Ep. 348 - Browse the Web. Rate things. Earn Crypto. w/ Yup.io Founder, Nir Kabessa

In this episode of CRYPTO 101 we spoke with Nir Kabessa of Yup.io to discuss how cryptocurrencies are enabling a new social network paradigm whereby users are rewarded for their contributions every step of the way. Yup.io allows users to build influence and earn money for rating content on any website. We discuss the new YUP token, which takes a unique multi-chain launch. Users curate content on EOS, yet provide liquidity on Ethereum. This way, YUP capitalizes on the speed and efficiencies of EOS, and the liquidity and massive network effect of Ethereum.

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Episode Transcript

Bryce: Alright everybody, it is time for another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. But
before we dive in to our awesome guest in conversation today, I want to remind you guys of two
things. And the first one is that if you go to crypto101insider.com, you can join our private
community. Here’s where we have our model portfolio and all of our top picks.

We also have Crypto 101 University, where we have hours and hours and hours of written and
video content that explains blockchain and explains cryptocurrency in a very bite-sized and easy
to understand way. And we have a weekly newsletter that goes out in quarterly state of crypto
addresses that go out. There’s just a ton of value packed into this every which way.
So I want you guys first to go to crypto101insider.com today, if you haven’t already. I also want
to remind you guys that Pizza Mind and I recently just finished a book. It took 11 months of our
lives to write and we’re calling it Crypto Revolution: Your Guide to the Future of Money.
We walk you through this fascinating world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain and its part
history book, its part instructional guide, and it’s going to really show you guys why
cryptocurrencies are globally disruptive and how they’re going to actually change in real life and
in real terms, the way that we buy and sell and even live. We include a bunch of how-tos on
getting started with your first exchanges.

We give you tips on how to safely buy and sell in store cryptocurrencies, as well as how do we
evaluate potentially good cryptocurrencies. And the best part of the books is that we’re giving it
away for free. All you have to do is pay for shipping and handling. So go to
cryptorevolution.com and pick up your copy today.

All right, all of you good wonderful citizens and a lot of crusaders here of Crypt Nation, a lot of
people trying to usher in this whole new crypto revolution, welcome back to another
action-packed episode of the crypto 101 podcast with your beloved hosts Bryce and Pizza Mind.
Pizza Mind, let’s touch base baby. How are you doing?

Aaron: And that’s not to exclude our dual citizens that are also members of altcoinalert.com. So
welcome everyone. I’m doing great today. We’re seeing so many cool things popping up in the
world right now. They say necessity is the mother of invention and we’ve had so many things we
were comfortable with that were used to just take it away from us out of nowhere by this
covid-19 pandemic.

With its created opportunities, opportunities for reconnecting with our neighbors with ourselves
and noticing what we shouldn’t be connected with which is banks which is other very once
trusted social platforms and institutions that are now blocking certain news and censoring certain
people that are not going with the popular narrative and more and more people are waking up to
this now and that creates opportunities for new sources of information, new trusted platforms,
and there is a huge race to become the new established number one credible source that deserves
to be so with us today we have Nir Kebassa, the founder and CEO of Yup. Nir, welcome to the
crypto 101 podcast.

Nir: Thank you very much guys for having me. Hope everything is going well.

Bryce: Life is good. Are you calling in from by the way? New York? Was it?

Nir: Yes, New York, West Village. hell of a time to be in New York. I’m actually loving it.
Things are starting to open back up and you know people talk about New York being dead, but I
haven’t seen that yet. It’s pretty fun and free out here in West Village currently.

Bryce: Do you mean the news is painting an inaccurate picture of New York City?

Nir: Crazy.

Bryce: In out here.

Nir: Crazy thought yeah. Yeah, you know it definitely when I have friends who come back they
feel like they’re about to enter a war zone and they’re surprised to see that things are pretty much
the way that they were a lot more open seating and social distancing of course, but yeah, it’s
definitely a beautiful summer

Bryce: Good. It’s really good to hear. Yeah. I feel like you know people are just naturally
emotional. They’re naturally just reactive and so they always anticipate the worst and in our
minds whether it’s you know, whatever it is, right you always like for me I’m thinking like, oh,
what’s the worst possible thing? That might potentially be happening like that’s happening for
sure.

Aaron: I do, I sleep under a desk now. I move my bed and everything.

Nir: Yeah, and you know subconsciously that’s also the content that we want to consume right?
So when you hear about a story of stability or progress within a specific neighborhood in New
York City, that’s not what kind of get a lot of attraction, that’s not what’s going to get a lot of
eyeballs. You want to hear about the looting you want to hear about the crime or the instability
or whatever it may be.

Bryce: It’s a morbid big curiosity. It’s that fear-mongering that the media just does right it preys
on us because we always have this curiosity about like, oh, I want to know something exciting
and something devilish and all these kinds of things and it’s just a subconscious thing man, it’s
just the craziest stuff.

Nir: For sure.

Bryce: But Nir you’ve got a really interesting background. I remember when I first met you I
was just impressed because I had never met anybody and I hope I’m allowed to say this. If not,
I’ll edit it out. But a member of the Isreali intelligence community and that was kind of how you
first, you know your first foray here into computer science and all sorts of different stuff like
that. So just before we even dive into the amazing just beautiful awesome platform that Yup is
and how it’s changing media and consumption of social media and stuff like that.
Let’s dive into who you are and kind of your journey to lead you to founding Yup.

Nir: Definitely, I would love to so I’m Israeli-American, sort of spent half of my life in Israel
have a my life here sort of going back and forth. I would say even Israeli New Yorkers and spent
most of my time in the US and New York and always been sort of in both worlds, always seen
myself as sort of an international person and always very curious and in things like computer
science, game theory in particular around economics and a lot of politics as well. And so being
an Israeli I served in the Israeli Army and was very lucky to have the opportunity to work on
field intelligence and not just field intelligence. But in very controversial areas around Israel.
I was the kind of person who felt like I myself was in a bubble and Israeli, you know, upper class
bubble of how you see the world how you see the conflict and definitely, you know part of my
goal and entering the military was to burst that bubble and see how things are really functioning
at the most controversial places. So now I have the opportunity to serve as a sergeant both in the
operation in the Gaza Strip in 2014 and then afterwards as an officer and as a commander, you
know different terms in Israel as a commander in the West Bank and both of those were very
eye-opening for me in terms of understanding my own identity, understanding my people and the
and the news that we face. It really did burst that bubble for me and I learned a lot in that time,
you know being in the intelligence community, I had a lot of friends who are very involved in
cyber security and cryptography and were extremely passionate about Bitcoin and a little bit of
Ethereum at that time.

While I was in the army. I had the opportunity to serve, learn these things to it to a basic degree
and invest in them and sort of understand what’s going on where I was really curious about what
was going on here, but really didn’t understand the technology to the fullest extent yet. It was
when I got out of the military and started studying at Columbia which happen summer of 2016 is
really what I would say, I went fully into that rabbit hole started hanging out around people who
are very passionate about web3 and really, you know, what hooked for me was having
decentralized organization.

The whole concept of governance on chain that was sort of controlled by the people. I found to
be super interesting. I really, you know, it was driven to the economic sort of almost capitalist
primitives that make up the blockchain technology. But how other than you is for a lot of
humanitarian purposes and a lot of fairness and transparency involved with them and
democratization. For me, that was just a beautiful mix and the kind of thing that I wanted to put
my whole life into and since then really spend a lot of time in the space in my whole sort of four
years at Columbia was primarily, you know, surrounding crypto. I had the opportunity to be a
partner in a small BC and consulting firm. We invested in a lot of early stage crypto projects
both coming out of Israel and the US and that really, you know opened my eyes to how you look
at these startups and how you try to evaluate them. That went incredibly well, but I would say a
lot of that has to do with where the market was in 2016 to 2017.

And around late 2017, I decided that would make a lot more sense for me to almost do a 180 and
focus on the academics around what’s going around the space and sort of understand it better
myself. I felt like people were looking at me as an expert in something that I myself did not
know the depth that I would like to and really saw the opportunity to not only be to learn from
the technology from an academic standpoint, but actually contribute to that at the at the college
level because Colombia and other universities really being slow to start a lot of robust and
sophisticated education platforms or programs around blockchain.

So at the time I was elected president of lecturing at Columbia, sort of an organization on
campus that does all things in crypto and through that got really involved with anything watching
related on campus. I was lucky enough to be a teacher’s assistant of the first blockchain tech
class in the electrical engineering department.

I had the opportunity to be a mentor for startups in the Columbia IBM blockchain accelerator.
Our organization blockchain at Columbia also ran various lecture series and courses especially
before Columbia had enough classes people would really come to these and try to learn as much
as possible from these with a lot of great guest lectures and so on and so forth and just generally
throwing events on campus that really allowed me to dive deep into this community and really
know a lot of people in this space which has been one of the most exciting things about it
For me I’ve been super interested in sort of the financial implications that come with crypto. But
for me the thing that really sold me in that what I’m very passionate about is these decentralized
protocols that allow you to achieve things that you just could not without them and have this
inherent value and utility for the users and participants involved.

And so that’s really where my focus is. That’s where most of my mentors and the projects that
I’m passionate about rally around and really what got me started on the on the path on the Yup.

Bryce: Very thorough background. It sounds like you’ve just you’ve come at it from so many
different angles and you are the archetype for you are the you know, kind of that poster child of
you know, you’ve got the computer science. You’ve got the economics. You’ve got the
community building; the leadership and now you’ve got Yup. So tell us Nir, what is Yup?

Nir: Certainly, so Yup is a second layer social capital protocol that reward users based on the
engagement and opinions that they give on chain and through this actually reflects and represents
influence and social capital for all participants for all data points and all urls across the web.

Bryce: I don’t think a lot of people understand what social capital is.

Nir: I’d be happy to jump into that. So essentially the way that it works is that Yup is tracking
your activity across the web. You rate things when you like them when you follow certain users
is tracking those options and you can actually do them directly from our products for from the
sides of the platforms that you love

Bryce: Like every post all that kind of stuff you’re tracking and you’re scoring.

Nir: Exactly and what other influential users engage in a similar way. They like the same piece
of content. They support the same user. They you know, they think and or rate a certain piece of
content or location in a certain way that you actually get rewarded in tokens and you actually
build influence for yourself in a particular category and so, you know just to just to take that
back a bit really.

Yup is predicated on one important insight and it’s that influence will be one of the fastest
growing asset classes of the 20s, but that market is highly inefficient so that you know, our
influence online has become this ridiculously valuable thing both from economic standpoint and
a social standpoint, but the actual market itself and the way that it functions is highly inefficient
still and you see this inefficiency sort of two main ways that I think people will understand one is
like influence is largely a liquid.

So, you know, if you’re small-time influence or let’s say you have 8,000 followers. Even you care
about your thoughts and you want to be able to monetize that but it’s not very easy for you to do
so and that is even more the case for curators rather than creators. And this is an important aspect
of what we do which is that if you’re liking things if you’re retweeting things if you’re the one
who’s rating things, there’s close to knowing for you to actually be able to monetize that and we
think that that’s really the core of the problem here.

Second that is largely mispriced. So, you know from a market standpoint the metrics of
determine the value of influence online are enormously inaccurate so actually looking and trying
to measure social value based on the amount of likes that something has received, your followers
or stream count or views is as proven to be incredibly inaccurate and largely misleading that
most of us treat those as being much more true and valuable than they actually are and that that is
sort of leading to a lot of the problems that we see around influence online. So you think about
yeah take new information. Yeah.

Bryce: Yeah, and it almost makes me think of like the black box or the kind of the shrouded veil
behind like advertising analytics, right? So if I’m an advertiser, you know, I just have to trust
essentially what the platform that I’m advertising on tells me what they how many views I got
how long the average view wasn’t all that kind of stuff, but it’s like behind a walled garden of
data. And so is Yup kind of coming at it saying like Hey, we’re going to bring down the whole
veil and everybody’s going to see everything regarding the engagement of a certain piece of
content or something like that. Am I on the right track?

Nir: Definitely an and just to touch on that wall garden thing because I think is really relevant in
this case is not only does not have a lack of transparency, but it creates misaligned incentives
where what were the platform wants and what the platform wants to display is very different than
what the user would benefit from. I think the best example of this is in 2017. Facebook was
selling more space more advertising space to more than 30 million Millennials that don’t actually
exist.

So they were actually providing like giving you space to advertise to 30 million more people that
like physically exist in the US and any given time and so a lot of that has to do with the fact that
you have this fake activity bring that down because it actually increases the numbers of
engagement and they’re going to make more money on it but you as the as the advertiser or the
marketer are being hurt by that in a very there’s really a lack of clarity there about what’s actually
going on because you’re putting the trust in Facebook to identify users to censor users to
determine the value of a user from advertising standpoint.

And we think the sort of big issues and then, you know going to the transparency point that you
made, you know, definitely a big part of what Yup is doing is actually making all that clear and
available and not just not just available, but actually legible to all participants, advertisers, other
users and so on and so forth. So it’s one thing to actually be able to see engagement. It’s another
thing to be able to understand what that means from a social value standpoint and data legibility
is definitely something that that we’re very focused on.

In addition to that for the transparency standpoint, like most marketers highlight measuring the
ROI from influenser campaigns as being their largest challenge that actually a survey were
around 78% identify that as the biggest challenge that they face despite the fact that they’ve been
tripling their spending over the last two years on influencer marketing right influencer campaign.
So you really see that lack of you know, that opaqueness around influence and that mispriced
nature of influence itself around that marketplace itself. So even without Facebook or without
deformation of Facebook or other platforms may know there just seems to be a lack of clarity in
terms of how valuable and influencer is how successful campaign has been or will be when we
launched and so on and so forth and that’s really something that we hope to tackle with this
transparency.

Aaron: Yeah, so many good points there that I just kind of want to regurgitate real quick. One of
those are the missed price extremely mispriced value of social capital that’s something that I
don’t even understand very well. For instance when Bryce and I started as the host of this
podcast, you know, it took it took a lot for me to convince me that I can actually make a living
doing this and then Joe Rogan podcast just got sold or bought or sponsored whatever for 100
million dollars.

Dave Portnoy is now visiting the freaking president of the United States, but crypto 101 here
we’ve been voted best crypto podcast for the past three years by the blockchain influencer awards
get you know, we don’t have our title belts. I don’t have my invite to you know; visit Donald
Trump in the white house. So it’s probably all got lost in the mail with all the nonsense going on
at the post office. So, you know, I’ll keep waiting. But you know, how do we really value what
we’re doing here Bryce and I do this for the love mostly, you know, it’s great that it pays our rent
on top of it. But what really is the value of bringing this information and having influence. I
know we’ve got thousands of people in crypt nation that trust us to make good decisions and
fortunately they have come our way and we do everything we can to take good care of them.
But you know, just thinking we have a rule in our group that there’s no ref. links allowed because
that’s something that is kind of a conflict of interest. But I wonder how many thousands of
people we’ve sent to Crypto.com and Coinbase and Trust wallet and Exodus, you know, which
are four platforms that we always recommend for new users. How many millions of dollars in
revenue have we generated for those companies that were not properly getting a piece of it?
Doesn’t matter. I don’t know but I’m hoping that something like Yup can become mainstream and
grow and help us understand this emerging market of influence because even those who are in
the space like me, I don’t understand it.

So in terms of like reviews and opinions and stuff we’re all used to going to Yelp to leave
reviews. How isYup the same or different compared to Yelp.

Nir: So I just wanted to touch on that point you mentioned about influence where you know, one
of the things that we think isn’t a problem as well as that there’s a generalization for a lot of these
metrics. So the amount of views that you get or likes or whatever. It may be that don’t really
allow you to express your expertise. I think this touch is on Yelp as well right so when you rate
something on Yelp there is no, it’s not taking to account how much you understand that specific
subject, right? So, for example, you guys have these followers, you have this brand, you have
this community. It would be safe to say that you should be very influential and have a large
influence on opinions that relate to crypto. And so if we were rating you know in Bitcoin cafe or
a business of some kind of released crypto on Yelp, your guys’ understanding and support within
the community and reputation when it comes to crypto but it does not do that, right?
If I go to Yelp, and I know everything about Italian restaurant because I’m an Italian chef. It’s
going to treat my rating decision to account how much I really understand that thing and my
activity and sort of track record across other platforms, right? So, you know, I could be the
biggest podcast host for everything Italian restaurants related. It’s everybody else’s and it will do
that on Google Maps and anywhere else where you have those kinds of ratings and in Yelp in
particular you have some badges.

And things that identify users a sort of more important but it’s doing that across the board, you
know, if you’re an influential person into anything about what you know about cars or mechanic
shops or whatever it is, right. So really trying to silo down influence to specific categories
expertise has an influence, you know in industry is that people have certain reputations and so
you know that really being one of the big differences the other one, you know, just talking about
this platform agnostic nature. Is that really there’s a zero sum game happening between different
platforms where you know the data that’s collected on Yelp is very different and purposely siloed
to the data that’s collected on something like Spotify for you guys or something like Twitter, you
know for you guys or other influencers and that’s by design because they really make their
money on that data and don’t like but that really hurts the user in our in our in our experience
because you really have to start from scratch in terms of building status and reputation on these
different platforms.

If you guys started rating on Yelp tomorrow you’re starting from the scraps is not very good way
for you to leverage the expertise to reputation that you have from other platforms. Actually
decentralizing this whole process puts the power in your hands where you can actually take that
influence with you take that status with you in specific learn subjects and leverage it on other
platforms without having to start from scratch. That also takes power away from the platforms
themselves, you know, for example, what we’re seeing today with TikTok. I have a lot of friends
who are TikTok influencers. We’re spending most of their time thinking about ways to convert
their followers to a different platform.

Like Instagram reels or something, you know that where they don’t have nearly as much
influence because they’re concerned that you’re not American. I’m going to get banned from
TikTok. I’m going to lose a lot of my reputation and followers that I have there. How do I
migrated that over to a different platform, you know, so that’s an example where the government
stepped in but there’s plenty of example was where the platforms themselves are making those
decisions, you know censorship on YouTube censorship on Twitter of all kinds of we’ve seen it
really takes, you know, this is a way of putting the power back into the users hands by really
making this a disintermediated platform agnostic protocol, You know really focused on the
reputation around the specific identity.

Aaron: Yeah 3rd edit it’s not just a rating system you guys have built but you’re also doing
content curation as well, which I thought was a brilliant side. So what was the thought process
behind selecting these initial categories for your feeds? There’s some really interesting stuff to be
found, especially in the brain food category.

Nir: That’s my favorite category and you know, really the idea there came mostly from users.
Users were eager to have some sort of aggregated feed not only their content the things that
they’ve liked but also other users. And from there, you know, really we got a lot of feedback that
the type of users that were very interested in you have been particularly interested in seeing these
feeds. They sort of soft content like food, you know, you think about nutrition like you shouldn’t
eat too much junk food. That’s really how we feel about content and the way that we approach
the feeds as well where you know, you should really watch what you consume in terms of
content and we felt that you know by aggregating content from different verse feeds, but that
those feeds can play certain roles and functions for users themselves. And we really look at feeds
as the way you would look at like playlist on Spotify. We think that it should be something that
is specific to a specific goal or purpose that you want and to see anything like that in social
networks where I can really choose to see, you know, maybe slightly more sophisticated
intelligent content that isn’t necessarily as entertaining or funny or easy to read or maybe I just
want to veg out with just means and more funny things.

But you know also (inaudible) function along the same lines. In the long run we hope that those
will actually be communities where certain feeds can be maintained by certain community
members and that they would earn some sort of income for content that’s rated and exposed
through those seeds. But generally it’s really about users being excited about seeing aggregated
curated content across the web from one source that really drove us to do this on the side.
I will stress the fact that your group remaining platform agnostic is super important to what we’re
doing long-term and really is what allowed us to grow, you know, significantly quickly and
provide a lot of value for users short term without having the network effects. But you know as
users ask for it will definitely be building things like feeds and curated content for them to
consume directly from Yup.

Bryce: Awesome by platform-agnostic. Do you mean like I thought you guys were built on EOS
and I kind of wanted to dive into why you guys chose? I mean actually even before we get into
like why you guys chose EOS. I mean you decided not only to create an app but a protocol with
the token attached to it. So maybe if you could explain why you went that route first and then
you know, why you chose EOS and then maybe is there some broader interoperability
conversation to be had as well?

Nir: Definitely, so we’re not really talking about platform-agnostic. We’re referring to the site’s
themselves. So we want you to still be using Twitter. We want you to still be using Yelp, but we
want to enhance those experiences and we want you to be able to earn on them. We want you to
be thinking about your reputation at stake when you’re interacting with them, but really focus on
users still being able to use the products that they love across the web and something that I think
is to is a real benefit of building on a smart contract platform for that purpose and so you know in
our decision to build a protocol in addition to an app, you know, a big part of this is really
changing the way that people think about social capital and trying to you know, decouple social
capital from physical capital and we felt that the only way to really do that is build a robust
protocol that takes into account economic games and incentivizes users to rate things accurately
regardless of the amount of money that they have and so most of these other systems that you
would see are really based on some sort of staking or betting I would say so you think about
prediction markets or whatever metallic talks a lot about doing prediction markets for curating
content, you know in those cases you really have money at stake. And the more money you have
the more influence that you have over the network. We’re trying to move to a place where you
actually have your reputation at stake so that when you rate things on Yup and others disagree
with you, you don’t lose tokens, but you actually lose influence and you lose the opportunity to
earn more tokens in the future.

That along with just essentially having like an inflation based which I think is very popular and
the right way to go in terms of token economic incentives, really make sense for us to build a
system like this. I think over the last couple months, we’ve really proved proven right about that,
you know, seeing some of the yield farming and the liquidity mining stuff that’s happening is
really not far off from what we’re doing but really serves a much different purpose and has
physical capital has take rather than Social Capital so really, you know, just looking at those
things and the way that we wanted to build it. We felt that an app will not be enough and we
needed this robust protocol that prevents against civil tax, prevents against collusion, prevents
against bribery in ways that other decentralized social networks haven’t been able to do and that
would be very important for us at the blockchain level.

We’re big believers in data autonomy, and we want users to be able to let their data as well. And
I think for that reason having a blockchain is very important. The reason that we chose EOS is
you know, despite the fact that we’re big believers in the sort of protocol on chain approach, we
are certain that this needs to be a project and in product for mainstream consumers. We want
everybody to be able to use this. We wanted to have a web to feel in the way that you interact
with it. We won’t we don’t want to deal with a lot of the friction that comes with initial
onboarding for non cryptos out of users in many other platforms.

And this has been at the core of what we do and you know, there’s several like strong business
reasons to do this besides the fact that we think it’s the right thing to do and as crypto people we
would, you know, we’d like to see the market expand but A) You know the market size is much
larger if you can really tap into consumer social, even though it may be tempting early on to
really focus on the crypto and B) You know, really what we’re trying to build here is a protocol
that you know through social consensus represents influence accurately and part of accuracy
really has to do with diversity. And so, you know, when we look at our protocol, there’s
definitely a lot of incentives and being a first mover and so we’re very cautious of all of the first
movers coming from one community.

So if we only had crypto people on it, let’s say for the first year, I think the kind of content that
you would see the way that influences has distributed would not be so far from something like
steam or voice and when we think about really representing influence across the web it’s very
important for us that we cover diverse backgrounds. We cover influencers and nano influencers
from other communities across the world, other languages, other cultures, you know, I mean, we
don’t want an Ivy League crypto, you know distribution of influence. So, you know with those
things in mind is it was very critical for us to not only build a protocol but in the way that we
launched it and our target audience be something that’s broad and diverse. Yeah.

Bryce: Fascinating man, really good stuff. And before we move into the closing questions, I’m
kind of curious just like outside of outside of Yup, what other like crypto projects or kind of
ideas are you thinking about that are just really fast. I know you mentioned yield farming. Is
there anything else that you think like, Hey that that’s really attention grabbing.

Nir: Yeah, definitely, you know, I would say in general like the yield farming stuff and DeFy in
general is something that I watch very closely but myself I am not incredibly passionate about I
think that there’s a lot of more interesting stuff really happening in the space. I’m much more on
the web through e-governance douse out of things for me. I think the most important project to
follow right now is anything coming out of protocol labs. I’m just a very big fan of the things that
they’ve done.

I think that IPFS is the coolest thing since the Ethereum and they have some work that they’ve
done around reputation mechanisms that we find to be some of the most impressive in the space.

Bryce: They have also got Filecoin that they are releasing soon. Is that right?

Nir: Exactly, yeah Filecoin which is apparently worth more than the Ethereim at the current
market cap is kind of crazy. But we spoke to how impressive this team and is really kind of the
great work that they do. Their reputation mechanism work is not nearly as well known but I think
it you know for our case is something that we definitely nerd out about this civil ID paper that
they wrote that it’s a very interesting approach and they have this source transport of open-source
reputation mechanism that they work with as well.

So, you know big fan of those kinds of things and really watching those projects closely. I’ve
been a big, you know, a big supporter and had the opportunity to advise and consult with the
team at Kleros. I think that dispute resolution is something that’s very interesting to me, really try
to solve a lot of the last mile issues and really, you know for things like sharing economies and
market places to exist in a decentralized world.

We do own some sort of distributed sort of disintermediated dispute resolution. I think the team
is really talented. A lot of economists very interesting stuff and sort of where that they’ve tried to
approach those things. And I think I think they really taken like a calm, calculated slow and
steady wins the race approach with the things that they’ve been doing. Yeah big fan of that stuff.
Aaron: Very cool. Well, we just have a few more questions before we let you get back to your
hard work today, Nir. Who’s one person you admire in the crypto space? It’s really had an
influence on you, aybe more than anyone else?

Nir: Yeah, I would have to say Santiago Siri from Democracy Earth. I’m sure maybe you guys
have heard of him maybe not but he’s very involved with like radical exchange. And anything
that Glenvale is working on all the quadratic vote doing stuff that’s going on. He was very
involved with the quadratic voting that happen with the Colorado House of Representatives so
really super interesting stuff there.

That’s really making it to the forefront. He started a party in Argentina. I believe in 2010 running
on the platform that he would enact any law based on like the online consensus of Argentinians
and really tried to bring digital voting into the Forefront before cryptos even a thing. He was
working on a project called [unintelligible] bank, which is ridiculously like close too Yup but
way early in its time like 2011 and really has been a personal mentor of mine.
I’ve had the opportunity to get breakfast with him plenty of times and really a lot of the things
that I learned in the space came from his insights particularly from a political standpoint, from a
philosophical standpoint, you know, which is kind of stuff that I’m really interested in he has this
project now Democracy Earth for those that haven’t tried I highly recommend it’s on Ethereum.
It’s similar to Aragon but more social where you really have a feed where you can survey and ask
referendums or other questions to any token holders of your token and in general just you know
superstar guide, superstar team. Yeah. I think he would be great for this podcast. Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah. No, I’d love I love to get connected with him and do a deep dive on Democracy
Earth. That sounds awesome. It’s cool. And then the other last question we have we actually
everybody that comes on the show and it’s a simple as if this was the very first podcast that
somebody was listening to you who is just entering the crypto space today? What would you
want them to know?

Nir: I think, the big message would be like blockchain is way bigger than finance and I think
really people who enter the space and don’t know anything about it and are coming in during the
ICO boom or now the sort of DeFy boom. You get the impression that really the value is from
the currencies, the tokens how you’re able to trade them maybe some, you know, some from
some financial primitives around like investing but really there’s so much more to it. And it’s
going to disrupt so many aspects of our lives now, I won’t get into it specific ones, but I think if I
had just one sentence message, it’s like blockchain is bigger than the cryptocurrencies and it’s
bigger than finance really check out the technology as a whole and especially if you’re passionate
about some of these other aspects. Yeah.

Bryce: Wow, I love that. That’s actually I mean it seems so simple and so like obvious but you’re
the first person to ever say anything even close to that and you said it so concisely so I love that
that’s awesome.

Nir: Thank you, I am excited too and I think that’s important for people to know

Bryce: Well Nir, we really really appreciate you spending this, you know half hour with us here
on the crypto 101 podcast. I really encourage anybody who’s listening to go to Yup.IO , that’s Y
U P. IO and check it out because this is going to be the future of social media, and you guys are
not going to want to miss out so Nir, until next time.

Nir: Bye Bye. Thank you guys.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

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