GRTiQ Podcast: 52 Sam

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.

Sam (00:21):

And back in the DeFi summer, I was also in touch with a lot of developers and they were really explaining to me what this could potentially enable them to do. And I started to take a deeper dive in the technology and that’s how I fell in love with it. And I wanted to bring value to this project and see how I can get involved in its success.

Nick (01:11):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Sam, co-founder of Journal du Coin, the world’s leading source of crypto news in the French language and Node Guardians, a recently launched project that offers several creative solutions for both developers and protocols.

(01:28):

During our discussion, Sam shares his personal experience of how he moved from pre-med to a career in crypto. He also talks about the unique experience of building Journal du Coin and growing it from six people to millions of monthly visitors and subscribers. I also ask Sam about his newest project Node Guardians, his opinions of web3 and how he came to know about The Graph and the important role it plays in web3. As always, I started the discussion by asking Sam about his educational background.

Sam (02:03):

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Really humbled. It’s a great pleasure to be on the GRTiQ Podcast. Really amazing what you guys have built. And speaking of backgrounds, it’s not going to be that amazing. So to make it very short, I’m a med school dropout. That’s it. But I took a strong interest during my spare hours in Austrian School of Economics economy in general. I had this side business flipping rare sneakers and also items and video games using add to cart bots to snipe them before the others and trying to see how a value could be made. I was trying to fiddle around with everything. I was also taking interest in applied science in general, like computer science and everything. So a little bit of everything, but I’m a med school dropout. That’s my background.

Nick (02:50):

Well, Sam, you’re not the first guest that’s joined me who dropped out of medical school to pursue a career in technology and crypto, but you are the first to mention this buying and selling of unique sneakers. And in the United States, this is a whole subeconomy, people that buy and sell unique or rare sneakers. Tell me more about what you did there.

Sam (03:07):

Yeah, the technology behind it, I give sneakers as an example, but you could apply it to everything. It could be Pokemon cards, anything that is supplied with very small batches and limited supply where you have more people interested than like more demand than offer. You can just use these add to cart bots. And basically they rely on being able to fill the forms very fast and bypass CAPTCHA because these platforms, to protect that, they try to use technologies to make sure that it’s a human that’s engaging to get the product. So there is some fun engineering behind it that you can apply to a wide range of products. So a little bit of everything. This is just one story which was fun. But, yeah.

Nick (03:48):

Well, as that story points, you’re obviously an entrepreneur and that’ll be more clear as we continue here talking. But before we talk more about that, I want to ask you a question about France. And I always like to ask guests that are joining me from different parts of the world if they can just share what the attitudes and opinions of the people in their hometown are towards crypto and blockchain. So what can you share about the people of France, their attitudes or opinions towards crypto and blockchain?

Sam (04:14):

Wow, that’s a tough question. I’ll try to answer it. So basically France, you have to look at the relationship people have with their money in Western Europe, in France, against what’s been done in North America where the culture encourages you more to be an entrepreneur and engage and create a company and take risk. Well, in France, in particular in Western Europe, the system is built in a way that doesn’t incentivize you that much to build and become an entrepreneur because you lose a lot of social welfare by doing that. And what you’re being taught at school is not also engaging. It’s not really pushing you to engage your assets in, let’s say, solutions or fields that are a bit esoteric.

(05:00):

So in my opinion, among casual people, there are a lot of people that are taking interest in crypto. But when you just get out of high school with a basic understanding of what economical sciences are and with the mindset, the mind framing, that you have when you’re out of French school, I think that there is a huge fear of risk. I don’t know. People are a bit more skeptical about crypto and then to take historically a bigger interest into other fields, like rare metals or real estate and everything. But the shift is happening. And what is really interesting about France is that, despite the system, this French system being so different at the core compared to the North American one, it’s a machine. There’s so many engineers, tier one engineers that are coming out of these French engineering schools. France is really for training some amazing engineers. The methods how sciences are being thought. Quality of education is, I think, quite good. So there is a huge ecosystem of builders that are building.

(06:06):

And I think that if you just take a high level view of the DeFi space and see who’s a French builder, even though sometimes they’re not based in France anymore, you would find a lot of people coming from there. So interesting. I think that there’s a lot of skepticism, more than in other countries, Anglo-Saxon culture and everything. But people that come from scientifical side background-ish, they recognize the relevance of distributed systems and they engage strongly with them and they build amazing stuff. So yeah, that’s what I can say about France. Skepticism still because the culture teaches us to not take that much risk and everything. I think that that plays a strong role.

Nick (06:48):

Well, you bring up a point there that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and that’s this idea that it’s really important that when you think about web3 and crypto and the impact that it can have in the world, that you don’t always do it through your own lens. There’s a worldwide community and it impacts different communities differently. And we were talking before we recorded that you travel the world quite a bit. How important do you think it is for people to expand the lens by which they view the potential impact of crypto and web3 in the world?

Sam (07:20):

This is crazy important. Because depending on where you are existing on this planet, the relevance of crypto it just varies, and the meaning of crypto just varies from one place to another. So when I was in France, it wasn’t that much. There were some things happening in the real economy using crypto, but it wasn’t that much of a thing. But when I lived in Russia, you could see that there was a whole subeconomy leveraging crypto because people were more skeptical about the fiat currency that was deployed there, the ruble. But still the country was enforcing some measures to monitor the exchanges people had and everything.

(08:00):

Depending on where you are in the world, I think it’s super important. I mean, the way cryptos are being seen, it just varies a lot and it gives you so much distance, so much fuel to understand better how things are that I think that it’s just key to connect with the rest of the people. I can’t say I’ve been in Venezuela or in Ukraine. If you take the example of Ukraine where $1 for a hryvnia, it lost 1000% of its value since the crisis of the Donbas and a bit before. I think that in these countries where remittances are key and where you cannot trust the national currency anymore, then crypto is also playing a role which is at another level. It enables people to protect themselves against some systemic failures and everything. So yeah, if you can travel, it’s just huge the value you can get from that.

Nick (08:46):

So when did you first become interested in crypto then?

Sam (08:49):

Oh, that was back in the days when I had had that one friend, which was since a little bit after the Ethereum ICO, kept on shilling me and telling me the benefits of open smart contract platforms. I was not listening to him. And then happened the trusted set-up ceremony of Zcash when they generated the parameters of the secret of Zcash. And I found the technology to be interesting and wanted to get engaged with mining. But back then I didn’t have that much resources and I was just keeping a bookmark and checking it from time to time, but not really engaging concretely with cryptocurrencies. And then that’s where I really wanted to take the leap forward to go further.

(09:31):

I had that very close friends which was buying some stuff in some alternative internet. And I would visit him once a week after the weekend started. I was always checking what these guys were up to. And they were really, I was seeing them using that and I was just realizing that there was a whole parallel economy existing where people could do settlements that’s totally sovereign and independent from all forms of verifications. There is no Stripe, there is no payment processors and everything and they were managing to get concrete things. That was really running that I had the loop in my mind thinking about what it could potentially, like the strength of the system basically. And from that moment I really start to actively look at what distributed systems are, what is Ethereum, how to build with it, who are the actors involved in this system, what were the previous attempts to propose smart contract platforms like Ardor, everything and Nxt. I was just trying to get some understanding about what was going on.

(10:33):

I didn’t have that much resources, but at that point that was mid-2017, crypto was part of my daily life, reading and sometimes if had I would have some spare money, put it in what would match with my thesis back then, which was a bit like forex. I guess, I think I was not getting it properly.

Nick (10:53):

So you became interested in crypto early on and over time you evolved in the space and launched Journal du Coin. I’m sure I’m saying that wrong. I can’t speak French, but you can help.

Sam (11:05):

You nailed it.

Nick (11:06):

Oh, good. Appreciate that. So this is the premier resource for people that speak French to learn more about crypto and you really have this incredible entrepreneurial story. So tell us about that experience from first impressions of crypto to launching the premier educational resource for people that speak French.

Sam (11:26):

Oh, thank you for the kind words. I guess we are very happy and thankful to the community for what Journal du Coin is. Also thanks to them that it is what it is right now. Back in the days in 2017, I come from a city called Toulouse. So it’s like 1 million people, a very big city in the south of France with a lot of sun and everything. And we were hosting going to that meetup called the beer coin where we would talk about Bitcoin twice a month. And I was just trying to connect and engage with the local community that also had an interest for crypto.

(11:58):

It was about Bitcoin, but of course you had people coming to share their visions even though they were interested in other technologies. And so there were only 12 people or like 15 people for a long time. And we started to get along a lot. And all these people had a similar background. Either they were dropouts or ex-professional poker players. You know the way and everything. So a lot were cipher pranks or monarchists or agorists. So it was really interesting to see this community blossom.

(12:26):

And among these people, started to become friends with someone called Benoît Huguet, which I greet. Morgan Phuc. It’s a Vietnamese name. And we started to get to become friends and see each other outside of the context of these meetings that we were organizing altogether. And back then before Journal du Coin there was a blog called BitConseil, which we were running. BitConseil was a company that was specialized in providing consultancy and advisory to French NASDAQ equivalent current companies like Casino, Capgemini and everything, helping them to understand how they can leverage this technology to improve their functional capabilities. I don’t know if I’m saying that right. And also making them custom courses that are matching with their staff so they can be up-to-date about distributed leisure technologies and everything, the yada yada.

(13:18):

And we were also writing some papers, opinion papers about the fret of CBDCs for instance, and what could be the implications of that. Some very long papers and technical papers. We were also doing a lot of that back in 2017. And while we were building this, we came along the way with another team of amazing people, Romain and Lucas, which were starting that blog, which was rather small, called Journal du Coin back then. And we merged together both companies, that’s how it all happened. And this new structure, the fusion between BitConseil and Journal du Coin just remained Journal du Coin, which is a website which targets a broader audience providing people with a genuine interpretation of what’s going on in the crypto space, but also some research papers and technical profiles about protocols that we find interesting.

(14:05):

So you can just explore Journal du Coin and find something about indexation on The Graph or what is modularity and what is the system behind Celestia, what are fraud proofs or data availability proof and also some dev oriented resources. And so over time, over the years with all these founders, the company grew from just involving six people to now 40 and the serving I would say about more than 2 million sessions a month. So we’re very thankful for the community and very impressed with the results and that’s pretty much what happened. It was the story that spans on five years going through the barrier and eating glasses as someone likes to say in another community.

Nick (14:46):

You have a very unique life experience because not a lot of people have the opportunity to start something that’s relatively small with six people and then all suddenly it becomes Journal du Coin and you’ve got millions of users, millions of subscribers. What was that experience like scaling something like that?

Sam (15:05):

Six people? There’s something interesting that I need to share with you guys. So we were six, five, not even five, and back then I was following my studies and I didn’t really enjoy them much at that third year and I told myself, Sam, you’re going to take one year off and do your very best to make a reasonable income so you can really pursue something that you truly like without compromising your existence by having no income. And since I was in med school, I had access to amazing borrowing capabilities because the bank was betting on the fact that I would just finish the years that were remaining. And so I would be someone that would be able to repay a large debt. The thing is that I was like, “Wait, so they’re offering me some great credit with fixed interest rate that extremely low that I could potentially use for the purpose for whatever I want.” But I should not say that it’s for crypto otherwise they will decline.

(16:00):

So I can just say it’s for increasing my living standards or traveling to, I don’t know, God knows where, Singapore and the hotels can be expensive there. And my banker was a good pal because we were playing some video games together. I mean, so I just filed the borrowing paper and I took 25K, which is huge in France because tuition is free. So 25K is a huge amount of money. In the US it would be like 200K would be probably normal because you can just pays probably on, it pays your masters in Harvard or something like that or probably three years. And so I took that money and put it all in crypto and I was like at least I have something to have pure stake in what I truly believe to be relevant. And then I told myself, Sam, you have one year to bootstrap and build this journal with the founders and make an income out of it in an ethical way, which is also something that’s extremely hard to achieve when markets are not so nice.

(16:55):

And after that one year I was fortunate enough to make a living out of that and seeing all of this growing, I’ve lost all my hair, I’m 25, so it’s been a lot of fun. But if I have to be honest, it was great, very rewarding experience I guess. But myself with my temper and how much I try to involve myself, but I mean don’t take days off because I’m like playing a video game when I’m working. Every day I wake up and it’s like I’m grinding on StarCraft and I’m just trying to develop this company. So since I don’t have a proper limit between my private life and professional life, it took a toll on me a little bit. But it’s been amazing. It’s been amazing. Yeah, because we’ve been at some levels it was so bad, the media is very hard to maintain, it was not generating an income.

(17:51):

So we were like, the corporation itself was in debt. We could make some money through very bad ways because there were always some propositions that you could milk your people and just show them something that’s awful. And we really had to try hard and think deep on how to get out of this quagmire. But we had some competitors coming up that are amazing and some were really threatening to overtake the market, but we always managed to find a way, survive and do things a bit like in our own way. And then of course markets became more abundant, things were a bit different. But the whole process, the growth, it’s been a very moving experience, but very exhausting.

Nick (20:08):

You can’t have a life experience like that and not learn some lessons. And like I said, not everybody will have the opportunity to have that experience. So what are maybe the one or two lessons that you learned in taking something from six to millions of users? What are some lessons?

Sam (20:25):

Well, what are the lessons? When you build this kind of business, it leverages subsets of skills from so many different domains, from the optimization of the loading time of your page. So the Google algorithm brings you better because there is for instance, a new update that puts priority on that criteria to how you’re going to process content in a way that’s compelling and attractive to the person that would use your website to who you are going to side with and how you’re going to build strong bonds and connections with the best foundations and protocols that exist out there. So how do you draft your thesis? How do you choose people you want to partner with? How do you build bonds with them and show yourself as an entity that could be valuable for them, how to understand their needs and create a proposition of value that makes sense to them.

(21:19):

So you learn about partnering, you learn about writing in a way that is not only flattering, like pleasant to you but pleasant to the potential people that would stumble on your content. So it’s really about so many things. I’m sorry for not making a simple answer, but the lessons that it teaches you that don’t think just for yourself, try to design things that are intelligible making sense for a broad audience that’s a challenge. And don’t neglect the, let’s say I would call them the backstage aspects, the engineering, having a good tech stack and try to really be skin in the game in anything you do and try to remove intermediaries. Don’t always rely on agencies to optimize their semantics or search engine optimization. Try to retro-engineer it and understand how it works because this is the only way you’re going to be more cost-efficient and you’re going to achieve greater results and you have a better judgment.

(22:22):

And always try to seek for people, especially in North America where everything’s happening, try to find reference points or people that are doing it just better and see how you can take some elements from what they do and incorporate it in what you do to create something that’s truly genuine, but that’s better and always have these role models and chase them.

Nick (22:44):

Thanks for sharing that. I found it very insightful and I appreciate that you would share those lessons. I want to ask you this question about this unique perspective you’ve had then. So launching in 2017, growing your user base, you’ve also been able to watch the crypto space itself evolve. What’s changed in crypto or in web3 since you founded Journal du Coin to present?

Sam (23:09):

What has changed? Well, I’m going to give a very generic answer to this. First of all, the maturity. Remember the ICO boom and how many, you could just raise 20 million by making some kind of IoT force. You could create some shoe that’s connected to the IOTA blockchain and just raise 15 million because this is just going to revolutionize everyone’s life and stuff that were just based on very and out of thin air where collecting a lot of capital. But the tech stack behind first of all was much poorer than today in terms of templates, in terms of infrastructure and everything. So a lot of project didn’t ship, a lot of promises, smart contract platforms, there was nothing. Back then you had Ethereum, you had Ardor and you had EOS from Dan Larimer before he made BitShares and you had the beginnings, the humble beginnings of DPoS with [inaudible 00:24:03].

(24:03):

And that sounded like the new stuff because it could handle thousands of transactions but you didn’t have that much choice to build and not that many users. Let’s just face it, remember the price of gas back then and a lot of people were just there, I guess exploiting this opportunistic economy because it was just a new vehicle to raise fund. So it’s easy to make an interface with a web3 injection to get money from people without KYC, but that it was just all about that. And then when the bear happened and some relevant companies were still sustaining and trying to build great stuff, you can think for instance of [inaudible 00:24:40] or other well respected Ethereum companies, then you start to see people really leveraging what Ethereum as an open computer could offer. End tools were being sharpened. You could attend to these conferences, like the Berlin meetups of Ethereum, the ETHCC in France Ethereum conference.

(24:59):

That is also an event, I have a lot of, that I really love. That I greet the organizers of it. You could see all the builders coming together. Chain Link back then was also, you didn’t have Oracle, centralized Oracle, all that stack came after and this basically that stack that enables you to make complex protocols that enables people to make DeFi applications. And I think that this whole structure that was being built is what makes me think that today cryptos are really here to stay and they’re so strong purpose wise, now it’s happening.

(25:33):

And outside of Ethereum, if you broaden your scope, there are some amazing technologies that are seeing today. Let’s just take the example of zero knowledge proofs finally being leveraged. You have a concrete use of zero knowledge proofs to scale a system. These things comes from, I don’t know, ’82, ’84, Micali and Shafi Goldwasser just put some paper and it’s only 40 years after that you have people that are actually making a market ready application out of it. Isn’t that beautiful? And you see that in crypto, the best of gain theory and low level mathematics being planned into stuff that has purpose and increases the finance stack or the life of everyone or the way they can exchange informations. That’s like moving, it’s so major now. I mean it’s so major, it looks like it’s here to stay and look at the people involved in that space. It’s like Jacob Brains everywhere and it’s mental.

Nick (26:27):

How has the users, the subscribers to journal du Coin, how has that changed over the years?

Sam (26:34):

I guess global awareness increased. A lot of people have PTSD from 2017 and 2018 being rugged by projects that promised them like sun and moon and just offered them some tokens that went where they came from to zero. And this PTSD, I guess increased global awareness so people were learning to be more cautious but still in people’s mind, the greed or the constant search of opportunities or it’s all about what’s in it for me. Finance is about making money with money and you can’t change that very easily. People are just still looking actively for something that’s a lazy way to fortify, develop their capital. And this is still here, but people are employing methods and approaches to achieve that. They have a judgment, a site that has been evolving. And so now you have more, I guess people are more cautious when they engage with protocol or solution that’s promising them some quick income.

(27:32):

And from the dev side, they’re much more devs and they are becoming even more, I guess they have a sharper judgment on choosing what they will build and where they will build. And this is also very interesting. Now you really have the choice of your weapons if you want to build an applications and everything. So yeah, I guess everyone is more of a connoisseur now, but still it’s all about in general as someone who sees the media from behind the curtain, what drives people is most of the time and a lot of time is making money with money and most of the people get in for the opportunity of making money, eventually they lose some and then veer two comes and they stay because they took a deeper interest of all the technology they invested on and then they realize that it’s actually pretty fascinating.

(28:20):

Why should I even sell that? I guess I’m just going to at least leverage that knowledge and dig deeper and that’s eventually how great stories are being made. But there is no shame I think of entering this space, seeing an economical opportunity at first, let’s just face it. It’s the case probably of 95% of the people, but what makes you stay is what really matters. You have to see the large picture, the broad picture.

Nick (28:43):

Well I appreciate you making that point and I think it’s such an important point because I feel like there needs to be an evolution in the people participating in crypto and web3 away from this speculation focus and more to an appreciation for the technology. And so how do people do that? What’s the migration path for people to better appreciate that in your opinion?

Sam (29:06):

You’re asking me how people end up appreciating better the technology that’s behind crypto? That’s what I call a good lesson. I think that when you lose big, you might eventually reach that point where all that is left is the lesson you’ve learned and eventually some links that could help you figure out why you’ve lost money and what was the right way to do things or just understand how cycles or maybe markets do function. And by following this path, you eventually start to build a genuine interest for the technology that’s behind it. Or you are someone which really who’s really into game theory and understand mathematics or I don’t know, state replication and what makes, I don’t know, tender means consensus engine so good or whatever. And then you just have fascination for the mathematics behind it. And then it’s just obvious from the moment you start using, I don’t know, Cosmos SDK, you start just to see what can be done with such a tech stack or substrate and then you just fall in love with it.

(30:14):

But if you come from let’s say a non-tech background, I think the number one way is just to get wrecked. Yeah, take a good lesson, have a good PTSD, have some free time, think over what happened and eventually you’ll just stumble upon a paper that’s going to make your life different or you’ll just have that friend. But if you just decide to stick a little bit longer, you’ll have that friend who made it that might inspire you or you have that friend who’s buying stuff on the parallel web and it’s just like it’s bugging you. Why? How is that happening? I don’t know. And then interest comes up, but it’s all about, I think the number one reason is just getting wrecked. It’s one way to stick or just being a scientist that truly understand the, I guess the tech behind it. When you start playing with all these tools and you see the roadmaps of these projects like IBC back in 2018 when it was just on the roadmap, when you see what it enables, how it works, I think you want to stay.

Nick (31:11):

For listeners that want to learn more about Journal du Coin, maybe subscribe and see some of the content you’re producing, what’s the best way for them to learn more?

Sam (31:17):

So I guess that people who are listening us are probably speaking English. So on the website, unfortunately for now, you can only find content that’s in English, but there is a YouTube channel and an audio channel on which you can find two playlists that are made out of English podcasts. So I record the podcast in English and the team subtitles them in French, so you can find the playlist Entrevues with podcasts with builders from, I don’t know, for instance Yaniv Tal or Tegan Kline or more recently Mustafa from Celestia or people from StarkWare Eli Ben-Sasson. And you have one called [inaudible 00:31:53], which is one that’s where you have people that are more behind like funds, structures, medias for instance Larry Cermak from the Block or Kyle for Multicoin.

(32:02):

And in these they share their perspective on the market, what were their biggest mistakes, what they, let’s say most proud of, what are their insights or what they think of the current state of blockchain technology. And these two playlists, maybe you’ll find them relevant and it’s in English, so if you want to check it out, more than happy to have you, to increase the viewers that’s from North America, UK or wherever you come from that’s probably going to be relevant. But there’s more stuff coming in English.

Nick (32:33):

And for listeners that are interested, I’ll put links to these resources in the show notes. So be sure to visit the show notes. Sam, another reason we’re talking today, not only was to hear about this incredible story about Journal Du Coin and all the things you learned along the way there, but you recently launched a new project called Node Guardians and I have a lot of interest in this and I think a lot of listeners will as well. What can you tell us about Node Guardians?

Sam (32:56):

So I’ll put some context. Node Guardians is not a play to earn. It’s not an, it’s just a logical continuing suite of what we’ve been doing with Node Guardians. So when I was struggling to make Journal Du Coin with my team a sustainable, let’s call it a business, not a charity, I was looking for ways to make money while still enjoying my work. So not talking about stuff that is not interesting just because there is some paycheck to get at the end, here’s 2K dollars and make a PR. So I was like, “Is there a way that we could make income while speaking about stuff that’s truly nice to us? So people are really inspired to do the job and the job is actually nice.” So I started to look at foundations and grant programs of protocols that I like and try to understand engineer, see how we can be relevant to these protocols while initially not having that many developers because foundations usually support initiatives that help them federate more devs or that build tools to make their platforms more used or easier to use or create an Oracle system and everything.

(34:05):

And so I was applying for various grants, explored different ways to bring value to those projects. I was looking also at emerging protocols with strong value propositions in which we could participate early. And by interacting with all these projects, it allowed me basically to have a better understanding of what infrastructure protocols and Layer 1 platforms need most. And whether it was for Layer 1 or Layer 2 or other systems, we were going through these grants. Sometimes being rejected, but over time trying to really figure out what was truly need. And we started specializing ourselves into making our craft signature content that since Journal Du Coin is not about copying what’s in English and deep playing it or Google translating and making into French, we started making tech writing and also resources that break down complex technologies and make them intelligible for a larger audience. And this recipe was bringing great results. As French people tend to prefer having their content in French, even though sometimes they’re great developers.

(35:02):

We started to have these articles being seen by dozens of thousands of people and having developers sometimes discovering protocols through these articles and through these videos. And from that moment I was like, “Oh, this is just pretty crazy now. We are making this media afloat through grants by speaking about stuff that’s really badass for us and we enjoy it and we more or less understand how it works.” And we started to see that the demand for tech writing but also stuff that breaks down this technology makes them more understandable was just huge And we were not in, it was just not enough. We could not answer it. We were providing one and the request was 10. And also there was another need, foundations and protocols are always looking for highly available infrastructure and initiatives that involve more participants in securing distributed networks. And at that moment I was like, maybe we could just do noncustodial taking differently and create a tool that enables us, that makes it easy for protocols to distribute technical tasks.

(36:02):

So non-custodial taking providers, sometimes they don’t have community and if you have a lot of money you can have a great tech stack. I guess you can just hire half of MIT and make them do DevOps and that’s it. You have a great tech stack and they do NPC for your nodes and everything. That’s wonderful. But community is harder to grind even if you have money. Having millions of enthusiasts that share the same vision, that’s hard to build, it’s not that easy. I was like, “What if I make a new non-custodial staking experience with a layer of incentive, I’ll get to that later, in which we focus on educating our community of millions of users to the implications of securing PO os networks.” We don’t prescribe them anything but we just educate them and we make a new thing that’s in English so we can target the broader audience and on top of that we can create a matching engine.

(36:46):

So you have this staking part and we also explain you how to bootstrap a node because we are here to make networks more decentralized, not just teach people one way to delegate on one node. And then we create another tool which is a matching engine between developers and Layer 1s or protocols. The protocol can just log in a backend, create a new block in some kind of technological tree, put specifications of what they need. I need a 20-page guide on how to use anchor framework on Solana or how to set up a subnet on Avalanche. Here are the specs that I need. The profile I’m looking for it most. Here is the economical incentives because this is very important. And then they can just receive applications from people from our own team, but also people from all around the world and they can choose among the applicants who matches best with the job and give them the quests and people have a certain amount of time to deliver back something and if it’s good, payment is triggered and if it’s not good, it needs adjustments.

(37:40):

There is a dispute process and then it’s adjusted until a consensus is found on the quality of what has been delivered and payment is triggered and there is a reputation system. And so this way we can leverage people from emerging countries. I was living in Russia and spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and I noticed that there is a huge potential there. You go to, I don’t know, Moscow Technical University or Kyiv, there are a lot of developers that would be more than happy to create a template for an IMM and that’s easy for them. You have PhD in low level programmation or machine learning, they can make these tutorials because it’s something that’s in their range and they’ll be more than happy to take part in that effort. So why just relying on our own team when we can onboard all these talented people from our network and beyond our network through an open system that allows people to match with foundations and make some money while creating the documentation that they need.

(38:31):

So I wanted to create the ultimate tool for protocols to distribute a lot of technical tasks and later, initially it’s just for tech writing. It could also be applied for not only articles or documentation but also, I don’t know, build a bridge between Polygon and Mina and put the task and select a team that looks like they can take the challenge and you can give them the long term mission. So the idea is to create a new way, a new non-custodial staking provider that’s community oriented and the matching engine that’s for tech writing and it’s important, decentralization this way because non-custodial staking, if you’re a node and you just handle the stake from five hedge funds, that’s not really decentralization. But if you make a node and you have thousands of participants delegating on your node with small, medium and large stacks, that’s more interesting.

(39:24):

And I think that the idea is just not to be in competition with everyone, but just to make sure that people take interest about whole networks are being secured, take their tokens out of the exchange and start to do things with them. Just like securing the network but also use DeFi. The initiative is just like augmenting global knowledge while also making a sustainable business. Because I have to be very transparent, we’re not a charity but we’re looking at making money in a super ethical way while speaking about stuff that we truly like while not harming anyone. This is what it’s all about and it’s all about trying to solve this equation and we’re trying to do that. And just a follow up of what Journal Du Coin does, but this time for a broader audience.

Nick (40:02):

I appreciate that overview. It’s very helpful. So for listeners that want to engage or get more involved with Node Guardians, what’s the best path to do it and who are you looking for? Who would you like to get more involved with? Node Guardians?

Sam (40:14):

Oh, how to engage? How to get involved with Node Guardians? So we are actively working on finishing the blueprints and the documentation and some elements that I wanted to sharpen and our ambassador programs. So anyone who wants to get involved who is an illustrator or a cloud architect or someone who thinks he can bring value to the design of such a platform is more than welcome to reach out to me by email or on Twitter. I try to check all DMs. And later there will be a proper portal and a proper structure to engage and build with us on Node Guardians. So you should expect some proper guidelines and elements above that coming up next month I hope. But anyone with good intention just DM me and let’s see what we can work together on even. You don’t have to be tech savvy. If you make some great artwork, just reach out to us. If you like community management, it’s really like something you’re great at. I’m always excited to have you on board guys and see how we can work together.

Nick (41:45):

I want to now shift a little bit to The Graph and as listeners know, a lot of this podcast is about focusing and shining a light on the work that The Graph is doing in the context of web3. I’d love to get your perspective on The Graph. Do you remember when you first became aware of The Graph and what your initial impressions were?

Sam (42:03):

I think the first thing I stumbled upon was this Berlin through a meetup with Billy Rennekamp, Yaniv Tal explaining what The Graph could potentially offer to the builders. And I just took a look at it and I think that I found it very interesting and when I find someone that’s interesting, I start to a bit stalk about what this person does and what other podcasts is featured. I think I heard the Epicenter podcast from Brian Crain also featuring Yaniv Tal. And I think was, I found it very interesting that you could have a solution where you don’t have to run your own archive node anymore and your own indexation scripts and that could just make the development of dabs much faster. So I found it interesting I think in 2019, early 2020, but then I forgot about it. That’s it. I forgot about it. And then I rediscovered it because there was a lot of fuss, a lot of noise.

(43:03):

I think they announced during the summer there was some echoes about the sale of The Graph and then I started to dive back into it and back in the DeFi summer I was also in touch with a lot of developers and they were really explaining to me what this could potentially enable them to do and I started to take a deeper dive in the technology and that’s how I fell in love with it and I wanted to bring value to this project and see how I can get involved in its success. So my first move was to invite in September 2020 or October 2020, Yaniv, to give us a high level understanding of what The Graph is and the podcast is available in the channel. So if you can check it out, it was not that great. I think that I progressively started to dive into The Graph first. That’s it.

(43:53):

And there was a big challenge back then making this understood, this technology understood by everyone. And I can tell you that back in the days, the analogies calling it the Google blockchains were not a thing who would care about an indexation protocol from the mainstream side? I mean developers knew what was up, but the rest it was just the blue token and that’s it.

Nick (44:15):

So going back to what we talked about earlier of this initial impression related to speculation and the coin and this move to the underlying technology and impact, how has your opinion or perspective of The Graph evolved in terms of the technology and the importance it has for web3?

Sam (44:34):

Crazy, it was just about the blue coin and then you start reading the papers about how Brandon Ramirez planned a while ago to make this thing that was existing on a centralized stack to make it mutating into a fully fledged decentralized network that is sustainable with interactions between buyers and sellers and actors involved in the network that makes sense and could fuel it over their years to come. I mean you still have to take time reading some, I mean when you read the papers of The Graph, not being tech-savvy, it’s not that easy sometimes to figure out what this is all about. But if you take a deep dive, you really reset your RAM and you start to absorb what it is all about and how it’s being built and it’s just not only that blue token and you see that there are other protocols that have similar ambitions and that could potentially make developer experience so much better.

(45:25):

I think it’s hard not to fall in love with what The Graph does and I think that yeah, the result is here now. I mean there is no indexation solution that’s spread across multiple chains even though it’s on Ethereum main net, it’s fully decentralized, but it’s also being deployed on other networks having at [inaudible 00:45:41] Figment announced that they’re working on making it available on Cosmos. It’s coming everywhere near Protocol IPFS is there and it’s decentralized on it. I mean the competition is I think not close to that stage. I mean what has been achieved is huge and how well it fastens up the development of applications is just crazy. So to me the initiative, the tech is just impressive. It’s more than the blue token I was describing, but you need to really stick to that paper and read how it’s being built and that takes time, attention times and attention spans are super short nowadays. God, you really have to stick to it.

Nick (46:23):

How important do you think The Graph is for web3?

Sam (46:26):

It is key because from a business manager perspective, you want your people to be able to build fast to reduce the cost of building a protocol X, Y, or Z because you have limited capital most of time to build something that generate tends to be most ambitious. And if you have a solution that spares you from running expensive infrastructure and maintaining code to extract the data and you can just subscribe to a subgraph and get what you need and do things much faster and you don’t have to rely on a team that is able to make archive nodes and scripts and everything, you’re just saving cost of labor, super expensive labor and you’re just making the work experience much more seamless. Initiatives like that, they’re key because our only chance to get these web2 developers to come on web3 is to have an onboarding and a dev experience that’s, it’s not a scripted answer as I think it’s really, I mean it’s just obvious the more stuff we have like this, the more we’re going to win it.

(47:29):

And it’s important because right now there’s probably 200 million users using who have a crypto wallet to move from 200 million to 2 billion. We’re going to need a super strong stack and infrastructure and tooling because people are still going to stick to what they’re comfortable with. So The Graph plays a key role building on blockchains like an economically relevant experience and an enjoyable experience. We don’t have that fast enough. We’re going to have problems.

Nick (47:55):

I want to ask you about web3. web3 is there’s a lot of chatter online about what even web3 means. How do you think about the definition of web3?

Sam (48:08):

I don’t like that web3 term. It’s like a lazy way to qualify somewhat something that’s about crypto. And when you don’t know what to feel your sentence, you just say like, oh, web3 thing. Yeah, we going to make the web3 better. Or lack of having a word that’s more context specifically web3 and throw it at people like that. But from what I understand, from my humble understanding, I mean I still like the term, it’s a good shortcut. But it’s all about, you have read, write and ownership and ownership is what I care most about and deletion of intermediaries. Being sovereign with your diet data, there is like DID solutions coming, data availability solutions like Ceramic Network. There is this whole way of exchanging, communicating while retaining data and only offering it to people you sign for, you agree to share your data with, but also being able to transact without having an entity that can censor a transaction.

(49:04):

So without relying on proprietary systems that could eventually block you from doing what you truly want and web3 is just what enables, is the extension of freedom in the digital world, but genuine freedom, this is what matters to me and this is what matters at the end of the day, in my opinion and what I seek personally using crypto is also feeling more sovereign. And so I think is web3 is just the incarnation of that in the digital packaging. It’s just all the tools, all that crypto enables, I guess you can call it web3, removing intermediaries and being somewhat, enjoying some kind of freedom while roaming on the internet, communicating and sending packets here and there.

Nick (49:53):

Well I agree with you about the term web3, it’s been misused and it’s been used as click bait. I think it’s a huge risk to those that want to build web3 that we need to define and protect it. But absent of that, how do you think web3 impacts the world? What’s the positive benefit to people all throughout the world?

Sam (50:15):

Well, if web3 is widely adopted, then we have a world that gets closer to from heaven. It’s more ideal, it’s more like of, but let’s be a bit more pragmatic. web3 solutions at the core with what they enable people to do, will they really be composing the essential of internet traffic? I still think that there’s going to be some proprietary gate, but if we still have the option to use some protocols that work on web3 and that really respect our freedom, I think that we are up to something huge. And web3 is just the gateway for people who live in miserable conditions to actually do things that are vital on the internet. So let’s say you’re in a country that’s isolated from Swift Networks and CEPI. If you’re in Europe and you want to send value, it’s good that you can access the internet and eventually use alternative systems that do not require you to use KYC to receive and send value and that protect your identity.

(51:29):

It’s also nice that in the future also we can be the sovereign owners of our medical data and we can choose to use healthy applications that do not make money of selling our data to third parties or a NASDAQ companies, but we can really decide to share or pay for a service if we don’t want to share our data. And if it gets just at this level of adoption, this is just going to be amazing. I take a deep interest in privacy technologies, so whether it is with Zero Knowledge systems and what they promise like Aztec with Bronc or just Monero as a transaction layer, a primitive payment layer, but also NIM as a tour with steroids.

(52:10):

I think that this is what is really interesting, but I still have a fear that we’re going to get and act very bad by trying to make this technology mainstream because state by definition have tendency or a will to still keep control over the informations that are being exchanged and a pure breed web3 being fully available to everyone. Oh, dear. I would bet you that in two years you won’t be able to have more than 10K dollars in stable coins without having to fill up KYC. Let’s take that path, is that really web3 transacting using USDC if you have to provide some elements to broadcast transaction, we’ll see how it evolves, but broad web3 like co concepts is great on the paper and I can only wish for it to become true. It’s really going to happen.

Nick (53:02):

Sam, you’re a brilliant guy. I really appreciate your time and I want to make this last question something from the perspective of advice. So you started off in crypto with just an interest in crypto and you eventually grew it into a full-time job and you’re obviously a technical guy, you understand a lot of different terms, a lot of different really technical concepts related to crypto and web3. What’s your advice to listeners that say, gee, I don’t know a lot and I want to get more involved. What’s the path that they should take?

Sam (53:34):

That’s a tough one. You’re going to have to still find a lot of passion for this field, but you can make it and you can make it without capital, actually. Try to find, I mean try to get involved with projects that really resonate within you that you find really interesting. You can just be someone who’s into visual arts or who’s into copywriting or who’s into making logos. I don’t know. Just try to find vulnerabilities in protocols that you really like or just try to bring value without expecting anything at the end. Try to just allocate two hours of your time in the week because you probably have a work and that’s not easy to put two free days like crazy and just work on two in crypto and try to get involved and try to just allocate some bits of your time and get involved with these protocols.

(54:21):

If you see that it doesn’t work out in the meantime, always try to see what the king makers of the market and this whole space are saying and just try to see if your thesis, if your prism gives you, it has some similarities with what the great thinkers are thinking. And if you see that there’s some correlation, you’re probably doing it right. If you are supporting a project that’s into, I don’t know, that availability I’m giving just an example and it seems to be something that’s in huge need or sharding in huge need in the era that we’re going through, just keep on that path. But always reassess your position and the best thing you can invest is your time. And it also requires some passion, but my advice is that just allocate a little bit of your time. Find people who share the same interests as you and confront your vision and try to get involved at an early stage with Proco.

(55:18):

Find the black horses. You are probably going to stumble fail a few times, but at some point it’s going to pay off and when it’s going to pay off, you’re going to move from one partying to another. And that’s where the enlightenment probably starts. Your time is your best resources and it’s not about your cash. So wherever you come from, whether you have a Berkeley computer science degree or nothing, you have your chance, but you have to have a little bit of passion and you need to try hard and always keep yourself up to date with what the thinkers are thinking and see if you’re parallel with them in the way you think.

Nick (55:55):

That’s great advice, Sam, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been so generous. If listeners want to learn more about you or follow your work, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Sam (56:04):

Oh, you can reach out to me at [email protected] if you want to send a more formal email. Otherwise, I post a lot on Twitter, but I do it in French 50% of the time and 50% of the time in English, and I plan to do it more in English. My name is Sam on Twitter, probably not going to find the results, so you need to use the proper page name. It’s sam_jdc. Sam_jdc. You can also DM me there if you want to chat or speak about Node Guardians.

(56:31):

I’m super curious and really willing to have more people from the North American scene to engage with us and also to just have a chat so you can engage with me there. And feel free to check out our channel, Journal du Coin, where you’ll find some podcasts in English that eventually might be relevant to you, or you can find them on audios in an audio only format. And soon Node Guardians, if you’re a dev, you’ll be able to find some, eventually some resources that are relevant to you, but also some streams and podcasts that are more focused on the technical side. So feel free to hop by, and I’m super thankful that for this podcast, to me it’s like, yeah, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you so much.