DevHub Live 41 - Guest: GrowthMate

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

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   he want

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   hey welcome back to another edition of devhub live I am your host Joe we are packed with another great episode today uh a little bit of housekeeping before we get started uh again if you haven't subscribed to our newsletter down below uh please sign up for that lots of great stuff going on including our uh new challenges that are coming out regularly uh we are really pushing to

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   engage developers through these challenges uh actually we have Vlad coming on at the end of the show to talk about the upcoming challenge as well as his previous one uh which we got a lot of great feedback on so if you want to be you know first to know about that stuff obviously follow along here we also uh the hackathon that was just for uh one trillion agents just wrapped up uh all the winners were

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   announced on our Twitter you can definitely go and check that out there's plenty more hackathons going on um check out the one trillion agent uh website and you can see more of what's coming up there as well and today um so today's guest is growth mate and I'm excited to talk to them because this is an area that uh when we talk about the transition from Web Two to web 3 and what it means for data privacy and things like that uh you know how you

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   reach communities how you advertise how you go out there is an important piece of that and it's not necessarily going away it's still part of business so growth m is trying to tackle that challenge and uh using some things here on near in order to be able to do that and I'm really excited to talk to them and so we have uh Mohamad from growth mate here thanks for jumping joining us

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   today hi how's it going great great great so let's start at the really high level um what is growth baate yeah so sort uh we build recommender systems for web3 users um and so based on uh person's transaction history and onchain interests uh we can connect them to a pool of opportunities that our system knows about So when you say recommendation is it would you call it the same as advertising or is it something that is a

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   little bit more than that yeah so the core of it is about recommendations but then you can have multiple applications for that um and so in our case we actually do one of them it's advertising um and so the pool of options would be ads or campaigns from multiple advertisers um but we also have another product um and it's uh what we called wallet feeds and it's like the pool of uh candidates it's things that we collect ourselves and money does not

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   play any role in that so you guys are working with with onchain data what kind of prompted this approach to it I mean and and I'll preface this as uh you know I both for my own businesses as well as some of the other stuff work I've done advertising and recommendation is a big piece of I think anyone who's trying to run a business where does that piece of taking what somebody's doing on chain S to translate how you then like match

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   these communities up yeah so what prompted this is um in web 2 you have companies collecting all kinds of data like uh they try to know personal information the person's like gender age uh geography and they use those uh pieces of data to try to understand the person's interest uh so it's kind of an in indirect way versus in web 3 you literally have the person's like transac history which is like uh purchase history and so instead of doing like uh you know uh some kind of indirect way

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    it's you have there what you need and you don't need uh to try to get more personal data that's not relevant to like the purchase de decision itself yeah interesting interesting so one of the things that I think is important for this discussion before we dive more into the actual product and what youve built here is that that there is that part of if you are tracking and if you are looking at someone's transaction history some of the things

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    they're interacting with how how Anonymous is this stuff and I think and I'm not saying this is something that you guys are doing I think like people have a misconception of blockchain and like what that really means I think for some reason people are think it's uh more Anonymous than it really is um because it literally everything is is transparent um so how do you kind of phrase that and how do you think about that as you're building growth mate as a whole yeah

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    so um as some of the listeners might notice like when you try to open for example bank account then you go there you provide your personal information your ID um all that versus when you try to open to have like a wallet um basically all that that you are doing is you are generating a random number locally on your machine and then you're just using that random number to authenticate

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    yourself uh to say like hey I have control over this over this wallet I can make this transaction right uh so now every time you try to connect or and use like some web3 D app you're you connect your wallet and at that moment the D app itself knows your address and yeah they they can tell uh like they can look at your transaction history from the blockchain MH um but then on the other hand you don't they don't have access to the personal information because you know you don't provide that in the first

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    place right right right just random number and is it for you guys in in your business and and we're going to show a demo in a minute but I want to just kind of get into your business a little bit is the business here while you're providing these insights is it to be able to Simply go back back in present marketing opportunities or are you actually trying to be able to reach out and engage that user based like directly through

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    something yeah um so again for ads you have for ads itself you have multiple applications so for one you created a new product you want to get some awareness to your project right and so in that case that's one application for ads but yeah I would say like a more prominent application would be retargeting right so um yeah that's the case where users are using like they already used your product or used a similar product and so you would want to reach out to those users because you already know that they are interested in

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    what you're doing and you have a higher chance to convert them right yeah yeah know it makes a ton of sense um go ahead go ahead sorry I just wanted to add that uh so that's on the product side um on the other side uh which is our wallet feeds um we collect ourselves um like all possible actions that you can do on web 3 uh for that we built our own like uh um event processing pipeline that collects things from Twitter um like announcements um

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    and by the way here small shout out uh please if you are building on near and you make uh an announcement about your project please like tag either uh near week they have a near week bot or uh newer created fun um and because those those are two of the sources that we look at uh for example and we also look at U apis like def Lama um we scrape some websites so um yeah and the the goal from that is literally just to find the most interesting things to each user

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    because in web 3 in general attention span is uh there's so many projects uh fighting over it and there is so much going on that as a user even me and myself like I always miss things that I would be interested in yeah absolutely yeah no great great point there I mean I I think that is one of those things too that I really feel like is so underrated that like just again like looping into the ecosystem making sure that people are even aware of what's happening because we are so disconnected here

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    everyone online there's so much information all the time so curating some of that obviously uh is a piece of that uh I have a ton of questions I definitely want to go into some other areas but I'd love to maybe we take a few minutes and actually walk through the growth mate product and give people a sense of what that is and then that'll maybe help frame some more of my questions

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    here okay um so I see my screen here that'd be great let's see um I guess now you should be able to see one of them yep perfect okay um so here I started with the uh wallet feed product and so in this case like our latest iteration is just a chat assistant um that under the hood it has access to multiple sources of of information and so yeah you can see here I'm logged in with my wallet sc. near um and so it knows for example my net worth um it knows my portfolio my

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    Holdings um this is also like another um like one of the uh parameters that play a role in the recommendation for example hey you hold these assets by the way you can do these cool things with those assets that you hold already um and it has access to my transaction history um and we do this by the way also multi-chain so we have near ethereum polygon base many evm um and so based on that uh based on

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    my Holdings I was like okayy suggest me some cool things to do uh um and this is here I would like to highlight something uh in contrast to most ecosystem pages so most chains they have an ecosystem page where you can look up at all the projects that are deployed there um and in our case like usually if I just give you a logo and by the way we are going to uh I just noticed um Ria Finance right there is the new Rebrand we should update that um so most of them they just

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    show like Crea Finance or a finance they show you a logo and they tell you it's a de but they don't tell you the opportunities inside the project so it's like okay it's cool it's a de what can I do there in the end and so we go one level deeper and we um like surface all the opportunities from within the projects um so it's the Highlight here is about more about what can you do and not just about telling you hey this

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    project exists um and so yeah in this case uh it detected that I transact a lot with st coins um and I Al I also have some transactions with shitzu and so it recommended to me these farming um opportunities on on ref with stable coins so um yeah stable coins also is sorry I I want is the goal here for something like this is to be a standalone product or like would the recommendation for this to actually move

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    inside again like like a wallet or you know maybe R Finance actually has this on their site things like that yeah it's uh the second so stand having Standalone uh thing is great because it allows us to iterate and test with the users in the beginning uh but eventually we want it on ecosystem pages in wallets wallets already have like Discovery tab usually or some explore Tab and so I think this would be like a

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    really great fit um yeah nice nice and then you can yeah you can prompt it more you can tell it he show me stuff from other ecosystems um and we also noticed that uh many times the users in the beginning they would stop the conversation early mainly because they wouldn't know what to do with the Tool uh so this was like a really helpful addition and maybe like a good tip for anyone who's building agents in general uh followup prompts

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    they're great right makes kind of sense so for for you guys and for this like so like those recommendations where are those coming from are you sourcing those or is that something where you know like is it pay to play like where does that all fit into yeah no no as I said uh so first we Source them ourselves uh so this is where our event pipeline comes in where we collect things from Twitter telegram RSS feeds websites apis um it's not payto playay because again for this

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    product uh if it if it's going to be integrated into wallets ecosystem pages and like other third parties then you're providing the value to those and so the value there would be you should give really the best recommendations to their users where does that put you guys as the facilitator of that I mean is is that is part of your business model than to say like we're providing this best possible tool and so the service like

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    Rea would pay you guys where where does that all fit in for that yeah eventually the integrator uh should pay so for now because this is like a new product uh we would like to demonstrate value first uh but eventually it's it's on the integrators because they should be also the ones who benefit from the value sure and of course eventually they can make agreements so you see here um another thing is we always link uh the user and we try to make it like

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    specific to the page itself um so if I'm farming I will land directly like in the pools page um let's see if this works okay I guess because they this is the rare stuff that I should integrate um but eventually always try to send them to the exact place and so one possible thing is to add some uh like UTM parameters there and you can have some agreements between like the integrator and the target itself um yeah for you guys I mean obviously

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    agents are the Hot Topic right now for you guys integrating this piece of it is it something that feels like this is the better uh approach to the interaction with the end user or is this kind of like one piece of the toolkit I mean like you know is it is there a point where like it almost feels like you're presenting like ads like the way Google does and like results of just let me just show you stuff based off of that we know who you are versus you having a

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    conversation um yeah so when we started building this first we started as just the advertising product um and so it was mainly about ads uh but then again we realized for one if you're going to a publisher um or someone to integrate your ads platform then the main value proposition there would be hey you will be paid to to display ads right on your site um and there we quickly figured out that for certain verticals um in web 3

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    they are not interested in like the revenue that they would generate from ads um for one because the the number of users it wouldn't be that much they are mainly making money for example on Swap fees transaction fees right and so they would be interested in a different value proposition um and so they are mainly interested in growing their user base um in retaining their users and so when we looked at um what we have built already

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    uh we figured like hey actually again we are like in the core just a recommendation system the pool of candidate changes so you switch for one product the pool of candidate is advertising campaigns that are paid for for the other product the pool of candidates is um like uh these opportunities that we collect um then you can basically have like two products but you know they are built on the same system more or

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    less so it wasn't like a big um effort to spin up a second product um interesting uh so is this built on some within the ecosystem uh or is this fully from like your guys own the agent part of it just the agent part of it oh the agent um yeah so we started with b um by the way yeah like thanks a lot to their team they have been great with support and answer question um I liked a lot their like um

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    embedded um agent kit um but then we are also going very like very soon uh we will have a uh another version for near AI um and What attracted us mostly there is that um the data and the recommendations can be accessed from other agents um yeah so we don't need to do the Integrations ourself right interesting it's mainly like the way I think about it is mainly up to our agent to convince other agents uh that he's

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    the competent one to take over this desk right right so uh while we're on the topic of agents and I want to kind of stay with this a little bit here of as you're designing this to provide these recommendations like how are you guys able to test what's coming out like how do you and and I I want to phrase this as like obviously you can like ask questions right like you can do normal tests as like a user but you want to

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    actually funnel people into different paths based off of like what their background is what they're interested in what is that validation that you guys are doing for that piece yeah so for one it's just very simple uh web analytics so all you want is like you have we you know we created this new thing it's uh hosted on a website somewhere no one knows about it right uh so the very the easiest thing is you should first Drive traffic into it uh

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    for that we use ads surprise surprise right um and uh you just bring traffic into it and then with web analytics uh you can figure out um so that's one one of the ways that we figured out that hey the conversation was stopping very quickly for example as I mentioned and then we like oh let's add these followup prompts and then you would see the conversation going longer um yeah

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    and what would be um another thing I don't know I think that's it so and again this is uh this has got to be a challenge and and I'm using the web 2 as an example because I think it's the most clear thing that people definitely understand so I'm not trying to just do an Apples to Apples comparison here but in web 2 in order to get some of these type of results like they are collecting massive amounts of

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    data you guys are leveraging as much public data as possible in order to do this is there a point where you need to have some of your own data that's being collected in order to improve the product to get to that point and what does that look like for you guys in order if is that what you're doing what does that look like yeah um maybe a small story time here from like when we started this so we started again with the promise like hey we don't need to collect any um side

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    data right uh we have literally purchase history that's all you need um and when we tried launching the advertising product uh first Advertiser uh they were like hey we have a community of um we have a product from like a non English speaking country um and they were like we only want to run ads to people who would understand that language sure which like makes sense yeah um how do you get that from blockchain data

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    right it's not there like you don't see the person's main language uh from blockchain history um and so that's where we know hey we had to expand uh the scope a little bit um and so you have like one side you have blockchain data but then on the other side you also get um like serers side uh data so any data again this is maybe like some um you know like in in blockchain for example when you make a transaction to a

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    Smart contract then the transaction will appear uh in web 2 there is also similar things there are some data that must be revealed like if your machine is communicating with another machine then IP address will be revealed right of course you can like try to hide that through like VPN or tour or some other means but well in the end like you will get the IP address of the machine communicating with you and so with the IP address there are also

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    some headers that are sent with every request so that's like what we call server side data so we try to also like hold ourselves so far it's been enough um yeah and we don't want to get into like client side which is getting data from the users machine right right no I think that's an interesting approach I mean e there you know just from a philosophical standpoint I I like the way you phrase it like there are different probably

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    dividing lines of like when is it too much right like when is what is that line of like what's the bare minimum that we need to iterate our product X amount better and so I like the approach of that there and for people who are coming onto the platform as they start to then use this product and and as you guys are starting to serve up more recommendations is that a piece though for you guys are you collecting that

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    information of like um I I was doing farming it recommended this and I clicked through and now I I am like that was a good choice for me so you guys can then better serve that how it is that all work together yeah yeah so um we we get like uh first when we serve uh the recommendation anything that we serve it's uh we log it in our data in our own database so that's like what we did and

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    then uh the feedback on what we did comes in from first did the user see that so that's like a view like when you see on Twitter or YouTube that's like views it's the equivalent of that Impressions um and then whether the user clicked on it or not MH uh so and then of course uh right now this part like the rest part would is not automated but uh seeing if those clicks resulted in onchain actions right um I know some

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    projects they're working on this uh so this field it's called attribution and so there are many web3 projects that are specializing in this uh for now we do it in the form of like uh our own internal uh case studies you know I mean you you that the obvious answer was was right there of like like you just said of you s all you need is the onchain data in that regards because if they then do a transaction you now know okay you were

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    here you did this kind of transaction so you can start putting you know A and B together here and that okay that's what led to it without having to again and I think I'm bringing this all up because I I'm a big believer in user own own data and privacy and things like that and this is a really interesting approach you guys are being obviously conscious about that but this is where like the power of blockchain actually fits in this example of you don't have to have

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    all these loaded referral links you don't have to have all of this other tracking information because you're simply saying look the end goal is to make a transaction and so as long as I'm here and I know that like this was recommended to you and you then transacted like that's that's a win that that is Success now now a data point that's still publicly available for you guys to process am I on the right track of how you guys are thinking about that yeah

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    yeah exactly and then even sometimes it's helpful uh like in in minority of cases where you make a recommendation of something that we actually believe it's not the right thing um and so that's uh where you can test your algorithm because you can tell like hey what if the user actually takes that then our algorithm was not right about it right right so that's also like some good source of valuable data absolutely

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    absolutely for the for you guys and I guess I'd like to talk a little bit about actually because you guys are live you are an actual product you went from again you even said that you kind of slightly pivoted a little bit what's that process been like to have this actually ship it and then decide uh we need to adjust the plan a little bit just from a business standpoint well I mean you have conversations with projects um some projects they take your first product um

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    some projects don't and then you try to find the uh commonalities between um the projects that did and the projects that didn't and that's how you can like segment and from there you can know okay this is like a at some point you already know before talking to the team like hey this project is in this vertical probably we should pitch them this product with this value proposition

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    because this and this right and then for the other teams it was uh mainly like trying to get feedback from the the teams that didn't want the the first product mhm and that was Al like a little bit tricky because many projects they're just like no thank you but then like okay you know that they're not interested but you don't know what would be a good alternative for them and so we we had to take just do more conversations to be

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    honest what are you finding in you know and I guess probably this fits into maybe a further discussion of your road map but like what are some things that you're finding as you have these conversations like I I have to imagine especially those companies that are trying to be crypto native first they are trying to uphold some of that ethos that the idea of having to do recommendations and advertising type of

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    algorithms must be I don't say a tough conversation but just something that maybe like their instant reaction is like no and then you have to kind of go a step further of like well let me actually educate you on how we are still Pres observing some of this stuff is that is that part of the job of what you guys are trying to do here that is indeed part of the job yeah um but again for example like one of the most important vertigos to us wallets um

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    they already have like a wallet it's like the Gateway um to web3 um and at some point many wallets are working uh towards a future where they want to be the only uh place so the user doesn't have to keep switching and going to different uis different front ends to interact um with the like you know different projects they just need U it's more than just a key management solution it's just one super app if you want to

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    borrow to swap to stay you do everything from within that app and so they are already interested uh very much in retaining those users and uh knowing what would be interested to them uh um and what the things that their users are like um really want to do um now the problem there is many wallet they want to build that um internally like okay okay like we have developers we can do it ourselves um and

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    the big Point um at least in my opinion against that is um like the more data you have uh the better algorithms that you can train and better algorithms mean better recommendations and then again it's like a feedback loop with more recommendations you get more data um and that continues and so if you have like tens of wallets and everyone is just working on its own thing internally for one they would be repeating the same uh

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    process but then also like they um the acceleration or the Improvement of the recommendations would not um happen as fast as if they just uh give this to a third party and then they can just aggregate all the data and so that's yeah is that is that like the main value prop for you guys right now is that like you're going to be able to improve your recommendations and your algorithms Faster by being an aggregator versus someone doing it in

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    House of course I mean um like a wallet they have so many things to do I mean for one they have to make sure that they are managing the their users Keys security um you have all these new uh like chain abstraction account abstraction smart account these whole like signing uh standards that they have to keep up to date with they have to integrate with other projects under the hood they have so many things to do um like if we are not doing recommendations at least it's like our one thing and if

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    we not doing it better than them then what are we doing here you know yeah no for sure I I mean I I think just from like a a builder and developer standpoint there's a great lesson in there of like understanding like what you're good at and understanding like what your strengths are as a product as well and like you said I mean there are so many other things that go into running a wallet for example that for

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    them to then add on something like this in house is detrimental probably in multiple ways it's taking away time it's taking away it's maybe you know financially burdensome as well for them uh it's not their Core case they not going to have as much information as you have and probably when all said and done you know if they had just integrated a product like yours not only are you they

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    probably saving time but they're getting a much better end user experience for them yeah exactly yeah so kind of I want to go back a little bit here and talk about the advertising piece is that something that you guys are still pursuing or is that kind of going to the Wayside a little bit no it's we are pushing two products in parallel yeah what what is that what does that really look like for web 3 and I I and I guess maybe like just for even

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    for my own education a little bit of like how do you start to separate what does web 3 advertising look like versus what everyone knows of like web 2 that's that's a great question um for one I don't think that um we should try to separate U that much uh um because again advertising in web2 it's very mature industry um like they have uh um in the workflow like from the time that you

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    visit website to the time that you get an ad there is so many uh third parties involved uh so many you have like you know your demand side uh platform your supply side you have like the exchanges um there is like many pieces in there and I don't think we should just reinvent the wheel just because we are web3 mhm um I think uh the main benefit here in web3 is it's all about using

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    onchain data um there is like a really good place where we can fit into the existing web to infrastructure um I think like for example pre-bid enrichment solutions they would be like really great so that in that case maybe like a small uh background um so in many systems where you go to website uh the website like gets some parts of your data Maybe if there is like some cookie Associated um with you they put that with the context and then many advertisers um they can

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    bid it's like an auction and then the winner of that um is going to get to display their ad um and those bits they're done like in they're informed bids right they're bidding based on the data that they know about that user or about the context where the user is um and I think if like web 3 if we can demonstrate value in the data that we provide um and if the data that we provide does contain more signal than the other like personal data let's say um then

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    hopefully eventually um you know more advertisers would rely on these signals instead of uh the other other more uh privacy like less private um signals that they are getting um sure and so I don't think of it as like replacing Web Two I think of it as um like integrating in one specific uh place and doing that so well that you demonstrate value that they get to adopt your part yeah I mean it sounds like it's another data point that fits into

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    the larger message here and hopefully you can start to replace like you said some of those privacy concerning data points for you guys I mean just from the business aspect I don't know the advertising business super well I know enough just from like buying you know different ads like on Google ads or whatever but um for like that supply and demand piece of it is that something that you guys are trying to also solve

72. 38:25

    for of like how to price all of that because in the my understanding and please correct me if I'm way off but from my understanding is that the the more someone will pay for an ad is the more targeted it can be right so if I if I know that like I am reaching a very specific targeted audience that ad is worth more so I'm willing to maybe pay more as The Advertiser and I can charge

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    more as the supplier as well so so for you guys where you are limited in data and but you do have some interesting data with on chain stuff does that like how does how how's pricing start to kind of fit into that and like what are you guys thinking around part of that um so first um when you go to advertisers and you tell them like hey uh this is an ad solution um we found that many many of them they have like

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    some kind of anchor on web two prices mhm and so they they think like oh this is what I was this is what I would pay if I'm targeting on X or Reddit uh and so they would think of similar prices um I think that's like purely psychological um on the other hand we don't have it's like we right now our system works with an auction mechanism so use a perturbed second price auction um and so again we don't need really to push on on

75. 40:01

    prices as much as just leave it up to the free market um but eventually um as you said it's uh based on the data um and based on how much each like Advertiser stands to make by bringing a user to their platform yeah they should be willing to bet more when it's clearer to them that uh that that user is like more qualified let's say right right right right and that that feels like

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    where the work you guys are doing with the agent makes a lot of sense and I could see how that could inform what you're then doing on the advertising side of understanding like user acquisition how how do I get somebody who is in this bucket based off of onchain data to this product and you know I can start to see where those pieces all kind of make sense yeah um I mean maybe a small tangent here um so for W Feed you see an agent

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    uh which is like llm right yeah um llms would not be uh like a great fit for an ad product um just because for one you're optimizing for latency so you want to respond to the user like really fast like tens of milliseconds they matter because otherwise like the user would scroll past the and now you lost um the opportunity and so the way our project started is we started with uh by training our own predictive

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    algorithms so uh we look we get like all transactions that happened on a chain for a certain month yeah and then based on that we can train our own in-house uh machine learning thing that it can predict the user's next action and we did that with like like about 80% accuracy so given like users last n transactions you can tell for example which category they're going to interact with next uh so that's would be like a defi Dex amm borrowing um and how much

79. 42:13

    USD volume would be involved in that transaction interesting okay yeah but we found like uh the thing is when you when you build this sort of uh stuff and the way we did it um it's very uh like aifi any way where like if you if you're working with some structure of data and then that structure of data or you get like another data point then you need to change and retrain the models uh versus when you have something

80. 42:45

    like uh just pure recommendations where the user really wants to go and explore stuff latency is not as much of an issue so an agent gives us like a flexibility where I mean like like again right now we we integrate multiple chains we don't even need uh to have like a unified schema of the data from those chains you just like give it to the LM and it can it knows how to work with the data so it gives us like more freedom to iterate quicker yeah no that that that that

81. 43:14

    that's a really good point um of just how being able to feed some of that raw data in there probably allows for insights that you wouldn't normally catch on anyways right like it's just going to do a better job with some of that pattern matching and things like that um this has been really interesting I do want to end with um and this actually question came from the audience so I'll actually bring it up just kind of talk about like your road map um you guys are doing some interesting things here around both advertising and stuff

82. 43:45

    with the agent what does that road map kind of look like uh you've talked about cross chain a little bit already um what is what's the road map for you guys the next six to 12 months talk to more projects um get more adoption for both products and uh refine recommendations like make the product better I guess yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean that's I think it's a great point and like we talk to a lot of Builders

83. 44:14

    here and we want to highlight com from of that process sometimes the road map is simply just iterating right it's not always like right it's not just Feature Feature Feature Feature all the time sometimes it's simply like hey we know what we're trying to do we're going to continue to iterate um and know I love that you guys are are really seeking feedback um from outside and getting a sense of like what what users are

84. 44:39

    looking for um and what potential customers might want from there uh where do you see this as a a business model long term something where you start to allow people to kind of get in on the action some degree of like um like How brave does the thing of like you could like get paid for seeing some ads you know you get a token for that is that something that's on your guys mind how

85. 45:06

    do you see the the business model shaping up yeah like during our conversations some Publishers mention things um on like from from close to that um for now it makes it much easier if we just um give it all to the publisher or like to the platform and then it's up to them how they want to redistribute it uh between their users or between themselves and the users um it makes it just easier for us and it gives them more uh

86. 45:39

    flexibility um but again if that's uh something that more Publishers would ask for then um it shouldn't be hard to implement especially that you have this whole like closed feedback loop where you can look up the actions on chain right um in that case you don't even need to make the user like go like you can just you wake up one day and your wallet has a little bit more money in it because right you've been looking at

87. 46:04

    some stuff yeah yeah make makes a ton of ton of sense there um this was great I this is something really interesting I'm really excited to see how you guys continue to grow I know there's a few products I've seen around crypto trying to do something similar but it sounds like you guys have a really uh unique approach to this and uh I think the agent's really clever to get started from there um anything you want to end

88. 46:27

    on um obviously I put the website here at the bottom people should go check you guys out uh is that the best way to kind of get in touch with you as well yeah yeah from our landing page we have uh our email telegram everything perfect um thank you so much for the opportunity it's been great yeah no thanks for coming on and we I'd love to have you back on as you guys continue to

89. 46:50

    grow and kind of re kind of look back at like what's happening with all of this and stuff like that so thanks so much awesome appr you thanks Muhammad uh great stuff really great conversation guys I I hope people learn something from that and start to see you know again I love the part where he talks about uh what goes into building the app as well in that feedback loop as so that's a big piece of all this as well I think is people need to it's not just about getting a product that you

90. 47:21

    think people want to use but how you can iterate based off that feedback so uh really great stuff uh as promised everyone has been super excited about these challenges so I'm bringing Vlad back on here talk more about this past one future ones everybody wants more so we brought you more vad how's it going going well thanks for having me uh that was amazing talk by the way um really sful but uh back to the challenges first

91. 47:54

    I want to talk about again um just a reminder we are doing quests every week and the um last week was not exception and this week is is neither uh so but also this is educational exper experience so I will take a bit of a like we'll start from um uh recap where it all uh happened last week uh so let me uh let me C up the screen um is it shared Jo y uh amazing so this is where it all started so new quest for near

92. 48:36

    developers by near developers that is going to be the ongoing theme and as you can see this where it all started uh this is the output of near CS very beautiful way to view that the this is the account name uh that was um captured to this block height and you can even find the contract link associated with this code and obviously you can ALS see also see the methods available in the contract um there were some tips uh along the way uh how to solve it where

93. 49:11

    to look and this is where the code was published H it was implemented F in Python SDK and uh the um the it was a lot of fun to see how people tried to solve it without the um a way to solve it in the first day uh there was a clear indication that the the quest will start and being activated at specific time in the future uh I think I um didn't immediately communicate the fact that uh there is going to be a second uh secret portion revealed later on so um a lot of

94. 49:53

    people try to uh crack it before that I'm very proud of uh Pyon Decay uh to to hold strong no no bugs revealed and nobody could uh um interfere with my plans to to run this Quest that's good uh so we started on uh Friday last week Friday evening uh it the activation started to tick the activation uh was uh in this in realm of 24 hour like the there was two iterations of it so the

95. 50:29

    first iteration was 24 hours uh plus uh some random amount and it was recorded on chain uh the uh the activation time unfortunately the activation time was not printed printed in the logs um there was some funny uh communication here in the comments and uh the first challenge was to find when the activation time will happen and for that you could use uh near CLI uh to uh to or or any other uh tool

96. 51:03

    actually uh to view the state of the contract uh let me show you quickly how so on the contract uh in near CI there is a view storage and you can uh view two uh no not this one uh not the owner account but the Quest itself all keys s text main net yes and activation time was in NCS uh um UTC time so this is how you could learn where where it all start will start but then the second part you should have called withdraw method somehow and

97. 51:50

    withraw Method uh had several uh guards in it so so you you had to deposit uh some tokens uh with a call so you learned how to deposit uh near attaching it to the call itself then the activation time should come so whoever has a more precise estimation where it is uh kind of wins um then but also you have to call the contract from the uh uh from itself so you have to the only way to or not from itself but from the uh

98. 52:31

    owner account ID so you can only uh be allowed to call the withdraw method if you uh sign the transaction um or make a coros contract call from owner account ID and what is that that is this uh near Dev Quest owner account um and this is where most of the people spend their time the first 24 hours trying to figure out what what is the flow in this logic and how to abuse it uh there was none uh and um I'm

99. 53:09

    I'm well uh this always a good uh exercise to to maybe find some creative ways to avoid it so uh but there was no uh and the second piece of the quest reveal was revealed at the activation time um on blockchain so on the blockchain near blocks uh if it would go to the quest account or to the owner account doesn't really matter because they were interacting with each other uh sooner so this was the the the contract the account that was holding the contract

100. 53:57

     and if would as you can see there were quite some attempts to do something with it um and uh in the form of these updates so there were some contract calls happening please um let's see if uh we have other explorer that is working in the moment um here we go archival note uh for the win uh so there were

101. 55:03

     some messages going on and um the message had so yeah and and uh just a quick recap the quest actually was solved several times but the on the first day on Saturday um two attempts and two two successful attempts were done by white hackers and they decided to uh return the bank back to the to me and we restarted the quest and on Sunday I changed the rules a little bit so we will talk about the first rules so the F

102. 55:42

     the first um uh iteration of the quest so I I was posting the this hint um of inviting people to gain the control to the account and the and and was tell talking about some beneficiary account ID being for all and I was providing signature and uh a recent block hash um this may be too cryptic or maybe not but uh the uh each transaction on the blockchain when you submit it has a specific um structure so if we go to near core I I

103. 56:28

     want to like there is no secrecy in it so you should be should not be scared of looking into the code uh if we look into the transaction structure uh we can see that in order to build the construction so basically the the message that you are submitting to the blockchain you need several um data pieces uh so you need to provide signer account ID that is your account ID you need to provide your public key public not not private you need to record the public key here I will get

104. 57:08

     back to why we need it here you need nons non is the um also mechanism to prevent that is preventing us from reusing the same transaction uh in the future uh and uh you need to provide also receiver account ID like what is the target account that we are targeting and we have we need to provide recent block hash uh that is U recorded on chain uh so we ensure that this is a transaction not from a different chain but signed from for the same uh signer and receiver using the same public key

105. 57:47

     imagine we have the same account ID uh on testnet and mayet for example so to prevent reuse of the transaction just extracting it from other chain and putting it into main net uh we need block hash and we need a list of actions such as transfer function call add key remove key delete account create account and uh deploy code so um if we would look into action oops where is action action there is uh Delete account

106. 58:28

     action that requires you to specify beneficiary account uh what is this this is the account that will receive the remaining near tokens after the account is removed so when you want to uh Delete the account you need to specify the action delete account and specify beneficiary account ID and that is all like if you would go with near IRS you would be guided through this process and

107. 58:56

     will ask you to uh for example if I want to account uh Delete account uh uh owner uh near Dev Quest 02 owner account I want to delete it uh and I want to send the remaining tokens to frol uh and I want to check that the FR exists yes sure it's just a safeguard um visibility on mayet oh no it's yeah it's on Main it yeah and uh at this point this is a prepared transaction for me to to sign so this is UN signed transaction and uh in order to sign it

108. 59:37

     uh you basically take this transaction and uh uh you caliz it to to borch uh treat it like if you're not familiar with borch treat it is like ciz it to Json text and then hash it um and then and then sign uh that hash uh with with your private key uh with a private key that is corresponding to this public key and the nons should be uh at least uh one uh more one like this is just a simple integer uh that is um always has to be greater than the previous one that is recorded on chain

109. 1:00:18

     so at least plus one is enough and uh so the quest going back to the quest so what I what I was given to the uh people was the hint that they can remove my account by uh constructing a new transaction uh with the um specifying the uh fr. near as the beneficiary account ID to where the near tokens will be sent remaining near tokens of this account owner will be sent over the recent block hash is also required as part of the structure of uh transactions

110. 1:00:56

     we just covered um the public key you know the public key there was just one public key uh required on chain for this transaction you can also view it on near uh with with this Tool uh account list Keys uh owner here it is and you had nons that's also recorded on on chain always and you you know that this access key is full access key so this means that this access key can be used to remove the account itself

111. 1:01:26

     and uh you have the signature so the signature is the last bit so since you do not have the private key uh obviously you cannot sign the transaction but since I provided you the signature you can combine the transaction the transaction that is unsigned with a signature and then it will give you the signed transaction after that so if you if you would uh then see the uh history

112. 1:02:06

     uh withw with where is this why it's not visible here oh it's FR it's not owner hold on owner owner owner owner here it is so delete account so after I communicated this update here in the text I provide the signature someone was able to uh construct this transaction with this exact hash uh and with the

113. 1:03:10

     um with from from the owner to the owner and with the beneficiary account ID FR um and the signature that I provided so all together that was enough to basically then just what they needed they created this transaction just plain bites and submitted to the RPC and RPC was treen as is it as if I was signing this transaction so after they removed the the account delete account they was able to they were able to create a new

114. 1:03:44

     one uh so it was Pier who sold it first and they were able to control this account um because they own it after that point and they were able to to withdraw uh from the um main quest account so this was a solution really interesting I the couple really neat things here um obviously some of the account model stuff on near comes into play here um the cleverness of to understand how the key structure

115. 1:04:16

     works right it's a big piece of this understanding which I think is a great thing for all developers to understand if you're building on blockchain understand how Keys actually work with this and so like you said when soon as that account is deleted it is available for someone else to then claim and so and the contract doesn't know that it's a new key new private key so it just knows that this is the right you know

116. 1:04:43

     username so that that I think that's really uh an interesting lesson there for people too yeah yeah and then uh the the second iteration of it was a bit uh different so and and during this exercise um actually once someone removed it there is there was a brief moment in time where anyone could register a new account so I just wanted to highlight that flaw uh that we had here uh which is also um which is something that slime

117. 1:05:15

     Dragon tried to exploit in the second iteration of the quest so he was uh bombarding the the blockchain with attempts to create a new account um so once someone removed the account he he was trying to gain the control uh but uh the rules has changed over the weekend uh and uh I instead of asking and providing people with the um uh details on how on uh how to construct the transaction that would

118. 1:05:51

     uh uh Delete the um delete the account I provided with with instructions of how to um uh create a how to add your not your own but how to add a new access key that you already know the private key for so basically the the the end of the quest was the same but the beginning was in instead of creating the transaction that would uh uh remove the account uh we need to create a transaction that would

119. 1:06:33

     add a new access key to the account the access key that um uh so add access key is another um type of uh action transaction action that you can use at Key um on this way I think it's a bit better um so it was add key uh from the owner to the owner uh and this is something that you had to create and once you create that transaction and submit it to the to the blockchain again this was the transaction that not me was submitting to the blockchain uh it was Eugene kov

120. 1:07:16

     who solved the quest uh on the next day uh and uh after you added the new access key again there is a brief moment in in in in time where anyone can then use this private key to uh control that account which is why almost immediately uh Eugene was removing the uh where was it uh removing the access keys so he removed two access Keys the original possessed and the one that he just added

121. 1:07:53

     and he he the previous transaction he had he had was to add his own access key that only he knows uh and has control for so yeah that was a um an exercise on understanding how the uh transactions uh are constructed how they are decoupled from um wallet uis uh or the blockchain CLI or even my machine so if if I would so we we can always create uh different uh protocols and uh processes uh how to um use it and one of the example of the use

122. 1:08:42

     is MPC so if you if you've been following the cross chain uh chain obstruction uh um area of development in in general that it it does exact exactly the same on chain you create a transaction that is not signed and then the MPC Network providing you with a signature and once the signature and the transaction are in place you can just anyone can just submit that transaction to the RPC anyone it's it's no no longer um you know tied to one single machine

123. 1:09:19

     to do that so that is how cross chain obstruction actually kind of works under the hood nice awesome uh this was a great quest uh lot of Engagement a lot of feedback um so that was really great uh any sneak preview for the next one can we give a hint of what the next one's goingon to be absolutely yeah so I am about to commit and push to my G GitHub repo so stay tuned for the next probably like uh 23

124. 1:09:49

     minutes uh I'm uh building it uh yeah I I don't want want some people to to have more Advantage than the others before the announcement goes live that's why I'm a bit more um protective but it it is becoming more uh harder to to to to test out all my I'm sure I'm sure yeah people are watching iterations yeah awesome uh well these are great um these are fun uh and really great lessons for

125. 1:10:24

     for everybody to to to get involved with so again even if you don't know how to solve it definitely check out the how how they get solved because a lot to learn uh in that so very cool yeah and I just posted in the chat maybe you um Joe can uh put it on the screen this is the account that will be uh used where the qu oh hold on uh that's the wrong one oh okay it should have a for near in it uh so the this is the account where you

126. 1:11:06

     should start I will obviously post uh updates in the social media channels as well but you can be yeah pay pay attention to that very cool exciting so I think uh I'm going I'm going to give this one a try I should have time this weekend I I should be able to give this one to try myself too so I'm excited amazing cool good stuff well thank you Vlad uh these are awesome uh we're looking forward to many more and we will and for everyone watching this will be a

127. 1:11:39

     regular segment now Vlad will come on explain these so uh always stay tuned for these great St thanks Vlad we'll see you next week yeah see you next week all right bye thanks uh thanks everybody uh check out this check out this Quest coming up uh definitely want to uh get on top of that it's going to be fun it's going to grow fast a lot of developers are waiting now for that so it's going to be a lot of fun subscribe to our newsletter down below if you

128. 1:12:10

     haven't already uh all our latest news including these type of challenges and everything else will be always included in that uh if you want to reach out to us or if you have questions about development all those links are here at the bottom um make sure you check those out too feel free to jump in to any of the chats especially the dev support one people will definitely be talking about the challenge if you're doing that uh as well throughout the weekend as well uh

129. 1:12:33

     but until next week uh we will have more great guests coming the rest of this month uh really good stuff all the way through and then there's some more hackathons coming up as well which we are going to be announcing very soon so stay on the alert for that as well but until then uh have a great rest of the week and we will see you same time next week bye everybody got