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Perpetual Good in the Metaverse - Speculation Episode
Recorded: Jan. 24, 2023 Duration: 0:58:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
All right, Justin, let's do my test.
Hey, all right, man.
Look at all these tools.
I've never actually been on this side of a space, so I'm going to play with some of these buttons for a minute, if you don't mind.
Oh, here we – what happened to Justin?
I don't know.
He hit a button.
I don't know.
He hit a button.
Now, note that that may just happen.
Hey, have fun, right?
That's what technology is for.
They tell you you can't break things, right?
That's a lie.
That's a lie.
I see there's a leave button.
I won't press that.
I appreciate it.
At least not until we scare you away, right?
Oh, this is interesting.
A soundboard.
Okay.
All sorts of things.
Wait, what are you on?
I'm on my phone.
You're on your phone and you have a soundboard?
Okay, now I've got to play.
I do, yeah.
It looks like I could clap, maybe.
Okay, what phone are you using?
I'm on my iPhone.
I wonder if it's just an Apple thing, because I do not have all those cool features.
Wow.
Now I'm going to be doing this the whole time.
Nice.
Am I still on?
Because somehow I messed things up.
Oh, okay.
All right.
You know, now I never saw the value in an iPhone.
I always thought they were overpriced and everything.
I've always been an Android phone person.
But just for the soundboard features, I might have to get a dang iPhone.
Might be worth it if you're going to host these every week.
Only because I love to play with those noises.
So that would just, I don't know how, you know, valuable the conversations with me with, you know, all of those noises being thrown in.
But, hey.
Could add some spice to the mix.
You never know.
I'm going to kick this off.
I do an intro.
Then I intro you.
And then we get into the heart of it.
Then we invite folks to speak if they want to.
And we close it out.
So you ready?
I'm ready when you are.
All right.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Perpetual Good in the Metaverse.
Today, we're going to have kind of a speculation episode.
It's more in the lines of meet someone who's pretty cool, who is future thinking like myself, and then just have a conversation about what crazy ideas we can come up with.
Those might be some of my favorite ones because it's just, hey, what can we dream of kind of thing.
So from there, just a quick reminder for everyone who's listening, Perpetual Good in the Metaverse, the idea is to kind of bring together Web3, NFTs, crypto, play-to-earn, Metaverse technologies,
all into an area where we talk about the cross-benefits of the technology and social impact or nonprofits.
And with that in mind, while it's Metaverse, I am taking the license to make that very encompassing.
And today's guest is actually going to be an interesting conversation because in the past, I've always had either a nonprofit executive or leader on or a NFT creator or a Web3,
you know, like someone from the DAO or someone who's in technology with crypto and so forth.
And today we have Justin, who is the co-founder of Arcos, and he and I got into some conversations and just it was so much fun talking to him for like we were supposed to talk for 30 minutes.
And I think we talked for an hour and change that I figured, you know what?
He needs to be on the show. We need to talk about some of these crazy ideas, some of which are not so crazy.
On top of that, your background and, you know, well, you know, Justin, you'll talk a little bit more about what you did and how you ended up where you are today
and why we're talking about Web3 technologies, given that you come from a cloud server and Salesforce kind of background.
Yet today we're talking about Web3 technology and social good and social impact.
So with that as the introduction, Justin, why don't you jump in and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. Thank you for that intro, Carlos. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me. I myself, as you mentioned, I started as a technologist.
Wow. About 15, 20 years ago within a large enterprise.
And we were just starting to explore cloud computing and Salesforce specifically in earnest.
We were about to implement it. And this was back in 2007 or so.
And, you know, my now friends and co-founders of Arcus and I at the time saw cloud as a delivery mechanism for really cool software solutions that anyone could use.
And it kind of democratized the way that software was leveraged.
And, you know, if you were a Fortune 100 company, Fortune 500 company, Fortune 1000 company or a 10 person nonprofit, you were starting off at the same place.
And I found that rather profound. And the cloud, I feel like, is, you know, today how we're explaining how things get delivered over blockchain within Web3.
And that's sort of 15 years in two minutes right there, kind of skipping over all the gory details of building a company that delivers software solutions on the Salesforce platform for hundreds and hundreds of nonprofits every year.
So, you know, we see all the use cases and we've solved them all with Web2 and cloud technologies.
And now we're starting to look at how Web3 can be integrated into the software stack as it relates to nonprofit operations, fundraising, membership, and all in all, the way I think about it is just generally data interoperability, the ability to just move things around.
And own stuff as an individual. So you could start there or, you know, kick off wherever, wherever you want with the fun stuff that we were getting into the last time we spoke.
Well, actually, I think that I want to start a little bit digging into some of what you mentioned in terms around the technology, because I it's one of the things that I actually find very interesting.
And Tim was the one that kind of introduced me to you from HumanStack.
And when we were talking, you know, he was very excited about this idea of like, how do you do a DAO around common data management practices and so forth?
Right. And then you mentioned data interoperability.
When you think of something like that in terms of technology, Web3 and having worked in Salesforce databases, cloud services, how do you envision that concept of data interoperability and common data management practices?
And what could that what can the impact of something like that be for a small nonprofit or a large nonprofit or for distributed autonomous organizations that are out there thinking of how to use data to get their mission across?
Well, it's a really good question.
And obviously, you know, most of the meat of why we're here, the way I think about it first is within organizations that themselves are rather large and distributed and have challenges with understanding who their quote unquote customers or constituents actually are.
And I'll give you a few examples.
So a lot of nonprofits will, you know, some of the biggest ones will operate with the national headquarters and then regional or very local chapters or affiliates.
And oftentimes, in my experience, at least, these local chapters and affiliates have all the information and data about the individuals who contribute most on the ground to to the causes and they care the most about them.
And I'm not saying that this is universally true.
It's just how I feel about it.
And oftentimes, organizations don't do a very good job of having their own standards within an organization of how they're going to share information across a region or up to national or across an organization.
And a lot of that, I feel, is baked in a few things, fear, fear in losing it or having a security breach around it.
I also think that there's just, generally speaking, it's just very difficult to run a big operation like that, a really large organization that operates with the same set of standards.
It's just rather difficult.
It's just very difficult to engage however they want with any level of the organization and the organization reaping the benefit of providing the proper incentives for that individual to engage with local or national or some other region that's across the country or across the world, maybe.
That's what I think Web3 helps to empower.
Hmm.
And having worked at national organizations, even organizations that had international affiliates or chapters, data has always been an issue.
Data localization is another challenge that's often faced.
And then, you know, and that's just when you have an actual organization that has kind of a centralized model to it, right?
There's either a corporate headquarters with chapters and local affiliates kind of things, or there's a very strong governance around chapters that kind of feeds up into a centralized organization where the chapters are actually more engaged and have more of the power.
So it's kind of a kind of a bottom-up structure.
But even in those kinds of structures, there's a very strong guidance committee that, you know, dictates how the chapters work and how they engage the headquarters organization and so forth.
And in a DAO, I could see something like this being even more interesting just because there is no central organization.
Have you thought about, you know, when we talk about something like this, how a DAO might take advantage of it?
Well, DAOs are rather native to the concepts, so I haven't, you know, I've thought about DAOs as, like, natural replacements of certain nonprofits, but not insofar as, like, boots on the ground.
You know, I think that's, you know, that's, I think that's rather difficult, but in so far as, like, policy or, you know, organizations that are looking to just organize around ideas or activities, I feel as though DAOs are rather an interesting way of going about it.
And also, you know, bottom-up is the way that a lot of these communities operate, so, you know, a lot of the power goes back to, you know, if you look at art communities and NFTs, a lot of the power goes back to the creator, to the artist, to the individual contributor.
And I can see how that would translate to, you know, people who could potentially, in a DAO scenario, vote with their donor dollars.
That's interesting, right, where people want to hold organizations accountable for leveraging those dollars in a very specific way.
Now, you can debate whether that's good, bad, or indifferent, and I think that there's, you know, there's debate to be had there, right?
Like, hey, do you trust this organization or not?
And, again, but I think, well, I mean, it is interesting, right?
Just bringing that to the forefront.
And, I mean, if you think about it, public corporations kind of do that with the shareholders.
The shareholders with the biggest votes tend to have a lot of impact on the direction of that company.
And that's where I think it gets rather, like, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't want to pretend to be,
and I think that that's where it gets rather murky because, you know, then are you getting into, you know,
our donor dollars now securities that are held as votes?
I don't know.
That's really strange.
But I could see where just the level of accountability could be enhanced with blockchain solutions
to see where the money is actually going within an organization.
And, again, the concept of allowing people to vote and have certain things happen around a cause is never a bad idea.
And, you know, one of the things that has always dawned on me is another way in which nonprofits can benefit from just seeing
internet transactions occur on a blockchain could be where, like, peer-to-peer things,
where peer-to-peer fundraising activities occur, oftentimes the organizations are the ones that own the data.
And, you know, it could be where people are really about the cause and not about the organization.
And if we're really about solving the problem, then it doesn't really matter which organization, you know, we're donating to.
And if one organization has a better solution or solve or theory about how to solve a specific problem that you're passionate about,
it could be interesting to be able to find out about them in a very, like, I don't want to give you my data,
but I would like to hear from you kind of way.
Like, well, that's interesting.
Yeah, because now you're also starting to get into, like, the donor advice fund, the DAF kind of models,
where people contribute to it, and then they assign their contribution to a cause versus an organization.
And then the administrator of the DAF is responsible for the distribution of those funds to organizations
that are representative of that cause, right?
And I know, you know, endowment is someone we've had on the show a few times,
and they're kind of almost like a crypto DAF.
And so it is, like, I'm starting, there's definitely a lot of blending of those concepts
and how they could actually support each other.
I also thought about the idea of blockchain-based giving circles, right,
where individuals come together around a theme or geographics location, whatever it might be,
and kind of support the activities of organizations through those giving circles.
So one of the things I've realized, I first got into nonprofits back in 1995,
and I worked as an administrative assistant for the executive director of a foundation.
And it was very simple.
It was, you received checks, you received straight donations,
maybe you had an event like a gala that was put on,
there were sponsorships from companies.
Nowadays, the amount of diversity and complexity in donor management
has really drastically increased.
Yeah.
I mean, they come together, too.
I mean, there's so many different channels that people can be engaged in
or with an organization.
A lot of organizations feel like they have to exist in all the channels, too,
which spreads them rather thin.
That's a good point.
Right.
We've talked about kind of the use of data and how it might be managed.
You mentioned during that the idea that there's concerns around security
and data breaches and so forth.
Do you think that working with blockchain, you can resolve some of those?
Were those some of the elements you were talking about removing
from the considerations nonprofits have to deal with?
In some part, you know, once the, I think if you could shift the responsibility
from yourself as an organization back to the individual, you know,
whether you want, again, whatever you want to call the consumer or the person
or the constituent or supporter, volunteer, what have you, as soon as you shift the responsibility
back to them, it's your data and you own it.
Come connect with us.
I think that that resolves quite a few security issues.
And then I don't think it's there yet, but there are technological advances within blockchain tech
around being able to provide kind of like true false, you know, zero knowledge kind of answers
to, you know, art.
Can you prove that this is you or can you prove that you're this, that, the other
without really giving up too much or anything?
And I think once organizations learn to work within themselves to transfer data around that way,
that will lead to a lot of learnings of how they can start to leverage that even further externally.
Because, you know, you often see a lot of challenges with those, with those, with the nonprofits
that are organizations sort of top down where you have a headquarter and then a lot of chapters
or a lot of affiliates, a lot of data challenges there.
Who owns what?
Who can see what?
Who can manage what?
And I think we got into a little bit of that during our side conversation.
Why don't you talk to us about projects you've worked on or how you see NFTs or block technology,
blockchain technology coming together to support either social impact, social good or nonprofits?
Sure.
I mean, Argus and myself have worked, you know, it's really new for us.
So we've only worked on a handful of projects and they've been rather commercial so far,
more like social community tokens.
But, you know, one of the things that we are working on right now, and we are just about finished with,
so I guess I can talk about it, is for our nonprofit partner, PepUp Tech, which is a training program.
They work to train folks who are underrepresented in technology in general and help to train folks and give them an opportunity to learn,
generally speaking, Salesforce.
And because Salesforce is getting into Web3 and because Argus is a Salesforce partner and partner of PepUp Tech,
we're teaching a course on Web3, the Web3 University of PepUp Tech.
And what we've decided to do, and our mint is actually going to go live this week, and it's closed.
It's not an open mint.
But we're going to allow for 10 alumna to mint a token, and that token is going to be, let's call it their entry pass into the university,
so kind of like their letter of admission.
And then we're going to run the course for six weeks.
At the end of the course, we're going to assess knowledge, and if they pass, if the student passes,
they're going to receive a verifiable blockchain credential, which can be cryptographically verified as either as active, inactive,
or still current, which is not an NFT, it is a completely different blockchain tech or open standard for verifiable credentials.
So we're playing around in these spaces now, and we're learning a lot about it and trying to figure out where we can kind of fit
and how we can help organizations to just sort of try some stuff.
Okay.
And I like the idea.
So you're using the NFT as, so the crafting of the NFT is kind of their mission?
Yeah.
So we're, we have, we've already done the onboarding course where students went through a, you know,
a hands-on training to set up a wallet, a digital wallet, a MetaMask wallet, and they learned how to do that.
And then they are going to mint a token.
And once they do, that will be their admission path into the class.
So they're going to hands-on mint something.
And then what we're going to learn in the class is about, very much about Web3 tech.
We're going to learn about also how Salesforce is positioning, what they're doing.
And we're also going to learn about verifiable credentials and how basically the whole class is kind of proof of concept for how you can run an education type of organization on blockchain.
So I find that, and this is something that I've worked at an organization, at a company where we did certification management software to help track the business of certification and so forth.
And one of the presentations I did was on how Microsoft could rule credentialing right now and take it away from the nonprofits that are out there trying to do credentialing.
Or it could be a big partner to nonprofits that are out there setting the standards, allowing someone else to do the certification management.
And the idea behind it was, if you looked at Microsoft with, they own LinkedIn, where a lot of professionals are at.
They own, LinkedIn bought what was Lydia, and now it's, I think, LinkedIn University or whatever it is.
They also have an Azure cloud base.
So they have the whole kind of global space management.
They have Microsoft AIs, the Azure AIs kind of logic, where they could actually use all of the inputs they receive from all of the different Microsoft properties they have, tech properties.
And they can build a very strong profile for an individual understanding what their professional goals are, understanding where, you know, where they're spending their time in terms of opportunities, companies, network that they're engaging with.
And they can use all that to actually set a career path for an individual, showing them how to get from point A to point Z, and then all the milestones through that process, what courses to take, what certifications to get, being able to validate, you know, career experience based on where they worked and so forth.
And if you start to think about the purpose of certification being a validation of competency, right, if someone else can demonstrate that in a way that cannot be altered through blockchain and so forth, they create a very strong record of experience and competency that is irrefutable.
And so I find it interesting that blockchain and that you, and we didn't discuss this at all, kind of had something similar in terms of how blockchain could be used in the certification space.
Yes, yes, yes.
That being on the blockchain, not in someone's database, a lot of people nowadays, and you probably run into this, you know, the idea of your data being sold to everyone is just so common practice now that being able to protect your data through blockchain ownership, actually, I think, would appeal to many individuals.
I think once, yeah, I think once people wrap their heads around that aspect of why you might want to own some digital file, then it's like, oh, like, wow, okay.
Right. And, and, you know, I often look at a lot of parallels in real life, and you look at, like, a deed to a house, right?
That's what you're getting, you get the deed, right?
You don't, you live in the house, but you get the deed, the deed points to the property you were in the house.
And it's like, well, do you own, what do you own?
Well, I own that, I own that, I own the thing that legally says that we've all socially agreed, says that I own this land.
And that, I think, is a really good way to wrap your head around, oh, the digital entry in the ledger is the thing that points to the thing that I see with my eyes and enjoy.
However, where the ownership layer lives is way down there.
And, you know, it is important, but I also don't want to care about it.
Yeah, and, and I think that it is a good point that you make about where does the ownership identification lay, and how does someone access it?
I know universities started using NFTs to be able to kind of provide their, I, I always forget the term for this, but, you know, where you can see someone's records in terms of the grades they got, and that they did graduate with the degree they said, and everything else, right?
And so they're doing that, but one of the challenges that I saw when I was looking at this about two years ago was that while the universities were putting the data on the blockchain, not everyone had access to it without being, you know, told where to go to download the viewer, the presentation layer.
And, and, and so how do you, you know, how do you think about something like that?
And then is how, you know, we talked about Microsoft, you work with Salesforce, how does Salesforce tie into some of this?
Yeah, I mean, that's a good question that, you know, the verifiable credentials thing is a really good way to answer that, I think, which is to say that's more of a standards body, right?
So by Salesforce embracing a standard like that, and the same thing with NFTs, right, with Salesforce embracing, like an ERC 721 standard, on EVM compatible blockchains that run green.
Well, that's great. That's, that's a statement, right? That's a, that's an enterprise class piece of software that will integrate with a public blockchain infrastructure, but allow you to run business process on top of it in real time.
Whoa, that's my story. I mean, that's really cool. If you ask me, I can run all sorts of cool processes around how I might want to run an application process or how I might want to run an evaluation process, I can really do some cool stuff with evaluators and blind kind of mixing and matching there.
It can be really interesting when you are able to integrate that data into a CRM because, you know, CRM should be table stakes at this point for most organizations. Should be. I say should. It isn't. So I know that.
No, and I agree.
Well, how are you thinking about it?
One of the areas that I think is really interesting is, I think part of the reason you say CRM should be table stakes for organizations now is because of the importance around data and being able to mine data to understand the voice of the customer, to understand go-to-market strategies,
to pretty much position your product to be the most desirable in the market. And so much is going into getting data. You know, we have data warehouses, data lakes, data this, data that.
And when I start thinking of blockchain as kind of being the biggest state of light that you can kind of create because of its public nature, being able to have CRMs tap into that, I think is interesting.
And because it's public, and because it's public, it's allowable, but because it's all encrypted, you know, how do you actually get value out of using the blockchain data set?
And I think that's where it gets to be a little more tricky unless you are writing to the blockchain and then can decrypt the data back into your own kind of user interface, which is, I think, why Tim and I started talking about common data management practices and blockchain.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's all about kind of being able to think about the business processes that are more transactional and might belong on a blockchain.
And then being able to have a view into it, like you said, you know, if you could bring your own contracts and plug them into CRM data models and be able to bring that data in and look at it and use it in a way for marketers, you know, there's a lot there.
We've explored a lot of customer service use cases, integrations into Discord, for example, token gating.
Sometimes you're adding friction to the process.
And sometimes that's good.
Sometimes it's not, right?
Why add friction to a process?
But, you know, sometimes spam is there because there is no friction.
So you have to think about that.
Like there's a cost to transacting on a blockchain.
It's like, well, are you going to send out 10,000 spam messages?
Because that's going to cost you.
There's some good there.
So I think about it kind of embedded within these processes that we have just now come around to, like putting in the cloud.
So I kind of circle back to where we were at the beginning of this conversation.
And, you know, I remember those conversations that I was having in executive meetings where it was like, what is cloud?
Why is it important?
What's the difference?
And, like, why are you so adamant that we have to do this cloud thing?
It's just software.
And it was like, no, like, it matters that we do it this way because this is like a 10-year thing that we're about to do.
And, you know, we're going to be really far behind if we don't think about this straight.
And I feel like I'm having a lot of those same conversations.
And they're still very murky.
You know, those early cloud conversations were very murky as well.
You know, trying to get people to understand why you're not creating your own electricity.
Yeah, no.
And it's funny you mentioned that because, you know, if you've been around technology long enough, you kind of go through the same conversation every next generation, you know, tech generation cycle, right?
Where it's like, no, no, fax will replace mail services.
No, no, email will replace fax.
No, no, internet is a thing.
It's not a fad.
And, I mean, you know, computers on your desk are real and you do need to use them.
No more reciting your speech to your secretary kind of thing, right?
And so it is kind of interesting to have lived through all of the different technology changes and then be here at Web3.
And obviously, you know, the press doesn't help with, you know, a lot of what the, you know, what the public does here.
And therefore, you know, it's, it's, technology has always run into that issue, right?
Some of the early adopters take advantage of it.
And then there's, you know, the technology adoption, adoption curve has that chasm right before it gets into mass adoption.
And that's, I think, part of the reason.
There's always something.
And, you know, it's funny going back and every time there is one of these evolutions or revolutions, whatever you want to think about it.
And those are, I guess, different things.
You always see, like, TV clips of, you know, the Bill Gates on Letterman or, you know, the Today Show fumbling over pronouncing an email address, right?
It's like, what, what is internet?
Like, it's just very funny to see.
Like, you're right.
Like, it's very much the same thing every 10, 15 years or so when something comes about and it's like, wow, here's, here's something either very obvious or so out of left field.
And to some people, this is both of those things.
It's very obvious.
And to others, it's like, no, what are you even talking about?
So, let me ask you, in terms of other projects that you've worked on, any, what other projects or what other kind of examples can you give about how the technology and bringing CRM into, into the tech, into the Web3 stack can kind of support either social engagement, social awareness, social impact, whatever you want to call it.
So, I'll give you an example that is not yet real, but it's in, in my imagination.
So, I think about certain nonprofits that, let's use Warby Parker.
I know they're not a nonprofit, but they have a social message around their products, right?
They donate a portion of their products, right?
And there are some nonprofits that really operate as just brands and it's really just a pass through.
Right.
And they will even license their brand to other manufacturers who can sell, give a donation percentage, etc.
Oftentimes, the nonprofit does not ever get a sense of who their constituents actually are because the company who is selling the product using that brand is ultimately the, you know, they're the ones who have the customer then, right?
And I think about how a NFT can be used as almost like a receipt or not necessarily receipt, but a receipt, like an attachment to the thing that you purchased, maybe in a one-to-one manner.
Yeah, I don't want to call it a digital twin, but just something that is online that says, I bought this thing and because I bought this thing, a donation was made to this organization.
And that gets back to...
So, by buying the product, you get kind of a digital tag through an NFT.
Right.
And as a receipt, you just get dropped an NFT.
Here, thank you, a token of your appreciation.
And, you know, oftentimes, that organization that benefits from that purchase never knows who you are or anything about you.
They have no way of knowing that you are you.
And they might not still with you owning the NFT, yet they can give you an incentive to come and connect to them using the NFT.
Go to their website, you connect, boom, you're connected, you have that NFT, they know now.
Oh, look, it's someone who cares about us.
Let's give them a unique experience.
And let's incentivize them to tell us more about them.
And maybe if they tell us more about them, we can give them an even better experience.
And a new relationship is created.
And I think that that's where we go.
You know, when we talk about these one-to-one relationships that we can create at scale, it never happens.
And I think that this is an interesting way of doing that because, you know, you could go so far as to say, well, if I have that thing in my digital wallet and I walk up to any digital wall anywhere, I can press a button, connect to the wall, and it shows me something.
And that wall doesn't need to know anything about me, just needs to be able to connect to this wallet.
And you think about, like, subway stations, bus stations, anything, really.
It's even, like, the idea of having a personalized soda, right, flavor when you walk up to the soda machine.
Like, why isn't that stored somewhere decentralized as a token that any soda machine can tap into?
So, again, bring it back to nonprofits.
And you think about just having any item be able to be sold by anyone that can contribute to any organization.
It becomes rather interesting.
Well, and I think of, like, many companies now have kind of the pass-through donation.
And I've always wondered about that, right?
So, like, for example, if I'm at McDonald's and I want to round up my Happy Meal, right, and it goes to the Ronald McDonald's house, well, does then my contribution plus the millions of other people who make the contribution,
do their funds get pulled together, donated by McDonald's to the Ronald McDonald's house, and then they get a huge tax break, yet my contribution, which, you know, let's say I eat a Happy Meal every day and do that, might add up, right?
Like, I don't do, I don't eat a Happy Meal every day.
But the point being is that there's a lot of pass-through donations that are being done now that if there was a way where I can make that pass-through donation known to the entity for a cause I care about,
and then that then gets me, you know, like, gamification, you know, gamification was huge, what, five, six, seven years ago?
Imagine being able to do gamification of donations through third parties for a cause you care about using NFTs.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's, we just sort of, you know, I guess that that's what this episode was about, right, speculation, we just sort of went there, right, that's where that goes with a, like, little receipt.
Okay, now I can start to, start to tell people, come, oh, you, you, you rounded up, you're paying with a credit card most of the time, and you rounded up your change?
Thank you for that $0.27 donation.
And there, and you're right, it often gets aggregated, where donations will get made kind of one-off that way.
But others have, you know, there are third parties that are out there that do this at point of sale, and will understand exactly, like, who it is that's making that donation.
But, again, it, it gets siloed.
So, you know, we're trying to talk about how that doesn't have to live in one place.
That's sort of held within an organization that then, again, might be at a national level, right?
If you're talking about, you know, I'll just use an example, like, use McDonald's, I'll say Taco Bell, right?
They have a foundation.
And if you're rounding up at the Taco Bell, you know, odds are that's just going right to their foundation to help whatever they, their organization is there to help with.
You know, it'd be nice to get some recognition for that.
And you, yeah, think about how you can gamify, you know, your, your sauce level or whatever, how many tacos you have, or, you know, spicy fire or whatever.
Or, you know, you get kind of creative with the marketing around it.
And, and, and then, you know, back to your, you know, your point even earlier about having those things show up, like, on LinkedIn.
If done properly, these things can just show up in places, right?
Like LinkedIn.
Hey, why wouldn't you have, like, a donor profile on LinkedIn?
And, well, because LinkedIn doesn't want to build that around 50 different protocols.
Well, what if there was just like, all right, plug your NFTs in here.
Yeah.
And then one of the things, you know, that we started the conversation around was who owns the data, right?
And how do, how do you take that a step further then and say, okay, well, I am, I am picking different nonprofits or causes I care about.
I want to have a digital ownership record of my donations to all of this.
And I want to be able to see at the end of the year, because a lot of times we make donations that we don't really track, right?
And, and yes, you're supposed to get, you know, receipts from nonprofits that you give to and everything.
But a lot of donations are made to like your children's school or through, hey, do you want to give a dollar at the grocery store for XYZ?
Or, you know, someone's ringing a bell out in front of the supermarket and you want to put your dollar into that red bucket, whatever it is, right?
And how do you kind of, is there a way to start kind of bringing all of those different transactions into a single area and create a CRM record of myself for myself?
CRM record of myself.
That's interesting for myself.
Yeah, it's your digital wallet, right?
So your, your, your digital wallet does have all your transactions in it.
And in theory, like those are just transactions with, you know, contracts on a blockchain, but in theory that could have an output of something that's visual, like an NFT, or you can build, there are probably opportunities there to build applications on top of blockchain data.
That would be like, you know, that would be like, hey, aggregate anything that any transaction that's been made to a, a registered 501c3 wallet and visualize for people if they click, you know, click a button, filter it down to their wallet.
And that's, you know, that's an opportunity there to build something cool probably for some entrepreneur out there.
All those things are possible, you know, a lot of the things that we've built at Arcus.
Yes, not all of them, but some of them have been on top of what I would just consider web service APIs.
You know, it's not like we're doing solidity development or writing smart contracts.
We're, we're writing web service calls.
You just have to know kind of what some of the services are that are out there to do things you want to do.
Yeah, and actually, to that point, there, there aren't a lot of different software vendors out there that are doing like the rounding up or the digital donation options and so forth.
And, you know, I, I, I could see a future where someone might decide to start kind of creating that layer into layered integration, or as more and more organizations or companies start to take up the nonprofit, the blockchain technology, being able to create ways to read into those layers, work with the companies that are writing into those layers,
so that they can visually present, so that they can visually present because I can see branded opportunities for companies to kind of create social impact and be part of their corporate responsibility models.
Totally. And again, that's part of the reason why, you know, Arcus works with Salesforce is, you know, they have different products that plug and play right into their platform.
So you need to plug in a product that can help measure your ability as an organization to get to net zero, you know, so you could, you could plug that right, right in next to your NFT cloud and see what an impact your NFT sales are actually having on the environment, which is, you know, bringing a different level of accountability into the conversation.
You know, you know, but, you know, but, but beyond that, you know, it enables tons of different business processes around, around how different organizations operate, and, you know, back to the core principle where we started around just data interoperability, that's, you know, just the ability to connect to different experiences, and you bring your data with you to the conversation.
And I think that that's a real win for people to be able to just sort of come with their assets and plug and play into websites that are just going to work with them.
Whether that be, you know, whether that be, you know, whether that be, you know, you know, I see, you know, folks from CD, from CDFIs on here and plug and play, you know, lending protocols right into business processes, or just for fundraising, being able to plug it into different marketing campaigns and, and moves management.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're, we're about nine minutes out.
I want to open up the floor if anybody has questions we, we've talked a lot about a lot of different things.
I want to end it with, you know, one question for you, but I want to see if there's anyone who's listening who has any questions about some of the things we talked about, if there's just complete disagreement with anything we've said.
Again, that was all kind of speculating and thinking out loud.
So if anyone wants to come on stage, just raise your hand.
I'll add you, I'll give you privileges and we can walk through that.
Any questions?
My question to kind of end the conversation, and obviously, I mean, I can't believe 50 minutes went by already.
So what, what is the project that you are excited about that kind of taps into this conversation that you have kind of going on?
If you could talk about it.
Um, well, I think I, I touched on a little bit of that.
I'm pretty excited about that receding concept.
Um, I do think that there's a really cool, really interesting use case around nonprofits receding with using blockchain tech in NFTs and sending out proof of proof of anything,
but proof of donation using a token.
I'm, I, I think that that's so exciting for again, data interoperability being at the underpinning of something that I've been starting to call permissionless partnerships.
And what I mean by that is if I'm a brand or an organization or company or any entity out there, and I have the ability to entice a community to come and be interested in what I have to say.
And they connect with me and they bring their own stuff and then they're shown the unique experience.
I, I, you don't have to really ask permission to do that.
So if you were to want to partner up with a already existing community, you can just enable them to come to your website by telling them, Hey, there's an incentive for you guys, you community to come over here.
Because I'm speaking about the same things and I'm aligned with you and we have the same value system.
So why don't we talk?
And that's really difficult to do today.
I think I, I, I'm, I'm, I just have this feeling that the ability to tap in without really making that official like partnership, right?
Having like a signed agreement to share is what makes this work.
I really dig that.
And of course you saved that for the end before we can really dig into that.
I know I have to leave you with that.
Well, I actually have a couple of great kind of takeaways that I jotted down.
Verifiable credentials, I think is something that a lot of folks are looking at for NFTs.
I know cities, governments, municipalities are kind of exploring the idea of can an NFT be recognized as a legal document, which would start to create a lot of opportunities for business models.
So I really dig that.
The other one that you said, and I really love this and I think it's something that we could have gotten into another 20 minute conversation around was one to one relationship at scale.
I, a long time ago, I was talking about membership and how to create membership engagement.
And one of the things I mentioned was that, you know, you can't really have a one size fits all unless you built it to fit all.
Right.
And so when you start thinking about this concept of a one to one relationship at scale, it, to me, it sounds like that concept of like, how do you create a, a personalized experience when you're trying to do it for everyone?
Well, you do it through this model that you're talking about.
Yeah.
Oh, and then the last thing, you know, as I said, you kind of threw it there at the end is permissionless partnerships that, that I think is a great way to encapsulate that concept.
And there's so much potential with that, I would, I would love to get into these three topics one day.
I'd be happy to oblige.
I don't know if there's anyone out there who had anything else that they kind of walked away with, but those are the three bullet points I'm definitely going to highlight when, you know, when I post the recording for this show.
Justin, I really want to thank you for coming on and just, you know, kind of just talking.
Yeah, I appreciate it. I didn't even know what to expect. And I, as I said, I had all these sound effects ready, but I didn't even.
I might, I can't believe I might have to get an iPhone.
You have to get an iPhone. Jeez.
You have to get an iPhone just for the soundboard, right?
Yeah.
So with that, I just want to remind everyone next week, we're going to have March of Dimes on and they're going to talk about their experiences with crypto and NFTs.
Obviously March of Dimes is a very large nonprofit and that should be very interesting.
They are the I've heard them speak before and the conversation should be quite interesting.
And then to close it out, I want to invite everyone to part everyone who's in the upland metaverse.
And if you're not in the upland metaverse and you want to just kind of support, I am posting different tidbits.
I've posted a discord link to one of the folks in the community who has been very engaged.
He helped us out with the, the Creedmoor Halloween race spectacular, a great guy.
His wife is great.
His wife is not winning the fight against cancer.
And so they're doing a big event and they're doing a lot of work to support him and his family that is, that is going to be left behind and come out and support it.
Wow.
Okay.
On that note, I hope everyone has a great day.
Thank you, everyone.
