Patricio Worthalter is a self described "generalist" from Buenos Aires who joined the Ethereum Ecosystem in 2015 and when on to build POAP in 2018. Recorded on February 8, 2023 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.
Patricio Worthalter grew up in Argentina, where he was familiar with trustless systems, and in 2014 a customer of his had to pay a hacker in Bitcoin. This led Patricio buying his first Bitcoin where he learned of the power of blochain technology. He then made a risky bet on Ethereum, buying $10,000 worth, and in 2018 he founded POAP, a platform for consumer design interpretation based on Ethereum.
"Taking a crazy bet with minimal knowledge can be a risk worth taking if you are desperate for change." - Patricio Worthalter
In this episode, you will learn the following:
1. How living in Argentina has shaped the adoption of blockchain technology
2. How Argentina has become a powerhouse for blockchain talent
3. How the Argentinean culture of needing to be street-smart has translated into success in the blockchain industry.
Follow Patricio at https://twitter.com/worthalter
Follow Club CPG at https://twitter.com/CPGCLUB
To learn more about Crypto Packages Goods, visit https://www.cryptopackagedgoods.com/
GM. GM. We are back. Hello, everybody. Anybody who knows me and has met me in person, especially at an NFT startup event, knows how much I love POAPs. My inspiration for you've met Mikey comes from our guest. And our guest is none other than Patricio Worth Alter, the founder of POAP. His bio is short and that's intentional. He is a 36 year old high school dropout based in Buenos Aires. He joined the Ethereum Ecosystem in 2015 and has been running POAP since 2018. It is my honor to bring to the stage Patricio. Welcome, Patricio. How are you doing this morning?
I'm doing very good. It is my honor to share some time manage space with you. Although in the metavers still quality time, I agree 100%.
We've met a few times. I have been actually hunting you down just to make sure I could get the I Met Patricio PO app. Every time that we've met, it's actually been in completely different sides of the United States. Looking forward to seeing you in Paris. You travel a lot, but we're going to start this from where you started. So you were born and raised in Buenos Aires, where you're at right now at a remote secret location. And how did growing up in Buenos Aires shape your experience of getting involved in Web Three?
So in my family, I was the only technical person. My mother is a psychologist. My father was a high school teacher, so computers weren't much of a thing. I don't think I had a computer until I was maybe 14 or 15 or maybe we had something earlier, but clearly I was an outlier in my social circle. And not that I regret it, not that I wish things were too different, but I got a late start. I remember wishing to be involved with more technical people and that has shaped me because although I consider myself really technical, I could never be really technical like people that being stimulated to be computer scientists or software developers. I had to be happy with being a generalist and that's been good, but it definitely shaped it. Then, of course, something that shaped it, maybe much more than that, is that in Buenos Aires when I grew up in the 90s. But it was pretty much the whole century. We live in a state of alert where you really have to be seeking for your survival. And this is your safety, your access to disposable income, your relationships in Argentina, the institutional, the society is really fragile. So you can't have trust relationships. I mean, you can't have trust solutions, actually. Friendship, it's one of the main anchors of why the Argentinian society didn't crash. But you have to be super self aware of trust. So when I got to learn about trustless systems, not that I knew what I was learning about, I didn't know anything. But the idea that you could use this and nobody can rock pull you and rock pulling was anything at the time, certainly has shaped not only me, but almost all of my generation. Argentina is a powerhouse for blockchain talent, both in creation, development and also in adoption. It always has been since the very early days of bitcoin. Argentina was, if not the top one of the top markets for everything, crypto. And that's no coincidence. It's not that it just happened. It was really easy for all of us to understand the value of a technology that allows you to do things without anyone being able to stop you, without the government being able to meddle with what you are doing or even knowing at all. So certainly growing up in Argentina has shaped a lot the things that happened afterwards for me. And it is interesting that having lived abroad, there was a period of time where I lived abroad, I'm still here. There has to be something that's not.
So bad, so much that I'm thinking about right now in terms of shared experiences and how I can relate to that in some ways, and in most ways I cannot. You mentioned the trustless technologies. How did you get into Ethereum? Because you mentioned bitcoin is pretty well entrenched in Argentina. How did you get into the Ethereum ecosystem and what attracted you to it specifically?
It is not as glamorous as you probably think it was. So I hear of bitcoin around 2011. I didn't get it. I couldn't spend the time to understand it. Well, people were mining, they were making money, but for buying CPU cars, which is what it was using early 2010, 2011, you needed money and I barely had any money. So it didn't make sense for me, given how I was using my time. Like most of my awake time, I was working and barely making ends meet. So the idea of learning about this emerging bitcoin thing that could allow me to make more money but required an upfront investment, didn't make sense for me. I couldn't make the upfront investment. So I let bitcompass in 2013. Bitcoin has really its first large scale pump and I start seeing again and I pay a little more attention. But again, I couldn't understand whether it was a scam or not. And the whole thing looked really scammy. So not that I didn't meet a scam, but I did meet something that required lots of my attention to be properly understood. And I couldn't afford the distraction. Now, in 2014, a customer of my business, I had a small business fixing computers and data center work and networking for enterprises or medium sized businesses. And one of these customers, one of these clients has a server that gets one of at the time emerging. Now they are somewhat usual, run some more software. So you got a virus in your server or computer and they demanded you to send some bitcoin. So you get a decryption key and you get your data back our client comes to us seeking for help. It wasn't a server on our contract. It was under someone else's contract. Our servers didn't get hacked. And I am like, okay, how can we fix this? The clip in the thing didn't make sense or at least attempting to decrypt it didn't look like something that made sense. So I go to the bitcoin foundation. The bitcoin foundation. There was a nonprofit in Argentina that ran a coworking space called the bitcoin embassy. And I am like, can someone help me with this? And they're like, yeah, sure, we can sell you bitcoin. And I buy the eleven bitcoin the hacker wanted. Every bitcoin was between 200 and $400. And they helped me set up a wallet. They were really kind and some basic hashim things and they answered many questions that I had accumulated over the years. And I discovered not only the thing was in a scam, it was a fascinating piece of technology that allowed all of us to do things that were completely unthinkable. Not that they were nice, that they were disruptive, they were unthinkable. Similarly to how AI the way it is today was unthinkable ten years ago. If you were told ten years ago that you could speak to a device, asked any random question that you can answer with encyclopedia on hand, and it would answer in natural language with top accuracy, you would think that that's not postulation or not. We possibly time soon when I learn about bitcoin and I see that you can buy this digital asset, hold it with you, transfer it elsewhere, exchange sheet for products and services. And it didn't require you to be any technical because the wallet set up already had touch ID, and you download apps from the Apple store and you could transfer phones. It was fairly major. The basic functionality, this is going to change anything in Argentina. We have capital controls of the type that the government doesn't let you buy currency or send currency abroad, that you have to stick with the local pesos and very good luck not having your assets being hyperinflated or stolen by the banks. So it's like, okay, now you can move money overseas without having to go to adventurous dark operator, which is the way it was done at the time. And it is still kind of shanti. If you want to move money overseas, you have to hire some sort of super shady person. It is way harder than buying drugs. I don't use drugs, I never did. But I'm sure if I need to buy cocaine, it's way easier than sending money abroad. So that was mind blowing. And I started to reallocate my productive time and learning more about crypto. Shortly after I asked a friend, okay, I discovered this thing and it is a massive menu of things that I can start digging deeper, but I can't afford the productivity loss. Could you tell me what and I have to be honest with what I actually asked, because I didn't ask was the most interesting thing. I did ask what's the thing that I have to buy for making the most money? And the guy says I'm not going to give you financial advice. He's been working on YouTube for a very long time, so he kinda know. And this is Stephen Ordano, the founder of decentraland. He's not an unknown, it's not a fear that I can disclose jokes. So I meet Steven and he's like I'm not telling you to buy it, I'm not buying it. I barely understand it. But the most hardcore crypto people, the people that I look after when I want to learn more, when I want to see what's the coolest thing all of them are doing things with Ethereum. Ethereum had launched two months before. So we are already in September of 2015 approximately. And I started paying attention to that. I don't understand anything. The documentation was super rough. It wasn't meant to be consumed by a person that's not super diving to everything. Crypto, I tried to do things like running a note, the wallet. I failed quickly and that was good. I failed so quickly that it was easy to give up on that and focus on something else. I tried to buy Sir, I failed again. Exchanges were hard to understand, everything was super hard. So I asked him if I give you Bitcoin, which is something that I am past the tipping point of knowing how to buy and sell, would you do whatever it takes for me to buy that thing that you seem to identify as the most exciting asset that one can buy? I tell you, I can try. With that I gave him some Bitcoin, fortunately $10,000 worth of it, which for me it was a lot of money. But I was also so excited and so desperate for the change. I knew that it was reckless to do that, but I was also looking for doing something reckless with my capital. So he buys approximately 10,000 if it or something and gives me a piece of paper and some instructions that were between his handwriting and what I actually had to do. It was something for me to keep on a safe deposit box, knowing that whenever I need it, I will need some help. And this is one of the things that I say if I got earlier into computers, maybe I wouldn't have needed so much help for doing what it was, some basic or not so basic command line interface things. But for example, now I have friends in America that found themselves in similar positions and they have the literacy for doing what I needed help for. Also I wasn't really good on English because maybe if you wanted to learn and you wouldn't computer literate, but you were English native, you could go into somewhere and see a video or listen to a podcast and maybe you learn something. For me, the cultural barrier was much greater. So this is what I identify as Bonnie. And monosayers has given me a setback. I'm glad it wasn't too strong, so I somehow managed to overcome it. But it's not all fun and games. It's not that year. By being born in this shitty place, I learned the skills that someone in the first world couldn't learn. It's all a trade off learning. Being born in a third world gives you these survival skills that come really handy on societies where people don't have them because here they are completely useless. They are the baseline skill. You don't have any street smarts in our local market. Now, the other day in Polar, we were discussing with our lawyers about the trademark, because it's a trademark that we own, but Piro of attendance protocol, because it's somewhat generic thing that anyone may want to use, we had to defend for. And in the UK there was an opposition. Someone was like, no, you cannot have that because we have these reasons for why you shouldn't be the owner of this thing. And I am like, who are these people? And they say, the patent office doesn't tell you. Eventually we present lots of documentation explaining why Piro of protocol was a power thing and nobody was calling anything professor protocol and we get the patent accepted. Now, I asked our internal general counsel how do we know that that anonymous opposition was sent filed by cronies of our lawyers that are doing the filing so they can bill us some more hours for collecting all the defense materials that we had to collect. And you know what? I am completely sure that they are cronies of our lawyers. They tell me that we have the most integrity lawyers that you can get and they wouldn't do anything like that. And I'm like, conceptually speaking, if there is a loophole, the loophole is going to be exploited. Because that's how I mean, hardwire in Argentina. If you don't look around anytime you are out there, you're going to have a bad time. Either be, pick pocketed, kidnapped, killed, whatever. So going back to your question of ethereum and how I got it, I was seeking for making money. I was leaving paycheck to paycheck and the paycheck were in either two STD or two juicy or anything. And that seemed like a racing asset that you could buy. Bitcoin had already shown how crazy these musical chairs games can get. So I decided to take some gamble. I couldn't ever say that maybe I did, but I don't call what I've done an investment. I didn't invest in Bitcoin, I didn't invest in Ethiopia. I took a crazy bet with minimal knowledge that I wouldn't have taken if I knew. If I knew what I seem to actually was at the time I bought it, I wouldn't have bought it at all. It's not that maybe I could have bought less or thought twice about it. It was a clear no. Like, you can't buy an asset that has all these risks and this inflation, because when I bought it, the inflation was like five acres per block, and it was really high. Still, I was super confused about what is it was. I was missing lots of information, and that ended up being pretty good for my economy.
Thank you for sharing that story. There are so many highlights of why POAP is successful through your hardwiring, as you said, the grit and the determination that you have as a founder, the environment in which you live, in which you have to have this survivalist mindset. Look, as a vet, I struggle with this and that. I've been to combat and the idea of survivalism takes on in a different sense, but in some ways, similarly the idea of just you don't want to die. And that turns on a piece of your brain that is very hard to shut off. And so I can totally empathize with you. I also think when you're a founder and you sort of start to experience that survivorship as a function of your business, which is part of who you are surviving, it also lights up that part of your brain of, like, we just got to keep going. And I don't think it's something that everybody has the ability to navigate or master. I certainly have not mastered it, but it's something that I pay extreme attention to. And look, for me, none of that actually the bet part doesn't actually matter as much as the results that you did get, because I don't think that you had no insight. I think you were you, like, said it, you were making a calculated risk, and that calculated risk had long odds at the time, but now it appears like an act of genius. And so we're saying, I'm thankful that POAP exists because of that bet. And I think the moving forward part of, like, so now you have all this east, and now you're getting to the point where you're about to start POAP, because it was around 2018 that it was founded. What were you seeing in the ethereum ecosystem that that sort of prompted this Piro of attendance? Because for for me, I I think it's it's very much a thing that I think about constantly. And I think the idea and I don't know if you're a fan of Isaac Asimov or the foundation series or any of that, but, like, psycho history, the ability to kind of, like, have all of the things measured and calculated and accumulated so that we can project forward, is something that I feel like POAP is the foundation of in some way. To be able to project forward our history or calculate out things. But that's for the weird scifi part that we won't cover in the next little bit. But where did POAP come from in your mind? And what experience has started to shape it around the time of its founding.
A quick comment on how racing I mean, the third world relates to being in combat because for Bible it's a thing and you are right. But there's a little difference, which is when you're in combat, especially if you're American, you're in a co op game. You are part of the strongest army in the world, and you have the most powerful network supporting you. Succeeding. You are still risking your life, and it's still a traumatic experience that surely leaves you with lots of to learn. But the whole world wants you to succeed somehow except your enemy and even sometimes your enemy while racing in the third world it's competitive because for you to thrive you have to do better than others. It's not cop. And depending on your contention network, your parents, your wealth, your social circle, that can be really hard in my case, as I said, my parents not only weren't we wealthy, they were super blow to middle class. Like a high school teacher in Argentina barely makes a living wage and my mother as a psychologist made not so much either. So there are some similarities but the grid is different also because in combat you are on a mission that kind of has a time frame so it doesn't wire you to be in alert for life. Maybe it does, but when you argue.
It does, it really does.
I'm not sure whether that's good or not, but it feels a little different. And also being born in a solid world, the hard whiting happens at the earliest age. So when you are six and your parents teach you how to come back home from school and they tell you you don't stop there, you don't answer anyone, you cross the other side of the sidewalk. If you see someone, it makes you be in a way that otherwise if you want to acquire the qualities, it is really hard. Now, going back to your question of why pop, how pop in 2018 I can explain that. I'm happy to explain that but there's a 25 minutes long keynote that I've done last year on YouTube that it's really easy to find. Like if you do publish oversalta on Google, it shows up pretty quickly, where they explain in detail most of the urgent story in a way that whoever really wants to know the comprehensive view of how and then not only why, but then the implementation, which was crazy hard. You can find that keynote. But the part that it is fun or that I like to share on CPC is mostly about consumer design interpretation, which is pretty much what CPG is about, making all this fascinating technology be adopted. So in 2018 I have been full time in the industry for three years and I've done it with obsession. I've traveled to every conference, met every person that I could meet, reshape my whole lifestyle to become the best eidiom committee. Remember, I could be knowledge wise and ability wise and talent and biometrics in most I didn't succeed, but I tried really hard. So in 2018 I found that the market had collapsed. This is shortly after the ICO bubble. There were no deals to make because before I was chasing ICOs and underwriting different token sales, most of them really ugly and adoption was between zero and minimal. Nobody was using Ethereum for anything. And this is after Crypto kitties but still if you went to the chain it was for punsai schemes, ERC 20 token transfers which was mostly money moved around by the generated gamblers and other casino light activities and the only legitimate adoption that you have, legitimate adoption of Ethereum. It's not that gambling is not legitimate, it's just like it is not really organic. People weren't using the network because you could do with it something that you couldn't do with any other technology. I mean sure, unregulated gambling is a thing, but that's not what we are here for, it's not what we were there for. So the only legitimate applications that we had were highly experimental, minimally understood web, three startups and one was a prediction market collagor. It never worked. Maybe an appointment had 20 users and that was celebrated like with a full bank. We had 20 users during a national election and MakerDAO was a really complex experiment that maybe 50 people understood and some were playing around but out of that nobody was using Ethereum for anything. And I found annoying and obnoxious that the Bitcoin media conglomerate these were many influencers and newsletters and Coindes and others that were constantly pushing a narrative and they were successfully doing so about the film being a passing fat something that was a nice experiment but it was never going to be adopted. And the promises that the film community has made about Piro of a stake they were never going to materialize and although they were super malicious and they were just pumping their backs, they had many good points. It was true that all the adoption that Icidium had before when the price was over 1000 was only fueled by ugly speculation and there were reasons to believe that maybe the technology was never going to be a thing. It was worrying so with some friends that we were all very deep into the space and found disappointing that we were all bucketed as scammers. Because also they were so malicious that they made the stadium look like a scam, not like an attempt at actually being called technology that wasn't panning out. Because if they were honest, it couldn't happen. So unfair, but it was really unfair. The same Bitcoin foundation I went to the first time and they helped me set up my wallet. When I came back they made fun of me. The Bitcoiners were constantly like here's the person that we educated and at a point he lost track and got into the past of the Veil. Like, this is no show, these were actual comments. And now he's losing all his money because he bought the wrong asset and Bitcoin was recovering and Ethereum kept bleeding. So they were circle shirking about how she knew they were and never paying any attention to Ethereum and that whole dead shit. So with some friends we say, what can we build that uses this technology for something that's a real need of your everyday person? That's unserved? What do people want to do these days that they can't do because they don't have a trustless network for storing data and doing all the things that we know Ecidium did? Because Ecidium, technically speaking, in 2018 wasn't too different from Ethiom of 2022. And we started brainstorming this and we say, well, instead of thinking what can ICEM do for humanity? Let's think what we know Ethiopia does well. And that is going to help narrow down a lot what kind of product we can try to build. Because if we are still thinking what humanity wants, well, humanity wants to not have hunger. Humanity wants to not have climate change or global warming. An Ethiopian cannot do shark sheet for any of that. At least something we could do. So we start the way around and this is something that all PCs tell you to not do. We have a solution looking for a problem. We have a trustless network that writes little pieces of packets across thousands of computers all over the world at a pretty expensive cost. Although at that time it wasn't very expensive. What can this fascinating technology be used for? And on the very streaming process we're like, okay, we know that Resilient does tokens very well. People love tokens. And we have wallets and we have Blockchain Explorers and launching a token in CC and there are thousands of tokens and they all understand and loved tokens, but we don't want to do another pump and dump and we don't want to do an illegal business like an escrow contract for buying or selling illicit substances. We could do that. We could have created a smart contract for buying cocaine and that could have shown that this technology could do things that you couldn't do with any other technology. But that wasn't what we were after. So we are, okay, what's the problem that this technology can solve that has organic adoption that is fully compliant with local laws? And there were some other qualities that I remember, but it was a constraint for the thing we wanted to build. So tokens on the traditional financial sense, we're out. Maybe it was that it was hyper financialized or something. I wish I remember, but whatever. So I proposed to my friends that we do a Forest Square like system. Forest Square was the social network in the early 2000s or 2010 on which you went to concerts or music venues or parks and you checked in and they gave you a digital collective that proved that you were there. And then you could see who else was there and you could communicate with them and collect points and maybe become the council of the ambassador of that location by 2018, for a Square had been deadlocked for a long time. For Square didn't make it anywhere close to 2018. So I asked him, why don't we make a checking system like four square? But when you're checking somewhere, you get a token. And nonfunctional tokens were an emerging thing that maybe 50 or 100 people understood. And that token, because you have true ownership of it, will be with you forever. Unlike your four square batches that maybe you were collecting for years and now you no longer have because the company has pivoted to data weaponization and now the collectibles application no longer matters. So that's kind of the answer for your question of why power? Well, because we wanted to create something that proven Ethereum useful technology for the world at a point that nobody was doing that. Nobody was focused on crypto, non tech people using Ethereum for something they wanted. So we were the first team building that, or at least that I am aware of. And at that time, I pretty much knew all teams because there were 50 teams. So that was it. And I made kind of an sneaky sneaky because I was providing the capital for our team of friends to build the thing. So I felt entitled to decide that what we will end up building was a childhood dream of mine, of being able to check in at places and have a log book of every place I've been.
Amazing. Speaking of POAP, our POAP is now live. The secret word is in the chat.
I need to get mine too.
Absolutely.
Is there a reason why you don't say it out loud?
I will text it to you. We stream it. It's in the chat.
You want it only to go to the official community members instead of Sevilla? That's a very good idea. Okay, I got it. I got the chat message.
We get to all play together. We're going to do it.
Oh, I was going to tell you. Maybe you want to entertain people while I play. And I need you to put the word again or I exit. Yes. So let me explain what's going to.
Focus on redeeming your PO app. I will most definitely keep everybody entertained while you go.
Okay.
Are you ready?
I'm an idiot. I already lost two lives and I'm not even on 100.
All right, don't pay attention to me. Thank you for our community. Secret word is in the chat while we watch Patricio play the game. We'll have a whole discussion about the game, I think, shortly. I've told this story a few times, but my middle son and I love hockey. We have these treasured moments together. Where we've sat on the couch and gone to actual games. And one of the beautiful things that I talk to people about when they're like, well, why should I care about a Piro of attendance? Why should I care about collecting a moment? I point to a hockey game that I went to in San Jose. It was Latin heritage. Night of the San Jose Sharks. So they rebranded themselves Los Tiberones. And that game was epic. It was a it was against the Anaheim Ducks. It went through overtime to a very thrilling shootout. The shootout went to five shootouts. For anybody that knows hockey, it was a high scoring game. There was lots of action, and my son and I had an amazing time. And at the end of that game, through Ticketmaster and more specifically through the San Jose Sharks, I got an NFT. And I got an NFT to my account from the official source of the San Jose Sharks. And in this market where lots of things are, like, beautiful, generative art that people are bidding on and wonderful communities like CPG and Genesis and others that you purchase an NFT to be a part of, this is, for me, something that is immensely valuable, but it's only valuable to me. And it was something that was provided by that organization as Piro that I was there. And it's like a treasured memory. It is akin to celebrating my daughter's birthday yesterday on Instagram and posting. But I own it, and I have control over that asset. And that, I think, what you've highlighted and what is catching on and what is beautiful about what Poll app is that is also baked into me. I want to have those experiences. There are lots of, I think, examples from my youth of, like, video games that you can't play anymore or experiences online that just don't exist, that I would love to have more records and documentation of and be able to go show it. And this era that we're starting now enables us to do that. It enables us to go forward and have on this blockchain, hopefully forever, the ability to go back and look at them. And so I applaud you for pursuing what your childhood dream was of having that log book. I've been chasing you around the globe to get your POAP. I think the folks that are in the chat now who are redeeming the PO app, it's a good cousin PO app to redeem. And I'm just thankful that you have continued with vigor to pursue this. So now that you've concluded we have some folks that are like, okay, that game Dyslexia runs in my family, and the game is challenging intentionally, can you talk to us a little bit about that? We can take a little bit of a left turn on to how that game is, how the game is pursuing while I try and do it.
You all deserve an apology. I just got my POAP up and it was a lot and it was way too much than what we wanted to be. This was crazy. I made it with only one attempt left, with one live and the last 20 I was like I can't fuck up, I can't fuck up. And if I fuck up, I have to start over and I'm live. So this was a lot. I'm sorry we are making this be so hard for you. But let me explain to you why. Because there's a solid reason in power. As we were the first team building something meant to be used by real non crypto people, we got a challenge, which is there's no preexisting precedent on how to get anything done. Well, they are best practices. Like if you're building a website today, humanity has been building websites for 50 years or 40 or 20. It is pretty clear how to build a good website. Blockchain applications. Nobody has been building for many years, nobody has been building blockchain applications for the consumer besides power that achieve the adoption we have. So all the problems we face, we are the first team that ever faced and some of these problems are really tough and they may not even have permanent solutions that we can implement. And one of these problems was bot attacks because we made power ups to be precious collective else for getting a POW up past the curation process. The curation process is something many people hate. The reason why it exists, it is multipronged. There are many reasons why it exists. But one of the most important reasons why the population process exists is so all co ops have a story. You can't make a co op of something that was historically relevant for you or your community or someone. So we made POAPs be precious collectibles and that creates incentives for people to try to seek them out of no other reason. That getting more coops. There are criminal organizations that exist for farming POAPs, some of them very well funded. I could make a whole episode about these criminal organizations that exist for farming POAP. Once in New York City during Nfdnyc, I was harassed by a group of Chinese people that were sent to farm my POAP. It is a thing. So we were thinking what can we do to make this thing harder for the bots while still letting our collectors get the power? We didn't want to do a traditional captcha for multiple reasons. And be honest, nobody likes CAPTCHAs. So we said let's do a game. Let's do a game that can have a leaderboard, that it is fun to play, that it becomes a thing. And we came up with a really nice idea. Part of it you've seen, but you didn't see the leaderboard, you didn't see the incentives and other things that come when you play the game multiple times and when you learn the technique. So you are now facing this stage on which we launched the game. It's really hard. We need to adjust the difficulty. But in the meantime we are also building other many cool features that you need for the whole game to be successful. We are a start up and although we raised $20 million of venture funding, we have limited resources. Our mobile development team has certain bandwidth. So I'm sorry you have to put up with this shit. You have to bear with us a little longer until we make some improvements. So minting a POAP, it's not such a painful experience. Now there's a nice positive externality of the game being so hard, which is people only mean POAPs they really want. And although we want people to mean lots of POAPs, we kind of like the idea that you make an active intentional thinking on whether you really want a power up. So the more it has taken you to get it, the more willing you are to pass that game. And also when you see who else has that POAP you will say, okay, these are all people that are so passionate about this cause, whatever that causes, that they were willing to put up with this process. So it's a really hard calibration. We are learning as we speak. If you feel that you have a better idea for solving the problems that we have, go to Careers POV Xyc IO and come work with us because we have lots of these challenges.
That was an amazing plug. I am going to personally bear with you on it for sure. I would challenge slightly in that I mean, I get made fun of all the time in the chats specifically because I like my own posts often and so if I'm redeeming a POAP somewhere I always think it's the most important place to be because I'm there. And so, yeah, I have no problem redeeming any POAP where I'm at. It's very much a part of who we are in CPG. We've been handing out POAPs for these genius calls for a while. I'm proud of my rewards profile page. I think I'm only missing a few of the POAPs. What I want to focus on for the last little bit because we only have you for a couple more minutes. Let's talk about the far future of what your dream and vision is across the board for Poet and we sort of alluded to it before the call. You and I both share a love of hamburgers and we met in San Francisco at East San Francisco event and I asked you if you had been to in and out, because in and out is special and near and dear to my heart having lived in California and you're a Smashburger loyalist and that's totally cool. But we talked about the secret menu at in and out in that you can go and you can look at the board and you can say, well, I can get a hamburger. But if you know the secret menu, you can verbally order things and it unlocks this really interesting new menu that you sort of have to learn through secret channels. And POAP, as you alluded to when we were talking about it, is this canvas for people to create their own sort of games. What's the future for PO app? What do you have in mind both technically and then kind of socially for the future of it?
I'm thinking again about this story of knowing the secret world for getting a special minimum, you know how I would put it? POAP up, we pronounces the abilities of Good Storytellers if you're a good storyteller. If you're a good creator, you now have a really flexible weapon for making your stories more engaging and targeted. Because without this kind of tech, you can't make the secret menu to only be eligible for CPC members. While if in and out had an iPad on the counter with a token Piro scanner token Piro, and you've shown your CPC, your QR code of your wallet that holds a CPC token, maybe you could create a complete new dynamic that cannot be transferred by just sharing a secret world. And this is happening. Many top enterprises are working with us. Some of them that are present in your fridge or in your wallet or in your music cabinet for creating these weaponized tailored quality experiences. Part of what's in the future you can expect interaction. We polarization the idea that if you do this on that, something else can happen to you. That you want that on the implementation side. And in practice this could look like if you're a fan of a band and you follow that band when they play in places that aren't too popular, maybe when they are playing in coachella you get a VIP ticket. That's already happening at tiny scale because of friction. But we can only expect it to grow. Now, on the tech side, we have serious challenges for which there are no answers and we are working with the top minds in the industry for overcoming the problems that we have like curation, governance, credibility and integrity. How do we make Poet be available for every human while still being a safe place? With no pornography, with no hate speech, with no illegal content? For that. We don't have answers. We are working really hard. We are worried, but we are optimistic. We believe that we can make it. Humanity has done a lot of very good things very quickly. Things don't need to be as slow as they are in the blockchain. For example, in Bitcoin or in Bitcoin has started in 2009, so it's been around for almost 15 years. It's still rarely used. It barely does anything. The film has been around since 2014, approximately. So it's almost ten years old. And we may be 50,000 or 100 people using it regularly. So it's still really tiny. But other technologies, especially in consumer tech, when you nail a dynamic right, they spread way faster. So figure I said ethereum is ten years old, bitcoin is 15. You know how old WiFi is? WiFi is 20 years old. WiFi was invented in 2001, approximately ten years in. It was in every corner of the world. Same with the iPhone. The iPhone launched anything in 28 and ten years in every person that was on an iPhone had an iPhone. So we are optimistic that we are going to nail a flywheel model. We kind of did. Now we need to find how to productize it. We say in power we have invented ice cream that doesn't make you fat. Meaning that it's something that every person or burgers that you can eat as many as you want. Okay, there will be people that don't want them, but you can be sure that there's a captive market that's extremely large that wants your thing in bob, we have created this item that doesn't make you fat, but unfortunately we are constrained to maybe making £50 a day or £100. Our challenge is how do we manufacture a million pounds a day of this thing that they all want? And we are working really hard for that. And it's going well and we are optimistic, but it's going to be a long way together.
Ice cream that doesn't make you fat. We can dream. I want to be conscious of time. We have you for another eight minutes and the future is bright. I believe our community believes for web three and for crypto. And I am an ethereum. Maxi, what are some things that you would want to highlight for our builders who are engaging with POAP or with web three in general? And then I will leave it to you to close it out of anything that you want to ask me or just want to close with.
Builders are now facing a tough time because the wool market, the crazy NFD summer we had made all of us believe that we were at the right time for building stuff. And now we are finding out that we aren't. We are still too early for build consumer stuff. You cannot build a successful startup for a market of 50,000 people. There are days on which there aren't 50,000 people using NFTs at all. There are less. You can check openSee. There are days. The other day I saw a pretty cool metric that you cannot fake because this industry, unfortunately, many times lacks lots of integrity and they don't mind lying and they show you metrics that are skewed. But there are some metrics that you cannot lie with. And one of them was accounts that have used USDC since the inception of USDC, the dollar of a circle. And that's a pretty nice proxy of adoption because USDC, it's like the best thing if I dom does the best thing. If item does it say it is let you moving dollars from person to person super quickly, easily, with minimal KYC, et cetera. And I think the number since USDC launched was 2 million accounts, meaning that maybe at most they were half million humans because exchanges create a new deposit account every time you deposit and people have multiple accounts. So we say the whole market of active crypto people in Ethereum is 2 million people approximately. And some may say, coinbase may say that it is 10 million for them. But if they didn't have a wallet, they are in Web Three users. They are gambling on a brokerage account as if they were buying a stock in Nasdaq. And there are companies in Silicon Valley that have mobile apps with 20 million monthly active users that are raising money at $10 million valuations because of how hard it is to build a consumer app. And in crypto, if you're raising a $10 million valuation, you won't be able to get enough money for building a meaningful, useful piece of software without delivering yourself out because things are expensive, extremely expensive. So founders now have to be extremely conscious on how they navigate this miscalibration between potential, which is a sky high, and market size, which is a drop in the ocean. This has happened many times, especially in big tech and in and in.com bubble and in consumer web 2.0. And there's prior art. In 1997, in one of citizen, I went to Expo Internet. You can imagine 1997. Expo Internet through our country was mostly extremely primitive, but there were things like order food online, buy your pet supplies online, find dating online, find your wife online. They all died. They all were 20 years earlier. If you're willing a consumer having crypto, you better be extremely careful. You better be here for a long run and you better be very well funded. If you don't have these qualities, go back to the drawing board because you're going to burn yourself out. And we'd rather have you not do something that's going to fail and preserve you for something that you can do well. You do whatever you want, but this is going to be a tough market for builders and you can be too hand wavy on how you will actually do the thing, which is something we all were like in the last couple of years. The market was so crazy that they were all extremely handwritten. We were all extremely hand wavy about how we were going to finance this technology until it has the market size it needs.
Thank you so much.