Sina Habibian Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Matthew Chaim: Songcamp, immersive digital theatre May 05, 2022

Show notes

Matthew Chaim is building a laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and web3.
It's called Songcamp, and right now they're running their third immersive experience. They're coming together with a group of musicians, visual designers, developers, and at the end of this process, will be releasing new music under the moniker of a single headless artist called Chaos.
I've been personally completely nerdsniped by Songcamp and think it’s one of the most beautiful corners of our web3 ecosystem.

Timestamps:
(00:01:08) - Songcamp a web3 laboratory
(00:03:27) - songwriting camps
(00:06:30) - imaginative language and lore
(00:11:12) - incentive alignment
(00:20:55) - selection and curation
(00:30:31) - immersive digital theatre
(00:36:18) - having fun
(00:38:03) - the power of IRL
(00:43:01) - what’s next
(00:51:37) - economic models for internet-native collectives

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Disclaimer: this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell securities. The host and guests may hold positions in the projects discussed.

Simon de la Rouviere: cc0, derivatives, and bottom-up storytelling Apr 28, 2022

Show notes

Here is my conversation with Simon de la Rouviere.

Simon’s exploration of creative mechanism design through the years is documented on his blog. His contributions to the space range from seeding the idea of bonding curves and curation markets, to building one of the first creator platforms with Ujo, to writing a full length novel experimenting with different publishing models, to now working on bottom-up storytelling with Untitled Frontier.

In this conversation, we talked about cc0, designing NFT economies to welcome derivative works, bottom-up storytelling, and much more.

Timestamps:
(00:01:29) - How Simon got into the craft of storytelling
(00:06:25) - The lonely process of long-form content creation
(00:09:53) - Kishōtenketsu
(00:14:26) - Top-down vs. bottom-up storytelling
(00:21:52) - “The medium is the message.”
(00:27:17) - CC0, derivatives, Jenkins the Valet
(00:34:43) - Harberger Taxes and mechanism design
(00:39:51) - NFTs vs ERC20s for ownership and governance
(00:44:06) - New power structures

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

David Greenstein, Matt Masurka, & Vignesh Hirudayakanth on Sound.xyz and listening parties Mar 01, 2022

Show notes

Here is my conversation with David Greenstein, Matt Masurka (Gigamesh), & Vignesh Hirudayakanth, the cofounders at Sound.xyz.

Sound is a platform that helps musicians host listening parties and engage with their fans. It's a suite of tools that will grow over time to help musicians make a living using NFTs and other web3-native primitives.

I was particularly looking forward to this conversation since David, Matt, and Vignesh participated in Zeitgeist Season One and we got to work pretty closely together. They're moving fast and are working towards a beautiful vision of the world.

Timestamps:
(00:03:42) - Redefining engagement between artists and fans
(00:07:23) - MySpace, HypeMachine, Optimism, and Friends With Benefits
(00:12:50) - Using Discord DMs for recruiting
(00:16:53) - NFTs as the perfect medium for music patronage
(00:20:34) - Fair-play incentive structures for music
(00:26:25) - Differentiating the first fan and the millionth fan
(00:32:03) - The technical architecture underpinning Sound
(00:34:33) - Getting to market and building in public
(00:39:45) - Oshi breaks the website
(00:41:37) - The Daniel Allan EP
(00:42:14) - RAC and deploying to mainnet
(00:44:12) - Zeitgeist’s impact

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Mike Sall & Blake West: Goldfinch, uncollateralized loans in emerging markets. Feb 08, 2022

Show notes

Mike Sall and Blake West are the founders of Goldfinch, a decentralized protocol facilitating uncollateralized credit.

“One of the borrowers is a company based in Uganda. They provide rent-to-own loans for motorcycle taxis to thousands of customers. They've borrowed $5m to expand their operations."

Thousands of people in countries like Uganda, India, and Brazil have been financed by Goldfinch loans through local lenders, largely without realizing crypto is the source of funds.

These local lenders are largely innovative fintechs in the global south, and have historically fallen into an uncanny valley — they need too much capital for what is available in their local financial markets, and too little capital to navigate foreign institutional markets.

Timestamps:
(00:03:09) - The 'lightbulb' moment
(00:08:20) - The financing gap for emerging-market borrowers
(00:13:04) - Borrower profiles; Tugende, DiviBank, and Greenway
(00:15:43) - Interfacing with Goldfinch
(00:20:37) - Crypto-native KYC and how UID works
(00:23:18) - Bottlenecks for the global adoption of crypto
(00:34:40) - Compliance requirements for Goldfinch in the United States
(00:45:25) - Compliance requirements for borrowers in emerging markets
(00:50:56) - Demographics of ‘Backers’
(00:52:43) - Incentive alignment and fraud-prevention
(01:03:53) - Learnings from shipping a production smart contract system
(01:15:01) - Launching GFI token and governance of the protocol
(01:26:04) - The macro point of view

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Justin Glibert: Ember, and building onchain games. Dec 24, 2021

Show notes

The conversation on publishing today is the very first one I recorded for the podcast about six months ago. It's a conversation with Justin Glibert about patterns he's uncovered while building Ember (an onchain game) and Lattice (the engine behind the game) — patterns related to inflation and zero sum resources, spacial constraints, and user impersonation. I hope you enjoy.

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Phillip Wang and Nate Foss: Gather, and building the open metaverse Nov 25, 2021

Show notes

This is a conversation with Phillip Wang and Nate Foss two of the co-founders of Gather.

Gather is a video chat platform that puts you and the people you're communicating with in a virtual space - and gives you the ability to move around and interact with them based on your locations in that space, just like in real life. It's had a ton of traction over the last year and is being used by millions of people around the world. It's one of the coolest products I've personally used in recent memory.

As you will hear in this conversation, Phillip and Nate are two incredibly thoughtful and mission-oriented people — and they plan to build Gather into a progressively open and decentralized system. So in this conversation, we went deep on what this could actually look like. We talked about how Gather is architected under the hood and how they think about decentralizing the game engine and the tech stack. We talked about identity, login, and social graphs. We talked about business models. And lastly, we talked about the metaverse and the path dependence of how the future unfolds from here.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Links:
Gather's Websocket API - https://gathertown.notion.site/Gather-Websocket-API-bf2d5d4526db412590c3579c36141063

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Tracheopteryx: Yearn, Coordinape, and pseudonymity Nov 04, 2021

Show notes

This is a conversation with Tracheopteryx about the evolution of Yearn, Coordinape, and pseudonymity.

Tracheopteryx has been a key leader in the Yearn Finance community since its legendary genesis event. In this conversation, we talk about key moments in Yearn's evolution with an eye towards takeaways that might be useful for other projects. We talk about the introduction of the multisig; the mint — a complex governance proposal where the community eventually chose to dilute themselves in order to reward core contributors; and constrained delegation - the governance framework that Trach helped design and which is operating in Yearn today.

The other big area we get into is Coordinape. Coordinape is a protocol for decentralizing compensation. It was designed and incubated inside of Yearn, and is now being built as an independent project.

Towards the end of the conversation, Trach tells the story behind his name and shares a perspective on becoming pseudonymous that has stayed with me since.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

John Palmer & Danny Aranda: PartyDAO, and shipping product as a DAO Oct 29, 2021

Show notes

This is a conversation with John Palmer and Danny Aranda about PartyDAO and PartyBid - the product that lets people pool their funds and participate in NFT auctions as a team.

We dive deep into their experience building this project. We talk about what they see as the role of product vision in the DAO, how they think about hiring, the organizational design, the stack of tools they use to operate, and the legal structures they're considering. And that's not all — we also touched the role of community in NFTs, social investing, and what John and Danny see as interesting things to work on today.

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Austin Griffith: building on Ethereum Oct 13, 2021

Show notes

This is a conversation with Austin Griffith about his continued journey as a builder/educator, and learnings from onboarding thousands of developers onto Ethereum.

Austin is a friend and someone I've had the good fortune of working with extensively in our shared time at the Ethereum foundation. In this conversation, we take a tour through the different projects he's worked on over the last two years — starting with ETH.build (the graphical interface for working with smart contracts), moving to scaffold-eth (his development starter kit that has really taken off and been used by thousands of developers), and then moving onto the BUIDL GUIDL and the Moonshot Collective (DAO-like collections of developers who work on prototyping interesting new ideas). We also go down a few fun tangents around Loot, the Doge NFT, DAO tooling, and we get to hear a walkthrough of Austin's curriculum for bringing a new developer into the space.

I consider Austin to be a gem of the ecosystem, and feel lucky that we have him here. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

Gubsheep: Dark Forest, and building crypto-native games. Sep 30, 2021

Show notes

This is a conversation with Gubsheep about Dark Forest and building crypto-native games.

Dark Forest is a uniquely crypto-native game, and embodies patterns that we can all learn from. It's a game that takes place in a procedurally-generated universe that's shared by all players, where the smart contracts enforce the rules of the game, but where they don't leak information about what each player is up to by using ZK SNARKs.

In this conversation, we talk about how Dark Forest uses ZK SNARKs to enable this core game mechanic, how it has organically built a community of players and developers, how early DAOs are participating in the games, how the game might interoperate with other games in the near future, and we also have a good discussion on Layer 2s and the trade-offs involved in choosing a scaling solution.

Sina Habibian: https://sinahab.com
Sina Habibian on X: https://x.com/sinahab

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