Making the Metaverse Easier for Everyone with Donn

What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. Today I am joined by Donnie Dinch and he is the co-founder and CEO of Bitsky. How's it going Donnie? It's going well. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to dig in to Bitsky, but before we get into that, let's learn a little bit about you. What your background? And how do you get

into this space? Yeah, absolutely. So first, I started out after school doing consumer product and package design. Things that were in the retail environment and had a lot of fun with that. We worked on a bunch of big brands like T-Mobile, Microsoft, Nintendo, all these different things. I was living in Seattle and I started meeting people making the internet. I thought that was really cool. And

this is around 2009, 2008, whenever the App Store came out for iOS. I started a lot of the same sort of consumer sensibilities that I had implying to designing great consumer product packaging. Started to carry over to like consumer software. So it's been some time doing that. Eventually started a company called Will Call. I was like, I think almost like a hotel tonight for going to

see live music. Whole social layer, which is really cool. That was acquired by Ticketfly in 2014. Subsequently acquired by Pandora. And then myself and the other co-founders decided to take another crack at it and started a lab's company. And then I started to talk about software products during 2016. And then January 2018 is when Bitsky started. And yeah, I mean, I guess I can just kind

of go right into how that worked too. But basically, I bought and sold a Crypto Kitty. I thought it was a very cool thing. It was the first sort of non-financial product that I'd seen built on blockchain. But I really like this idea that if nothing else blockchain is this global source of truth of who owns what and what that stuff can do. And the example

of the Crypto Kitty is, it happened to be at the same time that it was probably spending like $200, $300 a month on like banana outfits on Fortnite. And I couldn't sell any of them. And that felt criminal. And so we just saw this huge opportunity in the space and a huge opportunity for NFTs. And you know, looked and said, Hey, we're very early. What are

the, what are the, you know, the foundational bits that need to exist. And that kind of set us on our path. Nice. Yeah. It's incredible how many founders got their start from Crypto Kitty's. There is easily, you know, 20 or 30 founders that I know personally that have started up NFT focused companies all because of that initial experience with Crypto Kitty's that aha moment. I think

a lot of it had to do with like just to be quite honest. Like, you know, I was, you know, just like everyone buying Bitcoin in 2013. And then, you know, in the, in the ICO wave of 2017, you know, putting markers on random tokens, but I had no idea what the hell is going on with any of this stuff. And so I think for people

that, you know, weren't deep in, in, in, in, like, from an engineering perspective, or from a finance perspective, it didn't really, it was really hard to get a good, like, concrete mental model for how to think about blockchain. And yeah, Crypto Kitty has really opened it up for us. Yeah, totally, totally agree. It was like the first kind of opening of functionality for a wallet that

was different than just money transfer and just value transfer like that with money attached. So I really enjoyed that, that mind-opening experience as well of Crypto Kitty's. And remember how it bogged down the entire network? Like, it literally, there's so many titties going out that it just shut down a theory of essentially. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was, yeah, it was, it was pretty funny. I,

um, at the time, I didn't even know why, like, I didn't understand what was going on with the theory. I was like, oh, like, maybe, you know, the only time you'd ever seen software or something go down is like with mega scale. So I'm like, oh, my God, how many hundreds of millions of people are doing this? That was the case. Yeah. So let's, uh, let's

unpack Bitsky a little bit. How did it start? And, you know, what's, what's the core mission of the whole kind of concept? Yeah, I mean, you know, I alluded to it a little bit earlier, but really it just kind of came out of this a very simple, like, primitive use case that seemed like, you know, blockchain and NFTs could, could address. And I think the way

that ultimately you really think about it is that at a very, very simple level, blockchain and digital ownership will fundamentally change the design space of how we build software, whether that's consumer products, whether that's game, finance products. And a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, benefits of that to an individual to a user, like, you know, for talking, you know, 100 million, billion

people are pretty simple, you know, it's not, you know, it's, it's not so much like if you ask a kid today, you know, do you want an NFT, they might say no, but if you ask them like, hey, do you want to be able to sell your Fortnite skin? They say yes. And so, for us, it's always been really focusing on, you know, these outcomes and

how can we, how can we, you know, create, how can we abstract the complexity of blockchain and cryptocurrencies to, you know, to really make this a mass adoption type idea? Yeah. So you, you kind of initially started with it with an NFT wallet, and then you created a couple tools. Is that kind of how, how you're approaching it? Yeah. So basically, it was really first principles

approach, like, you know, this again, this is the beginning of 2018. And we'd say, obviously Metamask was around. And I believe this cypher wallet that was eventually acquired by Coinbase was around. And so there was a mobile wallet, there was a browser extension. And basically anything that you wanted to do that interacted with, you know, blockchain or DAPs had to happen in those two situations. We

were, like, early on, very excited about, about games. And we knew that, you know, people who are building, whether it's a game, whether it's an iOS app or, you know, Android app, people don't want to change where they're building. They don't want to change the environment they're working in. So how can we, like, build a wallet that can be accessible, that can take, you can take

anywhere with you versus having to bring everything to your wallet? And so, okay, we're like, okay, let's, instead of, like, you know, most wallets today are kind of, like, running your own email server. What if we created a wallet service, like Gmail? And that's effectively what we did. We created a single sign on OAuth compliant wallet that you can connect to a number of different products.

It's, you know, fully support full Ethereum wallet supports multiple L2s. And, but, and you don't have to really worry about private key management. I think that's probably one of the, the more controversial moves that we made early on. And that we think that, you know, self custody is, is wonderful. And something that everyone should always have the option for, but shouldn't be a requisite for participating

in the space. And so we've done a lot of work on our own wallet infrastructure to provide a safe, secure hardware backed experience for a lot of people. And that's kind of the first thing. Like, if you, if you, you know, this use case that we were talking about of using a, you know, selling a video game asset, like, if you, if you're going to own

something, you're going to need to place to put it. So, okay, first step was a wallet. And then, you know, if you're the, let's say you're the, you're the game or the product, you're going to need a way to create and distribute NFTs. So let's build some APIs and services that are adjacent to the wallets to help people kind of onboard because the reality is we're

still even today, like, even in 2022, summer, we're still very early in the infrastructure space on, you know, allowing people to build scalable products that interact with the great blockchain. And so we couldn't just build a wallet in a vacuum. We needed to help kind of continue to move the industry forward. And so when you look at sort of the custom storefronts that we eventually started

building, we're allows you to create and sell an FTs, which is a bank account. People can buy those with a credit card. We have this a new feature called drop links where you can distribute, you know, NFTs to people via just a link without even knowing their wallet address in advance. And it's all these, it's all these things that we want to do to help push

the space forward. So we're going to be based on the timing and where we are. Got it. Very cool. Yeah, I think the user experience is a bit of a meme just in the space in general of how brutal it is, you know, with Metamask, private keys, all that kind of crazy, crazy bad user experiences all the way down to the long addresses and things like

that. So it's great to hear that you guys are focused on, you know, just getting into the hands of the average, the average person just wants it to work. That's such a, it used to be controversial. I feel like it's becoming more, more accepted that just having something that works is the goal. Right. No, absolutely. I mean, I think you have to, you know, I gave

a talk about this a couple of years ago, that, you know, you have to pick a priority. And like if your priority is, you know, full self custody or, you know, full independence and where you have, you know, it's completely trustless. That's fine. But if your, if your priority is building a, you know, a product that people want to use day of day, it's really like

don't let, you know, sort of dogmatic tendencies get in the way of that. And yeah, it was conscious. I mean, we were, we were on a life raft through like Defie Summer, we just, we wouldn't capitulate to like self custody only. All that said though, I will say by the time I guess this goes live, our iOS wallet will have launched. And up until the launch

of this wallet, every Bitski account has a one to one mapping to like their Bitski wallet that is stored in sort of our hardware vault. We are going to allow people to start importing South Korea, custody wallets in addition to the Bitski hosted vault. And that will allow people to have the opportunity to go a little bit off the deep end, if they decide to go

deeper into crypto, you know, they have a path to doing that. I think there's a, there's a, there's a big opportunity to build a very consumer friendly wallet experience that that allows people to eventually get to all the complexity or a lot of the complexity that people that are in the endemic to the space now are able to use, but kind of guides them. And so

that's, that's really where we see an opportunity moving forward with sort of like, you know, how we get people to become more educated in the space. Yeah, that's awesome. I actually really, really enjoy that because the way that I get people into the space is through Coinbase. I say sign up for Coinbase and start learning from there about self custody. Because that is like the spectrum

in which you can get comfortable with the core kind of mission of sovereignty and the space of how it started, but first start with a good user experience. And don't worry about the, the self custody aspect yet and work yourself towards the, the self custody component. And I think that's cool that you guys have sort of vertically done that within your app already. So they can

get comfortable. At first, they can kind of start to learn and tinker with the self custody aspect and move towards that. I think that's, that's how things really need to work in this space, I feel like, because not everybody is just going to immediately go research 50 articles about the importance of private key, you know, where to store it, how to store it, proper storage, all

of that. And I think it's, it's a good, a good tactic to ease people into it. Yep. That's right. And I think just to, you know, add a little bit to that is that what's really interesting is there's a sweet spot. Where I think folks are, are keen to have self custody. But at relatively low value wallets and, you know, extremely high value wallets, most people

don't want to have that responsibility. And so it's really interesting to kind of, you know, segment the market and figure out how things are going. My personal assumption is that the same amount of people with self custody wallets in 10 years from now, will probably be referring to the self custody wallets. You know, a reflection of maybe the same amount of people that still run their

own email server. Um, I, I, maybe it'll be a little bit higher because I think that there's, you know, a little bit more value associated with it. But I think, um, we'll see enough services come about where people don't want this stress of, you know, the reality is even things like met and asked with all the dependencies you have in a browser and like having, you

know, keys and encrypted and software. It's all, it just, we, we have these, you know, this idea of sovereignty. But the reality is we're still sort of at the, the best of the code that the browser's running and things. And so, um, it's a, it's a tricky thing. I think obviously ledger is a great product. And I think everyone should eventually have a ledger, um, put

your most prized possessions. But, um, you know, when you're getting into like, you know, yacht money, you definitely don't want to have that into like fireproof safe. Yeah. Yeah. There was actually a fantastic video that was made. I think it was in 2018 from mainframe. And the now CEO, I think he was just a new engineer there when they made the video. But it was like

kind of poking fun at the user experience in the early days. And everybody that's listening to this, because you definitely check it out, um, because it, it was an ad that basically was a guy who was in the desert. And he needed something to drink. And there's a lemonade stand. And the guys like, Hey, welcome to lemonade coin. You have to, you have to purchase is

lemonade. In lemonade coin. And you have to get it. Um, but first download this wallet, then go to that exchange. And then, um, and this guy like pops up with a big like, uh, uh, fox skinned, um, like sweater and he's Russian. And he's like, Oh, sign up for the exchange. Give me all your information. And it's just such a good poking fun of the quote

unquote sovereignty that we were talking about, um, and how the process is just so not like that. Uh, when you're purchasing and getting onboarded in all these different ways. So it's, uh, I immediately thought of that. When you were just talking about how it's not what you think it is. But when we think about sovereignty right out of the gate, um, with this, with these types

of pieces of software. Yep. That's, that's definitely right. And I guess one thing to add in case there's going to be any confusion for us is that we actually don't take custody of the assets. If you think of sort of a traditional custodian and the way they might secure things and hardware security modules. It's generally pools of assets. Um, Bitskis architectures much more like four billion

lock boxes. And so we don't have the, like, you know, the system is architect in a way that we don't have the privilege to sign on behalf of any user or to manage their assets at all. We just make sure that those keys stay safe. Um, which we think is, is a, is a good model going forward. And certainly requisite if you're going to have NFTs

that it's important to have that non-fungible, you know, specific token perpetual or, you know, persistently associated with your wallet. For sure. So let's dig into the, uh, the team a little bit. How big of a team is it? And, you know, you mentioned the iOS app, but what stage are you guys at currently? Is it pretty launch and what can you tell us there? Yeah. Um,

so right now we're about 40 people. Um, we have, uh, you know, the iOS, the iOS wallet will be, it's actually in the store today. Um, quietly. And we'll probably start doing our, like, uh, PR roll out. Uh, we might do something at NFT and I see next week. But, uh, if not, we'll definitely be starting this off in July. So, um, so they were super

excited about, we put a lot of time into, we put a, uh, you know, there's, it's going to be the first wallet that sends you push notifications when you receive NFTs. It's going to be the first wallet to support open sea activity notifications. Um, there's just a lot of things that we've done on the back and kind of what I was alluding to earlier, you know,

the, the, the, the infrastructure for building great consumer products and Web 3 is still still lacking. And so things that would take you, you know, 45 minutes in paying, you know, 1299 a month to some SaaS product or some developer tool and Web 2 just don't exist. And it takes three months and you have to kind of roll your own indexing is one of those things.

So, uh, we spend a lot of effort to make this a really strong and simple experience. So if you know, nothing about blockchain or cryptocurrencies and you install this because, you know, some game, uh, gave you an NFT or something and whatever the reason you don't have to be an expert to, to start to participate. So we're quite excited about it. Very cool. Very cool. And

I have to ask, you know, you got guys closed around, um, of series A round and you had Jay Z and Andrew Sin and things like that on board. Uh, I, I have to ask, what was it like with, you know, raising around like that from somebody like Jay Z and some of these, these bigger, uh, funds? Yeah. I mean, listen, again, I started, we started

this one in 2018 and, uh, 2019, 2020. Nobody was asking us about NFT. Um, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, each year, all year long and and this lead to this various, just the same class of our previous experience. But it was a rush. I mean, there was a lot of, there was about two weeks of just non-stop calls and, you know, meeting people. I mean, the whole NFT space in that last summer kind of

just felt like illuminati level type things that were happening. But just so many, like the people emailing, like you would think otherwise it was spam or fishing. It was actually the like the real people. But it was, it was great. I mean, listen, I think there's a lot of, a lot of folks that have, you know, made their, you know, made their mark in society in

other ways and have now really taken a Ken to technology and investments and really trying to, you know, shift the perspective of, you know, how, how everyone kind of sees where their value is. And so, yeah, there was a, there was a quite a few people from either entertainment or sports that they got involved. It were honestly just really excited about the opportunity that the stuff

provides. And so thankful for that, thankful for, you know, injuries. And so wonderful. We'll lead investor, great board members. I mean, we just, we really enjoy working with them. Nice. Very cool. And as somebody that's been in the space for, you know, quite some time, you've seen a lot come and go. I always like to ask, you know, outside of what you're building at Bitsky, what

is it that you check your phone for right when you get up in the morning when you're looking at this space that gets you extremely hyped about it. And one of the things that you're looking forward to, around just this space in general, yeah. I mean, I'll be honest, I think that, you know, we've had, you know, we've had people now are familiar with at least,

you know, NFTs and the way that these things exist. But they've really only seen one implementation of the, you know, of the medium is high value JPEGs. And what I'm most excited about, and maybe is wrong truth to this, this call is gaming. I think it's going to be heavily impacted. And every day, I'm constantly checking to see, you know, which new game development developers or

studios have either announced funding or have announced a project that they're going to be building. I think that's the, I think that's the most exciting thing right now is, you know, we're starting to see traditional game studio, you know, leadership from traditional game studios and publishers come to build Web 3 games. And, you know, that's these L2, you know, these L2s are becoming more performant, some,

you know, more performant L1s. And so a lot of the stuff that we were excited about in 2018 is starting to matriculate now. And so that's when I, like, when I see, like, for example, doctor disrespect, you know, starting a game that's going to, you know, leverage NFTs and, you know, asset ownership and providing players with liquidity and the potential for value accrual, that's like, that

gets me hyped. Yeah. I like that. I like that. The people that are just sort of constructing this space in general are always really exciting, seeing bigger and bigger people come in. So those are all the questions that I have for you. Where can people go and learn more? About Bitsky. Yeah, absolutely. You can go to bitsky.com, BIT, SKI.com. You can, you find us in the

App Store by the time this is live. And I have any questions. Just hit me on Twitter at Donnie. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing everything that is Bitsky Donnie. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you.