GRTiQ Podcast: 63 Abbey Titcomb

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Abbey Titcomb (00:00:19):

My first impressions were that Graph is really fundamental infrastructure for web3. It’s a major dependency as a web3 ecosystem at the moment, and for good reason, it’s basically the data layer of the decentralized internet.

Nick (00:01:01):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Abbey Titcomb, head of community and governance and council member at the Foundation of Radicle, a web3 protocol that enables peer-to-peer and open source software development. During our conversation, Abbey talks about how she got involved in crypto, what Radicle is and how it fits into web3, some ideas about The Graph and how Radicle uses it, and the recent news about joining the board at Optimism. Abbey also shares a lot of great insights on a broad range of topics, including Design Thinking, open source, DAOs, and navigating the difference between web2 and web3. We started the conversation by discussing how Abbey first became aware of crypto.

Abbey Titcomb (00:01:46):

So it all started when I was working at an early stage Venture firm at the end of my time at university in Boston. It was during the white paper freeze of 2017 and it was pretty formative to be watching these extremely well established investors, actually open source investors, some of these big investors behind large open source corporations in Boston and in the US trying to wrap their heads around crypto.

(00:02:16):

And I spent a lot of late nights with my coworkers breeding crypto kitties, trying to understand what was happening in the space, trying to sift through these white papers that were coming across our desk. And it was so interesting and I think I told myself that if these investors who had so much success in different stages of the web, basically with their open source investing, if this is all that they can think about, then this must be really special and there must be something here. So it kind of peaked my interest and then I went down the rabbit hole as they say.

Nick (00:02:54):

Was there a particular white paper that came across your desk that was the aha moment for you where you saw the utility of what could be?

Abbey Titcomb (00:03:01):

I don’t know if there was an aha moment. I think I went to the Ethereal Summit in New York to represent the firm, and this was the event hosted by Consensus, which is one of the earliest Ethereum Venture Studios that came out of Brooklyn. And I think that energy was what really got me going and what really kind of made me want to continue pursuing it further because there was so many people who were just envisioning all of these different futures. Some of them at the time seemed too early, it seemed why would anybody want this? And now you’re starting to see as it reaches more of a mainstream level, these ideas being revisited in different forms. And I think that that was truly what inspired me and motivated me to want to dive in. And I meant so many of those people that I met at that summit are people that I’m still working with in the Ethereum with me, this and now.

Nick (00:04:00):

Well, you mentioned that you first became aware when you were living in Boston. You currently live in Germany, and it’s something I like to ask guests of the podcast, what the attitudes and opinions of the people where they live are towards crypto and web3. So what can you tell us about the people of Germany’s attitudes and opinions?

Abbey Titcomb (00:04:16):

Well, first I’ll say I’m in Berlin, which I think is even more of a hyper-specific kind of ecosystem for crypto to form. And it’s completely different than New York and Boston, whereas in Boston and New York, Boston is driven by this SaaS mentality, software as a service. So it was kind of more of an enterprise focus, whereas New York was all about the FinTech, Wall Street, except for the [inaudible 00:04:41] that they represented consensus and what they formed in Brooklyn.

(00:04:45):

And Berlin has this more, and I would say crypto anarchist vibes and a lot, I think of the most interesting organizational explorations with decentralized technologies, some of the original peer-to-peer ethos that I think crypto and Blockchain has also taken and been inspired by reside in Berlin. And I think in the early days in Berlin, the web3 Summit was here for a couple of years. This is where Parody I think was formed and also continued. So there was a lot of this kind of more, I guess I would say counterculture crypto energy, which has then turned into as more of the, I guess I would say DAO space that we’re seeing in Berlin as well, but also has been deeply formative. It has changed a little bit as people have shipped off to Portugal, but there’s still a really quality group of people here who are just thinking about crypto and web3 differently than I think of in other places.

Nick (00:05:44):

When I have the opportunity to speak with guests like you, I’m always surprised by the diversity of background and educational experience that guests bring to the show. So be curious to ask you what your educational background is.

Abbey Titcomb (00:05:55):

So I majored in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University, as I said, in Boston, that’s when I was trying to figure out what was next after high school. But as I started my education, I ended up being exposed to this concept of product development and Design Thinking through actually one class at university. And this triggered a whole, I guess story arc for me where I entered a minor in entrepreneurship and actually spent a lot of my college career trying to found my own company and my own project called Nightly.

(00:06:31):

It is really cute actually thinking back to it. It started as a hardware device that was basically a safety device for people who are walking home alone on campus. And then it turned into a mobile phone application that was used to crowdsource community data about different safety related happenings on campus. And so I took on this student entrepreneur hat, which was so interesting and I think was one of the main reasons why I am where I am today in this space and why I was exposed to crypto because I was given the space to dive into entrepreneurship and startup life.

(00:07:07):

And in Boston there’s this really great, I guess I would say young entrepreneurship ecosystem where you can really dive into this network and start growing this professional network while you’re still in school that kind of spans beyond your graduation. So I worked for myself during one of my co-op periods at Northeastern, and it definitely gave me this energy that made me just want to keep diving into it even if it wasn’t Nightly that I dove into post-college.

Nick (00:07:36):

This class you took on, Design Thinking, had a real impact. What was it about that course that kind of inspired you and how would you describe what Design Thinking is as a discipline to listeners that have never heard of it?

Abbey Titcomb (00:07:48):

The definition, how I would say it, and now I’m pulling on the archives of all of those learnings, but it’s basically like human-centered problem solving. So the idea of being able to develop empathy for a person or an audience and use those insights to develop solutions that actually solve their problems. And so in engineering, it was actually an applied principle that you could use to develop products for people.

(00:08:19):

I worked at Shark Ninja, which is a consumer products company for a little bit, and they use it a lot, which is that how can you take a consumer problem and instead of just taking the most obvious solution or a stopgap solution, use and research and understand their needs, wants and desires to develop a product that not only solves maybe their urgent need but their latent need. And so that concept was really interesting.

(00:08:44):

And in this class I realized that this is what people do, that people try to solve other people’s problems and they develop businesses and projects around that. And I thought it was deeply inventive, deeply innovative, and also I think spoke to what my natural affinity is, or my, I guess I could say, strongest characteristic, which is being able to communicate and understand people and understand people and explain that to other people. So that was kind of something that I didn’t realize was even available to me before. And so I wanted to explore it further and just took off running and said, let’s just try it to do it on my own.

Nick (00:09:27):

So upon graduation, you eventually land at Radicle, but there’s this professional twist and turn, I’m sure, like so many other guests to get to where you are today. What can you tell us about your professional development and that journey you took to get to where you are now?

Abbey Titcomb (00:09:41):

Yeah, so after that Venture firm in Boston that I referenced, I moved back to New York, it’s where I’m born and raised and joined Onward Labs, which was a Blockchain specific spin out of a well known Venture Studio in New York. And so this plays into my Design Thinking journey. Human Ventures is a studio, technically a Venture firm, it’s Venture Studio, and its approach was to support founders at the earliest stage, actually preconception of an idea, support founders who have a deeply embedded expertise and understanding and empathy into a problem space and work with them to develop a scalable investible solution to that problem that they see by providing not only strategic and Design Thinking expertise to kind of formulate those solutions, but also business related and building skill sets as well through the people that were employed at the studio.

(00:10:41):

So similar to the consensus model, Human Venture saw some opportunity to start applying their studio approach to the emerging Blockchain space in New York.

(00:10:50):

And so I joined there as a head of strategy and I was actually coordinating the work shopping with these founders, and we were trying to understand how we could apply this new formative technology to these different problem spaces. And so I was basically taking everything that I’ve learned about crypto from this Venture firm, everything that I’ve learned about Design Thinking from school and my experience as a student founder and applying that to this design studio. And so with that studio, I actually was given the opportunity to start exploring and connecting with the Ethereum ecosystem. The Ethereum ecosystem was formed in these global gatherings, Devcon, web3 Summit, hackathons, [inaudible 00:11:36].

[NEW_PARAGRAPH]And as someone who was tasked with staying up to date with what was happening in the Ethereum ecosystem, I was responsible for diving in and trying to understand what was happening. So I actually started going to hackathons, conferences and I really started connecting with developer ecosystem.

(00:11:55):

Some of my closest friends are people that I met during that period of my life, and it made me realize I really wanted to start building something. I wanted to find a project to invest my time in and my energy. And so I left Onward Labs and started contracting with different projects in this space. I started traveling more and that’s when I came to Berlin for the first time because there was this big consolidation and I guess you could say gathering of people who were building in Berlin. And that’s actually when I found Radicle. I found Radicle only a couple of months after leaving Onward Labs and I’ve been there since.

Nick (00:12:29):

So Abbey, I want to ask you a follow-up question. I want to apply this Design Thinking lens that you’ve mentioned a couple of times here, and I love the background and I’m familiar with Design Thinking myself. If you applied your Design Thinking lens to the crypto space, what solutions or what kind of strokes of empathy is Design Thinking lens interpreting what crypto can do for people in the world?

Abbey Titcomb (00:12:53):

So I think that there’s a couple different ones and I think that they fall into different categories of problems and needs. I learned this framework from my time at that Venture firm from Michael Stock, one of the founders, which is that there’s different types of needs and I forget all of them, but one of them is obviously an urgent need, one that needs to be solved immediately because it is deeply impacting the people who are experiencing that problem.

(00:13:16):

And the other is a latent need, which is a need that people don’t really know that they need solved yet and is sometimes more of the interesting need because what it’s doing is introducing a new paradigm and solving problems that people didn’t even know that they had. So I would say that crypto has, it solves a lot of problems, but I think the two main ones is one urgent need and one latent need.

(00:13:36):

So the urgent need is the ability to access financial systems without the control of centralized parties like nation states and banks. I think that this is an urgent need that’s been demonstrated and kind of realized as you start to see inflation cripple different countries in central and South America or sanctions impact people globally, is that being able to retain agency and control within a financial ecosystem is imperative for retaining user freedoms in this cyber age when everything is becoming abstracted into numbers on balance sheets.

(00:14:20):

And so the whole concept behind decentralized finance, I believe is a very urgent need that needs to be applied to this scaling global economy that we’re all tied to. And while that might not be an urgent need for people in the Western world, it for sure is a global need and I think is one of the main inspirations behind the Bitcoin white paper as well.

(00:14:45):

So that’s an urgent need. The latent need is similar but slightly different, which is the need for decentralization. And so I think decentralization is actually this kind of contentious need is that people are like, “Why do we need to decentralize this? Everything works perfectly fine.”

(00:15:00):

And I think that this need will become more realized in the future as we realize how unsustainable it is to have our entire digital experience controlled and moderated by centralized corporations, conglomerates of corporations that drive not only our institutional landscape and impact our global economy, but completely run our lives basically.

(00:15:30):

And so I think that the control of the internet by these centralized corporations is inherently unsustainable and in this digital and information age where our data is potentially one of our most important assets and will continue to be in the future, maybe increasingly so in the future, it’s also incredibly urgent to be making sure that we own that data, that we can control it, that we not only in the real world can have our user freedoms, but in our cyber world can retain our user freedoms.

(00:16:04):

And so we’re starting to see the cracks show in centralized platforms, whether it’s through everything that’s happening with Twitter and the way that it impacts our political elections, GitHub, which we can discuss further with its relationship to Radicle, banning user accounts in US sanctioned countries or taking down open source repositories because of their perceived impact on real world laws, there’s a lot of implications here.

(00:16:31):

And I think that that’s the latent need that crypto is solving, which is decentralizing not just the way that we do things, but decentralizing control and returning control back to the users and the people who are experiencing and using this technology.

Nick (00:16:47):

That’s a great answer. I appreciate you providing such a thorough description of that, and it’s a great segue into your work at Radicle. For listeners that may not be familiar with what Radicle is, what can you share with us?

Abbey Titcomb (00:16:58):

So Radicle is basically a peer-to-peer staff for building software together, and this means a lot of things, but basically offers developers secure and uncensorable infrastructure to collaborate on code in a decentralized way. So currently collaboration is done through things called Centralized Forges, which are basically centralized servers that host Git repositories.

(00:17:19):

Git is free open source, distributed version control protocol that basically probably every developer knows of. And it’s basically the way that you can change sets to repositories in a way that can be tracked and then shared with others, so others can take those change sets and make changes as well.

(00:17:37):

So GitHub, which is an example of a Centralized Forge, basically coordinates that collaboration. Radicle provides a decentralized way, meaning you don’t have to rely on one server or one corporation to communicate your change sets with each other. It allows you to use a decentralized peer-to-peer network, one that’s stewarded by different nodes to share and collaborate on code repositories. On top of that, Radicle has this Ethereum integration, which allows us to touch into those sovereign identities that I was speaking about earlier.

(00:18:12):

By tapping into Ethereum, what you’re doing is you’re providing developers with a way to maintain a sovereign developer identity, one that they can use to organize and coordinate around. And so we offer tooling for collective code governance, and then we take in the power of DeFi and apply that to the developer experience, giving developers new ways to get funded for their open source work with one of our protocols called Drips.

Nick (00:18:36):

So Abbey, what you’ve described there, and again, I’m not technical, so I’ll just kind of rephrase it so it’s something that I can understand, but basically Radicle is a place where software developers, engineers can meet and create software in a decentralized kind of open source way, and then they can push it out into the world for people to use. Is that a good summation?

Abbey Titcomb (00:18:55):

Yeah, definitely. I think that the Uber for X pitch of it is that it’s decentralized GitHub, right? But it’s really giving developers a new decentralized way to produce and distribute their open source code, which is an incredibly powerful concept and one that speaks to the earlier values of the FOS movement and the early internet. And so Radicle is basically just trying to provide a viable and functional and usable alternative to the centralized platforms that kind of dominate our developer experience today, similar to other web3 projects that are providing alternatives to their centralized counterparts.

Nick (00:19:36):

So you obviously can’t talk about something like Radicle without exploring this idea of open source and what open source is. How would you describe what open source is for listeners that aren’t familiar?

Abbey Titcomb (00:19:46):

Yeah, so open source software is software that’s released under licenses, different types of licenses, that grants different rights to use change and distribute that software. But basically it’s open and publicly available code so anybody can see the code and usually change it, contribute to it, and distribute it in their own ways.

(00:20:09):

The reason that I have some qualifications is because open source is actually a term that originated from a more Radicle concept, which is the concept of free Libre and open source software or the concept of free software. So free software is software where anyone, regardless of the licenses, is freely allowed to use copy study and change that software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to contribute, to fork and to improve it.

(00:20:40):

So free software is a matter of liberty, not price. So they always say free as in speech, not as free as in beer because basically users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of the free software, regardless of how much they pay to obtain that program.

(00:20:59):

Open source is slightly different. Well, Richard Sullivan would probably be rolling in his grave if he heard me say slightly, who is one of the founders of free software movement, but it’s more of a political motive. Free software is open source, provides more of a, I guess you could say, constraint to the free software movement or just more ways that corporations and users can kind of apply intellectual property rates to it is what I would say. But it still has defined a new movement for development, one in which you can build code together in an open and public way instead of in a closed source proprietary way.

Nick (00:22:51):

You can find information about getting your ticket in the show notes or visit theGraph.com. See you there.

(00:22:57):

So much of the software in the world was created in a non-open source environment, right? I’m sure as we’re even talking here presently, the software that’s connected us, the software that is the main platform upon which we connected and started recording is not open source. So why would open source be better than traditional or conventional models to creating software?

Abbey Titcomb (00:23:32):

Well, it’s actually interesting because most of the closed source software today is actually built on foundational open source infrastructure. There’s so much data into the dependency of our entire digital world on open source software. I think almost every Fortune 500 company is built on open source software.

(00:23:54):

It’s crazy, and it’s amazing because it speaks volumes to the impact of the free software and open source movement in that software has been treated as information should be. And the drivers behind Wikipedia that information should be open and collaborative because that only enhances the impact of the information formed on top of it.

(00:24:20):

So there’s a lot of different arguments for why open source is better, but I think there’s one which goes back to the development philosophy of it. I think it was Linus Torvalds, the greater Linux who said that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow, and that open source development actually supports more innovation within development.

[NEW_PARAGRAPH]And that together we can build more and collaborate more than we can in a closed proprietary way. It supports more open collaboration, which best supports more open innovation and creates more things. So I think that that’s a very important underlying development philosophy, and I think it supports generally more resiliency in that if you are able to create long-standing, open source software that anybody can fork and contribute to, the concept of working is being able to take your copy of software, make changes, and then create a community around it.

(00:25:24):

And that’s what you can do with open source software. You can take that software and you can do new things with it. And so in the long term, it actually develops more resiliency and that the software is not being developed in this closed siloed way. It’s being developed in this open way which allows people to take it, run with it, and ideally create a longer, more resilient lifetime and lifecycle for that piece of software.

Nick (00:25:50):

What do you think it says about the future of technology that so much of what’s happening on the cutting edge right now is open source and developers are pursuing open source?

Abbey Titcomb (00:26:01):

I think it’s incredibly powerful, and with web3, the space that we’re in, being a predominantly almost all open source, is incredibly powerful because it speaks to the ideological, I guess you could say, paradigms that were challenging, which is that the internet, the digital space that we are all developing and producing and communicating within should be a space that retains and respects user freedoms.

(00:26:34):

And by intentionally pursuing open source as our development philosophy, we are also stewarding those ideological visions in. And that is incredibly powerful, especially since the, you could say that the digital space is one of the more immersion political sociopolitical spaces that have been developed within the last decades.

(00:27:00):

And the fact that we’re preserving the freedoms and our rights to produce and distribute the software in our own way is a very political act varying in impact based off of where you are on the open source spectrum. But the fact that web3 isn’t entirely open source speaks volumes again to the impact of the technology that it’s developing and how it will remain throughout its lifetime and into the future and what type of technology it will steward itself.

Nick (00:27:33):

You’re currently council member at the Radicle Foundation, you’re also the head of community and governance. So what can you share about those two roles and what you’re working on?

Abbey Titcomb (00:27:41):

I guess I kind of call myself the master gardener of the Radicle DAO. So I think to contextualize what that means, I can talk about what Radicle is and how it’s organized. The Radicle is a free and open source project. At one point in time, there was one company that built and designed Radicle, but with the launch of Rad, we actually decentralized the network. And so now the Radicle Network is its own thing.

(00:28:11):

It is operated by its community of contributors and maintainers, with the Radicle foundation being the steward holding the network’s hand as it progressively decentralizes more and more into the community. But the goal of Radicle is to be a community operated, community-owned, self-sustaining network for code collaboration similar to how Git is not Git the company or Git the foundation, but GIT is the protocol and that’s the goal with Radicle as well.

(00:28:45):

So at Radicle, how I contribute to the Radicle project is as the head of community and governance. So I steward the development of our community of contributors. I support adoption and marketing and communication with the Radicle community and users and more and more so as we decentralize further, I support the relationships between our contributors.

(00:29:11):

I support cross-project coordination and collaboration to ensure that the project is scaling and growing in a way that is healthy and productive for the network. We also do this via governance through the Radicle DAO. So in this with the launch of Rad, we also instant the Radicle DAO, which is a collectively governed treasury that’s prime directive is to fund the development of the project in the long term. Operating that treasury requires governance, which is done through Rad token holders and our greater community.

(00:29:46):

And so throughout the last couple of months, we’ve been activating our own governance system with different processes, gateways to ensure that our community can participate in the collective governance of this asset, which is really exciting.

(00:30:02):

So with the Radicle foundation, the role is similar, but it’s making sure that we are setting a vision for what this Radicle DAO is. How do we achieve that end goal of being a community operated and self-sustaining network for co-collaboration? Because it doesn’t happen in a day, it doesn’t happen with launching a token.

(00:30:20):

And so with the foundation, I work closely with all of our contributors to make sure that we’re aligned, we have cohesion, and we’re moving forward in a way that is, as I said, is healthy and productive for the growth of the network.

Nick (00:30:34):

Abbey, a theme that’s come up on the podcast multiple times with different guests is how difficult the challenge of decentralization is. It takes time, and like you said, it’s not an overnight thing. What would you share about your experience as someone who’s in the process of progressive decentralization, some things you’ve learned, and is it as challenging as other guests have kind of speculated that it is?

Abbey Titcomb (00:30:56):

Yeah, it’s definitely as challenging, I would say, because I think that when people think of decentralization, they think of technical decentralization, which is the use of token voting to instantiate an on chain governance system or other on chain governance mechanisms that have been employed.

(00:31:18):

But at its core, decentralization, especially in Radicle’s case, is incredibly social. It is an incredibly social experiment that is directly impacted by people’s ability to coordinate with each other. And so I think that that has been, again, for Radicle where we’re a free and open source project, and this concept of decentralization and community governance is actually not new, especially in the free and open source space.

(00:31:46):

It’s not something that DAOs just invented. Open source projects have been governing themselves for ages, for years. For example, the Rust Project has a very, I would say, thriving governance community that they use to steward the development of the Rust language, which is a open source public good.

(00:32:07):

And so while these ideas have been revitalized in the DAO and crypto space, the processes and method actually are similar to what we’ve seen in the past with the focus for this project. The only difference is the financialization, the ability to have this self-sustaining aspect of it, which is incredibly exciting, but also kind of interesting to experiment with as well.

(00:32:29):

So I would say the hardest part about it is the coordination aspect of it and being able to create social infrastructure that empowers the participants in these self-governing systems to effectively participate, have a voice, rebalance power and influence within these networks to ensure that we’re not just redesigning plutocratic or corporation controlled online protocols.

(00:32:59):

There’s a lot of social implications to the technologies that we’re building, and the hardest part is being able to create the infrastructure to support the ideological visions that we want while keeping things moving effectively and actually working. And so the space is very early and there’s a lot of people who are working on solving this, but it’s definitely something that’s incredibly hard, especially for projects that are still trying to try and product market fit, who are still developing their protocol ecosystems and who are just early stage.

Nick (00:33:30):

You’ve mentioned DAO’s a couple different times here in our conversation and in different contexts. In one sense that Radicle’s pursuing a DAO, in one context that DAOs use Radicle or might participate in Radicle through a DAO. I also know you’ve given a lot of talks on DAOs. How would you explain the way DAOs and Radicle relate to each other?

Abbey Titcomb (00:33:50):

Yeah, so I think to talk about how I view DAOs, which I think contextualizes how we talk about DAOs as they relate to Radicle, the official term for DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. They think the more laymen or just realistic description of a DAO is an online community coordinating around some means of production or distribution.

(00:34:17):

It’s kind of like an internet guild, and this is why I mentioned the history of decentralization in open source projects is because a lot of open source projects have already explored this concept of community operated and governed projects.

(00:34:34):

So with DAOs in the lens of Radicle is groups of developers that are coordinating actually around the development of open source software, with the only difference being that they’re also coordinating usually the distribution of a pool of assets, which is, it could be just a multisig with people coordinating their funds around, or it could be a Governor Alpha Bravo compound fork that’s governing millions and millions of dollars.

(00:35:05):

But anything from Uniswap to Compound to Radicle, well, they’re groups of people that are coordinating the maintenance, development and growth of the protocols that they’ve developed. So at Radicle, we want to power this next generation of Dev DAOs, which is taking a new frame on what an open source project can be, instead of being a project that suffers from sustainability issues because it’s based in development that’s entirely volunteer driven and done in people’s spare time, we see DAOs being the future of open source development in which developers can maintain, build and collaborate on open source software in a way that is financially sustainable.

(00:35:51):

And in a way that is, you could say, I guess politically sustainable in that they can operate as entities, they can collaborate together, they can form squads. It’s basically like guilds of people that are coordinating around the development of the software and doing it in a way that’s legitimate and sustainable generally.

(00:36:11):

And so I think that that’s where Radicle comes in on multiple stages because we not only give developers the infrastructure to do this in a decentralized way, so they can actually operate on the internet together and be recognized as these organizations, but also embed the power of crypto into the developer experience through all the things that we’re doing with funding and really challenging this open source sustainability paradigm by empowering developers to control their production and distribution of their work.

Nick (00:36:44):

As you said there, DAOs are not a new phenomena. They’ve existed for a while, but they certainly seem en vogue right now. It seems like everybody everywhere belongs to one or has started at DAO. How, in your mind, do you kind of curate the real tangible, I guess, substantive DAOs in the world from maybe others that are more on the periphery and may not actually be a DAO?

Abbey Titcomb (00:37:06):

Yeah, I think DAO means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. It has a lot of connotations. And so I don’t want to define too strictly what a DAO is and what isn’t a DAO, but there are some key patterns I would say that we’re seeing in this space that people, problems that people are tackling, and there’s a bunch of projects who have tackled those problems and are scaling.

(00:37:33):

So I think scalability is one of those. You can see these DAOs that govern millions and millions of dollars in their treasury that have these incredible valuations and that are governing, I think Boardroom put together a research post recently that said that there’s altogether, there’s like $15 billion that are being governed by DAOs right now, which is incredible. And it’s definitely challenging or beginning to challenge some of the traditional institutional treasuries that we see today that are driving our online experience.

(00:38:11):

So I’d say that there’s definitely a distinction, some would say between protocol and social DAOs, whereas there’s Protocol DAOs that are governing open source development or governing DeFi protocols that have millions and millions of dollars flowing through them. And then there’s social DAOs ones that are also very much so a DAO, but that are more so about creating communities and in stewarding communities, whether it be groups of developers coming together like in Developer DAO to coordinate development work or if it’s groups of people who want to form like a new online social club, like Friends with Benefits.

(00:38:49):

And so there’s different types, but I think that the problems that they’re experiencing and will be experiencing as they scale are directly related to governance. So how sustainable is the community governance method that’s being employed to function as a DAO, which is usually related to the distribution of assets for the actual decision making methods that are employed in the DAO.

(00:39:14):

There’s onboarding, which is how do you again, kind of onboard web2 to web3, and there’s a lot of different sub problems that fall under that category and you think really the ability to complexity. But then I think the last problem that I think is really the problem that we’ll all face, which is our relationship in MeetSpace versus cyberspace.

(00:39:36):

So again, DAOs are online organizations, they’re groups of people who are working together on the internet, but as they scale, they’ll start to face the same problems that I think real world or how I say it, MeetSpace, organization space, which is how do you provide your contributors and employees with the social support that they get from traditional companies or organizations in the real world, visas, mortgages like loans.

(00:40:07):

There’s a lot of real world problems that the online world hasn’t really been able to tackle yet. And this is the key thing that I see a lot of DAOs trying to problem solve for right now, which is how do they provide the same support? How do they compete with the support that real world organizations can provide the contributors that they want to onboard? How can they provide that through these DAO entities? And it requires more talking and communicating with the MeetSpace that we had or expected before.

Nick (00:40:46):

Is there a DAO out there you’re watching that you’re saying, “Boy, they are on the right path. They seem to be addressing all these challenges and are addressing these as they come up”?

Abbey Titcomb (00:40:54):

I would hope to say Radicle. It’s something that as we continue our transition to the DAO, we’re really leaning into how we can be solving these problems outright. But some of the big protocol DAOs are definitely touching on these problems. Like anybody from Uniswap, Ticket Coin, Optimism, which just announced the launch of their new token is also experimenting with some pretty cool things.

(00:41:18):

Protocol Labs, which is more of like a decentralized protocol ecosystem has been doing a great job as this as well. It’s definitely projects that we look to when we start figuring out, okay, so how do we create the most healthy and supportive environment for our contributors within the Radicle DAO? And those are some of the ones that we definitely look up to.

Nick (00:41:41):

So similar to the question I asked you about open source being better than traditional or conventional models for software design, how are DAOs better than traditional or conventional organizational structures?

Abbey Titcomb (00:41:56):

Yeah, I think that it’s sometimes better. I’m not sure if I would say better in all cases, but there’s definitely a lot of different benefits that you can achieve by operating in a DAO versus a MeetSpace entity. And that’s because DAOs are a better way to collaborate together as a group.

(00:42:18):

And when I say collaborate, I don’t just mean social collaboration, I mean collaboration as in production. It’s a better way to produce as a group because with DAOs, you’re able to embed financial primitives into the work that you’re doing, whether it’s through a collectively governed pool of assets or a decentralized crypto native way to receive funds. But basically what you’re doing is taking this concept of a group of people, a guild or a squad, if you will. This is the term point by Other Internet, which is this research org that experiments with what are the social implications of these decentralized concepts that we’re all building with and around.

(00:43:06):

But basically it powers and empowers squads to allow people to more effectively and more impactfully produce in a cooperative way and not only generate money and revenue, but generate wealth. And that when you start a company, you’re able to have equity in that company or you’re able to embed yourself in that culture and receive benefits for it.

(00:43:30):

A DAO is giving anybody the ability to do that within their own community or within their own group. So it’s taking this concept of wealth generation and production and putting it back in the hands of the individual, but in a different way than one could say Patreon does, right? These are tools that power individual creators is that they give individual creators gateways into different audiences, whereas DAOs and these other organizational primitives that we’re experimenting with in web3 give groups of people the ability to create their own platforms for their own communities, empower those with funding and empower them with governance.

(00:44:12):

And so it’s definitely returning agency to groups of people collaborating on the internet, but also instantiating it in a more impactful and I would say productive and rewarding way.

Nick (00:44:27):

So do you belong to any DAOs yourself other than the Radicle DAO you’ve mentioned a couple of times?

Abbey Titcomb (00:44:32):

Yeah, I would say that there’s definitely a Dunbar number for the amount of DAOs you can effectively participate in. So I spend most of my time on Radicle, but I’m a lurker and general participant in other, I would say public goods DAOs like Ennis and GetCoin ones that have missions that are directly aligned with Radicle and the vision of web3 that Radicle wants to support.

(00:44:58):

But in addition to these, I also sit on the board of the Optimism Foundation, which is actually kind of like a newly announced and instantiated DAO, Optimism is a Ethereum Layer 2 rollout network, and it is also like a big steward in the public goods space.

(00:45:15):

And so there means an announcement to decentralize their network is an attempt to challenge the paradigm of public goods funding and create a new design space for experimenting waste governance within decentralized networks. So I’m super excited about that and definitely one that I’m going to be participating more in the future.

Nick (00:45:35):

Well, the Optimism news is obviously very big news and congratulations to you on it. A lot of people in The Graph ecosystem are picking up on it as well because one of your colleagues on the board, Eva Beylin, is Director of The Graph Foundation. So obviously very cool.

Abbey Titcomb (00:45:49):

And thank you so much. And going back to my origin story, if you will, Eva from The Graph and Jane from Optimism were some of the first people that I met when starting to dive into the Ethereum ecosystem. And it’s so exciting to see these relationships form as we will all go off into our own projects and collaborate, but all aligned with this similar mission. And so it’s really exciting to come back together and bring that next stage, I guess you could say, the ecosystem board.

Nick (00:46:47):

So I’d be interested in asking you, Abbey, given your background and how involved you are in the web3 crypto space, how you describe the difference between web3 and web2 when you’re talking with family and friends that aren’t involved in the space.

Abbey Titcomb (00:47:15):

So you usually describe it in terms of gardens, right, with web2 being a walled garden or a network of walled gardens, ones that don’t have any connection or open access to one another, and web3 being an open garden, one could say a community garden that everybody can contribute to and tend and nurture and access.

(00:47:40):

So instead of an internet controlled by platforms in corporations web2, with our data and online identities siloed into these corporations basically so they can continue extracting from our share of information. This is the typical ad model that drives most of our corporations today. So instead of that, web3 envisions an internet that’s powered by open protocols. So this is similar if not the same as the visions of the early web. So some of the most important online interactions that we have, email, for example, is not built by Google.

(00:48:19):

The HCTP is a open protocol that was developed in the early ages of the internet. And these corporations have taken these open protocols and built these walled gardens on top of them completely closing off the protocol and this collaborative information sharing that this protocol allowed, closing that off in an attempt to extract and with an intent to seek profit.

(00:48:44):

So web3 allows us to obtain sovereignty and more control over our own data and our information, which I think as I said earlier, is arguably one of the newest and most valuable assets of the digital age. And so it’s really important to ensure that we retain user freedoms or reclaim our user freedoms on web, and that helps us be resilient to these profit seeking corporations that currently control our online experience.

(00:49:13):

So the garden metaphor usually works because it makes a lot more sense, especially when you envision the internet as something that’s larger together, that is something that’s collaborative similar to what information is. And so I also use Wikipedia as a good example, which is community sourced information resources are almost always better than ones that are built alone in closed spaces and proprietary spaces.

Nick (00:49:42):

When you think about where we are in the evolution of web3, how do you frame that?

Abbey Titcomb (00:49:46):

I’d say we’re still pretty early. We’re definitely way more mainstream than we were when the concept was introduced. However, I would say that web3 is more than just what’s happening in crypto. I think web3 has been meme-ified to represent all of the things that have been happening specifically in Ethereum and the decentralized technologies.

(00:50:11):

But people have been working on peer-to-peer and distributed technologies for a while. Nothing just has really taken hold, and I am of the opinion, I’m sure some people would disagree with me on this, that the financialization of the space, while chaotic and often hyper-financialized in a way that can be harmful, provides a new design space for experimenting with the scalability of these distributed systems, these decentralized technologies, because it allows us to create more space for people to contribute. It allows us to create more space to grow.

(00:50:54):

And so I think that there’s tons of work to be done to actually develop decentralized technology that can compete with our centralized counterparts. And so we’re still very early, but a lot has been validated about this space. A lot has been validated, and I think that we’ve now seen that this is a very real paradigm that we want to take on.

(00:51:19):

This concept of decentralization is not just some funny notion that is coming from the depths of the internet. It’s a real thing. And I think that as our world becomes more dominated by software and as our cyber space becomes more socially and politically relevant in our day-to-day lives, we’re going to realize that decentralization is more of that urgent need than that latent need that I said before. So I think we’re early and it’s such a good time to also get involved in the space because there’s so much to do, but I’m feeling really validated and more competent than ever about the direction that we’re heading in.

Nick (00:52:00):

Well, you mentioned the hyper-financialization is potentially harmful or something at least to keep an eye on in the web3 space, but there’s all these other challenges that you could throw into that same bucket, things like governance, a topic you’ve already hit upon, building decentralized infrastructure and so forth, even including bringing more devs into the space. So as you look at some of the challenges of web3 maybe evolving more fully into the future, which of those challenges, or maybe one I didn’t even mention, are you keeping your eyes on?

Abbey Titcomb (00:52:31):

I think that the MeetSpace versus cyberspace challenge, which I mentioned before, is one of the key ones, which is like how do you approach and relate to real world issues that your participants, users and contributors are going to be experiencing? And if anything from regulation just still an extremely volatile space depending on what jurisdiction you reside in to, again, how do you provide real world support for the people who are operating and building in web3?

(00:53:03):

And so there’s going to be, I don’t know if this is the word, but corporatization, I think it might be, but kind of more… I think it’s also like a scalability thing, but scaling the space to be something that can compete with the institutions that will try to take us down because we are taking away from what they need to survive in traditional capitalist society.

(00:53:30):

So it sounds a little bit, very dystopian, I guess I would say, but it’s true is that I think that DAOs and everything in web3 is going to have to take itself out of Twitter. It’s going to have to take itself out of these little bubbles that we exist in and start fighting the real fight in the real world to ensure that this version of the internet that we envision is something that we can actually build towards and retain in the long term because again, it’s about protecting and retaining and reclaiming user freedoms at the end of the day.

(00:54:07):

It’s not about crypto bags. And that’s the vision of web3. And I think that this is what we want and need to onboard more people to, right? Is that we need to start creating the space, not only in improving the usability of the baseline tools that we need to participate in web3, like wallets and exchanges, but also creating more space in the communities that we’re creating to onboard and educate people about the power and the potential of web3 and do that in a way that’s collaborative and not closed.

(00:54:44):

And that I think that the Ethereum ecosystem is so powerful because of how collaborative our projects are with each other. We’re all building on each other’s tech, right? And there’s a certain embedded, I guess, community sentiment, which is that Ethereum is about the community, it’s not about the individual projects.

(00:55:02):

And so I think retaining this, but utilizing it to onboard more devs into the space is going to be imperative to keep things moving forward and then making sure that things can keep operating effectively. So we’re experimenting with all these new organizations, we’re stewarding these ideological principles, but what we’re doing is in complete… And to this as to I guess how we’ve done things before.

(00:55:25):

So we’re doing something new. We have to focus on making sure that we can keep stewarding things effectively and make sure that we’re having, I guess you could say, empathy into the problems that we’re solving, so we’re not decentralizing just for the sake of decentralizing, but we’re doing it with intention and we’re doing it in the open and we’re doing it collaboratively and I think that that’s kind of… So that’s the challenges. And I guess what you could say is my pristine solution for how you can tackle that.

Nick (00:55:50):

Well, I want to turn our attention now to questions about The Graph. And as you know, a lot of my listeners are in The Graph community and are always interested in different perspectives about The Graph. Do you recall when you first became aware of The Graph and what some of your initial impressions were?

Abbey Titcomb (00:56:06):

So I was introduced to The Graph basically when Eva joined. And my first impressions were that ground is really fundamental infrastructure for web3, it’s a major dependency as web3 ecosystem at the moment, and for good reason, it’s basically the data layer of the decentralized internet.

(00:56:24):

I think that their [inaudible 00:56:27] is that it’s Google for Blockchains or something, which is, I love it. So if we truly envision the decentralized internet, then we have all of these things called dapps, right? The term which is decentralized applications that instead of having centralized hosting and centralized data silos is that they can all operate in a [inaudible 00:56:48] with these open protocols. And so that’s what The Graph is basically stewarding, is that they’re that layer that allows these apps to communicate with each other and retain these experiences, these endpoints that are built on top of these open protocols.

(00:57:04):

So it’s a highly developed protocol ecosystem and has a ton of builders and contributors, and it’s definitely going to continue to be one of the biggest players in the space, in my opinion, and one of the most necessary ones if we want to bring about this web3 vision.

Nick (00:57:19):

So Abbey, does Radicle use The Graph?

Abbey Titcomb (00:57:21):

Yeah, absolutely. So Radicle is a protocol. It’s a network powered by a protocol, but the Radicle staff is also a network of clients, which are basically code collaboration experiences and apps that are being built by our contributors that allow developers to interact with the Radicle network in different ways.

(00:57:46):

Some of these apps, like our web client uses The Graph to query data relating to Radicle identities and our Ethereum integration. So we have a feature called Radicle Orgs, which are basically sets of repositories that can be governed by a multisig and thus Ethereum identities. And so what’s cool about Radicle is that you can actually link your Ethereum address to your local Radicle identity, which is a key pair, which represents your unique identity on the device that you’re using to write your code.

(00:58:18):

And so we use The Graph to query this data and present it through our web client, which gives us the ability to have a similar experience to GitHub or other centralized platforms that just query their own servers. And so it’s a really powerful technology that definitely increases the usability of our code collaboration experiences and allows us to build out all these exciting new code collaboration features.

Nick (00:58:43):

So Abbey, I want to ask you this last question about the mission and vision of Radicle. If Radicle is successful, and it certainly sounds like it’s got all the momentum to do it, how does it impact web3 and the world?

Abbey Titcomb (00:58:57):

Radicle will be core infrastructure for the web3 ecosystem because it will allow developers and groups of people coordinating around development to truly own their code collaboration experience. And web3 is a space that’s entirely built on open source software.

(00:59:20):

And we think that the dependence on centralized platforms and corporations for the distribution of this open source software and the production and this open source software is inherently unsustainable, especially if we’re going to be challenging the traditional institutions with this open source software.

(00:59:37):

So it’s more of a paradigm shift than anything, and I really believe that Radicle is a necessary piece of that stack that will empower our developers in web3 to truly achieve the web3 vision. So I think that that’s the impact that it’s going to have, and I’m super excited to be stewarding this next generation of open source projects and experimenting with everything that we have available to us with decentralized technologies.

Nick (01:00:04):

All right, Abbey, well, we’ve reached the point in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast to help listeners learn something new or try something different or achieve more. So Abbey, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Abbey Titcomb (01:00:18):

I think so.

Nick (01:00:30):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Abbey Titcomb (01:00:33):

I think it’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, I think that’s how you say their name. Super awesome utopian conspiracy book about envisioning a world that’s fully automated and fully unemployed.

Nick (01:00:50):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you think everybody should be required to watch?

Abbey Titcomb (01:00:54):

Star Wars, the whole saga.

Nick (01:00:57):

Which one’s the best of this whole saga?

Abbey Titcomb (01:00:59):

Definitely the Empire Strikes Back.

Nick (01:01:02):

If you could listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one do you choose?

Abbey Titcomb (01:01:06):

For the rest of my life? I’d probably listen to one of my favorite DJs set on SoundCloud. Maybe Kim Ann Foxman, Mix from the Good Room, or I don’t know, a Mama Snake set from NTS Radio.

Nick (01:01:24):

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

Abbey Titcomb (01:01:28):

Stay out of show business. No, that’s actually a piece of advice that I’ve gotten. I think staying hungry. I know that that’s a funny Steve Jobs thing, but it’s actually originated from the Whole Earth Catalog. But I think this concept of staying hungry represents something really cool, which is stay curious, it’s stay motivated, stay driven, and I think it’s also staying excited and wanting that more. So stay hungry.

Nick (01:01:56):

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

Abbey Titcomb (01:02:01):

I think it’s hard because I think that there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t know, but I think that that’s actually the thing that I’ve learned, that it’s really okay to not know everything and being open about not knowing and being curious and exploring it is actually one of the most effective things that you can do to continue learning. So I think a lot of people want to know everything, and I think it’s really okay not to.

Nick (01:02:29):

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

Abbey Titcomb (01:02:31):

My Remarkable. Wow. I was a big paper notebook writer. I just had endless paper notebooks and I got this Remarkable, and it is so nice to be able to have a place that you can organize your notes and everything. Just kind of a super dorky life hack, but I love it.

Nick (01:02:53):

Based on your own life experiences and observations, what is the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains people finding success in life?

Abbey Titcomb (01:03:02):

Can I say two? I think it’s empathy and enthusiasm. I think enthusiasm is so incredibly important for creating a warm and welcoming aura around you, and that is so important for bringing people in, which I would say is one of the best ways of finding success is it’s finding people and everything is about the connections that you make.

(01:03:30):

But I think empathy is super important to contextualize or add another aspect, dimension to that enthusiasm is that trying and attempting to be deeply understanding of the world around you and then being enthusiastic, I guess about the conclusions that you pull, is incredibly powerful combination.

Nick (01:03:51):

And then Abbey, the final three questions are complete, the sentence type questions. So here’s the first complete the sentence. The thing that most excites me about web3 is…

Abbey Titcomb (01:04:02):

The freedom that it can empower, I would say. Maybe that doesn’t really make that much sense, but I like it.

Nick (01:04:09):

Complete this sentence. If you’re on Twitter, then you should be following…

Abbey Titcomb (01:04:13):

Kia from [inaudible 01:04:14] Guild, for sure. Or Toby Shorten from Other Internet.

Nick (01:04:18):

And lastly, complete this sentence. I’m happiest when…

Abbey Titcomb (01:04:22):

I’m excited about life.

Speaker 8 (01:04:25):

The GRTiQ 10.

Nick (01:04:32):

Abbey, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been very generous in answering so many of these different questions. If listeners want to follow you or learn more about your work, what’s the best way to do it?

Abbey Titcomb (01:04:42):

Yeah, so you can find everything about Radicle at Radicle.xyz or all of our development happens in public on discord. So it’s discord.gg/Radicle. I will say that Radicle is spelled R-A-D-I-C-L-E. It’s actually a botanical term, which is really interesting as it’s the first sprout that sprouts from the seedling. And you can follow me personally on Twitter at AbbeyTitcomb. So Abbey_Titcomb, which is A-B-B-E-Y_T-I-T-C-O-M-B. So that’s where my whole life is.