Open source software makes it easier for anyone to contribute to the health and growth of a project's codebase. But how do you build a system where users and contributors can participate in the economic value being generated by an organization or platform? We chat with Bradley Miles and Sid Kalla, the co-founders of Roll, which is trying to create an API-first platform for creating tokens and markets that allow users to invest and share in the value of creators or communities they love.
Episode Notes
You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here.
If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq as well as their personal socials: @bradley_miles_ and @sidkal.
If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain.
Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Notnooop, who explained how you can: Make An Emoji Enabling App.
TRANSCRIPT
Bradley Miles I may have no interest in being a part of Ben's community, but I may have seen Ben's rise from what he was doing previously.
Ben Popper You think I'm going to be bigger down the road?
I think Ben may be bigger. And I think that there will be interesting people that will join Ben's community. And I think since Ben is on Roll, and Roll is positioned as sort of an API layer as well, that will plug into other platforms and allow Ben to integrate with card networks and banks and social, I'd like to bet on the Ben community. And I'll do that by holding some Bens regardless of my feelings towards Ben. And so this layer, this financial--
BP You don't have to like a company to invest in it, you know? Can you short me?
[intro music]
BP Hello everybody, welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk about all things software and technology. I am Ben Popper, the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. And today I am joined by Sid and Bradley. Welcome to the show, y'all.
Sid Kalla Thanks for having us.
BM Thanks so much for having us, Ben.
BP For folks who don't know, tell them who you are, and where it is you work and kind of a little bit about what your organization does?
BM Yeah, so my name is Bradley Miles. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Roll and Sid and I have founded this company. And effectively, we see a world in which a lot of the content creators that are consumed online on platforms like YouTube, Spotify, etc. Eventually, they will have their own digital currency. And that digital currency won't be like some of the virtual currencies that you may have seen on Twitch or things like that. It'll actually be blockchain based. And the idea here is the currency can represent digital value that exist independent of platforms.
BP In the metaverse, you mean? [Bradley laughs]
BM Potentially the metaverse, yeah. But realistically, for right now, we can plug into blockchain based financial technology, largely known as decentralized finance.
BP DeFi, if you're cool, yeah.
BM DeFi if you're cool, yeah. And give content creators, their own digital currency that exists independent of platforms. So as an example, we could mint Ben's, and Ben may be on Twitch and Instagram and Twitter, but the value of the community that you, Ben, and all the folks you're bringing together, we're seeing can exist independent of platforms, and we're able to quote financialized that and bring markets and it's going quite well excited to dive deeper into it.
BP Alright, so tell me a little bit about who has some of these personalized tokens or currencies now and how the creators, the fans and the economies function? Like, what is the value of the Ben? And how does it fluctuate versus, you know, something that I might be able to spend in the real world, quote, unquote, with Fiat, boring old Fiat currency?
SK Yeah. So you know, in terms of the economics of this, you can almost think of this, you know, kind of piggybacking on what Bradley mentioned, in terms of what we're building. So you can think of this as an entire financial infrastructure for social tokens, right. And that infrastructure involves some components of a Web3. So these are emerging primitives, like financialization primitives, we see things associated with decentralized finance, being able to become an automated market maker using like, protocols like Uniswap, for example, and stuff like one side of it. The other side is just simply transactional value, right? Like, you will be able to almost use it as a medium of exchange inside a community.
BP Within a community, that makes a lot of sense, you know, like we all love, all three of us have the same creator, and we want to buy custom emojis, or we want to be shouted out on the live stream, or we want to attend an event. You know, I have a bunch of Bens that I've been banking for years, but Bradley's a new fan, I can trade him some Bens for something else. But outside of the community, what intrinsic value does it have to others that they would be willing to stake it or trade it on a Uniswap for example?
SK Yeah, so you can almost think of value as coming from the ownership of the community. Honestly, if you look at the value stack today, most of the value stack, or the value that's accrued at the platform layer, much less at the user or community layer. So with something like social tokens, that dynamic is flipped, because it kind of works independently of any platform, including Roll, since these are like built on Etherium. You know, instead of being able to say, Hey, I supported this creator earlier, and I have this t-shirt to prove that you actually have their social tokens and that's, you know, value in itself. You have a stake in someone in some communities success. That's a pretty powerful way that's not possible without you know, these primitives that we are seeing on the blockchain side emerge.
BP You know, I understand why, you know, vintage first ever concert Metallica t-shirt might be worth something to a collector. In the same way you know, a first minting Ben token would be worth something to collect. But to me, a vintage Metallica t-shirt is worth nothing because I don't like Metallica that much. Somebody outside of my super fans, why is a Ben worth anything?
BM So what we've started to really see is that the markets that we can create with some content creators are substantial. For instance, Sid and I started measuring the markets craters on Roll. And to this day, there's around a quarter billion dollars in fully diluted market cap, if you will, of all creators on Roll, the trading volume has now eclipsed, you know, it's typically in the range of one to $3 million in trading volume per day. So it's an emerging category. And what's interesting is, you know, I may have no interest in being a part of Ben's community. But I may have seen Ben's rise from what he was doing previously.
BP You think I'm gonna be bigger down the road?
BM I think maybe Ben may be bigger. And I think that there will be interesting people that will join Ben's community. And I think since Bens are on Roll, and Roll is positioned as sort of an API layer as well, that will plug into other platforms and allow Ben to integrate with card networks and banks and social. I'd like to bet on the Ben community. And I'll do that by holding some Ben's regardless of my feelings towards Ben. And so this layer, this financial--
BP You don't have to like a company to invest in it, you know? Can you short me? Do you guys offer options?
BM Yeah, I'll explain more about what it means to be in the DeFi ecosystem. And the fact that we don't even need to build these things, we can literally plug into anyone else that's building tools around these types of assets.
SK Yeah, so you'll see these, you know, one big, big advantage of building this on Etherium is we don't have to build our own automated market maker exchange, right? Like someone's already built that. And we can plug into that. We don't need to offer social tokens as a payment mechanism for NFTs. Because someone has already built that. And we just plug into those. There are option protocols. If there's enough value and volume being traded, I'm sure they'll have done. And then you can have all sorts of fun with different communities.
BP What are the biggest communities you know, on your platform and what creators are they centered around?
BM There's a creator on Roll named whaleshark, was interesting with new technology. You saw this with Twitter in the early days, and a lot of folks thought, oh, let's get Cameron Diaz, no, all these folks on Twitter super early, but very Twitter native people ended up being the biggest. And so we have very well known creators on Roll and they're fantastic. But emerging creators like whaleshark, who's you know, very well known in the NFT space, has built a massive community. And Roll has such an open design space, that it allows people to do many different things with their token. So whaleshark kind of invented this idea of having a vault of NFTs. Literally, there's an amount of NFTs that partially back his community. So it's sort of a vault that holds these. And in addition, people can start to engage in this community through Discord. But in order to get into the Discord, you need to hold a certain percentage of whale.
BP I've got one whale. Didn't you give me a whale when we met in person?
BM I did give you a whale when we met in person. Yeah. And so you can join the whale Discord right now. And there will be a bot that will scan your Roll wallet and detect that you have one whale in there. That bot will then allow you to get into parts of the Discord. You'd be called what the whale community calls a minnow, you'd have one whale. But if you were to, you know, have 50 whale, you'd be a whale whale. And you could actively get into more of the Discord.
BP I want to talk a little bit about the technology that underpins this and some of the design and platform and API choices y'all have made because I think that's interesting to our audience. Before we get I guess I would just say like, some of this stuff is so exciting to me. It's so exciting how fast people are building. It's exciting for people to be monetizing their art, their creativity in the space is so open and interoperable. But it's also just super depressing to me that to think like, all social interactions will now be monetized. And like you said, like, I come into a new space and I'm kind of a guppy but I can like pay my way to being like a more esteemed member. That to me, I'm not sure that's the world I want to live in. That's not a reflection of Roll or anything like that. But just curious, like, it's financialization of essentially social currency and social connections. What's your thought on where that--how to do that in a healthy way? I guess I should say.
SK I'm sure, like, Bradley has some thoughts on that, too. But I think, you know, it kind of goes back to like any, like, where technology's heading, like, in some ways, there already is value, we're just not capturing that. And so because that's invisible to you, you don't really realize what the social consequences of something like a Facebook or Instagram being a trillion dollar company is. I think, like what crypto generally does is you democratize that financial value. So yeah, like there will always be winners and losers. But, you know, I think overall, from our broader social perspective, democratization of these value systems, and giving that power to the people who create that value is a much healthier primitive than some of the current social media topics we have.
BM Maybe in the future, there may be some like Tristan Harris style figure that like decides the ethics of social tokens. But what we were describing is, you know, basically a Web3 or crypto version of Patreon, or just early on in another platform. The excitement about that is that could exist anywhere. If something like Clubhouse wanted to plug into Roll as well, start getting chats, etc. So we're very early.
BP Like let's just all get rich right now. What if I just convinced Stack Overflow to turn Stack Overflow reputation points into tokens today, give me like a rough estimate on the market cap. And we're talking like 100 million developers, the world's most sought after creators, the people who are building the future. They've got all this reputation, but they haven't financialized it yet. So let's financial--I'm coming to you, I'm saying I want to tokenize Stack Overflow reputation, what are we going to ballpark that? What's the market cap?
SK I think you should leave that to the community to decide. Usually, you know, markets work best when they're not centrally planned. So if you do want to do that, you want to incentivize the people who have contributed to Stack Overflow, give them majority of the tokens, let them decide how that's spent on what you can do. And then lead from there. Maybe there's a job marketplace on Stack Overflow, where you can take the best developers and you know, they get paid and your dollar SOs.
BP Alright, so let's talk a little bit. Yeah, how you built this, you know, you're saying it's this sort of Web3, we're early stage, you know, we're trying to build new primitives. I thought that was interesting. And I think there is a big sense of like, even with Facebook, where they're kind of like, we did the old thing, and now we're Meta, we're gonna try like, it's kind of like a do over like, timeout. This time. We're gonna, like, do privacy and safety right. So yeah, like, what were your sort of foundational architectural choices for the developers who are listening? How did you build this, and as you continue to build it out, you know, how you making it, as you said, easy to access API first, interoperable open concept?
SK Yeah. So you know, you can think of different layers for any blockchain app. In general, our lowest layer is on Etherium. So we have smart contracts that are deployed on Etherium. These act as gated token factories simply. So for example, if you want to issue a Ben or Stack Overflows on Roll, you would essentially submit a proposal to our smart contract. And that smart contract right now is centrally controlled by you know, the Roll team, but over time, that will become more decentralized and controlled by the community. And then they will give like a yay or nay, a thumbs up or thumbs down. If they do give a thumbs up, that token gets minted via Roll smart contracts. And then you can plug into all of the other infrastructure that we are building both on Web2 and Web3, a layer on top of that is just getting the data from the blockchain. So we have made the architectural choice to kind of segregate that into its own micro service. The big reason for that being database reads and writes are extremely fast locally, you're talking about, you know, milliseconds to microseconds, Blockchain, things can take 10s of minutes, probably an hour or longer.
BP Satoshi didn't really think it through. It's okay. We'll figure it out.
SK But the utility obviously, like overrides those kinds of like, you know, issues that you might have among developer experience. So keeping those separate is very useful for us. And then the layer on top of that is very traditional web app architecture. You have a back end server, you have a front end, we have apps on iOS, Android, and the web.
BP And how lean are you running this, like how many people are on the team? And how many people you're able to build this with? And as you look to the future, I know you recently raised around like, what kind of talent are you trying to hire?
SK Yeah, so we're about 12 people right now, seven of them engineers, reasonably lean team. We do have some overhead in building, you know, like apps look, more traditional web apps. So we, you know, kind of engineering talent they're raised around, we're generally looking for smart, intelligent engineers who are passionate about what we are building and about the space, anyone can always reach out to me or Bradley, and we'd love to chat.
BP And what is--etherium is written in its own language, solidity, or something like that. But what like if people are not familiar with that? What programming languages might you know, if I wanted to go write an Etherium smart contract, how long would it take to learn? Are there certain programming languages where I might be able to step in easily?
SK Yeah, so the smart contract layer itself is written in solidity. That's the role of smart contracts out there. Other options like Viper, for example, potentially Web Assembly down the road, everything above that we have written are pretty much all of the backend infrastructure in Go. So yeah, like if you if you don't want to do like, actually write smart contracts, you probably have to learn solidity. It's a strongly typed language, if you have background and C, Go, you can pick that up. There are obviously other considerations of, you know, being more secure being, you know, you're in a very adversarial environment. So you do have to have some design choices.
BP What do you mean by that?
SK Well, once you deploy something on the blockchain, you cannot roll it back. It's not like a web app, you also don't control how people would interact with that smart contract. It's almost like building an aerospace application or a medical application, more than building a move fast and break things paradigm. So generally, when we make developer choices, we like to segregate the part that touches those sensitive areas, which do move slow and move more thoughtfully. And then there's the surrounding application layer that can move fast.
BP So you want to make sure everything is triple agenda and very well tested. Because if you put it out there and it's written wrong, somebody else can write a legal smart contract and empty out your bank account when they haven't hacked you necessarily, they just followed you know, the laws of the contract you've written.
SK Yeah, at the smart contract level, yes. But you know, as a startup, we do have to move fast as well. So we do like to almost like sandbox the areas that are sensitive in that sense, including our backend and our smart contracts.
BP But is that what you meant by adversarial? Like people might try to take advantage?
SK Yeah, you've seen that in like DeFi systems as well. Right? Like you have, you know, like flashlights is like the biggest thing right now you have the minor extractable value. So where someone can front run your transaction before that gets mined by miners because your transaction is visible to the nodes. Or like flashlights, it's like you know, you can borrow, you can borrow a billion dollars worth of tokens for more or less free, as long as you return those tokens within the same transaction. These don't have an equivalent in the traditional financial space. But it's also makes the whole thing exciting, right?
BP I'm trying to be, you know, optimistic about Web3 and blockchain, but it's like, all of the worst parts of high frequency trading are already in it. And I just feel like, I don't know.
SK This is a different high frequency trading though, because, you know, NFTs kind of rely more--
BP Front Running, that was their whole thing.
SK Yeah. But this is a, it's in a very different financial design space. But we're super early days, man, like, we don't know how this will evolve. But the idea that you can take this flash loan is so powerful, like imagine you're migrating your mortgage from Wells Fargo to Bank of America. And you can do this in 12 seconds, because you've taken a loan, you have paid back, or Wells Fargo, and you've borrowed from Bank of America. And that's the end of the transaction. It's done. So these are very powerful primitives that will make everything better. But there's also like the flip side of that, which is what to hear in the press more or less.
BP No, it's not that. We just had a long episode about Web3 because of Meta and because of Friends With Benefits. And I was actually the optimist on that episode. I do the show with Cassidy Williams and Ceora Ford, and they were the pessimists. And you know, I think it was a valuable lesson for me, they were coming from a place of, you know, for us, the internet has not really--it has not been and still is not a very like welcoming and friendly and harassment-free place. And, you know, women or people of color working in the tech industry, there's a lot of things that happen that are pretty demotivating. So these sound like interesting new tools, these sound like you know, things we can use to build the future. But saying it's going to make things better, you know, we heard that about AI and machine learning, and it didn't work out exactly the way we planned. So maybe a better question for you would be, yeah, like working in this space? What does it feel like? Does it feel like people are learning lessons from the past and applying in the future? To me, it seems like there's just, you know, from the outside, a ton of that kind of like wide open, wild west enthusiasm of you know dot com or early machine learning. And sort of like you said, like, Let's Move fast and break things, which is productive from a startup point of view, but maybe not from a societal point of view.
SK Yeah, I'm sure that Bradley has thoughts too. But I think there, there is a fundamental spectrum in which technologies tend to aggregate. The early internet was, I mean, people are nostalgic about that precisely because it was very decentralized. You would have a blog, you would have an RSS feeder, and you would read articles of people you follow. Social media is a centralizing force and brings things together in a very different way that has not always been healthy for society. AI is something similar, you own the data set, you own the AI algorithm more or less. So that's a very centralizing force. Crypto by its very nature is a decentralizing force. So it pulls in the opposite direction, from a society perspective to other trends, like AI, for example. Obviously, you know, we have many challenges in the current Internet for accessibility, you know, like, people of color, women or many other like groups, do they have this like a safe space and right access, you know, it's kind of up to us to like build that. But at the same time, the crypto by its very nature again, like is decentralizing. Before you do a smart contract, no one is trying to check your race or gender, right, like these are more like mathematical primitives. So in some ways, like it is more inclusive than your banks, or anything else of that nature, where the bias is more implicit.
BM What's interesting is like we're playing on top of existing culture. So there's creators on Roll that have 10s of 1000s of followers, or hundreds, 1000s, or millions, that following has its own culture, it may have its own language, with gifs and memes and inside jokes, and the ability to have your own monetary system inside of that culture and for that, to be truly owned by the community is uniquely powerful. And so they could literally take that and like whatever group, for better or worse, can take that in any direction they choose, and sort of be wholly owned by them. And this is really a way to increase, you know, the value proposition and thesis of the group. And so far, we've seen, Sid and I have tried to curate, you know, internet positive and sort of, you know, positive groups forward, inevitably, you know, what, we'll start to see the opposite of that. But our job is really to try to curate this category, bring it to mainstream in a way where people are excited about it.
BP So tell me a little bit about what you've got planned for the near future, you know, the next six months to a year, and then where you hope, this kind of technology and this kind of community building, community, you know, creation of finance and value will be in five years.
SK Yeah. But you know, kind of more immediate and short term plan, we have certain pretty interesting like Web3 products that are planned. So things like we have seen almost a new way emerge in the Web3 space to support your creators, which is to become a liquidity provider. We are building tools around that. And the other big thing is we know social tokens really to succeed and our vision for this being platform independent. We need those API's that can be very easily be integrated neatly between two applications, we are going to double down on those developer API's and experiences. So any new developer, the person is building the next clubhouse the next two weeks, the next Facebook will be able to say, hey, like not bring your community directly to our platform, we're not gonna have you beholden to this platform. And here's the value network that you already own. The network already exists, right, like all you're doing is importing that network in some ways, and you can export it out to the next platform, as that gives more power to the individual users of that platform.
BP It's interesting, I guess, you know, what you're saying about proof of stake, which is an interesting idea within Etherium, you know, both from a financial and a environmental perspective, is that how some of the way in which, like these community, you mentioned, right, like, you might want to speculate on Ben, or speculate on a creator, because you know, their community will be more valuable in the future. But another thing would be, if somebody within the community, right, to say, I'd like to support you, I'm going to stake some eth for your coin. And I'm going to like, establish essentially like a financial baseline for this. And so what you're saying is like, instead of giving to Patreon, you would sort of like, put value towards that token in a stake in a way giving it you know, a certain level of value over time. Is that right?
SK Yeah, that's precisely the case. The automated market makers work a little differently do like an eth and a Ben pair, you essentially allow trading of one token against another. But in that sense what you're helping is you're providing liquidity to the people that people who want to exit your community or enter a community, you're providing an on or off ramp for them. And that's a very valuable service.
BM So for instance, the largest token on roll right now has nine and a half a million dollars of liquidity. So you could easily you know, enter or exit the market, you know, for any reason, on an institutional level.
BP So somebody is saying, I'm willing to provide $9 million, I mean, not all at once, but like, I would buy millions of dollars, or sell millions of dollars worth of this token, I think, you know, as the market maker, I have faith that I could, that it will be worth that, you know, in an hour in a day, in a month. There is no market maker anymore. Sorry, I'm old school school, there's actually nobody in the middle, it's just--
SK It's a smart contract in the middle. So you can say you will contribute, you know, in your Stack Overflow example, for instance, if the market, let's say, currently thinks, you know, like 1000 tokens for about an eth, then I can provide another 1000 tokens and then eth into a liquidity pool, and then that trades according to a mathematical formula. So essentially, you don't need that Citadel, you don't need those high frequency traders that you're talking about. It's like people like me, you know, I've provided liquidity to many social tokens on Roll. And I make money every day like on trading fees from that. We don't need a Citadel or professional hedge fund to sit in the middle.
BP So how is the yield farming going? Is it good? Should I get in on this? How do I start yield farming?
SK We'll send you once our product is live, which, you know, we're hoping to be very soon, but we would love you to join in.
BM Yeah, we're building an automated version of this. That makes it extraordinarily simple.
BP I know people are out there just making money hand over fist on these uniswap you'll find me it makes me sad that I don't have the time or brilliance to just--it just seems so complicated. I don't know. It's above my paygrade. Thinking a little bit farther out, we just watched you know, Zuckerberg give his big spiel about what's you know, they're going to be voting for the next 5, 10 years. So neural interfaces for your AR assisted experience of the world. What kind of stuff? Are you excited about it at Roll?
SK Metaverse from Facebook is a very centralizing force again, like you'll probably want everyone to hang out in this Metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg and team are creating.
BP No, no, he said it would be open and interoperable.
SK But you know, what we want to do is those again, like those value networks need to be independent of those platforms. And that's where like social tokens really shine, you're building the network completely independent of any platform that includes the metaverse plug from, and you can take that community and move across platforms that you want. So right now, you can't import your social friend graph from Facebook into another platform. But in the future, at least from a value network perspective, you will be able to. And we do want to know how you're providing that contracting force towards some of these broader trends and technology as well.
BP Do you have an ETF? Can I just go in and buy like--I don't know these creators, I'm too--I'm an old dad. I'm not cool. Can I just go and buy the Roll ETF? And if if these creators succeed as a group--because I do, I believe in Web3, and the future of all these craters, but I couldn't tell you if whaleshark is cooler than somebody else. So can I get your index fund? Is that possible?
BM We're kind of in the process of, you know, decentralizing the underlying protocol for Roll and that would potentially look like is an opportunity where the asset that we'd create would potentially serve as a beta for the entire creator economy that we're building. But in addition to that, there's many other protocols that focus on indices for particular things. So if we had a bunch of rappers on Roll, someone you know, without our permission, can create a, you know, a rap token index. And you know, you can go along on every rapper, that's on Roll that has a community.
SK I think that's the most powerful point like you don't need our permission to build these indices. There are people who can just do it today.
BP Sure, I don't need your permission, but I also couldn't do it so I can't help myself. But it's interesting what you mentioned there that this kind of--the idea that social you know, popularity and social connection and community already have strength and almost financial strength, but in an abstract way, right? If you are a popular rapper, you can walk into any restaurant in LA and get a table or, you know, you're going to get the VIP suite, you know, somebody they love bump somebody else off the list, or you could walk into a lot and get a car and not pay for it, because they know you're good for it. Right. And so the idea that, like, let's digitize and financialized that, so that, you know, it's in some ways has more utility, but then I that makes me feel sad. Like I think about like an aging celebrity who's like tokens are not worth as much. You know, they go to the place where they're always used to like buying a beer, buying dinner for like, 10 of their tokens and like now it's 30. And that just makes me sad.
BM But that happens in real life, that ageing rapper, you know, 25 years from now may not be able to get that free car.
BP I don't know, that makes me sad, you know, like not--yeah, the Jay Z's have only accrued in value over time, but didn't work out that way for everybody. Alright Bradley, anything else you want to add in terms of, yeah, like the vision and the long term before we sort of say our goodbyes?
BM Yeah. So what's very interesting is social tokens are sort of a gateway into the next version of the social web. You can think about self expression Web2 as things like retweeting, liking, etc. What we're kind of doing is saying these things that you're doing are sort of going to be represented through digital assets. So take TikTok for an example. A lot of people think about concepts like web 2.5, the idea that like, Old Town road with Lil Nas X, someone did a dance. And that song went from nothing to like, number one on the billboard, if you think about that music is like a digital asset. And that creator is sort of expressing themselves through that digital asset and making it go up in value on the Billboard, this could potentially be the future of the next great social token network, right? I may be an influencer. And I may lock up a piece of content. But in order to view it, you know, everyone needs to hold 10 Bens. And so what's happening there is we're growing the Ben economy, without the creator, Ben, doing anything. And this is probably how very, very large creators start having their own currency. Rihanna may not have the time of day to do a five minute one on one or hang out in sort of a Discord. But if there was a token, where her community could express themselves in ways as simple as Twitter, but it's through a token, we think this is how things like this go mainstream. Sid and I won't build things like this, but we will definitely power them, many of them in the future. So we're actively incubating and sort of working with folks that want to build out these types of idea.
BP And so I guess, in that, in that context, like the creator, like if the community on the tour be created separate of the creator, is that something that would upset them, like they can't trademark it, you know, they can't necessarily like be involved in owning of like a large stake in it. So like, their fans would essentially be enjoying the spoils of having forged the community and financialized this, but you know, they might be on the outside. Is there any concern there if I'm the biggest Rihanna superfan, and I create the first Rihanna token on Roll, and that goes on to be a huge community, because she's got all these fans. And now they're trading, you know, money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then Rihanna shows up. What do you do if Rihanna shows up? She's pissed and she has some lawyers.
BM So in that example, earlier, the Ben token that was created by you, Ben. There's just another platform where I could express myself in Ben, but it was created by you. So think about a TV show like Squid Game or Succession. And the fandom around it, we're all going to dress ourselves, but it'll be through that token, and everyone will benefit including the creator.
BP You can create a community with its own rules and its own purchases and content. They don't have to, but they're still going to spend it in your token.
BM 100 times over on many platforms. And this is kind of how we see the future working.
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BP Alright, everybody, it's that time of the show. I'm going to shout out the winner of a lifeboat badge. Somebody who came on Stack Overflow, saved a question from the dustbin of history. Today, it goes to notnoop. The question they answered was: Making An Emoji Enabeling App. Who doesn't want that? So thanks, notnoop, appreciate the lifeboat. I am Ben Popper, the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter @BenPopper. You can always email us podcast@stackoverflow.com, questions, suggestions, whatever you want to send us and if you'd like to show leave us a rating and a review. It really helps.
BM Awesome. Thanks so much for having us, Ben. My name is Bradley Miles. You can find me on Twitter @Bradley_Miles_ or just email me at bradley@tryroll.com. Thanks so much.
SK Thanks for having us, Ben. I'm Sid. I'm the cofounder and CTO of Roll and you can find me on Twitter @SidKal. You can also email me sid@tryroll.com And you know we are hiring engineers. If you are passionate about the space, we'd love to hear from you.
BP Alright everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon.
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