Sweat Economy's Billion-User Blueprint for Scaling Consumer Crypto Apps - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

great to see you Al and thanks to 249 for for having us great to great to be here so um we have 13 minutes and 48 seconds of unadulterated access to OLG um would you like to start by telling the audience a little bit about about yourself and about sweat um yeah so my name is I'm one of the co-founders of sweatcoin which was a web to original business that we started in 2014 so we've been added for 10 years and in 2022 we have discovered near protocol which was fast enough and robust enough for us to build on because we have 164 million users and Counting and at such scale you cannot build on any chain pretty much there are just a couple that can actually support that so yeah very very happy uh about our Partnerships and yeah also we were probably the first big scale one that joined and then Kai ching and play Amber so yeah like dominoes are starting to fall which is really amazing AB absolutely I mean and for the for audience contacts um we're very fortunate in the near ecosystem um to have some of the biggest projects in web 3 some of the biggest apps of which sweat is one yeah um and you know like you mentioned like the scale that you guys areer at is is pretty unprecedented for for web 3 what was behind your thinking you know of making near your home well there were three things that well actually you know let me take a step back in 2021 when we realized that technology or blockchain technology started to get robust and fast enough we look that everything that was out there and we've done really proper due deal and you know talking to Founders talking to teams BD Technical and we've of course done quite a lot of testing you know test Nets some building some contracts and one thing that we figured out was that it is impossible to compare uh blockchains between them you know everyone is talking about completely different things and they are accentuating aspects that that make it incomparable let me give you an example everyone is talking about transactions per second salana for example defines transaction as a any message between any node and any node instead of the actual transaction where the assets are changing hand so even the definitions are different what we've done then we kind of went okay we don't really know how to evaluate all of this information so we went back to First principles and we asked ourselves what do we want want we want to have a partner that builds for Mass Market because that is what we are second we want to to have a partner that's got the best ux because that's really what matters for Mass adoption and the third which was more of a hygiene that the chain is fast enough and cheap enough from kind of transaction perspective so that you know kind of using chain does not eat into our users pockets and basically we looked at these three things and there were only two or three chains that actually you know kind of ticked most of the boxes and luckily for near that was the time when salana was uh going down like 19 hours one week 5 hours another week and we of course having so many users we could not say o you know what let's build on salana we were just chickening out and you know also the more time we spend with Ilia the better it was getting actually our first contract was built by Ilia he just knocked it together in 15 minutes send it over to us and said you know what do you think of this and that's that's Ilia pukan co-founder of the of the protocol um yeah and my team was like holy you know the the GitHub is saying that you know Ilia plasan actually wrote this code so everyone was really taken a back yeah he's he's a Hands-On he's a Hands-On guy and he saw the value of the of the partnership right and and you're right I think that conversation about the robustness of the infrastructure has come to the FL again you know salana and and others have have been struggling in some context with really high volume transaction volumes and leading to transaction failures and um you know the near predal is a sharded layer one and so in theory has infinite scat ability and I think something that the the the core partical team is very proud of is they've had 100% uptime since since since main net launch which I think is an amazing amazing feat but I think also recently they've been doing a lot of work expanding the number of shards they're also working on something called stateless validation which will further bolster the performative capabilities of of the underlying protocol yeah but I think before we dive more into I guess the technical features of the of the ecosystem I wanted just to take a step back and ask you you know as a Founder you know in web 2 business originally what was it that caused you to want to make that leap into web 3 what was driving that decision great question um our business that we created in 2014 was called sweatcoin and his name would suggest we actually wanted it to be on blockchain back then the problem was that there was only one blockchain which was Bitcoin and it's too slow too expensive too cumbersome to build on and we spoken into vitalic in 2015 But ultimately we launched centralized because we were hoping that within next six months something would come out you know that would be another project that we would be able to build on and the reason why we were so insistent and we had to wait eight years but we really really insisted on it is because our vision has always been that we need to create a liquid asset that is autorized physical activity you cannot do that with a centralized point system that only operate within the app it needs to be freely tradeable it needs to be on exchanges so that there is actually completely kind of arms length pricing because what we realized is that physical activity has a lot of parallels with attention and attention economy is $7 trillion in size and it is built around you paying attention you been active is extremely similar to you paying attention both actions are valuable to you both actions have third parties that are willing to pay for it advertisers for attention uh Healthcare Providers insurers ultimately governments are very interested in physical activity and they are prepared to incentivize you for that and the third aspect is both are cars you don't have an unlimited amount of attention you don't have an unlimited amount of calories and time to be physically active now you put two and two together we build 7 trillion business or industry around one and the other universally everyone agrees it is valuable but when you ask a question how much everyone going to go what do you mean if something is valuable then there's got to be a price on it and that's exactly what we're doing we're tokenizing physical activity and and we are driving its value up because when you're rewarded for your physical activity with a token it does change Behavior it makes the world more physically active which is ultimately our mission and our objective and so you know I think you're taking one of the features of of blockchain infrastructure which is this kind of open incentive structure to incentivize this Behavior which is you know it's good for everyone to to be more physically active and to be healthy yeah but I think you also touched on another point that I wanted to just pick at which is you know you talked about the value of the data that is generated from these types of activities yeah um and we were just talking about it earlier actually you know that that's very sensitive information right and I think there's a lot of organizations traditional organizations that would want to get their hands on that yeah and and and I think in in the the current Paradigm that would be done often in a way that's not transparent it's not something that users would fully understand they might not get remunerated for it could you talk us through how the the kind of web three implementation that you setled on can help reset that Dynamic a little bit great question this is not something that's going to happen in next week or next months but it is definitely going to happen um the data question for us is very sensitive because we are in Europe the data is in Europe we are governed by gdpr but this is just a regulatory framework what matters is that we do not believe ultimately that it is up to us to share or sell the data we've never done it we don't do it and we never will do it however what blockchain enables and allows us to do is to partner with a data Union you're probably familiar with the concept and basically we can allow you user to make a decision that I will open my data for analytics so you can make this decision not us and then this data Lake is going to be analyzable and we know that this data is immensely valuable because we already had number of Partnerships with insurers that were on the surface you know kind of doing weird and wonderful product things but under the surface all they were interested in is data granular detailed data so that they could put it into their cual models it is incredibly valuable for them we did not follow through but we do know that it is immensely valuable now when you unlock this data and make it available and somebody analyzes they will use sweat to pay for it and you will get the biggest chunk of that value if your data is unlocked and a certain percentage will go as rewards to the whole community and token holders so all of a sudden we can monetize data because it is not us making decision but the user yeah so I think and that that is all about empowerment right so you're you're flipping the the controls and power dynamics away from the providers to the individual end users which is a fundamental part of of the open web right and I think that that is one of the most important um features of of an open Paradigm and and at the near Foundation we're all about supporting the emergence of an open web um and so I wondered you know and you touched on this and we don't have a huge amount of time but maybe time of two more questions one you talked about user experience being important something that is really challenging for web 3 right now how have you guys navigated through that and how have you you know trying to meet web 2 but in the web 3 Paradigm and that's how we we bring users into into web 3 great question actually on this note and you know given the fact that we have just more than two minutes um this is our core strength building incredible products on mobile that millions of people use you know we've been added as I mentioned for 10 years and we have 164 million users on sweatcoin and more than 10 million users on sweat wallet this is huge huge huge scale and learning curve that we've gone through and we continue innovating and there are actually three things that are going live today so if you do have sweat wallet if you were to restart it you will be a able to use it in Arabic that was the most frequently requested Language by our user base and the team has enabled it very very early in this morning so if you have an Arabic you know um if you are living here and you know you have setting on Arabic your phone or sorry your sweat wallet is going to speak Arabic to you the second thing that we're starting to do today is roll out something that we haven't touched on but chain abstraction narrative that near was talking about basically as from today we're becoming a multi-chain wallet and we will gradually enable this functionality so you will be able to use not just near you will also have B&B chain and we have enabled that and you know we're not going to roll it out 100% of users because that would be you know kind of extremely extremely risky given that the infrastructure is very new but we're starting to roll it out from today so don't be surprised if you discover that you actually have BNB in your wallet and the third thing is you call it fast or we call it magic keys and the onboarding tool yeah exactly so our users have the best onboarding that works in web to but now we're going to make make it even better and you will be able to recover so from security perspective your account not by having an activation email that a lot of people deleted by accident but as long as you have control over the email address you will always be able to regain command of your account so it's simplifying and making the account management more familiar exactly I me it just it just makes it fluid and really really really really easy without any cognitive overload for users so it lowers the barer entry which is which is what we're all about and you know want we're out of time but I want to do a quick shout out to say you know what you just refer to you know chain signatures technology which effectively allows you to manage digital Assets in any blockchain environment from your near account is hugely powerful Innovation was just launched a couple of weeks ago all the documentation is on n.org all is pioneering it in our ecosystem and we're seeing the power of it and we're very grateful to him for that um I think on that note we've got to wrap up we're at time so thank you so much OLG for uh for the conversation and thanks all for for listening