Rob Solomon, Co-Founder at DIMO, on DePIN, DAOs, and Building the Future of Mobility | Ep. 306
In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Rob Solomon, Co-Founder of DIMO, what is DePIN and its importance to the broader crypto narrative, building a blockchain for consumers, and zk-tech.
About Rob Solomon
Rob Solomon is the Co-Founder of DIMO, an open-connected vehicle platform. Rob’s background is in finance, investing, and organizational design. Most recently, he worked at Consensys, the largest Ethereum-focused development company, focusing on finance, internal economics, and decentralizing the organization. Prior to that, he was at Vroom, a pioneer in the online used-car marketplace sector. He started his career at the Downtown Project in Las Vegas (a spinoff of Zappos.com), working on corporate finance and investments and implementing Holacracy.
Rob Solomon gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- What is DePIN and its importance to the broader crypto narrative
- Building a blockchain for consumers
- Peer-to-peer economies – the purest form of decentralization
- 2024 trends – zk-tech + DePIN
- The future of mobility – DIMO is the world’s first decentralized, open, connected vehicle network
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, still coming in hot from Mexico. And I’m super pumped to have today’s guest on the show coming in hot from New York City, the best city in and on the planet. Not even up for discussion folks. New York is the absolute GOAT. Pardon me wish that was there, but story for another day. Super pumped to have Rob Solomon on the show today. The Co-Founder at DIMO and open connected vehicle platform. Guys, I can’t wait to get into this. We are going to get buzzing on everything DePIN related and how these guys are truly connecting the future of mobility. Super pumped. Got to finish the bio though. Rob’s background is in finance, investing and organizational design. Most recently, he worked at Consensys. Yes, the Consensys we all know, the largest Ethereum focused development company. And he focused on finance, internal economics and decentralizing the organization. Prior to that, he was at Vroom, a pioneer in the online used car marketplace sector. He started his career at the downtown project in Las Vegas, a spin off of zappos.com, working on corporate finance investments and implementing Holacracy. Rob, super pumped to have you on how you do my friend, pumped to have you.
Rob Solomon
Good, yeah, you got it all there. RIP, Vroom’s e-commerce business, they shut it down I think two days ago. Not selling used cars online anymore.
Matt Zahab
Two days ago they shut it down?
Rob Solomon
Yeah end of an era for them. Yeah.
Matt Zahab
How crazy was the used car boom when COVID hit? When used cars were going for like a couple grand less than new months?
Rob Solomon
Its the supply chain you kind of see what happens with housing with cars or anything like that when you have populations growing, people spending, and supply chains breaking down.
Matt Zahab
Obviously, you guys are, you know, you’re working in the web space right now in the car biz and you have a history in the car Biz, you big car guy?
Rob Solomon
I like cars. You know, someday I want to have a project car, like you buy like one of those like, you know, 91 Ford Bronco, whatever, Toyota Ford runner and like paint it, fix it up, make it nice. I’d love to do that someday, but I’ve always been honestly, I’ve been a little bit more of a point A to point B guy. And Vroom was just a good opportunity to join at a really interesting time at a startup in a great position. I followed somebody over from Zappos, from Vegas to New York to work there. And I wasn’t sure I would actually use the automotive experience again, but it’s super useful with DIMO. So yeah, everything makes sense when you look, you know, hindsight, you look back, all the dots connect pretty well. And you have Vroom plus Consensys equals DIMO. It was a pretty good path there.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, nice little synergy. What was it like working at the Downtown Project in Vegas, which was a spin-off of Zappos? I’ve, again, I don’t know anyone. Yeah, I guess you’re the first lad I’ve ever met who’s worked at Zappos, but I’ve heard some crazy corporate culture stories working at Zappos. Do you have any good stories to tell us?
Rob Solomon
Honestly, yeah, and it was the first job out of college. It was, we kind of got spoiled. Like, you know, we heard all about the culture there. It seemed fine, but then you kind of go on. I’m not saying that Vroom has bad culture, but like you kind of realize later on how special that place kind of, you know, was or maybe still is. I’m not as plugged in there anymore, but you know, Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos. He passed away a few years ago, but genuinely really great guy. I got to know him pretty well while I was there. Really great intentions, super smart guy. And so what he did is he wanted to move Zappos from the suburbs to downtown Vegas. Downtown Vegas didn’t have much of a residential or even like, you really had no reason to go down there unless you were going to the old strip. And he invested like half a billion dollars of his own money to just try to, and it wasn’t just like apartments and grocery stores. It was like, you know, cool cultural events and schools and health clinics and all kinds of stuff. So I was working on that. And at the same time, he implemented Holocracy at the downtown project in Zappos. And I was part of the team working on that. It’s idea of like decentralized organizations and managerless organizations and all that kind of stuff. And there’s, I have some, we can talk about that management structure if you’d like, but I think there’s some real issues with Holocracy specifically, but decentralized organizations as a concept is really cool. And I think it can work just maybe not exactly the way we were trying to do it. And that’s why when I was at Vroom and I came across the ethereum.org website and I was reading about DAOs and identity and whatever. I thought, okay, you know, I like Vroom, but I want to spend the rest of my life working on this stuff. Cause this is, you know, I can see the benefit to building systems on blockchains. The smart contracting is too cool. You know, there’s again, like, you know, DAOs are still a little bit premature or immature, I guess, and like the way that they’re operating, but long-term there’s a lot here. And so I was going to meet ups, met a bunch of folks from Consensys and worked there for four years.
Matt Zahab
I mean, that’s everyone. It’s crazy. Like the Consensys, I feel like the Consensys blanket of founders is almost similar to like the PayPal mafia where it’s like so many incredible crypto Web3 blockchain companies have founders that did a little stint at Consensys.
Rob Solomon
If you’re in the space of the time, it was one of the best places to go. It was a great environment. There was a lot of resources and smart people there. And yeah, also just like a numbers game. Like a lot of people worked at Consensys. I was interviewing, there was like 250 people there. When I actually joined, it was like 400. A couple of months later, there was like 1500. And I was like pretty quickly. And yeah, and a lot of respect for like Tony Hsieh from Zappos, Joe is a lot in common. Brilliant guy, really nice guy. Still really supportive of everything they do over there. And actually they invested in our last round too. So happy to be back in their ecosystem a little bit.
Matt Zahab
I love that. I want to keep buzzing on DAOs for a bit here, Rob. This is something that, again, I don’t know where I stand in this regard because I see the use case, I see the utility, I see how powerful it can one day become. But just to sort of fortify your point a couple of minutes ago, it’s like we still haven’t seen a whole lot of present day magic when it comes to DAOs. Very choppy. Perhaps the tech isn’t good enough. Perhaps the organizational structure isn’t good enough. The communication flows, the Zync, everything, the workflows. You’re way more in tune to this than I am. What can we do to actually make DAOs a thing? I hate to be the timeline guy, but how sort of far out are we from actually seeing DAOs really work magic in organizations as a whole?
Rob Solomon
Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessarily a technological limitation. I do kind of think it’s a bit of a system design thing. I have a very specific take on this, which is, so with Holocracy, the idea is no managers, right? For any system to work, like whether it’s a corporate system, a village, a country, whatever, like you need to be able to amplify good ideas, suppress bad ideas. I don’t mean like censor them, like arrest people. I mean, like if you open up a bad restaurant, it will lose money and it will go out of business naturally. Like you suppress bad things, you amplify good things, you create incentives to do good things. There’s positive feedback, right? Feedback loops, resources are allocated appropriately. And the things that the system wants to produce like should have some incentive and way to like emerge, right? And at a normal corporation, that is done where, at the top level, direction is set, resources are allocated from the kind of executive level down to teams, like a big budget goes to the marketing team, a smaller budget goes to the ads team, and a smaller budget goes to the Instagram ads. So, and everybody’s kind of responsible for metrics flowing back up. And that’s the way you do it at a corporation. And the limitation that we’re kind of sensing into, with Zappos and Tony was sensing into is like, that works great. You can run a village with 15 people and a chief who goes like, you guys get food, you guys get shelter, you guys get clothes, and I’ll make sure everybody is pulling their weight and everything will be fine. You can run an economy like that at that scale. You can run a company like that, up to a thousand people. The issue is like, you can’t run a country like that, right? You can’t have like the president appoint the head of agriculture, appoint the head of this, that, and then you go all the way down and then you have like that person managing the people making bread and then the president, make sure everyone’s sharing like it doesn’t scale. So what decentralized orgs attempt to do is push decision making to the people doing the actual work and kind of decentralized org of it. The issue is though, if you don’t also have these feedback loops on resource allocation and you don’t have a way for kind of like the incentives to exist for people to do the right things, then you just end up with like disaster of a program. So I think about DAOs and what could make them more effective. I draw a lot of inspiration from free markets. So, and I was trying to do this at Consensys a little bit and then there was some restructuring and then I left. So we didn’t get a chance to kind of fully play this out, but part of what I was trying to do there and part of what I was working, still consulting, after the fact was Zappos on was this idea of creating internal markets at a company. So if you have a shared service like marketing, for example, that’s like a Consensys was helping 20 different spokes, different startups within Consensys. The idea would be that they would all get funded as startups and they would pay the internal marketing team in some type of like internal Consensys dollar and that would count towards their budget. And that’s also how you hold the marketing team accountable. Like they are providing services to other kind of groups within this ecosystem and it makes the DAO in that case more of like an economy than a big blob. So that’s kind of the direction I was trying to take it in. That’s one way to do it. I worry about any type of organization that doesn’t have strict feedback loops and intelligent ways of allocating resources and aligning incentives. So it doesn’t have to be that way, but there needs to be something for that or else it won’t work.
Matt Zahab
Rob, we got to jump right into DIMO here, the bread and butter of the show. 300 episodes in here, more than 300 episodes. Rarely do we get real world use cases. So when this came across the desk for lack of better terms, this is tangled my fancy going. I’m not a huge car guy myself. Obviously I have a whip, not here in Mexico, but when I first learned about DIMO, I was like, this is so frigging cool. And the use case is so massive. This could truly be a game changer. I’m not even going to try to explain it because you can do a much better job than me. I got to throw the ball over to your court. Let’s start with sort of the just high level. Give us the elevator pitch, the TLDR on DIMO, and then we’ll get into all the nitty gritty stuff.
Rob Solomon
Yeah, it’s a connected vehicle platform that uses blockchain. And the one of the coolest things about this, and I think why people should be really excited about it, is blockchain happens to be what makes it possible. We’re not, it’s not blockchain for blockchain sake. Like we’re making cars smarter. We’re building a platform for anybody to build really sophisticated, interesting things for your car. You might have like a smart doorbell, a smart home speaker, you know, you have a smartphone, but your car is still like a landline, you know, more or less in terms of its technological sophistication. Maybe you have a car that lets you download an app, that lets you like unlock it remotely. But like, you know, that’s Tesla’s better. Tesla, I would say, like if a normal car is a landline, and then, you know, a newer Ford is like a flip phone. Tesla’s like a Blackberry, but we’re building the iPhone here, right? So we’re gonna make it possible for your insurance company, your bank, for social applications, whatever, to build applications for your car. That means no more going to the DMV. That means selling your car in an open-seat style NFT marketplace. It means you can share your car with somebody. It means, it means someone could build smart insurance where you pay per mile. You could join an online digital, you know, club for Porsche owners, whatever, you know, whatever applications people wanna build for drivers. You’ve got 35,000 cars connected today. We’ll have millions and millions, not too distant future. And if you wanna build an app for those cars, doesn’t matter what automaker they are, any car 2008 and up, you can quickly build an app on top of the DIMO platform and deploy it. So, yeah, like in a big way, you kind of see like, you know, in some countries, they skipped from building landlines directly to mobile phones, right? Or smartphones, and like they, you know, kind of like skip that generation of technology. Automotive never even really upgraded itself to Web2. And a lot of that’s cause like the industry is so fragmented. Like, you know, the biggest automakers have like in the teens percent of the cars in the road. Like Toyota is like 14% of cars on the road. Most of them are single digit, Tesla is like 2%, 3%. And so hyper fragmented across the automakers. And then even crazier is like, there’s no vertical integration either. There’s like different dealerships. It’s like, you know, Ralph’s Chevy of Western New York. It’s a bunch of different mechanics, bunch of different banks, bunch of different insurance companies. Industry is so fragmented. They’ve never been able to like agree on digital identity for vehicles. It’s still just like the Vin. It’s still like faxing documents. It’s still going in person to places. You go buy a used car. There’s a used car salesman like calling up banks, you know, negotiating prices. You’re not getting, you get insurance once. You probably never try to get new insurance again for six years until you get your next car, right? And why can’t you like get new insurance policies in real time, get new loans in real time? Why can’t you sell your car with all of its, you know, verified vehicle history? Why can’t you share that with whoever you want? So that’s what we’re building. And yeah, and the reason, as I mentioned, like blockchain is important for that, not so we can justify, hey, we’re a blockchain company, pay attention to us and fund us, you know, VCs. It’s because if you want all these different participants, you know, Toyota, SunTrust Bank, Geico, whoever to all trust this platform and want to build on it, it has to be trustless. It has to be neutral. It has to be an actual protocol and not just like an API service offered by a traditional Web2 company that could just like cut your access off at any point. So that’s why we’re building it that way. We actually started with a problem and found blockchain is the answer, whereas I think a lot of, you know, some projects start with like, what can we do in blockchain and so apply it to something. And we started, you know, we started very much with a goal in mind first and identify the blockchain as we were to do it. So at a high level, that’s what we’re building. As I mentioned, 35,000 cars connected. Anybody with a car 2008 and up can connect today. If you have a car that has a subscription already, like if you have the Ford Pass app or the Tesla app, you can probably log in depending on your region, depending on which subscription it is to our app and connect for free and that will meet an entity of your car. If not, we sell a device, we sell two devices. This is the bigger, more expensive one. There’s a smaller one that runs on the Helium network, the Loroan Helium network, that’s a hundred bucks. They’re both sold out now, but coming back in stock soon, you can pre-order them and connect any car 2008 and up that way.
Matt Zahab
That one that was incredible too. I have six good gajilion questions. So I’m gonna have to choose wisely here because you know, we only have a certain amount of time. Let’s start with the little device. What exactly is that device? What does it do? Where do you plug it in? And yeah, the follow up to that like how do all the cars talk to themselves? How do they talk to each other? How do they how do you guys pull data from the cars to you know, enrich the data set and and give the feedback that everyone’s looking for?
Rob Solomon
I can only go so deep on this is the non-technical blockchain founder. I should say the other founders, our CEO comes from Waymo and Transdev, our CTO worked at Ford, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen, GM, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles. So really great fit for the type of thing that we’re doing. Our CEO comes from chain analysis. So they could speak much more eloquently to how this works, but think of this as like, it’s almost like a hardware wallet, like a Trezor or a Ledger with a raspberry pie in it and secure elements, so it has a wallet. And this plugs into the OBD port in your vehicle. Every car has one. We’re actually helped massively by federal right to repair law and standardization in the space. Cars are required to have this OBD port. And signals for the vehicle kind of run over this can bus. And this just plugs in and draws from that. If you go to get your car, you go to like the dealership and they want to see what your engine codes are, what’s going on with your vehicle, like they plug into the same port, they plug in the device, this effectively is the same type of thing. And it’s just, it’s passively listening while your car is driving to things like fuel, location, engine speed, like RPMs and stuff like that, the load on your engine. All kinds of stuff. It’s wild. It’s very, we’re limited mainly by our ability to decipher what’s coming off the can bus because we can actually get like 170 different data points. And right now we’re focused on like VIN odometer fuel and speed. And we can, this has a GPS and accelerator on it for acceleration and location. So that’s the device. That bigger one is LTE device. The other one sends data over Helium’s network. So it compresses the data down quite a bit and sends it in a very small payload on the Helium IT network, but that connectivity is incredibly cheap for that other one. And yeah, users who connect can access their data in the DIMO mobile app and they can share it and they earn some demo tokens every week just for staying connected.
Matt Zahab
So cool. What’s, I want to take a step back here. How did you, you mentioned you and the team started this with a problem. Was there a specific issue as a whole that, you know, like there’s, seems like there’s a multitude of problems that you guys are providing solutions for. Was there one specific one? What was that like aha moment when you guys came together and like, man, this is such an no brainer. Yeah, there’s a bit of that like. The industry and mobility network hasn’t, or economy rather hasn’t, you know, had a revolution, hasn’t leveled up in so long. Like what was that aha moment that made you guys make this?
Rob Solomon
So the other three co-founders were already together. We really started with our CEO and CTO linked up first. And they were doing a bunch of different projects. One thing they were trying to do, and actually I still think it’s one of the coolest, the first pivot of DIMO was a, you would 3D map a parking garage, you would mount sensors everywhere, and then communicate with self-driving vehicles where to go and how to navigate a parking garage. So you could just have a self valet parking garage. You get out at the front, your car goes, parks itself in the garage, you utilize space better, and the car comes back out. And one of the biggest challenges with that is like, okay, well, maybe you could build that for like just Teslas, or just, but how do you make this across? How does the Ford talk to the Chevy inside the parking garage? Like ask the Ford to pull out so the Chevy can go, and then the Ford pulls back. How do you build all that? So that was the first one where it’s like, that’s a bit of a challenge. There’s not a lot of standardization. There’s a problem here. But that idea was killed because of COVID, and nobody was driving anywhere. Parking garages did not care about this type of stuff. There were some like pilots brewing, but then that kind of killed that. Then later on, there was another project where Andy and I have, and I think Alex had joined them at this point, were trying to acquire electric vehicle battery data for a client, and they couldn’t get it. And they actually sourced a bunch of these devices, and we’re just gonna pay people cash to plug them in and subscribe to the battery data for the car and just see how they’re performing in the real world. And it’s like, why limit it to just that? Like, why have everybody who wants to answer one question has to go and install these things in a bunch of different cars? Why not just make a universal platform for it? They were mining Helium at the same time, and kind of like, what if we took this model over here and this model over here? And so they called me up, Andy and I worked together in Las Vegas. Him, RCOO and I had all done venture for America, say Andrew Yanks program before he ran for president was placing people straight out of college into startups over the country. So the three of us knew each other from that. And so they brought me in and I thought, I had the chance to go be the founder of a couple, when you’re at Consensys, things always come up and I could have gone and tried to start something else with other folks and whatever. But this was the first one where I was like, man, I really couldn’t see how this could be solved without blockchain. What a cool use case. This is something that I would just be excited to see exist. I want to go work on it. And I was kind of drawn to it. First is like other projects where it’s like, do you really need a token for that? Is this really a, you know, is that really a blockchain thing? Is it gonna move the needle forward even if you succeed? So it was an obvious answer for me. And then I joined and that was kind of the genesis of it.
Matt Zahab
And the rest is history. That’s so cool. Rob, we’ve got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show, PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we’re going to keep buzzing on DIMO and because we barely scratched the surface and we’ve got to talk about DePIN, one of the trendiest topics in all of the crypto sphere at the moment. Until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT, longtime friends of cryptonews.com and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. We love the team at PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders, always demanding and giving you highly reliable market data and performance. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can always design, customize your layouts and widgets. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That is CRYPTONEWS50, all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50, all one word, CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to show with Rob. Rob, we got to jump into DePIN right now. DePIN is sort of the underlying tech narrative acronym that you and the team are using to make this happen, to allow the vehicles to speak and pull data, to enrich the app, the ecosystem, just make everything happen. I’d love if you could give just a quick primer of DePIN and then we’ll talk about how you guys are using that over at DIMO.
Rob Solomon
Yeah, I mean, I think that the name is appropriate for what it is, you know, decentralized physical infrastructure network. So the key bit of that being, you know, physical. Now, where do you draw the line on that? Like, I mean, I don’t know, I guess Bitcoin is a physical infrastructure network. It has miners all over the world, you know. So it’s like, where exactly do you draw the line? I think it’s expanded a little bit over time. I think initially it was, well, initially there was DY, which was like Helium and wireless networks, building out, you know, wireless connectivity. People would install sensors all over the, or hotspots all over the world, and that would allow people to create wireless networks. Again, that’s what we were inspired by. And, but we’re not building a wireless network. We’re building like a vehicle network. We have all these real world cars and used to do other projects. There’s a high mapper doing something. You see a high mapper doing something similar. You know, there’s a couple in this category of sensor networks where we fit in high mapper fits in. Maybe you’d put like teleport in there as well, which is like maybe one level up of, like they’re building like a decentralized Web3 Uber kind of thing. People are doing this with drones and other kinds of things, 3D printers. There’s decentralized like compute networks. And so that was actually one of like the earlier, it’s like storage, file coin, render, you know, where you’re kind of borrowing compute resources from machines all over the world. That seems to have kind of found its way into the DePIN circle. And of course, you know, DY and I think that those are kind of like the main pillars. I’m sure there’s, you know, people will include more than just that in the little, you know, mind maps of DePIN that you’ll see, you know, circulated. But I think that’s the defining characteristic. Physical infrastructure is deployed, incentivized by tokens to build out a more peer to peer style network.
Matt Zahab
What’s the importance, and again, this is more for the listeners here, because I get asked this when rarely family, more friends or someone in my network says, hey, been on Twitter recently, see DePIN popping off, can you explain to me? And that’s one of the things that I always tell them. The peer to peer aspect is massive because this isn’t like, you know, for example, you guys where you could pick car company X, Y, or Z, where you go to that company and use their infrastructure, use their ecosystem without the people, without the peers giving to the peers and talking to the peers and interacting with the peers. This whole thing doesn’t work. It’s the same with any other companies, similar to HYGmapper, who obviously wants to do something talking to each other as well. What’s the importance of the whole peer to peer aspect of this as a whole? Like, I’d love you could explain how without the people talking to the people, this whole thing can’t work.
Rob Solomon
I don’t know, was it like Naval or Bollinger? I forget who kind of made this like tweet thread that has been reposted a lot, but this whole like the biggest taxi company has no taxis like Uber. Like the biggest hotel company Airbnb has no hotel rooms, right? And about leverage and all that kind of stuff. I think this is just like the next iteration of that. It’s like a more fair version of that. Like the biggest vehicle network has no vehicles, right? Like where DIMOs going, the biggest, you know, wireless network Helium, in their future, owns no cell towers, that kind of thing. I love that model. And I think we have the opportunity to build better and more fair networks that way with blockchain because ultimately with Uber, for example, like if you’re one of the early drivers, if you’re an early power user, you referred 500 people, doesn’t make, like, okay, you got a credit, you made maybe a little bit more money early days, but like you don’t own any bit of it now. You don’t have any say in where it goes. And, you know, an executive team is built a moat and they can just like decide, hey, we’re going to cut driver rates in half tomorrow and you’re going to deal with it because you have no other option, right? And we are the only show in town. Whereas when you build a more blockchain based network, I mean, there’s forkability, sure. There’s, you know, governance through the token and all that. But really what we’re building at DIMOs, it’s like our users are harder manufacturers, like the people who participate are the owners of this network. And they’re being, it’s a step beyond just giving like a ride credit, you know, like that Uber did when you refer people. So I think that makes it a lot more compelling and in the protocol nature of it, the kind of blockchain nature of it, the forkability aspect of it makes it a little bit more neutral as well. So that’s where I think this is a level up for that distance model.
Matt Zahab
I love that. I know we can’t divulge too much into this, just SEC and everything FINRA and regulatory related, but I’d love if you could talk about how participants of the ecosystem get DIMO tokens and how they plug in the DIMO machine, the car, gives the data, and then return the tokens. I’d love if you could talk about how that economy works.
Rob Solomon
Yeah, right now there’s a baseline reward and it’s called baseline because like if you connect and you drive that week, we received data from your car that week, it stays, you know, it’s a verified connection, then you earn your share of right now, it’s a little bit under a million. It goes down by 15% every year. So we just had our first decrease in December and next December it’ll go down 15% again, but that split kind of across all participants and the percentage of that that you get depends on how many people are connected. It depends on how you connected, like somebody who’s had one of these things connected for 50 weeks is gonna earn more than somebody who just connected their car with software last week, proportionally. So that’s the main way people earn today. You can also earn, you know, there’s a marketplace in our mobile app and when you book service, when you buy new tires, that kind of stuff, you get some reward back in DIMO tokens, really trying to kind of make the token like an airline reward point for your car. People are used to like getting reward points from Delta, that you can use to book flights and things like that or MX, you can use to, you know, buy hotels, whatever. So we want people to be able to think of the token as something like that for themselves. In the future, there’s all kinds of ideas being kicked around by the community developers or building different things. Someone just deployed a proof of concept of like a DIMO credit where you can burn DIMO tokens to mint a stable credit that could be used to, be the unit of account to pay for data. In the future, when people build applications on top of DIMO, they will be spending something, probably not actually needing to hold the token because we don’t want like Toyota or others to have to like hold cryptocurrency. But when they acquire data, it will result in some tokens going back to the protocol, some going back to the user, some going back to the people storing the data for them. And so there’s real utility for it, pretty much, you know, like other blockchain projects like ETH with its gas fees and so on. So and EIP 1559, they’re burn things. So yeah, you can expect similar types of primitives to emerge with DIMO that kind of expand what the token can be used for. And yeah, already it can be used for quite a bit today.
Matt Zahab
I love that. We’re gonna talk about ETH. Your big ETH guy worked that Consensys. You had a great tweet not too long ago on the reports of Ethereum’s death being greatly over exaggerated. You and I are in the same camp here. This was just classic Web3, classic crypto. And the price doesn’t go up like the others. Everyone’s shit’s on the coin. Everyone’s shitin’ on ETH right now. My only thing about ETH, still, gas fees, no bueno, way too high. It still kills you when the network’s congested. I mean, you’re hooped, especially when we’re onboarding someone from the land of Web2 and they come on and they go, wait, so I have USDT in my wallet. I wanna send it to someone else, but I can’t send it, because I don’t have ETH. You know, a couple little nuances here and there that definitely make it Friction City population less. But I’d love if you could sort of talk about that report from Polygon and why you tweeted that out.
Rob Solomon
The other side of that, you might assume that anybody’s saying that the reports of ETH’s death are exaggerated, would mean that they therefore think Solana is useless, like this is being the main other smart contract chain people are talking about. I like Solana still. I think they’re both interesting. I would say I probably do have an EVM bias, which for reasons I can get into, I like to think it’s about objective facts of it, but I have a history with Consensys and having built on it. So maybe I do have more of a just irrational bias towards it, but I think some of the stuff that Solana is doing is really cool. And I’m definitely more of a DIMO maxi than anything. Like I care about DIMO success. And if DIMO success is improved by moving to Solana, then I would support that. There’s a couple of different things I think I need a developer or people need to consider. There’s obviously a cost and security, and we don’t need to really get that far into that right now. No one gets that. The cost discussion is a little bit obscured, like Solana subsidizing transactions more than Ethereum. Ethereum is deflating right now. Solana is inflating. I don’t think that inflation is crazy, but it’s worth pointing out that there is somebody else helping to pay for each transaction on Solana, but it’s very fast, but there’s security, but it’s security good enough. I’m not really qualified by the way on that. I think it’s all kind of fine. The other really interesting thing, so being a Consensys for four years, I kind of got to see a bunch of different chapters. And when I was joining it was like the ICO boom. It was a bunch of people thinking crypto was ready for mainstream, it was pre-crypto kitties. We didn’t even know that the blockchain would just break itself when it got popular. So we saw a lot of like direct to consumer stuff trying to get built and they were building it without hard hat, without a mature, infura and alchemy without it. It was so hard and wallets were way worse. And to build a cool product that people like, it’s not good enough to just deploy some cool smart contracts in a good UI. You wanna have robust infrastructure around. And also too, it’s easier if you don’t have to develop those smart contracts. If you can just pull some open Zeppelin contracts off the shelf, they’ve been audited, they’ve been battle tested in other applications. And we’re just gonna kind of reuse these standard contracts, these standard things. Solana I just, I think today published like a bunch of extensions that are like, we call them extensions, but really it’s something like, vetted official contracts that you can use on the, just make it easier to deploy certain types of tokens, whatever, all that stuff is super helpful. And not just like the back end stuff, but even the front end stuff, we don’t wanna build a governance voting platform. We want you to be able to go to snapshot and log in there and vote there. And the reason we picked Polygon was whenever you go to any of these websites, and especially two years ago when we chose Polygon, and you click in the top right corner for where it says Ethereum, and there’s a dropdown, Polygon was always like the next one. Now it’s like, you know, optimism based Arbitrum, but it’s like still, those are the ones that are guaranteed to be there. Maybe you get Avalanche, but maybe not. And then if you’re on Avalanche, you have to go find a different solution. But like that was the, it’s like with Polygon, it’s like all these applications will just work. Oh, there’s a cool real world asset lending protocol being built by someone else that could be used to take out car loans that we can go talk to. Guess what, they’re deployed on Polygon. It makes it a lot easier. So that was a big, stick to the core, yes, stick to the core. Motivation behind it. And so, but I will say, you know, since then Solana, like the amount of DePIN projects moving onto Solana has been impressive. The kind of staying power of Solana has been impressive. So I wouldn’t write them off, you know, by any means and they continue to make progress. They’re, I think doing a lot of things very well. The part of what I was really starting to get confused about and, you know, still have some questions about is like the future of a kind of modular L2, L3, L1 million blockchain ecosystem, as opposed to like a more monolithic one. And I think Solana does some interesting things. They’re multi-threaded. They have this like CPI thing to make sure that, you know, you’re not executing the same smart contract on different threads, which kind of lets them preserve characteristics of a monolithic chain without having like the UX downside of having to bridge between, you know, different L2s. And that really bummed me out about, you know, kind of where Ethereum was going is like, I want you to be able to take your car on DIMO and attach other things to the vehicle issued by some other protocol and take out a loan against it and bundle and take your, you know, your home deed, which is on like base or optimism or whatever, package the two together, take out a loan against both, repackage that instrument into like another drip, you know, like this whole money Legos, experience being on money Legos, like it’s just, you know, the Lego, the composability Lego thing, you can build such solid, unstoppable, like perfect applications on blockchain because like unlike the real world, but if you keep stringing these things together and one goes down and it all kind of falls apart, like you can build these blockchain applications in such a way that as long as the blockchain is running and they all work, you know, like all the, all these recombinations of DeFi stuff, as long as the blockchain running, those smart contracts will, will work. And I guess you have to worry about smart contract exploits or whatever, but they’ll be there, you know, the team, the team can disappear off the face of the earth and that protocol, that contract will continue to exist. So I love that aspect of blockchains. It seemed like we’re kind of getting away from it a little bit. I’m really excited about what Polygon’s doing as it relates to when one, there’s ZK tech, but to this call like idea of aggregation and the ability to kind of build apps that, the key thing in that post I linked is like, it feels like a monolithic blockchain. It feels like you’re interacting with one chain. You don’t have to get ETH on multiple L2s in order to clear a transaction. You don’t have to worry about where the other person’s wallet is. And if they can deliver on that, I would be, I’d be happy to do that.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Rob, you’ve absolutely been on fire today. We are getting all tight for time. One last question and then we will wrap up. Give me some 2024 trends. Doesn’t have to be good, can be bad, but give me some 2024 crypto trends that are tickling your fancy at the moment. Things that you think will really help us out towards the end of the year.
Rob Solomon
I think it’s gotta be UX and more mainstream things. There’s been a lot of attention on wallets, a lot of VCs funding wallet companies, a lot of people doing interesting things with the account abstraction, even, you know, incumbents with pass keys like, it seems to be some broader adoption of authentication technology. And so we can get to a point where the wallet experience gets really good, gets really seamless. You can use wallets across applications. You don’t have to have these clunky secondary wallets and, you know, breaks down when you try to deep, you know, go from one app to bounce the wallet and then back. If you can make that experience better, make it simpler and more safe for people, I think we can really start to get to, you know, mainstream apps at the every app that your mom, you know, would be happy to use. And you already see the little bit, you know, Blackbird, the guy from Rezzy launched one recently. And other than like having the dollar sign before fly, that’s like, you know, dollar sign flies what you earn in there. If it weren’t for the dollar sign, you might not even realize it’s a crypto app. You don’t really see the wallet or anything. I think they’re using privy behind the scenes. But that is the thing that I think in 24, I thought we weren’t gonna have another bull market until that was, I was surprised at how much, how quickly we kind of bounced back. But I thought that was gonna be the thing that’s gonna unlock the bull market. I still think it’s needed as the next thing.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Rob, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and DIMO online and on socials?
Rob Solomon
Yeah, I’m @robmsolomon everywhere. So, R -O -B -M -S -O -L -O -M -O -N on Twitter, on Discord. Yeah, it’s dimo.xyz is the website. You can find links to our Discord and everything there. It’s @DIMO_Network on Twitter. It’s probably the best place to kind of just subscribe to updates. And yeah, you can find us in the Metaverse, drivedimo.com to buy a device and connect your card, DIMO Mobile in the App Store on iOS and Android. You can get connected pretty quickly. I definitely recommend. It’s a great one to try out. It’s a great one to show to people who are less familiar with crypto and want to have a good experience trying something new.
Matt Zahab
And last question here I totally forgot to ask. You guys are currently all sold out of the devices. One of those bad boys back in stock.
Rob Solomon
Very soon. We should have more of the smaller device back in stock next week. And the bigger one I expect will be fulfilling orders again within two to three months.
Matt Zahab
Amazing. Rob, what an episode. Really appreciate you coming on. And at the current rate that you guys are building and shipping, we will definitely have to around two and within the next couple of months. And truly treat, appreciate your time and can’t wait for the next one.
Rob Solomon
Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Talk to you soon.
Matt Zahab
Folks, what an episode with Rob Solomon, Co-Founder of DIMO. Absolute treat of an episode, everything DePIN, DAO is building the future of mobility and of course everything DIMO related. Rob brought the heat, knowledge bombs left, right and center. Really appreciate that. We’d love to see it. If you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you did. Please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to team love you guys. Justas you’re the man I appreciate you. And back to the listeners. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
