GRTiQ Podcast: 30 Brendan Asselstine

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Brendan Asselstine (00:21):

We were using The Graph for a long time, and yeah, we’re including it with all the different projects. I mean, it was good for a couple different reasons too. Not only was it an applicable use of that technology, but their long-term vision was very much aligned with the ideology, the ethos of the space, which is self-sovereignty, which is censorship resistance, which is sort of power in numbers and ownership by many people. And so yeah, I knew it was the right technology to use.

Nick (01:19):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Brendan Asselstine, co-founder and chief technology officer at PoolTogether. I’d be surprised if anyone listening to this episode hasn’t already heard of PoolTogether, especially if you are an early Delegator, Curator, or Indexer in The Graph community. The PoolTogether subgraph was a highly visible subgraph very early on in the evolution of The Graph. Our conversation with Brendan spans a wide range of topics, including his entry into crypto, the origins of PoolTogether and what it does, how PoolTogether uses The Graph, and so much more. As always, we started the conversation by talking about Brendan’s professional and educational background.

Brendan Asselstine (02:05):

Well, professionally, I’ve been building software products now since … Well, I’d say for about 12 years now in different capacities, whether it was my first job, which was at Concordia University, working for their bioinformatics department, or for a more corporate gig I did in Australia, all the way through freelancing here in Canada to a dev shop that I ran with a partner, now into the startup world. So I’ve run the gamut from academia all the way through to a startup.

Nick (02:34):

Well, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to anybody that had a focus in bioinformatics, so I’d be hesitant to ask because I don’t think I’d understand it, but what is that?

Brendan Asselstine (02:42):

Well … Oh, man. Bioinformatics. They were basically tracking scientists’ data. So okay, so I wasn’t directly involved in bioinformatics, what we were building is a portal for scientists to swap files and chat. It was such a silly project because we were basically just rebuilding Google Docs and what is now offered by so many different cloud services. But to be fair, that was 2008, and that was before the kind of the big wave broke and unleashed these amazing tools on us. So I mean, I’m sure that system is long made redundant by all these other services, but it was basically for swapping files and chatting.

Nick (03:16):

So I’d like to know how you first got involved or interested in crypto.

Brendan Asselstine (03:20):

Well, my interest in crypto began, I would say, in 2018. I had just left a position and I now had a lot of free time to myself. And so I decided to look into … Research, two different topics that I thought were really interesting. The first of which was machine learning. I went online. I did the Andrew Ng course in machine learning, taught myself how to build some fairly straightforward neural nets, among other things, and how to train them and build a hypothesis, and then test the errors and then tweak the model accordingly. And that was kind of interesting, but it didn’t feel like I could make an impact on any short timeline.

(03:58):

And so it was a fun project to play with. But then I switched after a few months to blockchain because that was the next thing I wanted to look at. And I was immediately captured by these new amazing properties that blockchain offer, namely scarcity and ownership, concepts that were lost to the software world because people could just copy software. And it was a huge problem from wares in the nineties, which I mean, still probably is called wares or maybe that’s just a old school term for us millennials/boomers, and it was an amazing that these properties now you could code with them. And it was in a way … I mean, if you’re looking at the dapp level, it was pretty simple tech, but albeit with a very complicated implementation in blockchain networks.

(04:41):

But people didn’t know what to do with it. And I thought wow, what an opportunity. You could do huge things with such small pieces of code, and so I was immediately drawn into it. And also the ideology of it really struck a chord with me in that this is truly bringing self-sovereignty back to the internet. It’s bringing this kind of more peer-to-peer networks back to the internet versus these internet monoliths that control all of our data and all of our payments, and control of the internet is very much centralized still. And so really it’s really exciting.

(05:14):

It’s funny looking at these different crypto events, I thought it was such an interesting mix of charlatans and scammers, but also ideologues and people who really wanted to realize that internet vision back in the nineties of this cyberspace utopia where you could do and be anything you wanted to be. And so playing around with these people has been very interesting. Of course, need very high security for the scammers and exploit artists, but also it’s a lot of fun working with people with such strong ideology.

Nick (05:43):

You raised so many interesting points there and I’d love to ask someone like you this question, which is how do you reason through the resistance that so many established entities have towards blockchain? How do you reason through that? Is it naivety? Is it fear? Is it something else?

Brendan Asselstine (06:00):

I mean, I think it’s mostly just ignorance. People don’t trust what they don’t understand, but just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It took me a long time to understand like to get it. I remember when I received that email from, I believe it was a local developer’s mailing list here in Vancouver, and it was in 2015 saying, “Hey, Ethereum is launching. Get in on this.” And I remember that Eth was like, it was like $0.15. It was something ridiculous like I don’t even want to really think about it. But back then when I saw that, I was like what? Why would anyone pay per compute like that? That doesn’t make any sense. What, I have to pay money to run code. No. I would just use AWS, and that’s because I didn’t understand what it meant to run that code on the Ethereum blockchain. I didn’t understand blockchain and so I wrote it off and I lost. I wasn’t exactly the pizza guy, I didn’t exactly spend 10,000 Eth for nothing, but I definitely didn’t buy it either.

Nick (07:01):

You mentioned you’re joining me from Canada. I’ve had other guests on the podcast that are from Canada, and the recent core dev teams that joined The Graph, some are based in Canada, Figment and StreamingFast. What is it about Canada that makes it this really interesting playground for people interested in crypto and blockchain?

Brendan Asselstine (07:21):

That’s an interesting observation and that actually extends to video game development and software development in general. Canada punches above its weight and I don’t know why exactly. I would even perhaps attribute it to our long winters and us being indoors and perhaps being more computer savvy that way out of necessity. We have a very educated populace. We share a lot culturally with the United States, so it’s very easy for us to work for American companies, but that extends to a lot more than just crypto. It’s just tech in general. Canada is doing pretty well there and Vancouver is a real up and comer in terms of the startup community. So yeah, I think it’s just a kind of broad specialization that Canada seems to do really well.

Nick (08:02):

So as you made your way into crypto, what was the path you took to eventually founding PoolTogether?

Brendan Asselstine (08:07):

Well, that was a long path. So originally my goal was to understand and I understood through learning about all the different smart contract platforms that were out there. I remember at the time it was like Auger and Colony, some of the OGs in the space, and I was just studying their code bases, and I started writing articles about the code bases, specifically about upgrade-ability because I thought that was fascinating. That was a place where this code differed significantly from the code I was familiar with previously, and that attracted some attention from partners that were building out a blockchain app. And so they contracted me to build it.

(08:45):

And so quickly I rolled in an ex-colleague and we formed this kind of ad hoc dev shop and eventually we formalized it as Delta Camp. And we ran that for a good I’d say year and a half, and we specialized in Ethereum, dapps, that’s what we did. And so I went to hackathons, I went to conferences to try to hustle and meet people and get contracts, and we managed to stay afloat even through the bear market. I remember initially we got paid in Eth, and so our paychecks lost I think 70% of their value as we kept holding and holding and holding, hoping it would go up and it didn’t. And so yeah, those were tough times, but we managed to survive all the way through it.

(09:28):

And at a hackathon in Denver, Eth Denver, very dear to my heart, I’m a very big fan of Eth Denver Hackathon, we met our co-founder Layton. And so the other co-founder mentioned Chuck and I, we headed up Delta Camp together and then Layton was our third, we met him at Eth Denver. And what was funny is that he pitched this idea of a no loss lottery the Thursday night before the hackathon started in earnest. It was the pitch night where hackers would get up on stage in this very kind of casual group and pitch their idea in the hopes of gaining momentum and building a team around that idea to be able to build it over the weekend. And so he pitched this no loss lottery and I was immediately struck by the simplicity of it, by the kind of consumer applicability of it. This isn’t some weird de-gen thing that only finance nerds would understand, this is like oh, okay, this has mass appeal. And so I was intrigued by it.

(10:24):

But the funny thing is that I went in with a pretense. I had an idea for a project that I really wanted us to build, and so we ended up building that that weekend and we did get top 20 out of 120, and presented and we did quite well. But in the last hour of Eth Denver, Layton and Chuck and I were all walking around and I bumped into Layton and I was like hey, that idea you had, I really like that idea. Let’s chat. And so we chatted and basically we ended up being contracted to build the first few iterations. And the very first version of PoolTogether, it wasn’t very good, let’s be honest here, but I built it in three days. And what was so amazing about it though is that the concept was so simple and it was so tractable to people that we gained a lot of traction because people are like oh, this is fun. And it was surprising how many deposits we got for such a shitty product.

(11:18):

But the second iteration was much, much better. [inaudible 00:11:21] the foundation came through and ended up giving us a grant to continue building. We got some design help and then the momentum kept building and then we were approached by VCs and decided hey, let’s do this. Let’s raise and form an official startup and put our full committed weight behind this idea. And so I guess that was maybe … I guess that was about two years ago. I believe we launched in August and here we are, we are a team of eight now and we have a professional designer. We have put a lot of time into these different iterations and I’m very excited about the next iteration that we’ll be launching. We’ve solved a lot of the problems that have plagued us for the previous versions and it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be amazing.

(12:07):

So we’ve been persevering over the last two years and really just laser focused on this idea and especially because price savings are a very old concept. The product market fit has already been proven, it’s just a matter of getting it right and making sure the experience is perfect and flawless and that everybody is winning something at some point. And so we are iterating towards that end goal. It’s taken time, but we’re getting very, very close.

Nick (12:33):

Well, I’ve had the opportunity to interview other folks on the podcast who were early partners of The Graph in the subgraph development department or as users, and one thing that’s very interesting about PoolTogether is as I, myself, was very early into The Graph community, joining and delegating shortly after its ICO, PoolTogether was intricately linked with what The Graph is. It was almost like it was part of it because every time I logged in and looked at The Graph Explorer, you would see PoolTogether. It was the only subgraph, I think, running for a long time. So you had a ton of, I think, brand recognition from day one with members of The Graph community that were new to it just like me.

(13:14):

So for that reason, I’d like to kind of unwind a little bit from that story you told about how you started PoolTogether with your partners and discuss exactly what it is. You mentioned it’s a no loss lottery and some of these other concepts. Can you break down exactly what PoolTogether does?

Brendan Asselstine (13:29):

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a good point. Let’s step back. PoolTogether is a prize savings account, and what that is is a savings account where you deposit money into it and instead of earning paltry interest on it, you have a chance to win the accrued interest on all deposits. And so once a week, all the interest is bundled up from everyone and awarded randomly to a winner, or rather it’s actually split across multiple winners. And so right now we’re giving away just under $100,000 US per week in prizes. And so when you deposit a PoolTogether, you have a chance to win a lot of money.

(14:06):

And it inhabits this really interesting space where it’s a very low risk, it’s basically no risk. We survived using Compound as our yield source, horrific markets that have lost huge amounts of value and then have bounced back and recovered. And we’ve seen … We’ve had pretty consistent prizes the entire time. It’s been pretty powerful. And so we’d like to continue that in that vein, we’d like to increase the amount of interest to increase the size of the prizes, but also what we’re looking at is having thousands of winners, is scaling the number of winners to basically be limitless because we do want everyone to win something.

(14:44):

And so we’re exploring that space. We’re basically gamifying savings. That’s our end goal is to make savings fun. Use those kind of dopamine hits you get from the excitement and anticipation of lottery tickets to saving your money because studies have been done where many adults in the United States have a hard time coming up with $400 cash and yet, America spends $70 billion a year on lotteries. That’s an insane amount of money. If those people could get that same hit but still be saving money, that’d be really powerful and that’d be a big social change that’s really enabled by blockchain tech.

(15:23):

Yeah, then this tech is so much better for this particular financial application because not only is it really easy for people to get their money back because there’s no intermediary. It’s auditable, it’s provably fair, it’s composable. So things like for example, we have this product called Pods where users can combine their tickets together to increase their chances of winning a share of the prize, just like an office pool for lottery tickets. So by having these crypto tickets be composable, you can do anything you want with them and it just becomes another Lego piece in this Defi world.

Nick (15:59):

Well, I’m sure some of the listeners to this podcast, this will be the first time they understand conceptually what PoolTogether is doing, despite the fact like me, they’ve been in the community for such a long time and they’re so familiar with the name, and it’s a really cool concept. What drives you and your partners to create something like this where it seems like the objective is to get people to save more money? What’s fueling this intent and desire to see that happen?

Brendan Asselstine (16:24):

For myself, I can’t necessarily speak for my partners, although I can say that we are all aligned with encouraging good behavior. We do want to see people not get burned by crypto. You don’t want to see beginners come into crypto, try out some product, and then get rugged, get wrecked. It’s not fun. It’s not cool. And granted, it’s perhaps not quite as exciting as like I got 10,000 X on this moon coin or whatever. It’s also a really safe introduction for a lot of people, so it’s a great introductory app to show people hey, this is what crypto can do. It’s immediately intuitive, it’s safe to use, and it’s nothing but upside. There’s nothing but upside to using this.

(17:08):

But on a more personal level, I’m just excited about building products that people want to use. That’s always been one of my biggest drivers is just I like building things that people want to use. I think that’s so cool, and this is of all products probably the best one that I’ve ever built and it makes a ton of sense just logically, in terms of consumer adoption, in terms of timing. The timing now of what we’re doing, and especially with our multi-chain approach is really, really perfect right now with where the market’s going in terms of multi-chain adoption.

(17:37):

I’m just excited in general about what we’re building, but ultimately this is going to really push crypto to a lot of new people. We have a lot of beginners in our Discord, and it’s cool to see them begin to understand what it means to manage your wallet, what it means to pay transaction fees. A lot of people are still asking us why does PoolTogether charge so much gas to use PoolTogether? And it’s like that doesn’t go to us. We have to educate them. That actually goes to the Ethereum network, that PoolTogether is free to use, so it’s a great intro app to educate people about crypto without them getting burned.

Nick (18:12):

So then how does it work for users? If I invest, let’s say $10 US, do I have 10 tickets? Do I have one?

Brendan Asselstine (18:20):

So when you deposit into PoolTogether, your deposit relative to the total deposits is your chance of winning for one individual prize. So for example, if you deposit $100 and there’s $1,000 total after your deposit, then you have a 10% chance of winning. And if we have 10 prizes, then you have a 10% chance of winning each of those prizes, so it’s proportional to your deposit. And so in terms of what you get back, when you deposit let’s say $10 USDC into the system, you get back 10 PoolTogether USDC tickets. And so this a always one-to-one with the underlying collateral. So if you have 10 PoolTogether USDC tickets, you can redeem them in return for your original USDC.

Nick (19:08):

So if I put in $100 USD and there is a weekly award and I don’t win it, or I don’t get a chance to participate, do I not earn interest on my account and I got to wait for the next reward? Or how does that work?

Brendan Asselstine (19:23):

So once a week we gather up all the interest and award the interest as prizes. And so it depends on the prize pools. We actually have about 10 of them, including the Celo prize pools. And some of them have 10 winners, some of them have five winners. It depends on the prize pool, but all the interest will be gathered up and then split among those addresses. So that’s the base product, but what we’ve done on top of that is when you deposit into PoolTogether with most of the pools, I mean, because it depends on the blockchain, but at least with Ethereum and Polygon, you also earn pool tokens. And so pool tokens are our underlying governance token that governs PoolTogether. And so as you are invested in PoolTogether, you begin to earn ownership in PoolTogether. And of course, those do have market value, so you could kind of call them APR in a way, but really you’re earning ownership in the protocol.

Nick (20:18):

So obviously, these accounts are earning interest and you’re paying out the awards, which is great. How are you earning that interest, and kind of how do you guys keep the lights on?

Brendan Asselstine (20:27):

Yeah, that’s a good question. So our first yield source was Compound, and how Compound works is imagine you have US dollars and you want to borrow Canadian dollars with your US dollars as collateral. The Compound system allows you to lock up your US dollars, and let’s say you’re allowed to borrow 50% of the value of the collateral that you’ve put in, then what you can do is go in and withdraw. I mean, let’s just assume for sake of argument that they’re at a parody, they’re at one-to-one Canadian dollars and US dollars. That means you can borrow $500 Canadian dollars and when you go to pay that loan back, you just have to pay it back plus a bit of interest, whatever interest is accrued on that. And so you’re able to borrow the Canadian dollars, you can go play with them or whatever. Maybe you’re speculating on them somehow, and then come back and pay back your loan.

(21:23):

But what’s interesting is that if your loans become under collateralized, meaning that if the value of the US dollar drops such that the collateral in the system is worth less than the borrowed amounts, then that collateral will get liquidated. It’s sort of people are able to buy it using the missing collateral at a discount. And so in that way, the system is always rebalancing itself depending on how the markets change, so it ensures that there’s always sufficient supply of tokens. Does that make sense?

Nick (21:53):

It does. Thank you for explaining that.

Brendan Asselstine (21:56):

And so our other markets, yield sources are very similar like Aave. Aave is a very, very similar lending market to Compound. And then we have another yield source which is xSUSHI, and this one is interesting because it is sushi swaps way of kind of paying dividends in a sense in that you can stake your sushi tokens and the value of the xSUSHI token that you get back in return goes up as more sushi is added to the pool. And so when you redeem your xSUSHI, you actually get back more than what you put in, and so we actually have a sushi pool as well. So we basically look for any yield source that is totally no loss and we can plug it into our prize pools, so PoolTogether is very modular that way.

Nick (22:38):

Do you ever hear from winners and get winners’ stories that are interesting to hear or satisfying for you as a founder of this really cool idea and company?

Brendan Asselstine (22:46):

We do from time to time. We had one winner, the winner of the USDT pool on Polygon was in our Discord and was like hey, I won. And it was really … It’s really cool to see that. It’s always cool to see the surprise, the joy that they have. We have seen some winners in the past. We would like to see more, and so that’s one reason why we are moving from say, having five prizes to having thousands of prizes. We do want to see more people winning. We want to see people loving the prizes themselves and getting that dopamine hit. I mean, if you have a dollar in the system right now, it’s going to take a long time for you to win. We want people to be winning a lot more frequently than that.

Nick (23:24):

For listeners that want to get involved and participate, can you explain that process? How can people get involved with PoolTogether?

Brendan Asselstine (23:31):

What you can do is go to app.PoolTogether.com, or just go to PoolTogether.com and then navigate to the app. And then from there, you connect your wallet, so it’ll probably be Meta Mask or Trust or Coinbase, or something like that. And then from there, you can deposit into one of our pools, so we actually are on four different blockchains now. We’re on Ethereum, Celo, Binance, Smart Chain and Polygon, and we’ve got pools across all four of those blockchains. And so depending on your wallet, you’ll be able to deposit in the chain of your choice, and it’s quite often stable coins. We focus on stable coins that people’s money doesn’t drop in value, although we have seen some attraction with more volatile tokens like sushi and uni and com, so that’s probably the simplest way to do it. You go connect your wallet on app.PoolTogether.com, and deposit away.

Nick (25:46):

Well, I want to encourage listeners that are interested in this idea to do a little more research, check it out, and connect your wallet and participate in this really cool idea. And I got to say, Brendan, I was less familiar with PoolTogether, but in researching for this podcast interview and hearing the great interview you did recently with Tegan Kline on the Around the Coin podcast, I got really interested, and it’s such a cool idea, so yeah, I appreciate you sharing so much about it.

Brendan Asselstine (26:09):

Fantastic. Yeah.

Nick (26:11):

I want to turn our attention now to PoolTogether’s relationship with The Graph because as I’ve said many times, most of the people in the community are going to be familiar with PoolTogether because it was this really early subgraph that everyone noted the name of. Do you remember when you first became aware of The Graph?

Brendan Asselstine (26:27):

Yes, this was sometime ago. Well, it was actually … It was over a number of hackathons because The Graph was present at a number of hackathons, namely Eth Denver Hackathon and the Eth New York Hackathon. I met [inaudible 00:26:40] at both those events and so I knew about their tech and we tried it fairly early on for some of Delta Camp’s projects and found that it was just such a suitable use for the event sourcing technology, which is basically like replaying a bunch of different events to kind of hydrate your kind of current state of the system, and The Graph allows you to do this. And it was so exciting to be able to play with this tech. It’s something I’ve been looking at for a long time. It’s really cool tech. It’s kind of like how Uber does their realtime analysis on their ride data coming in. It’s really industrial great stuff, and so it was really neat to be able to play with this with respect to the blockchain. It was such a perfect application.

(27:23):

So we were using The Graph for a long time. The Graph and the hosted service anyway for a long time. And yeah, we’re including it with all the different projects. I mean, it was good for a couple different reasons too. Not only was it an applicable use of that technology, but their long-term vision was very much aligned with the ideology, the ethos of the space, which is self-sovereignty, which is censorship resistance, which is sort of power in numbers and ownership by many people.

(27:51):

And so yeah, I knew it was the right technology to use and so we’ve been with The Graph for its transition from the hosted service now through to the decentralized network. And I’m really impressed with how well they’ve done, how well they’ve managed that transition because with a piece of technology as complex as what they’ve been building, it’s not easy, but they’ve managed to do it in a fairly slick way and the new studio is just fantastic to work with.

Nick (28:14):

Well, you mentioned something there that I think is really important and I love the opportunity to speak with consumers of The Graph to get their perspective on this. But I think most of the listeners of the podcast know there are other options or solutions for people that want to query or index blockchain, but The Graph does it in a unique way, and it does have this special long-term vision that a lot of people in the Defi and blockchain community are attracted to.

(28:37):

In your own words, kind of how would you describe that ethos, that vision, and why it is that The Graph compared to other solutions seems like the right choice?

Brendan Asselstine (28:45):

Well, from kind of a technical standpoint, it’s really good that they’ve open sourced their entire stack. Let’s say The Graph vanished. Let’s say The Graph didn’t make it to building their decentralized network. Let’s say they ran out of money and they basically just give away all their software and they closed up shop. Well, we would still be able to survive as dapps having built on top of this technology because they’ve open sourced their entire stack. And so that is so robust at a very deep level in that if parts of your infrastructure go down, you can still stand it up and be protected that way. So I mean, that’s just one point I just want to add, but as well as their eventual direction was to make it a decentralized network, which I believe is the right way to go for infrastructure projects so that you don’t have these kind of singular outages, you don’t rely on a single provider, and it just makes it much more robust in terms of your underlying infrastructure.

(29:41):

I think the one area that’s going to be interesting to see transition is payment because right now the gateway … So we’re actually communicating with a network through the Edge & Node gateway, and so they actually manage, so we actually put up a bunch of GRT which pays for queries. It’ll be interesting to see how people want to pay for that, whether that’ll be managed by protocols and centralized to some degree so that the protocol just covers the cost, the dapp usage, or if users do in the end want to pay for that through payment channels. But I have a feeling it’ll be very traditional and that just like what we’re doing now in that the protocols covering the cost with GRT for the queries, and users are kind of shielded from that to a certain degree. So that’s kind of my guess, but I’d be curious to see where that goes.

Nick (30:25):

That would be your preference, what you just described there is the way they’re doing it now?

Brendan Asselstine (30:28):

Yeah, I think that’s the most practical. It’s actually mirroring how traditional SaaS works is that the company that runs the website pays for the SaaS products that it uses to provide the website as a service. It’s I think mirroring the existing, I guess patterns is a lot easier than trying to reinvent them and have users like okay, you got to start paying for all these websites you use. People wouldn’t like that.

Nick (30:55):

So you mentioned subgraph Studio, I don’t know if you are directly the person on your team interacting with subgraph Studio, but that was a huge announcement within The Graph community. A lot of people are excited. It launched the same day Curation went live. If you are the person responsible for using or interacting with subgraph Studio, what can you tell us about that experience?

Brendan Asselstine (31:12):

It’s been pretty good. It’s pretty slick. It’s clear that they made sure they fixed all the bugs before releasing it. It’s fairly polished out of the gate, which is great, especially because we need it to start transitioning our subgraphs from the hosted service to the decentralized network, so it’s been a pretty slick experience. It’s been good so far.

Nick (31:30):

You work with a lot of different communities by virtue of what PoolTogether does. You’ve already mentioned a couple different blockchains. How is The Graph’s community different from so many others within the crypto space?

Brendan Asselstine (31:40):

I guess I would take this from an angle that I understand, which is from a bit more of a broader perspective. I’m not deeply involved in The Graph community at a kind of grassroots level. I definitely have stepped in a few times to the forums and participated in namely to get this unit testing framework going. What I really respect about Edge & Node and what they’ve tried to do is to … Like the major grant that they did recently to really create a second head to this beast that is their network that will improve their index or service, and I think that was a really brilliant move. And it’s also they’re really embracing the decentralized ethos of there is no one single entity that is heading up the network.

(32:25):

I think it’s really interesting to see that contrast between say The Graph and how they’re trying to create this more multi-headed beast and say Sushi. Whereas Sushi, if you go on their discourse, they are really organizing like a traditional company and there’s a lot of simplicity in that it’s like okay, great, people know who to go to. There’s a lot of simple accountability. If you want to go get hired by the protocol, you know where to go. It’s interesting to see the contrast between these two approaches of building a kind of more crypto version of a traditional organization versus like really trying to create this network, a multi-headed network. It’ll be really interesting to see how these experiments play out. So I think from that standpoint, I think The Graph’s angle is really interesting.

Nick (33:15):

Well, I want to go back to something you just said there then. You talk about how The Graph has organized its community or the entity itself a little differently than others you’ve seen out there. What do you mean by that? How is it different?

Brendan Asselstine (33:27):

Well, instead of being a top-down organization where there’s a singular entity that is doing all of the coordination and work behind the organization, The Graph gave a massive grant to StreamingFast, a protocol infrastructure company to build a better Indexer. And that’s an absolutely massive grant, and building a better Indexer, that’s like core work to The Graph ecosystem. And so it’s really cool to see that they are trying to build a truly multi-headed beast here in terms of having it built … Like not just having a core team. Say for example with like Uniswap, there’s essentially a core team that is building everything, and the Dow is very much I guess looking at legal, looking at what education, but the actual core construction is being done by Uniswap.

(34:25):

Same thing with Sushi Swap is that they have done … Although they’re a little different. Uniswap is actually a private company that is … Well, now Uniswap Labs that is building for Uniswap. But now you have SushiSwap, which is a decentralized protocol, but it’s building a similar kind of structure in that there’s the CEO, [inaudible 00:34:46], there’s the CTO, Joseph DeLong, along with options and salary and compensation for tax purposes. The list goes on in terms of how they’re really trying to structure it, and these are very different approaches. The Graph is really trying to build out multiple heads of infrastructure. Like Edge & Node is still building, they’re still building their gateway. You’ve got now StreamingFast that’s working on the Indexers.

(35:12):

I think that’s really cool. I think it’s interesting to see the differences between how these different protocols are organizing, so it’ll be really interesting to see how these experiments play out. I think both will excel for different reasons though. I really like Sushi’s approach where there’s some degree of accountability. There’s a core team you can go talk to, you can go ask hey, what’s up with this? And The Graph still has that ostensibly, they have Edge & Node, but with the rise of these other groups, I think that will begin to change and it’ll become more of a community, a network that you have to reach into. So it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve both of these in parallel.

Nick (35:50):

Well, as someone who is so involved in the crypto blockchain space, how important do you think a solution like The Graph is for blockchain and Defi, dapps, to reach their full potential?

Brendan Asselstine (36:03):

Well, it’s pretty essential. I mean, many, many dapps are building their own Indexers and so to be able to use shared infrastructure is really powerful. You can leverage other protocols, subgraphs, you can build your own. There’s so much composability in this space between different protocols that making sure that the Indexer system works across these different protocols is just absolutely essential, especially once The Graph eventually releases cross subgraph queries where they actually will link all of the data together. This will make it even more essential to the ecosystem.

Nick (36:41):

Well, Brendan, in speaking with you, I get the sense that you talk about a lot of dapps self indexing and in some ways trying to do what The Graph does in-house. But you’ve got so much knowledge and understanding of the blockchain space and building dapps. What are some of the challenges of a group trying to do this in-house? And why would it make so much sense not to do it in-house and just to use The Graph?

Brendan Asselstine (37:05):

Well, it’s complex. Something that I’ve really shied away from is any kind of ops, any kind of servers. I do not want us to run servers. There was a very brief time where we ran an Ethereum node in order to facilitate, basically create better test infrastructure for ourselves. And AWS would shut it down because it had too many open connections, it thought it was some kind of spam bot, and it’s challenging. Running servers is challenging, to do it well. Especially that was just a test environment, imagine doing that in production. And while bigger companies … And we could keep scaling the team, we could keep growing the team, but we’ve also wanted to be very focused on what we do well, what is our value add? And our value add is writing great smart contracts and beautiful front ends to connect to them, and so we have focused on that exclusively. And any kind of infrastructure, I’ve been very keen for us to hand off as quickly as possible.

(37:59):

And so The Graph is just a very natural fit. It allowed us to do some incredibly powerful reporting views on the blockchain data and do it in a way where we can just write a script that goes in and looks at all these different events and creates this data store and then they manage the whole infrastructure for us, so it’s fantastic. Like for example, Binance has been going on and offline, and The Graph Indexers are just kind of dealing with it. They’re working with the RPC nodes, they’re pulling in the data, they’re chewing through the subgraphs. We saw an error in a subgraph, then it recovered. That’s great. I love that it’s being recovered by someone else. That’s what we pay for. We don’t want to waste our time and energy on something that we are not specialized in, and instead will definitely defer to experts who are focusing on that explicitly.

Nick (38:49):

Well, you sort of referenced it there, but just to kind of double click on it, for members of The Graph community to want to see how PoolTogether leverages The Graph, how they might see it in the wild, where would we see that? Where would we see PoolTogether using and leveraging The Graph?

Brendan Asselstine (39:04):

Where would you see it? Well, The Graph data is present all over app.PoolTogether.com. Much of the data you see has been pulled from The Graph. Anything historical is pulled from The Graph, and it’s so pervasive. It’s difficult to say if there’s any one singular place where The Graph is used. I mean, I guess the probably most obvious example is the prize history is when you go back and look at ticket holders in the past, that’s impossible to get on-chain and that data comes directly from the subgraph because they’re able to do historic queries on past block numbers. So yeah, it’s pervasive throughout the app. I got to say just go to PoolTogether.com and you’ll start seeing subgraph queries.

Nick (39:49):

Brendan, you mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you really are passionate about creating products that people use, and so you’re obviously a very tech-savvy entrepreneur at heart though. How is being an entrepreneur in the blockchain space different than you think it is outside of blockchain?

Brendan Asselstine (40:06):

Well, in terms of the core value prop to the end user, that remains the same. You need to build something that’s compelling. You need to build something that people want to use, that’s intuitive, that scratches an itch, that solves a problem. I think where it starts to diverge is in how do you grow? How does this thing become big? And with the traditional product, you’re going to look to see how you can monetize it. You’re going to try to increase revenues so you’re going to raise capital so that you can grow the core team, you can grow the company somewhere, perhaps in San Francisco. Get as big as you can. But with decentralized products, it’s a little different. The code can be forked. It could be copied really easily. People can abuse the system. I mean, people can anyway with other projects, but everything is just so laid out in the open here. It’s very different in terms of the security profile.

(41:07):

And to grow this thing, how do you grow it into more of a network? I think that’s what PoolTogether is really starting to discover is that we have this really cool product and now what we’re starting to do is explore how do we build our network? How do we make it so that … This is a question I like to ask myself is how do we make it so that forks of PoolTogether want to join PoolTogether? That is the most powerful thing is when you can build a network that people want to be part of. And I mean, with products, I mean, they could call that community.

(41:43):

I think with decentralized tech, it’s … Community is a bit more multifaceted than that. You’ve got your users, you’ve got your community of users that are passionate about the product and really enjoy using it. But also, you have your network of builders, people that are actually integrating with the protocol, whether it’s other protocols, individual builders, private companies. The value network is very different than in a traditional company. And learning how to leverage that and how to grow that I think is what makes Blockchain very unique because it’s a very unique space. Yeah, there are a lot of experiments that need to play out first before we have any clear answers, but I think that a lot of power lies in the network and building up this value network.

Nick (42:27):

What’s your advice to web2 devs or engineers who might be listening to this podcast contemplating making the move into web3? You’re a guy that’s done it successfully. What would be your advice to those listeners?

Brendan Asselstine (42:40):

I would say start building, get involved, learn as much as you can. We have hired from our Discord, we’ve hired from our community, and so if you get a … If you see a project you like, just start contributing value and they will notice. And if you push, you will become part of that team. No doubt. It just takes time and it just takes passion and interest, so the key is just to start doing it. I mean, to be fair though, there are also a lot of companies that are just simply straight up hiring. If you don’t have blockchain experience, then you’re going to be competing with a lot of newbies into the space.

(43:21):

But if you do your own work and learn blockchain, learn how to code some basic dapps, you’ll be head and shoulders above the competition, so showing some passion in this space goes a long way because it shows that you’re interested in the technology beyond just a paycheck, and that means a lot to these different startups in the space. Because a lot of these companies are nascent. They’re not these massive corporations that are just looking to hire industry grade talent, they’re looking for people that are part of the going to be part of the core team, going to be part of the genesis, the founders, so get involved.

Nick (43:53):

Do you think a tool like The Graph is a bridge for web2 devs looking to jump into web3?

Brendan Asselstine (43:59):

I think The Graph is essential, but also it wouldn’t be the first tool to look at. The first tool is just building a website that connects to an RPC node, you just need to start talking to the blockchain. But as soon as you do start talking to the blockchain, you’ll realize just how inadequate communicating with it is. And so the next step will be incorporating The Graph into your dapps. I would say it’s a very soon step, but it’s not necessarily the first step into web3 development.

Nick (44:30):

Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, Brendan, you did a really great interview with Tegan Kline on the Around the Coin podcast. Again, I want to encourage listeners to listen to that. For those that don’t, you told this really cool story and I think I want to end with this story. You talked about attending a conference over in Berlin and the building and the place you met. I know it’s redundant, but for those that don’t listen to that podcast, I’d hate for them to miss this story and the symbolism that you drew from it. Do you mind retelling that here?

Brendan Asselstine (44:59):

Yeah, absolutely. It was quite a series of events in my life and I really did enjoy that time. So a bit of background, this was two years ago, back in October, I believe, and it was the first web3 summit in Berlin. And this was occurring right before Devcon in Prague, Devcon 4 in Prague. And what was so cool about this event is that first of all, it was bringing together all decentralized tech. It was bringing together everything like [inaudible 00:45:33], the sort of secret networking protocol to be … Basically be the better tour is bringing together, of course, a lot of blockchain enthusiasts, including Polka Dot and Ethereum and Cosmos, IPFS, the Filecoin team.

(45:51):

And so all in one place, these people are coming together and talking about what the internet could be, but where they were gathering was this place called the Funk House. And this is a beautiful old building in East Berlin. This building in its day was the largest radio broadcast center in the world, and it was built by the Russians in the fifties after they had taken East Berlin. And it was a beautiful old art deco building and it had some really interesting flourishes inside, in particular, these giant wooden clocks on the wall. But because when I went there, I was actually a volunteer and so I met a number of the locals that were volunteering in the event to provide support, whether it’s ticketing or directions or what have you. And one of the other volunteers was this young German man.

(46:45):

And I got into a conversation with him talking about the fall of the wall and about this beautiful building, and he talked about how behind a lot of these clocks apparently were microphones because they recorded people. The Stasi were listening to everyone all the time. And this gentleman’s parents actually lived through those times. And after the fall of the wall, if they wanted to, could go and look into the archives to see which of their friends were snitches basically, but they refused because they didn’t want to ruin their sort of social network. But that’s how it was back then. There was so much paranoia with people sort of snitching on everyone and kind of reporting to the authorities whether people are being bad or what have you.

(47:31):

And so to have these people that were pushing decentralized tech that is meant to empower the individual under the roof of a building that was created during that kind of control, that kind of occupation, was amazing. It was just delicious irony. It was beautiful too, or beautiful in a kind of industrial way in that it’s this old massive building that’s just surrounded by these kind of derelict, dilapidated apartment buildings that are being just smashed soon probably to replace by other buildings. But it was just such a wonderfully ironic place to hold this event.

(48:07):

And of course, after that event, only a few hours away by train ride in Prague was Devcon 4. And of course, that was a brilliant event. Loved all the presentations. That was really the beginning of all this zero knowledge work that was happening, at least my exposure to it, so it’s really exciting to see these different systems come online now after so long. Although I guess so long in this ecosystem’s three years, which is I guess not that long, but that’s an eternity in the blockchain space. But it was quite the series of events and I would love to see that again. I would love to see such a wonderful combination of cities because it really definitely became a destination event where we got to see a bit of Eastern Europe, got to see some of East Berlin. It was a lot of fun, so really looking forward to Bogota. I hope that has a similar vibe to it.

Nick (48:57):

Well, thank you for indulging me and telling that story again. I’ve heard a lot of stories, metaphors, analogies, of what decentralization and this revolution behind blockchain, web3, Defi, all of it means, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt one or had the conceptual touch with one like that story you tell, and like you said, the delicious irony of it. So again, I want to point listeners that want to learn more about Brendan and the team of PoolTogether to listen to that great podcast interview with Tegan Kline at Around the Coin.

(49:27):

Brendan, thank you so much for your time and for doing this interview with me. If people want to learn more about you, follow your work that you’re doing at PoolTogether, what’s the best way to stay in touch?

Brendan Asselstine (49:37):

I would say the best way to stay in touch is to pop into our Discord. That is where all the conversations happen. That’s where the day-to-day happens. If you want to see any new announcements, then follow me on Twitter. I’m just B_Asselstine. I’m sure you’ll have to Google that to learn how to spell my name. But you’ll Google it no problem, I’m there. And otherwise, just go to PoolTogether.com and follow us. A lot of the work is manifested through the PoolTogether Twitter app and through Discord. And so yeah, just get involved.