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#4 - POT: The Cryptocurrency Podcast - Token Gating, Loopress and Loopring with Stephen
89 Plays1 year ago
Looppress is a WordPress plugin that provides content creators to "token gate" content on their website. The driving philosophy behind Looppress is rooted in providing accessibility and ownership over one’s content.
As an open-source token gating solution, Looppress can lock a certain piece of information (such as a page, a login screen, or a piece of text) and only make it available to owners of a specific NFT.
Applications like Pinata have already recognized a need in the market for Token Gate content, so they have created paid solutions to address this need. Looppress however, is completely free to use and comes with a variety of useful features.
Looppress offers a user-friendly interface and a straightforward setup process, making it easy for creators to enter the world of web3 without a steep learning curve.
Looppress also emphasizes self-hosting, allowing creators to have control over their content and how it’s distributed. Unlike centralized platforms, Looppress operates on WordPress. This means you have full ownership of your content, and it can’t be censored or deplatformed.
Why Loopring?
Looppress currently works with Loopring NFTs and there is good reason for that. Loopring is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that enhances the functionality and scalability of Ethereum while maintaining its security.
By leveraging Loopring, Looppress minimizes these costs, making it more accessible to content creators and their audiences.
Oh and did I mention that Loopring’s API is completely free to use? That’s right. If you want to create an application that interacts with the Ethereum chain, you’re going to have to use the Etherscan API, which isn’t really free, so therefore not so scalable. Loopring on the other hand, allows you to interact with on-chain data completely free of charge.
Loopring offers Ethereum-level security, ensuring that your content and transactions are safeguarded. This level of security is vital in the decentralized web3 space, where trust is established through code and cryptography.
Looppress Features
Looppress offers a range of features that empower content creators and artists.
- Token Gating: Creators can tokenize their content and grant access to specific content or features in exchange for tokens, enabling a monetization model that doesn’t rely on ads or subscriptions.
- Web3 Login: Users can log in with their web3 wallets, enhancing privacy and simplifying the login process.
- NFT Role Access: Looppress supports access to NFT roles, enabling creators to offer exclusive content to NFT holders on different tier levels.
- Access-Protected File Downloads: Content creators can protect file downloads behind token gates, ensuring that only those who own the required tokens can access them.
- Visual Block Editor Blocks: Stephen plans to introduce a user-friendly interface for token gating, making it accessible to creators with no coding experience.
This podcast is fueled by Aesir, an Algorithmic cryptocurrency Trading Platform that I helped develop over the last 2 years that offers a unique set of features.
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Transcript
Introduction to Loopring and Layer 3 on Ethereum
00:00:00
Speaker
there's the long-term plan of Loopring being on top of Tycho, which will be the layer 2 to Ethereum. So Loopring will be the layer 3 on top of Tycho. So it will be Ethereum, Tycho, Loopring. And then the fees will be, you know, another exponential factor lower because it's on top of Tycho, which is bundling the blocks from Ethereum.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, man. Thanks a lot for joining. I'm here with Steven, who is the creator of LoopPress, which is an open source and free WordPress plugin for token gating. I'm sure it has other applications as well. First of all, good to see you, man. Oh, yes. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to talk about LoopPress. You know, I've been working on it for a few months, so it'd be nice to get... How long have you been working on it for? Okay. Yeah.
00:00:59
Speaker
I initially started working on it around February, but I first published it like on GitHub, uh, I think in March. But, uh, yeah, so just like eight months, you know, about that. Okay.
Development of LoopPress with Steven
00:01:12
Speaker
So are you like the only guy in the team is like a one man band, basically? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I've done it. I've done it by myself. Um, I've had like some, you know, creative input from other people and like some artists, like they've helped me really refine how
00:01:29
Speaker
the value, like the, um, uh, the value package, I should say, uh, you know, what they need in the plugin versus like, cause there's a lot that can be done with like an API, but you know, artists only need like specific parts of it. They don't need like all the bells and whistles. And sometimes it's confusing if you like add all that stuff.
00:01:55
Speaker
And then also there's implementing it in a way that it's easy to use and understand. So the feedback that I get is invaluable as a developer. Oh yeah, of course. And is it only for token gating or does it have any other applications? And maybe you want to talk a little bit more about how people are or how you're thinking people are using token gating and what are some of the best use cases for it.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah. So, uh, the few users that are using it now, it's a really small amount of people, you know, that I know of, I know that like the get hub gets cloned pretty regularly, but they don't like join my discord or anything. So I guess, you know, they're testing it out or whatever, but, um, in terms of token dating, uh, so one of the biggest things that loop press does that is like an immediate impact is.
00:02:54
Speaker
Um, I don't know if you've heard of this service called pinata. They, okay. They like host files for you on the IPFS, but you have to like subscribe to it like on a monthly basis. Well, they have this thing called pinata submarine, where they basically have, you know, files that they host for you that people can unlock and download basically token gating your files for you.
00:03:22
Speaker
But you have to pay for that service. The artist has to pay for it. Well, with LoopPress and with the token gating that it enables, you can have basically that whole service self-hosted and not have to pay a third party. So let's say you have like a 3D model that you want the owner of the NFT to be able to download.
00:03:48
Speaker
you would upload it to your site into the protected loop press folder and then put that download button behind a token gate and they can download it. And
Features and Benefits of LoopPress
00:04:01
Speaker
the direct access to the file is restricted. So it like, it takes it off the IPFS, which, you know, sort of centralized it, but it's faster for the end user.
00:04:19
Speaker
And, you know, for things like 3D models and stuff doesn't need to live on the IPFS. Like if it's not, you know, if it doesn't scale, like as soon as people start downloading it, the bandwidth is just going to get crowded.
00:04:37
Speaker
So that's an immediate impact. Unless you run an IPFS node yourself, then you're going to have to rely on all of these services that actually gate the access to IPFS because you've got to have to, like you said, use pinata to be able to pin files because otherwise the garbage collector is just going to remove your file from IPFS. If you don't do that, you can't just run it once and then turn it off and just forget about it. So is it that the file then would be self-hosted on maybe your machine or Raspberry Pi or AWS or something like that?
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, this, this whole, the plugin is built off WordPress. So WordPress is like the, the whole core, the engine for, um, this plugin and, you know, WordPress is very powerful. 40% of all the websites in the world run on WordPress. So it's like, it's here to stay. It's open source. It's great. Um, yeah. And, uh, so you can
00:05:36
Speaker
You know, it's just like a normal website. You can upload your files to it and that is where those files would live. There's actually a specific folder within the loop press plugin folder that is protected and it just denies all access. And that is where if you want like protected files.
00:05:57
Speaker
you put it in there and then the plugin would serve it to people. Oh, I see. So it's all built in the plugin itself. You don't have to find an external solution. Exactly. Exactly. That's really cool. Yeah. That's really cool. And especially the fact that it's open source and free to use and like people don't have to go for a paid option. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So the only other plugin like that exists on the WordPress market is called Mini Orange.
00:06:27
Speaker
And, you know, they're like a bigger plugin company and they do like authentication and stuff like that for WordPress. And like they added like web three authentication and it's really limited. It's basically just like sign in using web three. And then you have to pay for a subscription to be able to token gate stuff. And then like they have other features, which I'm slowly adding them to my plugin. But, um, one of the biggest one is like NFT roles.
00:06:56
Speaker
So like you can like assign a user role depending on like what NFT that they have. So like, let's say you have like, or if you have like a collection of NFTs, then you're like a premium member or whatever, and then you get access to the premium content or whatever. But on the mini orange plugin, it's prepaid. That's like, you know, $50 a month, but it doesn't cost anything to do that. Like the functionality is built into WordPress.
00:07:27
Speaker
So, you know, it's just like one of those things that they just like are trying to milk money out of you. And one of my biggest issues is the entry into art is, is tough because you have to like spend money to be able to get creative. And, you know, I don't like that. Like with music, you have to like buy all this expensive equipment just to like, you know, practice and sound good. And it's just, it's just not good. So that's, you know, that goes into the philosophy of why I
00:07:56
Speaker
made it free and open source because it doesn't hurt me whenever someone uses it. It doesn't use any of my resources. It only helps them.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm sure it also helps you in the process of learning and becoming a better developer and figuring out what people want. There's certain power with putting out an open source piece of software out there and just waiting for feedback and see how people act about that. I feel so many things, as you rightly mentioned, have been monetized to shit. People have stopped doing things for fun just because they're fun. Sorry.
00:08:35
Speaker
chugged on my coffee.
00:08:37
Speaker
Damn, I hate when that happens. Yeah, people have just stopped doing things for fun. I feel like development is one of these things that still kind of keeps that core ethos of just having fun or just building something for the sheer fun factor of it. And nothing's more entertaining than a healthy graveyard of ripples that you've just developed and kept for a while and then just haven't touched them since.
00:09:07
Speaker
I think about 21 repositories that I, that I built. And like, I enjoy the process of, of building stuff, but then when it comes to maintaining, okay, like maybe if there's like an issue that I see someone or a lot of people have, I'm going to go back and I'm going to fix the code or encourage other people to make a pull request. But I
Expanding Applications of LoopPress
00:09:26
Speaker
eventually just, I'm like, okay, this is now I'm moving to the next thing. I enjoy building probably more than I do, like the main maintenance part of it.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm new to GitHub and open source software and stuff like that. So it's a good learning experience. It's just beneficial all around to help the community. And then that doesn't even get into loop rings and NFTs in general. I'm trying to be a liaison or a
00:10:03
Speaker
someone who helps artists join the open source or decentralized finance community and take control of their art and their publishing and their rights and cut off the middleman. If you make music, you can stream it from your website. You don't have to pay
00:10:32
Speaker
somebody to host your stuff like the Apple App Store, you know, there's convenience, you know, in having, you know, all your music in one place or whatever, like on Spotify, and there's that's fine. But like, you know, special cuts, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. Soundtracks, like, you know, you can break the song up and you can have like, all the different tracks, like the drum beat, the melody, the piano, whatever, as different files on your site.
00:11:02
Speaker
And then, you know, people could like purchase the NFT for your song, get all the individual like MIDI files and remix it, you know, with rights. And then you get, you know, royalty if they sell the rights to that.
00:11:17
Speaker
you would automatically get royalties for it or whatever. Yeah, I think I've recently come across a website that kind of does that. It's a platform, I don't remember the name exactly, something with sound and people would upload albums or EPs or whatever and people would be able to mint them and I'm guessing they would receive royalties in return.
00:11:38
Speaker
I also think the platform would get a cut, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. If it's a maintained service that they have to spend money to keep their servers up and all that, I think that's entirely fine to get a certain cut, but not to go over just at the point where you have to do like 50-50 split with the artist or something like that, because that'd be a bit ridiculous. Yes, yes, no. Are you an artist yourself? I try to be.
00:12:07
Speaker
Me and my girlfriend
Technical Deep Dive into Loopring and Tycho
00:12:08
Speaker
made this mirror behind us, you know, it's like a, an art project with a broken mirror. I was wondering what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's a big broken mirror and then we like painted a board and like glued moss to it. So like it gives us like an outdoor vibe. I kind of like it. Yeah. Do you make any of these? I've made a few in the past, but you know, I don't.
00:12:34
Speaker
really, you know, push or sell them anymore. I'm all about like utility nowadays, I want like, I want to do tangible things instead of just like, you know, making cool, you know, like, yeah, pictures and models and stuff. Which, you know, I'm not dissing artists that do that. And, you know, I'm creating a tool to help them, you know, with Yeah, of course. And also like this expands the on art, a little tangential. So like,
00:13:02
Speaker
It can be used for like community, like full community management, like let's say, you know, you have, uh, governance tokens. Then you can like have certain parts of the site, like maybe that have polls, um, only open to people who hold a certain number of tokens or something, or people who only hold like a ambassador NFT, you know, can.
00:13:29
Speaker
Access one page on the site that allows them to change something or do something like that. There's really a lot of possibilities. So it's hard to like, you know.
00:13:38
Speaker
come together on one specific example. Yeah, it's hard to find a specific use case because there's just so many use cases with that kind of thing. You could have physical events in a space and then give people a token if they attend and then they can use that token to access a special part of the website like a group or whatever that means.
00:14:00
Speaker
They could, you know, let's say they went to the event, they got the token and now they can access a page on the site that allows them to purchase a shirt that only those token holders can purchase. Right. Yeah. Like that's one use case, you know, or like they get the token from the event. So now they can go to the site and get like behind the scenes footage of the event, you know, or something.
00:14:27
Speaker
Yeah. Are you familiar with Bright Moments? Have you heard of the Bright Moments project? I think they're a DAO, maybe a mistake, but I think they're like an NFT DAO and their project is there every month or every other month. They go into a different city and they stay there for a while. They rent like physical space and they sell tickets for people who want to come in and mint that city's edition of the NFT. So when they were in London,
00:14:56
Speaker
They had a London release and when they were in New York, they had a New York release and so on. And in order for you to be able to mint that, you either have to come to a physical place or acquire a ticket. And if you acquire a ticket, then you'd be whitelisted to continue to mint. And there were, of course, like a lot of, I guess, tokenomics in there because you'd be a certain amount to get a ticket and you might get lucky or you might not.
00:15:23
Speaker
but essentially would token gate the ability to mint unless you have this ticket, which I guess it's kind of a use case for that. Yeah. Okay. So it is, you know, it can gate like the block that allows you to mint, but this, this plugin doesn't do smart contract interactions. So it's not going to be able to sign a transaction on your behalf.
00:15:52
Speaker
And that is something that like I've built into it or I haven't built into it like on purpose because it's just a big security risk. And, you know, if I want this, you know, if I want any artists to be able to come in and download this and utilize it, I don't want them to be risking, you know, all of their fans or user base by installing this on their site and then their site getting compromised for some other reason, you know, because, you know, WordPress, you know,
00:16:19
Speaker
It's pretty secure, but user error happens and hacks happen. I don't even want the capability to be there to allow the site to sign transactions, because that's like a doomsday scenario. You don't want that, no. So it just reads off of Web3, but it never writes to Web3. Yeah, the only thing it ever does is
00:16:47
Speaker
brings up Wallet Connect, or it asks your wallet to verify that you own the Ethereum address that you're presenting. So basically, the site asks you, what's your Ethereum address? And then you say it's this. And then you have to sign it and prove that you own that address. And then it looks, now that it knows that you own the address, it looks up all your info from the public blockchain.
00:17:18
Speaker
Right. Okay. And it's loop ring. Is there a specific reason why you chose loop ring for the machine? Yeah. Yeah. So, so first of all is one of the big things that I stated in my philosophy is like, uh, free, you know, free and open source. So like you can't ping the Ethereum without using like the ether scan API or, uh,
00:17:45
Speaker
There's other ones, um, you know, drawing a blank on them, but you have to use some sort of API service to actually ping the blockchain and look up if a address has a certain NFT or if an address has a token or whatever. So, and yes, they're free, but they're only free up to a certain amount. And sometimes it's a lot like, you know, either skin, it's like 25,000 a day, you know, people paint, right. Or the 25,000 pings.
00:18:15
Speaker
But, you know, in terms of being just like a read request or, uh, it's an API request. So ether scan, you know, they, they have a whole bunch, but basically it would just be like, you know, give me a list of NFTs owned by this wallet and ether scan would probably return like the top 50 NFTs for the wallet that you request. Then you have to submit another one to get the next 50. Right. So someone has like a hundred NFTs.
00:18:46
Speaker
You know, it might be one or two or three, maybe API calls just to read for that one person. So, you know, it adds up whenever you, let's say you get a thousand people coming on, you know, like 3000 per, you know, some people have more, some people have less, but it adds up. So it's just not scalable whenever you have to be relying on a paid service. Now granted an artist could, you know, just pay for the service, you know, that's fine, whatever. But.
00:19:15
Speaker
Loop ring, their API is free, right? Free, a hundred percent free. You can just ping it and it's free. No rate limits. Yeah. Well,
Security and Compatibility in Loopring
00:19:25
Speaker
so you can get rate limited, but it, you know, you can just make another account and add that API key and then, you know, have a fallback, but like, you know, they will ban you if you just like family or the, well, they won't, they won't ban you though. They'll limit you. Um, so it's scalable.
00:19:46
Speaker
And then the minting fees on Loopring are incredibly cheap. Like, you know, it's less than a dollar to mint in an FT. It might be like 20 cents, you know, right now in this bear market to mint in an FT. And then, you know, there's the long-term plan of Loopring being on top of Tycho, which will be the layer two to Ethereum. So Loopring will be the layer three on top of Tycho. So it'll be Ethereum, Tycho, Loopring.
00:20:16
Speaker
And then the fees will be, you know, another exponential factor lower because it's on top of Tycho, which is bundling the blocks from Ethereum. I haven't heard of Tycho before. What is Tycho? Okay. So the core team from Loopring, they, so Loopring made the first zero knowledge roll up for Ethereum. And basically they bundle blocks together. Okay. They bundle receipts.
00:20:45
Speaker
of transactions together. Right. And this receipt is like, it's the mathematically shortest amount of characters to fit the information that it needs in that receipt. And then they bundle all these together on their relayer, but they're cryptographically like, prove, prove somehow, where they're posted onto the Ethereum block, and then they're, um,
00:21:13
Speaker
smart contract that runs like their wallet and stuff has a way. It's something about like a Merkle tree and like some advanced math that I don't know, but there's a way where you can withdraw your funds from Loopring's Relayer by reading those receipts that are posted to Ethereum. So like, let's say Loopring just like gets nuked or like goes offline.
00:21:41
Speaker
you can still withdraw your assets back to Ethereum. And I don't know how deep your understanding of it is.
00:21:53
Speaker
But I know a little bit about roll-ups and layer twos as a scalability solution. I know their core roll-ups because they essentially just roll up multiple transactions into like one big block of data that then they send confirmation of like, okay, these 50 transactions have been verified. Here's proof of that. But beyond that, I don't really know the intricacies of it. I would love to know. I don't really even know what a Marko 3 is used for.
00:22:21
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So the Merkle tree is like the magic. It's like this probability cloud. Okay. And it uses that receipt to like, you know, do the math on like, is it legit or not? And like, that's like the proof that it's legit in this, in this probability cloud or whatever. But what makes loop ring special is that it's a true L2, which means that it doesn't have like a side chain that it's operating on.
00:22:51
Speaker
So like I said, if loop ring goes down, there's a smart contract interaction that you can do on Ethereum and it will pull all of your funds out of loop rings, relayers, and your assets will be safe. So like, let's say, you know, I don't, I haven't kept up with like polygon and there's EK sync stuff, but
00:23:18
Speaker
The polygon like whenever it was a side chain if it I don't know if it still is But let's say their side chain went down then your funds would be frozen And you wouldn't be able to get your funds back to ethereum Loop ring on the other hand loop ring goes down your funds. You can always recover them uh back to ethereum and it's like built into the application so that that level of security is
00:23:48
Speaker
One reason why, you know, I chose to build on loop ring, you know, I didn't, I didn't want to build this for like poly on NFTs. So, uh, you know, Ethereum level security and then loop ring built on that the loop ring team. This goes back to Tyco. Cause that's what we were talking about. Yeah. Tyco is the original loop ring team. After they came up with this mathematical magic, they were like, we,
00:24:18
Speaker
you know, we've solved this, but only for application-specific programs. So we've built a smart wallet, you know, that you can refund your stuff back to Ethereum. That's one thing that we built that's application-specific. And then they built a decentralized exchange, you know, using this, you know, mathematical process. And
Future Features and Innovations in Loopring and LoopPress
00:24:43
Speaker
then they were like, then they added NFTs, right?
00:24:47
Speaker
So you can mint and they're called the counterfactual NFTs, but you can withdraw them to Ethereum just like the same, right? It's like offloading the, it's like offloading the computations and turning them into receipts that can be computed on Ethereum main line later if you need to.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah. And then fully EVM compatible. So everything you do on Loopring is directly transferable. No, it was. So yes. Well, okay. Okay. So the EVM compatible, it's not it. So it's application specific. Everything that you can do on Loopring can be withdrawn to Ethereum. Yes. But the core functionality of it is application specific. So if Loopring wanted to add something, they would have to, you know, work their math magic.
00:25:37
Speaker
So Tyco is the loop rings original team. They were like, look, we want to make this Ethereum EVM compatible. We want anybody to deploy a smart contract on Tyco and take advantage of this Merkle tree mass and zero knowledge and the low, you know, low block space. But there's a conflict of interest if it's loop ring that does it because loop rings
00:26:07
Speaker
you know, is it has all these products, they have the decentralized exchange, they have the wallet, they are, you know, partial. So the original loop ring team, some of them left like the CEO, Daniel Wang, he left and Matt Furlong, they're like head of business or something, he left, they joined this new company called Tyco, they started it called Tyco, and it is aiming to be
00:26:36
Speaker
the Ethereum virtual machine capable L2. And they want to do it for everything. Like they want Polygon to be on top of Tyco. Like they want everything to be on Tyco. So the way that it's going to play out is Ethereum is the security layer. Tyco is the application layer. And then layer three, Loopring would be the user layer.
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah. So the, so layer two is just like an abstraction for layer three, like an interface or something that then communicates between the two in a way. Yeah. Yeah. And the fees, like, so loop ring, you know, you can send the transaction for like two cents, right? So imagine a smart contract interaction or deploying a smart contract for two cents. And then, you know, loop ring on top of that, such transaction would be like, you know,
00:27:36
Speaker
I haven't followed the development on Loopring much lately. I know, though, in 2020, 2021, the cryptocurrency subreddit was quite crazy about Loopring. Everyone was talking very positively about Loopring, and I think it showed up to $4 at one point. Yeah, yeah. What is that? I should have told. Yeah. Have you done any development on Loopring itself?
00:28:00
Speaker
to two one hundredths of a penny, you know.
00:28:05
Speaker
No, no. So I haven't done anything, you know, on the main repository or anything. I've read through it. I've tried to like see where I could contribute, but at this point, you know, you know, I'm still sort of learning the ropes of GitHub and open source stuff. So, you know, maybe in the future I can, I can try to add something like there's a feature I would like them to add. Um, and I'll just say it here. I would like them to add like a,
00:28:36
Speaker
Sort of like how Bitcoin lightning works where you can like show a QR invoice to someone and they can scan it and then it says like, you know, pay like five or whatever. I would like that, you know, so, and I think it's possible because they just made this red packet, uh, feature where you can put NFTs into a QR code and then people can scan that QR code and receive the NFT. Right. So I think using that same
00:29:06
Speaker
you know, code base, it's totally possible to do like an invoice system where you can be like, okay, I'm charging, you know, 50 or whatever. And then you put in like a memo, which could be like a invoice number, you know, that interacts with your website. And, uh, yeah, then I could use, I could implement that via the API into loop press.
00:29:29
Speaker
You know, and yeah, you know, so people, so people could, could buy or, or perform a transaction by scanning the QR cooks. I'm guessing the transaction details are embedded into the QR. When you scan it, some web three magic happens basically. Yeah. Yeah. You scan it and then, you know, it would say like, you know, so whenever you scan the NFT QR codes, it says.
00:29:55
Speaker
You have to pay the transaction fee to receive the QR code. It's not like instant, but the transaction fee is like really little. So in my mind, you'd scan it. It would say like, you know, your website is requesting, you know, $50. And
AI in Open-Source Development
00:30:15
Speaker
then it would have like the description of what, you know, the website wants to put there and then you could
00:30:23
Speaker
accept or decline, you know, the, the offer. So yeah, it is like, you know, you could, you know, achieve the same thing by adding signing capabilities to like the loop press plugin, but then it compromises security on the user's end. Right. And, you know,
00:30:47
Speaker
Loopring didn't have to do the whole QR code NFT thing. Like they did it because they were like, this is a good feature that we want people to have. So I think that there's a good chance that we can get that worked in. Uh, I think I may have lost you there for a moment. Oh, oh yeah. Yeah. Your video froze. I don't know if you can hear me. Oh, hold on. Can you hear me? Yeah. I think we're back.
00:31:17
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Your video went, went out a little bit. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, we're back. Um, so yeah, we were just saying, uh, we were just talking about the, um, uh, the plugin, um, for, uh, the QR application for, you know, for, for, for loop press. Yeah. So, you know, that's something that, you know, if I, if I did want to add a feature to loop ring itself, that's something that I would work on.
00:31:44
Speaker
Nice. What language is it built in? It's written in Node, Node.js. Yeah, so JavaScript. I think, hold on, let me look. It might be. I'm just surprised that it's Node. It might be like TypeScript. I don't know.
00:32:20
Speaker
Let's see, so there's Solidity. Oh, C++, that's their protocol. So they run a node that bundles up all these transactions, right? That's, I guess, written in C++. Yeah, that's intense. But yeah, so JavaScript.
00:32:45
Speaker
JavaScript, Solidity, C++. Yeah. Do you know any C++? Um, I've dabbled in it, you know, and really like, I know like, I know like PHP and JavaScript. So, you know,
00:33:05
Speaker
one other language you know it's really the same dance different tune yeah it's true it's true they have the their weird quirks but eventually they kind of you're able to extrapolate from one to another um i kind of started with um first back end language that i really got into was python and moving from python to c sharp there was a bit of
00:33:29
Speaker
You know, what the fuck moment? Cause I was looking at the code and I'm like, wait, you have what you have types and you can do things with these types. Uh, that's wild. So like it added a whole nother layer of complexity. I don't know, like the advanced advanced stuff, but I can, I can make way like, you know, especially with like chat GPT and like, I learned way before chat GPT, but now like, you know, because I know what I'm looking for and like, I know how to debug, you know, it's so easy just to be like, okay.
00:34:00
Speaker
make me a function that does this and then modify it to my needs in pretty much any language. AI is changing the game for real. That's another reason why I think real artists
00:34:15
Speaker
you know, need all the help that they can get. Yeah, it's true. I mean, AI and programming is just such a wild thing when you actually know how to use it because when it doesn't work is when you like
00:34:31
Speaker
probably don't have a very good grasp of the language or of the core principles, and then asking chat GPT to create a function or a program or whatever, a file, and then iterating on that, it'll just get more and more and more complex without having to be, and you're not gonna catch some of the weird things, but so long as you have some understanding of the programming language and the requests you're making and what you're looking for, it's such a good tool. It saves so much time.
00:35:01
Speaker
It's fantastic. You give it an object and you just tell it, okay, well, based on this, I want you to create a type or an interface. And then, you know, I don't have to spend 10 minutes doing it myself. I just get the interface. It's fantastic. Yeah. It's amazing. Like, you know, it does have its quirks. You know, sometimes it'll just like go off the rails, you know, or sometimes it won't name variables consistently and you have to like debug it. Um, but if you just like, if it's really simple stuff that you're asking for it,
00:35:28
Speaker
I use it on loop press. Basically there's like a plugin where you can like have it look up like a webpage. And I, because it's on GitHub, I just like copied like the source URL for like the main plugin file. And I'm like, Hey, you know, I want to add this function, you know, to this and then it usually like, you know, it's pretty good, you know, nine out of 10 times.
00:35:56
Speaker
Oh, so you give it, you give it a code base and then you take this code base. I want you to build me a similar function or something like that. Yeah. So like, let's say, you know, I have a feature that I want to add to loop press. Then I would be like, okay, here's the file, the main plugin file, and I would give it the link to the GitHub, you know, file. And then I would be like, I want to add a function. Let's say it's a short code or something that does.
00:36:26
Speaker
something and then I would be like, what do I need to add? And then it would be like, you know, online 300 added this function, you know, I'll test it out. And then, you know, if I have any questions, you know, I'll ask it or whatever. But yeah, I mean, it's pretty, that's another benefit of like open source projects, right? Is like chat GPT knows everything that there is to know about WordPress, like,
00:36:53
Speaker
because if 40% of the web runs on WordPress and it learns everything from the internet, 40% of all of its knowledge is actually structured.
00:37:03
Speaker
as WordPress, you know? It's somehow capable of being like an incredible genius and a five-year-old both at the same time. Yeah, totally. It's wild how you've got so much knowledge and you do so much with that knowledge, but at the same time, you can just completely go off the rails. Yeah. Have you tried any of the tools, like these co-pilot tools that are supposed to help you code with AI, like GitHub co-pilots and stuff like that? Yeah, I mean, I've seen it. I haven't tried it just because like, you know,
00:37:34
Speaker
I don't want to pay another subscription, really. Yeah. It goes back to the whole idea of having open source software. Yeah. Yeah. And
Challenges and User Insights for LoopPress
00:37:42
Speaker
you know, like I pay the 20 bucks for chat GPT, but you know, in the long run, like, you know, it saves me so much time and just boilerplate code is, you know, it's worth it. It's like having a really smart intern, you know? Yeah, that's true. And it saves so much time instead of like asking stack overflow, like, Oh, you know,
00:38:03
Speaker
Give me a function that converts a calendar into pie chart or something. And it just whips it up. You can't find something on Stack Overflow that does that.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, there was that meme on programming humor that new developers copy paste from chat GPT, middle-aged developers copy paste from Stack Overflow, all developers copy paste from documentation. How we've developed in time. Yeah. I mean, you know, documentation is the way to go. But that's another cool thing about chat GPT is you could just be like, Hey, I'm following these docs.
00:38:46
Speaker
link it to the documentation page and then ask it to make you a function that you need it to make, right?
00:38:52
Speaker
Yeah, you can give it a documentation. You read that and tell me what to do. You can tell it. There is these PDF GPT software that's popping up. Like I see a few websites that somehow allow you to add to a lot more context because I think it's still limited to like 16,000 or whatever. Like these websites do some API trickery and you can basically give it a thousand pages worth of documentation if you wanted to and just ingest all of that.
00:39:21
Speaker
And now you can talk to it with that knowledge. That's crazy. Yeah, dude. It's going to be here like soon, like, you know, where, you know, maybe windows is going to have like, well, Microsoft owns GitHub. So, you know, co-pilot is already like the start of that, you know, where all they have to do is just present something that's better at logic than chat GPT and can also read your entire code base. Oh, you froze on me. Okay. Yeah. So a lot of, uh,
00:39:52
Speaker
technical difficulties. I was going to ask you a few questions about the, um, uh, the, the, the plugin itself. Like how many people are using it right now? And is everyone, is anyone using it in a, like a live kind of production environment? Yeah. So, you know, there's a few people that are using it. Um, it, you know, just some slight smaller artists. There's like this one guy who is a musician and he has some tracks up.
00:40:23
Speaker
that if you own the track you can download the files that made the track you know like I had mentioned. But you know I won't give him a shout out here just because he didn't you know explicitly tell me that I could so his website's sort of still under development. But there's this other collection and it's actually a GameStop you know marketplace collection it's called Inequities Book and
00:40:50
Speaker
their website, they are using the token gating to host the models and soundtracks and high resolution images of their NFTs. And this book, it's like a, well, it's a book obviously, and the characters are NFTs and. Oh, I see. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So like, there's like different settings that are NFTs. I don't know.
00:41:20
Speaker
Okay. Well, I mean, it's, it's just, it's experimental because so many things are experimental at this point. Like people are just trying to figure out what it is they can do with all this stuff. Yeah. And I guess this is kind of the cool thing about having a conversation with people in the space because everyone's trying to do, to try to do new things that weren't previously even, even thought about possibly. Yeah. It's all just about testing boundaries, you know, and you know, that is like, you know, that's art, you know?
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah. I'm going to send you a link to it. And then there's also another person who's building something else, but he does not want me to say anything about it. That's fair enough. And it uses loop press and NFTs and it goes into like the NFT roles and stuff like that.
00:42:11
Speaker
Yeah. And is it available on the WordPress plugin page? Okay. Yeah. So I submitted it, right? I submitted it right after I'd made it. And at the time there were like 40 plugins in review in front of it. And it said like, it would take like one week. Well, that like literally
00:42:36
Speaker
within like three days of me posting it, the main plugin reviewer, like announced their like resignation. And it turns out like, turns out like that person was the only person who did it. Right. So now there's like, there's like probably pushing 2000 plugins in the backlog to be reviewed by WordPress.
00:42:58
Speaker
It's, it's in the process, you know, it should be around 40th in line, but I've changed the plugin a lot since then. So, like, if they, like, see it and they're like, oh, you need to revise this. And then they work down their list of 1000, you know, it might be a minute. So, really,
Self-Hosting and Community Expansion for LoopPress
00:43:16
Speaker
the best way to get it now is off from GitHub and, you know.
00:43:20
Speaker
not as intuitive to download it from GitHub than it is the plugin repository. So they would just have to download the probably like the zip file and then put that in a specific folder in WordPress and then you'll be able to install it. Actually, if you're logged into WordPress and you go to the plugins tab, you can click upload. And then if you just upload that zip folder, then
00:43:44
Speaker
Ah, you can install it that way. That was pretty simple. I didn't do, I didn't do WordPress for a while. And that wasn't an option when I was using WordPress. That was not an option. You'd have to go into the, like the file system and drop it in a specific folder and then you can, it's like installed or whatever. Yeah. WordPress has gotten a lot better, especially like 6.0 and up. You know, I used to hate it. Like I didn't like it. And I've, I made like my own version of like a content management system.
00:44:14
Speaker
And then after I made that loop or WordPress, you know, six came out and I was like, holy cow. Like they, this is basically what I was building. You know, they made all the features that I had added. And so there's no point in me reinventing the wheel. So I learned a lot. I learned a lot building and that was before AI. So, you know, knowing how to like, you know,
00:44:40
Speaker
SQL database and like structuring like posts and pages and like storing page content in the SQL database as opposed to like status file or static files Yeah, so, you know learned a lot that way and then so I have like a deeper understanding of WordPress I appreciate it a lot more now. It's free, you know, anybody can develop on it and contribute it Contribute to it Yeah, you know, there's there's wordpress.com, you know, and they'll
00:45:10
Speaker
That's a company and they will like charge you money to like run a WordPress site for you. But if you go to WordPress.org, you can download the WordPress zip, I guess, and it contains all of WordPress. So you just like upload that to your server. So like, let's say, you know, this, this gets into like hosting all that stuff. But if you have like blue host, like a blue host account, then you know,
00:45:40
Speaker
they'll give you login where you can transfer files to the server, and you just drag and drop your WordPress files, and then boom, you're good to go. But also, Blue Post, speaking about it, they have a one-click WordPress install button. Yeah, so many hosting companies do that nowadays. They can install WordPress just like that. It's so easy. It's almost too easy. Yeah, so WordPress.com, they're basically hosting the website for you. That's why they charge you a certain amount.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. I knew there was a distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, but I didn't exactly know what it was. I'm guessing you could even run it on your Raspberry Pi if you wanted to. You could. I ran my first WordPress site on a Raspberry Pi.
00:46:24
Speaker
It was fun. Yeah. Um, do you have any plans to kind of grow like a community or to grow the kind of the, uh, the idea of, of loop press and to turn it into something bigger, maybe get a couple of more, um, devs on board that want to develop and grow this. Yeah. You know, I'm open to like, you know, any, I'm open to like, you know, growing, accepting help and.
00:46:51
Speaker
growing a community, I think it would be great, you know, because then, like, I do have the discord channel, but, you know, mostly people just come in and they ask for like help on like installing it or like, you know, some people ask me to add something like people have been like, can you add support for this? And I'm just like, no, we're sticking with the frame. But, uh, yeah, you know, um, I'm not trying to grow the community right now because.
00:47:18
Speaker
I don't want to be bombarded with feature requests and bug reports, but I'm open. People can join and download it and use it or whatever and stuff that they want. That's fine. I'm open to it. I'm not making a Twitter account and spamming it every day or running ads or anything yet. Once I
Improving SEO and Documentation for LoopPress
00:47:45
Speaker
have all the tutorial posts,
00:47:47
Speaker
and stuff on my website, and people have resources that they can go to, then I might push a little bit harder for all that. Yeah, because you said you've recently just built a blog for it, and that is an opportunity for you to do some blog posts for an SEO perspective, because you have a relatively niche
00:48:08
Speaker
piece of software that I think it would be quite easy for you to start ranking relatively well in Google search results. So I think a few blog posts with the right keywords and the right headlines and all that it would probably help boost some of your your exposure there. Yeah, and I'm new to like, you know, doing that. So it's a learning process, you know, but I'm taking my time like I'm not in a rush.
00:48:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Google Search Console is basically one of the main kind of websites that you can use to measure your SEO growth. And then you have SEMrush, which you can use for a lot more detailed SEO analysis. So you can track keywords and you can track the way how you rank in certain keywords. You can see competitor analysis.
00:49:00
Speaker
There's a whole rabbit hole of SEO that you can go down if you really want to. So I've done that for a while. And it's, I mean, it's interesting to see things ranking after a long time of like, I'm going to just keep grinding and writing blog posts in the hope that some will rank and eventually some do. So it's nice when that does happen. Yeah, I have, I have messed with the Google search console because originally like WordPress,
00:49:28
Speaker
That's the website. It wouldn't show up in Google. Like, I would literally Google it, like, word for word, letter by letter, and it just would not pull it up. It would pull up my GitHub page, but it wouldn't pull up the website. So I had to, like, go into Google search console and, like, manually, like, click, like, request indexing. And then after a few days, it showed up. So, but it was up for, like, a few weeks before then.
00:49:55
Speaker
And like I could see in the traffic that the Google bot was hitting it just for some reason, it would not index. But now it does, you know, and actually if anybody Google's loop ring, like loop press is like the fourth or fifth. Oh, really? Wow. Search results. Or at least that's what it, that's what the Google search insight told me. It was like, you know.
00:50:18
Speaker
Oh, maybe I, uh, Hey, maybe you're getting it. Maybe it's location based. Maybe you're more likely to, to, to get it. Hold on. I'm looking now. And I'm wondering if Google is biased. If like, if Google knows that it's, it's like your, your, um, website, so they're just showing it to you. Oh yeah. I'm not, I'm not seeing it whenever I Google it now. I don't know. On the, on the search insight though, it said that like, uh, average search position, it was like four and it was like keyword loop ring.
00:50:47
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Interesting. Well, they fluctuate a lot, especially if they change their algorithm, their search algorithm, which is not, they know they're notorious for that. Um, there's a whole website is called, I think it's called black black hat market or something like that. Black hat SEO. Yeah. Black hat SEO. And like these guys, they're just trying to consistently reverse engineer, whatever Google puts out as updates.
00:51:13
Speaker
So I mean it's black hat because it's technically you're not supposed to do that because your website might get that completely delisted if you get caught using some of the techniques there but that website's been online for like for so long and people keep trying to do that so I haven't really like got into it because I don't want to take the risk but I'm sure like it does work if you're consistent at trying to reverse engineer Google's magic.
00:51:41
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'll get into like all the, you know, SEO stuff eventually, but you know, right now I do need to work on those tutorial blog posts. And that's why, you know, like doing this has helped me because I procrastinate until the last minute. And like, at least I put out some stuff for this. And by the time this goes live, you know, I'll have made even more blog posts. So surely
Upcoming Enhancements and Community Engagement
00:52:05
Speaker
just beneficial. So what's next on the roadmap for, for Lupress?
00:52:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I actually wrote that down here. So one of the biggest things that's coming up is Wallet Connect is updating to version 3. So I'm going to have to implement that. That should be really easy. I need to organize the code base. I need to break it up into smaller chunks, individual files and stuff, make it a little bit more readable. In terms of the plug-in functionality itself, I want to add visual block editor blocks for loop press.
00:52:40
Speaker
So instead of using a shortcode to start a token gated content, you could just click the block editor and click Add New Token Gate. So I want that to be point and click instead of codey. I don't know if you're familiar with shortcode, but you have to type in brackets and stuff. And if you're an artist, and then you just type in something.
00:53:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, if you're an artist and you're just like, I don't even know what WordPress is. Like this is all just like confusing and it makes my head hurt. I can see where using short code, you know, while it does make it a lot easier, it's not perfect. Um, so that's, that's something that I want to add. Uh, I want to have more tutorial posts and I want to get to the point where I can feature creators on the front page, you know, and be like, here's some people who are using this and here's what they've done with it. You know,
00:53:39
Speaker
draw inspiration and stuff, because there's plenty of stuff that can be done for it. Like it could replace Patreon, you know, like you could do a monthly NFT that, you know, people have to purchase and then they get access to that month's content, you know, or, you know, ad slots on your site. You know, you can sell the ad slot, like for a banner ad as an NFT and then the person
00:54:09
Speaker
that owns the ad can come to your website and change that banner ad because they own that NFT. And that functionality could be unlocked using the shortcode and this plugin.
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah. So one cool thing is that you have like the ability to pretty much like own that piece of content, which is, which is really, really interesting is it kind of ties into a conversation that I was having with I'm not sure if you're familiar with the chain is called LTO network.
00:54:44
Speaker
I had a chat with them and they have their own version of NFTs basically and they call them ownables. And ownables are made in a way that they can, like the contract and the metadata and all that exists in a public ledger, but the creative is owned in that it doesn't have to be on IPFS or Arweave. You can host it on your own machine, you can host it on a different server.
00:55:09
Speaker
So they're kind of working with that technology, which is pretty fun and pretty interesting to see. They also have something called a proofy, like a KYC solution where they KYC you once and then they add a certain flag onto your wallet on their chain saying you're verified.
00:55:29
Speaker
and it's EVM compatible. So any application that wants to use, that you want to sign up for and uses proofy as a solution, they don't have to KYC you. Cause you just have the flag that says KYC equals check. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. That's good. You know, you mentioned something, you know, like how they, they host, you can host your, your files or whatever. And it reminded me like,
00:55:57
Speaker
A big thing with the IPFS is it's kind of slow. Like, you know, if you upload like a music file to the IPFS and like you want someone to be able to name that song, you know, it's kind of an issue. But what you could do instead is just like upload like a three second sound bite to the IPFS and mint that with your NFT and then put the full song behind a token gate on the site. Yeah. So.
00:56:27
Speaker
Or like a video, like a movie, you know, you could do like a, a trailer. That's what you meant as an FBI, but that's your movie ticket. And then you can go to the website and watch the, like, stream the rest of it.
00:56:41
Speaker
Yeah, especially with large files. I think that's such a good use case for it, right? Because I think OpenSea won't even show you the NFT if it's over 100 megabytes or something. You won't see a preview of it. So there's, I think file size is definitely like an issue for all these marketplaces. And I think, yeah, having like a preview and then the actual file behind a token gate, that's very good use case for it. Yeah. It like offloads the bandwidth.
00:57:11
Speaker
from the blockchain to your WordPress server, which, you know, what's it doing? You know, otherwise it's just like, you know, it might as well be streaming your, your content directly to them. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome, dude. Um, listen, it's been a great conversation. Um, do you want to wrap it up here? Yeah. Yeah. That sounds good to me. Um, let's see. I went over.
00:57:42
Speaker
My philosophy, while I did it, it's free. It's free. It's self hosted. It's open source. We went over why I picked loop ring. They've got a free API, Ethereum level security, and eventually they're going to be even cheaper because they'll be on top of Tyco. The plugin is your one-stop solution for token gating.
00:58:11
Speaker
Web3 login, you know, NFT role access, access protected file downloads, token gating. And yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it. Sweet. And any socials and any, anything that people might want to, if you want to give a shout to your GitHub, website, Twitter or anything that people would follow.
00:58:39
Speaker
So for LoopPress, if you go to looppress.dev, that's the website and it has links to the GitHub and the Discord. And that's basically where all the information is. The GitHub has the code and the tutorial for now. And the Discord, you can ask me questions and see even more information about the plugin because
00:59:07
Speaker
I'll do like random posts like as I add a feature or something. I'll put it in the discord. So if you want to stay like real time up to date, then join the discord. Otherwise you can learn about it at looppress.dev
00:59:22
Speaker
Awesome. Nice. Well, thanks again for joining, dude. Really appreciate what you do. I think a lot more people should kind of do kind of what you do, build open source projects, learn from them, share it with the community. Cause that's ultimately the spirit of decentralization and web three. And it's a nice little change from the overly monetized world that we live in. Thanks again, man. Thanks everybody.