The Exchanges

Q Beautiful. Ben, where could people find more about you and building on top of the river protocol?

A Um, you, uh, on me, um, it's at BenRBN, uh, on, on Twitter. Um, the river protocol is river.build. You can go and look at what the protocol there is that all the documentation there. Uh, if you're just curious about like, oh, how can I create simple, you know, uh, reputation, Smart contracts, which is, I feel like the idea we've been talking about, like that, that thing is literally a hackathon thing to do the thing that we talked about with the, with, um, with the teachers. Right. And then you can just go on towns, towns.com, which is the, the, the client that we built for, for River and anyone can build a client for River actually. And if you created that smart contract on reputation, you can create a town that is gated by that reputation. All of a sudden, uh, uh, now you have, uh, uh, a social place for people who did the action, uh, and have that kind of reputation of teachers and tutor and, and students to have a place to come together and discuss and knowing that, you know, uh, they're talking to the right teachers and the students are talking to their, the student talking to the right teachers and teachers talking to the right students. And, um, also, um, to the monologue that I had right before that about value accrual, uh, space creators on towns, they have ways to, uh, uh, uh, charge for that in a way that is transparent and on on-chain. You can just say, like, hey, t…

AI assessment note: “on me, um, it's at BenRBN, uh, on, on Twitter. Um, the river protocol is river.build.”

Q Yeah. Um, okay. So if you wanted, so I, I buy the idea that this would be valuable. So Ben, how hard is it to, uh, to build something like this? And can you give us like a step-by-step on how you'd build this proof of concept?

A For proof of concept, I would start with just a set of smart contracts that is on an On an, on an L two, basically on, on, on a lay layer that is much cheaper on top of Ethereum, where you can actually create this protocol, like just exist on Ethereum and without starting a whole new backend infrastructure. And I think you can actually POC it. You can actually POC it like that. You will, you will have to be somebody who knows how to do an SDK and publish it. But I think if you can do, if you can build an SDK from, uh, A to Z, you know, and publish it, That, and in curiosity around the, the, the web three space, I would build an SDK that essentially all it does, it helps other developers integrate it to the actions that users are doing, uh, on their clients, you know, on their Tinder or any other. And when an action happened verifiably locally, uh, your SDK, uh, gets the kind of confirmation that it needs. One of the interesting thing is integrating it with passkeys, right? You got passkeys on the phone. You can store locally in the, in the local encrypted, uh, drawer of the iPhone that you can only open with your face. You can store there the key that allows for the signature for the local action, right? So you can, you can actually almost verify that an action has happened with somebody's face, which is kind of cool. Go and sign that, uh, uh, transaction on the backend on, uh,…

AI assessment note: “For proof of concept, I would start with just a set of smart contracts”

Q entire conversation in four steps. So this is what I've learned. This is what I've learned from this conversation. How to create a product people want. Number one, find inefficient markets. Number two, add a trust layer. Number three, build social. And number four, don't necessarily say it's crypto. I mean, you talked, you said the word NFT before, but it doesn't matter, right? You don't have to expose that.

A It doesn't matter, guys. It doesn't matter. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a shame that, um, I almost need to feel embarrassed when I speak to people who are not, when I speak to an audience that is not necessarily, because, you know, a lot of the Because there's so much good in it. The idea that the internet was built so fast, was built so fast, and with the idea that people wouldn't pay for it. And now we have groups of people online that are creating value every day, and because, because the inception of the internet was from the state of mind that, oh, people won't pay for it, the people who create this insane value on the internet, they work Two times harder to repackage some of the attention that they're getting and selling it in some inefficient way where they need to prove that they, they're worthy of your, your, your credit card and stuff. And, and, and I think that That must have been the way we needed the Internet to start in order to get a lot of people on board, but it is a time for us to say the Internet need to be accessible for everyone, but it shouldn't be necessarily free. There are people who are honest people who are doing day-to-day, you know, work on the Internet to bring value to their community, and their job is just, you know, it's, it's not as rewarding as it should be. It's thankless. It's exhausting. You know, and they need to almost like hustle to…

AI assessment note: “It doesn't matter, guys. It doesn't matter.”

Q to go and build this, this, this watch marketplace idea, take, uh, you know, the, the big, I think as it's called, or, or the, the commission from, or, or, or from 15% to like A dollar a transaction. How do they go? Okay. They, they build this, they build it in a month. Now they want to make a more interesting with river. What does, what does that mean?

A So, so that the fun thing is that you don't, they don't need to do a lot with, with river. So I'll, I'll explain, um, what the way you should think people should think about when I say river, you should think about it as imagine if WhatsApp was an, the backend of WhatsApp was an open protocol that is owned and operated by the groups. So anyone can build clients on it. Anyone can maintain it. Anyone can build, ah, can improve it and, and operate it. That means you, you know, you, me, anyone, not, not, not just us, the builders of the portal. If somebody wanted to create the, the, a community of, of, of, A community, a permissionless community where the people who have the most interesting watches can trade them and have reputation and they, they, they take maybe certain amount of, of, of fee just to facilitate it. What I would do, I would do, there's just one thing that they should do is create the smart contract That, uh, people can interact with and use the, uh, unique identifier of the luxury item to, uh, Get received from the smart contract, uh, the, uh, uh, digital representation in the form of NFT that, uh, that gives that, that, that basically says this person actually secured here in an encrypted way, secured here, uh, that the, all the information that's needed for some, uh, as an owner for this Rolex. Let's say you just do it for Rolex or something like that. Okay, coo…

AI assessment note: “imagine if WhatsApp was an, the backend of WhatsApp was an open protocol”

Q what you're saying is, It's interesting because you're saying like, oh, with something like this, this is going to help, like you're kind of gamifying the experience in some way where there's like levels and almost leaderboards. Um, and in some ways, right? Cause you're like, you couldn't, couldn't you use this technology to do that? And in, in which case the outcome is like a high, more retentive student.

A For sure, and I, and I think what, what I'm trying to get here, what I'm trying to get at is a lot of bad tutoring is the actual, the relationship, the fit between the teacher and the student, right? So now you, what you have, what we have now, because we don't have a way to judge that reputation of the fit, because there's no shared open databases that people can make, you know, ah, those products can make decisions or help users make decisions. Because of that, you have an inefficient market where the most excellent teachers in the world, who by definition capture a lot of students, Because they're the top of the top. Now they have much more bidders on their time and the price go up because they have, but the argument here is that instead of Greg going to Tony Robbins and get like, you know, world-class one-on-one coaching because Tony Robbins, you know, is, you know, considered world-class. My curiosity Is this is because Tony Robbins, regardless of his relationship with Greg, is a, you know, number one in his field. Let's call it like this, just for the sake of the example. The outcome that Greg is getting from having a teacher that is relationship agnostic, but the teacher is number one in, in the, in the, in his, in his, in the world. I'm curious about that outcome if I gave you A teacher that is half as good as Tony Robbins, but is world class fit to you.

AI assessment note: “what I'm trying to get at is a lot of bad tutoring is the actual, the relationship”