Tea Protocol: Rewarding Open-Source Heroes | Timothy Lewis (CEO & Co-Founder)

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And I'm really excited for today's episode because we will be welcoming Timothy Lewis, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tea Protocol. So if you didn't know, Tea is the permissionless network powering the future of open source. So Tea anchors open source in cryptography and turns every signed commit into part of the global economy. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Timothy, learn all about Tea Protocol and if you are a OG listener of the show, you will recall that we actually hosted Tea Protocol on episode 20. So you'll get an updated look at Tea Protocol 200 episodes later. So let's have some fun and hope you enjoy.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show Timothy. I'm really ecstatic to have you on today, man.

Narb, really excited to be here, man. Been listening to this show for a while. You know, it's funny, I've known and I've seen the evolution of the Dev DAO since the beginnings of the Dev DAO, because at the same time the Dev DAO was beginning, I began a developer's DAO. I began at developer's DAO, I have at developer's DAO, I have developersdao.org. It was one of many DAOs, but I ultimately, you know, raised over I think over $50 million at the time for distributing value to open source devs. But you guys crushed it. You guys crushed it with your community, and you let an awesome community do it, but had this kind of Dev DAO similar idea. My mine was right at that same time 2018, we were doing all this like a lot of the same things together. But it's good to be here, good to connect with your audience.

Yeah, yeah. Likewise, likewise. Yeah, I guess Nader Dabit, the creator of Developer DAO, I guess he might have had like a early step on things, but yeah, I mean, the developer community here at Developer DAO has been great. A lot of lifelong friends have been made and people have found jobs and made careers for themselves out of the out of the community. So yeah, it's wonderful. Like I said, it's wonderful to have you on and thank you for being a OG listener of the show. I really appreciate that. And yeah, like I mentioned, we did have Tea Protocol and and Max on the early, very early version of the show. But before we kind of get into all the things Tea Protocol, I'd just like to ask you for an introduction in case folks aren't familiar.

Sure, Timothy Lewis. I'm a lifelong hacker and engineer. I started running BBSs when I was six or seven years old. I turned that into a couple shotgun ISDNs and a little little ISP out of my bedroom by the time I was 13. Really, the internet raised me. You know, I've been fascinated at all times with with distributed systems, computers and networking. I turned that into a love for cryptography right as right as PGP exploded. So in the like '91, '92, I started signing all my emails, making sure that I was doing the things that I needed to do to to be a part of the communication networks and kind of leverage that into a career in finance.

So ultimately I was designing low-latency networks for a lot of black box trading firms and designing infrastructure and data centers for organizations like Societe Generale, Fimat, Calyon Financial, a number of different organizations in the late '90s, early 2000s when speed was king for trading platforms. It still is, but back when it was kind of an evolving science. But you know, doing everything from the actual FPGA programming to help develop different routing better more efficient routing protocols for for for trading. You know, got super into that world. You know, loved the loved the idea of open source starting with the Cathedral and the Bazaar, you know, mid-90s, seeing everything kind of explode.

You know, got really into you know kind of some of the heroes, fell in love with guys like Larry Lessig from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Got to meet Aaron Swartz, you know as a as a younger man. I mean Aaron, he lived in Chicago, and we'd go up to some meetups up there. Like such an inspiring you know peer at that time and an awesome guy. And you know by by the late late 2010 or early 2010, 2011 is when I was first exposed to Bitcoin. And got to see what it was. Didn't understand Byzantine Fault Tolerance at the time, but you know really was open to the radical ideas about you know this what is value, what is money. That had already kind of been enshrined in me and you know then you know seeing that evolve, I really got more involved in Bitcoin in 2012, 2013.

And then seeing what was going on with colored coins, Jimmy Song, all those guys and the evolution of Mastercoin. I had moved out to LA at the time and seen JR Willett do what he did with Mastercoin and the idea of tokenized sales really evolved from Mastercoin. So I happened to be in that circle at that time, David Johnston and Michael Terpin and a number of other guys, Brock Pierce, Craig Sellers, were all doing things around tokenization and kind of breaking some rules but having fun with it. And so you know got very involved with those guys as Vitalik started making his rounds. You know I got super interested in this you know this this this world general compute idea. And you know I got into the Ethereum crowdsale and then into the Olympic network when it was you know super super raw.

And by 2015, 2016 it's you know it's all I wanted to do. I dropped my you know at the time I had been engineering with Kaiser Permanente doing some data center development with them. You know by the time 2015, 2016 shifted around, you know all I wanted to do was was work in in crypto and help a number of projects either through funding mechanisms or you know helping them just kind of design tokenomics back then when no one had any idea what tokenomics was. So that was a lot of fun. But by 2017 when we had the ICO explosions, I was working with this little really distributed group, this distributed network of advisors and you know we were helping fund a lot of the major projects.

So you know I helped out with one of the largest rounds for Hashgraph. You know found my ability to not only be able to help raise capital but also explain some of the ideas behind you know how to create decentralized communities. And so you know my crypto career kind of took off from there. I did I created an asset management company called Ikigai Asset Management. Then I then I created the DevX DAO Developer's DAO in 2018, 2019. You know a lot of this was from my love when when I looked at the foundations and the model of how people were distributing value back then. It was just really kind of spray and pray, not the best devs in the world were in the ecosystem at the time. You couldn't get the guys that were the the real the the enterprise level guys and it was tough to to see through what the technology could provide.

I had I had become friends with Max in 2013. You know Max and I had worked together on a on a local music platform. Both of us have a real love for for indie music and you know we worked together for a couple years on that and just you know remained friends, worked together on and off. But you know because of my position I have such admiration for him and what he brought to open source. You know at my position in 2018 was when I decided like hey, I can create you know some sort of foundation model to be able to give better value to developers, open source developers by open source developers. Again the idea of this Developer's DAO.

And you know we were successful with that to in in somewhat. I think by any record we we distributed over 18 million dollars, 18 million Euros in in grants to developers over about a three-year period, which is a real solid value. And you know we had our ups and our downs, had our disagreements, had political battles like all DAOs do, but you know enjoyed it. And it was one of those things, the first grant that we had given out was to Max for for Max to to think about what he would do differently. I'd given him an assignment about what to do differently with Homebrew in you know that time in '22 or '21. What he what he might do differently. And so we started talking about it then. At the end of this paper he and I you know kind of came together and collaborated on at the time what was going to be just a rewards protocol.

And ultimately, you know we've spent the last four years, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and a lot of changes, a lot of pivots to to build out something that you know we can believe in the primitives of and now very excited to get to market and introduce to everyone the what we're trying to do, what we hope to accomplish and and where it intersects with the crowd and community that we need.

Wow. That's an that's an amazing intro and background you have. You're basically like all over the place. And it seems like all these experiences that you had kind of have come together and and brought you here to basically revolutionize the open-source landscape here. In today's world especially, open source is more important than ever. I think more and more people are understanding how important some of these these smaller packages that kind of go into building some of these bigger and bigger apps from like enterprise to startups. Excuse me. So I guess to kind of help set the scene for maybe some people who haven't had their toes dipped into the open-source world.

I mean, personally I I didn't get into open source until I joined Developer DAO and really started seeing the value of it. But just from your perspective and all you've seen and and perhaps picking Max's mind as well, like why why do developers contribute to open source in the first place? A lot of people if you if the audience doesn't realize, they don't get paid for that and a lot of like you said blood, sweat and tears from your guys working on Tea Protocol and other folks working on whatever open-source project there is out there. Why do people do what they do in the open-source community? Why are they still sticking around?

Yeah, I think I think that everyone has their own reasons for doing it. You know some of some of it's social. Right, for some people it's you know that builds community and it builds camaraderie, builds friendships, which is an awesome way to build. For some people it builds a resume. You know, some people just you know don't have the the showable work. So going into this public space and building in public you know helps with that. For some people some people are driven to share knowledge. Like I do believe you know if you want to go fast go by yourself but if you want to go far go with others. Right? And so if we're going to build crazy things together, if we're going to build you know big world-changing things, open it up.

And now, you know for for me, you know I think as you mentioned earlier, open-source being more important than ever. I mean with the types of transactions that we're all involved with online now and the types of identities and the types of information that we have, it's more important than ever to be able to trust what you're running and not just take for granted that that trust from you know an Apple App Store or from you know a Google Play Store. You know those gates we've seen how fallible those gates can be. So a lot of different reasons that people will have to build open source, but you know it's it's a changing world. Not not everyone doesn't get paid. You know there are a lot of people who do. Some of the paychecks though come from people who are trying to change and steer projects. Right? So that's a different thing.

You know so so that's made it made it made you know that kind of difficulty. We do need to figure out how to value some of this stuff. You know 90 I'd say 98 percent somewhere around, we've had numbers before, but the large majority of open source truly doesn't never really had much value, right? But the small percentage of open source, the you know this top 2 percent, top 3 percent creates you know some of the largest value of software in the world. And and most large enterprise systems are built on open source as you said. And we are moving into a different place now though obviously. I mean the the developer world has been flipped on its head for the last you know year year and a half or so and continuing to evolve.

So there'll be different things that people look into. There was a Karpathy statement recently talking about the the the deep-level dependencies and whether or not you know those strictly will be used or whether or not you will yoink you know the important aspects of it or your or your AI LLM assistant harness will go ahead and change that. But for me, you know it's about valuing contribution and the original ideas. You know I very much am an AI you know AI first developer now. That's what I do and so I wouldn't go back for the world. But we do need to understand I still believe that the ideas come from the edge, the ideas come from the experience, and you know doing those in a community setting you know adds to understanding, adds to listening to the other people that are going to be using it.

But you know open source has always been split and there's been different types of the ideas what is open source. Right? So you know whether or not it's a FOSS model or Stallman's model, all these different kind of ways that we need to recognize. I mean how many different licenses are there? There's like 200 plus primary licenses that people consider right now. You know so you know we have to it's been it's been so decentralized for so long. Like open source hasn't recognized the parallelism between its you know origins and you know blockchain networks. You know there's so many people are so stuck still in that you know crypto is only for you know scams and and memes and doggy coins etc. So you know I'm excited to try to merge these these communities together and do it in a permissionless way. You know this is what's important. Right? Like the systems and the tools that we have you know allow us to build things permissionlessly.

And you know I very much am a believer in decentralization and distributed compute and you know making sure that people can still have their privacy, their anonymity and you know can contribute to a greater good. So we're hoping that we're building some tools that help create better ways for people to be acknowledged for their work. Whether they're doing it as a human typing syntax or whether they're you know they have an amazing agentic harness that's just plowing through you know plowing through codebases. You know there's a recognition of value that has to be exchanged. And that will ever change more now I think from direct human syntax to AI-generated. But there's also a whole host of problems when we're trying to battle maintaining a public project with you know the the outside AI pull request, you know denial of service attack that's going on right now.

Right? So so you know hopefully we have some solutions in line for that. And hopefully we can get some people to experiment. Right? So the thing that I'm believing firmly about when you're trying to create a community value that it is you know it follows you know the the principle the Metcalfe's principle, these laws of network value. And so ultimately you know if we can get some really good people on in early, contributing, building based on some of the primitives then I think we'll have a shot of being something a little disruptive and a little interesting for all people.

Yeah, well well said and I think this segues well into my next question for you, which is I guess with all this experience and as you mentioned trying to bring together a community blockchain and open source, I guess all of this came together to become Tea, Tea Protocol. For our audience who might not have heard of Tea Protocol, what is it and what problems are you guys looking to solve around it?

Yeah. So originally Tea started off as a rewards protocol for open source. Our goal initially was to try to understand how to rank and value the dependencies. You know not try not to figure out everything but you know we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out a a ranking graph that could be interesting for dependencies. And you know I think we've done a fairly good job at that but the dependencies aren't the only part of the puzzle obviously. You know there's so many other applications that sit on top that need to be valued. And so you know the project itself when it started we headed out that direction. We also had created at the time what was called Tea CLI, now called pkgx. So pkgx is a package manager, package runner not manager, but that that at the time early on you know was very public about the cross hairs of where it would lie within the blockchain ecosystem.

And then kind of pulled back from that. And it's become a very interesting package runner. It's it's amazing for agentic work. Right? So it can you know basically create sandboxes at will, you're able to easily go and run things you know kind of kind of dangerously in your sandbox without having to worry about the rest of your developer environment by using pkgx. So you know but now now you know at the first attempt to figure out how to bring it out, again I had founded the company with Max, I I raised about $17 million for us back in '21, '22 and then I took a bit of a sabbatical. So I was on the outside for about a year and a half. And I came back late 2024, so August of '24. And during that kind of run-up, there was there was an attempt to try to figure out a testnet. There was an initial testnet that really was just a dapp that was going to require people to register repositories and then based on the the teaRank they would get a value back.

And you know this was done in a way you know by someone who I kind of disagreed with the the directional pull towards it, but but it was done in a way to where I think we were probably the most kind of air-dropped farmed project probably in recent history. You know there were a lot of systematic misunderstandings I think by the by the person who had been architecting at that time and it basically caused this huge you know overflow of spam not only to not only to GitHub with account creation but to NPM. At one time we had over 3 percent of the supply chain were fake packages that were derived to manipulate the the the teaRank the Tea protocol, right? And that's crazy. 3 percent of NPM. And last year a few months ago, probably about eight months ago, there were a gross number of security releases about that what happened.

The fact that it is it's again it's a supply chain issue, right? It's a provenance issue. The fact that these could get in. You know these these have been permissionless systems for a long time but just like the problems with email, unless there are there is spam prevention, then you're just going to have absolute bloat. And a lot of these types of systems that we all work on can't face the monetary pressure of those sorts of things. Right? So so people do. Somebody's somebody's paying a server bill somewhere, right? And the more spam and slop that you put up on these things the the weaker the systems are going to be. So when I had gotten back I had to figure out what I was dealing with. You know we had some interesting primitives on the reward side. We had most of the Tea protocol done but we really didn't have anything the tokenomics in my eyes when I came back to really look at it was would have worked if token always go up but everyone knows token doesn't always go up. Right?

So you know when I when I looked at it you know I kind of took a pause took a beat to think about you know what could we do. And at that time a lot of the Optimism and Arbitrum networks were starting to to come alive and I had built I had been a part of building a lot of early Layer 1s and I had been been a part of like thinking about communities, getting people to build, doing either business development or running foundation work for what tools were needed especially during like the 2016 to 2020 period. And so that was kind of my bread and butter. And so when I thought about the tokenomics, you know I like autonomy in in being able to create our own our own kind of our own future. And I wanted to be able to create something that we could no matter what blockchain that we ultimately ended up on we could control where we were going to head.

And so when I thought about the Layer 2s, I thought about the things that we could make our Layer 2 different. Right? So I I started thinking about a blockchain for open source, a blockchain for software. Right? And I started thinking about you know what would be what would be needed. And validating the different signatures, the different cryptographic signatures that have been used in development for the last 20 years was more than obvious to me. At the time you know Ethereum which has been again when I look at blockchains the value of a blockchain how much value is locked on a blockchain for the for the ability to transact and how much trust has to go into a system that has that much value unlocked. You know I I've been a big fan of Ethereum since 2013. So happy to be building on top of that but it didn't have these primitives that were available to us, the GPG PGP at the time P256 hadn't arrived yet so this was pre-Fussaka pre-7702.

So you know try to also look at X.509 leaf certs and trying to be able to verify those types of signatures. So around the end of 2024, we started building out this Layer 2. You know we've built it in a way to where you know we're very comfortable internal team being able to to to to hack and slash at different abilities to make it faster do all the things. But speed and cheapness doesn't make a Layer 2, right? Like that's not that's not going to get something to survive. You know but our tokenomics are built in a way to where it rewards not only those that are building on our own system but more so those that are the the the dependencies the registered the registered repositories.

You know every transaction that we have the majority of fees goes to fund the that as open source. And so we're building out governance tools, we're building out different things but you know now we can do things like you know verify builds on chain. You know very use a package runner to to validate policy of of of built software, go pay individual commits by their commit signature. So this was kind of the thing for me when I looked at other systems that were trying to reward developers, everyone had to sign up. And and a two-sided marketplace never works, right? You can't you know you you have to have people there before it makes sense to try to create you know some some business around or some opportunities around a you know payments.

And for us looking at the SSH and and PGP GPG signatures that we have for some of the greatest software over the last you know 21 years now are all there publicly available. We can go you know historically and we can go in the future direct funding down to a commit. We can do things like a bounty reward, which allows someone to create a bounty around an issue on on GitHub and then once that issue is a pull request tags the issue that's pulled in, then we can permissionlessly verify that and a payment gets released. So we're doing a couple really cool tricks. But we hope people come out and build using those using those pre-compiled primitives to where we can build nicer, more fun, more interesting stuff along the way.

Wow. Yeah. That certainly sounds like quite the complex but I mean it it seems like it's necessary like protocol around open source and believe me I know from experience how say interesting difficult it is to run a a testnet and a rewards program and keeping everyone happy. You know we had over 1.7 million like registrants emails and you know I'd say again a good 60 percent of that absolute spam. People were creating these incredibly intelligent you know networks of packets packages to go get rewarded and the worst part about that was trying to figure out how to clean up that slop. Right? So so I didn't want to sacrifice the the token economy to a group that didn't didn't follow the rules.

You know I don't mind, I love the participation, but this is supposed to be one person one you know one reward, not one person 10,000 rewards. So along the way like last year when we were trying to cut through the noise, also you know when we were going up and trying to line up things with talking with exchanges, I've I've known so many of the people at exchanges for many many years. But when we were lining up you know people would would question like what is this. There's no way like our initial testnet you know we had more transactions we were running it on Alchemy at the time, it was the most transactions on a testnet that Alchemy's ever seen by a you know by a country mile. So we were getting a lot of a lot of activity but it's easy to run transactions on a testnet, there's no value, right? There's no cost to it, right?

So people were creating tools for that. And so everyone wanted me to okay, prove that these there's some realness to these people. And I didn't want to go the route of strict KYC. So we ended up working with ZK-pass and a zero-knowledge proof on verifying and validating individuals by the ownership of exchange credentials. So we used a number of different exchange credential verification you know things that we built in to where we were able to compress that you know 1.7 million individuals that could get rewards down into a more manageable 165,000, 160,000 of the of the kind of this airdrop I I refer to a lot of them as on-chain natives. You know because these these people you know from great communities awesome like our Indonesia community incredible right? Like really awesome people, our Korean community fantastic. Turkey, you know India, you know there's there's so many so many parts of the world in China that that have really shown up. Because a lot of people do care about open source.

You know a lot of people especially now now open source is like such a measure of pride, national pride in in a lot of Asian countries. Right? It is it is a way to break through and to way to participate and I love that the way that they've embraced that and you know I'm a huge proponent of open-source open-weight LLM models and you know really hope this this fight keeps coming because again I think that this you know we're we need to go far together on on a lot of this stuff. But we also need to recognize that during the last term you know the people that actually built the hard stuff or much of the you know the infrastructure didn't get rewarded, struggled through it while you know some people you know were able to extremely monetize that in a way to where it didn't really fall back into kind of a recognition for for value. And so you know we're hoping to be able to create systems that that you know people can easily use without much without much interference and being able to smoothly just contribute. You know a subscription base to to all the greats of the things that you're using while you're plowing through your you know LLM or your cursor or you know whatever it is that you're using.

Right? Yeah, yeah totally totally. And I guess we segued here naturally and I did want to pick your brain around AI a bit. I know you you you're quite into the the agentic coding and whatnot. So if you're if you're not you're on the wrong side of history right now. That's right, like this this is a new form of compute and you know simple English is is really the the syntax, right?

But you know you have to do it in a you have to understand your your context. There was a study I think by it was UCL a couple weeks back talking about you know after the Claude code leak happened, they were able to go do deep research on you know what the what percentage of like the completion of a thing was really being driven by LLM making full decision versus properly tuned harness making that decision. And it was I believe the number that they had come up with was 98.4 percent the harness. Right? So you know that that tells you about like when we think about these individual knowledge worker pillars that come up. It's going to be all the other tools that we can build around them to let the LLM work, right? To let the LLM do what it does best as it goes into AGI and then it's going to have everything. Right? So fine, I we'll submit to that.

But but along the way it's going to have to use the toolsets. And you know it's been great to watch these toolsets mature. You know from doing the simple API calls to GPT before you know the the chat interfaces launched and then then the moment that AutoGPT and BabyAGI came out it was it was like a lightbulb moment for myself and seeing where but the models just weren't ready and the harnesses weren't ready and the tool calls weren't ready and MCP didn't exist. Right? So all the things that get that are getting built up and they're really getting built you know collaboratively by the edges like it always happens, like the stuff always does right? So it's been great to see that. And you know I had I don't think in I really have not been so dedicated to a terminal in you know probably 15 years. You know like you know I I had done a tremendous amount of work from the early '90s to you know kind of the 2010 period. And then I was doing architecture stuff and you know doing low-latency network design and FPGA programming stuff like that.

But I wasn't you know I didn't get into you know I wasn't designing mobile apps and I wasn't doing cloud-based SaaS development, right? And then you know got involved in crypto so you're doing other things I was doing contracts writing and things like that but not nearly as dedicated. And now I just can't stop. And it is it is so much fun. There's so much to build and you know building out and now as you're progressing from like a prompt engineering to a context engineering to an environment engineering and harness engineering and orchestration. So many parallels exist in like any well-engineered distributed systems architecture, right? Because you're looking for for ways to reduce latency, you're looking for ways to provide you know reliable execution, right? And and and what I call I like to call turning the harnesses into more probabilistic determinism, right? So it's like it's not true deterministic software but the higher probability that you have they will outcome in that determined way that's what we're going for.

And you have to manage things across the board. So I've been obsessed with those harnesses and building out agentic systems myself. But when I look at those systems you know what is required in the back. You know what's important for me when I when I go out and I use say a Homebrew, NPM, pnpm, the those things are are you know the systems right now are generally grabbing a a latest a latest package you know I'm generally not pinning any particular thing. We've seen all the supply chain issues that these things just have had. So we need better supply chain security. And so we need to understand these tools as they're grabbing things how can we figure out some other way to to to create a more reliable distribution of software on the on the dependency level. So excited about the way that we can use the blockchain in that way.

Since we can have um since we can validate build hashes and signatures on the on chain directly, people can contribute to understanding the the value or reliability of those things as it gets built out. So you know that that's one of the things I'm really excited about. I think also you know agents need identity. And ideally it is it is an immutable global decentralized identity that we all that we all move towards. And agents need to be able to to reliably spend uh assets or trade or transfer or do things. And you know I think as as all RWAs come over as the tokenization eats the world, you know the although I love the new Link product by Stripe and I think it's incredible, I'll still go I I'm hoping that the decentralized networks provide the the asset transfer um you know cost savings and expectations that we'll all need to get to as it progresses.

But yeah, if you're not Honestly the last three months, you know I try to look at syntax as little as possible. I try to make sure that I have a number of not only the development harnesses but audit harnesses as well, agents as well and you know really I pass it off to my team to do any of the final review. But I I don't think I'll I think I'm happy here. Don't need to go back. Yeah, I personally I I feel the same since I think late December when Anthropic had their their Claude promo where yeah 4o had just come out. I mean that that was a you know that was the time right? Like everything kind of moved in that area. Or was it was it 4o then or 4? When when when when did that come out? I I honestly I don't remember. They they come out so frequently now that it's hard to keep up. But yeah like I I couldn't imagine myself living without it now. It's it's so powerful it's such a productivity booster.

And I guess on this point, where do you think software engineering in general is going to go? Like for the mid- to senior-level engineers like how do you think these agents, these harnesses are going to kind of change the role if at all?

You know I again I think that it's a question of alignment and and governance. Um and especially when it comes to like community software. You know I think when because again I spent four years building a DAO, working in DAOs trying to understand DAOs, you know and that wasn't the first I mean I had been working on different DAOs since like 2015. And I love the premise but you know still we need to make the tools easier right? I think AI is going to make using blockchain easier because AI is going to make user experience better, AI is going to get all that you know and especially now with the P256 passkey stuff, everyone can securely log in from an iPhone you know and be able to access these tools in a way that's not clunky when when they're interfacing with it. But what I expect is um you know again developers need to govern and and make sure their systems are aligned, right?

They need to obviously spec-driven development, test-driven development all day these days right? Like it's clearly defining making sure you don't go over too much that's a big part of it. Right? And then then then obviously the audit side of it will still be there, right? But now you're going to get overwhelmed with how much if you have got critical software. But when I look at public software, when I look at community software, you know some of the big pillars I think are going to start to shake, right? Like I think GitHub's going to start to shake. It's just not built Git itself is just not built really well to be built for humans, you know? It was it was kind of the the Linux core team and the way that they were kind of distributing patches at that time and kind of expanded and then when the team took it in 2008 to turn into GitHub it's you know it's okay. I never loved it. I mean I um probably like to get better than Subversion but you know that's not saying much right?

Um but some of these big pillars are are going to be going to be changing. And when I look now at at big public projects, you know there are so much there is so much activity from both sides. I kind of think about um you know a the participation in in that you know it's kind of like proof of work but you know I call it kind of proof of inference. Right? And you're going to need people to pay um to to try to excel or push forward your project. You might have things that maybe you don't want to spend the inference on. Maybe someone else has got a Claude Max account they can go max out after you know five hours of work rather than you, right? But you know there's also going to be those that are using it for bad, right? So so we need to encourage the participation of those that are using inference for good to negate the principles of those that are using inference for for evil and we need to come up with better systems to do that.

And for me it's you know evaluating doing the audits you know on anything that comes in there's an extreme cost to that. So really in the world that we exist in now it's kind of like this radical denial of service to these maintainers and I I had mentioned this before, you know the mid-level and senior-level engineers that have been so enshrined and embedded in like a this is the way of life, this is the world and they've built a fantastic career on that, some of those them are going to be more reluctant to to move because you know the tooling takes a long time and you know we didn't used to live in a world where you know you change your tooling often you know. There's people out there still using Vim all day every day and that's just you know what they're doing right? But you know now you have to change your toolset you know to be able to accelerate every time something radical comes out.

You know we weren't only mentioning the the models changing and yeah I think it was 4o because 4o only came out a couple weeks ago or whatever. Um you have to you not only have to pay attention to the nuances of the model, you know how they were trained but then also you know the tool that you can call and and there's a lot of as these emerge there's there's safe tools there's unsafe tools but the existing developers need to find their their piece with that, right? You still need to sharpen your tool, we still need to have humans that can understand code but honestly the code's going to start getting so complex that humans can't can't read it. That's just what it's going to be. You know and that's awesome but we we have to you know build better tools to go audit and go validate um to to to make sure that we're in a safe situation.

But you know excited to build some of the anchor some of the primitives of of what we're doing in the cryptographies that have been used around development for the last 20 years and support the historical view to be able to create you know identity from the provenance of your code commits over the last publicly over the last two decades. But you know excited for the future where you know policy can dictate you know packages that that you might want to use and that you can trust you know based on you know ideally systems of of a value that are being directed at those that are creating those tools that we're going to be using anyway.

Amazing. Yeah and it's certainly very exciting to to see kind of all this come together and evolve. Um yeah it's moving so fast it's hard to keep up. Um but you kind of alluded to it and I was going to ask you um kind of bringing this back to um Tea Protocol, just curious to hear what your North Star vision is for the protocol and what the roadmap looks like the the rest of this year and if there's any alpha you can share with us.

Sure, sure sure sure. Absolutely. Um so again we we've started this in 20 late '21. Um we kind of mentioned it first publicly sometime around March of '22, we had a nice TechCrunch article and uh then we released the Tea CLI in November of '22 and um you know we got a lot of people again this is when we caused this massive shortly after we caused this massive spam flood for both NPM and um and in GitHub. And um you know our but we did the one thing that we did do was amass a massive community. And through that ZK-KYC uh application that we did, we were able to really confidently break that into to about 165,000 people, which is great. All different types of people, which is important in a in a in a blockchain community, right?

So you know some the highest level open source engineers, some you know people that are just there to you know spread the vibes, some people that are just there to you know disrupt call out scam token, scam token, scam token because they want their free money, right? This is the war that they wage is is via Twitter, right? Um but we're very excited now after trying to figure out again you're not trying to time the market but you are trying to catch or race um an evolving field at the speed of an exponential knowledge machines at this point, right? So you have to so much software lost their moat over the last six months. Right? So you know I believe firmly that we one of the things that can create value is community. So we have this large community that's there that knows about us so we don't have to play the games with our tokenomics that get that.

So we haven't had to you know forfeit a lot of our tokenomics for exposure in in any way. Um and so we've been trying to figure out the best way to launch. Our community knows this now but I'm a big believer in DEXs. I'm a huge proponent of Aerodrome and the team at Velodrome Labs and Aero. So back start of last November we had already you know agreed with them that we were going to go do um a launch with them, an ignition launch with them, and um you know we are finalizing the final details of it. Um I don't think anything's going to disrupt it so I I will say here and wait for the actual official comms on Twitter but the voting period for this is going to start on May 28th and then the actual token and mainnet launch are coming on June 4th.

Um so you know even in this period we've got about five weeks left for we still have to go um wrap everything up and and get everything there which means I mean our our website hadn't been touched in about two years. I've got you know this is a complete overhaul, like complete new stuff. So you know we've had a lot of things converge but you know getting this out is going to be a lot of fun. Um hoping that we that we've done the right things, you know it's mixture between is the technology useful do you have a a crowd that that believes in what this is and where it's evolving towards and do you have the attention and awareness and also you know have you not sacrificed your token economy for the mixture of those things. And you know I think that we've done a great job all the way around. I know we're in you know headed into summer where you have kind of a low liquidity period across all markets.

Um but I also am a big believer in the you know kind of the Bitcoin super cycle. You know I've been around this for a long time and um you know I think that if you look at historic historically and the way that things kind of are when things are launched and when things are where things are at I think we're in a good time. You know it's it is the market right now is in a place to where it's not noisy, there's not a lot of nonsense going on, um so hopefully it'll be easier to get the word out, show people what we're doing. You know as we as we do launch, you know we're going to be talking about the the exact recipients, but we have a large number of projects that we're doing these retroactive grants to early on. We've you know with our Chai Oracle which kind of validates teaRank which is similar to PageRank for dependencies.

You know we have over 20,000 developers that are going to be getting very handsome rewards um for it and again this is permissionless. Don't need them to sign up. Hey guys, hope you still have your GPG key because if you do, you know it can you know it has this on it, right? So um you know hope hope that hits well you know when Linus Torvalds gets gets his portion of Tea, hopefully he doesn't just dismiss it. Um but you know that's going to be fun. But also the other projects like I'm a huge fan of libp2p. That's one of many that's going to be getting this direct direct distribution right around our genesis and there are others. And we've got ways for people to participate and have them kind of push towards their value towards these projects and show their you know show their excitement about them.

And we've done our best you know I think we've got some gates in there that's going to prevent a lot of the spam attacks that we did have. That was my number one thing. I don't want to be I don't want to cause more spam. That's you know bottom line just just in life don't don't do more spam. But you know we're excited for this to come out. Um you know we'll be releasing different information about what it is that we're building on top. We've got some cool primitives early on, you know again you can send directly to any GPG SSH PGP X.509 cert so you know you'll be able to identify developers and if you want to just contribute for the things that they're doing, you're going to just be able to do it. You're not going to have to look and see whether or not you have to buy them a coffee or you're sending their Patreon money or whatever the hell it is. But this this will be a you know as long as the developers have been signing their their code you will be able to go send them send them value.

And we've also done it in a way to where uh you know it can have basically a timeout on it because again some of these things are lost, right? Some of these some of these and we and I don't want to invest some money and not enterprises wouldn't want to invest a lot of money in giving someone something if it was going to be lost, right? So we've got some really cool systems for that verification so the capital isn't lost. But we also have these bounties, so the issues, taking issues, you know contributing towards issues, and it's easy also just to contribute towards any of the repositories themselves. So we'll come out with those features first and then and all it will be MCP of you know accessible. We have this chain.md file that we've been working on to make sure that you know these things really are understood agentically. You know I expect especially as we're driving forward into the first month everyone's going to see what our agentic plans look like between Tea and pkgx.

And you know really it's about other people building here though and people trying to come in and figure out governance, right? So you know a lot of projects start off as this association. It's kind of this old model where you have the Swiss association that launches the asset American Puerto Rican entity that created the developer team that created the development Swiss association that launches it nonprofit association. But that needs to move to progressive decentralization. You know I'm a decentralist, you know I hope that that's there. You know we are looking for people all around to go get involved. Um we've got some governance systems up but I expect the per-project governance things to be awesome. And my goal and hope is that these projects when they come and register they'll start to understand what their own community value is.

And they'll start to understand that crypto assets and crypto can mean lots of different things. It's not just you know a financial instrument, you know voting power and access rights to different things etc. And we're hoping that different tools get built on but the obvious one to me is governance, you know? And as you contribute your inference you should probably get some governance so you can probably you know try to have a larger voice in different communities. So June 4th and we're going to Aerodrome's the the location of my choice for that. They're going to be going through their big metadex convergence. You know we'll have hopefully a large pool by that time during that convergence. But a bunch of other CEXs as well. Excited, man. It's been about four years in the making.

Wow. Yeah. And congratulations I guess early congratulations for for that and uh thank you for dropping that alpha here. Get your alpha on DevNTell on the bleeding edge as as always. Um and Timothy I know we're over time here. I wanted to put in one more question to help send us off. For the aspiring founders watching today in the audience or even developers, I guess over your tenured experience building and founding companies helping raise money, what have you, is there any key piece of advice um that you'd be willing to to offer our audience today to help them yeah kickstart things?

Yeah, honestly I'd say first that like health is wealth. Right? Like making sure you take care of yourself. It's tough now like I I have been personally over the last four months, five months I'm averaging like four hours of sleep a night and and I can't keep that up forever. Um but primarily you know all of us treating ourselves and having that healthy body healthy mind matters so much. Um you know I've gone through ups and downs in my own health and getting to that you know is really important. But you know stay curious and and that the only constant is change. Right? So everything can get flipped on its head. You know the the tomorrow wasn't promised, you know we're all here so you know go build your hearts out. Like go build some stuff. Go be disruptive. You know go do things that that you didn't think would change and you know ideally make some friends along the way. And enjoy it. You know this is this is a marathon, it is not a sprint and the technologies will always change so be willing and able to change with the technologies.

Beautifully said and I think that's no no better way to to cap things off here. Um Timothy thank you so much. Really really appreciate you coming on the show today, taking the time out of your busy day your Friday evening to come chat with us. Everything you explained T is looking really exciting. And wish you guys the best of luck um on on your TGE your launch and yeah looking forward to to seeing it all come together.

You know whenever this happens we we always over- we seem to always overperform. You know we had this crazy airdrop period, this airdrop farmer explosion, but we also did a Coinlist sale last year, we were the the most oversubscribed sale of the year. And you know we're trying to get things right, nothing will ever be perfect but we're very excited. Thank you for having us here trying to get the word out and you know come check us out on on Telegram or really Discord. Um we really need to bring more of the developer minds into into some of the conversations especially those on the Web3 side that have governance an understanding of governance and the problems with it. So very excited to get the word out to your audience and yeah looking forward to seeing you all on the other side.

Excellent, excellent. And yeah and all the details around everything we discussed today will be in the description below. So it piques your interest definitely give it a looksee. And with that I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be and we will catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. Until then have a good one, folks. Cheers!