Episode Summary
We talk with David about his journey into crypto and the inspiration behind his current project, Jokerace. He highlights the benefits of building on blockchain rails, such as the ability to create internet-native contests and avoid fees that would be inevitable in fintech world.
David explains that Jokerace is a fintech product that allows anyone to create and participate in contests on the blockchain. He shares the current status of Jokerace and exciting use cases, including grants and creator-focused contests and some big names that will start using Jokerace. David envisions Jokerace as a protocol that enables other services to build on top of it, emphasizing the importance of executability anywhere which I really like.
Takeaways
Building on blockchain rails offers advantages such as creating internet-native contests and avoiding fees.
Jokerace is a fintech product that allows anyone to create and participate in contests on the blockchain.
Jokerace has the potential to be a platform for various use cases, including grants and creator-focused contests.
The executability of contest results triggering actions on other services is a key aspect of Jokerace's ultimate vision.
Video Episode player
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
00:47 Getting into Crypto
02:10 Building on Blockchain Rails
03:31 From Fintech to Joke Race
05:56 Current Status of Joke Race
07:31 Exciting Use Cases and Future Plans
11:21 Joke Race as a Protocol
15:10 Executability and the Ultimate Vision
17:48 Closing Remarks
Transcript
BFG (aka Petr): 0:23
Hello, hello everyone. So I'm back. I met David in Istanbul. I saw his talk, and it was pretty cool. He's working on a project probably on many, but the one he talked about was Jokerace. And since I recently submitted my first submission for a Superfluid contest on Jokerace, I knew David is definitely a person to which you know it's worth talking to. So let's start started with the typical question David, how did you get to crypto?
David Phelps (Jokerace): 1:10
Yeah, losing a bunch of money repeated times, I think is the is the classic story, and certainly mine as well. I got in in 2017. I was had a failed fintech company that I was trying to build for automating invoices, and the issue we're running into is credit card payments that neither the clients nor the independent contractors want to pay credit cards on invoices, and so you know, the professionals felt bad about adding into their client side, even if the clients would pay it, but they also don't want to cover it themselves and you know this is like 2.9% or something, and so when I read about disintermediating these kind of legacy financial institutions, it clicked for me that this was going to be a much nicer way to build, and you know, to some degree that thesis has changed and been updated, and it's, in some ways, the least interesting part of crypto and credit cards are obviously using crypto immensely now, and the idea that you know we're going to get rid of credit card companies, I think today sounds a little naive. At the same time, with what I'm building right now, I do think building a consumer crypto is just can't. It's such a boring thing to say, but it can't be stated enough that to build without incurring app store fees or credit card fees is a massive unlock for builders, especially when margins can be quite tight. You know, roblox has, like, lost money for years. They would be fully profitable if not for paying the app store fees. And you imagine, roblox is basically built like a decentralized, you know, economy internally Well, some of it centralized economy, but they have built an entire internet economy, natively to their game, that loses money because of app store fees and if they had been trying to convert it, they would not. They'd be making money right now, but I think it's still. It's still a huge unlock for the space and still one that probably doesn't really get talked about quite enough. All right, that's?
BFG (aka Petr): 3:09
yeah, that's actually very true what you were saying, the I guess you know the Typical problems, not only the fees, but you know the distribution. Yeah somebody, someone has to do it and then typically, someone wants to get paid for it, which I you know. I like the phrase from I think it was, I heard it from Dan Romero from far caster like dream. Yeah, this trip is so like dream about, or which you know, it definitely is a thing. But let's get back to to your current project. So how do you get the idea from fintech to Joe craze? Yeah, I actually see a big gap. Not totally different, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 3:56
So there's. There's a lot of other you know stories and narratives there and coming up through talent communities and Dallas Space and thinking about how you can create collective communities that can monetize and work together On chain, building on chain reputation, being able to execute decisions on chain all of these. But, but to go to the point, I think what we're building as, in some ways, a fintech Jokerace, is built entirely on the financial rails of blockchains. It's fully on chain, and when you build entirely on the financial rails of blockchain, a lot of things happen, right. One is that you think about internet native contests, like, like, what does it look like for anybody to be able to have a contest? That's not something you could do if you were not building on blockchain rails, and that really can't be said enough, right, that there are all of these hackathon platforms and grant platforms that have been built in web To and they have no way to distribute the money Automatically to winners. It can't happen. You know. They would have to create escrow accounts and put those up and then have legal documents signed for them in order to pay out. No, no one has a SaaS solution for that. That has been built, and when you do a, smart contracts is very easy, right? So, so, even just being able to build contests where people can win money, you know that's a finance product and that is one that can really only be done on on blockchain rails. But then you start thinking well, you can also monetize all these other pieces of it, right? You can let contest creators make money from all the actions that people are performing Within this product as well, and it's worth their while to do this because they can win big rewards as well, right, potentially. So. That's that's where it gets really exciting to think. Building directly on financial rails is effectively taking what traditionally we think of as non-financial products, and we have that division, right? Well, this is not a finance product. This is a consumer app. This is a gaming platform. This is a contest platform, but the beauty, the beauty of crypto is it lets you monetize at every step of the way, and so everything becomes a finance product in some ways, and I think that's true for us as well. I think what we're building is very much a finance product.
BFG (aka Petr): 6:02
Okay, so where? Where is Joe Chris now in the journey? This is like the real beginning, or because I you know. So I was super surprised when I checked all the yeah networks where you can kind of create. The contest was impressive list.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 6:20
Yeah, that's the easy part. Yeah, it takes us about two minutes to add new networks. We, the way that we we've built it, is a no-code smart contract deployment tool. So you're actually, when you creating contests, you're deploying a smart contract to whatever chain you're connected to in your wallet, so all we have to do is let you connect to your chain. That was my co-founders Chants, I think, really beautiful vision that we can be. It's really easy to build for multi-chain world. And then, you know, I always think about whatever I'm building at the very beginning, because all I can think about is all the things that I want to build ahead. So, you know, the project, in different forms, has been around for about a year and a half, but in my mind it's at the very, very beginning. We launched the v3, which is really, I would say, the first fully scalable, usable product, in late summer. So it's only been around about four months or so and you know, since then we've gotten a lot of big-name users, you know, like Aragon and Arbitrum, and I can layer, you know, etc. But I I still think a lot of the really exciting stuff is ahead of us that will be building over the next year.
BFG (aka Petr): 7:33
Yeah, so I've noticed you know there are some some contests are running, so it's not the total beginning, but I assume you know there are some big stuff coming. So is there anything which you know you can say you guys plan to do and it's really cool and people should be looking out for it?
David Phelps (Jokerace): 7:54
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, a polygon just announced they're gonna be running grants through us. I think that's a really great Use case. They'll be doing a campaign Next month and so that's, I think, just you know, great kind of legitimacy to see that they're gonna be putting quite a lot of Matic into this. I think it's like I might be getting it wrong. So like 147,000. So just being able to see that that use case is fully viable, you know, and that we're a good way to to run grants on chain, I think is, you know, that's nice to see. I'm really personally excited by a lot of use cases that would be creator focused. I think that we're increasingly a very good tool for creators to be able to monetize our communities, and so I have a lot of dreams of contests that have not been done, stuff where people could Pick their favorite prompt and that's fed into AI and it creates 10K images based on that prompting, of an NFT collection Projects where people submit different potential creatures and they never invokes them and if you voted on something, you get to collect it, stuff like that Stuff where the voting is not just about determining the winner but distributing points across different systems. I'll hold on to that. I think it's really exciting for me remix contests, when putting out a track and then going to the community to remix it and then the best one gets minted or sold with joint royalties as well. A lot of kind of co-creation, I think, is where a lot of my mind goes and a lot of what I personally excited by. I think there's a lot of businesses that can be built on us and I'm excited to see that happen. I think you can build a hackathon company on us. You can build a decentralized product on us. You can build game shows on us where American Idol has a new contest competing at each other and then thousands of token holders at home are all voting. They're live streaming it every week and they're voting on their favorite one and there's maybe ways for them to win rewards as well. That can be built on us too. Anybody who wants to build a citizen's journalism platform, where you want to put out a bounty to get information about something, you can decentralize that and you can actually start sourcing a lot of information and data from citizens rather than just relying on who a journalist happens to know. All of those sorts of things can be built on top of us and I'm excited to see that happen. In terms of what we're actually building, I think a lot of the focus next year is going to be towards making it easier to deploy contests with permissions so that you can easily allow us people to submit a vote without uploading a full CSV. Really focusing on we already started to do that so that in a T community, you can just drop a token address and it will allow us to vote. Thinking about stuff like that, thinking about stuff like more monetization opportunities at every step of the way for creators to be able to monetize, is going to be a big focus for us as well. Thinking about some of the UX things that can be done just to make it easier to participate without a lot of the wallet complexity is something we're thinking about. We'll see what happens Then. Thinking a lot about social like how can you increase notifications, potential email lists or just being able to reach out to other people playing in a contest. None of that's on the roadmap exactly, but those are all the things we're definitely thinking about long term.
BFG (aka Petr): 11:11
Yeah, I think it's actually more interesting to hear what you guys are thinking about than what's exactly on a roadmap. Roadmap's changed and it's cool. And yeah, I'm glad you touched on communities and NFTs because it's one of my bubbles, where one of the three where people are kind of excited, but I think most of them would never heard of Jokerace till now, so it's a good one. Just wait, yeah, it's there. So I remember from your talk that you basically said because you guys are on chain, you're kind of a platform, but do you think about yourself as a platform or do you guys think about being a particular app for something?
David Phelps (Jokerace): 12:05
I wrote a piece a couple of months ago on what I called proto apps, which I think of as like protocol apps, and so a protocol app is really an app that anyone can then build on top of, and, because it's on chain, you have composability. When people use this app, it can then trigger an action on these other kind of plugins that people can build. So it's basically saying that blockchains are like a permissionless plugin environment for anybody to build plugins on top. Chatgbt, I think, which is not a blockchain product, actually shows you a lot of what can be really cool with all these plugins that are built in. I think that the really good examples with Encryptor are Uniswap and Eigenlayer. Uniswap has hooks that people are able to build that can then perform functions, and so they're going to let their community build these hooks. People can build hooks that will personally monetize, but every time they're doing it, they're reinforcing Uniswap's core value, because now it has all these other services that can be built on top of it that it can deploy to Eigenlayer. I think is kind of similar where, in being able to take ETH and let you restake it to other services, it's effectively a plugin ecosystem for anybody to be able to build, put a protocol on top, plug into Eigenlayer, get the economic security and then increase Eigenlayer's core value, because there's now more products on the front end that it can plug into as well, and so thinking about this real unlock for blockchains is almost like open source APIs, meaning that anyone can build these permissionless plugins on top. I think it's really important for any app builder right now, and I think that's especially true for us. What's really really fun to think about with what we're building is that if this was Web2, not only would you not be able to offer money or financial rewards, but it would just be a platform. It would be a way for people to have contests and they would win the contest and then that would be the end of it. What's cool with Web3 is that anyone can build a top of us so that when someone wins a contest, an action is then executed on another service. So I'll give you an example, which is Hats has already built a module on top of us. Hats does role-based NFTs. So if you had a contest that said, hey, who should be the treasurer of our organization? You can plug that contest into Hats and whoever wins that will get an NFT that makes some treasurer of the organization and gives them full rights to whatever that includes within that organization as well, and so they were able to build that fully permissionlessly on top of us, so that you can now have elections that deploy on other services like Hats. You can imagine, if someone wanted to, they could build an NFT-minting module on top of us, so the winner of our contest is automatically minted as an NFT on any other service, and that means that we're supporting those services because we're effectively being a decision layer that then executes across over to them, and so we're empowering them. But they're also making our value proposition a lot richer too, because now there's more things you can do with us as well, and so really thinking about ourselves as a protocol, I think, is really really important to think any service can basically build on top of us as well, and so a lot of the pitch I've made so far is well, businesses can be built on top of us, and users can come and they can do rewards and they can build reputation and they can find other people to play contests with and they can develop a social graph. But there is this other piece that I think is really really the ultimate unlock and that's the executability. It's the idea that the result of a contest can trigger an action on another service, and it's just not something that ever could have been done in WIP2.
BFG (aka Petr): 15:33
Yeah, that's absolutely true. Yeah, Right, so there is the thing. So I spoke recently several people who were, I would say, close to your situation Closest would be Bruno from Remark so they built, they actually worked on the new ERCs or NFTs, like Nestable and Equipable or whatever, and it kind of seems it's like a chicken and egg problem, right? So in WIP2 it was simple because you were either a platform or you were an app and you kind of had to choose right at the beginning and you just build the business that way. Here it seems it's kind of harder because obviously you can only spend that much time which you have. Your team has the money, of course, also to push forward one of the narratives and the other one is kind of like the second day, and it's, I guess, everybody's choice because you know, in many ways I think everybody would love to be a protocol or a platform on top of which anyone else can build. The issue with that is, you know that the attention of people is finite, the number of project is huge and also, I guess you know the imagination is really wild, but only once you get to know something. So you know, if I know how joker is works and you know I can. I can definitely imagine a lot of possible use cases for myself, but until I get to know you it's difficult.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 17:21
And that's why accessibility is not the focus right now. Right, like you know, it is one of the things where we have a fully successful company. Without it, you know, we can build really effectively, but we also, if we do get a successful company without it, then that makes the value proposition for executability much greater as well. Right, it provides a lot of incentive for people to come and build on top of us too, and it unlocks us to a two great degree as well, and so I do see that as like a kind of ultimate vision. The sooner it happens, the better. You know, the more people that want to do it is permissionless. They don't need our support, they don't need our help. They can do that all their own. But I do see it very much as, like you know, it's the. It's really the ultimate vision for world. So anything you, anything else you would like to, like you know I should I should.
BFG (aka Petr): 18:12
okay, very cool. So basically you know, everybody will go and check.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 18:17
Now you got a daily. You know see what contests are out there.
BFG (aka Petr): 18:20
I have to. I have to dream up some contests for the podcast, so it will make a little sense, yeah well, we have some podcasts using us to determine what guests they have on their show and they'll.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 18:32
let's oh really okay, yeah, rehashes, this has been a couple others too.
BFG (aka Petr): 18:38
Oh yeah, yeah sure, yeah, they're good. The Dow exactly actually neat idea. Okay, any last words because I know you need to run.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 18:49
No last words. No last words. No, these are all first words and are subject to change.
BFG (aka Petr): 18:57
Okay, okay, well, thank you very much, David. Thanks for making the time.
David Phelps (Jokerace): 19:00
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Links To My Guest
Here are the links to David's and Jokerace's X accounts and website. I definitely recommend you take a long look at contests currently running on Jokerace and enjoy!
David's Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/divine_economy
Jokerace's Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/jokerace_xyz
Website: https://jokerace.xyz/
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