Getting Started with Rabble

Welcome to DevNTell. DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every Friday for founders, hackers, and anyone in between to showcase what they've built. Today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Raghu, the co-founder of Rabble. We might also have a guest appearance from Amruth, also a co-founder. Rabble is a multichain Telegram client with a built-in wallet, social feed, and Rabots to make crypto seamless for billions. Stick around to see Raghu give us an overview of Rabble and how to get started today. Let's get into it.

Welcome to the show, Raghu. Pleasure to have you on.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me on, Narb. I've heard so much about this show. A lot of my friends in VC and venture scouting learn about new products through your show. Really good to be here.

Amazing to hear that. We love to drop the alpha on this show. Welcome, Amruth. Hopefully, your mic issues have subsided.

Can you hear me?

Loud and clear.

Alright, we're in business. Welcome, both. Before we get into the content, would you both like to give an introduction about yourselves for those who aren't familiar?

Sure, I can go first. We're not typical crypto guys. Amruth and I come from the Web2 world. I've spent all my life with startups since 2011. I started as a journalist writing about startups, then headed growth for two SaaS products before getting into crypto. Our focus has been on helping builders—hiring talent, getting funded, and helping founders get users. Rabble itself is venture-funded, backed by ecosystems like Polygon and Sui, and venture funds like Rise Labs and Delta Blockchain Fund. I'm an engineer who's never done an engineering job, which is why I have Amruth on the team.

My journey is similar. I started in Web2 startups as a founding engineer, working on everything from cyber security browsers to 3D printing SaaS. Then I wanted to come into Web3, which is a funny story. I was doing comics, so I started selling NFTs, lost money on NFTs, and then decided to find money where I lost it. I didn't know Web3 was a meme before I came into the space.

Amruth is being humble. He's actually a physicist who became an engineer and dropped out of his PhD program. Now his full-time job is larping in Web3.

It's still faster than academia, to be honest.

For sure. Amruth, do you want to share how you went from physicist to engineer to Web3 founder?

I did my bachelors in material science, which was my first foray into coding, doing application of AI/ML in material physics. Then I realized I wasn't made for academia and couldn't solve the same problem for five to ten years. I came back to India, worked as a backend engineer in my first startup, freelanced for a while, and then met Raghu at a common friend's house party. We vibed and thought, why not do this together?

It was my house party! You were at my place when we met. We've met at multiple house parties, but that's true.

Was that house party where Rabble was born or where it started?

No. We were running Rabble in its previous avatar called Builders Tribe. Our job was to support founders. I was thinking about the best way to support them, and Amruth had some interesting ideas. It's been an idea maze to get to where we are. We realized there are some interesting things to do on Telegram, and that's where the journey really began. We knew this could be a compatible working relationship, and so far so good.

Excellent. This is a great segue to learn about Rabble itself. Raghu, do you want to bring up your slides?

Awesome. Let me know if this is showing in the slideshow view.

Yes, it is.

In a nutshell, Rabble is a consumer crypto experiment built on top of Web2 social graphs. We started by running a talent agency called LumoLabs, doing hackathons and accelerators for chains. We spun off Builders Tribe, which we productized into build.so. Over 3,000 founders found benefit from that platform. But we found that 20% of founders comprised 80% of the value, and they all wanted one thing: users and distribution. They could get network and funding, but they struggled with distribution, especially in crypto.

We found two key insights. First, crypto doesn't have a mature growth stack. In Web2, you can break down the acquisition funnel into acquisition, engagement, and retention. In crypto, such a stack doesn't exist; it was influencer-led and then quest-led. Second, even though crypto users are fragmented, they all live and coordinate on two key Web2 social graphs: Telegram and Twitter.

The third insight is that building on top of social graphs helps builders go viral. Frames and miniapps have shown that you can drive a lot of users to an app if it's built on top of a social graph. The fourth insight is that building clients on open social graphs is powerful, but it's really hard, especially for Telegram.

The fifth thing we believe is that agents are the real deal. Agents provide a strong solution for fragmentation and bad UX in crypto. We've built a product that leverages agents in that sense. All these learnings came together into Rabble, a crypto app that helps users leverage their Telegram social graph for rewards and use those rewards really easily.

Let me stop this presentation and get to the demos. Are we good on time?

Yes, we're right on time.

This is Rabble, a fully functional Telegram client. It has every feature Telegram has. As an example, if I wanted to write to Amruth, I could just go and say, 'Hey, what's up?' And because he's also on Rabble, I can send him some money. The wallet loads, I pick an asset, pick an amount, and I can send it out to him.

We also have an 'earn' section. This measures the channels I own, the groups I'm part of, and my login streak. If I invite more people, my worthiness score goes up. A product like MintAir can assign a reward based on my tier, allowing me to monetize my network on Telegram. Once earned, the reward goes to your Rabble wallet, which supports ETH, Solana, Sui, and Aptos assets.

You can work with one of our Rabots, which acts as an agent that does onchain work for you. For example, you can fund a USDC Aerodrome liquidity pool with just one click. I'll show the block explorer to demonstrate that this is a real transaction. The Rabot takes the funds to Uniswap, breaks them into USDC and AERO, and deposits both assets into the liquidity pool.

As a user, I can do a quest, earn rewards, and use them in a corresponding Rabot to earn more points and interest. Everything is built on top of the Telegram social graph. Every Telegram account on Rabble has a self-custodial wallet generated against it. This allows you to talk to your Telegram friends via the Rabble wallet. I'll take a pause for questions before Amruth gets into more technical detail.

Excellent. This is a standalone app that anyone can download and connect their Telegram account to, essentially onboarding them with a Web3 wallet without them even knowing, correct?

Correct. Ideally, we want people to earn their first crypto through our quests and then get into the ecosystem that way.

And who is your main target audience? Developers, Web3 natives, or people who don't know anything about Web3 but want to explore the space?

Crypto has so many different audience sets, but largely it's traders and developers. We target both. Right now, we're focused on someone who's bought a memecoin but doesn't know they can earn crypto themselves by being a positive participant in a network.

We're going after the primary audience that hates the complexity in DeFi. The one-click thing I showed is normally eight to fifteen signatures if you had to do it yourself. We also plan to open the Rabot architecture to developers later, so if you have an interesting strategy, it can be made as simple as drag-and-drop. We want to target both mainstream users and those irritated by checking their positions on Uniswap all the time.

Another important point is abstracting away the pain of sending money to a person. You've attached a wallet to a known Web2 concept, a Telegram user account. Being able to just send ETH in your chat without copy-pasting a wallet address is a really big pain point solved.

I took that for granted! It was the first thing we built. The number of people who have said this is the easiest way to send money because they're on Telegram all the time is surprising. It's the simple things people appreciate. Amruth, do you want to deep dive into some of the technicals?

The biggest blocker was forking Telegram. Telegram is open source, but forking that mammoth codebase across web, Android, and iOS was tough. Our iOS version is in TestFlight, Android has an APK, and web is live. What Raghu showed you is actually the dev version. We can double-click on how Rabots are built and how the multichain wallet works.

I was going to ask about the Rabots and how they're built.

Currently, Rabots are deterministic agents. This is stage one, where multiple transactions are batched using smart accounts on the backend. We use TurnKey as signers for key management. The agents have their own wallets, so they go do these 12 transactions once funded. Eventually, these will be AI-driven agents that can read market data and perform analysis, like finding the best gas prices in the next 24 hours. The beauty is it all happens inside your Telegram.

Amazing. Any alpha you can share on when the AI part will be available to the public?

It's difficult to tell, but I think maybe end of this quarter, we'll have our first AI bot.

I didn't know this timeline! He's sharing it for the first time on your podcast. Building inside Telegram and using these apps inside Telegram is an unexplored territory. We had to come up with our own miniapp architecture for ETH, SOL, and SUI, which I think is several steps better than what current miniapps are. On the topic of alpha, I have one word to say: Gmonad. You'll know what it is about later.

Gmonad! If you know, you know. How can people get started with Rabble today? Where can they download the client?

Just head to app.rabble.pro. You can get started with the web client and join our community there. We're rolling out iOS and Android to close friends and family as it's still in beta testing. Web works flawlessly. Head over there for social graph quests and cool learning opportunities.

And in terms of socials, what's the best way for people to reach out to you directly? Would it be inside Rabble?

Inside the Rabble community, obviously, but we're also very active on Twitter. @0xRabble is our handle. One of us—me, Amruth, or Kavya, our other co-founder—will respond to you very quickly.

Amazing. Unfortunately, this brings us to time, but this was a very lovely conversation. Thank you for coming on the show today. The link to download the client will be in the YouTube description. Before everyone takes off, I'm going to drop a link to BitBadges where you can claim your attendance badge for watching today's episode. Again, thank you so much for coming on the show, Raghu and Amruth.

Thank you for having us.

Thanks for having us.

My pleasure. Happy Friday and happy weekend everyone. We'll catch you back here next week for another episode of DevNTell. Cheers.