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Beam X Sophon
Recorded: June 18, 2025 Duration: 0:56:00Space Recording
Short Summary
Sofon is set to revolutionize the crypto landscape with its upcoming platform launch, focusing on user-friendly applications and strategic partnerships. The recent Token Generation Event marks a significant milestone, while the initiative to fund innovative projects through grants showcases Sofon's commitment to fostering growth and engagement in the Web3 space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. All right, here we go. Hello, how are you doing?
Hey guys, how are you doing? Can you hear me well? Yeah, I can. Good to have you on the Spaces again. It's been a little while.
Yeah, it's been a while. It's good to be here.
Good. Yeah, I think last time we did a Spaces together, I think was way in the beginning of SoFone.
So I think we're probably a year further now.
Yes.
So a lot for us.
It was around the summertime.
Yeah, exactly.
Good to be here.
Nice.
So, yeah, hello, everybody.
It's been a little while since we did our last X basis.
I know we used to do them, you know, on a bi-weekly, if not a monthly basis.
But nowadays, really trying to do those when there's actually, you know,
major stuff to talk about rather than just having random conversations at, you know, at given times.
Today, I invited Sebastian here, co-founder of Sofon.
And for those of you that don't know Sofon, I mean, you'll definitely get to learn a lot
today, but I also pinned the tweet where, you know, you can navigate to the profile,
learn from yourself.
But yeah, since we have Seb here, i'll leave it up to him to uh
first briefly you know introduce yourself for those that don't know you and then we'll uh we'll
dive right into what so fun's been up because you know there's been tge there's been milestones
have been hit there's a lot of things cooking in the kitchen so i think yeah again a lot for us to
talk about throughout the next hour yes sir, sir, definitely. And thanks a lot for having me.
So yeah, for the guys and ladies who don't know me,
my name is Seb, we're Sebastian,
and I'm the co-founder of Sofun,
which we've been building since pretty much,
let's say 18 months now, since the beginning of 2024.
I started it in Beam, previously Merit Circle Hub,
Syncubate, which so far has been an amazing relationship. And previously I was the head
of DeFi at Matterlabs, which is the development or engineering company that built CK Sync. Awesome, short and sweet. So I already mentioned now you're gonna
dive in my opinion right into some of the recent milestones but I think for those that don't know,
SoFan right, I think nowadays there's so many different blockchains, so many different ecosystems
I think it can become you know difficult for people to understand why do we need another one,
why should we embrace this?
Why should we use this?
So kind of to put it into your own words,
if you navigate through your vision,
how does SoFone in your eyes build invisible crypto
that actually reaches a million people?
Everyone is talking about user acquisition,
getting users in here.
How is SoFone planning to do that?
And why is there a need for SoFone today?
Yeah.
So I'll give you sort of the mission that we have, if you want,
which is just a couple of sentences.
And then we can kind of double-click on that
and dive a bit more deeply on how it makes sense
and make it more of a conversation.
So the mission for us is we want SoFone to be a platform and why it makes sense and make it more of a conversation.
So the mission for us is we want SoFone to be a platform that's dedicated to onboarding the next generation
of crypto users, right?
Like you were just alluding to.
And we see this as doing it
through everyday consumer products.
And we want to specifically focus on things
that monetize and reward the data that we
all naturally produced.
And so our mission is to take blockchain beyond just speculation, which it's one of the main
use cases, I guess, at the moment.
And we want to power real applications that people can love, use daily without the friction
of the traditional crypto experience, which up until now I think has been kind of a blocker
for onboarding the next generation of people.
So let's kind of double click on this
and feel free to interrupt me anytime,
but I'm going to kind of unpack all of this
over the next five to 10 minutes.
If you think about where crypto is today
compared to where it was, let's say when COVID COVID started, which was the resurgence of things, a huge amount of things have happened, right?
A lot of infrastructure companies have spent a lot of money, time, and engineering power to build better infrastructure for us to be able to build things on.
And when we decided to build SoFone, we were kind of at that stage where we said,
okay, the infra is there.
There's tech stacks that are open source
and they have all sorts of cool features
that mean now we can build stuff
that's very client-facing, let's say.
And the way that I would compare it
is building the actual blockchain stack you build with.
It's like picking AWS, Google Cloud or Azure.
You know, nobody really cares what you're building on top of. Right.
So when you're when you're logging on to your Netflix account, nobody says, hey, I'm going to go log on to my AWS so that I can use Netflix, right?
Like, that would be a terrible user experience.
You just want to go on Netflix and you want it to work and stream as fast as possible
wherever you are in the world and to have a great product and user experience.
It's the same thing for, I think, building the next generation of consumer and crypto
applications.
So we use very complicated zero knowledge cryptography
tech underneath, but you'll never really
hear us talk about it.
So we got to that stage when we built SoFone last year
where we're saying, OK, most of the people who
are using crypto today, they're kind of cryptonave users.
They're mostly early adopters of tech.
And I really believed we had gotten They're kind of cryptomitive users. They're mostly early adopters of tech.
And I really believed we had gotten to the limit
of how many of those people had come on chain.
And so we needed to do something different
to get the next stage of people coming on chain, right?
People who are not so tech curious, right?
And the observation I made is everybody
between the ages of 12, 13 years old, 50, most people in that age gap in the modern world and in developed countries, they're using technology on a day to day basis.
Right. And they're using new types of technology, but somehow they're not adopting crypto into their lives. So clearly we know that the young millennial or Gen Z,
they are very adept to using tech, right?
They're digitally native, let's say,
but they're not necessarily using crypto.
So that means there's a problem in the way
we're presenting crypto to people
or what crypto is useful for people, right?
It's not the other way around.
So then that means, okay, you need to start building stuff that looks and feels much more
intuitive to the average person.
And that's about building great products, great UX, great UI, great front ends, great
design.
And then you have to find what I call PVE use cases.
So player versus environment instead of PVP use cases,
which are highly speculative and like,
you need to lose for me to win.
And the business model of Sofon has evolved over time
since we started last year.
And now we're really focused on helping people monetize the data that they
produce.
So, we use a piece of infrastructure called ZKTLS, which essentially allows you to verifiably
prove the data that you're producing on a blockchain in a very secure and private way.
So let's kind of take a minute to think about what this means.
Couple of things to talk about here.
Data is the soft commodity of the 21st century.
The hard commodity, you could arguably call it as chips, right?
Or computing power.
Data is something that everybody in the world who has a smartphone or computer is producing.
It doesn't matter whether you're listening to Taylor Swift, playing chess.com, playing games,
whatever. Everybody's producing data every day. And all of the data that you produce is unique to yourself. It's basically
your data passport. And all of that is getting sold or monetized by big tech. And you as
a user is not getting anything from it, right? And all of that data is being aggregated and
sold for advertising services, things like this. And the other thing is that all of the data is very messy.
So cookies in a Web2 space,
they're what are collecting data about you
on a particular webpage, for instance.
But there's no real system
that's taking everything about you.
So if I wanted to know Marco or Freak or Sebastian,
everything about this one person,
there's no kind of data passport that you can have.
With ZKTLS, this works because you can create these data passports,
you can prove them on a blockchain, and you can do so in a very private manner,
which before wasn't possible.
So all of a sudden, you're unlocking a way for everybody to continue to do the things
that they do on a day-to-day basis anyways, right?
They just continue with their existing consumer habits.
But all of the value from a data perspective that they're producing,
they can now have a passport that only belongs to them, that's private to them,
and they can prove it verifiably on a blockchain.
So that's very attractive.
Then if you think about how are blockchains built,
blockchains are incredibly powerful open ledger systems, right?
We all know this.
And it's very obvious that now that we have an administration in the US
that's very positive about it,
there's going to be a huge boom in people wanting to build on these open systems.
But there's one thing that blockchains don't do well.
They are closed systems.
So they don't communicate with the outside world well, right?
Ethereum, Sofon, these are closed systems.
How do you get information from the real world and, you know, in a verifiable and programmatic way, say that this information is true on a blockchain?
In comes oracles, right?
Something like Chainlink.
Think about these oracle services.
Chainlink is taking the price of Bitcoin or what the weather is, for instance, and helping prove it on chain.
And that's how you link the real world with the blockchain world.
Now, with everything that I told you about Sofon and building up these data profiles for people using the CKTMS technology,
we can actually allow everyone around the world to verifiably prove on chain the data that they're doing.
So we've created an oracle of social data.
This is a completely new concept in the space of blockchain.
It's a completely new concept in the space of Web3. And I think it's going to completely revolutionize the way people monetize their data from a personal perspective
and then using crypto to do this.
And crypto is great to do this,
not because you can have speculative assets
or that sort of thing.
You can build composably on top of all of this data.
So the possibilities here are endless.
And the most important thing here is that it's done in a way that's open and
secure, right?
Before, if Facebook all of a sudden said, Hey, we're mining all of your data.
We're keeping it for ourselves.
We're this company.
And then we're going to sell it and maybe we'll give you a kickback.
You know, there are laws that you wouldn't be able to do this.
But when you're using zero knowledge proofs like we are, and you're proving them verifiably on chain in a private way,
you're not breaking any laws, and you're actually giving everything back to the person. So we're
building the social oracle on so phone. We're building a beta hub around this that's going to
aggregate hundreds of thousands of extremely high quality data profiles
and then we're building with different kinds of partners who are going to be able to leverage this
data whether it's ticketing whether it's sports whether it's social and all of the money that
people have been spending on these things generally can be rerouted back to the end user in the form
of rewards loyalty you know fun coupons all of a sudden it's endless.
And I think that when you've created a new paradigm like this, we've
essentially made a green field for exploration, for curiosity.
And I think in the next six to 12 to 18 months on so far, are going to
give, give, uh, give way to incredible new applications that we could not have dreamed of before.
Love it. There's a lot to unpack here. And I think it sets the perfect floor for a whole bunch of
follow-up questions I have in mind. But maybe for us to deep dive a little bit into what you've
just been talking about, and taking this let's
say real world data it owns you so fun if we're looking at the landscape today you already mentioned
for example ticketing i know that open is building on so fun for example but can you give some
practical examples of and maybe that could be open but uh what that looks like for a user perspective
but maybe also from a project perspective,
like why would they want this in a nutshell? And how are they already doing this today on
SoFan?
So there's plenty of reasons. If you wanted to sell tickets, for instance, from a primary
market perspective, you would be able to prove exactly, you know, let's say there's a Taylor
Swift concert somewhere, right? You only want to be selling to Taylor Swift fans because if there's a guy who's
bought in everything and reselling at a higher price who's who's buying the
tickets at a higher price right it's people who really want to go to a Taylor
Swift concert but didn't get to go people who are fans of things spend a
lot more money right these they when there's an emotional
attachment to a brand to an artist sports maybe the the net spend per user is very high because
they care a lot right this is something that's very synergistic in our in our generation our
parents didn't do this as much.
Like maybe our parents would not have spent, you know,
a thousand bucks going to a concert.
But today this is very common for a young person
to actually go out of their way
and maybe even borrow money sometimes, let's say,
because they want to have it experienced, right?
We know that young people want experiences.
So if you could basically prove
to the listening history on Spotify that someone is indeed a fan or that someone
has been to concerts before or they've traveled to see concerts before, you could do this
through their ticket master history, let's say. You can prove all sorts of things and
you make the fan experience better right only fans
get to go the company selling the tickets is selling directly to the fans that they want
so the the net spend per fan can be higher those companies can they can do collaborations so let's
say it's a champions league final and it's real madrid playing against against Feyenoord and Heineken is sponsoring.
Heineken can go directly to the person that they want from the Real Madrid fan base.
They know the fans are getting the tickets.
They can market directly from them.
You don't want to, you know, there's a huge amount of marketing spend that's misallocated
to people who are not actually the target.
to people who are not actually the target.
So there's a very, very strong enterprise play here
where the bang for the buck
that folks are getting is much higher.
And at the end of the day, if companies,
whether it's products companies, brands, et cetera,
if they're spending money to either grow their base or to acquire new fans or
new consumers, let's say, they've set aside a marketing budget for this, growth budget
for this.
Ideally, it goes directly to the people that they're trying to target, right?
Rather than in the pockets of another advertising company or a middleman.
And that's actually very powerful.
And I think that's going to be a key growth key
that all of a sudden is going to unlock a completely new way
for people to interact with brands, with companies and artists, right?
Because the other thing is we know today,
because we're living in a very developed and digital world,
that actually brands now, from a growth perspective, because we're living in a very developed and digital world.
That actually brands now from a growth perspective, their growth, or for most artists or sports teams
or things like this,
they're not necessarily onboarding more people
because they've kind of peaked in there.
Now what they focus a lot more on
is getting a much deeper relationship
with the core people that they have right so higher spend
more revenue distribution strategies that sort of thing right and because once you get that
relationship with a consumer you have that relationship with them for life right the
deeper the relationship the more that you know you own consumer, let's say for like a decade. And that's far more valuable for the long-term success and survival of a brand, an artist, or a company than just spraying everything in one go over there, everywhere, trying to get lots of people to maybe be interested once and not be repeat customers.
But I think that everything that I've described to you now, the way that we approach these folks is going to completely change the way that people do this.
Yeah, I love it.
This is just one practical example, but obviously there's a lot of areas when this can be applied
to you.
And I think to piggyback a little bit onto it, it's not just people hoarding and reselling
tickets as an issue, but at the same time, I know when I first spoke to Open a few years piggyback a little bit onto it. It's not just people hoarding and reselling tickets that's an
issue, but at the same time, I know when I first spoke to Open a few years ago, another example
they gave is there's a lot of scamming going on when it comes to reselling tickets, whereas
if those are two fair viable on-chain, first of all, you'll have less reselling because you're
actually selling directly to your fans. But when there is reselling, you actually know that you're buying a valid ticket
rather than coming to the doors, finding out that someone sold it to five others.
So, yeah, a lot of really good examples to be made here.
So, I want to dive into a few aspects.
I think the first one might be so from home.
But before we go there, I typically visit the end of kind of the spaces but
I think what I would love to hear from you Sab is looking at so fun I'm looking
at let's say the past maybe six months but also the upcoming six months what
will you say have been the most exciting milestones you know that you've been
working towards or are working towards?
Because there's a lot of events have been there.
And I think a lot of people, you know, within Web3, they'll see, hey, you know, TGE happened.
It's kind of a big milestone.
But reality is that's just, you know, where the show starts.
And it's just, you know, one more utility within your ecosystem.
But obviously, there's way more cooking.
So I'd love to hear from you.
Yeah, what are the highlights to you? them but obviously there's way more cooking so i'd love to hear from you yeah what's what's uh what
are the highlights to you so you want to talk about the last what was most exciting the last
six months or what yeah maybe the last six months and then then also indeed looking forward into the
next six months like what drives you what are the most exciting things to you that maybe you know
some expected things that you didn't anticipate happening before,
or what have just been things that have been on your roadmap for quite a while,
where we're getting close.
So there's, well, leading up to the TGE, that was a big focus for us this year.
I mean, you guys have obviously launched a token,
so you know how much time it it consumes sort of preparation everything uh
i think that we grew our marketing team a lot this year and we got much better at explaining
to people what sofon is telling our story growing our community and it's actually that's been one
of the most exciting things for me because and you'll know this too as a founder, you know, SoFone started last year.
It was a deck, right? It was a PDF. It was nothing.
And all of a sudden you go 12 to 18 months later and we have this community of people who are making drawings of people from the team.
We have this community of people who are making drawings of people from the team.
They're making music.
They're making clothes about SoFone.
They're writing tweets, explaining different types of things on SoFone.
They're interacting with projects on SoFone.
I mean, it's completely incredible to see.
For me, that's been one of the most exciting things from a founder perspective,
sort of looking back at the last six months.
Now looking forward, the most exciting thing for me is to focus the company on shipping
and bringing to market what I described to you earlier, which is our social oracle and
our data hub.
Sort of the strategy that we have here
is to have a few core partners that we can be super focused
on and really bring to market and highlight
how they're using our proprietary and so far native
tools from the data hub, from the social Oracle.
And I really want to show the market,
not just the crypto market,
but the wider market in general,
that crypto can be used
for very consumer-friendly applications
and that it can just, if executed well,
give value to people on an everyday basis, right?
And I think that that's probably the thing
I'm most excited about.
If we can get what I would call,
I don't like using the word retailer
like normal people, right?
But for the sake of this explanation,
if we can get people who are not into crypto,
interested in crypto for the first time,
not just because they're buying a shit coin,
but because they can actually start to monetize stuff that they're doing on a
day-to-day basis. And I think that's actually very exciting, bringing net new people on chain
and building cool products for them. That's very exciting. And maybe the last thing that I'm
excited about is that once all of this comes to market, and once we've thrown the market,
comes to market and once we've shown the market oh here's a couple examples that we've worked
super deeply with of what you could do on so phone like i said earlier we've created this green field
right and i think a lot of people are going to get very excited about it i think a lot of developers
are going to get very excited about it or brands and companies and they're going to want to
experiment and that for me is what i'm looking forward to the most is people coming to SoFone
coming with wacky ideas you know stuff that I could never think of and all of a sudden
experimenting and of course a lot of these experiments won't necessarily work out
but I know that some of those experiments will work out. And, you know, in the perfect world, from a founder perspective,
they give birth to completely new business models or projects
or applications that nobody would have thought of before
that are kind of pioneering this new wave of crypto users
coming to blockchains and using them for a completely novel reason
and everything's
happening and so on. I think we're heading in that direction. That's what motivates me the most right
now. Right on. Right on. Yeah, I think what's exciting to me here as well is, and I want to
highlight that, is if we're looking at, you know, past couple of years within crypto, and I think,
you know, gaming is always a very obvious one to people where they're like, you know, gamers understand spiritual goods,
they understand virtual value. So the blockchain aspect makes a lot of sense. But I think beyond
gaming, beyond DeFi, if we're brutally honest, you know, I mean, RWA is part of, well, I'll just
call it DeFi for now. But if we're brutally honest, there hasn't been a lot of different
ways of innovation throughout the past couple of years, right? After DeFi for now, but if we're brutally honest, there hasn't been a lot of different ways
of innovation throughout the past couple of years, right?
After DeFi.
Exactly.
I think consumer goods, you know, there are so many ways to indeed start targeting, you
know, let's call them the normal people that aren't being targeted today.
And you already mentioned, right?
There's a lot of people right now that have a phone, they spend a lot of time
this easily, but they're not, you know, using crypto. And I think partially that it comes from
the standpoint that, you know, when people think crypto, they think Bitcoin, they automatically
think about speculation. When you think about DeFi, that too is, you know, financial aspect,
and with gaming too, very often it's about play to earn, where it started, right, and the earning aspects.
So I think here when you think, you know, entertainment chain, when you think consumer goods,
you're going back to like daily habits, things people are already doing, doing already online,
and in this case just enhancing that experience in a way that's not about speculation but rather
like I said about enhancements. Something that I want to dive into a little bit as well, right,
is you mentioned people basically are building those digital profiles.
You have really digital data.
It's based on your activity, be it, you know, you've visited different
conferences, be it you've been to a concert,
be it you've played this game.
Do you see this Oracle and all this data,
do you see that play a role with SophonHome at the heart?
Or how should we be looking at the whole profile aspect
of things and achievements and whatnot?
SophonHome is in its infancy.
It's a beautiful product that our team built
where I wanted to be able to send
a phone to a person who had never used crypto before
and for them to be able to onboard themselves on their own.
So that was kind of the first worst start for the team.
That somebody can just go to our website,
create an account in an account is keyword, right?
Because I don't like this concept of wallets.
That doesn't work with non-crypto people.
But the concept of an account does, right?
We need to do things the way people are used to.
And everybody knows how to create an account.
So they had to be able to go to Sofon,
log in with their pass key, their Google or whatever.
Of course, there's a private key
and there's something being created in the background,
but the end user doesn't necessarily need to see that.
And then I wanted them to have a place to log into
with this account, which was Sofon Home.
And Sofon Home is a modular,
you can think about it sort of as a modular operating system.
It's going to evolve over time.
Right now, it's just been launched.
There's some teething.
It's sort of, you know, we're monitoring it very closely.
We're doing a lot of, a lot of lead research
to understand what people like, what they don't like.
And over time, that's going to evolve into something which I even cannot predict what
it looks like, right?
It can go in all sorts of different directions.
Right now, it's a discovery place.
You can think of it as a bit of an app store for people to come and discover what's on
the cell phone and interact with things on their profile.
But farther down the line, this is where they'll,
ideally it's someplace that people go to every single day
to consult their wallet,
to consult the rewards that they have,
to share the data that they have,
to see what their friends are doing.
And maybe, who knows what people can start to build
on cell phone and have integrated into SoPhone Home.
Like, the sky's the limit here.
Very, very nice.
I'm just thinking, you know, while you're talking,
I'm thinking about a lot of aspects.
I'm trying to figure out how to best structure it.
But when we're thinking about, you know, you're talking about,
I would love to work with, you know, big established brands that might want to dip their toes into the web3 side.
If we take that back to, like, the social aspect, the data aspect, let's say a brand like that says, you know what, I'm keen to do something with so fun.
It could be maybe for a concert.
It could be maybe a brand selling, it could be maybe a brand selling merchandise or whatsoever.
You can essentially target them right to the right user audience, but at the same time you also
mentioned all this data is private. So from a brand perspective that might want to look to target
those users, what would that journey look like? Would it be that they maybe
launched their application on
Sovon Home for people to,
you know, in their habits,
go check it out, learn from it,
and maybe opt in to share their data?
Or would it be, you know,
options directly targeting that
in a more private way?
How should we be looking at that approach?
It's always going to be
a big focus on privacy. I think that going forward, that's always it's it's always going to be a big focus on privacy
i think that going forward that's the most important thing um i mean people need people are
very it's a little bit like children um parents always act around children like oh you gotta
speak to them goo goo gaga because they don't know what's going on.
You have to kind of coddle them.
But actually, children are much smarter and more observant
and switched on than you think.
I think it's the same thing for digitally native users today.
So a lot of people from a product perspective saying,
oh, hey, yeah, these guys, we need to handhold them
for everything because they won't get it.
That's not true.
I think people, there's a certain user flow that people are used to because they recognize it but you can actually take people quite far in their discovery as long
as they're interested people who are digitally native are also very much
aware and conscious about the data that they produce and how it's being shared other places.
And they kind of accept this. There's this unwritten social contract that, OK, I know my data is getting farmed to the max,
but I can listen to Spotify for free or do this and that for free. So fine.
But if all of a sudden you tell people, hey, just keep doing what you're doing,
but you're going to be getting rewards for this,
if you explain to people very directly that, hey,
this uses zero-knowledge proof, this uses very complex
cryptography, and nobody's actually seeing.
We're not actually sharing your data.
We're sharing just a proof of what the data is
without sharing the rest of your data we're sharing just a proof of what the data is without sharing the rest of your
data uh i think people will get very excited about this and i've been in the zk space now
for several years so it seems very obvious to me the power that zk has um it's not the biggest
buzzword in uh in mass markets now obviously ai is a big buzzword in, uh, in mass markets now,
obviously AI is a big buzzword, but I think that, you know,
I've seen Google, uh,
is adopting ZK into their identity and Google wallet products.
Um, some other very large companies,
banks are doing the same thing as well. And over time,
we're also going to have this wider
market education i think about what zero knowledge proofs allow you to to have as a person right and as that happens someone is going to be positioned spectacularly well because people will understand
what these proofs mean that they're just sharing a copy of just a small piece of
data that you want to be sharing, but not the whole picture. So you can serve the privacy,
which is important for people. And I think that that's probably a very nice position that we have.
Very nice. Another aspect that I wanted to dive into, right, thinking out loud, is if
we're looking at Web3 landscape today, and if we're realistic, that's probably where
we have to start looking when it comes to users, depending obviously on which projects
you're working with and which projects might want to build on so far. But when we're looking
at the Web3 landscape and we're looking at different
ecosystems, a lot of it, you know, reality is most ecosystems, they are using token incentives to
get initial traction. And I think, you know, Sofon also obviously didn't shy away from that
with the staking, with the farming, with some locking mechanisms. I think the real challenge
though kicks in when, you know, avoiding basically to become dependent on that model. So I'm
wondering if you're looking at because you mentioned incentives
a little bit, right? And I think here you probably mean
incentives other than just straight up token incentives,
but we'll dive more into that.
100% the incentives will not come from us.
Exactly. So when we're looking at becoming dependent on an incentivization model,
what's your thesis for, and maybe let's look at chain activity first
and then indeed look at user activity, maybe exploring the apps,
but what's your thesis on converting early liquidity-driven users
into becoming actual participants who stay for the projects,
who stay for the culture, right? How do you foster that and how do you manage that? What's your view on that?
From an incentive design you're asking? Yeah, I'm thinking more from an ecosystem
design. Like when you think about incentives, you mentioned right incentives are not just going to come from us I'm just thinking about
sustainability I'm thinking about not just user activation but also retention
intriguing them to keep coming back to so fun to keep trying out more you know
applications in a organic matter because they're excited because they
like the culture that's built because they like the culture that's built, because they like the activity that's shown there, rather than coming for the incentives
and leaving as soon as those might pass or might change. Exactly. So that brings me to the point of
the separation from this PVP environment to a more PVE environment. So the way we're doing incentives right now in crypto
is we're taking part of the tokens that we have
and we're essentially selling part of the company
to subsidized growth, right?
Now, what I mean by other people providing incentives,
those will be external companies or brands
from the Web2 world who be using so fun will be using the data hub to access a social oracle to market to their users so those will
be repeat people right if come but I don't know let's say arbitrarily if if if Coca-Cola wants
to run campaigns on Sofon,
I mean, those are things that can happen
on a weekly or a monthly basis, right?
And nobody needs to lose in order for that to work.
You need to be building business models where,
you know, in a way it's kind of funny
because in the Web2 world,
there's so many Harvard Business School studies written about how to build businesses, what works, what doesn't work.
And somehow in Web 3.0, we're sort of saying, oh, yeah, but we don't want to know any about this, right?
But in reality, there's a lot we can take, a lot of learnings from how to build two-sided markets in the web2 space
and then just fork that in web3 too.
So as long as you're building business models
that can sustain themselves
and you're solving for a two-sided market,
I think the customers are repeat.
So what I'm saying in terms of other people
providing the incentives is if we're working
with external brands who want to
have access to this high quality data that we'll have instead of them giving money to meta or you
know buying aggregated data from visa or mastercard they'll want to actually interact directly with
the user going through the social record and we can just pass over those
those marketing budgets that they would have spent otherwise directly to the user.
So they're happy because they've directly interacted with their with their customer,
which is the most valuable thing that a brand or a company can do.
The user is happy because the brand and the company that they love is actually driving rewards towards them
to ameliorate the experience that they're having
and their loyalty or their interests.
And SoFan is in the middle having just facilitated this
and probably behave as some sort of marketplace
taking a tiny fee, right?
You can think of this in the web2 space,
it was very obvious that building high quality marketplaces that solved to to
double market situations was very profitable.
Think of Uber. They don't own cars. They don't own the users.
They just have the marketplace.
They take a tiny fee off of every deal that's done and look at where they are
today. The same thing can be done from a data perspective.
And the reason why you need crypto to do this
is that you need to use zero knowledge proofs
and ZKTLS to satisfy this sort of one-stop shop data passport
that people will have where you're not revealing
all of their information.
Nobody would otherwise sign up to this center web to space. It's far too intrusive,
but the tech we use solves all of those intrusions
and that's what makes it so attractive.
Otherwise, I mean, if Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp
would have been able to do this,
they would have done it already, right?
It's hugely attractive.
Yeah.
Like in a way, you know, when you briefly describe it, right,
users getting a piece of the pie essentially,
the advertising budget that otherwise have gone to Google
or Amena goes to the users in a very small way.
It's also actually direct paid user testing them
because you're directly targeting your user audience.
People might not have bought your product yet
or might have not tried it.
Here you're pretty much incentivizing them to do that
and hopefully convert them to become loyal customers.
Which is an interesting way to look at it,
given that there's whole businesses and marketplaces
and website around just that business model on its own,
where here that's model on its own, where
here that's obviously not the business, but indirectly it kind of becomes that as well
on top of the experience that's already there.
Pretty interesting.
So a little bit of a sidetrack, and I know that AI is a buzzword to a lot of people,
but I know that Sophondocs also writes about trustless AI
agents operating on SoFundReels, directly quoting it. Can you share some real-world use cases where
you see AI agents or maybe AI in general complementing entertainment or the gaming
verticals or SoFund, or maybe even, you
know, different aspects that we might not, you know, think of one to three.
I mean, AI is, it's like electricity for the 21st century, right?
It's not just that you can use it for querying a database or asking a couple of questions like people would do
in chat GPT, it's going to change the way, or it is changing the way we do everything.
And we're like six to 12 months away from starting to have pretty sophisticated agentic
systems where basically you'll have various agents responsible
for doing different things and you'll be able to ask those agents to do things for you right
and then those agents can trade with one another exchange information with one another based always
on a set of rules again that's why crypto or blockchains rather are so attractive for solving these problems.
So it's very obvious that Soapfun will have a highly AI driven strategy baked into the
data hub and the social record.
I think from an agentic perspective, it's going to be super interesting.
But right now, my focus is on shipping those things and then the AI components will naturally make themselves in over time.
I'm not going to come up with some more buzzwords or things like this without them being ready.
Now, what our docs refers to as the grants that we would do for agentic systems, etc.
We want people to come and look at the products that we're building, at the technology that we would do for agentic systems, et cetera. We want people to come and look at the products that we're building,
at the technology that we're building, and say,
hey, I have an idea to use an agentic system for X, Y, Z.
And when they come up with good business plans or good ideas,
even the craziest stuff, that's when we'll sort of say,
hey, let's work on you guys with this.
Here's some money.
We're happy to fund you.
And let's make something happen.
I think that from when you're building a highly innovative and unique technology like we are
in platform, you want people to come and experiment with the craziest ideas, right?
And you want to fund that
because that's where the sort of one-step innovations come from.
So we're building all this stuff around the data,
and we know that AI is going to have a critical part to play in this.
So the more people come in one experiment,
the more we are happy to back them
and dive into these experiments together.
Right on. Cool.
When we think about the existence today as well,
you mentioned right now,
main focus is on just working with a few core partners,
really nailing things out, mapping out the ecosystem,
figuring out technology improvements and whatnot. If we're looking at it
from the user perspective here as well, are you right now doing
like, um, small user group testing for those different
projects? Is everything building in the open for those projects?
What does that look like for, you know, in the case someone is
listening and thinks I want to participate? Yeah, yeah, the product team is listening and thinks I wanna participate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The product team is always doing sort of like user interviews
and continuously iterating to try and better understand
the users and come up with better versions of our products.
Some parts of us are building in the open,
but at the moment, a lot of it
is done in house because we have the expertise, right? We have a team of very skilled engineers
who are very, very familiar with the code base that we use, with the protocol that we
use. So we want to be able to build all of this out and then build things like SDKs, like the Sofone account,
and various other things that then third parties can come
and build on top of or explore.
Makes sense.
Makes sense.
Cool.
And by the way, while we're at it,
I see a whole bunch of comments to the spaces.
More comments than questions,
but I want to point out if you have any questions while I'm here while you all
step here, please feel free to send a tweet in the comments and I'll see if I can get to your questions.
But yeah, going over my doc,
I've covered a lot of different topics that I wanted to talk about today,
but I want to ask you, Seb, is there any topic in your mind that you feel like, hey, this is something that we haven't talked about yet, I would love to, you know, kind of talk about, highlight, etc.
Well, I think we went over everything, actually, which is great. Maybe, why don't you give us the latest on Beam?
which is great.
Maybe, why don't you give us the latest on Beam?
Sure, sure.
Yeah, I can imagine people might be wondering here too, right?
What is Beam going to do on SoFan?
I mean, you already mentioned way in the beginning,
obviously incubation side of things,
but I think for us too, you know, with Beam,
we've TDR, build a tech stack that can live in different homes.
And I think for Beam as well, from day one,
we already envisioned that certain elements of our tech stack
would live perfectly on Sophomix as well.
And I think in our philosophy,
when it comes to abstracting things away
and using blockchain to enhance an experience
rather than taking them out of their comfort zone into
a very heavy UI, UX, web-free experience. I think when it comes to gaming, when it comes to AI,
when it comes to RWA, I think our tech stack is here to support as well. So I think some of our
next steps is obviously to get Sphere Marketplace, working on Sofon, making sure that
you know people can transact their NFTs, be it for ticketing, be it for gaming, be it for you know
whatever they might want to use it for. So I'm personally very excited about that because it just
allows us to you know further tap into your community as well but also you know get the
BIM community to hopefully become a part of the daily
habits that you've been talking about around so from home so i think that that for us is obviously
uh i think on when it comes to so from very exciting and other than that i mean for us
being general i mean i think a lot of eyes are on the uh alba dubby venture fund side of things
which uh you know is progressing so as soon as there's
it already is yeah I think when there's like substantial progress to share when there's
milestones hits then we'll definitely start sharing publicly but I think you know we've
we've explained this before but there's a lot of elements when it comes to setting this up be it
paperwork be the legal side be the practical side on how are
things going to operate. But I think you know what it
enables us and I can't stress that enough, I did it during the
beam, you know, community event as well as it's opening new
doors that you know, similar to how you're looking to open new
doors for consumer.
Yeah, applications. I think here, you know, opens new doors for consumer applications. I think here, it opens new doors for us to be talking to parties
in the Middle East, in Asia that we nowadays don't have connections with yet. And so for us,
having been largely, I would say, involved in the Western world, I'm very excited about that
opportunity because it's just a whole new stepping stone and a leak to be playing in.
So, yeah, definitely exciting things while we continue to navigate the day-to-day waters.
But, yeah, definitely keen to share more on that when we're getting closer.
That's super exciting.
So, a fun question I thought to ask you before we slowly start you know rounding things up is we already talked about six months before six months you know ahead when it comes to milestones but
let's you know think bigger and say if we're two years from now or maybe five years from now
if you're wildly successful what are some of the things you would love to be able to say when it comes to Sofon,
when maybe at that time we have space again and we're talking about, you know,
do you remember all those years ago?
Yeah, I love that you asked that question because it's something that I've thought a lot about
and asked myself that question too and also that I've told my team several times,
like looking into the medium to long-term future,
I really hope that crypto will have graduated
from sort of this state that we're in now,
which sounds a bit like we're flying in circles
and looking for more things to do.
And that will have actually found product
market fit for much more things in the consumer space, in the gaming space, in the entertainment
space.
And if we've achieved this and the market looks back and says, hey, the team at Sofon
was either the team or one of the teams that were very intent on the way they did things,
where they really cared about the users, the user experience, et cetera. They really did
things their own way. And that unlocked everything. I would be very, very proud.
You know, my goal is, it's not for myself, but it's more for the team, more for the company and our community.
If we can go back and say, hey, those guys are really big contributors and in a way pioneers to the way things work now in crypto,
because they approached it in a completely different way and it worked, then I think we can be very proud of ourselves.
I love it.
I think I'll shake your hand and I'll align myself here
when it comes to Beam.
I love that.
It's always nice to have goals.
And I think sometimes people ask me too,
like, hey, Marco, if you look at Beam,
do you realize how much this has evolved throughout the past couple of years?
And I think conversations that we might be having today, they're going to look already way different when it comes to a year from now.
I mean, with Beam coming from Merit Circle, coming from Gaming Guild, there have been so many pivots and different directions along the way.
There have been so many pivots and different directions along the way.
Obviously, we stayed close to our heart when it comes to gaming,
but that turned Beam into so much bigger than we dared to even think about a few years ago.
I think it was so funny already thinking quite big.
I think the vision, the direction is very clear,
so I don't think we'll necessarily have way different you know conversations
when it comes to the you know target market you might have or the way that you want to tackle
blockchain experience but I think our conversations will be way different when it comes to hey which
parties are actually participating in this uh you know in this ecosystem at this point um so yeah
excited to to keep my eye on it I think you have got a really nice pool of projects
that are building on on so from right now.
So I think you'll surely have your hands full
for the foreseeable future.
But yeah, obviously eager to see that continue to expand.
Awesome, yeah, that's what we're hoping for.
Thanks so much for your time, Marco.
Yeah, no worries.
For anyone that's listening today and that's curious on, you know,
maybe they're a builder, maybe they're a user.
What's the best way for them to get involved on SoFan in your eyes?
Either DMing me or DMing someone from the team, I would say.
We're always open, always listening, always there to work with
folks. That's the quickest way. Cool. All right. There you have it. Lovely. So yeah, I think that
was largely our conversation for today. If you've been listening throughout this hour and you're
intrigued, then please, you know, give the Sof on so phone accounts give step a follow here on x
you'll be able to follow all the updates you'll be for you know able to hear more conversations
like this um so i wanna thank you so much for your time today as well like i said we don't do those
spaces uh on a you know usual bi-weekly case anymore but rather when we have actually you
know interesting conversations to talk about.
And I personally really enjoyed the conversation we had today.
Me too.
Me too.
Thanks so much for your time.
And thanks to everybody who joined in and listened.
Perfect.
All right.
Well, then all the rest for me to say.
Have a nice day, everyone.
If you have questions, feel free to comment once again.
We'll see to get to them. And I hope to see you at the next one. Thanks guys. Bye. Thank you.
