Charisma Social

Hey everybody, welcome to what's going to be another fantastic DevNTell. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they are passionate about or have been working on. This could be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share with the community. And today, I am happy to introduce Joyce, who will be sharing with us Charisma Social. Take it away, Joyce. Maybe you want to start by introducing yourself and how you got into the DAO.

Sure, absolutely. So hey everyone, my name is Joyce Lai, joycelai.eth. I joined Developer DAO pretty recently, I would call it about two months ago. Have wanted to join for a long time but was always hesitant because I'm actually not a developer per se, but I'm actually a lawyer by training. So just to give you a very short version of my background, I used to be in the hedge fund space doing private funds lawyering work. Then I was in ConsenSys for about four years, was one of their early attorneys. I decided to leave last May to do more fun and interesting things in the space, to get more involved, including joining hackathons and including potentially building my own product. And this is where we are now. So back in January of this year, I decided to join the ETH Global NFT Hack. I've never done any hackathons before, not a developer, but built a team there during the hackathon and we built what is Charisma, and we actually won and were one of the 16 finalists of NFT Hack. And so, you know, the team wanted to continue and build out an alpha and launch this to the world, but we wanted to spend a little bit more time to do it properly and to make sure you know we had a solid very first alpha, and that's what I want to share with you today. I would love to get your feedback, good or bad, on this, and I'm really, really excited to get more people to test it out.

So the website is live, I've dropped the link in the text chat. It's charismasocial.xyz, and the password is 'dazzle,' spelled D-A-Z-Z-L-E. So you guys can feel free to go ahead to try it out at the same time that we're going to chat about it. If there's anything that's broken, let me know and I'll jot it down. So maybe I'll give a little bit of an overview of what it is and then we can dig down to what's happening in the background and then I'll zoom out a little bit to explain like why I'm so excited about Charisma and why I feel like it's worth my time and other people's time to spend on this, right? So, you know, we have what we've created here is the world's first Myers-Briggs inspired personality test. Some of you might be familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, which is a psychology analysis that you do. You fill out a questionnaire and it gives you your personality type, which is one of 16 and it's created by basically eight personality traits. So here, instead of telling you whether you're introvert or extrovert, I'm able to tell you certain attributes about you based on your transaction history and your current NFT holdings. So if you put in your wallet address and you click find out, which I will do with you right now.

So you'll see that I am DSFL. So I am diamond hands, I'm a social butterfly, I'm a fledging project supporter, and I am in a lower ring trend today. And if you click on each of these four letters, you'll see here the reason why you got that trait that you got, right? And you can find more information here under Traits & Methodology. And I've also run a list of the top 50 ENS addresses, so these are the celebrities that I found on ethleaderboard.xyz, and you can see what their personality traits are as of May 2nd, which was around when I ran this. So you see Vitalik is a DSFL on that day. His wallet birthday is September 28th, 2015. I learned that I have the same wallet birthday as Chris Dixon from a16z, so that was really fun and interesting.

Yeah, so it's a lot of fun to figure out what your information is floating out there on the internet as you're doing transactions. And more importantly, you know, Charisma is a project to experiment with making sense of all this open data that's now available, right? And I guess this is the part where I kind of talk about how I thought about Charisma and came up with it in the first place. So I've had an idea to do, you know, something related to data, something kind of related to reputation as early as the end of 2018. And back then was, you know, the state of the world was when, you know, Donald Trump was in office, so there was a lot of, you know, talk about what people can or can't say on the internet and cancel culture and all that. And there were a lot of protests happening in Hong Kong at the time as well. Hong Kong's where I'm from. So just kind of observing those situations, you know, as a third party, kind of led me to realize the importance of, oh, I have some construction here in where I am, so let me know if you can't hear me. So it became like very clear to me the importance of utilizing data properly and to make sure that there's ways for people to utilize data and to create algorithms for themselves so that there's not some central party, some, you know, secret government there who's basically deciding things for us, right? Because ultimately when you're sorting through data and you're telling people what they are or are not and what they can or cannot do, you're really allocating resources, right? So it was an experiment on how to get people to play around with data and to how to create a way for people to open source the algorithm creation process. And so that's Charisma in a quick nutshell here.

Just want to kind of do a check. Can you guys actually hear me right now?

Yes.

Okay perfect, yeah, apologies there's some construction from my neighbors here. So I don't know if you guys had a chance to run your test. I wonder what everybody's personality result is that day or today. Feel free to share on Twitter. And one thing about it is that when you, if you connect your wallet, the Twitter prompt that prompts up is one that actually is specific to your analysis. If you just run someone else's wallet, you don't actually get that prompt where it says like exactly what your personality type is.

Awesome. Yeah, so going forward, sorry go ahead, did you have something to say?

Oh, no no, go ahead. Yeah, so, you know, I really wanted to share it with Developer DAO because I want to find more people who are potentially interested in working on this type of a project together. I think there's a lot of fun things that can be done with something like this. You know, I've gotten some feedback already from the current community from the alpha, and there's a lot of interest in creating like a dashboard and finding more fun and creative things that one can do with it, right? So I spent a little time doing like a potential mockup in Figma about, you know, what could be like a next iteration of this, right? So if you think of this as kind of like a profile or a dashboard of yourself, I can do a quick like comparison of, you know, your celebrity twin. This is even a way for you to find other people who are similar or dissimilar to you and then you guys can basically play with each other. And then we can basically take snapshots on each of these things that's happening and maybe people can mint it as an NFT or something like that to remember the moment, right? Yeah, so I think there's a lot of really interesting things that we can do with data to make it fun so that people can start understanding that their data is out there floating around so that people can, you know, actually utilize this information for themselves, right? If you think about what you're calculating here is you have a personality profile which is in effectively a little bit of a reputation, but really is also a set of information that could be used as a primitive for anything else, right? Whether it be getting credit, taking loans, or as simple as making new friends or even maybe incorporating it into some sort of a generative art project, right? So I think the things that you can do with something like this is really boundless, and it'll be really great to, you know, really have an experiment together on, you know, what are the possibilities and how to make it really fun and accessible for everyone.

Yeah, so that's Charisma in a really quick nutshell. I would love to hear any feedback from the group here. Did you guys find it fun, not fun, any sort of feedback would be super helpful.

Oh, Joyce, I think this is fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing. I kind of have a question around what kind of inspired you to go from the area of law to development and how was that transition for you and like what challenges and stuff did you kind of face?

Yeah, so, you know, as a lawyer, right, a lot of the things that you do is very reactive as opposed to proactive, right? And I think in the bottom of my heart, like I knew I've always wanted to build things, whatever that was. And it was just a matter of like what it is and you know what am I capable of. And so it's really kind of like a mental transition. I think my time at ConsenSys and having worked with a lot of developers and product teams while I was there, you know, even though it was in more of a legal capacity, really showed me like how much I really enjoyed working with developers, like how much I appreciated their skills and having, like I think the ability to write code and actually make something, I think is almost like magic what people can do here. So it's really about like how do I set myself up so I can do more of that, right? How do I set myself up so I can work with more developers and hopefully one day turn into something that is my real job where I can like make a living off of it. And yeah, I think it's not so much of a transition I would say as it is more of like a realization of something I probably always knew all along.

Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that's very inspiring and I'm sure there's probably somebody in the crowd or somebody that'll watch this that's been kind of teetering on the fence of whether or not to dive into development and you might have just inspired them to do so. So this is fantastic to hear. I guess from a technical standpoint, could you share a little bit about the tech stack you used?

Yes, I will try the best I can. So in terms of the front end, I work with the development team, so we have a front-end developer and a back-end developer, and I believe the front end we use React. Cool cool. Yeah in the back end, I don't know exactly what the technical description is, but I know that we're, you know, running things on AWS and we've also like created a dashboard that, you know, shows this data. We're thinking about ways of how to like more, more able to scale that in the longer term. In terms of the data sources, right now we're using Covalent API, OpenSea API, and also Etherscan API. Which has its own challenges. You know, one challenge we've come across is that when we are analyzing within wallets, if a wallet is very, very bulky, like the API itself just times out and therefore we time out. And so we've actually had to make some adjustments in terms of what we're calculating for to, you know, just fit into what's currently capable right now. So it'll be really interesting to hear workarounds that people might have and how, you know, developers are thinking about it here as well.

Cool. Cool cool. I guess with that, we can open up the floor to the rest of the gang. Does anybody in the crowd have any questions for Joyce? Don't be shy now. Here we go.

Hey Joyce, nice to see you. Yeah, I wanted to make sure I was going to be able to try to make this before my meeting. Um, yeah, so I'm super curious because when I first tried this, I thought it was awesome and I was blown away by like the thing that you just showed with kind of having that celebrity that you match up with, like that whole Figma mockup, and essentially being able to like find your tribe of people. That right there is just like super awesome. I'm curious, right, like how do you envision the like the measure, what is the measure of success for you with this, right? Is it, is it how many people are using this, or do you have more of an intrinsic goal of, you know, being able to make just this whole experience more fun? You know what I mean? Like what is that outcome and how are you all like thinking about measuring it?

Yeah, so maybe I'll take a step back, right? I think life is a series of Venn diagrams in terms of what you want to do, what the world cares about, and, you know, what the world is willing to spend resources on, right? So I think it's a matter of experimenting and trying to find the one small little crisscross area in the middle. I think it would be wonderful to get along like in the shorter term, right? Like I'd love to get like 10,000 users onto Charisma and to have like an active community where they're actually interacting with each other. I think building like a vibrant community is very, very important in our space. Another metric that I have is kind of like how much data I can put into context meaningfully. So for example, right, you know, these are some like ideas I've had in my head, which is, so if you take like mirror.xyz for example, when you write on Mirror right now, you log in with a wallet. So let's pretend someone logs in with their ENS, right? So now you have a piece of content that's associated with an ENS. Now if that ENS also runs a personality analysis on Charisma, now we know like what type of person is behind that wallet. So now I have a link between content, ENS, and personality type, right? Which means I can now link that piece of content to the personality type. Now what that means is if there's a way for me to sort through what content falls in which category, now we have a brand new, basically open-source way of sourcing content and now you get to decide, Daeshaun, like I want to talk to people and read about people with the experience of being paper hands, right? That's now available for you and you can go ahead and make that choice if you want to. Like you can say I want to push those types of content to the top of my feed, right? Now you're no longer dependent on someone like Instagram or Twitter to decide for you like what you're going to see first thing on your phone because you're going to be able to say I want to see that. And you get to like do that sorting directly.

Okay, this is my mind went a thousand miles an hour. This is a super like crazy data company. That's amazing. So I'm going to like wrap this up and then let other people speak, but you know, one of the coolest things, right, like maybe even some like marketing push is being able to see like I would be very curious to see what celebrity wallets I'm most like, right? Like that right there is like that those those quizzes that you take on random websites, like what type of wine are you or some craziness right there, right? And then the second thing, in terms of like the use cases and what not, there was I did marketing consulting for a HR firm, and one of our vendors was called Predictive Index and what they did was they had you like fill out, you know, kind of what you did as an employee and just like took a personality test and they were able to match up who you were to a company's culture fit. So a company could like at a high level see if you'd be a good fit for them before even talking to you and it's it's fairly accurate. Um, so that's kind of like what came to my mind for this. This is awesome. This is awesome.

Yeah, and you know how right now it's season zero alpha, and I don't think I'm as clear about this as I should be like in our, in the Charisma Discord, but like I want to get to season one, right? And if I can make like 10 seasons of this, right? 10 different categories of stuff to sort for. Now you have like a very rich way to just sift through information on the internet effectively. And I would love for one of the seasons to be developer-focused, right? I know I think you and a couple of other people have suggested like oh maybe we should explore whether someone is a adventurous explorer who goes to other layer twos and goes to other layer ones versus are you just like primarily on Ethereum, right? Which is, which is cool too, but it would be very interesting to know that, right? Like if I can find four traits to sift for that are developer-related and make it worthwhile and make sense, I think even that alone would be a very useful tool to use, call it in hackathons, call it in you know applying for work setting, what what have you not, right? Like I can't think of all the possibilities, but I just know that we need to find a way for people to access the data in a way that's not hard, that's not difficult. Because like I'll be honest with you, like I'm pretty I've spent a lot of time in this space, but for someone like myself, it's still really difficult to look at Etherscan. A lot of times I don't know what's happening there, and I think we need to fix that. So we need to, I don't want to use the word dumb it down, but we need to make it like accessible to a normal person, like the normal educated person, unless we do that, I don't think there's any point.

Yep. Yeah, I second that. I second that sentiment. Etherscan is very much so a developer-oriented tool and it's quite difficult to navigate if you're a non-technical person. So just want to mention we have about 7 minutes left if anybody else wanted to ask Joy a question or provide some feedback.

Yeah, I had a question. Did you consider for maybe further seasons, and not just analysis of the wallet itself, but analysis between different wallets? For example who you are interacting with, and things like that.

Yeah, I think all of those are possibilities. Do you mean like more than one wallet that's owned by the same person or like more in terms of like a social graph?

Well, it can be both because like a few days ago I had a discussion with someone who's like a bit very in the space because again your data is public and everybody can do those kind of analytics. And one of the suggestions that came up was that in the end you can like have a separate wallet for like each of your personalities, each of your identities, might I say. So that's one side of it. And the other one is just you can like recreating some type of a social graph, but here it's like a transaction graph maybe or something like that. So just curious like if there's some kind of data which can be gaining some insight you can be gaining from that as well.

Yeah, so I think the dream scenario is for you, someone like yourself, to want that information, and then for there to be a way within Charisma for you to very simply create that, right? Like you have come up with some metrics that you find relevant, you should be able to create that. And you can maybe share that if you will or just use it for yourself. Yeah, there should definitely be ways to create that for you to sift for that specifically. I don't see why not. It's really just a the limitation really comes in how calculation intensive it is in order to calculate because right now it's just really hard, like short of running your own node and getting all the information from the source, relying on APIs and stuff, it's tricky because it's very limited. Thank you very much.

Awesome, awesome questions here gang. Um, I guess you mentioned that you were looking for people from the DAO to potentially help out with the project. Um, are there any specific roles you're looking for, is the project open source, how can people get crackin' on helping you out here?

Yeah, so right now the project is not open source, mostly because I think we're it's so early, I don't really know which way is the right way to go or there could be different pieces that are better suited for one path versus another. I just don't know, right? So right now if there's anyone who is interested in, you know, even front end or like UX, right? I want Charisma to be as delightful as possible, like it should maximize delight everywhere that you go, right? It should be fun. Because people need fun before they want to use something and that's totally great. If there's anyone who is into data and wants to suggest things to calculate for and what are good and fair ways to calculate for those types of information, yeah, please drop it in the Discord, share it, request for it, ping me, those are all super helpful. If you can code it and put it together, that's even better, but even just like having that type of feedback as in like what are you interested in, what's actually useful to you, like that would be a great help already.

Awesome, fantastic to hear. We have a couple of minutes left. Is there any final questions for Joyce? Going once, going twice.

I don't have a question but just saying your focus on joy and delight is like definitely correct and I'm really excited to see where you go with this. Thank you, thank you very much.

I'm sorry I think there was somebody else as well who spoke up. Yeah, I think it's me. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, awesome. Hey, so great presentation, Joyce. Um, before asking, I already play around a little bit with Charisma and put some thoughts on it. I really like the concept, so I think it's a good question and a good thinking about the user structure of Charisma, how it's going to look in the end. Um, so the cold start problem says that you have a 1%, 10%, and 100% structure of users. The 1% create trends, 10% of your users contribute and follow those trends, and the 100% of the network benefits on those trends. Joyce, how do you think your user structure in this way I'm pointing out is going to look in the future? Who's going to create those trends in Charisma? Which ways are we going to be able to contribute? And I think the benefit of using the Charisma network is already established in the presentation, but the first two, how do you think that's going to look?

In terms of create, right? I think that's a very unique question in the Web3 context. So some feedback that I've received already is, hey, you know, I want to see which celebrity I'm most closely matched to and I want to see like what they're doing, what types of NFTs do they hold, right? And so if you think about what these people want, they want some information, but this information is actually created by past events. Right? So the celebrity isn't necessarily like recommending something to you, they just happen to have this, but their active involvement in owning this and interacting with it that way is self is the information, like is the product, right? So one way that I'm thinking about is how do you turn that into the creation piece of it, right? Is does someone have to actually do something in order to create something on Charisma? Yes, there's a part where, you know, there's kind of like the core team so to speak who needs to actually make and code it. Okay, yes, I understand that part. But if I can basically present the information of your actions in a certain way that's helpful, that presentation itself is already, you know, one form of value that's created so to speak. It's kind of like curation by way of you doing stuff. It's kind of like you putting your walk the talk so to say, right? Does that make sense at all? I feel like that was a very long-winded answer to your question.

It really does, because if you are finding a different use on Charisma as a user, you are kind of creating a trend. So I think that works. I would also suggest that at some point, Charisma opens endpoints in order to integrate Charisma. So in that way, different platforms will be able to scale on top of Charisma and use your scoring or kind of your describing structure of reputation in order to use that metadata of how users behave on the blockchain. That's very cool, thanks Joyce. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you integration. You know going back to the Mirror example, right, there's no reason why someone can embed a tweet in your Medium post, in your Notion post, but can't embed a little thing that says your experience into there, right? Like that should be a thing. Yep, 100% agree with you.

And it looks like we are unfortunately at time. But thank you so much Joyce for presenting Charisma Social with us. This was an awesome presentation and as Ryan mentioned, we're all going to be looking forward to seeing how Charisma grows in the future and playing around with it as well. So with that, I wish everybody a fantastic rest of their day, a happy weekend, and we will see you back here next week. And I will be dropping a link in the Developer's Voice text for attendees to claim their DevNTell POAPs. And Joyce, I'll send you your speaker POAPs through DMs. And with that, I will see you all next week. Thanks for spending your Friday with me and really appreciate it and ping me to chat more. I'm always around. Ah yeah, fantastic. Thanks so much Joyce, awesome.