EP.37 [EN] - Harry Zhang: Project Galaxy - From Enabling the Shadowy Super Coders to Empowering the Decentralized On-chain Credential Network / Project Galaxy - 从助力“超级影子码农”到去中心化链上声誉网络
53:43 Share

Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Mabel Jiang, the host of 51%, a podcast series presented by Multicoin Capital. This show is the exploration of blockchain's rapid development across Asia with a particular focus on the perspectives, communities, and operators based in China. My goal is to bring Eastern perspective to West and Western perspective to East so you can better understand the crypto's unique market structure and how these distinct communities think and operate.

This podcast will feature a mix of English and Chinese discussions. The language you're hearing now will be the language I use for the rest of the podcast. Stay up to date with my latest episode by subscribing to this podcast. Thank you for listening.

Mabel Jang is a principal at Multicoin Capital. All opinions expressed by Mabel or other podcast guests are solely their opinion and do not represent the opinions of Multicoin Capital in any way. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as an inducement to make an investment or relied upon as investment advice. Multicoin Capital may at times hold positions in some of the tokens or companies discussed in this show.

Hello everyone, welcome back to 51%. I'm your host, Mabel Zhang. Today, I'm super glad to welcome co-founder of Project Galaxy, Harry Zhang, to join the podcast. Hi, Harry. Hi, Mabel.

It's nice meeting you online. Online, sure. Yeah, I'm pretty stoked to have this conversation with you since you just launched this super shadowy coder campaign, which I'd like to discuss with you more in this podcast. But before we jump in, let's start with your background. Do you want to walk our audience through your background before crypto? How do you start in crypto?

Okay, yeah. So I graduated from Berkeley in 2017 and then I joined a web2 e-commerce company. In 2018, I joined Cryptospace and co-founded Dino and DLive. Basically, we want to democratize the content economy using the Dino blockchain and we want to give creators the power to earn without centralized parties like YouTube or Twitch

And even though DLive had quite a lot of users back then, we had around more than 10 million MAU at its peak. But I would say DLive and Lino did not really achieve what we really wanted to do. And we sold both companies in 2019. So yeah, now our team is working on Project Galaxy. And we want to build a permissionless infrastructure that powers on-chain credentials.

Yeah, you gave one liner for Project Galaxy, which kind of lands to my next question is what is Project Galaxy? Maybe you can expand a little bit more. Yeah, so maybe before I explain what we do, I can explain what's on-chain credentials. We think there are tons of valuable information on-chain that cannot be represented by simple numbers, right? So for example, your early contribution to a project by providing LP

or the fact that you borrow money from Aave and Compound and never got liquidated. So these can be extracted from the public blockchain and become what we call the credential data. And there are tons of use cases for these data. So for example, projects can use these credentials in combination with our NFT modules to build loyalty programs.

They can also use it to do target marketing. They can take the data as input to calculate credit scores. They can build a credential-based voting system. There are tons of possibilities here. So in essence, we provide the infrastructure for people to curate these credentials, and we also provide plug-and-play modules for others to use this data.

And then Project Galaxy is kind of launched based on the idea of having the on-chain credential. So what really inspired you to go with the initial idea though? I remember the idea definitely evolved quite a bit over the past half year or so. Right, right. And that's thanks to your help. So basically at the very beginning we

We think crypto projects don't really have a good tool to increase community engagement. So at the very beginning, we want to provide a tool for people to launch sustainable NFT-based loyalty programs using on-chain data. We don't want to see projects to only do campaigns like eoFarming or airdrop because those are not sustainable at all.

But even though these loyalty programs worked out pretty well, we realized that these on-chain data or credential data can actually have more use cases. And there isn't a general infrastructure for people to build and use these credential data. That's why we are right now building the Galaxy V2, where everyone can contribute to our credential data network, and they will in turn be rewarded when others use these credentials they curated.

So it will be a more scalable version of the one that we're building in v1, simply because there will be more use cases for this credential data other than the loyalty programs itself. And we also enable everyone to come in and contribute to this credential data network.

That's fantastic. Yeah, I definitely echo what you kind of mentioned earlier about people shouldn't be just doing yield farming itself. I mean, a lot of these on-chain activities that they do, for example, like you've been an LP on sushi for more than six months.

or like you've been trading on perpetual protocol as an active trader, all of these are, and then you never got liquidated, for example, like all of these can become part of your non-quantitative asset and then use as, you know, collateral. So what really inspired me was, um, curves idea of having the boost, essentially having all of those data, um,

metadata, your behavior on chain and then make them into NFT essentially is making your, those as a boot for a lot of the other things. So then maybe say like for perpetual protocols, like you can, once you have those NFTs as a credential, you can lower your collateralization ratio or you don't, you can even have like higher leverage. I'm just making this up. I don't know whether someone would do that, but I think that would be super,

helpful and expand a lot of the things that people can do with kind of like improve the capital efficiency. So I definitely see a huge potential here. So now that I kind of just brought up a few use cases, and we've seen you partner with a series of protocols in the past, maybe you can give us a few examples of these partnerships, just walk us through that.

Yeah, so one campaign that we did with the Yearn team was really fun, was the Woofy NFT campaign. So the Yearn team worked with Tx, who is a very good NFT designer, who actually you helped to introduce to the Yearn team. So basically they designed six different NFTs. We had one dog that

represented Andre, one represented Bentech, and we have others that represented the other core members of the Yearn team. So for every week that you held on 2000 WUFI tokens, you will be given one chance to claim the mission box that will reward you one out of the six WUFI UNITED TEAS.

So these NFTs are basically badges that represent your social status in the Yearn community. And the Andre NFT was actually sold for around 10 ETH at one point. So overall, it was not only a great way for the Yearn team to reward previous WUFI token holders, it also incentivized new token holders to come because they want to get these tickets to draw the box.

So within a couple of days after the launch, the WUFI token holders on Ethereum mainnet actually increased by over 30%. And the token supply of WUFI since it was swapped from the WiFi token increased by around 10%. So from this campaign, we see that these credential-based NFT campaigns is a great way for projects to increase community engagement,

And the Yearn team is actually working on a lot of stuff to add in more utilities to these NFT holders. So yeah, so that's one example.

We also support simpler campaigns. So for example, Apaka Finance, not sure if you know, is a leveraged farming protocol on BSC. They actually launched around 20 to 30 campaigns on Galaxy already. So what they did is for each new pool that they launched, they reward a new NFT to those that participated in that pool.

Also for each AMA they run within the community, they also reward an NFT to those that participated in that AMA. So the community really liked these NFT badges and over 90% of the campaigns had a participation rate of higher than 60%. So these are all the ways that we provide for projects to run with our infrastructure and help with their community engagement.

How about the second one though? I saw there's a few different criteria in terms of governance participation. I felt like NFT as a credential of people participating in different parts of the protocol can also be a very interesting primitive. We're actually working with various partners on making these credential-based NFTs

infrastructure for community members to do stuff, right? So for example, we're working with Snapshot so that people can actually use these NFTs to vote in the future. Right now, the voting system is purely based on how much asset you have, right? It's not entirely wrong, but we do think projects need a way to build a more flexible voting system. For example, they can say

50% of the voting power is based on the potential base NFTs and 50% is based on how much asset you have. So we're working with Snapshot on that front. And for the campaign that you mentioned that Yearn launched, they're basically rewarding NFTs to those that participated very early on to the Yearn ecosystem.

So they're rewarding to those that voted very early on, that yield farmed very early on. And yeah, they're also thinking about adding more stuff for these NFT holders to play. It can either be perks in the community or some other things around voting system. That's also very possible in the future.

Some other examples that is we're also working with projects like collabland so that these NFT holders can also join an exclusive group chat in Discord. So basically we want these credentials to be your social status, right? To be your how OG you are in the community so that you can join these exclusive chats that no one else can join.

Absolutely. I'd love to circle back in terms of the social aspect here. But apparently, I think you kind of got to a very interesting point, which I used to kind of mention this to Maki, direct Maki from sushi as well, which is for a lot of people who, I mean, right now, it is just like one X sushi, you have one boat, right? Like the sushi power. And then you can just decide on a lot of things if you hold a lot of sushi. So it's completely based on your holdings.

And then later on, they added kind of in line with, in the same direction of what you were just suggesting, which is O-sushi in terms of how long you lock your X-sushi and then whatnot. But

But I think essentially at the end, someone who participated in many different votings and activities on SushiSwap or SushiPortable in general should have more power in terms of governance than someone who just like sit there forever and huddle sushi and do nothing, even if they have that person have a lot more sushi than the previous person. So I think this can actually add a lot of interesting aspect to the

the DAO governance system. So I'm pretty excited about this. So in terms of all these campaigns that you've run, I'm sure you collected a lot of community feedback. So what was the takeaway for you from these campaigns? Maybe kind of just summarize a few.

Yeah, so I guess the main community feedback that we got is we need to add more utilities to these NFTs, right? So not only we want these people to show off their status, to show off these NFT badges, we actually want to give them

something they can work with on these NFTs. So we are working with all these projects so that they can actually add some utilities. So for example, maybe with some of these DeFi protocols, they can have a discount with these NFT badges. So as you contribute

to their ecosystem, you can actually get something back, right? So you can save more money in the future or have a lower categorized ratio in the future.

So that's something that we will be working with our partners constantly in the future. Right. I mean, this is also the magic about account-based system. You can, unlike all the Web2 financial applications where all the data do not share with each other here, for someone like Aave, they can leverage definitely someone else's financial history on-chain, which is pretty powerful. Yeah, I agree.

So working closely with these partners may not be that scalable. Like you said, that's why you were trying to kind of upgrade from version one to version two. So...

I guess how exactly will be, well, let me put it this way. What would be the kind of experience for a project to launch a campaign with you right now? And then how would it be after upgrading to version two for a project to permissionlessly launch the campaign?

So right now we haven't released our v1, the permissionless version of v1 yet. So right now what they need to do is they need to come to us, they need to supply us all the information that includes who will be eligible to the campaign, which usually comes in the form of a subgraph query. They will also supply us the NFT design, they will also choose the NFT module that they want to launch.

the usual job campaigns or we also have the mystery box. So it actually takes some back and forth between us and the projects to actually launch one campaign on Praxy right now. But we actually already built our permissionless dashboard for v1. We're still testing this internally.

We're probably going to release it within the next couple of weeks. After that, projects should be able to come to Galaxy and they should be able to create campaigns based on their needs on their own. They don't need to talk to us anymore. All they need to do is to drag and upload the pictures on Galaxy dashboard and that's it.

And for v2, what's more scalable in v2 is that we will enable everyone to come in and provide these credential data. So at that time, project themselves does not need to provide data. They can pick whatever credential data that was already curated on the Galaxy ecosystem.

So in that way, we will build a whole new ecosystem for everyone to come in and curate these credential data. And we will also have these projects or individual designers come in and pick the credentials they want and issue campaigns on top of it.

So we really think v2 will be a very good milestone for us and for the entire ecosystem to leverage and we will need to provide a very good infrastructure for them to do that.

That's very interesting. I had a follow up for this. So you're saying that not only the projects themselves can come in and pick up the curated data, basically similar to how Subgraph is working. You were saying that for designers, they can also supply their work onto the network and then other people can permissionless pick the work that they like and then they can just pay

pay to the designers based on that, right? It's sort of the other way around. So the designer can come in and pick the credential they want and they can sell these NFTs or issue out these NFTs. And whatever the proceeds they got from the sales, they will share that with the credential data curators.

I see. That's actually very interesting. I guess depends on whether the project itself picked or maybe someone, you know, let's say back in the days when we talk about the on-chain resume type of situation, it would be the person who run this query and generate his NFT. And then that person who generated this can choose whichever cover photo almost like he'd like to use. And then he will just pay the designer that he picked.

Right, right. Yeah, so in that way, it's sort of like a user is choosing whatever NFT badges that you are aware of, and you all pay to both the designer and the data curators.

That's super powerful. It's almost like an on-chain designer labor marketplace. I thought this would be definitely kind of emancipating a lot of the kind of back and forth work because I've definitely seen over the past 12 months or so, a lot of the campaigns or the DeFi protocols, they were really lack of the kind of design

designer resources, I think you probably see the king point in the market as well. And then, you know, this space is just doesn't have that many good designer who understand the memes and whatever. I think this, you know, you basically put the whole supply markets there and then allow people to pick and choose. I think this is like super brilliant.

Yeah, I think we do want to bridge this gap between the designers and the devs and the users so that they can contribute to this ecosystem together, right? We don't want one single party. So right now it's basically like one single party which just

which is our partner projects, they are taking care of everything. They're providing data, they're providing the designs. We don't want that. We want them to utilize whatever was already contributed to the ecosystem. So we really do believe that we want to build this in a decentralized way so that it becomes very scalable in the long term. Absolutely.

And now I think it's a good time to talk about shadowy super coder campaign because you just mentioned the V2 will be allowing one project to go in and pick up other people's data, how to permission the thing. So I think, you know, the shadowy super coder campaign, it's actually the first time for you guys to try it out and see how this would work because basically the, all of these, you know,

I guess the partners, the sponsors of the package, they are leveraging

other criteria, like not data they provided themselves, but actually a list of addresses that someone else run the query and kind of provide it to everyone. So maybe before we jump into the discussion, you can provide a bit of context of this campaign. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's actually pretty funny because your Senator Warren said a comment

I think it's something like "Crypto puts finance in the hands of shadowy super coders" I'm not sure what she meant exactly by that and I don't know if she intended to mock the crypto devs but it's actually a very cool name to be honest So we created this special shadowy coder NFT on Galaxy

to reward all Ethereum devs out there. What we did is that we filtered out around 100k addresses that deploy contracts on Ethereum mainnet. There are a couple filters on top to get rid of all the spam accounts, but that's the main idea.

And on top of the Shadow Encoder NFT that we're giving out, we're also partnering with 10 infrastructure projects and they're providing free perks to these Shadow Encoders. Our partners include Tenderly, Parsec, Alchemy, Anchor, Toros, Polygon, Gitcoin, Quicknote, Curvegrid, and Onekey.

They in total sponsored more than $300 million worth of perks. So it's huge. Money making time. Yeah. Um,

So I think the campaign will already be launched when we launch this podcast, right? So it's not an ad, but for your benefit, if you ever deploy contracts on Ethereum mainnet, you should go to galaxy.eco and you can click on the Galaxy space. You should be able to see the Shadow Ecoto campaign and claim the perks.

If you never deploy a contract on Ethereum mainnet, you should go do it right now. Even though you probably can't claim the shadow is super colder than NFT anymore, but hopefully I think the politician can come up with some better names in the future so that we will create more campaigns like this for you guys to join in the future. I really like this name to be honest and I think everyone on Twitter

probably agrees. I even see many crypto devs change their Twitter handles to shadowy super coder. So I guess we can thank Senator Warren for coming up with these brilliant names.

Yeah, memes is the hardest in crypto, but it's the best for sure. That's pretty funny. Thanks for sharing this context. So what do you think you can achieve through this campaign, both, I guess, from the sponsor level and also from Project Galaxy level? So I guess, first of all,

It's just really cool that while we are building something fun, we can also simply help out all the crypto devs out there. So this campaign is sort of like the GitHub education pack back in the days. And I do remember those free subs were really helpful when we were doing the dev works.

But on the Project Galaxy level, we also want to test out how we can help out other projects to target marketing. So right now, basically every campaign that we run is mainly about how can we help you guys to increase retention, increase community engagement. And we want to try this new type of campaign for you to do growth hacking.

There isn't a good channel or platform for you to do growth hacking in crypto right now. And we think campaigns like this should be a really good way for people to find their target users. And also with our plug and play modules, they can reward these targeted users either NFT or airdrop or free subs.

or basically anything, right? So we want to help all these projects to use on-chain credentials to do growth hacking. And hopefully Galaxy can become one of the first platforms to help crypto projects to achieve this.

Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, I definitely think this is like a perfect targeted campaign, especially given, I think how this is differentiated from the Web2 type of, like the Facebook type of targeted campaign is that all of the criteria is transparent. I hope that you guys will probably like kind of release your screening criteria so that everyone knows why they're eligible or why not eligible.

why they're not eligible. Yeah, we already did. Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah. So I think this is like a perfect way for all of these partners to kind of get the free advertisement kind of opportunity in front of all of their users. And then these users is like so, so obviously that they, you know, at some point they will use this. So,

So I think this is definitely interesting. But in terms of, you know, making this type of campaign more scalable, at this point, I think what Project Galaxy has in terms of the data on the platform, it's not sufficient yet. So I guess like a question to you is that at what stage you think, you know, Galaxy could safely say that you can make

you know, a campaign like this more permissionless where like people can just kind of like choose pick and choose whatever the data they'd like and then launch something and then find the right partners.

Yeah, so I guess there are really two parts to this question. So first is we need to provide a good set of tools for projects to use the credential data. So I mentioned

about all the modules that we built for the Shadowy Super campaign. We have the NFT module, the airdrop module, and the third-party API module, which is for infrastructure platforms to reward free subs. We are going to build more modules over time so people can have a fuller set of tools when they utilize on-chain credentials on Galaxy.

And I guess the second part to this question is that we need to have a better folder set of credential data network. This is why we're building the V2. So basically, we want everyone to come to us to contribute the credential data and in turn, they can get rewarded when these data were utilized by other projects. So we basically want to create this economic model for

everyone to contribute to our data system so that more projects can just simply permissionlessly come out to Galaxy and pick the one they want. So yeah, so we are approaching this in a very decentralized way and I hope within one to two years we can achieve something like this.

Yeah, I think one of the main challenges that I kind of see is that, like I'll just use shadowy super quarter as an example. I think a big part is about outreach. Right now at this stage, you will have to ping each of these sponsors and then ask them if you're interested in joining or not. And then they said yes. And then you guys kind of negotiated what would the perk package be, right? So in the permissionless version of this,

So I would assume there will be some sort of module allow one participant in this network to ping whoever else that's available on the network. So which requires a lot of other partners to, you know, apply or register themselves on the network first. And then once they ping them, they will have to have some sort of, you know, kind of communication in between. And then they kind of just lock down the term. So there still needs some sort of,

I guess, coordination in that sense. But I guess if we kind of see this as a...

it's a DAO process where someone who is committed to say like I'm gonna contribute to some of these campaigns I don't know what it is but people can come to negotiate with me and then in return in the future maybe someone else um that I ping like they would give it back so I feel like this is almost like a DAO or gonna evolve into a DAO which I thought it was very interesting obviously I don't know like how how willing everyone is going to commit but I feel like

if there are some rules that kind of apply on top of this, this can actually be run very well.

I think it's actually going to be pretty simple for other sponsors to come in and participate. Since basically we already have this credential data that's curated by us, right? Also, we thank Bantech for the help on the curation side. But with these shadowy super-cooler data that was already curated,

As long as we have, when we release our permissionless dashboard, sponsors can just come on and pick the modules they want to issue them first using this credential data. So for example, a process can come on and say I want to do air job to all these shadow encoders.

50 XYZ tokens and there will be a permissionless dashboard for them to pick the shadowy coder credential, pick the airdrop module and they send a token to a smart contract that we deploy for them and that's it. So we're actually planning to make this shadowy super coder campaign

a somewhat lasting campaign so that we welcome all sponsors to come and go so new sponsors can come in and say, "Hey, I want to issue some new perks to these users." And this campaign can sort of be like a perk center

for all Ethereum devs out there and they can come back and check in over the time to see if there's new perks they can take. So I do think this is very possible for this type of campaign to be very scalable in the long term.

Right. I get what you're saying. I think you were saying that for the perk provider, which is sponsored, they can pick the module they want to run, which is completely fine. I guess I was more thinking from a third-party angle who wants to create this package, but then the package does not only include their own perk, but also someone else's.

and then it would need some coordination. I think that's like a far away thing. Because it was more from like, you know, Gatsby's perspective here, that you were the coordinator here. But I mean, if you are going to standardize the coordination process into a tool so that other people can just basically pick whatever campaign they want to run and just put their own perk, I think that's absolutely going to be easy. And that's already a big step ahead already. Right, right, right.

So this is super interesting. I'm very excited. What do you think of the future of data curation, though? So previously, I invited Alex Smanavik from Nansen to join the podcast. And then in his perspective, he thinks centralized data curation would be

be a way to avoid dataset contamination, which I think to some extent who he is, right? Especially at this stage. What's your thought here though? What's the pros and cons? Yeah, so right now in Web2, many forms of

many forms of credentials, for example, the credit scores are calculated in a very centralized way, right? I think you actually wrote a tweet about this a while ago and I 100% agree is that in Web3,

data should be curated in a more bottom-up approach so that many different applications can have the flexibility to use many different types of credentials instead of being obligated to use one single data source. And of course, the downside is that data might not be as clean, but I do think that as long as there is a demand to use this data, there will always be a way to filter out the

the valuable ones from the ones that are not as clean. So for example, TikTok, there are probably millions and billions of videos out there. And because there is a huge need to consume these videos, algos can filter out the top 5% content and

As long as we have a good demand on using these credential data, I think there must be a good way to filter out which credential data is more accurate, which credential data is more valuable for others to use. And Dune is actually working out very well under this decentralized data curation system, and so is the graph.

I'm actually very curious to see how the graph will play out as they roll out their curation system. There might be something very interesting for us to learn from, but in short, I think we really want to try this decentralized way to build up this credential data network. And in the long term, I think the scalability

upside from this bottom-up approach while weighing over the top-down approach.

Yeah, I think another angle of answering that contamination problem is that I think contaminations are relative. Because I think if Nansen is creating, like they are training a model, they would think something will be contaminated if someone else's, like some noises comes in into their system. They have their own algal. But if we are thinking from another project demand, they may not want to exactly

kind of filter the data as the way that Nansen does or someone else does. I mean, that's why, like, that's where I was coming from for that tweet you were referring to, which is, I think the credit score system would work very well in the centralized platform because there's one specific, I guess, preset type of approach to screen out the data and then to train the data set and whatnot. But then, like, how do you guarantee that another project

who is also willing to use the approach that you apply, you don't know. So the best way is actually get them the tooling and then let them decide what they like and what they don't and then just do it. I think that's definitely what I agree with you on. But I mean, it's not going to be that...

happened that soon just because I think all of these on-chain data are still relatively scattered. And then I think it takes time for people to agree on using one protocol. And hopefully, Galaxy can become that protocol that people go to and then curate the data.

But of course it will need a lot of hard work. Yeah. And in the short term, I think we will... So the reason that we're still so actively working with all these partners on loyalty programs is that we're actually...

testing out a smaller set of decentralized participation for this participation, right? So basically we're only whitelisting all these processes that we trust

to curate our credential data right now. So I guess in the short term, I do agree that we need a clean and smaller set of credential data to start with. But in the long term, we do want to use all sorts of tools. It can be either algos or it can be economic models using some sort of token staking method for us to filter out which ones are more valuable and which ones are not.

Absolutely. This is probably the right approach. So moving on, I'd like to actually pivot to another discussion on social. Like we earlier, we also talked about social because I think on-chain credentialing is important.

Just kind of a natural fit. Like it's natural, only natural for you to think about that. And then, and social applications and web three, like I think whoever, whoever needs to kind of show off the status, like the, the kind of prerequisite for that is you have a social platform for those people, the communities to show off their own status in front of each other.

So what form of social apps or functions specifically do you think we need in the Web3 world? Well, I guess first of all, many people probably really want privacy and censorship resistance. So although...

I do agree that this is a very complex issue since even though Web3 can potentially achieve it, I'm not 100% sure that everything should be censorship resistant. I'm very curious to see how Twitter is going to tackle this with BlueSky because with the DLive platform that we built, the decentralized live streaming platform, it was actually very hard to find a balance between censorship

and free speech. So I guess that's probably something that the people want the most, but that's very complex. Secondly, I think one of the most upgrade that we will see in Web3 is user experience. I always think that IMs and wallet apps should go

They go very well together, right? This is proven in WeChat in China, it's somewhat proven in the US with Venmo and Facebook. And with Web3 with a single login and with the fact that you can integrate different protocols into one application will just make the user experience so much better.

I'm not sure why Metamask is not doing that right now. They seem to be very slow on doing anything. But I do want to see applications come in and combine IMs and wallets since I think it's going to be a very cool combination and there will be a lot of possibilities and features that can emerge on top of these integrations.

And lastly, I think it's the credentials. So right now with these recent NFT craze, the CryptoPunks, the Penguins, it's obvious how important credential is in social apps. Basically, the holding of an NFT is basically a form of credential itself. And it's kind of funny if you are a Penguin on CT and you see another Penguin, you instantly have this connection with them.

So because on-chain credential and social apps in Web3 will probably build on top of the same infrastructure, they're going to take a much bigger role in Web3 social apps.

Personally, I do want Galaxy to become a more social platform in the future since we're basically tagging everyone's wallet address and we're letting everyone to create their own resume, LinkedIn, so that we do want to make credential a more important role in the social applications in Web3.

Yeah, I mean, you had a few really good points. I want to comment on one by one. So I think the first thing that you commented was about privacy. I think one thing about privacy that...

I guess Discord or even Twitter allows you almost, it's like you've already seen it today. Like a lot of people do not have to operate with their own profile. Like they can actually just register and then post, like even shit posts about things and then just use avatar. You know, that is to some extent,

But privacy protected social media is like versus I guess like in the Web2 world, the type of, you know, Facebook or some of the other real people social app, they just cannot do that.

So I kind of had the sense that, you know, in the, you know, some people are kind of just discussing whether some of these Web2 social giants will come in and eat crypto natives lunch. My view is that some of them are actually better positioned than the other ones. Like, you know, Twitter is a good example. Discord is another example. Maybe GitHub even could be an interesting example, too.

So I thought, you know, this is kind of interesting. I know it's not directly related to privacy, but I realized that people, some people just want to stay anonymous and I still had commented. And then on the second part, what was the second thing you, oh, oh, IAM. I did realize that, you know, running or operating an IAM is really resource intensive. So I feel like there will be someone who's created an IAM and then be plugged in with everyone else. Yeah.

I agree with you that Wallet can run, they are the best position to run an IM. But at the same time, I think if someone else created a really good user experience, I think they would probably just integrate it. And I think everyone else will do that same. I think it's probably the way to go given we are in an open source world. I don't know who that is. I haven't seen anyone working on it yet. I know like some heavy lifting projects like Mobilecoin or

Even back in the day, Telegram, like TAN, like Telegram Open Network, they're all working on it. But I don't think any of them can really claim that they're successful yet. So I think there's still pretty big space for people to try it out. And the winner may not necessarily be the traditional Web2 ones like Signal or Telegram. It could be actually a Web3 native one. We'll see.

And then on the third part, the on-chain credentialing version of it, I actually thought of a very interesting idea because you mentioned Penguin. Because I did see, so the other day I tweeted about this and I said like usually there's like an unspoken social role among this community that people won't use other people's profiling because like the ones that they don't own. They only would likely use their own. But I realized that actually there are still people using

you know, stuff like the penguin, you know, the upside, not upside down, the left side, right penguin, you know, which one I'm talking about, right? Like some people use that. And then obviously that person does not have it. And then,

I think the reason for that is just like they think this is pretty cool and they didn't really think further. But if you go into the community, people will be like, oh, this is not great. Like you should actually use the one you own. So what I was thinking is maybe a social application in Web3, what they should do is like the avatar or the profile picture should be used as a display of

of the NFT they own. So actually like it needs to scan your address and then you can pick one of the NFT that you own from your own address instead of like just using a random stuff. And I actually think, you know, when you suggested about, you know, some of the social that you'd like people to see their own badges that they own on Chang, it's the same idea. And even I think you mentioned a project that you're working on to, to

to allow people to read the NFTs they have and then just get into the groups. I think that's something also quite needed as well. Yeah. So I do agree that there needs to be some type of checks, even though it might not be such a huge demand for all the groups to use. For example, I do see that

This project called Collabland, they're integrated within many Discord groups so that only people who have a certain NFT can join certain channels in that group. So it is a need, but I don't think it's like a huge foundation for the features on a Web3 social app. So it is something that can be worked around within the Web2 applications.

I guess for a Web3 social application to actually go mainstream, we really need the entire infrastructure to be supported. So for example, the IM that you are talking about, maybe that IM should be integrated within all the DApps, right?

within Sandbox, within OpenSea, within Axie, and there's some type of protocol that can allow people to use whatever chain they're on to talk to whatever addresses on all the other chains. So I would say that's something that would be very powerful.

That's interesting. Yeah, I think this is probably a little bit hard. Although I think the most imminent need for people talking, like the addresses talking to each other is like when you buy an NFT and then you just want to talk to the seller.

or maybe just kind of shared a connoisseurship or whatever but then like now there's no way even on OpenSea I don't think you can talk to the seller yeah so I think that's something it's quite needed it's just it's I think it's just natural like when people buy expensive stuff they want to talk they don't just want to like a simple swap I guess you could but still it's more about the community and connection

Right. Sometimes they just want to negotiate on the price and they can't do that right now. Well, I mean, technically you can, you can propose the price, but that's very different. Yeah. Yeah. That's not efficient. For sure. Yeah. I mean, like, I think we've talked quite a bit about like what you've been working on and also your view on some of these like on-chain credentialing, on-chain data, which is great. So I,

I guess we've kind of talked about what you want to do next in terms of version 2, but I still would like to ask, generally speaking, what's next for Project Galaxy? Anything exciting that we should be looking out to? And then I guess generally the final vision, long-term vision and mission of Galaxy. So I'm most excited about our V2, that's probably coming in Q4.

So I think we went over this. We want everyone to participate in our credential data ecosystem. And in a longer time horizon, we want to build a more consumer facing protocol or a more consumer facing platform for everyone to participate.

to build their on-chain LinkedIn, on-chain resume for them to show off their credentials. But in the shorter term,

other than the shadowy campaigns and the usual loyalty campaigns that we're launching, we're actually starting to partner with some of the NFT projects. So we realized that we have the infrastructure to support many types of NFT launch and some projects came to us wanting to launch these NFT profiles so they don't need to build their smart contracts themselves.

We actually have a project called Dino Gans, which is the first one to launch with Galaxy probably within this week. And we actually have another partner who will be launching something very fun in September. Basically, they will be launching NFT profiles only to those that participated very early on to the DeFi projects. So it's sort of like a credential-based CryptoPunk. I think it will be super fun. So yeah, as we...

work with more partners, we're coming up with more use cases with our infrastructure and hopefully with our v2 launching in Q4 we can become more scalable and we can collect more credential data for people to play with.

in the coming one to two years yeah got it great well massive alpha league i i think i just heard um credential based crypto punk i think this is really the truly the truly earned earned profile picture rather than something you can just buy um i'm pretty excited for that too uh let's see how it goes but yeah i really appreciate you joining me today it was a fun chat um definitely thank you

Yeah, thanks for having me. Hopefully we can talk about something fun next time. I mean, it's fun this time as well, but this is something that we talk about all day, every day. For sure, for sure. Absolutely. Thank you for joining. Cheers. Thank you.