spend $30,000 to acquire that first plug of audience you know that gets you like to some level and your goal is to hold on to the right amount right you're not gonna keep all of them you got a whole bunch of wrong people in that first cast of the net but if you hold on to the you know the diseased forms you know you pick the wrong idea and that's why like your project's ideas are are basically chasing either like the healthy one or the diseased one if you wanna be like weird about it right so it's like if you chase the diseased version of that idea like it's gonna atrophy and you're gonna die out you might have thought that was your that was your spark but they weren't you know smoking theirs
yeah yeah it makes sense yeah not everything's for everyone is like become a running theme in this podcast and i'm not sure if that's because where my head's at now or i'm lucky enough to be talking to smart people who have accepted into me but it's probably some combination of the two the audience the degen stuff is is definitely interesting to talk about i'm glad i'm glad i got your thoughts on it because you've always got some some interesting takes but on the theme of like growing in farcaster i know you don't talk like your bags a lot you don't talk like your product but part of the podcast i think is really highlighting that farcaster i think today is like probably the best option but in the future might be like the only option depending on how successful dan and me are and and everyone else that's involved of like you know your initial go to market especially for these you know 12,000,000 lizard people style businesses where you're looking for the right people and the identity is so tied in because there's so much on high high fidelity on chain data about what your interests are what channels you follow what you've minted how long you've been around net worth right like all these things are fairly easily to access and even if you don't know if like someone's true net worth like i don't know if you've looked at dan's hot wallet like it's got a lot more value than my hot wallet right like more things like you can sort of suss it out right and like yeah data science is is what it is but i think we'll get there so on that note have you have you done anything actually as i will
i know you've done one thing
i know you've you've you've posted a a comrade client friend who's selling some gummi of the psychedelic variety
yeah
which i cosigned heavy by the way
yeah yeah yeah awesome awesome
big fan so those are great but like other than that or if you wanna speak about that in particular like finding your audience on farcaster have you done anything have you tried anything any any wisdom to drop and if it's no that's fine because i i do know a risk coming into this was that devin just doesn't care about those things
but if
you've done anything i'd like to hear about it
i god okay so it's a weird way to say it but i i i think it's it's true to i mean it's accurate to say i don't care about those things what i do what i do care about is finding if those things are the things that i should care about
you know
what i mean so farcaster has been one large exploration from beginning beginning for me i've never personally invested or felt like i invested in a social network so like i've used facebook like everyone used facebook i use instagram like everyone used instagram and twitter same thing i mean i was on twitter since almost the very fucking beginning like i literally very beginning and i i never got over 600 followers on it right like it was never a thing that i was trying to get i didn't i didn't understand the utility in it i think i've shrugged that off a lot and i think a lot of like my previous mistakes were really truly not giving two shits about whether anyone like got to the point of using anything i ever made or not like i just wanted to make the thing and not a lot of that's true like i really just like to do the thing you know we were talking about like filming stuff earlier and like i i just love to go do the things i go do outside i don't really need to film it most of the time so i think part of that is just you know in one ear and out the other sort of thing but okay so anyway all that rambling to the to the side i definitely found interesting insight of network and and the network we do i think we do want when we want them i think i think it's starting to make sense so like i can find those things through farcaster i think earlier on i i didn't know there was like i didn't i didn't know anything so i was try whatever and i think i i you know i i pretty quickly came to the idea that most of the farcaster ecosystem was not necessarily the type of customer that i was talking about to begin with and i think that actually comes back to just well we were so crypto insider for a long time and then i don't think that's i don't think i don't think we're all crypto insiders there anymore it's a much bigger much bigger space now but it was so crypto insider that it was like completely myopic to the fact there was ux problems were still insane you know i and and and we still have that now but where i'm going with it is like i think there was just like even like weird pushback that like there was we don't even need to think about those things in that direction yet so for me i just kinda like wrote off the network as being like the place that i would necessarily source customers on for a period of time i think but in you know that didn't displace my interest or web finding utility in the network myself for building the product because at the same time like we are the we are the early adopters of stuff so like this community does make a lot of sense and and so i guess where i separate those things is i didn't wanna be i don't want to be overly influenced by a style or a direction that isn't where i'm going you know and then it's not a judgment on the style or direction so much as it's just like that's not where i'm going i'll say this way when i was snowboarding because like i snowboarded competitively for a long time i wouldn't wakeboard i wouldn't go wakeboarding because i didn't like wakeboarding style like wakeboarding style didn't look good to go with snowboarding style so yeah i would go out on the boat i would go wake surf i would have fun on the water no i'm not gonna go fucking wakeboard period
it's just like but i think i think a lot of people could could probably get something from that so that's interesting so i actually hadn't i hadn't heard this from you before but basically the forecast or audience call it a year ago six months ago whatever it may be was like too crypto friendly to give you like real feedback so everyone's like oh it's like yeah like it's a cool product but like i'd rather just like self custody and use metamask to go cross chain and then give someone direct through like whatever usdc then they can off offload it through yeah
yeah that's right that's yeah exactly i the link that you went through to buy those awesome mushrooms right like i put my mom through that link and my mom's her seventies and like that's it you know
i when i went through that flow and we'll we'll get some links in the in the description stuff like for whatever you wanna promote if if it's this or something else or sign ups whatever it may be sure i was like legitimately mind blown or like mind fucked is like the real term awesome i couldn't believe that like it had happened happened which is a weird thing to say because like so often i feel like we get caught up especially in crypto but probably anywhere that's like innovative we get caught up in like the the incremental like the minor incremental improvements which are getting us towards like some lofty goal of of something else yeah but i think i literally just like put a credit card in because i wanted to try the credit card flow
yeah
boom it was good and my wife works in the cannabis industry and i hear constantly about like so there's like bankless and there's unbanked right and like right yes and unbanked is is negative and it is negative right it's a negative nomenclature for like a negative thing totally and i just couldn't believe that it was so easy to to to like engage in this exchange of value right because i had done this what probably millions of times over my life at this point right i'm just thinking about how many times i order something off amazon or swipe my credit card or like send somebody something via venmo or zelle or whatever like i'm constantly doing this
yeah
and then anytime anyone asks me like hey what are you investing in in crypto i'm like dude i'm not i'm i'm like i'm like sign up for coinbase yeah that's as much as you're gonna wanna do i said bitcoin needs to be there like don't fucking bother me right i'm not gonna explain to you how dgen airdrops work i don't wanna i don't wanna explain the lore behind the og nft which is now like my most valuable piece of property like forget my laptop like forget like i don't own my house i rent so like like you had to pick one thing to go retire on like it's that stupid picture now that
they're asking what they have made
but the exchange of value should be easy because it has to be if you're going to exchange as much value as possible
and right
and i guess for backpack like synthesizing that or or or bringing those value exchanges together is that's the value app right that's that's where i participate in the flow of like making the world like just like straight up better which is like something that i've been obsessing over recently as well
dude i mean like so the motivation behind this whole thing i mean there's a couple motivation one of them stems from my distaste for raising vc and wanting to go out on that stuff which we can we can get into if you want it but then the other side was just you know like money money being broken is a problem to society and like we don't think of money being broken because we don't have alternatives right and we we complain about it a lot we have big you know economic events about it all the time but it it's a it's a fantastic system that is running now on our cane infrastructure that makes no sense for the world we live in today and the world we live in today needs to move faster like this is this one here's a really weird thing we've cared about the speed of our visa transactions and we've used that in comparison to speeds in the blockchain as if the blockchain has to compete and compare to the speeds at which visa moves money right which is like 10 well eight 80,000 or some it's some big fucking number of transactions per second right the money that lands that money moves crazy fast it goes from you to the to the processor's bank or the you know whoever's bank sitting in the back end right sit sitting there now it got there crazy fucking fast and now it is stuck there in purgatory for twenty four to thirty six hours so why did we have to move it that like why did we worry about those things moving that fast and like that one little thing is is the start of a big cascade of innovation for existing systems so like the card rails and the card system is the last thing that got built but it's also the most efficient and and it's impressive everything else that it connects to is arcane and asinine in terms of how fast it moves or how slow it moves and that cost of movement is actually has to be astronomical because opportunity and option that's missed on a day to day basis in business due to the fact that money is stuck somewhere and someone is having to try and triage for that latency is is a very very inefficient thing to occur when especially when we're talking about on the order of days right if i need to move if i wanna move a million dollars from bank a to bank b how many days and how many phone calls is that gonna take but if i wanna remove a million dollars in self banking i can sit in usdc in my self bank setup and i can move without any question from bank a because bank a doesn't exist anymore so now we've cut half the banks out of the equation i sit in usdc and then self banking makes it so that i can ach out to your bank well guess what that bank as long as i everything looks good on the you know money laundering side of the equation then that bank's gonna take that money in three days you can't move a million dollars in three days between two banks but you can from usdc to a bank and so like self banking just in one in one single instance can describe a much more efficient place to put money
yeah that makes a lot of sense it's i actually like you know as we talk about ux and stuff things that matter like the fact that the whole point of like people talk about visa about how great it is we have to match up to it in crypto or whatever it may be shows like the whole point is so you can walk out with your nikes and you don't have to wait three days for your nikes right that's the whole point no one actually cares about the rest
of it or at least not as much and it reminds me of really don't no no that's that's actually one of the most important things about money right it's like what is the value of money it's the experience that you get on the other side that's just a fucking conduit like we it's that's it you just care about the other side every time
yeah and i remember crypto pulling my father-in-law in 2017 he was like you know he's been in korea he's he's he's from korea he started to like catch wind of it eth is ripping i'm feeling really good and you know you can tell people stories and like some people care about text some people care about you know decentralization some people care about bringing down you know lizard people right like everyone cares about something different totally but for him his his his father my grandfather-in-law was going into the hospital and they needed to pay some bills and his brother-in-law is still back there and he's trying to transfer like a pretty sizable chunk of money from the us to korea to get some bills paid to make sure that his father got the care that he needed and he was like at a complete loss of how to get it done as quickly as possible and he came to me and said david like i i think like i need to get some money over there can i send ethereum i'm like yeah and he's like what do i do i was like just send it
just send it
like i don't know what you
what now just i
was like just ship it right and he's like what i got i was like the same way you got a wallet tell your bro tell your brother to get a wallet
yeah
and send it and then he said what does he do after that i was like well okay we're still in 2017 right so transfer it to covid or whatever it was corex and then you know sell it out and then you have to deal with all that other bit banking bullshit but this is exactly the idea i think you're getting at that
yeah
it had to be either back then you know gas fees are reasonable back then
yeah
he's like how long is it gonna take
i was
like i don't know
fifteen minutes
five minutes it's like he'd been on the he'd been like fighting with the bank for days to try to get this money there faster than like a week i think is what it was at that point because there's a lot of money issues like transferring outside of korea and stuff like that because one stuff we don't that's not interesting part of this podcast but it's those types of things right like those are the stories that remind me like why crypto matters like why why all this stuff is it bullshit why it's not just like nerds like jerking each other off about c k ai agents
right like
you like you can get out there and help people if you if you if you care about it i think that's i think that's the crux of what we've been talking about most of this time we're running a little bit over i i wanna be i've been cognizant of your time yeah i know but also i'm trying to be cognizant of of the watchers time because sometimes people like they drop a three hour podcast like i just dropped my first episode i'm like i love you dog i'm not watching three hours
i'm doing fine really fair
yeah hot new stuff but before we before we cut it
yeah
plugs for backpack who like and then not not because i'm trying to do this slightly different really like not like 20% discount like whatever like if people have been interested in the self banking thing if they think it might be valuable to them what do they do or alternatively slash additionally who like who are you looking to connect with that you think backpack would like really help a lot
so i i guess we have some major we have some major projects about to release on our side which is gonna help us internally and then externally to date we've been operating like super low key with a couple customers that we know really well that will work well with us in in really understanding the payments process because it's so funny to talk about payment this is the most confusing thing about what it is that we do right it's because i will talk about self banking and then i talk about payments and it's like well these are two different things but they're they're not actually because the way i i see self banking's role in rolling up the things that a bank is able to facilitate for us for us to do with our money and payments is one of those important things so that was one of the first places we went because that was also one of the first places we could find to make money in revenue so we've been working with merchants directly and we help the merchants create and facilitate their their payments which does all of the background magic of converting you know the car inbound card swipe and turning it into crypto and then settling the merchant in crypto and then i guess this is also like fundamentally been almost kind of an inverse paradigm as well to the crypto space and this is also something i saw in forecaster which is it seems to me that a lot of people on crypto believe the consumer is going to adopt crypto for payments first and i think that's actually the wrong approach what i think it's in i what i think you wanna do is approach the merchant to bank in crypto first because we can give them a way that doesn't disrupt the consumer to make the payment and then we can turn the consumer's payment into the crypto and then we can build services for how to manage your crypto like real money in a really comfortable way for the merchants maybe maybe everyone wants to get all the consumers first because it's a bigger number i don't i don't really know but the consumers have to have a way to use these things right so it's like our approach and our road map is to work our way to the consumer where i actually feel like we can do a good job you know helping you like there's weird oddities right like all of our crypto stuff relates to taxes in certain ways but then there's also the fact that i as an individual versus i as a company have a completely different interface to the tax and especially when that tax relates to crypto as well and so like if you look at the us tax code the best position for you to be in when you're dealing with money is as a business not as an individual so how do we handle that like because because i i this wasn't a belief i had before getting into this but now i've looked at it the more i've the deeper i've gotten i was like why would i exist as an individual in a country that actually prioritizes my existence as a business
right
right so put all of my money and have all of my things run through that that's a hard message to onboard a consumer with right off the bat as well like yeah so it's so like
have you ever thought about being a corporation
yeah you but you know what's funny is we've actually been talking about these things for decades right because we we have jokes about it it's like oh the corporation's a person now it has it has personhood and it's like but but actually yeah it does so you just turn your person into a corporation like go the other direction with it you know and then adopt all of the efficiencies that come with that with that change yeah that's that's a tricky message to get out there with backpack so i i you know the things the place we wanna go right now is we're working with merchants people that want to settle and bank themselves through merchant pro merchant like profile those are people that we can start onboarding and road map wise like we've got we probably got four more works of like trials and tribulations we're doing a bunch of client shit in the background right now with a number of different banks like that you know our main business is just stuck interfacing with the old world of fiat and trying to maintain the apis to be able to produce the product in such a way that everything works and actually so this is a good here's a good plug rain cards i fucking love those guys like
oh yeah
yeah like they're they've been rad they've been awesome partners they helped the card issuance you know occur for us like that's that's how we have a a big chunk of the product is able to like work well in that capacity
yeah let's talk to linx about them actually as well and that's how linx is talking to you so all the product guys are moving up together
yeah like linx has been building with us too is on his side as well and like that's been awesome and the team that we're we're starting to get put together i think is starting to look good and actually okay so here's like another positive of parcaster everyone on the team came from parcaster at this point you know james and myself but we've got you know thomas came in who's at s o like that motherfucker is bad ass because he showed up at a time when the whole house was on fire right like every startup like i i it's probably hard to go back and find like when the startup like our project has been on fire from my posts because it's the same is true with every single founder you sort of have to keep like the play the times when everything's on fire pretty low key because like there's another bullshit thing from vcs like never trust a vc when they say tell me about the bad stuff never tell the vc any of the bad things ever tell them it's fucking going great tell them you're not like tell them all that same bullshit like that's the only thing they wanna hear they don't know how to help you on the other side i know yeah someone will like argue with that but like prove me wrong
well i think that's that's there there's the that's the that's the unpopular opinion bombshell i think to to don't tell your b c's anything you heard it here from devon first the man who refuses to raise capital from b c's
this has been a pleasure man i've got some cast ideas that i wanna get out i think my favorite one that i have written down that i just wanna share with everyone would be if if if nike was branded by crypto people the timeline would probably be just don't not do it i think that encapsulates a lot of what's wrong and what you and i are upset about and sometimes it's just it's fun to be upset with your friends about things
i like that
but this has been great man thank you so much for coming on businesses who want to banking crypto or are unbanked definitely reach out to you yeah shoot me with good consultants i'm guessing like people who do work on the blockchain that might wanna bank do some crypto banking for whatever reason especially if they're global citizens stuff like that
i i remain open to hit a dc with or shout out to and grab a grab a call with so long as it remains high quality so if that if that everyone keeps that quality up then like fuck yeah like dc is open shoot me shoot me a thing if you you've got something in the banking side wanna talk talk about that stuff like we can we can go at it i found nothing but value in doing that and even if that means you need my help so you know don't be abusive but totally down to help
i love that man and if you if you if you dc devin and he doesn't respond it's because someone else before you fucked it
up so thanks again for coming on man
thank you man it's been it's been a pleasure and an honor to be here
this is a blast i'm gonna stop the recording don't go anywhere just yet