 So my name is Karl Benitz and I'm the co-founder of status which is an open source messaging platform that we're creating basically to interact with decentralized applications on the Ethereum public blockchain. Yeah and I'm I'm Jared the other co-founder and working on the same project obviously. So how did you come up with an idea for status in the first place? I mean originally like we were actually looking at doing like a Bitcoin version of a mobile browser back in 2013 and that was always like a sort of side project never really launched. We're playing around with like mastercoin counterparty colored coins and namecoin and all these kind of interesting projects that we're trying to push the capabilities of blockchain and then when sort of the Ethereum white paper came out in 2014 it was just solved all of the problems that these projects were having. Oh so you've been working on this for a while then? Well I mean 2014 there was no implementation of Ethereum but like we've been around the scene since the very early days and but it wasn't until probably 2015 that there actually became implementations that you could start playing around with. Yeah it wasn't really until actually about 14 months ago now that we started treating it as a full-time thing and started to build out the team and such. Fantastic so why don't you guys kind of give us a rundown exactly what is status, who would use it, how would we use it? Sure. Okay so I guess what we're trying to create is just in very easy way for non-technical people to begin interacting with blockchain technologies and in particular decentralized applications. So what sort of started out is would create this sort of browser for Ethereum like a web three browser you could say. What became apparent to us as we're building this on mobile is maybe that wasn't the best user interface and so it kind of evolved into this messaging type platform so if you're familiar with something like WeChat status looks a lot like WeChat when you open it but the difference of course is it's completely peer-to-peer and we don't have any centralized service in the background. So how would you use it? Well you can send messages to people, you can basically take control of your wealth, you can send payments to people. For now that's only that's only Ether but we're adding ERC20 support soon and then most interestingly you can interact with decentralized applications both in this sort of web view but also in a chat context. Yeah it's also important to note that status is actual Ethereum node in the participating in the network itself. So it's fully peer-to-peer and it's built entirely on top of the Ethereum sub-protocols. So we're all familiar with the Ethereum blockchain and we use the LES protocol to synchronize the blockchain headers but we do messaging over another sub-protocol of Ethereum called Whisper which has some really interesting sort of dark browsing and privacy functions built into it and later when we have image and audio support those will be running over Swarm which is a sort of decentralized file storage. You can kind of think of it like BitTorrent with an economic layer. Now so the value proposition would be it is a peer-to-peer decentralized messaging ecosystem that may go into competition against WeChat for example. Yeah and I mean that value proposition you described obviously only appeals to the small cohort of the population but I really think the value proposition that some of these DApps are going to provide are going to be greater than their centralized counterparts and there's going to be all these use cases that weren't really possible before blockchains were around and so a lot of these DApps that are coming along that we want to integrate with are going to be super fascinating inside of this chat type of context. So you might be familiar with Augur or Noces. Perhaps you're having a conversation with me via status and we could place some kind of social bit on the outcome of any event. This is just like one example but as the ecosystem gets as the ecosystem develops more and more there's just going to be this whole sort of huge suite of different DApps that you'll be able to use with inside status. Now you mentioned you're you're sorry you mentioned you were a full node right? Yeah well yeah we're full like we're a node like a real node but we sink by the client so you're not you're not a full node in the sense that you're sinking the entire blockchain. All right cool that was my good that was okay thanks. Yeah but I mean the important the important thing is with status is you can actually take Ethereum and the entire DApps the ecosystem around with you and you can have access to any of those DApps at your fingertips just like you would in a web browser. Okay let's run through a login so for example if I'm using status would it be the same process like Facebook I put my email my address I pick a username like how would the security onboarding work? Well I mean like whenever you start looking at things like that typically you're logging into a server per se and I mean it looks kind of similar on the front end but the difference by the way by the way you guys doing a great job for UX so that's one thing I do really love what you guys are doing because I saw the whole the mock-up that you did so that's really cool. Thank you yeah I mean so basically you generate this private key that you've entered your password in um future will have in the future will have like biometrics or a pin code and then you use decrypts your your your private key when you when you log in per se okay but you're not really logging into anywhere you're just decrypting whatever private keys and if I lose that is it so if I lose that pin am I fucked? That's a really good question um so this is a whole shift of switching responsibility for the end users right sure which is why we're we want to solve that using these sort of blockchain based identity systems which is actually smart contracts which acts as a proxy to you that reside on the on the blockchain and they manage your assets so if you throw away your phone or you lose your private keys there is ways that you can actually recover ownership or custody over this proxy smart contracts that you controlled with a previous private key and one of those is potentially using social proof so you would sign when you creates this proxy contract you actually create these sort of signed messages with your existing private key and you distribute them your threat to your friends or you can hide under your bed or in like a a safe deposit box or something like this and then you can get three or five of these private messages in the future when you do lose your phone to recover that account Facebook started rolling out something pretty interesting too they started rolling out trusted contacts in case somebody hacks your account or something happens where you can call on your trusted contacts and be like hey can you verify who I am yes it's a it's a very similar in concept except for this is decentralized fantastic so switching gears let's say hypothetically we have I don't know like a million users come tomorrow start using status are you guys worried right now on the scalability like transaction cost will it cost me to actually use like if I send a message is that a is that a transaction cost the speed of everything so is there kind of like a roadmap right now when it comes to okay you built this on top of Ethereum but is Ethereum does Ethereum have the necessary scalability at the current moment yeah at the current moment everything is pretty much experimental in alpha even Ethereum isn't even its final stages of development they're working on things like proof of stake and sharding which are to address these sort of scalability issues in terms of sending a message no that's not done on the blockchain it doesn't cost you anything okay it's done over a sub protocol it just uses the same node base as the Ethereum blockchain does okay and so yeah so that's pretty much it what's your business model your question more directly like we're not we're not in a position where we can be scaling right now so status itself is an alpha as well yeah we haven't undergone our security audits which is something we're going to begin this quarter okay and we're kind of aiming for a mainland release q1 of next year that's good it's around the corner so I was going to ask what's your business model for status or you're not worrying about that right now and you're just worrying about user acquisition sure so I think it's some of these new sort of economic models can be created through token issuance that's really fascinating so rather than trying to um rather than trying to extract as much value as we can from users we can issue this token this token represents sort of governance within the application but it's also a utility token that's required for certain features like what are some features um I think the most most practical example is a push notification market um Derek can probably explain that yeah so I mean you come from a marketing background so you're very familiar with this sort of advertising space and so if you look at how like say platform owners such as Facebook or YouTube they're offering these sort of services for for free but they do cost a lot in bandwidth and sort of server costs and that sort of thing which I mean drives them to want to essentially extract value from their users and how they typically do this is either by data brokers selling the data directly or developing some kind of app platform and generating leads for advertisers so what we're what we're really trying to do is actually start putting the the sort of governing abilities and of status to stakeholders in the status network itself uh this becomes really interesting because then like a lot of these costs which are hidden from us in these free services actually become explicit uh so Carl had mentioned the push notifications uh we actually create a market around basic services like push notifications um safe in a decentralized application uh achieving a similar user experience to what we have today certain things become a little non-trivial uh and that is uh this idea that's okay if I come offline I'm no longer in the peer-to-peer network how do I get notified that somebody is messaging me offline uh so with this it allows you to define some uh delegates uh via a deposit some node in the network to essentially hold your messages offline for you and send your push notification okay and then you pay for these uh via microtransactions um but what's really interesting about this is it makes that cost of very explicit so you're not like you're not your data isn't being sold to pay for that however if uh the the usually the typical question we get after that is like well hold on what about all these people who don't want to pay for push notifications um the important things uh to point out here is we're actually just making this explicit and it's a market so if their push notification provider came along that offered this push notification service for free they could do so but you would be choosing to give away your data or look at some ads or perform some action for them which you would consider to be free uh but they can still pay for the service uh underneath so I'm assuming eventually you're gonna have kind of like a marketplace for advertisers where they can have the option of paying for push notification in a sense like within this push notification market yeah this might opt in for certain ads if they don't want to pay these fractions of a cent yeah I think it's important to say okay well uh we're gonna have these push notification providers that will offer different services so like maybe they they go through google maybe they go through vital maybe they go through deep stream all these other services and they all have different costs associated with them so you as a user can actually choose which provider you want to go for so maybe on uh maybe you don't like the idea of your information going through google service so you opt out of that and you choose a different provider uh maybe you do want to use advertisements you can go for that one maybe this one is just cheaper so you go and pay for that one instead uh it's not it's not like there's advertisers per se it's providers of a particular service which is push notifications in this I guess these things are all based around just getting to this base sort of messaging experience within a sort of decentralized fashion so once we have that really down that's when we'll begin working on these other sort of essentially business models um so to the dot point out here one is a sticker market which would be sending stickers to people within chats which seems like highly highly trivial it's not you know a big the emoji market is yeah it's a big market it's a big market yeah and it also makes makes it a bit more fun to use particularly for younger audience and what's really interesting when you we start doing this in the blockchain space you can actually create real meme markets so you could actually end up you could imagine a scenario in the future where you have a stock portfolio which is all based on memes and they get their value from attention that they're they're producing within the network and then maybe you could even pay for your coffee in a in a cafe from your your pepe holdings in the past say a year and a half ish what has been your biggest hurdle right now in developing status um I guess just getting go ethereum to behave on a resource restricted device was originally not intended to do that to work on these sort of devices the like client protocol is but at the same time like getting it to all work and behave nicely it's just it's just part of the process of this whole ecosystem um evolving uh like like I said everything that we depend on is in um is also in flux as well so sometimes it's like building a castle on sand uh but it seems to be working so it's um we're very very fortunate to be where we are at the moment and are you guys planning to do an ICO or are you doing private investors vcs like what's the real map for that yeah so Karl and I we've been working together for about 60 years three of those years we were doing software distribution and we've been self-funded from from that enterprise for the year year in a bit that we've been operating status we'll be running a our contribution period um June 17th which will be the launch of our status network which will be this utility token so June 17th you're doing an ICO I wouldn't really call it an ICO I think it's more about the members within the community who want to help contribute to our development they can do that oh so you think they can actually donate like hours or the resources or knowledge that they have yeah in addition to AF as well um and how long is that that open for is it indefinitely or are you just going to have a timeline so it basically runs for 14 days or until the cap is reached um what's the cap we're doing it a little bit differently because basically in order for status to be successful rate we want to maximize the possible stakeholders so the more people that hold a very small amount of status tokens become evangelists for the network and then on top of that if we're to move towards the sort of decentralized governance we want as many people as possible who are helping to make the decisions for us so we're all then having this one set cap we have a basically it's called the first ceiling and then um basically these hidden ceilings that it's just after that that form this kind of curve and the idea is if you're a very large contributor or a whale and you want to try and throw money into the network um it becomes a lot more difficult to do that explain that very well yeah I mean ultimately we're trying a model where we we're just trying to get a larger distribution um have you I'm curious have you read Vitalik's paper that just came out two days ago for all in ICOs yeah it's blog posts absolutely yeah yeah so it's fascinating on a point there about um sort of having actual identity in order to do the token issuance and so this is one one part of what we're doing as well is we asked to previously like people can contribute code or translations or that sort of thing yeah so we've had this status genesis token which is to reward people who have been helping contributing to our code based in the past but also growing the sort of community and doing these translations analysis of things um and so what what is likely to happen um is that we'll have a sort of preference period where these sgt holders will have a sort of first first sort of prior already up to a certain limits to contribute so like if you're a very active member of our community over the past year um you have increased likelihood that you'll be able to get some some status network tokens and this kind of it's like a very sort of light form of identity but it's I mean it's very tenuous to call it that um but that's something that I think is where this space will end up going as it matures in the future okay cool so let's recap you're having your participation round coming up in a week or two um that's going to last about 14 days uh you've you've mapped out your roadmap uh moving forward beyond uh whatever just call I see what we'll call it whatever your community community support beyond your community support ICO right now uh what is your initial roadmap in the next six months what do you want to accomplish right now in those six months yeah so I think um it's mostly to do with stability and optimizing what we have at the moment uh we'll be moving into sort of security audits uh to what's the towards the end of q3 with a bit of luck um and uh as that's happening we're also going to be building out a a whole bunch of other teams to work on these other dApps that we've mentioned so like things like the sticker market the dApp directory um this sort of tele network which we haven't really gone into but it's the idea of exchanging fiat for crypto tokens um similar to local bitcoins I guess um and uh and on top of that we we're very animate and decentralizing status itself that's the whole point of having this network and having this governance separated out so also doing another project called commitf which is this sort of bounty system uh for github.com so these issues that you can create uh other other open source developers can actually get paid for contributing code uh in the future as well cool awesome I like the sounds of that so that is just sort of building out the team um so now we're um I guess including two people on a trial month we're actually a team of 14 um we'd like to make bring on some some additional um well project manager um a technical HR and a few other positions so if any of your listeners happen to enjoy closer scripts they they should definitely reach out yeah we'll go well I'll make sure I put a link in the show notes so people can reach you well I think we'll wrap it up over there I just want to thank you guys for coming on and uh educating us on your new startup and if people want to find out more about status what is the best resource for them to uh check out sure so that would be status.im we also have very large slack community of nearly 8 000 people um this slack.status.im um and then twitter slash eth status fantastic I'll make sure to put that in the show notes and uh thanks for coming on cool thanks for having us cheers