Panel discussion moderated by Marty Bent discussing funding the nostr ecosystem in front of a live audience at Nostriga in Riga.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD-Y0fq5KiA
ODELL on Nostr: https://primal.net/odell
Marty Bent on Nostr: http://primal.net/martybent
Preston Pysh on Nostr: https://primal.net/preston
Alex Li on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1szpa7cypmyd59083qs3pte9lez22lzfu6pl2guhgqx7q09x68y6qquh3td
website: https://citadeldispatch.com
nostr live chat: https://citadeldispatch.com/stream
nostr account: https://primal.net/odell
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@citadeldispatch
stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
(00:01) Introduction
(00:38) Overview of Funding Nostr
(01:15) Challenges in Funding Open Source Projects
(03:23) Role of Nonprofits in Early Funding
(06:20) Sustainable Long-Term Support
(10:07) Investment Challenges in Nostr
(18:00) Open Source Grants and Proof of Work
(24:43) Value for Value Model and Zaps
(30:49) Areas Needing Attention in Nostr
(37:00) Interoperability and Future Prospects
(41:43) Final Thoughts and Encouragement
[00:00:01]
Unknown:
Next panel, we're gonna talk about funding Noster, and, I'll just introduce our guests as they come up. Unless you wanna have a little lunch or something like that, we can, yeah, we'll we'll get going. Bring bring your bring your lunch up, Preston. You don't you know, we're we're casual. It's an unconference. In between, sessions, he's gotta get a quick bite. Alright guys, let's, grab a microphone and get ourselves comfortable. This is gonna be a great discussion and it talks about, how to fund Noster. So we have Preston, Alex,
[00:00:47] Marty:
Odell and, for the first time, I think, on the stage here in, in Riga. Marty, you're gonna moderate for us or were you on another panel? Forgive me if I if I missed you. You are correct. This is my first panel of the week, and I'm very excited to be here. I got thrown on last minute, and it's a topic that we talk about a lot. So I'm excited for the conversation. You got it. We're here to talk about funding Noster. Like I said, we talk about it a lot on our HR, particularly, not only funding Noster but Bitcoin. But before we get into the specifics, Matt, when we say funding Noster, what is the context of that the different context of that in your mind? Have you zapped today? I have. I actually got a zap war with you. There's a little bit of a zap war going on. That's how we're gonna fund
[00:01:34] ODELL:
Noster. Is Paul here? I don't know if Paul's here. That hummingbird everyone go follow hummingbird on Noster and just look at the zaps on their on their note. When you think about funding Noster, it's interesting. Right? Because it's a fortunately, it's a very false focused ecosystem. It's an open source focused ecosystem. Almost every project in the space is open source. A lot of them, do not have obvious monetization models or sustainable funding models for themselves. I think, there will be a lot of interesting strategies that different projects, employ to try and get sustainable funding.
But in the meantime, what that means is that a lot of the funding is based on donations. Right? And one of the cool things about noster is noster has Bitcoin built into it. Or if you use Rabble's client, it just has a random unit that you zap and the units go up, but not Bitcoin. And I think that will be huge in the future. I think, like, developers will post they'll they'll post on Nasr. They'll have a new software update or they'll they'll be teasing something and their users will directly fund them with no middleman. But that's a time and maturity and adoption thing. And right now, unfortunately, like, we we are seeing the early signs of that, but we're not seeing that in real I don't wanna say yeah. Meaningful amounts. Right? Like, people need to pay their rent. They need to support their family. They need to feel comfortable leaving whatever their well paying soul sucking job is, to work on this this very new nascent open source protocol.
And as a result, they need some kind of security. And, so what we've seen come in come into play, which is is is these organizations, these nonprofits, specifically OpenSats, which is is what I work on, and HRF, which is what Alex works on, are really stepping up to the plate and providing a lot of the early funding for a lot of these NASA developers. And I think I can speak for both of us that hopefully for a lot of them, this will just be kind of the jump start. Right? It's it's it's the paddles on the chest and then they like get up and they're the Frankenstein beast and they just keep going. Right? But right now, it's it's actually incredibly optimistic. Like, I the amount of developers we have working on this space full time, the amount of designers, the amount of just open source contributors in general is is incredibly impressive. It it compared to any other industry ecosystem at at this stage in its life, I I just think is unparalleled.
[00:04:23] Marty:
Yeah. And that's a a good point there. And, like, shifting to you, Alex, I think I'm gonna throw this out there. Like, you mentioned OpenSats, HRF. You guys have been doing, the funding of Bitcoin open source developers for years now. Were there lessons learned in building up those funds to fund Bitcoin developers that were easily applicable to Noster as it started to emerge?
[00:04:47] Alex:
When it comes to Bitcoin or Noster funding, I think that a lot of organizations tend to be very conservative. They want they're worried about their image. They wanna support the right projects. They're worried about blowback. They don't wanna fund a project that might be a liability down the road, whether it's due to, you know, some crazy developer who posts weird stuff on social media or someone who is not that sociable. I think one thing that HRF has learned that it is important to take risks early on when you have a burgeoning new ecosystem that's not been, like, vetted by corporate lawyers and auditors and, you know, people in suits to say, well, this is, you know, clean or this is good for the brand of whatever you're supporting. It's important to take calculated risks early on, support small and early projects that don't have you know you can't have a multi year long track record when it comes to Noster development when the protocol is only a couple months old in the beginning. So I think what I would say is we've learned to take some risks, be calculated.
Of course, you've got to do your vetting. You've got to look at a developer's history, proof of work, what they've done in the past. But it's important to be able to be action oriented, take some risks, get shit done, and support a protocol in its infancy so it can continue to grow and develop.
[00:06:05] Marty:
Now with that in mind, like, what are your in terms of funding needs right now from your perspective is, HRF and OpenSats looking at all the projects and, like, prioritizing, what to fund? Like, how how do you guys approach that?
[00:06:20] Alex:
I think one issue that is plaguing a lot of open source developers, and it's not just with Bitcoin or Nostra specific, is just figuring out ways for sustainable long term support. Right now, a lot of funding in open source is on a grant based model, where you give someone a grant to work for maybe 6 months, a year, maybe 2 years if you're lucky. And then 6 months, a year, 2 years down the line, you reassess. And that can be very stressful for developers who don't know whether they're going to have an income or salary after their grant is over. And in a grant based model, it often is very confusing for grantees as to, okay, what are the objective criteria for me to renew my grant? Will I still be supported down the line?
And oftentimes, that doesn't actually have to do with the quality of your work, but just has to do with the state of financial markets or the state of Bitcoin markets at the time, whether we're in a bull or bear market, or whether people that actually traditionally give you funding have money. And that's very stressful for grantees. And that's not an easy problem to solve. But
[00:07:26] ODELL:
we're working on it. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, 2 fold. First of all, it's always about increasing donor base and and getting as much donations as possible. I mean, huge shout out to Jack who's the overwhelming majority of Open Sats donations in terms of amount. But I will say one of the cool things about Open Sats is we have, I think, nearly 10,000 individual donations, because people can just easily donate with Bitcoin or or dollars. And if they donate with dollars, we automatically convert into Bitcoin. So we're just trying to increase that donor base, make sure that we have the funds available for open source developers regardless of of, you know, where we are in the Bitcoin cycle.
But then the second piece is the the second piece is, like, how do you scale these things up? And it's it's difficult. Like, as Alex said, like, the renewal process, is a mental time sync for everybody involved, not just the developers, but also the teams that are allocating funds and and processing all the paperwork and whatnot that is necessary. There's a lot of burnout in every direction. Developers are burned out. People on our team are burned out. It's just everyone is incredibly hard worked and hardworking, and there's there's very little time to go around. And and there's pain points that just keep popping up in different places. Communication is a is a major issue that we are specifically working on at OpenSats.
You know, it's, it's it's great when you receive a grant, and we're almost at 200 outstanding grants at OpenSats, which is kind of insane to think about for such a young organization. But I think we're at at, like, 800 or 900 denied grants. And if you just start to think about, like, the level of paperwork and communication that is required to not only manage the existing grants, but then also, manage the inbound interest and and need, it's quite monumental. And we personally are trying to do it on a very lean budget. You know, OpenSaaS is a 100% pass through, so we don't take a cut of any donations. So we have to fund our operations through a separate operations budget.
And as a result and we're very transparent with it. We try and keep that number as low as possible. So there's there's a lot of learning experiences there.
[00:09:44] Preston:
Preston, any thoughts that I'll just pull you into the conversation? On the OpenSAT stuff, no. I don't have any anything additional to add other than, to to Matt's point, getting donations from people that have really kinda leaned into this because they understand how important the free speech aspect of it is is vital. I think that that's gonna be a a main source of funding, moving forward. It's gonna have to be a main source of funding moving forward because from, like, an investment standpoint, a lot of this space this is a hard truth I'm about to say is is uninvestable, just because of where we're at in the time line and the the risk profile of of some of the start ups and the protocol itself is you know, as far as the size of it. Because this is this is one of the challenges that you have, from an investment standpoint.
Because we're Bitcoiners and we understand what that hurdle rate is, It's compounding, and we're gonna be pretty conservative. About 50% annualized is what we're saying is the hurdle rate. People in traditional finance would tell you the hurdle rate's 5% today. Right? And we're looking at it and we're saying, no. The hurdle rate's 50%. So if I'm gonna be a good steward of my LPs that are providing capital to me and I'm gonna employ that in a way that's gonna get a return because the the the number one question I always hear, in the VC side is, well, why don't I just buy Bitcoin? Like, why am I investing in you guys? And so I have to look at every single thing from this hurdle rate of 50% annualized, or else I can't look at that person with a straight face and say, oh, yeah. I can I can outperform that? Because if I'm not making decisions that is trying to outperform 50% hurdle rate, well, what am I doing? Right? So when we look at all these all the start ups in the space and we're saying, alright. It's like, what's investable?
Can it can it compound? Can the top line, you know, outperform 50%. Well, very early stage stuff can. But when you account for all the technical risk, the protocol risk, the all these I mean, we had a conversation up here about relays. I mean, I don't know what the consensus was, you know, for the people listening. That was a spicy one. It was yeah. But in a in a good way. Right? And, do we know what this looks like in 5, 10 years from now? No. We don't. I'm very hopeful. I I think the, you know, the environmental factors are really gonna push, more people to come on board. I you know, I wouldn't wanna be Elon right now. I can tell you that much.
I think he's got a massive target on his back. And so, like, let's say they lean into that and they they really start to pressure him even more than they they already did by not honoring, his options over at Tesla. Right? Like, we could get into a whole you know, put the tinfoil hat on. Why do you think that that didn't happen? I think some of it had to do with Twitter, to be quite, you know, honest with you. So, like, what happens when they amplify that? I think it's gonna give a nice tailwind into the protocol, into Noster, and I think it's going to help assist making some of these things derisked and and, you know, make the math work a little bit. But I'd tell you right now, the the the economic calculation and the math on it right now is very hard for for profit, funds, VC funds that are trying to allocate capital in a in a way that's very responsible.
[00:13:03] ODELL:
But Yeah. I mean, I would just to add there, like, I wear multiple hats, literally. And one of those hats is is venture. Right? We have we have 1031. We're focused mostly on Bitcoin businesses. We have a a a single investment in the Nasr space in Primal. And we tend to agree with you that a lot of this is very early in terms of investable opportunities and and and obvious business models on how this all works out. I will say I think it's actually kind of beautiful. I think, historically speaking, when you see new tech develop, it's it's largely led by VC Investment. And VC Investment comes with their own incentives and and and and some of them can be quite broken.
But in the opposite side, it's like we have this these open source grants that are being provided. And the first major incentive that that provides a a a project maintainer or a founder or something is you actually have a strong incentive to have a open source project. Historically, like, if you took VC money, and I I think Bitcoin focused VCs are are are not really included in this for the most part. They encourage you to keep everything closed source and proprietary and walled gardens as much as possible because they wanna protect their moat. And the open source grants does the exact opposite. The second piece is it gives founders a lot of flexibility because they're not actually giving up any equity in their business. Right? They're getting no strings attached grants while they figure things out and see what the business model could be, while they work things out. And then the third piece I would say is, you know, you said the hurdle rate, is is a conservative 50%. I mean, 10 years the last 10 years, it's 63% year over year on Bitcoin.
So, like, Bitcoin is very much the opportunity cost when you're talking about talking about anything you build. And it's not just from an investor's landscape. Like, if you are a founder, you if you're an individual, you should probably have the overwhelming majority of your assets in Bitcoin. And every every time you are bootstrapping your own project, whether that's a bakery or whether that's a Noster client, like, you should be factoring in the opportunity cost of that of that, yearly return that we see on Bitcoin.
[00:15:23] Marty:
Yeah. Just to add to this, I was upstairs listening to Oscar Mayer from Fountain explain how they did their migration to Noster. And it, having listened to that, it seemed like a pretty herculean effort on, their team's side. And I think what he mentioned upstairs is that Noster, at the protocol level, really needs to work on standardization that makes it easier for incoming companies that want to come on to Noster to do so via NIPS, particularly. And reason I bring this up is because if you're a founder out there building on Noster and you wanna build a business that's monetizable, I think focus should be on creating those bridges that make it easy for incumbent companies to get on to Noster because that will show, for profit VCs that there's a lot of activity here. It would increase the potential for you to get funded as a business. But there's as we said, particularly in VC timing is a big part of it, and it's objectively true that it is very early on in Nasser. And the timing probably isn't perfect for deploying capital into, investable or businesses for VC like return.
[00:16:32] Preston:
One thing that makes it really hard too is, Matt hit a little bit on the competitive moat. I mean, anybody who's an investor so I I have I come with this Warren Buffett value investing background, like, hardcore background in in studying him and all that kind of stuff. What you find is was one of the most important things he looks at is having a competitive moat. I wanna buy something. I wanna squat on it for 20 years, and I don't want some other actor to come in there and erode my competitive advantage in the marketplace so that I can continue to, you know, benefit from the free cash flows that the company kicks off. And, when we look at this particular space, it's very hard for an investor to to look at a business that's so open that any person can then, hey. You can make a client. Oh, and I can make a client, and I can tweak it just this little bit. I can basically fork what you're doing and just tweak it this little bit. From a competition standpoint And this is this is what makes Nostra so great. Right? We all know that. But from an investor's lens, they're looking at that and they're saying risk, risk, risk, risk.
I could just get chewed out. Like, I could have the best client for 2 years, and then year 3, it's gone. And, like, poof, there goes your investment, and there goes your return, and there goes Bitcoin. Right? Goodbye.
[00:17:50] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean but you also have the alternative when you build on open protocols and you build in an open source fashion where if you're bootstrapping a new business, you don't have to do it from the ground up. You get to take advantage of everyone else's network effect, and you're all compounding on top of each other. So there is a bit of a give and take there. And, you know, I I I personally believe that we should all try and be the change we wanna see in the world. And I I I do think that, traditional investing techniques are gonna be flipped on their head, and the way people think about things, in this way going forward, will change significantly. And part of that's open source. And then secondly, part of that is us moving towards a Bitcoin standard, and and money not being so cheap. You know, money money actually having a real cost and a a real hurdle rate that you need to to outperform.
[00:18:45] Marty:
Shifting this back to, open source funding, I'm sure there's a lot of people in the crowd, who are particularly interested to hear what you have to say, Alex, Matt. From your perspectives, you mentioned the communication, the amount of inbound that you guys have. Like, what advice would you give to open source developers looking to a grant? Like, what boxes do they need to check to make sure that they're getting noticed and that they have a high likelihood of getting accepted? Well, first of all, raise your hand if you're on an HRF or Open Sats grant in this room right now.
[00:19:16] ODELL:
Okay. That's awesome. Hopefully, next year, the the hands are even more. I mean, I think the number one thing is what's really cool about providing open source grants, and then I'll hand it over to Alex, is that there really is usually a verifiable proof of work, in terms of commits and repo activity. Also on Noster in general, because it is a communication protocol, you you get to see a lot of these projects actually develop in real time and interaction between them and their users. The more information we have, the better. Obviously, in in terms of resources, everyone is a bit constrained. So one of the issues is, like, having a reasonable ask, in terms of of how much money you're looking for.
But I think both us and HRF have been trying to push the limits a bit on on what kind of funding we can provide. And, actually, sometimes we do dual fund, projects where both HRF and us will split, a grant, and there's communication there, you know, that there's, like, honest communication there both with the grant. Recipient is is is saying to us, you know, oh, we're we're also applied for a grant on HRF and then also, you know, friendly communication between Alex and the rest of his team and us, in terms of actually verifying that's the case. We haven't seen anyone abuse that yet. But I would say in general, first of all, it's a longer process than you're probably hoping for. Hopefully, we can cut that time down. And the more information we have, the more proof of work, the better.
[00:20:51] Alex:
Yeah. At HRF, we have a Bitcoin Development Fund. And even though it's called the Bitcoin Development Fund, we also support Nostra projects. We support free and open source, Bitcoin and Nostra projects. And the number one piece of advice I would give to aspiring developers or educators, activists, community builders who are looking for grants and funding is, don't be afraid to make the ask. The worst that can happen is we say no, and then you can always reapply. So the first step is just, yeah, don't be afraid to make the ask. Don't be afraid to apply for funding. Don't be afraid to ask for help in this space, whether that's for applying for a grant or whether that's just asking for a referral, whether that's just showing up to a conference and asking for travel grants.
We're trying to support everyone. And although it's impossible to support everyone given limited constraints, we're doing our best to try to expand open source funding, give more funds every year, support more people, support more projects. So yeah. The number one thing I'd say is don't be afraid to ask.
[00:21:49] ODELL:
Yeah. The amount of times I've seen, like, a Nasr post where someone's like, why aren't you funding this thing? It's like, well, they should apply. You know, go to the website, put an application in. Like, if you don't apply, we can't fund you. End of story.
[00:22:03] Preston:
Marty, I would just say, if if people in this room, the builders in this room are looking at this and and hearing this conversation, thinking about what it is you want you wanna build something, you just don't know what it is. This is this is what I would tell you to start with, the upstream, you know, incentives and impacts that are playing out. Speech, they've gotta try to control the speech. These, you know, lizard people, are trying to control the speech aggressively. It's it's going to amplify. It's gonna amplify aggressively. K?
So there's gonna be this movement towards Nostra. Right? What exists today that is vital for free speech and for free and open communication, like GitHub, right, or Signal or, like, these things that that that already exist in the world. And then think, is it built over on Noster, or could it be built better? And and think in those very big, broad terms as you're thinking about putting in your application of of the business that that you're or the idea that you're trying to build out, that was really for me, that was really exciting yesterday to see the whole GitHub thing and all the work that went into that because that's huge. It's absolutely huge.
So that that would be my bit of advice for people sitting in the room that are maybe looking to do something. It's just start with the free speech, understand that there are things that are already constructed in a very centralized kind of way, and and build it, and then talk to these guys or submit your application with these guys.
[00:23:35] Marty:
Shifting back to, what you started with, Matt, like, the concept of Zaps and being able to directly not only fund projects, but you can tip people for their content. And we've discussed this for many years because we've been on podcasting 2.0 for probably 3 or 4 years now. We recognize that the amount of people streaming us ads or boosting us during the show isn't isn't material yet, but you can squint and look forward. And if adoption of Bitcoin in these apps increases, that it could become a significant revenue stream for pockets. Like, do you think that potential exists for funding projects, businesses,
[00:24:09] ODELL:
and Yeah. No. I think it's absolutely massive. I think people are really sleeping on that. I mean, it it enables business models that were just never even possible before. It it enables audience and donation based funding, without a middleman, very low fees, very low friction transactions. A lot of times people wanna support, but if there's any little bit of friction there, they fall off and they don't support. Right? So you wanna reduce the friction as much as possible. And seeing it on Noster, I mean, we've reduced that friction over the last year and a half, 2 years so significantly.
I think it's easy to just underappreciate how far we've come. But, like I said earlier, like, me and Marty are we literally got into a zap battle, over supporting that Hummingbird film about Bitcoin Jungle, and it was very low friction for us to send a lot of money to them. And I assume that zap battle will probably continue, and someone else on the livestream might might pick it up and and start battling us as well. But on the podcasting 2 point o piece, that was another key. Right? Is is lower the friction as much as possible. Oscar, and the team at Fountain have done a really good job at lowering that friction.
Some trade offs were made, you know, a lot of dependency on custodial wallets. Hopefully, we we can move away from that or at least have more private, privacy focused custodial wallets with stuff like Cashew. But we're definitely seeing a trend up. Even if it's just, maybe maybe the amounts are aren't as high as people would expect them to be. Like, clearly, like, on the podcasting side, you make a lot more money doing advertisement based model still. But, like, if we if me and Marty, like, open our notes, like, at any moment, there's, like, someone at least one person, like, sending one sapper bite while they're, like, listening.
And we're just sending one sapper minute while they're listening to, the podcast, which is, like, super powering and super cool to watch. And we've seen that trend up in terms of number of payments, if not the the total amount.
[00:26:18] Preston:
Just looking at it from an incentive stands point standpoint, I know what my podcast makes on the traditional side traditional advertising side, and I know what it makes by people streaming me sats. The disparity is so absurdly large, the difference, that if a person is is coming over through a natural incentive, they're not coming for the money. They're doing it to to support the network because you're in in I don't want to say this to offend anybody. You were we're kind of in an r and d phase with this. This is not, like, full production, like, deployment. We're sucking a whole bunch of demand naturally over to it at this point. You're not even close to that right now based on the numbers that I'm seeing.
That doesn't make it wrong. It doesn't make it right. I'm just trying to, like, properly frame the the current setup and the environment that I'm personally seeing with with this. The challenge that that you run into is is this model is so ingrained, this advertising model, the whole Spotify and all this kind of stuff. These are massive, massive, you know, things that are gonna take a lot of time to to switch over. What what is the timeline? It's not 4 years. I think it's more than 4 years for this particular topic. I think you're, like, 8 to 10 plus personally. But
[00:27:41] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think, as Bitcoiners, we talk about incentives a lot. Right? And the beauty of the value for value model, the beauty beauty of direct user funding or direct audience funding is you have this nearly perfect incentive. Right? Which is, the creator, whether they're a podcaster, whether they're a developer, is is directly getting, rewarded from their user base. And as a result, they are the stakeholder that they are trying to provide as good of a service or as good of podcast as possible. The advertising model is, at its core, is is is is a surveillance capitalism model that, like, perverts every incentive and makes these these large tech companies incredibly predatory. They make the podcast incredibly predatory, and they try and track their users as much as possible. That's why we start to see stuff like Spotify do these exclusive deals where they can try and track podcast listens even more so and know who the demographics of your users are and all this other stuff.
So it's it's it's important that we start going down this trajectory of of trying to improve the incentives. The second piece there is there's something about it on Nostr rather than podcasting 2.0 because I agree with you. Like, it's the disparity is massive between advertisements and value for value. On on Nostr, you do have that social signal element that you don't really have on podcasting 2.0. You do kind of on Reverdle recap, we read boosts, which is probably where we get the majority of our sats, from podcasting 2.0 because they get, like, shout out in the in the podcast. They hear their name. Right? They get that social signal. And I think just that little element on on Nostra clients of having that social signal, your little badge, you know, saying that I zapped more than Marty, does encourage people to do it. And then the third piece is it's different for a Joe Rogan than a new podcaster. A new podcaster actually has a lot of trouble getting advertisement deals.
A a a new developer that has a brand new project has a lot of trouble having any kind of monetization scheme. And there's actually not that much friction for them to have more in value for value than they do if from any kind of alternative. They're they have no alternative. That is the the only way they can go. Yeah. I I can hear Adam Curry rolling over in his bed right
[00:29:57] Marty:
now from afar,
[00:30:03] ODELL:
value for value. Well, maybe one day he'll understand Nostrad.
[00:30:07] Marty:
I just texted him about it, actually. But, going back to what Alex said earlier, like, if you wanna monetize via value for value, don't be afraid to make the ask. And figuring out unique interaction models with your audience, like Matt mentioned, we read the top 4 boost each week on rabbit hole recap and that creates a marketplace so that people get their boost read on the episode week in week out. And so as a creator or somebody building an app trying to get people to interact with your your nostril notes, like, think about unique ways to incentivize people to do that so that they are more compelled to zap you and then you can take that money and go build what you wanna build. Switching gears, you didn't really answer the question earlier. What do we think is the most prescient need in terms of areas of the Nasser protocol that need funding, attention, review, focus?
[00:31:00] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I don't have a good answer for you, Marty. Like, everything and everywhere. And it's cool because we are working on there there's there's so many different there's so many projects being working on worked on in Nostra. Like, we can't even keep track of all of them. I I don't I think anyone in this room that says they they know every single Nostra project that exists is just a 100% full of shit. Like, there's there's no way that you're able to track all of this. It's a full time job in itself. And I think that's the cool part because you can build on it in an open, permissionless way. I will say, like, we probably don't need more Twitter like clients, but also more don't hurt. And maybe there's a better one that comes out. You know? So I'm not also gonna discourage people from doing that.
In general, with how we do OpenSats funding is we try not to do, you know, we which the the way Open Sats works is we have a 9 person board, and during the review process, you it requires 5 of 9 board members to approve your grant. And the reason for that is because we wanted it to be as corruption resistant as possible, so individual biases of of board members don't don't corrupt that process. And especially when you start to talk about larger numbers, and more donations received, that becomes more and more of a concern. So it's important to have that base level foundation.
So it's hard to speak in broad broad strokes about how OpenSAT's review process works. And it's probably one of the most frustrating things for grant recipients because, like, they could have a 45 minute conversation with me or one of the other OpenSats board members, and they'll pretty pretty much still have no insight into whether or not they might get approved. But there are general broad themes. And and in general there, we don't we tend not to be like, oh, well, this is a client, and there's too many there's too many Twitter like clients, so we're not gonna fund this. It's it's does this project have a is is there a need for this project?
Does it accomplish something, in a way that other projects aren't tackling? And is there verifiable proof of work that this project actually exists? It's not just like an idea. So I I don't wanna discourage anyone from doing from from working on anything in the industrial space. I think it's so early that it'd be incredibly conceded to say that we know how to do everything. We actually know how to do very little. And, a lot of these things will be figured out over time as people experiment. So the more experimentation, the better.
[00:33:36] Alex:
To add to Matt's point, I totally agree with him that if anyone thinks that they know a 100% of what's going on in Noster, they're full shit. That's totally true. I feel like I took a 2 week break from the Internet where I just chilled and relaxed and try to detox myself from the toxic algorithms. I come back, and I'm just like, what's been going on, Noster? I'm just like, oh, like, all this new stuff going on. A solid contrarian take on what I think needs the most development in Noster is I feel like we have we're obviously not fully funding all the Nostr developers out there. There's a lot of projects, a lot of amazing developers who still need funding. But I think that we are slightly underfunding people who are doing community building, who are doing marketing, people who are onboarding new users. Right? Because right now, let's be honest, Odell and many people here on the panel have taken the brave step of deleting their x account.
Many of us still use x every day. I'm part of this crew. I even paid for a blue check mark and, you know, that oof. Yeah. Odell, you can roast me for that paying $8 a month to boost my algorithmic reach on x. Did you did you use a KYC'd phone number when you did that?
[00:34:43] ODELL:
I did. Oh, woah. Woah. I did. I did. So you you got me there. The issue isn't the payment. The issue is the is the identity verification. I I think, actually, in a lot of ways, one of the good things that X is doing is is proving at scale that people will pay for a product so you don't need to rely on the advertisement model. And I think that's a key piece that people miss, is that is that actually, we probably should be encouraging more and more projects to have some kind of premium model, where users pay them directly. That is it it's it's not Adam Curry's value for value because Adam Curry's value for value is is you is you pay what you feel like. But I think it is a step towards sustainable, more freedom focused,
[00:35:28] Alex:
user focused, human focused business models. Yeah. And I think one thing that HRF does slightly different in the Bitcoin funding space is we would try to fund circular economies. We try to fund global communities because we want people to be able to actually use Bitcoin. And if people wanna be able to use Bitcoin, they have to know it exists. They need to be in they need to have an environment where they can safely learn how to actually install a wallet, safe on and on off ramps within their country. So we try to fund Bitcoin circular economies and educators and activists around the world. I think that and I think we need a little bit of that in Noster, where we need a way to obviously, Noster is, is different than Bitcoin. And a innovation hub or a circular economy is not the same as a booth at a conference where you can learn about Noster. But we need ways to better on ramp people to Noster, educate people of Noster, get people to actually know that Noster exists. And I'm not sure what's the best way to do that right now. Is it funding people to go to non Bitcoin and non Noster conferences to educate people about Noster? Is it paying people to get on panels at mainstream conferences around the world so people know that Noster exists?
Is it just, you know, starting a global campaign to get people to delete their x account and to use Nostr exclusively? Who knows? But change comes in within change comes from within. And we have to start, even in the Bitcoin community, getting people to use Nostr. Like, it's amazing how oftentimes I go to a Bitcoin conference and I'll ask people, what's the best way to stay in touch with you socially? And they're like, oh, follow my Twitter. Follow my ex. I'm like, oh. We need to get to the point where you go to a Bitcoin conference, and the first thing someone says is follow me on Nostr.
[00:37:08] ODELL:
Damn right. I I would just I've I've been thinking about your question a little bit more. One of the things I'm really excited about is, you know, I I think one of one of the cool parts about Nasr is this idea that people can control their experience, that the user has, you know, fine tuned controls on on how they experience Nostr and and what content they see and how they consume it. And I think there's while there's a lot of good work that is is moving towards that direction, and and I'm I'm really excited about, like, DVMs and this idea of of of, like, choosing your algorithm and, like, algorithmic marketplaces where you can you can choose different things. I think there's still a lot of work to be done there. And and the key issue there is it's, like, twofold. Right? It's the technical issue of how do we provide users as much control as possible of their experience. So instead of having, like, a top down censorship model like you see with x or TikTok or something like that, it's the users ultimately choosing how they experience the protocol.
But the second piece is trying to do that in a non overwhelming with very little friction. Because if it's if it's overwhelming and you just, like, all of a sudden hit them with a bunch of sliders and a bunch of options and a bunch of different things, then we've also failed on that regard. And when when we're talking about onboarding people to Nostra, like, if they hit that piece of friction, they're just gonna get overwhelmed, and they're just gonna go back to Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever the hell they are.
[00:38:36] Preston:
On the, incentives to drive people to Noster, I think that the the Western governments are gonna probably do most of the heavy lifting for us. So, like, we can do a lot of these things and attract people in, but I think the the real pool and the real demand that's gonna come out of it is just people that get very frustrated because they're gonna have a a 2020 COVID, like, experience, not necessarily a pandemic. But, like, you like, all of my friends are like, wow. Like, I didn't realize that government was, like, truly, like, censoring us and, like, not allowing us to see stuff. Like, everybody was weirded out very weirded out after 2020, and I think that there's more of that kind of stuff on the horizon that's gonna just naturally push people over.
From an investments, I don't know if this is a good answer, but I I find the interoperability stuff to be really important. And, oftentimes, it's there's not, like, a business there, unfortunately. And it's people like Pablo and and many others that have been on stage, you know, the last day and a half that are out there clacking on keys, writing, like, amazing code that is benefiting the connectivity between all of this type of stuff. So when I see OpenSats and I see some of the stuff that they're that they're funding, I I absolutely love this program because it's it's the thing that's kinda stitching this all together that's going to eventually give us the performance that we're and and better than of what we're used to having in these centralized, you know, cesspools that are, you know, feasting off of us.
And it's gonna be a completely different experience on the other side, but stitching it all together because it's so decentralized is is really challenging. So we I was on a Nostra nest the other day listening to a Nostra nest, and, you know, there was, I don't know, 20 people, listening. And when you're on Twitter and you and you go on a spaces, if you have somebody with 10,000 followers or a 100,000 followers or whatever, their entire group of followers see that they're in a spaces, which then drives more engagement and more interaction and more people on stage, because it's all centralized. So when we're looking at the Nostra nest, is there some type of, you know, little circle that goes around the person's image that they're in the room listening to that? No. This is interoperability pieces where you're connecting things that drives engagement for that Noster NEST. But you have to have a client that's willing to to code that up. You have to have you know, all the all the engineering behind all that is not easy.
It takes time. It takes a lot of time to stitch that altogether. So I I get excited about the interoperability piece. I think it's a real challenge to have it funded. But, you know, the nonprofit and and, you know, having an appreciation for kind of where we're at in this prototype slash r and d phase is is very important for especially for everybody in this room that's that are real builders. I would just try to encourage people to do more of that.
[00:41:36] Marty:
Yeah. We've got 3 minutes left, so I'll make a comment, and then I'll throw it to you 3 for final thoughts on this. But I I I think it's important to really point out how far funding for developers has come over the last 5 years specifically and just give a shout out to you 2 gentlemen specifically for pushing this forward. And then on the, for profit side, like, funds like ego.1031, Disclaimer. I'm a partner at 1031. Coming to market. Literally wearing that. So I I think it could be. But I I think, like, everybody's talked about in the past, like, Linux Foundation, Redbox, but I think Bitcoiners have done a really good job over the last 5 years, particularly sort of paving the path for how to fund open source development and setting a new model. It's just been really cool to see play out. And with that, I'll turn it to you guys for final thoughts.
[00:42:27] ODELL:
Be the change you wanna see in the world and use Nostr.
[00:42:31] Alex:
To echo a very smart person, stay humble, stack stats. Also, stay humble and zap your friends.
[00:42:38] Preston:
Don't get frustrated. If you are going for funding and you're you're getting a lot of those, just kind of understand the environmental setting that we're in and how early we are and where you can kinda go for certain types of funding like we talked about on stage. And, it's just gonna take time. It's just gonna take time. And, you know, if the governments start doing their heavy lifting, maybe it'll move a little faster. So we'll see. Awesome. That's all we got. Thank you, guys.
[00:43:02] Alex:
Thank you.
Next panel, we're gonna talk about funding Noster, and, I'll just introduce our guests as they come up. Unless you wanna have a little lunch or something like that, we can, yeah, we'll we'll get going. Bring bring your bring your lunch up, Preston. You don't you know, we're we're casual. It's an unconference. In between, sessions, he's gotta get a quick bite. Alright guys, let's, grab a microphone and get ourselves comfortable. This is gonna be a great discussion and it talks about, how to fund Noster. So we have Preston, Alex,
[00:00:47] Marty:
Odell and, for the first time, I think, on the stage here in, in Riga. Marty, you're gonna moderate for us or were you on another panel? Forgive me if I if I missed you. You are correct. This is my first panel of the week, and I'm very excited to be here. I got thrown on last minute, and it's a topic that we talk about a lot. So I'm excited for the conversation. You got it. We're here to talk about funding Noster. Like I said, we talk about it a lot on our HR, particularly, not only funding Noster but Bitcoin. But before we get into the specifics, Matt, when we say funding Noster, what is the context of that the different context of that in your mind? Have you zapped today? I have. I actually got a zap war with you. There's a little bit of a zap war going on. That's how we're gonna fund
[00:01:34] ODELL:
Noster. Is Paul here? I don't know if Paul's here. That hummingbird everyone go follow hummingbird on Noster and just look at the zaps on their on their note. When you think about funding Noster, it's interesting. Right? Because it's a fortunately, it's a very false focused ecosystem. It's an open source focused ecosystem. Almost every project in the space is open source. A lot of them, do not have obvious monetization models or sustainable funding models for themselves. I think, there will be a lot of interesting strategies that different projects, employ to try and get sustainable funding.
But in the meantime, what that means is that a lot of the funding is based on donations. Right? And one of the cool things about noster is noster has Bitcoin built into it. Or if you use Rabble's client, it just has a random unit that you zap and the units go up, but not Bitcoin. And I think that will be huge in the future. I think, like, developers will post they'll they'll post on Nasr. They'll have a new software update or they'll they'll be teasing something and their users will directly fund them with no middleman. But that's a time and maturity and adoption thing. And right now, unfortunately, like, we we are seeing the early signs of that, but we're not seeing that in real I don't wanna say yeah. Meaningful amounts. Right? Like, people need to pay their rent. They need to support their family. They need to feel comfortable leaving whatever their well paying soul sucking job is, to work on this this very new nascent open source protocol.
And as a result, they need some kind of security. And, so what we've seen come in come into play, which is is is these organizations, these nonprofits, specifically OpenSats, which is is what I work on, and HRF, which is what Alex works on, are really stepping up to the plate and providing a lot of the early funding for a lot of these NASA developers. And I think I can speak for both of us that hopefully for a lot of them, this will just be kind of the jump start. Right? It's it's it's the paddles on the chest and then they like get up and they're the Frankenstein beast and they just keep going. Right? But right now, it's it's actually incredibly optimistic. Like, I the amount of developers we have working on this space full time, the amount of designers, the amount of just open source contributors in general is is incredibly impressive. It it compared to any other industry ecosystem at at this stage in its life, I I just think is unparalleled.
[00:04:23] Marty:
Yeah. And that's a a good point there. And, like, shifting to you, Alex, I think I'm gonna throw this out there. Like, you mentioned OpenSats, HRF. You guys have been doing, the funding of Bitcoin open source developers for years now. Were there lessons learned in building up those funds to fund Bitcoin developers that were easily applicable to Noster as it started to emerge?
[00:04:47] Alex:
When it comes to Bitcoin or Noster funding, I think that a lot of organizations tend to be very conservative. They want they're worried about their image. They wanna support the right projects. They're worried about blowback. They don't wanna fund a project that might be a liability down the road, whether it's due to, you know, some crazy developer who posts weird stuff on social media or someone who is not that sociable. I think one thing that HRF has learned that it is important to take risks early on when you have a burgeoning new ecosystem that's not been, like, vetted by corporate lawyers and auditors and, you know, people in suits to say, well, this is, you know, clean or this is good for the brand of whatever you're supporting. It's important to take calculated risks early on, support small and early projects that don't have you know you can't have a multi year long track record when it comes to Noster development when the protocol is only a couple months old in the beginning. So I think what I would say is we've learned to take some risks, be calculated.
Of course, you've got to do your vetting. You've got to look at a developer's history, proof of work, what they've done in the past. But it's important to be able to be action oriented, take some risks, get shit done, and support a protocol in its infancy so it can continue to grow and develop.
[00:06:05] Marty:
Now with that in mind, like, what are your in terms of funding needs right now from your perspective is, HRF and OpenSats looking at all the projects and, like, prioritizing, what to fund? Like, how how do you guys approach that?
[00:06:20] Alex:
I think one issue that is plaguing a lot of open source developers, and it's not just with Bitcoin or Nostra specific, is just figuring out ways for sustainable long term support. Right now, a lot of funding in open source is on a grant based model, where you give someone a grant to work for maybe 6 months, a year, maybe 2 years if you're lucky. And then 6 months, a year, 2 years down the line, you reassess. And that can be very stressful for developers who don't know whether they're going to have an income or salary after their grant is over. And in a grant based model, it often is very confusing for grantees as to, okay, what are the objective criteria for me to renew my grant? Will I still be supported down the line?
And oftentimes, that doesn't actually have to do with the quality of your work, but just has to do with the state of financial markets or the state of Bitcoin markets at the time, whether we're in a bull or bear market, or whether people that actually traditionally give you funding have money. And that's very stressful for grantees. And that's not an easy problem to solve. But
[00:07:26] ODELL:
we're working on it. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, 2 fold. First of all, it's always about increasing donor base and and getting as much donations as possible. I mean, huge shout out to Jack who's the overwhelming majority of Open Sats donations in terms of amount. But I will say one of the cool things about Open Sats is we have, I think, nearly 10,000 individual donations, because people can just easily donate with Bitcoin or or dollars. And if they donate with dollars, we automatically convert into Bitcoin. So we're just trying to increase that donor base, make sure that we have the funds available for open source developers regardless of of, you know, where we are in the Bitcoin cycle.
But then the second piece is the the second piece is, like, how do you scale these things up? And it's it's difficult. Like, as Alex said, like, the renewal process, is a mental time sync for everybody involved, not just the developers, but also the teams that are allocating funds and and processing all the paperwork and whatnot that is necessary. There's a lot of burnout in every direction. Developers are burned out. People on our team are burned out. It's just everyone is incredibly hard worked and hardworking, and there's there's very little time to go around. And and there's pain points that just keep popping up in different places. Communication is a is a major issue that we are specifically working on at OpenSats.
You know, it's, it's it's great when you receive a grant, and we're almost at 200 outstanding grants at OpenSats, which is kind of insane to think about for such a young organization. But I think we're at at, like, 800 or 900 denied grants. And if you just start to think about, like, the level of paperwork and communication that is required to not only manage the existing grants, but then also, manage the inbound interest and and need, it's quite monumental. And we personally are trying to do it on a very lean budget. You know, OpenSaaS is a 100% pass through, so we don't take a cut of any donations. So we have to fund our operations through a separate operations budget.
And as a result and we're very transparent with it. We try and keep that number as low as possible. So there's there's a lot of learning experiences there.
[00:09:44] Preston:
Preston, any thoughts that I'll just pull you into the conversation? On the OpenSAT stuff, no. I don't have any anything additional to add other than, to to Matt's point, getting donations from people that have really kinda leaned into this because they understand how important the free speech aspect of it is is vital. I think that that's gonna be a a main source of funding, moving forward. It's gonna have to be a main source of funding moving forward because from, like, an investment standpoint, a lot of this space this is a hard truth I'm about to say is is uninvestable, just because of where we're at in the time line and the the risk profile of of some of the start ups and the protocol itself is you know, as far as the size of it. Because this is this is one of the challenges that you have, from an investment standpoint.
Because we're Bitcoiners and we understand what that hurdle rate is, It's compounding, and we're gonna be pretty conservative. About 50% annualized is what we're saying is the hurdle rate. People in traditional finance would tell you the hurdle rate's 5% today. Right? And we're looking at it and we're saying, no. The hurdle rate's 50%. So if I'm gonna be a good steward of my LPs that are providing capital to me and I'm gonna employ that in a way that's gonna get a return because the the the number one question I always hear, in the VC side is, well, why don't I just buy Bitcoin? Like, why am I investing in you guys? And so I have to look at every single thing from this hurdle rate of 50% annualized, or else I can't look at that person with a straight face and say, oh, yeah. I can I can outperform that? Because if I'm not making decisions that is trying to outperform 50% hurdle rate, well, what am I doing? Right? So when we look at all these all the start ups in the space and we're saying, alright. It's like, what's investable?
Can it can it compound? Can the top line, you know, outperform 50%. Well, very early stage stuff can. But when you account for all the technical risk, the protocol risk, the all these I mean, we had a conversation up here about relays. I mean, I don't know what the consensus was, you know, for the people listening. That was a spicy one. It was yeah. But in a in a good way. Right? And, do we know what this looks like in 5, 10 years from now? No. We don't. I'm very hopeful. I I think the, you know, the environmental factors are really gonna push, more people to come on board. I you know, I wouldn't wanna be Elon right now. I can tell you that much.
I think he's got a massive target on his back. And so, like, let's say they lean into that and they they really start to pressure him even more than they they already did by not honoring, his options over at Tesla. Right? Like, we could get into a whole you know, put the tinfoil hat on. Why do you think that that didn't happen? I think some of it had to do with Twitter, to be quite, you know, honest with you. So, like, what happens when they amplify that? I think it's gonna give a nice tailwind into the protocol, into Noster, and I think it's going to help assist making some of these things derisked and and, you know, make the math work a little bit. But I'd tell you right now, the the the economic calculation and the math on it right now is very hard for for profit, funds, VC funds that are trying to allocate capital in a in a way that's very responsible.
[00:13:03] ODELL:
But Yeah. I mean, I would just to add there, like, I wear multiple hats, literally. And one of those hats is is venture. Right? We have we have 1031. We're focused mostly on Bitcoin businesses. We have a a a single investment in the Nasr space in Primal. And we tend to agree with you that a lot of this is very early in terms of investable opportunities and and and obvious business models on how this all works out. I will say I think it's actually kind of beautiful. I think, historically speaking, when you see new tech develop, it's it's largely led by VC Investment. And VC Investment comes with their own incentives and and and and some of them can be quite broken.
But in the opposite side, it's like we have this these open source grants that are being provided. And the first major incentive that that provides a a a project maintainer or a founder or something is you actually have a strong incentive to have a open source project. Historically, like, if you took VC money, and I I think Bitcoin focused VCs are are are not really included in this for the most part. They encourage you to keep everything closed source and proprietary and walled gardens as much as possible because they wanna protect their moat. And the open source grants does the exact opposite. The second piece is it gives founders a lot of flexibility because they're not actually giving up any equity in their business. Right? They're getting no strings attached grants while they figure things out and see what the business model could be, while they work things out. And then the third piece I would say is, you know, you said the hurdle rate, is is a conservative 50%. I mean, 10 years the last 10 years, it's 63% year over year on Bitcoin.
So, like, Bitcoin is very much the opportunity cost when you're talking about talking about anything you build. And it's not just from an investor's landscape. Like, if you are a founder, you if you're an individual, you should probably have the overwhelming majority of your assets in Bitcoin. And every every time you are bootstrapping your own project, whether that's a bakery or whether that's a Noster client, like, you should be factoring in the opportunity cost of that of that, yearly return that we see on Bitcoin.
[00:15:23] Marty:
Yeah. Just to add to this, I was upstairs listening to Oscar Mayer from Fountain explain how they did their migration to Noster. And it, having listened to that, it seemed like a pretty herculean effort on, their team's side. And I think what he mentioned upstairs is that Noster, at the protocol level, really needs to work on standardization that makes it easier for incoming companies that want to come on to Noster to do so via NIPS, particularly. And reason I bring this up is because if you're a founder out there building on Noster and you wanna build a business that's monetizable, I think focus should be on creating those bridges that make it easy for incumbent companies to get on to Noster because that will show, for profit VCs that there's a lot of activity here. It would increase the potential for you to get funded as a business. But there's as we said, particularly in VC timing is a big part of it, and it's objectively true that it is very early on in Nasser. And the timing probably isn't perfect for deploying capital into, investable or businesses for VC like return.
[00:16:32] Preston:
One thing that makes it really hard too is, Matt hit a little bit on the competitive moat. I mean, anybody who's an investor so I I have I come with this Warren Buffett value investing background, like, hardcore background in in studying him and all that kind of stuff. What you find is was one of the most important things he looks at is having a competitive moat. I wanna buy something. I wanna squat on it for 20 years, and I don't want some other actor to come in there and erode my competitive advantage in the marketplace so that I can continue to, you know, benefit from the free cash flows that the company kicks off. And, when we look at this particular space, it's very hard for an investor to to look at a business that's so open that any person can then, hey. You can make a client. Oh, and I can make a client, and I can tweak it just this little bit. I can basically fork what you're doing and just tweak it this little bit. From a competition standpoint And this is this is what makes Nostra so great. Right? We all know that. But from an investor's lens, they're looking at that and they're saying risk, risk, risk, risk.
I could just get chewed out. Like, I could have the best client for 2 years, and then year 3, it's gone. And, like, poof, there goes your investment, and there goes your return, and there goes Bitcoin. Right? Goodbye.
[00:17:50] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean but you also have the alternative when you build on open protocols and you build in an open source fashion where if you're bootstrapping a new business, you don't have to do it from the ground up. You get to take advantage of everyone else's network effect, and you're all compounding on top of each other. So there is a bit of a give and take there. And, you know, I I I personally believe that we should all try and be the change we wanna see in the world. And I I I do think that, traditional investing techniques are gonna be flipped on their head, and the way people think about things, in this way going forward, will change significantly. And part of that's open source. And then secondly, part of that is us moving towards a Bitcoin standard, and and money not being so cheap. You know, money money actually having a real cost and a a real hurdle rate that you need to to outperform.
[00:18:45] Marty:
Shifting this back to, open source funding, I'm sure there's a lot of people in the crowd, who are particularly interested to hear what you have to say, Alex, Matt. From your perspectives, you mentioned the communication, the amount of inbound that you guys have. Like, what advice would you give to open source developers looking to a grant? Like, what boxes do they need to check to make sure that they're getting noticed and that they have a high likelihood of getting accepted? Well, first of all, raise your hand if you're on an HRF or Open Sats grant in this room right now.
[00:19:16] ODELL:
Okay. That's awesome. Hopefully, next year, the the hands are even more. I mean, I think the number one thing is what's really cool about providing open source grants, and then I'll hand it over to Alex, is that there really is usually a verifiable proof of work, in terms of commits and repo activity. Also on Noster in general, because it is a communication protocol, you you get to see a lot of these projects actually develop in real time and interaction between them and their users. The more information we have, the better. Obviously, in in terms of resources, everyone is a bit constrained. So one of the issues is, like, having a reasonable ask, in terms of of how much money you're looking for.
But I think both us and HRF have been trying to push the limits a bit on on what kind of funding we can provide. And, actually, sometimes we do dual fund, projects where both HRF and us will split, a grant, and there's communication there, you know, that there's, like, honest communication there both with the grant. Recipient is is is saying to us, you know, oh, we're we're also applied for a grant on HRF and then also, you know, friendly communication between Alex and the rest of his team and us, in terms of actually verifying that's the case. We haven't seen anyone abuse that yet. But I would say in general, first of all, it's a longer process than you're probably hoping for. Hopefully, we can cut that time down. And the more information we have, the more proof of work, the better.
[00:20:51] Alex:
Yeah. At HRF, we have a Bitcoin Development Fund. And even though it's called the Bitcoin Development Fund, we also support Nostra projects. We support free and open source, Bitcoin and Nostra projects. And the number one piece of advice I would give to aspiring developers or educators, activists, community builders who are looking for grants and funding is, don't be afraid to make the ask. The worst that can happen is we say no, and then you can always reapply. So the first step is just, yeah, don't be afraid to make the ask. Don't be afraid to apply for funding. Don't be afraid to ask for help in this space, whether that's for applying for a grant or whether that's just asking for a referral, whether that's just showing up to a conference and asking for travel grants.
We're trying to support everyone. And although it's impossible to support everyone given limited constraints, we're doing our best to try to expand open source funding, give more funds every year, support more people, support more projects. So yeah. The number one thing I'd say is don't be afraid to ask.
[00:21:49] ODELL:
Yeah. The amount of times I've seen, like, a Nasr post where someone's like, why aren't you funding this thing? It's like, well, they should apply. You know, go to the website, put an application in. Like, if you don't apply, we can't fund you. End of story.
[00:22:03] Preston:
Marty, I would just say, if if people in this room, the builders in this room are looking at this and and hearing this conversation, thinking about what it is you want you wanna build something, you just don't know what it is. This is this is what I would tell you to start with, the upstream, you know, incentives and impacts that are playing out. Speech, they've gotta try to control the speech. These, you know, lizard people, are trying to control the speech aggressively. It's it's going to amplify. It's gonna amplify aggressively. K?
So there's gonna be this movement towards Nostra. Right? What exists today that is vital for free speech and for free and open communication, like GitHub, right, or Signal or, like, these things that that that already exist in the world. And then think, is it built over on Noster, or could it be built better? And and think in those very big, broad terms as you're thinking about putting in your application of of the business that that you're or the idea that you're trying to build out, that was really for me, that was really exciting yesterday to see the whole GitHub thing and all the work that went into that because that's huge. It's absolutely huge.
So that that would be my bit of advice for people sitting in the room that are maybe looking to do something. It's just start with the free speech, understand that there are things that are already constructed in a very centralized kind of way, and and build it, and then talk to these guys or submit your application with these guys.
[00:23:35] Marty:
Shifting back to, what you started with, Matt, like, the concept of Zaps and being able to directly not only fund projects, but you can tip people for their content. And we've discussed this for many years because we've been on podcasting 2.0 for probably 3 or 4 years now. We recognize that the amount of people streaming us ads or boosting us during the show isn't isn't material yet, but you can squint and look forward. And if adoption of Bitcoin in these apps increases, that it could become a significant revenue stream for pockets. Like, do you think that potential exists for funding projects, businesses,
[00:24:09] ODELL:
and Yeah. No. I think it's absolutely massive. I think people are really sleeping on that. I mean, it it enables business models that were just never even possible before. It it enables audience and donation based funding, without a middleman, very low fees, very low friction transactions. A lot of times people wanna support, but if there's any little bit of friction there, they fall off and they don't support. Right? So you wanna reduce the friction as much as possible. And seeing it on Noster, I mean, we've reduced that friction over the last year and a half, 2 years so significantly.
I think it's easy to just underappreciate how far we've come. But, like I said earlier, like, me and Marty are we literally got into a zap battle, over supporting that Hummingbird film about Bitcoin Jungle, and it was very low friction for us to send a lot of money to them. And I assume that zap battle will probably continue, and someone else on the livestream might might pick it up and and start battling us as well. But on the podcasting 2 point o piece, that was another key. Right? Is is lower the friction as much as possible. Oscar, and the team at Fountain have done a really good job at lowering that friction.
Some trade offs were made, you know, a lot of dependency on custodial wallets. Hopefully, we we can move away from that or at least have more private, privacy focused custodial wallets with stuff like Cashew. But we're definitely seeing a trend up. Even if it's just, maybe maybe the amounts are aren't as high as people would expect them to be. Like, clearly, like, on the podcasting side, you make a lot more money doing advertisement based model still. But, like, if we if me and Marty, like, open our notes, like, at any moment, there's, like, someone at least one person, like, sending one sapper bite while they're, like, listening.
And we're just sending one sapper minute while they're listening to, the podcast, which is, like, super powering and super cool to watch. And we've seen that trend up in terms of number of payments, if not the the total amount.
[00:26:18] Preston:
Just looking at it from an incentive stands point standpoint, I know what my podcast makes on the traditional side traditional advertising side, and I know what it makes by people streaming me sats. The disparity is so absurdly large, the difference, that if a person is is coming over through a natural incentive, they're not coming for the money. They're doing it to to support the network because you're in in I don't want to say this to offend anybody. You were we're kind of in an r and d phase with this. This is not, like, full production, like, deployment. We're sucking a whole bunch of demand naturally over to it at this point. You're not even close to that right now based on the numbers that I'm seeing.
That doesn't make it wrong. It doesn't make it right. I'm just trying to, like, properly frame the the current setup and the environment that I'm personally seeing with with this. The challenge that that you run into is is this model is so ingrained, this advertising model, the whole Spotify and all this kind of stuff. These are massive, massive, you know, things that are gonna take a lot of time to to switch over. What what is the timeline? It's not 4 years. I think it's more than 4 years for this particular topic. I think you're, like, 8 to 10 plus personally. But
[00:27:41] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think, as Bitcoiners, we talk about incentives a lot. Right? And the beauty of the value for value model, the beauty beauty of direct user funding or direct audience funding is you have this nearly perfect incentive. Right? Which is, the creator, whether they're a podcaster, whether they're a developer, is is directly getting, rewarded from their user base. And as a result, they are the stakeholder that they are trying to provide as good of a service or as good of podcast as possible. The advertising model is, at its core, is is is is a surveillance capitalism model that, like, perverts every incentive and makes these these large tech companies incredibly predatory. They make the podcast incredibly predatory, and they try and track their users as much as possible. That's why we start to see stuff like Spotify do these exclusive deals where they can try and track podcast listens even more so and know who the demographics of your users are and all this other stuff.
So it's it's it's important that we start going down this trajectory of of trying to improve the incentives. The second piece there is there's something about it on Nostr rather than podcasting 2.0 because I agree with you. Like, it's the disparity is massive between advertisements and value for value. On on Nostr, you do have that social signal element that you don't really have on podcasting 2.0. You do kind of on Reverdle recap, we read boosts, which is probably where we get the majority of our sats, from podcasting 2.0 because they get, like, shout out in the in the podcast. They hear their name. Right? They get that social signal. And I think just that little element on on Nostra clients of having that social signal, your little badge, you know, saying that I zapped more than Marty, does encourage people to do it. And then the third piece is it's different for a Joe Rogan than a new podcaster. A new podcaster actually has a lot of trouble getting advertisement deals.
A a a new developer that has a brand new project has a lot of trouble having any kind of monetization scheme. And there's actually not that much friction for them to have more in value for value than they do if from any kind of alternative. They're they have no alternative. That is the the only way they can go. Yeah. I I can hear Adam Curry rolling over in his bed right
[00:29:57] Marty:
now from afar,
[00:30:03] ODELL:
value for value. Well, maybe one day he'll understand Nostrad.
[00:30:07] Marty:
I just texted him about it, actually. But, going back to what Alex said earlier, like, if you wanna monetize via value for value, don't be afraid to make the ask. And figuring out unique interaction models with your audience, like Matt mentioned, we read the top 4 boost each week on rabbit hole recap and that creates a marketplace so that people get their boost read on the episode week in week out. And so as a creator or somebody building an app trying to get people to interact with your your nostril notes, like, think about unique ways to incentivize people to do that so that they are more compelled to zap you and then you can take that money and go build what you wanna build. Switching gears, you didn't really answer the question earlier. What do we think is the most prescient need in terms of areas of the Nasser protocol that need funding, attention, review, focus?
[00:31:00] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I don't have a good answer for you, Marty. Like, everything and everywhere. And it's cool because we are working on there there's there's so many different there's so many projects being working on worked on in Nostra. Like, we can't even keep track of all of them. I I don't I think anyone in this room that says they they know every single Nostra project that exists is just a 100% full of shit. Like, there's there's no way that you're able to track all of this. It's a full time job in itself. And I think that's the cool part because you can build on it in an open, permissionless way. I will say, like, we probably don't need more Twitter like clients, but also more don't hurt. And maybe there's a better one that comes out. You know? So I'm not also gonna discourage people from doing that.
In general, with how we do OpenSats funding is we try not to do, you know, we which the the way Open Sats works is we have a 9 person board, and during the review process, you it requires 5 of 9 board members to approve your grant. And the reason for that is because we wanted it to be as corruption resistant as possible, so individual biases of of board members don't don't corrupt that process. And especially when you start to talk about larger numbers, and more donations received, that becomes more and more of a concern. So it's important to have that base level foundation.
So it's hard to speak in broad broad strokes about how OpenSAT's review process works. And it's probably one of the most frustrating things for grant recipients because, like, they could have a 45 minute conversation with me or one of the other OpenSats board members, and they'll pretty pretty much still have no insight into whether or not they might get approved. But there are general broad themes. And and in general there, we don't we tend not to be like, oh, well, this is a client, and there's too many there's too many Twitter like clients, so we're not gonna fund this. It's it's does this project have a is is there a need for this project?
Does it accomplish something, in a way that other projects aren't tackling? And is there verifiable proof of work that this project actually exists? It's not just like an idea. So I I don't wanna discourage anyone from doing from from working on anything in the industrial space. I think it's so early that it'd be incredibly conceded to say that we know how to do everything. We actually know how to do very little. And, a lot of these things will be figured out over time as people experiment. So the more experimentation, the better.
[00:33:36] Alex:
To add to Matt's point, I totally agree with him that if anyone thinks that they know a 100% of what's going on in Noster, they're full shit. That's totally true. I feel like I took a 2 week break from the Internet where I just chilled and relaxed and try to detox myself from the toxic algorithms. I come back, and I'm just like, what's been going on, Noster? I'm just like, oh, like, all this new stuff going on. A solid contrarian take on what I think needs the most development in Noster is I feel like we have we're obviously not fully funding all the Nostr developers out there. There's a lot of projects, a lot of amazing developers who still need funding. But I think that we are slightly underfunding people who are doing community building, who are doing marketing, people who are onboarding new users. Right? Because right now, let's be honest, Odell and many people here on the panel have taken the brave step of deleting their x account.
Many of us still use x every day. I'm part of this crew. I even paid for a blue check mark and, you know, that oof. Yeah. Odell, you can roast me for that paying $8 a month to boost my algorithmic reach on x. Did you did you use a KYC'd phone number when you did that?
[00:34:43] ODELL:
I did. Oh, woah. Woah. I did. I did. So you you got me there. The issue isn't the payment. The issue is the is the identity verification. I I think, actually, in a lot of ways, one of the good things that X is doing is is proving at scale that people will pay for a product so you don't need to rely on the advertisement model. And I think that's a key piece that people miss, is that is that actually, we probably should be encouraging more and more projects to have some kind of premium model, where users pay them directly. That is it it's it's not Adam Curry's value for value because Adam Curry's value for value is is you is you pay what you feel like. But I think it is a step towards sustainable, more freedom focused,
[00:35:28] Alex:
user focused, human focused business models. Yeah. And I think one thing that HRF does slightly different in the Bitcoin funding space is we would try to fund circular economies. We try to fund global communities because we want people to be able to actually use Bitcoin. And if people wanna be able to use Bitcoin, they have to know it exists. They need to be in they need to have an environment where they can safely learn how to actually install a wallet, safe on and on off ramps within their country. So we try to fund Bitcoin circular economies and educators and activists around the world. I think that and I think we need a little bit of that in Noster, where we need a way to obviously, Noster is, is different than Bitcoin. And a innovation hub or a circular economy is not the same as a booth at a conference where you can learn about Noster. But we need ways to better on ramp people to Noster, educate people of Noster, get people to actually know that Noster exists. And I'm not sure what's the best way to do that right now. Is it funding people to go to non Bitcoin and non Noster conferences to educate people about Noster? Is it paying people to get on panels at mainstream conferences around the world so people know that Noster exists?
Is it just, you know, starting a global campaign to get people to delete their x account and to use Nostr exclusively? Who knows? But change comes in within change comes from within. And we have to start, even in the Bitcoin community, getting people to use Nostr. Like, it's amazing how oftentimes I go to a Bitcoin conference and I'll ask people, what's the best way to stay in touch with you socially? And they're like, oh, follow my Twitter. Follow my ex. I'm like, oh. We need to get to the point where you go to a Bitcoin conference, and the first thing someone says is follow me on Nostr.
[00:37:08] ODELL:
Damn right. I I would just I've I've been thinking about your question a little bit more. One of the things I'm really excited about is, you know, I I think one of one of the cool parts about Nasr is this idea that people can control their experience, that the user has, you know, fine tuned controls on on how they experience Nostr and and what content they see and how they consume it. And I think there's while there's a lot of good work that is is moving towards that direction, and and I'm I'm really excited about, like, DVMs and this idea of of of, like, choosing your algorithm and, like, algorithmic marketplaces where you can you can choose different things. I think there's still a lot of work to be done there. And and the key issue there is it's, like, twofold. Right? It's the technical issue of how do we provide users as much control as possible of their experience. So instead of having, like, a top down censorship model like you see with x or TikTok or something like that, it's the users ultimately choosing how they experience the protocol.
But the second piece is trying to do that in a non overwhelming with very little friction. Because if it's if it's overwhelming and you just, like, all of a sudden hit them with a bunch of sliders and a bunch of options and a bunch of different things, then we've also failed on that regard. And when when we're talking about onboarding people to Nostra, like, if they hit that piece of friction, they're just gonna get overwhelmed, and they're just gonna go back to Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever the hell they are.
[00:38:36] Preston:
On the, incentives to drive people to Noster, I think that the the Western governments are gonna probably do most of the heavy lifting for us. So, like, we can do a lot of these things and attract people in, but I think the the real pool and the real demand that's gonna come out of it is just people that get very frustrated because they're gonna have a a 2020 COVID, like, experience, not necessarily a pandemic. But, like, you like, all of my friends are like, wow. Like, I didn't realize that government was, like, truly, like, censoring us and, like, not allowing us to see stuff. Like, everybody was weirded out very weirded out after 2020, and I think that there's more of that kind of stuff on the horizon that's gonna just naturally push people over.
From an investments, I don't know if this is a good answer, but I I find the interoperability stuff to be really important. And, oftentimes, it's there's not, like, a business there, unfortunately. And it's people like Pablo and and many others that have been on stage, you know, the last day and a half that are out there clacking on keys, writing, like, amazing code that is benefiting the connectivity between all of this type of stuff. So when I see OpenSats and I see some of the stuff that they're that they're funding, I I absolutely love this program because it's it's the thing that's kinda stitching this all together that's going to eventually give us the performance that we're and and better than of what we're used to having in these centralized, you know, cesspools that are, you know, feasting off of us.
And it's gonna be a completely different experience on the other side, but stitching it all together because it's so decentralized is is really challenging. So we I was on a Nostra nest the other day listening to a Nostra nest, and, you know, there was, I don't know, 20 people, listening. And when you're on Twitter and you and you go on a spaces, if you have somebody with 10,000 followers or a 100,000 followers or whatever, their entire group of followers see that they're in a spaces, which then drives more engagement and more interaction and more people on stage, because it's all centralized. So when we're looking at the Nostra nest, is there some type of, you know, little circle that goes around the person's image that they're in the room listening to that? No. This is interoperability pieces where you're connecting things that drives engagement for that Noster NEST. But you have to have a client that's willing to to code that up. You have to have you know, all the all the engineering behind all that is not easy.
It takes time. It takes a lot of time to stitch that altogether. So I I get excited about the interoperability piece. I think it's a real challenge to have it funded. But, you know, the nonprofit and and, you know, having an appreciation for kind of where we're at in this prototype slash r and d phase is is very important for especially for everybody in this room that's that are real builders. I would just try to encourage people to do more of that.
[00:41:36] Marty:
Yeah. We've got 3 minutes left, so I'll make a comment, and then I'll throw it to you 3 for final thoughts on this. But I I I think it's important to really point out how far funding for developers has come over the last 5 years specifically and just give a shout out to you 2 gentlemen specifically for pushing this forward. And then on the, for profit side, like, funds like ego.1031, Disclaimer. I'm a partner at 1031. Coming to market. Literally wearing that. So I I think it could be. But I I think, like, everybody's talked about in the past, like, Linux Foundation, Redbox, but I think Bitcoiners have done a really good job over the last 5 years, particularly sort of paving the path for how to fund open source development and setting a new model. It's just been really cool to see play out. And with that, I'll turn it to you guys for final thoughts.
[00:42:27] ODELL:
Be the change you wanna see in the world and use Nostr.
[00:42:31] Alex:
To echo a very smart person, stay humble, stack stats. Also, stay humble and zap your friends.
[00:42:38] Preston:
Don't get frustrated. If you are going for funding and you're you're getting a lot of those, just kind of understand the environmental setting that we're in and how early we are and where you can kinda go for certain types of funding like we talked about on stage. And, it's just gonna take time. It's just gonna take time. And, you know, if the governments start doing their heavy lifting, maybe it'll move a little faster. So we'll see. Awesome. That's all we got. Thank you, guys.
[00:43:02] Alex:
Thank you.
Introduction
Overview of Funding Nostr
Challenges in Funding Open Source Projects
Role of Nonprofits in Early Funding
Sustainable Long-Term Support
Investment Challenges in Nostr
Open Source Grants and Proof of Work
Value for Value Model and Zaps
Areas Needing Attention in Nostr
Interoperability and Future Prospects
Final Thoughts and Encouragement
