An Interview w/ Rick Porter on Dripland, DSCVR, and other things
Rick Porter is the founder of DSCVR, the OG dropper of IC Drips, and an all-around awesome dude. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Rick a little bit, and a few weeks ago we sat down to chat about all things Dripland, a little DSCVR (and Discord👀!?), and more.
Rick has been the single greatest supporter of Dripland, and we’re honored to have his guidance and friendship.
BTW — Tomorrow (2 Feb 2022) starting at 10pm PST, Rick is launching a 7-day Battle Royale alpha version of IC Tanks. It will be 100% hosted on the Internet Computer (and will have a 50 ICP prize pool! Check it out!).
Eventually, Dripland (and others) will get access to this open-source game. This means small gamefi experiences based on IC Drips is in our future!
Until then, learn a little about Dripland, DSCVR, and the man behind the scenes.
AND, for many of you… I’m sure there’s a little nugget of surprise (or two) in this transcript. You read it here first, folks!
Bryan: What is it that you would hope for Dripland to ultimately achieve?
Rick: I want to see that the Metaverse style game comes together where you’re presenting this new paradigm of decentralized gaming that has all these weird DeFi incentives built-in…where the user themselves can participate with the tokens — with the NFTs that they own — and get themselves in the game. So, the NFT is kind of a ticket into the game. And I’m curious…with the 8001 NFTs that exist — how would that actually work? How would the users actually participate? And how could the properties on their NFT actually boost them within the game? And what other sub-economies can come out of it? I think that would be so interesting to see.
You know, the IC Drip NFT is open source. We still have to upgrade the standard, which I don’t think is going to be a big issue. But I do think that if we can get that basic game going for Dripland, I think people would be pretty excited to play something completely different.
Bryan: On the topic of upgrading the IC Drip canister, you have mentioned a couple of times about upgrading to the Dip721 standard. Could you shed some light on what that’s going to do, the implications of that upgrade, and why we need to upgrade the canister?
Rick: Yeah, you know, when we originally put together the Drip NFT, we just looked at what other Rust NFTs existed. And at the time it was just IC Punks and the thinking was — OK, we’ll follow their standard, and that will just be a simple way of doing this. But the issue is that it almost became its own unique standard and it made interoperability pretty tough, meaning we can’t open it up very well for other marketplaces. We should upgrade the standard to be what’s going to be adopted by most marketplaces, and I think that’s going to be Dip721.
We did an NFT drop for DSCVR where we used the Dip721 standard and it proved to be pretty simple. It also has all the provenance of CAP. And for us, having that provenance in place allows us to build more applications on top of it, like gated communities. So now we’re like, OK, this is probably the right way to go. How do we go back and upgrade? We think it would be pretty powerful, and valuable for the community.
Bryan: I’m sure we can find a way to upgrade the canister and make it a meaningful event for IC Drip holders. By the way, I listened to your interview on Will, Lee & Andrew, and I thought it was a great discussion. I’m curious if your inspiration to build DSCVR at all influenced you to launch IC Drips?
Rick: Yeah, a bit. It was mostly us asking what are the interesting things that we can build for the community that they can iterate on top of, right? And the whole point of DSCVR is to build something that we can actually iterate as a community.
It would be great to tokenize things and then open it up and then start taking in community proposals to make it quicker, faster, better, but also add new features.
With IC Drip we thought, can we turn this into a DAO in the future, or maybe we can turn this into some kind of community-driven effort. At the time, the tools didn’t really exist. But I think the tools are starting to come, and when the SNS is eventually launched, we should be able to do that.
Bryan: Yup. That’s going to be really interesting, and clearly, it’s what the entire IC ecosystem is waiting for.
IC Drip is a really unique name, and obviously, Gen Z inspired, so how did you come up with that name?
Rick: My co-founder, Alex, is super gen z. Actually, I don’t know if he’s technically gen z.
Bryan: So he’s just down.
Rick: He’s cool like that. We were going through all these possible names, and I don’t know how Drip came up, but there were so many other names. And I can’t remember how we actually landed on that. But at the time, I think it was just hilarious. We were laughing so hard. It just had to be a Drip Drop.
Bryan: So clearly Loot inspired IC Drips, but what’s the IC Drip creation story? And how did you come up with all the Drip item names?
Rick: My friend was working on an actual derivative of Loot, called Gears. And he just had a lot of fun with it, and we thought it would be cool to do something like this on the IC — since at the time, we hadn’t seen any text-based NFTs on the IC.
It was me and my two co-founders and our girlfriends and wives. Everyone just worked together and it was actually a pretty funny experience. Everyone has different tastes and aesthetics so it was just fun, and it took place over like three or four days.
By the way, I want to say that there’s actually a bug in the smart contract. I really want to go fix it, but it would impact rarity. You know the fire emoji, right? It actually shows up 100 percent of the time, but it’s only supposed to be showing up 50 percent of the time.
And there’s actually another bug too. There were like eight other emojis besides the fire symbol. And we didn’t notice that those emojis actually never appeared and we couldn’t fix it in time anyway, and so we pushed it.
It would be really cool to get back in there and do a full upgrade on the smart contract. Maybe not to fix the fire emoji problem or the other emoji problem because it would impact rarity. But I think it would make it a better NFT. One of the things that’s so cool is that we have the ability to upgrade. I think it would be really interesting to do a vote on this.
The challenge though is reaching all the Drip holders to get them to vote. Maybe there’s a way, but we’ll have to think about it.
Bryan: Agreed. There will definitely be challenges to this, but I agree that an upgrade would be welcomed.
On another topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this… Very early on when Norton was helping out… he started building this Drip bundler that was intended to break apart Drips and then re-bundle. So then @orcsun, who is the developer helping us now, started to continue that work. But then as we were testing we realized that potentially this tool could end up causing a devaluation of a lot of Drips.
So, if you can create custom drips with any number of items, then people will start to bundle together only those items that are extremely valuable, or perceived as more valuable, I should say. Then you end up with everything else that’s perceived as less valuable.
We were concerned that everything that didn’t have a fire emoji would be viewed as less valuable, and we thought this bundler could end up being detrimental to the project. And that’s the opposite of what we want. Of course, it’s all sort of just theoretical.
I’m just curious if you have an opinion about this. Should we limit the functionality of the bundler? Should we open it up and just say have at it?
Rick: I could imagine people wanting all the “Old”, you know, or a certain prefix or suffix, and then wanting to build something specifically for that. I think that would be kind of interesting. I think Drip would be really good for experimentation. And I think it would be very interesting to have more derivatives come out, and just to see what happens.
Bryan: We’ll have to revisit this bundler idea, because experimentation and derivative projects are definitely key to Dripland. Maybe we just need to take a more phased approach and avoid the free-for-all on Day 1.
Bryan: Can you help clarify how the Drip drop went down?
Rick: It was basically Stoic wallet users and DSCVR users who were active. We, at DSCVR, found 6000 users at the time who we felt were super active in the community, and then we asked Stoic to fill in the other 2001. It was super important that we made sure we hit active wallets so that we could get the right liquidity in the communities. And it was also important that we rewarded it to DSCVR users who were keen on making a valuable system.
Bryan: Nice. So what were the criteria in choosing those users?
Rick: You know, we’ve iterated on this so many times now. But it starts off with simply that you’re not banned on DSCVR. And then it comes down to commenting and upvote activity.
We use what we call the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. We have a bunch of users that we consider our Kevin Bacons and these are users who you have probably interacted with and may have never known it. And what we’re finding is that there are these “not influencer-influencers” like they’re influencers, but they’re not like influencers at all. They don’t even know the value that they bring to the platform. Probably they’re just people who are there to participate on the platform, and we use this to kind of better target drops.
Over time, this algorithm has evolved so much. But at that time it was really just the Kevin Bacon’s and who’s interacting with these Kevin Bacon’s. So yeah. And it was also super important that we find a multicultural approach to this too. So we worked closely with the Vietnamese community and the Chinese community for help in identifying active users. And also, we have a pretty good idea of who has multiple accounts. So, that’s what it was, but now we’ve almost completely stepped away from doing global drops. Now you build your own community on DSCVR and you set up the roles, and you whitelist your own users, and we can go from there.
Bryan: On that point, it seems like the ability for Dripland to use DSCVR for governance will be central to our future. I suppose I haven’t given it enough thought as to how we can implement this on DSCVR, through our portal. How do you see this playing out for projects like Dripland?
Rick: Yeah, we’re doing a lot of research on this in general. We have tools now to gate communities and it’s pretty good. Basically, you can transfer an NFT in or out of your wallet, and that can apply a role. So we’re actually thinking now, how do we open up this technology for Discord communities, too? We know Discord communities want this.
Bryan: Wow. You said Discord, right? Like using the DSCVR tech to gate a community, but within Discord?
Rick: Yeah. Like we’re not blind to the fact that modern NFT communities are built on Discord right now. It’s completely true. So how could we integrate with Discord? There’s a bridge between DSCVR and Discord… You know, we have a very similar role system and we’re both trying to do gated communities. And that technology, we think, can be mapped… there’s a way to link Discord and DSCVR, and we actually have a prototype Discord channel. And, so we know it works.
Now we’re trying to figure out what does the actual user flow look like? Let’s say, I’m going to create an NFT or I’m going to build a community. I go, I create my Discord community, right? And I also create my DSCVR community. And then you pair those communities together, like actually pair them through some sort of process. Right now, it’s super manual, but there’s got to be a way to pair them together correctly.
So you can have the live, real-time chat from Discord, but then you can pair that together with the article-based, long-form content of DSCVR. And so you could build up conversations… like maybe have the meta discussions in Discord, but have the local, long-form conversations in DSCVR.
You know, we see Discord channels getting fifteen thousand users, right? So we’re thinking, OK, well, this might be a good way of not only whitelisting your users, but also targeting them for jobs and having information about your user. For example, what are their wallet addresses and how do we actually give them something?
So it’s really early days…
Bryan: I wonder if with a Discord integration, you end up with a much higher quality of users… I mean, if you’re able to connect and even reconcile across DSCVR and Discord?
When we asked people on Discord to join or our DSCVR portal, people joined up immediately. They came over and our headcount was almost the same. But there is a discrepancy and I do wonder how many users are overlapping between the two systems.
Rick: Yeah. And you know, we wonder that too…I feel that personhood is what we probably think about literally every single day right now. I mean, even this morning, it was sunny out, I’m in Portland… and sunny for the first time in like a month. So I took a two-hour walk and I was just walking in circles thinking, how do we better establish personhood without creating more friction for the user? And it’s tough.
Bryan: You know, I wondered if what Dfinity is doing with the People Parties… if that ultimately becomes something that they open up for dapps to use… just like they will give us the SNS, born out of the NNS.
Rick: That would be interesting. I gotta think that’s in the pipeline. But, you know, going back to the personhood questions… so, there’s this Identity Labs project and I wonder how people would feel about this idea… Where your phone number verification and email verification could be baked into a DSCVR account without DSCVR knowing anything about it.
You literally would sign up for the service that’s completely external to DSCVR, and they have their black box that lets you verify your phone number, which they never know your phone number and lets you verify an email. They never know your email. And then this actually creates you an NFT that has certain properties and somehow can be bound to your DSVCR account.
Bryan: That’s amazing. Makes me of the PrivIC dapp in the Dfinity hackathon.
Rick: Yeah, by Dfinity themselves too.
Bryan: So, you’re looking to build out the DSCVR ID even more?
Rick: Absolutely. I do want that proven personhood ID, but I also want to be crazy anonymous. We need to be able to have IDs that aren’t linked to some real-world object or real-world identity. Then let the portals decide what kind of user they want. Do they want completely anonymous users to be able to post? Or do they only want to allow people who have the privacy token to join their portal?
Bryan: I totally get it. So DSCVR is providing the tools for these portals to manage their communities. And I have to say that broadly speaking, these are the kinds of ideas that drew me to the Internet Computer in general. A person’s overall web experience is going to be so much better with this tech simply because we take control over our data, our identities, and our general experience. It’s so powerful. This current lack of control is unfortunately the experience that most of us have come to expect in our web2 lives. But I think that’s changing.
Bryan: Hey Rick, I really appreciate all your time. So, to jump back and end on Dripland and IC Drips… how would you define success for Dripland? What are the challenges you think that we face, and I suppose more broadly, how would you like to see the community engage in the project? What do you think would make Dripland successful, and what are the things that you think that we need to focus on to get there?
Rick: I think it’s hitting the V1. Getting the V1 release out correctly, and then sticking the landing. I think the landing to me is going to be some sort of daily active users. I don’t know what that number is going to be… like maybe converting a certain number of current users into active users on the platform.
Bryan: Hey Rick, thanks again for chatting, man. I’m sure I’ll catch up with you again soon! We have lots of things to do for Dripland, and also looking forward to everything you’ve got going on at DSCVR!
Find us on Twitter
@ICdripland
@DscvrO
More importantly, find us on DSCVR!
dscvr.one
Dripland
And join our Discord :)
https://discord.gg/U8YppXuU2x
