Brian: Welcome to PodRocket. I'm Brian. That's Paul. And with us is Nader. Hello. Nader: Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me. Brian: We are very excited to have you today. Well, let's see. Everyone should know me who listens to the episodes or to PodRocket, generally speaking, Paul is a software engineer at LogRocket and likes crypto. Is that accurate, Paul? Paul: Pretty accurate, yeah. Brian: Fairly accurate. Paul: I like it. Brian: Great. Paul: Yeah. Brian: Nader, when people ask you what you do, what do you tell them? Nader: So, I'm a developer relations person. And that's like falling all over the spectrum of what you might not really know if you never like dived into this role before. I've been doing this for maybe five years, including four years full time and then the year before that, just with my own company. And DevRel to me is the most fun ... If you're going to be working for a company or for someone, a personality like me is the most fun because we get to travel, we get to experiment, we get to meet people. And we get to just like shit posts on social media and get paid for it. Nader: So, it's really fun. I like it. So, I can't really explain what I do other than really the core thing I think that if you're focused on DevRel, you might want to do is just make developers successful and happy. And if you can do that, you're probably doing DevRel right. And how you get there doesn't really matter all that much I think. Brian: I never heard anyone describe DevRel as shit-posting on social media as for a job, but it's very honest but also super accurate and helpful. But you also have a passing interest in Web3, crypto, etcetera, blockchain. Yes, fair to say? Nader: Yeah, totally. It's definitely what I'm doing right now and what I'm most passionate about right now. Brian: Yeah. So, for this episode, what I'm hoping to do is really to talk about not only what you're interested in in that space but why, and then the good things. If you're listening to this episode right now in your car or while washing dishes or whatever, there'll be no arguing here today. You can find that on the internet. What I'm most interested in is hearing the enthusiastic side. Brian: So, I mean, I think maybe the best place to start for that is I saw a tweet from you on December 5th if you're looking for it, just like this is the tech that I'm most interested in for 2022. And it starts with Solana and Graph. So maybe that's an interesting place to start. Why? What are those things? I'm not going to make you go down the list of like eight or nine things that you put. Nader: Yes. I mean, so I'll often share these updates of what I'm working on and what I'm interested in and it definitely changes over time. And, in general, I would say one of the things that has stuck with me for the last four years straight has been if you look at that list, probably the main things you might see four years ago as well as today would be GraphQL. You might see things around managed services like AWS and stuff. Nader: But in April of 2021 which is of course this year, I left AWS. I was manager of the developer relations team for frontend web and mobile, senior role and also was on track to be principal role. And it was a very comfortable position, making a good money and having a good time and all that. And I like just completely left that to join a startup that was in the Web3 space that had just been created a month or two before that. Nader: And the whole idea of why I left goes into the answer to that question I guess you could say. Because why would someone leave such a great, comfortable role and that have other opportunities out there and making more money like base salary and a lot more I would say consistent place to be with a lot less potential maybe downside or whatever people might think when they look at this from outside. And the answer to that is that I've been speculating and just playing around with crypto since 2015, but I've never really dove into the actual technological aspect of it like why does it exist? Why is this stuff here? Nader: And I was always really just not going past the very surface area I guess you could say of any of these different protocols. So, in late 2020, early 2021, I was looking into the Graph Protocol which is a ... It's actually what I work with the most now, but it's a protocol for querying blockchain data and it uses GraphQL. So, as a GraphQL person, that caught my attention. And I was like, "Oh, wow, this is a technology that I use at AWS. What in the hell are they doing it with blockchain? What does this have to do with anything?" Nader: And I dove into this rabbit hole and I completely just got fascinated by it. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I just had so much fun reading and playing around with the stuff that it made all the other work that I was doing seem so boring. And that list essentially is a list of the things that make me feel that way today, like what are these things that not only are really fun to use but you can actually build stuff with that are maybe things that ... Some of those are very mature, but some of them are not so mature and they have a lot of potential future upside. Nader: So, the ones that you mentioned were like Solana. So, a Solana is essentially just a Layer 1 blockchain. And there are probably countless Layer 1 blockchains. And if you think of a blockchain maybe as someone that hasn't really dive too deep into the differences between them, you have a handful of different blockchain types that are out there I guess you could say. You have something like Bitcoin which is really only useful for financial or sending a Bitcoin back and forth. Nader: But what's interesting to me are these smart contract platforms where you can actually execute code and write logic and basically have a computer that you can interact with. And Solana is just one of those Layer 1 smart contract platforms. And it's interesting to me because one of the biggest problems in blockchain is scalability. And when you hear about people arguing against the viability of blockchain, they'll often mention the throughput and things like that. Nader: So Ethereum for instance has like 45 transactions per second which is really, really bad, especially if you compare that to something like DynamoDB which is potentially millions or more of transactions maybe per second or whatever. Solana scales to six or 700,000 transactions per second. And it's one of the really big innovations I would say that has happened in this space that enables that scalability that people are thinking of when they think of this global adoption of blockchain and Web3 and stuff. Nader: So Solano is essentially just a really high-skilled Layer 1 blockchain with its own set of tradeoffs. You'll hear people like say why they think it's good, why they think it's bad. But if you think about something like Visa and you talk about this transaction layer for monetary transactions, Solana is like the first one I would say that is in production that people can write code for that actually scales to that level. Paul: Solana has a lot of cool stuff coming out. I think one of the most interesting things that I've seen with Solana is the Pyth Network. I don't know if you've heard of that but it's the 400-millisecond block times giving you real-time network data of different securities being traded. And it's really high-resolution data and something you can only get for the Solana with that type of really fast blockchain like you were talking about. Paul: One of my questions I had for you, Nader, was so you're working on the Graph heavily which is all about making blockchain data like data accessible. And the Graph was formulated around the central idea of making Ethereum accessible. And me being a developer, I'm like, "Well, that sounds great. I can run my own little subgraph. I can collect tokens. I can serve data." But it makes me think about, "Okay, well, if you put that in the context of Solana, the amount of gaps or spaces for somebody like myself to contribute to the network becomes huge and so fast because we're not talking about 14 TPS, we're talking about 700,000." Brian: Right. Paul: Yeah, right? And so do you think that ... Right now, Ethereum is like the cornerstone of the Graph network at least from what I've been reading and a little bit, I've been playing with it. So, do you think that that's going to change and it's going to be overtaken by just like blockchains that have more informational space on them sort of in that way? Nader: Yeah. So, there's a lot to answer in that question. One of the things though that we've done this year is that we merged or you could almost say AQUA hired a couple of different teams to solve this scalability of data or this exponential amount of data that you'll see in these other chains. So for instance, one of the teams that we brought in is called Streaming Fast. And we did a deal with them for $80 million, actually not dollars, 80 million GRT which is depending on the day, it could be worth $50 to $100 million, basically to bring them in to help us be able to index all these more high-throughput chains. Nader: So at Solana Conference in Lisbon, we announced Solana's support for the Graph. So not only are we supporting a lot of the Ethereum blockchains like the ones that we started supporting early on, but we now support over two dozen different networks in addition to just the Level 1 Ethereum. And some of the most high priority ones for us to ship production ready support are Solana, as well as we've already shipped NEAR but Solana is ... We've already built out the I would say infrastructure to make Solana work. And we're testing it out right now and that should be out soon. Nader: So, at the end of the day, you can think of The Graph. We want to support any public network data that we can that's out there and have a public data graph of all blockchain data in the world. So, that's the ultimate goal. It's going to take a lot of work to get there. We currently support a lot of networks on the hosted service which is like the original centralized version of the Graph. And we're now adding additional support to all these networks and the decentralized network. Nader: So, a lot of work to do but we already have billions of queries per day being served. Big DeFi projects are using the Graph. The more networks that we add, the more users that we'll have. And yeah, it's a really cool thing to be working on because there are a lot of big challenges. But I think we're the first to be doing this. So, it's pretty cool to be part of that. Paul: First, that I've heard of definitely like Solana's insane. I can't believe you're that far down the production pipeline of getting that type of data indexed and sorted. So right now, this is all happening in-house at the Graph in terms of your own centralized store. And then, the plan is to slowly allow this platform. You're making the platform available to decentralize it naturally and holistically as people, just the data need increases. Is that the direction that The Graph is ... Nader: Yeah, that's the way you could think of it. We have this core piece of technology called the Graph Node. And the Graph Node runs not only on the hosted service but also on the decentralized network. So you could think of the hosted service as the testing ground for us to ship a product that works. And then, once we've gotten it working to where people are using it in production, we can now make it decentralized. Nader: And that seems to be the pipeline of progressive decentralization that you'll often see in Web3 where you have this ultimate goal of data integrity and being able to have verifiability of the data being actually true. But to get there, you often have to build it in a progressively decentralized manner. Paul: That's interesting. You say that you're doing it progressively decentralized manner because ... Yeah, I mean, like most projects do that as you mentioned. They start with a team with funding and sometimes some VC and then they bubble up from there. Are there any projects you're aware of that bubble in versus bubbling out in terms of the decentralization strategy? Nader: I think Livepeer did that. Livepeer is a really cool network. Paul: Livepeer? Nader: Yeah, Livepeer. They're actually probably some of the best Web3 technology that's out there. It's at least 10 times cheaper than anything else that you'll see out there for livestreaming services. So, if you want to build something that is like ... Say you want to build Twitch or something like that, you can use this service. It's like a replacement or an alternative to some of the AWS livestreaming services. Nader: But yeah, they built out a decentralized network. And then now, they're also building a hosted version of that. So, that way, they can offer I guess both offerings. Paul: Interesting. Yeah, I've never heard of Livepeer. This is cool. We'll go take a look at this ... Nader: Yeah, the team behind that is really, really, really, really good. I can't speak highly enough of them, probably some of smartest people out there. Paul: Dude they have a landing page with an SVG-animated globe, it must be good and it looks great. Nader: Yes, it's great. Paul: I was also wondering like from somebody who's working on the Graph and seeing the new I guess we could call them customers pop up and be using this network, what type of projects are you seeing pop up utilizing this new technology? And I guess an extension to that question would be what type of technologies could you maybe see popping up once this is truly decentralized that maybe can't happen right now naturally? Nader: I don't think that it's going to change really the types of applications that are going to be able to be built because the data that they're going to be using should probably be consistent whether it's on the ... Paul: Right, true. Nader: Yeah, the centralized network or not. But I think that it's interesting, just in general, to see that we are a downstream effect of whatever Web3 is happening right now. So, if DeFi gets really big, then we start seeing an influx of DeFi subgraphs. If NFTs start being popular, we start seeing an influx of those. So we're like this down ... We see the downstream effects of the entire Web3 ecosystem. Nader: And I also feel that we will grow and shrink based on the amount of usage in the entire Web3 space. So, if the market grows by 10x, our usage should grow at least by 10x just because so many people in the Web3 space are just using subgraphs by default. Paul: Are there any ways that people are using subgraphs that you're seeing right now from The Graph's point of view that are really enticing or engaging that have caught your eye of making use of this accessible data? Nader: One of the things that a lot of people want to do is have what's called subgraph composition where you can call one sub graph from another subgraph. And then, this is the ultimate goal of like ... I wouldn't say the ultimate goal, but it's one of the big, huge, cool things about blockchain and public data is that you can build upon it. And I think that that's something that's going to unlock a lot of innovation and it's something that we're currently working on. Nader: I would say just like going through the Graph Explorer, you'll see all types of really interesting stuff going on. I think that DeFi is interesting. And if you see a lot of the stuff happening in the DeFi space, the way people are building out different views on top of DeFi data and being able to figure out I don't know or just spot different patterns and what people are doing, that type of stuff is pretty interesting. Yeah. Paul: I don't know if you've heard of bounties that are going on in DeFi space right now. Nader: Yeah. Paul: You have? Yeah. I'm sure the graph is really involved with people who are seeking to get involved with that because it's literally just go analyze some data for us and get paid for it basically. Nader: Yeah. We had like a bug bounty, a $2.5 million bug bounty ourselves from the contracts. Paul: That's wild. That's huge. Nader: I think it was the biggest bounty ever of any software in the history of software. Paul: That's like a one and done bug bounty. Nader: Yeah. You just solve that bug or you find that bug and you can retire. Paul: Did it get solved? Did you get a grande champion? Nader: Well, it's more of like an open ... It's an open bounty. It's still there now. If you can find a vulnerability in the Graphs' contracts, then you can make that, you can claim that. Paul: That's very interesting. So, do you guys have in your minds any competitors? Every business has a competitor in your business but it's a bit different because this is a business with a goal of transparency and decentralization. So, there are other companies out there that are serving and indexing blockchain data. There's other businesses and sectors that are being risen up from that. How does the Graph fit into that sector of SaaS companies? Nader: I think that anyone can build a centralized indexing service that does the functionality that the Graph does I would say. They can build it from scratch or they can probably build some abstraction on top of it. But there aren't any, in my opinion, competitors right now to what we're doing especially in a decentralized way. Even if you look at a lot of the stuff that Vitalik Buterin is talking about around how we can efficiently scale the future of Web3 with all of the Layer 2s in these more high throughput ... Paul: We're talking about his end game paper? Nader: Yeah, like all these alternative scaling solutions for Ethereum. The discussion of how to scale all this data and make it readable comes down to the Graph. And I think that we're so far ahead of what you'd have to build to compete. It would be pretty hard. Not to say that there isn't going to be a competitor. In fact, I'm almost certain there will be at some point because it's just such a valuable problem to solve that you're going to see a lot of people also probably trying to solve it. Nader: But I think that building out a decentralized way to solve this problem is a very, very hard problem to solve. Paul: Right. There's going to be a lot of ... I mean, you're basically building up a whole new data economy from scratch. There are going to be a lot of malignant players. Nader: And I would say the value and the importance of having the service be decentralized for this type of service especially is just so important because you need to be able to take the important security principles of the chain itself and make that part of the protocol. So, how do you guarantee that the data that is being read on chain is actually the data being indexed? Nader: So, building out a network that enables that is like the core value proposition that I think a lot of people don't realize when they first start looking at it. But once you understand the importance of that one thing by itself, you start realizing, "Okay, the Graph does solve that problem and it does so in a pretty, pretty cool way." Paul: It's definitely pretty cool, yeah, understatement, if anything. So, on the topic of data validity and I guess integrity, how does you or the Graph plan on making niche data trusted? Because if we're talking about Ethereum data, sure, everybody's reading that. I'm sure I'm going to do a subgraph whenever I finally figure this stuff out and get my stuff running. But we're talking about one of the thousands of Layer 1 blockchains that you've talked about the beginning of our screencast right here. Paul: What about something like that that wants to get indexed that has two indexers and just a few delegators running around? How do you plan on tackling that problem? Nader: Yeah. I mean, we have incentives built into the network that incentivize people to go and look for inaccurate data. And it penalizes an indexer for basically running that subgraph. So, I think that for subgraphs that are only being indexed maybe about one or two indexers, it might not be ... The more people indexing, the more confident you can probably be I would say in that data validity. So, I don't really know the answer to that. Nader: I think that over time as we scale this thing out, we'll see that we'll be able to I guess identify and find better solutions to all these different problems. But in general, the network has this taken into consideration where if data is invalid, the indexer is penalized. And the fishermen they call them is rewarded for finding that vulnerability. Paul: Got you. Okay. So there's like a seeker. It reminds me of validation slashing where it's like if you're not doing your job right ... Nader: Yeah, you get slashed. Paul: ... you're going to get slashed pretty heavily. Nader: Yeah. Paul: How could somebody who wants to get started with the graph get started in terms of being their own indexer and stuff? Because I know you guys have a ton of documentation out there and the steps aren't difficult I guess. But I think when people are starting the graph, there's some more big level questions about like if I index Ethereum, am I just going to be another like brick in the wall, so to speak or should I really be looking for some valuable data that somebody wants? Like a secret many index I can build up? Or should I be going in trying to find another newly supported chain. Paul: From your perspective, what's the best most, A, lucrative and, B, learning way for somebody to get involved? Nader: So, I mean, just learning, if you want to participate in the network without any risk or anything like that, you can just basically be a delegator which allows you to have your GRT or your graph tokens and put them on another indexer so you don't have to run your own infrastructure or anything like that, really low left thing to do. Nader: I think going beyond that as a developer, identifying interesting datasets that you can aggregate and put together in your own subgraph. So, being a subgraph developer, there's a lot of upside to that. If you can find some interesting ways to take existing smart contracts, just build your own view on top of that data and then put it on the network and then signal on that yourself. Nader: If other people start using it, you start making money off of that or making tokens or earning tokens I guess you could say. I shouldn't say money. But, yeah, that's pretty interesting. I think for people listening to this, the idea of being a subgraph developer is probably the best entry point because you can build out frontends and apps on top of it. You can also just participate in the network and that's a great place to start I think. Paul: Do you have any examples off the top of your head of a frontend or an example app that subgraph developer has done that has caught your eye or something that people can look at for reference? Nader: Yeah, you can go to thegraph.com. And you can look in the hosted subgraphs. And you can also go to just the Graph Explorer. So, the Graph Explorer are the decentralized subgraphs. And then the other one is like the hosted service which are the centralized subgraphs. And you can look and see all the different ones that are available there. Nader: Some of the interesting projects lately, I mean, the Art Blocks is popular like NFT thing. And that subgraph has been doing really well. Someone from OpenZeppelin and OpenZeppelin is the team that creates some of the most used smart contract will pull the plates out there that implement the standards like ERC20 and the ERC721. They created OpenZeppelin subgraphs which are ways to really, really easily build APIs on top of ERC20, ERC721 tokens. Nader: Yeah, it's really, really nice and it's supported by them. So, instead of having to write all this code yourself, you can use their tool and just say, "Okay, these are the contracts' addresses that I want to index." And you don't have to really write any other code than that. And you just run a command and it spits out the entire subgraph for you. And it's so nice and it's so easy to get up and running with. And the guy that built that, his name is Hadrien I think. He's just like ... Paul: Hadrien? Nader: Yeah. He's so good. Paul: So, why isn't Hadrien just running all the subgraphs, man? What's going on? He can just construct them like that. Nader: I mean, he's doing all kinds of stuff. Yeah, he is. He has his own subgraphs actually that are indexed. And yeah, he definitely is doing all kinds of stuff. He's a big participant in the ecosystem. Paul: That's exciting. So, for anybody listening, look up Hadrien Croubois. Look up the Zeppelin subgraph tool. That's really exciting. Thanks for sharing that. I haven't heard anything about that. Since I can ask more questions, I've been wondering your opopinio on DAOs and what's going on with the DAO space? Because I mean, not recently like this month or anything, but this year, 2021, we now have the LLCs in Wyoming so you can register a DAO as an actual legal entity around in LLC in Wyoming which is pretty cool. Nader: Have you heard about the Developer DAO? Paul: I have heard about the Developer DAO. Yeah, that one, I found it through some Discord channel that I was on. That one was really interesting. I saw you posted about that on Twitter as well. So, are you a part of the Developer DAO? Nader: Yeah. I created the Developer DAO about three months ago. Paul: You did create it? Nader: Yeah. Paul: That's so cool. Here you are in almost the flesh. That's awesome. Nader: So, DAOs to me are just like ... Paul: What's your goal with that? Nader: Yeah, DAOs in general are just fascinating as hell to me because they just offer ... And when you talk about Web3, people often focus on the blockchain and they're like, "Oh, the blockchain is good, or it's bad, or it sucks or it's good," whatever. They have their opinions about the blockchain. But to me, Web3 is so much bigger. And even if the name Web3 is stupid to you, let's talk about just the implications and the things that are made possible by this new technology that allows you to have digital scarcity and all of this stuff. Nader: So DAOs fall into that category because they don't look like a technology when you look at them. They just look like something really weird and you're just like, "What the hell is going on here?" But what they essentially enable is a new form of collective ownership, a new way to incentivize people to work together. And really just around a new incentive mechanism I guess you could say for people to build together and to create things together. Nader: So, the Developer DAO is just a really great example of that because it was an experiment. I was like, "Okay, what does the DAO look like? I looked at these other DAOs. Okay. So essentially, one way to build a DAO is to have a community that's token-gated. And in order to be part of that community, you have to have this token." And for some DAOs, that token can be very expensive. Nader: So for instance, if you want to get in Friends with Benefits, it was $20 to get in a year ago. Now, it's $6,000 or $7,000 or $10,000 or whatever, depending on the price of that token, too. So, that to me was a good and a bad thing. It's good that you want to provide some type of civil resistance so you don't have a million people in there that are just like causing chaos. But you don't want to make it gatekeeping to where the average person can't get in. Nader: So, I created this ERC721 contract and deployed it. And anyone that minted this NFT could get in. But instead of charging for it, I didn't charge anything for it so there was no money involved. It was just go mint this thing and you can get in. And this was a really cool way to scale up a community because now, we have 5,000 or so people that are in there. And within three weeks, we started having investors coming and being like, "Hey, we want to be part of this." Nader: And one of the earliest investors that we had valued what we had in three weeks at about $10 million. And they were like, "We want to be a part of this. And in exchange for your future token allocation, we want to give you half-a-million dollars." And this was so early that we're just blown away by it because we were like, "Wow, is what we have even worth that much?" And then a month later, we're getting approached at $30 million valuations and more. Nader: So, it's wild to see that you can grow a community. And this all happened within two or three months by taking advantage of these new primitives and stuff. And we don't really know what we're doing. But there's people out there that have DAOs that are worth $300, $400 million and stuff like that. So, I think DAOs are going to be the future maybe or not the future, they're going to offer a really cool way for people to build communities, build treasuries, build companies in the future. They're not going to replace anything. It's just giving you a new alternative. Nader: I think that's the core to this discussion of what Web3 is. Some people are really hating on it. Some people really like it. But at the end of the day, it's just offering new ways to do things. And it never hurts to be given a new way to do something because now, you just have one extra ... Paul: Right, a new way to think about it. Nader: Think about things, yeah. A new way to think about things. Paul: I think DAOs are really interesting, too, because they're going to shed a lot of light on inefficiencies in the current way that we organize things. And they're going to shed light on the inherent cost of organization and orchestration of humans because it just makes everything transparent. You can see and it allows people to circumvent those classical power structures. Paul: But to your point, I've heard that argument many times of everything will be a DAO and that's definitely not going to happen just because we're human beings and not everything can work with computers. But having that option is going to be really cool. So, do you have an end goal for the Developer DAO? Is this like a main project you're working on? Is it like it's set in motion and you're working with and you're just going to see where it goes type of thing? Nader: Yeah, it's set in motion. And we have a core team that's working on ... One person's working on a full-time. The mission values and goals of what the Developer DAO is mainly focused on public goods. So, we want to create educational content that is completely free for everyone outside of the DAO. That's like a core thing that we're focused on. Nader: So, the way that we do that is we curate some of the best Web3 content and just share it on our Twitter feed. Twitter's growing by like 10-12,000 a month. And people follow us and they're learning just by following us. So to me, that's already kind of a win because like there is ... Before we came around, in my opinion, there was just no really great curated Web3 learning content feed out there. Nader: We're also doing events. So we're going to be doing conferences. We've already done some livestreams and stuff like that. So educational content, all of that's going to be completely free. You don't have to be a part of the DAO to do any of this stuff. You can follow us on Twitter for free. You can attend these events for free. Nader: And then the next thing we're going to be doing with some of the Treasury money that we now have is incubating projects from within. So, if someone comes up and they're like, "Hey, I'll have this cool idea for building out this thing," we might just give them money. We'll just give them $50,000 and just say, "Go work on this full-time." And we may or may not have an expectation of some type of deal like partnership with them. We might just say, "Just take this and go build it." Or we might say, "If you decide to launch a token or something and give X percent back to the DAO and then we can use that on Treasury." Nader: So, those are some of the ideas. But I think the main focus is around free public goods and public education that's free. Paul: It reminds me of a similar setup to Polkadot where it was an organization that got funding and they're now seeding projects. But this is not from a company, this is a DAO so it's going to ... We can probably think in our minds, we're going to have more decisions made in the best interest of community if it's decentralized by nature. Nader: Yes, it's definitely ... It's not an easy thing to accomplish as far as getting people together to agree on stuff. But there's a lot of cool stuff that is in the category of DAO tooling. I think DAO tooling is another area that you're going to see a lot of innovation happening in the next year. Because you have now these groups of people wanting to do stuff, but how do you actually accomplish the things that they want to do without chaos. Nader: And Discord is kind of chaos. So, I think we're going to need improvements for those types of mechanisms, but already great things are out there. Snapshot voting allows you to propose things and have people vote on them using their tokens. You have these token-gating mechanisms. You have a few other things that are out there that you could consider DAO toolling. Paul: So, I just haven't heard of some of these DAO tools. I was going to ask you to elaborate a bit. So we got Snapshot voting and that's to help coordinate member like decision making? Nader: Yeah. So, if we have a proposal that we want to say, "Okay, we're going to do this big change in the DAO. Here's a link," and then you can go to that link. And then basically, it will bring up your MetaMask or whatever your wallet is. And you'd sign a transaction. And when you sign that transaction, then your vote goes to yes or no for this thing. Nader: There's also a really cool one called Coordinape like coordinate but like an ape, like APE. And it allows you ... Paul: I love that. Nader: Yeah. It allows you to basically put people that have worked on things and allow the community to vote on how much that they should maybe get paid for the work that they've done. So, you have a community of 5,000 people, how do you actually pay these people or give them tokens for the work that they've done? Well, we can say, "Okay, in season zero, we had these objectives." And anyone that feels like they've worked on those objectives can basically nominate themselves this coordinape pool. And then every person in the DAO is given 100 votes. Nader: And you can take those 100 votes and you can say, "Oh, Amanda, she crushed it on the websites so I'm going to give her 50 of my votes. And I'm going to give 20 votes to like John over here," whatever. So you can take these votes. And at the end of the voting period, you have a $50,000 budget and you would just distribute that $50,000 to the people that were in that coordinate pool. And that's how you allow payments to happen in a decentralized manner that isn't me saying, "Oh, my friend over here should get more money but that might not be fair. This is a more fair way of doing that." Paul: This is like LinkedIn endorsements with actual value tied behind them that help you execute your payment and stuff summed up in a nutshell? Nader: Yeah, it is connected to your wallet. And I think that the idea of a wallet and decentralized identity and public key encryption could warrant an entire discussion in and of itself. But a lot of this stuff is just enabled by that. Yeah, you could have done this before with your Google address or something like that I guess. But I think that once you start interacting with services via a public key encryption using some type of wallet, then you start really maybe buying into the idea of what the Web3 stuff is. Paul: Great, yeah. And I think it's cool that you can assemble a whole team just in your web browser like that. And you're not relying on a central organization to do that which is really cool. Coordinape, the APE thing just brings to my mind how I've been thinking about how DAOs are probably going to be used to replace some form of hedge funds in the future where you have members voting on owning securities. And we're seeing the new retail boom in the market right now. And I'm just thinking that's going to be bloody and dangerous and amazing. That's some cool stuff. I love that APE, the APEs funny. Paul: Nader, it was so awesome getting to chat with you. This was really informative not just for myself but I'm sure for people listening. Nader: Yeah. No, it was most pleasure. I appreciate the invite and allowing me to come on here and yap about all this stuff. I really like to talk about it. Brian: Okay. So, that's it. So, the two questions that I always ask for every one of my episodes are, number one, if people want to find out more about you, they probably already know how but if you had to direct them to a specific thing or whatever, what are those things you want to point them to? Nader: Yeah. Well, just check out my Twitter, dabit3 on Twitter, and then also my YouTube, Nader Dabit. I have a stream that I do every week called Shadowy Super Coders where I interview real people in the Web3 space and let them talk about the stuff they're working on. So, have a good time doing that and that's on my YouTube channel. Brian: Cool. And then, who's working on something interesting that you feel like you want to shout out maybe, isn't getting a lot of a lot of attention and they probably deserve it. Nader: So, I guess there's two people if I can nominate those two people. One of them is Saniya More. I'm not sure. I think it's Saniya, maybe Saniya. But we work together so I probably should know her pronunciation a little bit better. But she's joined our team at the Graph Protocol. And she has a newsletter that she curates called web3 tea. So you can go to her Twitter at S-A-N-I-Y-A-M-O-R-E. And she has a link in her ... For the first tweet, she asked to subscribe to that newsletter. Nader: And then the other person is Alisha and she's on Twitter @futurealisha and also alisha.eth. And she has joined the community of Web3 in the last few months. And she's really made a name for herself and seems to be crushing it. And I think if anyone's interested in following someone that has recently moved into this space, that shares a lot of really great insight and is doing a lot of cool community stuff, then she's someone I would definitely follow. And she has a great YouTube show as well. So you can go to her Twitter, YouTube and see the link to her YouTube which is youtube/futurealisha. Brian: Awesome. We'll put all the links and stuff in the descriptions as per usual. Nader, it is a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. Nader: Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at podrocketpod on Twitter or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's Brian at LogRocket.