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Zima Red ep 93: Harry Zhang
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Zima Red ep 93: Harry Zhang

How To Build A Web3 Startup + On-Chain Credentials With Galaxy

Jan 1
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Primer: Harry Zhang has been around the space for a long time. He co-founded Lino Network, a blockchain built for the content economy, and DLive, a fairer YouTube/Twitch for content creators. Project Galaxy is his latest project. Their goal is to build the infrastructure that powers both on-chain and off-chain credentials. Learn what are the ramifications of his project in this episode of the Zima Red Podcast.

Background

  • Graduated from Berkeley studying CS and Stats in 2017

  • Joined an e-commerce platform called Club Factory

  • Entered crypto in 2018, where he co-founded Lino and DLive

    • Lino was a blockchain built for the content economy

    • DLive was the first application built on Lino

  • Sold both Lino and DLive in 2019

  • Currently working on Project Galaxy

Club Factory

  • An e-commerce platform

  • Built a data infrastructure that collected data from clothing suppliers in China

  • Chose the best supplier in China and sold that to India and some countries in the Middle East

  • Tested ads in India, United States, and Europe. Their data model worked the best in India and they focused on that country

  • Did not know that e-commerce in India was really big. Became 1 of the top 3 e-commerce platforms there

How Did He Enter Crypto?

  • Best friends from college started to do something in crypto in 2017

  • Found out that content creators were not rewarded fairly

  • YouTube and Twitch takes 20-30% of revenue from streamers

“We wanted to build a platform that content creators can earn permissionlessly, while most of the revenue from their fans should go to them directly.”

- Harry Zhang

  • What attracted him to crypto and blockchain was that it can be used to create a content economy for content creators

  • Built the Lino blockchain for content creators

  • Lino never went to Mainnet. Both Lino and DLive were sold to BitTorrent in 2019

DLive

  • Overall idea was to build a fairer YouTube and Twitch

  • Had watch-and-earn in 2018

  • Streamers can reward users for their activities

Thoughts After Selling Both Entities

  • Was an unfortunate exit for them

  • Did not want to sell the company but had to as they were running out of cash in the bear market

  • After 2019, his team continued to explore what else they could do in the space

  • Realized that crypto projects do not have a good way to manage their communities. All of the following are not sustainable:

    • Airdrops

    • Giveaways

    • Farming campaigns

  • Found NFTs more vivid. Could be used to give people a status on top of a reward

Project Galaxy

  • In Project Galaxy, they are building the infrastructure to power both on-chain and off-chain credentials

  • Credentials can be anything:

    • Off-Chain: e.g. whether you follow someone on Twitter, number of Github followers, etc.

    • On-Chain: e.g. where you borrowed money and never got liquidated, whether you participated in governance, etc.

  • Building tons of plug-and-play modules for people to utilize credentials in their project

How Does The Off-Chain Credentials Work?

  • Currently, they are curating off-chain credentials in a centralized way — taking data from Twitter API, Github, etc.

  • Projects can come to them and request for the information

  • In their Shadowy Super Coder Campaign, they curated 100k Ethereum contract deployers on Ethereum Mainnet and partnered with more than 12 partners. These partners sponsored more than 300 million worth of perks to the NFT holders

Making It More Decentralized

  • Can have more data providers coming in to provide the data

  • In the short to mid term, they will allow people to come in to be data providers

Examples Of On-Chain Credentials

  • Financial-related credentials that can be used to calculate credit scores

  • For lending protocols such as Compound and Aave, the protocols could consider offering lower collateralization ratios to borrowers with good credit scores

Are On-Chain Credentials Better Than Off-Chain Credentials?

  • Doesn’t think that on-chain credentials are better than off-chain credentials

  • Most contributions are not on-chain activities (e.g. contributions on Discord, forums, etc.)

  • In the future, they will be supporting Sybil-resistant algorithms to check whether a user is a bot

Project Galaxy Spaces

  • Dedicated space for each of their partners to create campaigns

Examples Of Successful Use Cases

  • Yearn wanted to reward WOOFY token holders

  • For every week that someone holds 2000 WOOFY tokens, they were given one chance to claim a mystery box that will reward them with one out of six WOOFY NFTs

  • These NFTs are badges that represent one’s social status in the Yearn community

  • After 3 days of the campaign launch, the WOOFY token holders increased by over 30%

  • Factors affecting campaign success:

    • Creation of dynamic campaigns where users can do something and get something in return

    • Adding utility to the NFTs (e.g. NFTs used for voting)

Engagement Rates On Project Galaxy

  • More than 80% of all campaigns have higher than 60% participation rate

  • Received feedback from their partners that people really liked the NFTs

“And they're showing off [Project Galaxy NFTs] in their Discord chat, on their Twitter, as a badge, as a achievement, or as a social status, right? So these are great ways for them to increase engagement.”

- Harry Zhang

Launching A Campaign

  • Contact him or his team members

  • They will set up the space and campaign for you

  • Launching their permissionless dashboard soon. Once it is live, users can create campaigns on their own. They do not need to know how to code. They just need to use their tools

Is There Multi-chain Support?

  • They can work on any EVM compatible chain

  • Already deployed on Ethereum Mainnet, BSC, Arbitrum, and Polygon

  • Looking to deploy on Avalanche soon

  • Will work on Solana down the road

Which Sector Is He Most Excited About?

  • Most excited about NFTs with utility

  • Really like JPEG projects as they are used to indicate social status

  • In mid to long term, NFTs cannot be just JPEGs. They have to become something much larger

Thoughts On The Current Crypto And NFT Markets

  • Both markets are very hot right now

  • Tons of projects are coming out with crazy valuations at a very early stage

  • Thinks that the top tier JPEG projects will dominate the market over the long term vs new JPEG projects

Best Things And Hardest Things About Being A Founder

Hardest Things

  • Need to keep up with everything

Best Things

  • It’s always exciting everyday

If He Has Unlimited Resources, What Would He Do?

  • To build up the wallet infrastructure:

    • Improve user experience in onboarding users from Web2

    • Improving efficiency for existing users on Web3

Grand 5-10 Year Vision

  • To have a great network of credential data for Project Galaxy

  • Want to see Galaxy as a core infrastructure for the space

Single Favourite NFT

  • The Shadowy Super Coder NFT

  • Actually deployed a contract a while ago and was eligible for it

  • Those who have deployed contracts on Ethereum Mainnet should come to Project Galaxy’s website to claim it

Most Controversial Thought On NFTs

  • Doesn’t like the fact that there’s only 8000 copies available for Loot Project

  • Can’t imagine how any DApp or game will be built for just this amount of users in the next 5-10 years

If He Could Improve Something In The Space

  • Wants to scale up and improve the overall infrastructure of the space

Someone He Looks Up To And Why

  • Looks up to Elon Musk

  • As a founder, he knows about the problems a founder would face

  • Admires how Elon Musk can have the conviction and will to overcome all these problems

NFT Ecosystem In 3 Years

  • NFTs having more use cases

  • Excited to see how other projects come in and give utility to CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, etc.

All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Summaries are prepared by The Reading Ape. While reasonable efforts are made to provide accurate content, any errors in interpreting and summarizing the source material are ours alone. We disclaim any liability associated with the use of our content.

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