In case you're speaking, you're on mute.
How are things on your end?
We've been working hard for the new version.
And yeah, we're excited to showcase that to you and all the other people at UNS very soon.
Well, I'm a big fan of Parcel and I just in the short time that we've been working together, you've launched a lot of features and made the documentation and accounting kind of some of the most boring work.
You made it a little bit less painful.
And there's more coming your way.
So we're very excited to unveil all of that.
I think we can get started.
We have some members joining in, which is very cool.
Thank you so much, guys, for jumping on this Twitter space.
I want to start by introducing Alex.
He is an ENS steward and a delegate.
He works for ENS DAO, but he's also a founder of Nifty Chat and one other new company that we're very excited to talk about as well.
Alex, welcome to the space.
It's my pleasure to be here.
And I want to begin by talking about, you know, your experience starting with the space, Web3 space.
I would love to talk about that.
So I've been in Web3 for a while now.
It feels like I've been in Web3 for half of my career, even though that's objectively false.
But as everybody who's in crypto knows that things kind of move a little bit faster and a little bit more happens.
But my story starts back in 2021 where I bought Slobo.eth.
And it was kind of my light bulb moment of understanding crypto.
Before then, I only had like a financial exposure and I thought crypto was just about moving money around.
But when I bought Slobo.eth, I realized that this is the future and this is part of my identity and this could be a path to get rid of passwords and having to use all these password managers.
And the moment that I bought Slobo.eth, I got so excited that I went to OpenSea and I was going to degen into NFTs as people were doing back then.
And I noticed how my name ported with my identity.
So I logged into OpenSea and I saw Slobo.eth.
And the moment I saw that, I'm like, oh, this is how everything should be.
That way I can keep my package just to Slobo.eth.
And right away, I just wanted to chat from Slobo.eth.
And that's kind of how I started Nifty Chat because I wanted people to speak from their identity, which is Slobo.eth.eth.
And yeah, so I'll pause there and then the second part of the story I'll tell in a bit.
Yeah, I think you mentioned ENS there and for all the listeners who are new to the space and who don't recognize what ENS is and how big of a deal ENS is, would you like to explain to everyone what is ENS?
Yeah, ENS is the Ethereum name service and it is your global username.
It is kind of akin to DNS.
So, you know, back in the early 90s, if not 80s, everybody was going to different websites using IP addresses like 192, 168, things like that.
And that's not very user friendly.
So DNS was created to have things like Google.com and GoDaddy.com.
In Ethereum, there was a very similar problem that everybody was copying and pasting their addresses, their crypto addresses.
And it was, you know, A, you don't want to really be copying and pasting things.
You don't want to be typing in your numbers.
So ENS was created to, as they say, take the hard edges off Ethereum.
And that's actually the basis of the logo.
And now, instead of being 0x53421, blah, blah, blah, it becomes Slobo.e that resolves to that address.
But the moment people started doing that as a domain name, they also realized, hey, I can put additional information into ENS.
Like my Twitter profile is on my Slobo.e, my GitHub address is on my Slobo.e.
So when I log into other websites that are fully integrated with ENS, that information is pulled and I don't have to re-enter it.
So the very short of it is ENS takes the hard edges of Ethereum addresses and make it human readable.
And it is your global username.
And so, you know, like ENS, we realize that it's needed, it's badly needed in the space.
It's one of the core pillars of how we can get a lot of people to, you know, transact easily and be welcomed into the space very easily rather than showing hexadecimal characters to them.
And what we're more interested in is also about the formation of ENS DAO.
How did that came into being?
We know that it was ENS, the company that started it, and eventually it was handed over to ENS DAO.
Could you talk a little bit about the story of how that happened and how has the journey been so far for ENS DAO and yourself in it?
Yeah, so ENS started long before I came to the space.
So I will try to give a good history as I can, but keep in mind that I'm still fairly, you know, by the OGs, it's still fairly new.
So first of all, ENS was started by Nick Johnson, who's a true OG and, you know, a certified genius when it comes to Ethereum.
And he has lots of different things that he has contributed.
He was the founder of ENS, along with OFSA and a few other folks who were very early, like Makoto and Jeff Lau.
And they were working on ENS for years.
I'm almost like hesitant to give specific dates because I think it might have been 2017 was the time of the first auction.
And, you know, they were heads down programming, creating this value while the rest of us, or at least myself, we were in the Web2 world.
And then at some point, they thought that they wanted to fully decentralize ENS.
And the way they thought about it is they wanted to create a DAO.
And what that basically meant is they made the decision to hand over the treasury and control over many of the smart contracts to be controlled by the DAO.
And then for the DAO to be able to approve things, they dropped a governance token, which is more colloquially known as the airdrop that everybody is very excited about.
But that is the responsibility of all those holders to vote on major changes, major funding of, I should say, to vote on the changing of funds and the changing of contracts.
So, ultimately, the goal was to decentralize ENS by taking it away from the founder.
But, yeah, so that's kind of the beginning of it.
And I can also go through the various parties that are currently involved, because I think there is a little bit of confusion on who the people are, how the DAO interacts, what is the DAO.
So I would love to go through that as well.
That was probably my next question.
So what, so the way I would like to say is that the DAO doesn't do work.
And it's a mechanism to potentially give funding to working groups or to give funding to ENS labs.
So, and I just mentioned two different entities that are fairly important to the ENS protocol and ecosystem.
ENS labs is where the founder, Nick Johnson, and his team work there.
It is currently run by the executive director of ENS labs is Corey.
And they have a team of over a dozen people who are constantly working on the protocol, on the smart contracts.
They were the ones that were responsible for releasing the name wrapper.
They're the ones that were responsible for improving the name manager app, which is where most people register their names.
The DAO also funds or approves the funding to working groups.
And there are three working groups.
One is the ecosystem working group, which is the one that I am part of, which supports builders in the space that tries to grow and also holds weekly meetings to highlight all the interesting innovations that are happening in the space.
There's another working group called the public's good working group, which basically is meant to give back to the broader Ethereum community that's not directly related to Ethereum.
And part of that is when ENS got started, they got, I think, a half a million dollar grant from the EF to get ENS up and running.
And as a matter of paying it forward, that is the basis of why public goods working group exists to kind of pay forward those goodwill.
And the last working group is called Meta Governance.
Meta Governance has to do with all the operations of the other working groups.
And it also takes, it also does the work of like driving, like when there was an endowment to move the treasury to a third party manager, they were the ones that are kind of in control, all the things that are kind of around it.
So those are the various parties that involve, but I would love to hear questions in case something is unclear.
No, I think, I think a lot of it makes sense now, since you've explained it.
And, you know, the topic of this conversation, we kept it to the role of working groups in shaping a DAO.
And you basically alluded to that in your, you know, in your words.
And I want to get deeper into this, this working group structure that you have.
What, what was the idea behind forming working groups when ENS DAO, you know, came into being?
And how did you decide to structure it this way, having ecosystem, MetaGov, and public goods?
Why were these three the only working groups?
And, you know, did you talk about how many working groups would you, would you guys like to have at ENS DAO?
Or what's the optimal number?
How did you finalize the structure of the DAO as it is today?
Yeah, so again, I just want to say that I was actually not involved in the DAO, like, creation process.
I'm, I'm, I'm more a worker inside of the working groups than anything like that.
But I'll share what I know, which was initially, there were four working groups, because, and why, why do we have working groups?
Because the DAO, it votes on on-chain and off-chain activity that things happen.
If you had to vote on every single thing that happened, nothing would get done.
So, for example, I've given away, or the ecosystem group has given away several $10,000 grants to talented builders.
It would be really unproductive to put every one of those grants up to a DAO-wide vote.
Delegate attention is pretty, is a very scarce resource in the general marketplace.
So, the reason for these working groups to create it is that certain people, stewards, are elected to kind of act in the best interest of the ENS protocol that happens every six months.
There's three people per working group.
And then we get to make these kind of more on-the-ground operational decisions.
So, we're not straining the attention of, you asked, why are there these working groups versus some other ones?
Well, I think these three working groups kind of split pretty nicely.
You have, like, MediGov, which is basically operations, you know, and I'm going to put that in quotes.
You have Publix Goods, which is kind of everything that's just paying it forward.
And you have Ecosystem, which is the largest funded group that supports builders and the protocol.
And it's a pretty clear deal of separation between those.
At one point, we had a community working group.
But it made sense that the main thing that group did was hold IRL events.
And it just made sense that that wasn't worth having an entire group for.
So, now that's actually rolled into Ecosystem.
And for those that are going to be in Paris, for each CC, we're having an event that is sponsored by the Ecosystem Working Group and co-sponsored with ENS Labs as well.
Because we try to, you know, bring the community in IRL.
Now it all makes sense, the split of it and the structure of it.
I know you've been contributing to the ENS DAO for quite some time.
What, in terms of, you know, the pros and cons of forming a working group is, according to you?
You know, each working group, you know, has their own multisig.
And then the structure is such that you also have nested multisig, since this is one of the features that you guys use at Parcel as well.
And so, it's structured very differently from all the other DAOs that use Parcel or otherwise as well.
And what was the thought process behind having that structure as well?
And overall, like, what would you, like, what would you comment on the pros and cons of forming a working group in a DAO and then working towards achieving the goal?
Yeah, so there's quite a few questions.
I'll start with the structure of why, I don't remember off the top of my head, there might be something like eight multisigs within the ecosystem working group.
And one of the reasons for that is the stewards, such as myself, Limes.Eath, and 184.Eath, you know, we're here to allocate capital to initiatives that we believe the delegates and the delegates would support and that are good for ENS.
Because we all have other responsibilities, we can't necessarily be the ones that are executing on the work.
We're more like capital allocators.
Occasionally, we come in and we do contribute, you know, as in summarizing notes or holding weekly meetings.
But, you know, ultimately, we wouldn't really be able to scale our abilities if we had to do all the various pieces of work.
So, for example, we have a multisig that is dedicated to IRL events.
My job as the lead steward was to set a budget for the year or for a six-month period saying, like, hey, we as an ENS ecosystem could have a certain amount of money.
But I'm not even, like, in terms of managing the workflow of where the events is, how it's hosted, timing, all that kind of stuff, that is organized by other people.
And then they have the discretion to, you know, pay for those events where the stewards only get this higher level view.
So it's a way to kind of separate concerns and let other people become active members of contributing.
And that's really helpful from that perspective.
We also have a grants or, like, I think we have, like, a grants multisig where that money is meant to go for grants of builders or hackathons.
It kind of lets us designate a single individual or a few individuals that are going to actually be managing the workflow and can deal with the operations.
Because, as you may be aware of, we might have, I don't know, 100 transactions in a single term.
And if one individual was responsible for all of those, it would get pretty daunting and would become a pretty high lift from a work perspective to be able to keep track of all those things.
So that's why we kind of decentralize even the work by placing the responsibility on other people and giving them multisigs to manage.
Most of the time, there's a little bit of oversight of either me being on that multisig as well or the DAO secretary, which is a different role, which is also Lyme's daddy, who is responsible for knowing where all that money is going and acting as the last line of defense for making sure that money is appropriated or that is being spent appropriately.
I think now that makes sense, having nested multisigs and the reason for it.
I guess my other question, which are basically, you know, coupled with the earlier question is, what are the pros and cons of actually forming a working group like this?
Because you have different nested multisigs inside.
I can understand the pros, like you can actually delegate it to someone and, you know, the processes could be faster.
Do you also foresee like any cons of using this structure or any other thing that you might want to highlight here?
Yeah, I'm going to quote that if you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
And that's ultimately the trade-offs between working as an individual and working as a team.
And this is the drawback.
There is more people involved.
And as you get more people involved, there's coordination.
There's miscommunication.
Well-meaning people come from different contexts, right?
We work in a global environment.
And like I was born in the Soviet Union.
I came to America when I was a kid.
And I have a very interesting – you know, I have kind of this like mixed heritage, if you will.
I work with people from other parts of the world who have a very different culture.
But we're all here communicating and, you know, as I guess luck would have it oftentimes in English.
So – and miscommunications happen.
And the more of these multisigs you have and the more of these working groups you have where you have multiple people taking different roles and different responsibilities that are also not purely – it's not cut and drive.
It's not like the buck stops here with this one individual like you might have in a traditional company where you have a CEO.
And, you know, that individual is responsible for everything.
Here, there are slightly overlapping responsibilities.
And sometimes that's not perfectly efficient.
And I'll be the first to admit that.
But I think that's, you know, that's the work you have to do to get more involvement and to get a bigger amount of intellectual diversity inside the scope of the doubt.
So the drawback is inherent in the positive, which is more people, more problems, but better outcomes in the long run.
And so what I'm also curious to learn is do you see this evolving into the same thing going forward?
Do you think that the same processes will be followed a year, two years, three years from here in DAOs?
Or do you see another structure coming or another different way of executing things that can make DAOs more efficient?
Or my question is that are DAOs even actually aiming for efficiency at this point?
Yeah, so I have almost like a pet peeve on the word efficiency.
If you want to get from the roof to the first floor, you can jump off the building and that'll be very efficient, but it won't be very effective.
So I think what the DAOs and really any organization should be aiming for is to be effective.
And what does effectiveness mean?
It means doing the right things for ENS and growing.
So I'm pretty sure like the structure we have today won't be the structure that we have in two years.
And I think we're evolving, we're changing.
Like in the last year, we launched a small grants project that's been very successful, but some people find it a little bit challenging to participate in that project.
We'll probably be evolving how that works.
We have very intelligent people who are working in the MediGov working group, such as Fence, Catherine, and Nick.
And I think they're constantly thinking of how can we make the operations more effective?
And so I guarantee you there's going to be changes coming down the pipeline.
I don't know what they are.
I don't, in my role, I actually don't spend that much time thinking about the future structure.
My goal and the goal of the ecosystem is how can we improve the ecosystem from like boots on the ground perspective, which means like how do I get the right amount of money into the builder's hands so they can keep building?
How do I get builders more attention for their projects?
Because for anyone that's built in the audience or who's listening to this, getting attention of people to even criticize or critique or provide constructive criticism on your product is incredibly difficult.
And that's one of the things that is actually my personal joy, which is bringing these new builders who don't have an audience, who don't have a platform, and giving them other people who are going to be kind, who are going to be critiquing their product, and maybe even using their product.
As a builder of multiple products, such as Namestone, the attention of users is so critical.
And I think people maybe outside of the builder community don't appreciate how valuable attention of even one user or two users is.
And the ecosystem is fortunate enough to have a call where 30 people participate every week to listen about naming stuff.
And that is beautiful and amazing.
And yeah, I think that's God's work.
And you alluded to Namestone, and I saw this on Twitter that you founded Namestone recently.
I'm very curious to learn more about it.
Could you talk a little bit about what Namestone is and how that's complementary to ENS?
And what problem is it solving on top of ENS?
And as the price of ETH goes up and the block space gets filled up, gas goes up.
When GWE is 50 and the price of ETH is 1,900, it costs something like $30 to $40 to register a five-letter name.
And that might be okay for various parts of the Western world who are fortunate enough to have disposable income.
So I think that there are 8 billion people in the world, and there's no way 8 billion people can spend even $10 on a name.
What Namestone does, it provides the full functionality of ENS effectively for free.
And we basically use this technology called CCIP and wildcard resolution.
Well, it lets anyone claim a subdomain.
So the way this came about is I was working on NiftyChat, and we had a bunch of users come in.
We've had 13,000 people connect their wallets to NiftyChat and talk to one another.
But I realized that 70% of those users did not have an ENS name.
And I realized that that would not do.
I knew there was a way to give away these gasless subdomains.
So I ran this competition or contest where I gave away bob.nifty.e, so nfty.e.
And it was so popular that so many people claimed it, and they were so excited.
And other companies became excited as well.
And they said, like, hey, I want to offer gasless subdomains to my users.
And PoolTogether became a client.
Wasis, which is an NFT project, became a client.
And something like, you know, I'm going to just pitch Parcel directly on this call.
Like, maybe for the people who aren't in ENS, they might not have those names.
You want to give them a username within Parcel.
And now you have a gasless way to do that that's also brand safe.
Because people might change their jobs.
They might change their role.
You want to have a little bit more discretion and control over that.
And name stone is technology.
Just that makes that easy.
We're built on top of open source.
We're built on top of the value of ENS.
All our names are true ENS names.
But we just make it easy.
Because builders such as yourself and everybody knows, they can only focus on the thing that's their primary core.
And managing identities and managing usernames is usually not core to most businesses.
But if I can make it easy and nice for you, that's what name stone is.
And, you know, we also have an API so you can pragmatically integrate it into your own product and issue hundreds or even thousands of names.
And name stone already has, you know, wallet clients exploring us.
So they can basically provide the same value that CB that ID did, except spent without spending the millions of dollars to get there.
So, you know, I think we're going to need another call after this to understand more and, you know, explore it for integrating in Parcel as well.
And I want to talk about DAOs and your experience with token-weighted voting.
That's something, you know, that has the default way of actually how DAOs are functioning right now.
I know you contribute directly to a working group, but there is, you're also a delegate at ENS.
And so I'm wondering, how has your experience been, you know, apart from contributing directly to ENS DAO, but also seeing the token-weighted voting evolve and, you know, how participants participate?
And do you think, like, that's the best way to actually structure your DAO, like, right now or going forward?
Yeah, again, it's, like, I love these questions because it's not something that I think about day-to-day.
I think in many democratic countries, it's one person, one vote, whereas in, you know, ENS and other DAOs, it's one token, one vote.
And it tends to have a certain amount of concentration of power that occurs.
But in a way, I kind of think that's no different than what happens in American capitalism, where you have these things.
And for those that aren't in the U.S., you know, technically, you're not supposed to, you're limited how much money you can contribute to a specific politician at, like, $3,000 to $5,000.
But through certain court actions that happened over the last two decades, there's these things that have been created, which are these huge organizations that can funnel effectively an unlimited amount of money into various political parties and political representatives.
So despite America being one person, one vote, in actuality, it's really $1 one vote, which is very similar to what's effectively happening in the DAO ecosystem.
The only difference is, whereas, you know, democracy tends to pretend that, you know, it is one person, one vote.
Here, we kind of understand that this is token, and then many DAOs actually try to distribute the power.
Like, I'm looking at votingpower.xyz here for E&S, and what I like to see is that there's at least 10 people who have over 100,000, actually, yeah, there's almost 15 people who have over 100,000 delegated votes in E&S.
All those different people, they have different motivations, they have different interests, and I think that's more spread out than some of the other DAOs that I'm aware of, and I don't want to mention them by name because I don't want to accidentally shame them, but I think from a power distribution perspective, there's actually quite a bit of separation that happens in the E&S DAO more so than others.
I think through Free Delegation Week that Tally runs that I think Uniswap kind of supports and other people in the ecosystem, people continue to try to get other people to engage, but ultimately, there's only so much interest from the average person about naming things.
You and I might be very passionate about E&S and DAO and the future of naming things, but most people aren't, or maybe they're just interested in Uniswap or PoolTogether or Gitcoin, and quite frankly, I don't blame them.
But the fact that Web3 is such a small community from a global scale perspective, and yet every single protocol has dozens of people who actually keep up with the proposals who vote, even if they're not necessarily happy to vote, that's something that is truly beautiful about Web3 that I think is pretty exciting.
Yeah, 100%, and people have been talking about other ways of actually conducting a DAO.
I'm not sure if you've heard of them, like, you know, there could be two tokens, where people don't actually speculate, where people don't have the ability to, you know, basically overtake the power of token-weighted voting, like by just buying the tokens itself.
Like, it's a very simple way of actually hijacking a DAO, ENS is too big, so probably, you know, it's a lot safer, but for smaller DAOs, like it could be a lot of trouble, and we've seen examples of that happen, I'm forgetting the names, but that has happened previously.
What I'm trying to come to, is that, do you think that's going to be okay for ENS to actually continue with this model, or has there even been talks of exploring another model of running the DAO?
I'm sure there's been talks about other models, but I think it's sort of, I'm personally not aware, I'm not aware of those conversations, and I think the question is like, you know, Winston Churchill has this often quoted line of, democracy is the worst form of government, except all other ones we've tried.
I think something very similar can be said about token-weighted voting, it's the worst way to do it, except all the other ways, because you expose, like, there's no silver bullet, there's no Goldilocks solution, because the moment you try to change it, you expose yourself to other problems, right?
If you try to make it so it's one wallet, one load, you get Sybil attacked, right? And then all you're really doing is letting, like, shadow power come into it.
Now, there might be a balance of how to improve things, and I'm not a naysayer, but I'm saying is that any change will actually create potential issues as well, because there aren't, I am not aware of, and if you are, of any perfectly Sybil-resistant mechanism,
that kind of works out there. So people who want it, and I also think that despite a minority of people who are clamoring, I think the number of people who actually care is so little, that you need a few people who have the expertise and the dedication to be making decisions at the highest level, and for now, we've been fortunate enough that that tends to be correlated with the people who have the voting power.
So, and keep in mind, the voting power, you don't need to buy these tokens, you can get other people to delegate them to you.
Like, I personally only own, you know, like, I don't own that many ENS, but I have 50,000 votes delegated to me, and that's where I, you know, which is more than, that's materially more than what I own.
So I think the delegation process is interesting. One thing that I would love to see, which I don't know if it's possible, if we're talking about innovation, I would love for people to be able to re-delegate their votes once votes have been delegated.
Because some people might be really active in the community at one point, but then life gets in the way, and we want to be able to re-delegate those votes from that individual, and to do that in a way that doesn't cause an unnecessary burden.
I think that's probably the frontier. Some kind of liquid delegation, I'm kind of making words up, would be great, but in a way to balance the attention that that would be required.
And that might be useful going forward, but I don't think it's really possible retrospectively. So it's just, you know, the world we have is the world we have to work through.
And the question becomes, you know, which trade-ups do we want to make with alternative voting structures in the future?
Yeah, that's an interesting point about re-delegation. I think I met, I saw Linda from Scalar Capital mention it as well on Twitter.
I think she's been a delegate at Optimism and Gitcoin, and, you know, things come your way in life and you want to change things.
I think re-delegation is probably a very interesting point.
And so I think you also mentioned NiftyChat, and I want to bring that into this conversation as well.
I know you've been working on that for quite some time, and I think you mentioned there are 13,000 connected wallets that have used NiftyChat.
That's huge numbers. Could you talk about what NiftyChat is and how that also correlates with the DNS?
Absolutely. So NiftyChat was started because there was no good place to chat from your wallet identity.
There was no place I can have a community from slovo.e.
That's what NiftyChat is. You log in with your wallet.
We know all your on-chain activity, and we can create native gating.
We can create gating based on POAPs or Polygon NFTs or even the amount of ERC-20 tokens that you hold.
I think during the hype of the bull market, there was a lot of people.
There was so much attention, and people needed mechanism to filter through it.
That's why gating became so popular.
Nowadays, attention has become a little bit more scarce.
I think these things kind of go through hype cycles, and I think gating and all that kind of stuff will come back.
And it's very nice that there's a place that anyone can come, anyone can create a community,
and anyone can gate it in whatever mechanism that they want.
And the other thing that's kind of cool about NiftyChat is we integrate Web3 deeply.
So if you're using us on a desktop browser and you drop a link to OpenSea,
you can automatically transact and buy that NFT.
And I think integrated commerce is going to be the future of Web3.
Now, is that going to take three months to get here or three years?
But I think the fact is one thing that makes me really bullish on integrated commerce is the fact that in other countries,
WeChat has all the financial stuff integrated, and you can transact very seamlessly.
And the experience that Americans get or people from the United States get on WeChat product is very different than the experience you get when you're actually in China.
And I think there's an opportunity for crypto to make the user experience of connecting the social to the wallet and letting you consume when you want to consume.
And as more consumption comes on chain or becomes more fully, yeah, I guess on chain, the more valuable that integrated commerce will become.
So, yeah, I encourage everybody to try it.
And if you don't have a username, head on over to Namestone, find a way to get one for yourself,
and then right away you'll be able to log in and participate with an ENS name.
And if you really don't have one and you can't find one, I'm still able to give away .nifty usernames on ENS.
Just message slobo.eth because we have direct messaging.
You can message any wallet on the blockchain.
They may not check it, but I definitely will.
So just send me a message to slobo.eth.
And if you don't have a username, I will be able to provide you with the ability to claim a .nifty, powered by Namestone, of course.
I was just, you know, while you were talking, I was just thinking how underrated the composability of ENS is
and how hugely that could affect how people interact in Web3, right?
And in Web3, you have a lot of siloed system, right?
You have login with Google, Facebook, all this stuff.
But if you are in Web3, you just, all you need is an ENS, right?
And it will basically unlock everything for you, your bank account, your social profiles and everything.
So what, can you hear me, Alex?
Yeah, so I'm also curious to learn about how do you see the future of ENS from here?
Like, in your perspective, how do you see ENS evolving from what it is right now?
And, you know, there has to be a lot of builders building on ENS and integrating it directly.
And I think Namestone is one of the great things that I heard on this conversation that could probably, you know, help us in reaching mainstream adoption as well.
How do you see it evolving in the next five years, ENS?
And then what are some of the things that you think should be possible for us in this industry to be able to achieve via ENS?
Yeah, so I think the evolution of ENS is that different companies are going to attack the fact that ENS is extremely valuable, but not everyone has money.
And we have to move some of the functionality to L2s or L3s or off-chain so everybody can have an ENS name.
So I think a lot of the work that's being done at the ENS core team is focused on layer twos.
We recently had a contributor, DM3, build a L2 resolver.
So the work is being done.
And to make ENS cheaper, because ultimately ENS has solved the value proposition problem.
Almost anyone understands that it's worth something.
The question is, how do we make this value easier to capture?
And I think Namestone is actually a company that exists right now because of, like, the gap between, like, if ENS was on layer twos or layer threes, there would be less value proposition today for Namestone.
However, I suspect that even in the future, I can be the training wheels for people who want to have trustless subdomains, but they're going to issue them through something like Namestone.
Once they know that those are the correct parameters, like, you know, like, once it's, like, brand safe and none other words, you can then port that over to a fully trustless solution, hopefully on layer two.
And me being part of ENS is something that I would love to facilitate people kind of graduating up to the correct amount of trustlessness that they need, right?
Because trustlessness is not free, and not everybody needs 100% of it.
Sometimes you just need a little bit to pieces.
So the future of ENS is getting L2 support, getting more functionality, more integrations on where the profile is taken.
I think there are so many interesting companies that can be unlocked if people realize that when I say global username, it's actually much more than that.
It's basically an arbitrary data store that developers can build on top of.
And I have this dream that one day, maybe in five, ten years, I go to a website, and I want to buy, you know, jeans, like a physical product.
All my private data is stored on my name, but it's somehow encrypted.
I connect, and I never have to put in my address.
But I temporarily allow that particular website to have access to my address so I can instantly check out, pay in a stable coin, because everybody's going to be holding yeat.
And then get my product, and that way I never have to fill out any other form again.
I put all the relevant information into my ENS little bucket, and then I go about my world, and I don't need to manage passwords.
And if I have a business account, I just swap, and now I have a different identity, and then I communicate with my business profile, and I have ability to email or communicate with other people through, like, innovative projects, like MailChain.com.
I don't know if you're familiar with it.
And more and more things are going to get built.
So to reiterate, the future is, or what I hope the future is, it's all L2-focused, but the ultimate goal is that we know ENS has value.
How do we make it affordable for 8 billion people to have 10 names apiece?
So, like, I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but that's the vision for which I think, you know, if you're really thinking long-term, is how do you have 80 billion names?
And once you structure it like that, it becomes very obvious that the only way you're going to get 80 billion names or 80 billion things named is that you're going to have components of trustfulness and components of off-chain solutions like NameChain.
And it's, like, sorry, like NameStone, that's going to have different components addressing different market segments.
But, yeah, so that's what I'm excited about.
I think L2 support is, you know, in the works, and I think you guys will actually see more information of that coming out shortly.
There was a really good town hall where a lot of that information has been teased.
I purposely keep this kind of high level because it's very easy for me to say the wrong thing and make a mistake.
So I definitely encourage everyone to watch the town hall where Nick talks about L2s, and I know there's more information coming in the coming months.
I think I clearly see the picture as well.
It is ambitious, but I think it's quite possible the way that the ENS community is going forward.
Clearly, Alex, you're passionate about ENS and how that's going to evolve and take the space forward.
One of the questions that I ask everybody in this Twitter space is, apart from ENS, which is the second community that you're most excited about, that you follow, that you participate probably in, and why?
Well, my answer is nothing else because ultimately I am so into ENS and Namestone and my other projects that almost the only other one that I kind of kept an eye on, but I can't say I participate in.
I'm very curious about the evolution of optimism.
I try to, whenever I need a layer or two, I tend to focus on optimism, so I'm a fan.
If I had more time, optimism is where I'd be focusing more of my attention on.
Actually, that's not true.
The other community that I follow is POAPS.
I'm a big fan of what they're doing and that kind of fun aspect, again, a non-financial element.
I have all these interests, but in terms of heavy participation between the businesses that I run and my contributions to ENS, I like to cook.
So I don't really have any other communities besides what I just mentioned because I just, you know, I'm a big fan of focus.
I know you have two projects besides ENS to contribute, so totally understand that.
And, you know, it's been kind of you to come here, Alex, and speak to us about ENS and everything.
For all of us, our listeners who are wanting to learn more about Nifty Chat and Namestone, how can they possibly reach out to you?
Yeah, so my Twitter DMs are always open.
I'm super slowbo on Telegram.
It's also in my ENS profile name.
I highly encourage everyone to go to Namestone.xyz and see if this is the right solution for you.
Also, Nifty Chat is free to use for everyone, and it's nftychat.xyz.
Go in, connect your wallet, say hi, create your own community, invite your friends, and talk from your own wallet without ever having to share your email or any other kind of identifiable information.
It's a great platform, and I'm very proud of both those products.
And last but not least, I host weekly ecosystem calls that happen at noon Eastern time every Thursday, which is happening in 10 minutes.
I encourage those folks, if they want to learn more about ENS and what's happening in the builder community of ENS, to go there and join that as well.
So, yeah, follow me on Twitter.
Follow NamestoneHQ on Twitter.
Someone unfortunately had Namestone, if only there was a one global user namespace.
But, yeah, that's the best way to reach me, and it's been a pleasure being here.
Well, thank you so much, Alex, for joining this space, and thanks for sharing all that you did.
It's been an absolute pleasure to have you here, and we'll be looking forward to ENS, Nifty Chat, and Namestone.
Best of luck for all of that, and best of luck for your next call.
We'll give you 10 minutes back.
Thank you, and I appreciate your product, and I think it's great.
So thank you for these spaces as well.