Vibe Check with @dawufi ep5 interview with @sheldon and @marissaposner from /goldchain and /cropxyz
Aired Date
July 4, 2024
Series
Vibe Check
Episode
Vibe Check with sheldon and marissaposner
Watch on YouTube
https://youtube.com/live/Ugb-60oK1I8let's i've been we do a little clap yeah the sound check welcome to vibecheck everyone this is me davupi and i am just like pleased as punch to be hanging out with sheldon and marissa from from gold from crop from barcaster from from a lot of different things so thank you guys so much for for coming on we're gonna have a lot of interesting things to talk about but to kick it off what i've been doing is just letting i guess yourself talk a little bit about like who you are what you're working on how you found farcaster little things like that just set the stage because i don't want to leave people out who are interested in the protocol and and how to you know find your tribe find your vibe on there which you guys have done exceedingly well and just assume everyone knows everyone the way it used to be six months ago things have changed but sheldon if you wanna go first who are you
sure yeah so i'm sheldon sheldon trotman i'm a computer scientist by trade so i went to mit once i graduated i got into the crypto space in 2016 so
back then
i was doing a lot of early defi stuff like i built something similar to maker before maker's a thing got pretty invested in like hardware software integrations so if you go around in 2017 '20 '18 supply chains and blockchain was a big thing and so we built hardware and software technology i was able to track products through a supply chain kinda fast forward a bit i got pretty excited about nfts in 2021 as everyone else did did about five different collections sold about across close to like 4 to $5,000,000 across those five collections all of them sold out got into gaming in 2022 realizing that like nfts as a pfp was kind of lame and we could do more with that it'd be kind of fun and so actually the first version of crop x y z came out back in 2022 from kinda impetus from from kinda like a rationale of like if we can do more with nfts and defying like make some make things more fun right then fast forward a bit more got into analytics realized that analytics was really necessary in the crypto space because if you can understand what's going on at on the chain level it's really necessary and that's kinda how mercer and i story kind of interweaved so i'll take a quick pause there and let marissa kinda jump in and talk about herself
great yeah i'm marissa i studied at nyu i studied economics and computer science and was at nyu i actually was a professional fencer for a period so that was a different time in my life and i got injured and when i got injured is when i started to learn how to code so kind of from that injury i got really into data science and machine learning and around the same time my friend also introduced me to crypto and i started investing and after i graduated i went on to work as a machine learning engineer in the fintech space and i was working a lot with like web to transaction data building ml models a lot of like natural language processing and transformer models like kind of even before they developed into what they are today and then i was really interested in the web three space and kind of combining my like data background with web three and so i founded chainbrain which is a web three analytics startup and like sheldon mentioned that is how we met our friends introduced us they were like you're building the same thing you guys should meet so we met and the rest is history we kind of lost conviction in the analytics in in the analytics idea i think there's a lot of companies out there that are doing analytics really well and it's a it's a bit of a saturated space so we decided to pivot into building sugarcane which was a defiant investment super app up until like february of this year when we launched crop x y z on farcaster and have had a bit of success with that and realized that gaming is really poised to do well this run and and there's a lot of interest in gaming and we both believe that like a visual medium like gaming is something that can bring a lot of games on chain or just like how nfts did in in 2021 gaming is set to bring many web two web 2.5 users on chain cycle
yeah hell yeah actually well i wanna come back to the analytics thing because i've got a lot of thoughts about that i think there might be some hidden spice in there that i'm trying to like i'm trying to take like harder stance on the podcast but before we get to before we get to off topic i think the main reason that i was really excited to have you guys on to the podcast not that i wouldn't love talking to you guys about literally anything is that i'm trying to put out more information and help people understand like go to market tribes voice messaging especially on firecast because i think it's really different i think especially when you tie in the digital identity to the posting you are sort of almost encouraged and rewarded for authenticity and to be blunt i don't think a lot of people are doing it great but i think you guys are and i think that's part of the reason that the whole all of it popped off but to give some background whoever's better i i don't know who who handled the who handled the launch yeah but take me through what what happened because it's it's actually for me it's like it's like a growth guide it's like a riveting story of we we did a frame and then had to change everything in a good way yes so i don't know so you you seem like you wanna you wanna hop in and i'm
i'm i'm pretty excited about that just because so i got into parcaster with a kind of history lesson so i got into parcaster in january of last year so 2023 right and back then it was a very small niche community of other builders people who are excited about like just getting around each other talking about stuff and as you know like that's where i kinda met you for the first time like we got to just jamming about this random stuff in crypto specifically but the the problem at that time was that like people who were very technical and knew how to build stuff weren't able to like almost like flex that or show that off in a way meaningful way but then what happened in february of this year of '20 '20 '4 is farcaster launched this kind of product called frames and so frames is a very very novel kind of distribution channel the demographic of people who are watching this video probably are aware of frames but the difference is that like now you can build fully immersive experiences within a social feed and it's a bit of context for cropx i see the first version that came out in 2022 there's not a notion of social applied to it and so even though a lot of people were playing it there's like tens thousand transactions millions of tokens flowing through the system the reality is that like people are still fairly siloed but like a certain experience where you have very visual medium and it's actually very attractive and exciting kinda farmville style by itself is very very kind of easy to get lost in because you just catch it by yourself but now if you reapply that same experience in social feed now you get the whole level of like zynga like growth but in farcaster right so that's kind of the impetus for like how the frame itself was an amazing distribution channel for that type of experience because the game itself is very fun it's very immersive very attractive and also the frames that were coming out at the time when when the frames product first got launched in february they were very simple like one of the simple memes was like that you like recast and comment to to mint this nft right but now if you take a level up of that of that and say here's a fully kind of highly fleshed out game experience that may not be like the full like web three web web two like experience gaming but like it's still more than what you saw from before people got excited about that and like you can now mint like packs of land packs which has like a plot of land has like the props that you have and people are really excited about it and so like people saw that this could be a new way to play a fully immersive game that they used to play on facebook right but now in the social feed in farcaster which is kind of exciting so another big lot there
i think it's luck i think it's being prepared right like you put in a lot of work i know to the to the to the original version of the game so like being prepared for luck right or or being prepared for opportunity i think it's a really interesting part of the story but i also think you know i'm i'm fairly bullish on the idea that like it like it it rhymes it doesn't repeat right so like i think a lot of people are focused on like let's do the exact same thing we did in web two and like port it over and then it's like okay how do i make a halo on the blockchain it's like i don't think that's the point man like halo is pretty good by itself like i don't think halo is like out here like stretching for looking for a blockchain yeah exactly like no one cares so that's like why a lot of this stuff hasn't taken off whereas you guys had a very different approach you're like okay this is like this is supremely additive to something that we already knew was good and now that we can start to access my reality from people who are like genuinely interested and willing to like put financial backing behind it right like yeah that unlock of like financial backing in the feed to prove things out because i've been talking to a couple of different people on the podcast about this it's like okay if you're giving it away for free you'll never know if you have pmf if you're giving it away just for tips you'll never have pmf if you are paying people to do something you will definitely never know if you have pmf you have to have something you have to have work to create enough value that people are genuinely excited to exchange in value because they feel like they're receiving it back right and i think that's that's something you guys tapped into really nicely or so you're yeah loading and your mic's off the mic's unmuted so i'm learning to watch the signals
yeah % i think that's also kind of speaks to our stance on web three gaming in that we we don't really subscribe to the whole play to earn model i think that creates a lot of companies that don't actually have pmf but maybe you think they have pmf because they have they have a lot of users and revenue but like long term games are fun and that's exactly what we wanna do with games and and the type of games that we wanna support on gold are fun games like fun hyper casual fully on chain games that allow users to have unique experiences that they couldn't have in the web two world
yeah and that comes through in the messaging i think there's good alignment there like the brand is like it's it's fucking fun man like all the puns and like and the wars between the planet like my my obsession with arugula notwithstanding that's yeah yeah i've i've been i've been pitching arugula in the farm bill game for an extended period of time we'll see maybe maybe if this podcast goes well enough by the end i can convince you guys to put it in but talk about gold we're we're referencing something that i think is really important
infrastructure has been like i don't know whether it's overhyped or underhyped it's like still unclear to me right like it's like we're still all looking for like the thing that really works but you guys made a pretty decision to launch your own chain launch tool launch it launch it as a base l three which i i think it's fair to say it's a stance right like that's that's fair no matter what you think about it's definitely a stance there's people who are gonna like this people who don't like it personally i think personally i think it's brilliant and if you look at nature as sort of what i use for inspiration for a lot of these architectures it's like would you ever see a tree with one root it's insane like that's just like that's not how things work like fragmentation is fine not everything is for everyone but i'd be really curious to hear marissa if you wanna talk through the the decision process how you guys got to the place where you knew you wanted a chain and then you knew you i assume it was something like okay we need our own chain to do what we wanna do where's the place to do it we wanna do it with base we wanna do op stack i think there's a lot of people that are gonna be looking at this decision and wondering like why like e either because they wanna be convinced or they're curious or whatever it is
yeah a % so when we did the plot sale in february we sold out all of the plots within ten hours we weren't we weren't exactly expecting that so that was a a very pleasant surprise but we realized that if we wanted to support gameplay at scale for the around like 1,500 users that we currently have or people that own plots we were gonna need to spin up our own chain and the reason why i wasn't gonna work on an l two previously crop x y z was actually deployed on polygon back in 2022 but l twos yes even after protodank sharding like their fees have gone slightly down but they're still 30 to 50¢ whereas with an l three you can have like sub cent transaction cost and you can have a chain that's customized for gaming and what i mean by that is a chain that has specific op codes for gaming such as a z k coprocessor that allows for native randomness or native account abstraction built into the chain and one thing that i think sheldon alluded to earlier is the social component so just like how zynga had a lot of success with farmville built on top of the facebook social graph that's exactly what we're trying to do with crop x y z using the farcaster social graph so we're trying to make the game social you can farm with your friends send your friends crops and create that social gaming experience that we all have nostalgia for from the early twenty tens
yeah that makes sense i think i've seen a lot of people sort of trying to clone things or stay ahead of forecast on features or whatever it may be and you know some of those things may be valid i think supercast is great and i love what he's doing there but i can't help but feel that there's this massive
value creation that dan and v are spearheading and they are driving it the best way they know how through something that sort of looks like twitter it kinda feels like reddit sometimes whatever it may be they're focused on down growing the network and everyone like every i think it's a joke now right like great opportunity for alternative clients like we don't really need one of those like we need new experiences that leverage the graph because because it should be everywhere right like i think like everything maybe this is a hot take but i'm not saying everything in the world's gonna be a farcaster graph but there's no reason why almost anything consumer shouldn't be adding social components the most important part of what we do sheldon any any thoughts there or
yeah no i i % agree and the fact is that like we lean fully into the fact that like if there's a network that allows you to actually tap into the social graph you don't have to build it yourself right so for what we're building out we're able to build out infrastructure and tooling that's able to sit on top of a fully immersive experience for a consumer without actually having to know who that user is and it's funny because now previously you think of like twitter or facebook you have to have your social graph there to get the maximum experience out of facebook but now if someone else has a way that they built their friends or connections separate from proper ssc or even gold they can now bring that whole network into gold and into prop accessy and not into all the games that we've created or we're going to create or we're gonna work to create and then get a fully kind of personalized experience that you would never be able to imagine without having this kind of separate social network it's kind of a different thing about it but like you can now build fully immersive and personalized experiences just by nature of the person having control over their own social graph which is a huge unlock i don't think people really understand the power of that yet
i mean well it's never existed yet right yes sir it's like when was the last time we had an open social graph that was valuable and
yeah and also yeah the kind of cool thing is that like we we can now imagine if you think of gold in the future if you think of like ready player one style where like there's a fully immersive virtualized world with like virtualized goods and like everyone can like go to like different worlds and express themselves and and experience things on that world with their social graph and with their friends and with their assets i think that's what we're moving towards like you can you can imagine that like people can get excited about being with their friends in this new kind of well let's start with the farming world that we have but now taking a step further you can go to like some of the type of experience and still have the same high fidelity personalized experience there
i'm very much looking forward to the fitness app gold crossover where i'm literally farming to to help strengthen your own my crops that's awesome but okay so so that was the decision that's why you needed it i do wanna talk also a little bit about like tools tools that you guys are using because i think to be blunt this would have been a shitload harder last year for like a number of weeks walk me through what you're using i know cindy kidd i know i know my former employer stack like there's there's there's quite a bit this isn't a well how to put it takes a village right gotcha so for and then this is like i guess hard to call it alpha but like dig in to someone who's thinking like okay i need a l three like how do i actually do this what's what are you guys using and what have you seen that's been helpful or missteps as well if you have any yeah
so first and foremost a huge huge huge huge shout out to syndicate just because they've been amazing partners for us like we launched the game i think it might have been a tuesday we realized that the game had taken off from like what people have been expected about like what they actually how excited they got about it and then like within two to three weeks later we had launched gold the chain and so we that was a huge huge take undertaking and it was strictly because like syndicate is an amazing partner for us and so definitely would be kind of nowhere we are nowhere with what we have without syndicate so definitely huge shout out to them and then also another huge shout out to like celestia itself because celestia is again the first da layer that came out to enable kind of low cost data posting and so like from our chain's perspective we work closely with base the whole base ecosystem base team also huge shout huge shout out to them as well jesse's been amazing well base team's been amazing but we settled to base we post all of our data so it kinda again we can get into how that technically works but like we post all of our data to celestia and we're close to a syndicate because they're actually facilitating the node that we have that kind of talks to the chain and then we also partner close with airstack so also again another huge huge big big shout out to them because in terms of pulling data off of the chain they have built out like apis and infrastructure and tooling that allows us to index it so kind of like read the chain more effectively and so and airsec's been amazing for that as well so kind of those three four big big big partners
nice i love that yeah i feel like there's there's obviously the space is just getting started there's gonna be competition there what's marissa what's your take on l threes broadly
yeah i think it's interesting because recently we've seen the emergence of you know we may have been like the first l three on pace but since us there have been many more notably dgen chain and and i know there's more in the works i think we're gonna see a rise of app chains and then eventually i think there's gonna be some sort of consolidation in unless perhaps l threes get so i mean because now they're still expensive to launch like not anyone i mean could launch them so easily you need like a bit of funds but they're much more accessible than they were previously but i feel like there will be a consolidation of l threes into some more major players but i'm actually we're actually really interested in the l four space i know that's a a bit of a new topic but we've been actually thinking about ways to enable a femoral l fours on top of gold to allow individual games to have their own block space and we can spin them up and spin them down based on when they need it so basically it could be kind of like an aws block space so when you're not using your own block space you could rent it out to someone else for example and and earn sequence your fees on that so that's that's kind of where we're we're thinking of and and having it all settled down to to gold
this is why this is why i leave it kind of open because this is not on my bingo card but i love it elf wolf was definitely not on my bingo card that's sick you know it's super interesting to me because i came from the polkadot world that's where i was working on a pair chain over there when i met sheldon and
how do i put this i love the ideas in the polkadot space and i hate the execution of actually getting people to use things and i think this is one of the reasons i'm like super bullish on basis because they i think they work from a very like hardcore clearly brian armstrong mission first with the whole just like being out there and and and speaking his mind about different political topics or or lack thereof or whatever it may be and it's like we want adoption like we want people to use these things like like let's not forget that it's it's useful for people like like that's the trust the truth whatever it's all it's all nothing if we're not creating value for other people and sort of like making the world like broadly speaking better is the way i think about it and they ever on polkadot side i've been talking about this like block space like marketplace like for an extended period of time so it it's interesting to see that that idea sort of percolating around sheldon are you
hey miss edith
yeah i'm good i like this i just see it i'm trying to be a good i appreciate the lead up yeah
i think it's like you felt my excitement yeah
what's i mean
i'm sure
we reveal everything but like or like your personal like plans i i get that you have to put you back close to the chest but like talk to me about all fours i'm i'm
so so before before we get to the the four because like four is funny because like unit three is still a bit confusing for people in space so let's talk about actually like two like why two even matters right so if you think of like base right so base so my my quick stance on like l ones is i think they're kind of gonna all die except for like one or two or three maybe just because the l two l ones right l ones
so this
is all gonna die just because like the value prop of like multiple l l ones is kind of unnecessary because it's like large seven layers very expensive to be there and so that's what led to like the immersive l twos now the l twos like arbitrum optimism base they're generalized to the point where like if you want to enter the l two game doing anything novel it's almost irrelevant because it's hard to pull the level of like capital to your bay to your to your network and that's what all really matters in the end like all the whole blocks based conversation around l twos is gonna get fully commoditized and only thing that doesn't matter is be either distribution like you have a better distribution channel or two you have either remote or network effects that have brought to that fact right and as you see like arbitrum they've been the defi chain so all the defi teams have been there they have the most cdl right now base has been the the newest but it's actually been the fastest growing because they have the whole coinbase ecosystem and jesse's a killer to be quite frank and for us like being very being very pragmatic if we're doing anything social you need to do it on base because that's where the majority of users who are coming into the space are gonna enter through so their equipments experience they have a whole exchange experience that they've built out for web two users and so why try to be another l two to compete against that when you can just leverage that by being an l three on top of base so back to the conversation about what you said like being an l three on base of the stance it's very intentional very pragmatic because like we want to attract people to use our product and our chain and the best way to do that is by kinda working closely with an ecosystem that has been generalized block space for that right so now i think a step further into what we've kind of came through for this year is like l3s l3s is very much a most recent narrative but it's not just narrative because there's actual value behind it because now you can actually customize the block space to be very performant for what you want right so for in our situation we customize our block space for specifically just real time strategy games we have some sent transaction fees as marissa said low latency in terms of like getting things on chain and what we're building out is such such that like we can then copy that same highly customized block space on top of our own chain itself so it's almost like a recursive like taking our base and then pushing on top of ourselves so now anyone who wants to build out their own experiences in a fully customized way that's using this kind of similar stack to what we have and still settle to our kind of fast performing ecosystem and still get at in interacting with all the whole like kind of kind of massive gaming system we're building out you can now spin up an l four which is kinda this kinda ephemeral concept so you can spin up something that can be like a server for you store all your store all your state and then have that all consolidated down to like one specific update on on the gold chain and so yeah it was kind of a bit of a history lesson and kind of a bit of ramble but like we're very excited about how you can actually customize block space and then have that block space be used on top of your own block space like kinda get a whole like turtles all the way down yeah
no i love it the history is great i mean i mean this is over there like oh sheldon i'm not a history i'm kidding no he's not right there yeah everyone's bringing their own personality to this podcast for sure and it wouldn't be a sheldon appearance without some history it's sort of my my take on that but but the concept is interesting right because i've been sort of bitching is a strong word but i was like guys until it's just the web again like we don't have pmf like if we're still calling it web two and web three like it's it just has to be the web again it has to just work no one gives a shit about how https works no one cares about how rss works like it just either it works or doesn't and people move about their day right it's like i was talking about visa credit cards with that that means like dude can you imagine like trying to go cross chain with your credit card to buy some nikes like just silly right like that's that's how important the consumer experience is so i think this is a really interesting idea because i'm probably i don't know if i'm mapping this the right way but i think it sounds to me like the ultimate goal here is sure layer one layer two layer three whatever who cares like does it work is the block space efficient is the block space customized to your use case so that you can build the app or build the rate the payment rooms or build whatever you need to build so that the the user actually gets value and we we keep this humanity thing moving forward at least a little bit longer but yeah i love that okay so that was a lot of history and that was a lot of tech sorry go ahead
yeah one one parting one parting comment before we leave that subject yeah if you'll have me
yeah no so like the the one thing i have left to say about that is that like we kinda pair this all this infrastructure and ecosystem build out with like the app and and the product so like yeah we built up the game as a first point to prove that the infrastructure works and i think a lot of teams get caught up by like going infrastructure first and forget that there's actual users and so from our perspective we think of building out the application to be the proving point for the infrastructure and building that infrastructure that can then better help us leverage and create better experiences that's kinda the last thing i wanna say there
no i think it's super important i think it's it's a good it's a good closing note before we sort of pivot a little bit because i'm also getting obsessed with this idea of like everything's not for everyone it's a little bit silly and like you know charging for stuff is one way to make sure that you have the right people in your community that's how you get the right feedback right from the right audience of whether it's working or not and if you go some sort of orthogonal direction or or chase something down that isn't part of the road map because it's the flavor of the day you very much end up with with an unintentional audience at best or like the outright incorrect audience for what you are counting you're trying to build theoretically and then you get wrapped up in bad incentive models and i think we've seen a ton of that in web three the good news is i think a lot of people are learning from it smart people like yourselves who have adjusted strategy whether it be from personal learnings or seeing other people you know run up run down run out whatever it may be i think there's sustainable models here that are really interesting especially when you're intentional about the tribe and audience that you cultivate and i think you guys do a fantastic job of that and i don't wanna do it too hard and this has been fantastic but i we are running a little bit up on time and i'm trying to be cognizant of everyone's time my own yourselves and and obviously the listener as well i keep making the joke that like motherfuckers like oh just watch the podcast here's five hours it's all good listen to it and it's like no so so i've tried to get these a little bit tight but marissa i'm gonna throw it back to you and and really what the ethos of like you don't have to pump your bags for yourself because like it's very anti podcast so like pump your bag for me because it's good content what is going on with crop today things to look out for if people are interested what what can they go do can they play like just riff a little bit about what i what i begrudgingly call a call to action in my hated web two terminology
yeah well firstly crop to the moon we launched the first round of nft sales back in february so for the users that picked those up we're launching the beta version of the game or alpha beta version of the game for them to play next week so they'll be able to play that and then we actually are gonna do another round of plot sales alongside a very mysterious rebrand that we can't talk much about coming mid may and that will allow more users to be able to play the game so new users will be able to pick up those nft packs and play the game as well so that will that will be really big for getting more people in our ecosystem and then we're actually looking to hire soon so we're hiring game developers full stack engineers and and just generally other types of engineers as well we're really looking to hire from within the farcaster community considering that our chain is built on top of the farcaster social graph and we want people to have a very like good and native understanding of what farcaster is and why it's important so if there's anyone listening that is interested in becoming or in being an engineer at working for gold please dc sheldon or i on farcaster my handle is marissa posner and sheldon's is at sheldon yeah i'm a little jealous that he got the solo name
i've been trying to get the marissa one but there's another marissa in that's in crypto so been a bit challenging if you're listening we'll pay you for that but yeah so those are some of the big dates coming up for us so look out for the game launch next week for all those users that have already bought the pack and then the full launch will be coming right around the time of the the next nft sale as well so there should be some more features in there that will enable gameplay at scale which is all i'll say on that
epic do you guys post the jobs on the bounty caster i don't know if you guys saw that they did some stuff i forgot it's chain hires higher higher chains
no we haven't
yeah they have a job posting board i think it's higher chain i'll have to go back and double check on that but highly recommended because yeah i mean it's just like i feel like the if you're trying to like reach a twitter sized audience then farcaster is bad if you're trying to reach a farcaster audience then like just use the native tools like we're all using the same shit so sheldon any any closing words or anything that your partner in crime missed
no i'm pretty excited we have a lot of huge plans i've been historically very bullish on my timelines and mercy kills me whenever i say things about dates so for the interest of our own our inter own internal dynamic i'll i'll keep my all shut in terms of like what other product plans we have
coming out yeah like alright love it so definitely
check out this i think by the time this podcast airs it should be the the game should be live so like if you are interested in playing you can also either buy a pack off of opensea or you can like wait for our big launch because
we have
a lot of ideas coming up with that as well so i think those are two people that we can
and if the podcast is live and the game hasn't launched and sheldon's missing we know who did it
yeah blink sites are gonna need help yeah yeah exactly i think it's a good bombshell to end it on you guys are fucking amazing thank you for coming on re reformatting my brain with l fours i have research and and thoughts to do but yeah always always a pleasure thank you so much
thanks timothy
i really appreciate you thank you so much alright
check you later