GRTiQ Podcast: 177 Eliott Teissonniere

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal, or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions, consult with the proper professionals and do your own research.

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions, consult with the proper professionals, and do your own research.

Eliott Teissonniere (00:00:14):

We are dependent on indexing for our smart contracts. So is every single crypto project on the web. The indexing component is going to be key to get proper data, or statistics, or insights about a given dapp, or a set of dapps.

Nick (00:01:03):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Eliott Teissonniere, co-founder and CTO at Nodle, a web3 network that harnesses smartphones as nodes to establish a digital trust network for social good. If you’ve ever wondered about web3′s potential to solve problems, like authenticating real world events, or facilitating reliable reporting or social posts, this podcast is for you.

(00:01:25):

During our conversation, Eliott talks about what Nodle is and how it works, including an overview of an exciting new app called Click. We also explore Eliott’s early fascination with technology, his journey into web3, and what he learned about the industry while working as a blockchain consultant, and as co-founder and CTO at Bitnation. I started the discussion by asking Eliott about growing up in France.

Eliott Teissonniere (00:01:50):

Nick, thank you for having me. So, I’m French. I was born in a region of France called Auvergne, which is where we have volcanoes. And most recently, I have spent a large amount of time in Paris, and Paris area France. And even more recently, I then moved to San Francisco, because I wanted to be where “innovation happens.” I wanted to be in acceleration land, instead of deceleration land.

Nick (00:02:16):

And what were you like growing up? Were you always into technology? Was this sort of the path you were destined to be on?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:02:21):

Yeah, I was always a bit of a nerd. I first was mostly into books, and then I kind of stumbled across programming. I remember my dad not wanting to buy me a magazine, because the magazine was kind of overpriced, to be honest. And so his deal was, “Well, I’m not going to buy the magazine for you, but I am going to print papers.” And so little did he know that two or three months later, they were two or three drawers full of paper that he had to print every evening at work. I was just reading as fast as I could, so that’s how I learned how to program. Dabbled a bit with networking, security, and then stumbled upon crypto a bit later, after a lot of open source contributions as well.

Nick (00:03:02):

When you think back on that time in your life, how do you make sense of the fact that you are a young person, kind of going to some extremes to get access and to be able to read and learn this stuff? What was the attraction for you, what do you think?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:03:15):

I think perhaps it was curiosity, when you discover something new. And I believe I have an obsessive personality, so when I discover something new, I like to dig in, and then I will explore every single part of it until I get bored. So I think part of it was definitely obsession, curiosity. And also, especially with programming and computer things, there’s probably a feeling of power, of being able to create something, to turn zero and ones into something more concrete, and I think that can be very motivating for people.

Nick (00:03:46):

Was there an aha-moment or an experience you had growing up, where it really set things into motion in terms of career? Because a lot of young people have hobbies, they have interests, but those don’t always become a career. But in your case, the passion became a career. Was there a formative moment or experience, as you think back?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:04:05):

I wouldn’t say there was a specific moment. Of course, it very quickly became clear that this was interesting to me, and that I was clearly good at it, especially when I later joined some IT schools and I was way ahead of the program. I think a big turning point for me was when I joined this project called Bitnation, and I was actually very quickly, and a bit out of the blue, invited to be CTO and co-founder of the project. And I had to learn everything about crypto, and that was actually my entry to web3 as well, for e-governance, which was very interesting. When I ended up leaving Bitnation, I realized that many people wanted to come and talk to me and figure out what we could do together. So I think at this point, this was really the starting point of a good web3 career.

Nick (00:04:47):

I have a lot of follow-up questions about Bitnation, and we’ll get there in a moment. But curious about going back to growing up, as you mentioned, in France, early interest in technology. As things have grown in terms of adoption and interest in web3, even though you don’t live there now, but do you have a sense about the developer community in web3 or the crypto scene in France?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:05:10):

I think there’s a good crypto scene, especially in Paris. In Paris, we have a few pockets of entrepreneurships. I would say it’s nowhere close to what we can have here in California, or in other parts of the world, but we definitely have a few smart entrepreneurs based out of France. So before, when we’re just catching up, before the podcast, you mentioned Request Finance, which is very interesting. There was the team from Avantgarde Finance, I believe their CTO, Jenna, may be French, and a lot of their team is French or French-speaking, at the very least. So there’s definitely a few well-known projects coming out of France, definitely not as much as in other parts of the world.

Nick (00:05:50):

And so if we couple this interest in technology with the ability or the interest in being an entrepreneur, you get sort of what you are, which is a web3 founder. And this podcast has featured a lot of web3 founders, and as one might suspect, it’s typically that marriage between technology and entrepreneurship. So let’s talk about entrepreneurship. When did you sort of make that decision in your life that you wanted to be in business for yourself, or that you wanted to pursue something entrepreneurial?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:06:19):

I think I would say shortly after Bitnation. To me, Bitnation was, very, the starting point, but I was not that entrepreneur-minded back then. I kind of stumbled upon the project, and I was given a big chance, and I would say I made the best out of it. But afterwards, once I realized I could start a consulting business, and then later joined another team, that’s at least when I realized, “There’s something to be done. I would like to do more of that. And this is much more interesting than working for a traditional IT company, so let’s make something good.”

Nick (00:06:52):

So let’s travel back in time to when you first became aware of blockchain and crypto. You mentioned that this was probably the era when you started working at Bitnation. But what were your original impressions of the tech itself? You had been studying programming, you were clearly very familiar with these types of things. What interested you in blockchain?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:07:12):

Governance, without hesitation. The reason I joined Bitnation was because they were, and we were building governance tools. In fact, some of these tools were then marketed and provided to Estonia for their e-residency program, which is a very interesting program. We can talk about it later, if you want. So definitely, to me, joining crypto and web3 was, “Oh, wow. We can write these contracts, and we can script how people take decisions.” I mean, it’s a dream come true for a young nerd, lost in France at IT school. So definitely, my interest was in figuring out how we can take better decisions for ancient technologies, be it voting, or be it some more advanced structures, like futurarchy, which uses prediction markets.

(00:07:57):

And this, I would say this interest stayed on, even to this day. One of my prime interests in web3 remains governance. So I’ve been trying to participate a bit more with that, as I also launched Governance Research Institute a little while ago. I don’t know. To me, this is an underexplored area of web3, by most. And I’m a little less interested in the token gamblinomics, and a bit more interested in newer forms of technologies and how they can be applied to shape our daily tasks, without the financial aspect.

Nick (00:08:27):

Well, let’s double click on this idea of governance. And I think it gets thrown around a lot. You see it on crypto Twitter quite a bit, and I think a lot of projects sort of bolt that onto their value proposition, as one of these buzzwords. But for someone like yourself who’s passionate about it, who has deep understanding, can you just help us understand, first and foremost, what is meant when you say, “I’m passionate about governance,” and why it’s different in a web3 / blockchain environment?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:08:55):

That’s actually is such a good question. Governance means so much to so many people. Right? So I remember when I was doing the Research Institute, governance meant many things to a lot of people. It meant participating and joining those, and creating communities, and figuring out who moderates communities. While very interesting and definitely essential to governance, that is not my interest. I will not be the best at community building. What has always been interesting to me, however, are governance models, which is to research new ways or new voting algorithms for people to reach optimal decisions.

(00:09:31):

So back to the Bitnation times, we were investigating that idea of Holocracy, which is the idea of governance circles and sub-DAOs that can reach optimum decisions together. It’s also been trialed in the corporate world. And with the Research Institute, I was able to talk with governance researchers that were also trying to apply some of the governance models we created in web3 to web2. I think it’s still very early. I don’t think we’re there yet, but that’s definitely, to me, super interesting.

(00:09:59):

Because with web3, we have millions of people willing to participate in Governance, with a big G. We are able to test all these models. We are able to have projects, adopt a governance model, and to then learn from it. And I think if we do that enough and iterate enough of these models, we should be able to find optimum governance models. And then it would be very interesting to see if we can apply them to real world, our physical world structures.

(00:10:28):

So there was interest, for instance, for associations of people, like small communities. Right? We could call that communal communities, or enterprises. But I think enterprises will be a bit more tricky to apply that.

Nick (00:10:42):

Why do we need new governance models? I mean, I certainly could probably shape an argument myself, but I’d love to hear yours as to why. And I think there might be some non-technical people who listen to this interview and are thinking, “Is this even necessary? Governance isn’t broken, is it?”

Eliott Teissonniere (00:10:59):

I would say two points. There is the obvious point, and to me, maybe something more personal. I’m going to start with the personal one. Personally, I think that iteration can generally yield optimization or better results. And maybe that is the engineering in me, right? But even when you have a system that works, there’s usually ways to optimize it, to make it work even better. And making something work even better is generally very rewarding. So that’s a personal interest, which is probably biased from an engineering mindset.

(00:11:27):

The second one is that, I think many people could agree, that there is a growing dissatisfaction with existing governance models. I would say, for instance, coming out of France, in France, we’re very proud of our republican structure and democracy structure. But living in France and in Europe, I have seen governments that are slow, that are unable to move fast, that are actually drowning themselves in regulation and paperwork. And I wonder, and I always wondered if technology could be applied to kind of streamline this process, remove paperwork, lighten regulations when they don’t need to be as stringent. Maybe organize votes in a much more safe, harder to debate way, as we’ve seen last election cycle with American elections, where some people were kind of debating the veracity of the result that was reached.

(00:12:21):

So I think there’s a lot of these questions that we can just remove. And I think we should modernize ourselves. We are living with the same governance structures, and we did centuries ago.

Nick (00:12:32):

So this is a fairly common question I ask on the podcast, and longtime listeners are probably anticipating it. But when you think then about the emergence of blockchain technology, do you frame it as a way to address issues with decision-making or governance models? Or do you see it more as a revolution related to data, or the sins of web2? Or patch on any other type of theme that people seem to attach to the emergence of blockchain. How do you see it?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:13:05):

I would say it would be too quick to blame web3 on the sin of web2. We have very deep sins in web3 as well. We can mention FTX, we can mention any community sentiment, and we can very easily discuss splits of the crypto community.

(00:13:23):

To me, I think it’s more of a parallel technology. I think there’s very interesting applications to it. I don’t think it’s mature enough to solve today’s governance problems. I think it’s still a technology made for other technical people, but I think there’s something there, and I can’t quite pinpoint it. I don’t think web3, as we see it today, is what will prevail. I don’t think everybody will have MetaMask on their phone. I think it should be more hidden. I think it should transcend. And that’s a big thing that I’ve been pushing through Nodle, it’s this idea of web3 transcending to the “the real world.”

(00:14:02):

Today, web3 is mainly token NFTs, some governance, some more interesting use cases, and a lot of infrastructure projects trying to get other projects to build on top of that. So I’m more interested in, okay, we have this technology, we know there’s this thing in parallel. We know there is something, and we know it’s amazing to coordinate computers. People run some form of applications that need censorship resistance. How can this apply to our daily lives, to the real world? To say, so this can be through governance, this can be through alternative applications, or alternative to existing web3 companies, but I don’t think it has to replace them. And I think actually in some cases, web3 is not better than web2. It’s going to be super unpopular with the listeners, but I genuinely don’t think web3 is a joker or a magic wand that solves everything.

Nick (00:14:52):

Well, it’s been a fairly common response to a few of the guests, when asked about this relationship between web2 and web3. And there has been the argument, on occasion, that web2 won’t be fully replaced by web3. But I do want to ask you just one follow up before we move on to Nodle, and a little bit about your time at Bitnation. And it’s this question about the nature of web3. Are you viewing it in terms of an experiment, and we’re all just still waiting to see what happens? Or is this an evolutionary step, to borrow something you said earlier, kind of an iteration towards optimization of existing technology?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:15:34):

That’s a good question. I want to assess an evolutionary step, but if I adopt the introspective mindset, I’ve definitely seen it more as an experiment. Right? Even what I was saying with governance model, it comes down to experimenting in web3 to figure out the right governance models, and then apply them to our real physical lives. Whether it uses web3 technical components or not, I am agnostic too. Just like today with AI, we can debate what GPU we should use, or what compute product we should use, but ultimately, the end product remains the same.

Nick (00:16:06):

As you mentioned moments ago, you got started in the industry, and in working in kind of the tech field formerly as the CTO at Bitnation. For listeners that aren’t familiar with what Bitnation is, how would you describe the vision and mission of Bitnation?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:16:22):

So Bitnation had two visions, depending on who we are talking to. Depending on whether we’re talking to government people, depending if we’re talking to web3 “[inaudible 00:16:35]”. Back then, the [inaudible 00:16:35] world was not there yet. But that’s why it was … I would say, to the politics, Bitnation was a way to streamline governance. So it was providing e-governance tools. We were providing, for instance, a notary system on top of the Bitcoin blockchain to e-Estonia. And there were also experiments, which were awarded by UNESCO as a Grand Prix. There were experiments on providing paperwork for people without paperwork. So be it, it [inaudible 00:17:00] a digital passport, for instance.

(00:17:03):

But the real goal of Bitnation was to experiment and to see if we could create “decentralized borderless virtual nations.” Back then, DAOs were not quite a thing. I believe, I kind of got involved with the project right after the The DAO hack, and so there was this idea of a decentralized nation state. Which was the idea of, “Hey, can we implement some of the typical services provided by a nation state on chain?” So can be [inaudible 00:17:32], can be managing your identity. It could even be, in a very utopian world, managing security or infrastructure, for on-chain organizations.

Nick (00:18:45):

What did you learn through that experience? You got started there, you moved on, you’re now at Nodle working on some interesting things. But what are the lessons, the two or three lessons you take from Bitnation?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:18:54):

That’s a good one. And in fact, if you Google around, you’ll see that Bitnation is not what it was. I think it’s kind of on the back burner since then. There’s been a number of trauma. And that’s actually one of the lessons. I think one of the lessons is that governance, or governance projects will ultimately get tied to drama, in a good and a bad way. Right? We are all human, and disagreement is to be expected with large groups of humans. Even though we can make technology to try and take better decisions, ultimately, we cannot skip or forget about the human aspect of things, right?

(00:19:34):

So technology, even though if we have a perfect governance model, the technology will not be enough to reach consensus on decisions. And I think that’s really the number one lesson for me from Bitnation, and from later, the Research Institute as well. Governance cannot and can never be unlinked from the human aspect of things. And then probably, some other lessons around especially technical challenges we have to face. It was our internal challenges to the company. So for instance, we had some interesting potential to make a partnership with Aragon, when Aragon kind of came out with a beautiful DAO stock. And things didn’t quite turn out that way, which is unfortunate.

(00:20:13):

And actually, if we speak about Aragon, we also noticed that Aragon has its own set of drama. But governance tooling is not immune to drama.

Nick (00:20:21):

And what did you learn about the nature of DAOs then? That’s an interesting one, because DAOs were certainly in vogue for a period of time. I remember going to ETHDenver and meeting a lot of people, and it just seemed like everybody was in a DAO, starting a DAO. I think some of that popularity has diminished a little bit. There’s still DAOs, and there’s still good work being done, but what do you make of the state of DAOs?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:20:46):

So in 2017 when we were doing Bitnation, DAOs were merely a smart contract to manage assets, or to manage permissions in a protocol. And I would say that’s the most original form of a DAO, right? And then as we enter 2018, 2019, there was this dominant narrative around whether DAOs should be incorporated into the real world. And I think that’s especially because a lot of people were trying to figure out if a DAO could actually replace a contract. In practice, it looks like a lot of these efforts are kind of not panning out the way they should have panned out.

For instance, we can quote the MakerDAO Foundation that was dissolved, to actually allow the protocol to be fully decentralized. Because ultimately, it sounds a little counterintuitive to wrap up a decentralized organization into a centralized entity. So I think that was really the state of DAOs through 2017 to 2019.

(00:21:41):

Nowadays, we’re seeing a lot of DAOs, as it’s no longer just managing assets or protocols. It’s also tied to community incentives and engagement. We’ve seen successful and not so successful examples of doing that. We know though we interacted a lot with Polkadot, for instance, which is itself a giant DAO. I’m happy to talk about the pitfalls of a DAO that was made to incentivize the community to participate. It may not quite create the type of community you are trying to build as a founder, or as a project.

(00:22:17):

And I think maybe to go back to your question about the state of DAOs today, we are seeing a lot of DAOs being used as a tool to decentralize a project, which I think is good. We maybe just need to make sure we don’t structure them as the one thing that the community should be about. A DAO is not and should not be a way to distribute tokens or incentives to a community. It’s okay if it does some of that, but if the community and 99% of the activity of the DAO is to incentivize the community to do certain actions, I think it can be a Damocles’ sword.

Nick (00:22:56):

I hate to put you on the spot, but is there a DAO that represents the high bar of what a DAO should look and behave like?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:23:03):

I’m going to give you a very usual answer. I think we can look at  MakerDAO. I mean, to me, MakerDAO is the best prime example of what a DAO should be, and is. It’s optimized towards supporting and developing the protocol. Yes, there’s a financial aspect to it, of course, especially with MakerDAO, which is a financial project. But it’s not optimized towards incentivizing a community to participate, or make YouTube videos. I also have some keen interest into what Uniswap is doing, but I think it’s not on MakerDAO scale just yet.

Nick (00:23:42):

And so returning back to, then, your story. You were at Bitnation, you did some work there, you talked a little bit about the mission there, and your role. What did you do afterwards?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:23:52):

So I ended up leaving the company. Actually, Bitnation, I decided that it was not quite what I wanted to do in terms of company, and also in terms of community and people. And for a while I thought, I was still young, I was still going to school. “Whatever, I’ll just keep going to school,” and I end up studying IT, and end up finding a job later, maybe make a start-up. Things did not turn out that way. I instead was sponsored for the Google Summer of Code to contribute to some tooling in the web2 world, on security. So that was a nice venture [inaudible 00:24:25].

(00:24:26):

And then I actually set up … a year or two, a service company, which would provide consulting services to crypto projects. And so that was actually relatively successful. I got to see many interesting projects. And one of them turned out to be Nodle, about a year later. And so then my focus kind of shifted to Nodle, and a few other things on the side, here and there, which are now kind of closed down, and I’m solely focused on Nodle.

Nick (00:24:54):

As I’m sure you’re picking up, and again, long-term listeners of the podcast know this, I like to get nuggets of insight or wisdom from guests. And so you had a span there, where you’re working as a consultant. And as you said, you got a vast view of different projects in the industry. What did that experience teach you about blockchain tech, or projects building in this space? Did you glean any insights or new knowledge by virtue of being a consultant?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:25:21):

Oh, that’s a good one. So a lot of my clients back then were focused on DAOs, or creating DAOs. I think I had a good positioning for that. The market kind of shifted though at some time around how to best launch a token, or how to best decentralize a project, or how to govern a project once it is decentralized. A very interesting insight was that a lot of projects would try to decentralize, but naturally as a creator of the project, you also want to ensure you retain some kind of control. So it’s [inaudible 00:25:54], right? Where everything is supposed to be decentralized, and everybody’s supposed to be equal, yet you have some founders that … I mean, it’s their baby. Right? They want to make sure the baby evolves and goes in the right direction.

(00:26:08):

And so by the end of this consulting or service providing company history, a lot of the discussions and engagements were focused on how to decentralize the right way, which is how to decentralize by creating the community you want to create, not just blasting tokens to everybody else you can see. Which interestingly, as well is being done today.

(00:26:31):

And I think a good insight is that in that process of decentralizing yourself, there’s a big planning that goes into that. There’s probably year-long planning, because you want to make sure your community is around with your project. You want to make sure that the project will go in the right direction … that you can nudge it to go in the right direction. And you do want to retain some form of influence, without necessarily retaining ownership over the project. And so, usually, that’s a very tricky discussion.

Nick (00:27:04):

That’s an incredible insight. And so returning a little bit to this theme of decentralization, again, you talked about how web2 is best suited for some use cases, but web3 might be better suited for others. When you think about decentralization and web3, and maybe to be more specific though, the web3 stack if you will, how important is decentralization in your mind? Does the whole thing need to be decentralized for it to be web3?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:27:31):

No. I would say a lot of projects must be decentralized, just because of their ambitions, or what they’re trying to achieve. So Uniswap is the perfect example. It should be a public good protocol that is decentralized. Now there’s, of course, centralized exchanges, but the success of Uniswap is in its total and radical openness. Similarly, MakerDAO with the DAI stablecoin, it makes sense for that type of project to be decentralized. You don’t want one issuer to have control over the stablecoin, like we’ve seen with other popular stablecoin alternatives.

But I would say, some projects don’t need to be decentralized. They can, if they want to, but some projects can be simple services to build us, right? A good example would be indexing, I know we are on The Graph podcast. The Graph can be decentralized, and it is decentralized, as a public goods system. There’s great APIs you can use, but there’s also competitors, which I’m not going to name, which are centralized. And to me, it’s fine if they’re centralized. Because as a web3 project, for instance, you have a front-end, and you want to create an API. But the API naturally has to be centralized somewhere.

(00:28:46):

So maybe, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not completely familiar with The Graph stack. But I think that there’s a decentralized protocol and infrastructure which is accessible, but there’s also centralized services built on top of it, or tooling. And that’s perfectly fine. So I would say, if the project has ambitions to be a public good, it should be decentralized. If the project is providing a service or facilities on top of a public good, maybe it does not need to be centralized. Maybe it will actually be better if it’s not decentralized.

Nick (00:29:20):

And before we leave the point about indexing, you bring up The Graph, and as you know, a lot of my listeners are very enthusiastic about The Graph. How important is a indexing solution like The Graph for web3? Is there a real use case, a real need that somebody has to fill that gap?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:29:37):

Oh, yeah. It’s critical. And I’m not even saying that because on a Graph Podcast. I know that we are dependent on indexing for our smart contracts. So is every single crypto project on the web. There’s data in smart contracts, but usually the smart contract is extremely simplified, and extremely cumbersome to use for anybody that’s not an engineer or who did not work on the contract. The indexing component is going to be key to get proper data, or statistics, or insights about a given dapp, or a set of dapps. Right? And then, usually, it’s going to be the critical API that will be used to show all of this data to the end user on a nice and shiny front end.

Nick (00:30:17):

Well, thank you very much for sharing that perspective. I want to now go back again to your story and talk about the origins of Nodle. So as you mentioned, you left Bitnation, you went on some schooling, you spent some time at university, finished that. Then you did some consulting work, and you landed at Nodle. What can you tell us about the origins of Nodle and some of those early days, what you were thinking about, what the team was exploring?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:30:41):

It’s interesting, because what we’re doing today is, to some extent, aligned with what we were discussing six years ago. But we’ve, of course, added some bells and whistles to it and kind of fine-tuned the vision. So I joined Nodle a little less probably than a year after it was properly incorporated by my two other co-founders. So Garrett and Micha met when Micha was doing an app called FireChat. And FireChat was a decentralized mesh networking enabled way to communicate. And especially communicate without Wi-Fi or cellular, so this could be very handy when you’re on a plane chatting with people. And as it turned out, it was used that way during a protest in a not so democratic country that would turn off any access to the internet. So it was a case of FireChat, and the Umbrella Revolution.

(00:31:33):

And coming out of the FireChat story, Micha, especially with Garrett, was thinking, “Well, it’s a great technology, but can it be used and applied for more enterprise cases as well?” And the beautiful thing with Nodle … and that’s about when I joined. So beautiful thing with Nodle is that we are able, and we built a technology, to deploy networks without building antennas. That was our core pitch, back in 2019. Which was, we are able to cover a city like San Francisco with IoT connectivity, so it’s not you and I browsing YouTube. But we’re able to cover a city for IoT devices in a matter of hours, because we just deploy an app. We don’t have to acquire real estate on hills and install million-dollar antennas.

(00:32:21):

And so we kind of devised Nodle as being an enabler for cost-effective, power-efficient as well, IoT devices. So this can be seen as the AirTag today, which in fact, the AirTag network, the Find My network is very close to what Nodle does. This can also be applied to other devices, or to some of our customers, for instance, are using the network to find stolen cars. So if your car is stolen, they’ll be able to recover it. And so that’s where Nodle started, right? We devised it to be a connectivity solution. It would harness the power of people with smartphones that would honestly be willing to make money by renting some of those smartphones, in that case, bandwidth and connectivity, to connect nearby IoT devices.

(00:33:05):

And since then, we branched out in some of our use cases. I’m sure we’ll get to discuss them. But really Nodle, initially, it was an alternative to ISP networks. ISP, being internet service provider.

Nick (00:33:18):

I do want to ask you about how it’s evolved. Before I do, is Nodle one of these projects that could only exist in a web3 environment? I mean, you’re talking a lot about network there, and some of the use cases you used are web2 familiar. But when you think about Nodle and what it was doing, was this something that needed to be tied to blockchain/web3 type of tech?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:33:39):

I think this is the reason Nodle is able to get the coverage we have today. So today, we are in most countries you can hear of. For the cost, because we did not raise billions of dollars, like a traditional networking company. Initially, we would say web3 solved the chicken and egg problem, which is exactly what it did. Right? People are able to install an app on their smartphone, the network will compensate them for just being here and available, and then the Nodle Foundation can go in and find customers for this connectivity and can cover, actually provide.

(00:34:12):

So I would say, of course you can do it the web2 way. It’s going to cost you billions of dollars, and you’re going to be able to cover maybe one country, if you’re lucky. There are competing projects in France, where internet service providers are trying to deploy IoT networks, but they’re doing it using traditional technologies. So they’re using big expensive antennas, they’re using lower connectivity, which is not high bandwidth. And in fact, a lot of them stopped doing it, because they realized it was too expensive for the market that they were really addressing.

So I think Nodle, through web3 and through the solution we built, which is mobile first and which is based on people joining the network, which aligns very well with that idea of web3 being very open, is able to use web3 to be more efficient than web2 technologies. At the same time, because we are building this open internet provider, or service provider for IoT devices, we did feel like it would make sense for it to be a public good. We’ve all heard nightmare stories about internet service providers censoring content, or kind of manipulating things to be the way they want it to be. So I think if the network could be a public good, even though it’s mainly for IoT devices, maybe in the future it could be for more than IoT devices, it would benefit from being decentralized and transparent.

(00:35:29):

And actually, transparency is also one of those things that is essential to web3. Everything, except if you use privacy-optimized networks, mostly everything you do on web3 is transparent, auditable and verifiable.

Nick (00:35:43):

And so let’s go back and talk about how then the value proposition or the vision of Nodle has evolved. What is it then that the team is now envisioning, and some of the things that’s working?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:35:54):

Yeah. I would say we evolved from being simply an internet service provider. Again, for IoT devices. But we’ll see, but ideally, one day we’ll be able to do more than IoT devices. We evolved away from just moving data from A to B, to us being a bit more general and a bit more programmable. We created the concept of smart missions, which are smart contracts, but because they have to run on a smartphone, we did not quite call them smart contracts. Which is our idea of saying, “Hey, network. I’m going to script here, and I’m going to maybe give missions to people.”

(00:36:28):

And so we’re still figuring out the right way to implement it, and the right way to push it to people, and the right use cases for it. But we’re definitely moving towards more programmability, not just being a blind internet service provider. But most importantly, and I think more interestingly, we also had people come up to us because they knew we had very niche mobile expertise.

(00:36:52):

And to give you context before I branch to my next point, because the Nodle runs on mobile, mobile is by definition an untrusted environment, where it’s very hard to verify anything that’s happening. Which is a little tricky when you build a web3 protocol, where generally, you need everything to run perfectly well. And so we spent years developing protection technologies on mobile devices. We have partners, like Guardsquare, and also our own solutions. And without quite realizing how valuable it could be, we ended up creating some SDK components that could be used to make sure that you are legit users, and that you are using a legit and real smartphone.

(00:37:37):

And what happened a year ago, I believe, is that some people, like our investors, came up to us and said, “Well, we know you guys have these components. And with everything that’s happening currently in AI, could you not use your technology, this little component that you did not think was so valuable, and apply it to content created by people, to ensure that the content that you and I and the listeners consume is real?” Right? Because today, if you open Twitter … let’s not maybe dive too much into the politics of certain conflicts. But it is a well-known fact that there has been a number of fake news, generally from both sides, circulating on Twitter.

(00:38:15):

And sometimes with fake news are images of video games that look very realistic. And, “Oh, so there’s a bomb attack here,” but it’s actually a video game. Or these could be images that were taken years ago, and that are now being recycled and made to look like they were taken today. And in most cases, all those images and news reported by people, especially on Twitter and on our social medias, is taken on a mobile phone, right? It’s people doing “citizen journalism,” seeing something happen, take a smartphone out, take a video and post it.

(00:38:46):

And so this is how we created this social called Click. And so Click is the idea to create an application, it’s on a smartphone. And if you take a video or a photo of an event, we’ll be able to timestamp it, we’ll be able to certify it, and we’ll be able to digitally sign the provenance of the media you created. So that you can publish it, you can say, “Look, I did take this video of a missile in Ukraine last month.” And if somebody later tried to recycle it for another event, or for another war, or two years later, they’re saying, “Hey, look,” there will be a way to verify that this is not what they’re saying, that this was unique, you took a picture of a missile in Ukraine.

(00:39:24):

We are also looking at new ways to apply that technology nowadays. So we just signed a customer for press release authentication. They had issues of people crafting fake press releases to try and shutter stocks. Well,very similarly, it turns out we can apply some of these ideas to authenticate press releases and corporate communications.

Nick (00:39:44):

So this pivot that the team is making is remarkable, because in the one sense, the original vision, which clearly you haven’t abandoned, but there’s this network connectivity sort of core mission. But now with something like Click and the things you described there, we’re talking about something more metaphysical, you could almost argue, something about knowledge, something about authentication. Is that sort of how the team sees it? That you’re sort of dabbling in two really important things, but this Click project has huge implications.

Eliott Teissonniere (00:40:18):

So first I would say, maybe, if I can address the relationship between Click and the network. So the network has density and has smartphones all over the world. And what we realized is that the network can also be used to help authenticate some of these pictures. For instance, if you want to prove that you were at a certain place at a certain time, it’s relatively easy to fake GPS signals. You can even do it on your phone. There’s applications to do that.

(00:40:43):

However, if you had a third party that has been vetted, or that has some form of reputation, because it’s part of a giant decentralized and global network, that were to happen to be next to you and were to be able to authenticate and certify that your two phones are close by and these were in the same location, then suddenly, you could prove your location. So that’s also one of our realizations. We realized that, hey, we don’t have to do just connectivity. We can also use it to prove geolocation. So we have a concept of calling … we call them witnesses nowadays.

(00:41:16):

So I think the theme, to us, is very clear, that one can reinforce the other, or one can make the proof of the other stronger. And of course, for Click, it’s very motivating to us because we are working on real world problems that are problems today. We’ve seen especially deepfakes are exploding. We can throw a few [inaudible 00:41:38] so on, so on, but DeepFakes are exploding. They’re being more accessible, more than ever. There’s now AI tools to generate videos. And even though there’s approaches trying to watermark some of this content, are trying to detect AI content, we strongly believe these approaches are doomed to fail.

(00:41:58):

And instead, what we should be doing is to tag the provenance of all the content we create. And if the content we created is not tagged or certified as coming from a human, or as being authentic, then it may not be real. And the reasoning here is that the watermark can be removed, an AI detection tool can very simply be trained against, and as you know, fail. However, if we start tracking the provenance, I should say certifying the provenance of the content we create, then there’s no need for watermarking. There’s no need for AI detection tools, because the provenance is already here.

Nick (00:42:32):

As I’m sure you’ve picked up, Eliott, I’m non-technical myself. And so a very non-technical follow-up question would be about, where does all of this live? Clearly, it must be on a chain someplace, somewhere. So how do you solve for that?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:42:46):

Yeah. So same, going in that mentality of, these [inaudible 00:42:51] can do a lot of good, it is necessary for society in one way or another. From our perspective, it should be a public good. And as such, it should live on a chain. There should not be one single entity that holds all the root keys, and is able to then certify any content out there. So we adopted and partnered with ZKsync to host this technology. We, today, have a registry of content that is being certified and issued by users around the world, to take pictures of protests or other real-world events.

(00:43:28):

And we only want to grow it, right? So we’re going to grow this registry, we’re going to extend it to more types of content. So we recently announced a partnership with a French Media Conglomerate for PDFs, press releases, so that’s a new content we’re adding to the registry. And that’s also a kind of case where we do need indexing, because that registry is going to grow only so big, so we’re going to need easy tooling to query it.

Nick (00:43:51):

And I think listeners might find it interesting to know how one, especially a project like yourself, goes about selecting a chain partner. Right? So this was something early in the industry that I certainly didn’t understand. As I come to know and understand more about the blockchains, I didn’t realize there was distinctions between them, and maybe more benefits and value choosing one over the other. So talk us through a little bit how that decision to go with zkSync was arrived at, and how it’s different from other solutions.

Eliott Teissonniere (00:44:22):

Yeah, for sure. So for history, as a project, initially existing on Polkadot, as a Polkadot parachain. And even before then, used to exist on Stellar, when we were just a simple connectivity rewarding scheme. So we moved from Stellar to Polka because we wanted programmability, and because we strongly believed in the success of this strategy to host individual high-scale web3 applications in individual sub-networks that would then settle on a real exchange.

(00:44:54):

I think we can dabble into the current success and troubles of Polkadot. To us, I think we realized that we wanted a tech stack that was maybe a bit more mature, and especially, we wanted EVM support. We wanted more than EVM support, in fact. We wanted interoperability with existing EVM applications, which has been a little tricky on Polkadot. At the same time, we always wanted to build this system on Ethereum. We just did not have the tooling to do it just yet.

(00:45:26):

But over the past year, things changed. There have been countless roll-ups launching. And especially, each of those roll-ups is now creating an open-sourcing roll-up stack. So we have the OP stack, the Arbitrum stack, and the ZK stack for ZKsync. And so when it came the time to choose a roll-up, a Layer 2 to build on top of Ethereum, we had to look at each of the solutions. Our perspective, understanding of that, call it the way you want, is that ZK is the endgame. Zero-knowledge proofs are the ultimate way to scale Ethereum, and to do so safely and in a decentralized manner. While there are alternatives like Optimism and Abitrum that are optimistic Layer 2s, we believe they will be made obsolete, as soon as ZK proves it can scale a bit more.

(00:46:16):

So to us, it made sense to focus on a ZK [inaudible 00:46:18] solution protocol on top. Since we wanted EVM support, at least EVM equivalents, this ruled out Starknet. And this left us with ZKsync. And the really cool thing with ZKsync and now the ZK stack is that, actually, they’re using a lot of these ideas that seduced us when we decided to build Nodle on Polkadot. So for instance, ZKsync has that idea of launching hyperchains, which are individual chains hosting individual subsets of applications, to scale them independently, and then settle together over a shared bridge, or on itself.

This is exactly how we thought we could scale a network like Ethereum or Polkadot. It’s happening with technology we think will make other technologies obsolete, so it made perfect sense to join zkSync, and we’ve had really good reception from the community that’s been very supportive. I must say that the ZKsync core team is also really strong partners and very supportive of the project. They really see the good it can do, especially in today’s world. Elections are coming, AI, et cetera. So there’s also some very strong alignment between the people and the future of projects.

Nick (00:47:26):

I appreciate that explanation. It’s an incredible insight into the world of L2s, and how people like yourself and the team think about choosing the right partner, and the rationale for how you do it. What news or announcements, or any kind of alpha you can share about Nodle or Click, that you’d be willing to share with the audience today? Anything that’s coming or you’re excited about?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:47:47):

Definitely, I saw that. I would say, look, we have more announcements and more customers coming out. We’ve been working on a subset of really big deals for the project. Some of them have now made really good progress. Obviously, we can’t quite share names or too many details. But we recently communicated, for instance, on an upcoming offer for smart cities. So we have this customer that is interested in using the Nodle and Click technology. So Click for Enterprise is actually called Content Sign, Click Certified. I’m trying to simplify it.

(00:48:23):

So they’re using some of our SDKs to certify interactions. So they’re creating a service where they have buses and people running around in cities, and those buses and there’s a small computer that is able to scan the streets and detect, say, a badly parked car, that would actually make you and I’s life around that time very inconvenient, because now you can’t park your car, or you can’t cross, or you can’t use a sidewalk. So this company will detect it, and will actually file a ticket with the city for it.

But it could be very easy to challenge this ticket and say, “Well, this is coming from this weird computer. This was not me. This must be someone else, or this must be fake.” However, by applying some of our technology, in that case, Content Sign or Click, they’re able to say, “No, we have a clear timestamp and certificate of this media, or this subset of media being real.” And so, to us, it’s going to be a really important venture into more real world use cases, especially working with cities, like cities that we have all heard of. I’m not sure we can quite share the name of the cities.

(00:49:35):

But this is going to be really important, and this is going to be a big venture into more real world use cases, which is something that I have personally been very interested in for Nodle. I’m very interested, as you may have caught, in web3 being applied to real world use cases, and not just tokens and NFTs.

Nick (00:49:54):

Well, Eliott, I’ll put links in the show notes for any listeners that want to click and learn more about some of the things we talked about today. They can do a little more research and become more familiar. I only have a few more questions for you before I ask you the GRTiQ 10. Those are 10 fun questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week. The first question is entrepreneurship. So if you could save listeners of this Episode the headache or heartburn of being an entrepreneur, what are the one or two things that you’ve learned that you think would save people time and effort, that are thinking about launching their own entrepreneurial venture?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:50:31):

I would say a big lesson, especially through the past few years, has been to potentially focus more on distribution and technology, which is funny coming from the CTO. But I think especially in web3, we are so focused on building great products or great protocols, and we very often forget to consider how people would use it, or how we would convince and educate people about using these products. And that’s a lesson that applies to not only web3 companies, that’s actually a lesson that comes out also for web2 startups, which is to focus on distribution, distribution, distribution. And then everything you do is in service of distribution, or making your product a bit better. So I would say that’s really the number one lesson.

(00:51:09):

Number two lesson is that … and so this one came out a few years earlier than distribution, which is, the grass is never greener. I think entrepreneurship and making your company is sometimes very challenging. And sometime, you may be thinking other projects are doing better, or that maybe you could join this project instead, all those things. And then when you start looking into the details, you realize that the politics you’re seeing, and the challenges you’re seeing are generally the same politics and challenges at other companies or other projects. And in fact, in most cases, challenges between web3 and web2 are very similar, surprisingly.

Nick (00:51:46):

And the second question I want to ask you is this idea about narratives or themes that’ll sort of emerge in every cycle. And so I think most of us would agree that we’re in a cycle, or hard to know where we are. But what themes do you think will sort of emerge within the cycle we’re either in or circling about right now? What’s the important stuff people will be talking about this time around?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:52:12):

Yeah, I’ve personally seen two big trends. To me, it’s clear that DeFi and NFTs, and even governance, were kind of past cycle themes. But they do come back, and they do also come back in strength. However, there’s clearly a lot of demand and interest for people to apply web3 to AI. Nobody quite knows what it means to apply web3 to AI, but yet, everybody wants web3 and AI. And so we’ve seen some people dabble with decentralized computer access to AI, some people are trying to dabble decentralized access to data, to train more AI models, some people are trying to tackle the point of distributing or testing and providing AI models through web3. So there’s definitely a big interrogation mark here, but there is something.

Eliott Teissonniere (00:52:56):

I think everybody’s kind of waiting to see a big successful web3 plus AI integration. I might be very biased, but we’ve also seen and heard a lot around DePIN, which is decentralized physical infrastructure networks. There’s more and more of those launching by the day. There’s brilliant projects, like our friends at Xnet have been gaining popularity lately, and also, some of our competitors. And also, of course, Nodle. So think DePIN will also be a very interesting play.

(00:53:25):

And I think that to translate, kind of ask for people to see web3 apply to more real-world use cases. My own ambition for real-world use cases for web3 is probably shared with other people. And so I think DePIN is a great way to, in fact, integrate real-world use cases or real-world devices with web3. And in fact, a lot of the AI plus web3 integrations are actually looking a lot like DePIN networks for GPUs.

Nick (00:53:51):

And I actually have another question. I said I only had two. I’m going to make one more, and then we’ll do the GRTiQ 10. And the question is, how does somebody like you, with your perspective … you’ve clearly got a very disciplined technology-oriented mind, and you have a very serious lens about real-world use cases and the applicability of technology. How do you make peace with the hype and the token drive in an industry that you’re working in, contrasting it with all the things that you care about?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:54:24):

I’d say it’s hard to make peace with it. I think hype is, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the point of view, a key element of web3. I think web3 is about the community, and nobody quite knows what this means. But generally, with community comes hype, especially if you want to deploy a community very fast.

(00:54:44):

To us, what helped has been to just focus on our end goal and mission, which is to build technologies that can make the world a slightly better place. And of course, hype does the same with projects. I think we also need to be relatively honest, that without the community, Nodle would not be where it is today. Without people being hyped about joining the Nodle network, there would not be as much of an interest in the Nodle network today. So both sides are … it’s a love and hate relationship with the hype cycles, I would say.

Nick (00:55:19):

Well, Eliott, thank you for answering that third question. Now I want to ask you the GRTiQ 10. I ask these questions every week. It gives us a chance to get to know you a little bit better on the personal side. And as I always say, I think it opens the door for listeners to learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own lives. So Eliott, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:55:36):

Let’s do it.

Nick (00:55:48):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:55:52):

That’s actually a good one. So I got these questions ahead of time, and I came to the podcast with one book in mind, and I actually just changed my mind. So to me, I would say the most impactful book, especially in the past, let’s say, five years, because that’s when I’ve really started to read these type of books … has been to read a book called The Unfair Advantage. And I could probably find the author on the fly. But The Unfair Advantage book can be very much summarized into this idea that everybody has unfair advantages, and then to succeed in life, you must learn to leverage them.

(00:56:30):

And so, the writer is Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba. And it’s a relatively medium length book, but it comes up to that kind of mentality that I’ve then developed after reading that book, which is that life gave you cards, and you can complain about the cards you got, or you can figure out how to best play them. And so a big part of your activity as a human being should be to find the cards you’ve been given, and to play them.

(00:56:57):

And sometimes, life will give you some more cards, and so you might as well play them. Because you can always find somebody that is smarter than you, that is richer than you, that was born in a better place than you. But you worrying or complaining about those things is not going to make your life better. However, you have your own sets of unfair advantages. So personally, I learn very fast. I’m able to focus and do very big deep dives into very niche topics, and generally come up with a good understanding of them. And so these are things I can use to then achieve my end goals.

Nick (00:57:31):

And how about this one, Eliott? Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:57:36):

I would say, as a kid, I really liked this show called Mr. Robot. The character is named Elliot as well, so I might have been biased. So that’s kind of the main show I would like to recommend. I don’t think there’s any special learning vibes, besides it being a very interesting page on more nerdy characters, and people who are probably somewhere on the spectrum. And I think, given that in crypto, crypto founders have to be somewhere on the spectrum to do what we do, I think it could be a very interesting watch.

Nick (00:58:07):

How about this, if you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:58:13):

Ooh. So I actually don’t listen to too much music, so it’s going to be hard to give you one album. But if I were to describe the album I would listen to for the rest of my life, personally, I like music that does not have too much speech, because I use music as a tool. And I like using music, for instance, when I need to focus in a more noisy environment, like nice music on your AirPods will help you focus.

(00:58:39):

I would say, even though I can’t quite give you an album like this, I would say this album probably would have relatively speechless music, something kind of pumped and high vibe, because you kind of need to get the blood flowing. We don’t want to fall asleep. And generally, some bass and electronics would be welcome.

Nick (00:58:57):

What’s the best life advice someone’s ever given to you?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:59:01):

Grass is never greener on the other side. I think this one has such … especially when I was younger and I was kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. There are so many opportunities, it’s very hard to identify which opportunity we want to focus on. But once you have chosen an opportunity to focus on, then you might as well give it your all. You can’t be left wondering how life would’ve been different if you’d chosen another opportunity. I think it takes dedication, give it one more shot if you need to, but give all your mind to what you’re doing. And don’t half-ass things, and try to wonder what life could have been.

Nick (00:59:45):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life, Eliott, that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Eliott Teissonniere (00:59:52):

Yeah. I think one of these things could be how to interact with different people in, let’s say, work settings, or how to share ideas. Right? Especially in America, I would say we are in a relatively polarized country. And people have a tendency to stick to their own ideas, and to think that everybody else is wrong. And I think it takes a lot of skill, and it’s not easy, but sometimes, we also need to be receptive to other ideas. And so it’s kind of weird, but it has to be a bit of a balance between holding certain ideas dear to your heart, and so having very strong opinions on certain ideas, but being able to change with ideas if reality is different.

(01:00:43):

So we could apply this to politics, but politics are very hard to apply that to, because politics are inherently personal, and so we all have different opinions, and there’s no real truth to those opinions. But especially when we apply that to more technical challenges, it has been quite interesting to have that iterative approach of holding certain ideas or models strong, until they’re proven wrong. And then when they’re proven wrong, being able to just switch to new others very quickly.

Nick (01:01:11):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Eliott Teissonniere (01:01:16):

Noise-canceling AirPods with electronic music is a good one. It’s actually something I’m a big fan of. I think our brain is wonderful and can be programmed. Probably the engineer in me speaking, but your brain can be trained to do certain things. And so I’ve noticed, especially again in America, a lot of people saying that they have trouble with focus, or trouble doing certain things. And they say, “Oh, I’m not motivated, or I’m lacking willpower.” And my answer to that will be that you need willpower to train the habit, and then the habit kind of puts you in auto-pilot.

(01:01:51):

And so to me, especially for focus, a lot of people struggle with focus, yet you can command focus when you need it. So if you train your brain, that when it’s focused with certain things happening around it, the next time that certain things are happening, you will naturally be more focused, [inaudible 01:02:08]. So for me, it has been to … usually, when I would want to focus, I would like playing some music and not thinking too much about it. And nowadays, I’ve done that so much that just putting on the AirPods, playing that one playlist that is always the same 10 musics, will almost instantly put me on what I call hyperfocus.

Nick (01:02:30):

Brilliant. And how about this one, Eliott? Based on your own life experience and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

Eliott Teissonniere (01:02:43):

Obsession, I would say. And I think that’s not even a new answer to that question. I think if we look at some of the most successful people around us, if we look at Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or even Sam Altman, those are some people that were able to let themselves be obsessed about an idea, and they’re obsessed about solving it, despite anybody telling them otherwise. And usually, that makes it successful. Because through obsession comes perseverance. And through perseverance maybe comes resilience, because you’ll persevere. So I think obsession would be a good answer to your question.

Nick (01:03:20):

And then the final three questions are complete the sentence-type questions. The first one, Eliott, is, the thing that most excites me about web3 is …

Eliott Teissonniere (01:03:29):

Governance, or the ability to take better decisions.

Nick (01:03:33):

And how about this one? If you’re on X, I still call it Twitter, then you should be following …

Eliott Teissonniere (01:03:39):

You should be following Nodle Network. Let’s do a self-plug.

Nick (01:03:44):

And the final question, I’m happiest when …

Eliott Teissonniere (01:03:48):

When I’m shaping good stuff that ends up being used, or when I see the impact of what I’m shaping.

Nick (01:04:02):

Eliott, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. What an incredibly fun interview. And I appreciate, a lot of great insights, not only into governance and the state of DAOs, but also your own story, and the types of things that Nodle and Click are working on. If listeners want to stay in touch with you and follow things that you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Eliott Teissonniere (01:04:24):

I would say, following the project and myself on X, formerly Twitter, as the way we say it nowadays.