Episode Summary
What if your tiny team with a grand vision for a blockchain-based application could simply and effectively build it without the need to develop all the extra services and maintenance packages and without worries about counterparty risks?
I get up close and personal with Johannes, the co-founder of Nerif Network, a project designed to make that happen. Johannes shares how a project in South Africa fueled his interest in crypto, leading him from a career in consulting and investing to co-founding Nerif. Join us to see how NeriF aims make Devex suck less!
And not only that - have you ever wondered what it would be like living in a crypto-friendly environment? We take a virtual trip to Switzerland's Crypto Valley, a rapidly growing European hub of crypto activity. Guided by true local. If you're a developer, founder, or simply crypto-curious, you'll want to hear about this digital hub's family friendliness (maybe because of Crypto Dads group?) and also why it's not the most exciting place for singles.
We cover a lot of topics with Johannes, so don't expect developer-focused talk - we talk music, technology, streaming services, the potential of blockchain in revolutionizing how artists get paid, exciting prospects of NFT ticketing and more, including tacos.
This episode provides a buffet of insights and stories to satisfy your crypto-curiosity.
Video Episode player
Transcript
BFG (aka Petr): 1:11
Hello everyone. So we are back. I am here with Johannes from the project called Nerif. I keep butchering the name to Nefrit all the time, but hopefully you know it won't happen during today's talk, hi.
Johannes: 1:23
Johannes, how are you? Hi Peter, thank you so much. I'm good you know you're enjoying the fall in Switzerland. It's hard to pronounce Nerif, it's Nerif.
BFG (aka Petr): 1:34
It's really hard. It's just, you know, I've read a book a long time ago which I loved, and it was about some Nefrit's.
Johannes: 1:42
So you like Egyptian history?
BFG (aka Petr): 1:47
I did, I used to like it, yeah, so I think you know the typical start, which you know I like to do, is basically ask the guests about how they got to crypto and then you know how the idea of their current project came about, and so why don't you start how you actually ended up in crypto valley and how do you get crypto?
Johannes: 2:11
You know that's been a while now. I've been professional in crypto since, I think, 2017. Okay, oh gee. So just like after that first one, is he after? Kind of the whole hype happened, but it actually started earlier. So I was starting in South Africa with my bachelors and in Salomon we had this one professor who is teaching about economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa and he very early I was in 2014. That was really really early on. He had this project, this idea of you have a lot of people from Zimbabwe living in South Africa and basically sending money back home, but now it doesn't really have our back down. I'm not sure how it is today a proper banking system. So they would literally give people cash to the taxi driver and ask the taxi driver if they could take it over the border, and so the kind of the cost of monitoring was like 20 to 30%. And they came up with this idea of let's use blockchain to do remittance payments. So that's the first time I really got in touch with blockchain. And then went back home to Switzerland and started this venture called Co-Foundment, which was all about helping startups to kind of become startups, so founders funding their co-founders. And we didn't make money. So we thought about hey, how can we monetize this whole thing? And one of the problems or challenges we had was that early state startups, which are our main, you could say, client base, they don't really have money and at the same time, with a lot of VCs and stuff scouting on the platforms. So we came up with this idea of, well, let's do seed rounds, kind of on a platform, let's do tokenize. That was in 2016. That was going to be the first wave of the ISO hype and let's enable startups to do the seed round on the same. Now the problem was that there was no stable coins, there was no regulation in place, there was no infrastructure. So that kind of remained a theoretical concept. But that triggered my interest really, especially my technically interest, which then led to me joining a Swisscom blockchain, which was back then the consulting arm of this national calco focusing on blockchain and really going into that professionally as well. So that's how it triggered it. And then, when it came from there, and then suddenly I see what became a bad word and we could do less and less. And then it was more and more about permission to blockchains in the hyper lecture. And then once again that sometime later I then joined forces with a tremendous gentleman who had just founded this company called L1 Digital, which turned now into one of the largest allocators investors in bitchlasses in Europe. So I spent three or now years there and then basically wanted to go back into building and being more technical. So I actually was introduced to this new idea of narrative by a former colleague at Swisscom blockchain. So we kind of jumped on that to become a co-founder of narrative and have this idea of making Web 3 so class. So really, what narrative is all about here is we believe that the user experience is really really bad in Web 3 at the moment and we want to change that and we build software to change that.
BFG (aka Petr): 6:14
I see Okay. So basically, narrative is focusing on user experience in Web. 3. Do I get it right?
Johannes: 6:20
Yeah, you know, that's kind of in a vision sense. If you break it down a bit more, it's it's very simple things. It's, you know we orchestrate the apps. So, if you're building your application, you usually you could think about the idea of the following you have your blockchain and then on top of that you have a set of smart contracts and On top of those smart contracts you have a user interface. That's the theory right now. In practice, if, if you're building this, you need to build a lot of surrounding parts, you need to build notification systems, you need to build, you know, cron jobs for maintenance tasks. You, you need to build, if you want to do cross interactions, maintenance tasks, and all that stuff is typically built in the centralized fashion or somewhat centralized fashion, and and is very complex to build, but even more complex to maintain and very expensive. So what we, what we do now, if you just give you a tool or a set of tools as a developer where you, you can, you know, build that very easily and you don't have to worry about maintenance and, more importantly, also don't have to worry about counterparty risk because it's running decentralized on its own.
BFG (aka Petr): 7:31
Okay, and you, so you do maintenance for those tools, or who?
Johannes: 7:35
Well, which, instead of you know, instead of having to run a server where you have to run a node, where you have to run an indexer which you have to maintain, yeah, basically our network does that, so you don't have to worry about keeping things updated, maintain it. It's just kind of working out of the box.
BFG (aka Petr): 7:52
I see, I see sounds cool, and so your ideal client or typical client would be a small team with an idea, something on block builders, builders exactly.
Johannes: 8:07
Doesn't really sound like user experience, though, so it's more like user experience, for Well, it's you know, like I have a little card here it says you know, make web 3 debacks suck a bit less. You could say it's about developer experience, but we believe that actually, by making the developer experience so it's good step back, we believe the core problem of why why work 3 doesn't really have more use adoption is the user experience is bad. Yeah, the reason why you experience is bad, or one of the reasons we believe, is because it's actually very cumbersome and hard to build user experience. So, by giving developers tools right to build better processes, to build better, for example, notifications is like the easiest one to understand over this year you give them tools to build by the UX. Great, okay, right, so it is. The end goal is UX. However, we basically build the foundation to enable developers to go to the west.
BFG (aka Petr): 9:08
Okay. So basically you are trying to give them more time to focus on UX doesn't mean they're gonna focus on that.
Johannes: 9:16
Very much hope so, because you know we have this idea of you. Know how do we, how do we make you know one board, the next billion users on the web, and without UX, that's not gonna happen. So you know basically that goes out to every developer here please, if you have, you know, more time, because your application For developers that is less complex, please use it to focus on UX and not on I don't know.
BFG (aka Petr): 9:43
I totally, I sign up for this. This plus one, please do it. Yeah, it is cumbersome, fun in many ways and I think even for people who kind of spent a lot of time in in the space it's still feels cumbersome anyway, and yeah, I, I wish, I wish there is gonna be something which you know it's gonna be like one bullet for them all, or? Yeah, man, I'm hoping that you can do it For them all. Or look at them, don't worry. Yeah, man, I'm optimistic. It is just that you know I may lose a lot of bullets along the way. Remember where they are. And when you change computers, you know a lot of stuff changes, cool. So how long have you been running Neriff with your co-founder?
Johannes: 10:34
So we formally launched and I joined in February this year, so a bit more than a half a year. There was some, you know, technical ideas from my co-founder before that, but from my side, basically, and going full, full steam ahead since, since February this year, so going a half a year we've come a long, long way since then. I'm super excited. We launched our Harmony with alpha, we've built some tremendous partnerships with different in layer two's and Also big players in the market. And now kind of in this phase and you'll actually hear more about that very soon from our side, I'm sure, when you're gonna publish this but it's coming out probably like mid-November. Cool, then basically that will be in full swing, which you will hear about more like what Neriff is doing and how people are building on Neriff Awesome.
BFG (aka Petr): 11:25
Okay, looking forward to that. Okay, so it's probably not the right time right now to give shout out to some projects building on NERIF, or is it?
Johannes: 11:37
Let's, let's wait, let's wait. You know, let's, let's you follow up on Mid-November December and then I can give you really really cool updates on that.
BFG (aka Petr): 11:47
All right, no problem, perfect. So one of the topics when we connected in ETH Milan, one of the topics you wanted to talk about was like how is the ecosystem growing in? You know, the crypto valley in Switzerland. Oh the infamous crypto valley. So maybe you can just you know for everybody else, like how did you end up in crypto valley you, I assume you haven't born, that's my parents. Oh.
Johannes: 12:23
I'm one of those five people who actually grew up in soup, so my story goes. I Was born here. I was a drop in soup. Actually, I went into school To the former mayor of soup. He was my teacher in high school. But then you know through, this is small place, not the one who haven't been it's a really tiny place. So when you're like an 18 year old young person, you Just want to move out. So I moved out. I was studying to go and then I was, you know, living. I'd be all around the world and I'm basically made my wife in Chile and when, when our son was born, we decided to move back to Switzerland, so I kind of came back here. So I maybe have a bit of an kind of abstract view on that whole crypto valley thing. It just as a person is being there for his own life.
BFG (aka Petr): 13:13
Well, you know, I think you have probably a good view because you know it inside out, but you've been out also, so you know you can definitely say what's good or what's bad.
Johannes: 13:24
So soup isn't always has been right. This is not something where the crypto valley has brought to to is the place of money, in a sense. What took is all about is that you have a government which is very welcoming on kind of Chinese new concepts, new ideas, on New businesses. We've sold up in the 70s with with my bridge company and Actually the full the success successors being blank or basically brought spot trading to. So you have the whole Quality trading which is in a sense, comparable to to crypto in that is moving big, you know, big amounts of money without having to need in a physical space like in the place where you have to do the trading right, and and that brought kind of really surrounding industry here Lawyers, and I think that combination kind of created this. The reason why, why the crypto valley is what it is right with, in combination with the government which is, in a sense, used to kind of deal with this kind of a special Industries. Now, you know I have a great group of people here. There's a lot of really cool people here working. Now, if you're, you know, visiting soup, you will not find hordes of developers and builders in cafes building. That is not a place where you find that you will. You will find by me, like me, right you have. We have, for example, we have this crypto bats group right which, like the video where you have a bunch of founders it's just People actually physically are here, are either Swiss and they are kind of more on the service by the level, or they are founders or like executive level, you know, foundation President CEOs, which kind of physically need to be here as well and because it's it's quite expensive to live here in a sense, and it is quite boring as a young person. It's great for a family right. It's a really really good place to be if you have kids, but as a single, you know just stereotyping your single male between 25 and 35.
BFG (aka Petr): 15:47
I was a brutal stereotype okay, nice one, so it was about it was gonna be. My question is like is it really international or it is international, it is, it's.
Johannes: 15:59
It's it's like 35% foreign residents, that's pretty deep and yeah, it is just, it is extreme international. But that is, you know, it's. It's the different of international right. It's it's a. I tell you that you have family. Come here, you know, like it's a great place if you can afford to live here, great place to be. But if you're young and you want to, some want some adventures.
BFG (aka Petr): 16:27
It's better places to go, we get it being somewhere else also Around the world. Would you, you know and not, if you wouldn't be Swiss, would it be the place which you would choose to, like you know, live and work in the crypto space, or would it be some other places in, I don't know, us, asia?
Johannes: 16:49
Yeah, wherever you with a family and the financial means. Yes, definitely, okay, right, that is a thing, right, this is. It's like, it's those two points. It's Took is difficult because it's hard to find a nice place to live, right, like a house or black or something. But if you have that and you're looking for a more quiet life, it is no, oh my, oh, my own. I would probably. As a single developer, I would, or single founder, I would probably not be here. I probably be. I mean, I'm a big kind of Cape Town, I'm a big fan of Valencia as well, in Spain, I would be a bit more in Seattle, somewhere where it's a bit warmer, a bit more movement, maybe, okay got you, got you.
BFG (aka Petr): 17:41
So basically, what you are saying is it's good if you have family and you can afford to live there, or if you just want to come and talk to people who have money.
Johannes: 17:52
Yeah, well, it put it this way All right, all right.
BFG (aka Petr): 18:00
So I can deduce from that that you know there are some people in crypto early who are actually developing stuff, but it's not that many of them.
Johannes: 18:12
You know it's not that many of them number wise right Number wise, yeah. But in fact, wise, there's probably actually quite a bit of you know, because you, as I said, right, you would find who you would find the founders here, like you know, just like I'm at my office here and in the, let's say, the 200 meter radius around my office, there is probably, like you know, just the back of my hand. We have safe here. On the other side, we have three foundation very close. We have to hear in front of what I don't have any people here, the officer here. We have streamer extremely close, polymeg extremely close, like a lot of cool projects which are physically there, have physical office here as well. Right, but it's, you know, it's not the thousand in the house.
BFG (aka Petr): 18:56
Okay, it used to live in, you know Silicon Valley, so typically looking for something like oh, so you basically just walk into a cafe and you bump into everybody you know from the news.
Johannes: 19:08
You do that, you do that, but the thing is no well question for you what do you think? How many people are living in soup? 20, 30,000. Exactly, it's a small, small, small town, right? So, yes, you actually walk. I mean, you know we have to be careful to go over lunch, right, because chances are the person next to you is also working in the space, but it's just because it's not. It's you know, it's only 25,000 people living here, so there's actually not that many people. So if you have, you know, a couple of other people working in one thing, that's already.
BFG (aka Petr): 19:38
Right, right, that's okay. Well, you know, I stopped drilling on the. I came to the valley. I'll come and check it out myself.
Johannes: 19:46
You know, come come to this here and talk it's nice, it's it's, it's really nice and it you know it. It will be nice to have a bit more kind of whittlers and stuff here and not just suits, as I call them.
BFG (aka Petr): 19:55
Right, okay, so I wanted to pick a little bit of your brain because we had a chance to chat over dinner about a lot of things and then different topics, and it seemed to me that you know you have very broad overview of what's happening in crypto space Now, especially, probably especially in Europe, I would say. So what are some projects which you find exciting, and they don't have to be based in crypto valley, just you know, in the crypto space which you find exciting, you know? Now, I mean, it's like oh, I'm so.
Johannes: 20:37
I have a bit of a penchant for not the non-financial use cases, right.
BFG (aka Petr): 20:43
So what you?
Johannes: 20:44
have, you have to, you have to defy, defy super important. But then I asked the question do we need another? You know perp tags, right. Really another protocol to leverage stuff.
BFG (aka Petr): 20:56
Yeah, totally.
Johannes: 20:59
But then you know, like stuff, for example, I'm super excited about lens because what excited me about it is that, if you look at, you know what two things actually, from a data perspective, things like Wikipedia, reddit and Facebook are the same thing, broken down just on a data thing. It's a person who's writing some kind of content in some form and there is a collaborative element to it. Very abstract, right. That means if you have, like an infrastructure such as Lens, which basically incorporates I think Lens is, in the end, nothing else. It's a place where I can create content, I can save that content. It's visible that I created it. There's a collaborative function to it, right, you can comment on it, the follower, whatever you want to call it. Then it's all about the user interface. With that same data structure, data layer, you can build different applications. Then you can start creating new things, kind of interacting and connecting them and basically having a mix between, let's say, reddit and Wikipedia. On top of that, because you have to share data layer, the blockchain, you can start connecting things. You can start, for example, doing a credential that you actually have. You don't have a different user account than Wikipedia, and which one? It's the same wallet right, right, then you can connect to something. Okay, this is an expert. I don't know what this person has more credibility on a certain topic on any of those platforms. What comes on top of that is what basically blockchain brings, apart from composability and the shared data layer, is the ability to natively monetize it in some way, however that might look like. So you can really start building really, really cool applications On top of that. That's just one example Social, in a sense, decent social media. I try to avoid the term. What's it called? Socialfy Exactly? I'm trying to avoid the term socialfy because that puts too much emphasis on the fi aspect of it. Right, which is interesting, but it's not the only one.
BFG (aka Petr): 23:24
I think socialfy and the current setups it's mostly great Ponzi scheme which people love because there's nothing else to do, honestly. So at least it's probably not a day that somebody doesn't DM me or bring me somewhere on Twitter that they bought my keys somewhere.
Johannes: 23:46
It's like whether it's friends or Exactly, and I suffered, suffered, just came out with that. Apparently Just a friend texted me just before.
BFG (aka Petr): 23:57
Or on the blockchain, like Bitcoin, alternatives of those. It's like I like experimenting but I'm also kind of bored with different things.
Johannes: 24:08
But that's just like this layer which they're taking out the fire of it and seeing what else you can do with that, and that is really, really exciting to me.
BFG (aka Petr): 24:16
Okay, that's one example.
Johannes: 24:18
Another example might be music, like the whole IT discussion, where music is a bit special in that sense because we're all used to not in art. You buy art right and they have it, when music we're all used to pay rent. We pay a monthly fee, spotify, or you basically pay every time you consume it, don't just pay it once, but you pay for it.
BFG (aka Petr): 24:44
I'm old enough to remember records and cassettes.
Johannes: 24:49
I thought one time but that's a different story, right, like the last many years changed that, yeah, yeah, for sure In one sense or the other. And that is also something where the whole rights usage and rights management is extremely inefficient and geared towards the big players, and that's where also it might be an equalizer, where technology really really might have a big, big impact. There's a lot of cool projects.
BFG (aka Petr): 25:17
Do you have any? Free projects where you go to check music on chain.
Johannes: 25:22
You know well, the biggest one being Audius. I've been in early support of Audius. I think they're a bit in a rut at the moment. The problem you have is the distribution of the curve. Who listens to what? Music which is extremely kind of steep and you have kind of a very long tail but high concentration? I'd like the pop stars, and that's why, in a sense, you need to somehow work with the incumbents in the industry to actually make it work. Because if you then just build a new platform, you might have a lot of kind of independent artists, but those artists that have an incentive to be on something like Spotify because Spotify what it gives you is exposure Kind of those people who listen to the Metallica's and the Britney Spears of the world they would then also find, like, newer bands on Spotify. But if you're not on the same platform as those big stars, the algorithm doesn't work. So you know, this is like something which is close to my heart personally. There's a lot of approaches. This is a very long process because it's a very conservative industry, but I think there's tremendous potential in here also to kind of change that.
BFG (aka Petr): 26:43
I was just looking through some music projects on chain this morning actually, so I was trying to figure out. So the podcast is basically a continuation of the one which I did about NFTs and I wanted to use it to educate my friends on different sides of the you know font you could say so my NFTs friends about other things, just not just NFTs, and my technology friends who hate crypto and blockchain about the use cases which actually makes sense. And I got asked a lot by NFTs friends about where is the you know web-three part of this? Because you run it on sub-stack and you talk about interesting projects but there's nothing to mint. I'm like, yeah, well, you know, so I am creating an art for every episode because that's what's kind of fun, and I was looking on the places where you could kind of give anyone who is in that space who wants to mint something. All the time, like you know, is there a chance to have like nice art minted together with the episode, because most of the platforms do one or the other. It's like you don't really get the nice art or you really don't get the episode Anyway. So this is total digress. Sorry about that.
Johannes: 28:12
But you know, I think that puts it very nicely we're not there yet, right? There's a lot of things to build. There's a lot of cool ideas. Just yesterday I had drinks with a couple of friends I would like to cripple that and there was this big topic of NFT ticketing, where it is in a sense a no-brainer technically, but there is no good platform still which just makes it work, where you don't have to sign up with your wallet and go into Discord and approve your wallet and then with that Discord you have to basically claim a link and then with that link you have to go to browser, where it doesn't work in mobile because MetaMask was the proper link for mobile, so you have to do it in desktop. But this is, you know, that's really that's you know. It gets back to this thing of make web-free subclass or like let's make great UX. This is UX. That's for me. This is UX and you can see how the web page processes simplifying those processes, combining them, and I think that is. There's a lot of really smart people working in this space. It's very fragmented, but like we're starting to see kind of more standards and just kind of stuff merging. I'm extremely positive that this will be one of, if not the kind of changing thing that you know, having great UX, having at least UX which is at least as good as what we are used to in work through, which has been working for 20 years. Right, 20 years ago, the work to UX was also really bad. You're a bit older than I am, so you probably remember a bit better than I do, but you know we've gone a long way there. Well, I just I remember, like how Bakeoff and Change, like Game Change, and React, for example, is Reactjs, which just allows you to do one single page applications which are interactive, which are frictionless in a sense, and you don't have, you know, click, wait until the page loads, click, wait until the page loads you know, yeah, yeah, okay, cool, okay.
BFG (aka Petr): 30:22
We are approaching about, you know, half an hour. So any thing you would like to point out at the end, like how can listeners be useful for you, what they should go and check, I will include anything you want in the show notes, of course. Or, you know, just a shout out to anybody and any project you wish.
Johannes: 30:42
Maybe two things. You know, if you're a builder, if you're a developer, check out what we build with Nerf. I'll send Peter a link where you can, you know, skip the white list which we have. If you are a non-developer and basically interested in crypto, you know, think about what is the investment case like, but then think about what kind of technology change, because this is a really, really big difference. I think that's talking to, in a sense, people are not kind of building deep in this space. That's really the most important thing I always say is that Web 3 is not about price go up. Tokens are just in application of it. It's about what can technology be used for? To build groundbreaking and game changing things. There are two things. Oh yeah, also, if you like, tacos and our builder. We're running those, those events all around the world. So I will also send you the link, all right?
BFG (aka Petr): 31:41
Are you going to be in Istanbul in November?
Johannes: 31:43
I will be in Istanbul. Yes, now, this is the question if you're basically publishing this before Istanbul or off.
BFG (aka Petr): 31:49
Well, I can definitely include it in the soundbites. You know, even if the whole episode is not going to be out. I can definitely put it in the teasers.
Johannes: 32:00
Then you should definitely join us for tacos in Istanbul and you will see that in the link which are going to be in the show notes.
BFG (aka Petr): 32:06
I can definitely like you so much for the tacos, for having the picture. Oh, you're welcome, you're welcome. Thank you for making the time. I just want to say I want to vouch for the tacos. They were awesome in Milan. I'm sure they are going to be very cool in Istanbul as well. I hope the same. Thanks, hey, take care.
Links To My Guest
Nerif Network:
on Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/NerifNetwork
Johannes on Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/jonk93
FOLLOW US:
Follow Web3Magic (X) - https://twitter.com/Web3MagicHQ
Follow BFG (X) - https://twitter.com/aka_BFG
Follow BFG (Farcaster) - https://warpcast.com/bfg
Follow Web3Magic channel (Farcaster) - https://warpcast.com/~/channel/web3magic
Subscribe on YouTube - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-youtube
Subscribe on Apple - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-apple
Subscribe on Spotify - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-spotifyAnd very nascent Instagram for Web3Magic: https://www.instagram.com/web3magic/
COLLECT THIS EPISODE
Mint on Zora - http://tinyurl.com/w3m-mint
HOT OFFER:
Want to get help with launching your bespoke podcast to reach new audience for your project or company: check out our MagicPod Guy service: http://tinyurl.com/MagicPodGuy
That's it, friends. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and let me know what you think on Twitter (X) or Farcaster. Till next time … keep it colorful!
