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. On today's show, I'm joined by Munam Wasi, COO at DelegateCash. DelegateCash's first product is an immutable NFT delegation registry. Users can delegate access rights to NFTs in their position to other public addresses on the various EVM chains where DelegateCash is deployed. Future airdrops and off-chain token gating software can integrate DelegateCash's contracts to allow people to interact with minting contracts and verify on Discord, all from delegated hot wallets without ever touching the wallet that holds their precious NFTs. Munam and I discussed the current product and ERC-5639 delegation registry, co-authored by DelegateCash founder Fubar, Wilkins Chung from Manifold, Riley Oh and Jake Rockland from Artblocks, and Andy from Tessera. We also discussed their new liquid staking project. This episode is the third interview I've done with wallet security software providers. If you're interested in the subject, check out my interviews with Harpy and Fire. It was great chatting with Munam about DelegateCash. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody.

Munam Wasi: Hey, how are you doing?

Nicholas: Good, good, good. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Hey, Sammy. Hey, CDT. Hey, Von Hagel. How's it going? Nice to have you. Today we're going to talk about DelegateCash. It's going to be actually a crazy little afternoon here because I'm doing this DelegateCash call and then in 55 minutes, hopping over to a very impromptu worm emoji, John Palmer, Jacob from Zora possibly chat about the blur, open C situation, which should be interesting. I'm hoping to learn a lot. Hey, there's DelegateCash.

Munam Wasi: Welcome. It's still me.

Nicholas: Hey, Munam. How's it going?

Munam Wasi: Great. Great.

Nicholas: Okay. I'm excited to talk to you about DelegateCash today. I know a little bit about it. I've been looking at the documentation and ERC 5639 a little bit, and I'm really looking forward to hearing from you a little bit more about how it came to be and what it does and the good work that you're doing.

Munam Wasi: Sure. So I think at the baseline, if we start from a question of what is crypto, I think the easiest way to think about crypto is programmable money and all that entails. Then the natural evolution of that as far as where we see DelegateCash is, is it takes that idea of programmable money and introduces the element of a programmable power of attorney or a programmable proxy. You're able to set rules around who is able to basically represent your assets for you, in this case yourself. So you can have your cake and eat it too, so to speak. You can keep your assets in cold storage, but use them with a hot wallet for a wide variety of things short of actually transferring your assets. So that's the baseline primitive. We built it as a fully immutable, fully composable public good for everyone. And I think it's been really, really fun to see the insane level of adoption that's happened. We launched on September 28th, so it's been about four and a half months. And as of right now, I am refreshing the page as we speak. We have $524 million worth of delegated assets. So that's ultimately a vanity metric because it doesn't necessarily reflect any amount of money that we've made. We've actually not made a single penny off of this, but I think it does show the strength of the network effects and the amount of trust that users have.

Nicholas: Okay. So maybe we should start with. what's the problem that having this power of attorney, this delegation ability solves? What's the danger of the system as it exists today?

Munam Wasi: So let's just say that you own one asset and you want to make a claim on it, as in. someone has offered you an airdrop for your asset. The problem is you've got slim pickings. If you've got good wallet hygiene and use a cold wallet, option A is let me sign this with my cold wallet, which is horrible. Don't do that. That's how people get sort of drained of everything. Option B is to transfer your asset to a hot wallet, pay the gas for that claim, hope the claim goes well, transfer both of your assets back to yourself, which again, costs more gas. And the problem with that second scenario is that if the contract is compromised, you still lose the asset because your asset has left this sort of protective bubble of cold storage and is now in a hot wallet. The cool thing about delegate cash is that on the backend of delegate cash is a delegation registry. The delegation registry is a, you know, it's basically like this list on chain that contains all the mappings between like wallet A, asset A with wallet B. And that lets applications on the other side, you know, use it. You can think of it like an Oracle that programmatically proves that you own an asset. So you can actually kind of go out and be reckless with signing things because your underlying asset is always safe in cold storage.

Nicholas: Got it. So let's rewind a little bit. Where did delegate cash come from? What started the project?

Munam Wasi: So funny thing is, is that delegation tooling had existed for probably two years prior to us launching. And there had been lots of efforts at building out other delegation tools. There's even this ERC standard, I believe it's ERC 777, lucky number sevens, that natively specifies delegation capability. But those other tooling and that standard, quite frankly, is a little bit of a pain in the ass to work with. You know, they're long and they're cumbersome and they were sort of designed as technical nerd snipes, you know, just to prove out that some capacity existed. I think our approach was we saw that this was a problem. We ultimately want to solve account abstraction at large. And delegations are the first step towards that. And so we saw that this problem existed and we thought to ourselves, what is the simplest way that we can solve this problem? That's the entire genesis of delegate cash.

Nicholas: Got it. So the basic solution is I put my NFTs or I leave my NFTs in my own cold wallet. Or do I have to pass them to a... Maybe you could just explain, like, from a user's perspective, what's the onboarding like if I want to start using delegate cash? And does it only work with collections that have integrated delegate cash or does it work with any NFT?

Munam Wasi: So you can delegate at the entire wallet level, the smart contract level or the NFT level. And you can delegate any of your own assets, but they're ultimately in read-only mode. That's the way to think about what's going on until an application on the other side actually integrates the registry as a source of proof and allows you right access, so to speak, on your own assets. So other applications have to ultimately respect and integrate the delegations, which is why if you look on Twitter, it's kind of interesting that a lot of projects, you know, basically will announce an airdrop or a mint and

Nicholas: users

Munam Wasi: will request on the bottom, you know, can you integrate a tool like delegate cash so that I can mint via delegations?

Nicholas: So basically, let's say Board Apes. I have a Board Ape and they're about to launch Mutant Apes or something. They would have to integrate delegate cash. Is it iDelegate? There's like an interface. They have to... iDelegation registry would have to be integrated into the contract that I would be claiming the new airdrop on. But they don't need to change anything about the old contract. Is that right?

Munam Wasi: Yeah, they don't need to change the contract provenance of the original because, you know, that ship has basically sailed and there's sort of no advantage to... You know, there's no claim to be made over there with sort of the original one. So for every new experience, they have to basically just include that one function. And the nice thing is, it's ultimately about five lines of code and we're chatting with lots of different projects and marketplaces about including delegation boilerplate so that it's plug in and play for anybody using the common tools to build up their own experiences.

Nicholas: So let's say I'm writing an airdrop contract. I integrate this iDelegation registry. It's got... Well, iDelegation registry has a bunch of different functions on it, but essentially it's just going to go read that registry. Is everybody writing to the same registry?

Munam Wasi: So each chain has its own siloed registry, but we're on about 13 different chains and each registry has the same vanity address on each chain to make it really easy for developers to basically be able to call all of those different chains. And so that's just the sort of optimal cleanest approach for a lot of people since their activities are typically restricted to their chain of choice. Those actions get written onto that same registry within that chain. And that's where this really virtuous cycle and sort of our growth flywheel developed because the first project we launched with was Forgotten Runes. And when the people who chose to delegate at their entire wallet level delegated, it basically caught all of their assets in the blast radius of delegation, so to speak. So it was really cool to then be able to go up to other prominent projects and say, hey, you know, I know we've never talked before, but like a hundred apes or a hundred of your NFTs have already been delegated. Please provide this value to your users.

Nicholas: Interesting. I'm not sure I totally follow. So maybe the first distinction to zoom in on there is, is there an option to delegate just some of the NFTs on a certain contract or does everybody have to delegate all of their collection associated with a certain NFT contract?

Munam Wasi: No, you have total control. So you have three options for delegation. Number one is to delegate that entire wallet. So that's like if you've got your vault or your cold wallet, you can delegate the entire thing to a hot wallet.

Nicholas: And when you say that's all of the NFTs in it or just as for a specific collection?

Munam Wasi: It's just wallet to wallet. So it's so it's everything over there. That's option number one. Option number two is to delegate at the smart contract level. So you allow approval sort of within a specific range. And then number three is to delegate at the individual token level. So one great example of that is there's that famous Ford Ape holder, Tropo Farmer, the guy whose ape has that sort of bright green background. And he actually tweeted this out and we hadn't talked with him beforehand. So it was really cool to see him take the initiative to do this. He had delegated one of his sewer passes to another wallet and he had delegated it obviously at the token level. And he tweeted out the private key to that wallet, which is arguably the cardinal sin of crypto. Never tweet out your private keys. You know, don't even write your private keys anywhere other than on a piece of paper that you bury somewhere deep underground. But he had delegated the token to a wallet and tweet out that private key and said, anybody on earth who wants to play this game can go play this game. Just add this private key to your own like MetaMask instance so that you're ready to go.

Nicholas: Very cool. So anybody could use his Mint Pass essentially.

Munam Wasi: Absolutely. And that's where I think delegate cash starts to get really, really interesting at the base layer. It's just this idea of you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to security. But when you look at the delegation registry, not just necessarily as like a technical byproduct of the implementation design, but as a core value proposition, that's where things start to become really interesting. That's where our growth flywheel exists. That's where like interoperability between projects becomes really, really, really interesting. because the Forgotten Roots project that we launched with, I believe on Halloween, they did this Halloween airdrop. And that Halloween airdrop gave, if you had other NFTs from sort of other big collections like I believe Azuki's and some other sort of really notable NFTs, you could get this basically goodie bag from those guys. And this made it really, really easy for like their project to basically do growth activities with other projects and other people to basically safely be onboarded into delegations once. And it was like a domino effect. You know, once the Forgotten Runes launched, then it's like, OK, cyberbrokers hit us up and Invisible Friends and Token Proof and Art Blocks and so on and so forth. And most recently, and I would say the biggest name has been, you know, Board Ape Yacht Club. World of Women has announced that they're using delegate cash as well, too, for sort of their next big launch that's coming. And we're coordinating with their team to make sure that everyone can have an amazing experience with it. And there are a couple of projects underway that we're chatting with. You know, think of the biggest names. I'm not going to confirm nor deny them, but we're in conversations with everybody because it's a really virtuous cycle. It completely protects your community and it gives you interoperability with other communities as more and more experiences get built out around the sort of common idea of being able to sign in with a delegate.

Nicholas: So if I understand correctly, with the Forgotten Runes example, people were delegating their entire wallet. You mentioned that you can either delegate for the whole of your vault wallet or whatever wallet contains NFTs, let's call it the vault, just for a specific NFT contract or at the token ID level. So in the example of Forgotten Runes, people were encouraged or were just naturally defaulting to delegating their entire wallet, which then allowed them to use the same hot wallet that they had delegated to to claim other things for their Azukis or whatever other collections that were already in the same wallet that they had previously delegated. Am I understanding right?

Munam Wasi: Absolutely. And part of the thing is, is that a lot of people have their wallets or they have their assets split up across multiple wallets. So Delegate Cash supports multi to one delegation in both directions. So you can do multiple, you know, wallet A's to wallet B or multiple wallet B's to wallet A. You know, you're able to control to what extent you delegate. So in a certain sense, it serves as account aggregation. A lot of people were aggregating their assets that way. And a lot of applications are interested in Delegate Cash as like an enterprise use case developer tool for that purpose. A lot of crypto products have been built out with the idea that one wallet equals one account. You know, we've sort of been accustomed to this idea that instead of an email and a password, you use a wallet. The problem is people split up their assets all the time. And so projects need to either do really, really complicated engineering to allow for multi-wallet sign in, or they can use basically take advantage of delegations to allow for that. And I think it ultimately depends on the user and each community has different proclivities. So a lot of the board A holders, they tended to delegate just their board A because a lot of them have really, really siloed wallets and really silo their assets just because they know that their community continuously at risk for scammers. But it also depends on the individual end user as well, too. Dingaling, I believe, who's like a really famous NFT collector, has the most assets delegated with Delegate Cash. It's almost 14 and a half thousand ETH, you know, an astoundingly high number. And well, you know, the guy has hundreds of assets, if not thousands. And so he basically was taking advantage of both the individual level delegations and the, you know, master sort of delegate your whole vault at one time.

Nicholas: So you're saying if I have Zookies in one wallet and Board Apes in another wallet, I can delegate both of them to the same hot wallet. They can stay segregated between two different private keys. So there's not really a security concern. Right. It allows me to claim things more easily. I can have a single hot wallet that I used to do all my airdrop claims and then even pass those assets back to the vaults that are segregated for, let's say, you know, my Board Apes vault. I'll pass back all the Yuga assets to that one, for instance.

Munam Wasi: Perfect. You know, that's a great example of it. I believe with the Dookie Dash claim, for example, there were different tiers of claims like tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four, based on sort of how many of the underlying assets you own, like whether you own an ape and a mutant and a kennel club and something else. So there were a lot of users who say, oh, like I have one hardware wallet that just holds my ape and I have one hardware wallet that just holds my mutant. So if I want to get like the really, really good claim over here, I need some sort of way of aggregating those two together without transferring them. And so this was the solution that they used, to your point.

Nicholas: And are there any risks of introducing the iDelegation registry interface and any implementation that might be required into the contracts? Is there, I mean, obviously there's some risk for integrating any new code to a contract, but how should developers think about the using DelegateCache in their own airdrop claims?

Munam Wasi: Ultimately, you know, there's no transfer function. So with that in mind, there's sort of no ability to, you know, have assets stolen. I think the one thing that developers just need to make sure is that they don't allow for some sort of double counting mechanism, you know, where someone delegates to multiple wallets and does multiple claims off of one underlying asset. I think that's the only thing end user developers need to be aware of. But ultimately, you know, there's no transfer functions. All the functionality, you should think of it as like read, write and sort of claim functionality and access functionality. There's no transferability. And the cool thing about this is for the users who are not developers, who are interfacing with contracts, they can confidently interact with things with cache because they know that their underlying asset is always safe. And the one thing that I would encourage devs to think about is when you think about DelegateCache beyond the perspective of just this is cool security tooling, I start thinking about like what sort of novel use cases can I build up for my particular community? I think that's the platonic ideal. So I'll give you two examples over there. Take the Artblocks Friendship Bracelet airdrop. Now, the Artblocks community is kind of like a pretty OG NFT community, and a lot of these people are super pros. So the Artblocks people built out an experience that they called auto magic. And what that translated into was if you had delegated your wallet, you could paste in your delegate wallet address into their end claim application. And the Friendship Bracelet airdrop wouldn't actually touch your delegated wallet. It would automatically go straight to the cold wallet that was associated with it. That's an example of taking advantage of basically this data layer, you know, the delegation registry that we've talked about a little bit to build out a really, really novel experience, because now you have this beautiful abstracted experience for your end users where they don't even need to now transfer from the hot wallet to the cold wallet. It automatically goes to the cold wallet. But the hot wallet is the wallet that's taking on all of the contract signing risk, so to speak. And it also had second and third order effects and benefits in that that slight little bit of friction of, you know, having the airdrop in a cold wallet meant that people were less likely to even prospectively list their airdrop for sale, which keeps, you know, the floor price high. I know we're sort of all supposed to be above talking about floor prices when it comes to communities and NFTs, but it sort of really, really matters. You can enable really good, positive, some experiences for everyone psychologically through actions like that. But the flip side is also possible. You don't just need this super clean, super abstracted experience. The cyberbrokers community, who's sort of one of our biggest proponents and has used us very, very heavily, their community is kind of the opposite. For a lot of people, it's their very first NFT they've ever bought. And their community also skews a little bit elderly. It's really cool. They have a lot of older people who aren't necessarily the most tech savvy. So they wanted to build up.

Nicholas: That's interesting.

Munam Wasi: They wanted. Well, but we say this endearingly, you know, every community is wired completely differently. So it's really important to, you know, cater to those people's needs. And they wanted to build up an experience that wherein they would hold people's hands throughout the experience. So instead of that super sweet auto magic experience where, you know, you met with one wallet and it goes to another wallet, they built out an experience where they would tell you, OK, paste wallet address one here. OK, paste wallet address two here. OK, do this. Do that. So on and so forth. So the end developer is in total control of how abstracted they want something to be or how, you know, friction filled they want something to be. There's pros and cons for both. And our job, I think, as a tool set and a public good is to be unopinionated on that matter.

Nicholas: So if we like reduce to the absolute simplest definition of what Delegate Cash does is it lets you use one wallet on behalf of another wallet and then it's up to the developer how they make use of that. I think this example of the hot wallet making a claim, but the NFT actually never touching the hot wallet, going straight to the cold wallet is a pretty good example. Is that a good definition of like the baseline functionality that a dev can make use of?

Munam Wasi: Absolutely. And obviously they can build those custom experiences over it. And what's funny is that we are building further premium interfaces and experiences on top of this very simple core primitive. Like you said, there's sort of only five or six functions in the entire contract. But that doesn't mean that there are a lot of. there aren't a lot of superpowers built in into it. So we really recently launched Liquid Delegate, which I believe you've gotten a chance to take a look at. And if we sort of look at the older analogy we use, where if crypto is programmable money and Delegate Cash is as programmable power of attorney, you could think of Liquid Delegates like a programmable escrow. And what that translates into is that it takes any NFT and it can put it into a programmatic escrow that includes all the rights within that NFT to someone else. So you could do really, really cool things like if I know, for example, six months from now, there's going to be another Board A claim, but I need some cash right now and I don't have time to wait for this airdrop that I plan on selling off. I could basically rent to you my Board A programmatically for, let's say, three months, the sort of duration until that airdrop claim for some money up front. The cool thing about sort of Liquid Delegates and this idea of programmable escrow is that there's no counterparty risk. That's a huge problem with NFT lending because upside on NFTs is asymmetric. Let's say, let's say you want to borrow some money from me. So you put up your any one of your NFTs that you have and it's an over collateralized loan. Well, if the price of your NFT doubles and even if you have the money to pay off that loan, why would I as the counterparty here return to you your asset if, you know, for for less than basically what it's worth? That is a problem that a lot of NFT lending protocols have. And Liquid Delegates solves that by having a programmatic escrow that has time based expiry that you're fully in control of. There's no ability for me to go out and steal your NFT just because it's gotten more valuable. So we can come to like a business agreement, a trustless business agreement, and the contract and the code takes care of everything from there. So that first example that I had sort of described about the airdrop claim for the Board Ape, you can extend that in many more situations that don't just work for like super wealthy individuals, but work for lots of communities. You know, if I've got a community that I'm curating, let's say around a love for photography and the access passes are these NFTs that I'm selling out. It's sort of a big deal if I want to charge a premium price for people to enter my community because they may not necessarily know upfront what the value out of the community is. So you can do a really, really cool thing where it's like, OK, why don't you rent a pass for, let's say, 10 USDC for 24 hours and you could try before you buy this community? That's one example of it. Second example, you know, another example of it could be something like if I'm a crypto game and my treasury holds, you know, 200 of my own assets, you know, it's great that we believe in ourselves and we believe in the value of our assets. But it's also a problem in the sense that that means that 200 would be users who would be contributing value to the community and sort of the game are unable to play. You can also do sort of things like gaming rentals and so on and so forth. So as you can sort of see from the chain of events where if we start with programmable money and we introduce basically programmable power of attorney and then we add programmatic escrow on top of this, you can build really amazing solutions and experiences for people. And we're doing all of this with the idea of things being 100 percent on chain, 100 percent trustless and an open public good for everyone.

Nicholas: So in this liquid delegation contract, it's unlike the regular delegate cash contract where it's just a registry where I'm making an association between a cold wallet that I have the private key to or I guess even a like a contract wallet, like a safe or something could also be used for that. And I delegate responsibility to a hot wallet instead in the liquid delegation contract. It's like a contract that actually will hold the NFTs in escrow itself. Correct? Absolutely.

Munam Wasi: What happens under the hood if we get technical for a second is it takes any ERC 721 and it wraps it as another ERC 721 and that wrapped NFT basically is representative of all the rights that are contained within it. So I'll give you a very real world example. You know, we're chatting with this one company that wants to build out an NFT image rights IP company. So the founder of that company, he basically pioneered or he had experimented previously in the past with renting out basically the IP rights for some of his NFTs for like candy makers or sort of like cannabis companies or other packaging companies to use the likeness of his assets on their packaging for certain ranges of products. And they are basically building their front end, leveraging this programmatic escrow backend.

Nicholas: Got it. I see. Wow. OK, so there's no shared, direct shared DNA between the contract that is live right now, or I guess liquid staking is also live, but it's sort of the new product. But there's. no, they don't follow the same standard in any way. It's basically an entirely new product.

Munam Wasi: Yes, it's a new product built on top of it. And we're obviously leveraging basically the underlying primitive of delegations to power everything under the hood. And I think that's the really exciting thing about sort of working on this project is the tech has theoretically been here for a little while. But I think our approach of keeping things dead simple as possible has created an opportunity for further development to increase. Now we don't have multiple repetitions of the same underlying primitive. We can take advantage of these larger registries and these larger network effects to build out really, really cool experiences. So, you know, we already have an open C integration. We've been chatting with pretty much all of the other marketplaces that are out there. And a lot of them are really interested, obviously, in the delegation tooling. But they're also interested in this liquid delegation tooling because, you know, they want to pioneer things like curate curation, for example. Curation would let you, let's say, you know, if you're my friend and I've got, you know, 100 NFTs and you want to put on an art show and you want to use, you know, 10 of my NFTs, I can basically rent them each for you for, let's say, a week for, let's just say $1, you know, for $10 total. And it's programmatic renting. You can display them through your own custom interface. You can create this online digital gallery. And those assets come straight back to me. So there are a lot of people that are building things on top of this, whether they're in the form of DAOs like that, you know, crypto games that I sort of talked about before that want to pioneer, try before you buy. We're already chatting with a couple of crypto games about spinning up a DAO together with them to, you know, projects that want to do sort of curational things together. So the cool thing about this is we are still learning ourselves in real time what the best practices are and what the really cool effects of this are.

Nicholas: It reminds me a little bit, this last application you mentioned of sort of renting permission to access, limited time access to NFTs without the risk of them being transferred, for instance, reminds me a little bit of, did you ever see Flash Mint by Jacob Franz? So it's a little bit in the same neighborhood. It's very specific for like essentially creating an order book, making it possible to sell Mint access or like token gated access to on-chain write functions. So you can, it's very similar, different implementation. But have you ever seen that Flash Mint project?

Munam Wasi: It sounds really familiar. And it's funny that you say Flash Mint because we've been chatting with a lot of NFT lending protocols about that sort of inherent dilemma. You know, one of the problems is, let's say, you know, I'm borrowing money from you and I put up my board APAS collateral. And if the Dookie Dash claim is going on for a limited amount of time for the sewer pass, you know, we're both in trouble because I can't claim it. And, you know, you're not, you weren't able to basically get a premium for that asset, you know, for that airdrop existing and so on and so forth. So a couple platforms that are NFT lending platforms have built out what they call flash actions, which are, you know, one time use flash loans to sort of make a claim in the same block and return an asset to escrow. But flash loans are, you know, very scary for everyone involved, both the developers, the platform, the end users, they sort of make everyone feel uncomfortable. And the beautiful thing about delegations is theoretically you can just delegate that escrow vault to another wallet to sort of do claims on top of it. So I think it's a particularly elegant solution that goes away with or does away with technical complexity that other people are introducing.

Nicholas: Awesome. I have more questions. I want to know more about the OpenSea integration and how OpenSea is making use of delegate cash, but first it's time to read the ad for this episode. This episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain is brought to you by RainbowKit, the best way to connect a wallet in your Web3 project. Trusted by over a half a million developers worldwide, RainbowKit is built for developers and designed for everyone. RainbowKit is built for developers and designed for everyone. That includes you. Try it today at rainbowkit.com. My thanks to RainbowKit for sponsoring this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain. This is the second episode that RainbowKit has sponsored and I'm really happy to have them on board. If you would like to sponsor a future episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain, please head over to juicebox.money slash at sign Web3 Galaxy Brain, buy an NFT, get a sponsorship, read like this. So thanks again to RainbowKit at rainbowkit.com. So Munam, tell me about the OpenSea integration. How is OpenSea using? delegate cash?

Munam Wasi: Sure. So it's funny that OpenSea is taking advantage of the data layer and I think they were the first project to really, really dive in into that. OpenSea has created a new policy internally, wherein for pretty much almost any transfer or the vast majority of transfers that go through the, you know, end UI slash GUI on their, that NFT transfer basically becomes locked or after transfer, it becomes locked for three hours. And that gives them time to run their automatic fraud detection and sort of their human level fraud detection on those assets as well. Now, the, the only things that are white listed through the front end are wallets that you have delegated to yourself. So if you, you know, let's say buy something or transfer something with a hot wallet, you can send it into cold storage using their front end interface. Throughout the, I guess this whole experience, you can still have programmatic access transfer everything, but that's beyond the scope of the vast majority of users. So that's a really cool way of basically using delegation tooling to prove whose wallet is owned by whom, and to basically work around, you know, fraud detection necessities that a platform like OpenSea would have. Everyone just wants to provide a premium experience based on whatever their individual platform needs are.

Nicholas: Right. The one that comes to mind with OpenSea is the like terms of service agreement that you do when you sign in and many sites doing this as they adopt sign in with Ethereum, which seems to me like a really bad idea for people who have any valuable assets in their wallet at all to become accustomed to signing lots of messages as they traverse the web. And also having to, especially sites like, I don't know, I think Blur still requires that you sign a message in order to just see the order book. You can't even search the site. You can't even see what's available until you've made a signature with your wallet. OpenSea's not using any of that functionality yet, I guess.

Munam Wasi: Sure. I think that's definitely like a use case going forward that people can start taking advantage of, especially as, you know, I guess corporate mainstream practices, I think, let's say meld with crypto primitives and crypto design. And we sort of, you know, reach situations where lots of projects have terms of service, whether it's for regulatory necessity or whatnot. I think this is like a great example of that. Now, if, you know, I'm trying to sell my NFT, I don't need to risk the wallet that holds that NFT just to be able to like view the site and see if it's for me and see what bids and asks there are and so on and so forth.

Nicholas: Right. I wanted to talk a little bit about the ERC. that Cache is essentially, I mean, I think it's the exact same contract, right? The ERC 5639 delegation registry. Is it, is it the same exact technology? or is there any difference between the delegate Cache implementation and that EIP?

Munam Wasi: So if we take one step back to EIP 5639, it's basically fundamentally the exact same code and it's, and we weren't the only sort of authors of that. You could recognize some names like Andy from Tessera and some couple other people.

Nicholas: Yeah, Wilkins, Wilkins from Manifold. I think the CTO of Manifold also.

Munam Wasi: Absolutely. And you know, the Manifold team has had the delegate Cache integration worked in into the backend for quite a while. It's actually been sitting up on their GitHub, but they are still working on building out like the perfect front end experience for everyone. So Manifold is on the way as far as a project that will be integrating delegate Cache, but, um, you know, between sort of all of these.

Nicholas: Also Riley from Artblocks, is it the, I might as well list the coauthors. There's Fubar, Wilkins, Riley O from Artblocks, Jake Rockland, I guess is also from Artblocks. and yeah, Andy, you mentioned from Tessera previously fractional art, so all-star cast of devs on the, on this EIP.

Munam Wasi: Absolutely. And so that's what delegate Cache was sort of built on top of it. And, and what's really cool about this is, you know, it's a collaborative effort. Well, obviously the Tessera team is also integrating this, but they are still developing out that perfect experience. And I think that actually is the X factor between how we view delegate Cache as a public good and perhaps how some other people view public goods. Like I think a lot of people just rely on the idea of the brownie points associated with public goods that, you know, if you've just released something for free to the public that, you know, if you build it, they will come. And I don't think that that could be further from the truth, you know, and, and I don't mean this to come off as basically tooting our own horn, but like one of our value propositions that we have internally is that it's all about customer service, even for a free product, like when people were having trouble, let's say, or, or they were unsure of delegate Cache with, you know, any of their airdrop claims, we were responding to every single message. We were responding to every single DM. I was quite literally handing people in the DMs, my telegram handle. And I was saying, if you call me within the next 30 seconds, I'll diagnose, you know, whatever concern you have for you in real time. And that's our approach to building things. You know, it's a very collaborative effort and we do it in public and we do it with the idea of building up standards. That's why I, again, I kind of started with that preface that the contract is only 300 lines of code. This is not like we have discovered the cure for cancer. It's not like this is something that only we could have come up with. But I think what has changed now is that we have put in the work to simplify it as much as possible. And as I'm sure everyone here can appreciate simplification is sort of. Typically the hardest thing to do for anything. It's really easy to make things complicated. It's a lot harder to keep it that simple. And then, you know, try to speak with as many people as possible, you know, including yourself to try to get the word out and to make it accessible for people. When we started, you know, I said cryptos programmable money, delegate cash is programmable power of attorney and liquid delegates is a programmatic escrow. That may sound like simplistic wording, you know, in hindsight, but in reality, that was about a week's worth of comms R&D. We're always trying to find the best way to explain things to people and make things intuitive. And I think that's sort of table stakes, like building tech for the next, you know, 1 billion users, which is just this sort of copium that we all tell ourselves while we're in the middle of the bear market that we're sort of all magically building towards. that only really happens if things are accessible for people. And so, you know, a series of small steps consistently taken, you know, you cover a really large distance and that's our philosophical approach to building here.

Nicholas: Yeah, I definitely agree. Everything I've seen, you know, project creation depends a lot on the unsung labor of people helping others to adopt some new technology. So I definitely agree. I saw amongst the list of partners that Premint is one of the partners. Have they integrated it deeply? What is the application for Premint?

Munam Wasi: So Premint, you know, specifically with Vulkan and I guess Colabland as, you know, one of the alternative solutions that a lot of communities use to like access gate or token gate things are integrating it for that entire purpose. Because, you know, if I buy a really valuable NFT, right, I mean, I'd love to participate in communities, but I'm so scared of citing messages. And it's no fault of the Vulkan team and it's no fault of the Colabland team. But just those feelings are a bit scary for everyone involved. It's to basically risk your asset just to join a community. And the cool thing about allowing delegated sign ins is that I can know I can have the peace of mind that my assets completely safe and I can still enter these community spaces. And if you look at, I guess, the bigger umbrella picture around participation communities and you think about governance, that's, I think, going to be another really huge unlock for delegate cash. We've been speaking to all of the governance tooling teams, you know, whether it's the snapshots of the world and stuff like that. and scoping out, you know, integrating with the delegation registry, because I think we can make participation a first class citizen. That's both for, you know, you and I as like normal people who perhaps now don't need to like sign a billion messages just to, you know, participate in things. if we've delegated all of our governance tokens. So let's say one hot wallet, that's our governance hot wallet. It'll make life easier for us, you know, in that regards. Number two, for a lot of institutionals, we're stuck behind custodial solutions that preclude them from transferring millions of dollars worth of assets in and out of them just to go vote on something. They can use delegated voting. So I think one of our things that we sort of tell ourselves internally and we've sort of tweeted out a couple of times is that we want to make crypto fun again. You know, I think what has sort of changed over the bull market? euphoria, we even saw this before, I guess the bear really was upon us, that people started getting a lot more conservative just because we were seeing this huge influx of, you know, one wrong click and you lose everything. And it can happen to anyone. We don't call, you know, delegate cash an idiot proof solution. You know, we call it an idiot and an expert proof solution because it just precludes you from transfers, but it gives you that safety and flexibility to still go out and participate.

Nicholas: Idiot friendly. Okay, a couple questions. First of all, for the governance application, essentially snapshot, your snapshot strategy for your off-chain DAO or your governor Bravo or OpenZeppelin governor contract would instead be paying attention, kind of synthetic, like delegate interface to the original NFT collection, presuming that it doesn't drop with delegate cash integrated or the delegate registry interfaces. You would create a new contract and then people could delegate. How would you do it?

Munam Wasi: Sure. I think it just depends on if you're either rolling your own solution, whether you're a highly custom DAO or you're using some sort of tool like snapshot, which would hopefully, you know, natively integrate into the next version of their contracts. It just depends on that scenario. But I think the core underlying similarity between either of those is that it just respects the delegation. Again, the delegation registry is not an Oracle in the strictest of terms, but it's helpful to think of it like an Oracle. It's basically serving as a source of truth for, you know, whatever this governance system is that in fact you do own, you know, XYZ amount of these assets.

Nicholas: Got it. And you mentioned that pre-mints Vulkan. I've actually haven't used it. It's like an equivalent to collab land that doesn't require that you sign anything based on like clicking a link in Discord. Is that the idea?

Munam Wasi: I believe so. I think Vulkan makes you change your like OpenSea header to something else to basically prove that you own that OpenSea account, which, you know, is displaying the NFTs in question. So I think that's how Vulkan works specifically. And they're not the only ones, you know, Guild Z has also announced that they will be integrating delegate cache soon too. So what's pretty cool about between like these three solutions and, you know, a couple other ones that are on the works as well that haven't been announced yet is that, you know, that's that covers like the vast majority of like off-chain communities that people participate in. And one of the like, I guess, philosophical, from like a philosophical standpoint, the benefits of delegation tooling is even if applications and communities are off-chain, their aggregation becomes more on-chain, if that makes sense, just due to the nature of the delegation registry. And I think, you know, for a space that's ultimately founded on Cypherpunk principles, that's, that's pretty important.

Nicholas: You know, I'm a little bit behind the times here, but how does delegate cache and the stuff that you're working on relate to account abstraction? And I know there's EIP-4337. Do you have a sense of how, for someone who's not extremely familiar with the state of account abstraction discussion today, how do these options compare? Is delegate cache an alternative that entirely replaces the need for full-on account abstraction?

Munam Wasi: You know, like account abstraction, like delegation best practices is the type of thing where we'll just need to see it implemented and to figure out what sort of the best, you know, thing will be or best end state will be. I'll give you an example. I've got a good friend who's building out like a white label NFT building platform, and he's been experimenting with account abstraction and he launched just for fun, sign in with Twitch. You know, you can like somehow sign in into your account via Twitch. That's also tied to this wallet address of yours. That is account abstraction sort of in, I think, a very simplistic sense. But I think the delegation tooling of the first step towards that is that it's normalizing the behaviors that we expect to see with account abstraction. And the end thesis around account abstraction is that, you know, the sort of paradigm that we have of hardware wallets and EOAs and, you know, things like these is probably not the optimal UX. You know, I'm sort of a tech optimist in this regard. Like I think we'll come up with sort of a better paradigm. And, you know, this is just patiently building like consensus towards like best practices until new tech patterns and new technologies themselves like manifest. So that's how we think of. how do you go from step one of delegations towards account abstraction? We think the best is yet to come and there's still a lot of tech that needs to be developed, but we are putting ourselves in the front row seats, I guess, to be able to build towards that.

Nicholas: Make sense to me that, I mean, it's incredible. the adoption that you've got amongst these, you know, blue chip, AAA tier, FT collections, it obviously positions you well for developing future technology and those people adopting it as well as all the pre-mint, guild, et cetera connections.

Munam Wasi: You know, I was just going to say one thing. I think we've got sort of the easiest job on earth when it comes to this, because I think thankfully some of our approaches to user education have started to work and users are now starting to demand delegation tooling. You know, we always kind of laugh at it internally where we see on Twitter all the time where, you know, some poor artists or platform will announce some sort of airdrop claim or something. And like the first or second comment is always, can I claim with delegate cash? You know, some big collectors like DC collector have gone so far as to say that they won't be claiming airdrops unless it's via delegation. So if artists and platforms respect, you know, their collectors, they'll basically allow for this side of tooling. So I get to play Mr. Nice guy and, you know, tweet like, hi, waving hands emoji, you know, like totally happy to help the team out over here, like feel free to shoot us a DM or something. And it's this really virtuous cycle where I think this is not like, this is just an enterprise grade solution for projects to implement. that, you know, impacts how users can use it. I think users are starting to demand it for that reason. You know, I think it must be slightly annoying if you can mint via delegates for one project, but for the other project you can't. And that's, I think also the beauty of having an open standard is that it becomes easier for other people to integrate and, you know, hand over our heart. It's about a, it takes most projects between 30 to 60 minutes to integrate it. It's actually funny. We had entered the Canto hackathon and had our deployment of delegate cash on Canto as our submission. And we were second in order of presenting. Sammy, who was sort of in this Twitter space slightly earlier, I believe he was the fourth guy to present or the fourth project to present on the docket. And you can still see this in the live stream of that hackathon where he says in the comments like, oh sweet, you guys are live on Canto. Let me deploy this now. And by the time they got to him, he said, oh yeah, like I already have delegate cash up and running over here.

Nicholas: Like we built this to be... He's not helping his case in the competition.

Munam Wasi: Thankful for that, I guess.

Nicholas: But Sammy, Sammy Bausch for anyone curious.

Munam Wasi: And he has his own NFT project, Rasslers or something.

Nicholas: He has a bunch, he's done so many things. He's a crack jock. He's really, he's really great. Yeah.

Munam Wasi: Yeah. And, but, but see like that is. our ethos is keep it simple, stupid. It does not have to be overtly technical to have a huge, huge impact.

Nicholas: We didn't really talk about it, but from the experience of someone who has already delegated, they go to a Mint website. I guess the Mint website probably has to support both people who directly, you know, the wallets they're claiming with have the NFTs directly in them and delegate cash, so they're implementing some like JS SDK into the site that will give you the option to claim, or does it just work if you go to claim with a wallet that doesn't have an NFT, how's that flow like?

Munam Wasi: So if we, if we take a step back from the end user and we look at the developer experience, it's, it's very vivid in my head because we always use this whenever we're doing some sort of like beady conversation with another project. You know, we've got this great screenshot of the Invisible Friends implementation. So it's approximately five lines of, there's two functions in the screenshot. The first one is five lines of code. And that's the standard, you know, Mint and AirDrop, like from owning an Invisible Friend. So it's about five lines of code to basically enable that flow, which checks, do you have an Invisible Friend and then go off and allow you to Mint and AirDrop because of it. Then we also have, it also has immediately underneath it, the function that's Mint from a delegate. And instead of five lines, that one is just six lines because all what's happened is at the top is inserted, you know, like read from the registry basically, and each step, instead of referring, reverting back to the Invisible Friends contract, you're just reverting back to reading from the registry and, you know, there's a null condition in there as well too. And so that is the, I think really cool thing over here is that it's just meant to be pretty dead simple and pretty intuitive, so it doesn't work differently than what you would, you know, consider. Like it basically covers both use cases.

Nicholas: So if someone is dropping a contract today, but they don't have any particular AirDrop or Mint gated dynamic, is there any reason why people should be thinking about delegate cash for future proofing their contracts? Is there any reason to integrate it if you're not doing an AirDrop of some kind?

Munam Wasi: Well, I think the ecosystem is starting to afford it. And so if you've got built in delegation support off the beginning, you can sort of take advantage of those things and you can prime your users to take advantage of those things. I mean, it basically becomes utility. Like, what are you going to tell your users when they like buy or sell something on OpenSea and then they have to wait three hours before they could transfer that asset? You know, it's a great idea to have it built in into them and to, I guess, do the legwork of it, and we're really good about co-marketing things with projects of priming people about, you know, like why delegations are advantageous for your community. And I think it does a really, really good job of educating people, even if they don't use it themselves. Take like, you know, the Board Ape holders, just because they're targeted because the assets are so expensive, have sort of had this reputation of like always getting hacked all the time. But if you really think about it, during sort of this whole Dookie Dash, like sewer pass Mint experience, did you really hear of any at all that were straight up like hacks or starting the wrong contracts? I don't think you did because pretty much every single one of those people used, you know, some delegation solution.

Nicholas: Interesting. We're coming up on the hour. So I just had a couple of questions left. First of all, is there, well, how many people are working on Delegate Cash right now?

Munam Wasi: Three people. So it's, it's, it's myself. You know, I'm, I'm one of them. Let's see for anyone that doesn't know that. And I, I mean, I guess I'm technically the COO of Delegate Cash, but I've been doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the BD and growth and operations over here. There's, you know, Fubar and it's his baby and he does a lot of the heavy lifting on the smart contract development end, and then we've got our other dev, Rye Shrimp, who, you know, handles not just our front end, but the SDK development as well, and our component library and the infrastructure behind all of this and sort of optimizing everything. And the next sort of people that I guess we're looking to join is a really, really killer UX designer.

Nicholas: So early days, despite all the adoption, very small team, and I guess it's too early for, for any kind of business model. Is that right?

Munam Wasi: Well, technically Liquid Delegates is a thing that like we can take a take on it. And there are mechanisms of, of, of financializing that because it's a marketplace that we own. But you know, if someone is going through our own marketplace, as opposed to just building on top of the tooling, but you know, we're, we're, we're in it to win it for the long haul. And, and I think the, a world in which everyone is using Delegates is, is obviously good for us because it's, it's our brand equity. that's over there. So I think we can build a premium interfaces and we're already experimenting with, you know, our own governance tooling and whatnot. So cool stuff is in development, but we're not in a rush to, you know, turn on fee levers on anything. And, and for the underlying primitive, we can't, it's immutable. Like, trust me, I look at $524 million and wish like, like, can't we just get a 1% of it? Like, like I could retire by now or something, but we can't, we're, we're building it open for the long run.

Nicholas: Well, now this is super interesting. Thank you so much for explaining Delegate Cash and all the new future plans, the liquid staking, et cetera. I think this is very valuable and frankly, just seems like a great way to do airdrops much safer than, than the, the typical way. So thank you for sharing all this information. If people want to check out Delegate Cash, what's the best place to go?

Munam Wasi: Just, you know, hit us up on Twitter. Our website is delegate.cash. Our Twitter handle is just at delegate cash. If you shoot a DM, chances are I'm going to be the one who responds to you. The way you can figure out is if it's in a lowercase letters, it's probably FUBAR, if it's got proper capitalization and grammatical conventions, it's me. And, you know, I guess that's why FUBAR is the boss and, and, and that's how we operate, you know, just, just message us anytime. And if your favorite project doesn't support Delegate Cash, you know, I'll be the good cop to your bad cop. Just make sure to ask them to integrate Delegate Cash and shoot them my way. We'll take care of it.

Nicholas: All right. Thank you, Munam. Talk to you soon. And thanks again to Rainbow Kit for sponsoring this episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain, you can check them out rainbowkit.com. And if you'd like to buy an ad on a future episode, juicebox.money slash at web3galaxybrain, I'd be happy to have you. I'm going to jump right now to this other space. We're going to be talking about how Worm Emoji, I think maybe Wilson Cusack's going to show up. I know Jacob from Zora and John from PartyDao, we're all going to be chatting about worms theory that, or I guess observation of how Blur pwned OpenSea using Seaport. So jumping over to a different space in just a minute. Thanks everybody for coming through and see you again next week. Same time, same place 5 PM Eastern on Fridays. Thanks Munam.

Munam Wasi: Nick, no, thank you for your time. And you know, on that rainbow point and especially that rainbow kit point, I guess I'll do a little bit of alpha leak. Pay attention to a MetaMask, Rainbow, Floor, Flues, and a handful of other wallets and Coinbase wallet and a handful of other wallets in the upcoming days. Probably actually upcoming months. Some interesting things are cooking. That's all I'll say on that topic, but I'll talk to you soon.

Nicholas: All right. 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 ends. 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 PM Eastern time, 2200 UTC on Twitter spaces. I look forward to seeing you there.