Audius (with CEO Roneil Rumberg)
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All right, Acquired LPs, we are here today with a very, very, very special guest, Roniel Rumberg, the co-founder and CEO of Audius. We're super excited to have this conversation because I feel like

Until recently, but for the past, I don't know, 6, 12 months, well, plus, we'll hear the whole story. Every time we talked about Solana or we talked about crypto projects in general, there was like one canonical example of like the real world non-DeFi use case for crypto and it was Audius.

Now, of course, there are many more, but like you guys were the first. We're so excited to dive in with you. So welcome, Roniel. Awesome to have you here. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And I'm stoked to be here, too. This is going to be a really fun chat. Oh, it's going to be so fun. So probably most people listening will at least have heard of Audius and a lot, I think, will know what you are. And hopefully many will even have used it as millions of people have. Maybe to start, can you just give us the overview? What is Audius?

At the highest level, Audius is a digital streaming service that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new music. We really see that direct piece of that explanation being our key differentiator between Audius and a lot of the music listening and distribution services that you might know today. The way that Audius achieves that is by being fully decentralized. So there's a network of

node operators that are actually hosting all the content, hosting all the metadata, all this other stuff on the network, basically running the network. And artists and fans have come together to run this as a community good, effectively. It's been a crazy ride since we got going, but it feels like things are only just beginning now.

And when did you start the company? The project got started in early 2018. So coming up on about four years now. It actually took two years to get the first version of the product or nearly two years to get the first version of the product out publicly. So that launched in late 2019.

Early 2018, the idea of building a consumer application, let alone a music streaming application, decentralized, you know, on a blockchain on, you guys use a combination of Ethereum and Solana. You use both. Nobody was thinking this. You were taking crazy pills. Why did you believe firmly enough in sort of certainly Ethereum winter that this was an interesting thing to pursue?

The idea for Audius actually first came for my co-founder Forrest and I in 2015 or so. The idea really was a community-owned and community-operated version of SoundCloud. That was very directly inspired from seeing, I think, some of SoundCloud's missteps and issues around that time. We really felt that if there were a way for users to be in control of

the decisions made around how the platform works, how discovery works, how curation works, how all of these things work, a product could have staying power around user-generated audio that no one ever seemed to get.

Right. Going all the way back to like MySpace was really the first place for for user generated audio. So that was the initial like genesis of the idea. I was working at Kleiner Perkins at the time. Me and a couple of others started this little seed practice thing.

Edge? Is that what it was? Yes. Yeah. KPCB Edge. Oh, man. I remember that happening. Yeah, that was me and a couple of good friends of mine from school, Anjane and Ruby. So Anjane was the one that led up Edge and organized the effort internally. And he and I were good friends in school and he knew I was very into like

I guess, like distributed systems and decentralized tech stuff. So he was like, hey, you know, like, why don't you come help us look at this area and hang out and have a good time? And I was like, great. Yeah. But anyway, with respect to Audius,

We concluded at that time that tech didn't exist to do what we wanted to do. We actually came up with this very, very convoluted design for Audius that would work with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has this OP return field in a transaction that you can write arbitrary data into. This would have been in those days when

Or maybe slightly after when people were trying to create Bitcoin 2.0, like right as Ethereum was getting started and there was like the colored coin guys, all the projects in Israel that were like, oh, we can build on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and create these other fields. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So we didn't make it very far with that, right? I think we quickly realized that like this was not going to work, right? And I'm glad that we did because in retrospect, it definitely wouldn't have at that time. But so I spent a few more years at Kleiner. My co-founder, Forrest, ended up starting a company that kind of

worked on like data center asset tracking management problems. So they would track like usage of licenses across, you know, natural transition from that to, you know, the music streaming industry. I could see some similar problems to solve there.

Yeah. We all give him a lot of shit for that. It's pretty funny. I think he was like so, so scarred by enterprise software sales. That was like heavy, like on-prem software enterprise sales, not like SaaS, right? He was just like, never, never again. So obviously what we did with Audius couldn't have been more the polar opposite in terms of that. But he sold that company in

mid-2017 to a company called Avi Networks that later got bought by VMware. I decided to leave Kleiner around that time because I kind of wanted to get back to building stuff.

It was a little bit tough at a firm like that to spend a lot of time on what I thought were the most interesting things in crypto, which were these token-y things. Now things are a lot easier in terms of how venture firms can get exposure to that asset class. But back then, it was really not clear from a legal perspective, from the limited partner agreement perspective, how you could engage with that asset class. And it was basically Union Square Ventures that was dipping their toe in

And all other VCs were like, yeah, definitely not.

Anyway, yeah, to kind of close out the thought, we revisited this idea in late 2017. Obviously, Ethereum and IPFS had both launched by that time. And we thought were the two enablers that could help us do this and said, hey, let's let's try and make a prototype around this and see if see if we can make something work. And

We did. And then some folks got excited about like helping to lead a seed in the project. So that happened and everything kind of went from there, I guess. Yeah. Who were your early believers that you're willing to sort of shout out here? Yeah, it was Nico Bonazzos at General Catalyst and Adam Goldberg, who was at Lightspeed at the time, but now founded a dedicated crypto fund called Standard Cryptos.

So it was the two of them. They co-led that seed. They were the ones that believed when to what you mentioned earlier. Like, yeah, I mean, everyone thought we were dumb, dumb as a rock to try to do this. Right. It was like, what were the known things about crypto in 2017? No one uses it is number one. Nothing works yet is number two. Floyd Merriweather is doing like ICO scams. Yeah.

What was known about music businesses at that time is that none of them make money. Spotify was the one exception to that, but there was such a long trail of destruction around music technology that no one wanted to touch that either. You're right at the intersection of two just beautiful trends that investors are champing at the bit to go in and invest in. Yep, exactly right. So we were just chomping

just kryptonite, right? Like everyone thought we were stupid. We've used the phrase seed several times on this show once to describe the seed practice with KPCB edge. And then again, for Audius, can you describe what seed meant in what you were doing at Kleiner Perkins and what seed meant when you raised a seed round for Audius? Just to, cause now it's totally different. Yeah.

It even became different, I think, during that time. So when I started at Kleiner Perkins in 2015, seed meant like one to two million dollars at like an eight to ten cap, say for some other kind of thing like that.

Rarely priced. That was pretty cookie cutter, right? And KPCB Edge, that group was writing checks of 100 to 200K at a time. So we were not leading seeds. We were just a small participant in them. Ronil and I were both at Stanford when Snapchat was happening. And if I remember right, didn't Lightspeed do Snapchat seed round with a $600,000 total round? I think at a 6 million cap. That's right. On the note.

Wow. Oh, my God. It's crazy. It's like this is totally not what this episode is about, but it's so hard not to take it here every time because the world has just changed so much. I mean, even in the last like 12 months, but certainly in the last four years. Oh, it certainly has. And it's just it's just kept changing in the face of I remember when I was at Kleiner, people were like, oh, my God, you know, a $10 million cap on a seed like this is nonsense. Like, this is crazy. You know, how are we ever going to make money investing at these

crazy prices. It's like, nah, nah, nah. You're going to do fine. Don't worry. Before we get into some of the implementation of how Audius is implemented using blockchain technologies, can you talk a little bit about the why of decentralization in music? I think it's helpful to start from

Is that growing, shrinking, or flat?

That's growing. Actually, all of those categories are growing in terms of the dollar amount of revenue. But only 12% of that makes it to artists, which is insane. So the other 88% are going to...

Distributors, platforms, middlemen like these so-called right societies that collect revenue on behalf of songwriters and other groups and then sort of sit on it and take a cut and do whatever and maybe pay it out like one to two to three years later. There's just so much like kind of structural stuff.

inefficiency and complexity there. The bigger thing to take note of with that is that the economics of music more generally look about the same as they did like 30, 40 years ago, right? When

Making a record back then was really expensive. If you think about you had to have a factory to produce CDs or LPs or tapes or whatever the medium of choice at that time was, you needed a physical distribution network to get that out to retail stores. You needed distribution...

deals in place with like the Tower Records and the Best Buys and, you know, the Amoeba Musics of the world, like everyone from the independents all the way to like the big box kind of music retailers.

That was really expensive, right? And what it also meant was that there could only be maybe a couple hundred artists in a year that could get distribution. Well, plus there was the whole radio dynamic, right? Of like, you had to have the relationships to get the radio airtime to drive demand. Like it was all so cloistered. Yeah. And same thing there. There's a fixed amount of radio airtime in the same way there's a fixed amount of retail shelf space there.

Of course, the internet completely upended that, right? We have an infinite shelf and an infinite amount of distribution capability, right? When the marginal cost of reproducing music is now zero, there's so much that... And distributing it. Yes. Is close to zero. Yeah.

It's all close to zero, right? There's so much more niche music that can have a place in the world, can find fans that otherwise... If you were an artist with 10,000 fans, you had no chance in the old music industry. But today, if you could get 10,000 people to pay you 10 bucks a month, you're doing pretty damn good. So...

Music, despite being kind of the earliest unintentionally to the digital age...

Streaming, if you look at the economic breakdown there, kind of looks the same as all those same parties that used to exist in physical record distribution still exist today and still capture roughly a similar amount of value to what they did back then. They don't add value.

value to the chain, right? I'm so glad you brought this up. Over time, given an infinite timescale, if you're not adding value, you can't capture any more value. But these things take a while to shake out. And so I'm curious, like, you just made

a phenomenal argument for why something like Spotify or Apple Music should exist. Algorithmic recommendations, infinite musical shelf space, zero cost to reproduce the music, zero cost to distribute the music. What you end up with is the streaming services we have today at very large scale. And so I'm curious to hear your perspective on why are there all these parties who are involved and how do they manage to still...

capture value in this new ecosystem. So there are a lot of structural and historical reasons there that I think they're able to maintain their position in the market, everything from like legislation across the world to pre-existing longstanding deals that say the major labels had made with given distributor companies and things like this. Right.

The groups that have power in music haven't changed. And that's why the economics of the industry haven't really changed either, because they're kind of controlled by folks that have a vested interest, obviously, in maintaining their current position. So when you look at folks like Apple Music and Spotify, I think they did the best that they could with a shitty hand. They had to

get these groups happy because they were not direct upload or direct engagement tools, right? Like you actually still can't upload music as an individual directly to those things. You have to go through a third party distributor. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but... Which is insane. What if you needed a third party distributor to upload to YouTube or a podcast or like, you know? That's right. Although I think there's a place for it in the market too, right? In that

This is, David and Ben, something we talked about last time we spoke, but Netflix and YouTube can coexist serving different segments of the market. And so too, I think, can user-generated audio exist in a different sphere from this studio-quality professional environment?

For the user that knows what they want to listen to and just wants to look it up and find it, I think Spotify is great for that user. And that's why we don't really see ourselves as competing with that platform.

You want Fleetwood Mac or you want Notorious B.I.G. All that is owned by the labels. You got to go through the labels to get that, right? Yes, that's exactly right. That comes with all the various baggage associated with it. But I think that the sea change that's coming is that the labels are a lot smarter than people like to give them credit for. And I think they actually do add a lot more value than people like to give them credit for.

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This is something I would be like dying to ask you. So I'm going to put you in sort of the exact opposite position as most people usually put you in, which is you are a record label. Like imagine you are one of the big, I don't know if it's five, four or five record labels. I'm an emerging artist. Can you pitch me on the value proposition of me signing with you versus giving you the finger and saying, I'm going it alone?

If I'm the record label, my pitch is I'm the most effective marketing and brand building machine that exists in the music industry. And it's kind of a venture type of bet, right? In the same way that as a...

As a founder, if you raise a seed round, like going back to our earlier thing, and then your thing doesn't work out, if you sell your company for like a million bucks or whatever, you don't make any money, right? That all goes to your backers. It's the same kind of dynamic in music. If you want to be the next Drake or Katy Perry or

that's the way you do it. That's the only way to do it. But that one size fits all model doesn't work for everyone. If I were in the shoes of the label, that's the pitch I would make to folks is like, look, if you're willing to roll the dice on like the 5% to 10% chance that you can become a superstar if we work together, we are the best place to do that. And we have a business model that can underwrite

losing 95% of those bets because we make our money back on the 5% that do pay off.

I think a lot of the sour grapes around how label deals are done, it would almost be akin to a founder being mad that their early stage investors got such a good deal or something when they go public. So they go like, "They only spent 600K on their Snapchat equity and now that's worth a billion dollars or whatever."

People made a deal in a place at a time and like the way that the world works, you honor deals that you make, you honor your word. So it's incumbent upon artists to ask themselves that question, right? Do you want a 95% chance of failure or do you want...

like a meaningful shot at like having a great you know living and great career but like a control your own destiny kind of yes yeah with the labels right like it's easy from the outside to just look at this especially like all of us in tech and be like wow this industry is so backwards and messed up but you said about you know you want to be drake or katie perry

So the labels business models, they're built on creating Drake's and Katy Perry's, right? So like if you have aspirations to be the next Drake, you should do that. Yeah.

If your aspiration is to be like a great folk singer, you know, there might be a better path. Either something with a small TAM or with slow growth, like to contextualize it into startup terms, like something a bootstrapper would be interested in versus a venture scale founder CEO. That's the key point I'd definitely drive home, I think, is that...

The labels approach is kind of one size fits all. It's suited to a world where there are 100 artists that matter every year, right? And that's just not the way that today's world is. But it does still work for, you know, some certain caliber class of artist. But

The thing that's also really interesting, the label model is very much kind of predicated on high cost content. So the model there for everyone listening's understanding is the label will advance money to an artist. And then the artist actually uses that money to produce an album, produce content, and then releases it and then releases.

The label recoups the money that they advanced. The artist's kind of like a, almost like a book deal, basically, or it is the same as a book advance. Like you, the label recoups against revenue and then revenue gets split according to your contract after the recouping is done. The vast majority of these deals never recoup the same way that like the vast majority of book deals never recoup probably. Or the vast majority of startup deals never clear the preference hurdle. Yeah. Yeah.

Here's where things get interesting, though. Like a lot of folks don't realize that producing a typical like pop or rock song, it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars per song. There's an audio engineer that needs to be there in a physical studio space sitting with you and recording. It takes weeks and weeks of the band sitting together and re-recording parts over and over again. Then there's a producer that has to like

merge and organize it. That is so different and requires a different amount of capital from like a dance musician who can sit on their laptop in a room for a few weeks and produce a piece of content like, you know, on their own.

I think hip hop, actually, we see similar dynamics where beat makers are separate from, you know, like rappers and folks like that. You know, someone can, same as a dance producer, like sit in their room and make beats. A rapper can, you know, go listen to and hear cool beats and then say, oh, I'm going to, you know, like rap something over this. Like, this is dope. I'm going to use it. So the cost of producing those types of content is just so much lower than

That artists in those areas tend not to need the advance to be able to get content out the door. Whereas if you're a rock band, like a typical guitarist, bassist, drummer, singer, like, you know, producing folk music, right?

That's really expensive content to make well. You kind of need the advance to be able to do something like that. Whereas I think where you see behaviorally, like what a lot of hip hop and dance folks will do with the advances they get from the label is not make music with it, right? Like, cause you can, you can spend that money on whatever you want. So, right. I mean,

I mean, classically in the book deals, the writers use it for six months to live while they're writing the book. It's a lifestyle expense. Yeah. So when you look at everything in the music industry...

economics wise, you can walk through a very logical explanation for how things came to be that way. And the same way that I just did for why labels have advances and then have to recoup it and then have the revenue sharing model that they do, right? It all kind of makes sense, right? But artists and creators are free people. And I think the role and opportunity for platforms like Audius to play in future is to give folks an alternative to that path, right? To say, hey, here's a way to

you can own the rights to your music and get it out to the world. It works very well for content that's cheaper to produce. You don't need the advance from the label. You don't need all of that machinery, all of that everything, right?

When I first checked out Audius, you know, there's a lot of great like EDM, dance music, some hip hop. But it's exactly that type of thing that it's like stuff you could make on your laptop. And the cool thing is laptops have some unbelievable software at this point to be able to produce things where you're like, wait, one person did that in their bedroom is mind blowing. Yeah. The cost of producing content going to zero, I think, is actually...

Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy. Okay, well, this is great to steer us back toward Audius. I want to ask you a question, but then also give you a minute to tell us about the scale that Audius is at today. I think people will probably so far think, oh, this is nice. Like, this sounds really good. But I don't think we've had you explain the like, serious scale. Like, this is a presence in the world. So I want to ask my question, but then first open with that, please. How does Audius

decentralization help this? Obviously, someone could do everything you're talking about on AWS, where there's a company that serves as the middleman that lets you upload your music directly, lets fans stream. So why decentralization? Yeah, it's about distributing ownership and control of the system. And it's about the trust that comes with that. So

Artists communities have been burned so many times by products in history that they're quite wary of, you know, investing a lot of time, energy, effort into some new platform for it to go away, you know, a couple years later, or their account to be taken away or their fans to be taken away or whatever, whatever it may be. And there's this great example. I'll say it. So

you don't have to, but you, you know, at the top of the show, you mentioned SoundCloud. Like to my mind, that's such like the, the perfect cautionary tale for an artist here. Like it was this great hope of like, Hey, the YouTube for music, like we're doing like everything we've been talking about. It's here, it's happening. It's getting momentum. Um,

And then it stopped for lots of complicated reasons. But yeah, for artists that are heavily invested in that, that like must have been crushing. It was. I mean, it truly was because so many folks ability to get booked for tours, which ultimately is how most artists actually make make their money is from touring.

was dependent upon their engagement numbers on SoundCloud and elsewhere. So if they invest a lot of time into SoundCloud as a platform, and then their engagement numbers start falling off a cliff because users aren't going there anymore for...

some algorithm change or, you know, we introduced a new feature where we highlight people that are paying us or something like that. So what decentralization does here is it removes any company or set of individuals from being in a position to make decisions like that, that undermine the both the integrity of the platform, but the ability for users to continue to get the same value out of it that they have been previously.

And I think that also has helped us grow to where we are today. So Audius serves about 6 million people on the listener side every month, and over 100,000 artists have uploaded stuff today. It all kind of comes back to that trust aspect and that trust dynamic that people feel when

They don't need to trust us to use this. They actually like earn the ability to control this by contributing content, by contributing value back to it. There are some interesting dynamics there where the network directly incentivizing and distributing control of itself is

to the people who are making it valuable. So both incentivizing that value creation and spreading control of itself out across the community, that's turned out to be this very powerful dynamic, right? Because artists are being told, hey, if you can bring your fan base here, like this network will pay you in ownership to do that. Yeah, so let's talk about that. What's the primary mechanism by which I gain control

governance over the future product development of Audius. Actually, one thing real quick before that, I think you said 6 million monthly users just for the record's sake. I think that makes you the most used crypto app in the world. We think so. It's not entirely clear. Brave Browser is a

their top line monthly user numbers, but it's not a decentralized application necessarily in how it operates. So you're right, David, we should not have let that just slip. Congratulations, Renil. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so I believe we are the largest decentralized application in existence by user numbers. For comparison's sake, MetaMask, I think,

just crossed 10 million monthlies. And that I think is a good proxy for what is all of crypto in terms of like the crypto native crypto usage for us as a single product to be at 6 million has been really cool to see. So our user base is not crypto native,

in the majority of cases. And I think that's how we were able to kind of get here, right? When you use Audius, it looks and feels like any other music listening experience and music player product, right? Yeah, I signed up and I kept waiting for like, okay, where's the part where I need like to either hook up my cloud wallet or my like, you know, bearer asset wallet that I have. Oh, weird. Nope. This just feels like a web app. Like there's no mention of crypto anywhere. Huh? Yeah.

Okay. And so maybe this is a good segue to that previous question before I so rudely did not acknowledge what a ludicrous scale you're at of like, how is this a crypto app and how does governance accrue? In the audience experience that you were using when you signed up, you actually have a wallet now without knowing it that the audience app generated and now manages for you.

It's one that you as the user control and custody, there's a somewhat complicated explanation around that that I can get into if interesting. But long story short, you have a wallet. Your wallet was actually on your behalf signing transactions and submitting them on chain to create your account to a

follow the initial set of people you followed to repost and engage with content. All of that's actually triggering these actions on your behalf behind the scenes. And your browser is actually talking directly to these community-operated nodes on the network. So when you go to audius.co, you know, you're getting this like,

client-side app bundle. But after that, your client-side app is able to do all of this on your behalf, basically talking directly to the network, which is...

pretty neat. So, you know, the majority of our users have no idea there's any decentralization, crypto, anything there, right? But they're getting the benefits and the value props that exist around crypto despite not knowing that, which is pretty cool. So like, even, you know, if you look at all of our public marketing materials, everything else, we talk about all the benefits

that this model provides, right? You get unfettered and complete access to your relationships with fans. You get all the data associated with those interactions, including the ability to target things to subsections of your audience and things like that. You get that kind of control over how content can be unlocked by whom and under what conditions. So all of these sort of

benefits that none of those things I just described would have been possible without the audience product being fully decentralized. But

Users don't need to know how they're possible, right? It would be like if... Don't sell implementation details, sell the benefits. Yeah, it would be like saying, you know, you should use my Facebook competitor because it's built on Postgres instead of MySQL. And it's like, who gives a shit, right? Like if it does something new and interesting that matters to a group of people, like...

You should use Snapchat because the photos disappear, not because what they chose for a database. Yeah, yeah. And I think so much of the Web3 community today, it's just... I mean, we're just so, so early in terms of how...

the benefits of this are communicated to users and even like what the benefits are. I think people aren't like, you know, kind of honest with themselves, you know, around what the benefits of a lot of these things are with respect to decentralization. And I think we're going to see a reckoning that happens because of that, right? In the same way that in the late 90s, like everything was

was on the web, regardless of whether it needed to be on the web at that time or not. A lot of things were just let's do X that already happened in the real world and put it on the web. We're seeing the same thing now, right? Like let's do X that happens in Web 2 land and put it on a blockchain and then maybe it'll somehow be better.

So let's take an example. Let's say some product manager in the future at Audius wants to introduce a feature that makes it so that for an artist to reach the fans who currently follow them, they have to pay Audius a bunch of money to do that. How does decentralization and sort of governance being decentralized over the product prevent that from happening?

The way that Audius, kind of the incentive model around Audius works, it all ties back into this Audius token that sits in the center. That has three functions. It secures the network so the people who run those nodes actually put up a bond or a stake of

those audience tokens to be able to run their node. And if their node misbehaves or does something wrong, they actually can get penalized against that bond that they put up. So it provides this level of economic security. The token that is provides this level of economic security around how the network runs. The token also grants access to certain types of distribution features.

So, from the artist side, if you stake a sufficient number of those tokens, you can get different abilities within the network. And then the third function is it maps directly to governance power within the ecosystem.

When the Audius network officially launched, which was October 23rd, 2020, from that moment onward, our company was incapable of making any changes to the code that powers any of Audius, right? Anything from the way that content uploads work to the way that search and discovery works. All of those things were basically like,

at that time, sort of handed over to the community to say, hey, you know, we tried to make some logical, sensible choices for how things could work up front, but like, you're in control of how this works going forward. So actually, to make changes to those things, you have to make a governance proposal, convince the community that there's

that change is worth making and then vote it into, uh, into place. So even, you know, routine like bug fix updates and stuff that our team will help to put out, we, uh, you know, summarize and, and explain the list of, of, uh, bug fixes and say, Hey, you know,

These all seem like good things to do. Like, if you agree, like, please vote in favor of this. And yeah, so we actually aren't capable, I think, of making some of those poor decisions that many other platforms have made previously when they reached a certain level of scale, like pulling the rug out from under their API, for example, or yeah, all these things.

And this assumes basically that those node operators or the validators, they're as idealistic as you sort of set out to be. It sort of requires that this decentralized web of people who are voting whether or not they want to take the change, they have to have this sort of same set of principles and ideals upon which you founded the company, or I guess they could have an economic incentive not to ruin a good thing.

They are one of many participants on the governance side. But actually, a node operator doesn't get to vote with all the tokens that are delegated to them on the staking side. They're only able to vote with any direct stake they may have put up. So they're actually a very small minority of the total voting share and voting base right now. Actually, yeah, anyone can...

vote with their tokens on these sorts of changes and outcomes. But that shifts the focus of your question, but doesn't change the nature of it in that there are still some interesting incentive issues around that, right? Like, I think the biggest risk that governance structures like this run is that it's kind of like a rich get richer kind of model, right? In that

The people who control it today will vote to retrench their own power over time and make themselves more powerful over time. There's, I think, some work for our community to do to iterate forward towards a model that is the most perfect.

So the network right now is minting about 70 million tokens on an annual basis. And it's distributing those to the folks that are creating the most value around the ecosystem defined by like driving engagement, other things. So like...

The intent there is basically to like forcibly distribute control and ownership among a very broad set of folks who are, you know, in proportion to the amount of value they are creating today. There's sort of two aspects to at least as the way I think about decentralized applications and systems. And Ronil, feel free to correct me if I'm thinking about things wrong. But there's the carrot and the stick. Governance is the stick.

but economics are the carrot, right? How are tokens distributed? And my hypothesis is that like the carrot can oftentimes be the better incentivizing factor for behavior of like you're an artist or you're a node validator or whoever, like, you know, you're generating value for the system. Great. You get tokens. You also get governance as a core, but like if the tokens, you know, Hey, they have value today. And if they appreciate more than you own the network and like you see the value there.

I love that carrot and stick analogy in that I think it's absolutely on point. So governance is it's both meant to improve and push the protocol forward, but it's also meant to punish those who are misbehaving within the ecosystem.

I think we're on the cusp of like the one of the larger kind of conflicts to play out there over the coming months, which is around botting and abuse. So there are a lot of folks in in the ecosystem now getting concerned about like people running, you know, like.

tools to manipulate the way, you know, how many plays their thing has and all this other stuff, right? So there are a number of features going that I know folks in the community have been working on to reduce those issues, right? There are ways that you can detect behavior, right, that looks not human.

The question is, you know, how will the existing power base of governance respond to a situation like that, right? This problem is still very early. So it's not like it's, you know, significantly impacted the distribution of governance power.

But it brings up this very interesting question, which is what if the very people in control aren't incentivized to punish themselves or to fix the problem? So yeah, whereas the economic incentive structure...

I guess they go kind of hand in hand, right? Like the, you know, your ability to earn the carrot has to be protected by some ability to enforce good behavior. The rules of the game, yeah. Yes, yeah. Because people will abuse, you know, these things, right? Especially if there's some monetary value ascribed to what they're able to earn in the form of these tokens and things. There's some stuff to be cognizant of there. So, yeah.

So how do people earn tokens today? There are a number of kind of incentive programs in place. Like if you upload a track that crosses a threshold of listening or engagement on it, if you curate a playlist that ends up being one of the top playlists, there's like a recurring set of rewards that are distributed on a weekly basis that, you know, the top

X number of folks in each of these categories, including actually like API integrations. So there are a number of folks that have built on and around the Audius ecosystem. A lot of folks don't realize this, but the majority of listening on Audius is no longer driven by our core ecosystem.

app, the one that you use at audius.co. It's actually by third-party folks that have built these amazing, cool applications that drive listening in different ways. There's this music racing game where you have to steer your car around and through obstacles that are in sync with the beat of the

the music that you're listening to. That's awesome. And they use the Audius catalog to help back that to more typical alternative music player experiences. So for example, the Audius app that our company put out, the mobile app, is a React native app that's not super great, candidly. We're a small team. We didn't have any native mobile engineers on the team. So there were some folks in the community that were like,

hey, you know, we can do better than this. So they built a great, there's a couple of great like native iOS apps now that search again. It's like the alien blue example in Reddit land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because the Reddit app itself was garbage for so long, right? No offense intended to them. It was just like not a focus clearly, right? In the same way that for us, it wasn't a focus for a while because the majority of our engagement is still on desktop web actually.

Also, probably in no small part because the majority of our growth has happened during COVID. There were 150,000 people listening to Audius on a monthly basis this time last year, and there's 6 million today. Oh my God. Yeah. That's awesome. All of that happened in a COVID-native world, right? There had to be some weeks in the last year where you're looking at your growth chart going, are we the fastest growing company of all time? Yeah.

Oh, I don't know about that. We're four years old now, right, as a company. If you're getting from $150K to $5 million in a year, I assume there's some like several hundred percent growth weeks in there. Maybe not. No, no weeks like that. We have had like 150% months before. But yeah, our growth was actually much more like...

steady than you might think in that, like, it's been, you know, 50 to 70% month over month. And then, you know, now it's down to more like 35 to 40% month over month because we're growing off of a much, much larger base today. I mean, that's still freaking great. I mean, yeah, yeah. I was thinking through my comment, like, wow, reverse engineering compounding is hard.

Like trying to think through like what actually would those be? Yeah, because if you think if you run the math back on like what is, you know, 70% month over month growth for 12 months, it's a big, big number. Yeah. Yeah. Compounding really, really gets you a lot quicker than you think. But to be fair, we definitely did have growth.

There were some moments where things just went like crazy. I mean, the week that this TikTok integration went live like a month ago or so, I think we added nearly a million users in like a week and a half or so afterwards, which was pretty cool to see. That's awesome. That was like...

you know, 10 times as many users as we had after a year of running, we added in like a week. Yeah. So those things are fun. Yeah.

This gets to a bit of a technical question that I've been wondering about for all companies like Audius. And when I say companies like Audius, I recognize that that's not necessarily a big category yet. But for companies that are creating a Web2 front end, or perhaps an API to create a set of Web2 front ends to a Web3 product...

How does that work? Like, all the blockchain stuff is decentralized, but like, I go to audius.co and that routes through DNS, presumably to like a centralized AWS hosted or something like that web server. How does that work in order to make the client side stuff as decentralized as it as it needs to be?

Yeah. So I think the way that clients decentralize is actually kind of, you know, exactly what we were just talking about, like this sort of API ecosystem, right? Our client was always meant to be a reference implementation, but not the kind of primary interface. And our clients completely open source. So like lots of people have forked it and done fun things. That was actually like how I think the first dark mode of Audius happened because

That was one of those things that like, you know, another one of those things that our team never got around to doing. So someone in the community was like, well, I'll just do it and it'll be cool. I think they just made like another style sheet that you could like load against the same webpage, but they did it by taking, you know, the existing styles from the open source code and playing around with them. So there actually comes a time where, you know, the core first party product, you know, stops being,

hosted by our company and hosted exclusively by the community. But even today, the majority of listening is happening not through our own product. So I think this is one of the biggest frontiers around decentralized tech and decentralized products, because I think a lot of

Folks are saying, you know, oh, well, the smart contracts are decentralized. So the thing is decentralized, even though, you know, like 99.9% of people use it all through a single website controlled by a single group of people that, yeah, yeah.

Right. So that's kind of where I'm going with this is like, okay, cool. Let's say you give up the strategic market position of having all the traffic, the front end, all the traffic. And you say audios.co is it's no longer the biggest or the best, whatever. And so your back end's all still decentralized on the blockchain. But let's say someone makes like a really sick front end and then they gain like 90% of the

all traffic sort of goes through them. Well, can't they just turn around to all the validators and everyone with tokens and say, like, look, I control the traffic. I want to add this feature. I'm either going to kind of go around the blockchain-based backend, and I'm just going to introduce this feature in a centralized way with my client, or I'm going to force you all to take some change because, look, I just have so much power in this ecosystem. Yeah.

That gets super interesting. There are certainly things like that that could happen in the future, right? In that this is the will of the community is what governs this and people will find interesting ways. The thing that has always made me feel like we would be resilient to these things over time, and again, like I'm speculating, so this has never happened, is that

All of the content and interactions around the content, all the data driven, you know, generated through that and aggregated around that lives in the network. It's very hard to build a network effect around a front end when, you know, there I guess for a front end to abuse that position because they don't have defensibility from people using other other front ends. Right.

exactly what you're getting at is is one of the big reasons why like spotify or sorry soundcloud and twitter and like so many other social products would like rip away their api after a while because like they don't want other people to be able to like i think there's like a really really powerful thing here that is a unique thing to web3 and ways of doing things like audius which is like

you don't have to have that Twitter, SoundCloud-like business model, like the way that token economics work. It's the underlying...

like database for lack of a better word that where the value is and like that just enables someone like i love when you the example of like audience being used in video games like could you imagine like going and just licensing music from you know via spotify or apple music or whatever to go use in a video game like no you got to go negotiate all those rights and whatnot but like you can just be this decentralized clearinghouse where like all that matters is streams of the tracks and

The artists get value for that because they create like as long as their play counts are going up, they're getting rewarded with tokens. Right. Like and it doesn't matter where it's happening. And like you can just like spread out decentralized to like everything. That's exactly right. And Ben, I think that's where we get our defensibility to what you were describing. I think value accrues at the network level here, not at kind of the level of the interface here.

But I think what remains to be seen, like I think where things are going to be really fascinating or where, you know, as there are third party interfaces that gain large amounts of traction, right?

What's their business model become, right? We've started to see, at least here, some things from folks like they're thinking about having ads, for example, in their front end, things like this. But again, there's that like, there's a fine line between if you go too far with that, you're going to push users to other things, right?

it'll be very interesting to see, you know, if, if, and when there are others that control the network from the interface perspective, like if they try to misbehave with that positioning, but,

But yeah, I think right now, you know, we've, we managed to create a great amount of diversity around how people are accessing the network. And I think to your, to your point, we're actively pulling back from our own interface alongside of that, you know, which is part of the reason that a majority of, of listening happens elsewhere. But I think there's a lot more, you know, the bigger reason is just that people come up with cool stuff that like we never would have come up with. Right. Yeah.

How does a company launch entirely on a Web3 stack? Because there's all these components of an application, and it's easy to just single out the mobile front end or something that just isn't Web3 technologies. And I'm always sort of wondering, at some point, does every line of code that runs as a part of an application, can that be decentralized? Yeah, yeah.

That's a really great point. And DNS is like the linchpin here. That's like the big limiter. So I think the only way to do that today would be to have a desktop app. If you tell people, hey, you have to download this app and then you use the app to talk to the network, or if they install like a handshake or ENS Chrome extension that lets them resolve names on those networks. But I mean, that's the UX around that is like pretty garbage. So I

This feels like eventually the opportunity for Brave, like once they have a blockchain based, widely installed application that then can run full stack Web3 applications. I agree with that. And actually Metamask too, like I'm surprised that they haven't because they do have that Chrome extension install base. They could, you know, resolve names in the URL that like others don't.

Might not be able to maybe they don't want the Chrome extension to grab that permission. It's scary I don't know if you've ever seen that when you install a Chrome extension It says this extension can read and modify like all data are related to this website or whatever they have to do that to be able to intercept like a

like, you know, the requests. But in the case of an ecosystem like Audius, having many, many interfaces and ways to interact with the network actually achieves the same kind of decentralization

But I don't know that that serves itself well necessarily to a lot of other use cases. Music's different, right? So there's like a lot of people want to build stuff with music. I was just thinking that same thing. Music is so perfect. Like before we worked with Young Spielberg and Mike Taylor and got our awesome Who Got the Truth theme, which they just killed it. We worked directly with them to make that happen. God, we had so many headaches with music on Acquired and like, oh, it was so...

was such a pain and I can just see like with audience if it's like all that matters are play counts and artists get rewarded based on play counts all that goes away right it's like everybody every artist would be like oh I would love to have my songs in these podcasts or what these video games or these movies or wherever because like it's all in the network it all works and

Yeah, and it all drives awareness of their content. This can be kind of my hot take of the day, I guess. Like, I think the way that the future of music is evolving...

The thing that will capture value increasingly over time is the brand equity around the artist, not the asset of the content itself. Artist business models are shifting towards that, right? Like the average artist makes the vast majority of their money from touring, not from the average artist that's earning a living from music, mind you, not artists.

the longer tail of creators. But they basically use content as marketing to source super fans who come to their shows and buy their merch. And the shows and the merch are actually the business model, not the music. I think as the labels have wrapped their heads around this, so we've seen the rise of these so-called 360 deals where labels are now capturing a percentage of all revenue generated around the artist's business, not just

off of their music. But the incentives across the industry are starting to align towards like building value around the brand, not necessarily trying to, you know, build, build royalty revenue around content, which is sort of the older way, right? So if you treat content almost as a loss leader for these other businesses, it, I

I think there's actually a lot more money to be made than $42 billion, right? If you think about the cultural impact that music has had. Kanye West releasing Donda a little while ago had already made probably about as much selling. I don't know if you guys saw this, this little speaker. He made a speaker that had samples from the album. You could like push buttons on the speaker.

He made more money on that than he'd likely make off of a year of royalties from the album. It's just like a joke, right? To compare, like you can make a little speaker and those speakers are like, they have this super marked up resale market on eBay and elsewhere, of course. Like it's become this whole like thing to clear like millions of dollars directly into your pocket from a tertiary company

experience like that that like a very small number of of uh aggregate numbers of people are engaging with it's just a very we're in a very different world from monetization where scale is not necessarily um the biggest driver of income for for artists today it's actually not even not necessarily it's just it's just not clearly this thing was like manufactured at scale and is a super cheapo thing and it was sold for two hundred dollars and

Yeah, it was probably like 20 bucks at a factory in Shenzhen. It was like the bomb for that, right? Yeah, yeah. But his fans love it. They're clearly getting fulfillment and value out of being able to engage with Kanye in that way. And that's $200 per one of those people going directly into his pocket. Like that's huge for him. So yeah. It's wild.

Two more big buckets that I want to cover. One is a technical topic, and then another one is like the current chapter of Audius's life involving your recent investment and working with artists. But first on the technical topic, we have mentioned...

audience on the show before as a good example of something that works across multiple blockchains that takes advantage of the benefits that each one has to offer. And at least to my knowledge, those two are Ethereum and Solana. And can you talk about what you use each one of them for and what it's like to build a multi-chain application?

Yeah, so there's actually a third one in that mix, which is called POA Network. It's an Ethereum sidechain. But that's actually where we got started on POA Network and then the Audius token staking system governance process.

launched on Ethereum. And then the stuff that's on POA network has been migrating to Solana because that's faster and more secure and better. So that's how Audius was decentralized from day one, but still had a decent UX. POA network has a block time of around five seconds. The fees were very low. So it was pretty easy to get going there. And that was in...

early 2019 was like the first alpha of Audius. It was like seven, eight months after we got going. POA Network was the only thing that existed at that time, right? That was not Ethereum. So we've been, I guess, multi-blockchain for the whole existence of Audius. But the key insight that we had that doesn't apply to most other projects, but puts us in a really unique position is that because there's this

off-chain node architecture in Audius. So there are these community run nodes that host all the content, host all the metadata. As a end user, when you upload something to the network, you're actually uploading it to one of those nodes. It's returning to you a pointer to that content, which your client then writes on chain. And that's what signifies, hey, my private key is signing the message saying this is my content. I'm claiming this as mine.

So that whole end-to-end workflow, like you have these references to content and to various things on-chain, so you get the security of the on-chain structure and the kind of

logical centralization, I would call it. There's one source of truth for what's all the content in Audius, who has the rights to update and modify it, and then who triggered the engagements around it. So every time you repost something, you like it. That actually is all hitting the chain as well. Anyway, the key insight we had, tying back to how I started this thought, was

that these off-chain nodes can bridge information between various chains, right? A lot of the complexity that might come in a model like this is when the Ethereum stuff needs to know some information that is definitively known by the Solana stuff or the POA stuff. And can you just give an example of what would be a thing that's squarely in Ethereum land and something that's squarely in Solana land?

How many tokens do you hold is Ethereum land? Because the token is an ERC-20 token and it lives in Ethereum, whereas the stuff squarely in Solana land or a mix of POA and Solana land, I guess now are things like, you know,

Who is this user? When did they make an account? Things like that. So there's an arbitrary Ethereum address that holds some number of tokens. That's all that the Ethereum stuff knows. But there's that arbitrary Ethereum address controls a given user account in POA network, let's say. So that same address controls different things in different places.

So the way we are able to grapple with that complexity from like the developer model perspective, there's this metadata indexing node that... So there are two types of nodes that people in our community run. There are content nodes that store content and then discovery nodes, they're called, that index and kind of...

allow for easy discovery of content. That indexing node actually indexes the data across all these networks and then provides a unified API interface for looking it up.

So you can search data across all these things and do so in a trustless and decentralized way because it is being run by our community. There's like a staking slashing mechanic around ensuring that those folks are operating those nodes properly. So there's a level of trust that you can build with those things, but you effectively get this kind of like Oracle structure thing.

you know, indirectly by doing that. Right. So if those nodes can now report that information back to other chains, say like, you know, the

this user has like 10 tokens right now if that could be a signed message from the Discovery node that can now get delivered to another chain and then you know if that sign message has a timestamp with it with some You know decay rate on it like the timestamp has to be say 30 seconds or one minute old at maximum to be valid on the other chain and

Sorry, that got very complicated and technical, but having the off-chain nodes allows all this information to get bridged and kind of reconciled in a sensible way. Without that, this would be really hard. Even popping up a level, let me just ask the devil's advocate question of like, couldn't you just build it all on Ethereum? Why or why not?

Today, there are over 400,000 transactions per day being done on Solana, for example. If that were on Ethereum, depends on the time of day and the things, but at least judging from like my recent MetaMask interactions, yeah, that's, you know, like...

Potentially at a minimum like four to five million dollars a day at a maximum, you know potentially like twenty to thirty million dollars a day It's just not like it just would never work Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah four million dollars a day if the transactions are only ten bucks each and and I don't think that would be That would be the case

And I assume that like my like listening history is probably stored as a part of my account. So if I'm like liking a song and hitting like next, next, next, next, next, if those were all rights to the Ethereum blockchain, I imagine the whole thing would be cost prohibitive and you couldn't operate it. Yeah, it would be very cost prohibitive. But even all those things aren't rights to Solana either or to anything else that would blow up like anything. It's

when you actively engage with a track. So if you repost it, if you favorite it, if you make a playlist around it, those actions are all hitting the chain. It's not like there's a, I guess, like, you know, the level of like data that you might get from a Google Analytics or something isn't making it to chain. That is all actually getting stored locally on your browser. And we've been trying to figure out a way to

allow folks to get better recommendations driven by that data without compromising their kind of user privacy is a bizarre thing, right? Because your browser knows what you've listened to and how long you listened to it and how you found it and all these things.

The network knows some of that. The network does know if you completed listening to a track, for example, that gets recorded as one of those play counts, right? It gets super interesting to think about the data models around this. As it is right now, there are already people building recommendation systems on the Audius data set because all the data of who's favorited what and when they found it and all that is all public.

So you could write a collaborative filter very easily on the Audius data set like anyone can because it's all just out there for the taking.

The data modeling around decentralized consumer scale applications like this is just super, super different from a traditional product. If we were a traditional consumer product with 6 million users, we'd probably just have one super giant gargantuan Postgres database and probably nothing else. And it would be fine. Stick the content in S3,

have a Postgres database be done. There could be like one engineer building this and it would be like totally fine. To adopt a mental model here, it's like you're trying to have a really long view on the success of this

product and ecosystem. And so because you sort of have an example, and again, I'll say it, not you, of something that didn't work eventually with SoundCloud, and you know where the pitfalls are, you're sort of incurring a lot of costs, like massive taxes on the system from a development cost perspective, from a need for decentralization perspective, in order to be able to sort of complete the marathon. Yeah.

That's exactly right. I actually even think to begin the marathon, I mean, there was no reason for people to use Audius without those value props up front.

Just the ability to own the relationships with those fans, have some certainty around the rules of the game being somewhat set in stone and not subject to like the random whims of a company. Those things resonated with the right communities early on. And that's what got our network effect going. I think without that initial hook, like no one would have ever existed.

come here. So talk to us about the artist communities that it's resonated with. And you've been very modest, so feel free to flex a little bit. But like, who's on the platform? How do they use it? Do you have any fun stories?

Oh, so many, so many fun stories. So our early bread and butter was dance. Um, that's, that's kind of where my co-founder Forrest and I had, you know, some, uh, at least like deep personal background, no professional background, but, and I think also that community was one that was very much aligned with the early ethos of, of SoundCloud and that, that,

you know, that ended up really resonating with our product and product direction. So people like Skrillex, Deadmau5, Dylan Francis, Diplo all use Audius on a regular basis, which has been super, super, super cool. And that I think was, you know, to the stories, the more surreal thing of all of this.

One of our earliest supporters on the artist side was Blau, the producer. Which a lot of people out there right now are having the moment of, oh wait, it's not 3Low? Yes, yeah.

I was a fan of him like forever. And, you know, I remember he came and played a small show at Stanford in 2011. Actually, you know, David, if you were you weren't at Stanford quite yet then, but it was the full moon on the quad in 2011. I think it was that was he played that back then. And I was like, oh, he's

And Full Moon on the Cloud was legend. They shut it down, right? I think. I have no idea. They threatened to shut it down every year. And the whole thing was kind of gross. Like, I don't think anyone liked any of that kind of... I never participated because Jenny and I were married even before I started at GSP. But...

I mean, I didn't either. I think the idea of that like was just quite disgusting. I think this would have been like right after Blau left. He went to Wash U for college. Yeah. And I think he he dropped out to pursue music full time. And yeah, this was probably right around right around then. Yeah.

I mean, I went to the show from him at Stanford. And then this was like four or five months after we started Audius. He was super into cryptos. We found an intro to him. And yeah, it was like super cool to be talking to this person who was like, oh my God, I love your music. And then that happened again and again and again and again. And you get desensitized to it over time, I guess. But I still, you know...

Yeah.

Started out very dance-centric, dance-heavy. We've started to make a lot more inroads and have a lot more growth in hip-hop more recently, I think, for similar reasons, right? That community, kind of like I mentioned earlier around the cost of producing content and the grassroots kind of support around how folks...

and break out rather than, you know, artists being broken. That breaking an artist term just means like when they break out or when they get discovered, basically. But, you know, hip hop artists tend to break through,

their communities not by like you know the there's this term the industry plant in in music right like there's no sort of like hip-hop industry plants uh that have you know been been able to like be successful right it's not like uh in sync here like yes yeah yeah

I actually don't know the story of NSYNC. Maybe they certainly kind of feel like it, right? If you think about the level of like that prescribed like template. Both NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. Definitely the Backstreet Boys, right? Like they were architected, I feel like.

Like, there's no way they weren't. I don't know for sure, so I won't say. There was another one that was literally on making the band, that like they architected them in front of America on TV. That was maybe like O-Town. I feel like it, but right in that boy band. Yeah.

Okay, well, Raniel, on our closing topic, would you be open to telling us about your recent fundraise? And of course, like what you raised and who was involved in all that, but maybe mechanically, since it's quite unique for companies in crypto. We just announced a small $5 million raise from a lot of folks in the broader music industry that

that have been supportive and helpful to the network over time. But this was a chance for them to have a little bit more skin in the game and a little bit more access to ownership. So there was a kind of $5 million raise put together with

There's a very long list of folks, but some of the highlights that you all might know are like Katy Perry, Nas, Steve Aoki, the Chainsmokers, this fund Mantis that they run. Yeah. Chainsmokers are investing in everything these days. I mean...

I mean that in a good way, you know, for you, but like they're investing in non-music tech. They are so sharp on kind of the business side of music and tech when you chat with them, like they're great dudes and they're extremely sharp on how all of this works. So it's been a real pleasure to get to have gotten to work with them. They're another one that I was like, I love their music for so long. And it was kind of definitely super wild to talk to them.

So yeah, great group of artists, great group of kind of industry heavyweights. So some folks like Mark Geiger, who ran WME for many years, the Bandiers, Marty Bandier, who...

ran Sony, Sony Music Group for many years. So there's a great, yeah, great set of folks from all different directions that were able to come together here. And yeah, we're super excited about it. I think it helps us with a lot of our upcoming work starting to serve the broader, the broader music industry and continuing to continue to grow and do cool stuff.

And I assume that they didn't buy shares in some Delaware C-corp called Audius Inc., right? Yes. So they bought tokens. The way that this mechanically worked, actually, there was an SPV that an investor in our ecosystem formed, a guy named Ken Seif at Blockchain. Oh, yeah. Oh, cool. You all know him. That's great.

Ken's like quietly like the investor in like a bunch of really cool Web3 technologies. He is. And I think that's how he likes to be. He likes to be, you know, a little bit quieter and in the shadows. But he's been so instrumental in helping get Audius to where it is today. And this was another case where, you know, there's...

It's kind of hard to hold, buy, engage with tokens. He formed this SPV and is administering it as a favor to the ecosystem to help folks who wouldn't otherwise be capable of the logistical hurdles of...

Yeah, I mean, it's a whole thing, right? So that SPV was able to kind of, you know, administer and manage or is able, sorry, to administer and manage the position on behalf of these folks. And yeah, it's been really cool. So yeah.

You're right. Crypto projects, doing fundraising is a very strange and odd kind of process given like the structure is just so different. How do you think about... This is going to sound weird about like money and resources and like, you know, like...

It's a really, really good question. There are kind of different parties or groups in the Audius ecosystem that work on various things. So like our company receives grants from the Audius Foundation, as do others. The Audius Foundation is actually what

controls this treasury of tokens. And did the SPV purchase the tokens from the foundation? It did. Yeah. Okay. So the foundation's job is to kind of manage this treasury of tokens and make sure that it has enough cash, like, you know, kind of

dollar or other stable coin denominated cash or whatever. The dollar is not the most stable thing in the world these days, but it's basically meant to insulate the ecosystem through ups and downs in value, like various macro events can affect crypto, right? So that treasury management function is really the foundation's role. And then it's sort of

The job of companies like ours to go ask the foundation, like, hey, you know, we want to do X, Y, and Z. Like, do you want to fund us? And they can be like, no, or they can be like, yeah. Is it one-to-one of token ownership, audio token ownership to governance of the foundation or...

So the foundation's not governed by token holder governance. So there's two separate treasuries, which gets complicated. There's actually like a community treasury that's on chain. There's a pot of tokens that the community is able to vote and allocate.

Over time, actually, you know, I believe the foundation will shift control of its books into the community's hands. But I think for where the project is at right now, the foundation being able to be a little bit more agile is helpful. So, you know, the foundation is still able to conduct kind of, you know, real world projects

contracts and things of that nature that like, you know, it's going to take some time before a DAO can... We need some more infrastructure built in all this. Like a legal invoice or whatever it may be, right? We'll get there. I have faith we'll get there. It's just going to take a lot of time. So, but yeah, so we think about money, I guess, the same way as like any other early stage company would with the caveat that

You don't get to make more tokens. That's not a thing, right? Unless the community were to vote to make more tokens,

tokens, there is a finite quantity that the foundation oversees. It needs to kind of, you know, manage that like an endowment more than it does like an evergreen source of potential funds. I mean, not that like company equity is evergreen and tokens aren't equity, right? They serve very different functions and behave very differently. But

But in a traditional tech company or whatever, you can like make new shares, right? Like financings are dilutive. In token land, financings are not dilutive. So that gets very, very different, right? It just changes the calculus. Fascinating. Well, that seems like a great place to leave it. Ronil, where can listeners find you on the internet? How can they get involved? What should they go to?

Definitely check out Audius. It's A-U-D-I-U-S dot C-O is the primary product that you can go engage with and discover cool content, listen to stuff.

Twitter is where we announce most interesting news and things. So it's at Audius Project is the handle. Give us a follow. Check it out. For myself, I don't really do much interesting outside of Audius. So I don't think I have much interesting to say on the internet outside of that. But, you know, if you want to see lots of retweets of Audius content, you can go follow me on Twitter. It's at Ronil R.

R-O-N-E-I-L-R. We'll link to all that. I think you're probably selling yourself short. Awesome. Well, Ronil, thank you. Listeners, we will see you next time. We'll see you next time. Thank you for having me.