319: Bradley Miles Explains Social Money

Bradley Miles is the Co-founder and CEO of Roll, a platform that helps individuals create unique and branded fan-based digital currency or what they call social money. In this conversation, we discuss social money, how content is currency, what the bull case for fan-based currencies are, and how big of an opportunity this could end up being. =============================== Our second sponsor is choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Bradley Miles is the co-founder and CEO of Roll, a platform that helps individuals create unique and branded fan-based digital currency, or what they call social money. In this conversation, we discuss social money, how content is currency, what the bull case for fan-based currencies are, and how big of an opportunity this could end up being. I really enjoyed this conversation with Bradley, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:39Anthony Pompliano?

  The first is BlockFi. I'm an investor and a super happy user. They currently have three products. You can buy and sell crypto, you can deposit crypto and get a US dollar loan, or you can deposit crypto or digital dollars and earn up to 8.6% APY in their new interest-bearing accounts. No brainer if you're looking for any sort of interest. It beats every single interest rate in the legacy world. They're also running a special through the end of the month, but if you go ahead and take one of the US dollar loans using crypto as collateral, they'll give you a little boost of extra free loans with no interest. So go check it out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp.

• 1:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Our second sponsor is Choice. Super excited about these guys. Their new self-directed IRA product. If you're listening to this, you're likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too. So now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. A new self-directed IRA product that allows you to use tax-advantaged dollars to buy real Bitcoin where you hold the private keys in that IRA product. RetireWithChoice.com/pomp. Again, RetireWithChoice.com/pomp.

• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about Business, technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. If you want to click on any of the links rather than type them in, you can also go in the description and they're all there for you to click. That's it. So let's get into this episode with Bradley. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:59Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Bradley here. Super excited to talk. Thank you so much for for doing this.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, super excited. Thanks for having me.

• 3:09Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. For those that don't know you, let's start with background. Where were you born? Where'd you grow up and what'd you do before Roll?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so born in New York City, grew up just outside of the city in a small suburb called Westchester. For those familiar, it's a small one-square-mile town there called Ardsley. Went to Columbia, became pretty fascinated with venture capital, wrote a book that a lot of people read actually called Break Into VC. It's funny, a lot of Gen Z people read it now and Ping me and it's kind of how they get their associate analyst jobs. From there, worked as a entrepreneur in residence at Techstars and the founding research, I was one of the founding researchers at CoinDesk and my job was really putting together these huge reports called the

• 3:58Speaker 02

  State of Blockchain Reports after Mary Meekers State of the Internet Reports. This was around the time around, you know, maybe five researchers in this space, 2015, 2016, Ethereum blew up, did a huge report on that and really kind of never looked back.

• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so first I got to ask about writing the book. Did you self-publish it? Or did you go with like a publishing house?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a crazy story. So I won't, I won't name names, but I had a publishing deal in Canada. It's a small publishing company and they were like, oh, this is great. A soft skills book. This fits with, you know, this other guy who's also writing a book. Yeah, we'll publish it in like 2021. And this was in like 2017. And I had slowly realized that, I guess, writing a book and getting a deal was very similar to like signing to a major label or something like this where you really don't have any rights or decisions. So read literally 12 books on self-publishing, had a mini launch party on Facebook at the time.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  And just launched it, man. And it's just, it just becomes something that a bunch of people are reading that I'm pretty excited about. Yeah.

• 5:09Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. And then how'd you get the job at CoinDesk?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really good story. So I was working at a sort of an analyst associate at a firm. And this was around 2014 and we had, we were, we were all assigned sectors to sort of choose. And everyone was terrified of Bitcoin. So I just dove right in and basically chose Bitcoin as the sector I'd look, I'd look into. And at that time, so sort of 2014, there really wasn't any news sources. There were a few blogs and really just CoinDesk. So all roads really led to CoinDesk.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  At that time, in the team, there was about four people on the teams. It was Ryan Selkis, Pete Rizzo, and a few guys running ops. So literally pinged them, had a beer, jumped on, and the rest was sort of history from there.

• 6:10Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. And had you heard of Bitcoin before you decided to cover it? Or you just were intrigued the first time you heard it?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was pretty familiar, sort of started hearing about it in like 2012, 2013. But but didn't was really trying to find an excuse to to get involved. And just being the guy at a firm has always been, I kind of talk about that as an author, like a lot of books still ping me, I'm like, how do you get in the VC? And you literally just need to become the person that kind of knows topics. So becoming that person for a topic was was really interesting. I loved how I weren't really shied away from the idea of digital currency in 2014, 2015. So just saw an opportunity to dive in.

• 6:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So made a lot more sense for you to to do it. That's awesome. And so as you get to CoinDesk, you start writing these big reports. Ether and Ethereum come out. What was the general sense? Like, there's a lot of people who know that the ICO was relatively popular in terms of the buildup to it, but maybe kind of from your seat at the time. Like, what was the the things that you remember going into the ICO and then kind of the first couple of months afterwards?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was an insane time. I mean, people were, man, I can't name names. People were coming to the office that had just raised like tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars. At that time, they were all just really curious about how to get covered in CoinDesk. They wanted to be in sort of our reports. And my job also at the time was really looking into these things, things like Waves and sort of other blockchains that were sort of coming out and sort of seeing what's going on. It was, it was, I was pretty much the Wild West. You know, just kind of like watching a John Wayne movie or something and just seeing all this, this sort of action happen.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  You really couldn't necessarily tell the difference between sort of an Ethereum or Waves at the time. It was kind of, it's kind of pretty difficult. But but eventually, you know, all the smoke cleared. I started diving a little deeper after the Ethereum hard fork. I had to write a piece on like Ethereum Classic and the differences. And was just pretty fascinated about that. The Dow came out and yeah, formally decided to start building on top of Ethereum around 2017.

• 8:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And did you always know that you wanted to go and build a company? Or was it something that as you just learned more about the technology, you eventually said, hey, this is, this is something that I should go do?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yes, that's another insane story. So, so basically I was at CoinDesk, wrote the book and effectively the book did so well that I basically went on, needed to go on a book tour and I spoke at around 20 colleges. And because of the nature of the book, Breaking Into Venture Capital, a lot of investors just started pinging me. I'm like, who the fuck are you? Like, how did you write this book? What's going on? And I got invited to a lot of panels that I probably shouldn't have been on, but jumped on them anyway. So one of those panels was with Alex Isgold, is a former manager of Techstars New York and now runs a firm called 2048 VC.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Had dinner with him and basically made me an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars. It was the first check into me as the only kind of person at the company. And then sort of grew all from there.

• 9:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so what, when you walk in day one entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, like what did you want to build? Did you have any idea? And then kind of how did you get from there to here?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll basically phrase that by saying I, there was this one guy Goldman Sachs that,

• 9:55Speaker 02

  yeah, there was this one guy at a bank that kind of came into CoinDesk. And we're just really talking about sort of the advisory market and just sort of what was going on in crypto. And I was really just a fly on the wall in the room and really just thought, man, I could eat this guy's lunch. I know most of the people in this space. I know how to raise and all these things. So the very first idea, so sort of like the first few months, was pretty fascinated by the idea of starting an advisory group and really wanted to start this sort of consulting firm that could sort of separate sort of, sort of the tier one companies from the tier two companies that are kind of raising. So that was the initial impetus when I jumped into Techstars

• 10:36Speaker 02

  and then raised a sort of a small round off that and pivoted to ROLL.

• 10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so what is ROLL today?

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if I were to tell you in 2010 that the next 10 years would basically generate hundreds of billions of dollars in value for user-generated content, you know, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc., that would have been unfathomable. So that's gonna, our thesis is that's gonna repeat itself in a new way. So user-generated content is gonna jump into the next phase, user-generated currency, or what Roll calls "social money." So Roll is really a blockchain-based network that allows anyone to create, distribute,

• 11:27Speaker 02

  now invest and trade their own social money. So these are branded Ethereum tokens. We've made it literally as simple as clicking a button to sort of sign up. There's over, there's close to 200 communities on the network now. It's around 10,000 people that hold social money. And, you know, we're just super excited about where things are going and the opportunity.

• 11:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so let's start at the core of the conversation, which is what the hell is social money?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, take you back and back again here. So the concept of social currency, let's say, is around 120 years old, right? Or social capital. This idea that every kind of individual has this, this network around them, and that network has this sort of, you know, almost intangible value. We sort of carry this in like a philosophical sense. So what Ethereum uniquely allows you to do is turn this cultural primitive now into a digital and financial primitive. So the network value that, let's say, you have, starting a podcast and sort of, you know, a Substack and having this presence, the idea is you could effectively make that fungible

• 12:41Speaker 02

  and tradable and sendable through Ethereum. And then for us, we see this really as a mass adoption primitive. In the future, we see many people having their own currencies. So we wanted to create a term that was super friendly, almost as friendly as ice cream, two words that people just like next to each other. And this effectively became social money. So social money are branded Ethereum tokens, named after individuals and communities, and, yeah.

• 13:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so would it be fair to say that this is analogous to like Amazon gift cards, right, where it's a branded currency that can be used within that network? Or is that something that would be a little bit inaccurate?

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we adopt a lot of language on ROLL. So if you go to ROLL right now, social money can be earned, it can be redeemed. But Ethereum adds these amazing benefits. I mean, first of all, social money now becomes interoperable across systems, right? And so there's social money on blockchain platforms like Uniswap. So social money is traded every day. People exchange it for different NFTs or collectibles. So it's sent all the time on OpenSea. There's folks that use it on Patreon and Twitch and Instagram and Twitter. So the idea of creating this interoperable, auditable system where the value could be

• 14:08Speaker 02

  integrated into different platforms is really special because all of a sudden you're not just on the network, you become the network. And philosophically, that's why people we think are coming to ROLL. They never really have their own money. And that's just the lead in. But philosophically, the sell is, once you have your own money, you can create your own rules and become the network. And it's a very new value prop that we think is unique for this decade.

• 14:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So help me understand, like, why do I, let's say, if I'm X person running a community, right? Let's just say it's, I don't know, whatever community. Why do I need my own currency versus just use whether it's fiat currency or one of the existing cryptocurrencies?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so fiat currency is great. For social money, we really see this as complementary. So a lot of people that have an online community, effectively, a lot of them really have their own, their own, their own culture with fan behavior. They may even have their own language with gifs and memes. What social money literally does is bring economics to that digital community or nation. The community now has its own money and its own sense of belonging. And what happens here is social money really opens up new feature sets, right? The community itself can be traded. It could exist on many platforms while being sort of independent of all platforms as well.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And it's an amazing tool to really start incentivizing your community, right? So if there's something you want to do, whether it's sort of more subscriptions on YouTube or more comments on Substack, you can literally, like a new web superpower, generate that type of activity directly towards those actions with your social money.

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so I guess part of this is it's less about the money and it's more about the social component, the branding, et cetera. Like the monetary policy, if you will, is not the focus. It's much more around how do you use this new exchange of value in a community to get people to kind of stay locked in, be much more engaged, to participate, earn things, all of that type of stuff. Is that fair?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So we're onboarding entirely new communities in this sort of completely new way. And, you know, we've made the economics as simple as, you know, Twitter has made, you know, character counts, right? So Twitter has a 280-character max. Roll has a 10 million unit of social money maximum supply. And so every person that comes on Roll doesn't need to do any mental math or anything like this. They'll come on and know that they have a 10 million supply. They'll get 2 million on day one, and so the rest will be released over time. Yeah, absolutely. You're able to now sort of send your social money across platforms, have it be spent on different products and create different ways for it to be earned.

• 17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So if I wanted to create, let's say, a POMP coin, right? And there's 10 million POMP coins that exist in the world. Do they all hold whatever value I ascribe to them? Is there an open market that determines that value? Do kind of the users in my community or network ascribe that value? How does that work?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so first, if you created POMP, I think everyone would freak out in a really good way. You wouldn't be alone. There's a lot of people with massive communities that have just joined ROLL. Fred Wilson's testing it out with ABC. We just talked to Ja Rule. We'll sort of be doing something with him later on. And folks like Cammy Russo and sort of others that have built sizable communities around ROLL as well. What's very interesting is we basically cloned the Uniswap protocol. So we have our own Uniswap front end, which allows any sort of social money to be traded easily. And what we would do effectively, if you wanted to, is start market-making POMP, right?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  So we've done this enough that we could ascertain the value of any social money in the ballpark of, you know, an order of magnitude. So there's social money now that's worth half a million dollars as market cap. There's some that's worth a few hundred thousand. So once we sort of do that, the market is really going to tell us the value of POMP at that point, and it sort of stays there. And what we've seen is as more utility is driven towards social money, the demand for the network goes up, and that sort of increases the value of social money. So it's this idea of sort of the community is almost a form of cash flow. And if there's more demand for the community, there's more demand for your social money.

• 18:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What's like the best way you've seen it used within a community? Any examples that you can talk about in terms of just, obviously, when people hear money, they think, okay, you're paying for something or you're receiving value for something. But how have you seen this specifically used in communities you think is pretty cool?

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's several examples. So I think one of the most popular ones at Barstool Sports heard about this, a few others. So there's someone on Roll who's a young entrepreneur and sort of a community manager named Alex Massmash. And Alex raised $20,000 with his social money named Alex. So he effectively built all of his rewards on Roll, built a network, and did a formal Kickstarter-style crowdfunding and used Alex as a crowdfunding mechanism. Another engineer named Kermit did this as well. So Kermit raised around $25,000. That's an extremely interesting use case, just kind of building your own network and monetizing in this new way.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Aside from that. The people who bought the Alex token or the other one, what did they get in return? Why would they buy Alex, for example?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so buying Alex or Kermit effectively gives you a stake in that person's network. And so what that means is you now own basically a percentage of this community. And if you believe in sort of the success of this community over time, what that could effectively lead to is sort of an overwhelming growth of what the community means. And the interesting thing is, this isn't just tied to Alex or Kermit, it's tied to the currency. And what we've seen over time is the most successful social money, its utility actually

• 20:43Speaker 02

  becomes democratized. So the biggest users of Alex and Kermit aren't exactly those individuals. They're people in the community using it in the peer-to-peer way, which is sort of fascinating. So you own a piece of this of this community that can exist over time and effectively increase as the demand for the network increases.

• 21:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. And then I guess you were going on about other use cases. So you have those two folks who raised money essentially when they when they sold this. What are some of the other use cases that you've seen?

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a lady who was the very first person to issue on Roll. Her name's Laurel. I met her at BitCon. And Laurel is an influencer with over, you know, a million followers on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, has never touched Bitcoin, has never touched Ether, is crazy about her social money called Tingles. And there's around 1,000 Tingle holders in the world. Tingles is traded every day on Uniswap. And Laurel uses Tingles to incentivize the KPIs that matter to her. Laurel has an OnlyFans. She has a Patreon. She has a TikTok. She has an Instagram. She has her own app.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I'm a I'm a I'm a patron on her Patreon, so I'm on the $5 a month tier. Every month, I get a certain amount of Tingles for being a Patreon subscriber. I get I get a few thousand. If I were to increase my tier to $10 or $20, I'm going to get more Tingles from Laurel for this. And so what she's effectively doing is creating a network on top of her network with Tingles. So we've seen this with streamers. We've seen this with sort of creators. So streamers are sort of, whether it's Twitch or Mixer or DLive or any platform, the KPIs that matter to them are basically donations and subscriptions.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  So if you want to enhance those, an amazing way to do it is giving social money cash back. So streamers invented this on Roll, but literally stop the stream and just start streaming Roll and give, you know, some Pygos or Forcer or whoever the streamer is, give some social money back for those donations and subscriptions. So at large, we're really seeing social money act as a way to incentivize the KPIs that really matter to you.

• 23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Very cool. And I guess as part of this, is it all individuals so far? Or have you seen what I'll call organizations and companies start to be interested as well?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're at a fascinating turning point. So some, some, some interesting things that started happening a little while ago. Our group started approaching us and it was the first interesting thing. So there's a group called DeFi Italy. So they're a group in Italy, a meetup group, and they, they talk about DeFi. And so they minted Italia with us. And so, you know, if you want to be in Italian, you could hold some Italia and gets you access to sort of all these different things. Since then, we, we were about to make a few announcements. So Ja Rule's been a friend of the company for a while. We're pretty excited about that.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  And there's a few other platforms that effectively want to be the role of their industry. So there's people that have reached out to us from top streaming platforms. There's people that have reached out to us that are connected to festivals like South by Southwest and Coachella. There's people that have reached out to us that are connected to esports teams and people that are connected to sort of DJs, et cetera. And they want to utilize the role of infrastructure, the role of protocol to allow their platform to issue social money on behalf of their users. So if I run a popular DJ platform and Fat Boy Slims on there, or DJ Jazzy Jeff, or someone like that,

• 24:39Speaker 02

  you'll have a really simple interface already on that platform where those DJs can plug in, utilize the role protocol and issue social money on behalf of the user on other platforms. And so this is the future role we really see where

• 24:56Speaker 02

  everything touched social in the past 20 years. We think everything's kind of touched social money in, in the next 20 years.

• 25:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it's really interesting when you start to look at kind of the comparison. So take a South by Southwest. They don't necessarily have money, but they have everything from wristbands to passes and kind of all of these things that essentially give you access to events and things like that. But I can't necessarily take my wristband and exchange it in any way with either other attendees. Or people who aren't there. I'm sure there's people who go, you know, when they're done with the event and they go sell it to somebody outside so they can get into the event or whatever. But but but it sounds like really what you guys are attempting to do here is create a digital item that has both monetary value and kind of the economics behind it.

• 25:47Anthony Pompliano?

  But also has the utility that could be used, for example, getting access to an event or attending something. Or getting a piece of content or a meet and greet or something like that.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. And the opportunity is massive. I mean, just to give you sort of a sense here. By default, we've kind of become the PayPal of this concept, right? So this idea that this type of social money can be moved. Can be created and moved anywhere, anytime, to anyone all over the web, the same sort of value prop as PayPal, but for social money. And that's allowed, you know, substantial platforms to now reach out to us and create a V2 of role. Where we just become the social money web infrastructure, these massive platforms. And that's huge. And and and there's there's there's huge incentive for entrepreneurs to do this, right? To become the role of esports, the role of events, the role of, you know, fitness, et cetera.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  And so entrepreneurs are sort of reaching out to us, the way to do this. And the most exciting thing is, you know, we won't necessarily onboard like a South by Southwest or a Tribeca Film Festival or sort of a Hundred Thieves or or, you know, Fat Boy Slim. Entrepreneurs will do that through their platforms. It will literally just be the infrastructure that allows it to exist on the network.

• 27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. You mentioned a couple of people who are using it. Who's are the biggest people using it? And then give me an example of somebody, you don't have to name them, who tried this. It hasn't worked and explain why they they found it didn't work.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so some of my favorite people using Roll. It's a bit niche, but it's sort of the digital artist category. So there's these people making, you know, the whole CryptoKitties, NFT framework. There's people making, you know, provably scarce digital art through that. And they're creating social money on Roll. So my favorite is probably this guy Jeff. Goes by Skinny is from Madrid. Tattoo skulls on people's arms and backs. And he approached us and created Skull. And he makes skull-based art. And what happened next was pretty fascinating. So he offered his skull-based art on OpenSea in Skull. And what happened next is

• 28:13Speaker 02

  different games and exchanges and artists also started accepting Skull. And Skull just became this peer-to-peer thing that all of a sudden, nothing to do with this guy who created it. We started to market make Skull. People now sort of trade it every day. But you're seeing that as sort of this inevitable path, this democratization of utility. One person starts it, all of a sudden it's used for many different cases. That's been pretty fascinating. I love what's happening in sort of the newsletter community. So a lot of folks on Substack, TinyLetter, different sort of email subscription services. They're just dropping their social money at the end of a newsletter. And they're dropping like 10 or 15 different lengths.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  And you know, only the first few people can claim it. It's just sort of like Pavlovian training for people to sort of jump in and sort of collect,

• 29:04Speaker 02

  open the newsletter quickly and sort of collect social money.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  One category we're really thinking through, we just onboarded our first one is athletes. I think athletes are interesting. So we have a lot of like founders, we have a lot of engineers, a lot of community members, a lot of artistic creatives. I think it's a wide opening spot for athletes. I think what would naturally happen.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Seeing this happen right now is is people will start building platforms that are for specific groups using social money. And the idea's role would be that infrastructure. So we think there does exist a specific role based platform for streamers, for artists, for rappers, for athletes. And those are things I think we'll we'll kind of see built in the next few years, hopefully on on roles infrastructure.

• 30:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So elaborate on that a little bit, right? Like, where does all this go? Because I think a lot of people look and they say, OK, so you basically have infrastructure built. There's a couple of people who have created a couple being, you know, 200 or so people have created these social money currencies. They're using it in a various number of formats, but they're, you know, relatively small compared to the, you know, the the world, right? It's not like Kanye West or or a, you know, an NBA player or anybody yet. I think that that's kind of where you guys aspire to get to. And and there's a a strong argument as to being able to get there. But where do you see this? Let's call it, you know, 10 years from now, right? You you started out earlier talking about kind of user generated content, creating all this value that a lot of people wouldn't have expected.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that look like kind of the bull case for social money?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so at scale,

• 30:54Speaker 02

  what you'll see is content becoming currency. And so we've created this simple framework where people, you know, kind of for the first time can now come to a platform and create their own currency.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  What happens next is role just opening up its smart contracts, right? So let's say we onboard Coachella or South by Southwest. And we have such significant mind share in the idea of minting a social money for an event. And you want to mint some social money for, you know, your birthday party. Or let's say a Zoom call. It may not make sense to have the same monetary policy that, you know, Coachella has or that we currently have on roll. You may just want to create five and maybe an exclusive party. I want to create 15 or 1,000, you know, whatever. You'll actively be able To decide all of these economic parameters through other platforms will sort of integrate roles. You'll see like role parties, right? Sort of log in and kind of do it.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  So this is sort of the long tail, right? A bunch of nannies are getting together for some wine and you know, the Hamptons. They'll create a sort of a simple token for their party to kind of engage and sort of that'll be the end of it.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  At scale, I think what you'll see is the most interesting people creating completely new economies because it philosophically makes sense for them to own the value of their network. You could redefine influencer marketing in this way. Brands will effectively now want a piece of someone's currency because that's the network that the individual is saying matters the most. That's what hundreds of thousands of people are now holding and that's what exists across, let's say a TikTok or Twitter, next generation platforms. So not only will the next generation of social natively integrate this type of currency,

• 32:50Speaker 02

  but how brands communicate with people can be changed if this network shifts, right? And the paradigm becomes about the currency over the content and that's sort of the world which we see and the infrastructure we're kind of building for.

• 33:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So in that world, like how big is that, right? Is that a hundred billion dollar type economy that gets built there? Is that a trillion dollars? Is it $10 million? Like, just how do you think about scale here? And understanding that I'm basically asking you to hit a moving target 10 years out is almost an impossible task. But just kind of like today, how do you think about how big this can get from an addressable market standpoint?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's two things that role is really. So role is, one, it's web infrastructure. It's this idea that, you know, we could send pomp back and forth. And you could use role web infrastructure to send pomp from Twitch to Twitter to Shopify to Pizza Hut to the mall. And there's the underlying role protocol, really, which anyone could sort of plug Gmail could plug into writing, create a role plugin, start sending, et cetera. So as everything has sort of wrapped around social.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  If optimistically, everything then wraps around social money, we're seeing this as a potentially trillion-dollar opportunity with multiple players. And the opportunity there is owning concepts, right? What do journalist tokens look like? How are they different from DJ tokens or event tokens? That these types of categories are going to be enormous. And we're sort of the first significant player seeing that vision. I don't think we'll be the last, but we are bringing this to market in a way that the masses are reaching out. So at a protocol infrastructure level, creating a Coachella token or South by Southwest or sort of these different brands or communities. It's in a multi-trillion-dollar category.

• 34:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And I guess as part of creating that, you mentioned multiple players. Do you feel like there will be specialization around different use cases? Or do you feel like you guys can build kind of the foundational layer? And then, as you described, you'll get kind of vertical building by entrepreneurs around, you know, role parties or journalist tokens or whatever there.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think what we're seeing right now is we have such significant mind share that the different players are reaching out. But you can really unbundle a lot of things that are going to happen, right? So like right now, there's like roles like a, it was like a one-stop shop, right? So you're minting a particularly different type of currency right now. But, you know, in the next year, people may want this, you know, Chipotle-style minting process in a fast casual way. I may want, may want a minute token for my birthday party on Saturday or, you know, my relationship or is it anything, anything like this? So you'll see different minting products. You'll see this, as you said, sort of break into categories. I think those will be owned by people in those communities.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  So what will happen is someone that knows a lot of people in events will contact the blockchain first company like Roll, integrate it, and then sort of onboard those types of people. So yeah, you will see segmentation. I think roles.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Position in that to sort of mass audience is really how it moves from one platform to another, right? So if you onboard Fatboy Slim on this DJ platform, you may also be interested in streaming on Twitch. We may create a time released bot that releases, let's say, Fatboy based on sort of how long the streams are. You may also want to send it on Twitter, integrate it into a Shopify. These are all part of the world that role exists in moving social money from one place to another.

• 36:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So we've talked a lot about people who all consider the edge cases in terms of general society, right? So these are people with smaller communities, things like that. Obviously, the largest networks in the world are the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world. What is your thought process around? Do we see Facebook try to create a currency that doesn't really kind of correlate here that they went more after what I'd consider like a nation state type currency?

• 37:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitter has obviously a CEO and founder who is very bullish on Bitcoin as a currency. Do you feel like this type of social money is targeted at a different type of audience than, let's say, the Facebooks and Twitters? Or do you see a world where maybe whether it's them or other large networks, maybe Twitch or whoever says, hey, look, we actually want to create a Twitch coin, right? A Twitter coin and can use what you guys are building to do that?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the real premise or sort of why, why we're personally fascinated by a role is it flips the entire thesis of social on its head, right? Chris Dixon from Andreessen writes a little bit about this, like as a platform develops, it just ends up competing with its users and sort of cannibalizing a lot of the activity that happens. And you saw that with sort of Instagram getting rid of likes and sort of a

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Some sort of a few other things like that. And flipping that thesis on its head and allowing individuals to be the network on top of these platforms is a completely new idea. So we've seen like, they've seen like the, seen like can and props and sort of different platforms create tokens. And if that continues to happen, right, if there is a Facebook coin and a Snapchat coin,

• 38:45Speaker 02

  one isn't going to adopt the other, right? So Facebook isn't going to want to use Snapchat coin and Twitter isn't going to want to use, you know, Facebook coin. But everyone's going to want to use Kim's coin. Instagram is going to want to use it. Snapchat is going to want to use it. So imagine the top 1,000 influential people on the web having their own currency. This just becomes the way of operating and sort of, sort of filters down. So I think that's the real

• 39:18Speaker 02

  play here, instead of sort of a platform creating their own, their own currency. And yeah, I, I think that's sort of, sort of what we're after right now.

• 39:27Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that user experience look like, right? So if pretty much every network, I'm a part of every community, I'm a part of every person that I kind of subscribe to, if everyone has their own currency, like, how do I as a user manage all of that? How do I kind of think through that? Does it become overwhelming to me? What, what's kind of the thoughts there?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. So right now you can kind of think about it as, you know, thesis like, everyone that, you know, can create a YouTube channel will create a YouTube channel. So everyone that, you know, wants to create a currency will. And it'll be somewhat similar to that. It'll be somewhat similar to the people that you follow. The, the YouTube channels that you go to. You may hold, you know, 400 different currencies, but you may only actively engage in, you know, let's say 20. What's become fascinating is

• 40:16Speaker 02

  People see social money as a primitive, so this is starting to grow in a sense. And the question becomes like, what do you build on top of the social money primitive? And a lot of people are really excited about the concept of curation. How can you imagine, how can you reimagine Twitter in this version where the sort of boards are different people's currencies? And so, once you start playing around, you know, reinventing social with this new type of money, you get these really unique ideas of sort of how to play and engage in value. And I think that kind of changes who wins and sort of how they win. But generally, yeah, the process and how you associate with these currencies will be very similar to how you associate with the content around that individual.

• 41:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. And I guess if, let's say, five to 10 years from now, this is unsuccessful, meaning social money does not become a thing, what would you say is the number one reason today that you could see that happening? What like, what's the biggest risk in terms of this being unsuccessful moving forward as just an overall industry trend of social money?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I would say, right now, I'd say in the next few years, I think what we're going to see is overwhelming developer interest. I think one knack people have in on this space is sort of blockchain in general is it's almost the same, it's almost a knitting circle of the same like 20,000 people talking to each other about the same topics. You're not really seeing a lot of new energy come in, almost the same protocols are kind of using each other in sort of different ways. If there, if developer support, if developer demand sort of increases in this category and massive platforms are starting to utilize this primitive of social money, I think everyone wins, right?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  More people are using Compound, more people are using Uniswap, etc. Bringing in sort of new people, new tokens, new ideas. So I think one thing that would stop that is sort of this. Latent developer demand over time. Luckily, we're seeing that now. But if the people who run massive platforms, for some reason, don't want to integrate these sorts of ideas or be able to have their communities mint tokens. Yeah, you could see sort of a stagnation. And yeah, we're not seeing that now, but I think we do see that in the future. Probably should figure out why and to reassess how to get people excited.

• 42:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And then talk to me about the technology stack in terms of all of this right now is being built on top of Ethereum. From what I understand, do you see that being the long term strategy? Do you think that there's the possibility other things will pop up that can kind of replace that foundational blockchain? Kind of how do you think about technology stack and Ethereum versus other things?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Ethereum has a really special place in people's hearts right now. It's sort of the largest developer community. It may have surpassed Bitcoin, I'm not sure about that.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  But, you know, we're going to go where basically the developer excitement is. So we're sort of at heart, we're sort of blockchain agnostic. But, you know, we do love Ethereum as sort of our kind of introduction to sort of these types of applications. But it's, you know, it's somewhat plausible that another blockchain sort of comes in and does this. But the idea of roll sort of porting that value from one blockchain to another becomes feasible, right? There's nothing that effectively like ties roll forever to Ethereum. But yeah, we're just going to continue to build because they have the most primitives. No one needs to rebuild a Uniswap or a Compound or sort of any of these things. And we're really excited about, you know, how things are going.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  I think there's going to be some interesting things with sort of ETH2 and Layer 2 scaling. And, you know, we may adopt some of those in the future.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I gotta ask, does ETH2 ever happen?

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's a really good question. Luckily, how Roll works.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Roll works in a semi custodial fashion, so

• 44:28Speaker 02

  there's thousands of people that are sending money back and forth every day using Roll on sort of internally, and they use these links to blast them out to masses amounts of people. All of those things are sort of off chain, so sort of go back to sort of Roll's semi custodial wallet there. So for us, we really don't necessarily need ETH2 to come out. We would love it to come out to sort of enhance what's going on with us.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think it's feasible that it comes out in the next sort of two or four years.

• 45:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. What's the one thing that has surprised you since you started Roll?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Oh, hip hop culture is trying to embrace blockchain in interesting ways. So we just did this podcast with with Ja Rule, which was fascinating. He's an awesome guy. Learned about his background from Def Jam, but the conversation really turned into something really special because we saw a lot of commonalities between blockchain and hip hop, right? They both started in these, this one place, right? Hip hop in the Bronx, 1973, and you know Bitcoin blockchain with the Bitcoin white paper. And you know, somewhat centralized, and they both sort of spread out, sort of became decentralized over time to where anyone could sort of utilize the technology. And so the idea, the thesis of that, like,

• 45:55Speaker 02

  interview was like, is blockchain the next hip hop? And if so, like, what is the Def Jam moment? Where, you know, the beastie boys of blockchain comes and they run the MC where all of a sudden now hundreds of millions of people are using it. And so you're seeing a lot of cultural figures that are, you really wouldn't suspect it, but I kind of talked to them behind the scenes and they're they're in this category where they're super excited about blockchain. They just haven't found a reason to dive in. And we're seeing if you literally brand a token after their presence, it's something that they're excited about. So those conversations are are super exciting. I wouldn't expect an audience like that to embrace Roll.

• 46:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, it's a thing. I think I said this to Ben Baller once when he came on podcast. I told him that he's a disruptor. He's an entrepreneur, right? He doesn't think of himself that way, but that's what he's done his whole life is he's built things, right? And he's been innovative. And so I think that a lot of folks, especially, you know, kind of the people that you and I probably look up to as like the hip hop legends, kind of from the 80s and 90s, like, that's really what they did, right? They had no other choice. They had to innovate and build. And so it's kind of cool to see they have an interest in more technology driven stuff. We've seen it from professional athletes and all that, but seeing it from kind of the music side is surprising.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Another thing I'm excited about is just our investor base is pretty diverse in terms of where they come from. So there's folks that, you know, were their first blockchain bet. There's folks who, you know, their only other bet is Coinbase. So this is Gary Vaynerchuk and his brother AJ. They've been super supportive, seeing a long-term vision there. Spencer Dinwiddie is great, another investor, been on your show a few times. Arthur Hayes, you know, sort of names synonymous with sort of Bitcoin derivatives, built a massive business. Thinks this can be a massive business as well, all the way to just, you know, traditional investors as well.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley VC firm. So having that sort of having that sort of very investor base is pretty helpful as well.

• 48:03Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes sense. Shout out to Spencer. He's always got a, he's always got a spot in my heart.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Great guy.

• 48:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Before, before I wrap up, I asked the same two questions. First one is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Oh, you know what? I knew you were gonna ask that.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  I have several answers, but I guess I'll go with the top of mind answer. It's really hard to fire people. It's really hard to.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Have have serious conversations with people, whether it's at a founder level or a company level, or sort of anything, anything sort of concrete or difficult like that. And there's a massively successful book. I'm just saying this because I imagine people have rattled off the same sort of top entrepreneur books, so I'm gonna name a more obscure one. So this book is called Crucial Conversations. You can look it up on Amazon. Literally tells you how to start, you know, go through the messy middle and sort of end of all these very serious conversations that you need to have in a business context.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  After you read that, you just feel like you have the armor to deal with any of the crazy nonsense. Let's say your company or firm scales to like 50, 75 people. It's a lot of nonsense going on at all times. Reading that book, you'll just feel prepared for all these instances. So Crucial Conversations would be my bet.

• 49:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. A less serious question, aliens believer or non-believer?

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Oh my God, I've never been on record here. Yeah, Elon, Joe Rogan did a pretty interesting podcast with a few believers. And I do have to say that it is, it is probably likely that extraterrestrial life is out there. It's also probably likely that, you know, perhaps we're in a simulation. These are all theories that people talk about. Probabilistically, yes.

• 50:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Would you believe that aliens are real or the simulation is real? Which one do you believe more?

• 50:17Speaker 02

  We're getting in a wacky territory here, but if I have to answer, I would say that it could be possible that extraterrestrial life is running a simulation. And we are the reality TV of other areas and maybe some of the sightings that people have are sort of like the repair guys kind of coming in and kind of just like fixing the simulation and going back. But yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe that's the case.

• 50:52Anthony Pompliano?

  The aliens are just jealous that they don't have social money. That's fine.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You could ask me one question to finish up. What you got for me?

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Um.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Under what circumstances would you mint pump?

• 51:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I, for whatever reason, I knew that's what you were gonna ask me.

• 51:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I wanna see it. There's two things that I'm waiting for. One, I wanna see it used at scale in a way that gives me the confidence, it's a, it's a good investment of time, right? So the time investment is the most important thing to me. Uh, and time I use as a proxy, the more that I sink time into it, that means the more that I'm asking the community and audience to trust me that this is real, this is gonna work, it's gonna be sustainable, etc. Uh, and in this case, um, when it comes to investing, I'm like guns blazing, love to be, you know, the first or, or very early to do things.

• 51:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When it comes to the content stuff, I'm actually like very late to the game on a lot of things. Uh, it's like, I don't even have a TikTok, for example, right? Um, and, uh, some of it's by design of like, I really gotta be convinced something's worth it because I know that once I uh, decide to do something, like it is a, uh, multi-year thing. So like that, one of the things I tell everyone who wants to create content is like, hey, when you start, are you signing up for five years or 10 years? And a lot of people are like, oh, I didn't realize that. I thought I was just gonna do it for like a week. It's like, nah, you, like, this is a, this is a multi-year thing. So I think that's one. Uh, and the second thing is, uh, I don't think that I understand yet what I would do with it. And that's on me of like, I just haven't critically thought enough about like, hey, if I had this, like,

• 52:41Anthony Pompliano?

  what would I do with it? Uh, frankly, I probably would like joke around on Twitter, right? Which maybe, maybe that is a good use case. I, I, I just don't know, but um, I, I would have to think really deeply about like, if I'm going to do it. How do you do it? And I think part of, I always go back to this one principle. When I worked at Facebook, there was a saying internally that was always deliver more value than you extract, right? Or deliver more value than you deliver, or than you take. And in this case, a lot of the use cases that I see, it's probably an equal value transfer, right? It's like, I'm getting as much value as I'm giving. And so I would have to just think more critically about how do you actually use this in a way

• 53:25Anthony Pompliano?

  where the community people or the users get more value than I'm actually getting? You will be helpful to me, help thinking through that. But also, I think I just gotta sit and critically think about it. And then once I know that, and I see kind of, you know, one or two examples of it being used at scale, you'll get me.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Got it. Yeah, okay. Makes sense. Just wrapping.

• 53:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I see your wheels spinning. You're trying to think of how you could sell me as soon as we get off the call.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Well, no, just hypothetically, I think you were on our, you were on our list. You're in our, like, our top 10 of people we wanted to grab, but yeah.

• 54:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, never say never.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  No, of course.

• 54:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Listen, Brad, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. I will, where do you want people to go? Where can we send them to check out you and roll on the internet?

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So check us out at www.triroll.com. There's 10,000 people using Social Money right now. You could sign up for our beta. We're gonna open that up to the general public soon. You could follow us on Twitter at @trirollhq. Shoot us a DM or just say hi. I'm at Bradley underscore Miles underscore, if you want to say hi as well. And yeah, that's about it.

• 54:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this and we'll have to do it again in the future.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Cool, man. Yeah, this was great. Thanks for your time.