[00:00:00] Donny: The world is waking up to the power of crypto. And we are seeing this with new NFT and token launches every day, all using blockchain technologies. We’re also seeing huge marketing spends by crypto exchanges and platforms. And so this season, we are speaking to the marketing leaders of those crypto companies hosted by brave software in me, Dani, Devon.

[00:00:26] You’re listening to a new episode of the brave marketer podcast. And this one features Maddie Taylor, and he’s the head of growth at Solano labs and has been obsessed with cryptocurrency ever since he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the economics of proof of work consensus mechanisms. And prior to Solano, he was at zero X and also at square.

[00:00:45] I think you’re going to really like this episode, because we’re going to talk about what makes salon a different and their user experience. And really talking about how the community drives the growth of Salada [00:01:00] and less like traditional marketers or marketers for cryptocurrency companies.

[00:01:04] And then Maddie is also going to talk about what excites him about defy and he breaks it down and it gives a great analogy, just like the movie, the big short. But before we get into today’s episode, we want to highlight our brave pick of the week. And every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with brave.

[00:01:19] And this week we’re choosing unstoppable domains. So unstoppable domains recently ran a cyber Monday sale with brave ads to promote their buy one, get one on NFT domains and they were in a single day. Push notifications globally in tandem with the us sponsored image to raise awareness and generate site traffic

[00:01:37] And it’s a pretty cool company because you can buy unstoppable domains. And so now for this week’s episode of the brave marketer,

[00:01:45] Maddie. Welcome to the brave marketer podcast. How you doing? Good. How are you Dani? I am doing well. Thanks for taking time out [00:02:00] to sit with us. why don’t we jump right in and why don’t you tell the audience what’s the most exciting thing that you’re working on, right.

[00:02:06] Matty: we’ve been running a lot of, hackathons every few months at Solana. and I think, that’s been a really exciting thing the community, to participate in and contribute to. And so, we’re planning our next one and. that’s been a big focus area of mine. so yeah, fairly excited about that and to get more builders interested and educated on crypto.

[00:02:27] Donny: Cool. What are you guys I’m hacking? Like do you give out different assignment?

[00:02:31] Matty: a community event and we’re a big contributor to it where it’s not like a traditional hackathon where you go in person and it’s like over a weekend and you spend 48 hours trying to create some proof of concept.

[00:02:44] It’s more kind of model where a longer timeframe and it’s online. And so it’s anyone in the world can join these things. And, it’s usually about six weeks. And by the end of it, it’s more of a way to like, kind of introduce your product to the [00:03:00] Solano community and invest.

[00:03:01] Kind of class. And so, I think it’s more of a product competition or a launch that people get really excited about and, have a lot of, I guess time to, to connect with other builders who have a similar idea and yeah. Create awesome projects.

[00:03:16] Donny: Cool. Could they have been working on the project before the hackathon started or like they started it and then they ended it within the six.

[00:03:22] Matty: Yeah. So that’s something that we kind of go back and forth on, but I think generally, you should start the project when the hackathon starts.

[00:03:31] if it’s a couple days or like even a, like a five or six days before. Not a huge deal, but I mean, if you’ve been working on this project for six months,those people can apply to. but it’s just that the judges and the community will only kind of evaluate your project, based on the work that you did during the hackathon time.

[00:03:50] and so that’s kind of the deal. When

[00:03:52] Donny: was the last hackathon? Was there any like interesting projects that came.

[00:03:56] Matty: Yeah, for sure. So our last [00:04:00] hackathon, ended up, in mid-October, it was called ignition, had 7,000 registrations, about 600 project submissions, many of which have gone on to raise, you know, tens of millions in seed funding and are kind of off and running and.

[00:04:14] these are great. Just kind of community events to kickstart your project, get some projects

[00:04:20] Donny: or whether like from

[00:04:22] Matty: the board, I would say the kind of the biggest category is,defy, but there’s projects in web three, there’s gaming, there’s NFTs. there’s all sorts of different projects in between.

[00:04:33] And so, yes, it’s a wide range. That’s

[00:04:36] Donny: amazing. so our companies have done some work together. we had a big announcement. so we have our wallet that we announced. We announced our partnership with Solano at your event in Lisbon. do you want to speak a

[00:04:48] Matty: little bit about that?

[00:04:49] Sure. it’s a really exciting thing that brave decided to integrate with Selana. was great listening to Brendan. Talk about the reasons for that. And, yeah. Awesome to have you [00:05:00] guys in the ecosystem and bringing on so many users. I think you guys are something around 30 or 40 million monthly.

[00:05:06] Actually we

[00:05:07] Donny: were 42 million at the conference. And then since the conference we announced 46 million users, by the time people are listening to this episode because it’ll be in January, I’m going to guess that will be about 50 million.

[00:05:20] Matty: Yeah. I mean, so that’s super exciting because, I think Phantom Allah, which is the most popular crypto wallet in salon, or today has something like 1.5 million weekly users.

[00:05:31] And then the long tail of other wallets have maybe another half million of users. So total like two to two and a half million users. Currently and just like bumping that up to something like 50 million is insane. And I think I mean, this is why Solano was built in the first place, right. To handle that type of usage.

[00:05:50] and so, yeah, I really excited that you guys are joining the ecosystem.

[00:05:54] Donny: Yeah. It’s exciting. You know, we’re trying to build out the wallet usage. not all 50 million [00:06:00] users are using the wallet, but you know, you combine the two where we’re growing our wallet and then you have access to. Everything within the Solano ecosystem, the defy products, the NFTs, all of that access.

[00:06:13] And I personally have enjoyed using Salada so much more than Ethereum. I tried to do a simple buy an NFT, for, you know, a couple of hundred dollars, but then I’m hit with like $200 of gas fees. And I literally just say like, forget it. And I start questioning why. So many people are still so bullish on Ethereum, but I mean, I understand why, because there’s a huge ecosystem.

[00:06:34] there’s a lot of developers there, but once they just start using Salada for like a second and realize how fast it is and how limited, like how small the fees are, it’s great. It’s like when I send money to you and it’s like, as fast as me sending an email to you and you saying. Like, that’s great.

[00:06:52] with others. I’ll send it to you. And it’s like, all right, why don’t we, check back in like a half an hour and see if I got it, you [00:07:00] know? and then all the fees. So, do you just hear that same sentence over and over again?

[00:07:05] Matty: Yeah. It’s I think the phrase that we hear a lot is like, it’s the crypto’s iPhone moment.

[00:07:10] It’s kind of the moment where you kind of get the web two level feedback and response that you expect in kind of a web three format. Right. And I think a lot of the ecosystem projects have really taken what, you know, Solana enables and built out these like great user experiences that feel like a web to experience, which is awesome.

[00:07:29] and so, yeah, and I think like that’s not to say anything bad about Ethereum. Like Ethereum is amazing. I’m a huge fan of Ethereum. I worked in that ecosystem a few years before Solana and I think, you know, there’s lots of interesting use cases there still, and that will continue to be the case. I just think that, for certain use cases, salon.

[00:07:49] because of its speed and kind of like the user experience that you can develop downstream from that is exceptional. And it’s going to grow to, you know, billions of people around the world using it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:59] Donny: If you [00:08:00] have a good product, more people want to use it. If more people are using it, you want to make it better.

[00:08:05] So, for the new listeners listening, really the Genesis of this podcast is the brave marketing moments. The moments where marketers took a little bit of a risk, stepped outside of their comfort zone, and exhibited bravery,

[00:08:20] Maddie, why don’t you tell us about your brief marketing moment? what were the strategies and tactics that you used in that.

[00:08:27] Matty: Yeah, I think I may have a little bit different way of,answering this question than your previous guests. I think this will get to kind of maybe the differences between traditional tech startup marketing and you know, this whole new crypto kind of blockchain world I think one thing when I joined salon and other people have this view as well, It was that like Solano labs, the company that I work for is not going to scale this crazy marketing organization and scale [00:09:00] out to thousands of people like you see in Google or Facebook or whatever.

[00:09:04] Donny: So you’re not running a super bowl commercial.

[00:09:08] Matty: Well, no, not I should. Hey. but I think it’s more just about the strategy. getting the community involved very early on to everything. because don’t think, these systems they’re grassroots, they’re open source.

[00:09:22] the users are the kind of stakeholders. And I think, getting them involved in things like hackathons, early on, where it’s not just us, like running a hackathon, we may set the date of like when the hackathon is going to be. All of the judging, all of the prize pool the seed funding offering after the fact, all of that is community kind of run and supported.

[00:09:45] And I think that just makes it even more effective rather than us just being this single kind of top-down entity saying like, oh, this is what this event or this campaign, or, this should be, it’s more just like getting everyone involved from [00:10:00] day one. And I think. that’s been a very effective tool and just like growing a, an early community that feels like they have ownership over all aspects of the project.

[00:10:08] and so, yeah, I think that’s been really effective.

[00:10:10] Donny: I love the way you used the word community. I’ve heard it over and over again. when there are new and FTE drops or minting going on, when there’s new coins, when there’s just new projects, the first thing that everybody always says is community.

[00:10:25] You have to have a community because if there’s, three people on a room launching a new. 10,000, NFTs or a new token, but there’s nobody following it. There’s no community, there’s no rally behind it. It’s just going to die in the vine. but when you have a community, I mean, that has a big community and brave, salon ecosystem as a huge community and the things, tick off.

[00:10:47] So what do you do to excite to that committee?

[00:10:53] Matty: Yeah, I think first and foremost, I think you kinda touched on this before, is that. as new projects get [00:11:00] introduced into the ecosystem, just helping people, just education and awareness of like here’s a new project. give it a try.

[00:11:07] I think, we are, one of the, kind of actors in helping new projects, find new users and introducing them to the. I think this is kind of speaks to why the community is so important. They’re so willing to try new things like automatically you have a user base that you can tap into from day one as a new ecosystem project, because all of these community members are just kind of dying to try out new DFI projects or a new game or a new NFT, related marketplace or whatever.

[00:11:35] and so I think that’s something that’s been affected. interestingly enough, I think this kind of is just like a great marketing principle that I learned at square. when I used to work, there was best marketers for a company or a product is not the company itself, right.

[00:11:53] For square. It was like the merchants who loved using square almost to the point wherepeople love square, who weren’t [00:12:00] even. necessarily businesses that use the POS terminal, right? it was often like the users of their business. And so I think that’s the case in crypto too, where it’s like the biggest kind of most effective evangelists or marketers in the Solano world is not us.

[00:12:16] It’s all of these great projects and users that are talking about. And fast, the blockchain is, and so I think that’s a really important thing. Yeah. I mean, it’s in the

[00:12:25] Donny: books, like crossing the chasm as an example where you have your early adopters and then when you go into, mass markets, it’s the viral effect.

[00:12:34] it’s people telling people about it. You saw it with all the social networks like Facebook and you know, how it grew like wildfire at the schools and stuff. And I like what you’re saying about POS systems. I’ll go into a restaurant now and they’ll have this toast. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like toast, but they turn the screen around and you type in your tip and everything and you can review your order.

[00:12:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That looks right. That’s great to me. versus just canning over my [00:13:00] credit card. And then I dunno if I’m out there evangelizing toast. Well, I just did on this podcast, but, I think maybe other people are.

[00:13:06] So, Maddie talked to us a little bit about you. So what excites you about crypto and then go into, are you an NFT guy, a defy guy, gaming guy, like what’s your stick.

[00:13:21] Matty: Yeah. I guess the first part of that question, what excites me about crypto it’s just this mechanism and these systems to unlock new.

[00:13:28] And I think that’s an incredibly beneficial thing for the world. and I think in terms of what verticals excite me, I play around with all this stuff because there’s great projects across the board, in the salon ecosystem. but personally, like I’m really excited about defy and I think that’s where.

[00:13:48] Crypto probably has the best product market fit outside of like, what Bitcoin’s doing. and so I think defy is particularly exciting right now with something like Solano [00:14:00] where Ethereum, there’s a lot of great GFI projects in Ethereum and they kind ofpaved the way. All of these various use cases, whether it’s a borrow, lend protocol or a Dex, or even structured products or perpetual swaps and all of these different kind of like primitives.

[00:14:15] And I think on salon and you’re seeing a lot of these primitives get rebuilt, except they’re just built for capital efficiency and built for speed. And I think that’s where finance thrives generally. And so it’s just exciting to see how ecosystem is evolved and, yeah. that’s I that’s what I’m excited about

[00:14:32] Donny: for anyone listening.

[00:14:33] It’s kind of a, not necessarily crypto newbie, but maybe they have some Bitcoin Ethereum, maybe a little bit of soul, but, when you talk about DFI, what’s like the number one use case that you would use to explain DFI, and how people are using it in salon. Yeah.

[00:14:48] Matty: maybe I’ve been trying to play around with this like analogy to help people understand why DFI is important.

[00:14:54] have you seen the movie the big short or read the book? Okay. Do you know that scene? And I [00:15:00] think this will, this analogy will maybe kind of explain what are some things that I’m excited about, but,you know, the scene where, you know, Michael burry, right. had this view that there was something wrong with this like MBS product, right.

[00:15:11] There was something wrong with mortgage backed securities, but first of all, it wasn’t transparent in to figuring out like, what is even packaged in these securities. Right. And so it was this arduous process for him to like go through and try to find all the data that, that showed like what was actually in these products, even though.

[00:15:32] Credit rating agencies had it like rated AAA. Right. and that was kind of like a trust, In these credit rating agencies, these kind of like institutions that were telling us that like these things were safe. And even when he figured out that one, I can’t trust these credit rating agencies, because I finally found the data that showed that this there’s something wrong here.

[00:15:53] How do I allow. Take a position in the market to show that well, like the product didn’t even exist. Right. So he had to go [00:16:00] to financial institutions and be like, make me this product. Let me get into this position to express my viewpoint on the world. And it was just like this, you know, tons of legal costs and tons of, you know, just time and resources putting in just to make a simple trade.

[00:16:16] And I think what’s interesting about, DFI and I think. across, you know, all diva ecosystems. Is that one you don’t need to trust anyone. The data is transparent on chain. Like you can check all of this stuff instantly on dashboards that dune provides or Nansen to, you can be, Ukrainian developer and have like a product idea and just like spinning up in your basement right.

[00:16:39] Within an hour and deploy it onto Ethereum Ruslana and it just works. And it’s listed on, decentralized exchanges and. it just lowers the barrier for anyone that has a viewpoint on a specific asset class to take that position. And so I think that’s, what’s really exciting. And so I just think in terms of like a specific example, I’m really excited to see how [00:17:00] serum on sauna has developed.

[00:17:02] So. In Ethereum, like ANMs automated and market makers like unit swap and curve and balance are, have become really popular. I think part of that is just that it’s really hard to build an, a fully on chain order book in Ethereum. That’s not the case in sauna where Saram was built with this view from day one and.

[00:17:23] It’s really started to take off as like a core primitive, how people trade. so yeah, really excited about Sarah. I’m really excited about decentralized exchange on salon, right? So you’re saying like

[00:17:32] Donny: being able to like, kind of unpack all the securities and see what’s there.

[00:17:36] Matty: Yeah. I mean, because all of this stuff is on chain.

[00:17:39] People have built out dashboards that show exactly. All of what’s included in our PR. I mean, that’s the nature of open source, right. Is like don’t trust, verify. And like, all of this stuff is transparent from day one, unlike a lot of Products in the financial industry. Right.

[00:17:54] Donny: And then the UI UX we were talking about earlier, basically exemplifies how it’s all clean [00:18:00] and you can see it all right.

[00:18:01] I’ve seen like the blockchain looks like, and I don’t ever want to see it again. It’s like a lot of code and stuff and I don’t really get it, but when you can show it, you know, the keys or whatever it may be, in a more visually appealing way, It makes a lot of sense.

[00:18:15] Matty: Yeah. I think it’s even more important to have a great UX in DFI because you’re obviously have a lot more responsibility over your kind of actions I would say, versus like in Facebook, if you screw something up on Facebook or there’s a bug, it doesn’t mean there’s like a complete loss of funds, right.

[00:18:34] Versus defy. Like you are holding your keys. That’s a huge responsibility. and I think the UX needs to be very good and clean and honestly like explanatory into how to like use this product safely. And so I think it’s even more important in defy. Got

[00:18:50] Donny: it. There’s a really big project at brave to basically decentralized advertising.

[00:18:55] So right now, when we’re doing advertising, brave is in the middle. you could almost see us like a bank. you [00:19:00] know, the advertisers need to come to us to execute buy and advertising buy, and then we execute. within the brave browser, but there’s a project called Themis and you can search it.

[00:19:09] You can brave it. and it’s T H E M I S. and we’re going to be building that on Solano ecosystem and, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you aware of that? And could you speak at all to why do you think we’re choosing salon?

[00:19:23] Matty: I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know the exact details about why you decided to build on Solano. So I’d love to hear it from your perspective.

[00:19:29] Donny: Look, I wasn’t at the conference, but what I do know is that when you transact and advertising and you’re doing programmatic buys, you’re talking about something that you need an amazing amount of.

[00:19:41] An amazing amount of low costs. And that’s what I think about Solano speed and low cost. Those are the two things I just keep on thinking about. So it makes sense that we’re going to build it on so on, and I’m sure there’ll be more blog posts to, come for that. so let’s go in another direction and talk [00:20:00] about.

[00:20:00] Crypto marketing in general, you talked about how you lead by community, versus other marketers, but what do you think about kind of crypto marketing? I mean, you worked at square before now you’re in the crypto field. I’m sure you talked to other crypto marketers. in what ways maybe besides community is crypto marketing different than traditional marketing

[00:20:25] Matty: Yeah, there’s a fair amount of similarities. I came from a very kind of, I guess like analytical marketing background, where, when you run a campaign, or you spend some money,you know, exactly like. Who signs up for your account? There’s usually like a user signup flow, right. you know, exactly once they sign up, how much they use your application, how much they’re spending, you know, and that leads to downstream things like lifetime value, right. LTV of a customer. And then once you kind of have these backend metrics on, like, this is what one customer is.

[00:20:56] To us, you can take that kind of like target audience [00:21:00] and use other channels to try to attract. And you have a better way of understand. How effective your marketing is, in crypto, like a lot of these defy applications or layer one blockchains, like Selana or an NFT marketplace.

[00:21:14] there’s usually no account, right? you don’t know someone’s email or phone number or any kind of information like that. Other than this like random address that connects to your application, right. You don’t necessarily. have a good sense then of these downstream metrics that you can build off of in terms of how you spend your marketing or like what channels you use.

[00:21:35] Right. And so I think that’s a huge challenge and something that. It’s an interesting, kind of like new opportunity to figure out how all of that works and in the crypto world. So yeah, that’s something I’ve,heard a lot from other crypto mark.

[00:21:49] Donny: Facebook Metta just allowed crypto advertising.

[00:21:52] what do you think that, that says to the.

[00:21:56] Matty: I mean, I think it’s great that like things like Metta, Facebook, [00:22:00] I think Google is also loosening out their policies as well. I mean, I just think it, these are traditional channels that, work really well in the web two world.

[00:22:08] They’ll work in the web three world as well. I hope that personally, I hope that this whole, sort of like advertising model changes quite a bit. And now I know you guys are working on. as well, to be a little bit, more beneficial to end users. And so I hope a lot of these kind of incumbent tech companies get disrupted, but in the interim, like, it’s great that they’re offering this too.

[00:22:30] And I think it’s especially effective for more centralized businesses. So like, you know, Coinbase is very similar to any other web to company, right. It’s or, you know, Binance or these kinds of. I guess, centralized exchanges. but yeah, I think it’s exciting that, you know, they get to use those channels as well now.

[00:22:48] Donny: Yeah, exactly. I was listening to, an interview recently with the CEO of Coinbase and he was basically saying that like, They are a centralized company and they’re a technology company, [00:23:00] but they want to be a decentralized company and they’re not there yet. We’re like, you know, salon is pretty much a decentralized company.

[00:23:07] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think it was salon as necessarily a company. It’s just like, that’s why I keep talking about community. It’s,it’s really multiple kind of participants, you know, there’s validators. Ecosystem builders, developers, there’s users using their projects. Like there’s external developers just building on the protocol itself.

[00:23:29] And so I really don’t think of it as a company. and so what would you call it? I call it an open source project or an open source network.

[00:23:38] Donny: How many people are on the payroll

[00:23:42] Matty: at salon? A labs? you know, I think they’re probably up to 75 people, but it’s not like we have this like super defined, like sales funnel where we know exactly every customer that’s coming in.

[00:23:53] Like we don’t know, 90% of the new projects built on sauna. We learn about them when they announced on. and so it’s [00:24:00] well beyond what we’re kind of working on. And that goes for a core network development as well from an engineering side. And so,interesting thing that, that Brian Armstrong said that they want to become a decentralized company because I think there’s an inherent push and pull there that I don’t see that working out actually personally, like I think it’s going to be very difficult.

[00:24:20] Centralized company to completely decentralize their business. Because I think at the end of the day, it’s going to eat into their revenue, a lot. and I think there’s always this push and pull between like the shareholder interests and a for-profit revenue generating business.

[00:24:34] And so I think Binance is kind of struggling with this, to be honest, they’re trying to, you know, start this like Binance smart chain, and they’re trying to figure out ways to decentralize, but I think there’s this always, this kind of contention between the two. Got it.

[00:24:48] Donny: So to just start wrapping it up, you know, what do you think are the biggest, challenges that, you know, the crypto market is facing or crypto marketing or crypto.

[00:24:58] Matty: Yeah, I think for [00:25:00] both, I think, you know, one benefit of being in like kind of a bull market that we are today for the most part in the last couple of years, is that like, it brings in a lot of interesting people that have, you know, an ear to listen right. Where they see the Bitcoin chart or this long uncharted Ethereum chart.

[00:25:17] And they’re like, wow, like what is this? They kind of come for the speculation, but then they’re interested in learning about the actual technology and economics behind these systems. And I think. You know, it makes it easy to like basically educate people because they’re so open to it. I think that education piece is the biggest challenge is like, how do you teach people to care about the principles behind this stuff enough where they actually kind ofgo down the funnel where they become an active community member or they become a builder in the space or an entrepreneur.

[00:25:46] And so, yeah, that’s how a lot of the time that I, you know, spend thinking about is,is. How do you educate people? Especially if the market were to turn, because that’s happened many times in the past and it gets really [00:26:00] hard to get people interested in this stuff when there’s not this financial speculation around it.

[00:26:05] Donny: Yeah. So last question. Can you nominate another brave marketer to be on.

[00:26:09] Matty: Sure. I mean, this is just a guy that I learned a lot from in the beginning of my career. His name is Andrew Chan and you’ve probably heard of him. he like kinda like growth at Uber for a while. And he’s a partner at Andreessen Horowitz now, but he is an awesome guy to listen to about just talking about like, how he thinks about marketing.

[00:26:28] and yeah. So yeah, I would recommend him highly.

[00:26:30] Donny: Cool. I’m actually, I do have one more question. for like the first 30 days I was calling Salana Solano and everybody that I’ve ever spoken to. Oh, we says Solano until I have to correct them. Where does the name Salada come from and why didn’t someone just say, let’s just call us Solano.

[00:26:49] Matty: Yeah. So Salana comes from, Salana beach, California, which is in San Diego. it’s just like Anatoli, yakka, vanco. Who’s kind of the creator of the protocol. he [00:27:00] worked at Qualcomm in San Diego and him and his buddies used to go surfing all the time in Solano beach. And so I think.

[00:27:06] That’s where the name came from. I think people call it Solano because has been up at the top of the market capitalist for a long time. And people just see the names together and somehow mix the two. And that’s my theory on it, but I actually have no idea why people would call it Solano,

[00:27:25] Donny: All right. On that note, Maddie. Thanks so much, really appreciate you having the, beyond the podcast. Thanks

[00:27:31] Matty: for coming on. Thank you so much for having me and yeah. Thank you.

[00:27:35] Thanks again for listening to the brave marketer podcast, to stay up to date on all things. Brave, sign up to the brave ads inside a newsletter@brave.com forward slash add news. Do get tips for advertising and the cookie. This world exclusive content, industry insights, best practices for consumer privacy and more.

[00:27:55] If you’d like to get started on your brave ads campaign or speak to someone from the team email. [00:28:00] Ad sales have braved.com. That’s 80 sales dot com. And finally musical credit goes to my older brother already. Divorced provides inspiration every single day until next time.