00:00 · Rob (Delphi)
Welcome back to the Delphi Podcast. This episode is part of our Web3 Series where we have invited some of the top minds building and thinking about the space to better understand what Web3 is all about. My name is Rob. On this episode, I am pleased to be joined by Robert and Reka of Agora and most notably, Guilds. Welcome everyone.

00:19 · Rob (Delphi)
Before jumping into everything Web3, I would love for both of you to tell me about yourselves, how you fell down the crypto rabbit hole, and then what led you to start Agora.

00:30 · Reka
I am originally a veterinarian, which has nothing to do with this space, but that kind of allowed me to explore more territories because it is a broad category. I started doing digital marketing and social media, but I got into the Ethereum ecosystem in 2016 when I was volunteering in Sweden at a meditation retreat place. The host that I was staying with was fully into crypto back then. He introduced me to it. Since then, I have been following along, investing and everything, but I only found out then realized that crypto is not just DeFi, but it is more social and DAOs and everything in the 2020 winter. We started working together last year, January in 2021, and we co-founded Agora and then Guild last year.

01:27 · Robert
I am Rob. I am a nerd. I got into programming when I was six and that is because my father co-founded the first Hungarian internet provider company. Because of this, I grew up on the internet. I discovered Bitcoin early, but only joined the space in 2013 as a Dogecoin supporter. I just found it hilarious. I wanted to invest all my savings from *indistinct* to Dogecoin immediately. It turned out to be a good investment, but eventually I lost almost all my investments during the next year. In 2014, it was a real s**t show. Later on, we started a family office and family software firm. I ran the family office and my little brother ran the software firm. The two companies grew out from just being a small firm to a twenty plus people operation.

02:27 · Robert
We invest in early-stage companies, but then I always wanted to get back to building. Because my main passion in this space has always been the DAO space. That is what attracted me to Ethereum in the first place. When the DAO hack happened, that was the point when I decided to fully dive deep into Ethereum because it just looked so interesting. It was a disappointment because most of these DAO-related companies did not deliver what they promised. I wanted to do something else, something from another perspective. We started building out DAO tools which are more focused on the user experience. These tools are mostly off-chain. Basically, they live where the users are and do not require complicated stuff from the beginner users all the time.

03:35 · Rob (Delphi)
One thing I want to kind of jump into, I noticed if you go to Agora’s Twitter page, it will show that it is a studio DAO, and what you just described was like, “Oh, we are going to be building these different products here and there.” What were the choices for that? To make a step into Guilds, what is Guilds itself? What is Agora?

03:58 · Reka
Initially I think, jumping off what Robert just touched on, is that the full Agora vision back last year was coming out of these pain points that the frameworks did not really satisfy. We saw how the communities do not like operating within platforms and being logged into walled gardens in that sense. The first Agora version was that we wanted to build tools and this very independent, very interoperable set of toolkits that are supporting founders to allow anybody to create and handle and scale their communities in a very modular and free way that suits their community. So, giving back this actual sovereignty to the communities that Web3 offers in its vision and mission, we want it to be fully aligned with that because that is what we believe in as well. That is where we started, and the whole Agora vision was a little too much at the same time.

04:59 · Reka
We wanted to do a lot of things at the same time. Last year we struggled with our vision with Agora and coming out of that – we went to Paris last year and we started talking to a lot of people and got a lot of useful feedback and then continued to jump around our idea or jump it off of people. In August, when the LOOT Project, this NFT project was kind of hyped, we kind of found our holy grail or the core or MVP for Agora, which was Guild.xyz, which is the very first tool and very simple, very easy to understand tool. At first, it was just to spring up these party chats for people who share similar blockchain assets with very specific blockchain assets, for example NFTs based on traits, like only Crypto Punks with cigarettes in their mouths – that type of specificity.

06:01 · Reka
That was the core idea. We pushed it out into the open in early September. The guys built it here in like nine days once we had the idea of what we wanted it to look like. Obviously, we had the base of it for Agora already. We just had to specify it and make it more clear with a cool UX.

06:23 · Robert
Yep. Before Guild, we more wanted to build an integration layer between the tools that we found very useful because we saw an emerging new class of off-chain DAO related tools like SourceCred, Collab.land, snapshot, and not just off-chain, but essential tools like the Gnosis multisig, but all of these tools were very separated. Initially, we wanted to build an integration layer between the possible tools with swap-in/swap-out. Essentially, if you wanted to use this multisig instead of this multi-sig, you can do that and still connect all these together and provide a more full-featured experience. We realized that these tools are not just scattered, but also quite closed in their own ecosystem, so we decided to start building our own tools that builds on very simple fundamentals. Also, these tools are more like sandbox type of products, not framework type of products.

07:40 · Robert
That is where we started with the Guild. We wanted to create a tool that is very modular, that is capable to do things that we did not imagine.

07:55 · Rob (Delphi)
I was actually going touch upon something that you said earlier when it came to the freedom of Web3, and what you’re describing now is essentially like giving users and giving the community the ability to build out with the modular framework (for lack of a better word) that you guys built. How are you viewing Web3?

08:20 · Reka
We are very much aligned with what Web3 initially wanted, which is very decentralized, very revolutionary socially, and on the infrastructure section.

08:33 · Robert
And permissionless. That is very important.

08:37 · Reka
That’s precisely what we are going for. We have to say that it is not possible, or not very functional to do everything at the same time, so now we are focusing on building out the toolkit that will allow us to be way more horizontal and way more innovative on the social side of things as well. We have it in mind to be very easy, very accessible, as cheap as possible, and permissionless for users. That’s the financial side of the tools and everything – so Guild is fully free for the users and we want to keep it that way. That is also like the core idea behind our tools is what you said: to be permissionless, easy to use, easy to access, and very modular for each community to fit themselves.

09:37 · Robert
Reka mentioned the LOOT Project and that it inspired us a lot. We initially built Guild for the LOOT communities and we built it in the same philosophy: to give it to the community, make something very simple, and without any unnecessary stuff, and just let them do whatever they want to do with it. Then we immediately gave the opportunity to the community to control the development process and that’s still the core of the Guild idea. It started out as a very simple tool that does only one thing, and the community controls the direction of the new features and new integrations and all this stuff.

10:35 · Reka
Back on that point: we put it out in the open in September, and since then we have talked to thousands of people in DMs and we have built our own community of mostly founders or soon-to-be founders in this space. It has been a very interesting ride to build together with the community and make the full evolution of our tool out in the open. Now we are out of the alpha phase as well. We also have our public roadmap that is managed fully by the community. Anybody can submit a feature request or an integration and upvote it so it is higher up on the priority list. This way, we have more of a possibility to be less than just our own little circles of influence and go with what we think is right, but we have the ability to listen to more people from our community. Even if we do not have the capacity to talk one-on-one with everybody anymore, we still have an open conversation portal with them.

11:37 · Rob (Delphi)
It is amazing. I remember speaking to you back in September when LOOT came out and understanding, “Oh, this makes so much sense to onboard these various communities in such a simple way.” You were probably one of the first teams actually thinking about the human component when it comes to these communities where I feel like a lot of teams working with DAOs are just working from the tooling space. They’re more or less looking back towards Web2 to understand, “Okay, this occurred in this kind of time period, this technological period, how do we bring this to Web3? What does that exactly look like?” And just kind of building it versus working with the communities, understanding certain pain points, and what you can really strip down and understand from a crypto perspective, what can be built here.

12:16 · Rob (Delphi)
I feel like you also focus specifically on things that first impression and that easy onboarding process. What went into decision-making for Guilds itself to make it as simple as possible to get people to be onboarded?

12:32 · Robert
Answering the first part, it is very funny because in our case, it almost worked the opposite way. We recognized very important stuff in Web3, and mow we are thinking about how we can implement it in Web2 to give it to more communities and onboard more communities with these new opportunities and new features. It is very interesting and it’s only possible this way. We always looked at what is possible and not what are the problems or what can we do again, what others did invent too, or in history. The second part was why did we decide to keep it simple? It was initially like a philosophical thing, but it was also coming from our frustration with the existing ecosystem and our personal experiences with some of the tools, not just in Web3, but with software in general. I grew up in a family where open-source software using Linux was the norm and still the norm.

13:57 · Robert
We always mastered our products. It is very important for my family to be the expert in the software and not let the software control us or steal our data and other stuff. It was an easy choice for me.

14:24 · Rob (Delphi)
It sounds like it. That brings me to my next question: what are some of the things that you can do with Agora and Guilds in Web3 that Web2 companies cannot even do? It was interesting what you mentioned before about how you have understood what can be possible or what is the creativity aspect you can bring in Web3,and how do you bring it backwards towards Web2, which is a lot different way than many people are thinking about it in this space.

14:48 · Robert
Yeah. We are thinking about access control and now membership management a lot because all the DAO space makes it possible for an association of people to come together and work together in a fully revolutionary way. We are still experimenting as a collective on the social front with how does that work. Human nature still requires a lot of trust, but we started using a technology that is trustless that would treat us in a way that some people think that we can just rely on the technology purely, but that is clearly not true. We saw it with big hacks, like code is not law. This is a constant argument in the Web3 space. The human component is not there yet, where our technology is at the moment.

15:58 · Robert
So, it is very important to build stuff that’s easy to adopt and easy to accept for non-technical people and non-believers of the crypto space. Still, on the other hand, there are certain things that just make the internet, like the log-in experience, so simple. Probably everyone knows this is in Web3, but essentially logging in with Ethereum is just the simplest thing possible on the internet right now. That is for example, something that we really want to go back to Web2 as well, and not just logging in, but also creating an authorization layer and the hierarchies behind the scenes based on chain parameters to Web2 products. That is a great opportunity.

16:51 · Reka
I would add here that what we have in Web2 with like G-suite with Google, that you can log in with your email address with your Gmail account anywhere, we are adding that layer. We are building out this full infrastructure to bridge a community and the membership structure across Web3 platforms and Web2 platforms as well, so having this element of your email address login or that possibility and adding on top of that all the things that Web3 has to offer, like ownership and this incredible layout of communities made up of a lot of trustless stuff, but also like way more trusted stuff, if that makes sense. Like on the financial side and on the voting side and governance side and ownership, which is so much talked about, but I think almost not enough still, because like us basically owning a company, owning everything together that our community is building is a crazy advantage of Web3.

17:59 · Reka
We’re combining this with the Web2 things or trying to do that. Since we have Web3 elements, now we are trying to connect it with more Web2 so it is more familiar and even more accessible for everybody. Combining the Web3 vision and the Web3 accessibility and ownership with the convenience of Web2 stuff is very exciting for us. That is our aim to do this year so that we have a base to grow from socially as well. As Robert said, the social structures and that hierarchies within the DAOs and how we work together is not there yet. We still have some room to grow on the technical side and that is what we are trying to pioneer and drive and push further.

18:48 · Robert
Yeah. I agree that the trustless ownership is the biggest advantage of this era, the whole Web3 technology stack – that we can own assets and own tokens and NFTs already, but we still do not own our identity. We still do not own a lot of our social data. That is what I wanted to touch on. It is still a huge opportunity.

19:22 · Rob (Delphi)
Before we jump over to social identity and everything else, I want to take a step back and just look at a high-level view of what we have mentioned including treasury management and multi-sigs at Gnosis safe. We mentioned Coordinape and SourceCred from the contribution layer. What does the tech stack look like for a DAO? If I wanted to start something right now, what are those high-level components you are looking to add? CI know this is something that a lot of teams and DAOS are trying to figure out. There are so many tools in the space. What do I start with? What do I need to get started?

19:58 · Reka
That fully depends on what your community or your group is going to do. The simplest version is to have a comfortable chat where you can talk with each other. For a lot of communities, that is Discord for now and/or Telegram for certain other things. Have that established – a cool server where you are comfortable and can talk to each other freely. On top of that, you should have some cohesion that’s giving more community ownership but without you having to go through the process of launching a token or an NFT, because that could be complicated and expensive sometimes. I would recommend getting into CoOp* because it is free. It is something that people can collect in their addresses and their wallets and then have more community cohesion and something that you are doing together and has some blockchain aspect.

20:57 · Reka
For that, I think later I would still like to have some access control and membership management like Guild.xyz. Also, have something where you are managing your community and what you are doing, so maybe a Notion or a Clarity is great for project management for Web3 communities and DAOs. What else?

21:22 · Robert
I just have a different opinion.

21:24 · Reka
Okay, good.

21:28 · Rob (Delphi)
I welcome it all.

21:29 · Robert
Because from a technological perspective, if we are really talking about DAOs, then the entry level is just so high. We can’t say that most of these communities right now are DAOs that we have in space, in my personal opinion. One of the few DAOs is the Ethereum ecosystem and the miners in Ethereum because essentially – what is a DAO? It should be decentralized, it should be autonomous, and it should be an association of people. That requires a massive community to be really decentralized and really autonomous. It is just so difficult to reach that point. I think most of these communities are heading to becoming a DAO one day, but still 99% aren’t DAOs at all. They are just a new wave of internet communities. I would call them modern communities on the internet and that is perfectly fine, in my opinion.

22:34 · Robert
The technology is iterating so fast. We just cannot comprehend so many new things. If we call DAOs just the communities in Web3, then again, from a technology perspective, it could be like just the communication channel or it could be like just a fancy multi-sig or just a boring multi-sig, or even some cryptography where you can sign and with some threshold encryption you can make decisions together. It can be primitive or just very traditional, like creating a new chat room.

23:28 · Reka
On the aspect of the stack, like the tools that you need to use, I think that changes every three months since the improvements and evolution of the DAO tooling space is really fast. You must keep up with the trends. I just checked, like we were talking the other day about what projects do we want to integrate next or first when we have our API out in this next few weeks? I looked through everybody that we talked with since September, like I have an Excel sheet of everybody that makes contact or we want to talk to later, and a few of them are not even around anymore. You got to really be on your tippy toes to know everything that is going on in the DAO tooling space. I am very curious to see what is going to stick and stay around for another year or another few years and evolve with the communities that are here and their needs.

24:23 · Rob (Delphi)
You read my mind because the next thing I was going to go into is the stickiness of all these tools. I know a while back someone posted from a high level of where the tools are located across a couple of chains, understanding what is available for knowledge management, what’s available for treasury management, what framework can you even use, what about token gating, etc. There were over 250 and another 70 individuals whose projects reached out. The list is growing and growing at this point. Do you see the space continuing to push experimentation or are you going to see over time some form of consolidation? What do you think are those pivotal factors that lead to a consolidation if you go that route?

25:02 · Robert
I think it really depends on adoption in one way, but also I expect a lot of these tools are going to just stop being developed at some point and new tools are going to appear. I sadly expect that the new tools are going to be less decentralized and then Probably will have more features glued together. I think the tools are going to become more complex and more platform-like, and better for different things. Touching on one more thing from the last question, the DAO requires to have a lot of people. It just does not work any other way. If you do not have hundreds of active participants, it cannot become a DAO in any way. Because of that, the tools used by the DAO are getting dropped out and new tools are getting in with the community venue; community members join, they will start to build or bring their own tools from elsewhere. That’s just an organic way for the communities to discover new opportunities and better tools and then basically evolve their cooperation.

26:41 · Reka
In terms of the experimentation and conservation factor, I think we are going to go in cycles, i.e. more tools being experimentative and coming out super-fast about different things and very simple, kind of like what Guild did – just doing one thing. I think a lot of the tools are going to come out that way. We saw that during last season since last autumn to January. We are going to get saturated with that with the new things. The projects that did not make it are going to fall off and maybe come back later. This is going to lead to being more platform-oriented, like what Robert said. I think people are going to have the need after trying all these tools and like using five to ten tools to manage their communities, they’re going to be more favored towards platforms again

27:37 · Reka
Then they’ll get sick of platforms because of being logged in, then the experimentative tools are going to come back again. I think we are going to do this cycle in a little bit of a changed way until we reach the point where the technology is as decentralized as we want it to be and as modular as we want it to be. Until then, communities are going to keep experimenting and then going back to the safe things. I think that will be a cycle until we reach that point for the social and the technical advantages to match each other.

28:15 · Robert
I remember how big of a disappointment it was for me as a child, when I realized that people aren’t using Linux because they don’t know about it, but because they don’t want to take the effort to learn the Linux commands and learn the hundreds of pages of documentation about the operating system. So, they use Windows.

28:46 · Rob (Delphi)
So that was at age six, right?

28:51 · Robert
*Laughing* It was more recently. For a long time, I really believe that people do not use Linux only because they do not know how awesome it is.

29:00 · Rob (Delphi)
Full confession here: I do not use Linux for some of the points that you raised. I do like the simplicity, and I do agree with the platforming and unbundling and rebundling – just the classic cycle of startup innovation, but I will try over this year to at least take a look into Linux for you. No promises in using it though.

29:24 · Robert
Yeah. I was saying this because Guilt is like a Linux command. It is a very simple tool. It can do hundreds of different things already. The possibilities are extending, but I know that people are attracted to simple platforms that have everything that they need immediately. I expect to move into that direction for Guild as well if we want to stay relevant for the users.

29:53 · Rob (Delphi)
Speaking of that community aspect, how important is it for DAO contributors/leadership to focus on the community? What experiences are needed to be there to get the most value out of a product like Guilds or any of the various tools that we’ve mentioned prior? Are there certain KPIs or metrics that you are looking at to make sure you are going on like that north star path being integrated across that access layer?

30:22 · Reka
For now, we are so early stage at this that we are doing like freelance user experience research that we are talking with people still on a one-on-one basis. Every few months, we pick up conversations with people and get their feedback manually. We do have a UX researcher joining our team, so that is going to get a little better and faster for us. I think it is very important, especially when you are a product growing a community around you to pay very close attention to what that community that grows around you is talking about and feels about your tool, because that is going to reflect how well your development is going and not just in your head, it looks fine, but your community actually enjoys using the tool and loves to shill it, and they are like your ambassadors because they love the product. That is the goal for the product-to-community pipeline.

31:17 · Reka
If it is the other way around, like if you have a community and you are forming a product within that community, it is a bit different. I think in that sense, it is harder to stay on track because it’s less centralized in a way, which is good in some ways, but it offers a lot of difficulty on the operational side and the project management side and making sure that the roadmap is clear for everybody and they stay on track with that roadmap.

31:50 · Rob (Delphi)
Yeah. I think just to kind of sum that up, it’s obviously like listening to your community, building with them versus building something for them, which we touched upon earlier in our conversation. That brings me to another aspect that I really want to address is: what pain points are keeping DAOs, users, anyone from using Guilds?

32:11 · Reka
What we found is that this is another tool they must get accustomed to. Even though we have very simple UX, and we are developing our UX, evolving it in a way that it even becomes simpler, it is still something that people have to jump through – to get on another platform and look at what it does. Also, we are not good at communication. That is something that I know we must get better at. Being the non-technical co-founder, that is mostly my responsibility, but as Robert mentioned, the tool developed in a way that now it does like hundreds of combinations of things that you can do and create this immense membership management layer for your whole community. We are not really communicating that well to people. I think discovering it is the biggest hurdle probably, discovering it and finding out all the things that you can do with it is their biggest pain point.

33:16 · Reka
It is all our fault. We must get better at that. That is something that we must improve. Other than that, it is very simple, so the technical side of it is super simple and that probably has no issues on that front. But the communications…

33:35 · Rob (Delphi)
I think that kind of echoes like the broader ecosystem itself – it comes down to an education problem. The technology is there, at least from the building blocks and the foundation that yourselves and everyone else is building in this space, but really understanding what you can do with these tools and what you can unlock, whether it comes to a certain engagement, what are you tracking? What are you able to foster when it comes to a community? Since you are the non-technical co-founder, what kind of educational efforts are you thinking about spearheading when it comes to Guild and just the broader Web3 ecosystem?

34:08 · Reka
As coming from a social media background, the rise of video content is also here in Web3. Now we have Noon that I just discovered a few weeks ago because a lot of the projects that we are discovering also use that. We are doing more videos about just describing how you can do this, how we can do that, and what combinations you could use, and we are personalizing those. We are pulling up a full database of these videos to send out to specific communities if they have a question. It is like live help or live description. Also, I really love how the ENS token airdrop went. I do not know if you did that, but it was like a very clear walkthrough. You had to click through everything. Even if I did not know, now I fully know what the governance is going to look like, what my token does, how I can give my governance rights somebody else, and I loved that.

35:05 · Reka
That was such cool UX. It takes some time. We are on the process of developing a guide like that for Guild onto the website and everything. If people want to get more information, they can click this through, and it is going to show them everything.

35:21 · Robert
Yeah, not in the documentation. That is important to say because our developers refuse to create the documentation because they are saying that we must keep the product so simple that it does not require a documentation.

35:39 · Rob (Delphi)
That’s a fantastic north star to keep going to, to make it so simple that nothing needs to ever be written down. It is just so intuitive for developers, users, and communities just to quickly be onboarded. I love that. I feel like that is a great question that I am going to start bringing into a lot of pitch meetings.

35:57 · Reka
Good for the future. For the longest time, we had that in mind – that kind of UX aspect, but every so often we get one or two questions about the UX and some people that are not as Web3-native have more issues of getting onboarded. For them, we are creating videos, we are creating documentation and these click-through things, which I think is going to help for different types of interactions, e.g. If people prefer to see video or being talked to, or just love reading something and use control F to find exactly what they are looking for. This is how we’re approaching this. Also, with our UX research person who is also a psychologist who’s joining us, that’s going to be a very big help for us to really see what we don’t see from a personal perspective, what we see from a UX perspective that we’re going to notice that are issues that are stopping people from using it or leaving them confused or seeing any other pain points that come up that we don’t know about.

37:04 · Rob (Delphi)
To shift gears, I know you are going after that access layer and really permission across Web2/Web3, any application that you are working with, and that brings us into understanding and thinking about what does a social graph look like. Obviously, you have the connections that you had in like Facebook, Twitter, and those respective circles that grew. Once you had the newsfeed. you started seeing more people you follow and their followers sending out tweets. How are you thinking about the social graph you’re creating on this identity layer?

37:38 · Robert
It is like a new type of membership model. That is the only angle of it. We just call a group of people and then groups in those groups; essentially DAOs, sub-DAOs, or intersections of DAOs. We are really focusing on the edges of these communities and how they collide.

38:06 · Rob (Delphi)
Yes. Up to you if you want to dive into the whole privacy aspect, cause that can open up a lot.

38:13 · Robert
Yeah. That is actually a very difficult question because from day one we wanted to build this private, but obviously for a lot of cases, it just does not make sense. For example, in a Discord server, to run something like this in a fully private way, because you cannot run a Discord runner, so a Discord bot, in a decentralized way currently. There is always going to be a party that accesses the connection between the Discord handles and the addresses. Still, privacy because essentially our wallet addresses are becoming much more than just simply financial wallet addresses. They are becoming our profiles in Web3 and how we connect with each other, and our DAO profile, i.e. where did we enter and where did we leave and where did we invest, etc. I think a lot of people still do not handle that well in a way that if you want privacy right now on Ethereum, still, it’s a public blockchain.

39:27 · Robert
You can do that already if you create a new wallet for all the different things. We wanted to support this from the very beginning and already have multi-address support. That way, you can use different wallets for different things. When you are joining a community, even though later on, if we want to use it for any social stuff or just the owner of the community wants to export the wallet addresses, obviously without the Discord handles but just the wallet addresses, they can’t get their hands on all the other addresses that you have. That way you can reserve privacy for a lot of cases. Still, to join communities, participate in whitelists even on Twitter or just on Discord through Guild – it is possible already to have privacy, but most people just do not care about it. Not just do not care about it in general, but do not care about their profile that’s building up on the blockchain.

40:32 · Robert
So, it is a difficult question. We decided to address this with, besides the multi-address support, with like a new lineup of the product. There is going to be a new version of Guild that is already in development in the background, mostly in design phase, but still. Essentially, that’s going to make it possible to have not the hundred percent same functionally that Guild.xyz has, but like 80% of the same functionality in a fully privacy-preserving way, supporting Secret Network and other privacy-preserving blockchains as well. What was the initial question?

41:20 · Rob (Delphi)
It was just hitting more on social graphs itself, but I love where this is going. So, continue with everything. This is great.

41:28 · Robert
Yeah. We do not really have a follow feature. Essentially, we do not collect any data on the users, not even a username – just the wallet address and pieces of your identity across the web. Now also talking about commercial APIs like Discord and Telegram have, and later on GitHub, YouTube, Twitter, because we are plugging in all these platforms to verify your actions on these platforms.

42:01 · Rob (Delphi)
I just want to take another step back. What is missing from the current stack when it comes to the DAO tooling and even just the Web3 space itself? Is there anything that you are like, “Wow, this is a blatant hole that needs to be built? Whether it be the SDK that can help connect everything or just something that no one has thought of yet.

42:19 · Robert
A lot of stuff. From our perspective, the most important thing is portability – that communities do not stick onto some specific thing, but they can move towards…

42:34 · Reka
When you create a community and build that community and try to scale it so that you would not be stuck with one platform or one tool anymore, that is very much missing from the space for now. That is why we are focusing on this so much, that you can take this community and port it anywhere with the same structure and the same everything – that is going to make life so much easier for people who are participating in this culture and this ecosystem. Also, relating it back to more Web2 stuff to make it even simpler. Yes, but making it more like Web2 really raises the question of how important is privacy is. I think that is a great thing to explore with what Robert talked about before. When we are marrying Web3 things and Web2 things together, that is going to help on the privacy front, but still have the ease of Web2 things.

43:39 · Robert
Yeah. Quality is one of the most important things that we are missing. It is a big pain point, especially because it should be possible already based on on-chain data and on the current infrastructure. As I see it, a lot of builders are not collaborating enough. There are certain groups that share data with us and share through APIs and share of all sorts of metadata, but in general, the tools are still not collaborative. Because of that, the community is not portable. Even though they all have their identity already on Ethereum, you just can’t bring your community and your group of people to anywhere else other than where you started it.

44:35 · Rob (Delphi)
What is the stopping point for a lot of these protocols in porting things over? Is it from a design choice on their side, or is it from the communities wanting to enhance their internal systems first before really making a lot of this data public?

44:57 · Robert
Both. Also I see a tendency that everybody wants to build a new platform, a new stop that others are not going to build on top of, so they tend to create their own sidechain or own distributed system instead of building on the existing infrastructure or building in cooperation with others. That just leads to many different tools and many different ideas. We must accept that still the only decentralized thing is just the Ethereum blockchain and the data on the chain and some scaling solutions and sidechains. Other than that, everything is just a new experiment.

45:50 · Rob (Delphi)
I agree. A lot of stuff has been siloed across so many different things, not even just the chain level but from the application level. Speaking with founders on a daily occasion to hear, “Oh, this is going to help us here. We are thinking about going open source or open sourcing a component of this later, several months down, potentially years.” Just really getting everyone to agree to not even one data standard but just a couple would be helpful to move forward with in order to really set the backbone of some of these primitives that we can build on top of to build that open Web3 permissionless future. To wrap some things up, I just got like a few more questions. For Guilds specifically, what are you most excited for over the next six months?

46:32 · Reka
With Guild, we are building it out with Agora space, and we have a bunch of other tools in the works. I am the most excited about connecting it all together to make them independent tools, have their own Twitter accounts and their communities and everything fully independent, but still be working together and to be this whole set of things that a founder might need and they can use it how they would like to. I am very curious and excited to see how that is going to be taken and how we might have to switch the idea or turn it around or refine it. Launching something is always very exciting, and launching multiple things at the same time I think is exponentially more exciting. For me, that’s definitely it. What is it for you?

47:22 · Robert
I can’t tell if it’s even going to happen because we are still strategizing about this, but I’m getting very excited about the idea of people moving in some ways from Web3 to Web2, and that’s just a ridiculous and provocative sentence. Still, essentially I see a lot of things that we have in Web3 that would be very useful for a lot of non-tokenized, non-NFT using communities. In that way, I am very excited to hook these communities and then later on incentivize them to start their tokens, start their NFTs, and onboard them to Web3 because Guild is obviously always going to stay a Web3 product. Not just at this stage, but it is going to go much further. We have big plans about how we can decentralize it from a technological perspective as well, not just socially. The most exciting thing for me is how we can use it as a bridge for gaming communities, fashion communities, music communities, and all sorts of huge communities on the internet to onboard them.

48:50 · Reka
This could also be a drinking game. This episode of the podcast – drink every time you say community.

49:00 · Rob (Delphi)
I like keeping track of it. It is a lot. When it comes to bringing these Web2 communities on board with some of the aspects that you have in Web3, you mentioned gaming and music. Are there certain use cases that Guilds is looking at? You do not have to list them all, but maybe one or two from that hooking and bringing them into Web3.

49:23 · Robert
Okay. I will say only one specific thing because I do not want to uncover too much. It is just very important for us now strategically. Also, it’s not 100% that it’s going to happen, but one example: we can integrate the game platform Steam. We can verify if a user owns s game and is active in a game and has certain achievements in a game, or if it’s even a privately hosted game, we can verify much more and essentially prove those things about a certain user all around the internet with the platforms that we integrate in, starting with Discord. Communities without even wallet addresses can use Guild to verify a lot of things about their members in the community and build their communities in social media as well.

50:33 · Robert
It is also useful for combating spam, combating scammers and a lot of other things. It is really like a new membership model that is coming from Web3 and using it for gaming communities, for example. If you combine that with YouTube, for example, that we can check if you follow a YouTuber or pay for a follower. The possibilities are endless with membership management.

51:10 · Rob (Delphi)
We’ll leave the breadcrumbs for the rest of the community and the listeners to figure out. As you mentioned, the possibilities are endless – what you can do when you are thinking about this credential system that can go over from Web3 and back into Web2. I just wanted to wrap up with a question. On a scale of one to ten on adoption, where are we with Web3 right now?

51:35 · Robert
I hate these numbers questions. I like to joke about this all the time. *Laughing*

51:43 · Rob (Delphi)
Well, guess what? There is a follow-up question, and I cannot wait until you say a number.

51:48 · Reka
Subjectively, in my opinion, I think it is like three or four.

51:57 · Robert
I personally think that ‘Web3’ is almost like a buzzword invented by venture capitalists. If we are talking about the buzzword adoption, it is already out of ten so probably eleven because we are over-adopted already. If we are thinking about the ownership economy and everything related to blockchain, we are still early, and maybe a three.

52:28 · Rob (Delphi)
Yeah. When it comes to adopting the cryptographic principles, the ownership, and actually having that kind of community driven value versus the Web2 data-siphoning value, I would agree we’re on that three to four level. How do we end up notching that up to a five, and what does a ten look like? Is it something similar to what you described with your YouTube, your Steam, where all these Web2 companies already have these credentials, so you can pull them back and forth?

52:58 · Robert
Ten is probably then ownership is fully pegged to your consciousness. Essentially, then your seed phrase or whatever your connection with the ownership is, it only exists in your head or basically wherever your consciousness is. That is adoption ten.

53:21 · Reka
What I would say from a more grounded answer is that when your parents are using that type of technology that we as pioneers are using today, that is when it is like ten – when they are benefiting from it without being active users.

53:41 · Robert
That’s five or six in my opinion.

53:46 · Rob (Delphi)
Yeah. If ten is consciousness, that is fantastic. I was not expecting that. I feel like we can have several hours going deep from age six to now of how you are thinking about computers, networks, and all that. In the essence of time, I do want to be conscious of all that. Just to leave you with any parting words, here is your opportunity, like you have done over the past hour shilling Agora and shilling Guilds and really understanding what it means like the community aspect, how to integrate certain tools. Is there anything else that you would like to leave the listeners with?

54:27 · Reka
Use us and give us feedback. That is our most valuable thing at the moment.

54:32 · Reka
Yeah. Also, the API and the SDK is coming out as soon as we can. That is going to speed up integrations. From our community side and from our side as well, that is going to allow more or the centralized development, which we are very excited about. We just added a new authentication system, so it is secure and everything. Nobody can come and mess up the whole system just because they put in a new integration. Yes, for the developers and founders, that is more exciting.

55:08 · Robert
Yeah. Reach out to us. We are very open people and yeah, we are going after meritocratic values. If you can provide value, we will make everything to have you in any way.

55:26 · Rob (Delphi)
Fantastic way to end this. Thank you again, Rob and Reka for coming on. Everyone check out Guild. As Robert mentioned, they are very approachable. He is always in the DMs. Thank you everyone for joining.

Web3 is a Shared Experience: Reka and Raz, Co-Founders of Agora

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