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X Space: Fireside Chat with #FLOW Devs
Recorded: July 29, 2025 Duration: 1:17:30Space Recording
Short Summary
The Lifeflow hackathon has officially launched on the Fluxer platform, inviting developers to showcase innovative projects. The conversation highlights the significance of AI integration in blockchain applications, the success of NBA Top Shot on the Flow network, and the ongoing support from the Flow team through grants and partnerships.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. hey everyone
hello Hello. Hello.
Hi, I'm sorry.
Hi. Let's wait for five minutes more and then I guess flow team will also join. Thank you. Thank you. . Thank you. Thank you. you Hey everyone, so I guess we will be starting in 2 minutes.
Meanwhile, if anyone wants to introduce yourself, just raise your hand and I will make a speaker
so that we can start it.
Anyone over here? Thank you. Anshri you want to go ahead? Hello. Sorry, what were you saying? Yeah, you want to go
ahead with the introduction, please? Yeah, sure. Hello everyone. I am Anushree Mehta.
I am representing Fluxer and I am the Debrel of Fluxer and it's great to see all of you here so yeah that's about it
anuska you wanna go so i guess we should start okay so this is about us on lifeflow hackathon which we already made
live and it's already live on flexor platform
let me share the link and if you guys are building anything cool you wanted to showcase
in front of everyone and you wanted your things to be public and for everyone so just go for the
go for the space and find the link or you can directly go to the flexor.io website and find it over there as
well okay and if you are having more a ali my man is already here just wait hi ali just one second
Yeah. Hi, Ali. Ali, can you hear me?
yeah hi ali
I can hear you loud and clear, Kanesh. Can you hear me?
Yeah, loud and clear.
Nice.
So I was just explaining the rules and like, I was just explaining like what it is about, what's, you know, fireside, deaf chat, workflow development project,
it is about that.
So I guess you can, you know, more enlighten everyone.
So I guess Fred has also joined us.
So yeah, can you go ahead, please?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I wanna first off start by highlighting really
that I appreciate y'all making time to come here.
I know that it's probably near midnight just by listening to Kenish's voice.
So you guys are either like a cute night owls or real hustlers either way, like mad respect and appreciate you being here. I guess, like, do you guys have a list of prepared questions,
or should I just kind of talk overall about, like, the activation and the hackathon,
talk about flow, talk about background?
Like, what do you think would be best, Kenesh?
Okay, so for now, I have a few questions,
but I just wanted you to explain a little bit flow to the audience
so that we can go deeper while we ask questions.
So I guess that would be great.
Absolutely. Have you ever been in a flow state?
Have you ever gone with the flow?
No, I'm just chilling there.
So flow is a layer one blockchain.
It was created by the team behind CryptoKitties.
Can I get a react to anyone who's heard about CryptoKitties or knows about what CryptoKitties. Can I get a react to anyone who's heard about CryptoKitties
or knows about what CryptoKitties is? I guess most of you guys haven't been around like at the
kind of early like 2017-2018 cycle. It essentially, it was the first ever viral
blockchain application in history. And so what ends up happening was it was the first ever viral blockchain application in history.
And so what ends up happening was it was launched at a hackathon, very similar to this hackathon,
East Global Waterloo.
And you could think of it almost as a generative AI digital collectible game where you can get these cute unique art pieces of cats with unique
traits and characteristics and then you can put them together and breed them and they'll create
new ones and they all have like different levels of rarity and it ended up blowing up all of a
sudden you had thousands of people creating more and more of these NFTs of cats on chain. And people on the Ethereum network were like, what's going on? Where are these crazy cat people? All of a sudden, about one third of all transactions were happening with these cats.
And then gas prices 6X within about a month period. So like, all these people were like, why are people putting images of cats on chain? They didn't understand the power of cats. Just, just kidding. Long story short, like that was the
first viral app that ended up going out. And the team behind that were like, okay, we've discovered
a massive problem with scalability on Ethereum. And in fact, the entire ecosystem, that was kind
of the nexus point. That was, that like genesis moment where everyone realized like, oh my God, there's
scalability issues.
And so every L1, every alt chain, every L2 that you see nowadays in some way, shape or
form can trace its roots back to that realization around scalability then.
So the team ended up looking at like over 300 of the top white papers
and like brought top PhDs together to discuss like, okay, how do we build a scalable chain
to solve real problems by app developers or app developers? And Dieter Shirley, our chief architect
ended up proposing Flow. And he is, for those of you that don't know, the person who invented the word NFT.
He coined the term NFT and he was one of the three core contributors to the 721 standard.
So long story short, the first major app that was built on the Flow network was NBA Top Shot.
If you guys were kind of here in the last like major cycle,
it was the app that kind of kicked off the last bull run
and the NFT craze.
They're essentially digital collectibles
for key video moments in NBA history.
And all of a sudden people were like,
oh my God, this is super exciting.
Like Stephen Curry, my favorite person,
that slam dunk he did like when like,
like, I don't know, Brandt was over there. And this guy was over there. Like, that was such an
important memory in my childhood. I need to collect that. All of a sudden, millions of everyday
people started using this Web3 app without even realizing it was built on the blockchain. And that
got in like everyday normies, everyday people from every spectrum of life that were sports fans into Web3.
And so the whole thesis was like flow was created in a way that everyday consumers, everyday people could engage with the value propositions of blockchain without any of the challenges. Like if I, who's here? Aryan. If I was Aryan and I was inviting Kimanshu
to this Web3 game,
and Kimanshu ends up going like,
oh man, you know, my friend Aryan and Safi,
they're all recommending this game.
I'm super excited about this.
You end up going to this game,
but you don't know anything about Web3.
What's the first thing you're going to see
in the top right corner of your screen?
You're going to see this ubiquitous thing that says connect wallet and you're like
what the heck is that is that a sign-in is that authentication you click on that whoa all of a
sudden you're being prompted to install some funky plug-in on the chrome store you're like that's
kind of scammy but whatever i'll click on that all of a sudden you know you're going through an
installation process and you're given a series of different words that you have to like write down or note down and
memorize. And you're like, wait a minute, this is warning me that I have to not share this with
anyone or I could lose everything. I don't even have anything. I'm already terrified that I'm
going to get scanned and lose that. So all of a sudden, you know, you're nervous, you have to
save these words, but don't save them on the computer. I'm going to write them down, but then I could
forget the paper I write, whatever. I'll just write them down or I'll take a
screenshot and I'll ignore it. And then all of a sudden, what happens once you
actually get that wallet created and log into the app? All of a sudden you're
just kind of sitting there like, what the heck? Like I can't even do anything
because there's something called transactions and they require something
like this magical internet tax called gas.
What the heck is gas?
Then you chat GPT it and you're like, holy shizzle, I need to find a centralized exchange.
If you're in Canada, like I was based out of it for the longest time, like all the major banks will flag any crypto transaction.
So you have to get on a call for four hours with the fraud department. So you could imagine like whatever good user experiences, the average person
who's getting into web threes, like user experience is the opposite of what good
is it's like, you can't get worse than that.
Like user experience, you're typically thinking, how do I remove, like reduce
the number of clicks for a user to achieve what they want from five clicks to two
clicks here, it's like, how do I reduce that from two days to being able to instantly use the app?
So, like, the ability for everyday people to onboard into Web3 applications
has been a massive, massive barrier.
So how is it that millions of these people were able to get into NBA Top Shot and use them?
Well, really, from the ground up, we included protocol level account abstraction and protocol level primitive that make it so easy to do things like sponsor transactions without the need of standards like 4337 or 7702 at the transaction level itself. We make it so easy to do things like account abstraction so that you could have walletless onboarding
and have full spectrum ownership. So users, they could just log in with their emails.
They don't need privy.
They don't need any additional like platforms off the bat.
Like from the protocol level, they're able to make apps that are usable by
anyone where the users don't even have to know that gas exists.
And it's really easy for app developers to sponsor gas on flow because one flow equals about 20,000, 30,000 transactions.
So it's really cost effective and feasible.
Another very interesting thing is how the architecture was built on Flow.
And we were like, okay, you know, how do we achieve horizontal scalability without sharding?
Because millions of people are getting these like very big videos if I want to make a decentralized social network like scalability is going to be a
big challenge and so we ended up creating a very unique multi-role node architecture
I'm going to go just like lightly here because I don't want to like lose people with the jargon but
on most chains you'll have these nodes that are kind of doing everything they're they're working
with the exact same data on flow.
It almost uses the Ford assembly model.
If you're familiar with it, imagine like a car assembly line where like, just to oversimplify
you're in a car assembly line, you have one person putting together the tire and the
wheel and the chassis and the chairs.
How long will it take that one person to assemble the entire car versus having 10
people, one person just focuses on the wheels, one person just focuses on the chassis, one person
just focuses on like the windshields. It's a lot faster to produce that scale when you have these
hyper specialized roles. So on Flow, the node architecture is very unique in that there's
several different types of nodes, hyper-specialized on specific roles,
whether it's verification or so on and so forth.
So that kind of allowed scalability to the point
where millions of times more people
were using this app than CryptoKitties
and millions of times more data was used
because these are video clips
that are like stored on chain, right?
So what did that end up doing to the token price or throughput or like, or overall like
transactions on the network?
It didn't affect it pretty much at all.
So it kind of proved to people that you could scale to the level where a single app could
impact millions of people.
And when NBA Top Shot launched, it had more transactions than the entire Ethereum network
proving that, hey, there is a path forward for the entire ecosystem.
You could have a single app scale to the point of entire networks.
And that was super exciting for people.
After that, Ticketmaster, like NFL, Mattel ended up launching apps.
Lots of people don't know this, but Ticketmaster on Flow has about 100 million nfts if i'm not mistaken it's
one of the biggest nft platforms in the world and that comes as a surprise because most people that
watch the lion king or go to a play with ticketmaster don't even know that it integrates
with web3 because it's so seamless the end-to-end user experience so to say all of that is to
summarize that like we've become the consumer chain and
we're looking for consumer killer app. Awesome. So the thing is, like, I found so many students
wants to, you know, apply for the hackathon. They wanted mostly wanted to build through using AI and as we already know, Lightflow has an insane integration with AI
and since you guys are on hunt to find more consumer apps, what are the key features or
key learnings you have while you use AI to get a product in an MVP stage much faster than anyone can imagine. What is the key you use to make this
thing more faster? Absolutely. And great question, Kanish. So, I mean, AI has disrupted the entire
industry. Like I was talking, like we were invited to A16Z's like crypto cohort, and I was talking
to some of the stakeholders at A 16 Z crypto about how AI is
changing, how they invest in projects.
Even like crack labs this year, I was talking to them about like how AI has,
has integrated into like how they evaluate projects like ETH global, like
hackathon organizers, like AI at every way, shape and form has kind of disrupted
form has kind of disrupted how we create startups to how we create MVPs. Like investors now expect
how we create startups to how we create MVPs.
you to have like a fully working MVP in place before considering giving you like a pre-seed
check or a seed check because two years ago it was a lot more costly and a lot more effort.
At the hackathons that I've been going to easily 97% of the hackers are heavily relying on, on AI tools.
And at the last two hackathons that we hosted in person, at least one of the
winners was someone who had never programmed in their life before.
They didn't even know what GitHub was.
Like I was sitting down with him.
I'm like, what are you doing?
And he was literally going like, I don't know what GitHub is, but I'm just going
to put this all in a zip file and I'm going to drag and drop it here and treat it like Google Drive so that my friend could
access it. And I'm like, very interesting. These guys ended up getting first places or like winning
prizes at the last two hackathons, even though it was the first time they were pretty much coding
in general. And I'm starting to see a lot more of that. Stats show that there's about 30,000 developers, like blockchain developers out there.
Now there's billions of people that can speak like everyday human language and English or
everyday language is becoming the new best programming language. So the people that kind
of adapt to that and cater to that, I think are going to see massive massive results. On Flow specifically, there's a couple things that I'd recommend. We have, if you go to the developers.flow.com,
the Flow Developer Documentation, there is a section under Tutorials called AI and we have
like end-to-end guides for beginning developers on how to set up their development environment to maximize
AI assisted programming, whether you're using Cursor, whether you're using Cloud Code or
Windsurf or any of these like pretty big platforms. Now, if you're a developer that is also a student,
Windsurf has a student platform that can make your AI enabled programming pretty much free.
So like look at look for their student plans.
I think cursor might also I'm not entirely sure about cursor.
But as a student, you have access to a lot of these like things for free.
And just doing quick surveys like this, literally these tools turn what used to take three months of work into two days.
these tools turn what used to take three months of work into two days. If you're not onboarding
onto it, if you're not using it, like you're doing yourself a massive disservice in my opinion.
In terms of specifically, what were you saying, Kanesh?
Yeah, I was totally agreeing on this. Like if you're not using and leveraging the AI
and still sticking on the learning JavaScript and other things. That means you are letting behind from the world.
A hundred, a hundred percent.
And I'm starting to notice like a lot more platforms, whether they're
hackathon platforms, et cetera, offer like LLM credits to support their kind
of vibe coding hackers.
And I mean, here we call it vibe coding
because of like this famous meme by this music producer.
If you wanna Google it,
you could Google a vibe coding like video clip
and you'll see what I mean.
But like I do a hundred percent think it's the future.
Back in the day, like when I would code on Cursor,
I would look for all sorts of plugins
to make my programming a little bit easier.
Whether it's like even pre-defy, like making my code more pretty when I do control S.
I think in the next like half a year or so, people are going to be browsing for different MCP plugins,
specifically for programming languages like Solidity, but also to like make it easier to program,
like integrating with different APIs and platforms, et cetera.
So there's, there's the side of like using AI to become a better programmer and 100x your programming.
Everyone like should invest like at least a couple hours and getting up to date with the latest information.
And like change management is one of the hardest things.
Adopting new tools is one of the hardest things, but it is worth it.
As a minimal lift, if you're already using VS Studio,
literally think of Cursor as a skin on top of that.
It takes seconds to import all of your settings.
The UI is the exact same, but you could unlock a ridiculous amount of value.
The second part of that question is more, how is flow unique around AI agents?
And there's a lot of different cool things if you're planning to create AI agents or agentic systems.
So what are the two biggest problems that exist when it comes to AI agents?
Number one, it's liveness.
And number two, it's inference.
And number two, it's inference.
These are the biggest challenges or barriers that exist that prevent us from delegating more and more responsibility to these agents.
Now, Flow is extremely unique in that it offers things that solve both of them.
I'll give you an example.
Imagine that I create a Fluxor trading bot.
And this trading bot, essentially, I give it like $100,000 or 5Es or whatever have you.
And I wanted to trade meme coins or I wanted to trade on my behalf. I wanted to like look on
Twitter. I wanted to get alpha from different Discord and Telegram channels and make decisions,
give like trust scores based on different like people. If someone says like, hey, bro, like,
check out this meme coin. It's about to launch tomorrow. And then it ends up tanking, I give them like the agent gives them a less lower trust score. If someone ends up being right, they get a higher trust score. So it's doing all these different things with social stuff. It's trading on your behalf. It's actually doing the transactions. What happens? And like, again, in order to do those transactions, it's also managing the keys for the wallet, right?
What happens if I stop paying the DeepSeek or Claude
or Gemini or OpenAI LLM credits?
What happens if I disconnect my credit card?
That's a rhetorical question, I guess,
because everyone's muted,
but essentially those funds are pretty much like locked.
Like I can't really access them the agents
the agents kaput that's a massive risk like you can't guarantee liveness like how many times like when Studio Ghibli came out on chat GPT like how many
how many service interruptions did they end up facing right like everyone was like oh I gotta take a picture of my niece and put it in here.
And then, so what you end up facing is like, how could you create systems that you delegate massive responsibility, and you trust this agent to do stuff, especially with millions of dollars,
if there's always that risk that's super centralized that those funds could get blocked,
right? So on Flow, we have a very unique account model. And this has something that
we call account linking that you can't really find anywhere else. And you could super simplify
it and use an analogy. Think of it almost like Google Drive folders. You have a main
Google Drive folder that Cracked Labs, that Vivek, that Divanch have access to with read
and write access. And then you have a child account that himanshu and saki have access
to but the others don't right so you can essentially create child like nestled child
accounts that are owned by the parent account within a given app and you can have different
levels of control and access to the assets and funds within those accounts that are spread
between different users
using this unique account model. So hypothetically, if I have an agent with a million dollars
managing funds for 10 different people, each of those people can access the funds in that account,
even if the agent goes offline at any time and claw back the amount that they should have access
to, whether it's all of it or a portion of it. And there's another thing on flow called capabilities, which you could think of as
almost like AWS I am access controls, but at every level at the asset level on chain,
at the function level, at the contract level, this makes it super easy to specify
things like Ali has access to these NFTs or these meme coins or these tokens from 5am to 6pm or maybe like, I don't
know, Ali doesn't do any transactions whatsoever over two years, all of a sudden, his dependents
and his lawyer and his partner end up getting access to those assets. Like these capabilities
allow you to do very fine grained access controls, which are really, really, really cool. So that kind of
solves the problem of inference and the sort of liveness. And then the second problem is inference.
And what does inference mean in this situation? There's a famous example of AI agent that went
live. And this AI agent was trained with like the invariance that you're only allowed to accept money from other people, but you're never allowed to send money out.
And in order for people to interact with you, they have to send you some crypto beforehand.
And then so all of a sudden, what happens is a honeypot starts getting formed.
One person sends like a dollar to talk to it.
Another sends $2.
All of a sudden it's sitting on $10,000, $20,000, $30,000. The more money it was sitting on,
the more people, and I feel like I'm giving Alice ideas here, the more people got inspired to
interact with it and the more hype and incentivization that was there, right? And then
around $40,000 when it was sitting on, someone created a prompt and messaged it that was really intelligent and it tricked the agent to send him all the money it was sitting on, even though its invariance was that it was never allowed to do that.
So one fundamental challenge that we have with agents is they have limited context windows.
They're improving day by day, but they have limited context and inference windows, which makes it easy to trick them. They're improving day by day, but they have a limited context and inference
windows, which makes it easy to trick them. They're almost like children. So that's where
something like the capabilities that I mentioned come into play. You could create an agent on flow
that it will actually never send those funds because the capabilities prevent it from being
able to do so. But then it could always receive those funds or you can have safeguard it.
You could use capabilities to create safeguards
and safe rails that allow you to delegate
immense responsibility to agents
that you can't really do anywhere else.
So just to summarize, there's two different ways
that flow supports on the AI front.
One is creating next generation AI agents.
And the second one is just trying to give you guys
as much resources and tools as possible
to get up and running as AI-enabled developers.
And one thing that I'm personally trying to do more and more
is work with these large Googles of the world,
deep seeks, et cetera, to get more credits for our builders.
And if you go to the Flow Developer Docs,
you'll see under Ecosystems, there's a section for builder perks these are these are exclusive builder perks that give you
discounts or free access to things that developers find like really useful so check those out um it's
not there yet but i'm working towards trying to get more and more llm and ai specific perks for
builders think of it almost like the github like student perks plan uh plan
we are also building some kind of some sort of that similar thing for the builders as well
so that if they wanted the auditing thing they can do in our platform itself or in our partner
platform itself and the more like the most of most of the time what we saw as a developer and I guess you also face this thing.
Whenever we do the chat GPT, whenever we do cloud thing,
so at a certain point of time, it started to retard the codebase.
It made the codebase much more dirty than before.
They didn't listen to us what we wanted to command.
It generally happened with perplexity
it generally happened with v0 most of the time sometimes people find cursor is a just
because of this so how do you tackle these kind of situations because like uh there are so many
new developers are out there right they directly start you know they directly copy and paste and
just write a single line,
refactor this thing or refactor that thing. Done. And they expect a whole code to be renewed.
So what are the key factors which can be used by developers so that they can enhance their skills
and build their MVP really fast? So what is it? Yeah. 100%. and i do strongly believe that this relates a little bit more
to the problem of inference that we were talking about earlier right um so just to give an example
i log like i i start using cursor i'm working on a zombie apocalypse game simulation and then all of
a sudden i want to make a change to the front end. So I'm like,
you know what, I want you to change this heading or this hero image at the top. And then all of a
sudden, I have it on agentic mode. And then it deletes half of the front end. And it goes like,
here you go. And I'm like, wait a minute, wait, you've completely ruined it. Like, go back. And
it's like, oh, you're absolutely correct. Let me go back and change that. And then I'm like, wait
a minute, it's too small. Now, you're absolutely correct. Let go back and change that and then i'm like wait a minute it's too small now you're absolutely correct let me make that like smaller no wait wait the ux is
terrible now you're absolutely correct so let me let me start gaslighting yourself and go like
what's going on with this agent like this guy's just a yes man that's agreeing with everything but
changing things that i don't want it to change and you'll you'll notice that it's a lot easier
like to start a project from scratch as opposed to get it to actually fix things like after two days or three days of Vybe coding the same thing, which is why you see a lot of Vybe coded projects or AI created projects get created in a short amount of time because it loses that context and awareness.
So there's a couple of things that I would recommend as practical tips.
So there's a couple of things that I would recommend as practical tips.
One of the tips is learn about rules, learn about whether it's in cursor or
cloud code, I forget what the version cloud code is called, but learn about rules.
It's going to make the amount of hallucinations and inference mistakes
and context related mistakes go down tremendously.
And it's going to like level up your overall coding with those things.
So learn about rules, add as many rules as possible about what should happen,
what shouldn't happen, what your expectations are.
And then always before you start programming, like in a repo, one thing
that I recommend doing is literally having the LLM analyze all the code.
And like you give it specific examples before you even start
writing. So assume you're starting a project from scratch, what I'd always do is create an LLM.md
file or a context.md file. And I will write out the exact architecture. I will say, these are the
user journeys. This is what, like, these are the different portions of the app. Like there's this
component, there's this component, there's this screen and page, there's that page. We integrate with this backend. Like this is what
we're using for this. Like as a new user who is a employee, assume it's like an employee management
system. Like these are the workflows that I must be able to do as a manager. These are the workflows
that I must be able to do. And you could use AI to
help you like, like map out the entire architecture, entire like context of the different user journeys,
store that in the MD file and include that as like a core doc or context. Like whenever you're
programming that massively reduces crazy hallucinations from happening where it deletes half
of your stuff. Cause it's always reminded about how things should work when it forgets that context.
And then third thing, it's more practical set is I would recommend. find that, you know, you were five coding very good on the first day and then day
two or day three, it ends up making like massive mistakes that you're not able to
like easily fix by just like going back to a checkpoint, or it's not able to get a
certain important functionality worked.
Sometimes if you're not able to get it working after four or five, like tries
where it does 20, 30 calls, sometimes it's actually easier to start from the beginning than the end.
Again, it depends on the project.
It depends on how, how much, how far you've gotten it developed.
But that's something that I started implementing as well.
So those are the three things first, like rules, implement rules,
have a context file that you include, and then have like a heuristic for like
when it makes sense to like go back to the drawing
board and like remove your some cost fallacy mindset of like oh already i've already vibe
coded for half an hour or two hours this new project here like i don't want to start from
scratch etc does that does that make sense yeah that makes completely sense and you know what what I use I generally use three kind of AI
first chat GPT whenever I have any raw idea I just go for chat GPT make the PID out of it once
I have a PID with me I'll refine with some other thing then I'll put those thing into the cloud
and ask it to use a modular approach not the fully
functional not i don't want single file to give me all code i just wanted a nice clean repo with
modular code so that i can you know work upon it if i want it at any point of time and that makes
everyone believe like devanche is here you can verify this like he always be like sir how I can
achieve this thing sir how we can do this thing now he'll be like sir I am doing this thing so
if Devansh wants to talk he can literally explain how the experience is going smoother once you have
sure thing what you wanted in from your project then I can really understand that that those things right
this is okay and for the next question is very generic one for everyone how flow teams find
project is best consumer app or how flow team find this this this this gap is gonna work for
the future so how what is the selection criteria for the hackathon and,
you know, for grant thing? Just give me one second. 100%. I, like, just before I jump into
that, I wanted to agree with you, like, taking a modular development approach is essential. It's
essential to, like, not even working with the LLMs, but it's good practice in general.
Um, in terms of like how, like what we're looking for when we say like killer apps or consumer apps,
it's like that kind of question.
And I know it could be a little bit frustrating in vageness, but it's, there's a concept that investors, um, tend to like ask again and again, and accelerator programs, whether it's Techstars,
Y Combinator, et cetera. And the concept is product market fit. You're usually for an early
stage project, you're looking at product market fit and founder market fit. Founder market fit
essentially means are these the right people to build it? Do they have an unfair advantage?
Do they have the skills necessary, et cetera? Product more like is this the right product at the right
time for the right um pain point and so at an early stage you you figure this out through things like
usually customer discovery or maybe you've experienced the pain yourself and like those
tend to be the the strongest early stage um indicators and when i say customer discovery i
mean imagine that i'm building an app for um walking and I think like, oh, dog walking is a service or something cool.
I like I would actually go and talk to dog owners and like better understand their pains.
Like, oh, wait, so you have an important meeting, but your dog really needs to pee.
Like, what do you do? Like, so like and I start understanding, like, OK, these are the pains they face.
This is how I can potentially make a business around this or a software project that solves these things and those like the more people you talk to the
more you're probably able to drill into a pain that is is very real um now the way we define
product market fit like every other person will give a different answer why combinator likes using
the example of people,
like you have an overwhelming demand that it's hard to keep up
with all the people trying to use your app.
And I've seen that with CryptoKitties.
We've seen that with NBA Top Shot.
Like those are apps that when they were launched,
like millions of people were trying to use them.
And it was hard to like keep up with all that demand, right?
Like it sucks.
It's kind of like when you go
to your Chachi and you're going through the whole Rishya process and then you're like,
how do I know I'm going to love this person? Should I talk to this astrologer or whatever?
And it's like, oh, you know, when you know, it's like, that's not the ideal answer,
but when it comes to startups, like, you know, when you know, right. Um, that you have that
product market fit. Um, what I'm specifically looking for along with the team is, are you solving a pain
that's big enough that you, is it a real pain? Are you solving a pain that's big enough for a
large group of everyday people? And is it good for everyday people? I gave the analogy of the
barriers before, like, okay, this wallet is confusing. Like this other stuff is confusing.
Can your grandmother use it? Can your brother use it? Is it something that's super accessible?
And is it solving an actual pain? Is it using like blockchain in a way that actually makes
sense as opposed to like we're forcing blockchain, like we're just adding an achievement NFT for the
sake of having an achievement NFT into it, because we have to hit that checkbox? Or is it actually
solving a problem with human coordination that you could really only solve with blockchain?
That's the kind of thing that I like seeing
when it comes to killer apps.
Now, it might be useful to look at an example
in another industry.
We've had LLMs and GAM networks for decades.
It wasn't until ChatGPT came out
that it became accessible.
That technology became accessible by your grandmother.
Your grandmother could use it for cooking.
Your brother could use it to cheat on his homework.
I mean, your brother could use it to help him learn for his homework.
Your sister could use it for like her, her like drawing doodles.
Right. There's like, it had so many different applications that everyone
understood and it had product market fit in that.
Billions of people had already gotten
used to using chatbots, whether it's through Facebook, whether it's through
WhatsApp, whether it's through Snapchat, like the market was already ready to
use that kind of framework front end internet access was high, et cetera.
It was the right medium, the right time for solving a big problem for like
multiple big problems for multiple
groups of people how many people that are using chat gpt actually understand how the llm works
under the hood 99.9 don't right um how much jargon is used with chat gpt versus solving the real pain
for that user like they're not using create like like we we kind of have it in web3 where you know
a user comes and it's like man i totally have like zero knowledge proofs that are able to like abstract away.
Like we use a lot of jargon that everyday people don't really understand.
And it's super confusing.
And like, we're not really focused on the experience and the value propositions and the why we focus more on the how and the engineering and the features.
And we're in love with that, which when you're trying to like solve real problems for everyday people it's not an ideal approach so think about chat gpt and how
it was a consumer application it was an app that everyday people could use that solved real problems
for these people in a way that didn't harp on the technology didn't confuse the people but
the technology was essential in unlocking that value like That's a very good tangential example of what a killer app could look like.
Now, for the purpose of this, it could be anything.
It could be a game.
CryptoKitties was a killer app.
It was a game.
NBA Top Shot was digital collectibles.
So it was more related to NFTs.
It was an experience.
It could be related to DeFi.
It could be related to AI agents.
It could be an AI agent that you take a screenshot of your health insurance and it automatically uses an MCP with
Google Calendar and books out the next year, massage therapy, chiropractor, you're going on
a vacation, it cancels the next month. It could be any type of app that has that core blockchain
component. So it's a very broad
theme. Now, how do we, how do we judge you guys was the last part of the question.
I'm surprised I, like, I remember that because I kind of went on a bit of a tangent, but
the way that we kind of grade it is very similar to every hackathon. There's not a lot of divergence.
If you understand and you're able to reverse engineer the rubrics, it's not that hard to win hackathons.
Like I've won like first place in 14 hackathons.
Like if you understand exactly like how the process works, it's not that crazy.
The thing is a lot of people just like they get the first idea that comes to
their mind, they just start working on that.
There's about five different core categories that people tend to look at
when they're grading or in using their rubric to grade your submission.
They're looking at the technical ability.
Like, like, is there just one commit or was there a series of commits over the time?
Like if there's just one commit that tends to be a warning sign, especially if it's a hackathon,
it's looking for fresh projects that, Hey, maybe these guys just copied this from a past hackathon.
How is the UX and UI, the usability?
Am I able to like, you able to actually use the product?
Does it work?
Is it super sloppy and people won't be able to use it?
Adoption potential is another very, very big one.
Is this something that has adoption potential?
If I make an app that's killer, like an AI assistant
for the President of the United States,
and it's like my whole pitch is this is hugely impactful.
This AI agent for Mr. Trump is going to be able into the United States. And it's like my whole pitch is this, this is hugely impactful. This
AI agent for like, Mr. Trump is going to be able to make economic policy, immigration policy,
food policy, it's going to be able to take billions of data points. And it's going to be
able to assist him in making all these decisions. Like, okay, yeah, the impact could be big, but is
the adoption potential there? One key thing is you have to actually get Trump's buy-in to actually use that,
which is probably going to be impossible unless you're his son-in-law. So think about the adoption
potential in addition to the impact, in addition to the technical contribution, in addition to all
these things. And I mean, you could even look up online hackathon rubrics. Virtually every hackathon
will use variations of the exact same core rubrics.
And you should always kind of reverse engineer in your mindset when you're doing your pitch.
Am I hitting each of these things?
Am I showing how it has high like sustainability potential?
Am I showing how it has high adoption potential?
Am I showing that it makes technical sense?
Am I showing that like've thought about the end users
and the UI and UX is ideal?
Yeah, that's what you should be thinking of.
Got it.
My last question, like land after that,
I guess it's already late for everyone.
So my last question is,
like let's suppose there is a founder
who is coming to you
or coming to the flow ecosystem.
They had the raw idea. Okay, they don't have funding they don't have what is web3 or other things All she or he have just a raw idea
So how flow gonna help them to build and scale the application or they will just denied or ask them to build
You can you know find what developers pay by yourself.
So how is Flow ecosystem, Flow Foundation going to help them with those kind of founders
who don't know about Web3 but still wanted to build in Web3?
Absolutely great question. And one thing I want to highlight is a hackathon.
It's easy for us to attach our identity to a hackathon.
And it's like if we don't end up being one of the winners, we get pissed.
But a hackathon is a battle.
It's not the war.
Um, last month, like we helped founders in our ecosystem win over 420,000, like USD
in support and prizes and funding, et cetera.
And one of the winners that got over $60,000 last month,
he ended up losing,
like he ended up interacting with the flow team at ETH Prod
and we didn't give him any prize.
He didn't end up winning any prize there,
but he was diligent.
Like he had a different idea
that he really wanted to work on.
The reality of these hackathons
is there's a very finite number of rewards and he like he ended up getting a lot more funding than all the winners at like ethprog like combined
because he had this idea he had this passion he continued working on it and solving real problems
so the first thing that i want to highlight is that and this is general like like throughout
like all like different like foundations or ecosystems idea, like if you don't win a competition, don't take that as a massive loss.
There's more and more opportunities.
If you're passionate, if you have something that has a valid business model,
if you want it to be successful, like continue working on it.
And in the flow ecosystem, we have multiple different channels of support.
We always try to have an upcoming next activation to give you support.
We have an end to end funnel where we help.
So every member of our developer relations team has either started
in a startup that has gotten into one of the world's top accelerators.
They've exited a startup or they were a core founding
team member of a unicorn startup, Every single member of the team. So
like we understand end to end if you actually want to make a product like that goes beyond
a hackathon that actually solves real problems. If you have an idea and you need that validation,
like we're here to like help you strongman it. We're here to help you at that early stage,
figure out what the business model looks like. We're here to help you with the go to market etc so what ends up
happening is as a practical tool every single thursday morning which in india would be like
in the evening time um we have developer office hours you could find them i believe fluxor linked
to them before you could subscribe to that calendar and join and that's the perfect opportunity for
you to go and pitch your idea and get feedback from the dev rel as well as other builders in the ecosystem and opportunities.
If you need funding and support to like get to the next level, we have hackathons and activations like this, where you could build teams, have fun, explore the technologies and like get an MVP in place.
But then we also have regular grant programs through grant out that support you for hitting financial milestones over three months.
And these grant rounds repeat every single three months. So that's another
app that you can directly go down. And like Altcoin Daddy is one of the grantees who's on
the call right here. Now, in addition to that, we have something called the reward store. So first
time project founders tend to think about products.
Second time founders tend to think about distribution.
So, and it's become with ViveCoding, making it really easy to actually create software
distribution, getting your first users that are paying, et cetera, is becoming extremely
valuable.
So one thing that we've done is we've created this reward store that we funnel, like we
give points and rewards and quests
for you for the 50 million users across the ecosystem to like get funneled and experiment
and play around with your app and we've had hackathon winners um at past hackathons that
we featured on the store that have gotten hundreds within months hundreds of thousands of dollars like
um like funneled through their platforms.
Like there was one big project, BZ, that when they got listed, I don't remember the specifics,
but if I remember correctly, it was around like five to eight X, like increase in users and funds,
like by getting listed there. So we have multiple examples of actual hackers getting listed there and getting much more users.
And then in addition to that, we have
a BD team that's very early stage friendly. If you did want, not every hackathon project wants
to become a startup. And it's fine if you don't want it to become a startup. That's not the goal
of most hackathons. But if you did want additional support in that, if you got to a stage where
there's early signs of product market fit, maybe you have their first users, maybe you have a good business model, and you needed to raise a seed round,
like we'll help you with investor readiness, and also potentially help make warm intros
to different investors so that you could get to that next stage. And last but not least,
our marketing teams, like super active, like altcoin daddy could react if he agrees with this,
in terms of like retweeting, liking, supporting, like what you're building in public and the projects that you're contributing to.
So those are the main support areas I'd highlight.
Awesome.
So now I just wanted to open a mic for everyone if anyone wants any questions regarding this hackathon regarding flow regarding anything
you are building so we have 10 minutes so that or more if anyone wants to come raise your hand
i'll make the speaker and we can have one on one chat right here right now is anyone interested
I don't bite guys
i don't buy guys
and if not so
this is a good night for us
and good morning for you
I appreciate you guys all for coming
and I hope you have a great sleep
again like I know it's super late
there but like the fact that you guys
are all able to make it means the world.
And again, we're here to help you find your flow state.
We're here to help you go WTF.
We want to unleash your pagal or pagloo.
We want to make it real.
So whatever your crazy creativity is able to get funneled towards, let us know how we could amplify you.
Again, if you want to talk to us live, let us know how we could amplify you. Again, if you want to like
talk to us live, join us on Thursdays in the chats. Fluxor is also super active in responding.
If you have any additional questions, like, again, this is just the beginning of like your journey.
If you actually want to like take this to the next level, you want to do a start, if you want
to do a public good, you want to do a school project that like actually gets thousands of real users that you can put on your resume and try to like leverage for a
job at google or fang company like we're we're here to help you at any stage um get to the next level
so thank you awesome like uh i don't do have any questions uh just raise your hand yeah go ahead
any questions or just raise your hand yeah go ahead uh hello uh ali i just want to ask you one
thing about uh some i have actually doubt and some of my friends actually told me key you are like
the king of this industry or like the blockchain and you know a lot of things in this industry so
i just want to ask you yeah yeah actually you. All right.
So I just want to ask this thing, how did you feel today?
And how did you really actually reach at the stage of you have immersed knowledge in this
field?
And what do you want to just give us one piece of advice if we want to just start our journeys
in blockchain and Web3? can you just help in this
for me well by like i first of all i'm honored um i personally think that i'm probably the most
smooth-brained person in the room so i'm like kind of i see kanish is a mentor personally like that
he's the gigabrain in my mind um but in my in my advice, if you're starting out, um, if you're a student, you have a
superpower, like one thing, like I did my first internship slash co-op for a year at
SAP and I remember my first week on the job.
I talked like, I ended up talking to my manager and saying like, Hey, there's this
director and this, this person, this director came straight in from germany where sap was like founded and he was like the boss of my
boss of my boss of my boss my boss the highest person like in the office of like 2 000 people
and i told like the my my manager like hey you know i want to learn from like the the people that
are doing all this stuff i'm gonna make like a little bit of a like Earl Grey tech.
It's going to be like this tech blog.
And I want to pick up brains and understand their journeys and learn from them.
And my manager said like, oh, no, that guy, Garrett, who's at the top, like, don't bother him.
Like, he's super busy.
I've never even talked to him.
Like, like, like, there's no chance.
Like, instead, like talk to maybe a senior developer
or an intermediate or one of the junior developers
on the team and I recommend that.
Now I didn't tell her before that meeting and chat with her
that I'd already sent like a DM straight to this Garrett guy.
And I was like, oh shit.
So I kind of kept that quiet.
And within two minutes after that meeting,
I look at my computer and he immediately responds saying like, hello, I would love to get like a meeting with you. Here's my assistant, like, let's grab lunch. And then I was like, whoa. And I quickly realized like, oh my God, like no one wants to be the jerk that turns down a student asking for support and asking for help. And you have a crazy superpower where you could, you have a hundred times higher
likelihood of talking to like a lead or a director at like Google or at a startup or at a foundation
as a student, as opposed to like, if you're a lower level employee that was just starting out
there. So first thing I'd recommend is be brave. And like, even like what you did there, pushing
yourself out of your comfort zone, raising your hand hand talking in front of this group of people like that that in and of itself is a massive skill that will push
you into places that like you will grow tremendously um one axiom is that you don't grow without pain
there is there's a famous analogy of lobsters, like how do lobsters grow? They end up
like growing against their shell with their meat to the point where there's so much pain,
they have to go behind a rock and then they remove their skin and form new skin. But they don't
actually become two, three, four in size, unless they have pain that activates or acts as a
motivator for them to actually go and grow. So like, like pain, struggle, like stress,
stress is something that, you know, there's an axiomatic trade off between risk and reward,
the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward, especially now while you guys are students
or if you're early grads, like push yourself into as many uncomfortable positions as possible.
Don't be afraid to like literally like DM people and say like, Hey, I'm a student.
I'd love to pick your brains. Like let's chat. You're going to very likely get a mentor that
is going to make like so many opportunities in your life that you can't even imagine. And last
but not least, just being curious and having a give first mentality. Like, like don't, don't
have an extracting mentality. Always have like a give first mentality instead of like how, like, what can I gain from this? Always think about like what you could give. an extracting mentality always have like a gift first um mentality instead
of like how like what can i gain from this always think about like what you could give even if you're
talking to a mentor like think about like what you're learning with your peers or around that
you could share because like you are probably a different generation you probably have very
different insights and and learnings um yeah i completely agree on this yeah yeah i completely agree on this remember the first
meet we met at like thailand and i was super excited to just you know throughout whatever
i learned throughout years and just wanted to validate our idea and other things yeah all right
all right oh gm everybody I believe everyone can hear me.
Ali, how are you doing?
I'm doing good, brother.
How are you?
Awesome.
Awesome.
Working on my project.
All right.
So I've actually been seeing vlogs for a while now.
So I will see the things they are putting out.
So this is more like a question, but more like a way to encourage them, right?
They should keep
building what you're building because it's obviously going to make sense
someday right because I've actually seen some kind of brand that starts like
this and at the end of the day they become big brands so you can think of
Alchemy you can think of NodeR, plenty of them, right? So just bunch of students coming together to put amazing ideas together.
And at the end of the day, it's all making sense.
So I'll tell them the snorrel length, right?
You've said it all.
Don't think of what you gain from something, but always think of what you can give.
Always think of the impact you can make in an ecosystem,
how to actually make the ecosystem grow. So, and obviously the ecosystem is not going to forget you, right? And don't be
afraid to make mistakes. Don't be afraid to try multiple things, right? It's obviously going to
work. So, at myself, when I got on boarded to Float, I knew nothing about Cadence, right?
But while today, I'm fixing it up, like putting things together and amazing stuff.
So guys, I just believe if you guys cooperate, you work together, it's obviously going to make sense, right?
And if you need help with anything, everyone in the Float team is always there.
They are just one call away, I think everyone in the Flow team is always there. They are just one call away. I think the Flow team have that title, one call away,
and someone is actually going to pull you through,
like solve your problem for you.
It's not even going to take time.
Just say, you need this, and it will be done.
So if you guys also need help,
if there's something I can help with,
I will just help you guys make it happen.
So that was your stay.
And keep building.
Don't stop building.
I love that.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say, I 100% agree, Altcoin.
And I very much appreciate the kind words.
And I love the point you made about like just taking that initiative. And if the
serious things in life, like I mentioned, axiomatic trade off between risk and reward, like, like,
flux or like it even being created originally, like, that's a massive risk, like you're giving
up like a potential to get a really good nine to find job. But then like, imagine there's like,
a hot girl or guy that you're really into, like fear of rejection ends up being one of the biggest barriers, like to just going and asking them out.
Right. Like that fear, fear could be very debilitating and just embracing a mindset of like, you know what, asking is free.
Like they're going to take it as a compliment, even if it, if there is rejection, I'm going to start the startup.
I'm going to ask this person out. I'm going to like, like getting over that fear of rejection and fear of failure and just embracing it.
Like that's a Silicon Valley saying fail fast, just embrace it and just, just take that initiative.
And, and you'll be shocked at how much turns out great. Oh, I'll go in.
Oh, Altcoin?
Oh, Kenesh, I think Altcoin has the standout.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
I'm good.
I'm good.
I'm still here.
Okay, okay.
Any other questions?
I'm always here.
I'm always here.
No, no, there's no other question.
Honestly, you are always there. I don't know, man know man like you're in every time zone at every time that's real hustler sometimes i
wonder if you're just yeah i just room around like data movies that 100 okay so I guess we can leave. Thanks for time. Thanks Elcoin for having your science kind words.
I guess there's one more. Gurusagar wants to speak. And after that we can hop off from this space.
Gurusagar, I hope you get access.
excuse
so i had a doubt while reading the developer docs from flow i was looking that it is both
evm compatible as well as it supports cadence so what would you recommend
for like building a blockchain app we should go for solidity or like we? So great call out.
And I really appreciate you asking the question,
Gurdsagar.
So on Flow, we're one chain with two virtual machines
or two VMs.
One of them is EVM.
One of them is cadence.
Typically, like 95% of hackers I see
hack on the Solidity side because if they run into issues,
like usually people are familiar with Solidity
and then also like flows on the EVM side
supports everything you're used to,
whether it's MetaMath, whether it's Alchemy,
whether it's Hard Hat, whether it's Brownie,
whether it's like any IDE you use.
So it's like, it's identical to any,
if you go to any other EVM L1 or L2,
it's so easy to deploy within seconds.
And like, just go to the faucet, add funds, like start developing.
So if you're familiar with Solidity, hackathons tend to be a short amount of time.
I typically would recommend like going into like what you're familiar with and building it out on the EVM side.
And most of the reason for that is because like most people tend to be more familiar with it and it's like more streamlined for people.
Cadence, it's really exciting.
It unlocks a lot of value propositions and you could extend your EVM apps.
If you want to challenge yourself, I encourage you to explore it.
But there is a risk that like you could get stuck on certain things and not be sure like, you know, how to proceed.
Um, we're here to help and support and like guide you through it, but like, you'll probably
like online resources and even like LLMs because there's so much more information about solidity,
you're probably going to be able to like vibe code, like answers to questions that you run
like answers the questions that you run into on the EVM side a little bit easier.
into on the EVM side a little bit easier.
So it really is up to you. On the grading side of things, they're completely identical.
We don't give extra points for making a cadence project versus an EVM project. Do what works best
for you and do what works best for your goals. If you are interested in exploring new languages and
learning about the new frameworks and taking advantage of some of the functionalities that I talked about before, like capabilities or the account model, those are
more on the EV, those are more on the cadence side. But then there are some things that are
super cool that are on both, such as randomness. So on Flow, within one line of solidity, we have
on-chain randomness where you could get a random value. You could do that both on the EVM and
cadence side using
something called, like it's a pre-compiled solidity contract called the Cadence Arc.
And literally it takes a fraction of the time to use to get a VRF, like verifiable random function
value, as if you were using Chainlink or another platform and it's free. So like if you're making
a game or something else and you want to use that, you could use it on either. If you want to do more complicated things with agents,
you might want to investigate like Cadence. But again, to summarize, it's completely up to you.
We don't place a priority over one or the other and I would expect 95% of people to probably
develop on EVM and with Solidity, etc.
develop on EVM and with Solidity, etc.
But I personally like cadence a lot more.
Altcoin, do you have your hand up?
And for a lot of people that are learning
smart contract development for Scratch,
the feedback I've gotten is that cadence is a lot better.
But Altcoin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So for myself, I, I'll recommend Cadence, right?
No, because it's something I'm trying to get familiar with, but I always tell
people, um, if it's, if it's difficult, like if it is easy to, to get it, then
I don't think you might want to value it because solidity is something like you could wake up every morning
and you just jump into it. Bro, trust me.
Cadence have put me on my feet for the past
three months or two months there about, right? So trying to perfect
something. So it's not making me see programming
in a smart contract development in another level, right?
So I always tell people Cadence is a new solidity, but they don't know the reason why I say that.
Just that Cadence will always want you to do the right thing and make it perfect.
So to me, I recommend Cadence, but there is no priority over the other.
To me, I just feel we should have new age of smart contract developers that say something different, right?
So if I just say Cadence, what are you writing with?
I say Cadence and people be like, oh, what's Cadence?
I start telling them this is what Cadence is all about.
But if I just say, oh, I'm building this and it's solidity,
oh, people just know this is what you're building, right?
And this is the language.
Everybody knows what it is.
But a few people should just explore Cadence more.
That's just my thing.
100%. And like learning cadence like we're building more and more tools for you to extend your evm apps with cadence to unlock some really cool functionality but i do see we're two minutes
over time i already feel guilty about keeping y'all up so late so maybe this is a good time to end
have a great day guys bye bye all right guys thank you so much bye all right guys bye Thank you.
