Fireside Chat with Roham Gharegozlou, Dapper Labs, and Kartik Talwar, ETHGlobal I Pragma Sydney 2024

[Music] the next interview is some person I'm super excited to welcome on stage this is a talk I'm personally excited for because we're going to talk about all the things that have been finally accumulating in the background and we're kind of feel like we're at the right point where you can see another explosion and what we're going to talk about is how far are we on getting more consumer apps to the space and for this interview I'd like to bring on roham who is the founder of dapper Labs you may know Dapper Labs from all the amazing projects like crypto kitties or NBA Top Shot and everything in between and now recently the Disney Pinnacle and we're going to talk about what the world has been looking forward to on how do we get more and more people to play with blockchains so please join me in welcoming r on [Applause] stage thanks thank you beig care you and I have a have a very long history of uh of overlapping and uh doing a lot of things in this space but I feel like I still have to bring this up every time because I don't think more new people know this I personally believe with enough evidence that roham is the person responsible for the main ification of nfts they made what nfts are just one possible as a standard contributing to that helping invent that but also really kind of showing people the cool things you can do and how you can make blockchain playful and not just finance and uh the kind of first question I want to ask you is how has that evolution been uh you kind of started off by building crypto kitties on ethereum we kind of saw a bunch of bottlenecks that sort of got you into a whole new path on inventing a handful of new things to solve those issues uh give us a a kind of quick history of the last seven years yeah seven years dating myself and and first of all I mean thank you for having me I I always love being at ethereum events because I truly believe ethereum is the most interesting community in technology right now and I think that includes chat gbt and so you know the value that we're sort of transferring and creating here is is uh is absolutely incredible and and doing it in an open way so really excited to be here you know the before I answer your question I want to tell a little story because it kind of broke my heart a little bit so I as first time in Australia um I'm going through customs they they select me for one of these totally random uh checks and and as a lady's kind of going through my stuff she asked me what I do for work and I ask her uh have you heard of nfts and she kind of looks at me and and and you know she smiles so that's good but her answer kind of broke my heart because she said oh yeah nft is those things you buy and sell and as you know you know we've always been about well there's it's not just about the buying and selling it's the ownership experience is why you would have them in the first place why you would hold them what you can build on top of them and in fact you know for me nfts are just stuff digital stuff and and a lot of times you buy and sell stuff but often you you don't necessarily um and so for for us you know the the most interesting things that um I think happen in um nfts are divided in you know both digital things that happen in digital worlds and we started that with crypto kitties because you know the the initial purpose of a cat was just sayy pass on its digital genes to its next Generation Um but I think so much is happening today with digital things and physical worlds and you know the the concept of an NBA Top Shot or or a uh even a pfp or or an asset that you have is about showing your identity to everyone not just uh um the people that that are sort of in that community so um for us it's been a journey of not just kind of increased utility but increased reach and trying to figure out how we can take this this technology and make it something that people can interact with Beyond just buying and selling um and actually make it something that's part of part of everyday life after crypto K is kind of launched the the media famously Ted that we've cloged the blockchain and this is never going to work and we kind of obviously saw a bunch of obvious uh problems that sort of got us more and more motivated to the scaling path but you kind of separately went ahead and implemented your own solution which was the flow blockchain what was kind of the goal and motivation back then for creating flow and uh kind of how or I guess what does the flow e system look like right now and how's how has it evolved yeah so flow uh flow.com I mean the motivation was twofold it's not just the scalability issue but in a lot of ways it was user experience and you as know we were Dapper was a big builder in ethereum for you know the first sort of two years after crypto kitties we built the first uh consumer smart contract wallet it was the first wallet to pay for gas on user behalf first wallet to do credit card integration first wallet to do key recovery um and it wasn't it by the time we got that MBA deal which was you know mid 2019 we just didn't feel that that was enough it was still too complicated it was still too much friction and and it wasn't something we felt we could you know introduce the mainstream audience to and that that the Genesis of flow.com was effectively that the protocol needs to do a lot more work on behalf of the developer and make a lot of things that are now actually part of the ethereum space with uh account abstraction and and other elements a native part of the protocol so you get uh Native protocol level cter abstraction you get a new programming language that makes it really easy to play around with uh new use cases for uh smart contracts and and and new use cases for crypto um but at the same same time we kind of over we overcorrected and and in a lot of ways um the the being so different um blocked a lot of adoption made it really difficult for um external developers to build on Flow and so the folks that ended up being most successful on Flow were sort of bigger companies like Dapper but also Ticket Master Mattel um you know startups that have raised a fair amount of capital like Genies or or or others um and I think what we're doing this year and I'm so excited to be part of the ethereum sort of community again is is the new um uh flow upgrade basically makes flow um lowers the barrier to entry and makes it makes everything we've built available to ethereum developers and makes it so that builders on floor are not leaving ethereum behind but everything they're creating is actually fully compatible with the etherium landscape um so I'm excited to talk about that but um maybe one quick thing you introduced me as COO of dapper which is the role I'm here um in um I say we because flow is the Dapper is the biggest builder of flow the original creator of Flo um but Flo is a completely independent U Foundation entity team board of directors and um and separately funded now which is also part of that exciting element of actually being formerly part of the community so we've got some folks from Full Foundation here we've got some FL from Dapper here so folks on Flow Community here flow verse Etc um and it's all it's all really exciting and I mean it's also a growing Evolution too because you had to make the first bet and be your first customer and then overall over time you you saw a lot of people use it and actually that became a big Community we what you kind of said was super interesting you kind of started off the the intro with saying that this is the most e interesting Community out here and this year there's going to be a heavy push from the protocol side on flow to make sure that the the developers have a have a place too what does it mean for them to now deploy contracts on Flo and what exactly does it mean for you to support evm um as kind of part of this big push so so for us the the the way we Implement evm two things were most important number one it's got to be fully evm equivalent that that means that it's got to look uh and feel exactly like deploying to another L2 and so in that sense anything that works on ethereum mayet will work out of the box uh on Flow as of the the crescendo upgrade so Crescendo is the preview net now so you can go test it out and the and the the environments right there test that um end of this month early next month and Main that um a couple months after that so it's coming up quick but that that's the first design goal of like make it um really easy for ethereum developers to deploy onto it and by the way that first includes a lot of the multi-chain tooling so onramps off-ramps um all of the sort of utilities middleware that other developers rely on um and then the second design goal was there's no point doing that if developers don't get something extra so we it's not just another um ethereum L2 it's a it's a um it's an ethereum Network an evm network with the additional features on functionality of cadence and so you can in the same contract take Assets in and out of the AVM environment U put them in the Cadence environment perform operations on them and then put them back um uh seamlessly in one transaction and what that so for a user that means hey my stuff is I can interact with an NBA Top Shot but my stuff still shows up when I go to open seat um I can for a flow developer I can have a application written in whatever programming language but the asset will still be on erc20 it will be comptible with all of defi on ethereum it'll be easier to get listed on exchanges etc etc and so we kind of want to think of flow as an extension of uh of ethereum not just um not just evm and for that to happen I think has that be that seamlessness between ethereum and flow and that seamlessness between flow evm and then flow uh that kind of cadence and environment and I think the the other thing is you know the developer shouldn't have to should be able to use whatever is the right kind of tooling for the job and in the future you can imagine wasm environment running on top of um Cadence or move or whatever it might be amazing um what has been the initial reaction for all the the devs on both sides so ethereum and also the kadas developers kind of trying things out yeah I mean I think um on the ethereum side it's been uh universally positive because in a lot of ways you know people want more content people want more users it's it's the our missions are aligned in that we want to bring more and more uh adoption and sort of real world sustainable use cases to the space but it's been this Schism of like oh if you're not even compatible it's a whole new set of consideration and so so for for kind of this um uh Community it's been incredible because now we can actually have topshot um integrate with ethereum application so we can bring our assets and our users and and plug them into uh everything that you guys are working on a lot um a lot easier um for flow developers I think people haven't because hasn't happened yet people don't yet know that um people don't yet sort of understand the full power of hey you can write an application um In Cadence and they can actually control evm assets move stuff around and so truly you can use flow as a computation layer and ethereum as a liquidity layer and actually have that be seamless to the user and I think that's that's really powerful so you can have the great onboarding experience like MBA Top Shot Etc but then those assets aren't not part of the evm environment those assets can actually back to ethereum those assets can can uh be collateralized inside you know nft defi that can live on both either the ethereum side or the Flow side and kind of that that interoperability is uh is hasn't happened yet so people don't realize it but I think it's part of what sort of it's powerful it's so powerful and honestly it's what part of what broke like I think bull runs end when promise gets too far ahead of reality and when you know I'm on stage and everyone's on stage talking about yeah nfts are the future they're these interoperable digital assets and and yet as I'm saying that in my head I'm thinking well you know Top Shot is one of the biggest nfts right now open C is the biggest nft Marketplace you can't take Top Shot and put it on Open SE so even this kind of interoperable Technology can't even interoperate with itself and I think that that's you know something obviously you know our our choices were sort of responsible for but I think it's a um uh um and and in a sense it was necessary but I think we're sort of putting that back together and and yeah get me excited uh I'm going to put you on the spot here but uh for for for people in the audience G give them an idea for how big existing games on Flow AR just talked by either users or transactions or things you've done just sort of any recent stats they're able to give us on on the success of some of the the games yeah well I think we're we're still kind of scratching to the surface I mean I think the biggest product on float is actually not a game and in a way you know sometimes the boring found stuff is actually interesting I think tick Master is one of the biggest nft projects period right now they've dropped over 10 million um they've dropped over 30 million nfts to around 10 million people over the last 12 months and and part of that is just kind of you know these are ticket stubs they have the utility of ticket stops which is not a lot of utility but it's establishing that concept of digital identity and provenance um and that people can build on on top of that um and then when it comes to kind of like our products so topshot all day um and and and now Disney Pinnacle I think all three are just scratching the surface of what what they can be U but you can kind of if you squint and put them together you can sort of see what we're working on for next season so if you download the NFL all day app um that's kind of the best onboarding we've ever had about 40% of people that touch that product end up purchasing which is obviously much higher than any other um product we've built certainly um that's sort of normal people downloading op the app store if you download the Disney Pinnacle app you see it's got by far the best sort of onboarding progression uh activation experience and about um 75 people per of people that start that project start the flow end up finishing it and they get off to charts retention 90% plus after four weeks so so then and then Top Shot the new game we launched fast break which hasn't gone on chain yet but will and developers can build on top of it including in the AVM uh environment um is kind of giving us the best retention rate we've ever had so combining those three things together this next season we want to get to a point where every MBA NFL ticket holder can can we can start giving them hey here's a Top Shop pack here's a $5 here's a way to come into our communities um and then you're talking tens of millions of uh of of additional sort of net new users coming into the the product but you know Top Shot today is still um relatively small 650,000 total holders um and tens of thousands of active users like that's still that's an order of magnitude above where crypto kites was but but the thing that we have to all work on is is that next order magnitude above how do you get to that 10 million holders and million active users that's kind of where um uh you know we're we're focused on aaper and where I think hopefully most of the builders kind of at the application Level are focused on especially when you kind of look at put that in context which there's like a billion basketball fans out there so even that is like what three magnitudes of of growth and you get to expand even more on so many other kind of categories yeah EXA I mean the the the basketball fans you can but you can also look at more um even things like sports betting even things like fantasy even things like just physical trading cards and and thinking about the number of people that engage in sort Commerce fueled activities around their fandom um and how hard it's been to actually get them into a crypto product because it's about the buying and selling of it rather than just the um the the sort of the community aspect of it I think that's going to all that's all going to change um um and I'm also excited about things that are kind of digital only that are kind of games that where the digital thing derives utility because it's a it's it's part of the Digital Universe whether that's what Doodles is doing with their um Doodles and isuki is doing with hey I own a thing but it shows up in media and we're trying to bootstrap an IP brand from the ground up like again things that go beyond just buying and selling I think you kind of said super something super interesting a lot of it seems to be around activities that communities sort of do whether it's a transition from doing this in person to kind of digital only or just kind of bringing a community together that didn't really have an Avenue before is that what you think is is a good consumer app that kind of leverages crypto or like to you what is a successful crypto consumer app well I think the success is the million da I think that's that's that's the next sort of you know glass ceiling to kind of break and I think um and I think we're we're the pieces are put coming together for it to for it to happen but actually I I'll I'll maybe correct myself it's the million Au while having a fully composable uh developer experience I think where you know where where you've seen consumer crypto go wrong in the past two years or seven years is either you choose a fully open developer experience and you end up with a user experience that can't service more than uh you know the million or so crypto native people that exist in the world um or you end up you know topshot had an awesome um user experience but it completely closed developer experience and that prevented you know the sort of outside world from building on top the users that we on board and I think this next cycle including the products we build we're really trying to uh uh capture that that energy because that's where where the true value of web 3 lies it's hey there's a community here and you can build for it and I can't even stop you and I shouldn't be able to meter it and I think when people recognize that that hey web 3 is literally makes every asset kind of an App Store where everyone can build apps for every uh uh every asset that exists out there and the owner or originator of that asset you know they it's just another piece of utility for them and like that that kind of openness I think is you know obviously it's led to everything we have today the concept of that you could build a Marketplace for someone else's products then we just take as as a as a normal thing is is pretty special it's wild it's wild and you know I had a whole career in Tech before crypto and I could never imagine going back to writing software in a way like hey it's the useful information runs on a server somewhere that someone else can even that I why why would you ever build software like that the kind of the paradigm shift I think you can never go back so it feels like it's not a good way to think about more people coming into the space by saying there's going to be some killer app that makes it possible for a 100 Millions to show up and uh we're looking for what that idea is because everybody kind of thinks of it that way and this is how it works in web to um is kind of the the thinking that for us to see more millions and millions people to kind of be day-to-day users of crypto it's going to be kind of a slow start but then it just becomes more of a retention game we slowly get more people or or kind of do you feel like no there's still a there's a good chance that some killer app does sort of get a power law majority share and we just haven't figured out what is the right play here because you're anytime something becomes successful it gets financialized and that's going to where the the drop off point is well I I mean I think the problem right now is it's so the incentives are set up that you know everyone wants short-term gains it's actually easier to get short-term gains by focusing on crypto native people than going and trying to get non- crypto natives into uh you know a much lower kind of arpo experience um but but I do think there's going to be like I think I think what's happened in the past is a killer app emerges that that shows a pattern that others copy and the winner take all that's happened in the past has been at the distribution layer right like you know there was a lot of experimentation on what a social game should look like like um on even on the earlier social networks before Zinga kind of figured it out on on Facebook and that then play them and all these others kind of copied them and and now it's just how you build I guess you don't build basb games anymore but then the same thing happened on mobile where you know since the days of Nokia you know snake etc etc people trying to figure out what's the business model for for games on mobile but it was actually you know King and and supercell and purchases with within that purchases but also that kind of like dopamine Hooks and like the right kind of uh uh design that walks 10 years later mobile apps are kind of the same same pattern although you know much much wider application I think the same thing is true in crypto where that pattern of I mean even uh being able to introduce content without dep new content without depressing the price of old content that's not a trivial uh pattern to figure out and I think you know topshot is just now starting to figure out some of its pieces um but but you know the the sort of combining inflation with deflation basically is what I'm saying but things like that are kind of what's inherent in sort of that game design of what a what a real crypto consumer application that millions of people can use every day looks like and once someone figures it out everyone else is going to copy um but but but I do think there's going to be a winner take most dynamic at some of the distribution lowers because yes it's open so Facebook can't like block you from it and apple can't charge a 30% tax and all that stuff um but you know habits matter branding matters user experience convenience will still usually win ex exactly so I think l so maybe as a tangent do you define crypto wallets that have a lot of users as as consumer app and and like do you think that falls into the same category or do you really see like a utility being look if it's not a game or a social network or or a trading platform that has million users that's not a like it's not a consumer and then where do kind of wallets fit in from from your perspective um well wallets I'll just plug flow wallet because I told those guys last night at dinner has the potential to itself be a killer app um but I think generally like I don't think people should start with wallets I think I think the current Community has wallets but I think the um the the if you think about the next billion rather than the last million I think they're going to start with just the application that they start in whether that's uh Ticket Master to get a ticket stub whether that's uh joining a community on NBA Top Shot whether that's you know hey I want a doodle hey whatever it is you download the app you buy the thing that in fact um the crystal the thing that became crystal clear to me in the early days of topshot we've only had a app for a year or so um was I told anytime I told a normal person a non- crypto person about NBA topshot oh wow that's really cool they popped open their app went to the App Store um and and tried to search for topshot there and and it just you obviously it didn't show up so I think most people want to will start by interacting with the brand and so I think that you know walless onboarding what privy is doing what basan is doing what magic is doing it's so so important um but but the roll of composability is critical because it doesn't it's not good enough if I'm stuck in adaper wallet somewhere and I can't actually use a third party application it's not good enough if I'm stuck in a in a sort of custodial solution and then what I have to export my private key and then this whole Key Management space is another big kind of you know it's it's not a solved problem when you have either Hardware wallets that are useless if someone steals your seat phas or you have software wallets where people are literally kind of copy pasting private keys back and forth and you know that that um um it's it's going to lead to some headache somewhere so I think um but but that wallet software you know whether the user thinks of it as a wallet or whether it is kind of more of a app store or social network or whatever it is is uh you know Up For Debate yeah the the only reason I kind of brought it up was because I think the interesting question here is what does it mean to have distribution and then sort of who is still the last owner of that relationship for for a distribution and if your assets are in a single place technically you're that Avenue to explore everything that's out there but we don't have a Defined answer or even a Define Playbook like some if you're on openc technically openc can still manage that catalog of all the nfts you have but if you have tokens like well is that Unis swap managing this example or is it my wallet's transaction page showing what I have and and who has a distribution because still interact I think I think the power is with the consumer because unlike any other product you can just switch from Unis swap to whatever it is without leaving your stuff behind right like I can I can go to Unis swap.com or I can go to 1in exchange or I can go to sushi swap or I can just use my same wallet my same stuff I can get the same value I can use aggregators that compare the cost for me and like you couldn't imagine that in the and you never had that choice before yeah exactly I mean you had early days of instant messaging right and you know the the older people in the room will remember like the you had the aggregators you had your MSN friends and you had your you know AOL friends and whatever whatever and I think that that's actually better for consumers and in in the long run because it means that these platform providers can't withhold your information and increase their market cap at your expense um that sort of consumer surplus uh forc to everybody so I think that's what but but like when you talk about open SE I don't think open se's value or the reason it has your eyeballs is hey it has your stuff because your stuff is with you no matter what interface you're Lo the distribution and in the marketplace aspect exactly more you know going on the rankings finding what's next what's hot what's the next opportunity discovery not distribution the the discovery and I think that's under explored actually by by that team because in a lot of ways for a long time openc was the sort of um the homepage of of ethereum so how do you how do you get that uh sort of dynamic back and actually I'll plug the flowe guys who are in the audience because you know they were on a Marketplace on Flo but but it started off say Hey how do we become the homepage of and just show what's happening and then you people get interested in in what they one and then oh get the stuff you want but you know how do you make that experience super seamless exciting social it's not just about what I want but about what my friends were doing you know and and kind of and and getting rid of these barriers between hey this network versus that Network that's nonsensical for an average consumer they shouldn't care that an asset is on you know an L2 which L2 versus which L1 it's it's it's just got to be about you know what best developer experience best customer experience I think that's what's going to win I I think you kind of already answered my last question a bit in Parts but I'll I'll still kind of ask it to you in case there's a as a more concise way you want to put something where say differently uh for those in the audience who are thinking of starting a consumer crypto company what advice would you give them well do it it's a lot of fun it's I think I think the single most fun you can thing thing you can do in crypto because it's um you can play around with weird ideas and it can it can just be part of your uh daily job uh but my number my second advice is to really pick the audience you're going after and focus on it because compromise I think kills uh any sort of uh just creativity and any kind of uh customer value so whether you are going after the existing crypto native Community build something awesome for them or you're going after some new kind of community pick a deep Niche and build something awesome for that Ro thank you so much for this amazing uh conversation and uh if you have any questions for him feel free to find him after uh off stage right here