Podcast with PoolTogether

We love collaborating with other projects, and often feature in their podcasts, interviews, publications, etc. This is how we keep track of it all!

PoolTogether is a no-loss prize savings protocol. A summary of our conversation with Tim Cox on the 55th episode of the PoolTogether Community Podcast follows. You may listen to the whole episode here.

Highlights

• Aviral was exposed to the blockchain in early 2014 when he heard his friend talk about Silk Road. In 2020, the motion design artists he followed and admired were increasingly dabbling in NFTs. That's when he fully plunged into the space.

• A year later, Aviral chanced upon DAOs, contributed to a few as a designer, and realized there's only so much you can do as a contributor. Ideally, if you've done the work, you should not have to start over again if you go to work for another DAO. But this wasn't the case. He wondered about having his "proof of work" onchain, which led to starting rep3.

• Whipper156 first came across Bitcoin in 2017 and immediately started finding ways to short the cryptocurrency. As he learned more about it, he understood its potential and went full-time a year later.

• Aviral believes that the space has taken massive strides in tech and adoption. Whipper feels that the tooling and hardware still have a lot of scope for improvement.

• One way to look at rep3 is like a Swiss army knife for communities. It's an interesting way to incentivize and engage users, give them badges, and incentivize their participation in interesting ways.

• People create value for their communities in multiple ways, yet the current options available to communities only capture or acknowledge a small part of this.

• Tools like rep3 level the playing field in communities since voting based on tokens that one earns is much fairer than voting based on tokens that one buys.

• Membership badges of today are unidimensional -- they only denote if someone is part of a community or not. But member activity is multidimensional.

• rep3 dynamic membership badges are a more realistic representation of membership as it captures various member interactions with their community. It quantifies the intangible value members create and empowers community builders with a non-monetary method to acknowledge their efforts.

• Some of the projects that are interested in rep3 are yield aggregators, DEXs, bridges, etc. They are looking to use rep3 to incentivize protocol interactions and aim to use the Discord integration to manage community members, automatically update server roles, etc.

• The essential features of rep3 are entirely free to use, and all gas costs are covered as well.

• Currently, the protocol is live on Polygon and can be deployed on any EVM-compatible chain.

• In the future, members that build their onchain reputation will be able to -- quite literally -- stake this reputation to get loans and do many other exciting things that we can't even think of right now.

• Onchain credentialing as a concept is just getting started, and the future is going to be very interesting.