FOX Foundation’s Willy Ogorzaly Gives a Master Class on DAOs & How to Create Them (Episode 299)
FOX Foundation’s Willy Ogorzaly joins to discuss and gives a Master Class on DAOs & How to Create Them.
Willy is a ShapeShifter by day, Givether by night, and 24/7 DAO evangelist. In his current role as Head of Decentralization for the Fox Foundation, Willy is focused on supporting ShapeShift DAO in achieving full decentralization.
Links:
foxfoundation.io (optional)
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The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.
00:01:22:17 – 00:02:10:02
Richard Carthon: Everyone, your host here, Richard Carthon, coming at you with another episode of Crypto Current. And I have a very special guest with you that I got to meet during consensus. Now, what was really cool is that we organically start having conversation and I was like, Wait, that sounds really similar to. A project that we’ve had on our show previously called Safety. And it’s like actually it’s funny because I’m actually the head of the central decentralization over at ShapeShift. So I am talking about Daos. I’m talking about the centralized autonomous organizations. For those who listen to the original episode with Eric Voorhees back on Episode 195 and even a follow up episode we recently had with Jon and episode to 66 that Steve was able to talk to, of course, live and in person, meet this amazing person that we have with us today.
00:02:10:22 – 00:02:32:29
Richard Carthon: I’m excited to bring him on because I wanted to really unpack daos for anyone who is new to the world of decentralized Thomas organizations. We are going to unpack this and we are going to hear about all the amazing things that he’s working on. So today we have Williy, who is the head of decentralization at ShapeShift and also as part of the Fox Foundation. How are you doing today?
00:02:33:25 – 00:02:36:07
Willy Ogorzaly: What’s up? Best day ever. How are you doing?
00:02:37:10 – 00:02:50:00
Richard Carthon: Hey, man, just gets better. I mean, I’m excited to learn today. I’m excited to hear what you got going on. And, yeah, we got plenty to unpack. But before we dive into all that, let’s learn a little bit more about you. Can you give us a little bit of background on yourself?
00:02:50:29 – 00:03:21:28
Willy Ogorzaly: Sure be happy to. And so I started my career in 2013 as a college student, started a class project as a legal tech enabled marketplace, connecting clients with lawyers. I didn’t know anything about what to really or about starting a company, but ended up going down that path. We dropped out of school, ran that company for about five years, learned a ton, ended up selling it at the end of 2017 and then throughout 2017. At the beginning of 2017, I’d really gotten into crypto. Finally, I’d heard a lot about it.
00:03:22:03 – 00:03:54:04
Willy Ogorzaly: There was a Bitcoin ATM in our co-working space where we were building a legal tech startup, but of course I didn’t have any extra money to spend on it. I was all in on the startup, but I would walk past a bitcoin ATM every day and I heard a lot of smart people talk about it but never even really had money to invest or time to invest. So in 2017, I sold my house in Colorado to Austin for the startup and finally had some money to invest. A lot of theory was really it was the first crypto I bought. I kind of felt like, Oh, maybe I’d like as a little bit late to bitcoin, but ethereum’s this cool new thing.
00:03:54:06 – 00:04:25:04
Willy Ogorzaly: And I love the idea of this like this decentralized app store and stuff and all these different use cases sounds amazing. So fortunately kind of got in at the beginning of the 2017 bull cycle and then I thought it was genius. Everything was going up. I’m like, Oh, this is amazing. Very quickly, it started to become obsessed with crypto. So 2017, we were going through that acquisition process which took like over six months, no longer had like an endless list of things to do. And basically it was like, right, we’re just going to keep the business running and really focus on this acquisition.
00:04:26:03 – 00:05:01:00
Willy Ogorzaly: And so that gave me some more time to learn about crypto start going to the meetups. I got to give a huge shout out to one of the multi coin capital engineers. Ryan He was they just hired him. He was like the first engineer. He was 18 years old. I got to drop out of school to build build tools for their hedge fund. And he taught me so much about crypto. I really had a great teacher that explained it to me. And yeah, so throughout 2017, being obsessed with crypto and I was like all about all these different altcoins. So like, I love to shapeshift as a product and would use it just to find out and find out about new tokens.
00:05:01:02 – 00:05:32:03
Willy Ogorzaly: And I loved all these visions. I’m like every token I hear about, I’m like, Oh, that sounds so cool. I got to get some of that token and stuff. And then sure enough, by the end of year, I realized that actually what I’d done better if I had just like held onto my initial portfolio and hadn’t traded, I would’ve done better. And so that was like a big learning lesson. We started Bid Fracked at the end of 2017, so the same month that we sold the legal tech start up and some other friends and I started bit fracked, which was the first tool where you could trade crypto for multiple digital assets at once and it was built on top of shapeshift. And so that into being a successful project, people really liked it because it was free.
00:05:32:14 – 00:06:04:09
Willy Ogorzaly: We didn’t charge any extra fees on top of shapeshift. That’s beautiful. And if you guys remember in 2017, let’s say you wanted to go buy ten cryptos. It could take you all day, right? You have to go to all these different exchanges. Or if you’re doing it with shapeshift, you had to ten transactions. It made it so you could just design the portfolio you wanted like, oh, I want 15% Etherium 10% Doge 12% Litecoin send the bitcoin in. And then we would send we would do the trades, the shapeshift and shapeshift would send you all the different cryptos. So in June 2018, ShapeShift acquired it. Frakt brought the team in to start building the new version of ShapeShift.
00:06:05:13 – 00:06:37:16
Willy Ogorzaly: So right around the time that ShapeShift came to the conclusion that we had to implement KYC, and so we started building basically an interface for key and other hardware wallets where you could kind of manage your whole portfolio and do trade. So still leverage, shapeshift trading. And that was a really exciting journey. But unfortunately, like when we implemented KYC, we ended up losing like 99% of our business. So it was a tough few years after that as we continue to shapeshift and try to find new product market fit in our new form. And I was really excited when the dexs proliferated.
00:06:37:18 – 00:07:13:03
Willy Ogorzaly: So like 2020 we saw Uniswap getting a ton of traction and I’m like, oh my gosh, this uniswap is like doing what shapeshift original vision was. But even better. So we embrace these decentralized exchange protocols, integrated zero x to aggregate a bunch of dexs on Ethereum and Thorchain in April. They did it. They launched their main net, and then we shut down our trading desk. We stopped seeing users and in July we announced that we were going full DAO and to me that was like the best news ever because I was already a big fan of Dao’s. I had had the pleasure of working with this kind of develop a Dao from the ground up and had seen firsthand just the power of these communities.
00:07:13:05 – 00:07:47:16
Willy Ogorzaly: And when you have a great name that people can align around just the ability to bring in people all around the world who are aligned with that mission. And you can ship beautiful products that without raising funds and without having a centralized organization. And so I saw that firsthand, the magic of these daos and didn’t even really know it was possible with Pacifica to do this. I was always like, Man, how can we how can we make Fox a governance token? And even if it’s centralized, like how could we still give our token holders power over shapeshift? I didn’t really know it was possible. And props to Erik and John for basically digging out a path to do this, getting the board and the shareholders on board with taking this path.
00:07:47:29 – 00:07:54:05
Willy Ogorzaly: When they told me the news that we were going to. Decentralized a jumped out of my chair with excitement. It was the best news I’d ever heard.
00:07:54:20 – 00:08:41:11
Richard Carthon: Right. And I can imagine. And we actually talked about this and unpacked it all at consensus that I there’s probably a rift between people who are really excited, like yourself and others who were not so excited and were not as pumped with the uncertainty. But before we dive into that, I want to just backtrack for a quick second, because you unpacked a lot and I don’t want to overshadow some of the gems you just gave us. One, you know, you college dropout that just went through two successful acquisitions, which that’s huge just in your young career already, which is really, really cool. But being able to build things that were helping ultimately bring you into this crypto space and then also just learning key lessons around instead of trying to be an active trader versus an investor where if you buy and hold a little bit longer, you know, you might see a little bit more success.
00:08:41:13 – 00:09:13:18
Richard Carthon: Ah, you know, in being able to learn that at a crucial moment. It’s from 1718 as we saw the bear market happened the last long bear really good lesson to learn there. But fast forward to build a new product. It turns out that people don’t want to KYC and people kind of dip out and you then learn about Dexs. So then as you learn about being able to decentralize a lot more, you’ll look at Daos. And then your company was actually one of the first company to be to go on a DAO model.
00:09:14:03 – 00:09:34:10
Richard Carthon: Eric dropped that news back when he came on the show. And, you know, it’s been a year since that’s happened. And I want to unpack what are the lessons and what are you seeing from that a little bit later? But first, let’s set some foundation. Can you explain what a DAO is and can you kind of just give examples, like to a toddler of like, how does this work and why is it valuable?
00:09:35:06 – 00:10:11:09
Willy Ogorzaly: Yeah, it’s a great question. So you guys probably know what that stands for, a decentralized, autonomous organization, but what does that mean? So Daos they can take a lot of different shapes and forms. A My favorite definition for just what a David is at its core is just a group of people who are managing a treasury of assets. Right. And that’s basically what A is. And so for shapeshift, they’re the group of people. For us is FOX token holders and the treasury of assets is an on chain. This is safe and token holders can create proposals basically the only way to get funds out of that and as a safe is for token holders to create proposals and approve these proposals, we’ve got a governance process that explains all the different steps.
00:10:11:17 – 00:10:41:29
Willy Ogorzaly: Anybody who has one can create one of these proposals, and if the token holders approve it, they can actually execute transactions. Ominous as without any multisig we do have a multisig there is like a safeguard and the Multisig can also execute transactions. It’s committed to not executing transactions that the community hasn’t explicitly approved, and eventually the community can decide to get rid of that multisig and have the only way to basically make execute transactions on business is safe by creating and approving proposals. So that’s that’s the kind of the core of a doubt that can take a lot of shapes and forms, right. Like you can.
00:10:42:14 – 00:11:14:07
Willy Ogorzaly: We’re seeing so many different types of daos, depending on whatever your use case is, your or your vision. There’s a lot of different ways that you could. Designer Dao There’s a ton of different tools that you can use to help build your Dao. So we have like a lot of different pieces of our DAO stack, everything from like discord where a lot of informal chat happens. You guys are welcome to jump into our discord, discord slash shapeshift. We’ve got an awesome community that’s like a mixture of both our users and contributors and just token holders and partners, other daos that we work with, which is really cool.
00:11:14:10 – 00:11:29:22
Willy Ogorzaly: Like at ShapeShift, before it centralized shapeshift, we were in Slack and we had a discord, but there was a huge silo between our team members and our users or community. Now those borders are just completely broken down. Anyone can jump in the discord. We’ve got community meetings like on a daily basis that you’re welcome to attend.
00:11:31:19 – 00:12:01:29
Willy Ogorzaly: And then we have a forum. And that’s where these ideas really kind of turn into actual drafted proposals that follow the template. They get feedback. We have a whole process for like putting the draft proposal in the work streams channel, talking about work streams later. And then it goes to a ideation stage where people can still get feedback. If it’s got enough support, then it can move towards the final official governance proposal stage. And so you can see all this happening. You can see like about 100 proposals that we’ve created and passed over the past year.
00:12:02:06 – 00:12:16:24
Willy Ogorzaly: You see proposals that have been rejected. You can see all the conversation from the community like to get to that point and you can weigh in. Anyone is welcome to participate. Anyone with access to an author and wallet can get fox tokens and participate in this. And yeah, I think.
00:12:18:14 – 00:13:00:08
Willy Ogorzaly: That’s a high level of kind of like what those are. I think the thing that’s really interesting is like these governance tokens, basically, it’s like a new way to basically organize communities and give ownership that anybody can access compared to like private companies where you have shareholders and stuff. And even if you’re a shareholder, you don’t necessarily actually have a say in like the day to day operations. You can’t necessarily post an idea and get rewarded for it. These governance tokens are so cool because they enable you to distribute your tokens to really anyone. You can decide how you want to distribute these governance token, which is important for a DAO. Who are these owners going to be? Ideally, like if you have a product and stuff, you can actually give your users these governance tokens and ideally have a cycle where the users that are earning these governance tokens are adding value to the Dow.
00:13:00:16 – 00:13:20:06
Willy Ogorzaly: If you can figure out that cycle, it’s just really magical. And basically, like I mentioned this before, you can have community members all around the world or just individuals all around the world who align with their vision and now can just get involved and start adding value and then become owners in it. And that’s magical. So that’s that’s high level of daos and set it down a little deeper to.
00:13:20:21 – 00:13:52:29
Richard Carthon: Yeah. Know that that was a really good explanation. And I think we’re the first, the next place where a lot of people’s heads go around or they hear that and says, that sounds amazing. It sounds like a really cool thing. How could I go and implement a Dao? So I don’t know if you give any like particular example of like a very simple like, I don’t know, like a community club, people trying to go like do kickball and do a fundraiser and like they’re putting the money together. Any kind of example that you want. But like someone hears this, they’re like, That sounds really cool. I want to go and implement this at a super easy level.
00:13:53:01 – 00:13:54:00
Richard Carthon: Like, what would that look like?
00:13:54:15 – 00:14:28:10
Willy Ogorzaly: Yeah, that’s a great question. So let’s talk about like what a Dao MVP is a minimum viable product, or I’d like to use the term minimum livable product. And it’s surprisingly like it’s might sound complex, but you can launch it out today if you wanted to. And I think we’re seeing this a lot like in hackathons. We’re seeing Daos get created over the course of a weekend, whereas you would never see like an LLC get created. So like that, that’s might sound a little complicated, but like starting an LLC, starting a corporation that’s complicated. You probably need to like hire a lawyer and stuff like that. You’ve got to do these registrations and everything with a DAO. Anyone with their theory and wallet and something to pay for gas can like deploy one of these smart contracts.
00:14:28:12 – 00:14:59:03
Willy Ogorzaly: So there’s a lot of different tools. I think an MVP and NLP for a DAO need to at least have like something to hold these funds. You need this Treasury gnosis safes are really popular, but you can also use like Aragon for one Hive Gardens or Malak dao Dao House. There’s a lot of different frameworks that basically provide this Treasury for you, and some of them also have some of the other pieces you need. So you need a treasury, you need a ability for token holders to vote. And I guess let’s back up. You need you need a token. But again, anyone can go to play token today. You can choose to make them.
00:14:59:12 – 00:15:08:20
Willy Ogorzaly: You can use like an 20 token. You could use Nfts for voting and you could do both. You could have like years, twenties and nfts and configure your voting power for each of those
00:15:10:13 – 00:15:38:05
Willy Ogorzaly: you need a governance process. And what sometimes we see is like tokens, projects will do like an airdrop. And then as you’re claiming your airdrop, the first thing you need to do is like vote on approving this governance process. That’s fine way to do it. I think it’s also fine if you just basically launch with the governance process and say, here, this is what shapeshift did. It said, All right, surprise, everyone, here’s a Dao. It’s all set up. We got we got Dao Stack ready to go. We did this airdrop and then boom, as you come clean to airdrop, come join our discord come NIC proposals and stuff. And
00:15:39:23 – 00:16:09:29
Willy Ogorzaly: and that was an MLP, right? Like you need to at least have some of these core pieces in this Treasury. You need the voting tool, you need the token that gives voting power. And those are kind of the core pieces. Obviously, you should tell people like, what’s the vision, what’s the mission, why should they get involved? But as long as you have those pieces then and you know, you have a discord, you have a forum, like these are things that are good to have in place but not necessarily required, because as long as you have those other pieces, the community can then coordinate and start developing that. And if the community wants to change the governance process, they can.
00:16:10:24 – 00:16:22:01
Willy Ogorzaly: But those are kind of the core pieces that you at least need at minimum. And then, yeah, beyond that, you don’t necessarily need to build everything upfront because once you launch it, now you have a community that can help you build the rest.
00:16:22:21 – 00:16:51:03
Richard Carthon: Right. And again, thank you for setting that foundation. I think for everyone who’s like very curious and looking at first steps, you just got the blueprint. You heard it from the man himself. So we went out a couple of times, start to go implement those things and you got some base foundations. So now stepping back into the macro, it’s been almost a year utilizing a Dao for for shapeshift. So brings back to create that you were super excited when you heard the our move into this model. Some people weren’t necessarily as excited. How is that kind of panned out?
00:16:52:02 – 00:17:22:23
Willy Ogorzaly: Yeah. So on the day that we announced to the company that we were going to fall down, I had heard like a week before I got the heads up and it was pretty interesting to see it firsthand. Like Eric, basically we had these all Fox meetings and Eric just told the whole company, Hey, this is this is where we’re going from here. We think this is the best way to achieve our vision. So I gave a presentation right afterwards to try and paint a picture of like what the Dow might look like. Because to your point, like, there are a lot of people at the company who had either never heard of that or if they had heard of it, they really had no idea of what what it would actually look like.
00:17:24:00 – 00:17:54:01
Willy Ogorzaly: And so I tried to paint a picture explaining what it could look like and painting that picture and really like a big part of my goal as shapeshift started to wind down essential operations were was to get as many of the employees to give it a try as possible because I knew like if you like working for shapeshift, I think you’re going to love working for the Dow. It’s so magical. And sure enough, a lot of the people that did transition are loving it. They’re sticking around. And they we even had a couple of people who, like, left. They’re like, Oh, I’m going to go get another job, another, another crypto company or Web two company.
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00:17:54:03 – 00:18:42:06
Willy Ogorzaly: And then they came back to the Dow. And I think something that really helped us was that we didn’t just like change to a Dow overnight. We basically had a six month period where we launched the Dow. The Dow was operating and then over over six months, we had three waves where we let all the employees go. And that gave us some time to set the Dow up so that by the time some of these departments were basically shut down or wound down at ShapeShift there, the Workstreams in the Dow had already been formed. So there’s already a proposal for like as marketing is going away at ShapeShift and here’s a new marketing workstream and anybody any contributors that were part of the ShapeShift marketing team that we’d already recruited and hired and trained and all of that that wanted to continue contributing had to were able to the next day after their job ended up shapeshift, they could log onto the discord and continue contributing to the Dow.
00:18:43:03 – 00:19:19:02
Willy Ogorzaly: That was really helpful. I won’t say there have been challenges. Like, for example, right now it’s a it’s a bear market. And so there’s a lot of conversations going on in the Dow around like budget optimizations and everything. And I think in the bull market, the community had a big appetite for approving almost every proposal that like could have added value and now it’s framework. And we’re like, okay, we can make sure we can survive this thing. We need to optimize our costs, trim some of that fat. And it’s really interesting to see these conversations happening in a public forum. They’re hard conversations, but I’ve been at least really encouraged by the fact that there’s a lot of people in the community who are acting like owners, basically, and they’re not just here to collect the paycheck.
00:19:19:06 – 00:19:52:03
Willy Ogorzaly: They believe in the vision and they want to make shapeshift successful. And that is so cool to see. We have I think there’s much more of a spirit of ownership at the Dow and there was a centralized shapeshift, even though all the employees had equity. So I think it’s going really well. I’m not going to say there have been challenges, but like I will say right now, shapeshift as a down. We’re spending less every month. Our overhead is far lower than it was a centralized organization. We’re earning more revenues, especially like we were profitable for a bit during the bull market as a DAO. And then bear market came and we’re not profitable anymore, but we’re working to get back there and we’re shipping faster.
00:19:52:05 – 00:20:16:16
Willy Ogorzaly: Everything’s open, source permitting a lot faster. So to me, objectively, I hear a lot of people say, Oh, that was very inefficient stuff. I’m like, What are you talking about? We were a centralized organization for seven years and now we’re a DAO and we are moving more fast. We are more efficient now, objectively, sure, there’s there’s inefficient daos and there’s efficient daos just like this, inefficient or inefficient or but to me, I don’t see any fundamental reason my daos can’t be as efficient or more efficient than centralized, centralized organizations.
00:20:17:05 – 00:21:11:26
Richard Carthon: I think you brought up a key point there, though. You you had a six month time period to be able to move over away from these the six centralized way that you have things set up, moving more into this decentralized. And you would have these on off board and on ramps that were in place where I think a lot of people are still excited about that and they don’t necessarily do all their due diligence or understand like how do you put good systems in place and then have that being applied to Dao? I think by having your experiences through your own companies and of course with other experiences that the rest of the team has had, being able to spend the time to make sure that it’s done properly and not rushed and being patient, like almost going back to the initial lesson of like, you know, sometimes it’s just good to hold on just a little bit and to give it time and, and not rush into getting in and out of something very quickly.
00:21:11:28 – 00:21:50:23
Richard Carthon: And I think this is a good example of making sure that the time was there to put the right systems in place into the even the piece that you said about the governance, the ownership piece of that, that people feel like they really are owning this even with bad equity before. But now with being in this style, truly having that, that, that ownership in the government’s token to be able to speak and put proposals and etc., it does give you this new sense of like my voice matters and like even though I only have this one token or a couple of tokens, like it has weight and I think we’re a lot of people sometimes get confused is like they don’t understand like the weight of being able to be part of that.
00:21:50:29 – 00:22:06:17
Richard Carthon: Governance. So another direction I kind of want to be in the conversation was why do you think battles are? How do you think Daos could be the future of where companies start heading towards instead of like traditional LLC? These are LPs, etc.?
00:22:07:14 – 00:22:46:23
Richard Carthon: Yeah, I very much believe that dads are the future. Part of why I believe that is that there’s only a couple of things that does and do that centralized organizations can do. So like you can have a bank account, you can’t sign contracts because you don’t have a legal entity and that’s basically it, right? Like the Internet, a short list of boring things that does can’t do, but there’s infinite things that daos can do that centralized organizations can’t do. I also think that in this day and age, there’s a lot of regulation and bureaucracy that makes it very difficult for the average individual to to start a business and understand how to start a business, write all these documents you’ve got to file and stuff that is to protect consumers and stuff.
00:22:46:25 – 00:23:17:12
Richard Carthon: But at the end of the day, and also whether or not it does that, it also curbs innovation quite a bit. So for a Dalek, what I love about it is that we don’t have to worry about any of that. Right, because there’s not any precedent. There’s no laws that technically apply to as it’s not clear which jurisdictions laws would even apply to us because we don’t have a legal entity registered in any jurisdiction. It’s just a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain and there’s not any officers or anything. It’s the community of token holders that control the smart contracts and they can do whatever the fuck they want, right? And no one can stop them.
00:23:17:14 – 00:23:52:03
Richard Carthon: And that is so powerful and so cool. And if you contrast that to when we were a centralized organization at ShapeShift, there were so many things that held us back that weren’t relevant, in my opinion, to our core business and our vision. One example of that that Eric shared recently in this blog post, he wrote kind of recapping the difference between shapeshift is a centralized we’re going to Dao highly recommend checking out that blog post if you’re interested with just the ability to hire people. In France, for instance, we had all these weird employment laws and stuff. We had a whole h.r department. We had a legal team, compliance team, all this, all this overhead, and we couldn’t hire anyone from france.
00:23:52:05 – 00:24:22:25
Richard Carthon: The company said, you know what, french employment laws are too rough. It’s like I’ve heard it’s hard to fire people in France, is my understanding. So because of that, we’re just not going to hire anyone from France. And so a whole country of people that just we couldn’t couldn’t hire just because of these weird regulations and rules. Right. But if a you know what, if a French contributor wants to work for the Dow and they don’t care if they can get fired and stuff like that, they still want to get into working for the Dow. They can do that now. And we have an amazing French engineer who joined the Dow who was a fan of ShapeShift before, but we couldn’t have hired him even if we wanted to.
00:24:24:03 – 00:24:55:26
Richard Carthon: That’s just one example. But there’s a long list of things every day that would hold us back and constrain us, like a lot of the cool stuff we wanted to do. We’re seeing, you know, Coinbase struggling to launch like an interest product for Usdc. And so a lot of the cool things, we had a lot of similar struggles at ShapeShift, a lot of the fun, cool things they wanted to do, all of this innovative defi protocols they wanted to integrate and we weren’t able to, at least not in like the fashion we wanted to, but now is Dao again. We can whatever the community wants to do, we can do it. And that is incredibly powerful. And just just one of the benefits of down it.
00:24:57:16 – 00:25:37:14
Richard Carthon: Yeah. I think that’s great indeed. You brought up a ton of really interesting points just with the flexibility that you’re able to now work within. Right. So you’re not confined and put into a box of like here’s the world that you have to comply in and do things. Now you can say, Hey, this is what we’re going to go do. And now you have a path for people who want to participate and be a part of shapeshift and and innovative, innovative way to do it and in a way that the community deems as as fair and as a way for them to be able to come in and do that, which I think is really cool, giving the power back to the people and into the individual.
00:25:37:22 – 00:25:47:02
Richard Carthon: But I know that you have a lot of really cool and interesting things that have been happening over at ShapeShift. You kind of want to share some of the things that you been working on.
00:25:47:24 – 00:26:18:10
Richard Carthon: Yeah, I would love to. And I will just say real quick, the community is so powerful and that’s probably the other magical piece of being a down is the fact that you can just for these governance tokens to everyone, contributors, to new members, to users, and they’re now owners and they can make proposals. They can get rewarded with more of these governance tokens. Like it’s really hard to imagine doing that with shares as a Web two company, maybe you could figure it out, but there’d be so much legal red tape around it. But again, like these, these Legos are just there for anyone to to assemble to do this really cool, powerful stuff that I think is disruptive. So yeah.
00:26:18:12 – 00:26:49:08
Richard Carthon: So at ShapeShift, right now the community is aligned on the vision of building the ultimate interface for the centralized universe. You can check it out right now at Dutch Ofcom and it is non-custodial. That’s kind of like always been our core value at ShapeShift and Multichain and there’s shapeshift wallets. So you can create a new ShapeShift wallet to keep the hardware wallet that centralized shapeshift used to own. Now the Dow has a partnership with the new entity or you can connect other top wallets like Metamask Defi Kepler totally cash while connect coming soon.
00:26:49:25 – 00:27:23:15
Richard Carthon: And basically we are just an interface between users keys and decentralized protocols. So you can buy, sell, send, receive, trade, earn yields on your crypto across multiple different blockchains. There’s never any fees added the only fees you’ll ever pay on that protocol level. The Dow actually has relationships with a lot of these protocols and services where they will pay the Dow Treasury a percentage of the fees that we generate for them. And then the vision is to actually then take those fees or the community can decide to do this right. Take the fees that the Dow’s earning as revenues by FOX and reward FOX token holders who have staked Fox for Foxy.
00:27:23:24 – 00:27:29:05
Richard Carthon: So that’s live. Right now. You can stake Fox and get yields that comes from revenues, not just like inflationary yield.
00:27:30:20 – 00:28:02:11
Richard Carthon: And as we add new revenue streams, those also benefit fox stakers foxy holders that for example, if you go by equity right now, 50% of the revenues go to the Treasury, 10% of the revenues in that sale go towards buying Fox, rewarding Foxy holders. So right now, I guess what we’re really focused on is aggregating protocols like we’re building the best UI you can. Four really popular categories of use cases that crypto users care about. So things like buying and selling, sending, receiving, trading, earning yield, and then aggregating all the protocols that share that same UI UX.
00:28:03:25 – 00:28:35:21
Richard Carthon: So it’s going well. We’re about a year into this. One of the next big milestones we’ve been working towards is rebuilding the legacy shapeshift app’s fellowship to dot com in our mobile app in a new open source app that’s got the same features but is architected for decentralization. So previously at ShapeShift, we ran all these different nodes. We had servers and a database of all their users. It was very centralized and we were basically like getting data from these blockchains, storing it, and then presenting its users. Now we’re cutting ourselves out of the equation. So it’s really again, just an interface between users decentralized protocols.
00:28:35:27 – 00:29:12:24
Richard Carthon: We don’t have a database. All the data is coming from directly from the blockchain or from other third party services, so it’s architected to be completely decentralized. That front end right now is hosted on Ipfs, so anyone anywhere in the world can access it. It’s got IP office hosting as well as in for a name service for domain routing, and we’re working on decentralizing the backend. So that was a proposal from Michael, Brooklyn, former chief information security officer at ShapeShift to create this new blockchain called Flux Chain, which will basically incentivize different node operators to run nodes to get blockchain data and then serve that blockchain data to clients.
00:29:13:11 – 00:29:44:01
Richard Carthon: ShapeShift will be one of those clients, but any app that actually wants to be decentralized and not just rely on a centralized blockchain data provider or run their own nodes and basically tap into Foxx’s chain to get this data that’s under development. Coinbase Cloud actually made a proposal to the Dow to help support us developing this, which was really cool. So they’ve been great. And yeah, that’s basically the vision. Like we want to build the ultimate decentralized interface. We believe that interface should be multi-chain, non-custodial, multi wallet, open source, free community owned and decentralized, and that those are our principles that are guiding us.
00:29:44:27 – 00:30:18:01
Richard Carthon: Which are amazing principles. And I see the work happening. It’s been really cool just to see how much I’ll develop in the last year since implementing the now and all the new features they are rolling out. A lot of people who I know who use shapeshift are avid users and have nothing but incredible things to say. And I think it’s a testament to the type of community that y’all are establishing over there. So, Willie, I really appreciate you sharing all that information. Thanks for explaining down for us today as we kind of wrap up. I’d like to finish with a couple of fun questions and the first one here, which I think is still pretty relevant.
00:30:18:29 – 00:30:39:10
Richard Carthon: A lot of people who have entered the market in the last year or so have never experienced a bear market. And for yourself, you’ve been able to collect about, you know, five year, roughly five years worth of experience. If you can impart one or two pieces of wisdom to yourself when you first went through your first bear cycle, what would you tell yourself?
00:30:40:09 – 00:31:07:27
Richard Carthon: Oh, man. Well, I’m a permeable. So one mistake I made in the first bear market is that I didn’t sell anything, basically. And I went. And I went all in, and I thought it was a bottom and it wasn’t a bottom yet. So I guess don’t blow your whole load all in one sitting. Basically that’s the dollar cost averaging is something that I think tends to work much better than than just yellowing. So dollar cost averaging is a great lesson learned.
00:31:09:15 – 00:31:42:12
Richard Carthon: I’m really bad at timing it, so even though I’m super fucking the space, I’m not a great trader. I’ve learned and like, it’s really hard to time those bottoms and find those tops. But what I what I learned after the 2017 bull market was to focus on building. Basically, it’s like that’s those are the skills I have. Those are skills that a lot of you guys probably have. And that’s like a guaranteed way to create value and stack crypto during bear market. And you just focus on that like I to try I don’t know, this is not financial advice, but I am trying not to sell, just trying to accumulate more crypto because I already blew it and then didn’t sign the top.
00:31:42:14 – 00:32:01:12
Richard Carthon: So now it’s like, alright, we’re in this for the rest of the bear. But yeah, I’ll be happy if we can survive this bear, come out of the bull market and have have larger stacks of crypto. I’ll consider that a win and fortunately I won’t have spent a bunch of time staring at charts and stuff and trading. Staying up late at night, I will have been focusing on my time on building, which is also a great way to learn for sure.
00:32:01:14 – 00:32:28:03
Richard Carthon: I think those are two really great lessons. This is your best friend. And again, for a lot of people, as much as we like to think that we’re traders, a lot of people aren’t investors and being able to focus and build right now, building right now is just super crucial and can yield even bigger yields in the future. But really, what is the final thought that you want to leave with everyone here today?
00:32:29:14 – 00:33:00:12
Richard Carthon: Yeah. Well, if you’re interested in Dallas, I really encourage you to just jump in and try it. Find a Dow that aligns with your interests because there’s so many different types of Dallas. If you’re into DEFI and safety, it’s a pretty cool deal to get involved in because we touch so many different pieces of crypto and we’ve just got an awesome community who’s super experienced in meetings every day. If you’re into that stuff, come check out ShapeShift. If you’re into building the future of giving philanthropy, then check out Give It. Give It is another project that I’m a part of that I’m a huge fan of.
00:33:01:05 – 00:33:21:21
Richard Carthon: Or if you just want to donate some crypto, go to give it that I Oh, there’s over 5000 awesome projects you can donate to both great communities, but if you’re interested in other stuff, I don’t know, there’s like a blunt Dao I heard recently, there’s a beer Dao, there’s, there’s all sorts of Dallas and there’s no doubt is going to create it. If you don’t find a Dao that aligns the theory of your passion, maybe you can start that. But yeah, I really encourage people to jump in and check it out. It really is magical
00:33:23:11 – 00:33:54:24
Richard Carthon: and don’t be afraid to just add value. Like if you wait for someone in the Dow to like ask you to get involved, you might never get asked, right? But if you if you do a lot of these daos have plenty of opportunity to contribute. You’ll it’s easy to find something that you could do that would add value and just do it. I really encourage you. And then if you want to make sure you get paid for it, then reach out to me. Say Here, here’s what I want to do. Maybe you can make a proposal. Maybe there’s a workstream that you can reach out to, pitch your idea to, and basically get get a guarantee that if you do what you are asking, then they’ll pay you.
00:33:56:05 – 00:34:31:25
Richard Carthon: But also, you know, if you if you have the bandwidth, don’t be afraid to just do it. I always say, like if you’re adding value to a DAO and the debt is not rewarding you, that that was doing something wrong. Um, but yeah, you can just get involved in permissionless, right? You don’t need anyone’s permission to add value. And then one thing I want to mention, too, because we talked about this earlier and it talks about how easy it is to start a dialogue and what an MLP looks like. I also want to kind of like give the other side of that that you don’t have to launch a DAO to start building a community. So you can just start building your community and and work with that community to still design the Dow.
00:34:32:08 – 00:35:05:08
Richard Carthon: And then, you know, you might not have a Treasury on day one anyways. Right. And initially, when you have your Treasury, it might just be a bunch of tokens and there’s pros and cons, like once you launch Dow, you have a token that you can then use to reward contributors. But if you want to zoom and people to understand what your tokens for what your Dow is about and you have a bunch of these tokens like that can also backfire. So I think it is important to make sure that you’re seeking that MLP and what you’re launching isn’t just viable, but it is lovable. And don’t be afraid to start building the community before you actually launch the Dow.
00:35:05:22 – 00:35:07:09
Richard Carthon: Just wanted to kind of give both sides of that.
00:35:08:01 – 00:35:27:21
Richard Carthon: Absolutely. And for a reminder, MLP is minimal, lovable product. And again, really has dropped a ton a ton of great gems for this. So make sure you go back, listen to a lot of those great talking points. I appreciate you spend some time with us for people who want to connect with you personally or learn more about what’s going on with ShapeShift, how can they do that?
00:35:28:29 – 00:35:46:07
Richard Carthon: I’m willing to go with the why on Twitter. ShapeShift is just at ShapeShift on Twitter. That was a win for the Dow. The Dow was able to finally acquire that shapeshift handle. And yet I really encourage you guys to come up in our discord. I’m at Willy Fox and Discord and pretty active. So I love to see you guys in there. See you guys in the metaverse.
00:35:47:03 – 00:35:51:24
Richard Carthon: Perfect. Well, again, really, thank you so much for spending time and for everyone listening. Stay cryptocurrency.
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