Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

On February 17, 2023, Context and Mint. Fun co-founder Worm_emoji, aka Luke Miles tweeted “Can someone have me on a podcast to discuss how Blur used OpenSea's own protocol to defeat them on the royalties / creator fees issue?” I responded to the call, and a couple of hours later, Luke, John Palmer from PartyDAO, Jacob the CEO of Zora, and I got on Twitter Spaces to Blur, OpenSea, and the proxy war...

I’m joined today by Harpie founder Daniel Chong . Harpie describes itself as an onchain firewall that protects NFTs from theft. In this episode we discuss how Harpie’s mempool monitoring and emergency vault contract works on a technical level. We also cover Harpie’s unique business model, and their growing enterprise service which grants organizations like OpenSea access to their malicious transac...

In 2022, Paradigm launched a CTF game called 0xMonaco. 3 players are in a race to the 1000 block finish line. Each car is armed with 15,000 coins which they can spend on acceleration or throwing shells to slow down their opponents. Prices adjust dynamically according to a variable rate gradual Dutch auction. Competitors submit Solidity contracts that manage these resources on their behalf. Matchbo...

Today, I'm joined by Hamzah Khan, Head of DeFi at Polygon. This episode is an inquiry into the secret internal dynamics that set Polygon apart in the blockchain ecosystem. Polygon is known for a run of incredible business development successes, including deep partnerships with Reddit, Starbucks, and OpenSea. But underlying this extraordinary BD is a unique ability to pragmatically manage multiple...

Today on the show I’m joined by Jeff Krantz and Josh Breite, cofounders of Fire. Fire is a consumer oriented EVM transaction simulator designed to keep blockchain transactors from losing their NFTs and fungibles to malicious transaction requests. In its current form, Fire is a Chromium browser extension. When a dapp requests a Metamask wallet signature, a Fire window pops up next to Metamask, prov...

Today on the show I’m joined by musician and NFT artist Jonathan Mann . For over 5000 days, Jonathan has written, recorded, and published a Song A Day . After discovering CryptoPunks in 2017, he fell down the crypto rabbit hole. Over the past 6 years he’s melded his daily music practice and his interest in artist empowerment through NFT creation. In this episode, we discuss Song A Day’s evolution...

In May of 2022, the Truth NFT studio secretly released the Goblintown generative PFP NFT collection on Ethereum. As the crypto bull market turned into a bear, Goblins and the meme of “going goblinmode” took Crypto Twitter by storm. In my mind, Goblintown is most identified with a surprising and creative new use of Twitter Spaces for NFT community building. During Goblintown Spaces, a short clip of...

Public Assembly is a burgeoning software development community that describes itself as a “distributed collective building the missing pieces of the internet.” Today I’m joined by Valerie , Salief Lewis , and Neesh Chaudary , three of the seven founding members of Public Assembly. In this episode, we discuss the barriers to growth and learning that they’ve faced in the first phase of their Web3 ca...

Today I’m joined by a chorus of organizers and critics of ConstitutionDAO2 , a crypto crowdfund effort attempting to buy the Constitution, again. Just over a year since the original ConstitutionDAO failed to acquire the Constitution, a group of contributors to PeopleDAO have banded together to attempt a repeat fundraise, with some new ZK powered technology in hand. On this episode, I’m joined by M...

Today I’m joined by Drake Danner, data analyst at Flipside and MetricsDAO. In this episode, we discuss Drake’s latest work in progress, Badger, an ERC-1155 based badging protocol currently deployed on the Polygon network. Badger was conceived in the course of Drake’s work at MetricsDAO, where contributors providing blockchain analytics services needed access to various SaaS tools like Dework and W...

Today I’m joined by Backseats and Frolic , two independent full stack Solidity devs, for a conversation about their latest projects. First, we discuss Backseats as-yet-unnamed NFT primary marketplace browser extension. His work in progress idea is to deploy an NFT discovery browser extension that populates new browser tabs with 1/1 NFTs for sale from the artist. Artists will list works onchain via...

Today I’m joined by Shreyas , co-founder of Llama . Llama is a community that works with the most respected DAOs in the world, including Uniswap, Aave, ENS, Gitcoin, MakerDAO, Nouns, and more. Llama’s contributors work together to provide engineering, treasury management, and analytics services to these protocol DAOs. In this conversation, Shreyas explains the ins-and-outs of Llama’s organizationa...

This is a special episode. Today I’m joined by Brandon H Gomes , CTO at Manta Network and Poseidon Labs. Brandon is one of the smartest people I’ve had the good fortune to meet this year. He’s deep in the ZK technical stack and able to clearly communicate the core mechanisms of ZK to laypeople. In this episode, we discuss what Zero Knowledge Proofs enable, the difference between ZK as a technology...

On today’s episode, I’m joined by three members of Nouns eSports. Sasquatch is an OG member of SharkDAO. ApeNoun (aka Oni) is Noun 119. Together they co-founded the Nouns esports Pod, which now participates in several esports leagues. We’re also joined by Costabile , a pro Dota 2 player who recently represented Nouns at The International, the most prestigious tournament in the Dota scene. In this...

Today, I’m joined by XR researcher and creator Jin . You may be familiar with Jin’s work building and evangelizing open and interoperable VR and AR experiences through the many projects he’s been affiliated with, such as Webaverse, Exokit, M3, The Meta Factory, and more. In this conversation, Jin and I discuss his newest project, Open Voxels, an effort to fund research and archiving activities foc...

Today, I’m joined by Robin Schmidt, video creator and former Head of Video & Content at The Defiant . In this episode, Robin and I talk about his love of cinema, 16mm film, Firewire, and anamorphic lenses. Robin tells me how his team found their groove making irreverent explainers and analysis with their video about Curve , and we discuss how The Defiant’s video team scaled production to 7-vid...

Today, I’m joined by Matt Galligan , co-founder of XMTP Labs. XMTP is a messaging protocol built atop EVM wallets. Situating itself in the lineage of email protocol SMTP and Jabber IM protocol XMPP, XMTP aims to make DMs, notifications, group chats, and more available to everyone with a blockchain wallet. XMTP Labs, Matt’s new company, is the primary developer of the protocol. In this episode, Mat...

Today, I’m joined by SirsuHayb to learn all about the past, present and future of esports gaming DAO BLVKHVND . Sirsu is a prolific Web3 builder and organizer. In 2021, Sirsu co-created The Mint Fund, Crypto Cookout, The Well, and the primary subject of today’s conversation, BLVKHVND. BLVKHVND is an esports DAO. It’s essential premise: put ownership of an esports team into the hands of the players...

Today, I’m joined by NounsDAO developer Brian (aka @pbrianandj). Brian is one of a small group of developers in residence at NounsDAO. His work for the DAO is focused on the nouns.wtf website, which is the primary interface to the DAO’s daily auctions. Brian is also the creator of AddressForm, a Google Forms for Web3 SaaS product. In this episode, Brian tells me about his experience working on Nou...

Today I’m joined by LordOfAFew (aka LOAF), Cairo developer and core dev at Realms. Realms started life as a Loot derivative NFT collection on Ethereum Mainnet. In the year since the collection’s initial deployment, LordOfAFew has led the charge transforming Realms into an onchain multiplayer resource management game. The first module will be called Realms: Eternum. In this episode, LOAF tell me ab...

Today I’m joined by Jonah Erlich and Ittai Svidler , cofounders of Den . Building on their experience coordinating multisig transaction signing in ConsitutionDAO , Jonah and Ittai are creating a suite of tools for operational multisig teams to create, track, and execute Gnosis Safe transactions. At the time of recording, Den comprises a webapp interface for building and annotating multisig transac...

At the end of each week, I sit down for a Friday afternoon conversation with some of the brightest people building web3. In this episode, I'm joined by David Silverman, Project Manager at Lens Protocol and Aave. Lens Protocol is a set of social publishing primitives, built for the EVM and currently deployed on the Polygon Network. David and I discuss the motivations for building Lens, its essentia...

Today, I’m joined by Nader Dabit , founder of DeveloperDAO. DeveloperDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization composed of thousands of Web3 developers. In this episode, author, educator, and developer relations specialist Nader Dabit walks us through discovering his passion for programming in his late 20s, his time at AWS and Edge & Node (creators of The Graph Protocol), and how he creat...

Today I’m joined by Dan Romero . Dan is the co-founder of Farcaster and former VP of Operations at Coinbase. Farcaster is a decentralized communication protocol that uses Ethereum as a username registration service. Farcaster promises users a direct and uncensorable relationship with their audience. It promises developers permissionless access to all content on the network, no API required. In thi...

In this episode I’m joined by GUN founder Mark Nadal to discuss GUN . GUN, also known as GUNDB, is a real-time, decentralized, offline-first, graph database. In practice, GUN provides a Javascript API that allows webapps to sync data between peers with no centralized server dependency. GUN peers use WebRTC and similar transport protocols to sync data to localStorage and IndexedDB in the client. GU...