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We launched on Solana November 1st, 2023. So it took, I think it took longer than expected, but I mean, the rest is history.
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Hello, hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the SolFate Podcast, where we chat with founders and builders in the Solana ecosystem. This was a great one today. Nick, you want to tell us a little bit about? Yeah, it was super good. We had Rick, the founder of Discover, one of the biggest social networks in Web3, I think. It's super interesting. We did get a bit technical. We're dropping some technical bits as we go.
Rick, he's a technical founder, know, it's my favorite kind of people. But yeah, we talked about like, on one hand, why social on web three, like why web three social, like what's the unique benefit there? Like what's the value add that web three and blockchain can bring to social, but then also some, how should I phrase this? Like what's a con of it being on blockchain?
TLDR, it's all public by default. that poses some interesting restrictions in a way and like how to work around it and everyone's sort of figuring it out. Yeah, it was really, really cool. Yeah, I think even for the non-technical folks, it was a good chat. It was a pretty mellow chat, gets a little bit philosophical, right? About sort of the whys behind some of these things. Overall, it was very interesting to me. Like I definitely came in as someone who...
is not super big into socials, right? Like I use Twitter and that's about it. sort of left the chat feeling, okay, I should give Discover a try, but also, you know, maybe there actually is some unique value prop of like, you know, blockchain coexisting with social, which is something that I hadn't really considered before. So lots of interesting things there. And then lastly,
You know, he gave some words of motivation, I think, to all builders at the end. They're really great. So stick around, have a listen. Before we dig in, just a quick shout out to Phantom. Phantom's the preferred wallet of the Solana ecosystem. We love partnering with Phantom. Also, if you have any dev needs, reach out to me. My dev shop Unboxed is here to help, whether it's, you know, Web3 or whether it's more traditional Web2 stuff. We're always around.
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And lastly, we don't ask this enough, but we would love to get, you know, like reviews and ratings on whatever podcast. leave us a review. You know, like that would really help, right? We'd love to reach a wider audience. And if you like the show, please help out. But yeah, let's dig in. Let's go. Nothing in this podcast is or should be considered financial advice. Any opinions and thoughts expressed are solely those of the individual. They do not represent the opinions of any entity. Enjoy.
It's great to meet you, Rick. We've never met before, but I'm happy to have you on. I'm excited to chat about your product and everything. Awesome. You too, James. And also Nick, thanks for setting this up. I know things get lost in DMs so easily. Oh yeah. Yeah, we're happy to have you. I gave James a little bit of a rundown of some of the things that we've talked about and what Discover is and how it sort of works.
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I guess for the listeners, we'll probably start something like this of like, who are you and what is Discover? Can you give the elevator pitch for what Discover is? Yeah, my name is Rick Porter. I'm the CEO and co-founder of a platform called Discover. Discover is a Web3 social network and our goals for it are to unlock monetization, distribution, and ownership. For pretty much everyone, it's
as much as possible. Myself, I've been in crypto for 2016 professional, it was my first crypto job. I was doing diamond traceability for De Beers. So we're tracing diamonds from the times I lived amongst in Botswana to the time they hit the retailers in Antwerp. And everything was built on Ethereum when like, at the time, gas prices seemed more realistic for something like that.
That's super interesting. I might want to click into that a little bit further outside of the episode at some point, because that's not something I'd heard of. And I definitely didn't think that a non-crypto company was doing that sort of thing in 2016. That's neat. digital twins, I think digital twins go in and out of popularity, but it's super interesting stuff.
I mean, I mean, the end result was, like, you know, you really couldn't put that much information on chain and it ended up being a hash. So like, uh, we built this distributed network of like Intel SGX secure comp, uh, compute enclaves. Um, and the technology was like extremely, uh, fresh at the time. So there wasn't a lot of support and the only people who really had tech like public, uh, repositories around it.
You won't believe it was by do. So that were the people who are actually kind of like pioneering the and being like the thought leaders and like the open source technology for it. So very bizarre, right? Wild, wild. What was what's sort of the path from there to founding a social based company? Yeah, you know, I actually had a couple social based products before the first one that like
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I actually really appreciated was this one called fan backed. And the idea was like, and this is like pre crypto, not pre crypto existence, but like before I actually was like super aware of this could have been done in crypto. And the idea was is like you wanted to finance a movie, TV show or game, and you would go to your fans and actually start selling like digital assets to them. I mean, this sounds weird, right? Like,
Mo crowd funding type thing. Yeah. would be so like an example was is my favorite one we worked with is a guy named Rob Zombie. He has a band called White Zombie. But he has a lot of horror movies. movies too. That's cool. They're intense. Yeah, very intense. Yeah, like buckle up. Like I remember being yeah, I can do horror. And I started like watching him and I was like, damn, this is on a whole level. So he
Like we had this platform and it was like a Patreon style platform. this is like, right? Patreon. I remember when we were announcing, we're also announcing it, Patreon. And the, the idea was, is like, we had this like chat where you could like come in and like a little forum like tech where you could like come out, write a comment after you've purchased or ask questions. And Rob, we, we brought, we onboarded Rob and he had this like.
all these really detailed things that he wanted, like high customization. He wanted everything to look and feel different, but like be the aesthetic of the platform, but be his own style. And so like I introduced a lot of new stuff, but like what was interesting was like, he'd like be on the movie set and like walk over to like a fake zombie and like pick up its head and be like, okay, I'm selling this right now on fan back.
or you know, whatever a couple hundred bucks and everyone would be like, they jump on the platform right away and like bid on it and like it was, but it was like, uh, like one of ones, it was one of tens, things like that. So like all the paradigms of like a crypto, but not at the time. And then he also sold this thing called like the, man, I think it was like the super VIP pass or the forever pass or something like that. But like, it was a digital pass that when you got it, um,
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you could go to all his shows for free. Well, for the cost of that original pass, I it was like five or six grand and there was a limited edition. And so he would sell them like right on the platform and like, but he had like tons of these really in depth social needs. Like I want to be able to reply, but show up as like the creator of this project. I want to have DMS and I want to be able to like message my fans one-on-one and receive messages from them. I want my own inbox, but he had like
really a list of extensive social features. And we just kind of went, we're like, okay, cool. We'll let you kind of take the roadmap here. And at that moment, it was like all the like interesting engagement with the fans to me was like really exciting. Like how he engaged, how he actually like onboarded folks. And we worked with a lot of different creators at the time. We worked with Slash. We started working with Corey Taylor from Slipknot.
and a couple others, like for him, his way he engaged with his fans to me was like, was like really my first social kick. And I worked at MySpace like really early on. And it was like, those were interesting days, like, but like it was a totally different work environment. It was in Beverly Hills next to the Playboy office. It was everyone was shoulder to shoulder, cause this was late within like MySpace's lifespan.
But like you started seeing creators, like influencers actually exist on this platform. And it's like, why was this person famous? And people would be like, well, they're huge on MySpace. And it was like, the only one I can remember the most is Teela Tequila. But it was like seeing those kind of like, those types of like paradigms of like this is normal human being, like heavy quotes that just started posting on MySpace and becoming popular. And then you saw like this.
transition to like how influencers were actually created. But so after after doing fan backed, I was like, I want to take this like same concept and pitch it to institutional banks. So we went to State Street and State Street was like, yeah, let's do this. And they have like trillions of dollars of AUM. And the pitch was like, what happens if like all the news you got showed up in like a Reddit style feed? But
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it was sorted and ranked instead of like how people upvoted, it was sorted and ranked based off of your equities, your public equities and what those holdings look like. So your news would be relative to what you were holding. And the project kicked off and got a lot of usage out of it pretty quickly. It was a lot of data and it was a lot of work working with.
a bank like State Street, like so much security involved with every little step we had to do, like had entire areas where we couldn't even have cell phones. And like, as like a group of like entrepreneurs not being able to easily access your phone, cell phone or the internet was like, actually like five X the amount of time it took to do any style of development. Cause like, like, let's say you have a question on anything as a software engineer, you have a question.
Like you just don't Google it. You can't Google. There's like, cause you don't get the internet like that. You have to like leave the building and go to a coffee shop and Google your question, memorize it, and then walk back in and like do work. Hey there, it's Nick. Quick intermission on the episode. If you're enjoying this episode, drop us a review in whatever podcast app you're already listening to Spotify, Apple podcast, YouTube. It would really, really help us out. We're trying to grow the show, trying to spread the good word of Solana and all the cool things and builders that are there here in the ecosystem.
Yeah, and speaking of YouTube, if you're watching on YouTube, we publish all of our episodes there. Don't forget to subscribe. It really helps us out too. And yeah, let's go ahead and get back to the episode. What year was this roughly? This is like 2014 or 15. this is pretty wild. It was that restrictive even by that. mean, that it was like, you can't have internet access when you're writing this code.
Right. Like, I mean, if you have friends who are at the DOD, right. That's the, think they still can't straight up like Google. Still like that all the time in tons of secure, secure locations in the military and DOD. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. So it's like, end up in this slide. It's tough, right? But it was cool. It was really fun building the app, like seeing the engagement on it and things like that. But like, right. Like you, everyone has that concept. I don't think there's a human being who doesn't like.
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appreciate social and sometimes actually think about it and think, wow, like, how would you build your own Reddit? Right? Like, I'm sure as any software engineer, it becomes an interesting just question in general. And so I was at like, I was at Google, and I'd get off work and I'd be like, I kind of miss programming I miss like, because like most of my day was like a little bit ago and a lot of management. So
I would sit there and be like, I want to learn something new. And everything was wasm at the time. So I like picked up rust. and like Solana being rust is just like luck. A lot of luck there, but like, yeah, I mean, it was just like everything Fond Discover just ended up was like this rust project. And the whole thought was like, okay, it becomes a wasm module and this was a module is this on chain. And, now anybody can interact with this like.
program that exists within sight of a protocol. And we released it like 20, man, four years ago, three and a half years ago, three and a half years ago, it really released the main that quote unquote, but the alpha was probably like almost four years ago. But like, as soon as I posted it within like a day, remember having the first version of discover. Yeah. First version of discover. And the concept was super simple. It was like,
Can Reddit exist on chain? That was the only real question. And we found this network that could like, you could deploy the Wasa modules too, and you could deploy the front end too. So like everything could technically be there. And when the first deployment went out, was like, it was an ugly site, had like a lot of issues, but like you could post and comment and you could have like the comment trees. And I remember like that, it was a lot of spam, like insane amount of spam because people were very like, what is this? You know?
Um, but there was this one user was like, hello. And I remember just being like, damn, that's like, it's a kick. You know, you see that because it felt like authentic. I remember replying to them. Hello. And then they replied like with questions and at that exact, it's just like at exact moment, it became like, okay, well, this person has these bugs and this person has this. These issues. And it would be neat if the users could do that. So it was about like a year of that. And then I was like, Oh shoot. Like,
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I literally can't spend all my time doing this. have a full job. So we got to figure out something. And we went in about a year and a half into it, raising money for Discover. It was led by Polychain Capital. And I mean, the rest is kind of history. You know, we've gone through so many ups and downs on the platform, but sometime, man, it was like,
2023, summer of 2023, I went over to the New York City hacker house. yeah, it was, was interesting. was, remember the red day, remember the New York's like red city day? Yeah. I have a bunch of pictures from the New York office. The New York's sauna foundation, New York office. Like we're all like looking out the windows and we're just like, the entire city is on fire. Like what is happening? It was, it was Canada that was on fire and everything was hitting the city all at once. It was wild.
That's right. was Canada. was like trying to remember why was the city red? Yeah. And yeah, that's, I mean, went to the hacker house and it was, um, like we just were like looking for, we needed a lot of integrations. That's the only way social like web three social works. It has to plug in. You can't really like rebuild everything and you need the things integrations that like not only onboard users, but like reduce friction and all those things.
So we were like, look, it's going to take us like four to five months to do this, but it's a big risk. And it was moved to Solana and like start moving a lot of our major components. And we launched on Solana, November 1st, 2023. it took, I think it took longer than expected, but, I mean, the rest is history. What were you on before Solana? Yeah, we were on this protocol called the internet computer.
Um, and it was by a uh, a foundation called definitively. And we probably were with them for many years. Like, um, man, I think I met the original team back in like 2016 when post they did a, like a, one of those like a theory on based ICOs. don't know if you guys remember those. Yeah. It was like EOS.
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like five others and them. And eventually they took them till what is it like three years ago when they launched. But the, I think the WASM modules and all those things, like a lot of that technology just existed, know, like WASM was 32 bit. think it's 60 more, 64 bits more common, but you got to imagine that's like 32 bit systems, four gigabytes of memory.
That's a lot of restrictions to work within, but eventually it solves itself. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot that you said that you were on ICP. I remember it wasn't Solana initially, but I could not remember what it was. One of the things about our show is our audience is definitely leans towards the more technical side. You're dropping these technical tidbits all over the place here, so let's dive into it.
Can you talk more about the architecture of how Discover is actually built? Because like you said, almost every developer has had this sort of thought experiment. Some have put it into practice of, I could build a social media platform, social network. What does it actually look like under the hood? What was your thoughts of building it and how you decided to tackle some of it? Yeah, you know.
I mean, like right now and when it started, it's completely different. Like I'll give you a thousand foot view of now. And now when I really think of the major systems, I think of our transactional system, which like all data is written to. And it almost works like a, I would say like a database on steroids. It's got like basic business logic, but it eventually data has persisted.
and persisted within order. And it's a full transactional system that you users are signing everything that is written to discover, meaning posts, comments, upvotes, like changing your username, changing your user settings. Literally everything is a signed transaction by a public and private key that is then persisted to
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the network and then eventually reaches finality. The identity system which issues those private keys is a delegated identity system. There's the primary transactional system which all transactions are written to and then there's the identity system which sits separately. That uses delegated identities.
all identities are generated in a secure system and then that private key never sees the day of light. It'll never leave that system. But what we do is we generate a delegated identity on top of it. And so that delegated identity issues another public and private key, which maps back to the original.
public key, which can be verified through its private key. And so the reason we did this was that if, there's an expiry. And so the idea is, like, you can log into discover, it issues you a new public and private key, which is being, which has the capabilities of being mapped back to the original. And if that public, and if those, those two keys that are delegated ever get leaked or ever make it to the internet, they expire.
So it's not permanent and you haven't permanently lost anything. And since that was the kind of thinking it's like, man, this is embedded into the browser. It's kind of scary. but like also this identity system allows us to create identities with your biometrics. and there's actually a, I forget the word for that, but, like you're able to do with your fingerprint scanner on the phone. and that'll issue, a passkey wallet.
Yeah, passkey and I can't remember the exact name for those biometrics, but basically passkey. And also we have typical wallet logins. We have the ability to log in with your Phantom wallet or your SolFlare wallet and backpack now. And then we also have like email password and Gmail. And I was like, I would say 70 % of users.
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use Gmail and the other like 20 % use most likely Phantom. And then everything like breaks down in a million different ways from there. But yeah, and then there's like, so those identity, the identity system, our actual transactional system, and then our feed engine is probably another major system. I would argue the feed engine is more complex than both of those systems combined at times. Something we totally did not expect. And then when we originally wrote everything,
you know, many years ago, the feed was just part of the transactional system. It was just like, well, I'm in the query data and then show me the buy time and most upvoted and like, and then they got a little bit more simplest of social algorithms. Show me what's recent. It's the very MySpace approach to like every single social media platform. These days they have very complex feed engines of like, what is the user, what is each individual user going to see?
based off of all the asserted data points that you have on a particular user, their interests, who they've interacted with. You're trying to keep them on the platform. And then the MySpace approach is like, whatever's recent, we don't care. Show it. Let's go. I love the simpler approach. It was good. And eventually, was like, your followers. Rank them higher.
Communities you follow, rank those higher. And then now the infinite, like the now the amount of different things it does before it displays a query. I don't, feel like there's like a hundred different things that'll decide upon before it even shows you a single post, within the feed. like, like almost everyone's feed is different, but for like where we're at to where we would like to go is mountains and mountains of work.
Like you definitely feel when you show someone like we have four to five different feeds on discover. and all of them use the same feed engine with different inputs, but like the feed engine or the feed that everyone uses is by far the one that use has the most amount of like. Custom a personalization and customization to it. Like that's it's just no matter where we move it, people will go find it and just browse that feed only. And so it's become like.
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I like when you think about the word feed, like to feed, like to eat, right? So it's like, it's weird, right? Like feed engine to feed to like, you got to feed the users. And if you're feeding them things they don't like, they're obviously not going to stick around. So it's like everyone's palette is different. And you've got to really, really customize and people don't, people don't like following people right away.
They don't like this just because they'd like something doesn't mean they just because they follow something doesn't mean they like it. Like a lot of people follow friends, but they don't necessarily give a shit about their content. yeah. So yeah, so feed engine is interesting. It takes like by far it's like, okay, feeds are slow or feeds are slowing down. We've got to upgrade it. We've got to like, there's something that can be always something that can be optimized. but like.
you spend a lot of time optimizing it. And then we have like, gating engines, which is like, I think the, closest paradigm is matrica, for discord. So like how, like you have the ability to gate any community by any NFT or token. And that thing's a beast. uses like simple ha abuses the shit out of simple hash. How about that? but yeah, there's like.
when you take that step back, and then there's like the user ranking engines. Those are actually more, they're very quick, but tons of tweaking. You could literally just sit there all day and just tweak these little numbers and get What goes into like the user ranking engine? Like what are you ranking them on based off of, is a particular user likely to be?
you know, for lack of a better phrase, like high quality user on the platform or are you just like the platform in general, or is it specific to an individual, a different user? Yeah, no, it's, it's basically global. And it's, we've, we do take external inputs and external inputs can basically help for civil. But like, it's not.
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always strong indicator. So the goal of the engine is to decide, give us a snapshot of like the overall health of the social, the social graph. Like what is the overall health of our social graph at this point in time? And as like the, by look, and that was unintentional at the beginning, but that's become kind of like, shoot, like you can start seeing that like the ranking in users relative to the global.
snapshot over all time is starting to drift. So you're seeing like people who are in the top 500 become less active. And then people in the lower like 10,000 posting and commenting more. And just because your ranks low doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad user, but it may mean the overall health of the network is starting to tip in one direction. And you see it, you know it too, like
You can just browse the site, go through all the posts, go through all the comments. And you're like, there's definitely some, something missing, but we use about 17 different data points to determine a user's rank. and it's like everything, like your follow ratios, your like ratios, your comment ratios, your, how, like, what is your uniqueness engagement? So like.
Are you getting a lot of engagement from unique users? Or is your engagement coming from the same users? And so it's like a really popular user has high, like huge engagement rates, huge ratios and huge unique scores. So they're not typically within the same, they're not always addressing the same audience. And I think you could feel that on Twitter too, when you're like, you're kind of getting the same likes from the same people. Awesome. You know, that feels good.
But also it might mean you're not growing in followers. You're getting caught in the algorithm, as people say. You only get exposed from the algorithm to the same people over and over and over. So yeah, you're not growing anymore. And that sampling is expensive. I bet. I'm curious to hear about the infrastructure that you run for all of this, because like...
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You're describing all of this and like it's a lot of data analytics and data analytics can add up fast on, on infra costs. Yeah, you know, um, it's not crazy. I think we're only at about 10,000, 15,000, maybe a month for infrastructure costs. Uh, luckily we're rust. Um, and I think that is where it's really saving us. Our TypeScript systems are probably just like maybe a 50 % to a hundred percent more expensive. Um,
because they take beefier machines, require more memory. What you mean? No JS and JavaScript don't like eat a lot of memory. I'm so surprised. Dude, the, you know, it's like, there's this, command and I've almost memorized it, but it's basically you tell your, your computer to allow JavaScript to execute over eight gigabytes of memory or over, you know, 10 gigabytes of memory.
Yeah, I figured out what the command is, but like, that was like, think it's RM dash RF JavaScript. Yeah. You're, your home directory there for all JavaScript files. know, what's funny is like, you, you, but you know, what do you, if you ever use JavaScript, you feel it like, you, the, amount of data it can transform relative to like,
Rust is, it's not even comparable. Like you think, cause in JavaScript you think nanosecond or you think milliseconds, right? And then as soon as you start using Rust, like anything over a millisecond, means you're like, something's broken. So. Yeah. Yeah. I want to, I want to ask a couple, maybe less technical questions. Cause I am, I feel like I don't know social that well.
Right? Like this is, this seems to be a world that you're very embedded in. And so I'm super curious to understand the value add that you give social by putting it on a blockchain. Like I definitely understand the, the, sort of nerd snipe desire to like, can I, can I put a social media platform on a blockchain?
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But I'm super curious to see like you've clearly found some product market fit over the last few years and like have some resonance with some folks in the community. And I'm super curious to understand what is the primary driver of that first to someone who maybe doesn't get it. Like I'm looking to have that light bulb moment. Yeah, you know, there's a kumbaya. The kumbaya answer I don't even really love, which is like.
Now it's decentralized and verifiable and traceable.
down, discover social network, the data, anybody could pick up the nodes and run operate their own nodes in the network would never go away. And I think like, that's a powerful statement. And I do think there's a lot of truth to it. But I also think like, mastodon or sorry, activity pub, which is like, been around way longer, and they're a federated social, they're federated.
instead of decentralized, could make a lot of those arguments at times, at times. But I think with, for me, when I really look at it is I really think about like the open and accessible APIs and the open and an accessible network. And so when that really like gets me is that like now there's a standard protocol or a standard way of actually plugging applications directly within the social that's unopinionated.
And when I think about like Reddit, okay, it's so it's a lot easier now to say these things than it was like three years ago. But like, the argument is like, well, if Reddit ever shut down their API, like, what would people actually do? And then are then ready, like shuts down their API last year, and then opens it up and heavily monetizes it. But we used to say that like, as like, hey, you know, this could happen. And they literally did it, which is like,
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shocking. And then the people who actually most likely grew Reddit, which were Reddit is fun. And I think it was called Apollo, which were the two alternative apps, most likely laid the path for Reddit to be part of like people's mobile phone experience. Because there wasn't like this official app. And so they literally shut down those apps. And now you could argue all the different reasons why. But like,
it should have been accessible still for those apps to exist and it still should have been possible given the data that still exists. But because of that data was gate-capped and sits behind their infrastructure, they could remove accessibility to it, which they also means they could remove the ability to access it through those APIs. And I actually don't think Apollo or Reddit is fun, could have.
if given the raw data could have built something on top of it. Like it's just too much data. Like we're talking, you know, millions of posts and comments a day. Like I can't even imagine you would need 20 XR infrastructure. No, no, no, a thousand XR infrastructure to be able to like, not only handle all of that, but like have a lot of access to that information. And then when you think about like really great put together APIs, like discord.
where you can build diverse amount of applications on top of, you kind of see that paradigm of like, okay, like there's something within the API, but like, how do you trust that? Discord's API will still remain. And if Discord's API goes away, is there any way to like, for me to continue building applications on top of it? And the answer is probably not. So.
For me, when I really take that step back, it's making things like open and accessible from a developer and user perspective to allow them to have that freedom of choice with their own experience. And I think like, and the transparency, think, and we're not even doing this that well, but like, how are you giving transparency behind what people are actually seeing in their feeds and what are they receiving within their feeds?
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Like, how do I know I'm shadow bent? How do I know I'm demoted? You know, how do I know that I'm actually like, why am I not getting reach? And so it's like, how do you give the users transparency on ways that they can actually solve those problems? But like, to me, when you back it all out, this actually empowers the creator. And there's one easy example of why.
And there's one harder one. I'll go for the easy one first. The easy one is like YouTube creator program. Like if you want to be, if you're a YouTuber and you want to develop content, you actually have to be within the pre the creator program to monetize it. And from a web three perspective, it just seems weird that like this monetization is gate kept. like there's no real reason why. So it's like on and within web three, there's probably a million sites I can go to sign up.
I've become a monotone, being able to monetize myself as a creator, as a Web3 creator. So I think there's actually one very specific reason why it's like that. Maybe this is a hot take, maybe it's not, but it's because it costs too much for them. So like for YouTube, you have to have like a thousand subscribers and like X number of watch time. I split either at shorts or with their long form content.
And like, soon as you hit that, you're still probably only getting paid best case, like more than likely, if you're like barely at those thresholds, you're getting paid maybe a couple of dollars a month. If that based off like how they do it, but if they're only sending costs are just too high. Exactly. think the payment processing costs are too high, which is why they set that minimum bar of like, if you're at this level, you're basically a break even for, for their processing costs, not including like data, data, info, and you know, all that kind of stuff.
I think that's why. Vice with Web3, you have all of these financial efficiencies that have been, they're just accessible, especially on Solana, fraction of a fraction of a penny to send any amount of value. You don't have those same processing cost fees. not to mention they can't prove that value and claim it when they want to instead of paying to send it. That's interesting. That sort of is another point on top of what you were already saying.
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Rick about like the, you know, benefits of the blockchain. There's actually a payment aspect. totally agree. And like, there's this actual whole angle that I wasn't aware of until like two years ago, which is
I'm at a conference speaking to this like person who manages TikTok creators. And it's like already it's like, well, it's super weird and interesting, but like, I, I, like, I haven't talked, spoke to a lot of these. mostly spoke to him on the YouTube side. And then within the first, a couple of instances, I tell her what I'm doing and she's like, wow, that's amazing. That's exactly what we need on TikTok. And I'm like, what, does TikTok mean with this? And she tells me this whole story about how
All the data within TikTok is gate kept. So if you're a creator and you're trying to figure out how do I get better reach? What are the statistics on like people who read the style of content and like, are the, what are the numbers on people who actually participate in, my genre? And her genre is like, she sells,
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I'm gonna kitchen appliances is like, it's not the right word, but it's like kitchen gadgets. And so basically her whole thing is like going, getting her like cooking creators on TikTok to like show a new, gadget, right. And one of them is like this like AI oven, but she says like, I don't have the data. I'm not part of this like TikTok cabal. So I don't have the data on actually like, what are the right things to be doing all the time? And there's like.
There's people who are privy to this information. So this information is gate-kept from the general creators, exclusively given to groups of creators. And so they can now exclusively grow faster and better because they have these insights. so- like the TikTok platform builders, maintainers, owners, whatever, they're actually giving the data to select few people or like groups of people.
Sounds like it's like expo. I want to say it's like, I don't like foresee it being like, they're just picking up the data and shipping to them. But I'm foreseeing dashboards. Like there's like, here's a dashboard on more detailed information, like pro creator dashboard or something. Yeah. So it's like, what are the hashtags trending or what are like, what are the different trends with inside of these genres and categories? So
Technically, like in web three, if that was, if TikTok was an open protocol, people could like siphon the data off of that open data and derive their own insights and derive their own information. And yeah, so maybe TikTok gate keeps it. It's super complex, expensive system to run. But, if that data was, if the underlying data powering those dashboards was like freely available, then everyone would have
technically have access to the same raw information, but now people could have exclusive access to how that raw information is transformed or how insights come out of that raw information, which I think is abstractly fair. so I think Web3, sometimes the whole, even the word Web3 feels like I'm saying something bizarre or I'm not even sure.
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what it means at all times. But like, it's like deep and I feel like you Google what's deep and it's like all these projects come up that you're like, is this even deep in? But like, that's to me, when you think about when I think about web three, I think it's like really about that open and charitable information. And it's like, kind of leveling the playing field on giving everyone the same insights. And like, it's it's similar for trading, like, we all have the same trading information, but maybe people have been like, are spending money.
on enriching it, like, who are the wallets behind this? What are the bubble maps? You know, like, but like we at the end of the day, we have access to all that same raw information. And I think from from social as high how competitive social is and how sadly or happily important it is becoming to society, I think being
I was going to say financially too, but like, which is true, like us all having access to the same raw information to me is the right step in the right direction. It's interesting. Like as you're talking through this, I'm having this almost philosophical question in my mind about like, is data like a utility? Like should it be treated like a utility the way that we treat, you know,
water and, you know, like in most countries you have easy access to certain things because it's like, hey, this is almost viewed as a human right that you have access to it. Maybe not access to the fancy dashboards that someone has to build. Maybe you have to pay for someone to do that, but you have access to the underlying data. can use that, manipulate it to, you know, derive value somehow.
And it almost feels like that's what you're positing is that like the underlying data stream should be available to anyone. And I'm not, and I'm not against that by any means. I just have never really thought of it that way before. And so I'm, I'm kind of like working through it real time. Yeah, same. I'm like, I have one huge wrench that gets thrown into it. Every time I think about it, is privacy.
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And the right to be forgotten, right to be forgotten. It's not a U S law. It's a GRDP compliance law. I'm dyslexic. I think I'm getting one. Yeah. like, okay. At first I was like, yeah, I get it. And then, we had these users for Vietnam, uploading adult content and like engaging heavily with the adult content.
And it was not like it was normie stuff, dude. was like, like, I feel like if my mom saw it, she'd be like, whatever. But like, they reached out. Some rumors went around saying that, like, I would like we report people to the government. And like, I don't like I don't know where this was like, we're even started, but like, they reached out and we're like, would you report us to the government? Well, what government first of all, and like, like,
I don't know, would you think I have time for that? But like, let alone like care. And I looked it up, it's actually illegal to share, create and share adult content in Vietnam. And so now there's like this, if everything's on chain, so like high level, everything's on chain, then I have this huge traceable history that can't be forgotten and therefore I can't make mistakes.
Like, let's say I legitimately like accidentally upvoted it, you know, or I legitimately accidentally did X, Y, or Z, or maybe I'm like 13 years old and saying stupid shit online, you know, can, does that have to follow me the rest of my life? Yeah. I think, uh, that's where it all breaks down in my mind. That's, that's one of the downsides about blockchain is, is basically all blockchain is public by default. And, you know, it's,
inherently has to be verifiable retroactively, both in the moment, because like consensus algorithms and that kind of stuff, but I like to like replay a blockchain's ledger and like go through all that so that way that you can verify everything. Removing a bit of data that has gone through the ledger at some point sort of breaks down what blockchain is and how it works. that's, that's a really interesting.
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I mean, have things like ZK that like can help it, but yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, we, we also, we, we, that's what we, when we come too often. Um, so like, when we think about our protocol, we have this aspect of private folders, which don't that if you operate a node, you can have your own private folder and you can control the.
read and write to those folders. But like, it still raises a lot of questions. There's a lot of trust issues. There's a lot of questions. But like high level, everything on Discover can be just thought of as a giant like drive. So the whole network's one drive. And within those are folders. Every folder is owned.
by a user or a group of users and the rule-based access control of accessing those folders is all built within the protocol. and you can just, easiest way to conceptualize this is a discord, a discord server is a folder. And then you know how you have like the whole role thing within, if you guys ever use those, those are just basically rule-based access control. And then those have permissions like can read the channel, can write the channel, can, you know, mention the channel.
So we follow a very similar paradigm. So when you have a sub channel in discord, it either inherits all the permissions of its parent, or you can decide on special permissions. And we follow a similar permission hierarchy with inside of it. So. Interesting. What is, I guess, you know, if you had to make
quick 30 to 60 second pitch on why someone should use discover just like as a regular user, not necessarily a creator, you know, like a big time creator, just like, Hey, James, you use Twitter a lot. Like you should come check out discover because insert, insert here. Like what's, what's the, what's the pitch there? Yeah. For us, it's really growing a collection and growing a new following of completely new, uh, social users.
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You're going to be able to address an audience that's not your traditional Twitter, Farcasters, like Warpcast, or you're not going to see a traditional like Facebook groups or your telegram. You're going to see a completely new collection of Web3 users or WebEx users. And you're going to be able to engage with an entirely new audience, but you're going to actually be able to monetize your following with inside of our
And that's a lot of what we focus on. Nice. Okay. That that did, that's enough for me to go try it out. So I'm, I don't, I don't know if I, don't know if I'm sold, but I'm sold on trying on trying the platform out, right? Like I'm like, I'm sold on creating a user and seeing like, what is the different sort of audience that I can create on discover.
It happens to be a good fit for me because I work in the Web3 space. so it's like, OK, yeah, it'd be really interesting to have an audience of folks that are all in the Web3 space. That automatically creates an environment that is interesting to me. So I will be checking it out for sure. dude, excited. Hit me up when you do.
a problem that we still work on, which is like, how do you take a new user and give them reach on a platform that they've never, they don't have any followers on and they don't, they're not following anybody. That's everywhere though. Like that's, I think all social media has a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. You know, and it's like, how do you, how do you build that out without it taking years of bootstrapping?
That's where Web3 uniquely comes in. When you have a base layer identity of your blockchain wallet, you have, when someone joins a brand new platform, you have all these data points that you can already collect about them from the public information. What tokens they hold, what NFTs they have, maybe someone that they've sent, like an address they've sent direct funds to, a one-person-to-person transaction. You can sort of build a...
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quick rough like getting started point for a brand new user because of the unique properties of blockchain and web 3 I think it's actually probably the best way to do it because you have like this user has already opted into to interacting on chain so you could sort of collect that Interesting, you know, I totally agree. I really think there's these
Like I hold these NFT collections and I'm super curious and we like recommendation engines is like, brutal. They're brutal too. But, the right recommendation engine, I think would somehow be able to use your on-chain data to instantly derive who you're like friends are with inside of a platform. That would be way cool. Yeah. I actually cannot think.
My, my entree and identity is fragmented between so many different wallets that that like, that would be, it'd be, it'd be very challenging, which by the way, I was very interested in what you were bringing up about this sort of abstracted identity piece, right, where you've got this base layer identity that that sort of delegates to other wallets. That's fascinating to me. That's something I've thought about before. And I'd love to dig into that another time, because I would love
all of my wallets sort of tied together into a single identity while maintaining the the opsec of having separate wallets for different things, you know? Yeah, you know that it's like the abstract wallet paradigm. some days I love it, dude. Some days.
I hate it. yeah, pros and cons across it. So yeah, pros and cons to everything we're building. You know, it's like you want you we all want some magical protocol that that sort of like solves everything without introducing new problems. And it just doesn't work that way. It's the fractured assets that piss me off. That's it. But there's like, it was genius for the time I think it's still has legs. But you end up in this paradigm where like every app has its own wall.
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And eventually you're just like, imagine like you have like 20 wallets in your own home and like, you're too lazy to move cash between them. So it's like, okay, I need, damn, I have my wallet with only 40 bucks in it today. No, I, I, totally agree. It's like, I, I like the idea somehow of there being a master wallet that can, that can do anything, but also having having
these sort of spun up focused app wallets that so that you can't accidentally, you know, get drained for all your worth kind of kind of thing. I'm not sure how to implement it, but it sounds like you guys have an interesting identity delegation thing that would be fun to fun to talk about. I think before we wrap, I'd love to give you an opportunity to just give a final shill or something to to our listeners.
It doesn't need to be about discover even just like anything that you want to get across. You want to let people know for reference. It's like our audience tends to be like Nick said, relatively technical of those who aren't technical. They're still builders. They're all folks who are sort of interested in building in this ecosystem. So if you know whether it's words of wisdom for them or just you know, final shill of discover, go for it.
You know, I feel like I've talked about discover long enough. I do think if you're a builder, just build, like experiment early and often don't be, don't be scared to be wrong. don't care about how right you need to be. some of like the, the craziest stuff is built, in the latest nights with the most amount of issues. And that's sometimes it is the, it's like,
It's like, what is it the solution? It's the solution for now, maybe not for later, but like sometimes it's really just making that stuff one. Like you can, don't think it's like, you know, we are, live in an era where you can release a million times over. And yeah, if you have a flicker massively crippling bug that like destroys everything, okay. You really may be fucked up, but, you can like re-release, you can push more code. You can fix more problems.
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Like, and I think there's like that one core, I forgot who said it, if you're satisfied with it, you almost spent too much time on it. Yeah. I think it's just release early and often and fail fast. And you'll get where you're going. and you're going to learn so much. Cause you don't also, I think the biggest is don't have a misconstr, don't underestimate your ability.
I think a lot of software engineers underestimate their capabilities and overestimate it, massively overestimate it and do whatever it takes to meet your own expectations of where you're at, because I think that's where you're going to find exactly what you're looking for. And don't forget about the journey. It's all a big, the end is when the company ends and it's all over. It's like, it's all about the journey. So.
Keep it going. love that. Thank you for the wise words. Yeah, I think we'll just leave it at that because that's a great way to wrap it. Thanks so much for being here. It was great chatting with you, Rick. And to the lift, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.
Right, thanks for joining us for this episode of the Sulfate Podcast. I hope you liked it. I know we did. We always have a blast recording with our amazing guests. If you've got a moment, please leave us a review in your podcast app or subscribe on YouTube. And I guess it's time to get some more coffee and get back to work.
