Blockchain, NFT’s Memberships and WordPress

Bob: Hey, BobWP. I’m here. Do the Woo and I’m Wooing with the one and only Brad Williams. Brad, how are you doing?

Brad: I’m doing great. It’s February. I saw a meme that said January was the longest year yet this year, so I’m glad it’s February. It was the long month, I don’t know.

Bob: It kind of was. Now, we have a short month, so did they say.

Brad: We’ll see how it feels come end of the month.

Bob: Technically it’s short.

Brad: Short in days, but we’ll see. Either way, it’s good to be here. I’m excited about the topic today. It’s going to be a fun one.

Bob: It’s something that I know you have a bit of interest in. So, I think it’s going to be a good conversation. Why don’t you lead into that and talk about what you like to do when you’re not WordPressing and who the guest is?

Brad: That’s a good question. What do I like to do when I’m not WordPressing? But, let’s get into it. So, today we have a really excellent guest, a friend of mine, we’ve known each other for a long time, probably I don’t know, 10 years or so, Christopher Carfi. How’s it going, Chris?

Christopher: It is going very well, Brad, and good to see you, Bob, as well.

Digging into Web3 and coming back to WordPress and WooCommerce

Brad: We’re excited to have you on the show. Like I said, it’s been a number of years and your path and different things that you worked on has changed a little bit. Now, you’re in some real kind of future tech stuff, some things that I’m excited to dig into because I’ve been kind of experimenting in the world of Web3 and blockchain and NFTs, and I know a lot of other people are out there and I’m sure there’s people listening that have no idea what this world is, but I can promise they probably at least heard the term NFT or blockchain or crypto. Maybe they’ve even muted them on Twitter because it’s almost everywhere you look in hear these days, but we’re going to be digging into the interesting space of Web3 and obviously bringing that back into WordPress and WooCommerce and what that looks like, but you’re actually working with a company. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that? That is really kind of a bit of the tip of the spear in terms of Web3 and the WordPress space.

Christopher: So, sort of a circuitous route to get here. I have been with a number of different startups, was with GoDaddy working on the GoDaddy Pro program for a bunch of years, and then earlier in 2021 connected up with a project called Unlock Protocol, which is both a company and an open source project that’s focusing on how Web3 NFTs more as a technology than as sort of the art-type buzz phrase can be used for doing really, really interesting things, in particular around memberships. So, it seemed that I was sort of drifting away from the WordPress space a little bit and they just keep driving me back in.

Brad: Dragging you back.

Christopher: Exactly, and one of the things that we have now is a WordPress area, a plugin that just went live in the WordPress plugin repo late December that actually lets somebody use NFTs to set up memberships on a standard, run in the mill WordPress site, which is kind of cool.

Brad: It’s very cool, so let’s take a bit of a step back just quickly so that our audience, and I say that in quotes because I’m really talking about Bob. We can fill Bob in on what is the world of Web3. Web3 can mean a lot of things. It’s kind of a somewhat loosely defined… I guess it depends who you talk to, but at the heart of what we’re talking about here is blockchain technology, and how blockchain integrates with different services, WordPress being one of them.

The blockchain integration explained

If you could, just a quick overview for someone that maybe doesn’t really understand this at all, or hasn’t heard of it, what is blockchain and Web3 and then maybe lead that into NFTs and what does it all really mean?

Christopher: Totally, so there is a new-ish technology that’s been out for a few years at this point, all around blockchains. If you zoom way out, you can think of a blockchain as a big shared database that we can all read to, we can all write to, we can access that is out there and shared publicly. So, instead of every organization or every project having its own SQL server install, there is this big shared blockchain database in the sky that anyone can access, and there have been a number of different ways that folks have been using that. It originally started with things like Bitcoin back in the early 2010s, thereabouts. There was a new aspect of it called Ethereum that started in probably five-ish years ago or so, and now we’re starting to see some really interesting use cases come up.

When we hear the term Web3, it is frankly, still kind of nebulous at this point. One of the better descriptions I’ve seen is if we think of the last three waves of web stuff, Web1 was you could read stuff that was on the web and Web2 is you could read and write stuff to the web, and that’s where we started with the early, early blog things in the early 2000s and then got into some of the social media space and things like that.

Fundamental technologies like RSS came out of that as well, which without RSS podcasts wouldn’t exist, which is kind of cool, and now we’re getting to an idea of Web3, which is you can read, you can write, and the actual users of the system can get some ownership at some level in the systems themselves, either directly through various cryptocurrency or having the ability to have some voting aspect and some voting rights and some governance in various projects in the open source side of things and we see a lot of things and there’s a whole buzzword soup around NFTs and DAOs, which is a DAO, distributed autonomous organization, and the like, or decentralized autonomous organization. I’ve heard it used as well. So lots of different things, but really I think at its core, big database, big shared ledger that anyone can access and write to, and there are models and projects and opportunities now where people can actually get some of their own ownership in various incarnations into that infrastructure.

Brad: And, I think that at least from my perspective, and I think many of us in the WordPress space specifically, the open source nature of what we are drawn to around WordPress and Woo and some of the other products really lends itself very well to things like blockchain. Like you said, it’s an open ledger. Blockchain is essentially an open database of sorts that we can all use and we can all benefit from in a sense. So, I think naturally just in that very simplistic way of stating it is like, “Yeah, that sounds interesting. I like open source. I like helping others. I like others helping me.” I definitely like it better than proprietary, and that was, I think, one of the initial reasons why I got somewhat interested to see, what is this blockchain stuff everybody’s talking about? Of course, now one of the newer kind of use cases of blockchain that has really taken off is the world of NFTs, and I feel like you either get it or you hate it with NFTs right now. You either understand it or you hate it, there’s no middle, man.

Christopher: Indeed, there is not a lot of kind of meh, that’s just not out there.

NFTs at the base level

Brad: So, if we explain to people, what is an NFT? What is NFTs just at a base level? What is this thing that has people all fired up one way or the other?

Christopher: So, it’s interesting, the same thing depending on how you look at it, you can view in a bunch of different ways. At its core, so I’m just going to think of this from the pure technical side of things, NFT, it’s an entry in that shared ledger. You’d almost think of it as a certificate of authenticity or a certificate of ownership for something, and that is what the underlying technology is. NFTs as a concept have been around for a few years at this point, Unlock, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, has been around since 2018 or 2019 at this point, and using NFTs in this original sort of fundamental, technical utility manner. Now, what got all hyped were NFTs, they’re again, certificates of authenticity. If you hold one of these tokens, you can be viewed as the owner of something.

And, it’s not really the thing itself, it’s the thing that shows that you own the thing and people started using them for art. So, there were a couple of projects a couple of years ago that came out. One called CryptoPunks, which was one of the very first ones. CryptoKitties was another one, and this was in 2017-ish or so. And, people started realizing that you can use NFTs to represent ownership of a piece of digital art. What’s happened over the last year is really taking off in the beginning of 2021, this concept of, ooh, we can have verifiable ownership of these particular digital assets completely blew up.

And so, we saw huge spikes in projects where pieces of art were going for millions and millions of dollars, and people are starting to really connect their online identity in some ways to these digital representations. Sometimes they’re from a set of similar looking pieces of art, almost cartoonish in some way, and people are using them as their avatars, and we’re starting to get these really interesting second order effects where not only are you an owner, you’re a participant in this NFT or NFT art space, which again, is just one use case of NFTs, but you also are sort of part of this group in this community either of NFT owners in general, or one of the 1,000 or 10,000 people who are involved in a particular project. Now, you’ve been involved in a couple of projects, haven’t you, Brad?

Brad: I have, yeah. I got into NFTs about a year ago. It was around February, March. Chris Wallace, who’s now full end NFTs, at the time he was at 10 up and we were friends and we chat and I noticed he started to get into NFTs and I was curious, so he gave me the rundown and I was definitely drawn to it because it’s interesting. So, I’ve been dabbling in NFTs, I’ve been collecting them, and I think that’s the one hot topic that people latch onto around NFTs is what you touched on or I guess what they’re missing as a piece that you touched on, which is the digital ownership because that’s really what it comes down to is right now the hotness, the thing that everyone’s getting drawn to because it’s kind of the quick and easy thing you it into is the digital art side of it.

But, the idea of being able to have digital ownership over potentially anything is almost mind blowing when you start to think about what that could mean. Digital ownership maybe of your house or your cars or your physical goods of literally anything that you own could be proven on a digital ledger, and I think that is where it really starts to open up the mind of how revolutionary this could be in terms of how we own stuff and how we prove that we own things beyond just a JPEG because everyone’s like, “Ah, I write click save. Now I own it.” It’s like, “Great, now go sell it and how much are you going to get out of that? Versus what I’m going to get out of it when I show that I actually own it on the ledger and that’s what I’m selling is that proof of ownership, not the JPEG.”

There’s a million ways to steal stuff online, but to prove you actually own it is where it gets very interesting. Or certainly at least one of the areas of the Unlock Protocol comes into play. It’s kind of taking this idea of digital ownership and interacting with it and bringing it to WordPress. So, let’s talk about that a little bit, the Unlock Protocol.

A look at the plugin Unlock Protocol

Christopher: I’d even turn it a couple of degrees from there and spin it to digital membership, and we talk in the Web3 space and in the crypto space a lot about wallets, and if you open up your wallet and look what’s in there, we think, “Oh, that’s where we put our cash, that’s where we put our money.” The cash that you have folded up in your wallet, if you have any these days, is probably not what you’re really using your wallet for. Most of the things that you have in there, those little cards that you have, are probably membership cards to a thing. They might be to a gym, they might be to a club, they might be to Blockbuster when that was a thing.

Brad: It might just be the Blockbuster, that’s quite an example.

Christopher: Exactly.

Brad: So, if you have a Blockbuster membership card in your wallet, you need to clean out your wallet.

Christopher: Exactly. The interesting thing about what Unlock is doing is it is so A, open source, and B, protocol and what we mean by protocol is it is something that if somebody wants to build Web3-based memberships into their project, they can do that. Again, it’s an open source project, and so what we’re trying to do is provide this really interesting level of interoperability for membership and what this means is if you have a membership token, a membership NFT for a particular community, then it’s very easy for any site or service that implements the Unlock Protocol to know if you are currently a member of that site or of that community.

Brad: And, that’s just checking your wallet basically. I log in, I authenticate my wallet and it says, “Hey, Brad has this NFT token. Come on in.”

Christopher: That’s exactly it.

Brad: I love it.

Real-world, cool examples

Christopher: There are two very cool examples we saw spin up this week. One was a crypto-based community that’s run by a person on Twitter who goes by the handle of Croissant. I think their Twitter handle is CroissantEth, and if you go there they’ve got this site called Bakery at bakery.fyi, and it’s all about their learnings and findings and the like of what they’re seeing in the crypto space. And, they have set up their site as a membership site. They happen to be using the WordPress plugin, and the way Unlock works for WordPress in general is it is represented, in this case, we’ve taken the underlying protocol, connected it into a Gutenberg block, and if you install the Unlock plugin, you just have a new block in your little tray on the side, and you can drop in a block that you can nest other content blocks into.

It literally takes about 15 seconds to configure that block to look for what we call a lock or configure that block as a lock, and then if you have the membership NFT, when that page is rendered, when somebody visits the site, and so when you grab one of those memberships, you are a member of that site for whatever the duration of the membership is and you can get access to that content.

WordCamps and NFT’s

Brad: I can see a world in the not too distant future, maybe even this year, where if attending a WordCamp, actually all attendees get an NFT. The WordCamp has a really nice, professionally-made NFT token, every attendee gets one. What’s your wallet address when you check in, or when you register? Maybe speakers get a special one, volunteers, organizers, and then over time, obviously you can have all the proof and all of the history of the events you’ve attended right within your wallet, but that really starts to open the doors because then membership sites, or even WooCommerce sites, or whatever could integrate and say, “Hey, if you attended this WordCamp,” and I say attended by quotes, “If you have this NFT, however you got it,” you might have bought it from somebody that attended.

They can get sold, but if you have this, if you attend a WordCamp, you can come over to our site, maybe get a free membership, maybe get a free, whatever, 30 days, maybe get 10% off all your orders. There’s things you could do, and you can validate they have this NFT, now we can unlock some special things for this user, and that’s where my mind starts to blow a little bit and think this is going to change the landscape of how the internet works and whether you’re into NFTs or not, whether you think they’re stupid or not, ultimately you’re going to up interacting with NFTs in some capacity in the very near future. We’re not that far away from it, so it’s exciting. That type of stuff is great.

Christopher: And, the wild thing that happens is A, everything you just mentioned, we’re already seeing this. So, a number of the Ethereum conferences are starting to use NFT ticketing. We’ve had a number that have used Unlock Protocol to manage that because it’s very cool. When it’s in your wallet, it can also be represented as a QR code, and you can scan and know if that NFT has been used and such, but the fact that that membership or that, in this case, proof of attendance, but if you think of it as I’m a member of the club who went to WordCamp Philly in 2022, you are a member of that club, and any site, any project, any system that integrates Unlock can prove that you’re a member or check to see if you’re a member of that.

A lot to unlock for a wide integration

So, it can be a Woo site and give discounts to someone, it can be a Discord server, it could be some other event, and what happens is when the membership itself is held by the member, literally held by the member, instead of being managed by any one central site, all of a sudden when you do that 180 degree flip, all of a sudden you have all this interoperability that just you couldn’t do because every one of those sites would’ve needed to figure out how to integrate using APIs to whatever the system of record is and all of that complexity goes away.

Brad: Exactly, it just isn’t feasible or scalable at that rate. So, this really opens the doors. I mean, I have proof of all the conferences I’ve been to in a box right next to me, just full of lanyards, which once you leave an event, it’s kind of neat to hold onto, but then both of you have been to tons of events like me, you probably have the same box in your house or it’s hanging on the wall and that’s cool for me, I guess, but you throw it away. I just moved and I’m looking at this box, do I take this with me? I hate to toss it, but if all that was digital, I could care less if I had a physical thing around my neck.

Just put it in my wallet and a way we go. So, I think that’s going to really change the event landscape pretty quickly because look at the WordCamp, was it US, this past fall? Obviously, it was virtual for obvious reasons, to keep things safe, but then it was like, “Hey, if you want to Wapuu it’s like $50 or something to get it shipped to you.” I’m just thinking, man, there’s a solution right in front of us, and it doesn’t involve shipping Wapuus through the mail.

Make it amazing, unique, Wapuu just for that event and give it to everybody that registered, and then they get their cool digital Wapuu, take it to the metaverse maybe down the road and run around as Wapuu, whatever, but there’s even more creative solutions. And, you can’t see if you’re listening, but you guys see on video I have some Wapuus behind me, the stuffed ones. Yes, those are neat, but I would much rather have something digital that I can have out there and show, hey yeah, this is what I have. These are the places I’ve been.

Thanks to our Pod Friends GoDaddy Pro Hub & YITH

NFT’s connecting and rewarding with memberships

Bob: I’m the one person in the world and that’s me, that just explains a lot about me. So, I’m going to segue into WooCommerce, but I want to do it in a way that I’m trying to clarify what I’m hearing at the same time. And this is going to be a strange way of wording it maybe, but let’s say you start a WooCommerce subscription and you’re doing some kind of a club-ish thing, who knows what, and you may be selling things. So, it’s not so much saying that this particular plugin or you’re using blockchain or NFTs or anything to base your entire membership model around, maybe even how I know that it monetizes, but payment to get into it.

It’s also that fact that you’re adding almost, I don’t want to say rewards, but you’re adding other great stuff that can be accessed via the blockchain that could not normally be, and that is part of your membership, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be entirely wrapped around it. It could be like, if I join a membership and I say, “Oh, I met Brad’s, whatever, membership site.” And, Brad has these really cool things on the blockchain that I can do, then he has this other cool stuff that I can actually buy and have shipped to me. That’s the beauty of it. I can say, hey… Or, I don’t really care about the blockchain right now, I’m going to figure that out later or something because all this other stuff is groovy, but that other enticement there adds another layer to it. Is that kind of what you’re looking at?

Christopher: Technically, what’s going on in the WordPress world with the plugin is what we’ve done is we’ve connected up the fact that you have one of these NFTs in your wallet, or we check to see if you have one of these NFTs in your wallet, and if you do when you’re first signing up for the site, it basically creates a WordPress user of a certain class, using all of the regular WordPress stuff. So, in the way the plugin works right now, you come in and if somebody signs up using Unlock, first the cool thing is they can pay if there is a paid membership through a whole raft of different crypto ones. We also support credit card gateway as well. So, you don’t even have to know you’re using any of the blockchain stuff and it works the exact same way, but what happens is in the version of plugin that’s in the repo right now, we just create a subscriber role the same way everybody has created subscriber roles for the past 15 years.

And, we just map and bind that particular WordPress user, and we say, “Oh okay, they are associated with this particular crypto wallet.” For Woo, if you had, say, a group called premium, you could do the same sort of thing, and when somebody came in, they could sign up for their premium subscription, or premium membership. I want to get into the intricacies that are blockchain-specific between memberships and subscriptions because there are some really interesting things in there, but you get put in that premium membership group and from a WordPress perspective, from a Woo perspective, you’re just a premium user at that point, but the fact that you have that NFT, it can be, again, portable to other places. And for example, you have, Bob, your awesome Woo site that somebody is a member to. Brad, you could choose, hey, I want to accept Bob’s members over and give them discounts on my site as well. You could totally set that up.

Brad: I like how it’s decentralized like that. You’re not attached to, well, I got this NFT from this one space and that’s the only space I could ever actually use that. That’s not actually true. I could say, hey, if you have a Bored Ape, which is one of the most popular ones, or a CryptoPunk, you can come in and get a free membership. I’m not attached to those projects at all. I don’t own one, I wish I did, but I could still validate that, yes, they have one. Come on in, you get the Bored Ape status and right up to the VIP level.

The public ledger and membership sites

So, the fact that it isn’t just you’re attached to it, you can just interact with it however you want because it’s a public ledger.

Christopher: Exactly.

Brad: So, essentially anybody can query it in the ways that you query it, simplifying it, but you could query it and say, “Do they have this, yes or no?” It doesn’t matter where they got it. Do they have this, yes or no? Maybe it does matter where they got it, and you could check that too. Are they the ones that received this or did they buy it off somebody and now it’s the third owner? It’s only original owners. You could check some of this stuff. It’s funny, it reminds me… I don’t know if you guys ever watched Frasier, the show Frasier, there was an episode where him and his brother Niles join this elite spa. They go into the spa, they’re loving it, blah, blah, blah. Then, they see a guy walk through a locked door and they’re like, “What is that?” Oh, well that’s the next tier up. And they’re like, “Wait a minute, there’s a higher tier than where we’re at?” So, the whole episode is them getting up to the next higher tier, which they finally do. Then, they find another locked door and they’re like, “We have to get into that door. Whatever’s behind that is the VIP of the VIP.” And, they finally get through that door and they basically lock themselves outside on the roof because it’s nothing, it’s just a locked door. There is a story to be had there or moral of that story, but it always reminds me of different membership levels I’m always thinking about. I got to get to the next level. What do I need?

Unlocking subscriptions vs. memberships

Christopher: Exactly, and this membership versus subscription is a super interesting thing. Membership is sort of state-of-the-art and state of technology right now and Unlock is doing a fairly unique thing. Most of the other projects that are out there, and I don’t know if I’ve seen any other ones that think about time-based memberships as well. Normally, it’s if you have a particular NFT, then you have it, and if you don’t, you don’t. And, one of the things that Unlock built into the protocol is this idea of time binding things. So, you can be a member for a day, a week, a month, a year, 100 years, in perpetuity, what have you, and that is an awesome thing for memberships, and again, we see hundreds of projects out there that are doing that sort of thing.

Subscriptions are a really interesting thing in the blockchain space because a subscription is effectively an automatically renewing payment for a membership, and the way the crypto monetary, if you will, interactions go is you say, I want to do this thing, it asks you for permission, you say yep, in my wallet and then your wallet transfers some funds or some coins, or what have you.

A subscription implies you are pre-approving future transactions against a wallet, which is not something that is really done today. And so, we Unlock are working on some mechanisms and on our roadmap for near future, Q1, H1 this year, we are going to be trying to crack the code on how to be able to do not just memberships, which we have down cold, but also subscriptions using Unlock, which will be not anything that we have seen anyone else doing. And again, we’re doing it out in the open, we’re doing it as an open source project, so anybody will be able to take that and build that into what they’re doing, which I think for Woo builders who are both doing memberships and subscriptions is going to be super, super interesting.

Incredible flexibility in the blockchain and memberships

Bob: And this is drawing something in, and again, I’m talking out of the side of my mouth because I’m just listening to what you’re saying and I’m thinking with subscriptions. So, I don’t know if this is something that would be involved with what you’re working on, but let’s say, could it be possible if you went and joined Brad’s membership for a year, could he essentially, if it’s a subscription, okay, you join a year and then you renew the next year, could now or in the future, could he essentially say, hey, you’ve dropped my membership, but I would like you to still be in the blockchain of my membership forever and ever because, I don’t know, I just think you’re a great person, that’s why, or whatever the reason is, but would that be possible?

Christopher: 100%. So, once you have one of these tokens, once you have one of these NFTs, it’s in your wallet forever. The way the Unlock one works is we have some metadata associated with them that says it’s valid starting here, it is valid until this date, but past that date, you still have it. It’s just like having the expired gym membership physical card in your wallet. You still have the thing, but if anybody checks it, it’s like, “Brad, you haven’t been to the gym since 2019 and this is kind of expired, but you still have it.” And it’s analogous to that, but Brad could either choose to still accept that thing. There are other ways that people can get these NFTs as well, so you can purchase them, sure.

There’s a concept of air dropping, which is I just send one to your wallet or I send one to Brad’s wallet and then they have, so he could have the emeritus or the alumni membership level and airdrop them things. We’re starting to see some very, very cool things as well, using that concept bundled and connected to other things. So our founder, Julien, his blog, he has memberships on there using Unlock to illustrate how the technology works, and he has the thing set up that if you follow him on Twitter, you can click a link, go to basically a Twitter off page, just like the ones that we’ve been using for the last 10, 12 years, and if you authorize Twitter for basically his blog to check, there’s an automated process that gives you a membership, that sends you an NFT for his site for it’s like 30 minutes, a trial or things like that.

And so, we could see use cases where you go to a New York Times article, oh, I just hit the paywall, but I really wanted to read this article, and the New York Times might say, “Cool, you don’t have to pay the 15 bucks a month. If you just want this one article right now, go follow us on Twitter and click this link and we’ll drop you a thing for the next 30 minutes that gives you access either to the whole site or just to this area, and again, the fact that all of this is decentralized enables these use cases that we have just not been able to do before to actually be built in many cases, like in a weekend, at least to get early prototypes going.

Bob: And, I think you just kind of answered because I was thinking of another scenario of Brad, if him and I are connected somewhere with both our membership sites and they drop Brad’s, then it sounds like they could still come to mine and get a deal, or if somebody got a deal because they dropped Brad’s membership, but they could still get a deal at Bob’s and I could almost, in a way, he’s upselling them back because it’s like, hey, thanks to Brad, and you hanging out with Brad for a year, now you got this great membership, so maybe you should go visit Brad again type of thing.

Christopher: Or, you give them an even bigger discount if they drop Brad, which I think would probably happen more often.

Brad: That’s a more likely scenario. That’s the funny thing about NFTs, people are experimenting all the time and not to say Unlock does all of this stuff, but there’s people out there like, “Hey, if you buy 10 of these really cheap ones I released and burn all 10 of them, then you’ll get the super rare one that I made.” And, only a few people did it because it’s a bit of a process. So, it’s a bit of the Wild West too in how some of these things are going to interact because you could say, “Hey, we’ll give you something if you ditch our competitor,” and we can validate that on the blockchain. That’s an interesting space, and we’re just scraping the surface here of just getting the idea of logging into a site with a wallet, which I love, get rid of accounts.

My wallet is my account, I don’t need to log in with Facebook or Twitter, or make a new account, I can just log with my wallet. I love that, and the idea of just understanding NFT is a token it’s proof of ownership. So, you can prove you own something and that could unlock some doors. So, that’s really just scraping the surface of all the possibilities of just Web3. There’s a lot that falls under Web3, but this is a really, really exciting area of it is that digital ownership and what we can do with it on the web.

A new energy in the space like early blogging and podcasting

Christopher: I have not felt this kind of energy in the space since the early, early blog and early podcast stuff because we’ve got a bunch of folks who are just trying and stuff out and seeing what works and some of it’s going to be awesome and some of it’s going to be yet another learning experience and that’s okay, but this idea that the individuals who are participating literally get some aspect of ownership is very different than what we’ve had before. The fact that we can now, through these kinds of technologies, you don’t need to have someone in the middle who’s mediating these transactions or deciding what’s okay, what’s not. If you are a creator and you want to offer a membership directly to your fans, you can do that. You can have that connection to those fans irrespective of platforms.

So, one of the big things that we hear a lot is the only reason I still am on Facebook is that’s where I set up my Facebook groups for my community, and there’s just no a feasible way to move those folks somewhere else because I would have to rebuild those memberships, if you will, from scratch. And in this case, if it was done using something like Unlock, it is literally trivial to say, “Okay, community, we are meeting on this website and if the website supports unlock as a protocol, that works, or we’re meeting at this restaurant or meeting at this club,” all of those things, again, they just work out of the box and tether the connection is between the creator or the community convener and the members or fans and it’s totally portable. It’s the connection between the humans as opposed to being mediated by whatever platform is in the middle that, it’s managing a membership.

Bob: That’s interesting, and, I think the audience of Woo builders, as this transpires, it seems like it’s at least important to have the basic understanding because I could see somebody say, “Hey, I heard Chris talking about this on Do the Woo, and I was thinking this sounds intriguing because I have a membership site and everything.” So, probably word of advice to builders is to at least be aware of what’s going on because you either kind of got to start to embrace it or if somebody mentions blockchain, I pass on it and say, “Find somebody that knows what they’re talking about or doing actually.” So, it brings up a lot of interesting stuff and that’s why I have people like you on here, so I don’t have to learn it all and you can explain it and I figure if I have enough of you people talking about it, I’ll eventually really get it.

Brad: I’m telling you, Bob, Bob WP, NFT. It rhymes, so it clearly needs to happen.

Christopher: It does.

Bob: And, that could unlock the doors to all sorts of things in Do the Woo world. This was really great. I guess it’s time to it up, right, Bob? So Chris, why don’t you tell everyone where people can find you online and definitely where they can find the Unlock Protocol?

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m super accessible on Twitter and other the things at Ccarfi, and Unlock on Twitter is at UnlockProtocol all together and you can go to unlock-protocol.com. We’ve got a super active Discord community as well and creators and developers and interested folks. Feel free to hop in the Discord and we’ve got lots of friendly folk in the community who are happy to answer any questions.

Bob: Excellent. Well, I guess depending where you are on the side of the fence on this topic, I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about it. We may have Chris back several months down the road and see how things are going with that. Who knows what will have transpired by then? But, I certainly think you will be hearing more about Web3 and NFTs and all that good stuff here on Do the Woo, and if Brad actually pushes me enough and helps me, who knows about that.

Brad: Who knows?

Bob: Bob WP, NFT, so who knows. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

Christopher: Absolutely, thank you for the invitation. Great to see you both.