S3E3 - Billy from Intuition; Decentralized Identity and Reputation

Summary

I talk with Billy Luedtke, from the project Intuition about his short journey to crypto and long journey in crypto :)

We both agree on the importance of decentralized identity and Intuition aims to create a trusted interaction layer in the blockchain space, allowing users to make better decisions by providing more data for humans and things as well. 

The platform Intuition is building will allow for the claiming of information about anything, from people to products, and they aim to create a semantic web where data is easily accessible and understandable. Intuition is focused on the protocol and middleware layers, but will also initially build on the application layer to drive adoption. as every successful team in crypto has to. The platform will be live in June/July 2024.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Intuition and Decentralized Identity
15:20 The Vision of Intuition: Trusted Interaction and the Semantic Web
37:21 Go-to-Market Strategy and Future Plans

Transcript

BFG (Pete) (00:00.974)
Hello everyone, welcome back to Web3Magic. You guys know what's going on here. I am interviewing every week builders of very cool blockchain based projects. Projects which bring some real world utility. And that's why I'm super happy to have Billy with me. Billy is from the project I was watching since the very beginning. It's called Intuition. The name is insinuating something, but if you go and look at their website, that has pretty cool layers.

into it and Billy will try to sort of summarize for us what exactly they're trying to do but the important piece of information is you know it's from the reputation and an identity space which is a big topic in general and even bigger it seems this year so I'm super happy to have Billy here. Billy welcome.

Billy Luedtke (00:51.663)
Thank you so much for having me on. Really excited for this.

BFG (Pete) (00:54.734)
Awesome. Let's jump right in. So I always ask the first question. It's like, what was your journey to crypto? Where have you started? I assume you are an engineer, but just tell the short story.

Billy Luedtke (01:06.415)
Yeah, I'm bad at the short story. So I'll do my best to keep it short. But I like unassumingly, so I did my undergrad in systems engineering and then just randomly stumbled into like my first job being like working on this distributed seismic network at Caltech with the United States Geological Survey Office. So like got really early exposure to distributed systems and got involved in crypto around the same time. So the reason I got involved in crypto was...

a little bit, sorry Blizzard, but like I really liked botting in video games. So for those of you that aren't aware, like what botting is, is like, you just have these like macros that play the game for you. And like it's something like Diablo or World of Warcraft, you just can have it play the game while you go do other things. And then you come back and your guy is a higher level or has a bunch of items or gold or whatever. And I love that concept. I just loved having like my computer work for me.

And so I learned that I could have my computer like make me these things that people were willing to pay real dollars for. And I loved it. I just built my mining. At first I was just mining. I liked my shitty laptop. But then I was just like, wow, this is a, I like this feeling. And so built my mining rig, fell in love. Didn't really know, like I didn't get Bitcoin at the time. Like I didn't dive deep right at the beginning. But in doing that, like obviously.

wanted to learn more about why people are willing to pay these real world dollars for these things and then read the white paper and I was like, this is going to change everything forever. So I got absolutely obsessed with it. And then after the USGS stuff, I went over to E &Y as a tech consultant and there was like a couple of people over there who were also obsessed with Bitcoin and we like...

There's, I don't know, five, six people led by this guy Angus, and we pitched leadership on why they needed to start a blockchain consulting practice, like before there was even really an ecosystem. And so started getting to work on it professionally. At that time I was, I moved to San Francisco and really the tech consulting for financial institutions thing.

Billy Luedtke (03:23.951)
really made me aware of all the issues with the current financial system. Like I, looking from the outside in as someone completely ignorant, I saw the big buildings and I saw the pillars and I was like, these guys like totally have their stuff, everything together and they're super mature adults. And then you go behind the scenes, it's like a dude with an Excel spreadsheet who can just arbitrarily edit. I was like, this is, this is how you do it? And the, or the 1960s mainframe, it's just like, my God, this is, this isn't even salvageable. I just saw so many projects that.

They spent hundreds of millions of dollars like migrate their systems to new tech and it just was a waste. They didn't even it just horrible. And so it's like, okay, burn it all down. We got to build a new parallel system. And so I thought Bitcoin was like the best tool in our tool or blockchain technology generally was like a really good tool in that tool belt. And then being in San Francisco, I was just I got super lucky just hearing about Ethereum like in March of 2014. So I was just at a

like this hacker house party. And we were just outside talking about Bitcoin, because that's what we did. And this guy was like, have you heard about this thing, Ethereum? And he explained it still in the best way that I think I've ever heard it explained, which convinced me to go home and learn more. And I went home and saw that Vitalik was coming to San Francisco Bay Area to present at like one of the first Ethereum meetups over there. And I was like, this dude Vitalik is going to be here next week. Like we should totally drive down to the hacker dojo and like go to this thing.

And so me and him and this other dude drove down and I just met the smartest people, like the most interesting people I had ever met, probably ever. I was like, this is something and this is something that I need to be a part of. And so that was kind of how I got immersed in all of this stuff early.

BFG (Pete) (05:06.542)
That's very cool. I think you are my first guest who actually ever had anything to do with distributed systems before blockchain. That's the first thing. Second thing, so I missed Vitalik in Hacker Dojo by a year when I moved to San Francisco to start a different company. But I heard about it a number of times, actually. People thought it was very, very cool. Okay, so...

That was early start. So you're basically a reformed consultant. That's nice. I also started in like big five, but way, way earlier. Cool.

Billy Luedtke (05:45.487)
It's a nice pedigree. It teaches you a lot. So I'm super thankful for the consulting experience. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

BFG (Pete) (05:56.526)
Yeah, yeah, I think, you there is actually if you are curious, there is probably no better way to learn about the world fast. Just, you know, join a big consulting company and anything around management consulting or technology. And you will just see that whoever you think has their act together never has. This is just

Billy Luedtke (06:03.503)
Yeah.

Billy Luedtke (06:16.591)
No.

BFG (Pete) (06:18.446)
It's just total nightmare everywhere. So you don't have to worry about startups because the big guys are doing it exactly the same way, just with more money and more people. So yeah, true, truly believe that. Okay, so I think after the consulting, you joined ConsenSys, right? Was that the first crypto trip? And from there, just take us from there directly to Intuition.

Billy Luedtke (06:21.103)
Yeah.

Billy Luedtke (06:39.503)
Yeah, I can see.

Billy Luedtke (06:43.599)
Happy to. So yeah, did the blockchain consulting thing at Ernst & Young for a while. And then there was like this Microsoft blockchain council thing that happened that Microsoft got to everyone in a room who wasn't IBM to talk about like competing with IBM because they had Hyperledger and they were just for free doing all of these blockchain consulting projects. And so it was kind of this pow wow with like ENY and Deloitte and Consensus and like all these other

people about like Ethereum ecosystem stuff generally. And I met Joe Lubin there and Andrew Keys and this guy, Andre Swalindahl and like just down for lunch. And you know, at the end of the conversation, just kind of Joe just put his card down and it's like, come work for us. And I was like, that, yeah, for sure. And so moved over to Consensus. I'm still a special advisor to Consensus. I've been there seven years now and did a bunch of stuff over that time.

One of them, which was decentralized identity stuff. So when I was at E &Y, I was building kind of these KYC POCs. And that led me to like be early member and like decentralized identity foundation conversations and formation, which led me to meet the YouPort people. And so when I joined Consensus, I ended up working with YouPort, which was like the first self -sovereign identity thing built on Ethereum. Yeah, the zoo, yeah, exactly. Yep.

BFG (Pete) (08:04.046)
Was it Switzerland, right? The Zug thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Billy Luedtke (08:08.975)
Yep, that's amazing that you know that. Yeah, so we did that. And so ever since then, I've always had this kind of identity slant when architecting systems. And so that is why intuition, I think, looks the way it does. I think that just self -sovereign decentralized identity is one of the most important tools in our tool belt for building like correct systems. And so...

Anyway, that all happened. And then where intuition came from was the height of the last cycle. I was doing a ton of angel investing in advisory work and my value prop to people was not anything unique, but it was, Hey, let me connect the dots for you. I've been in crypto for 10 years. Let me tell you who's come before, who exists now, best practices, tooling, things like that. And that worked great. But then I was on like lots of calls that I didn't want to be on. And I was like, Ooh, how can I disintermediate myself here? So I was like, okay, like, let me export my

Web3 knowledge into this visual knowledge graph. So instead of coming to me to ask me so many questions, you can just go to the knowledge graph and find the information for yourself. And that worked great for like portcos and clients and friends even just onboarding to Web3 who had infinite questions. And if I didn't handhold them, like especially the new people onboarding, they'd immediately get scammed and lose all their money. So like they need handholding. And so this just like helped a lot. And I just started kind of keeping track of my own stuff in this knowledge graph because...

you know, I had a thousand browser tabs, I still do, but like thousand browser tabs open, a million bookmarks I have never gone back to. I use Roam Research to take notes and I tag things with things sometimes, but like it's not great for what I was trying to do. And so I just kept track of my own stuff in this knowledge graph and keeping track of it for me, it kept track of it for everyone else. And I was like, this is a really cool concept. And then I thought, well, like, what if it's not just my knowledge in the knowledge graph? What if it's...

everyone's knowledge in the knowledge graph. And what if people were incentivized to add good data to the knowledge graph or to curate or vet information? That'd be pretty interesting. Like, I don't know how to do that yet, but if we could do that, like the more I thought about it, the more I was like, this could like change the world. And so I just got obsessed with it and started architecting it. And I guess from there I wrote the white paper and the rest is kind of history that I can go into if you want, but I don't have to.

BFG (Pete) (10:20.014)
There you go.

BFG (Pete) (10:26.35)
Yeah, we can definitely get into it. I think it's a pretty cool process. I actually remember the U -Port passport thing. I think like most non -cryptonative people, I actually thought it was a proof of blockchain not really working.

Billy Luedtke (10:51.983)
Yep.

BFG (Pete) (10:53.326)
But when I came back to crypto, I thought it was a nice pilot and just unfortunately with very sensitive audience and basically just it's a sensitive area to work on passports, identities in real life. So I think I heard you somewhere saying that it's better to start with less sensitive areas.

and get people on board it and test the systems and get people used to it in a sense. And probably to be fair, I think given the timing was way ahead of its time, I think tech has moved a lot with all the account abstractions and other things which can sort of work for normal people without a lot of stress. So that's probably pretty cool. Okay.

So that means you actually wrote the white paper yourself, just alone. Okay, just pretty impressive then.

Billy Luedtke (11:57.743)
Yeah. It wasn't good. And like it's bad white paper and it was like three, four, five, six complete. Like the end I just kind of trailed off. So I'm rewriting her right now and it'll like version two will be out soon. I'm not the, I'm not the best. I'm not like PhD academic guys. So, but I have a lot of thoughts that I would need to express. And so hopefully the new white paper will be like my medium for expression of.

all of the thoughts that now it's like most not just my thoughts now it's like the thoughts of the intuition team over the past three years. So like, it's way better because it's better to think about things as a group. But yeah, I wrote that that original one alone. And that's why it wasn't so good. That's why I didn't publish it publicly. Otherwise, I would have.

BFG (Pete) (12:47.374)
OK, nice. So are you still, but it's total sidetrack, are you still using Roam or you switched to another tool? Yeah, you are. OK, have you tried Tana?

Billy Luedtke (12:54.575)
Yeah.

Billy Luedtke (12:58.479)
What is it?

BFG (Pete) (12:59.63)
Have you tried TANA? T -A -N -A? Okay. We can get sidetracked after the show. It's impressive. It's like ROM 10x. Cool. Let's go back to intuition. So, okay. You really do troops. You got some funding. Let's skip the beginning. Tell me.

Billy Luedtke (13:01.455)
No, I'll check it out then.

Billy Luedtke (13:12.591)
What next? All right, I'm in. I'm sold.

BFG (Pete) (13:27.886)
This is actually a good one because on most podcasts I hear different, you know short pitches for intuition from you So I'm gonna enjoy this one. So what's the one -liner for intuition now?

Billy Luedtke (13:39.247)
no, that's a hard question.

BFG (Pete) (13:41.23)
It is, it is.

Billy Luedtke (13:45.071)
I've been saying that either the trustless or the trustful interaction layer or trusted interaction layer, something about the interaction layer. So I'm going to go with like trusted interaction because that's really what we're trying to do here is just like give people more data to make better decisions with as they go around the world interacting with things. And it's like interacting with a smart contract or.

you know, interacting with an EOE, like getting your wallet drained, like maybe that shouldn't happen anymore, or trying to buy a product on Amazon or going to a restaurant or hiring a per like interactions with things like trying to add more trust to all of them. So that's kind of where we're at right now. But again, I think like the one -liner is really important and anyone listening, if you have feedback on that one -liner, please let me know because we need to come up with one that like is a mind virus and

can get more than one degree of separation away from me. Every time I explain intuition, it hops to the one person and then they're like, it's pretty cool, but I have no idea how to explain it. So we need something like restaking, which is really tangible and obvious. So you come up with one, let me know. Anyway, I'll stop ranting, but yeah.

BFG (Pete) (15:03.826)
Okay, yeah, I just have to show the layers on the website. Okay, and so, let's probably start with where is intuition now? So you guys are working on this for two years, three years now, two probably. Okay, so where are you now? You mentioned you are about to launch soon. So tell us what's the state of the things and then we look at the bigger vision.

Billy Luedtke (15:20.719)
Yeah. Yeah. We're.

Billy Luedtke (15:31.567)
Yeah, so like the protocol, so there's three layers of the stack. So there's like protocol, there's middleware, and then there's like the application layer. We really wanna mainly focus on the protocol and the middleware, but what I saw at the beginning of like the evolution of all these ecosystems like Ethereum and Uport and other like layer ones and stuff is if you don't build stuff at the application layer, people don't really know what to do with the protocol and the middleware even though it exists now. So.

We have this very heavy emphasis also on the application layer coming out of the gates. So protocol middleware, crossing my fingers, but seeming like they're relatively stable right now. And so we still have a little bit of work to do on the application layer front, just to try to make a splash as we come out of the gate swinging. So I hate setting timelines because I keep not adhering to them, but I'm going to optimistically say we'll be live in about a month.

We got, I'm very excited. So yeah, the current state of things is like version one of the system. And I would say there's, there's always, we've got a backlog of about 800 features that we want to add. So it's like a 25 year journey probably to get to like a state where I'm like, all right, we did intuition, but version one coming soon.

BFG (Pete) (16:44.718)
Sure.

BFG (Pete) (16:55.278)
Okay, that sounds pretty okay. So normal, I would say, if you are coming up with the version one. So, you know, I am intentionally sort of going backwards on it, but so what's going to be in version one? What will the typical like normal user, what will they see? Let's start with non -nodefs.

Billy Luedtke (17:14.895)
Yeah. So there is a bifurcation of experiences based on user persona. So again, like we don't want to be, it's not an application. It's like developer tool. It's like infrastructure for the next evolution of the internet. So what the experience looks like to a developer is use our APIs and SDKs to do things you couldn't do before. For the end user, like we will have a...

Again, like we have to build a little bit at the application layer for just like the lens and Lensster or Farcast or in Warpcast. It's like, we need an app that we built ourselves that's opinionated. So to the end user, it'll be like kind of a more social, it'll be like a social experience of attestations. And the, the core of all of it, like the user action that you get is people claiming things, not even people, like things claiming things about things. That's all it is. Just.

claiming things about things. You can claim anything about anything for the first time ever. And you can, like, we can now maybe arrive at social consensus around, like, subjective things around things based on attestation. So at the core is just, like, allowing things to claim things about things and framing that, like, in juxtaposition against the current attestation infrastructure.

When people hear attestations and decentralized identity, they oftentimes think of the identities of people and they think of use cases like KYC, AML, civil resistance, like achievements, under collateralized lending level, I don't know, just that type of thing. And that's awesome. We're doing that too. Because again, claim anything about anything, you claim it about people. But what has always excited me about decentralized identity is that if we get it right, we can realize this vision of the semantic web.

And it's not just identities for people, it's identities for everything. So the example I like to give, and sorry if this is repetitive to some people, but it's like, let's say you want to sell a used car online. What you have to do right now is you have to create a bunch of identities for the car in the form of listings on all these various platforms. So you create the eBay identity and the Craigslist and the AutoTrader and the CarMax. Every single time you fill out some rudimentary information about it. And then people have to go to each of these application specific silos to query.

Billy Luedtke (19:35.503)
for the cars for sale that match their criteria. What if the car just had a single decentralized identifier and then like structure semantic metadata about it in the form of attestation. So it's like, okay, person sold car to this guy. So this is the new owner of the car. A mechanic worked on the car. They test that. So the car is DID builds up like a profile over time. And then you as the owner of the car could like toggle a for sale Boolean to true. And then anyone could query at the layer of the internet for all cars for sale that match their criteria.

So that's what, that vision of the internet, that's just more open, bizarre, is what really excites me. And so another example, juxtaposition against current infrastructure is, let's say you're in dev right now, or you're a user, you're like, I wanna make an attestation about Ethereum. What is the unique identifier you use to reference Ethereum? Is it the website? Is it the Wikipedia page? Is it the word Ethereum? I actually don't know.

What unique identifier to use to reference Ethereum? When I go to make a naturopsy about it. And the answer is people will probably use like a bunch of different ones and they get all this crazy fragmentation. So in web three, four users, it's kind of nice. Cause it's like, okay, I've got my public facing E and S address. It's like self sovereign private key resolves to address, maybe have an E and S on top. You want to make a claim about me, make it about Billy .Eath. And then the thing doing the claiming also has an E address. So it's real clean.

So what we're trying to do is arrive at social consensus around what the globally persistent canonical identifiers are going to be that we're going to use to reference different things so that we can start making claims about them. And the things can be anything. It can be a word, a concept, a product, a person, it doesn't matter. And then when you make the attestations, just making sure that the data is kind of forcing it into this like semantic structure so that it's very easily.

indexable and queryable and machine readable and consumable by all apps. So you can actually use the data for like really cool use cases as opposed to like it being really fragmented and non understandable. Does that kind of make sense?

BFG (Pete) (21:43.918)
No, no, totally. I am. I'm glad I started from that direction because I think the car and Ethereum actually examples are very nice and very tangible. I think everybody can imagine that. And also most people probably can imagine a lot of issues along the way. It's like, you know, who starts with the claim? Do you need cooperation from the car manufacturer? Is it voluntary or can anybody just do it?

all the sort of things. But I think it kind of paints a nice picture of the massive vision. So one question which I always wanted to ask, is there any hardware involved? Because it sort of seems to me that to claim attestations or claim things about things, lends itself to some sort of hardware which kind of captures the situation in real life for some...

forms of things and attests that this is it, this is the car, this is the color, whatever.

Billy Luedtke (22:51.599)
There's 100 % a hardware component, but we're not building hardware. Not right now, maybe if we get way more money and get some manufacturing people on board, but we are not playing the hardware game at all. But that is, I think that's the perfect, that's where we need to get to. That's the ultimate end user experience where you have, I guess, I think the simplest example is, maybe it's not even us building the hardware, but just using.

end user hardware for purposes like this, where it's like, okay, you take picture at point in time on phone. If we could like verify that you were like actually at that location at that point in time, then like you can make an attestation about that. And maybe that has some purpose or like for a video or something like that. So there's a ton of hardware things that can happen, but I think they're like higher up the stack. And I think the first thing we have to do is build this kind of like low level.

protocol which is entirely software based that doesn't need new hardware other than the hardware we have right now available.

BFG (Pete) (23:57.134)
So my question was kind of a leading question because I know there is a guy on Farcaster who I think his name is or his handle is Juli probably. Yeah, his handle is Juli. And he announced he's building a hardware which will sort of like notarize IRL things for the blockchain, which sort of seems to me like a perfect match for you. But...

Billy Luedtke (24:15.727)
you

Billy Luedtke (24:20.399)
Cool.

BFG (Pete) (24:25.838)
So I wasn't sure if you guys are connected or not.

Billy Luedtke (24:28.687)
We're not, and I'd love to connect. And that's actually like, that's a good segue into explaining intuition a little bit more deeply. So it's like people like that who can generate some provably verifiable evidence of a thing. Like it's like, where do they publish that data once it exists? Is it in their app? Is it in their centralized silo? And then you have to integrate with July or whoever's like platform to get the data. What if you could publish it to this open permissionless decentralized knowledge graph that anyone can publish to?

for any arbitrary purpose. So it's like, okay, you're a smart contract auditor. Maybe you'd like, you audit a thing and you like post the audit report to Intuition. Maybe you're this guy with your device that verifies thing, you publish it to Intuition. Maybe you're a user and you publish your opinion to Intuition. Maybe you're a WorldCoin and you scan an eyeball and you publish the eyeball scan to whatever. Like we're just the platform for the expression. And then the hope is like, instead of you as a developer needing to integrate with,

a million different APIs to get all this random data. You integrate with one API. Like the platforms all integrate with intuition and then everyone else integrates with intuition and you just have this like common neutral ground upon which to work with this kind of like unified verifiable data lake.

BFG (Pete) (25:45.902)
So you do you assume in the like, you know, let's call it a distant future Do you assume there is one protocol which kind of you know provides all the identity information or do you think it's gonna be sort of like the multi -chain world of house and multiple protocols trying to work together?

Billy Luedtke (26:09.167)
It's probably going to be the latter, I would assume. I think that we were the first to do like kind of what we're doing. And so at the beginning, it'll probably be us that looks like us. Like I think intuition will look very novel, but then like, I assume over time people will build some more things and then we'll be either competing or interoperating and eventually we'll evolve into a world that's interoperating. And I think it's like different, different protocols will be good for different purposes for sure. And I think we've.

We've tried our best to make things generalized to the point where you could use intuition for everything, but there's probably design decisions that are better suited to a different approach. And so I have to assume that there's probably going to be this like multi -chain world that evolves.

BFG (Pete) (26:56.366)
So we can probably do a little bit of like technical overview. So you guys are layer one blockchain and no, okay. So you sit, where do you sit with the thing?

Billy Luedtke (27:09.519)
Yeah, I know.

Billy Luedtke (27:14.223)
Yeah, so I guess basically there's the on -chain component and there's the off -chain component. On -chain components are obviously going to tap into the security guarantees of Ethereum. I think you are... It doesn't make sense to not do that right now, so we will be deployed on some L2. What L2 that is will probably change over time, probably do our own roll -up at some point in the not -too -far future because these roll -up -as -a -service platforms are really maturing.

And then once cross -chain communication protocols kind of catch up, probably do our own roll up. But for now, deploy to some existing L2. Probably going to be based in the immediate term, depending on market sentiment, which I think is very much leaning their way right now. And so on -chain piece on L2, and then there's off -chain piece, where it's like...

BFG (Pete) (27:49.838)
Okay, fair enough.

Billy Luedtke (28:05.839)
You can think of it like NFT architecture almost where you don't want to store like heavy metadata about things on chain. So you got to store them off chain. So you can use like any verifiable data register you want. And you can think of like the on chain architecture also as NFT where it's just like you have on chain references to off chain things. You just have arbitrary URIs that point to data somewhere. Our happy path right now is pointing to IPFS, but it's like our way ceramic network.

blockchains are verifiable data registry. So just like pointing to data somewhere is what's stored on chain. What also is stored on chain is like the relationships between those URIs. So basically you can think of it like a neural network where you just, you have nodes and edges, each node and each edge has a URI. And it's just like the relationships between URIs and the weights of connections between those things, that's all stored on chain.

as well as like all of the economics of the system. And then everything else is stored off chain. So it's like, okay, URI points to this did document for this object, which says it has this name, this description, this image, whatever.

BFG (Pete) (29:14.094)
Gotcha. So probably two questions, important ones. I assume there is some optionality for privacy, ZK stuff and similar, because not everything has to be publicly readable.

Billy Luedtke (29:30.223)
Yeah, no, like at the beginning, like, so again, you have, you can have your eyes that point to arbitrary off chain data. So it's like, you want to encrypt off chain data? Yeah, for sure. Do it. so like what you really don't want to do is you don't want to store like raw data on chain forever. Immutably. That's like really scary. So in this world where you're just like pointing to off chain stuff, it can even live in like a centralized database where you just have like your.

BFG (Pete) (29:50.35)
Totally.

Billy Luedtke (29:56.783)
methods that you already have for whatever business you're running. So like, yes, and over time, the hope is like building out, I think a big piece of all of this is building out that privacy and permissioning feature set, because the, the worldview, like the user flow that I want to get to be able to doing is, I'll root it in an example. So let's say you are, you're betting on a basketball game.

and you, LeBron James is playing in the basketball game and you go to LeBron James' profile and you see, Apple has attested to LeBron James' sleep recovery score. And you're like, that's an interesting piece of data for me to bet on the game. Like maybe he had a really bad night's sleep last night. So that's useful data for me. I want to like request it from LeBron. So I like send.

a request over to LeBron like, hey, if you selectively disclose this piece of data or let my computation run on top of your encrypted data, spit back a result for me, I'll pay you like 30 bucks, whatever. I don't know what the price is, but it's like, and then like I get the data, he's happy and he maybe he's wearing a bunch of devices now to generate interesting data about himself so that he can sell it to people who might be interested in it. I don't know, but that's where I really want to get to. And I don't think it's too far, but we have some.

BFG (Pete) (31:19.694)
RoboCop world. Okay, fair enough. Is there a token? Okay.

Billy Luedtke (31:23.565)
Yeah.

Billy Luedtke (31:29.679)
Yeah, well not yet, but there will be.

BFG (Pete) (31:35.724)
There will be. Okay. Well, you know, I'm just asking because it's like, you know, NFTs were very 2023, 22. Now it's meme coins, coins, tokens. You don't have a token, nobody wants to talk to you. So I had to ask so people would get interested again in something interesting, hopefully.

Billy Luedtke (31:54.767)
Yeah.

BFG (Pete) (31:57.454)
Okay, cool. Do you envision like a B2B use cases? Because I used to work with a protocol which had something similar in mind, but they were coming at it from the storage perspective. But there is a lot of obligatory storage requirements around the world, which you have to fulfill as a business. And a lot of it would kind of land itself.

as well to like attestation from different parties that, you know, this is really the data and everything.

Billy Luedtke (32:30.575)
100%. I'd like that's, that's where I want to increasingly trend over time. Like I think at the beginning we look very much B2C and then we become become like B2B or B2B2C. And so it's like, there's, there's a lot of people who want to attest to a lot of things already, but then also like the insights derived from this new kind of like combination of the social and knowledge graph, I think it would be pretty interesting for businesses, like analytics wise. One of the main points of intuition is,

to try to extract humanity's intuition and get it out there in the digital realm. So like my, I'm not expressing like who I am holistically and all of the thoughts that I have holistically on the internet. Like my digital expression is really limited. Going back to my angel investing advisory thing, it's like all that information about web three was stored in my head. And if you had a conversation with me, I could tell you about it, but I wasn't publishing it anywhere, just like I don't.

I've never written an Amazon review. I've never written a Yelp review. I've never done a LinkedIn endorsement, but like I have opinions about all of those things. I have opinions of like coming to me and you ask me about a person I've worked with or like a restaurant that I've been to or a product I bought and used. It's like, I can tell you about it, but we have to have a conversation. And so like the whole point kind of is to like incentivize the extraction of a little bit more of this data and make it usable by four users, but through businesses. It's like,

the users probably aren't gonna look at the raw expression of data. Like let's say they look at a product and it has 35 billion data points. Like that's not useful. The end user's not gonna look at the raw data, like in the knowledge graph. So it's like, okay, business taps into that. They filter it with whatever lens they want. Or we have our front end that like filters the data and helps people make decisions. So 100 % B2B.

BFG (Pete) (34:23.406)
Okay, cool. Yeah. And, you know, so it's one of the things I always ask when somebody comes to the like B2B idea. Cause I think for many reasons, and you know, I use super simple analogy, always like, you know, Dropbox and box .com basically the same companies doing the same thing, starting at the same time. Just look at the, you know, look at the size of different things.

And the consumer start basically always wins because it's so much easier to please the consumer if you have the right product. And also it's so much easier and cheaper to make mistakes with the consumer than it's with the business. It's just like, yeah, you can get one great business, which will pay for like a million consumers, but you make one mistake and they make you pay it all back 10 times.

Billy Luedtke (35:19.055)
100%.

BFG (Pete) (35:20.544)
So yeah, definitely I think for most of the great ideas, the consumer is actually a great entry point.

Billy Luedtke (35:30.191)
I agree. And I guess like one, to your point earlier about like the zoo thing, it, one of the...

I learned this lesson because of going through it a bunch of times where it's like, if you, if you go beat the B2B model out of the gates, you, what you end up doing is you end up like trying to conform the product to meet the requirements of the business that you're working with. which are oftentimes like they, they deviate from like what you actually want to build, but you're like, we got this big client. We have, we have the government of Zoog in Switzerland. They want to do passports. Like we have to be able to accommodate the passport use case. Cause.

why we can't pass this opportunity up. And then you spend two years trying to accommodate that specific use case. And then the use case doesn't go anywhere or the partnership doesn't go anywhere. And you've just wasted a whole lot of time because the requirements of the next guy probably gonna look a whole lot different. And so if you just build for like real people, like consumers first, it's like, you can, I feel like it's a little bit more general and you can kind of reason a little bit better about like, Hey, what would maybe everyone want as opposed to like, what would this?

these couple businesses maybe want if I can convince them of the fact that they need this thing.

BFG (Pete) (36:41.934)
Yeah, totally. And I'm saying it as a person who spent like 70 % of life in B2B actually building companies and actually working for companies which were owned by governments and other complicated institutions. So it's always easier to get the signal from the crowd, even though it looks like it's harder. But if you have like a large idea.

Crowd is always easier. So, okay, we crossed 35 minutes, which is a testament. The topic is interesting. And which also brings me to the important question, which we are getting close to the end. So what's up for the Intuition in 2024, apart from the, of course, launch, which is coming up in about a month or two?

Billy Luedtke (37:21.167)
I love it.

Billy Luedtke (37:39.543)
man, so much. Token, production, go to market strategy. Like everything's all happening all at once. And so like pay it, start paying attention, like turn notifications. You didn't have to turn on notifications for the past like two years, but like turn on notifications now, like start following us, go to intuition .systems, go to Twitter, track what's going on. There's going to be points. You want some points, maybe do some stuff. No, no.

BFG (Pete) (38:07.982)
No, no, no, no, no points, please.

Billy Luedtke (38:09.231)
no points. but yeah, like go to market. It's actually quite interesting. I'll try to keep it short, but kind of our whole go to market strategy over the next couple of months is focused around web three navigability and security. So going back to an earlier point, now that you can claim things about anything, what, what can you do? Well,

You know, like again, this is like decision making technology. It's trusted interaction, going back to the one liner. So it's like trusted interaction in crypto is really important. Cause if you interact with the wrong things, you lose all your money. If you interact with the wrong things elsewhere, you go to the wrong restaurant. Okay, whatever. You buy the wrong product on Amazon. you return it. You buy another one. You interact with the wrong thing in crypto. You have catastrophic consequences. Sorry, I'm sorry if that was too soon.

or if it hit home. But it's like, the user experience of Web3 can't be what it is now. Like the next, if we're hitting another bull market, like the next 100 million people can't pour in and have no idea what to do and get immediately scammed and lose all their money. Cause they're gonna get disillusioned, they're never gonna come back and it's gonna be another five years for any like real users to pour in. So we have to solve this now.

BFG (Pete) (39:08.174)
Hahaha.

Billy Luedtke (39:35.439)
And the way that we can do it is we can come together as a community to crowdsource information about the things in web three. Once we give you guys the tools to be able to like structure that information in the right way. Like you can, you can claim stuff on Twitter right now, but you're kind of shouting into the void. It gets lost in your timeline. And so you can't like discern this. It's hard to like new user comes in, they just get lost. They don't know that if like to choose Ethereum or to choose like Metamask as their wallet or interact with Uniswap or whatever they do.

They have no idea. And so trying to solve that in a bunch of different ways. So hopefully over the next couple of months, this all coalesces. We launch, start populating the knowledge graph with some of this information, and then we start getting integrated a couple of places so that the Web3 experience looks a little bit better than it does right now.

BFG (Pete) (40:25.614)
Awesome. Awesome. What are the events where people can meet you? Are you going to be at the ECCC in Brussels or, you know, Defcon in Thailand, wherever?

Billy Luedtke (40:34.703)
Yeah, I'll be at both of those. Probably gonna start doing more conference circuit things as well, but I will definitely be at ECC and DevCon, as well as maybe some other team members.

BFG (Pete) (40:36.236)
Alright.

BFG (Pete) (40:46.094)
Awesome. So I'll see you there and we can do a short catch up. What's going on? Awesome. Thank you very much, Billy. I think let's keep it at 40 minutes. I'll put all the links you guys need to know into show notes. It was great that you made time to talk to me. It was a treat. Thank you very much for that.

Billy Luedtke (40:50.735)
Let's do it, man.

Billy Luedtke (41:08.687)
Great conversation.

BFG (Pete) (41:11.534)
And you guys don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss another lovely episode which is coming next week. And definitely make sure to check intuition because I think they're onto something. Thank you very much.