WP Mainline Episode 12 - The Great Wapuu NFT Experiment

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode 12 of the WP mainline podcast for Thursday, September 16th, 2021. I am your host, Jeff Chandler joined by absolutely no one. You know, what's going on here. I've got two co-hosts that switch out, uh, duties on the show and none of them were available today. So I'm flying solo, but not exactly solo. I've got some awesome guests lined up on the show today. Uh, first up is Aaron Edwards. Aaron, thanks a lot for joining the show. Thank you. And next up we have Josh daily. Jess, thank you for being on the show. Speaker 2 00:00:55 Thanks for having us. I'm super excited to be Speaker 1 00:00:58 Here. And the reason why I had these two gentlemen on the show is because they are part of the web three WP project. And if you haven't been following WP, mainline.com, first off, why the hell not? You know, that should be one of your main priorities during the week. I'm only messing, but, but, uh, I recently wrote an article covered their project. They're creating a collectable wop hu NFT, which will fund additional experience, uh, experiments with, uh, with the web 3.0 and what that entails. And half of the proceeds will go to the WordPress foundation. So I thought it was apt to get these gentlemen on the show. This is interesting. Take on why poo and we're going to learn some things about what NFTs are, uh, what this is all about. I, I gotta say I, I, I've been kind of looking at NFTs from, from an outside, looking in. Speaker 1 00:01:55 I found Chris Wallace on Twitter and he's really big into NFTs and tased those some blockchains on what's going on. And, and I'm also seeing it. It just seems to me like these people are creating digital art or JPEGs and they're selling for the, uh, I think it's ether him. That's how you pronounce it. It's kind of, it's a cryptocurrency and it ate through him. I mean, these images and artwork are going for thousands of dollars and I'm like, you know, maybe I should go back into my deviant art gallery, remove the watermark and then sell those as NFTs. And maybe I can rake in some of this dope, but, but, but we'll get into a first, let's start off at the beginning. First off. What is web three WP? Speaker 3 00:02:39 Yeah, sure. I'll start, um, basically over the last year and the story goes back further, but I've really kind of been diving into kind of what's going on in the blockchain world. Um, and of course, something that was sparked by you see every few years in the news, suddenly Bitcoin is reaching all, all time, highs you and all these new crypto millionaires being made billionaires, you know, I'm gone, what is this, why am I missing out on it? So this year I kind of really buckled down and just started digging into like, what is this underlying technology? You know, it doesn't seem to be going away. Uh, every time you think it's done, then it comes back even bigger than before. So just really kind of wanting to get a good understanding of what is going on here. And, um, so it's kind of a long story, the whole journey down there, but I started learning all about altcoins and, um, dif the world of DFI, which means to centralize finance and now just getting started in this NFT space. Speaker 3 00:03:41 Um, honestly I didn't have any understanding of what any of these things were at all. All right, good. I'm not the only one. Yeah, for sure. Um, but I think really what it comes down to is like you have traditional use of blockchain, which is cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin that everyone is familiar with. Right. Um, but of course, underlying all that, you heard all these developers and Giggy types saying, well, blockchain is going to change the world. You know, blockchain technology is going to do this and that it's the future. And I always kind of thought about that as like, what is this, you know, some utopia for the nerds, you know, doesn't really make sense to me, uh, what the practical use cases are. And, um, so I think really it's pretty new to me and new to Josh, to where this project really is something we launched to kind of explore these themes and topics together. Speaker 3 00:04:36 So basically I've come to the conclusion and a lot of other people in tech have, are starting to come to this conclusion too, um, that seeing past these fads like NFTs and cryptocurrencies and things like that, and actually seeing the underlying blockchain and decentralized app technology and what its actual potential is, you know, to, to revolutionize how Altec works, how the internet works, how ecosystems work, how finance works, how governance works. I mean, there's just so much that it's touching in so many things that it looks like it will be the solution to, you know, so really the idea was founding this web three WP project was that, um, it's a chance for us to explore deeper. And it's a chance for us to like, um, introduce this to the WordPress community specifically. So that's the niche that we know this is the community that we're a part of, you know, um, for many years now. Speaker 3 00:05:36 And, um, so instead of trying to get in some crypto world crypto community, where everyone already knows about this stuff, we thought it'd be really cool to build some practical experiments and practical projects. And eventually, maybe products even that, um, can really introduce the WordPress community to this new web three technology. They call it web three because, you know, you've heard web, I've heard of web three, I've heard a lot of these technologies centered around, like, this is the web 3.0, and I imagine it's not going to have as many pre gradient generators are making things shiny around the buttons. And just probably, we're not going to go through the experience of missing thousand domain names all over again. Right. Yeah. I think probably it'd be good to kind of cover what we mean by web three. And what, what I think that the main stream thought of what the calling web three is. Um, so basically a 1.0 is what you'd call like the read only internet. So that was the early days of the internet and, uh, the days of learning dream Weaver. Yes, exactly. Dream wager Weaver, you know, basically from page. Yep. I had my a geo cities all my first website. Exactly. Speaker 3 00:06:57 Yeah. So, so basically, I mean, it was exciting this whole new internet thing, but really it was kind of read only, you know, you had to be a geek if you wanted to put up a website or some content, even all the major websites out there were pretty much just read only, you know, static sites that you're visiting to get some content, you know, so it's putting more information on the internet, which is revolutionary, but it didn't allow normal people to publish also on the web. So then we saw like in the early two thousands, the beginning beginnings of web 2.0, um, which is more like a, a read-write web. So it allowed the internet to be more interactive. You know, they had technologies like Ajax and stuff that made user interfaces a lot easier. I remember Gmail when that came out compared to like Yahoo mail or something like how revolutionary it was. But to me they're near time. One of the big things that came out that was really revolutionary. And I was learning about, I heard about all this stuff about Ajax and what it stood for and it was going to revolutionize the web and it really did. It actually fulfilled on its on its height was Google maps. That was the big one for me. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well Speaker 2 00:08:08 Of course WordPress falls into that category. Big time, WordPress, Facebook, my space, like everything became interactive and like Aaron and I have been friends since what, fifth grade, sixth grade. And, um, and Aaron has always been, had more of a technical bent than myself. The first time I got into this stuff was probably around the MySpace timeframe when, and just breaking sites with, uh, copy and paste HTML. Speaker 3 00:08:42 That was a great way to learn. Yeah, for sure. It was MySpace templates. Speaker 2 00:08:48 Yeah, exactly. Putting music that automatically played when the site came up and motion, graphic backgrounds, gifts and stuff. Speaker 1 00:08:58 Yeah. And, and as we've seen the results of web 2.0 and all these services and communities and online social spaces and social media that that's popped up now, we've got a bunch of log gardens and a lot of major tech companies that have controlling a lot of things. And, and, and one of the big words around web 3.0 is decentralization, how does that fit into what 3.0 and the, the continued evolution of the web? Speaker 3 00:09:30 Well, the thought is we've given, you know, all our data, so much of our privacy to all these big tech companies. So, um, it's cause I mean, we've seen all kinds of problems, you know, whether it's censorship, whether it's just the privacy and employee vacations, whether it's, um, like government things, you know, like China or, or other governments being able to censor things. Um, so I mean, there's a lot of things that have come up out of this. Um, and also I think part of it too, is the creator economy. So we have this whole new world of creators, like YouTube burgers, podcasters, bloggers, whatever it is, social media influencers. And when you actually calculate like, like they produce all this content, when you actually calculate how much of a percentage of the value of that content they get, it's tiny compared to the big tech tech companies, you know, um, it's, it's at best as like 10%, something like that, you know? So, um, kind of one of the, one of the cores of web 3.0 is decentralization, which means you don't have to trust anymore. This blockchain technology makes it so you don't have to trust a big organization. You don't have to trust the government. You don't have to trust other people even because everything is controlled by economic incentives. Um, which was really fascinating. And then Speaker 1 00:10:57 I guess on that topic of trust, I think, uh, I think it was open. See, there's recently a person that was working for open city or one of these NFT listing websites. And they had behind the scenes access to what was going to be published on the front page and what they were doing was buying, buying these NFTs before everybody else was kind of like insider trading kind of, but they're buying these NFTs before everybody else. And then as they would hit the front page during the spikes of popularity, they would sell them and they were making a profit. And what people did was they used his, uh, his eat is he has some kind of wallet address and they're able to use that to track his purchases among the blockchain. And they could piece together what he was doing. And then the company came out and, and finally said, we've updated our policies. This is unacceptable is not what we want. This is probably not what we're going for. And it was kind of a, the example of, of the trust that's built into, uh, using blockchain technology. Speaker 3 00:12:05 Yeah. That is an interesting thing, is, is with the blockchain everything's tied to like a public cryptographic key, right? So, um, it's kind of your choice. If you want to share what your key is, or if that's going to be public where people can attach it to your name or a real real-world identity or not. Um, but once it is any transactions you make on the blockchain, it's all public for anyone to see, you know, forever, you can never be erased or hidden. So that kind of allows like an amazing amount of trust because every transaction is public and no one can change it, uh, which is how a lot of these decentralized apps, how web three works. But at the same time, it gives you an option for privacy too, when you want to do things. Um, but you don't feel that anyone should know, you know, it's, you don't have to provide that, that, that, um, connection between your keys and your identity. Speaker 1 00:13:02 And when we, and when we speak about the creator academy, that's, that's mostly what I'm seeing now around NFTs is the artwork, the artists that these, these people are now creating collections and doing artwork where they don't have to mess with the DV and art. They don't have to go through a, an art collection agency, whatever they, all these people are managing and dealing with art and having it auction off through the blockchain, through these cryptocurrencies, through networks like open sea and, um, uh, there's other blockchains like tastes those and what's going on over there. Uh, it's pretty interesting to see. And again, it comes back to decentralization. These people were doing it on their own, and these artists are spread throughout the internet and throughout the world. And, uh, there seems like most of them are making a decent living doing it so far because a lot of this artwork I'm seeing is going for a pretty penny. Speaker 3 00:14:00 Yeah. It really unlocks a whole new world of monetizing, like your creations, you know, whether it's audio, whether it's art, whether it's, um, even writing, blogging, whatever it may be. You know? Speaker 1 00:14:14 So we've up to this point, I've described NMT is digital artwork JPEGs, but what can be an NFT, which is stands for non fungible token out, but I said that right, but fungible, by the way, it's such a cool word to say non fungible token, but what could be considered an NFT? Is it just artwork or can it be other assets, digital assets? Speaker 3 00:14:38 And it can be anything. I mean, you can kind of think of it more as like, not the asset itself, but a certificate that proves that this is the real asset or that, or the, this is the real of the asset, current owner of the assets. So, um, that's really what it is. It's, it's kind of a receipt that everyone can trust. So, um, I kind of give the example on our, on our website that like, what if you were some rich person or whatever, and he bought some, you bought the Mona Lisa, you know, there's one of a kind painting, right? Uh, who knows how many million millions of dollars that's worth. Uh, but how do you prove to other people that this is the real one. If you want to sell it, if you want to show it off, whatever, the only way is if both you and other people have some third party that they both trust, that's an expert and can examine it and say, okay, this is the real thing. Speaker 3 00:15:30 Right? And, um, so NFT is kind of provide that ability in the digital world, which was never possible before, because I mean, if you're a professional painter, maybe you could copy the Mona Lisa and trick someone to believing it's real, you know, but in the digital world, you just right. Click and save as an image file. And it's exactly the same quality that it was before. You know? So how can you prove that this image file or this thing that you created or someone else created is the real thing, the real original thing. And that's what NFT technology really solves in the digital world. And it never been solved before this. Speaker 1 00:16:11 So what you guys are doing is you're creating a wahoo NFT collection. Tell us, tell us how this is going to be created and, uh, what is purposes? Speaker 2 00:16:25 Well, I think, um, something that's really important to note about a web three WP is we see this more from a space of experimentation at this point, and not as much of a investing platform. Um, we're not trying to get people to, to buy into something that they don't understand or know about, but what we're trying to do is lower the barrier to entry. Speaker 1 00:16:53 Well, I'm glad that I'm glad you said that. I think one of the coolest things about this is that for, for people like me, who may, who may be paying attention to NFT or are kind of on the fringes with it, I think just kind of introduces a way for people in the WordPress space who are, who are on the fringes to get involved with what NFT is, are maybe it's not as risky as participating in maybe some other projects. Speaker 2 00:17:17 Right? Right. And it may not end up being as lucrative. But what we're trying to do by having this on-ramp space is some people will pay to, you know, to buy into it because they believe in the project. Some people won't have the resources to be able to do that. And they'll still be able to participate in the project. We're going to make as much of the code base as available as we can on get. And we're trying to build a community up around the technology so that we can continue these experiments because the currently there's, we see this as a, still a distant it's close it's here now and everything, but there's also a distance between this being main mainstream. Um, and one of the big hurdles is just the fact that people don't even know how to set up a wallet at this point, or they don't have a wallet. Speaker 2 00:18:12 And a lot of this hinges on tying your identity to a wallet. Right. And so that, so selling an e-commerce or these bigger ideas of security and logging into accounts and setting your personal avatars and, and, uh, identities with these wallets only works if people have wallets, right? And so at this level, we're just trying to get people acquainted with those things. We're trying to use the wop poos as a way of inviting them to participate with things they already understand. Um, and so that would be art collecting and trading, right? You go to a word camp in person when they were still, you know, thriving and going, and hopefully they come back someday and you would walk booth to booth and collect these, you know, pins and, and other, uh, swag, you know, that you're collecting and you got all these t-shirts laying around and you got all this stuff. Speaker 2 00:19:20 NFTs would transform the way that we engage in, even in person, settings, not just virtually online. So imagine you being able to purchase your ticket, verify your ticket on location, get airdrop things, uh, during that time, get your collectible stuff, be able to validate that you were there. And then the ongoing sponsors being able to communicate back going, uh, Hey, I wanna, I want to give you a year trial of our membership. And so some of what we're doing with the NFT stuff by having the branded sponsorships is we're playing around with these ideas of what would be possible if we were in an in-person setting, or if you were doing a hybrid setting, which I think is going to be, uh, become an even more real thing, uh, as time goes on because of whether it's from, um, disabilities and other things that keep people from health reasons, keeping them from being able to attend events and you have these things happening, but they still are able to participate then in the swag and the other parts of the event without attending the event. Speaker 1 00:20:35 I'm glad you mentioned swag in it, in this idea you're bringing up with, with, uh, with in-person events and NFTs and whatnot. Cause you know, I I've attended many work camps and I've got lanyards up the ying game and I've got, I've got swag and shirts and pants and all that stuff and pins and all that stuff is cool. But if you attend many of these work camp events, you end up getting swag overload. And it seems like, like perhaps going the NFT route, it could give swag, uh, more shelf life because maybe you could, the sponsors or somebody could change the messages or coupons or, or it could, it could decrease the physical impact that these work camp events had because you wouldn't have to make so much physical swag. So maybe it would cut down on waste and helped out help out the environment. And I see a lot of potential there with NFTs. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:21:26 And I think some of the fun stuff that I'll let Aaron talk about, cause he's way more, um, familiar with, with the governance side of this, but could you imagine your participation in those events being, um, given tokens for that kind of stuff, your participation in the community, your participation in, um, code contribution, your participation, all being awarded with these virtual tokens that give you buy to the community that would then allow you to participate in other ways with decision-making and other stuff. So there's, there's these bigger ideas that we know are further off and we don't want to call, Hey, invest in a wall poo, we're talking about no invest in the idea of the community. Let's explore these opportunities that are bound to change the way that we interact with, with the internet, similar to how web 2.0 did. And we don't even think about it anymore, but web 2.0 has been primarily dominated by either, like you said, big corporations or the privileged, and this allows for the decentralization of that. But still we recognize that even jumping into web 3.0, is very difficult at this point. And again has such a high barrier to entry with cryptocurrencies rising. So high and Ft prices rising so high that, you know, compared to USD and the buy-in that it takes. And so we're just trying to, to create a safer place to explore that stuff, you know, Speaker 1 00:23:19 And I'm glad you, I'm glad you guys are reiterating that this is more of about an exploration, sorry about that. An exploration of, of things of ideas. It's not, it's not a moneymaker it's that you're not doing this primarily for investment. It's about exploring ideas and let's see what happens. And this is, uh, we could use a lot poo as a way to experiment and explore in one of the, I want to give, I want to talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to WAMU, for those who don't know why poo is the unofficial official mascot of WordPress that was created and why poo is licensed under the GPL. So it has the same freedoms as, as WordPress, but it gets a little wishy-washy because why poo is an image and the GPO is a software license. So how that works with what poo is kind of a, it's kind of a weird gray area. Speaker 1 00:24:17 And with the freedoms that the GPL licensed entails for WordPress, you know, we, we, we assume that those freedoms are applied to Y poo, whereas you could use it for this way or that way it's, it's free, it's open source. You can share it, you can modify it for your own use, but when you look at NFTs and I, you know, I think I might have T's as something that's unique, something that's yours, something you own that you don't want to modify, that you don't want to share that you have as your own. That's where I think some people have an issue with turning white poo into an NFT. So let's, let's, what's your guys' take on this. Speaker 3 00:24:58 It's I mean, it's definitely tricky. I mean, as far as like licenses are really it's, uh, something that's enforced by a government, right? You have like a central authority that you trust that, okay, this copyright, this trademark or this license, that if they violate it, you can Sue them in the government courts. And then hopefully, you know, when, um, so NFTs are kind of something outside that in the fact that it's all on the blockchain and there's no necessarily legal thing, it's just the central source of truth that everyone trusts because it's programmed into the code, Speaker 1 00:25:35 The NFT a distinct difference from intellectual property. Speaker 3 00:25:39 Yeah, definitely. So intellectual property, as I said, is tied to basically government laws and then NFT is tied to the blockchain and really what the NFT is, is it's the provenance of an item. So it's not necessarily the intellectual property or a license or copyright or trademark, but it's an actual, you're buying a certificate that says, this is the only one in the original. And that's basically, that's basically how it works. So you're buying the Providence is created by the original creator and that's where the value is in something because anyone can right. Click and save any NFT, you know, and use it somewhere else. And, um, maybe it's copyrighted. Maybe it's not, maybe it's licensed in a certain way. That's tied to the blockchain. So there's been a few like, uh, projects that have been made to try to create like an NFT license. Speaker 3 00:26:35 Um, so various NFTs created by different organizations have had different kinds of licenses or things that they tried to attach to it, you know, giving people rights who own it to do this or that, but there's no real standard yet. Um, so definitely, I mean, part of this is we're thinking about, okay, GPL and NFT is like, is that there may be some controversy there, but at the same time, we're definitely respecting the GPL license in the actual smart contract of, of this NFT. The GPL license is actually going to be a hard-coded there on the blockchain. So everyone knows GPL and anyone knows that if they make a derivative work off of it, that it has to be GPL also. Speaker 2 00:27:18 And, and, uh, the other things like the tension of this space for is not past me or Aaron, um, like my primary function in, in any company that I work with from, from a marketing perspective, but even past that is in the artistic space. So I very much, I do my own original art. I do a lot of that stuff. And so what I don't want to do is steal somebody else's art for my own purpose. Um, what I do want to do is use something that is recognizable to try and raise awareness about a new kind of technology that we can, can play around with and, and invest our time in and get other people involved with in a way that's kind of creative and exciting. And we're also adding and incorporating our own designs into that. We're not just posting up a bunch of the yellow WordPress, you know, wild poos, we're making changes to the, you know, what it's wearing and the backgrounds and the accessories and that kind of stuff. But all of that stuff is going to be additional artwork that, that we've put together and put time into and invested our time and resources into. Um, but outside of that, yeah, if there's 100% attention around that and we're avoiding trademarked things like we're not using the WordPress logo we asked, Speaker 1 00:28:54 Which I think was very smart. Speaker 2 00:28:56 Yeah. We asked, um, what the foundation and didn't hear back. And th and they're probably busy and have their own things going on, but we did ask the foundation for permission to do that. And I think because it's so new and they probably are, I would assume the people checking that stuff wouldn't, um, necessarily be super familiar with what we were trying to do or accomplish. And because it is so far out, they may want to just avoid the controversy of the topic as well. So I, I get it, you know, Speaker 1 00:29:28 I think, I think overall not using the WordPress trademark is, is super beneficial to, it just eliminates that possibility of, of it being an issue. Speaker 3 00:29:41 But at the same time, like one of the benefits of doing this is I think that it can add value to the WordPress community and ecosystem. You know, um, it's kind of, uh, emergers two worlds, the whole NFT crypto world with the WordPress world, you know, and kind of can give some more visibility to WordPress and in the community. So, Speaker 1 00:30:03 And by the way, if your listeners out there, these are not two gentlemen who just came out of nowhere, who just decided to pick up why poo. And this is what they're going to do with the air. And Edwards is the CTO of ink sub a well-known well-established company in the WordPress space. And Josh Dale is the CML of infinite upload. So these two gentlemen have been in the WordPress space for awhile. They know about Y poo. They know about the intricacies. They know about the GPL, they know about the community, and they're there during a very good position to do, to do an experiment like this, Speaker 2 00:30:34 Right? A lot of this stuff is trust, right? And the NFT blockchain things that Aaron and I even sat yesterday and had a conversation about this. Like it's really important to us that people don't think we're doing a pump and dump thing where you go create, which is a big deal with this art, these art projects, lots of promises under deliver. What we're trying to avoid is over promising things. And under delivering, we want to, we want to under promise and over deliver. And at the end of the day, this just leads from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing that we're able to continue exploring. And someday it may turn into products for us that that will be branded products. But the initial project that we're doing, the web three WP side of stuff is not going to, um, that's gonna stay an open community project. Speaker 1 00:31:34 I got to say somebody's special edition while poo designs that I've seen are pretty darn cool. How, what, what ever since the news has gotten out about this project, what has the reception been like from the WordPress community and how many, how many we don't have to name the companies. I think that might spoil what people can expect with the special edition while actually companies can sponsor just different sponsors. You can purchase where you can actually get like a watt pool that's designed around your company. You can get them involved in this collection. What what's the reception been like from the community and companies who want to get involved with this experiment? Speaker 3 00:32:10 It's been pretty, uh, interesting. Um, we it's, I mean, we kind of came up with the idea what if we had some, some one-off, you know, poos in this collection, um, that are special design. And we thought, I bet some companies, I mean, so many were press companies already have their own white poos. We thought it'd be great if we could partner with them and have them include their poos in this collection. Cause then it adds like some, even more collectible items, much rarer, you know, that people might want to collect or, or get their hands on. And also it kind of gives some unique publicity and stuff to other companies. And it allows us to really bring them on at the beginning and partnering with this web three project. A lot of them, they just made me feel like, well, I've inherited hearing all this stuff about D apps and web three and NFTs, but I don't really understand it or know, and then you'd have all these other people that are saying, this is the future of the internet. I just kind of want to know what it's about and learn, you know, so this is kind of a, an opportunity for them to jump in and join the community as we do these experiments and share our findings and code and, and on our blog and different things like that. Um, it's kind of an education opportunity for them as they're getting in. Speaker 1 00:33:23 Others, going to be in this collection was 1,234 unique wipers, but now you've guys have bumped it up to, I think it's 2,222, and let's say I'm a company. And I go through and I purchased sponsorship and I get my either have a wahoo design or I get a designed from you guys and it gets put into the collection. There's no guarantee that's going to be minted. Right. Minted as in created, and then be part of the blockchain. Speaker 3 00:33:52 Yeah. I mean, we're committed to getting all these wild poos minted POL 2,200, but obviously we can't necessarily guarantee. Um, but I mean, eventually if we have to make them completely free or whatever, then we'll do that. We just want to get them out there in the community, you know? Speaker 1 00:34:10 And I'll tell you what if I had the money, I'd be, I'd be all over this. I'd want my wild pool in here. I think this is a, I think this is a cool idea. Yeah. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm very close to actually getting a wallet set up just so I can mint one white poo and I can start participating in this and if team NFT movement and actually start, you know, uh, trading or looking at wild poos and finally getting involved in this space. Cause I think one way or another, I'm going to have to learn through participation or whatever to the NFT is blockchains and cryptocurrency. I'm going to have to get involved some way. And this, this seems like the perfect ground floor opportunity for me. Speaker 3 00:34:50 Exactly. And that's, that's kind of what we want, you know, once you have that wallet set up, once you have a little bit of ether in it, then that opens, unlocks a whole new world of being able to connect to and use all these decentralized apps that are out there and ones that we'll be building for WordPress communities. And Speaker 1 00:35:08 So if those were listening who want to get involved with this, who want to mint a wop who kind of described the process? I mean, first of all, you got to get a wallet, right? Speaker 3 00:35:22 Yeah. Um, so any, they call it like a web three compatible wallet. There's Speaker 1 00:35:27 I know you guys mentioned, I think it's a mass, the browser. Speaker 3 00:35:31 Yeah. That's kind of the, go-to probably the most popular one out there. So it's a free browser extension. You install it and it makes it pretty user-friendly to create your, your first public private key pair. And then you write down the seed phrase, which is basically your secret password that you never ever share with anyone. And you write it on a piece of paper and lock it away somewhere. And then that's your entry to the world of crypto, the world of web three. Speaker 1 00:36:00 And I believe that wallet is hooked up to the a, is it the Ethereum blockchain and how much, how much money are you? Are we looking at to investor or to purchase ether room in order to meet one of these wild poos when, when, uh, when, when the mentee process is available? Speaker 3 00:36:19 Yeah. And when we start, we're planning on having the mint price at 0.02 F um, so of course the price of that cryptocurrency is always changing day by day. So it definitely varies like in what the value is, uh, in your local currency. Um, so, but that's kind of the starting point. And then in addition to use the network, the blockchain network, you have to pay, what's called a gas fee. So, um, gas fees are basically like a little incentive that you have to add on to every transaction, which helps all the minors and all the computers around the world that are running that blockchain. It gives them incentive to actually include your transaction. So Gaspesie is to be almost nothing lately with the NFT boom and cryptocurrency, boom. We've had some crazy spikes like to where it could be hundreds of dollars in, I call them gas wars. Speaker 3 00:37:17 Like sometimes when some of these NFTs drop and everyone's fighting to get a limited amount and they're all setting huge amounts of gas to try to get their transaction process first, you know, it's, it's crazy. So we're really working hard to, to lower the gas as much as possible. So one thing we did is I've been working on our smart contract and then you're using the most optimized and doing all kinds of tests to make the smart contract for the NFT, make the smallest gas fee possible. And also we're planning to launch on Saturday next Saturday, the 25th, um, because historically gas prices are much, much lower on weekends. Speaker 1 00:37:56 Did, did you, did you say you're planning on opening up at 0.02 F Speaker 3 00:38:03 Uh, 0.020 0.02 Speaker 1 00:38:06 Points. Okay. Speaker 3 00:38:09 Yeah. So that was a, that was an interesting decision in itself because a lot of these NFT projects, it's probably ranges from 0.04 to two, one to three F, which is crazy. It was like, Speaker 1 00:38:25 So that looks like, so it looks like $72 right now and that's without the gas, Speaker 3 00:38:30 It sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, that's kind of our plan at launch and really that's just to raise kind of our initial funds so we can work on these next projects. I'm already started on our second project, which I'm much more excited about. Um, this first one really is just, as we said, it's an intro to get people on board. It is to raise awareness about kind of this project and also hopefully provide just a little bit of the seed funding. We need to work on these next projects. Speaker 1 00:39:00 Oh, you've mentioned the term a few times and I think it's, we need to explain what it is. What is a smart contract? Speaker 3 00:39:07 All right. Smart contract. Um, so basically, um, Bitcoin was the first blockchain and it's pretty much can only be used for cryptocurrency Bitcoin trading it around, um, Ethereum or Ethereum came up with this idea that what if you could put a little piece of programming language, like a little application, um, on the blockchain, and then anyone can interact with that and that's called a smart contract and it can be really hard to wrap your head around, but basically imagine it's, it's an app that's deployed into the blockchain and then anyone can interact with it. So, um, an NFT is Speaker 1 00:39:48 Kind of sounds like an API. Speaker 3 00:39:51 Yeah, it's, it's basically an API, but it's decentralized. So, so no one can block it, control it, and you can include any kind of logic in it. So they've used these to create tokens so anyone can create their own basically coin. You know, you could have the WP mainline coin that people could invest in and you can set the rules in the smart contract for how they're minted and distributed and passed out to people, you know, and it's amazing the kind of possibilities that, that come from these smart contracts and FTS is just one of the innovations that has become mainstream, you know, Speaker 1 00:40:28 And these smart contracts are exactly the technology that would allow. In fact, you guys allow this with sponsorships where they can actually, um, put a coupon code or a discount or a mat or a message or link to a product within the smart contract. Speaker 3 00:40:46 Yeah, exactly. I've actually included a cool little Easter egg in our smart contract for that who's and it will be possible after they're minted, we're gonna release, um, the ability to rename your watch poo. So, Ooh, so you buy a watch poo, you can actually interact directly with the smart contract and save into the blockchain, your custom APU name, and that wire poo name will be tied to the NFT for all time. Like as it's even if it's sold or traded or bought that custom name is attached to it as it goes. So that's just kind of one little possibility that you could see with some of this stuff, Speaker 1 00:41:25 Man, that'd be, it'd be kinda cool to go to a word camp. And then by going to the word camp, like in person, uh, be able get a wow poo design. That's just for that, but get it as an NFTE. And only those who showed up in person can get it to their wallet. You're able to mint it or something to that effect. Speaker 3 00:41:45 Definitely something you want to explore. Speaker 1 00:41:48 And speaking of smart contract, that goes back to the discussion we were having earlier about sponsorships and swag and how that can, that could really be part of sponsorships and how companies interact with word pressors going forward with this, a new way of reaching out to potential customers. Speaker 3 00:42:08 Yeah. There's lots of potential there there's experiments Speaker 1 00:42:10 Everywhere you look. Speaker 3 00:42:12 Yeah, exactly. I have a whole list to work on one thing. There's a project out there called prolapse P O P, which stands for proof of attendance. Hmm. Something, uh, um, protocol, I think. And, uh, basically you can tie like basically like an event ticket or whatever, to an NFT. So if someone attends a word camp, then it gives their wallet exclusive access to mint and NFT, which is basically a little badge or certificate that proves that you attended that. And that's something that resides on the blockchain and that you can show off, like in your profile or different things like that. And, uh, is there for all eternity? Speaker 1 00:42:56 I mean, I imagine, imagine me sitting here, like, Hey, that white who designed it looks awesome, but it was for a word camp on the other side of the world. There's no way I'd ever have a chance to go there in person. Let me check the, uh, let me check the directory open, see whatever, see if any of them are available on the blockchain for auction, if anybody's selling them and oh, look, there it is. And then I can purchase it and I can, I can grab it. Yeah, Speaker 3 00:43:20 Exactly. Yeah. Digital swag. We think this may be the first WordPress digital swag. So kind of excited about that. Oh man, Speaker 1 00:43:31 That sounds cool. So now you mentioned that half of royalties go to the WordPress foundation and you mentioned that you've been in touch with the WordPress foundation, have they approved this? Are they, are they fine with receiving half of these royalties? And in addition to that, the way this works, you mentioned that as the wild poos continue their life on the blockchain, each time a transaction occurs where the watt pu prominence, which is hands, uh, the WordPress foundation and, uh, web three P will continue to benefit. Speaker 3 00:44:06 Yeah, that's something that we thought, I mean, we want to give back, you know, to, to WordPress to through this. And, um, we thought that'd be a cool way of doing it. Um, a lot of the marketplaces like open sea, which is probably the main one for, for Ethereum network, um, they provide the ability if you own the smart contract to add a royalty percentage. And this is a way this is kind of one of the revolutionary things about NFTs is creators like artists, not only can they sell their art, they can also attach in the logic of the smart contract, a royalty so that anytime it's sold or used in the future, then automatically royalties are distributed to them. You know, instead of relying on Speaker 1 00:44:49 That's an agent or something to middleman some middleware, Speaker 3 00:44:52 Exactly. That's not enforced in the smart contracts. You're not having to depend on anyone in between, you know, so there's various standards for that, that are still being worked out for NFTs. But, um, we're, we're definitely setting that up for the major marketplaces. So if people, so, or, or by what these white poos he's collectible, while who's in the feature, um, that's our hope is that it's going to take off and it's going to become a real collectible, you know, for people to buy and sell and collect. The more rare runs because different white poodles will have more rare traits. The traits will be weighted. So that the ones that are much more common than ones that have much rare traits. Um, and so there'll be more collectible and possibly even more valuable, you know? So anytime those trades happen, then royalties, we're going to give half of those royalties to the WordPress foundation. So Speaker 1 00:45:46 It'd be caught if I, if I meant it, a white Poon, it came with a, uh, it looks like one of them has a flannel shirt and I'd like the one with the flannel shirt and the trucker hat. Yeah. Give that to me, man. That'd be cool with that cool hair, but, um, yeah. So, so tell us, uh, I guess, tell us a little bit about this collection of wild poos. I know you mentioned this earlier about traits, but is it just caps hair? I mean, did you guys just set up a collection of elements for different parts of the wet booze and you put them all in a system and it's just randomly generates a wild poo. And is there any chance of duplicates? Speaker 3 00:46:23 Yeah, so I actually created a script that, um, basically have a lot of like image layers. Um, I could look up what they actually are, but we have different traits, like, like head gear, hats, or hair. Then we have like skin color. Then we have background color. And then we have like the item that they're holding, whether it's a ball or a guitar or whatever, it may be, um, clothing, um, also like accessories, jewelry, things like that. Um, so those are all different layers of traits. And then the script actually combines those all in a completely random way to create unique wild poos. And then it actually goes through and gives them each a weight. So we'll say like the watt poo that has this certain character, only 1% of them are going to have this specific clothing type, you know, or only, only 0.05% of them might have the skin color, you know, uh, that way some can be like even more rare, just like when you open a pack of Pokemon cards or baseball cards, um, you never know what you're going to get. Exactly, exactly. So it's kinda the same thing. It helps like give the collection like more fun and collecting and also gives kind of that. That's the prize value when you're minting and you don't know what you're going to get, you might get a, one of a kind, you may get one that's very rare. You may get one that's a little more common, you know? Um, so that those all set up in the code that, that generates all these, all these wild poos randomly based on the traits that Josh has been developing. Speaker 2 00:47:55 Yeah. And then the, the completes, like when you look at the ones that are fully matching across, we're going to create one of those that, um, will, there will, for sure be a full like pirate one or a full, you know, rocker one or whatever those ones there will be for sure. Ones of those in that 20 to 22. Um, so yeah, it's been fun because I, I look at these layers and you start seeing different parts of it go together and you end up getting one with like pirate boots and a clown nose. And you're like, oh, that is so, so random. But it's like a toy box or a dress up box. I have kids, you know, they, they come out with an iron man mask in a, in a, um, frozen Elsa dress on, you know, it's like the only Speaker 1 00:48:55 The way you would see a white poo design, like this is through January, January. Speaker 2 00:49:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we'll have ones that are completes that are very rare because they're one or only one or two in the collection and they're very, um, different. And then you'll just have some, some of the randomly generated, generated stuff, but all the layers it's, it takes a lot of work because each layer has to work and function with all the other layers. So, and right now I think we're pushing towards a hundred different traits that can be distributed across to all the things. So every one of your combinations can be unique, but all of those traits have to work because we don't know what's going to be the output at the end of the day. Speaker 1 00:49:44 Yeah. Well, those traits nullified, you don't have to worry about them. If it's a special edition, one-off like sponsored by the company cause it's already complete. Speaker 2 00:49:53 Right. And we're not, we're not taking their traits and integrating those ones. These are ones that we're creating customizing for the, the generative ones. Speaker 3 00:50:02 Yeah. And we're using a random number generator to, to decide like where those, those special edition ones are going to end up in the collection. You know, whether it's going to be number three or number 1000, you know, whatever we want to make sure that that's fair. Um, so we're, we're, that's going to be a totally controlled by computer, like where those get placed in the collection. Speaker 1 00:50:24 I can trust you guys. And I know that you're on the right track is by looking at your sponsorship tiers, you've got Y premier you've got dev poo and Boston, you, in terms of how you name your different tiers, you know, how can I, how can I not trust a WordPress centric experiment? I mean, those are, those are pretty gloomy. I'm a <inaudible> I can't even say the word, but it's so good, but okay. So is it too late or can companies still get involved if they're, if they're even at the lowest level of $500, individuals can get involved, if you want to, um, get them over sponsorship. Speaker 3 00:51:00 Yeah. It's not, it's not too late. We'll take you as late as we can, but I mean, even, even if you miss getting into the collection, um, we'll definitely like keep sponsorships open and we have other upcoming projects in the pipeline that, um, people can get involved in, you know? Speaker 1 00:51:18 Oh, wow. So is there, I guess before we wrap it up here, um, give us a little insight info on sort of the next project you're, you're experiencing. You're experimenting with the one that you're excited about. Speaker 2 00:51:32 I think Aaron, Aaron going to have to lay into this one because it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. It's a governance experiment. So Speaker 3 00:51:41 Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of different potential things. Like one of the things that, that this web three technology has unlocked is new forms of government. So I don't know if you've heard the phrase Tao T a O, which means to centralize autonomous. Speaker 1 00:51:56 And I've seen Chris Wallace using on Twitter, but I'd have no idea what doubt means. Speaker 3 00:52:00 Exactly. So example Chris Wallace, he created a Dao, that's a collective of artists and developers and things like that in that NFT space. And dowels are basically the new business, the new, uh, organization model, uh, in this new world of web three. So instead of having a government or, I mean, instead of having a business, that's incorporated as an LLC or a C Corp and then bylaws that are legally written and enforced by, by the laws of a nation, you know, you create all that in the smart contract on the blockchain. So you have everything encoded as to who gets, what percentage of the votes, how, um, initiatives are, are, um, proposed and how they're voted for and decided on how the way people contribute to a project, how that automatically distributes the tokens so that they, so their contributions are monetized or, or distributed in a way that gives them more governance voting rights in the organization. Speaker 3 00:53:04 So it's, it's crazy this whole new world that, that web three is unlocking. And I really believe strongly that that is the new business, the new business model people will say, I work for a Dao or I'm a member of a Dao instead of, um, I work as an employee for this company. So, um, that's one of the things that we definitely want explore it when it comes to WordPress. We know we're pressed governance has been a huge topic and controversial topic over recent years. And this whole world of web three unlocks the potential to connect some of these things in an automated fashion, trustless fashion, to where people who contribute to the project who had the most value to the project are also the people who get to decide the project's direction or get rewarded monetarily based on their contributions in the project. So that's kind of a whole can of worms that we have to dig into. Speaker 1 00:54:00 I know you're in a, in an interesting and very cool space where you can experiment is when you're messing around with technologies that other people are in and had been validated, but you tell it to somebody and they say, what the hell are you talking about? Speaker 2 00:54:14 That's most of our conversations, Aaron's explaining something to me and I sit there and go, wow, that is too wonderful for me to know, but I'm along for the ride because I trust you, you know? Speaker 3 00:54:28 Yeah. So, so project number two, after this wild poo one, um, I'll just give some Hanses. So what we're working on, so it is an FTE based, um, but the idea is a project to incentivize WordPress's growth by rewarding contributors. So every time a new version of WordPress comes out, there's a whole list of all the people that contributed to that version of WordPress, right? And there's actually an API where you can pull that information. So we're creating a project that is actually gonna provide, uh, something to those contributors, um, that they can use either to, to show off or that they can use to possibly, uh, get value and monetize the contributions that they made to those versions of WordPress. So I don't want to give too much away, but it's really exciting. Speaker 1 00:55:20 Yeah. A new way to monetize open source. It could cause that's always been a big discussion who pays for open source and, uh, not too many, a lot of the individuals pay for it through their blood, sweat and tears. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:55:35 Right. Which has become a bigger, yeah. It's become a bigger tension point though. Cause we've been talking about, this is how many times have you seen a tweet go out where somebody, like, if you had a sponsor money to contribute, where would you sponsor out? What would you do? What would you contribute in what way would you do that? And so that constantly is a question that keeps popping up and obviously ours would again be experimental and hopefully lead to something that would be much more, um, valuable for people going forward. But, uh, yeah, I think what ends up happening is that contributing, like you said, it either costs a lot of blood, sweat and tears for some, or it does become monetized in a way with where bigger organizations begin deciding the direction and it becomes less and less decentralized and becomes a centralized thing where the bigger companies are funding volunteer work with their own employees. So it drives in a direction that gives them the most, uh, benefit at the end of the day. Speaker 1 00:56:47 I think, I think you'd be hard pressed to not have people think that that's what that's, what's been happening over the years between automatic and Gutenberg. Uh, so certainly it certainly seems that way. I mean, there there's contributions from a lot of people from a lot of different orgs and volunteers, but by and large, it's been the introduction of Gutenberg into WordPress and who's, who's funded the most development in work and has actually now hired people to, to ease in transitions between different editors and full site editing the blacks it's, it's been automatic Speaker 3 00:57:19 And that's what web through technology has the potential to unlock. So you can, you can encode incentives and into a project and governance and a project into a blockchain where, where it's trustless, where everyone can see it's in code, you know? And so it just unlocks a whole new world of how you can use economic incentives and, and, and different things like governance and incentives to, to guide a project in, in a whole new way. Speaker 1 00:57:49 Well, I want to thank you guys for being on the show. Um, how can people interested in this poo NFT project? Where can they go to learn, to learn more? Speaker 2 00:58:00 Yeah. If they want to just jump over to web three, WP three, the number three, not spelled out web three, wp.com is our website. And there's a section on there specifically about that. We're also trying to build out blood content. It's going to take time, but we're creating tutorials and things, and obviously we'll have other means for communication. But primarily right now we're communicating on Twitter at web three WP. Speaker 1 00:58:35 Yeah. I think if you, for the blog portion of like, what three WP, just an exploration of, of content and ideas and experiments that you guys are looking at and even just tutorials on how to set up a wallet and how to participate. And just maybe down to earth terms like someone like me can explain as to what it means, what minting means, what NFT means, what does, what these things mean? You know, the, the, the simpler the better. And I think it would just help onboard more people onto these types of experiments. Speaker 2 00:59:07 Yeah. I appreciate that feedback. Cause that's kinda the stuff that's, we're kind of running at this fast and furious to get there, but Speaker 1 00:59:15 Yeah. You're like, you're like I don't have time to write about this app. I got to experiment man now. Well, Speaker 2 00:59:22 We wanted to get more people involved in the community so we can get more feedback and we're not just guessing at what people want. Right. Yeah. And so I think that kind of feedback is exactly what we need and, and you're speaking my language for sure. When you say that simplifying getting, getting it so that people can do it. And like we said, whether you're going to purchase an Ft, whether you're going to get a wallet or not, everyone's welcome to the party. So come over, we're going to get a discord set up soon as well for continued communication. We'd debated between slack and discord, just so you know, like just cause a lot of WordPress happens on slack, but, um, discord has the benefit that we can actually validate owners of NFTs. Um, they have an option for that. And so, uh, we do want it to value the members that are participating in that way and, and creating opera options for them to participate at different levels as well. So these are all things that are in the works, but you know, it takes, it takes time to get there and, and the more feedback and, and community members that we get participating, the more likely it will be that we have something that's exciting for everybody at the end of the day. Speaker 3 01:00:37 Yeah. We'll be pushing out, uh, educational content and kind of instructions. And also we're gonna, we're gonna run some contest to where you can get a free YPO poo NFT, um, just sent right to your wallet. Cause we're gonna reserve a certain amount, um, at the beginning that we can just give away for free for contests and stuff like that. Speaker 1 01:00:58 So, so, so it sounds like web three WP right now is an exploration of what 3.0 technologies with various experiments. But at the same time, as you get people involved in the, come in and check out all this new stuff, you're also setting up a community of hopefully like-minded individuals who either want to get involved with the experiment or who are brand new and everybody can learn together. Boy, it reminds me of the WordPress at 2000, the early two thousands. Speaker 2 01:01:26 Well, I hope so. I hope that's what it becomes is something that people feel a part of and not just something that we're out doing in a silo. Um, I think that's kind of what's happened with web three to, uh, to a degree, is that it, it was a silo because it was not accessible for people to participate in, in a lot of ways. Like Aaron's own story. Uh, I know you got to probably jump and run, but like Aaron's own story in kind of finding blockchain. What, uh, years ago, 2015, was that what you were, you had said 14. Yeah, 2014. He was working on it for market press, you know, e-commerce solution at the time. And somebody had suggested, uh, block, uh, Bitcoin as a payment method. And so he was trying to explore that, but the buy-in was, was so high that you're going like, ah, man, do I really want to invest in, in, in, you know, in your mind at the time monopoly money and, and JPEGs, you know, I overpriced JPEGs or whatever. Uh, it's, it's really challenging. And so we want to drop that ceiling down and especially by being able to give some of these away, hopefully they end up in hands of people who couldn't otherwise afford them, you know, and going like, oh, I set up a wallet. They gave me this NFD and now I'm participating, but I didn't actually have to, um, spend anything or invest anything to get there. Speaker 1 01:02:59 I dig that. And uh, you know, it'll be interesting to see where these experiments take you guys and your community because you know, one of the coolest things about this is you have a direction to explore, but you never know how it might detour into something completely different. That's also cool or someone that problem that you eventually saw that you weren't even aiming for. That's the cool thing about these experiments. Speaker 3 01:03:25 Yeah. And we've seen, we've seen a lot of people leave the WordPress community for this new web three kind of silo. Um, whether it's into the NFT world or crypto world. Um, I mean big names and WordPress have left. Um, so we're hoping to kind of merge the two together so people can explore the future of, of what we think the internet is. Um, and still use that in the WordPress space. Speaker 1 01:03:50 Well, I want to thank you too for joining me on the show today and giving us an insight in both the NFT world and this project again for listeners out there, web three wp.com, I'll have links to that site in the show notes, we'll start with you, Aaron. How can people get ahold of you? I get in touch with you and follow your progress on what you're experimenting with. Speaker 3 01:04:11 Yeah. You can follow me at ugly robot dev on Twitter, and I'm also be tweeting on what three WP on Twitter. Those are probably the best ways. And you can also find on our website links to our get hub and our blog. And, um, that's where we'll be sharing some of the code and, and a lot of stuff that we're doing, Speaker 1 01:04:34 Josh. Speaker 2 01:04:36 Yeah. On a personal note, you could follow me at Josh daily on Twitter. Um, best space for me to be at. And then like Aaron said, I'm participating in content creation for web threes, Twitter and our other venture. So, Speaker 1 01:04:56 All right, good. So I know who to go to if you're, if you write a post that I have no idea it's spending my head, I'm going to go to you, man. I'm going to say why I don't understand this. Why? Speaker 2 01:05:05 Yeah. Come to me first, but then I probably go, if you don't understand it, it's probably errand errands. It's probably something super technical that I didn't write. Speaker 1 01:05:17 All right, everybody, Speaker 0 01:05:17 That's going to do it for this episode of the WP mainline podcasts. You can find show notes for this episode and all other episodes on WP, mainline.com. Just click the podcast link and we'll be right there. Um, we'll talk to you again next week. Everybody have a safe, enjoyable weekend so long everybody <inaudible>.