Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. Today I'm joined by Drake Danner, data analyst at Flipside and MetrixDAO. On this episode, we discuss Drake's latest work in progress, Badger, an ERC-1155-based badging protocol currently deployed on the Polygon network. Badger was conceived of in the course of Drake's work at MetrixDAO, where contributors providing blockchain analytics services needed access to various SaaS tools like Dwork and Wonderverse. Inspired by JokedAO's disposable ERC-20s, Drake co-created Badger, which allows system administrators to grant access to Web3-compatible tools by provisioning NFT badges to their members corresponding to their roles. Drake believes this mixture of managed roles running on transparent and decentralized infrastructure is crucial glue for Web3 working groups. It was good to sit down with Drake to chat about his journey from traditional finance to DAO tooling experimentation. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, how's it going?

Drake Danner: Doing well. How are you doing?

Nicholas: Good. Do you go by Danner or Drake? Or Drake Danner?

Drake Danner: So my full name is Drake Danner. You can call me either one.

Nicholas: Okay, great. It's good to hear from you.

Drake Danner: Yeah, you too. I know we've been trying to connect for a while, so I'm glad we finally got a chance to do it and always good to make some content out of it too.

Nicholas: That's the thing to do. I'm excited to, I just started playing a little bit with Badger and I'm excited to talk about it. It seems like it's got some deep affordances. Well, its affordances are fit for Guild. Yes. So I'm sure there's lots we can get into.

Drake Danner: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was really like Guild was one of the big inspirations that joked out and we really wanted to purpose build it to work kind of hand in hand with Guild. So glad that you noticed that.

Nicholas: Yeah, definitely. Well, okay. So first for the recording and for everyone's benefit, give me a little sense of what's your background? How did you get into crypto in the first place?

Drake Danner: Sure. Yeah. I've been following crypto for, I don't know, I guess a while, 2014 or so. Really got interested in Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. And just really just like, oh crap, like, you know, decentralized money and this is going to be cool. And you know, what's this thing called Ethereum? And we can have, you know, programmatic versions of this decentralized concept that we're exploring with Bitcoin. Didn't really, you know, have no time or capital to really invest in it so much as just kind of sit on the sidelines and pay attention. But in early 2021, I'd say really got back into things. Had been doing a lot of work in FinTech as a data analyst. So found Dune, got active on Dune and it was definitely easy to or easier to participate and pay attention to crypto as someone that was kind of contributing to the conversation or like sharing insights as opposed to just sitting on the sidelines. And then from there, kind of just ran. So had a lot of success, you know, at least with what I thought I was coming into using Dune, eventually joined Flipside to do analytics there and data pipelining. But over the past year or so, I've been more focused on DAOs and, you know, enabling metrics DAOs specifically.

Nicholas: Very cool. I think we first crossed paths in somewhere associated with Dune and some of the dashboards you've made.

Drake Danner: Yeah, yeah. It sounds right. I mean, it's crazy how you just put some of your work out there. You really get to make a lot of connections.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think. I mean, I definitely noticed it when I first started being more serious about crypto at the end of 2020 and was really encouraging everyone I knew who was a little bit interested to just, I mean, everyone's. even now, though, I thought it would end sooner than it did. But I guess the recent crash has helped us in this sense. But you know, everyone's got their DMs open. Everyone's quite friendly. I find it's pretty rare that you have someone who doesn't want to talk or isn't open to checking out your thing or, you know, jamming.

Drake Danner: Yeah. Makes things really easy, honestly.

Nicholas: Yeah. Despite how complex crypto is, it's much more approachable to talk to people than like even Silicon Valley kind of startups.

Drake Danner: I think so, too. I think like a couple of things and, you know, just my opinion on that is with crypto, there's a couple leaps or steps that you can take. And then once you start to understand some of the basic concepts, things really open up. It's kind of like coming over a hill on a learning curve. And then once you get over that hill or even if you're, you know, getting close to the top of it and starting to see that that's coming for you, other people can feel that too. And they get excited and want to help you, you know, either reach that top or explore on the other side with you. It feels like traditional tech and finance is almost saturated. There's so many people that have gotten over that hill that it's not as special to find someone else over there as it might be in crypto right now.

Nicholas: Yeah. And also there's there's such a even now such a dearth of talent in crypto and Web3 stuff that it's like someone new comes in and it's like, oh, we really needed you. Yes. It's just your skill set.

Drake Danner: No, absolutely. Absolutely. I tell a lot of my friends, I think there's still a big skill arbitrage opportunity from traditional companies over into crypto. And we still have a big need for people that know how to operate and run like traditional organizations and what it takes to have like a sustainable business model.

Nicholas: Totally. I think one thing that's different is that you have to be a bit more self-starting in crypto than in traditional tech jobs or any kind of jobs where there's really well-defined paths and 50 years of organizational development that you can just sort of skate through. I mean, I think most of the people who are in crypto like that, like that. there's no prescribed path that you have to follow. And instead, you can follow your interests. And also that it's sort of you tell me, but at least in my experience of DAOs, especially very embracing of the whole of a person, not just

Drake Danner: their

Nicholas: particular skill set that they got involved with or most useful for, but also, you know, whatever hobbies and interests they have that somehow find a way to be relevant in the cultural happening that is a DAO.

Drake Danner: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think honestly, that's kind of the autonomy, right? You need someone that's going to come in and have their own fire and push things in the direction that they believe. And that autonomy is important in having some almost authorial intent over the direction that you do want to go. Being able to communicate that, inspire other people to move in that direction with you and make something happen. It's definitely, you know, I think you could argue that it might be harder to be a self-starter, but I kind of, I find it a freeing almost kind of go in direction you want, like you said, kind of follow your passion.

Nicholas: Yeah. I think you, you give up some certainty or stability, stability. Yeah. It's a little bit more precarious, but at the same time, because you're, you have to be more autonomous, you'll, you'll find a way. if, if whatever it is you're doing now falls through or goes away or changes, you probably have the skills to find something new afterwards. So it's a different kind of work.

Drake Danner: Yeah. It's a different risk profile.

Nicholas: Definitely. Well put. So I want to get to Badger, but maybe can we just do a quick, tell me a little bit about what Flipside is like.

Drake Danner: Yeah, absolutely. So Flipside, you know, we do a lot of things for our clients there. I'd say primarily data provider. So we have a really strong data team that's ingesting you know, transaction data off of nodes doing ETL prepping that for end users. We've also run bounty programs for partners. So Flipside's partnered with Delana, Osmosis, Sushi, Thorchain, Algorand. And basically what we're doing is getting their data ready for investigation or interrogation, then also kind of structuring how that data should be interrogated or investigated. Flipside also has a really active governance arm. So I believe a very large delegate in Aave, Maker, Hot Protocol, Optimism. So that team will really stay engaged with everything that's going on in the space and you know, do some meta governance activities. Recently we've also been spending some effort kind of in the DAO space. So helpful in activating and bootstrapping MetrixDAO, which is where I spend all of my time. And then building, you know, tooling like Badger as needed to support the goals associated with MetrixDAO.

Nicholas: Yeah. Okay. So tell me a little bit about this MetrixDAO initiative.

Drake Danner: Yeah. So MetrixDAO was, you know, an opportunity that we saw to take the model that Flipside had been running with the community enabled analytics and bounty programs and to do that in a more web three native way in a more data provider agnostic space. In the past, Flipside as a data provider running bounty programs was, you know, just running programs on its own data. As a data analyst myself, other people that I work with, we know that you kind of need to use the right tool for the job. So operating a more agnostic program means we're gonna get better outputs for partners. It also means that, you know, using all of the information that we've learned at Flipside over the past year and a half, we can build a system from the ground up, but with knowledge and doing that as a protocol made more sense.

Nicholas: So who's the target user of MetrixDAO and also who constitutes MetrixDAO?

Drake Danner: So on target user side, I mean, we're servicing blockchains, protocols, or just anyone that's seeking information, generally in on-chain data. I mean, up to this point, we're really utilizing Flipside data, Dune data, the graph, footprint, a few other providers, but primarily on-chain data. And it could be because a blockchain, you know, wants to make people aware of a new feature, so Aave came out with v3 and we want to do some content around v3, how it works, show it in action, do that with data-enabled content. And then on the kind of provider side, I mean, we're seeking people that want to produce analytics, which are either people that are looking to get into crypto, people that are active in crypto, spend their time on data analytics. But you do see a lot of people that are students or working at traditional consulting firms that are looking to get into crypto and can find their way in through data analytics.

Nicholas: So in that Aave example, they release a feature and then they work with MetrixDAO in order to get proof that it's being used in the markets for their communications?

Drake Danner: Yeah, exactly. So we do a number of things to try to get the word out about the analytics as well. So some partners might be seeking, you know, business intelligence. They need to make a decision based on something that happened in the past and they want to understand what's going on. Someone might be seeking more of a marketing pusher. Community-enabled analytics, again, is what we call it, where it's really like, we're going to turn on the machine, make a bunch of database content and push it out into the market so we'll have our analysts tweet about it, discuss it, really show off what's going on.

Nicholas: So is that equivalent to something like a Nansen in terms of their analytic services on top of the data or Masari?

Drake Danner: Maybe closer to say like a Masari report. So I wouldn't say, you know, not like Masari Governor or Masari's like dashboarding tooling and not really like Nansen insofar as Nansen's doing a lot of purpose-built dashboards with really strong labeling to kind of tell a story about what's going on on-chain. I think MetrixDAO really shines on the BI side more where, for example, we had a client come to us that was looking to understand, you know, what type of impermanent loss has occurred on these Bancorp pools and, you know, based on that, we want to make our users whole and what's that amount. So it's really just kind of like asking questions about what's going on in the past. But, you know, there is that other side of more of that marketing push.

Nicholas: And what makes it a DAO exactly? Is it run fully decentralized or?

Drake Danner: Yeah, no, I'd say we're on the journey towards the centralization, if you will. The value in the network is coming from the providers, which are, you know, the analysts and the peer reviewers. So it makes sense, you know, to me and I think other people involved with MetrixDAO that the people that are creating the most value in the network should have a say over how it operates and how it should progress.

Nicholas: So you can earn in addition to getting paid directly for your work, you earn a stake in the DAO.

Drake Danner: Right. Yeah. So at this stage today, we we use a token called XMetric. It's a non-transferable ERC20. We think of it kind of as like a reputation token. So depending on the number of XMetric that you've earned based on your actions, you get access to workflow. We are working on protocol and another token that will act as a reputation token along the protocol token. But XMetric in the meantime is allowing us to beta test some of the concepts.

Nicholas: And folks get compensated entirely in XMetric for now or also in cash of some kind?

Drake Danner: Oh, the value flowing through the system is cash. We call it P tokens, so partner tokens or payment tokens. If we do work with Aave, we might pay analysts and peer reviewers with Aave alongside XMetric. Really want kind of that reputation token to be more of like a back-end tracking tool rather than compensation.

Nicholas: Got it. So speaking of back-end tracking of sort of reputation in the system, I guess that's a perfect segue to Badger. So where did Badger get started? Inside of MetrixDAO?

Drake Danner: So inside of MetrixDAO, we think about like our participant network, but we also have contributors, kind of like more team members that are doing operational roles or butchersing the bounty system where the providers or the participants are active. And for the contributors, we need to make sure that they have access to the right Discord channels, maybe some bounty boards like Dwork or Wonderverse, Snapshot as well. And we just needed a way to be able to use kind of one system to provision multiple tools. And I'd had experience in more traditional companies working in IT doing this type of provisioning, but I didn't see anything like this for on-chain organizations. We explored a few options, but ended up going with kind of developing our own. And the main thing that, like I said, I was inspired by JokeDAO and Guild because JokeDAO exposed in ERC-20 factory, let you create your own token, distribute it as you needed, set some parameters on it, and then Guild would let you plug in any token that you wanted and gate different spaces, whether that be Discord, GitHub, a private Google Doc. So JokeDAO had a lot of the features that we needed. And honestly, like, you know, v0 of Badger, I would say, is just JokeDAO plus Guild. But we needed something that would allow us to revoke access. And that wasn't something that JokeDAO offered and not something that I saw in a lot of the other badging tools either.

Nicholas: So when you're talking about provisioning access, what do you have in mind?

Drake Danner: So like, let's say, you know, you join our team and we want to make sure that you're able to vote on things that are relevant to your contributor group. We want to make sure that you have access to the right Discord channels. And then maybe, you know, we're operating, say, like a bounty board through a program like DWork or Wonderverse. You're on the growth team, you need access to the growth tooling. Got it. I could either go into each one of those tools and provision you individually, kind of like managing transactor lists on each of those tools. Or I could give you some sort of key. And what we've seen is like most of these tools like Snapshot or DWork or Guild are thinking about like bottom up organization formation. So like you go to an NFT min, you buy the NFT. Now there's, you know, 10,000 people that exist in a network that all get access to something. And it's very bottom up. But traditional organizations operate a lot more top down where you have an administrator that can provision different accounts, revoke access, etc. And I'd say that's kind of an anti-decentralization, anti-web3 ethos. So we wanted to find something that was kind of in the middle. And a big piece of that felt like it was just transparency and access to data. So if we embrace top down systems with high access to data, then maybe we actually can middle out systems where anyone that has access to that data could become an administrator in their own right.

Nicholas: What do you mean by that? An administrator in their own right?

Drake Danner: If I manage a network and I manage like a set of keys for people in that network and I manage locks that people in that network can access and it's public data, how all of that works, then anyone else could set up their own set of locks and their own set of keys and kind of vampire attack that network. It becomes very easy to move networks around when all the data is public.

Nicholas: So essentially the provisioning administrative tools are all on chain, in this case on Polygon, at least for now. So anybody can go and replicate. if they disagree with the way that you're running some tooling or they want to offer some other tooling, they can replicate the list and go from there. They don't need to start from scratch. And they also can manage multiple tools as long as those tools are paying attention. Like their web three native and pay attention to Polygon and who owns what NFTs. They don't need to go into each tool and use their own administrative system. Instead, the tooling can just pay attention to who owns the NFTs.

Drake Danner: Right, right. Exactly. And there were, I mean, in metric style, there were cases where, you know, I was kind of acting as an administrator for the entire contributor network. But within that contributor network, there are different pods and different pod leaders. And those pods are going to operate better if the pod leaders can access and control all the tooling for their people. So if I set things up in a way that's all public and very transparent, clear about everything works, then they can kind of take up the mantle and bring their pod out into its own organization if they desire.

Nicholas: So the idea is like, it's interesting. It's not like, say the X metric token we were talking about. You wouldn't want that to be the kind of token where an administrator can just delete your tokens. Right. But for access to, I don't know, maybe these things aren't compatible right now, but you can imagine a future where Discord moderator status or admin of the discourse forum or Figma access or Notion access, or as you say, Dwork or Wonderverse, I guess, already have this kind of thing. You do, it's okay to have someone delegated the responsibility of controlling who has permissions to modify or invite or change the billing, et cetera, of different tools.

Drake Danner: Exactly, exactly. And then having that nuance between contributor and participant and also recognizing that an individual could be both at the same time gives you a little bit more design space. So our guild has some channels that are gated to people based on their X metric holdings, which again is like a non-revocable, non-transferable token that people earn based on their reputation in the system and some other spaces that are gated based on badges. So that allows us, again, I think Guild is one of the best tools out there for organization management right now, at least for on-chain orgs. It gives us a lot of flexibility to utilize fungible tokens and semi-fungible tokens alongside each other.

Nicholas: When you're talking about your guild, which guild is that specifically?

Drake Danner: That's MetrixDAO, so guild.xyz.metrixdao, yeah.

Nicholas: Okay, okay, okay, sorry. I thought you meant sometimes people use guild to mean like a task force within- Sure, sure, yeah. Okay, so you mean the sort of ownership of X metric or other assets on-chain that's used to define a member of the guild.xyz.metrixdaoguild.

Drake Danner: Exactly, exactly. And then some other organizations that I'm in, UTC, Coast and Ocea, we use guild as well. And again, having that mix of, we can go to JokeDAO and mint some fungible tokens, we can go to Badger, mint some non-transferable tokens, or we can also make transferable tokens with Badger. But there's basically just a lot of design space then where you can have a bunch of different mechanisms managing how do people earn access or how are people granted access. So you get a little bit of a hybrid permissionless setup, which again, I just think opens design space that's a little bit different than some of the bottom-up formation we've thought about for the past couple years.

Nicholas: And is there, I mean, the obvious use case that we kind of discussed or implied here is managing access to tools where you want someone to be able to revoke access. Is that the typical use case or is there anything else that comes to mind that this might unlock?

Drake Danner: Yeah, I think that when I think about Badger, I think about two levels. There's trybadger.com, the web app that's built really for people like me, like operators or system administrators. Anyone can log on there and just click buttons and set up an organization. There's great tutorials. It's pretty straightforward. If you're a developer or someone that's working a little bit closer to the metal, there are some more interesting things that you can do with the primitive layer of Badger. I think the one that is the most interesting to me would be contract badging. So basically, I could build a smart contract that says that it requires a badge to use a certain function. And then I could badge individuals or badge other contracts to call that function. And if you keep going down that line of thinking, Badger can essentially act as like an on-chain software license. So people could buy and trade these items that allow them to access functions on their smart contracts.

Nicholas: I see. So access controls to on-chain abilities across multiple contracts, composable.

Drake Danner: Exactly. The way that I think about the application layer is you're mixing a lot of no-code or low-code tools that have been developed by really amazing development teams that make UX very smooth. You can plug Badger into Guild. You can plug it into Snapshot. It's very composable. It's just an NFT. But if you're a developer, again, things open up a little bit more. It's just a flexible 1155 issuer with a lot of different parameters. The website, the web app that we build is like a specific opinionated use case of that primitive, but you could take it in different directions.

Nicholas: And it's actually, when I was onboarding, you tweeted out, replied to this tweet with the type of token that you'd like, and I'll give it to you. And I asked for a transferable one because I think there's some concern some people have about non-transferable tokens. Let's say your wallet is compromised or something. But I guess because the tokens are administered from the top, you generally probably do want those to be non-transferable because you don't really want someone trading around their, I don't know, D-Work permissions. Yeah.

Drake Danner: Yeah. Yeah. A couple of things there. I think I paid a lot of attention to the conversation around soul-bound tokens, non-transferable tokens. I think there was a lot of uproar, maybe is the right word. I don't know, concern around how those would play in our ecosystem. So we just kind of made the decision that with Badger, if you own a badge, you can always go for that. So they're non-transferable, but they're burnable. It's not like a tattoo so much as kind of like your individually provisioned key that you can turn in if you want to resign. As far as the transferable and the non-transferable thing, I'm still kind of exploring that space. And like, you know, with the tweet that you responded to, that's one of the organizations where I'm kind of playing around because if you have a flexible contract, so Badger Factory gives every organization its own contract. And within that contract, each token ID kind of represents a badge. So token ID zero could be a core team member badge. Token ID one could be a contributor badge. And then each one of those badges has its own parameters.

Nicholas: For people not familiar with the token IDs, you can issue multiple of each token ID at an 1155 contract. So the token ID can represent some kind of responsibility, and then you can have multiple of them given out to multiple different addresses.

Drake Danner: Yes, yes. Thank you. And if you, you know, say like token ID 10, we're going to define it as a transferable token. But, you know, zero through nine are all non-transferable. They represent different roles. And, you know, as Nicholas said, we can issue those to different team members or groups of people. If you have a mix of non-transferable and transferable tokens inside of a contract, I think that you might be able to move towards like an economy inside of a contract and say that there are like, you know, tokens that represent individuals or roles within that economy, as well as like a number of, again, semi-fungible objects that exist within that economy that could be transferred amongst people that have roles or people that exist outside that contract.

Nicholas: So you're saying I could have token ID one is something non-transferable, token ID two is transferable, but I need to hold token one in order to be able to send or I guess receive. even you could add a requirement that I have to hold token one in order to be able to touch and interact with token two.

Drake Danner: Right, right. And, you know, I don't, you know, just to be clear, I don't think that the way that we have it set up wouldn't necessarily allow that type of situation. But if you say that, you know, token ID two is used in some other exogenous application and that exogenous application checks for token ID one to see if you're allowed to spend token ID two. I see. You could also imagine this way. Exactly, exactly. That's I keep moving towards that direction. where I'm like, I think you could use a badge organization to run a game. And I think that when I first discovered 1155 about a year or two ago, there was a lot of discussion about how it would be used for game economies. I think I think that's super interesting. I haven't seen people explore 1155 as much as I would expect.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think a lot of the excitement has been around speculation on strict non fungible tokens, but there are a lot of 1155s out there, given that I think all of the OpenSea shared contract NFTs are all 1155s. So yes, there are quite a few out there. Just most of those people don't know that that's what they are.

Drake Danner: I remember early in my NFT analytics days, I was looking at gutter cats and that's an 1155 contract. And I was like, what the hell is going on here? Like I'm used to 721s, like it's all very simple. You see, you know, one item moving around with 1155s, you have all kinds of different stuff like batch transfers. You can do transactions that might transfer different token IDs of the same contract or different balances of those different token IDs of the same contract. So it gets a little funky, but the design space is exciting.

Nicholas: Definitely. It's very cool. And I think maybe we'll eventually see some of that Skyweaver and other games coming a little bit more to the fore. I'm curious, what was your role exactly on the project and who else was involved in building it?

Drake Danner: Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, a couple of guys that definitely we need to shout out is Mason and Chance. So Mason is Mace on the chain on Twitter, Mason the chain. And then Chance is NFT. Chance. Mason was a lead developer on this project. Chance did a lot of work to support Mason and to help us work through a couple different roadblocks. My main role is, you know, been operator at MetrixDAO. So I'm looking at a lot of different tools in the market, trying to find things that will meet our needs. And then just trying to, you know, in cases where I can't find what we need, get the right team together to deliver what we do need. So I didn't do a lot here, Nicholas. I was just, you know, idea guy in QA, implementer and talker.

Nicholas: Senior idea guy, we call that around here.

Drake Danner: Exactly. And I love it.

Nicholas: Very cool. And I'm curious, I know I haven't dived deeply into it, but I know there is something called HATS protocol and I know there's Orca, which has renamed, I can't recall what they've renamed to. I don't know if those are overlapping. I think HATS is maybe the closest thing to what you're working on.

Drake Danner: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, initially, I mean, of course, when you're trying to solve a problem like you honestly never want to have to build the solution. Like it's easier if you can just go find one, especially in crypto, because things are often free, honestly. So like we looked at, we looked at the other options. You know, PoApp is kind of, I think, like something that people look at initially, but they use a shared contract on GnosisChain. I mean, GnosisChain is easily indexed, but the shared contract makes the data difficult. We also looked at OtterSpace, but again, a shared contract with a unique EIP, so not as composable and not as indexable as we needed. OpenSea actually kind of suffers from that same problem where it's all those 1155s are on the same contract. So data indexing is just, yeah, it's terrible. And I mean, we're flip side. Like we know how to work with crypto data. Like we know what we need. HATS again, strangely, a shared contract.

Nicholas: Oh really? I didn't realize that.

Drake Danner: Yeah. So HATS is taking honestly a super interesting approach. I'm very fascinated by it and I'm excited to hopefully be involved with whatever they do. They have like one 1155 contract, which is the HATS contract. And then depending on the token IDs you're using, it defines like different branches of a tree. So the data indexing is possible. It's just I think it's going to require some specialized indexing. And like, again, as an operator, I'm just like, I need this shit to work. Like I need it to be super simple. So I was talking to Mason and Chance and I'm like, guys, like, you know, there's this, there's that. Like I feel like all I really need is like my own NFT contract where I can just plug that contract address in the guild and plug a token ID in. And if these were 1155s, then I could just use token ID zero as my core contributor. I could use token ID one to represent this pod or that pod. Like, again, being a senior idea guy, like it felt like an easy idea. But nothing on the market was. Was making it as simple as it needed to be, if that makes any sense, it almost felt like it was such a simple problem that everyone tried to overcomplicate it.

Nicholas: Interesting. OK, I have to spend a little bit more time with HATS protocol because that is an interesting project, too, in this direction. And it's Metropolis. Orca has renamed to Metropolis.

Drake Danner: Yes, yes.

Nicholas: Thank you. Which I guess has the pods concept, which is similar. I'm not sure how their admin stuff works, if it's if it's the same as Badger. Yes.

Drake Danner: And there are there also, I believe, a Gnosis safe wrapper. Which is, you know, so you're coming in with a safe and kind of like building a pod around that. I could be totally wrong, but that was my understanding when I looked into it. Badger, I mean, Badger contracts, honestly, they can hold assets because they're just 11 to five. So like you could use a Badger contract as a safe if you wanted. But at the same time, like for our use case in Metrix now, like we already utilize Gnosis safe. We utilize different payment processors that wrap around that. So we just needed a distinct credential management system.

Nicholas: And in the blog post launching thing, Mason talks a little bit about treasury management. Is a badge from Badger something that could be used for managing a safe?

Drake Danner: Theoretically, so. Still kind of exploring, like integrating with Gnosis and what that might look like, and then at the same time, like recognizing that these Badger organizations could theoretically operate as safes on their own. So right now. You could transfer assets to a Badger contract and the contract owner can withdraw them. But I believe in the future what we want to be exploring is kind of having like a set of admins on a contract that are represented by badges and then those admins almost working together as a multi-sig. I think it's cool to think about a multi-sig made up of transferable badges and you kind of have like a rotating set of signers. But again, new design space not yet explored.

Nicholas: Very cool. So it's live, right? It's in people's hands basically already. Try Badger.

Drake Danner: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's ready to rock and roll right now. We've been using Metrix now. We've had a couple other team members and flip sides spin up little Badger organizations for groups that they run. I believe Content Guild and Crypto Culture and Society have taken a look at it and are starting things up too. So, yeah, it is live and I'd be happy to talk to anyone interested about use cases, implementation, missing features, etc.

Nicholas: Very cool. So you are actively developing subsequent updates to it according to feedback? Yeah.

Drake Danner: Yeah. Building in public. So everything is road mapped out on GitHub. Trying to keep our docs in a really good shape as well. I believe that we are on V5 or V6 on the roadmap right now. We are road mapped out to V18 or so.

Nicholas: Wow. And are there any key features coming up that people should be excited about?

Drake Danner: I think like one of the more exciting ones that I think should be coming hopefully by the end of the year is like gas station implementation. So this one, I'll try not to spend too much time on it. We did post a paper about this on Cosinostra.gg. So we're looking at subsidizing transaction costs for different protocols. And there are gas station implementations that do things like this. I mean, you can look at other blockchains too, like Flow has done a really good job of abstracting all transaction fees away from users. So we want to build kind of like a badge enabled gas station. And the first place that we'll use that will just be on Badger to make Badger completely free for anyone. And then you could use, you could use badges to set up your own gas station network and make your protocol free and have like an intelligent subsidization mechanism. So based on someone holding a certain set of badges, they might get subsidized at a different rate than someone else.

Nicholas: Very cool. So you could make your DAP free for people who have a badge, a certain NFT.

Drake Danner: Exactly. You would basically pay transaction fees on their behalf.

Nicholas: You can even do that cross network. You could even.

Drake Danner: Yes, you could. It's kind of crazy.

Nicholas: Very cool. Very cool. And are you married to Polygon or how do you think about the chain that you chose to deploy?

Drake Danner: Yeah, it's a good question. Polygon is like fantastic for. I mean, it's fantastic. Like it's so cheap. We've run. I think there's something like 70 or 80 Badger organizations that have been created. You know, obviously a wide number of those are just people testing it out. But we do have over 250 unique badge holders and I'd say, you know, solid usage and the total cost for everyone has been under six dollars.

Nicholas: Awesome.

Drake Danner: That's crazy. Everything indexes against Polygon. There's no concerns because we can do that cross chain indexing. We definitely want to deploy on other EVM chains, though. So, you know, if anyone has a reason that they need to be on a certain chain, please reach out. We'll make it happen. And then eventually would love to get some create to action flowing and see cross chain organizations basically have one organization on every chain and deploy badges on the chains that are, you know, right for different purposes.

Nicholas: Yeah, I guess one thing that's nice about this architecture, it's very simple, but there's no real lock in because at any point you could take a snapshot of all the badge holders and migrate to a different protocol or roll your own thing or switch chains and use the same protocol on a different chain. So it's nice because there because everything is public and you have this administrative control, you're not really at risk of. I mean, there's there's very low risk. There's not really a motor and kind of lock in that makes this a dangerous thing to try.

Drake Danner: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that was something that joked out helped me understand a lot. So joked out is, you know, one of the big things that I saw from them early on was like single use contracts like, guys, let's just, you know, issue some coins, run this on chain vote and next week we'll do it again. But like, who cares? It's the same contract. Like, we're just going to keep moving. We're going to keep iterating. Obviously, you know, when you're running an ongoing organization, like you don't have to change things all the time. But by having the really open data system and enabling like bulk actions, it's pretty easy to migrate your organization manually right now. And in the future, we want to offer a lot of like automated migration stuff. So I can imagine a situation where, you know, someone's running their organization on Ethereum. It gets up to a certain size. They want to migrate it over to Gnosis chain to save money, make that very nice and easy for them. You're basically just pulling data off the chain on Ethereum. Put in a CSV, mint over to Gnosis. And then the only thing you have to do is go change your locks.

Nicholas: When you say change your locks, that's change responsibilities associated with each NFT.

Drake Danner: I would say that, like, again, we have like all these different token gate parameters that are available and Guild or Snapshot or, you know, Wunderverse or DWerk. Those are kind of always the ones I go back to. But Badger being kind of the key maker for those different locks, if I issue different keys, I just probably need to go back to Guild and switch my setup on my lock.

Nicholas: Right, right. Very cool. That's super interesting. I'm going to have to take. I mean, I played a little bit with it, but I'm going to have to take a closer look. So if people want to try Badger, where should they go and where should they find you?

Drake Danner: Yeah, absolutely. Try Badger.com. Please try it out. Shoot me a message if you have any questions or want to jump on a call to talk about it. Twitter is honestly probably the best way to reach me. Add Drake Danner on Twitter. And yeah, happy to chat with anyone about Badger and anything else DAO or Web3 related.

Nicholas: Awesome. Is there anything else you're jamming on? I know you mentioned JokedAO. I agree with you. I think JokedAO was incredibly influential for their discovery, invention of these kind of disposable ERC-20s. I hadn't seen anyone use them that way. I thought that was very exciting. Still is exciting.

Drake Danner: Yeah, it's amazing. I get a chance. So Sean, lead developer at JokedAO, was at Flipside for a while when I started and got a chance to meet him. And his work has definitely been an inspiration. So really happy to connect with that team and kind of watch everything that they're doing.

Nicholas: Yeah, Sean's awesome. JokedAO's great. Anything else you're super excited about this week or mostly Thanksgiving?

Drake Danner: Dude, mostly Thanksgiving. I appreciate you having me on.

Nicholas: It was great talking to you. Thanks for coming through. And yeah, come hang out next week. You're doing another show every Friday, you know?

Drake Danner: Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much, Nicholas. Look forward to talking to you more.

Nicholas: All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks. See ya. All right. See ya, everybody. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. To keep up with everything Web3, follow me on Twitter, at Nicholas, with four leading ins. You can find links to the topics discussed on today's episode in the show notes. Podcast feed links are available at web3galaxybrain.com. Web3 Galaxy Brain airs live most Friday afternoons at 5 p.m. Eastern time, 2200 UTC, on Twitter Spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.