Conversations with the Coop - ChainLinkGod - Chainlink

Conversations with the Coop - http://www.indexcoop.com Audio and transcript from the April 7th, 2022 installment of “Conversations with the Coop” with ChainLinkGod - Community Ambassador at Chainlink. To listen live on the next Conversations with the Coop - Follow Index Coop on Twitter and join the Index Coop Discord to get the real Owlpha. Follow us on Spotify: Link here RSS feed for Apple Podcasts: Link here Crypto Texan: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conversations with the Coop. This is where we source questions from the index coop community to gain insights from today's leaders in crypto and DeFi. I'm your host, Crypto Texan. And today on the show, we have ChainLinkGod, who's the community ambassador to Chainlink. So ChainLinkGod or CLG, how's it going today? Are you having some bitcoin Miami FOMO? ChainLinkGod: Yeah, a little bit. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go but, otherwise, always having a good time link billing. So thanks for having me on. Crypto Texan: You're pretty good at the link billing too, and just based on your Twitter following as well. I think you have like 130,000 followers now. ChainLinkGod: Yeah, I have a little bit of experience educating people on Chainlink. Crypto Texan: Well, good. And that's why you're here, too. So let's start with your background, CLG. How did you get into crypto, DeFi, and how did that road eventually lead you to Chainlink? ChainLinkGod: Yeah, it's a good question. Essentially in 2018, early 2018, I was in the gaming community and I saw GPU prices basically skyrocketing. I looked into it, I saw this thing, crypto, which I knew about it. But it wasn't until I learned that you can run a program on your computer and money spits out that I really had to dive into it and understand what the hell this technology is. So at the time, I was going to school for computer science. And so I really took a first-principles approach as to what crypto matters. And that went from Bitcoin over to Ethereum and really dove into the value of smart contracts, how the cryptography works, decentralized consensus, the social consensus. But ultimately, it just kept running into like, "Okay, it's great. But how do these contracts actually execute based on things in the real world?" How does it know what the price of a home is or who owns it or the price of an asset? I didn't really understand how that was being sold. And it really wasn't at the time. It wasn't until I came across a forum thread on the business of finance board that I saw basically the enterprise strategy of Chainlink. And this was mid-2018. And so this was a year before Mainnet, before, basically, anyone had really heard of the project or really knew what the oracle problem was. And that was a deep link pill that just completely changed my view on the crypto ecosystem. And so from that point on, I was basically fully linked pilled. And it was in 2019 when I started my Twitter account when the Chainlink crypto Twitter community was basically a few dozen frogs, maybe battling with the XRP community. But I kept answering people's questions about Chainlink and debunking the FUD and misinformation. And then I kind of specifically been taking a facts and logic first approach rather than just based on the motion and ad hominem attacks that a lot of people like to do, unfortunately, on Twitter. And so I just ended up growing my following from there, became a Chainlink community ambassador, and now I'm basically helping just educate the community through different content streams and through these types of podcast conversations. So, yeah, that's been my journey. I actually dropped out of school about a year ago. And so I'm doing this full time now. So it's been quite the journey. And I'm very blessed that I have the following I do and so many people are interested in the vision of smart contracts as the superior form of digital agreement as a whole. So that's my background. Crypto Texan: Yeah, I guess more of just a cultural question from the Chainlink community. What's the story behind your avatar? And what is the significance of frogs in the Chainlink community? ChainLinkGod: Yeah, it's funny. I would say that there's the team and then there's the community. The team initially in 2017, 2018, they were just heads down building. The community itself, basically, the grassroots growth. By just people following on 4chan, the infamous 4chan on the business and finance biz board, they basically launched on the Chainlink and there wasn't really much information at the time. So they were basically digging for breadcrumbs. And so the 4chan is fairly well known for their mimetic abilities. And so that's where a lot of the frog culture, the Pepe/Apu Apustaja type memery came from and that's where Chainlink community really got its roots. And so that mimetic approach just carried over to crypto Twitter, where a lot of the community is now. Now it's split across, that a lot of it is own crypto Twitter now, so the mimetic is just carried over. And so that's why and the initial community was literally all frogs. It's a little more diversified now, but that mimetic energy is always carried forward and it's always been an effective signaling mechanism, I suppose, around Chainlink, but it's just like the power of mimetics, cannot be understated. So that's just carried on continuously. Crypto Texan: Yeah. And so how did you get started? Did you just start tweeting threads about what you were learning about Chainlink on Twitter? Or were you on Reddit educating people? Or was it 4chan? How did you ... I mean, you had to have started somewhere to get to the point that you were today. So how did all that start? ChainLinkGod: Yeah, I would say in early 2018, I used to use Reddit as the source of crypto news. But it was horrible, admittedly. There was just not much alpha. So I came across 4chan. And that's where a lot of the breadcrumbs I came across. That's where I have a lot of my initial knowledge about the scope and power of Chainlink, some of the different services that were being explored at that time. It wasn't until really joining crypto Twitter in early 2019. I mean, that initially started as literally just like a shitposting account of joining in the mimetic fund. But I just kept continuously researching all the information that was available from the Chainlink team and just in the ecosystem. I was always continuously learning about smart contracts on the Ethereum ecosystem. DeFi was very, very early stages. I mean, I think it was around the time Compound & Uniswap launched. And I dove into using those protocols and saw how if DeFi were to expand, we really needed this oracle thing, which happened later that year. And then just from there, I just read every public information and just tried to break down complex topics very simply to people. But that approach evolved over time where I improved how I would explain things to people, and people just formed around me as a schelling point about community education. So as I was educating people, I was also learning myself. So it's a two-pronged process. It's synergistic in that regard. Crypto Texan: Yeah, I've talked about this with some other people on the show and just in general that that's where I got a lot of my information back in 2017, 2018 was cryptocurrency, Reddit. And I don't know if you've been on there lately, but it's so bad. It's just all shills and doom, I don't know. Have you been on it lately? ChainLinkGod: Not in a while. But last time I checked, they were still stuck on the same 2017 era coins VeChain, Nano, XRP. I looked at it, I'm like, "Nope. No, thanks." Crypto Texan: Yeah, that's how I am when I see people shilling VeChain. I haven't thought of VeChain in forever until you just said that. Yeah, that's interesting. But, yeah, let's get back to Chainlink. So Chainlink has incredible product-market fit in just smart contract ecosystem in general. And I think that's because smart contracts are a great, innovative technology. But they do have th… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit indexcoop.substack.com