Brian Flynn I Rabbithole Quests and The Future of Work | Pragma Waterloo

foreign [Music] our second demo for the day before we break into lunch is going to be me bringing on Brian from rabbit hole a lot of you have been in this space the last couple years and you've absolutely definitely have heard of what rabbit hole is but today we're going to talk about a new product that rabbit was launched and that is rabbit hole quests we can talk about what rabbit hole is doing to get more people into this space and how they're thinking about planning for getting even more millions of people to try out what's happening in all of our ecosystem so without further Ado please welcome Brian to demo rabbit requests how's everyone doing it's it's funny I uh I worked with Benny at uh Dapper Labs it's probably been you know 2018 2019 and uh all of the ideas we were talking about then kind of have come to life uh in the past five or six years which has been pretty crazy to see because it at the time it kind of felt like the spike dream um and so I'm just really excited for what's happening tokenbound accounts and you'll start to see in this demo some sort of parallels between how can we actually take tokenbound accounts this new primitive and actually start combining it with things that arabical's working on as well so I don't have a fancy presentation like Benny has but I will give you a demo of stuff that we've been working on behind the scenes uh we actually just launched a lot of this stuff um so a quick background on me I'm the founder of Rabbit Hole uh worked at openc worked at Dapper but overall the thing that we do the most is we help onboard people into the crypto space uh so Rabbit Hole started uh in in 2020 uh really the problem trying to solve the time is hey everyone is has tokens but really on buying and coinbase connect metallic was saying but no one actually uses this stuff how do we actually get people doing things on chain for the first time and so we came up with this concept of quests to go to do that and I will give you a demo what that actually looks like but before I do uh my favorite book is ready player one who here has read the book or watched the movie Ready Player One a lot of people here so a lot of a lot of what's inspired myself and the company is just taking a lot of those concepts of what really excites us about digital scavenger hunts and kind of brings it on chain because that's what actually makes blockchain possible so I'm going to run through a demo really quickly uh and there is a surprise for the audience as well if you want to play along as well so let's start I'm just going to sign in real quick all right so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start deploying a quest so this is actually a digital scavenger hunt where you're going to do an on-chain action across web 3 and able to actually earn tokens for completing that action so I'm going to select an action from a menu uh and then I'll kind of show you how this whole process works feel free to play along you'll wait to earn tokens in the process as well so I'm going to select our favorite which is uniswap suit the scavenger hunt here is you have to do a swap on uniswap I'm going to make this available to everyone and when I say everyone I mean anyone so lots of our users on the site right now are completing quests they'll be able to complete this Quest as well that I'll be put in here going to select an optimism so a lot of our users are in random countries across the world so a lot we have 60 different countries that our users are in uh so l2s really help us reach those users have a really diverse user base so we're going to have op tokens gonna have gonna have 2 000 op tokens for this Quest so we're going to do this live we're going to we're going to deploy 2000 op tokens we're going to give everyone 40 op tokens each for this scavenger hunt so 40 participants are able to complete this Quest so we're gonna we're gonna schedule this up and play right now don't start yet it won't work all right so um we're about to deploy the quest once the quest is deployed I'm going to sign this message all right hopefully it doesn't break first time we're doing a live demo all right give it a few more seconds there we go quests deployed successfully so we're gonna now go to the quest Details page here so we see the quest is live and now when we go to Rabbit Hole uh we actually see this Quest live right now so right now if you go to if you go to Rabbit Hole you'll be able to see this Quest and you'll be able to make a swap on use up an optimism and earn 40 op tokens if you do that swap on optimism so this is right now a race you could call us to do a scavenger hunt of sorts um so you're racing against our users in real time you actually want to earn this token Award right now um and so just for context here so this is actually a smart contract that was deployed on chain that holds those tokens and as users are able to complete each of these different on-chain actions they're able to receive each of these different token rewards so a lot of the time we're working on l2s you see a variety of different quests here as well so you can think of this page here as sort of your quest inbox so anyone can send and receive quests and just like how you can receive email uh only cert users may be eligible for certain quests depending on their on-chain behavior so the more transaction history you have the more assets you have the more that you actually get for these quests in itself so let's check in on the progress of some of these glass so it looks like if you don't have anyone who completed it yet but we will probably soon because there is a pretty hefty reward here but what you're able to see here is all the quests that have deployed on the quest protocol to date um and we and what's interesting is that lots of users are complete using this thing every single day so even in the past uh even in the past month we've had about 150 000 users come through the platform looks like the demo failed on me so I can show you that chart but we have a bunch of users coming through that are able to complete these quests and what we're really seeing across the board uh in in rabbit hole is lots of users come to the platform for the first time and are able to earn their first crypto because of l2s and what actually makes it possible to have low transaction fees and so we work a lot with protocols across the space to actually help them with their token distribution so the first Paces where they can actually deposit tokens to contract select the users that they want eligible and then they can brush it wide to a very wide user base as well so uh there we go so we 131 000 users have have completed a quest uh in the past month alone so I'm just really excited about what we had so far come here so let's check out the progress requests if anyone's completed here all right nice refreshing and looks like the site crash of people trying to access it so we did have a failed demo in the process but uh anyway I hope you guys are able to complete that quest uh on your own accord get that 40 op uh and just uh if you want to check out the site rabbit hole.gg or deploying quests every day we have Community University playing Quest we have protocols to playing quests it's a permissions protocol open to everyone using smart contracts across every evm Network so go check it out thank you awesome I feel like if you refresh a couple more times it'll eventually work it's probably a websockets thing but uh I wanna I wanna talk to you about a few more things around a lot of your inspiration around starting rabbit hole and especially when when you're gonna start in 2020 that was kind of the moment where everything was just beginning to heat up like D5 became a thing yeah everybody was trying to figure out what they can do with covet starting and uh and that's what really changed a lot of the game around how we think about this ecosystem yeah 2020 was that really pivotal year for the space because it was really the first time where people started doing different actions on chain mostly with D5 there was of course there were high yields that were bringing people to space but it was interesting because it was this first time where you had many people had their money on really on centralized exchanges now kind of discovering this entire unchain world of of D5 Primitives uh and the question we were trying to face at the time and talking to games just starting out was uh the protocol is like hey we we have uh we have these token token holders we're on centralized exchanges but nobody actually even knows we have a product actually everyone thinks we're a meme for the most cases they were just talking about it on Twitter and talking about the cash tag itself so how do we actually get people using these things and so uh you know a lot of a lot of experimentation in in the early days but we take a lot of inspiration from this drops concept it's actually very popular in the consumer world and video games too at video games too exactly uh and ready by one and so driving on inspiration from that we're actually able to create this funnels of attention to actually have users complete an action uh and receive reward in real time for doing it and and that drove a lot of activity to users actually interacting with these protocols for the first time so uh we're seeing really across the board is just this this really this gaming interest that's kind of translate across the board we're seeing this with token bound accounts and metaverse or things like quests that are really just driving lots of usage especially uh in in country especially in Asia across the board no that's amazing and one obvious thing here is that it clearly is working I mean I just saw everybody on their phones as you were demoing trying to be the first one of the 50 and somebody just claimed that's even better now uh it should be an Unchained transaction so you'll have to confirm that you'll have to make it on uh proof of receipt of quest completion uh try try a refreshing always a good thing is we can trace it is on chain yeah but speaking of that um well everything is on channel sports and and this is intentional one by Design uh what are some benefits of doing this and why did you choose to keep everything on chain yeah it's a great question so we we took out Progressive decentralization approach uh in in the early days uh we wouldn't be able just to move fast uh and actually moving things on chain it wasn't even until year two uh which got the benefits of having this thing just uh the product itself being more streamlined to having anyone be able to deposit a token into the contract rather than just a permission party in the first case is that that kind of opened up a new variety of use cases um but what's really interesting about Quest is that it may seem like just a game in the first cases but what we kind of look at it internally is really a social coordination tool right because you could have any action assigned to and with any token and you're able to drive mass amount of transactions a very short period of time so if you actually want to coordinate a large amount of users to go take an action you could you could do it very quickly with Quest so if that is kind of the key unlock that hasn't been possible before with crypto that says uh you've gave me 551 attacks yeah that's another way no uh that's actually super cool because effectively to me what you talked about is well people get to have others try it out but at least the way I understood this is like you're effectively giving people a really tight feedback loop to how do you improve the product if suddenly 10 000 people go to some site and they realize that these are the 500 most common complaints you've given that feedback to the developers to improve it and that's also either the intentional or a really good side effect yeah exactly right and and that's one of the most common use cases that we see all the time is protocols or developers that want to get feedback or want to have users even on test Nets as well because we support test stats um that want to describe usage get user feedback see how people are playing around with it it's a really good way just to incentivize usage kind of bootstrap that early user base to see if things are working or not what's kind of been the most technically challenging piece on kind of getting this going yeah the most technical the technical in part actually is able to verify these transactions have completed at scale right so of course so not the entire stack of rabbit hole is decentralized right now we still have this indexer this transaction indexer that is actually verifying of these transactions completed right now that is basically running on some server or basically having if some full node uh and the goal is to have everything decentralized across the board so that the protocol and and the platform and everything can run without rabbit holes uh control in in that aspect um and so the way that we actually get there is we're actually looking into Technologies like ZK proofs where you could actually start using uh ZK Starks actually verify that these things have been completed on chain um so there is that kind of the trade-off of hey do you actually want to have this additional verification on chain pay digital extra cost maybe sacrifice a little bit of latency uh but also probably have something more decentralized that anyone can use anyone can spin up at the same time so there's also some privacy for the user you kind of get limited exactly and that's a lot that's kind of the other side of this coin is you know you have lots of these users who are now able to earn and have a lot of their transaction history that's publicly available to everyone now what does that look like on the Privacy side as well when you're kind of getting targeted you know the analogy that a lot of people use uh with some of the request platform is kind of like it's kind of like advertising like it's more of a crypto native advertising tool where you're able to do targeting uh of people with these rewards itself which of course has its own set of problems in web 2 as the crypto industry likes to say distribution still matters that's right that's right so in the last two years what's kind of surprised you the most about the community in terms of how they've reacted yeah there's really been this explosion of use cases that we just really haven't expected so when you have something when you have a very simple primitive such as being able to have a token board that goes to any on-chain action as the actions start to expand uh you kind of see this new wave of use cases that we're impossible for as a very simple example uh sound XYZ which is an empty music platform that's that's getting a lot of popularity recently uh is using quests to incentivize so nft music artists are able to incentivize collectors to collect their music right and what that's able to do is now you're able to actually Target specific collectors to say Hey by you collecting my my new music nft uh you're actually taste making in that regard so it's you know do additional targeting on top of that so we're seeing a variety of those use cases happen across the space right now and so with every new action with every new protocol launching a new kind of use case emerges for a simple primitive like quests yeah so you've effectively given an advertising platform to anybody not just companies and that's right it heals really well that's right and and it's the I think one of the more interesting things is about that is when we started we were really working with protocols and most if we're Distributing their token then what's actually been the most surprisingly it's actually these creators and sort of the the issuers of these platform itself that find actually the biggest use cases because those are the ones that actually want to drive a lot of their Community engagement not just from the protocol side like the nft music artist on its own so uh that's been probably one of the biggest surprises I mean that's a pretty good side effect because you've discovered and unlocked an experience for a whole new audience that never yeah they would have a tool like this yeah that's totally right so people now have the ability to in a way effectively reach Mass audiences and and game if I or incentivize them different ways everything is on chain there's a social graph of all these things sounds to me that we're kind of creating a new feature of work here um fast forward three years from now what do you kind of think rabbit hole looks like or what you think will come the new Norm what's really interesting when you kind of break down what a quest is it's really just assigning a task to be done with some Financial incentive or some ownership incentive who never attached to it as well um and so and you don't even need to know someone's identity all you need to know are they able to do the task itself and because they have this on-chain resume or transaction history you know that they're capable uh this kind of unlocks entirely new way of just thinking about work to be done inside of these decentralized protocols and so that is kind of what this future may look like in five or ten years where you're not actually forming companies but when you're creating a new decentralized network or Community you're actually be able to recruit people by giving them token ownership for completing different on-chain tasks or doing transactions inside of that Network itself uh and maybe it is also token bound accounts or NPCs that are also being recruited inside of these decentralized Community three years those timelines overlap yeah I mean five or ten years definitely that's for sure well that's awesome too as you get to see that and it's great to see that hundreds of thousands of people have already used it and uh have basically onboarded themselves into not only just crypto but also a specific community that they're they're passionate about yeah no definitely really really excited about progress and I think with a lot of l2s really starting to ramp up now and transaction costs uh going even deeper we'll we'll probably even see an explosion of just a lot of a lot of users especially in Asia in South America uh in Africa really starting to use this technology as a way to get on ramp for the first time that's kind of what we're seeing right now across the board can't wait for that Brian thank you so much for for this amazing discussion thanks for having me can't wait for others to try out quests [Applause]