Crypto Sapiens - Connecting Communities | Niran - Founder, Panvala
Primer: Panvala is more than just stamp collecting. It is an entire movement that’s dedicated to directing value from extractive advertising agencies to Web3 communities. In this episode of Crypto Sapiens, Niran, Panvala’s Founder, shares his philosophy and what he’s hoping to bring about with his project.
Background
Founder of Panvala
Background in software engineering
Previously, he was working in different startups building apps
Came across Bitcoin and Ethereum. Initially thought that they were scams
Came across Augur. At that time, he was excited about prediction markets
Started contributing to Augur. Learned about Ethereum as Augur was built on it
Left his job and worked at ConsenSys for 4 years
Panvala came out as a prototype while he was at ConsenSys
Society: Rules And Games People Play
When it comes to making money and allocating power and resources in society, the rules are biased
Impossible to write perfect rules for society
Some people are going to find corner cases and extract more value for themselves, leading to the decay of the system
“Extraction is the core problem that we need to organize against as a society, as a movement, as Web3, and all over the place. Like the ability for people to get money for doing nothing, by extracting value from you and other people and put it in their pockets.”
- Niran Babalola
In Web3, the general ethos is to eliminate the middleman to prevent extraction. However, this approach is very narrow
It has to be a mass movement against all forms of extraction
The default advice for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is to extract as much value as possible. Instead, it should be “how can you make your customers as happy as possible?”
Thoughts On Decay In DAOs
Decay is a core thing that’s going to happen
What will unlock value for many people is not a particular DAO or structure, but an ecosystem of DAOs
When something decays, you have the option to opt into something else and leave the decay behind
For example, when BlackBerry failed to innovate fast enough, people will switch and buy iPhones
A lot of things in life cannot be opted out from (e.g. healthcare, education, etc.)
When people feel the decay, they get mad at one another. Instead, they should get mad at monopolies
To him, building a base layer where there’s an element of choice is important to prevent stagnation
Is focused on community life rather than governments/corporations to solve problems
Community members need to chip in their resources together to get it to work
When he thinks about the broader DAO ecosystem, he wants all the DAOs to grow
Panvala
A mass movement that drives dollars spent on marketing into the budgets of communities
Has introduced Panvala stamps — NFTs that are collected when you make a purchase/do something from a particular company
The stamp is worth money. The collector can take it to any community they want to fund
“Every time you're collecting a Panvala stamp, you're doing work that shifts value in our economy, you're shifting marketing dollars to be spent in businesses. And the more we all collect stamps, that's our leverage. That's what this movement feels like.”
- Niran Babalola
This shifts marketing dollars away from middlemen in the advertising economy into Web3 communities
Most of their communities and sponsors are in Web3
There are live campaigns from Logos, Index Coop, and Opolis:
Logos is trying to bring together people who want to work in DAOs — Subscribe to their newsletter/podcast to earn stamps worth $1.50
Index Coop produces index funds — Subscribe to their newsletter and YouTube channel to earn stamps worth $3
Opolis is an employment benefits organization for the decentralized world — Refer someone to Opolis and earn a stamp worth $5.28
How Do Communities Cash Out The Value In The Stamps?
Panvala runs on its own currency
Each quarter, the community gets the payouts from the stamps that they have collected
The community can sell that instantly and fund all the stuff that they care about
PAN stakers are earning dues credit
A cut from the stamps is used to fund the common needs of the network
Communities do not need to stake or hold PAN in order to collect stamps and cash them out
The PAN Token
The PAN token is the most boring part of what they do
They are people-focused — teaching communities how to collect stamps, building that culture within communities to capture marketing value
The token exists to bootstrap the network to provide the surplus — when people collect stamps, they actually have more value than the stamps have available
They don’t think of the token as the treasury of the system, but as a flow of resources that’s coming in from sponsors and going out to communities
The face value of the stamps that are minting is the PAN that is bought off the market and placed back into the token supply
Their contract logic makes it hard for the price of the token to go up or down
Long-Term Goals For Panvala
Stamps are their main focus
To have more stamp campaigns within Web3 and for those funds to remain in Web3 communities
Want to prove that stamps are a better marketing tool than everything else out there
Will be going to each city and introducing how this works
Person Who Influenced Him The Most
A book titled Mutualism by Sara Horowitz
She talked about how communities who see themselves as problem solvers actually organized themselves to solve the problem
“Web3 is the start of a giant social movement that will reinvigorate communities across our society.”
- Niran Babalola
Any Last Words To Add?
The problems in society will be solved by you and I
“If I can leave anybody with anything, I hope it's with a sense of agency that the problems that we face are within our grasp to solve and that you're going to be the people who solve them.”
- Niran Babalola
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