Australia, Basketball NFTs and PoolTogether
PoolTogether Community Interview #32 GandalfsDad
Hello,
Welcome to the latest edition of the PoolTogether Community Interview. Hopefully you are depositing on Optimism and are claiming OP Rewards (as well as win some USDC prizes)!
Today, we go to Australia to hear from one of our Community Members called GandalfsDad.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Describe yourself in a few words/facts:
My name Is Rhian (Ryan spelled bad). I’m an Aussie who grew up in rural Queensland. I’m a Engineer/Data Scientist sort of hybrid currently working a normie job for a large oil/gas company in Brisbane. I live with my wife and 2 French bulldogs Gandalf and Opal.
How long have you been into crypto?
I got properly into crypto/web3 around Xmas last year. I wanted to buy my sister an NFT for Xmas so YOLOd my way into it with some leftover funds from a failed go on a centralised exchange in 2018.
After the not so straight forward experience I spent lots of time learning about blockchains in general, then wallets, then solidity programming and DeFi. Due to my addictive nature It sort of kept snowballing to the point where I am now more seriously considering career change.
What are you thinking about in terms of the career change? What would you like to be doing and in what sector of Web3?
I think the smart contracts side of things is where I’ve found the most interest so far. Have been spending a large amount of my free time trying to learn more solidity, doing different tutorials, trialing my own ideas from scratch to test my understanding and that sort of thing. I’m hopeful I can pick up enough skills to apply that knowledge in the DeFi or even utility/ gaming NFT sort of space.
Do you want to tell us about the main lessons you have learned since then?
I think the main lesson really is the Do Your Own Research sort of mantra. It’s very easy to get caught up in some of the potential high upside in the crypto space. And the attractive upside can be quite tempting and perhaps even achievable.
But there are always risky projects and protocols and it’s important not to ‘ape’ in just because you see a triple fidget APR.
What are the elements of DYOR? What should people not do?
For me it’s really just making sure I understand as much as possible Before clicking that sign/approve button. At a base level the starting point to using any service/project is hearing about it. There is already some risk here as it’s likely your hearing about it from somebody on twitter or something and its always possible just an influencer earning their $s (especially on the NFT side).
The next thing for me is really about documentation, trying to read through and really Understand what goes behind the one sentence summary or whatever it was that grabbed your attention. Usually next is finding a somewhat active community (probably discord). Checking for red flags there or asking any questions about the documentation. My final thing is usually research by doing. For DeFi things this is as easy as small investment first, answering questions like “is it really a click of a button to get all my tokens back?” Or “Do I really see the stated yield or intended effect of using the product”. That’s at least how I roughly Approach it.
It’s also not even exclusively about avoiding rug pulls. I recall getting caught up with ENS on my first try - As it’s a multi step approval process to sign up/ sort out the address. By not being informed enough I blindly trusted the initial cost estimate and ended up being short on gas. By reading a bit more on ENS (and to be honest understanding the transaction pricing better) this would of been an easily avoidable $20/30 cost I avoided.
What was your best crypto moment?
As I entered when prices were starting to come down I’ve not experienced many big financial wins - so it’s nothing like that. I think so far my best moment is definitely when I was one of the successful ideas in the first Pool Together Bounties campaign. It’s good to have you that sort of positive feedback that I am starting to understand the space a bit better and could even contribute.
And your biggest fail?
Definitely when I entered to buy my sister an NfT. I sent the funds from an Australian exchange to the Binance smart chain instead of mainnet. Then had to create an account and work out how to convert it to mainnet. After that I realised I needed wrapped ETH not ETH. The whole experience ended up being over $100 for what was quite a terrible $5 NFT.
How did you find out about PoolTogether?
I think it might of been a bankless roll up or something like that initially. And then I stumbled onto some blog post and decided to give it a go after hearing about it a second time. I joined the discord and said hello and tjark was very welcoming. I then decided to buy a few pool tokens and deposit on Polygon.
What made you stick around?
For me it is mainly The Friendly community and the ethos behind the protocol. Use cases outside of some pure profit really get me excited and I find are the most interesting part of web3.
How are you involved in the community? Tell us about it.
I like to hang out in discord and ask/answer any questions I can think of. Comment on the government forumn when I get some free time. I would always like to do more but am quite time poor these days.
Would you recommend PoolTogether to others? How would you describe it to them?
Yes I have recommended to a few friends. I describe it as a no loss lottery savings account. It is an uphill battle with some I think. Many folks hear crypto and either they think of the great gains they’ve heard people make or they have the “ it’s a total scam” point of view. I will always keep trying to onboard folks though. Eventually they will listen.
Are you involved in any other projects or communities?
Not so actively. I hang out in the Ballies (basketball NFT on cronos chain) discord a bit when the nba season is going. Also have a D_D NfT and keep an eye on plenty of the DeFi protocols discords for developments etc.
Can you tell us more about Ballies. What is this, what is the goal of the project and how are you involved with it?
Ballies (https://ballies.gg/) is a P2E basketball NFT project Centred around 10k PFP NFTs. The NFTs were minted a few months ago and Currently moving towards an alpha version of the game in the next few weeks. From there the roadmap is to get a full game in the next few months and extend to other sports.
For me, my involvement is I hold 3 of the NFTs and hang out in the community chatting basketball. I’m keen to see the game aspect evolve in the coming months as it’s one of these Web3 areas which still has plenty of room to grow. Also for me it’s just an intersection of my interests and Web3.
Do you have any other thoughts and comments you would like to make?
The PT community is great and I’m Really excited for what the future holds. Especially with the OP launch.
Which books would you recommend people read? And why?
I think the Three Body problem series by Liu Cixin is absolutely mind blowing and something less people are aware of then they should be. There is a Netflix series on the works if reading is not your usual thing but I highly recommend people to try to read it.
What are the main changes and developments you are expecting to see in DeFi in 2022 and 2023?
I’m really just excited to see the DeFi TVL migration to layer 2 eth really kick off. Plenty of established protocols have migrated/released and some new ones have popped up but at a high level if you look at charts from the likes of Uniswap or Aave it’s still quite L1 dominated.
As somebody relatively new to DeFi I may not be the best to comment but I believe there should be plenty of new innovations coming up in the coming months. Hopefully some completely new things that were simply not possible/feasible on L1.
How widespread is crypto adoption in Australia? What are the main use cases and most popular cryptos/Web3 platforms? Do most of your friends and colleagues invest/gamble in crypto?
I think if you were to look at the adoption in Australia it’s a lot less then some other parts of the world. My guess as to why is probably we don’t have some of the issues (or at least not as severe) that exist in other countries that perhaps drive higher adoption.
In a lot of places it’s my understanding that the driving forces of mass adoption are typically either an escape from a fiat currency with some inflation issues or as a way to avoid either a non existent or not ideally operated banking system. For Australia the banking system is certainly not perfect but there are certainly not as many pain points as I seem to hear about in other countries.
In terms of platforms i think the centralised exchanges are still the most popular platform. Around. We have some some of our own but also have the likes of Binance/crypto.com .
At least from my own group of friends/family that’s where I see the most use. There are some national efforts for things like energy/carbon trading but I think that is quite common around the globe. This question has prompted me to deep dive a bit more in the local ecosystem.
We hope you enjoyed this interview all the way from Down Under! Please be sure to join us for the PoolTogether Community Call on Fridays at 1.45pm EST on the PoolTogether Discord.
Plus, please deposit into PoolTogether at the following link: https://app.pooltogether.com/deposit