Lift Report Interview: Michael Sofaer at Pylons
Our guest chef for today’s interview is Pylons CEO, Michael Sofaer. Sofaer gives us an interesting expose on his crypto worldview including topics such as the gamification of DeFi and possible applications of blockchain that will enhance the human experience. He also gives us a peek at new projects on his radar & his thoughts on Doge coin.
Sofaer first got into blockchain in 2013 when he was running the dev team at TradeHill. Today, Sofaer is CEO of Pylons and Director of NFTs at Tendermint which is one of the core dev teams of the Cosmos ecosystem. Pylons is a Cosmos based blockchain focused on NFTs. Pylons goal is to make it easy for a non-developer to create their own NFT based app. It takes the programming out of building blockchain experiences and allowing them to design the experiences they want.
When Sofaer was asked what projects are getting his attention outside of Pylons he had an interesting take on Dogecoin. Yes, Dogecoin. He sees Dogecoin being scrutinized by bankers today the same way that Bitcoin was being scrutinized back in 2016. If you look at what bankers were saying about Bitcoin, it is almost the same exact thing they’re saying about Dogecoin. Now you see large companies adopting Bitcoin and allowing the hold, sell, and trade such as Visa and Venmo. With these adoptions, traditional banking processes are now being rebuilt and relearned to conform to blockchain transactions which is very exciting.
Of course, we wanted to get Sofaer’s perspective on gamification, philanthropy, and how blockchain will improve the human experience. See some of the direct questions and answers from the conversation:
Chris: Why are you using Cosmos over anything else?
Michael: The Tendermint SDK is really great. Binance is built on it. Crypto.com is built on it. Terra is built on it. Cosmos is one of the technological underpinnings of a great number of crypto currencies without much marketing. The teams that built this SDK and built Gaia, which is the software that runs the Cosmos hub, haven’t pushed as hard to market ourselves in relation to the other chains using our tools, but we’re doing a little more of that. The inter blockchain communication technology that we are pioneering is going to be completely transformative. That’s why I chose to build my project with the Cosmos SDK. That’s why I was so excited to join Tendermint and be on the inside of this crew because I think that what happens is that the internet wins in the long run. So what you’re going to see is the fragmentation of blockchain ecosystems and custom chains for more specific things. People are going to fork chains when prices go up because the branding of the chain is going to matter less and less as people see it less and less because what they’re looking at is the product they’re getting, not the chain it’s running on. Then you’re going to start seeing a lot of chains. You’re going to see a lot of fragmentation and the ability to interconnect those chains. The technology that makes those chains all work together is going to be what is really the glue of the cryptocurrency internet.
Chris: As you look at the financial aspect of block chain and the way these communities are run and the way that culture is being developed, what role does gamification play?
Michael: The easiest example is that gamification of DeFi doesn’t change DeFi because DeFi is already a game. What concerns me about DeFi is the extent to which it’s sort of self-referential. So, it’s really interesting technology, but no one involved in the ecosystem thinks that they are a customer, right? Everyone is an investor. When I see a system where no one is a consumer and everyone is an investor, I don’t understand how this can be sustainable. So DeFi is such cool technology and the people who are doing it are really having a good time. It’s awesome. In terms of how gamification relates to community building, I don’t do it. I think it’s a thing that attracts the wrong type of people to my community. If I started running games and giveaways in my Discord channel, I would get a lot of people who are in my Discord channel to succeed in the giveaway. Then I would have to hire a community person to manage the channel. I’d start getting spammers who are trying to get people to go to other channels for other giveaways.
I think real value is generated through experiences. It’s accrued through the course of humans interacting in interesting ways, and then the value exists out of that. For example, baseballs are more or less all the same. But the particular baseball that gets hit out of the park during the World Series, that’s worth more and it’s worth more because of the experiences of everyone involved in that game. Which has been built through that whole season. All of the sort of emotional weight of that drama is represented in that object. I’m trying to find a way to generate value that mirrors that by having large communities interact in interesting ways and in ways that are mediated through items.
My Discord channel is just people talking about what we can build with Pylons and that’s what I want it to be. I’m trying to have it be a community of builders, not a community of players. That’s how I feel about gamifying discord channels at a broader level. From a product perspective, Pylons is trying to enable a dynamic by which fans of a brand can interact with the brand. Similar to fantasy sports as gamification that allows fans to sort of express their attachment to the team and to particular players. It allows them to show off the research they’ve done and get acknowledgement for whether they were right. Pylons approach is “What is an interaction?” How can you mediate, as a brand, your interaction with your audience through digital items?
Chris: Where do you think philanthropy, crypto, and blockchain intersect?
Michael: What I’m interested in about philanthropy in the cryptocurrency community is being able to get out ahead of the pack on philanthropic projects like disaster relief. What I would really love to see is for people on the ground who see something coming and then that person says “there is this disaster that is coming”. Will anybody do anything about it? The answer right now is usually no. I’m really interested in starting to see what if that person could get together with some people and say “If the world wakes up to how bad this is and we got a cash infusion of one hundred million dollars within a course of two days, what would we do?” How would we distribute that? And I think you could probably get vendors on board, get them set up with wallets, get a distribution plan of how you want to use these funds. Then set up analyzed programs so that in the moment, it’s ready to go. I started thinking about this with hurricane relief. If you think about a Caribbean island and you want to have a hurricane relief plan, you could probably know what needs to happen. If you don’t necessarily have any organization that is really effective at getting the money out to where it needs to go, by the time anyone’s paying attention it’s too late. You could potentially be thorough up front around structure of the payouts, vetted by locals and show them what we want to have happen. Like we want this grocery store to receive “x” amount of dollars to order water for this community.
Chris: You can expand on that to say that the supply chain could even be configured in a smart contract. It’s triggering an event in this smart contract that is now being funded. So, one hundred thousand units of water will be purchased as well as the shipping contract fees and the last the last mile delivery truck.
Michael: That’s what I’m excited about. Programmable disaster relief that can be done up front. Planned out, set up, structured, ready to go so that you just pour money in the top of it. If the event happens the plan just operates and you don’t need to hire these disaster relief professionals. It’s hard to avoid scams in the high intensity disaster relief context. The difference between scams and incompetence is really hard to differentiate because there’s a lot of well-meaning people who just can’t get it done right and think they can. In order for this to work, it’s like you said, everyone’s got to be about the unbanked. Everyone’s got to be able to take this currency and the flow has to really work. So it’s hard. But I’m just really excited about seeing disaster planning with programmed little funding channels actually built in and ready to be turned on so that you don’t have to use an organization like the Red Cross as your funding proxy.
Chris: How does blockchain and Web3 improve the human experience? One of the horses I can get on when thinking about this is decentralized identity. The idea that I have to have one hundred logins to navigate the web down to a single wallet in my browser that has all of my personal information that I’m willing or not willing to share.
Michael: I really like the concept of personal information. I don’t love Facebook as an example for this because, to a large extent, the information they have about you is information that they generated by you interacting with Facebook. So it’s actually stuff they know about you because of your interactions and you don’t even know it. It knows exactly what kinds of photos you like to look at. It knows that because of how long you look at the photos. You might not know about some preference you have that Facebook knows about because it’s just right there in the data of what you like to do. So, when you think about medical records, the zero knowledge proof around whether you are eligible to be in a clinical trial. You can prove that you meet the criteria for entrance into a clinical trial. If you are to be between the age of 30 and 60, can you prove that to the person running the trial without revealing your age? I find those really interesting. The data that Facebook is getting from you is primarily there to change your behavior in ways that make them money. So in general, you wouldn’t want to sell people data that is going to be used to make you make bad choices. But data about your personal health is very different because they’re very powerful reasons why you want particular people to have to know particular things about you. I’m a pilot. The FAA has the right to know whether I have a heart condition from a legal perspective. The FAA has a duty to determine whether I’m going to have a heart attack or not while flying. So can that information be provided in a way that is minimally revealing? The world is just full of stuff like that or vision tests for driver’s licenses. The same idea can be applied to anyone who is licensed. How can you share that you are licensed without providing all of your personal information?
Chris: To conclude, is there anything Pylons related or Cosmos related you want to close with?
Michael: I don’t think we have even begun to scratch the surface of what digital items are going to be and how exciting and powerful and valuable this is all going to be. I just want to encourage people to imagine these things are fully programmable and free to transact with. If you’re not paying any gas fees and you can do whatever you want, what would you do? Because there’s so much that NFTs aren’t doing just because we haven’t had the imagination to do it. We do not have to have a fight about gas fees and the ecology. We don’t need to have expensive NFTs. We don’t need to have a big argument. What have you already bought? What do you want to buy? These certain things don’t have copyright associated right now, but what if they did? How would you structure that? What kind of copyrights do you want attached to these things? There’s so much cool stuff to build. If we do put something as simple as fantasy sports on the block chain, there’s just so much cool stuff to do there. There is a self-expression piece of digital items that I’m just really excited to be part of. I couldn’t be more excited to keep building with my team and with anyone who wants to be part of the community.
Pylons Twitter: @pylonstech
Michaels Twitter:@mikesofaer
How to contact Michael: m@pylons.tech
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