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Ethos Network: Let’s talk about trust
Recorded: March 31, 2025 Duration: 0:41:27Space Recording
Short Summary
The Ethos Protocol Network is introduced as a project focused on enhancing credibility and accountability in the crypto space. Innovations include the use of vouching with ETH to establish credibility and the integration of reputation scores for DeFi applications. Trends towards decentralized governance are evident with community voting on changes. Discussions on token launches highlight considerations for long-term sustainability and growth.
Full Transcription
Okay, so we have another live stream. It's Monday. It's Monday just after New York Open, and bizarrely the markets are actually looking pretty good for the first time since probably last week Monday.
not the case.
Just kind of making light banter because we are about
to kind of get people coming in.
So today's show is a really interesting one.
We are chatting to the CEO and one of the co-founders
of Ethos Protocol Network.
What do you guys, you can correct me
on what the right terminology is, but essentially
ethos is
I believe, and I think at Blockmates
we believe is something that's very much
needed, is giving credibility to people
in the space and acknowledging
those people who are trying to do good
and rewarding them in
different ways, and we'll find out
what that looks like. Sarah Pintaxed,
welcome, sir. Long overdue. Thanks for them in different ways and we'll find out what that looks like. Sarah Pintaxed, welcome sir,
long overdue. Thanks for joining. Yeah, no, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. It's been super excited to chat today. Yeah, man. So I think just in terms of getting everyone in,
I have shared the link for our main account in the private chat here if you want to just retweet
that.
And, yeah, I think for me, just to kick it off,
give us a little bit of background around kind of like how the heck did you land up doing what you're doing right now?
And tell us a bit about yourself and also what you guys are building.
Yeah, so I come from a background of building products in Web2,
work for a bunch of different big companies as a product guy.
Even worked for a startup once, a Y Combinator backed startup that was super tiny and was trying
to solve a really difficult problem then that would be solved very easily by smart contracts
today. But yeah, my background is building web two products. I run a hedge fund in Web3 called OX5F Capital
and have done that on the side of my regular job for a while.
Always wanted to find a way to kind of pull together building
and all my experience in building Web2 products into Web3,
mostly because I think Web3 has some of the more fascinating things
to be working on the world right now outside of maybe AI.
I saw this opportunity with Frentech and what Frentech was building, mostly around the fact that the things that you do were now tied to what you say on Twitter.
And I said, wait a second, that's actually really fascinating. What if we could solve crypto's biggest problem, which is all the scam and fraud and crazy stuff that's going on? And what if we could actually hold each other accountable? What if they had no way to like know who was who it was anonymous
and like shipping something across the country anonymously and and paying for it it's kind of
silly um and their business really boomed once they started adding things like reviews after
transactions so um i thought that was a pretty cool idea to kind of bring all those things together
so long as you built it on chain and it was in this like decentralized
permissionless way.
Yeah, I think
it's definitely kind of
like, I think the
very much a precedent was set
obviously during this meme coin season
with pretty much
like all the psyops and
kind of like the level of scams that were going
on and then you find out that it was actually one group of people that were actually behind
everything.
And I suppose the question to ask is, is that avoidable, you know, in terms of what
it is that you guys are embarking on doing?
And, I mean, how do you, how have you guys thought about that dynamic and what are the
possible solutions around kind of avoiding that yeah i mean i think last cycle showed us a lot about this and particularly in terms of like
you know people like the end of the cycle so to speak or the end of the like many run that we had
was like pretty much mass extraction um by people pulling strings uh and i think this happens
everywhere in crypto.
Of course it does.
Like everything is financially motivated.
I think one of the worst things that is worth solving
is just repeat offenders,
people who do it and then come back again
and find another way to make more money and extract.
But at the end of the day,
what most people don't realize is
when you have events like these
or you have meme coins
where on the other side of whatever you're doing, there is someone that knows more than you what most people don't realize is when you have events like these or you have meme coins where
on the other side of whatever you're doing there's someone that knows more than you
or has better info than you or is basically willing to risk you know cheating the game
to beat you um it makes it really challenging to even be competitive and most of the time that results in a lot of us regular traders losing our money
basically and so the way that i think about it is like think about you know a new project comes out
a new meme coin you know meme coins kind of took away the idea of like a founder of a project and
a road map because we got screwed by so many people in the cycle before that, and people committing to things and not actually delivering on them.
I think the meme coins are like a reaction to that almost.
And I think there's a really strong way that ethos can help both promote signal in the right places,
people that deserve to be recognized and deserve to have, you know, interest in what they're working on from, you know, repeat offenders or people that maybe don't have as much credibility and are potentially trying to rub people or commit fraud in some way.
are you quantifying things? Are you qualifying things? I know that there's quite an elaborate
plan that you have in place. Just talk us through what that looks like. And have you
managed to put it into practice yet? Yeah. So the big thing that we always felt was missing is,
again, going back to the review concept, like some social signals, a way to be like, okay, this guy likes this guy,
this guy doesn't like this guy's tweets.
You know, these people trust these people in those circles.
Like we don't have any instrumentation of that yet.
And so the core kind of thinking of ethos is,
oh, you have a review.
You can go positively review someone,
negatively review someone, negatively review
someone. But we wanted to bring the concept of economic security into the equation. And you say,
okay, well, how do you make that sufficiently difficult to attack? How do you make it such
that you can't spoof that credibility in any way? How do you make it such that it either takes time
or money to spoof that credibility um and so we've introduced
the idea of things like vouching where you stake your eth against someone's name put your money
where your mouth is if you really trust them then you'll you know help their credibility by putting
money in this and writing someone's name next to it basically um and so that's kind of where the
original thinking came from is like how can you extend it into not only a review system, which most Web2 review systems have problems of being fake or have censorship problems?
And so we copied a lot from proof of stake and how proof of stake works in the sense of like, it is a mechanism for providing economic security and making it sufficiently expensive or difficult to spoof that credibility.
So, I mean, so the obvious kind of concern that I have is that you get people that will come in and gamify this whole thing.
is that you get people that will come in and gamify this whole thing.
I know that you guys have had an issue recently
with a process that you've been running
and you've had to change things up.
Just tell us about what it is that you were doing.
Someone who's completely on the outs
and is clueless as to what that dynamic might look like
and what were they doing that you guys have now decided
to actually change things up?
Most important thing is what lesson did you guys learn in that and how does that help you guys going forward? to actually change things up and yeah um most important thing is
what lesson did you guys learn in that and how does that help you guys going forward yeah good
question so the one thing that so all these instruments the signals that we're talking about
right yeah huge people we had um we have a credibility score and so all this instrumentation
leads into one score that's meant to provide consensus about how credible you are. And we had one part of the algorithm that
said, if your content, if your reviews on ethos got upvoted, then you would earn more credibility
for doing so. And we found that people were farming that basically people were just uploading each other's stuff and not necessarily reflection of quality of content, but rather people that were just trying to, you know, make themselves appear more credible. Another one that we had was whenever you invite someone else,
their score can get boosted pretty significantly.
So if I had a really high score and I invited you,
your score would get bumped up way more than most people.
So we made a couple of changes to those.
The last one would be like account age,
like how old is your ETH address account like how old is your eth address account or how
old is your twitter account we basically took a step back i said okay we've got abuse in one place
and then are is are we actually determining credibility if you have an old twitter account
like that's the easiest thing you could fake are we actually determining credibility by having an
eth address like i mean kind, but it's not really the
credibility, right? It's not what people say about you. And an asshole can have an eight-year-old
ETH address, right? Like, so we made changes to the algorithm. And because everything is
interconnected, it was a pretty drastic drop for most people, anywhere from like 150 to 200 points.
for most people anywhere from like 150 to 200 points um and what happened was a lot of people
reacted negatively to this particularly because you know they were reputable and now we've dropped
their score and now it's neutral and i totally empathize with that because it's like if you were
trying to play the game of ethos which i would argue there is no game it's just a credibility
score um but people try to play the game of their credit score which I would argue there is no game. It's just the credibility score.
But people try to play the game of their credit score in the US. They want to improve their credit score so they can have better credit worthiness. It sucks to be like, whoa, I was
reputable and I wrote a thread about it and people love that I'm reputable now. And you log in the
next day and you're neutral again. And so i think our biggest learning through all of this
is like obviously we had an idea that people were going to be upset about the fact that the
credibility score has changed um we need to we it is really difficult to get everyone to align
on what the credibility score changes are going to be and now, on our path to decentralization, we are the stewards of that
score. We don't make what me and my co-founder, Ben, we do not make credibility, right? Like we
are going to make what we think the best, you know, result is for where we are in a business
right now. But at the end of the day, this has to be collectively determined.
And so one of our big takeaways has been, you know,
we've always included the customer in terms of conversations that we've had with people about what if we introduced this change and had back and forth
from different people.
We launched a snapshot on Saturday so that people can actually, you know,
voice their opinion in the snapshot, actually vote on these people can actually, you know, voice their opinion in a
snapshot, actually vote on these changes going forward. You know, it's not necessarily what I
would call governance. It's, you know, eliciting feedback more clearly and having community be
able to vote and have their say on things. But it will be interesting to see how it works.
Most people would say, don't introduce the idea of governance early because it will only trip you up in the long term.
And so, yeah, I mean, that's a really long kind of long winded answer to like what what we've been through the past few days and how I think about things going forward.
I like the fact that you kind of like drew ideas from kind of like eBay and, you know, the feedback.
And I spent a lot of time on eBay many years ago and had an account that benefited hugely from those reviews.
And I completely see the benefit of that.
And I completely see the benefit of that.
But I see even more benefit around getting an accurate metric,
if that's the way you can term it around kind of like consistency of,
you know, have you behaved in the correct way?
And I'm interested to see, you know, based on kind of like the different parameters
that you guys are now using to measure credibility.
What has worked really well up until now
and what hasn't worked really well up until now?
And are you guys reviewing that list?
I don't know if you want to just go through those metrics just quickly
and just tell us what seems to be working better than others.
Yeah, so it's reviews. Who's reviewed you?
Specifically, the difference in your scores.
So if someone with a really high reputation reviews someone who's middle tier,
it will have a bigger impact than people all neutral reviewing each other.
Vouching, so staking your money against someone.
We have how many people vouched for you, which is a, like, we think about that as a defense against whales.
Like, 100 ETH from one person is worth very little, but 1 ETH from 100 people is worth a lot.
Mutual vouching, so if you vouch for someone and they vouch for you back that indicates high trust
in two people unless it's abused which it can get abused pretty easily uh and then account ages i
would say again we also had a thing about content like content quality that we had to get rid of
and i would say like that was probably the most obvious one that just didn't make sense
like we have to find ways to incentivize people to write high quality stuff on the platform it's a tough one
because you're like every system before us has never depended on that like yelp glass door
uh stack overflow like those people aren't incentivized other than they just want to
participate and you know push a public good further.
So that's a really tough one for us to figure out, but we need to figure out a Web3 kind of approach to that.
You know, I am a big believer that vouching is the way to prove credibility because it's putting your money where your mouth is.
It's not, you know, it's an opportunity cost with that money too and so you're only going to vouch
for people that you legitimately trust and I think that is really the point of ethos in a lot of ways
is how easy it is to spoof credibility through other means we don't want it to be easy like you
shouldn't if if anyone can spoof credibility with nine
reviews from neutral people and become reputable then we have not built a good system we've built
a very attackable system um so those are kind of some of the learnings and the things that go into
it um i i again i think i actually think theed ETH in tandem with a number of vouchers, where we do not allow people to build credibility with a significant amount of capital, it's actually just other credible people vouching for them.
I think that's really the key to us remaining resistant to people's, people attacking us, basically.
Yeah, we've looked at, we've at the the positive aspect where you're vouching
and you're giving credit and what about the negative sides kind of like if someone's being
a bad actor in the space how do they then be how they then kind of like reveal to be that
consistently and obviously importantly reliably because you don't want someone to be kind of
accused of something because maybe they pissed a small group of people off,
but actually they didn't really do anything wrong.
Or how do you avoid those kind of scenarios?
Yeah, it's tough because as much as I want to change the culture
of how humans work, it's really difficult to do that.
On Twitter, there is mob mentality, right?
Yeah, definitely. We're getting mobbed to an extent right now right people are kind of ganging up and being like oh I like I'm quoting ethos or whatever I
don't want to participate anymore and and it kind of snowballs and so fighting human nature is really
tough um instrumenting human nature is really easy. And our goal has mostly been
instrumenting it. Where I would say when I think about the negative side, let's say that someone
does get a negative review. What ends up happening is the mob resistance is kind of built into how
the scoring works. And we've seen it. We've had someone who got um they originally got you know
one negative review and then it kind of snowballed into this person's past and people you know
documented a bunch of negative things while we went look at the data and you're like it was all
like neutral level people basically that reviewed this person and it had a very like they had like
40 reviews and it only accounted for like minus eight on their score overall.
And it was because it was from a bunch of non-credible sources as opposed to credible sources.
And so negative review is kind of the first primary metric to do that.
But we also have this idea of slashing where if someone really steps out of line, according to what social consensus is,
maybe they rug pulled or maybe they just pissed someone off after an
over-the-counter deal.
You can basically put it to a vote and have people participate on that vote
and share their opinion and share exactly what they think,
you know,
is how they approach the situation. Like, Polymarket got slashed the
other day. Polymarket's been stepping out of, you know, they had an issue with UMA resolution,
and someone wrote up a really long thread that says, like, you know, I think they should get
slashed. They should lose some of their credibility because of this. And it went to a vote, and people
voted over 48 hours, and they lost credibility because of it. And
I think the negative side is qualitative and quantitative, but the qualitative is actually
the key takeaway that I think most people are missing, which is like, what did people say?
Well, like, why are people slashing? Why are people negatively reviewing each other? It's
not just the score. It's like what goes into the score and who it's coming from. And so those are kind of some of the negative
signals that exist on ethos and how they've played out so far.
Why should I get involved in ethos? What is it, what is there beyond just kind of like the
social good? Because I believe that it is a social good thing.
And but what else is there?
Like, is it like is there kind of like a long game initiative in place in terms of the way that you guys have designed this?
Yeah. Why should I get involved?
involved? We look at ethos and what you see with ethos mostly as a public good. It's meant to be
We look at ethos and what you see with ethos mostly as a public good.
something that anyone can contribute to, anyone can go create content for and write to. And it's
also meant to be something that, you know, people can help push forward and improve what the
credibility score is collectively. We can't own that just, you know, me and my co-founder.
So if you believe in, you know, reputation and credibility and want to be a part of that
and want to be a part of like, you know, being able to either support people that you know,
maybe it's a project that you want to see succeed and you go vouch for them or positively review
them. That's kind of like the core part of ethos that most people would care about.
The secondary or like the extension of that is kind of the things that we're working on now,
which is more along the lines of, okay, now what do you get by being credible?
What do you get by being reputable on the space? And I'd like to think this is the obvious stuff.
We're like, okay, reputation literally drives exactly how all of society works, right?
You can only get a job if you have X qualifications.
You pick a doctor because other people have reviewed them.
We want to build different types of businesses on top of ethos data,
things that are better with trust, things that get unlocked because of trust.
And there are a lot of things that we think about more on the near-term horizon,
including just things like over-the-counter trading, right?
Like, hey, I don't know you, you don't know me.
I'm trying to solve this token or thing or whatever
that's a liquid asset.
Otherwise, there's no liquidity in a marketplace
for me to sell it to.
Or maybe it's just a good or a service
or I'm trying to hire someone, whatever it might be.
We want to basically say,
hey, this over-the-counter problem,
it's really tough right now.
It actually gets abused a lot of the time. People use pre-market trading as hype for projects. And we all know how that turns out
whenever someone says, oh, the pre-market trading price is $5 per whatever. I want to put all of
that on chain. And I want that to be a safe marketplace where like okay the other person i know has been vouched by
or is reputable um by these other people therefore i feel like i can do an over-the-counter trade
um even could be that we act as the middleman or the broker in in the middle of that um and so
that's just one idea of like the many other ways that we think of extending usage of this score you know we could go work with
other companies that offer lending and say hey if you have a reputable score maybe you get a slightly
better rate um what if you could use some of the your ethos vouch balance as collateral and something
like that um so there's a lot of things that kind of again it's kind of tough because I view it as such like a infrastructure part of the social layer ethos today.
Like whether we build stuff on top of it or we enable people to extend that into their app, like that is the future of success of ethos is that score goes everywhere with you and becomes how you interact with other people and basically every product that you use.
Yeah, I like that. And I think it's definitely got what I like about it the most is that it's got
kind of this elasticity and it's not just about ethos. It's about incorporating ethos
and it's the reputation that it, the data that it gathers and that you can basically extrapolate
into other things. I remember originally when I first was introduced to the idea of ethos,
the first thing that came to mind was what Kaito was doing, you know, kind of like a,
like in many ways Kaito is almost more, is more expansive and therefore loses the focus of
the reputation side of things. Even though
there is reputation
baked into it, it doesn't go
into it to the extent that you guys
are doing it.
I think I did ask the question at the time,
is there anything cooking there
potentially with what Kaito is doing
and how that product,
because I think that product has found relevance in the space I think they're also dealing with challenges
around people gamifying the whole point system at the moment and and kind of like Kaito points
versus launches but that's obviously something that you and the team need to figure out just
like you guys are figuring stuff out but that that's another conversation. The question is, how do you guys view a potential partnership
if there is something like that down the horizon?
I'm not saying we're assuming that you are speaking to one another,
but how would ethos fit into something like Kato practically?
Yeah, I think they're super complementary, right?
Like I've always shared this equation in my head,
which is
influence equals attention plus reputation. And what's cool about that equation is someone could
have an incredible amount of attention, Andrew Tate, and zero reputation, Andrew Tate, and have
a ton of influence, right? Someone could have zero ability to drive attention to themselves and an incredible
amount of reputation people you've never heard of before and be more influential than andrew tate
and i think kaido is measuring attention really well right now uh in the space and i think we we
instrument and measure reputation uh we had to instrument it because it doesn't exist there's no
way for us to observe this data and so i'd like to think that these two data points are how people
will make decisions about maybe it's hiring a kol to promote your project or maybe it's working with
uh you know content writer or something because you you want the person with the best attention
but also like
isn't doesn't have a reputation for like you know showing stuff and then deleting to posts or
something afterwards yeah um and so that's kind of how i think about things is between kaido and us
is i view them as two very complementary data points um and i think they can work well
and I think they can work well
just supporting each other
and how people look at other people.
No partnership on the horizon
other than we have a telegram
and are lightly chatting back and forth about things
and I was even thinking this morning
about like, yeah, we have the same problems, right?
Like the second it turns into a game,
everyone's going to try to game it.
That's just the point
and that's how crypto works. Everyone knows that. Um, but I think there are
ways that like, if you think about yaps getting rewarded, you know, should yaps get rewarded to
people who are sharing like absolutely fake news content? Should yaps get rewarded to people who
like, we know that like kaito's already doing pretty
advanced analysis on using their ai algorithms on like is this real data is this fake data like
who is reacting and responding to the tweets like should we give them the apps because of that
and you know i could see a world too where it'd be pretty cool if you if kaito said like hey
these people aren't reputable and like they're sharing
tweets that aren't actually you know pushing the space forward they're sharing tweets that are
designed to get engagement right they're 100 attention zero percent reputation based um maybe
they don't want to reward those i have no idea but or maybe they do but that's kind of how one thing
that came to mind otherwise i think it's
really just like you know using the pieces of information in tandem could be really powerful
in terms of partnerships that you guys have established on this journey of yours and very
much an experiment um who who what when where is there some alpha there for us on this chat
What, when, where?
Is there some alpha there for us on this chat?
Yeah.
It's interesting because a lot of the stuff that we're working on
is still very early in terms of the partnerships front.
Why?
Because we focused on building our product
and getting it out there first,
as opposed to like,
oh, I'd love to announce this thing
that maybe it's a partnership.
I mean, you know how it goes too.
I kind of roll my eyes sometimes when I see people announcing partnerships and you're like, oh, whatever, like you guys aren't
working with each other. It's just like a cool thing to announce. I would say we've been working
with a few different people that help us kind of solve some of the different use cases we want to
solve. Some of the things I was talking about earlier, including our self-building some of that
stuff, you know, nothing that's like,
oh my God, it's going to just shatter everyone's brain in terms of how they think about these
things. But I do think it pushes us a lot further down the route of like, what is my score worth
and why is it valuable to me? And so, yeah, I don't have any good alpha to share there other
than the conversations are happening. They only really started happening 30 days ago because it was like,
well, we've got to get the damn product out there and get people to use it
and show that people want to partner with us and use our data and stuff like that.
Yeah, I mean, I think Kato would be a natural one for me,
and I'm sure kind of like the lending and borrowing platforms would also be pretty cool.
I think the, you know, I was going to ask the question around kind of like,
even though we live in quite an anonymous space, I think you can overcome that just through,
it doesn't matter. The point is if someone's got a nickname or whatever the case is, or a profile,
you can still gauge that. So it doesn't really matter whether they're anonymous or not. Obviously,
I would imagine that if someone decides to dox, in many ways, it could be viewed as being a positive thing by some people.
I don't really care.
And I'm just curious as to whether you guys have seen more attention around certain aspects of reviews.
And does doxing make a difference or does it not?
doxing make a difference or does it not? I mean, have you noticed any trends around that kind of thing?
I mean, have you noticed any trends around that kind of thing?
Yeah. I mean, if you look at the top of the like trending, a lot of the times it's dox people and
the numbers going in the wrong direction for them. Yeah. It's interesting. Okay. So I've done a bunch
of research about this and I've talked to a lot of people about doxing and how does it mean anything
for credibility? And a lot of projects, a lot of potential investors
in the trenches of projects do view a founder doxing as bullish because it creates some layer
of accountability. What we saw in the last cycle, in my opinion, what we've seen pretty much all
crypto is think about an influencer, right? I mean, sorry, a celebrity. They come in, they have tons of credibility.
And they say, hey, go buy my token
because my token is going to be so valuable
and people are going to be so interested in it.
And they leverage that credibility
and then they have no interest
in actually following through with anything.
I think that in a lot of ways,
most people now are viewing doxing as a bearish thing, especially if it's like overt and in your face.
If it's like your profile picture is you about like hey what if like someone docks privately
in a zk and then we put that next to their ethos profile should it make them more credible and
you're like it makes yeah it doesn't really right it makes them more human but like you could fake
doxing right you could easily like you know buy someone else's identity not easily
you can buy someone else's identity right like um so i kind of had this feeling of like it could
help but it doesn't really it's not i still believe the strongest indicator of credibility
is the fact that like other people have an opinion about a thing right it's kind of like yeah it's tough because
you think you go back to businesses and you're like how do you trust like that restaurant down
the street is like serving good food you listen to what other people say um but there is also an
underlying assumption that they follow health code and they they do you know comply to to government
mandates and like if they did do something stupid, they would have accountability next to it.
So we're kind of trying to figure that out still, I would say.
But doxing is one that I haven't been as bullish on in terms
of actually proving someone's credibility.
Interesting.
It doesn't surprise me.
I mean, I think there's truth, absolute truth,
in what it is that you're saying.
And I believe that it's about the consistency and the reliability
that that individual or business or product displays.
I think for me, it's just like, have they been doing this for a long time
and have they been consistent?
And then it's kind of those conversations that people have
and you guys obviously wanting to reveal what those conversations are in a public platform with measurable metrics as per the criteria that you've set out.
In terms of your roadmap, obviously, there's this experiment, there's these ideas.
And as is the nature of BlockMates, we always get to things really early and i think we are very
early to ethos i think the idea is as old as the hills themselves but obviously the implementation
in web3 is a very challenging one so i'm really curious and also for listeners and viewers
to who are interested in what you guys are doing what does the roadmap look like
what is kind of the dynamic with the token and product market fit? And just fill us in on what the rest of your 2025 looks like and
beyond. There's still a lot of improvements to the overall platform itself in terms of like,
how is this used? The credibility score itself could be refined. And we're looking at really
getting that right.
I need confidence in that score, right?
If I wanna go to another team and say like,
hey, this person is somewhat credit trustworthy,
like the score better damn be good, right?
If it's not, then we're screwed.
And so beyond the platform,
like on the platform,
there are a bunch of other things that we wanna do,
like make it easier to understand the data,
maybe make it easier to go look at the data and observe that data
and see who's connected with who and why they're connected with who.
There's things that we really want to do in terms of connecting further out of stations,
like, oh, you've got Twitter connected, and that's it.
And you can't add any more wallets.
How do you add more wallets?
How could you connect something like your Discord identity?
How could you actually become the kind of aggregator, the main aggregator of identity
in a lot of ways?
You know, we still need to add financial slashing.
We have the idea of social slashing right now where people risk their credibility to
call someone out.
How about, you know, financial slashing, which is the real concept that's closer to proof
of stake.
You put money against someone's name, that money is always at risk. Like you could get slashed yourself and
adds the other kind of counterbalance to what is otherwise right now risk-free credibility gain for
someone. So those are kind of some of the short-term things that we're thinking about.
I would say midterm is more things like our site where we can help do things
like over-the-counter trading. I'm not 100% committed to like, oh, this is going to be the
future of OTC trading yet, but we want to start. We're very incremental builders. I want to get
something out there and start seeing if it's valuable to people. And other types of businesses
like OTC trading on top of Ethos are things that are on our mind right
now another one is like project launch pad like how do we help users identify who is backing what
project and uh who the team is and what does what do people say about the team members and
um just kind of bringing more connectedness to like investing in the space and new products
in the space. I'm going to go on for a while because we build a lot and we like to build a lot
and I'm fairly confident about all of these things. The other things on my mind, you know,
we have Ethos Markets, which is a product that also sits on top of Ethos Network it's kind of similar to you know where i'm talking about with building new products we're pretty good
at that um we want to keep extending that too it's the idea that you can trade people's reputation
by votes of trust or distrust against their name um but i think really like the mid the midterm
kind of look for the rest of the year is like, how do we integrate ethos and make
sure that that's everywhere? How do we make sure that it goes with you when, again, you come to us
for an over-the-counter trade or go somewhere else for an over-the-counter trade or when you're
browsing Twitter and you can see exactly, you know, who's trustworthy and who's not. But it also,
again, goes to things like lending.
again, goes to things like lending. I'd really like to be able to integrate with, you know,
I'd really like to be able to integrate with lending protocols.
I'd like to be able to integrate with other social protocols too.
So there's a lot in terms of how do we create value for people
that have reputation on the product such that that reputation can be realized.
Nice.
And then token launch, you guys looking at doing that? Or is that not really
something that's in your scope at the moment?
It's not in our scope at the moment. What I'd say there, yeah, it can significantly dilute a lot of
things very quickly. The thing I always remind people is like, we're not
building a product that's meant to be here for four months, create a TGE, make a bunch of money,
and then leave. Like, go look at our history of work, go look at the products that we've built
in the past. Like, everything, I don't, what I always tell people is dude i'm not going back to web 2. i i want to
work on this forever like this is this is so much fun to work at web 3. it's so much fun to work on
real problems being solved in the space like this is something that we are here for the long term
for like this is the opposite of the like get rich quick exit scam this is preventing those
things from happening right um and so you know when i think
about something like a token you're like yeah that that is the easiest way to kill our project
very quickly um very soon and but i do think that ethos overall is a public good and something that
we have to get more further more towards decentralization and we've introduced concepts
like governance light of just
like ensuring that we are holding ourselves accountable for having other people vote and
how the protocol progresses forward so yeah um yeah not in the near term at all um it's something
that is a long-term thing to be thinking about and very much aligned with where we want to be
and how we think about ourselves building in the space too.
Cool.
Yeah, I think you are, once again, 100% correct.
It needs to be, you need to find the value.
Don't expect the value to come to you.
You need to create it.
And yeah, I think you do that with time
and you do that with finding the product that fits the market.
And that's something that you guys are going to have to figure out and bump your heads and figure out.
Totally.
And eventually get there, which I'm sure you will.
Yeah, it's been really cool, Serapin, to chat to you.
And it's also cool to catch you, like, really early in this mission that you guys are on.
I know it probably feels like a lot longer than early, but I think in the general perspective, very early.
And, yeah, I think you guys definitely do have the right ingredients for we told you so down the line in terms of where you guys are going.
And hopefully we will get to tell people we told you so.
We told you that this was a good idea.
And I think it is.
I think it's a great idea for what it's worth.
Thanks.
You know, I think this space genuinely does need a measure,
a metric for kind of like reliability and trustworthiness
to be kind of showcased.
And hopefully you guys get it right.
It's definitely needed.
And I appreciate your time.
And I know you're a busy man, but it's good to get you on.
And thank you.
Yeah, no, thanks for having me.
It's been fun to talk about it and off the heels of a fun weekend for us,
for sure.
Yeah, yeah.
It sounds like it.
Honestly, I didn't know about your fun weekend,
but it's cool to kind of like check in with you
and hopefully people understand and kind of like accept
that you guys are on a mission to do something positive,
which I'm sure they will.
And yeah, stick to your gun, sir.
Stay true to what you guys are doing.
doing here.
Yeah, 100%.
Cool.
Yeah, thanks everyone for joining us.
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