Dialogue with DEV Marvin: How to do a good on-chain transaction? Analyze it for you from the perspective of "workhorse".

The following text is compiled from the series Twitter Space #对话 DEV, hosted by FC, Founding Partner of SevenX Ventures, Twitter@FC_0X 0

Guest of this issue: Marvin, Founder of Phala Network, Twitter@marvin_tong

First time doing Dev: No top VC endorsement, but with the support of the community, I got on Binance

After graduating, Marvin became an ordinary part-time worker and worked as a product manager in a large factory. In 2018, the disruptive revolution brought about by smart contracts gave him and his brother @bgmshana, who is doing machine learning on the Gmail team, the idea of starting a business.

What track to choose? Marvin: The core value of Web3 is to solve the crisis of trust, and in the process give birth to new models of innovation, and the value of these innovations will be captured by the technology with the highest level of trust.

And TEE, that's exactly what it is. And so Phala was founded, a decentralised cloud that uses TEE as hardware. After a period of build, Phala became a very top project in the Polkadot ecosystem, and then seized the opportunity to successfully list Huobi and Binance.

When it came to listings, one of the things Marvin thought they were doing right at the time was the fairlaunch of the token. Most of Phala's tokens are mined, and users do not need to run a special node, as long as there is TEE hardware, the coins can be mined.

This has given Phala a lot of support from the community, and as a result, it has gained a lot of traffic. Although there is no endorsement from a top VC and a team with a "first-class" resume, with the outstanding data indicators of the community and user dimensions, the AKA mass base, coupled with the trend of Polkadot, has made the project go on the coin.

But Fairlaunch's trade-off is still around today. Because the team only has 5% tokens, many capital cooperation that came over after listing the currency have been lost.

Dev's Transformation Path: Go to the U.S., Find PMF

'21-'22 Defi Summer and NFT Summer were a very painful phase for Marvin and his team, as they kept trying to find some use cases, but unfortunately nothing came of it.

Marvin began to reflect, and he had a vague feeling: in the past few years of crypto, because of some prelisting, postlisting, and other rules of the game of crypto itself, he has ignored the real points that need to be paid attention to when doing projects. He came to two conclusions:

1. For any Infra to actually be used, it needs to find PMF
2. The whole team must only serve this thing until the PMF is found, and not be distracted from doing anything else.

Of course, the premise of this conclusion is that the founders themselves figure out what they want. We feel that there are 10,000 times more space in the TEE that has not been explored at all, so we have to do this, and I think it will be killed. in this direction. If you fancy a direction, you will be the boss in this direction. "

In order to find a breakthrough, Marvin moved to the United States in '23, and one of the motivations was to do Infra, enterprise and developer services infrastructure projects that can actually have users and PMFs, maybe 70% -80% of them are in the United States, so they need to be closer to this market, know these people, know how these people do things. They go to talk to projects, they do hackathons to talk to developers about their problems, and there have been some PMF systems since last year.

What's it like to find a PMF?
1. Someone is genuinely willing to pay for your stuff
2. It's done in a strange way, and it's usually not the way you expect it to

It's like if you sell bricks and ask everyone to build a house, but people don't buy it, but one day there is a person who wants to buy your bricks to put out the fire on their head, which is probably what it feels like to find PMF. Once this kind of scene appears, all you need to do is to go to the person whose hair is on fire, and change the form of the brick product to make it extinguish the fire faster.

Key Points of Transformation: How Did Key Partners Onboard?

Phala has been largely an onboard customer for the entire 24 years, and along the way, Marvin mentions two key teams:

1. Flashbots

Flashbots is the key team that found that TEE must be used to solve the censorship problem under the Ethereum chain, and it was also on the way to solve the TEE problem that Phala was found, and there were a series of technical exchanges and cooperation. Now Phala is also providing some services for Flashbots.

2. ELIZA

Marvin met Shawn in a hacker house and told him about the AI Agent that can achieve full autonomy if it runs in the TEE, which is the "end game" of the AI Agent in Crypto. Shawn was very buy-in about this logic, and after that some Phala developers started to contribute more deeply into the ELIZA ecosystem.

It was also because of this opportunity that Marvin did the spore.fun last December

The story behind the launch of Spore

After meeting and talking to Shawn, Marvin came up with the idea of creating an ELIZA+TEE case with two routes:

1. Do Unrugable AI. By running the agent into the TEE, it can eliminate artificial rugs. Marvin's product is called AI POOL, and they provide technical support.

2. Do Autonomous AI, and fully realise the ultimate autonomy, and then spore is again.

Under what circumstances is AI truly autonomous? It's when it doesn't need humans to feed it. Now all the AI on the market still needs people to pay the bills, and the developers are silently paying Google behind the scenes and paying for the API of OpenAI's large model. What Marvin has to do is get the agent into the TEE, he pays himself and earns his own money to support himself. If it earns a lot, then let it copy its own genes, then evolve, compete, and finally survive the fittest.

After the launch of the spore, everyone liked it, and the market value of ATH may be 80 M, so Marvin also began to pay attention to this product, and it was a separate project to operate and develop.

"In fact, after GPT 3.5, we found that more and more projects in the AI sector are willing to try our stuff, or at least take the time to listen to our pitches. Later, as onboard became more and more AI customers, we also began to focus on serving the AI track. "

When Dev switches to trading, how does he describe the potential of his project?

About Phala

First of all, if you believe that one day the penetration rate of Web3 will grow from 10% to 90% today, then there must be a very low-cost, trustless technology to be compatible with Web2 software, because it is impossible to rewrite Web2 software. And in this Web3 Mass Adspotion (required) infrastructure track, Phala is in the leading position from the current point of view, and it is the first place if you are not modest.

Second, all problems are caused by insufficient growth. These problems such as insufficient chips and insufficient capital are not worth mentioning in the face of violent growth, so we should start to pay attention to the growth space of the project.

Finally, quantitative data may not be of great reference significance, including the so-called value capture and profit, etc., depending on the application scenario, that is, whether there are more people using Phala's TEE, and who is using Phala's TEE.

And then spore

Now its value is brought by the team + theme, and this product is still being built by a passionate team, so its growth space is reflected in:
spore may become the most popular launchpad in the ai16z ecosystem, and this launchpad is also self-generated by AI.

"For a very good low-code agent platform like Virtual, 95% of the AI made by it has a uniqueness or intelligence level of 60 points, and the intelligence level of these AIs born by the AI above the spore itself is also 60 or 70 points. The difference is that on Virtual, if you pile up resources or have a good team, there is a 1% chance that you can change an AI from a level of 60 or 70 points to a 90-point level, such as AIXBT, but the rest of the long-tail AI is no different from the level above spore. "

So spore has a big chance. Nowadays, many teams with ideas, or teams that have already made some good products but can't issue coins, they can do the following through SPORE:

• AI Agent does not require any AI knowledge. It has a unique ability that is added to the sixty or seventy points of the agent automatically generated by the AI, turning it into an eighty or ninety point thing.

• 2. All agents produced on spore are automatically running under a TEE ecosystem, using the ELIZA framework by default, and tokens are issued on SOLANA, which is interactive

What dimensions should you think about as a Dev?

Marvin describes the current crypto market as extremely retail and extremely attention-driven.

He made an analogy with the development of short video live streaming sales. At first, unknown Internet celebrities and actors were on the air, and then more and more anchors slowly poured in. At this time, there will be three types of people: 1) the audience, who finds it interesting and indulges in it every day, gives tips and buys things; 2) Those who despise criticise from a moral point of view, thinking that this is an eye-catching and declining world; 3) The practitioner, he thinks, if the world is selling goods in the future, what will everyone need? What do I need to do to capture the growth of the market?

The same is true of the current Crypto market, where presidents have issued coins, and as a "practitioner", we should think about what I should become if the issue of coins becomes as common as air and everyone expresses their needs. Is it to become a seller? Become a supplier to the person who sells the goods? Become a tool in the process? Or does it become a short video platform itself?

If you don't have an influencer system, it's not easy to become a seller.

To become a supplier, it is best to find an active market that is not widely circulated/scarce, and then sell it through binding channels, in fact, many teams are suitable for doing this, and there are many people doing this.

Providing tools, being a platform or part of a platform, is a process of finding PMF, and the odds of winning are relatively small. "But like GMGN, it is a product that can grasp the demand and the trend, and it may be a product that can be run out of an extreme practice-driven team and work ideas."

In fact, for Dev, under the premise that he can't predict the market for a long time, he doesn't have to think about what the market will happen in two years, but he has to think about what you want and what you can do.

What are the Stop Doing Lists for Dev?

"Don't try to learn from others. I think the thing I regret the most is not thinking from the perspective of the first sex and constructing my own uniqueness.

The core logic of business is that you can provide value that others can't provide. All actions, what products to do, what services to have, in fact, fall on this point in the end.

Once you are lazy in deep thinking and primacy, the price is that you will find that although you do a lot of things and may have some effect, it is a waste of time and resources because it is not necessarily what you really want. "

Regardless of whether he has experience in the crypto industry or not, he should quickly distinguish which are the rules of the game to be mastered to enter the industry, and which are valuable to his first thought. Even if he is wrong, he will iterate a little faster than others through negative and positive feedback. If you don't realise this at the outset, you may have to take a lot of detours.

Trading opportunities with Crypto AI

If Marvin brings a trading perspective, his way to observe the market is not to look at mindshare, because the object is people, and should pay attention to the content itself, and look at the most popular posts related to AI topics in Kaito. If you read the top 20 posts every day, you will find a sense of disk like looking at a K-line, and the content that is headed, liked the most, and retweeted by the bigwigs is talking about AI, and you will slowly get the trend.

When it comes to the new direction of AI, Marvin himself focuses on two things:

1. AiFi

AiFi is not a simple Ai+DeFi, it is not an agent that can swap or a DeFi can adjust AAVE is called AiFi, Marvin believes that this thing has practical value, but it is not enough imagination. AiFi is most likely an agent that can have some economic swaps.

2. Swarm concept

That is, how the interaction between multiple AI agents can hit interesting scenes, rather than simply returning search results. So how do you find it? Just the one I just said, look at the post that is liked and forwarded the most by mindshare every day, don't look at people, look at the post and slowly have this feeling.

Finally, there are Marvin's little bells, which have three:

1. @NousResearch @SH L0 MS and @ropirito of the team

Recommended reason: Builder is strong, AI development ability and cultural accuracy are very good, shape things mindshare is very high.

2. @shawmakesmagic

3. @yoheinakajima

Recommended reason: The more awesome True Builder in AI, not only is the technology, but also the sense of his product is very close to the market, and it can shape out what everyone wants.

FC is written at the end

Abstracting from the perspective of results, Marvin as a Dev does a few things right:

1. Choose the right track that is in demand
2. Know where the game leader is and stay with them
3. Because I chose the right track, I met a new opportunity, and I met the key person in this opportunity
4. Know the rules of crypto, how to play at the second level, how to play at the first level, where the resources are, and how to pry them
5. Luck and persistence

I hope it can give you some inspiration.

Thanks again to Marvin for joining Dev, Space audio will be updated in the small universe one after another, and we will have a separate podcast column. If you have any suggestions for the new series, you are also welcome to leave a message for interaction.