Finn  0:42  
Hello and welcome to The Ether. Today's Tuesday, December 28th 2021. This is a Space hosted by SuperTerra. It's the Onboarding Space for onboardoooors. Let's take a listen.

SuperTerra  0:56  
I'll just give everyone a couple more minutes. I know we're just getting started. And I can see Simon's joined. And we also have LunaFest guys, so thank you, look forward to kick it with you.

Simon Chadwick  1:08  
Legends. How's everyone? Just give it another more minute.

SuperTerra  1:12  
Yeah, I can see people are starting to gather now, which is great. Welcome. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our latest Terra Spaces, where Simon and I are going to kick off a discussion around a really important topic and one that you almost forget once you've been in the space for a while. How we onboard newbies to crypto in general terms of crypto education. And specifically, how do we get some more people engaged with Terra, and I've got some very exciting guest speakers, who I think will give you a very interesting angle on how they're approaching that. So to start with, I'll just introduced Simon, and we'll get things rolling.

Simon Chadwick  1:49  
Just have made sure that you mute your mic, as I seem to get feedback through yours. How you going everyone? So this is an exciting discussion around education and onboarding to Terra, as SuperTerra has said. It seems to be a pretty big issue, especially as the deeper you get into crypto and to crypto Twitter, into chains, into all this sort of stuff, what ends up happening is, I noticed, a lot in the Space is people tend to lose a lot of touch with the outside world. And especially if you're onboarding newbies. There's a lot of terms that newbies don't necessarily understand. There's a lot of words that they don't understand that are thrown out and expected that they're to be understood. And the moment you start using those words, you create a lot of confusion. So what we're going to do is we're going to just have an open discussion around education, Terra onboarding, what some thoughts are, what we need, what needs to be around. We'll open up the floor as well to questions or comments as well. So if you put your hand up and you've got something to add, we'll add you in. We've also got the LunaFest, guys. So yeah, I'm Simon, I've been running courses in crypto for a long time. And I'm now the head of Loop Learn. So I'm building an education platform in partnership with TFL. But I'll talk about that later and I'll cover what we're creating later with that. So LunaFest guys, it'd be awesome to hear from you guys. And we've obviously had a lot of... I know you guys have had a bit of a rough patch over the last couple weeks, but seems to have come together and I'm looking at the governance vote and seems to be alright. So yeah, what's your input on this discussion? And how do you think we should target onboarding to Terra?

IanLunaFest  3:38  
I'll jump in, Andy. Do you want me to go first?

LunaFest  3:40  
Yeah, go for it. 

IanLunaFest  3:41  
I mean, I'm, I guess, co-founder of LunaFest. There's quite a lot to unpack in that one, Simon. So there's quite a few tangents of thoughts I could probably go down, but I'll try and pull them out individually. But I guess starting with onboarding, and yeah, for the last... Well, I mean, I've been in crypto for three or four years. Longer than that, actually. But I've spent the last... Since COVID, onboarding family and friends, and the first thing that I always do is point them towards Bitcoin and try to get them to understand blockchain with some very basic knowledge. And I actually have a series of WhatsApps, which I continue to forward to people, when people come to me and say, "Look, I want to learn about this industry," and really start them off with the basics. And as you correctly say, there's a whole load of terminology, which I... There's some nice slides and things and maybe I can point them towards you after this call. But yeah, I literally have a whole realm of things that I literally just forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, and I forward the same messages to the new people and I say, "Look, this is just a bit of a very basic starting point," and point them towards the Bitcoin standard and things like that. And then when people can understand what's actually going on then LUNA comes next as far as I'm concerned, because obviously this ecosystem is, in my opinion, the most exciting ecosystem that's in the blockchain space. What's going on within decentralized money and the metaverse, and everything else is wonderful. But yeah, I always try to start them off with the very, very basics. And yeah, that's how I look to onboard. But and yeah, I can talk about LunaFest, obviously in a separate tangent, but I'll let Andy have a quick introduction as well. But thanks for joining, guys.

Simon Chadwick  5:39  
Actually a good way to open quickly, you're obviously... I'd say maybe let's bring up the problems that we see with crypto education. So what are the issues that we see that beginners face around... What do we see as the main challenges for people onboarding on Terra and the main challenges for people onboarding into crypto? That could be a great way to start off and go down that...

SuperTerra  6:02  
'Cause I see those as two separate issues. They're combined, but they're also separate in the sense of, there's one thing just learning the terminology, and then there's another thing learning Terra. They're two intertwined, but also separate issues. And I've recently kind of tackled that myself. So are you more interested in talking about the initial onboarding to crypto, or actually the actual, "Alright, you've got some basic knowledge, now we need to onboard you on to Terra"? Which are you more focused on?

Simon Chadwick  6:29  
A bunch of both, to be honest, because I think more and more the lines are getting blurred. And I think, maybe not in the past. But now obviously, with the adaption to Terra, we're skipping a few steps. Traditionally, with students, I brought them into centralized exchanges first, and I showed them how to work with crypto in the centralized realm before moving to the decentralized realm. But Terra is so UI friendly, and especially with applications like Anchor and lots of upcoming applications, that you start to skip a few steps. And obviously, there's a lot of terminology they need to understand, there's a lot of workings they need to understand. But with Terra, we're going to see a lot more of that jumping of... They're still going to need to set up centralized exchanges for a lot of it to create on and off ramps, but there seems to be like a jumping... There's more of a jumping of steps ahead with Terra than there may be has been in the past interacting with crypto. So I guess we could touch on both different points. But I thought that it was great... Tt'd be great to... That those blurred lines are actually becoming a lot more gray area than ever used to so you can touch on either/or, or both. But yeah, that's sort of where I wanted to approach it.

Ben May  7:39  
Okay, well, cheers for that. I think the biggest problem I face... I mean, I've known about Bitcoin since like 2013, but I really kind of educated myself in the last six weeks, right. And I think the biggest problem is, is that a lot of the concepts are not new, but for some reason, we've decided to name them, like "transaction fees" are now "gas fees", for example. I mean, that in itself creates a huge barrier to entry and a bit of like... People hear them and they just... A lot of people get embarrassed when they don't know the meaning of something. So they don't ask, right. It's kind of like a weird bit of human nature. And then if you look at Terra, there's a lot of it that's been gamified, whatever, like when you look at StarTerra, to make it more interactive, more fun for people. But again, that's added another layer of complexity, where it's a bit like, "Oh, what the fuck is going on here, I need to stake something and then I get STE, Star Energy, or whatever they call it. I mean, I'm still not quite clear on it, even myself now. So there's that problem. And then the other problem is that I kind of see is, or... For people to really learn these things, you can't read it, you need to use it. And the fact that you need to chuck in $1,000, $2,000, whatever, and just have a play with it, if there was an ability to actually use everything on Terra, but have... On like a Testnet. So you could... You got 1,000 "dollars", but they weren't actually dollars, it was just something for you to use to actually then play around with it and see how everything works.

SuperTerra  9:12  
I think that's a really interesting observation. And actually, from my own background on coding and programming, you kind of have test areas to play around making mistakes and so on. And I think probably one the most daunting things is going in for real, and then sending something to the wrong contracts address, misunderstanding or getting conned by something that you just innocently sent over and didn't know. And I think your point on StarTerra, that's probably an entire separate topic. How to make something so damn complicated it makes your head explode so you walk away from it? And obviously, if you're an American, you can't even take part 'cause of KYC, but I'd say that's an entirely separate topic. I think the other thing as well, which I think is really interesting is you're absolutely right. I think we've almost put up... I use the royal "we" because I try not to do this, and I've been sort of in and around this space for a number of years. I always try and demystify things. But I think you're right, we almost renamed traditional concepts in a new way. And it feels like there's a certain part, and I don't think this is prevalent in Terra, where people want to create a kind of an elitism around it with its own jargon, it's terminology. I actually want to do the antithesis of that, and that is really opening up so it kind of demystifies it.

Simon Chadwick  10:23  
I was actually messaging SuperTerra yesterday, because I've been writing scripts, and building the onboarding and the education for TFL and Loop and stuff. And I've been running scripts and really jumping into the beginner's shoes and trying to... How can you simplify as many of the complicated terms as possible and not use any terms that people don't understand before you've brought that up in the scripts? So until the word "liquidity" is explained, I'm not going to bring up that term. And I'm not going to use that terminology, because it's too much to understand. But I had a little incident yesterday, I was running scripts, and I had... Not going to name who, but I had someone who's very heavily involved in blockchain and high up, that edited some of the scripts, he went and had read over and actually edited some of the scripts. And I messaged SuperTerra really mad going like... I was really pissed off, because this person had taken a script that I had simplified, and had added pretty much PhD speak into it, to the point that I couldn't understand half the terms. And it's not their fault, and that's just... 

Simon Chadwick  11:33  
The thing that we face with crypto, and as Ben massively understood is this whole... Not just the terms that they use, but using really big words, using big financial words, using words that are too much, and they're not layman's terms. And so when people come in, they're in complete state of confusion, and they don't understand any of the stuff. So it's very important for us to take this really, really fresh eyes perspective on education and go, "Hey, even the most basic of concepts that seems super dumb to us, is actually not to a beginner person." Or even a word that we throw around like it's anything, even a word like "liquidity", if you actually dive into it, the majority of the average user out there doesn't actually understand the word liquidity. It's a kind of word that is thrown around a lot, but people don't actually understand what it is. So when you use it, maybe subconsciously, their brains are in confusion mode, even if they're not noticing it they're going through, their brain is trying to catch up going like, "Okay, what's that word? What does it mean?" And it just stops them from learning properly. So I think Ben, that was a really, really great addition to that.

Ben May  12:35  
I appreciate that. I totally agree. I mean, there must be a phrase or a name for that kind of weird phenomenon that people... They just, their brain shut off. And I suppose it's a bit of ego, it's a bit of like, just overwhelmed feeling, whatever. But, I mean, the only solutions, just from my own personal experience of this is that, you know when you go on some websites, and... You're on a new platform, for example, and it will have like a tour, kind of, initially when you login. So everything be grayed out except for like, there'll be a number one and then an explanation of what that is, then you click next and it goes to number two, etc. I mean, for example, you go on Anchor, it's not necessarily intuitive what Anchor is. I mean, it's very easy to explain what it is in one sentence, but it's... You have to kind of really go and read and understand it, what it is, and then... Just because it's called Anchor, it's not called you know, like a boring lending blah blah blah. And, yeah, the other idea I had as well is just listening to you guys. Do you know the YouTuber, danku_r, I think he's quite big in the... Probably the best YouTuber for Terra on YouTube. And, I mean, I don't know if there's a way of actually getting him to create custom videos, just 30 second, minute-long videos for each of the main platforms. He's really, really good at explaining, and he's been my kind of go to resource for the Terra ecosystem.

Simon Chadwick  14:03  
I'm actually gonna be doing that very soon, in terms of this stuff. But also, as I said, I haven't mentioned it yet, because I'll say it towards the end, but I'm actually working with TFL. We're building a full education platform that's built breaking down everything from zero to everything. From complete beginners level to what is Terra, but also breaking down concepts of why as well, so not just what it is, but why. Because a lot of the times we're like, okay, what is this but people don't understand the concepts and the reasons behind it. So I've been working on that pretty heavily and SuperTerra's seen a lot of the introductory stuff. But you're right, that's a very powerful thing on YouTube is to create short breakdowns of platforms.

Ben May  14:47  
I've got one other problem that I don't have a solution for, but it's something I've faced was. There's one thing when you go into the Terra ecosystem, and you've already got maybe some basic blockchain Web 3.0 knowledge etcetera. You go in, there's the existing main platforms, Anchor, Mirror, etcetera. But then there's a whole kind of platforms that are doing their ICO, and there's some in the works. But it's really hard to know what the main strategies are that the really experienced people, like Cephii, are using, and the only way you really find out which ones are good and which ones are bad, or which ones are preferred, let's say, is by going into Twitter Spaces and that. So it's one thing learning it, there's another thing understanding actually what you should be doing, or what is preferable to do. And again, I don't have an answer or solution to this. It's just a problem that I face myself. And the only way I really solved it was just going into Twitter Spaces again and again and again, and listening.

Simon Chadwick  15:51  
that's actually a tough one. And it'll probably get tougher with time, I think. 'cause I mean, it's looking at the gaps of levels. There's a difference between a beginner who is coming in from the TradFi world who comes in and uses Anchor and gets the 20% yield on their savings account, and then maybe plays with a couple different apps, maybe uses a decentralized exchange. But then when you bring in complicated concepts like Prism, and you're using platforms like Astroport, and you're using Mirror and stuff like that, that's almost like another more advanced level. So I would separate it a little bit from onboarding, and I would start with... Obviously, starting with the basic platforms, and then maybe having, then... You can have a platform that advence... That touches on advanced strategies and stuff like that. But it's a little bit hard, because how do you do that without being unbiased? Even as an educator or... As a platform, it's hard to go, "Oh, yeah, this one's crap. This one's good." I think that's always going to be more in the hands of the YouTubers to break down strategies for particular platforms and how they work more so than a platform on Terra, because that would create some friction, I'd imagine.

SuperTerra  16:58  
Yeah, no, I think you're totally right. And it's also the kind of like... Some people are never going to get past the basics of just using Anchor, let's say. I mean, that's not a bad thing, it just is what it is. In some ways, you do want a subset of people just doing that. But yeah, not just an onboarding thing, it's much more advanced.

Simon Chadwick  17:20  
Cool. LunaFest, do you want to add anything?

LunaFest  17:24  
I was just going to add that you've heard from Ian, and Ian is actually the person that onboarded me. I've been in crypto for about six or seven months now. Ian was actually talking to me about crypto, probably back in 2018, 2017 maybe. Stupidly, I ignored him back then. However, this year came around, we got back into conversation around it. And Ian introduced me to the Terra ecosystem. And Ian's... I've dread to think how many people that Ian's actually onboarded personally into the ecosystem, and created a group, a Telegram group to begin with, that just allows people to ask really stupid questions. And there's literally no simple question that's not allowed to be asked. We've all been there. We all appreciate that even things like learning how to use Terra Station to begin with can be quite complicated for somebody that's never seen it before. Then you start talking about Anchor and Mirror the very... The early protocols that are in the ecosystem. And I think that there's... More so now than ever before, there's resources out there like there's the Learn Terra, which is on YouTube, which is kind of bite sized chunks two, three minute videos. I know that TerraSpaces are putting together a really basic list of onboarding information, how to use simple things, exactly that, staking, claiming airdrops, etcetera. And I've noticed that on Loop as well, there's some really great introductory pieces on what's Web 3.0? Why is it here? What does it do? So I think the resources are spread out. So it needs like one library where we can access all this information. But definitely having that opportunity to be in a group where you can ask stupid questions and really, really get basic information. I think that's essential. And that really helped me. The group's grown probably doubled in size in six months since I've been involved in it. And every time you get the same questions over and over again, so I think you're exactly right, trying to find one depository where everybody can go in and pull out that information to get individual bits of information from the very, very basics of how to set up a ledger, how to set up Terra Station, how to claim your airdrops, what's what is staking, what is a validator, All that sort of information is crucial. And unless you've got people, at the moment, like Ian, that's going to go through that with noobs like I was six, seven months ago, it's quite difficult. I think, Ben, you mentioned about the YouTube videos, and there's some fantastic... There's danku, Cephii is out there giving his strategy. And I think you really need to be in the ecosystem for probably two, three months, especially if you only got a very basic understanding before you can even start to grasp any of those concepts that those guys are talking about. Even now I sit in and it just blows my mind some of the strategies that those guys used to increase their...

Ben May  20:42  
I still, now, listen to some of that stuff. And I'm like, "Yeah, I kind of get it."

LunaFest  20:47  
Yeah, I think that's far too advanced for me. I've been in a number of Telegram channels where they talk about different strategies. And I think you pick up bits as you go along. And that testnet idea is a great example of being able to play with maybe the different protocols or Terra Station, and kind of work out different strategies without risking your assets. I mean, we had a guy that was in one of our chats that was doing a swap, I can't remember between what coins but the slippage was absolutely enormous at the time when he went to do the swap. And it was just really bad look, that when he swaps he managed to lose, I think it was almost like 30%, during that trade, quite a substantial amount. And it's a really simple mistake to make. And I feel really sorry for people, especially if they we're doing things like that on a regular basis, and not recognizing that they're damaging their LUNA stack every time they trade something in that way. So I think that  there's got to be some form of almost like basic schooling where you can send somebody to a Terra Station address, like with a testnet, you get given 100 testnet LUNA, and then you can go and play with that. I think that's crucial. I don't know if that's even possible. Yeah, I mean, Simon, you probably know more about this than I do. 

Simon Chadwick  22:14  
I'll just jump in here, 'cause it is possible. I've actually talked to the Loop boys about it, bbout creating this exactly, which is a demo mode for platforms. It can be hosted on separate servers. So it doesn't create issues with current protocols, and opening up bugs and things like that. From the stuff that we're building, the first iteration of that is going to be on-chain activities. So the ability to perform an on-chain activity. So you watch a video on how to stake, and then you deposit a bit of... Or you watch a video on how to deposit funds, and then you have an on-chain action, which is depositing the funds, then it checks, you get a reward, watch another video on staking, you have maybe a small amount, you stake, but it's not yet a testnet just quite yet. But that will be possible in the future. It's definitely a possibility. But I think you'd have to work with each individual protocol as well, and make sure that it doesn't create any security issues, which is quite important. 

IanLunaFest  23:11  
And I'll just jump in there quickly. I absolutely agree. The testnet, as you continue to talk about, I think it's a wonderful idea and to give people an opportunity to play around. I remember in the early days messing around with things like BitMEX, and they very much had a testnet, where you could put some money on there and and play with some leverage and mess around and see what you were doing and lose all your money. But it wasn't real money, it was just test money. So yeah, I think that's a really good idea. I think what Andy said as well, I've been lucky... I mean, I say lucky, but unlucky as well. But I've not worked in the legacy world since COVID arrived, which really gave me an opportunity to go full time crypto. And yeah, 50, 60 people have been on boarded. And we have a really, really, really fun group of people that we literally... Every single person I meet, every taxi driver, every restaurant, or every person that comes across my radar, you have a conversation with them about LUNA. And not everyone's gonna take the bait. Not everyone's gonna jump on board and go, "I want in." But occasionally you get somebody go, "Yeah, I'm in." And you say, "Download Telegram, here's my number, come along." And you introduce them to the group, you make it fun. And over time, all of the guys in the group that Andy's referring to, they've all been trained up, and they're all knowledgeable now and they can all hold conversation. And yeah, they all know what liquidity is. Yeah, they're not all maybe using all the best yield strategies out there in the ecosystem. I'm not either and you've got your own choice. You don't have to go right down the rabbit hole. You can just hold LUNA and just stake it and just earn the yield and get the airdrop.

Ben May  24:53  
I agree. So there's one thing is kind of going off from that is, I'm in E-commerce in my regular job, so I've got an E-commerce business. So one of the things that I do when... 'Cause pictures are very important when you're selling online, right? But the way we structure and decide how we do our pictures, we very much figure out what other questions customers are asking themselves. What are the features they're looking for? And then once you've figured out what those bunch of questions are, you put them in order of importance. You kind of rank them and you maybe look at the questions customers asked on the product pages, whatever it may be. And then what you do is in the pictures, you use the pictures that answer those questions via pictures, right, in order of importance. So in line with what we're talking about right now is, yeah there's Learn Terra and stuff, but lot of people when they come into Terra, they just hear about, "Oh, I can make 20% this..." Whatever it may be. And I'm sure there's probably like a bunch of maybe 10 questions, maximum, that everybody's asking, all beginners ask. And maybe if you started from that point of view, and you sort of... Instead of Learn Terra just being like a Wikipedia, you actually start it from the front page with top five most asked questions or top 10. And then you could go down the rabbit hole from there and decide which rabbit hole to go down. 

SuperTerra  26:15  
I think what's really interesting for me. And sorry, apologies, I'm still recovering from COVID, I have constantly to shake it off, so if my voice goes, that's why. But yeah, basically, the Wiki concept is obviously something that glues it together. But I think what you're talking about there, it feels like that kind of almost a gamification of rewarding people for understanding concepts by actually walking it through at their own pace, they can dip in, they can dip out. I'm thinking back to some of my early coding days, we could go in, as I say, you could play around in safety. Or to give a completely unrelated sector, and I'm not promoting it at all, but I was involved in that a number of years. But in the gaming sector, there are ways to play with play money. And we've seen that as well, in traditional stocks and share sector. We can have a kind of a play account so you can make those mistakes, you can lose your virtual $10k, just like that. And then you go in and you try it for real and you hopefully don't lose the $10k. 

SuperTerra  27:08  
But the but the point is, it's how do we kind of break down those barriers? I think, this group that Ian's talked about and Andy's talks about sounds fantastic. I mean, I myself have learned through lots of bad mistakes over the years, about what I try and do is impart and share that knowledge so that others don't make the same mistakes that I did. I think, obviously, we've talked around a number of different areas, I think probably the biggest one is for someone who's completely non-native to this, how do you even sort of get them to look at the door, let alone walk through it? And it's just been interesting to get basically how various of you started. I mean, with me it was an intellectual curiosity. I was really interested in the background of how this whole new concept of blockchain was going to change the world. And this was six or seven years ago. And I was just completely bewildered by some of the talk and some of the conversations at the time, because it was completely alien language. And it kind of put me off. I was aware from a peripheral, financial, play around, have a bit of fun, sort of way and lose, in my case. But actually getting through that door and fully understanding it, I would say I've only really had that immersion in probably the last two or three years and really only in depth through Terra. And it's actually happening very, very quickly. So yeah, just well confused, and how people first got into this space full stop. 

LunaFest  28:29  
I don't mind jumping in there. First thing is, I was probably the most recent one to get involved in the ecosystem. I think, like I said, Ian promoted... Or, we had a good chat about cryptocurrency a few years ago, and like I said, I didn't get involved. However, when we spoke again, Ian talked a lot about utility. And I think utility for me was the key aspects. One of the first protocols that I talk about when I'm now talking to new people that are interested is Anchor. You talk about the legacy TradFi system and the yield you get of 1%, if you're lucky, on your savings. And then all you need to do is start talking about the yield you can get, the APY, you get a 20% with Anchor, and all of a sudden people's ears prick up. I think that as soon as you start talking about real world relatable protocols, that people can grasp quite easily, people all of a sudden are very, very interested in that. Then you talk about, say Mirro, for example, I know Simon, you said it's probably one of the more complicated ones. But when you talk about people that are interested in investing in stocks and shares, and you talk about what Mirror Protocol can provide, and how easy that is to use, I think that's another massive onboarding opportunity to speak to non-natives about, because people do grasp the concept of it. They might not necessarily trade in it but they grasp the concept of stock and shares and stock markets. I think things like Prism and an Astroport that are far too complicated, you certainly wouldn't use that in your opening gambit to a non-native. But I think for me, it was all about that utility part of it. And that's the bit that really interested me. So when Ian was talking about what you can do, and what the ecosystem can actually provide, and how it's completely different to the TradFi system, that, for me, was the biggest onboarding attraction and that's the thing that got me into the space, was the capabilities of what the LUNA ecosystem can do. So yeah, for me, that was it. It was it was purely down to utility and what you can do with it, and plus being able to make a bit of money is always a bonus too.

Ben May  30:48  
Yeah, that seem very similar to myself. The other thing that was the same, in terms of when I'm explaining things to people, I find a lot of them... I try to feed it to them in the correct order in terms of how things happened historically. 'Cause the space is so fast moving and Terra exists because of all the things that came before it. And the problems that those things faced. Terra probably wouldn't exist if there hadn't been those problems, if that makes sense, or wouldn't exist now. So I very much think you have to teach things to people in the correct order as they happened for them to make sense as to, "Oh, this happened because this."

Simon Chadwick  31:33  
Fully agree. Yeah, 100% agree with that. A lot of it's also whys, right? It comes from concepts. So for example when explaining Terra, and I did this when writing a lot of scripts on Terra, we're starting with basically the why. What is the problem in the space that's been currently existing? And how does Terra solve it? And then from there, you can explain how the mechanism works and tie that on, but it's always starting... I think starting big picture, starting what... It's like any sales, right? What problem are you trying to solve? What problem you're trying to solve? And you start with those concepts, and then you go into the how and explaining more of that. But the why is usually a good way to start. In terms of my own... Oh, it invited me to co-host finally, it works.

SuperTerra  32:23  
Some issues with the tech this morning. Apologies. [chuckle]

Simon Chadwick  32:27  
Oh, good. Oh, good. But basically, my journey in crypto has been interesting one, because I started not from the intellectual perspective, even though I'm an intellectual. I started off end of 2016, so 2017, going pretty hard on... When Bitcoin kind of left $1,000 and kind of got into the space, I really started with trading. So I was really big on trading, and then I moved more into delving into fundamentals and chains and in the deep sides of DeFi. And then obviously, I found Terra and Anchor, and all those platforms, and that was game changing to be able to find this level of composability and this level of innovation, and this level of really working to build the gateway to crypto. And that's been really my mission for a fair while now has been building the gateway to crypto for the mainstream, and helping onboard users into crypto and now into Terra. So yeah, it's very exciting.

LunaFest  33:29  
Just a quick point to add there, I think that the single biggest thing that you can... Obviously we spoke around testnets, but other than that, if people say, "I want to get involved," obviously, I always go down the road of, "Look, I'm not qualified to tell you what to do here. But like, you've got to have some skin in the game. And if it's £50, if it's £100, if it's $100, if it's $50, if it's $30, whatever you can afford, just buy a little bit, send it to Terra Station, set up a wallet, I'll help you set up a wallet. I'll show you what to do. Right, these are your keys, what are your keys, this is how you need to look at your keys. And just give them a real introduction and drip feed them and slowly talk to them and when they're ready, they'll ask the next question. What do I do about staking? How do I earn the yield? What can I do moving forward? But yeah, have some skin in the game and put a little bit of money in, have a little play around, look at what the opportunities are, put some money into Anchor. I'll help you do it. I'll sit here all day and I'll help anybody, show them what to do and how to do it, and how to set up a wallet, and how to do the things correctly in the first instance. And the more time you spend with people, then that literally just opens up their brains to go, "Look, wow, look, I'm doing this." And then they go and tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends, and the more we can just give the one-on-one education, every one person... If I've told 50 people, I can assure you those 50 people have told 50 people each, and those 50 people are going to tell 50 people each. And this is wildfire, and all you've got to do and all our responsibility is, and I'll say OGs and the early guys in the ecosystems, but all we've got to do is spend time. And the more people you can tell, and the more people you can be patient with, and the more people you can give your knowledge base to, then that's just going to continue to help this thing spread. And it's already spreading four times quicker than the internet. It's already going that fast, but it will go faster and faster and faster and adoption will get quicker.

SuperTerra  35:26  
I've got a question for you, Ian. 'Cause I'm very much... Totally agree with everything you've just said. The skin in the game, you've got to use this, it's the only way you're really going to learn it. But one problem I've had recently, so I bought a load of .ust domain names, addresses for my friends and family to kind of onboard them. And when I was trying to get them to do it over Christmas, a bit of an issue with actually... I got them all to buy some UST on binance, okay. And then suddenly, all the withdrawals were not allowed to come out, they're suspended them. What are you guys using to actually onboard normies into this, like for friends and family, normies, whatever. Which centralized exchange are you using to actually get from fiat into UST?

LunaFest  36:19  
I think now you've got Transak available, which is really simple. So if people are using Terra Station, I don't necessarily think it's the cheapest route, but it does save a lot of aggravation, you can do that with either bank transfer or a card payment. I think it's fairly limited. I think it's maybe £1200, so $1,500 in a single transaction for a card, but I think you can do a much higher transaction with a bank transfer. Binance is fairly straightforward. I think now with UST being listed on a lot more of the exchanges, it makes it a lot easier. When I started, it was quite difficult to find... I think had to buy UST on Coinbase, and then send it through to Binance. Or, sorry, buy USDT on Coinbase, send it through to Binance. Then with Binance, change that to LUNA, then send the LUNA into Terra Station. So that was a much more long winded affair and obviously you talk about gas fees and transaction fees, although they're not massive, it did cost a little bit to transfer it. But I think now with Transak being available, and that's on Terra Station, you can do it on Anchor, I believe you can do it on Loop. Don't quote me on that, though. That's another opportunity to do it. So it's becoming easier and easier.

SuperTerra  37:39  
No, I mean, because the biggest problem I find is, I've got a lot of E-commerce friends who I've onboarded to LUNA, and a lot of them would just... Everyone's got cash reserves in companies as they are. Wouldn't it be great if we could just onboard to park cash and just have it in UST, and just gain that 20% yield. The issue is, is that for example, cash in Europe, they've got a limit of, I think, about £10,000 or £11,000. So when you're talking about a 250,000, 500,000, that's not even possible right now, to my knowledge anyway.

LunaFest  38:11  
I think Michael Arrington is putting an incentive together. I know it was dropped probably five or six weeks ago, to onboard institutions into Anchor to earn a 20% yield and I'm not sure exactly what the strategies are. But yeah, I know people are very much working on increasing the amount of capital that they can put in in one transaction.

SuperTerra  38:32  
I'm very much hoping when Qredo, there at the UK. I'm very much hoping when they're gonna have this solution, so maybe not... But again, it's fiat on-ramp that's the biggest problem I'm kind of coming up against. And just anything over a certain amount seems to... I just haven't found a way of doing it.

Simon Chadwick  38:52  
Crypto.com's pretty good for it. I had a student of mine, we put a couple million into Anchor and Crypto.com was the way to do it. Not through UST, and this is where becomes more complicated and I think over time, it will become easier. But basically sending LUNA in, that's what I've always taught. It will get easier as UST adoption comes up but just being basically, buy LUNA on Crypto.com, send it to Terra Station, swap it. And I know you're gonna get some slippage and some fees, especially now with Astro taking most of the TerraSwap liquidity, it's going to be a bit harder for a little bit. But yeah, I think that for now. But now that UST is obviously spreading, it's going to be a lot easier for that. But Crypto.com, I haven't... I don't know, it probably depends on your jurisdiction, but I haven't run into any issues with withdraw amounts. There was a couple of issues loading fiat on to Crypto.com, but that was on the bank's ends mainly, so I had to run around a couple of issues with the bank going like, "Oh, you're not allowed to do this because it's a crypto account overseas," or whatever. But most of the time it's pretty alright, so that's been a solution I've used.

SuperTerra  39:58  
We came up against that. But the way I've solved it is, for example, on Starling or on Revolut, you can create new virtual cards. So you just have to... If they block it, you just create a new virtual card and do it, and you're able to get away with it once or twice before they block it again.

Simon Chadwick  40:15  
Yeah, I don't know how that works. I mean, this was different because this was something like $800,000-$1,000,000 transaction trying to send into Crypto.com. So it was more, I think, the transaction size and the bank going like, "Is this to finance terrorism?" Or something along those lines. It's a different animal.

SuperTerra  40:33  
Yeah, that must been a funny conversation. Has anyone... Sorry to hijack this conversation. Has anyone tried to actually off-ramp like $1,000,000 plus? Has anyone actually tried to do that yet? 

Simon Chadwick  40:52  
Why would you want to? [chuckle]

Ben May  40:55  
No, that's the question. 'Cause no one I know bloody has. So I'm just wondering, has anyone actually tried to do that. It doens't have to be that much, but just a few hundred thousand kind of thing.

Simon Chadwick  41:05  
I've off-loaded a fair amount. I think the biggest issues that you get is liquidity on exchanges. But I mean, if you look at Binance now and you look at even Crypto.com, the liquidity is pretty solid for those kind of amounts. The main thing is, yeah, I think you'd have to withdraw it in little chunks. I think, sometimes Crypto.com's got like, I think it's like $100,000 a day withdrawal or something along those lines, if you do all the verification. So it's not too much an issue. The main issue that you'll get is the liquidity if you're swapping. So if you're trying to swap into your fiat wallet, you got to make sure that you go down the correct route. Because if you're swapping $1,000,000, and there's no liquidity, it's gonna hurt. So yeah, but I think there's a liquidity as UST spreads, it's gonna become easier. I'm personally not a massive fan of Binance, I used to use it a lot. And I've kind of some friction towards it. But obviously, UST spreading is going to make things a lot easier, liquidity is going to get higher, and the onboarding is just going to get easier. We're at such early days when it comes to Terra's ecosystem. If you look at ETH, money in and outflows of ETH is so much easier these days, but we're going to go down that route. And we'll have the liquidity to be able to handle that.

SuperTerra  42:18  
Yeah, no, I'm super bullish on it. Generally just the fiat on/off ramps, and just the idea of Alice wallet and the ability for normies to get... I mean, all the things we've been talking about in this conversation. There is a clear distinction about the people who will be able to understand this, or want to understand it, versus the people who don't. I mean, 95% of people in the world are just never... Well, maybe not that many, I don't knwo. But there's a large amount of people in the world that are just never going to be able to understand it, or want to understand it. They just want to be able to click a button and to get the 20%. They don't want to do the heavy lifting of having to figure it out.

Simon Chadwick  42:59  
I hear a lot of people say that, but my actual experience in the real world has been different to that. And it's been mainly that people don't want to understand, because they've seen it as overwhelming. And I'm not saying that they're going to go down crazy rabbit holes and understand the deep levels of it. But a lot of the time, what happens is it gets put in a basket. And because it's explained in a way that they don't understand, or they have judgments or preconceptions about what it is. And things from what they hear from friends, family, news, all this sort of stuff, a lot of them haven't had the exposure to a basic understanding of it. And I found that when I explained on a really basic level people go, "Oh, I actually understand that. That makes sense." Not going really deep into the stuff but conceptual, like conceptual education, which is, "Okay, why? Not just what it is, but why? What is this changing? What is this impacting?" And the other side of the coin is that, this is what's powerful about Terra and the composability of Terra. If you don't understand the word composability, it just basically means the ability to build in a lot of the protocols that we have on Terra into other applications and utilize the code of that. So take Anchor, for example. And there's some stuff I can't really delve on, but Anchor is able to be built into platforms like Alice, for example. And you'll see a lot of normie applications that you have in your AppStore, social medias, all this sort of stuff, where Anchor will actually be built into all of these apps, and you won't even know that you're in crypto. You might be using Mirror, you might be using Anchor, you might be using all this sort of stuff without even realizing that you're in the crypto space. And that is the next level of solution.

SuperTerra  44:36  
That's the future. That's what it's gonna look like for a large amount of people in DeFi. It'll just look like what they're already used to. And none of that heavy lifting, only the very minimum amount of information required. All the heavy lifting done in the background.

SuperTerra  44:53  
Absolutely. Simon, you're a mind reader, that's exactly what I was gonna come on and say, that actually, if you think about it, and I guess, with, say, a marketing hat on, there's different segments of people. People that want to get into deep detail. And if you think about it, how many people have a traditional pension, and actually understand how pension funds work? Very few. There's an expert layer, if you like. And absolutely, I was gonna come on and say the likes of Alice Finance and others, are really ones that are going to absolutely explode this space in terms of adoption. But the key is those adopters will be a low fundamental understanding of what DeFi is about. But they absolutely want to get into the space because they are attracted by the high headline rates. They are aware that traditional system needs to change. And I think ultimately, where we'll be in five to 10 years time, DeFi and TradFi will essentially merge, because TradFi is no longer sustainable in many markets, because we're now seeing the genie's out of the bottle in terms of what we're really capable of achieving, if we "cut out" the middleman. But yeah, I think it's fascinating. I think those kind of GUIs, for a want of better word, those nice, easy to use front ends, those of you who may code and love to get into the depth, there are lots of people who just like to put boxes together and create charts and things. And it's that evolution that I think we're looking for, and I think Terra is absolutely going to lead the way there.

SuperTerra  46:20  
So one question for you guys is, Terra, by my estimation... Bear in mind, I've only been really deep in this space in the past few weeks, right? But Terra is early, and there's still a lot of problems that are coming up, they're now being solved, right. And the community seems pretty great about that. But for some people, when you tell them about the fundamental, or the mint/burn relationship and that, I do come up against this thing, some people go, "Oh, that sounds like a Ponzi," or something along those kind of lines. It's almost too good to be true. Have you guys also come up against this? And how are you tackling that one?

LunaFest  47:01  
I think that's the the easy answer to basically say, I don't understand this. So the first thing that people fireback is just, if they don't understand it, "Oh, it must be a Ponzi. It must be too good to be true." I think that's just the automatic response from people that don't want to admit that they don't understand it.

Simon Chadwick  47:23  
Also, the way you explain it too. I talked about concepts over hows. And I always lead with concepts when I teach stuff. Concepts comes first because when you get into the hows, when you get into technicals, you force people into the technicals. When you go into concepts, it almost tackles a different area of the brain. And you're painting the vision, rather than going into exactly how something works. And I mean, the mint and burn stuff is obviously important. But you can go in from a more conceptual layer around why this exists, and what the problems are in the world right now, and how this helps to solve potential issues, rather than going too deep in the technicals. And I actually never run into that objection of any sort around crypto. The main one that I used to run into, was about... What about the value? Where does the value come from? But then being able to explain the value, I used an analogy... And I think I talked about this with SuperTerra before, the analogy of a piece of land. So you take a real world analogy that they understand, and then you explain it. So with blockchain or with values of crypto, I always explained it like imagining a piece of real estate. And when stuff is being built on top of that real estate, like schools and hospitals and stuff build on top of the ecosystem, naturally, people want to move to the area. And so the real estate, the underlying real estate appreciates. And so when you can take a concept that they already understand, and a normal world concept that works with their brains, and you can kind of add that into explaining crypto in a very conceptual level, you kind of relate to them a lot better, and you remove a lot of those walls and those objections. So I think that's the way, in terms of that kind of stuff, is just to have a bank of analogies that you can use that they understand, rather than trying to explain complicated topics that they may not.

SuperTerra  49:14  
So the key for me, I always like to keep it simple, is educate, not intimidate. And I think how we break those barriers down is really the key to growing the space. And I think the sort of things that Ian talked about with his spending time, tutorials, and so on. I think that's a great one-on-one way of introducing it. And then those people ultimately become advocates because they're not bamboozled from day one. And let's face it, if you walk near into Terra now, it's a much more complex space than it was even three months ago. 

LunaFest  49:45  
Quickly to interject there, and I know we've really not touched on LunaFest, and I know many of you will have probably not even come across LunaFest but, we are working on putting together a decentralized festival experience to onboard artists to the ecosystem, where festival goers can pay for their tickets with UST and will receive NFTs. Artists that perform at the festival will get paid in UST. As part of that process we're looking to present at the International Music Forum in Ibiza, in a few weeks from now... Well, in April. And where we are going to literally look to give them exposure to the ecosystem and give them a personal onramp to say, "Look, we will give you one-on-one tuition, we'll show you how to set up a wallet, we'll show you how to look after your crypto assets, we will pay you in UST, and we'll give you one-to-one tuition on how you can benefit from that UST within the ecosystem." And these people have got some of the millions of Instagram and Twitter followers, and we believe that we can pay them to perform at a festival experience by being paid in UST, and then they're going to tweet about it and they're going to talk about it on their socials. And we think that's probably one of the best forms of marketing that we can get out there at the moment.

SuperTerra  51:07  
I think that's genius. On that, are you targeting specific demographic? Are you targeting specific music genres? Or is it just everything? 'Cause I mean, I have noticed a large amount of, for example, UK grime artists are very heavily into crypto, but more so in the Ethereum space, than Terra.

LunaFest  51:26  
Yeah, so we're working with Sarah Main, who was a resident DJ at Pacha, Ibiza, has worked alongside every single artist that you... I mean, supported David Guetta on his world tours, Swedish House Mafia, these are the biggest names in the industry. And the International Music Summit is run by Pete Tong. People like Richie Hawtin are sort of high up there at the cutting edge, you got BT, Flaming June, fame. There are some really big artists that are very much in the NFT space. And Sarah is connected to all of these people. And we're committed to driving... Well we're going to present at the forum. And we're going to put the proposal forward for LunaFest to happen in 2023. We have a governance vote out at the moment, so you can go see that on Agora and read what we're planning on putting together. But yeah, so that's our way of onboarding. I've just told you how I've on boarded my family, and my friends, and my mates, and the bloke in the pub, and everyone I've met for the last two years with success. But let's now let's start onboarding people that have got millions of Twitter followers and millions of Instagram followers, and that's how we really get this snowball rolling down the hill. But yeah, that's what we're doing from a festival perspective. Sorry to change tact a little bit. 

SuperTerra  52:45  
Is there no one to do some kind of play-to-earn kind of force it here, or learn-to-earn to force it.

Simon Chadwick  52:50  
That's what's being built, actually. That's a perfect, probably, segue to actually explain what's happening. I'll just touch on it really briefly, before we kind of wrap up and stuff. But I want to bring this up, because it's powerful, and I appreciate it. So what I'm in charge of, so I'm building the Loop Learn, which is a partnership. So it's built by Loop Finance, but it's in part with TFL, so we have a direct partnership with TFL. So it will basically become the, almost the education hub for the Terra network. We'll have a lot of stuff in there, we'll also had some dev education stuff on there to onboard developers into Terra and educate them on how to get into Terra. The whole idea is actually learn-to-earn platform. So we're building a gamified learning education platform. So basically, people come on, and then they'll have the ability to earn NFT quests, we'll have on-chain actions as well. So you might have someone watch a video on a particular topic, perform the on-chain action, and then earn an NFT as a reward. And the NFT can be a utility NFT. So we're looking at building some utility NFTs that might give someone a reduction in trading fees, or increased staking yields or something like that. So that's part of the strategy to onboard people. Obviously, from the Loop platform side, so as a DEX is bringing people into that. But the power that comes with that is really kind of having that one learning experience in that one hub, because currently on YouTube, the big problem is, is a lot of... It can be very overwhelming for beginners coming into YouTube. So they come in and there's videos all over the place. Even if you jump on a channel, like Whiteboard Crypto, you don't have a learning flow. You start at one video, and then suddenly it's showing you 6, 7, 8 different videos and you don't know what to go to next. So kind of having that learning journey is important. 

Simon Chadwick  54:35  
And then on top of that, what Ian was talking about, influencers. We've got a bank of access to some pretty high level influencers across different spaces. So the whole idea is to build the platform, and then to feed influencers and marketing campaigns into that platform and use that platform as kind of a large lead magnet for crypto and Terra. So that's the idea of it. So that's cool. That's kind of what we've been building and there's big things happening for that. So I thought I'd touch on that because that's the learn-to-earn platform for Terra.

Ben May  55:07  
Yeah, I definitely think the...

SuperTerra  55:08  
You're having some issues there, Ben, I know it's been a bit of a flaky Spaces with tech today. We'll just wait to see if Ben returns. What I was gonna suggest as we're coming up to the hour now, fantastic conversation, really appreciate all the inputs. Does anyone else from the floor want to just interject with any questions for the lastcouple of minutes? Just raise your hand, as it were, virtually. And I'll add you as a speaker. As I'm not seeing any hands, I mean, last thoughts from our key speakers. Obviously, LunaFest, and Simon, before we close out, what's been a really enjoyable hour's discussion. My voice has just about held up. So thank you all for all your contributions. 

LunaFest  55:54  
No, thank you, and it'd be great, Simon, to have a conversation post this Twitter Spaces to talk about having you and the platform that you're providing feature at LunaFest, because obviously gonna have a lot of people that are going to be attending that are non-natives. And finding a way of getting people in a very short space of time, literally over the space of two or three days to onboard those people, maybe in bite sized chunks at the festival. If you've got any ideas around that, that'd be amazing. Obviously, we're going to try and do pre-event with the artist. But I think at the event itself, we're going to need some sort of platform to onboard festival attendees over the course of the two or three days.

Simon Chadwick  56:36  
Depends on the timeline. We're kind of... Not issues of timelines, but the content we're providing, so content that we're using with TFL are some very, very high level production videos. So time has kind of been an issue with that in terms of how fast they get made. So just depends when LunaFest is for that. But this will be rolled over the next couple of months, basically,

LunaFest  56:59  
Oh, no, you've got plenty of time. We booked in... Due to the pandemic, we moved it back to July 2023. So plenty of time to get that ready.

Simon Chadwick  57:09  
It'll be fully operational by then. I think by July, we'll have all the gamified... The gamifications of the on-chain stuff, the rewards, all the videos. And literally there's a contract to make over 20 videos, 20 videos a month about the ecosystem. So I don't want to touch too much about it. But we've got pretty much every platform on Terra is going to have some kind of education similar to Coinbase Earn, how they have a breakdown of how the platform works and what they try to achieve. And that will likely all be housed on there. So it's pretty cool. Some pretty cool... Yeah, some pretty cool stuff coming. But yeah, definitely, let's have a chat about it. And that could be a cool segue, because I think this platform is going to be really huge. And it's going to obviously become like an onboarding... Almost like an onboarding section for Terra, which I think is going to be really, really beneficial for this ecosystem.

LunaFest  58:03  
Great, thank you.

SuperTerra  58:04  
Just to just say, great chatting to you guys. Fantastic to hear a lot of English voices, normally a lot of Americans I end up talking to in these Spaces. But I just... So you mentioned that you're doing a festival and you're gonna have these influencers who got lots Twitter followers, Instagram followers, whatever. Just one sort of main thing is, I think it'd be really good if you guys were able to target some more YouTubers, because that content's a lot more evergreen in the sense it's around forever on those channels. And those channels have millions of subscribers versus Instagram and Twitter, it's there and it's gone, almost. I mean, less on Instagram, but still, YouTube's... The quality of the people on there, and the following people have is much more engaged than, say, on Twitter or on Instagram, which is a bit more flippant, or...

LunaFest  58:55  
Yeah, we've got a guy called Harrison, who's our sponsorship partner who's going out and not only just speaking to well known, mainstream household brands, he spoke about Rolex and Tesla and people like that, but also, well known celebrities, YouTubers, etcetera, and he's already started to reach out to those guys too. I think it's really important that we get as much exposure as possible in all different sorts of platforms. He spoke to TikTok already about LunaFest, and they're really interested too. It's amazing to think that these social media platforms are really keen to get into this space as well. So, yeah, no, great point, Ben, and hopefully we can adopt some of those social media influencers from YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etcetera, as well. 

SuperTerra  59:43  
Great stuff. Right. Well, thank you, everyone. I think we've got everyone back in. I'm assuming Ben, you had some technical issues. I saw you drop off and drop back in. Thanks everyone so much for all your great contributions. This Spaces will be recorded. and shared later by our lovely friends at Terraspaces. Thank you again, to you guys for everything you do within the Terra space. And thank you all of you for either listening or contributing, or both and keep telling the world about Terra.

Simon Chadwick  1:00:16  
Epic guys, thanks for jumping on. I love your contributions. And we're going to be doing these more regularly on different topics. The whole aim is to... We're kind of going to get some education and some open topics and discussions on Terra, and lots of cool content coming. So thanks for jumping on guys. 

IanLunaFest  1:00:31  
Thanks, everyone. 

LunaFest  1:00:33  
Thanks, guys. 

Ben May  1:00:34  
Peace out.

Finn  1:00:35  
Thanks for checking out another episode of The Ether. That was SuperTerra talking about Onboarding, being an onbordoooor. Recorded on Tuesday, December 28th 2021. For terraspaces.org, I'm Finn. Thanks for listening.

Finn  1:01:02  
digging in the dirt trying to find the treasure, learned how to mix this business with pleasure on kinking of lecture smiting conjecture I get some word while a flip in the gesture we've been like a gesture reinvested in these extras dissected a mess the eagle looking headstrong infinitesimal This is an exploit and if you don't agree with then I'm afraid you're dead wrong so leaves a mess hauling clean your plates up I can't believe the rest of y'all feed on makeup bereavement break up to rearrange your wake up mingle bloody mess like a scene from Braveheart driving race cars to beat the fade it's hard to meet your maker when the feature scene Mark trying to slide underneath the paywall. I'm afraid this motherfucker is gone a wall

Finn  1:02:00  
we've been on the earth trying to find some head space give a little gift like I'm lifted dead weights the risk of resting kicks the mistakes were in the nuts y'all feel the test day the breeze swept in no need to resting at least depressing so sweet but miss say I need the best day to keep professing and hold my body doesn't leave behind a red stain. Pour now little liquor for the dead states while the rest wait and bleed domestic no means suggest date breeds the best cake Phoebe on the back of the queen she just state to take a little dive down to K hole one landflip The B roll right into a roll the main the payroll go a little further replace the merger with the tainted version you're promoting American yogurt your news

Unknown Speaker  1:02:58  
bigger and you will you will not you will not. You will learn by the number. I will teach you get on your feet