Scaling to Millions How SWEAT Leverages NEAR AI

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

1. 0:00

   thank you it is great dramatic uh fall here thank you it is great to be here thank you all thank you near my name is Jeff wilser I'm the host of the podcast AI curious and the recently launched podcast the people's AI the decentralized AI podcast joined by OLG great to be here OLG please share a bit about yourself and what your North Star is at sweat oh great question um well good afternoon pleasure being here I'm ol I'm

2. 0:30

   founder and CEO of sweat and sweat wallet together we call it sweat economy we'll get into that a little bit later and our North Star as a business is to make your active day as valuable as possible effectively it's what other 10,000 steps that an average person takes a day generates an income to them so we want to make you healthier and wealthier by making you move more what I

3. 1:01

   love about oleg's answer if you're you know just if you didn't notice this not once did he mention Ai and what I think is cool about this is not yet no and we'll get there but there's so many projects and like no shame no judgment many projects are launched and announced as being this AI company and that's great again there are plenty of worthy ones but my personal speculation here is

4. 1:26

   that a lot of mass adoption will see a lot of real use cases of AI we'll see are a little more under the hood and not in the bright and shiny AI object and I think as we'll see with sweat and olig AI is crucial to your growth in scaling even though it's not on kind of the obvious surface level so we're going to get to how AI is a main driver of him scaling and from his him scaling therefore the path of billions and trillions of AI agents but on that

5. 2:01

   Journey before we go there o tell us a bit about the origin stories of sweat and then how near came to be involved and then we'll kind of get to the aess of it all yeah we started in uh 2014 and with a project called sweatcoin as name would suggest we want to be on blockchain but it was too early we spent a bit of time trying to Fork Bitcoin but we realized too slow too cumbersome no smart contracts so we spoken into vitalic in 2015 but it was too early and

6. 2:35

   we launched centralized being confident ethereum so you were speaking of metallic pre ethereum right yeah ethereum wasn't called ethereum back then I don't remember what was the project name but it was research grade code that we spent some time on and we realized that you know what it was too early it was just prone to you know kind of some issues and we launch centralized and and we were absolutely

7. 3:00

   sure that within six months we're going to find you know if it's not ethereum then there will be another project that we will jump on we scaled extremely quickly by 2016 we already had several million users and it was way too late because our transaction requirements became about 200 to 300 transactions per second which would be orders of magnitude higher than Bitcoin or ethereum were able to deliver so by sidest stepping blockchain in the beginning we actually saved the chain that we would have built on and we saved

8. 3:33

   our business because invariably it would have been dead so fast forward every year we were dabbling and looking at everything that's happening in blockchain testing various different solutions but it only happened in 2022 when bunch of really high throughput chains went into production near salana Avalanche so we looked at 14 different ones and we chose near actually for three reasons one is

9. 4:04

   alignment and strategy for Mass adoption and really driving you know kind of penetration of blockchain solutions into billions of people second was team which is absolutely incredible and it's an absolute pleasure to work with them third was throughput and very importantly No Cap because you know for example if you're building on evm you know that you if you hit 525 transactions per second your fees are going to start going through the roof and everyone is going to be pissed off

10. 4:36

    everything is going to slow down everything is going to become really expensive that's not something that we could afford near sharded architecture gave us confidence that we would be able to scale horizontally when we started there were two shards on near now there are six and I'm hearing based on the number of kind of hair spikes on B and Wang's head that we are rapidly approaching eight so it's been an incredible journey but it gives me confidence in the future okay so you

11. 5:05

    have grown also 2014 like well before any of this was cool you're building this you've increasingly gotten decentralized you have how many users roughly now in web 2 we have more than 180 million registered users what 1808 Z yeah okay in three we have nearly 20 million token holders of sweat which makes us I believe ninth widest token in the world and we have roughly 3 million active users per month close to 2

12. 5:37

    million onchain active per month I'm so glad you went there and shared that because again as I my thesis is this might be the closest we'll get to approximating the rest like the non web3 world like actual like big companies corporations and that is kind of like getting those folks to embrace decentralized AI is the way I think will eventually in my own personal view will eventually get to quote trillions of AI agents so let's now pivot to you not a AI company you have been like for a

13. 6:09

    decade you've been scaling how are you now starting to use AI for your own growth and then we'll kind of get into to what extent you're embracing AI agents and how you see that fitting into the larger ecosystem of kind of growing the AI agent Universe there several questions there and I'll try to unpack them um you know our approach to building is actually not idea based but a problem based so the problem that we're solving is to make the world physically more active

14. 6:43

    everyone wants that and there is nothing simpler than simply tokenizing and you're rewarding you for every single step yeah let's give a quick quick quick like primary for those who have not yet bought into the sweat sweat lands give us like a 20 second Pitch of what for an a average user what do you do what do you get how do it work yeah I mean sweat is the value of your physical activity tokenized we all know that our physical activity is not zero value

15. 7:14

    right mine's pretty close to zero but I hear you in concept I'm pretty confident that if somebody would offered you to go and run a marathon and bring back some beer you would tell them to go screw themselves because you Val your time and you value your calories and you value your mov there is there is value there we feel it intuitively and what we're doing is we're tokenizing it and giving

16. 7:38

    that value to you to J oppose it with attention economy so movement economy what we're building is around the value of you been active attention economy that everyone's familiar with7 trillion dollar economy by the way works in the following fashion Google takes your attention sells it to the highest bidder puts all the money in pocket and all you get is two gigs with a Gmail y y got it

17. 8:03

    so so so short hand I've got and I I've downloaded all getting aside I have the sweat app on my phone as when I walked here when I walk out of here it's capturing my steps I'll be rewarded ultimately with sweat tokens all right let's pivot now to you building and these tokens have utility and we've been deflationary because I very frequently get this question so how are you different from other move to earn apps well very simply we've been at it for 10 years we're still around our web two business is profitable for years our web

18. 8:36

    3 business is on path to become profitable and we know how to build sustainable to economics because sweat was deflationary since July 2023 so we are really building for longterm and that's why I'm saying that our goal is to make the world physically active and to make your active day the value of an active day that you get as high as possible that will bring billion people people and it will make them more physically active so when did you first bring in AI into the equation and then what's it doing for you now yeah so

19. 9:08

    coming back to we're solving a problem not starting with idea which basically means we are looking at every Tech that comes our way as an opportunity to enhance our product make it Slicker faster better simpler to illustrate we couldn't build on blockchain WE launch centralized when blockchain technology became fast enough and robust enough we deployed it you're pragmatist you're

20. 9:35

    more into Solutions than an ideology yeah sure I you know kind of anything goes as long as it pushes Us in that direction then a came along we deployed our first AI product which is an MVP in November last year with the sole objective of just simply starting to test and understand how to talk about it how to position it and guess what we had 700,000 questions asked through that Ai

21. 10:05

    and when we were developing what we're about to show you we did not start from scratch we didn't start with some hypothetical ideas like what would people be interested in we basically just looked through 700,000 questions we brought the list of four to five that pretty much everyone was interested in and then we pushed the boundary to integrate these answers so so that you're not looking just at text but you can actually take an action right away from your personal AI agent answer which

22. 10:37

    means that we can remove a lot of friction we can actually remove a lot of functionality from our app for example Dow voting is used four to five times a year we don't need to have a graphic interface for it in the future it is going to be run through chatbot and llm so simpler only core things and everything that is used occasionally can be managed through personal AI agent amazing and was there something you wanted to show or share is this yeah gentlemen is there a chance that you

23. 11:09

    could run that demo I I have to say that it's working I have it here the problem is that there is no cable that you know you can see his phone right everyone could see us clearly on his phone yeah it's it it's true if in doubt come and you know approach me after this uh and I'll show you that it's actually working okay I just want so what uh so there is a thing happening here okay great her name is Mia movement in

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    action so what you see there are those prompts which is four or five questions that are most frequently asked so this while we're watching this as I understand at Ole this has spared your team the expense of creating FAQ pages of creating explainer videos of as I'm sure many of this room folks in this room know all of the content and tasks you have to do to deal with massive onboarding that has dramatically been reduced thanks to this solution is that

25. 12:30

    right but most importantly it spared our users time and effort to go and find those FAQs filter through them and read text they ask a question exactly how they want and they just get a very very concise answer and what you see there is it's not just a concise answer that you're getting for example a lot of our users are asking so what are grow jars and which one should I choose basically

26. 12:58

    the answer is there are two types of grow jars step-based jars is where you earn on the basis of physical activity and if you want to create one you just press a button and it gives you a transaction you just put an amount and you confirm and it's done so easier interface easier to find information and it allows our users not to waste time you know trying to go to YouTube and watch some videos or go to FAQs and help pages one thing you shared with me off

27. 13:31

    mic is your idea and let me know if I'm getting this wrong is that to get the true billions or trillions of AI agents in a mainstream way that actually has to come from human beings can you elaborate on this what you mean by that and then kind of how it relates to both to you and near and then maybe a device you have for a larger uh space that's kind of developing all of these tools yeah um I believe that at this stage of AI

28. 14:03

    development everything will start with humans even deployment of an agent ultimately somebody is going to have to sit down write some code or you know give it a prompt and swipe to create it and give it some budget so in order for those trillions of agents to appear we either need to have a lot of Builders deploying crazy number of Agents or we can give our 3 million active users

29. 14:35

    personal AI agents train them better make sure that users build confidence and then build into this personal AI agent capability for them to deploy AI agents on near AI directly from chat Pro uh Pro uh directly from the um agent prompt I think that that is going to be an extremely interesting way for people to experiment M and we're going to see definitely an explosion of Agents created this is not what we're going to

30. 15:06

    start with as an MVP however this is something that the team is extremely excited about I love that I think it's a nice counterweights the idea that we'll just have some awesome code and then poof these agents all appear to your point it kind of starts with unboarding humans for some use case which you've been doing for a decade and that agents flow from from that absolutely and look AI is there to make life of our users

31. 15:35

    better faster ultimately I believe that we will be able to farm out to this agent a lot more than just the chat for example all communication will go through chatbot on boarding will be done with llm and chatbot and we're not starting with an agent able to do transactions for you because a lot of our users have feeling nervous about this however that is a destination especially with near account structure I can foresee that I would give my

32. 16:09

    personal agent an authority to spend let's say hundred bucks swipe it off and see what it does without worrying that this agent can potentially drain all the assets that I have on my account great hopeful note to end on thanks again sir enjoyed it thank you all thank you very much Jeff