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Episode 97

LIVE From Rare Evo: The Hidden World of Web3 Asset Trading

Jay Chrawnna, director of The Kus, dives into the subtle ways people are already using Web3 in everyday transactions (often without realizing it) and what this means for the future of consumer Web3. He explores how gaming projects like FIFA Rivals are redefining digital asset ownership, and highlights how entities like the Indonesian government are leveraging blockchain to improve transparency, efficiency, and mainstream accessibility.

Transcript

Luke: Jay, welcome to Brave Technologist. How you doing today?

Jay: Good. I’m happy to be here. Happy to meet. I’m glad meet you as well. Glad to have you here, man. Like this is cool to meet in person. We’re here at Rare Evo you’re gonna be speaking at the conference today about consumer Web3.

What’s the core message you hope people leave with?

Jay: Well actually I get the chance to interview somebody who’s really crushing it in this space. Right.

Luke: Oh, cool.

Jay: We have this situation where, and I think, you know, you’re hearing it more and more often where people are. Waking up to the reality that the people on crypto Twitter is just not enough people to sell to.

Right. There’s this huge addressable market. Yes. That Web3 can, you know, change the lives of these people. Yeah. I’m gonna interview a guy named Cam from the Mythos Project.

Luke: Oh, cool.

Jay: They’re a roll up on Polka dot

Luke: Uhhuh,

Jay: and they’re a gaming chain. Nice. Who releases mainstream games on. App Store and the Google Play Store.

Luke: Awesome.

Jay: They just released a FIFA Rivals game.

Luke: Oh, cool.

Jay: Six weeks ago, 1 million downloads. Wow. Wow. That’s huge. None of these people know they’re using Web3 to trade assets with each other. Oh, that’s fantastic. And to build their teams. Yeah. But it’s all happening, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it makes it cheaper for the users.

It makes it more efficient for the company. Mm-hmm. It [00:01:00] increases retention. It’s an incredible thing. We’re gonna talk with him on stage about that. That’s

Luke: fantastic, man. Yeah. Like what does Consumer Web3 mean to you and like how does it differ from what we know in the crypto Twitter space with Web3,

Jay: consumer, Web3 is like no wallet.

Mm-hmm. It’s no acknowledgement of the different brands or anything like that. It’s Right, right, right. It’s simply living a better life. Yeah. That’s empowered by this Web3 technology. ~~Right. That’s fantastic. Taking out all these. ~~the messages we had like five or six years ago. Oh my God. Right?

Like taking out the middleman. Yes. Yes. Right. Yes. Take taking out the trust in all the institutions and, and inserting sources of truth that we can, we can believe in. Yeah. And we, we can rely on Yeah. This is the world that we wanna move to. And it’s a world where Web3 is hidden. Yes. You know, you don’t have to go to a conference to understand what’s happening.

Exactly. Well, I mean, in so many ways

Luke: it feels kind of like, almost a part two of what was happening like 20 16, 20 17? Yeah. Yeah. Where like, oh, here’s what the promise of this could be. Mm-hmm. And then everybody got caught up in all the technical tribal stuff. Yeah. But like, meanwhile, actually now you can do something where a million people can download a game.

And it’s true. Not [00:02:00] even know

Jay: it’s ‘cause you know, the technology needed some time to catch up to the vision, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then in the interim. The only use case was was betting on the vision. Right, exactly. Which became like all these tokens and whatnot. Exactly. So I guess it makes sense why that happened, but we’re definitely pulling out of it Nice.

And there’s gonna be projects that contribute and then projects that don’t. right. And yeah, I think that’s the bet now. Awesome.

Luke: Well, how can projects like mythical games contribute to the growth of Consumer Web3?

Jay: Just by making great experiences Yeah. For users. Right. The gaming industry, not only by users, number of people, but also by the hours of attention is greatly outstripping.

Movies, music. Yeah. Any other form of media. People are spending more time in games than anywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So if, if people are spending their time there making decisions there, gracefully inserting Web3 Right.

To improve their experience is something they’re doing. So they build great games, games that people love, games with people who know how to build games. Mm-hmm. Who’ve already built great games before Web3. Right. They slip in Web3, which makes everything cheaper, [00:03:00] more fun, more exciting, more interac. And there you go.

Fantastic. Now you have to see

Luke: Web3 i I wish more people did that, right? kind of like you see the things that get market fit, like poly market, right? Sure. Like poly market is on the news. Yeah, it was on the news. It was better than what the political polls were doing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Nobody really talked about the crypto part at all, which is great, you know, like, and Totally. It’s cool to see that happening in gaming as well. Love Poly Market though. I think it’s great, man. Like, what are the most promising trends in consumer Web3 gaming that you’re excited about?

Jay: Oh, I think the most promising trends is pretty simple.

It’s a little boring actually, but it’s just having the digital assets. Yeah, that whole um, ownership of digital assets uhhuh, but it also allows us to price digital assets. And then people can trade them without having a middle exchange currency. Right, right, right. That they’re aware of. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like I have three soccer players that are worth this much.

You have two that are worth this much. Why don’t we just do a swap? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s like, that’s a really cool trend. And that allows somebody who doesn’t have access to credit cards. There’s a lot of people who love soccer in the world who don’t have access. Right. Oh my God. Credit cards. You [00:04:00] can imagine, right.

Billions. Right? So they can play the same game that you and I play. And they can have a team that rivals our team because they can trade their way up. Yeah. They can put their time in the game and they can trade their way up. And this just levels the playing field for gamers around the world. Yeah. And actually increases the number of players who can play the same game.

Really cool.

Luke: Fantastic. I mean, that’s one of the cool things about hearing FIFA in this is that like, you know, so much of the actual practical adoption of crypto is happening outside of the western world, right? Like in a lot of these parts of the world where soccer’s huge, right? Like, and people follow it.

Very closely. And so seeing the gaming part kind of come on with that, and then the ability to kind of work crypto into that too, you’re gonna, it seems like it’s gonna have a lot of high impact potentially,

Jay: you know, if you wanna talk about kind of other parts of the world. Yeah. Where Webster can have a big impact.

I gotta tell you about another project. Yeah, yeah. Also, it’s also launching as a polka dot rollup. Oh, cool. It’s called Mandala.

Luke: Okay.

Jay: And this is a government chain for the Indonesian government. Nice. So I went to Indonesia last year, and [00:05:00] they’re talking about lifting. They’re citizens up in this thing called Project 2045, if I’m not mistaken.

Okay. Okay. And they have 280 million citizens. Yeah. Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. And

Luke: people don’t realize how big Indonesia is. That’s that. It’s massive. It’s mental. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay: But they really believe, like, you know, they wanna lift all their countries up and they think blockchain is like, is the solution.

Yeah. So they are making their institutions more efficient by putting them on chain. Identification regional banks. Mm-hmm. IP government services. They’re taking out all these places where there’s just handshakes and trust. Right, right. Everywhere you see handshakes and trust it’s future corruption.

Exactly. Exactly. If future extinction. Right. Exactly. And you just put in mechanisms where we can rely on, and they’re gonna do that with all of their citizens on chain.

Luke: Wow. Wow. That’s huge. That’s huge. It’s a, it’s massive. Yeah. is there like a timeline on that? are they, or is it just announced basically, No, actually all those

Jay: four use cases that I, I just spoke to you about. Yeah, they’re ready to go. Oh my God. Yeah, so they’re starting to roll out. Wow. Cool. Thing about [00:06:00] Indonesia is, you know, like ca for Canada. Yeah, yeah, yeah. USA and all that stuff. Indonesia. Dot id. Oh my God. So, so they’re really, yeah. If, if you want to interact with, with, with banking services and government services, you’re gonna sign up for a id.

Wow. And that’s the onboarding process. That’s fantastic. Yeah. It’s big.

Luke: That’s awesome, man. What are some of the key challenges in integrating blockchain technology Into mainstream gaming, or just more in general even?

Jay: Well, I think the challenges. ~~Or the challenges, ~~what we’re all facing is, how to hide it and how to do it gracefully. Yeah. Yeah. Also. It’s a little bit of a risk to not play the crypto Twitter game. Yeah. Yeah. Where you’re trying to, you know, appeal to this same little venture capital pool and, and you kind of kind of play this like, I feel that like Yeah.

Right. It’s like, it’s like, no, okay, we’re gonna just believe in us. We’re gonna go and attack this totally new group of people. Yeah. and yeah, we’ll see you see you when you get there. Yeah. You know, and so it takes, I guess some like boldness to do that and just to believe in this.

This new consumer vision. Yeah. And then I think it’s finding the people who can build it. Yeah. Yeah. Because there is still a lot of money being thrown [00:07:00] around that is being spent on, I don’t know what exactly. Things that are never going anywhere. There’s a lot of competition to get to get good builders, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I think that’s another challenge as well.

Luke: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the cos as a media broadcaster Mm. And the role you play in the polka dot ecosystem. We got to know. You guys it was cool. It was a cool experience, but I’d love for the audience to learn a little bit more about that.

Jay: That’s right. ‘cause we had you guys on our, our weekly live stream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where what we do is we actually, anybody who wants to spend the polka dot treasury mm-hmm. Because Polka Dot has this big, you know, but Polka has this big money pot. Yeah. And everybody who holds DOT has the right to suggest how to spend it.

And everybody who holds out has the right to vote on those suggestions.

Luke: It’s a fantastic system too, by the way. it’s really open and you get feedback from all walks of life, all types of questions. It’s a place where from, just from our experience. Yeah. Like, every type of question will get thrown at you that can get thrown at you, which really as a project.

It gets you to really sharpen your pitch and make sure that you’re, it’s a great exercise. Like, I think it’s really cool setup that you guys have.

Jay: That’s cool.

Luke: Well, it,

Jay: it was nice to have you, wanted to integrate Polka dot into the Brave Wallet. Yeah. Yeah. [00:08:00] We’re, and usually you, go to a foundation, right, right.

And you kind of make a deal there. Yeah, both polka.you have to come to all the voters. Yeah. And so that’s why we have this show. Yeah. That’s only one of the, the things we do on the Coose. The, the mandate is basically to increase the velocity and volume of high quality information in the ecosystem.

Because there isn’t that foundation that’s making the decisions. Right, right. We all have to be in the same, on the same page. Yeah. It’s cool. It’s cool, man. It’s cool. I know it’s a

Luke: really, like, people talk about ethos and all of that, but going through that governance process, like getting to meet all the different individuals that all together kind of make this ecosystem, it was super cool.

I think I wish more. I wish more networks were like that. with blockchains. And I think it’s like a good example for everybody else. Like if you’re working to have more open governance, go look at what they’re doing. ‘cause it’s, it’s really neat. That’s cool. So yeah, we

Jay: have that, that governance show, but we also have a weekly podcast.

Yeah. In person only like we’re doing right now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we have a Friday news show where we just cover everything that’s happening. It’s like a nine minute show. Nice, nice, nice. We speed through everything. Yeah. And new shows throughout the week [00:09:00] and event coverage. And that’s cool. Which like the newspaper of Polka Dot.

That’s so awesome, man. I

Luke: love it. I love it. How did you become a contributor to Polka dot? Like, you know, with, with both, without being formally hired, but like what was your journey to kind of finding Polka dot?

Jay: Yeah. Well, I was. Doing the COVID crypto deep dive. Oh yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fell into defi summer. Nice. At, won and lost, you know, you know. But I ended up back where I was. Yeah. I like, this is, this is wild, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was just like looking around. ‘cause I was like, I, I should like, commit myself to something that I think is really gonna go. Yeah. Like long term, I mean, Uhhuh.

And then I found Gavin Woods’ contribution to Ethereum. Mm-hmm. And then his move over to make polka dot. Yeah. And then polka dot made a lot of sense at the time. Mm-hmm. The like multiple blockchains and parallel thing. And so, polka dot was launching their pair of chains, like the first kind of consumer thing you could do.

And the UI was really tricky. Mm-hmm. It was like a developer console. Right, right. So then I started making videos of how to use it. Oh, okay. And then that led to, there was a console controlling the treasury at the time, and they just sent me like 40 bucks. [00:10:00] Ah, I see. Yeah. Sometimes like 400 bucks. Okay. Okay.

And they just kept shipping me money, you know. Nice, nice. And I was like, oh man, this is so cool. And eventually it took me, I did about a hundred videos like that, and then eventually I was convinced. To do a full spend proposal, you know, ask for a chunk of money. Yeah. Yeah. So I asked for 30 K upfront. Yeah.

And I was approved. Nice. I hired an editor,

Luke: Uhhuh,

Jay: and that was the beginning

Luke: of the Coose. There’s a lot of output, a hundred videos too. I mean, that’s a good amount. it’d be hard to justify saying no to that. when somebody’s got that kind of conviction to make that many

Jay: things, reputation is one of the, the most important currencies in OpenGov.

Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, token based, token weighted voting. If you have more tokens, you have more power. Yeah. But there are a lot of people with not a lot of tokens, but with a lot of reputation. Yeah. Who really move the space in polka dot. Oh, that’s cool. And yeah, that’s what you gotta do.

Luke: Yeah. So, what’s your perspective on dot cap supply and the implication for its token ons?

Jay: Okay, so this is a great example actually. bring that up because this is a very difficult thing to do for polka dot. Polka dot has major inflation, Uhhuh. [00:11:00] It had like a 10% inflation.

Gavin Wood, who designed it, called it like pie in the sky. Okay, okay. No, somebody should change it, but nobody ever did. Ah, I see. And it’s just, it, it’s insane. And, and you can see it in the chart as well. Mm-hmm. The selling pressure’s insane. So about 18 months ago Gavin brought it up first. He’s like, we should cap the token supply.

Mm-hmm. And we should do like a step change inflation like Bitcoin, you know, like it happens. And nobody really picked up on it. But then, I don’t know, like two months ago. Wow. I was just like, we should do this. And I just started to push in the ecosystem and started to campaign and did a little spend proposal to get a research grant and crowdsourced research.

Mm-hmm. And we got all this information, we became super knowledgeable and now we’re pushing in a few weeks to actually put the vote on chain. Oh, cool. To stop the inflation, step it down every two years. Yeah. Yeah. And cap it. Yeah. At half a billion more tokens than we have today. Yeah. So 25 or 33% more than we have today.

You know, over a few decades, but. Forcing polka dot holders to actually [00:12:00] like create. Like a profitable business right before polka dot. Right. Because right now inflation is just like, it’s like the credit line keeps getting extended. Yeah. Why do we have to do anything?

Luke: And, and, and it’s not year one anymore, right?

Like That’s right. I think a bunch of projects are kind of starting to see this where look you know, especially now and you’ve got all this competition like for attention for everything. Yeah. Where there’s like hundreds of L twos, there’s like all these all down ones. the folks that have been there for a long time, they see this.

Inflation happening, and they’re like, dude, like, we’re not going anywhere, but what the hell? You know,

Jay: like, here are the top projects that have a cap supply. You have Bitcoin? Yeah. XRP. Yeah. Ada who else is there? Shit. Oh, B and b. huge holder cultures. Right? Right. Like they just, they hold through All the people who held through XRP is bullshit.

Oh my God. Like, come on. Yeah. I mean, same with Cardo as well. The people who, who have been holding and waiting there. It’s crazy. Right, right. And I think this is a really powerful, it’s the industry’s most powerful meme. Yep. And it’s mathematically creates more hard money. Yeah. Sounder money.

So I think it’s what, what we have to do. That’s a herculean [00:13:00] effort, man. We

Luke: might just do it. We’ll have to see in a few weeks. would you consider uh, polka dot the most contrarian trade in crypto? Hmm.

Jay: Yeah. If you’re in crypto Twitter? Yeah. Yeah. Because the reputation for polka DOT’s kind of like, like people don’t understand it, right?

Yeah. They had like the pair of chains Yeah. Auctions. Yeah. And that was a huge thing in 2021. Yeah. But then that didn’t work out for like a bunch of reasons. It didn’t make sense. Mm-hmm. And so now we have something that’s much better mm-hmm. For like, because we’re able to launch mythical like we were just talking about.

Right. Right. Or mandala. Like they can come into space and use this massive throughput, but nobody really knows about what’s, like, nobody really knows about those things that I just told you. Right, Those are just a few of the things. Right, So I think that projects like mythos and, and Mandala, you know, during the next bear market.

We’re gonna see like insane activity on these chains. Like that, that hype cycle is not gonna die. Right. Right. They’re, they’re being used, it’s a real, you know, real application happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, to catch on now and to, and to see that and to kind of trade [00:14:00] against that, that trend of not really believing in Polkadots so much.

Right. I dunno. It might work out. Interesting.

Luke: How can the polka dot ecosystem support the development of, of consumer Web3 applications?

Jay: It supports it through scale to, yeah. Okay. Yeah. The throughput. For polka.is, is is really remarkable. Awesome. We did a real test last November where we took just a few of the, of the roll-ups mm-hmm.

And we just, we we spammed them. Yeah. Like with insane amounts of, of, of transactions. Yeah. I think it was like 15% of the network and we did like 143,000 TPS. Wow. Wow. Whoa. and polka.is super resilient as well. Yeah. You know, they say decentralization isn’t so hot anymore, but like if you want extremely high throughput, like a major FIFA game or a country, yeah.

And you don’t want anyone to come and fuck with the with the output. Right, right, right. But you don’t No, I I, yeah. It’s the, I think it’s the only place to go. Yeah. Because you can get major throughput, but like, make the trade off of, of resilience. Right, right, [00:15:00] right. I

Luke: think people arguing against resilience or idiots, like I I, there, it’s, it’s never been more important to have resilience in right now.

Oh my God. And, and

Jay: look like, look what’s happening in like, places like Europe right now. Like the UK is cracked out in all this weird stuff all over,

Luke: even in America, like, Florida and Texas, right? Like they’re starting to age verify, put your IDs into things. I think really?

It’s just like crazy. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. For adult content and stuff. But yeah. You know, before you know it like, YouTube is gonna require ID verification for, you know, anything that’s not children related content and stuff. Okay.

Jay: So this original mission of Web3 is so important, right? Yeah. And I think if you wanna do Web3 at scale, I think Polka DOT’s the only place.

Yeah. I, I think you can get like, elements of it, but to get it all, I think it’s, I think Polka DOT’s the place

Luke: where can people go find out about Polka dot, like, I mean, I know you’ve got your content, but that’s, we talked about a lot here, but you gotta follow the Coose,

Jay: follow the co.

No, that’s the game. Where can people follow the co? So you gotta type in the KUS Uhhuh anywhere you like to consume content. Okay. And then you’ll be in a few weeks, it’ll be a little alarming at first. You’ll be like, wow, there’s so much going on. Who are all these people? What’s going on?

Right. Two or [00:16:00] three weeks in. You’re gonna be hooked. You gonna have a more fun,

Luke: I mean, when we were on, it was like, it was neat because we got to kind of sit through a lot of the uh, the housekeeping types of business, but like, yeah. Yeah. It was like being almost like in a board meeting where you’ve got people reporting in on different areas and giving numbers and Stuff. I’ve been in lots of board meetings, like it, it’s very, very much like that in an open way, which is super refreshing to see. And so, yeah. Yeah. Jay, like super happy that you were here. Thank you for giving us the time. Love to have you back to you to kind of check back in on things and appreciate what you guys are doing, like for the ecosystem and for crypto more broadly.

Jay: Thank you for the time. I think almost 24 hours saved from not seeing ads by using the brave browser. I love it, man. Yeah, dude, I love the brave browser. Thanks to

Luke: come to with polka dot and brave uh, in the near future, man, so I’m looking forward to that too. Looking forward to it, man. Thanks a lot.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast.

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Show Notes

In this episode of The Brave Technologist Podcast, we discuss:

  • How the next wave of Web3 could be completely invisible to users.
  • Why Polkadot may be the only platform capable of scaling Web3 at full potential.
  • What “Consumer Web3” really means, and why it’s about more than wallets and tokens.
  • How blockchain is being used to reimagine institutions at a massive scale.

Guest List

The amazing cast and crew:

  • Jay Chrawnna - Director

    Jay Chrawnna is the director of The Kus, a media broadcaster for Polkadot. On the Space Monkeys Podcast and weekly Attempts at Governance liveshows, the DOT eco’s top movers and doers drive discourse and shape the second age of Polkadot. Jay exclusively uses the Brave browser.

About the Show

Shedding light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!
Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.