Miljan is the Founder and CEO of Primal, one of the most popular nostr and bitcoin apps in the world. His team recently launched Primal 2.0, bringing users more functionality than ever before. Bitcoin is an open protocol for money, nostr is an open protocol for speech, Primal brings the power of both into an easy to use interface for everyone.
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Miljan on Nostr: https://primal.net/miljan
EPISODE: 145
BLOCK: 872088
PRICE: 1071 sats per dollar
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Outro Music by TIP NZ: https://primal.net/p/npub1hrctsg2qwu5gsp65gvj29968z460g0th755jq92c8uaz620lewmq6qk525
(00:00:00) Bloomberg Intro with Jack Mallers
(00:04:18) Introduction
(00:06:01) Primal 2.0 Launch
(00:11:54) Advanced Search Features
(00:21:55) Primal Premium and Legends
(00:33:35) Feed Marketplace and Custom Feeds
(00:45:04) Long Form Content and Reads
(01:03:04) Explore Tab and Discovery Tools
(01:18:25) Integrated Wallet and Future Plans
(01:28:14) Nostr Adoption and Future Outlook
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Ultimately, what you've seen in terms of trading on the platform since the election?
[00:00:05] Jack Mallers:
The day post election, the Wednesday post election, our business doubled. We saw a 100% growth in Bitcoin purchases. Our customers are predominantly purchasing Bitcoin And over 90% since election are actually taking the Bitcoin off the platform and holding it in their own custody. So we're not seeing active speculative trading on gambling on this short term price. We're seeing long term accumulation on our platform. And our customers are excited. We serve Bitcoiners, and Bitcoiners are excited right now. Okay. So you're maybe supporting those that are focused purely on the ecosystem, but people are going elsewhere
[00:00:37] Unknown:
to trade, whether it's gambling or not. We now got options trading on the Bitcoin spot ETFs. What do you think of that? What do you make of this transition from, well, DeFi and and crypto into more traditional finance? Well, the last time I was on this show, I told you and Ed, which Ed, congrats, by the way. I'm thinking of you.
[00:00:53] Jack Mallers:
I told you guys I thought Bitcoin was the only money in crypto. I wasn't sold on any of the other cryptocurrencies and that my business we're predicated on Bitcoin as money and we sell our customers financial services. So if you're a customer of mine, want Bitcoin Financial Services, you wanna buy it, you wanna store it, you wanna move it, you wanna pay your bills with it, you maybe want a loan against it, these are the type of products that we want to serve our customers in the future. We do not think of ourselves as a speculative exchange. So, that's my customer base. Options, ETFs, MSTR, all of these things are pro liquidity for Bitcoin. What you want in a money or a store of value is you want it to be salable, you want it to be liquid at any point 247, 365 globally. You wanna be able to sell it. And so all of this is pro liquidity, which enhances the profile for Bitcoin to be a better asset for a government, a corporation, an individual. So everything is bullish for Bitcoin. That's what I always say. So another day, more bullish activity for the asset. Okay. I think the unique positioning on the Bitcoin strategic reserve, I think if this happens, this will be one of the most important economic announcements in US history. I think it'd be on par with 1971 and Nixon. However, what I think is not being talked about enough is it's positive. In 1933, the US had a really big economic announcement. What was it? We're taking all your gold. In 1971, the US had a really big economic announcement. What was it? We're divorcing ourselves from the gold standard so we can print money. In In 2008, the US had a really big economic announcement. What was it? It was we're bailing out all the big banks that misbehaved.
In 2025, if the US has a really big economic announcement, what is it? It's we're pro technology, we're pro innovation, What principles and morals and ethical alignment does Bitcoin have? Equal rights, equal opportunity, an open network. These are American ideals, American values. This is an asset that was accessible to the people 15 years ago that the people own. Governments only own 2, 3, 4 percent of this asset. This asset is held by the people. It acts in the best interest of the public. It's pro jobs. It's pro energy. It's pro industry. It's pro growth. And does anyone else have a plan to get us out of debt? Are we gonna start a lemonade stand out here in Times Square? No. How about the best performing asset in the history of mankind?
We lean into it. We buy it. Coinbase is an American company. Stripe's an American company. Kraken's an American company. Tether sells the US dollar. Let's support these businesses, let's support this industry. Over the last 15 years Right. The best thing you could have done is buy Bitcoin. And I think that's gonna be true for the next 1500 years. And so, as a country, I think we have a choice. I think everyone else around the world is understanding we are pro growth, pro business, pro Bitcoin as this new administration takes office, and we have to make a decision. I think the Bitcoin as this new administration takes office, and we have to make a decision. I think the worst thing we can do is not own enough. And, actually, to derisk this, we should buy some and push these American ideals in technology and innovation and growth through the best performing asset in technology in mankind.
[00:04:19] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was our boy, Jack Mallers, on Bloomberg. Absolutely crushing it. I it's, I still think that stat to me is amazing that 90% of funds on strike are withdrawn to self custody. Absolutely love to see it. Not your keys, not your coin. We have a great chat lined up today. We have Millian here from Primal. How's it going, Millian?
[00:04:59] Miljan:
Going well. Good to see you, Matt. Good to be back. Good to see our boy, Jack, crushing it on Normie TV as usual.
[00:05:08] ODELL:
Yeah. I think this is the cycle where, we just constantly have a a our friends on on mainstream news networks. They're all Bitcoin pod during bull runs, they're always turned into Bitcoin podcasts, but this time even, more so. I don't know why the live chat is only showing zaps, but, I see your live chat, Freaks. I, it's way to communicate with us is to throw, like, massive Zaps out there. It was it was kind of accidental, but if you want your message to show on screen now, you have to use the Zap. So I'm just gonna actually leave that. We're gonna be talking about Nostr today, so I feel like it's even it's even more fitting that we'll have a Zap only live chat.
Nostr, I mean, you guys have heard plenty about it. Milian here is is the founder and CEO of Primal. They're a tiny ass team, that's building one of the most popular Nostr clients. I mean, I'll start it off with the disclosure that my fund 1031 is the largest investor in Primal, proudly so. I I do not recommend Primal because we're an investor. We're an investor because it's such a good product. Like, it's just an it's an awesome app. It's an awesome team, and, they're really trying to to onboard, you know, the next a 1000000000 people into into Noster. So so I've had 1,000,000 on the show a couple times, I think, already.
But the reason we're here today is because primal 2.0 launched. So why don't we just start with that? What is primal 2.0, and why should we be excited about it?
[00:06:56] Miljan:
Yeah. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. We shipped primal 2.0, a few days ago, Thursday last week. And, Yeah. We're all still catching up on sleep, from that. I saw your announcement of it on our HR on Friday, and you did a great job there, by the way. That's a great summary of primal 2.0. My wife heard it, and she was so impressed by it. She was she thought I was important.
[00:07:23] ODELL:
Oh, there we go.
[00:07:24] Miljan:
After listening to that. So that's good. Thanks for, thanks for that. Yeah. So it's a pretty big release. It's it was a long time coming. I I heard you say, hey. These guys have been working on it for 3 months or so. And I was like, no, man. It's been 3 months that I've been telling you it's imminent. It's been, like, 3 months that I've been telling you it's 2 weeks. Fair. But, yeah, it's probably more like 8 months. And Damn. In retrospect, retrospect, probably a little bit too long. We're going to try to make, the upcoming releases a little bit more incremental because the 2 point o was, was basically maybe 3 or 4 releases rolled into 1.
So we, shipped, reads support. So long, support for long form content on Oster, kind of as a major tab. So it's a top level item. And that alone probably should have been on the release in itself. Right. If we had done it that way, we would have shipped that feature a few months ago.
[00:08:32] ODELL:
Right. I've been using it for a while now.
[00:08:35] Miljan:
Yeah. Exactly. So we kinda rolled a number of things into one massive release. So And why was that? They were kinda related to the features that we were look looking at, and, of course, it was possible to break them out and and ship them separately. But, the next big release, feature as part of the 2.0 release is the whole feed marketplace and restructuring of the app to, support basically infinite feeds. Alright? So, in primal 2.0, we we we rearchitected all of our apps, so iOS, Android, and web, in a way that the home tab and the reads tab have the ability to host infinite number of feeds. And from there but when you go to manage your feeds, you, you get to browse the feed marketplace and kind of add and remove feeds like that and reorder them. And you can set any custom feed to be your default feed and so forth.
So it felt important that to have this capability as a part of the Read's launch. It wasn't essential, but it they kinda went well together. And then we're like, okay. Since we're doing the whole feed marketplace thing, we, wanted to make it easy to for people to build their own feeds. So we really leaned into advanced search, which in itself probably should have been a release. So that's a major feature. It kinda like, things things, got out of hand, and we kind of, yeah, we packed it all into one massive release. And then, of course, on top of it all was, Primal premium, which, we launched, as a part of 2 point o.
[00:10:26] ODELL:
Yeah. So you kinda I mean, to to be fair, I was right there with you during I mean, you guys did the work. I I was just providing feedback. But I I mean, I I supported the decision to bundle it all together, because that that makes sense. But you also kinda end up in this situation where there's so much new shit now that each one is is massive in its own right. And I I feel like then it becomes a little bit hard. It's I mean and that's fine. Whatever. It's gonna take users a little bit to realize what kind of powerful new features they have available to them. And that I mean, Noster is is still incredibly young and incredibly early.
So I I guess that's fine. But, like so so it also creates some issues with this with this show because I don't know where to start. I think I and I just wanna be clear. The the one feature I really wanted him to bundle into primal 2 point o, which he hasn't yet, is integrated ZapStream. So when will we get that? Will we get that in, like, 2 weeks? Can I can people just view the stream live and primal in 2 weeks?
[00:11:40] Miljan:
Man, we we shipped such a massive release with so many features. And your first question is when something new.
[00:11:47] ODELL:
Sorry. That's my job. I just have to keep I gotta keep pushing you from the sidelines. Okay. I think we should start with I actually think the search. I think the search is a a killer feature. Let's talk about the search a little bit. What what ability have we given users in terms of search?
[00:12:03] Miljan:
So, yeah, as a part of this, 2 point o overhaul, we, kind of reimplemented big parts of our stack, including the indexing service. So completely new technology stack on the back end when it comes to, the indexer for Noster. And I believe we're still somebody should correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe primal is still the only open source indexer for Noster. So hope that we'll get more, indexers to join the party there. But, yeah, we reimplemented it in a way that made it way more powerful, way more kind of granular in terms of the types of things you could you could specify there to, to be searched.
So maybe I'll talk about search at the high level first, in in the new Primal apps. We have this kind of yeah. I'll stay humble. Definitely, is a good, good advice there. So Always good advice. Searching yeah. Always good advice for sure. Search at the high level at primal. We have this this kind of simple contextual search in any section that you're currently in. So, basically, if you're in home, tab, if you just tap on that search icon in the top right corner in the mobile app and type a quick search, it will search notes. Right. If you're in the reads tab, it will search reads. If you're in the notifications tab, it will actually search notifications.
So this is kinda like a quick and easy way to get contextual search anywhere within the app. Oh, by the way, if you're in somebody's profile screen, there's a search icon there, and you can tap on that. It will be and it will, search content posted by that user. So that kind of quick contextual search works as you'd expect. But then, when you open that search, screen, the the you can the search icon gets replaced by kind of the settings icon. And if you tap it again, you get the advanced search screen, which is, like, way more elaborate and powerful.
[00:14:13] ODELL:
So we The regular search is, like, I just wanna, like, look up a user. I wanna go to, like, Jack's profile or something. I would just quickly type in Jack. And then the advanced search is where the magic happens.
[00:14:24] Miljan:
Exactly. So exactly. So the regular search is you can look at profile up or do a simple kind of key, keyword search. But then if you want advanced search, you basically tap on that same location twice. You go top right corner, tap tap, and then all of a sudden you have the advanced, search UI. And there, you can specify all kinds of things. You can specify, first of all, the the content type that you wish searched. So you can say, you know, search for videos or images or, notes or, long form reads and things like that. So you can specify that. You can specify the list of users that should be, considered who have posted this particular content. So it's like posted by, essentially.
But you're not limited to one person. You can go and, like, add a number of profiles there. So you can kind of keep typing in. That's awesome. You can just keep adding people. Yeah. Exactly. And then so that's the posted by. And then you have replied by. So if you want to just search replies, you can say, okay. Give me, notes by, you know, that were replied to by Odell, for example. That's insane. Yeah. You can find that kind of stuff. Or either one of those could be a list. Right? So you can really, you know, make it much more interesting than that.
And then zapped by as well is is another, kind of, field where you can, set the list of people that have zapped. And think about how interesting of of a feed you might get if you, you know, say, give me all the posts posts, or notes zapped by, Jack and NVK, for example. Yeah. That's right there. I I didn't wanna say Odell because you zap a lot. So
[00:16:26] ODELL:
they don't allow it down enough.
[00:16:29] Miljan:
Right. You're one of the most prolific zappers out there. And then you can get Yeah. Go on. Go ahead. No. I mean, there's also, like,
[00:16:39] ODELL:
and we can just double get to that later. But in the explore tab, there's, like, a Zap feed, a live Zap feed, which I I absolutely love. But we're still we're talking about search. We're talking about search. Yeah. I mean, I think people don't realize with search like, one of the killer features of of x and and of Twitter before it was is the search. Like, the search is is incredibly powerful. On x, before before I left x, one of the things I love doing was I would just just retweet old, like, 5 year old posts, 6 year old posts, and people are like, how does he remember that post or whatever? It's like, no. I was good at using their search. But this search is infinitely more powerful than what is built into X right now. Presumably what is built into Facebook or TikTok, I don't know, I haven't used those in I've never used TikTok, but I haven't used Facebook in over a decade, LinkedIn. Right? The search the search is key. It's key for for discovery, and it's key to be able to interact with, you know, a global communication protocol.
[00:17:44] Miljan:
Yeah. I think we legit have the most powerful search of any social media now. That's amazing. So remember that narrative that an Oscar has a discovery problem, and who's gonna run the indexers and stuff like that? Turns out the same people who build the roads. And, yeah. So so yeah. We implemented this indexer. We're running our own indexing service, and anyone can use our code to stand up their own indexing service and, you know, tweak it the way they wish to tweak it. And there we're gonna have many index we already have many indexers running out there.
[00:18:29] ODELL:
But yeah. Just Rheinmold's indexer specifically is open source, so anyone can run one if they want to.
[00:18:35] Miljan:
Exactly. And it's it should be fairly easy to run. So, yeah. So going down the list of features there, you can also specify the scope for your search. So it could be by default, it's global. But you can say, no. Just search through my follows or just just search through my network or just search through my network interactions or my follows interactions. Meaning, that's kind of the slice of the networks. Search through all the Noster events that people I follow interacted with. So liked, zapped, replied, reposted, then, you know, any sort of reaction to it. So that's a crazy that's it's a very, interesting slice of the network because it's not precisely the content posted by your follows.
Right. It's it's content it's wider than that. It's content that your follows found interesting enough to engage with. So that produces some interesting results there. And then you can set a whole bunch of filters on the search and all of that. So, you can say minimum number of zaps or the content score, all kinds of things. So any combination of the parameters that I've just, outlined above is possible and quite easy to do within any of our apps. And then you do your search. And if you think this particular search is useful, you can save that search and save and it gets saved into your home feeds or Reeds feeds if you're searching through Reeds.
And and it becomes available to you to go to later on at any time.
[00:20:19] ODELL:
Yeah. Now you have now now that search becomes like a a feed itself, and so you can just toggle it on the top, which is awesome. Incredibly powerful. Yeah. I I wanna you said but we've heard this refrain constantly. Like, Nostar has a discovery problem. Like, I think this makes it apparent to to the deniers now that noster is a discovery solution. Like, noster is how you will be able to discover new content, important discussion, anything you want on the Internet going forward. And, you know, the status quo up until this point has been just a bunch of solid walled gardens. Like, I have no idea what the hell is going on on TikTok. I have no idea what's going on in Instagram. I have some idea of what's going on x because I get a lot of DMs about x.
But Nostr has this open protocol that is searchable. And once you provide powerful tools to users, really, the sky's the limit. Okay. Search. We nailed down search. I wanna go next to by the way, shout out Mav 21, highest Zap, in our live chat. Our live chat is at sildispatch.com/streamwith10,000 sats. There's a lot of questions rolling in, so I'm gonna use one of the questions to go to the next topic, which is Ivan is asking how I got the little gold halo around, the little gold halo around my my profile picture, which is, a Primal premium feature. So let's talk about Primal premium next.
[00:22:00] Miljan:
Okay. So with the 2 point o release, we shipped, like, a paid tier of primal, primal premium, where for $7 a month, you can get the primal name and a bunch of nostril tools. So, like, primal.net/odell
[00:22:18] ODELL:
is the primal name [email protected] for the lightning address?
[00:22:22] Miljan:
Exactly. So the primal name gives you three things itself. So it gives you a verified nonster address if you want to use it. It gives you a friendly lightning address for our kind of built in custodial lightning wallet, and it gives you that VIP profile where that you can kind of easily, link, to your profile by go by giving out a primal.net/odel. So that name get can get used in any of those scenarios. And you're not required to use, you know, the the, verified nostril address by primal. You just have that option. Same goes with the lightning address. Right. So that's primal name.
And then nostril tools, we just thought about, the types of things that would be useful to Nostra users, that Nostra users might be might find valuable enough to pay a monthly fee for. So this, currently in the first release includes things like increased media storage. So you can, you get, 10 gigabytes of storage instead of, 1 gigabyte, which you get with the free tier.
[00:23:34] ODELL:
You can post So that's if you're uploading videos or photos or whatnot?
[00:23:40] Miljan:
Right. Exactly. And you get a very nice, UI for kind of managing all the media you've uploaded. We I'm quite happy with that part of the the app. Then we give you some Nostra account backup features. So for example, we back up the contact list, like, the history of your contact list over time so that if, a client, let's say, wipes your contact list, and I think it happened to, almost everyone. It happened to me many times. Sometimes it was my own client doing that. So Noster is not immune to that. It's nice to be able to go back and see, like, the, you know, the history of your contact list. It will tell you, you know, like, on November 25th, you had 655 contacts, But on November 26th, you had now have 1.
[00:24:37] ODELL:
But, specifically, this is who you follow, not who follows you. That's right. The way Masterworks is you can only control who you follow. That's what you're updating and saving.
[00:24:50] Miljan:
Yes. So that's called the contact list. It's your follow list. It's the list of accounts you follow. So we made this, utility, essentially, that's a part of primal premium that makes it very easy to go through the history of your follow lists and kind of restore the one you think is is best. And so it's, like, 2 clicks away, for you to do. We also, fully backup your, Nostra content. So all of the Nostra events that you publish as a premium user, we keep a backup of all that content. So this includes notes, reactions, articles, anything that you publish in Noster.
And you can we provide the UI for that in the premium tier where you can kind of see the categorized, kind of list of different content that you have along with the number of events that you have in each category. And you have the ability to rebroadcast any of those categories, or you can rebroadcast all of the events. And we will rebroadcast to your list of, specified relays that you have in your in your contacts, in your kind of account settings. So let's say you wanted to keep your own backup of your content. You can just add your let's say you you wanna stand up a relay, and you can add that relay to your relay list as a right relay and push rebroadcast, and it will rebroadcast the entire history. It will copy the history of all the events that you've, published to your relay along with all the other relays that are in your list.
In the web app, we'll let you actually download, the, all your events as well. So it's kind of that was one of the open questions. Local backup. Exactly. And so that was one of the the open questions in Noster, you know, over the years where, you know, relays don't typically have SLAs. There are some premium relays out there that they might. But, typically, you know, people create accounts. They set their kind of, relays, and then they publish content, and there's no guarantee that any relay will hold any of your content for any amount of time. You know, there's some big relays like, the damos relay where Will makes a point of wiping the relay, every once in a while.
Because the point being, don't rely on me hold keeping all your stuff forever. Right. That's that's not what we, have committed to doing. And also, Noster should not be affected with these, occasions where a massive relay wipes all their content. So he wanted to put that theory to a test a couple times, I think, and he did. And everything worked as expected. So Nostra continued to function even though, the damage relay was wiped fully. So that was good. Notice any notes missing or anything. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a good test for for the network, and that was great. But as a user, you may want to get a certain level of assurance that your content will be kept by, some of the relays that you, opposed to.
So now, with Primal, we that's what we do for our premium users. We strive to kind of keep the content, like, all the content that we index, but we can't, of course, make guarantees for the entire network. It's it's crazy to be able to do that. But we do we can make those guarantees for our premium, users. Obviously, that's a much, much smaller part of the network. And for them, they get this,
[00:28:40] ODELL:
service as a part of the as a part of Primal Premium. And then UX wise, it's great. It's like literally just a single rebroadcast button. You just click that button and boom, rebroadcast.
[00:28:51] Miljan:
Yeah. And in the web app, next to that rebroadcast button, there's also a download button. So Hazard's asking what format is the download gonna be in? Do you know yet? It's JSON. Yeah. You can already try it. It's just like, you know, zipped JSON, essentially. Got it. So, if you go to if if you have Primal Premium and you use our web app now, there is the manage premium section, and one of the tabs there is, you know, content backup. So you can download that content and check it out. Marcelo's asking,
[00:29:26] ODELL:
if you miss 1 month payment in premium, do you lose your Noster address and Friendly Lightning address?
[00:29:33] Miljan:
No. So there's a 1 30 day grace period after kind of your subscription expires, during which all these things will continue to be assigned to you. But after that, your name gets released, and it becomes available to for others to register. That's how the system works currently.
[00:29:54] ODELL:
Great. And, I feel compelled to mention here, since I was so outspoken against the BlueJeck, why I think this is fundamentally different than Elon's, BlueJeck system on x, is is is two main reasons. First of all, my issue and I was very I've been very consistent on this. My issue is not the payment. I think actually more services should go to a pay model because then users are actual customers. They're your users. They're not the product that you're just trying to milk, for surveillance ad revenue. So I like I like people paying for a product. The issue with the blue check is that it has identity verification built in in a very quiet way, which is through phone number verification.
And I expect him to actually increase that verification requirements rather than decrease them. Maybe maybe I'll be proven wrong. With with primal premium, you can pay with Bitcoin. You don't have a billing address attached. You don't have a credit card attached, right? On BlueCheck, you have a phone number and a credit card attached. Neither of those are required for primal premium. And then the second piece is, it's dev it's kind of like a what you see in a lot of the shitty mobile games now, which is a pay to win model, on the in in Blue Check Land, which is if you if you pay and get verified, you will get better engagement and better reach on the platform.
While primal fundamentally does not change how people are viewing feeds and whatnot based on based on paid status. So so any user, a user that's using Amethyst that's not a Primal premium user or whatever, has the same the the the same quote, unquote reach as someone who is a primal premium user. So I think those those things make it fundamentally different. Once again, I challenge Elon to make those changes on x. I don't think he will. And instead of complaining about it, I wanted to be part of the the future that that we could build that is better, and that's why I'm here.
So with all that said, then there's another tier above this called primal legends. What is primal legends?
[00:32:11] Miljan:
If you don't mind, I'll just back up a little bit and kind of echo what you're saying there. I I think it's really important to get our own interests. Our our by saying our, I mean, primal. Primal's interests align with those of our users. The we've had questions, you know, over the past, however, many months since we launched Primal regarding how Primal was going to monetize and whether we're, like, tracking user data and where whether we're, trying to monetize user data. And even though we spelled out quite clearly in our terms of service and privacy policy that we don't monetize user data, it's kind of nice to kind of launch this paid tier where it becomes very clear what our interests are. So, our users are our customers, like you said, and, we get compensated when users find primal products and services valuable enough that they are willing to pay for them.
Therefore, we're incentivized to, wake up every morning and make the product better for our users who are our customers. So, this, kind of alignment of incentives, I think, is equally important as many other aspects, on of Noster that we talk about a lot more usually. You know, like censorship resistance and all these things. So user sovereignty, we covered that quite a bit, and, of course, they're important. But, coming up with business with ethical monetization business models, is extremely important on Noster. And, I'm I'm glad to see that there are other services out there that are essentially, looking to monetize in the same way.
I haven't seen any, I think, advertising based businesses. I'm sure there will be some eventually. But what's interesting is that they'll they'll be competing against Primal and others who are not monetizing through advertising. We were monetizing through best possible UX for our users. So Love it. Let's see what happens. I'm kind of excited.
[00:34:31] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely gonna be advertising models bolted on top of Nostr from other players. But it'll be a beautiful free market, and users will have options and and be able to choose which path they wanna go down. Okay. So can we talk about primal legends? What is primal legends?
[00:34:53] Miljan:
Let's do it. So primal legends is like a higher tier than primal premium, and, it wasn't my idea, really. I spent, some time with Gigi a couple of months ago, and he was adamant about this idea that this there's the kind of the concept there. Basically, the argument he was making was that there are people on Noster who are willing to pay way more than $7 a month, in order to support the project and that we should let them. And not only should we let them, but we should recognize them in such some kind of way. And, I'm I'm glad that he convinced me, to do this, because that's turning out to be the case. Nostr is a very, very special community.
It's it's a very special user base to build for and kinda launch products for. Nostra users yes. We're not, massive in numbers yet. You know, probably we're looking maybe a couple 100000 people who are active on Nostra. But this initial cohort of of Nostar users that we have currently are extremely passionate, extremely mission driven. Our users are as mission driven as we, the developers, are, I would say. And it's very interesting to build for this community because, like, you get, extremely competent, intelligent, high conviction people as your customers.
And, in many cases, they are quite technically savvy, so the feedback we get is is very precise many times when it comes to kind of identifying the problems and kind of making the product better. And, you know, many of them are not, like, developers themselves, and they're looking at ways to contribute to kind of growing Noster and making Noster better. And, they we already in just a few days that we've had this, available, we've, we've had more than I would expect. People kind of find this feature, which is, is not kind of super visible in the user interface. You kind of have to buy premium, and then there is, like, a link somewhere saying, hey. Are you enjoying Primal?
Find out how you can support us further. And then you click through that, and then you find this kind of legend, kind of, purchase, option and go from there. So there's a number of our users to who have found this and went ahead and, you know, bought the legend tier, just so they can support us. And, you know, the the name Legend was a little bit of a tongue in cheek kind of, kind of positioning. But now I'm like, after having interacted with some of these users, I think the label is appropriate. Like, going back and forth. No. I'm serious, man. They are, they really are legends. They're like, no. I know exactly what I'm doing. Yes. I'm, you know, this I'm overpaying for, like, 10 years of primal premium. But, like, I'm making a bet in you and your team that you guys will are going to continue building this, and I'm willing to do this.
To you know, a a few times I've heard from them, like, I'm not a developer. This is how I'm going to help. Through a master adoption to cut products and so forth. So, that's what primal legends are. And, when it comes to, you know, the the the halo that you mentioned, that's the that's the idea that Gigi was, advising us to do where we should somehow, recognize these, contributors to like, significant contributors to Primal and give them the ability to further customize their profile, and, which is optional, by the way. If if you want to not stand out, that's the default. Right? So you you can be a part of the legend here and, not stand out publicly. But then if you want to customize it, there's a pretty easy way to do so. So by becoming a legend, you get a never expiring subscription.
So you're you get a forever subscription. Lifetime subscription. And, you get more media storage and this, you know, profile customization options. And this has been we've received quite a bit of good feedback about this already. So that now we know this is a thing, and we're going to lean into it way harder. And we're already working on making, like, expanding the profile customization capabilities, not just for legends, but also for premium users. So we're going to make this awesome in the next update.
[00:40:15] ODELL:
Love it. Legendary. I, on the media piece, by the way, just out we're about to leave the premium section of the show. But on the media piece, like, to be clear, like, once you're a premium subscriber, you don't have to be a Legend subscriber. You can scroll through all of your media, and you can copy the links of the old media or you can delete media that you've already uploaded, which is just a very clean UX. I do have a question for you, and I guess I could have asked this offline. And maybe I did ask you already. It does it strip metadata when you upload a photo or video? Yeah.
Okay. So primal media servers strip metadata when you upload there. That's important, Peaks, because if you're just uploading media onto Nasr and metadata isn't being stripped, it can have, like, location information, like what device you took the photo with. I'm a crazy person, so regardless, I've just always stripped my data personally. But, yeah, that's a good that's a good practice. Okay. Are you good with us moving on from premium now?
[00:41:21] Miljan:
Sure.
[00:41:22] ODELL:
Okay. Let's go to Reeds. What is Reeds?
[00:41:26] Miljan:
So Reeds is the, is a brand new section on Primal, which covers, long form content on Nostril, long form textual content. So it's the type of content that people have usually, used applications like, Highlighter or Habla News or Yaki Hani or, I think, there was, like, a blog stack. There there are multiple Nastr clients that specialize in, long form content. So essentially, these are sub stack or medium, but with Nastr. Exactly. So I was just going to say these are, like, substack andmedium competitors. Why I think, this type of content is extremely important, on Oster is that it allows us to add nuance into the public discourse.
I think Oster has the best, foundation to become the global town square. The micro blogging type of features are already there and the the open network and, you know, every all every event getting signed that you get this sort of authenticity, as a part of it is exactly the type of foundation that's needed to for for a protocol to to become a global town square. But what's, what makes it even more powerful is when you can meaningfully integrate long form content into these these types of user experiences where, you know, there's only so much, context, and there's only so much, information you can pack in a microblogging note.
More nuanced discussions require, you know, long form content. So, at Primal, we wanted to, make long form content of 1st class citizen within the application. So, like I said, it gets its own tab. But also, we wanted to cover all of the interactions, in a way that, that they can surface into your kind of social media, micro blogging feeds as appropriate so that your your social media feeds, become a discovery mechanism for long form content. So for example, if you go through a long form content feed and you select an article, You can, you can highlight any section of the article, in primal that creates a nostril highlight event that's visible in any nostril client that supports highlight events.
But then you can select that highlight and say quote and post a note with a comment, and that will appear in your microblogging feed as a short note with a quoted highlight and the link to the long form article. So it'll be very clear to the users of your, you know, the the viewers of your, short form note what it what it is that you did there. So you highlighted some a part of the article. You had your own comment there, and you link to the article itself. So I think in the last few days since we launched, Primal 2.0 with, Reads integration, it I don't know if you would agree, Matt, but it feels like the, long form content is getting a lot more views and a lot more a lot more response.
[00:45:04] ODELL:
No one wants to leave the app. Right? You you want it all integrated. And then also just the discovery of of, you know, micro quote unquote microblogging, like tweet style feeds is is key. Right? Like, I mean and you see that, like, even when users don't have the tools, they tend to go that route where they'll they'll send out they'll send out a post that's like, check out this article with a link. Right? And to have it actually nicely integrated into the UX where it's first class citizen. I mean, I'm not a big I don't write long form, really. I just do podcasts and shitpost. But, I I can I I I I I do like consuming it and reading it and and participating in it? And that's a key element of the discovery you want it as as part of this. And this is what I think people don't realize where they say, like, Nostr is so much more than a Twitter competitor or I like I I like Nostr the protocol, but I I don't like, you know, Noster, the social aspect. And it's all it's all important together. Like, it's it's we're we're we're building we're building the network via short ship posts.
And but it all needs to be connected together. Otherwise, you don't have something that's actually useful to users.
[00:46:24] Miljan:
100%.
[00:46:27] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think the reads is pretty awesome, and I love that it's got, like, a dedicated, you know, feed system in the in the app. So you can basically, like, move into your sub stack world, or move back into your x world, which I think is very clever. I actually realized, and I know, for example, if you've been listening for a while, you know this is how I function. I move back and forth a lot. On the premium section, there's 2 things that I wanted to cover that we didn't cover. First of all, if you're a premium user you have a special relay that you have access to, right? The premium relay, which is once again like who will run the relays, right? Well, it's like if you're a paying user, you have this nice premium relay that only premium users can write to, but anyone can read from. So it doesn't mat you could be a non premium user using Domus or Amethyst or Coracle, and you can still pull from the premium relay, but only premium users are posting to it.
And then the second piece is there's some, let's just talk about for a second why why if if someone's using iOS, why can't they pay for premium with Sats in the app?
[00:47:41] Miljan:
Oh, what's the old app store rules? Yeah. Once you have once you're trying to monetize something within the app, Apple and Google won't want their cut. It's it's as simple as that. So, we do have those in app purchases. In in all honesty, they're quite convenient for the end user. You're literally in 2 taps, you become a premium subscriber. So that's nice. And then you get like, people manage so many subscriptions, and you necessarily don't want the cognitive overhead of tracking different types of UIs to cancel the subscription and so forth. So both Apple and Google do a good job, to provide users with that kind of UX.
So this is the reason why, if if you're iOS or Android and you wish to subscribe to to premium through the app, that's the only option. It's Apple Pay or Google Pay. Exactly. And then, of course, on our web app, you can pay us with SaaS directly. And it we don't say this. Well, I'm hoping it's obvious. If you have a primal premium subscription, it's active for you in all of our apps. So for example, if you use our web app to buy, primal premium, the moment you log in to any of the mobile apps, your Primal Premium, account will be active immediately.
There's nothing else for you to do.
[00:49:10] ODELL:
And if somehow you made it this far in this show and you don't know how to sign in on Primalweb, you need a, browser extension, and I recommend the no s two x extension, which is maintained by fiat jeff. So you install that extension. You put your private key in in that extent extension, and then that's how you sign in via web, which is not immediately obvious. Like, we probably should do a better job with that.
[00:49:40] Miljan:
I agree. I agree. That's one of the, parts of the primal stack that needs, the most work. You sort of need to walk people through this completely nonintuitive, concept that you need to install an extension to log in securely. We do, provide a way to, you to log in to Primal, without using an extension that's less secure, where you can kind of paste your end second, provide, kind of like a, PIN or any sort of code to encrypt that and sec locally with. But, using the extension is much more secure, and that's the recommended way. I didn't even realize you offered that. Yeah. We do. We do. Use the extension, freaks.
[00:50:29] ODELL:
No s 2 x. Okay. Next, Feed Marketplace. What is the Feed Marketplace?
[00:50:38] Miljan:
So feed marketplace is probably one of the most exciting features of of Nostra, at least to me. It's not anything that we invented at Primal. The core tech behind the feed marketplace that we plugged plugged into was invented by Pablo well over a year ago using the DVM spec. The the data vending machine spec is quite powerful. It can do all kinds of things, including creating custom feeds. So, few months after this invention, some people created some feeds, and they kind of created a spec for for kind of publishing a special event, signaling to the network. Then then now the there's this feed that exists that people can plug into.
And the feed itself just, like, gives the list of note addresses, the note IDs. That's it. And then it's up to clients to figure out what to do with those, and every client is capable of, showing a list of notes based on those IDs. So it's extremely lightweight and simple. And, it was grassroots like many great things in Oster. You know, Pablo created the spec, then some devs were tinkering with it. People created a few feeds, and then a few clients, integrated those, the kind of this into their UI. And the clients were Coracle, which is has very, kind of capable, custom feed, features.
And DVM feeds are just a subset of Coracle, you know, custom feeds. So I encourage people to check the that's quite wild what, Huddl bot came up with there. So Coracle, Amethyst, no strudel, probably some other clients that I'm not not even aware of, integrated this feed list, feed marketplace into their UIs. And then we we kind of we, from Primal, observed this thing emerging organically on Aster. And this is so magical, man. Like, it's like there's no central planning. There's no central coordination. So people come up with stuff, like Paolo, then developers either pick it up or don't.
Some things get published. A few clients find it interesting and integrate it. And next thing you know, there is maybe critical mass. And, at Primal, we just looked at this and we're like, yeah. This is exactly what we want to do. And then we leaned into it all the way from Primal. So we did 3 things to support this. The first thing is, like I already said, we rearchitected our entire application shell to be able to support any number of feeds and easy reorganization of feed and setting the default feed and all that. Like, we wanted the app itself to be capable of being fully flexible when it comes to management of feeds.
And as I mentioned, this pertains to the home tab as well as the reads tab. Then, we expose the feed marketplace user interface in within the app when you go to kind of manage your feeds. Right there, you can kind of add a custom feed, and we give you the the user the the kind of user interface to browse the feeds that have been published. So you can tap into that, get the preview of the feed. If you like what you see, you can add it to your home feeds, let's say. And then it's there. You can reorganize. You can reorder. May maybe set that as your as your main feed. So when you think about it, it's like the polar opposite of a walled garden here.
So you can literally remove all primal feeds if if you don't like them. You can go to the feed marketplace, pick the feeds you like, and set any of them as your main feed, and that's your UX on primal. It has nothing to do with what primal is, serving out in terms of feeds. That's, like, not only possible, but it's super easy to do. And then the third thing we did is since at Primal, we we we build clients and we run services, So we we create our own feeds as well. We decided that every feed that we create is, we're going to publish to the feed marketplace as well. So, and we've done that, and we're going to continue doing that. We're preparing some very interesting feeds in the coming weeks.
So, you know, be on the lookout for that. And what's nice is that we can improve or add value to the entire Nostra protocol by publishing a new feed. It comes it becomes available in Primal, but it also becomes available in any Nostra client that supports a DBM feed marketplace. So, you know, if you're using Amethyst or Coracle or Nostrudl, you have access to that. And now that we have, you know, this capability, all of these products become better overnight almost without any, additional effort required by, the developer of those clients. In fact, like, it this fact blew our mind, like, when Pablo and I were preparing to do a talk in in Riga on this specific topic.
They were having dinner, and we went to the hotel room to work on the slides. And we realized that our slides were already out of date from from from the day before because, we were going to use the no strudel client to show the list of feeds. And then we looked went to the client and we realized, oh, there's another feed. No strudel just got better while we were at dinner. And and the developer of, Nostradle Hazard was with us. So we were all having dinner, and his product got better because he supported feed marketplace at that point. So we it was one of those, like, mind blown moments. And,
[00:57:15] ODELL:
the situation I was at bed and dinner. Right?
[00:57:18] Miljan:
Yeah. You were there. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:57:20] ODELL:
Shout out Milian. He, he paid for dinner that night. I sure
[00:57:25] Miljan:
did. So, yeah, that was crazy. It it kind of, it it was one of those moments where you realize that it's the openness of the protocol that's going to make Noster win. It's I don't think it's necessarily censorship resistance and user sovereignty and all those things. Like, they are extremely important, of course. That's the the foundation and the the core user base of the protocol. Basically, everyone on us today cares about that a lot. You know, the general public doesn't necessarily yet anyway, but they do care about high quality content and and high quality apps. And we're inevitably going to have those things because of the openness of the protocol.
So can't help but, like, be bullish about this. I mean, it's basically this open verifiable
[00:58:19] ODELL:
API for the world. You can just build on it without permission. No one can stop you. Sky's the limit. And then you get all these other benefits on on top of it that that almost become like side effects. But I mean, I think that's why we've seen such a viral organic growing developer community on Nostr is because everywhere else you look, you're basically building on quicksand. But with Nostr, you're building on this incredibly strong open API, this strong foundation. I just wanna like, this is another example, by the way, of just packaging all this stuff into primal 2.0 that I I feel like people don't appreciate the power that is available here. Like, you can if you use if you use TikTok, like, the CCP chooses your algorithm. If you use Instagram or Facebook, Zuck chooses the algorithm.
If if you use x, Elon chooses the algorithm. If you use Nostr, you can choose a 1000000 different algorithms. You can choose no algorithm. You can create your own algorithm and then other people can choose it. And it doesn't matter which app you use. You have as long as the app supports these feed marketplaces, you can use it in any app. You can switch between apps and you'll get that same that that same feed that you would get otherwise. That is mind blowing. That is that is something that is feels almost impossible to overstate, and it's gonna take people some time before because it's it's a paradigm shift. Right? It's a complete fundamentally fundamentally changes how you how you view, discover content, interact with content on the Internet.
And it, like, breaks people's brains a little bit. They just don't even think that's possible.
[01:00:05] Miljan:
I agree. It's magical. And another aspect of the feed marketplace that I'm, that it's very exciting to me is that it's extremely easy to explain. And you can convey this message in 2 words, feed marketplace, and people will basically know what you mean. And it's such a crisp message that you can contrast this, against all the other closed networks. And you can say, well, you know, Twitter doesn't have and can't ever have, feed marketplace. Blue Sky, you guys are supposedly an open protocol. Where is your feed marketplace? It's it's such a simple, crisp message where you get this, you know, fundamental feature of, delivering user agency.
You get to pick your algorithm, that only Noster has. And as far as I can tell, only Noster can have. It's wild.
[01:01:11] ODELL:
The one I kind of agree it's a good name, but when I hear feed marketplace usually, when I go to a marketplace, I have to pay money for things. And so as it stands right now, all these feeds are just available for free. You know, it's you you choose your own adventure for free. Are there gonna be paid feeds as well? Is that a is that part of the spec? I don't.
[01:01:35] Miljan:
That's definitely part of the spec, and we are contemplating some feeds at primal that, might be premium only feeds. So, we'll strive to, you know, publish most feeds as free feeds because at this stage of the game, we really want everyone to be able to, you know, as many people as possible to to enjoy as many feature features as we can deliver. But it might be interesting some of specialized feeds, some feeds that, maybe are more compute intensive. We can, we already have the technology. This could be rolled out easily where that those feeds would be available to, Primal Premium users only. And then you get a situation where you might get, like, a subset of our user base who necessarily don't find Primal clients to be their kind of preferred client of choice. They might wanna use maybe Amethyst on on, Android or so forth, but they might wanna use our premium feeds.
There might be some users out there who, would be willing to pay for some, features like that and still use them outside of the Primal clients. Right. It's it's crazy that we already have users of Primal who are not using Primal clients.
[01:02:55] ODELL:
Right. That's that's fascinating. It should be interesting to see how that market develops. Okay. Next, the explore tab. Cool. What is it?
[01:03:10] Miljan:
Right. So it's another kind of top level tab in primal 2.0 just like reads tab. And the whole idea behind it was to, make Nostar content and user discovery easier. And it's still early days, but currently, it has, you know, several tabs. The default tab is the is the feed marketplace itself, which I think is appropriate because, like, if you want to explore, probably a good place to start is to look at all the feeds that people have created out there. Right. So so that's the first tab, and then you can swipe over to the people tab, which will essentially show accounts you don't follow, that have gotten some level of engagement lately, that have gotten that the follow, number delta is, significant enough to show on that list. So people who
[01:04:10] ODELL:
So there's people who I don't follow that maybe I should be following?
[01:04:15] Miljan:
We're not as smart yet to know enough about you, based on your interests or whatever to tell you who you should be following command people there. We're hoping to get there in the next release where, you know, during onboarding, you do specify the interests there, and we can, publish that event to the Noster relays so that other clients can, utilize that in a way that doesn't docks you. So we can encrypt that, we're looking at that now. We can encrypt that, data and, make each client, available aware of it who can kinda decrypt this and use it to do smart things, you know, that relate to your interests.
So it would be nice. We already have, kind of follow recommendations based on the types, the categories of content that you're interested in. During sign up, we could as that list expands, we could be smarter about it in the explore people tab to give you more relevant results. We're not there yet. So the way it currently works is we list people you don't follow, who've gotten a lot of new follows lately. And it seems to work quite well because when there's a new account or a lot of people follow them or something, you know, like, there's maybe some drama around their account or an account that's not worthy for whatever reason, they tend to pop up on that list.
And in my own usage of this feature, it kind of every time I went to that tab, there was something interesting for me to see, and, I ended up following a few people. So this is one of the common kind of original critiques of Noster going dating a few months back, you know, where people say, oh, it's impossible to find people or, you know, it's hard to figure out who to follow and so forth. So this tab of the explore section is kinda meant to improve that aspect of Nasr.
[01:06:26] ODELL:
Makes sense.
[01:06:28] Miljan:
Then the following tab is basically top Zaps, the global top zaps. I forgot if we're doing it based on the last 24 hours or 48 hours. We should really label that so people know why these things are showing up there. But, essentially, we just
[01:06:43] ODELL:
It's my favorite tab.
[01:06:45] Miljan:
Yeah? Tell me about it.
[01:06:48] ODELL:
I mean, people should zap more. Be the change you wanna see in the world. I just love scroll it it it kind of just knocks anyone who anyone who's like, no one uses Nasr, just go to the zaps tab, and you just see generational wealth being transferred. This is like freedom money being sent between strangers on the Internet. Just, like, knocks you right off on your ass.
[01:07:09] Miljan:
I agree. It's, it really and gives visibility to, the zapper. Gives visibility to the person, who got zapped, and the content they created that got zapped. So all of those three things get surfaced to the top. So you can look up those profiles. You can look up at or you can go to the note or article that was zapped. So it's a good discovery tool in all of those dimensions, and it does promote zapping, doesn't it? It makes that, like, a much more visible. And we made sure in our web app that you can link directly to any of these tabs. So any of the tabs into the, explore section, you know, if you go to, primal.net/explore and then you click on, let's say, top Zaps or Zaps, you can share that link, and it will, like, open the appropriate tab when you, when when the page loads.
[01:08:14] ODELL:
Okay. And so this I think the Zap features I mean, it and from a discovery point of view, right, like a great article, right, is if it's getting zapped a 100,000 sats, you know, that's $94 currently. Like, it's probably a pretty good article. Like, you should check it out. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense to me. What are your thoughts on people gaming that?
[01:08:35] Miljan:
Because it will be People go people gonna game that. Game. Yeah. This this is this is gonna be game. We will have to kind of fight this fight as we go. Okay. There's gonna be a lot more. Maybe. We'll see. But in the meantime, we're providing high quality signal for people. Got it.
[01:08:53] ODELL:
And we'll see how how it goes from there. Yeah. It's gonna get wild. I'm sure. I mean, like, the low IQ way of handling it, like, the left curve way of handling it is, like, if you see someone that's routinely gaming it, you just blacklist that that end pub. Yeah. That's not an ideal situation.
[01:09:11] Miljan:
No. I mean, you can also, kind of, game it in a way that you get someone else in trouble maybe or
[01:09:19] ODELL:
we'll see. Like, the thing is with, the receiver receiver the receiver is the one that's sending out the receipt. Right? Right. Exactly. So the receiver has to be in on it. So it's Everyone else is trusting the receiver. When when you, like if you open Primal and it says, I've received a 5,000 SADZ app, you're trusting me that I actually received the 5,000 SADZ app. You're not trusting the sender.
[01:09:44] Miljan:
To be more precise, you're trusting the wallet service, that the receiver is using. That because that service is creating the the receipt and publishing it. So And my son is using their own server, but yeah. Which makes sense. Exactly. So so then you can get into the reputation of different wallet services, etcetera, etcetera. So, you know Oh, fair enough. There are there are ways to deal with this. And we are, kind of I think we're still in the fuck around and find out stage of Nasr. And the this really, kind of applies to everything we covered today.
You know, like, some of our friends, were very skeptical about launching the premium tier so early, quote, unquote. Right? And, I think it it's true that the Noster user base is so small that, you know, these probably won't, like, amount to some significant revenues at this point. But we need to start we need to start, kind of, experimenting with, business models like this and learning what works and, kind of growing from there. Right? Like and I actually have a pretty good feeling about it based on how it's going so far. I love that it's all out in the open too. You know? It's just like
[01:11:07] ODELL:
many different people around the world just building out in the open and just seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, and we iterate over time. We'll figure it out. So there's I guess there's one more tab. Right? Was it the media oh, there's 2 more tabs. What's the deal with the media tab on So the media tab,
[01:11:25] Miljan:
basically lists, it's kind of like a Instagram type, UI where you would show thumbnails of either images or videos that have been posted, and we apply some sort of, logic, in terms of, like, content scores, like how popular they are and, like, when it comes to other users engaging with it. That's the sort mechanism we use there. I think it's the previous either 24 or 48 hours that we take into account there. So it should be fairly fresh when you go there. In fact, if you pull to refresh that,
[01:12:03] ODELL:
screen, you're likely to see new stuff every time. It is not like an endless scroll. Right? It's I'm looking at it right now. It's like
[01:12:12] Miljan:
At some point, it will end. But, yeah, because we do we'd, yeah, exactly. So so we don't go back in time infinitely with so it's kind of So this it wasn't be like trending. It's like trending media. Right? Or not? You can think of it that way. Although, we don't order it by content score like we do, let's say, on the trending feed. We it's if you're above a certain kind of content score threshold, I think we order it by time. So new stuff shows up at the top. Honestly, it's been a while since I looked at that, so I don't understand. Well, anyway, it's a step in the right direction. I think as
[01:12:50] ODELL:
a, like, as a protocol, like, we need to do a better job providing things for the Instagram types, right, like the the the media consumer types. I mean, Pablo just released his own Instagram specific type of client called Olas, But and and we'll get there. We'll get there. But, that's a step in the right direction. And then we have topics. What is topics?
[01:13:15] Miljan:
So topics is simply a list of, essentially hashtags that are being used in a short form notes, based on kind of their frequency of use. So you'll see things like noster, bitcoin, what's new. Whatever is topical at any given time should bubble up to the top if people are using that hashtag a lot. And then you can, click on any of those topics, and it will give you search results based on that hashtag. So if you've used primal before, primal 1.x, that screen was the the entirety of the explore screen Right. Before. And it was pretty useless, even the way, we had implemented the kind of the logic for for those, for for come coming up with the the list of topics there and ordering that wasn't that great.
So we've improved on that, and, so it should be more useful now. But the entire explore section, of course, is much more versatile.
[01:14:19] ODELL:
Makes sense. Yeah. So the whole explore tab is exactly what you would think it is. It's it's meant to aid discovery and and things you wouldn't see otherwise. I see Pseudo Carlos with a very teeny zap of 21Sats asking why not allow users to choose sorting for media? I assume this is, you know, it's just an iterative process. It's not, I've I'm like, what? Like, do you we could use the same things as, like, with the feed marketplace but with media.
[01:14:51] Miljan:
There's no reason that You can. So, there were there's the advanced search. So you can open the advanced search. You can, say search images or search videos, and then you can search your sort order. You can set filters any way you like in terms of, you know, content score or number of zaps and so forth. You can have all these settings that you can, optionally set and create the feed that you you want to see. And then you can save that feed. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:15:28] ODELL:
What about, so, like, we're we're talking about the feed marketplace stuff. Is Primal at some point in the future gonna allow people to then, like, publish a feed? Like, actually allow other people to subscribe to it?
[01:15:42] Miljan:
So currently, the only way to to publish a feed into the feed marketplace is to be a developer and create a DVM feed. And when you do that and then when you publish the appropriate nostril event, your feed will, show up in the primal feed marketplace. And maybe I'll kind of give a bit more info on that. So we have a back end service that checks these, like, the pings these all of these custom feeds. So it took a check for their health. So if a feed doesn't return any results, if it's unavailable for, a number of hours, then we we remove it automatically from the list. So you're not likely as a user to, encounter dead feeds there. That kind of it itself heals.
And then if the, if the feed comes back online, we will bring it back up. So just so you know how that works. And, to answer your question, Matt, it's the logical next step. So currently, you need to be a developer to create a DBM feed. Right. And it shows up there, so it's already a massive step. But, really, what we should make possible and easy to do is to create a custom feed by, like, any user and then publish that feed to the feed marketplace. I think there's there might be, like, some really interesting feeds that they're they're created by users. In addition to these kind of algorithmic, kind of search based feeds, I think we should also support curation based feeds where you as a user can, provide curation services.
I think this is going to be massive. And then you, you know, you may have a really good taste in science fiction or something like that. Then you create a a feed of science fiction, long form reads that's, like, super high signal. And so you can apply this to any category, you know, cooking or whatever. Right. And we'll have users who, specialize in certain kind of categories like that and create extremely high quality kind of high signal, content, which I think eventually they should be able to monetize as well.
[01:18:06] ODELL:
I love that. So that might be a premium feature because it needs to be hosted.
[01:18:11] Miljan:
We'll think this through. If if it's possible to do it, cost effectively without it being a premium feature, it'd be nice to expose the this capability to everyone.
[01:18:23] ODELL:
Awesome. Okay. The last piece I have on my nonexistent list is is the wallet. So the so Primal is, I think, unique in Nostra that it has an integrated wallet.
[01:18:39] Miljan:
No. Sorry to cut you off. There there there was a product, that launched an integrated wallet, prior to us in the name of current current app. They were the first ones to kind of integrate a wallet. It was also a custodial wallet, not in a sort of centerpiece type of manner as we did, but they definitely were ahead of us there, and they managed to get it through the App Store first. So I remember seeing this and saying, oh, this is possible. Let's see how let's see what we can do. So other than that,
[01:19:17] ODELL:
I'm trying to figure out matter. Well, how do you think about the integrated wallet? Because this is, like, one of the big people bring it up all the time, the integrated wallet, both on the positive and the negative side. How do you think about it as as the actual founder and CEO and the guy focused on shipping the ship?
[01:19:35] Miljan:
So the integrated wallet is a flagship feature of Primal. We definitely take the built in wallet very seriously to the extent that we kind of look at the wallet and all and the social media clients as kind of equal parts being a part of primal. They're both full time jobs. They're neither is a part time job, and we want to make the wallet itself as capable and as, kind of easy to use as as we can. And so far, we are getting a lot of good feedback about the wallet in terms of its usability. Many hardcore Bitcoiners actually tell me that they use it as a daily driver because it just works for them. Right. Sort of like a replacement, for wallet of Satoshi, which, by the way, when we assess the kind of technology landscape and we're trying to pick the right way to, implement the built in wallet, that market signal that, was being sent out there that, you know, the success of wallet of Satoshi was kind of very clear in terms of what the majority of the users wanted out there.
And since we wanted the wallet to be very approachable by nontechnical people, we wanted the wallet to to just, you know, work out of the box. It was not really possible to, build a self custodial lightning solution that's that was very easy to use and kind of functional from from the get go. So we decided to go with a custodial, wallet, and, we decided to partner with Strike to host the wallet back end so that we are compliant and that we, have, like, a, you know, a licensed custodian for for these funds. We don't just YOLO into custody in people's Bitcoin. And, the downside of this approach, of course, is that we had to implement, KYC Lite to be, be compliant and not have to remove the product off the market, you know, maybe a month or 2 after we launch it.
So that was my assessment, about the state of the art back, almost 2 years ago, a year and a half ago when we started considering the wallet. Things have evolved since then. So e cash is now very interesting and especially Cashew. The Cashew protocol is, really picking up, and there's a lot of this is it's like the whole ecosystem that's, developing around Cashew is quite exciting, both in terms of the development of the core protocol and the apps built on top of it and then bins that are getting stood up. So it would be great. I would love to, have the option for primal users to not use the, you know, the compliant kind of custodial solution that we have now with Strike.
I imagine that still, like, the majority of the users might go that way, but it'd be nice to have the option, to maybe somewhere, like, in a, you know, like, behind the developer flag or something like that where user users can say, no. I I want actually, better privacy here, and, I want to use a Cashew wallet. And what the the the call, scheme that Pablo came up with for nutsack where you kinda store your, Cashew tokens on relays in an encrypted matter. I think that's excellent for for this use case. So I can see us building something like that in the future when we, think we're ready and the and the the sort of Cashew ecosystem kind of grows a little bit more, it would be, that would be a great addition to Primal, I think.
[01:23:44] ODELL:
Yeah. I love that. Basically, just choose your own mint. You choose a mint on in the back end, then strike is no longer your custodian. Primal is no longer your, like, wallet partner. And then you can still just as easily zap. Because, I mean, on the positive side, it's the most seamless Zap experience. Like, just one click Zap, long hold to send a custom amount. It's just clean. It works incredibly well, because it's integrated. But, obviously, it's it it it sucks to to take user information and and tie that user information to social activity.
[01:24:27] Miljan:
Yeah. Agreed. We don't love it. And we when it comes to UX too, there's also this whole notion of, you know, with with the primal custodial solution, currently, we guarantee that your funds will be, you know we're not gonna argue. Stocks are not gonna argue. We guarantee that. We can't make those guarantees with Cashew. Right? Because, we're not going to run a Cashew Mint.
[01:24:51] ODELL:
Right. They're gonna use some other custodian. Exactly. The the cool part about Cashew is that it's an interoperable
[01:24:57] Miljan:
protocol where you can choose your own custodian and choose your own front end. Exactly. And have perfect privacy pretty much, on on the protocol. So, this is why I kind of consider this to be, like, a power user feature where it will be behind some sort of a, yes, I understand. I'm responsible for choosing my, you know, mints. And, I'm not going to hold Primal accountable if I get robbed by this other mint. All these types of things that might be super weird to normal users to kind of be subjected to. For power users, that who understand what's going on, that would be quite welcome. And, honestly, that's the type of product I would like to use, so it does make sense to have this capability eventually in Primal. And, I mean, I think it's worth noting that,
[01:25:50] ODELL:
users right now, you don't have to use the Primal Wallet. You can just you can use Primal and just completely ignore the integrated while it exists. You can set any Lightning address to receive. Right? So, like, right now, all these apps we see on screen are are coming to my npub.cashwallet, my ecash wallet. And and then on Android, you actually have Nostra Wallet Connect support. So you can actually send zaps in app with a click, without using the integrated wallet. Why doesn't I know the answer here, but why doesn't Nostra Wallet Connect exist for iOS users right now where they could use an external wallet easily for sending zaps?
[01:26:35] Miljan:
Yeah. Since the built in custodial wallet, like the the compliant custodial wallet isn't, a perfect fit for everyone out there, we decided right from the get go to implement the option to connect to an external wallet. And we implemented this across the entire primal stack. So in Android, you can use Noster Wallet connect to, to connect to a, a wallet that supports that feature. That's that's been available on Android for from day 1. On the web app, you also can use, a third party extension that has its own built in wallet, that's not a primal wallet and comes out that way. And we also implemented Noster WalletConnect on iOS.
However, we couldn't get that through App Store review. We I still don't understand why, to be honest. And Apple is a lot of times just like a black box. Yeah. You when they reject you, a lot of times you don't exact you you don't understand exactly why I rejected you. And when they accept your submission, you don't know why they accepted it sometimes too. You just kinda go with the flow. But, yeah, that's the the summary. We implemented this across the entire stack. We couldn't roll it out on iOS.
[01:27:57] ODELL:
Got it. Yep. That makes sense. At the end, I mean, building anything in the Apple Vault Garden ecosystem is a exhausting frustrating experience. I think many developers can relate. Okay. So I wanna move to high level Nostra thoughts. Where do you how how do you think about the current level of Nostra adoption, where we are in Nostra's growth? What do you think about going forward from here? Where do we stand?
[01:28:34] Miljan:
So you can look at Noster adoption in 2 different ways. You can look at it as user adoption. How many users we have? How many, you know, active users and so forth? And you can look at it from the developer adoption lens. When it comes to developer adoption, we're absolutely crushing it. I'm not aware of any, competing network that can, like, be in the same ballpark even as us on Nasr. There's so many project. There's so much as there's so much being built. Applications services are being stood up and so forth. So that's extremely bullish because the old adage goes, if you wanna know what future holds, just, look at what all the developers are doing in their spare time.
And they're all building on their apps. When it comes to user adoption, it's a bit of a different story. We don't have, big numbers in terms of absolute user kind of, accounts. Probably a couple of 100000 relatively active humans are are on Noster. There is a subset of that group that's, like, extremely active and passionate and so forth, and this is something you want to see at the early stage of any sort of product adoption and especially when it comes to a protocol. This, like, extremely passionate user base. The rider dies. The rider dies. They're here, and they're not going anywhere.
So that's that's excellent to see. And then, you know, people like to, you know we often hear some criticism in comparisons to, let's say, Blue Sky. Recently, we had, like, a lot of people sign up to Blue Sky, and the people are you know, millions of people signing up to Blue Sky in a week compared to much, much, much smaller numbers than Oster. And people ask why why this is happening. And this is just such a, wrong comparison. It's literally like comparing Venmo and Bitcoin. Well, one is a company, and the other one is a protocol that's being stood up. And when you look at the types of people and the profile of the users of Noster, like, the couple 100000 people I mentioned, well, we all hold our Noster keys.
And Noster is the only protocol, the only network where this is the case. So there's no second best. There's only Noster. If we're looking at, bootstrapping, brand new self sovereign protocol for the Internet, there's only Noster. And the trajectory is to me, it looks exactly like the way I would expect it to look at this early stage. It's like you said, the rider dies. It's the type of people who are not going away and, a ton of developers building interesting things. So it's up to us developers to make the UX better, to create the better better tools. You know? We really work around the clock. You know, like, we there there's not a lot of, time off to the not the developers' stake. We're building as fast as we can.
And I'm hoping the results are visible there because, like, for people who are taking kind of multiple touch points within Noster, like, with months in between, I'm hoping that it is very evident that, like, the the, UX and the services around it are getting much more sophisticated with every subsequent touch point. So we need to do that. And, I think we already are starting to getting to the point where you no longer need to squint to see some of these things, to see all of these different content types, being stood up on Aster and new breeds of applications that are kind of, merging and kind of, bringing together these different content types into new user experiences that are starting to be better than the legacy UX that's being offered out there. Like, I like to think that, you know, merging, microblogging, short form feeds with a long form content within the same app the way we've done at Primal, and, like, merging a wallet into the whole UX there.
We're starting to, in some aspects, overtake the feature set and the UX that's available in legacy platforms. And this is just the beginning. You know? We've been at it for almost 2 years at Primal. It was started coding in January 23. It feels like we've barely begun. And we're definitely up against, companies that have been around for 10 plus years with multibillion dollar budgets. But already in some aspects, we are we as in Noster applications are starting to look better. You know, we have better UX around, like, this kind of textual content. We have better search, and, there's still more work to do, I think, when it comes to improving the UX even more. Like, I'd like to reach, Instagram level kind of polish and performance in in Primal Apps. So there's a lot more that we need to do.
But you can you can help but be bullish about the, trajectory. So we know the apps and, like, products are rapidly getting better. We're getting more content creators interested because they see this UX and they like their content to appear there. And then they we're getting to the point where they can recommend Nostr Apps to their audiences with a straight face. Right? You can tell people, okay. Follow me on Primal or find me on Primal, and it's a pretty high chance they'll be able to download the app, get signed up, and get going. So in summary, I'm bullish about where things are going.
[01:34:58] ODELL:
Very well said. I mean, I think, well, we've made massive progress. It's obvious. And there's still a lot of work to be done. And I tend to agree with you that, people most people will not come for censorship resistance or verifiability or permissionlessness at its core. They will come because the UX is way better and the UX will be way better because of those key foundational elements. So they're definitely interconnected. There's also something, you know, where you kinda have to flip on your head how you kinda measure these things with an open protocol, which is, for example, user numbers.
Nasser is an open transparent network. Anyone can make relatively verifiable calculations on what they think user numbers are. If you're asking if if you're trying to figure out how many users of Telegram exist or how many users of X exist, you have to just blindly trust Pavel Durov or Elon Musk on how many users they say there are, like there's zero way that you can verify it.
[01:36:02] Miljan:
Or Blue Sky.
[01:36:03] ODELL:
Or Blue Sky. And there's another piece there where, these things are walled gardens for the most part. I think Blue Sky you can view without an account decently well. And TikTok, you can too because CCP wants as as many eyeballs as possible. But Instagram, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, x, you like, you can't you can't interact with that content unless you have an account. And there's been many studies that most people, the way they interact with this stuff is they're lurkers. They they rarely engage and they're just viewing. So from that perspective, I like to say that in in terms of Nostra users, we have the entire Internet connected population, 5,000,000,000 plus people, because they can just click a a primal link or an end jump link, and they can just view the content, everyone who replied, everyone who quoted it without ever having an account. Those people will never be measured, period. And then the last piece is daily active users itself is a kind of a predatory mind frame to view these things. I mean, it's literally like you're you're measuring addiction. It's a it's an addiction metric.
It it'd be like it'd be like calling, you know, heroin users, daily active users. How many daily active users do we have of this drug or that drug? But in big tech, like, it's become the the the normal metric, the normal KPI that people use to measure it. So I would push people back to like, we want people ideally and there will be plenty of people addicted to Nostr and Nostr perhaps, because, you know, it's app developers will try and make things more addictive in a lot of in a lot of situations. But I would push us as as a community to strive for experiences that could be healthier for users, that could be very useful for users, where they don't necessarily have to check it every day or scroll for 9 hours, you know, and 10 hours and try and get those scroll numbers up because the incentives can be built in a way where where you're not monetizing that attention, where you're not monetizing, surveillance data. You're not monetizing, these different dystopian big tech surveillance, corporate surveillance ad models.
So as a result, you don't necessarily need users to be addicted in order for everyone to win. So there's a lot of different things at play here. And, I know people tend to get frustrated when they see, like, the most conservative user number metrics, you know, that we see floated around. And I think a lot of times it does a little bit more harm than good. It doesn't matter, I think, in the big scheme of things, but it does, like, discover it does discourage people to a degree. And there's different elements here with that make it more challenging as an open protocol in terms of that initial push of users because the community does care so much. And I saw this with Bitcoin growing up.
You know, for instance, with bit with Bitcoin, it's way easier to onboard someone if you just recommend them a single wallet, right, If you say go use a cold card. But people feel it's that's an open protocol and you have a lot of choice. So people wanna give you, like, 10 different recommendations, and then they give you 10 different recommendations. And then as a result, the friction and overwhelmness in your head, you don't end up you don't end up, actually using something. And I think we'll start to see that with Nostra too, as it grows. Like, people will just be like, follow me on Domus, download Domus, or follow me on Primal, download Primal, and then the user will incidentally get all the knock on benefits. Like, if you have any complaints at the end of the day, like, I see some comments in there, gaslighting us a little bit in the in the live chat. And at the end of the day, the beauty of Nostr and why you can never compare it to the decisions that are made on closed big tech is that at the end of the day, if you don't like a decision that Primal makes, you can just go use another client. If you don't like a decision that Vidr makes with Amethyst, you can go use another client and you lose nothing. You have the freedom of choice, which none of them could ever provide.
Okay, that was my long rant for the day. Millian, it's been an absolute pleasure as always. I don't wanna keep you from integrating ZapStream and Primal. I know you're gonna immediately go and integrate live live video streaming directly into the client, so we'll have it in 2 weeks. Do you have any, do you have any final thoughts before we wrap?
[01:40:46] Miljan:
Sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Who needs sleep? Let's go and get more stuff. Yeah. The final thoughts, I'll just, like, riff off of what you just mentioned here. Like, the daily active user, metric is really not that relevant, let's say, for for a company like Primal anymore because we, our goal is not to create engagement. We we we don't care if you spend 5 minutes or 5 hours on Primal. It doesn't, what what we care about is how many users found Primal useful enough to, pay for the, premium subscription. That's really like, when you look at our incentives, it's about making the product useful and providing high quality signal to to and great tools to our users. If we do a good job, we get paid. It's irrelevant whether we make somebody doom scroll for 5 hours, if we are not able to do those things. So aligning these incentives is, I think, one of the keys here. I'm super excited that we are taking this path.
[01:42:01] ODELL:
Love it. Million, thank you again for joining us. I appreciate you. Keep keep crushing it. And huge shout out to the freaks who continue to support the show, whether that's through podcasting 2.0 apps or a ride or die in the live chat. Dispatch has no sponsors or ads, so you guys are what keeps the show going. So thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining, mill million million. Keep crushing it, and hopefully, I'll have you on soon again. Cheers. Same old high fats. Thank you. Always.
[01:42:44] Unknown:
Our world is chaotic, but life found its way by channeling energy to bring order to chaos. It is in our nature to fix signals amongst noise because it is through communication and exchange that we evolve beyond the darkness of chaos until the dawn of civilization. Our evolution thrives in exchange of all the info we try to convey. They flow through to the marketplace and form the signals to regulate how we coordinate where things need to be. Price speaks, so we learn to compete. This drives us to efficiently shape the world with our voice. Now let the market speak. So we build, we sow, we trade, we grow to meet our wants and needs. We specialize, drive from the mind, our creations, into reality. We make progress in our process to get more for less, advancing society. We brought forth dawn of the age of technology that harnessed the energy to reach prosperity.
Our money embodies the power to reap what we sow, so the market becomes a channel for our collective energy to flow. When value is traded for value, we are aligned and so we evolve. This is how amidst uncertainty, life continues to grow. But the dawn of tech gave rise to light speed information exchange. So to transact fast, we further abstract money from energy constraints and became more aligned on a few large entities to coordinate trade, concentrating the power, resources, and authority to create more and more of our money, distorting its signals, eroding its worth, and throwing us back into the darkness of chaos.
When we destroy the mechanism of money, we destroy our ability to navigate through uncertainty. And when we can't trade value freely and directly, we must trust the few to govern the many. What happens when all our means center around an authority? Complexity builds now coordination. Relies on conformity. Observe our thoughts, the sense of dissent and coerce our actions. Can there be true innovation when there's no freedom of expression? What happens to our voice? The ones that shape social discourse now whose ideas get created and which problems get solved. If our progress depends on hearing many sides to resolve, then why would we suppress the voice that shapes how humanity evolves? When we cut off the perspectives that make up society, we lose sight of the truth that forms our entire reality.
Each person's contribution builds up our resiliency. Did we forget these differences are what strengthens humanity? When communication breaks our words tend to silence, our acts become violent, and the world is divided, and its darkest truth is twisted by our pain and our bias, eroding the common ground, making us more and more fragile. To navigate uncertainty, we must solve for robustness, so everything gets tried and tested by various efforts until we discover the system that best coordinates us. Mirrors life's process of channeling energy to create signal from chaos. In the era of technology, we transform energy into computational power to process the noise of free markets into structured order. And just by looking at numbers, we can derive how much power is required to reduce chaos and inscribe a flow of value for order verify, that our transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust.
Transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust when we can see proof. It is real time consensus that our lines is to evolve. This is how, amidst uncertainty, our lives continue to grow when we uphold our own rules. We preserve our own work and defend our own voice, which lets the true market emerge. The strength of the design lies in each of our participation since we are the nodes that channel our energy end to end. As we claim responsibility to uphold our own rights, we radiate the power that brings our truth into light.
And when that dawn of light touches all parts of the glow and it ripples throughout society and it returns us the hope that that becomes the power that sparks humanity to thrive, that same power that fuels the creation of the mind. And when our mind and our money are truly set free and they transcend the limits of past boundaries, now knowing becomes owning and ideas become wealth. What happens now? We can all push to expand the edges of our existence and assume evolution when things are the hardest. As we head for the light, we have to push through the darkness that is in these moments. We do what we do first. We take the chaos in the darkness and use our power to create. It is in these moments when we're all in alignment and our freedom of difference ascends us to our highest limits and depth of it all. Though that hope is not gone. It is always the darkest before dawn.
Ultimately, what you've seen in terms of trading on the platform since the election?
[00:00:05] Jack Mallers:
The day post election, the Wednesday post election, our business doubled. We saw a 100% growth in Bitcoin purchases. Our customers are predominantly purchasing Bitcoin And over 90% since election are actually taking the Bitcoin off the platform and holding it in their own custody. So we're not seeing active speculative trading on gambling on this short term price. We're seeing long term accumulation on our platform. And our customers are excited. We serve Bitcoiners, and Bitcoiners are excited right now. Okay. So you're maybe supporting those that are focused purely on the ecosystem, but people are going elsewhere
[00:00:37] Unknown:
to trade, whether it's gambling or not. We now got options trading on the Bitcoin spot ETFs. What do you think of that? What do you make of this transition from, well, DeFi and and crypto into more traditional finance? Well, the last time I was on this show, I told you and Ed, which Ed, congrats, by the way. I'm thinking of you.
[00:00:53] Jack Mallers:
I told you guys I thought Bitcoin was the only money in crypto. I wasn't sold on any of the other cryptocurrencies and that my business we're predicated on Bitcoin as money and we sell our customers financial services. So if you're a customer of mine, want Bitcoin Financial Services, you wanna buy it, you wanna store it, you wanna move it, you wanna pay your bills with it, you maybe want a loan against it, these are the type of products that we want to serve our customers in the future. We do not think of ourselves as a speculative exchange. So, that's my customer base. Options, ETFs, MSTR, all of these things are pro liquidity for Bitcoin. What you want in a money or a store of value is you want it to be salable, you want it to be liquid at any point 247, 365 globally. You wanna be able to sell it. And so all of this is pro liquidity, which enhances the profile for Bitcoin to be a better asset for a government, a corporation, an individual. So everything is bullish for Bitcoin. That's what I always say. So another day, more bullish activity for the asset. Okay. I think the unique positioning on the Bitcoin strategic reserve, I think if this happens, this will be one of the most important economic announcements in US history. I think it'd be on par with 1971 and Nixon. However, what I think is not being talked about enough is it's positive. In 1933, the US had a really big economic announcement. What was it? We're taking all your gold. In 1971, the US had a really big economic announcement. What was it? We're divorcing ourselves from the gold standard so we can print money. In In 2008, the US had a really big economic announcement. What was it? It was we're bailing out all the big banks that misbehaved.
In 2025, if the US has a really big economic announcement, what is it? It's we're pro technology, we're pro innovation, What principles and morals and ethical alignment does Bitcoin have? Equal rights, equal opportunity, an open network. These are American ideals, American values. This is an asset that was accessible to the people 15 years ago that the people own. Governments only own 2, 3, 4 percent of this asset. This asset is held by the people. It acts in the best interest of the public. It's pro jobs. It's pro energy. It's pro industry. It's pro growth. And does anyone else have a plan to get us out of debt? Are we gonna start a lemonade stand out here in Times Square? No. How about the best performing asset in the history of mankind?
We lean into it. We buy it. Coinbase is an American company. Stripe's an American company. Kraken's an American company. Tether sells the US dollar. Let's support these businesses, let's support this industry. Over the last 15 years Right. The best thing you could have done is buy Bitcoin. And I think that's gonna be true for the next 1500 years. And so, as a country, I think we have a choice. I think everyone else around the world is understanding we are pro growth, pro business, pro Bitcoin as this new administration takes office, and we have to make a decision. I think the Bitcoin as this new administration takes office, and we have to make a decision. I think the worst thing we can do is not own enough. And, actually, to derisk this, we should buy some and push these American ideals in technology and innovation and growth through the best performing asset in technology in mankind.
[00:04:19] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was our boy, Jack Mallers, on Bloomberg. Absolutely crushing it. I it's, I still think that stat to me is amazing that 90% of funds on strike are withdrawn to self custody. Absolutely love to see it. Not your keys, not your coin. We have a great chat lined up today. We have Millian here from Primal. How's it going, Millian?
[00:04:59] Miljan:
Going well. Good to see you, Matt. Good to be back. Good to see our boy, Jack, crushing it on Normie TV as usual.
[00:05:08] ODELL:
Yeah. I think this is the cycle where, we just constantly have a a our friends on on mainstream news networks. They're all Bitcoin pod during bull runs, they're always turned into Bitcoin podcasts, but this time even, more so. I don't know why the live chat is only showing zaps, but, I see your live chat, Freaks. I, it's way to communicate with us is to throw, like, massive Zaps out there. It was it was kind of accidental, but if you want your message to show on screen now, you have to use the Zap. So I'm just gonna actually leave that. We're gonna be talking about Nostr today, so I feel like it's even it's even more fitting that we'll have a Zap only live chat.
Nostr, I mean, you guys have heard plenty about it. Milian here is is the founder and CEO of Primal. They're a tiny ass team, that's building one of the most popular Nostr clients. I mean, I'll start it off with the disclosure that my fund 1031 is the largest investor in Primal, proudly so. I I do not recommend Primal because we're an investor. We're an investor because it's such a good product. Like, it's just an it's an awesome app. It's an awesome team, and, they're really trying to to onboard, you know, the next a 1000000000 people into into Noster. So so I've had 1,000,000 on the show a couple times, I think, already.
But the reason we're here today is because primal 2.0 launched. So why don't we just start with that? What is primal 2.0, and why should we be excited about it?
[00:06:56] Miljan:
Yeah. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. We shipped primal 2.0, a few days ago, Thursday last week. And, Yeah. We're all still catching up on sleep, from that. I saw your announcement of it on our HR on Friday, and you did a great job there, by the way. That's a great summary of primal 2.0. My wife heard it, and she was so impressed by it. She was she thought I was important.
[00:07:23] ODELL:
Oh, there we go.
[00:07:24] Miljan:
After listening to that. So that's good. Thanks for, thanks for that. Yeah. So it's a pretty big release. It's it was a long time coming. I I heard you say, hey. These guys have been working on it for 3 months or so. And I was like, no, man. It's been 3 months that I've been telling you it's imminent. It's been, like, 3 months that I've been telling you it's 2 weeks. Fair. But, yeah, it's probably more like 8 months. And Damn. In retrospect, retrospect, probably a little bit too long. We're going to try to make, the upcoming releases a little bit more incremental because the 2 point o was, was basically maybe 3 or 4 releases rolled into 1.
So we, shipped, reads support. So long, support for long form content on Oster, kind of as a major tab. So it's a top level item. And that alone probably should have been on the release in itself. Right. If we had done it that way, we would have shipped that feature a few months ago.
[00:08:32] ODELL:
Right. I've been using it for a while now.
[00:08:35] Miljan:
Yeah. Exactly. So we kinda rolled a number of things into one massive release. So And why was that? They were kinda related to the features that we were look looking at, and, of course, it was possible to break them out and and ship them separately. But, the next big release, feature as part of the 2.0 release is the whole feed marketplace and restructuring of the app to, support basically infinite feeds. Alright? So, in primal 2.0, we we we rearchitected all of our apps, so iOS, Android, and web, in a way that the home tab and the reads tab have the ability to host infinite number of feeds. And from there but when you go to manage your feeds, you, you get to browse the feed marketplace and kind of add and remove feeds like that and reorder them. And you can set any custom feed to be your default feed and so forth.
So it felt important that to have this capability as a part of the Read's launch. It wasn't essential, but it they kinda went well together. And then we're like, okay. Since we're doing the whole feed marketplace thing, we, wanted to make it easy to for people to build their own feeds. So we really leaned into advanced search, which in itself probably should have been a release. So that's a major feature. It kinda like, things things, got out of hand, and we kind of, yeah, we packed it all into one massive release. And then, of course, on top of it all was, Primal premium, which, we launched, as a part of 2 point o.
[00:10:26] ODELL:
Yeah. So you kinda I mean, to to be fair, I was right there with you during I mean, you guys did the work. I I was just providing feedback. But I I mean, I I supported the decision to bundle it all together, because that that makes sense. But you also kinda end up in this situation where there's so much new shit now that each one is is massive in its own right. And I I feel like then it becomes a little bit hard. It's I mean and that's fine. Whatever. It's gonna take users a little bit to realize what kind of powerful new features they have available to them. And that I mean, Noster is is still incredibly young and incredibly early.
So I I guess that's fine. But, like so so it also creates some issues with this with this show because I don't know where to start. I think I and I just wanna be clear. The the one feature I really wanted him to bundle into primal 2 point o, which he hasn't yet, is integrated ZapStream. So when will we get that? Will we get that in, like, 2 weeks? Can I can people just view the stream live and primal in 2 weeks?
[00:11:40] Miljan:
Man, we we shipped such a massive release with so many features. And your first question is when something new.
[00:11:47] ODELL:
Sorry. That's my job. I just have to keep I gotta keep pushing you from the sidelines. Okay. I think we should start with I actually think the search. I think the search is a a killer feature. Let's talk about the search a little bit. What what ability have we given users in terms of search?
[00:12:03] Miljan:
So, yeah, as a part of this, 2 point o overhaul, we, kind of reimplemented big parts of our stack, including the indexing service. So completely new technology stack on the back end when it comes to, the indexer for Noster. And I believe we're still somebody should correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe primal is still the only open source indexer for Noster. So hope that we'll get more, indexers to join the party there. But, yeah, we reimplemented it in a way that made it way more powerful, way more kind of granular in terms of the types of things you could you could specify there to, to be searched.
So maybe I'll talk about search at the high level first, in in the new Primal apps. We have this kind of yeah. I'll stay humble. Definitely, is a good, good advice there. So Always good advice. Searching yeah. Always good advice for sure. Search at the high level at primal. We have this this kind of simple contextual search in any section that you're currently in. So, basically, if you're in home, tab, if you just tap on that search icon in the top right corner in the mobile app and type a quick search, it will search notes. Right. If you're in the reads tab, it will search reads. If you're in the notifications tab, it will actually search notifications.
So this is kinda like a quick and easy way to get contextual search anywhere within the app. Oh, by the way, if you're in somebody's profile screen, there's a search icon there, and you can tap on that. It will be and it will, search content posted by that user. So that kind of quick contextual search works as you'd expect. But then, when you open that search, screen, the the you can the search icon gets replaced by kind of the settings icon. And if you tap it again, you get the advanced search screen, which is, like, way more elaborate and powerful.
[00:14:13] ODELL:
So we The regular search is, like, I just wanna, like, look up a user. I wanna go to, like, Jack's profile or something. I would just quickly type in Jack. And then the advanced search is where the magic happens.
[00:14:24] Miljan:
Exactly. So exactly. So the regular search is you can look at profile up or do a simple kind of key, keyword search. But then if you want advanced search, you basically tap on that same location twice. You go top right corner, tap tap, and then all of a sudden you have the advanced, search UI. And there, you can specify all kinds of things. You can specify, first of all, the the content type that you wish searched. So you can say, you know, search for videos or images or, notes or, long form reads and things like that. So you can specify that. You can specify the list of users that should be, considered who have posted this particular content. So it's like posted by, essentially.
But you're not limited to one person. You can go and, like, add a number of profiles there. So you can kind of keep typing in. That's awesome. You can just keep adding people. Yeah. Exactly. And then so that's the posted by. And then you have replied by. So if you want to just search replies, you can say, okay. Give me, notes by, you know, that were replied to by Odell, for example. That's insane. Yeah. You can find that kind of stuff. Or either one of those could be a list. Right? So you can really, you know, make it much more interesting than that.
And then zapped by as well is is another, kind of, field where you can, set the list of people that have zapped. And think about how interesting of of a feed you might get if you, you know, say, give me all the posts posts, or notes zapped by, Jack and NVK, for example. Yeah. That's right there. I I didn't wanna say Odell because you zap a lot. So
[00:16:26] ODELL:
they don't allow it down enough.
[00:16:29] Miljan:
Right. You're one of the most prolific zappers out there. And then you can get Yeah. Go on. Go ahead. No. I mean, there's also, like,
[00:16:39] ODELL:
and we can just double get to that later. But in the explore tab, there's, like, a Zap feed, a live Zap feed, which I I absolutely love. But we're still we're talking about search. We're talking about search. Yeah. I mean, I think people don't realize with search like, one of the killer features of of x and and of Twitter before it was is the search. Like, the search is is incredibly powerful. On x, before before I left x, one of the things I love doing was I would just just retweet old, like, 5 year old posts, 6 year old posts, and people are like, how does he remember that post or whatever? It's like, no. I was good at using their search. But this search is infinitely more powerful than what is built into X right now. Presumably what is built into Facebook or TikTok, I don't know, I haven't used those in I've never used TikTok, but I haven't used Facebook in over a decade, LinkedIn. Right? The search the search is key. It's key for for discovery, and it's key to be able to interact with, you know, a global communication protocol.
[00:17:44] Miljan:
Yeah. I think we legit have the most powerful search of any social media now. That's amazing. So remember that narrative that an Oscar has a discovery problem, and who's gonna run the indexers and stuff like that? Turns out the same people who build the roads. And, yeah. So so yeah. We implemented this indexer. We're running our own indexing service, and anyone can use our code to stand up their own indexing service and, you know, tweak it the way they wish to tweak it. And there we're gonna have many index we already have many indexers running out there.
[00:18:29] ODELL:
But yeah. Just Rheinmold's indexer specifically is open source, so anyone can run one if they want to.
[00:18:35] Miljan:
Exactly. And it's it should be fairly easy to run. So, yeah. So going down the list of features there, you can also specify the scope for your search. So it could be by default, it's global. But you can say, no. Just search through my follows or just just search through my network or just search through my network interactions or my follows interactions. Meaning, that's kind of the slice of the networks. Search through all the Noster events that people I follow interacted with. So liked, zapped, replied, reposted, then, you know, any sort of reaction to it. So that's a crazy that's it's a very, interesting slice of the network because it's not precisely the content posted by your follows.
Right. It's it's content it's wider than that. It's content that your follows found interesting enough to engage with. So that produces some interesting results there. And then you can set a whole bunch of filters on the search and all of that. So, you can say minimum number of zaps or the content score, all kinds of things. So any combination of the parameters that I've just, outlined above is possible and quite easy to do within any of our apps. And then you do your search. And if you think this particular search is useful, you can save that search and save and it gets saved into your home feeds or Reeds feeds if you're searching through Reeds.
And and it becomes available to you to go to later on at any time.
[00:20:19] ODELL:
Yeah. Now you have now now that search becomes like a a feed itself, and so you can just toggle it on the top, which is awesome. Incredibly powerful. Yeah. I I wanna you said but we've heard this refrain constantly. Like, Nostar has a discovery problem. Like, I think this makes it apparent to to the deniers now that noster is a discovery solution. Like, noster is how you will be able to discover new content, important discussion, anything you want on the Internet going forward. And, you know, the status quo up until this point has been just a bunch of solid walled gardens. Like, I have no idea what the hell is going on on TikTok. I have no idea what's going on in Instagram. I have some idea of what's going on x because I get a lot of DMs about x.
But Nostr has this open protocol that is searchable. And once you provide powerful tools to users, really, the sky's the limit. Okay. Search. We nailed down search. I wanna go next to by the way, shout out Mav 21, highest Zap, in our live chat. Our live chat is at sildispatch.com/streamwith10,000 sats. There's a lot of questions rolling in, so I'm gonna use one of the questions to go to the next topic, which is Ivan is asking how I got the little gold halo around, the little gold halo around my my profile picture, which is, a Primal premium feature. So let's talk about Primal premium next.
[00:22:00] Miljan:
Okay. So with the 2 point o release, we shipped, like, a paid tier of primal, primal premium, where for $7 a month, you can get the primal name and a bunch of nostril tools. So, like, primal.net/odell
[00:22:18] ODELL:
is the primal name [email protected] for the lightning address?
[00:22:22] Miljan:
Exactly. So the primal name gives you three things itself. So it gives you a verified nonster address if you want to use it. It gives you a friendly lightning address for our kind of built in custodial lightning wallet, and it gives you that VIP profile where that you can kind of easily, link, to your profile by go by giving out a primal.net/odel. So that name get can get used in any of those scenarios. And you're not required to use, you know, the the, verified nostril address by primal. You just have that option. Same goes with the lightning address. Right. So that's primal name.
And then nostril tools, we just thought about, the types of things that would be useful to Nostra users, that Nostra users might be might find valuable enough to pay a monthly fee for. So this, currently in the first release includes things like increased media storage. So you can, you get, 10 gigabytes of storage instead of, 1 gigabyte, which you get with the free tier.
[00:23:34] ODELL:
You can post So that's if you're uploading videos or photos or whatnot?
[00:23:40] Miljan:
Right. Exactly. And you get a very nice, UI for kind of managing all the media you've uploaded. We I'm quite happy with that part of the the app. Then we give you some Nostra account backup features. So for example, we back up the contact list, like, the history of your contact list over time so that if, a client, let's say, wipes your contact list, and I think it happened to, almost everyone. It happened to me many times. Sometimes it was my own client doing that. So Noster is not immune to that. It's nice to be able to go back and see, like, the, you know, the history of your contact list. It will tell you, you know, like, on November 25th, you had 655 contacts, But on November 26th, you had now have 1.
[00:24:37] ODELL:
But, specifically, this is who you follow, not who follows you. That's right. The way Masterworks is you can only control who you follow. That's what you're updating and saving.
[00:24:50] Miljan:
Yes. So that's called the contact list. It's your follow list. It's the list of accounts you follow. So we made this, utility, essentially, that's a part of primal premium that makes it very easy to go through the history of your follow lists and kind of restore the one you think is is best. And so it's, like, 2 clicks away, for you to do. We also, fully backup your, Nostra content. So all of the Nostra events that you publish as a premium user, we keep a backup of all that content. So this includes notes, reactions, articles, anything that you publish in Noster.
And you can we provide the UI for that in the premium tier where you can kind of see the categorized, kind of list of different content that you have along with the number of events that you have in each category. And you have the ability to rebroadcast any of those categories, or you can rebroadcast all of the events. And we will rebroadcast to your list of, specified relays that you have in your in your contacts, in your kind of account settings. So let's say you wanted to keep your own backup of your content. You can just add your let's say you you wanna stand up a relay, and you can add that relay to your relay list as a right relay and push rebroadcast, and it will rebroadcast the entire history. It will copy the history of all the events that you've, published to your relay along with all the other relays that are in your list.
In the web app, we'll let you actually download, the, all your events as well. So it's kind of that was one of the open questions. Local backup. Exactly. And so that was one of the the open questions in Noster, you know, over the years where, you know, relays don't typically have SLAs. There are some premium relays out there that they might. But, typically, you know, people create accounts. They set their kind of, relays, and then they publish content, and there's no guarantee that any relay will hold any of your content for any amount of time. You know, there's some big relays like, the damos relay where Will makes a point of wiping the relay, every once in a while.
Because the point being, don't rely on me hold keeping all your stuff forever. Right. That's that's not what we, have committed to doing. And also, Noster should not be affected with these, occasions where a massive relay wipes all their content. So he wanted to put that theory to a test a couple times, I think, and he did. And everything worked as expected. So Nostra continued to function even though, the damage relay was wiped fully. So that was good. Notice any notes missing or anything. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a good test for for the network, and that was great. But as a user, you may want to get a certain level of assurance that your content will be kept by, some of the relays that you, opposed to.
So now, with Primal, we that's what we do for our premium users. We strive to kind of keep the content, like, all the content that we index, but we can't, of course, make guarantees for the entire network. It's it's crazy to be able to do that. But we do we can make those guarantees for our premium, users. Obviously, that's a much, much smaller part of the network. And for them, they get this,
[00:28:40] ODELL:
service as a part of the as a part of Primal Premium. And then UX wise, it's great. It's like literally just a single rebroadcast button. You just click that button and boom, rebroadcast.
[00:28:51] Miljan:
Yeah. And in the web app, next to that rebroadcast button, there's also a download button. So Hazard's asking what format is the download gonna be in? Do you know yet? It's JSON. Yeah. You can already try it. It's just like, you know, zipped JSON, essentially. Got it. So, if you go to if if you have Primal Premium and you use our web app now, there is the manage premium section, and one of the tabs there is, you know, content backup. So you can download that content and check it out. Marcelo's asking,
[00:29:26] ODELL:
if you miss 1 month payment in premium, do you lose your Noster address and Friendly Lightning address?
[00:29:33] Miljan:
No. So there's a 1 30 day grace period after kind of your subscription expires, during which all these things will continue to be assigned to you. But after that, your name gets released, and it becomes available to for others to register. That's how the system works currently.
[00:29:54] ODELL:
Great. And, I feel compelled to mention here, since I was so outspoken against the BlueJeck, why I think this is fundamentally different than Elon's, BlueJeck system on x, is is is two main reasons. First of all, my issue and I was very I've been very consistent on this. My issue is not the payment. I think actually more services should go to a pay model because then users are actual customers. They're your users. They're not the product that you're just trying to milk, for surveillance ad revenue. So I like I like people paying for a product. The issue with the blue check is that it has identity verification built in in a very quiet way, which is through phone number verification.
And I expect him to actually increase that verification requirements rather than decrease them. Maybe maybe I'll be proven wrong. With with primal premium, you can pay with Bitcoin. You don't have a billing address attached. You don't have a credit card attached, right? On BlueCheck, you have a phone number and a credit card attached. Neither of those are required for primal premium. And then the second piece is, it's dev it's kind of like a what you see in a lot of the shitty mobile games now, which is a pay to win model, on the in in Blue Check Land, which is if you if you pay and get verified, you will get better engagement and better reach on the platform.
While primal fundamentally does not change how people are viewing feeds and whatnot based on based on paid status. So so any user, a user that's using Amethyst that's not a Primal premium user or whatever, has the same the the the same quote, unquote reach as someone who is a primal premium user. So I think those those things make it fundamentally different. Once again, I challenge Elon to make those changes on x. I don't think he will. And instead of complaining about it, I wanted to be part of the the future that that we could build that is better, and that's why I'm here.
So with all that said, then there's another tier above this called primal legends. What is primal legends?
[00:32:11] Miljan:
If you don't mind, I'll just back up a little bit and kind of echo what you're saying there. I I think it's really important to get our own interests. Our our by saying our, I mean, primal. Primal's interests align with those of our users. The we've had questions, you know, over the past, however, many months since we launched Primal regarding how Primal was going to monetize and whether we're, like, tracking user data and where whether we're, trying to monetize user data. And even though we spelled out quite clearly in our terms of service and privacy policy that we don't monetize user data, it's kind of nice to kind of launch this paid tier where it becomes very clear what our interests are. So, our users are our customers, like you said, and, we get compensated when users find primal products and services valuable enough that they are willing to pay for them.
Therefore, we're incentivized to, wake up every morning and make the product better for our users who are our customers. So, this, kind of alignment of incentives, I think, is equally important as many other aspects, on of Noster that we talk about a lot more usually. You know, like censorship resistance and all these things. So user sovereignty, we covered that quite a bit, and, of course, they're important. But, coming up with business with ethical monetization business models, is extremely important on Noster. And, I'm I'm glad to see that there are other services out there that are essentially, looking to monetize in the same way.
I haven't seen any, I think, advertising based businesses. I'm sure there will be some eventually. But what's interesting is that they'll they'll be competing against Primal and others who are not monetizing through advertising. We were monetizing through best possible UX for our users. So Love it. Let's see what happens. I'm kind of excited.
[00:34:31] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely gonna be advertising models bolted on top of Nostr from other players. But it'll be a beautiful free market, and users will have options and and be able to choose which path they wanna go down. Okay. So can we talk about primal legends? What is primal legends?
[00:34:53] Miljan:
Let's do it. So primal legends is like a higher tier than primal premium, and, it wasn't my idea, really. I spent, some time with Gigi a couple of months ago, and he was adamant about this idea that this there's the kind of the concept there. Basically, the argument he was making was that there are people on Noster who are willing to pay way more than $7 a month, in order to support the project and that we should let them. And not only should we let them, but we should recognize them in such some kind of way. And, I'm I'm glad that he convinced me, to do this, because that's turning out to be the case. Nostr is a very, very special community.
It's it's a very special user base to build for and kinda launch products for. Nostra users yes. We're not, massive in numbers yet. You know, probably we're looking maybe a couple 100000 people who are active on Nostra. But this initial cohort of of Nostar users that we have currently are extremely passionate, extremely mission driven. Our users are as mission driven as we, the developers, are, I would say. And it's very interesting to build for this community because, like, you get, extremely competent, intelligent, high conviction people as your customers.
And, in many cases, they are quite technically savvy, so the feedback we get is is very precise many times when it comes to kind of identifying the problems and kind of making the product better. And, you know, many of them are not, like, developers themselves, and they're looking at ways to contribute to kind of growing Noster and making Noster better. And, they we already in just a few days that we've had this, available, we've, we've had more than I would expect. People kind of find this feature, which is, is not kind of super visible in the user interface. You kind of have to buy premium, and then there is, like, a link somewhere saying, hey. Are you enjoying Primal?
Find out how you can support us further. And then you click through that, and then you find this kind of legend, kind of, purchase, option and go from there. So there's a number of our users to who have found this and went ahead and, you know, bought the legend tier, just so they can support us. And, you know, the the name Legend was a little bit of a tongue in cheek kind of, kind of positioning. But now I'm like, after having interacted with some of these users, I think the label is appropriate. Like, going back and forth. No. I'm serious, man. They are, they really are legends. They're like, no. I know exactly what I'm doing. Yes. I'm, you know, this I'm overpaying for, like, 10 years of primal premium. But, like, I'm making a bet in you and your team that you guys will are going to continue building this, and I'm willing to do this.
To you know, a a few times I've heard from them, like, I'm not a developer. This is how I'm going to help. Through a master adoption to cut products and so forth. So, that's what primal legends are. And, when it comes to, you know, the the the halo that you mentioned, that's the that's the idea that Gigi was, advising us to do where we should somehow, recognize these, contributors to like, significant contributors to Primal and give them the ability to further customize their profile, and, which is optional, by the way. If if you want to not stand out, that's the default. Right? So you you can be a part of the legend here and, not stand out publicly. But then if you want to customize it, there's a pretty easy way to do so. So by becoming a legend, you get a never expiring subscription.
So you're you get a forever subscription. Lifetime subscription. And, you get more media storage and this, you know, profile customization options. And this has been we've received quite a bit of good feedback about this already. So that now we know this is a thing, and we're going to lean into it way harder. And we're already working on making, like, expanding the profile customization capabilities, not just for legends, but also for premium users. So we're going to make this awesome in the next update.
[00:40:15] ODELL:
Love it. Legendary. I, on the media piece, by the way, just out we're about to leave the premium section of the show. But on the media piece, like, to be clear, like, once you're a premium subscriber, you don't have to be a Legend subscriber. You can scroll through all of your media, and you can copy the links of the old media or you can delete media that you've already uploaded, which is just a very clean UX. I do have a question for you, and I guess I could have asked this offline. And maybe I did ask you already. It does it strip metadata when you upload a photo or video? Yeah.
Okay. So primal media servers strip metadata when you upload there. That's important, Peaks, because if you're just uploading media onto Nasr and metadata isn't being stripped, it can have, like, location information, like what device you took the photo with. I'm a crazy person, so regardless, I've just always stripped my data personally. But, yeah, that's a good that's a good practice. Okay. Are you good with us moving on from premium now?
[00:41:21] Miljan:
Sure.
[00:41:22] ODELL:
Okay. Let's go to Reeds. What is Reeds?
[00:41:26] Miljan:
So Reeds is the, is a brand new section on Primal, which covers, long form content on Nostril, long form textual content. So it's the type of content that people have usually, used applications like, Highlighter or Habla News or Yaki Hani or, I think, there was, like, a blog stack. There there are multiple Nastr clients that specialize in, long form content. So essentially, these are sub stack or medium, but with Nastr. Exactly. So I was just going to say these are, like, substack andmedium competitors. Why I think, this type of content is extremely important, on Oster is that it allows us to add nuance into the public discourse.
I think Oster has the best, foundation to become the global town square. The micro blogging type of features are already there and the the open network and, you know, every all every event getting signed that you get this sort of authenticity, as a part of it is exactly the type of foundation that's needed to for for a protocol to to become a global town square. But what's, what makes it even more powerful is when you can meaningfully integrate long form content into these these types of user experiences where, you know, there's only so much, context, and there's only so much, information you can pack in a microblogging note.
More nuanced discussions require, you know, long form content. So, at Primal, we wanted to, make long form content of 1st class citizen within the application. So, like I said, it gets its own tab. But also, we wanted to cover all of the interactions, in a way that, that they can surface into your kind of social media, micro blogging feeds as appropriate so that your your social media feeds, become a discovery mechanism for long form content. So for example, if you go through a long form content feed and you select an article, You can, you can highlight any section of the article, in primal that creates a nostril highlight event that's visible in any nostril client that supports highlight events.
But then you can select that highlight and say quote and post a note with a comment, and that will appear in your microblogging feed as a short note with a quoted highlight and the link to the long form article. So it'll be very clear to the users of your, you know, the the viewers of your, short form note what it what it is that you did there. So you highlighted some a part of the article. You had your own comment there, and you link to the article itself. So I think in the last few days since we launched, Primal 2.0 with, Reads integration, it I don't know if you would agree, Matt, but it feels like the, long form content is getting a lot more views and a lot more a lot more response.
[00:45:04] ODELL:
No one wants to leave the app. Right? You you want it all integrated. And then also just the discovery of of, you know, micro quote unquote microblogging, like tweet style feeds is is key. Right? Like, I mean and you see that, like, even when users don't have the tools, they tend to go that route where they'll they'll send out they'll send out a post that's like, check out this article with a link. Right? And to have it actually nicely integrated into the UX where it's first class citizen. I mean, I'm not a big I don't write long form, really. I just do podcasts and shitpost. But, I I can I I I I I do like consuming it and reading it and and participating in it? And that's a key element of the discovery you want it as as part of this. And this is what I think people don't realize where they say, like, Nostr is so much more than a Twitter competitor or I like I I like Nostr the protocol, but I I don't like, you know, Noster, the social aspect. And it's all it's all important together. Like, it's it's we're we're we're building we're building the network via short ship posts.
And but it all needs to be connected together. Otherwise, you don't have something that's actually useful to users.
[00:46:24] Miljan:
100%.
[00:46:27] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think the reads is pretty awesome, and I love that it's got, like, a dedicated, you know, feed system in the in the app. So you can basically, like, move into your sub stack world, or move back into your x world, which I think is very clever. I actually realized, and I know, for example, if you've been listening for a while, you know this is how I function. I move back and forth a lot. On the premium section, there's 2 things that I wanted to cover that we didn't cover. First of all, if you're a premium user you have a special relay that you have access to, right? The premium relay, which is once again like who will run the relays, right? Well, it's like if you're a paying user, you have this nice premium relay that only premium users can write to, but anyone can read from. So it doesn't mat you could be a non premium user using Domus or Amethyst or Coracle, and you can still pull from the premium relay, but only premium users are posting to it.
And then the second piece is there's some, let's just talk about for a second why why if if someone's using iOS, why can't they pay for premium with Sats in the app?
[00:47:41] Miljan:
Oh, what's the old app store rules? Yeah. Once you have once you're trying to monetize something within the app, Apple and Google won't want their cut. It's it's as simple as that. So, we do have those in app purchases. In in all honesty, they're quite convenient for the end user. You're literally in 2 taps, you become a premium subscriber. So that's nice. And then you get like, people manage so many subscriptions, and you necessarily don't want the cognitive overhead of tracking different types of UIs to cancel the subscription and so forth. So both Apple and Google do a good job, to provide users with that kind of UX.
So this is the reason why, if if you're iOS or Android and you wish to subscribe to to premium through the app, that's the only option. It's Apple Pay or Google Pay. Exactly. And then, of course, on our web app, you can pay us with SaaS directly. And it we don't say this. Well, I'm hoping it's obvious. If you have a primal premium subscription, it's active for you in all of our apps. So for example, if you use our web app to buy, primal premium, the moment you log in to any of the mobile apps, your Primal Premium, account will be active immediately.
There's nothing else for you to do.
[00:49:10] ODELL:
And if somehow you made it this far in this show and you don't know how to sign in on Primalweb, you need a, browser extension, and I recommend the no s two x extension, which is maintained by fiat jeff. So you install that extension. You put your private key in in that extent extension, and then that's how you sign in via web, which is not immediately obvious. Like, we probably should do a better job with that.
[00:49:40] Miljan:
I agree. I agree. That's one of the, parts of the primal stack that needs, the most work. You sort of need to walk people through this completely nonintuitive, concept that you need to install an extension to log in securely. We do, provide a way to, you to log in to Primal, without using an extension that's less secure, where you can kind of paste your end second, provide, kind of like a, PIN or any sort of code to encrypt that and sec locally with. But, using the extension is much more secure, and that's the recommended way. I didn't even realize you offered that. Yeah. We do. We do. Use the extension, freaks.
[00:50:29] ODELL:
No s 2 x. Okay. Next, Feed Marketplace. What is the Feed Marketplace?
[00:50:38] Miljan:
So feed marketplace is probably one of the most exciting features of of Nostra, at least to me. It's not anything that we invented at Primal. The core tech behind the feed marketplace that we plugged plugged into was invented by Pablo well over a year ago using the DVM spec. The the data vending machine spec is quite powerful. It can do all kinds of things, including creating custom feeds. So, few months after this invention, some people created some feeds, and they kind of created a spec for for kind of publishing a special event, signaling to the network. Then then now the there's this feed that exists that people can plug into.
And the feed itself just, like, gives the list of note addresses, the note IDs. That's it. And then it's up to clients to figure out what to do with those, and every client is capable of, showing a list of notes based on those IDs. So it's extremely lightweight and simple. And, it was grassroots like many great things in Oster. You know, Pablo created the spec, then some devs were tinkering with it. People created a few feeds, and then a few clients, integrated those, the kind of this into their UI. And the clients were Coracle, which is has very, kind of capable, custom feed, features.
And DVM feeds are just a subset of Coracle, you know, custom feeds. So I encourage people to check the that's quite wild what, Huddl bot came up with there. So Coracle, Amethyst, no strudel, probably some other clients that I'm not not even aware of, integrated this feed list, feed marketplace into their UIs. And then we we kind of we, from Primal, observed this thing emerging organically on Aster. And this is so magical, man. Like, it's like there's no central planning. There's no central coordination. So people come up with stuff, like Paolo, then developers either pick it up or don't.
Some things get published. A few clients find it interesting and integrate it. And next thing you know, there is maybe critical mass. And, at Primal, we just looked at this and we're like, yeah. This is exactly what we want to do. And then we leaned into it all the way from Primal. So we did 3 things to support this. The first thing is, like I already said, we rearchitected our entire application shell to be able to support any number of feeds and easy reorganization of feed and setting the default feed and all that. Like, we wanted the app itself to be capable of being fully flexible when it comes to management of feeds.
And as I mentioned, this pertains to the home tab as well as the reads tab. Then, we expose the feed marketplace user interface in within the app when you go to kind of manage your feeds. Right there, you can kind of add a custom feed, and we give you the the user the the kind of user interface to browse the feeds that have been published. So you can tap into that, get the preview of the feed. If you like what you see, you can add it to your home feeds, let's say. And then it's there. You can reorganize. You can reorder. May maybe set that as your as your main feed. So when you think about it, it's like the polar opposite of a walled garden here.
So you can literally remove all primal feeds if if you don't like them. You can go to the feed marketplace, pick the feeds you like, and set any of them as your main feed, and that's your UX on primal. It has nothing to do with what primal is, serving out in terms of feeds. That's, like, not only possible, but it's super easy to do. And then the third thing we did is since at Primal, we we we build clients and we run services, So we we create our own feeds as well. We decided that every feed that we create is, we're going to publish to the feed marketplace as well. So, and we've done that, and we're going to continue doing that. We're preparing some very interesting feeds in the coming weeks.
So, you know, be on the lookout for that. And what's nice is that we can improve or add value to the entire Nostra protocol by publishing a new feed. It comes it becomes available in Primal, but it also becomes available in any Nostra client that supports a DBM feed marketplace. So, you know, if you're using Amethyst or Coracle or Nostrudl, you have access to that. And now that we have, you know, this capability, all of these products become better overnight almost without any, additional effort required by, the developer of those clients. In fact, like, it this fact blew our mind, like, when Pablo and I were preparing to do a talk in in Riga on this specific topic.
They were having dinner, and we went to the hotel room to work on the slides. And we realized that our slides were already out of date from from from the day before because, we were going to use the no strudel client to show the list of feeds. And then we looked went to the client and we realized, oh, there's another feed. No strudel just got better while we were at dinner. And and the developer of, Nostradle Hazard was with us. So we were all having dinner, and his product got better because he supported feed marketplace at that point. So we it was one of those, like, mind blown moments. And,
[00:57:15] ODELL:
the situation I was at bed and dinner. Right?
[00:57:18] Miljan:
Yeah. You were there. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:57:20] ODELL:
Shout out Milian. He, he paid for dinner that night. I sure
[00:57:25] Miljan:
did. So, yeah, that was crazy. It it kind of, it it was one of those moments where you realize that it's the openness of the protocol that's going to make Noster win. It's I don't think it's necessarily censorship resistance and user sovereignty and all those things. Like, they are extremely important, of course. That's the the foundation and the the core user base of the protocol. Basically, everyone on us today cares about that a lot. You know, the general public doesn't necessarily yet anyway, but they do care about high quality content and and high quality apps. And we're inevitably going to have those things because of the openness of the protocol.
So can't help but, like, be bullish about this. I mean, it's basically this open verifiable
[00:58:19] ODELL:
API for the world. You can just build on it without permission. No one can stop you. Sky's the limit. And then you get all these other benefits on on top of it that that almost become like side effects. But I mean, I think that's why we've seen such a viral organic growing developer community on Nostr is because everywhere else you look, you're basically building on quicksand. But with Nostr, you're building on this incredibly strong open API, this strong foundation. I just wanna like, this is another example, by the way, of just packaging all this stuff into primal 2.0 that I I feel like people don't appreciate the power that is available here. Like, you can if you use if you use TikTok, like, the CCP chooses your algorithm. If you use Instagram or Facebook, Zuck chooses the algorithm.
If if you use x, Elon chooses the algorithm. If you use Nostr, you can choose a 1000000 different algorithms. You can choose no algorithm. You can create your own algorithm and then other people can choose it. And it doesn't matter which app you use. You have as long as the app supports these feed marketplaces, you can use it in any app. You can switch between apps and you'll get that same that that same feed that you would get otherwise. That is mind blowing. That is that is something that is feels almost impossible to overstate, and it's gonna take people some time before because it's it's a paradigm shift. Right? It's a complete fundamentally fundamentally changes how you how you view, discover content, interact with content on the Internet.
And it, like, breaks people's brains a little bit. They just don't even think that's possible.
[01:00:05] Miljan:
I agree. It's magical. And another aspect of the feed marketplace that I'm, that it's very exciting to me is that it's extremely easy to explain. And you can convey this message in 2 words, feed marketplace, and people will basically know what you mean. And it's such a crisp message that you can contrast this, against all the other closed networks. And you can say, well, you know, Twitter doesn't have and can't ever have, feed marketplace. Blue Sky, you guys are supposedly an open protocol. Where is your feed marketplace? It's it's such a simple, crisp message where you get this, you know, fundamental feature of, delivering user agency.
You get to pick your algorithm, that only Noster has. And as far as I can tell, only Noster can have. It's wild.
[01:01:11] ODELL:
The one I kind of agree it's a good name, but when I hear feed marketplace usually, when I go to a marketplace, I have to pay money for things. And so as it stands right now, all these feeds are just available for free. You know, it's you you choose your own adventure for free. Are there gonna be paid feeds as well? Is that a is that part of the spec? I don't.
[01:01:35] Miljan:
That's definitely part of the spec, and we are contemplating some feeds at primal that, might be premium only feeds. So, we'll strive to, you know, publish most feeds as free feeds because at this stage of the game, we really want everyone to be able to, you know, as many people as possible to to enjoy as many feature features as we can deliver. But it might be interesting some of specialized feeds, some feeds that, maybe are more compute intensive. We can, we already have the technology. This could be rolled out easily where that those feeds would be available to, Primal Premium users only. And then you get a situation where you might get, like, a subset of our user base who necessarily don't find Primal clients to be their kind of preferred client of choice. They might wanna use maybe Amethyst on on, Android or so forth, but they might wanna use our premium feeds.
There might be some users out there who, would be willing to pay for some, features like that and still use them outside of the Primal clients. Right. It's it's crazy that we already have users of Primal who are not using Primal clients.
[01:02:55] ODELL:
Right. That's that's fascinating. It should be interesting to see how that market develops. Okay. Next, the explore tab. Cool. What is it?
[01:03:10] Miljan:
Right. So it's another kind of top level tab in primal 2.0 just like reads tab. And the whole idea behind it was to, make Nostar content and user discovery easier. And it's still early days, but currently, it has, you know, several tabs. The default tab is the is the feed marketplace itself, which I think is appropriate because, like, if you want to explore, probably a good place to start is to look at all the feeds that people have created out there. Right. So so that's the first tab, and then you can swipe over to the people tab, which will essentially show accounts you don't follow, that have gotten some level of engagement lately, that have gotten that the follow, number delta is, significant enough to show on that list. So people who
[01:04:10] ODELL:
So there's people who I don't follow that maybe I should be following?
[01:04:15] Miljan:
We're not as smart yet to know enough about you, based on your interests or whatever to tell you who you should be following command people there. We're hoping to get there in the next release where, you know, during onboarding, you do specify the interests there, and we can, publish that event to the Noster relays so that other clients can, utilize that in a way that doesn't docks you. So we can encrypt that, we're looking at that now. We can encrypt that, data and, make each client, available aware of it who can kinda decrypt this and use it to do smart things, you know, that relate to your interests.
So it would be nice. We already have, kind of follow recommendations based on the types, the categories of content that you're interested in. During sign up, we could as that list expands, we could be smarter about it in the explore people tab to give you more relevant results. We're not there yet. So the way it currently works is we list people you don't follow, who've gotten a lot of new follows lately. And it seems to work quite well because when there's a new account or a lot of people follow them or something, you know, like, there's maybe some drama around their account or an account that's not worthy for whatever reason, they tend to pop up on that list.
And in my own usage of this feature, it kind of every time I went to that tab, there was something interesting for me to see, and, I ended up following a few people. So this is one of the common kind of original critiques of Noster going dating a few months back, you know, where people say, oh, it's impossible to find people or, you know, it's hard to figure out who to follow and so forth. So this tab of the explore section is kinda meant to improve that aspect of Nasr.
[01:06:26] ODELL:
Makes sense.
[01:06:28] Miljan:
Then the following tab is basically top Zaps, the global top zaps. I forgot if we're doing it based on the last 24 hours or 48 hours. We should really label that so people know why these things are showing up there. But, essentially, we just
[01:06:43] ODELL:
It's my favorite tab.
[01:06:45] Miljan:
Yeah? Tell me about it.
[01:06:48] ODELL:
I mean, people should zap more. Be the change you wanna see in the world. I just love scroll it it it kind of just knocks anyone who anyone who's like, no one uses Nasr, just go to the zaps tab, and you just see generational wealth being transferred. This is like freedom money being sent between strangers on the Internet. Just, like, knocks you right off on your ass.
[01:07:09] Miljan:
I agree. It's, it really and gives visibility to, the zapper. Gives visibility to the person, who got zapped, and the content they created that got zapped. So all of those three things get surfaced to the top. So you can look up those profiles. You can look up at or you can go to the note or article that was zapped. So it's a good discovery tool in all of those dimensions, and it does promote zapping, doesn't it? It makes that, like, a much more visible. And we made sure in our web app that you can link directly to any of these tabs. So any of the tabs into the, explore section, you know, if you go to, primal.net/explore and then you click on, let's say, top Zaps or Zaps, you can share that link, and it will, like, open the appropriate tab when you, when when the page loads.
[01:08:14] ODELL:
Okay. And so this I think the Zap features I mean, it and from a discovery point of view, right, like a great article, right, is if it's getting zapped a 100,000 sats, you know, that's $94 currently. Like, it's probably a pretty good article. Like, you should check it out. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense to me. What are your thoughts on people gaming that?
[01:08:35] Miljan:
Because it will be People go people gonna game that. Game. Yeah. This this is this is gonna be game. We will have to kind of fight this fight as we go. Okay. There's gonna be a lot more. Maybe. We'll see. But in the meantime, we're providing high quality signal for people. Got it.
[01:08:53] ODELL:
And we'll see how how it goes from there. Yeah. It's gonna get wild. I'm sure. I mean, like, the low IQ way of handling it, like, the left curve way of handling it is, like, if you see someone that's routinely gaming it, you just blacklist that that end pub. Yeah. That's not an ideal situation.
[01:09:11] Miljan:
No. I mean, you can also, kind of, game it in a way that you get someone else in trouble maybe or
[01:09:19] ODELL:
we'll see. Like, the thing is with, the receiver receiver the receiver is the one that's sending out the receipt. Right? Right. Exactly. So the receiver has to be in on it. So it's Everyone else is trusting the receiver. When when you, like if you open Primal and it says, I've received a 5,000 SADZ app, you're trusting me that I actually received the 5,000 SADZ app. You're not trusting the sender.
[01:09:44] Miljan:
To be more precise, you're trusting the wallet service, that the receiver is using. That because that service is creating the the receipt and publishing it. So And my son is using their own server, but yeah. Which makes sense. Exactly. So so then you can get into the reputation of different wallet services, etcetera, etcetera. So, you know Oh, fair enough. There are there are ways to deal with this. And we are, kind of I think we're still in the fuck around and find out stage of Nasr. And the this really, kind of applies to everything we covered today.
You know, like, some of our friends, were very skeptical about launching the premium tier so early, quote, unquote. Right? And, I think it it's true that the Noster user base is so small that, you know, these probably won't, like, amount to some significant revenues at this point. But we need to start we need to start, kind of, experimenting with, business models like this and learning what works and, kind of growing from there. Right? Like and I actually have a pretty good feeling about it based on how it's going so far. I love that it's all out in the open too. You know? It's just like
[01:11:07] ODELL:
many different people around the world just building out in the open and just seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, and we iterate over time. We'll figure it out. So there's I guess there's one more tab. Right? Was it the media oh, there's 2 more tabs. What's the deal with the media tab on So the media tab,
[01:11:25] Miljan:
basically lists, it's kind of like a Instagram type, UI where you would show thumbnails of either images or videos that have been posted, and we apply some sort of, logic, in terms of, like, content scores, like how popular they are and, like, when it comes to other users engaging with it. That's the sort mechanism we use there. I think it's the previous either 24 or 48 hours that we take into account there. So it should be fairly fresh when you go there. In fact, if you pull to refresh that,
[01:12:03] ODELL:
screen, you're likely to see new stuff every time. It is not like an endless scroll. Right? It's I'm looking at it right now. It's like
[01:12:12] Miljan:
At some point, it will end. But, yeah, because we do we'd, yeah, exactly. So so we don't go back in time infinitely with so it's kind of So this it wasn't be like trending. It's like trending media. Right? Or not? You can think of it that way. Although, we don't order it by content score like we do, let's say, on the trending feed. We it's if you're above a certain kind of content score threshold, I think we order it by time. So new stuff shows up at the top. Honestly, it's been a while since I looked at that, so I don't understand. Well, anyway, it's a step in the right direction. I think as
[01:12:50] ODELL:
a, like, as a protocol, like, we need to do a better job providing things for the Instagram types, right, like the the the media consumer types. I mean, Pablo just released his own Instagram specific type of client called Olas, But and and we'll get there. We'll get there. But, that's a step in the right direction. And then we have topics. What is topics?
[01:13:15] Miljan:
So topics is simply a list of, essentially hashtags that are being used in a short form notes, based on kind of their frequency of use. So you'll see things like noster, bitcoin, what's new. Whatever is topical at any given time should bubble up to the top if people are using that hashtag a lot. And then you can, click on any of those topics, and it will give you search results based on that hashtag. So if you've used primal before, primal 1.x, that screen was the the entirety of the explore screen Right. Before. And it was pretty useless, even the way, we had implemented the kind of the logic for for those, for for come coming up with the the list of topics there and ordering that wasn't that great.
So we've improved on that, and, so it should be more useful now. But the entire explore section, of course, is much more versatile.
[01:14:19] ODELL:
Makes sense. Yeah. So the whole explore tab is exactly what you would think it is. It's it's meant to aid discovery and and things you wouldn't see otherwise. I see Pseudo Carlos with a very teeny zap of 21Sats asking why not allow users to choose sorting for media? I assume this is, you know, it's just an iterative process. It's not, I've I'm like, what? Like, do you we could use the same things as, like, with the feed marketplace but with media.
[01:14:51] Miljan:
There's no reason that You can. So, there were there's the advanced search. So you can open the advanced search. You can, say search images or search videos, and then you can search your sort order. You can set filters any way you like in terms of, you know, content score or number of zaps and so forth. You can have all these settings that you can, optionally set and create the feed that you you want to see. And then you can save that feed. Yeah. Yeah.
[01:15:28] ODELL:
What about, so, like, we're we're talking about the feed marketplace stuff. Is Primal at some point in the future gonna allow people to then, like, publish a feed? Like, actually allow other people to subscribe to it?
[01:15:42] Miljan:
So currently, the only way to to publish a feed into the feed marketplace is to be a developer and create a DVM feed. And when you do that and then when you publish the appropriate nostril event, your feed will, show up in the primal feed marketplace. And maybe I'll kind of give a bit more info on that. So we have a back end service that checks these, like, the pings these all of these custom feeds. So it took a check for their health. So if a feed doesn't return any results, if it's unavailable for, a number of hours, then we we remove it automatically from the list. So you're not likely as a user to, encounter dead feeds there. That kind of it itself heals.
And then if the, if the feed comes back online, we will bring it back up. So just so you know how that works. And, to answer your question, Matt, it's the logical next step. So currently, you need to be a developer to create a DBM feed. Right. And it shows up there, so it's already a massive step. But, really, what we should make possible and easy to do is to create a custom feed by, like, any user and then publish that feed to the feed marketplace. I think there's there might be, like, some really interesting feeds that they're they're created by users. In addition to these kind of algorithmic, kind of search based feeds, I think we should also support curation based feeds where you as a user can, provide curation services.
I think this is going to be massive. And then you, you know, you may have a really good taste in science fiction or something like that. Then you create a a feed of science fiction, long form reads that's, like, super high signal. And so you can apply this to any category, you know, cooking or whatever. Right. And we'll have users who, specialize in certain kind of categories like that and create extremely high quality kind of high signal, content, which I think eventually they should be able to monetize as well.
[01:18:06] ODELL:
I love that. So that might be a premium feature because it needs to be hosted.
[01:18:11] Miljan:
We'll think this through. If if it's possible to do it, cost effectively without it being a premium feature, it'd be nice to expose the this capability to everyone.
[01:18:23] ODELL:
Awesome. Okay. The last piece I have on my nonexistent list is is the wallet. So the so Primal is, I think, unique in Nostra that it has an integrated wallet.
[01:18:39] Miljan:
No. Sorry to cut you off. There there there was a product, that launched an integrated wallet, prior to us in the name of current current app. They were the first ones to kind of integrate a wallet. It was also a custodial wallet, not in a sort of centerpiece type of manner as we did, but they definitely were ahead of us there, and they managed to get it through the App Store first. So I remember seeing this and saying, oh, this is possible. Let's see how let's see what we can do. So other than that,
[01:19:17] ODELL:
I'm trying to figure out matter. Well, how do you think about the integrated wallet? Because this is, like, one of the big people bring it up all the time, the integrated wallet, both on the positive and the negative side. How do you think about it as as the actual founder and CEO and the guy focused on shipping the ship?
[01:19:35] Miljan:
So the integrated wallet is a flagship feature of Primal. We definitely take the built in wallet very seriously to the extent that we kind of look at the wallet and all and the social media clients as kind of equal parts being a part of primal. They're both full time jobs. They're neither is a part time job, and we want to make the wallet itself as capable and as, kind of easy to use as as we can. And so far, we are getting a lot of good feedback about the wallet in terms of its usability. Many hardcore Bitcoiners actually tell me that they use it as a daily driver because it just works for them. Right. Sort of like a replacement, for wallet of Satoshi, which, by the way, when we assess the kind of technology landscape and we're trying to pick the right way to, implement the built in wallet, that market signal that, was being sent out there that, you know, the success of wallet of Satoshi was kind of very clear in terms of what the majority of the users wanted out there.
And since we wanted the wallet to be very approachable by nontechnical people, we wanted the wallet to to just, you know, work out of the box. It was not really possible to, build a self custodial lightning solution that's that was very easy to use and kind of functional from from the get go. So we decided to go with a custodial, wallet, and, we decided to partner with Strike to host the wallet back end so that we are compliant and that we, have, like, a, you know, a licensed custodian for for these funds. We don't just YOLO into custody in people's Bitcoin. And, the downside of this approach, of course, is that we had to implement, KYC Lite to be, be compliant and not have to remove the product off the market, you know, maybe a month or 2 after we launch it.
So that was my assessment, about the state of the art back, almost 2 years ago, a year and a half ago when we started considering the wallet. Things have evolved since then. So e cash is now very interesting and especially Cashew. The Cashew protocol is, really picking up, and there's a lot of this is it's like the whole ecosystem that's, developing around Cashew is quite exciting, both in terms of the development of the core protocol and the apps built on top of it and then bins that are getting stood up. So it would be great. I would love to, have the option for primal users to not use the, you know, the compliant kind of custodial solution that we have now with Strike.
I imagine that still, like, the majority of the users might go that way, but it'd be nice to have the option, to maybe somewhere, like, in a, you know, like, behind the developer flag or something like that where user users can say, no. I I want actually, better privacy here, and, I want to use a Cashew wallet. And what the the the call, scheme that Pablo came up with for nutsack where you kinda store your, Cashew tokens on relays in an encrypted matter. I think that's excellent for for this use case. So I can see us building something like that in the future when we, think we're ready and the and the the sort of Cashew ecosystem kind of grows a little bit more, it would be, that would be a great addition to Primal, I think.
[01:23:44] ODELL:
Yeah. I love that. Basically, just choose your own mint. You choose a mint on in the back end, then strike is no longer your custodian. Primal is no longer your, like, wallet partner. And then you can still just as easily zap. Because, I mean, on the positive side, it's the most seamless Zap experience. Like, just one click Zap, long hold to send a custom amount. It's just clean. It works incredibly well, because it's integrated. But, obviously, it's it it it sucks to to take user information and and tie that user information to social activity.
[01:24:27] Miljan:
Yeah. Agreed. We don't love it. And we when it comes to UX too, there's also this whole notion of, you know, with with the primal custodial solution, currently, we guarantee that your funds will be, you know we're not gonna argue. Stocks are not gonna argue. We guarantee that. We can't make those guarantees with Cashew. Right? Because, we're not going to run a Cashew Mint.
[01:24:51] ODELL:
Right. They're gonna use some other custodian. Exactly. The the cool part about Cashew is that it's an interoperable
[01:24:57] Miljan:
protocol where you can choose your own custodian and choose your own front end. Exactly. And have perfect privacy pretty much, on on the protocol. So, this is why I kind of consider this to be, like, a power user feature where it will be behind some sort of a, yes, I understand. I'm responsible for choosing my, you know, mints. And, I'm not going to hold Primal accountable if I get robbed by this other mint. All these types of things that might be super weird to normal users to kind of be subjected to. For power users, that who understand what's going on, that would be quite welcome. And, honestly, that's the type of product I would like to use, so it does make sense to have this capability eventually in Primal. And, I mean, I think it's worth noting that,
[01:25:50] ODELL:
users right now, you don't have to use the Primal Wallet. You can just you can use Primal and just completely ignore the integrated while it exists. You can set any Lightning address to receive. Right? So, like, right now, all these apps we see on screen are are coming to my npub.cashwallet, my ecash wallet. And and then on Android, you actually have Nostra Wallet Connect support. So you can actually send zaps in app with a click, without using the integrated wallet. Why doesn't I know the answer here, but why doesn't Nostra Wallet Connect exist for iOS users right now where they could use an external wallet easily for sending zaps?
[01:26:35] Miljan:
Yeah. Since the built in custodial wallet, like the the compliant custodial wallet isn't, a perfect fit for everyone out there, we decided right from the get go to implement the option to connect to an external wallet. And we implemented this across the entire primal stack. So in Android, you can use Noster Wallet connect to, to connect to a, a wallet that supports that feature. That's that's been available on Android for from day 1. On the web app, you also can use, a third party extension that has its own built in wallet, that's not a primal wallet and comes out that way. And we also implemented Noster WalletConnect on iOS.
However, we couldn't get that through App Store review. We I still don't understand why, to be honest. And Apple is a lot of times just like a black box. Yeah. You when they reject you, a lot of times you don't exact you you don't understand exactly why I rejected you. And when they accept your submission, you don't know why they accepted it sometimes too. You just kinda go with the flow. But, yeah, that's the the summary. We implemented this across the entire stack. We couldn't roll it out on iOS.
[01:27:57] ODELL:
Got it. Yep. That makes sense. At the end, I mean, building anything in the Apple Vault Garden ecosystem is a exhausting frustrating experience. I think many developers can relate. Okay. So I wanna move to high level Nostra thoughts. Where do you how how do you think about the current level of Nostra adoption, where we are in Nostra's growth? What do you think about going forward from here? Where do we stand?
[01:28:34] Miljan:
So you can look at Noster adoption in 2 different ways. You can look at it as user adoption. How many users we have? How many, you know, active users and so forth? And you can look at it from the developer adoption lens. When it comes to developer adoption, we're absolutely crushing it. I'm not aware of any, competing network that can, like, be in the same ballpark even as us on Nasr. There's so many project. There's so much as there's so much being built. Applications services are being stood up and so forth. So that's extremely bullish because the old adage goes, if you wanna know what future holds, just, look at what all the developers are doing in their spare time.
And they're all building on their apps. When it comes to user adoption, it's a bit of a different story. We don't have, big numbers in terms of absolute user kind of, accounts. Probably a couple of 100000 relatively active humans are are on Noster. There is a subset of that group that's, like, extremely active and passionate and so forth, and this is something you want to see at the early stage of any sort of product adoption and especially when it comes to a protocol. This, like, extremely passionate user base. The rider dies. The rider dies. They're here, and they're not going anywhere.
So that's that's excellent to see. And then, you know, people like to, you know we often hear some criticism in comparisons to, let's say, Blue Sky. Recently, we had, like, a lot of people sign up to Blue Sky, and the people are you know, millions of people signing up to Blue Sky in a week compared to much, much, much smaller numbers than Oster. And people ask why why this is happening. And this is just such a, wrong comparison. It's literally like comparing Venmo and Bitcoin. Well, one is a company, and the other one is a protocol that's being stood up. And when you look at the types of people and the profile of the users of Noster, like, the couple 100000 people I mentioned, well, we all hold our Noster keys.
And Noster is the only protocol, the only network where this is the case. So there's no second best. There's only Noster. If we're looking at, bootstrapping, brand new self sovereign protocol for the Internet, there's only Noster. And the trajectory is to me, it looks exactly like the way I would expect it to look at this early stage. It's like you said, the rider dies. It's the type of people who are not going away and, a ton of developers building interesting things. So it's up to us developers to make the UX better, to create the better better tools. You know? We really work around the clock. You know, like, we there there's not a lot of, time off to the not the developers' stake. We're building as fast as we can.
And I'm hoping the results are visible there because, like, for people who are taking kind of multiple touch points within Noster, like, with months in between, I'm hoping that it is very evident that, like, the the, UX and the services around it are getting much more sophisticated with every subsequent touch point. So we need to do that. And, I think we already are starting to getting to the point where you no longer need to squint to see some of these things, to see all of these different content types, being stood up on Aster and new breeds of applications that are kind of, merging and kind of, bringing together these different content types into new user experiences that are starting to be better than the legacy UX that's being offered out there. Like, I like to think that, you know, merging, microblogging, short form feeds with a long form content within the same app the way we've done at Primal, and, like, merging a wallet into the whole UX there.
We're starting to, in some aspects, overtake the feature set and the UX that's available in legacy platforms. And this is just the beginning. You know? We've been at it for almost 2 years at Primal. It was started coding in January 23. It feels like we've barely begun. And we're definitely up against, companies that have been around for 10 plus years with multibillion dollar budgets. But already in some aspects, we are we as in Noster applications are starting to look better. You know, we have better UX around, like, this kind of textual content. We have better search, and, there's still more work to do, I think, when it comes to improving the UX even more. Like, I'd like to reach, Instagram level kind of polish and performance in in Primal Apps. So there's a lot more that we need to do.
But you can you can help but be bullish about the, trajectory. So we know the apps and, like, products are rapidly getting better. We're getting more content creators interested because they see this UX and they like their content to appear there. And then they we're getting to the point where they can recommend Nostr Apps to their audiences with a straight face. Right? You can tell people, okay. Follow me on Primal or find me on Primal, and it's a pretty high chance they'll be able to download the app, get signed up, and get going. So in summary, I'm bullish about where things are going.
[01:34:58] ODELL:
Very well said. I mean, I think, well, we've made massive progress. It's obvious. And there's still a lot of work to be done. And I tend to agree with you that, people most people will not come for censorship resistance or verifiability or permissionlessness at its core. They will come because the UX is way better and the UX will be way better because of those key foundational elements. So they're definitely interconnected. There's also something, you know, where you kinda have to flip on your head how you kinda measure these things with an open protocol, which is, for example, user numbers.
Nasser is an open transparent network. Anyone can make relatively verifiable calculations on what they think user numbers are. If you're asking if if you're trying to figure out how many users of Telegram exist or how many users of X exist, you have to just blindly trust Pavel Durov or Elon Musk on how many users they say there are, like there's zero way that you can verify it.
[01:36:02] Miljan:
Or Blue Sky.
[01:36:03] ODELL:
Or Blue Sky. And there's another piece there where, these things are walled gardens for the most part. I think Blue Sky you can view without an account decently well. And TikTok, you can too because CCP wants as as many eyeballs as possible. But Instagram, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, x, you like, you can't you can't interact with that content unless you have an account. And there's been many studies that most people, the way they interact with this stuff is they're lurkers. They they rarely engage and they're just viewing. So from that perspective, I like to say that in in terms of Nostra users, we have the entire Internet connected population, 5,000,000,000 plus people, because they can just click a a primal link or an end jump link, and they can just view the content, everyone who replied, everyone who quoted it without ever having an account. Those people will never be measured, period. And then the last piece is daily active users itself is a kind of a predatory mind frame to view these things. I mean, it's literally like you're you're measuring addiction. It's a it's an addiction metric.
It it'd be like it'd be like calling, you know, heroin users, daily active users. How many daily active users do we have of this drug or that drug? But in big tech, like, it's become the the the normal metric, the normal KPI that people use to measure it. So I would push people back to like, we want people ideally and there will be plenty of people addicted to Nostr and Nostr perhaps, because, you know, it's app developers will try and make things more addictive in a lot of in a lot of situations. But I would push us as as a community to strive for experiences that could be healthier for users, that could be very useful for users, where they don't necessarily have to check it every day or scroll for 9 hours, you know, and 10 hours and try and get those scroll numbers up because the incentives can be built in a way where where you're not monetizing that attention, where you're not monetizing, surveillance data. You're not monetizing, these different dystopian big tech surveillance, corporate surveillance ad models.
So as a result, you don't necessarily need users to be addicted in order for everyone to win. So there's a lot of different things at play here. And, I know people tend to get frustrated when they see, like, the most conservative user number metrics, you know, that we see floated around. And I think a lot of times it does a little bit more harm than good. It doesn't matter, I think, in the big scheme of things, but it does, like, discover it does discourage people to a degree. And there's different elements here with that make it more challenging as an open protocol in terms of that initial push of users because the community does care so much. And I saw this with Bitcoin growing up.
You know, for instance, with bit with Bitcoin, it's way easier to onboard someone if you just recommend them a single wallet, right, If you say go use a cold card. But people feel it's that's an open protocol and you have a lot of choice. So people wanna give you, like, 10 different recommendations, and then they give you 10 different recommendations. And then as a result, the friction and overwhelmness in your head, you don't end up you don't end up, actually using something. And I think we'll start to see that with Nostra too, as it grows. Like, people will just be like, follow me on Domus, download Domus, or follow me on Primal, download Primal, and then the user will incidentally get all the knock on benefits. Like, if you have any complaints at the end of the day, like, I see some comments in there, gaslighting us a little bit in the in the live chat. And at the end of the day, the beauty of Nostr and why you can never compare it to the decisions that are made on closed big tech is that at the end of the day, if you don't like a decision that Primal makes, you can just go use another client. If you don't like a decision that Vidr makes with Amethyst, you can go use another client and you lose nothing. You have the freedom of choice, which none of them could ever provide.
Okay, that was my long rant for the day. Millian, it's been an absolute pleasure as always. I don't wanna keep you from integrating ZapStream and Primal. I know you're gonna immediately go and integrate live live video streaming directly into the client, so we'll have it in 2 weeks. Do you have any, do you have any final thoughts before we wrap?
[01:40:46] Miljan:
Sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Who needs sleep? Let's go and get more stuff. Yeah. The final thoughts, I'll just, like, riff off of what you just mentioned here. Like, the daily active user, metric is really not that relevant, let's say, for for a company like Primal anymore because we, our goal is not to create engagement. We we we don't care if you spend 5 minutes or 5 hours on Primal. It doesn't, what what we care about is how many users found Primal useful enough to, pay for the, premium subscription. That's really like, when you look at our incentives, it's about making the product useful and providing high quality signal to to and great tools to our users. If we do a good job, we get paid. It's irrelevant whether we make somebody doom scroll for 5 hours, if we are not able to do those things. So aligning these incentives is, I think, one of the keys here. I'm super excited that we are taking this path.
[01:42:01] ODELL:
Love it. Million, thank you again for joining us. I appreciate you. Keep keep crushing it. And huge shout out to the freaks who continue to support the show, whether that's through podcasting 2.0 apps or a ride or die in the live chat. Dispatch has no sponsors or ads, so you guys are what keeps the show going. So thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining, mill million million. Keep crushing it, and hopefully, I'll have you on soon again. Cheers. Same old high fats. Thank you. Always.
[01:42:44] Unknown:
Our world is chaotic, but life found its way by channeling energy to bring order to chaos. It is in our nature to fix signals amongst noise because it is through communication and exchange that we evolve beyond the darkness of chaos until the dawn of civilization. Our evolution thrives in exchange of all the info we try to convey. They flow through to the marketplace and form the signals to regulate how we coordinate where things need to be. Price speaks, so we learn to compete. This drives us to efficiently shape the world with our voice. Now let the market speak. So we build, we sow, we trade, we grow to meet our wants and needs. We specialize, drive from the mind, our creations, into reality. We make progress in our process to get more for less, advancing society. We brought forth dawn of the age of technology that harnessed the energy to reach prosperity.
Our money embodies the power to reap what we sow, so the market becomes a channel for our collective energy to flow. When value is traded for value, we are aligned and so we evolve. This is how amidst uncertainty, life continues to grow. But the dawn of tech gave rise to light speed information exchange. So to transact fast, we further abstract money from energy constraints and became more aligned on a few large entities to coordinate trade, concentrating the power, resources, and authority to create more and more of our money, distorting its signals, eroding its worth, and throwing us back into the darkness of chaos.
When we destroy the mechanism of money, we destroy our ability to navigate through uncertainty. And when we can't trade value freely and directly, we must trust the few to govern the many. What happens when all our means center around an authority? Complexity builds now coordination. Relies on conformity. Observe our thoughts, the sense of dissent and coerce our actions. Can there be true innovation when there's no freedom of expression? What happens to our voice? The ones that shape social discourse now whose ideas get created and which problems get solved. If our progress depends on hearing many sides to resolve, then why would we suppress the voice that shapes how humanity evolves? When we cut off the perspectives that make up society, we lose sight of the truth that forms our entire reality.
Each person's contribution builds up our resiliency. Did we forget these differences are what strengthens humanity? When communication breaks our words tend to silence, our acts become violent, and the world is divided, and its darkest truth is twisted by our pain and our bias, eroding the common ground, making us more and more fragile. To navigate uncertainty, we must solve for robustness, so everything gets tried and tested by various efforts until we discover the system that best coordinates us. Mirrors life's process of channeling energy to create signal from chaos. In the era of technology, we transform energy into computational power to process the noise of free markets into structured order. And just by looking at numbers, we can derive how much power is required to reduce chaos and inscribe a flow of value for order verify, that our transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust.
Transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust when we can see proof. It is real time consensus that our lines is to evolve. This is how, amidst uncertainty, our lives continue to grow when we uphold our own rules. We preserve our own work and defend our own voice, which lets the true market emerge. The strength of the design lies in each of our participation since we are the nodes that channel our energy end to end. As we claim responsibility to uphold our own rights, we radiate the power that brings our truth into light.
And when that dawn of light touches all parts of the glow and it ripples throughout society and it returns us the hope that that becomes the power that sparks humanity to thrive, that same power that fuels the creation of the mind. And when our mind and our money are truly set free and they transcend the limits of past boundaries, now knowing becomes owning and ideas become wealth. What happens now? We can all push to expand the edges of our existence and assume evolution when things are the hardest. As we head for the light, we have to push through the darkness that is in these moments. We do what we do first. We take the chaos in the darkness and use our power to create. It is in these moments when we're all in alignment and our freedom of difference ascends us to our highest limits and depth of it all. Though that hope is not gone. It is always the darkest before dawn.
Bloomberg Intro with Jack Mallers
Introduction
Primal 2.0 Launch
Advanced Search Features
Primal Premium and Legends
Feed Marketplace and Custom Feeds
Long Form Content and Reads
Explore Tab and Discovery Tools
Integrated Wallet and Future Plans
Nostr Adoption and Future Outlook
