Weekly Livestream August 26 Recap

We’ll start with the questions first, then we will move to updates on the wallet and Q&A if we have any.

1. I did not see an NFT section in your wallet. Will it be possible to store, send, and mint NFTs?

We really do think that NFTs are going to be an integral part of crypto, so we are looking at ways to integrate it. It’s definitely on our feature roadmap. We’re looking at doing close integrations with others that are doing NFTs. We’ll see these features pretty soon, so keep an eye out for them and partnerships as we deploy this! Our vision is to have the wallet be the interface into the world. We’re going to have apps everywhere.

We haven’t fully explored the VR space but I think that’s also an edge. Why not create a VR wallet? What’s the difference? It’s just the front end. Imagine a wallet where you can immerse yourself in the NFT. You can touch it, which might be cool. NFTs are JPGs right now, but it’s really just any metadata: could be a file, or a video, or even an .OBJ file that you can literally touch.    

2. What advantages do you have over your competitors Martian and Fewcha?

This is a good question. Initially, we’re aiming to have a production-ready wallet that’s going to be safe, reliable, and something that you can trust. I’m not sure what the other ones are. Hopefully they are also going to be production ready once they go live. I know safety is the number 1 priority for us. Hopefully it is for others. I honestly think that the best way to think about wallets is to find product market fit. If you’re overlapping too much with others then it’s too much of a race to the bottom with regards to features and whatever thing is being monetized, potentially fees.

But the main advantages that we see are that we’re aiming to be a platform that’s really well integrated into the apps that we’re working with. We’ll be announcing a lot of partnerships as well as native integrations into the wallet that you’ll be able to easily access. We’re trying to disrupt the browser here as it can be dangerous. It’s prone to DNS attacks, so we just want to make sure that you feel safe when using this stuff.  

We don’t want to release too much info right now, we’ll be shipping features as they come. We’re definitely aiming to be better than the competitors in several aspects.

3. In addition to the virtual AMA, does Pontem have any plans to hold an online AMA event and greet already enthusiastic fans in person? For example, scheduling a certain place based on voting. Wouldn't it be nice to introduce Pontem more broadly? How does this impact the environment?

I think the best way to do it would be at conferences. If we’re going to be at any conferences, we’ll let you know. We’ll potentially have a booth or room of some sort where we could do this. People could potentially come out and ask questions. Of course we want to meet our fans! We definitely want to  engage with more of our community. It’s important for y’all to get to know us and meet us. It’s similar for us. We want to meet you and hear you out. We want to see the people we’re interacting with in real life.  

We could definitely do something based on voting on the Ambassador program, that’s a great utility for what we’re creating. I definitely believe it would be nice to introduce Pontem more broadly. We’re trying to get the word out as much as possible. We really hope that everyone out there is helping us spread the word, and meeting us in person would definitely help drive that.  

Physically we’ll be walking as much as possible, we don’t want to pollute the environment. Metaphysically, we hope this creates a more conducive environment to allow people to really get to know each other. We need to build a really cohesive community. I might share a little bit of alpha about how we’re thinking about the community, the “Pontemites”, the “Pommune” that we’re building here.

We’re just spreading the word and creating a conducive environment that hopefully drives a sustainable community that people want to be a part of and is good for the environment both physically and metaphysically. Hopefully it’s a place where we’re all loving each other, caring for each other, and building each other up. Community is a double-edged sword. If you anger your community, they can be your biggest downfall. All your supporters and fans can turn on you quickly, especially on the Internet.

What we want to do is encourage an inclusive, supportive community. This is how we become better. This is how people want to become a part of your thing. Because if you’re inclusive and you really like other people and build each other up, we think that’s the best approach to stuff like this.            

4. Will Pontem turn tnto a DAO that provides grants to those who want to build on top of Pontem?

First of all, what is a DAO? It’s a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. It’s something that exists on its own, independent of any one individual party, whether it’s an entity or a company. That’s definitely the vision. I think everything should be a DAO. You give the power back to the people. This is the whole purpose of why we’re here. Disrupting these large enterprises, these large monopolies, these gatekeepers. The blockchain is no different than the cloud. The cool part is that there’s this ownership economy around it where people can essentially be not only part time owners of this economy, but also contributors. Your tokens grant utility, they grant you voting power - which could be potentially escrowed so that the people who have been with you long term have more voting power than the people who have not. That’s the power of the DAO. We’re definitely aiming to create one and potentially others, possibly sub-DAOs and mega DAOs.  

But a DAO, on principle, has to adhere to certain thresholds and benchmarks of decentralization; otherwise it’s not decentralized. It also has to adhere to several principles of autonomy. If it’s not autonomous, if it’s dependent on something that doesn’t allow it to operate autonomously, then it’s not a DAO. It isn’t an organization if it’s just chaos.  

We’re definitely aiming to create DAOs and we will be accountable through certain DAO benchmarks like decentralization, autonomy, and organization that will allow us to improve the DAO. Not all DAOs are created equal. Definitely make sure that the DAOs you’re in are not DINOs - Decentralized In Name Only. If you’re just putting up a front for decentralization, that’s not what we’re here for. I think, unfortunately, principles of decentralization, security, and scalability can somehow be corrupted. It’s a trifecta; it’s a three-dimensional vector graph that has tradeoffs and people can choose. You’re opting in with your work, yourself, to be a part of the DAOs that adhere to your values and principles.

Yes, we’re DAO builders, and we’ll be accountable for the principle of DAOs. In terms of grants, once the DAO exists there’s nothing we can do to control it. So if the DAO wants to give out grants, they will give out grants.                

5. Will your wallet be available on iOS/Android mobile devices?

Yes! I think we demoed this alpha a few weeks ago, so check out the replays on YouTube. We’re making good progress on going live on mobile. We’re hoping to be first to market here. We’ll get you plugged into your phone.  

6. Can you share a funny situation when creating and testing a network? Thank you!

What if the whole system blew up? I think that would be a funny situation. Just kidding, that wouldn’t be. The thing is, things fail, things succeed, and it’s somewhat funny how we get there. I don’t know of anything specific off the top of my head. I guess the story I would tell here is when you launch something, you’re expecting everything to go well. You can’t account for every single edge case or scenario, therefore, you essentially just have to launch it and pray and hope that you did all the testing required to enable all of these edge cases, but things will just come up. This is what makes things really resilient and robust, though: the fact that we’re testing things live, doing audits, and creating big disclaimers where we can. Essentially, when testing things out, you’re bound to run into situations where things break and you just have to be flexible and get feedback really quickly from the community so you can make things good again.          

7. In the not-too-distant future, when Pontem Wallet can be used to pay for online purchases, goods, and other things, who would Pontem like to cooperate with? More specifically, which companies are close to the Pontem concept?

This is a good question, but I can’t say any specific names. But we’re definitely looking into integrations for online purchases, both on and off ramps. I think that is a key infrastructure. We’re not focusing on that right now, we’re not going to build that ourselves, but we’ll definitely integrate the partners we know will enable people to do this. There’s a great opportunity here to integrate directly, especially on mobile devices, into Apple Wallet, Chrome, Google Wallet, and to connect your existing cards to crypto. Imagine going in or out without any form of friction, that could be pretty magical. I’m not going to drop any names, but keep an eye out for it.        

8. I follow the Aptos ecosystem and see how certain products are developing on this blockchain, and I noticed that you do not cooperate much with many currently popular NFTs and marketplaces. Do you plan such cooperation in the near future?

We’re definitely planning to partner with NFT marketplaces. The one thing that I’ll say about partnerships and jumping the gun to partner with everyone is that we don’t really know what’s safe. I don’t really know what’s safe. You probably don’t know what’s safe. But we’re looking into it, we’re going to do our due diligence and research, and make sure that everything that we do promote and everyone that we partner with are safe, not anonymous, and that you’re not going to get robbed by stuff that we push you to. That’s super important to us. Just be careful out there. We think the trust and reputation from our community and users is what differentiates us. Just know that when we do push out a collaboration or a cooperation, we’ll have done due diligence to make sure that it’s relatively safe to the best of our knowledge. Hopefully that enables trust.      

9. Why did you choose Aptos blockchain instead of some blockchains with mainnet?

This question comes up often. The reason is that it works. A lot of other things that promise high throughput, low transaction fees, and high uptime reliability doesn’t really work. You probably see this yourself when you go out and test these other chains. They’ll say they’re cheap, but you still have to pay $10-$20 in transaction fees when you’re just trying to buy a $2 JPG. My doges that I buy, which I bought on Ethereum, I paid 3 or 4 times the price of the actual thing in fees. I was just trying to support a local artist somewhere in the world and it just doesn’t work. Most people can’t afford these fees. Most people are going to get hurt by chains that go down.      

It’s kind of interesting because these are just versions of reality that we are adhering to. These Layer 1s of reality that we are adhering to. If your reality goes down, then is that really real anymore? You have to make sure that things are uncensorable. I really like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum has proven to be not censorship resistant, by the way. The DAO attack and the fork: that happened. So just be really careful of everything that you support.

To be honest, I only promote Bitcoin because it’s the only one that I trust. Aptos as well, but Aptos isn’t live yet. Bitcoin has been around since the immaculate conception of this beautiful thing by Satoshi Nakamoto. Others have tried to emulate it. I think Ethereum came close. Vitalik would probably also acknowledge that the Ethereum Classic fork was maybe one of the things he regretted. But maybe it saved the chain, who knows? In my opinion, it definitely went against the principles of censorship resistance and decentralization.

If you haven’t read The Cryptopians by Laura Shin yet, it’s an amazing book where she goes into detail about this. The fact that so little people made decisions for so many others makes this probably not a DAO, right? Maybe at that point in time it wasn’t really a DAO and was only in the hands of a very small number of people that made the decision to fork Ethereum.

I feel for the Ethereum Classics, and similarly here when we fork into Ethereum 2.0. Is proof-of-stake really the safest thing? Probably not. We do want to keep some proof-of-work. That’s also a contentious decision. This one wasn’t voted on either. This was just a decision made by the developers. Actually, I’m now kind of convincing myself that Ethereum is not very decentralized. Maybe they’re not a DAO.

Essentially, you want to choose something that adheres to your own principles, as well as decentralization, security, and scalability. I think that right now, there isn’t one that optimizes all three. There always seems to be a tradeoff between them. I think that the best way to optimize for all three is just to diversify. Diversify your portfolio according to your own principles! I like to prioritize security and decentralization.

I think scalability will come on layers above and we can scale around it. But you cannot get rid of security and decentralization. They are the core reasons we are here. I feel like a lot of other blockchains are somewhat holding back on these values to optimize on scalability. Scalability is definitely needed, but we need to make sure that it’s done responsibly and effectively to protect users. Because at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing: the users are safe.    

So why did we choose Aptos? Hopefully it adheres to all three principles. There’s definitely going to be tradeoffs and we’re going to be tracking that as well. We do want to optimize for security and decentralization. Long term, the Move ecosystem is going to grow and we’re going to grow with it. Part of our strategy is to take the Move VM everywhere.                            

10. What security measures are you ready to take once Aptos is in the top 5 blockchains?

ALL of the security measures! Audits, tracking and decentralization, risk parameters for collateral and exotic assets, everything. Let me know if I’m missing anything, send it to me! We want to make sure that we’re adhering to security first and that you feel safe and trust using the products we put out there as well as the products that we promote.

First of all is audits. Keep an eye out for that. This is a good segway for our episode next week where we will be talking to a security expert, but I won’t reveal the name. Just make sure you tune in. We’ll be posting our audits pretty soon, we’ll be timing it with this podcast. We’ll be interviewing whoever did our audits, which you will find out soon about.  

That is all the questions. I do want to share something with you along the lines of this being a product update.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of literary fiction, I like to write stuff down and think outside the box, so I wrote a story for y’all.

I want to share with you the vision for the Pontem “Pommune,” get ready for a lot of puns here. Essentially, this is what we want to turn our community into. We need to build a self-sustaining commune, a “Pommune”, full of Pontemites like yourself that love and care about each other, that support each other, and that care about the bigger picture. People who share a vision not founded on greed or money or any of these corruptible values. Our values should be grounded in each other. I think love should come first. Honestly we should all love each other and support each other in both the best of times and the worst of times, and we should be there for each other.

I think that if we can optimize for that, maybe add love to the trifecta of blockchain, maybe we can build something more powerful than these individual tokens, blockchains, and NFTs. I’ll share the vision with you. Again, this is a literary work of fiction so keep that in mind. Maybe you’ll start to see it come to life. It could maybe even be a Netflix show or potentially a movie.

The Pontem “Pommune”

It’s a build-to-earn (B2E) social experiment. The only way to earn these baseline Pontem points is to build the Pontem Pommune. The Pommune is on Planet Pontem and it’s populated by the Pontemites, which is all of you. The Pontemites are made up of a very diverse group of people. It’s everyone. Anyone can be a Pontemite, anyone can join the Pommune. We’re inclusive, we will love everybody. There’s values, there’s principles, and it should be self-sustaining enough where if people start to break those values and principles, they’ll just get self-rejected. If we need to excise some cancerous parts through surgical means, we will do it.

We just want to build the principles around this. The Pontemites will be made up of space flight attendants, pilots, engineers, space traffic controllers, mathematicians, PONT yield farmers, space line executives and other builders. These people/aliens/robots can choose, on a sliding scale, to get paid in either cash or space line PONT (Pontems airline points), which are redeemable for trips to the planet Pontem where there is a self-sustainable Pommune that is cohabitating away from the greedy Earthlings who are corrupting Satoshi’s vision with ponzi-nomics on airline miles.

It’s like the airline miles started to get hyped up and there’s a huge bubble in airline miles. There’s no one traveling in airplanes because everyone is going to space. Everyone’s going to the moon, or Mars. And people are thinking that because of that the airlines are going to do well, thus pumping up the price of airline miles and insiders are dumping on the outsiders.

This is definitely not in line with Satoshi’s vision, and shouldn’t be in line with anyone’s vision that is building in this space. So let’s take this out of Earth and take it somewhere else, the Pontem Pommune on planet Pontem, which isn’t even in this galaxy or in this space-time continuum. It’s in a totally different dimension.  

As part of the vision, there are other characters here. There’s various space cowboys, who are living there and milking NFTs and tokens to then sell those at various exotic farmers markets to buy trips to the Pontem planet. They can buy these trips at the Ponet Earth station, and the price of these trips will be based on the supply, demand, and Pontenomics of trips to Pontem.

Pontenomics is the opposite of Ponzinomics. Hopefully you can see that it’s a sustainable token design for people to create a self-sustaining and long-term economy that we can all thrive in. This is necessary for DAOs to exist long-term into the infinite future.                                            

Planet Pontem in the crypto galaxy, is reachable through layer sub-0, an interdimensional travel protocol that lies just below the various layer-1 simulations of reality that stem from these different shelling points of users in the Web3 metaverse that are adhering to the trifecta of principles and this three-dimensional vector graph that we’ve been discussing around decentralization, security, and scalability.

So what does this mean? It means that essentially, you as the user choose where you stand in this trifecta of principles. Do you prioritize security and decentralization over scalability, then you’re with us. You’re a bitcoin maximalist. But you need scalability, so you diversify into Aptos as well. Then you start to create different shelling points across access to this Pontem planet.

All are welcome. We prioritize security and decentralization because that’s what’s important to you. If you want to come here, there’s various tunnels, accessible through this layer sub-0, that interdimensionally teleport you to our planet where you can get in line to join the Pommune. Just because you get to the planet doesn’t make you a Pontemite, it doesn’t mean you get into the Pommune. You need to adhere to the base principles, like loving and supporting each other and being nice to each other. As long as you do this, you’ll be let into the Pommune.

It’s an inclusive, self-regulating walled garden where it spits out the things that hurt the ecosystem. It’s like a living, breathing organism - a DAO - that self-regulates for the negative principles and optimizes for the positive ones.

The builders on the planet Pontem choose to get paid in either cash or PONT, and these are redeemable for tickets to Pontem (the planet). Accessible only through underground tunnels that go through the fabric of space and time. They teleport the users into the reality that connects all these different simulations.

These simulations are all happening at a layer above base reality for us humans here on Earth. We experience real life and we have our doubts of what’s real or not. All of these layer-1s are just simulations of reality, so you have to be really careful about where you stand in the three-dimensional vector graph.  

If something isn’t secure and decentralized, then the transactions can be rolled back. The money you thought was yours could go away at any point in time if it’s not truly censorship resistant, which is what decentralization and security guarantees you. We choose on the spectrum, the tradeoffs between them. All of these above-base layer of reality simulations are only accessible into this metaverse which we’re calling the Pontem planet.

Some of these space cowboys that want to pay their way to Pontem and get in line to access the coveted Pommune. They can buy PONT out in space or from the Pontem stations in various L1 dimensions using digital commodities such as bitcoin or with liquidity provider (LP) tokens. We take all types of tokens, and we thank you for them since there’s a value for them.

If space cowboys want to come in and purchase them, they can. In addition to being able to purchase these PONT, the space cowboys that want to help build the Pommune can also earn their way. They can earn by building, earning PONT for the fair price of their labor at an hourly rate that is mutually agreed upon by the Pommune and the cowboys.

This is a vision where you can essentially buy your way in, if that’s what you’d like to do. There should be no reason why if you’ve worked somewhere else that you can’t use that labor you leveraged to also join this. But you can also earn your way. We’re inclusive. We know that everyone has value, and we want to make sure that if you’re adding value to this thing that you’re getting rewarded for it.

Legal disclaimer: This is all fake, this is a work of literary fiction. Nothing other than a figment of our imagination. Requirements to buy these PONT from the Pontem stations are the same as any other regulatory-compliant token launchpad that adheres to the KYC/AML requirements and interdimensional commodities restrictions that exist in your local jurisdiction. Pontem is still subject to local jurisdictional in-real-life laws around financial primitives. They are also subject to a required one-year lock up and 24 to 26-month vesting or dynamic curve with voters entering a smart contract which boosts yield from farms in the Pommune. These enable utility and products on Pontem such as bartering, swaps, and spots on Ethereum, Aptos, stablecoins, and other different commodities that are mined by other in real life Web2 and Web3 builders through hard labor.

We also want to turn this into a script, potentially a movie or show like a cartoon. The big joke here, the premise of the story is that it’s a mockumentary, which is a fake real documentary in which the characters film a reality tv show about Netflix documentaries, and then they end up uncovering that it’s a real murder mystery. It becomes a true crime reality tv show, which is the best plot twist that blends everything that people love into one show. It’s hilarious, smart, and endearing. It’s real and raw, and I think people will love it.

The Pommune Netflix Documentary: A Cartoon Mockumentary

It’s a parody cartoon documentary of interdimensional annuals, beings and aliens. It’ll have a little bit of a Rick and Morty look and feel. These characters are doing a documentary on the crypto industry, which is being masqueraded as a drama of characters trying to conquer the known metaverse, whatever the metaverse means.

There’s various characters. There’s the Earthlings, who are idealists that are fighting for the vision for crypto on Earth. There’s several cult leaders on Earth. There’s Satoshi, who is an actual god. He takes different anonymous forms like magic dust or shadowy figures. There’s also Vitalik, who is Jesus, I’ll say no more. There’s also large people like SPF who potentially are Batman. They’re heroes that turn villains that turn heroes again. They are very complex characters that are trying to save Earth from itself.

Then there’s other planets, other characters. There’s a planet of the apes, who are the NFT enthusiasts and anyone who has been burned by NFTs as well. There will be benevolent emperors as well as bored apes, who are a civilization of highly evolved mutant chimps that are way smarter than humans. Then there’s the degents. They got stuck on this planet of apes because they were sold a ticket that was just a picture of a monkey and now they have to be subservient to the apes.                      

The apes try to integrate them into society but the degents are just being degenerates. Even though the apes really love them, maybe they have to do something that’s not great for the degents but it’s in their best interest. It’s a complex relationship between the bored apes and the degents. The degents, by the way, are mostly humans.

Then there’s planet Pontem, and the Pontemites are romantic idealists. There’s also cult leaders there, there’s Sadogei (Sa-doge-i), who goes through the hero’s journey. He is the Frodo Baggins of the story. He’s a benevolent dictator that didn’t get elected, never really even wanted to be in the spotlight, but was forced to be the leader by all the Pontemites due to his technical and social skills. So he’s kind of awkward most of the time.    

He’s known for launching these reins of power, otherwise known as tokens, specifically in this story as the PONT spacelines. But once he sees how corrupted everything is, the character Sadogei decides to take all the tokens that he can and throw them into a fire pit and burn them forever.

This is essentially Satoshi trying to destroy his creation. Sadogei unleashed this vision into the world that became way more powerful than he counted on. It is a DAO because it’s definitely something he doesn’t control because it’s decentralized and autonomous. So he’s just trying to get as many of these tokens and burn them up to save the world from his own creation.

Then there's Boris, he’s the man behind the curtain pulling all the strings.There’s Stas, he’s the sales guy that you love. Then there’s the Cat who is legal counsel.

There’s other planets, most notably the Martians. It’s a counsel of gods and they made it. They lowkey pull all the strings behind the scenes in the crypto universe. They’re like a type-3 civilization. They can mine suns and move planets, literally and figuratively. And part of these characters will be based on real-life characters.

There’s CZ, who is also a benevolent dictator similar to Sadogei. He just wanted to build a good product and it just took over the world and the galaxy somehow. Then there’s Justin Sun, he’s Aaron Burr, who has good intentions but shot his best friend. There’s also Elon, who definitely has to be in here. He’s just the king. Good or bad, love him or hate him, he’s there and he’s all-powerful.  

Remember, this is a work of fiction, but we hope to see it come to life one day. Thank you all for viewing and remember to tune in next week for our special guest. Keep up-to-date with us in the meantime by following us on Twitter and joining our Telegram chat.