Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing

[AUDIO] Campbell Easton: Redstone The Modular Blockchain Oracle vs Monolithic Chainlink

• Peter Abilla

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Summary

In this conversation, Campbell Easton, head of communications at Redstone Oracles, shares his journey into the crypto space, the innovative modular approach of Redstone in the blockchain oracle market, and the importance of client integration and support. He discusses the challenges and solutions related to real-world assets, the integration of Bitcoin, and the advancements in oracle technology, including the potential intersection of decentralized finance and AI. In this conversation, Campbell discusses the innovative communication methods being developed for AI networks, the importance of security in product development, and the concept of Oracle Extractable Value (OEV). He emphasizes the significance of building a community around oracles, gamifying engagement, and creating a unique community language. The discussion also covers event marketing strategies, content marketing, and educational initiatives, culminating in future plans for Redstone and how the community can get involved.

Takeaways

- Campbell started with crypto in 2018, mining Ethereum.
- Redstone is the fastest growing blockchain oracle.
- Oracles are essential for DeFi applications.
- Redstone's modular approach allows for rapid integration.
- Client integration is streamlined and efficient at Redstone.
- Real-world assets require customized oracle solutions.
- Integrating Bitcoin is less complex with Redstone's tech.
- Why Redstone is better than Chainlink
- User experience and security are top priorities for Redstone.
- Redstone OEV aims to revolutionize liquidation processes.
- AI and DeFi are converging with new projects like Clara. AI networks are evolving with new communication layers.
- Security is the top priority for engineering teams.
- OEV is a critical yet underexplored area in oracles.
- Community engagement is essential for oracles' success.
- Gamification can enhance community involvement.
- Authentic community building leads to better engagement.
- Unique language fosters a strong community identity.
- Event marketing increases brand visibility.
- Educational content can attract new users.
- Redstone is focused on creating valuable products. 

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Campbell Easton and Redstone Oracles
02:25 Campbell's Journey into Crypto and DeFi
03:19 Understanding Blockchain Oracles
05:02 Redstone's Modular Approach to Oracles
09:15 Client Integration and Support at Redstone
12:22 Real World Assets and Custom Solutions
15:29 Integrating Bitcoin and Other Chains
17:25 Enhancing User Experience and Security
18:04 Innovations in Oracle Technology
21:25 The Intersection of DeFi and AI
24:28 Innovative Communication in AI Networks
26:29 Prioritizing Security in Product Development
28:04 Understanding Oracle Extractable Value (OEV)
31:21 Building a Community Around Oracles
33:35 Gamifying Community Engagement
35:55 The Importance of Authentic Community Building
37:35 Creating Unique Community Language
39:20 Event Marketing Strategies for Visibility
43:32 Content Marketing and Educational Strategies
46:44 Future Plans and Community Involvement

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See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.

Campbell Easton, welcome. Great to be here man, really, really excited. Awesome. You are the head of yapping at Redstone Oracles. Is that correct? head of Yapping, is, Yapping's a topical term right now, but really it's communications, marketing, everything public facing, yeah. Love it. That's great. We usually like to begin with people's origin story. Would love to hear yours. How'd you get into crypto? So I dearly wish I was one of those guys who brought Bitcoin back in 2011. Sadly, I'm not. I first started playing with crypto 2018. I had this gaming battle station that I used to start mining some Ethereum. I didn't have a very good graphics card at the time, so didn't mind that much. And it doesn't matter because I lost the keys anyway. I stayed relatively close to the space, followed developments, played with a few coins here and there. Full time was about 2021. A friend of mine reached out to me he was like, hey man, I need a CMO for my project. What are you doing? And I was like, well, you know, I've been doing some, some evil PR corporate stuff. You know, what are you cooking? And he's like, yeah, well, we raised a million dollars to build a DeFi protocol. And I was like, cool, sold, awesome. So went full into DeFi back then that was yeah, 2021. four years ago now, never looked back for a second. That's amazing. So why are you still in crypto? So I was looking for a way to work at startups that were like high growth and actually contributed stuff to the world. So I think like a lot of people I read zero to one and was reading all the like Y Combinator materials really got sold in the power of like tech and startups to change the world. And by the time Web2 startups had kind of died out, like Airbnb and Uber were already scaling up and the startups that I saw getting built weren't doing all that. was based in South Africa, so like all the startups are like regional payments things, which aren't very interesting. Crypto, on the other hand, was like explosive. It had momentum and it had the power to change the world, I believed. My first month we were using Silicon Valley Bank to pay salaries. There was an issue with salaries. So it's like, cool, we'll pay you in crypto. In my account, cross border in seconds, faster than with the bank. And I was like, hell yeah, this is something. So I stuck around and yeah. That's awesome. Now you're at Redstone. Tell us a little bit about Redstone and what you're up to there. So Redstone is a blockchain Oracle product. And right now we are far and away the fastest growing Oracle. 2024 was explosive for us. added over 100 clients, which was like 500 % client increase. Our TVS grew from total value secured under a billion dollars to at its peak last year was$6 billion, which is absolutely crazy. Where Redstone differentiates itself is we are the only truly modular Oracle. The other big incumbent Oracles were designed for like one chain. And what we're seeing is that they are not as good at scaling as the marketing would tell you. So when it comes to supporting new asset types, new pricing methodologies, new chains, supporting new use cases like LSTs, LRTs, Bitcoin staking, Bridgestone just does that faster and it can do it safer at speed than anyone else and that's what drove our explosive growth to this point. got it. Let's back up a little bit and maybe help explain to the audience what an oracle is for those not familiar with it. Awesome. So fundamentally, like, there was this like fundamental problem in early day blockchain. It's called the blockchain oracle. Blockchains are great at knowing what has transpired on that blockchain at a previous point in time. Blockchains are not good at knowing what happens outside of the blockchain. So you have a DeFi app like Aave and someone's like taking out a loan against $10 million of Bitcoin. That loan needs to get liquidated to provide security to Aave at a certain price. How does Aave know what that... price is. And that's where a blockchain article comes in. We get data from off-chain sources and on-chain sources. We aggregate it in a way that creates a A version of a real price, you can never say what the real price is, it's a deep philosophical conversation, but we bring that price on chain and a smart contract reads that price and is able to conduct a liquidation. Similarly for perps, many, different use cases of oracles, but that said, we put prices on chains where apps can use them and there is no way you can actually have DeFi without a blockchain oracle. And you mentioned a couple of, you mentioned that there's a big incumbent in the space. If we're to think of oracles as a category, I think one of the first in the category is chain link, which is quite well known. And you mentioned how guys are, how redstone differentiates itself with the modular approach versus the, I guess the monolithic approach. And in this case, it'd be, chain link, deeply integrates with specific chains and the integration time takes a while. likely. Having worked with Chainlink many times, I can attest that's true. It's a lot of work to integrate a chain. How is it from the developer's perspective, I guess from two perspectives, from the chain as a client, what does the integration look like if that chain were to integrate Redstone into it, or Redstone provides Oracle services? And in terms of time, like how long would that typically take and why is that even important? Totally. Incredibly, incredibly good question. So we think about our clients in three buckets. You have DeFi protocols and it's like a layman looking from the outside. That's who you think of is the DeFi protocols that use the price feeds. You have the new chains that you launch on. And then you also have increasingly asset issuers. So I'm a project that's launching a token or we're like a liquid stakes project that launches like a bunch of different tokens or tokenized derivatives, or we are a real world asset protocol and we want to tokenize off-chain assets. we need to get someone to produce a price feed for us basically. So those are the three users that we look at. And each one has different requirements. The application needs you to support price feeds for all of the assets that it wants to utilize in the app. So if it's a lending protocol, they want to be able to have those assets as collateral. And they really care about the range of support, and they care about how fast you can support them. Like if you're a PERP protocol and Trump has just launched, you want to be able to list Trump as soon as possible. want to be waiting three, four days for someone to deploy a Trump price feed. And apart from that, security, right? Like if an Oracle delivers a zero or doesn't deliver a price, there are a lot of architectures that fail completely. So reliability and security are the bedrock of the industry. As a chain, you're launching and day one, you wanna have a range of assets with secure, reliable price feeds and you want that range of assets to be as big as possible and as easy to integrate as possible and as secure as possible. So if you think about UniChain, you think about Ink by Kraken, you think about BarraChain, you think about upcoming Monad. There are like more chain listings lately, launches lately than you can actually keep track of. Stories coming out this week as we're recording. They just want an article that's going to be there, do all those things. So security for us support wide range of assets. And then they care about price and they care about price sensitivity. And so one of the huge differentiators between us and the bigger incumbents is deploying a new chain is like, you know, there's some risk analysis that needs to be done. We need to make sure that there's infrastructure in place. It's not really massive infrastructure. that's needed, but because Redstone is modular and our data distribution layer is omni-chain, you could effectively reduce deploying to a new chain to a pull request in GitHub. There's even a school of thought where like it could be permissionless one day, or this could be a UI where you're clicking like, you know, get Redstone on uni-chain. The big point where we differentiate from Chainlink is Chainlink runs They were designed for a theory. They were designed for one chain. They basically, to support a new chain, need to redeploy Chainlink. They need to take their entire network of node operators, roll it out for that new chain, natively bridge and stake link on that chain, and then they need to keep that chain, that network in sync with all their other different networks that they're operating. So you would hear anecdotes of conferences that like, did you hear what it cost to get Chainlink to that chain? It was literally millions of dollars. And I heard that so many times, I thought that was before I joined Redstone, like just what they wanted to charge. No, that's the operational cost of getting Chainlink onto a new chain, literally millions of dollars. And so if you go look at GitHub block, sorry, if you go look at DeFi Llama, they're on like 18, 19 chains right now, Redstone is on close to 80. And we believe that's gonna be where most of the value comes in the future. So we're live on Unichain this week, we were live day one on Barrechain last week, Chainlink was not on Barrechain last week. And Barrechain's a pretty big deal. as far as we're concerned. Yeah. I hope I answered the question there without rambling too much. No, that's great. You said 80 chains right now? Close to 80 chains. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So more than 100 clients, 80 chains for 1,250 different assets. That's a lot of different assets and support. The typical client integration process that I'm used to with Oracles is they're very hands-on, white glove support. You must have a massive team to be able to support and integrate 100 chains. We have a really, so, I mean, this is kind of another differentiator. I understand Chainlink has between like 600 and 700 full-time stoppers. Redstone, because we've managed to make this process relatively lightweight, we're a much, much smaller team, about 40 or 50 people. So we fundamentally do the same thing. We actually have better quality data. I can point to a number of benchmarks and independent studies that show we deliver better data. And we're just way leaner to operate. Yeah, so we've got about six or seven people doing integrations right now. And our big challenge right now is pipelines. Like it's a struggle to keep up with all the VD requests that are coming in. It's a struggle to keep up with all the co-marketing requests. Our calendar right now is kind of a nightmare, but these are good problems to have, right? Like we scaled our client base 500 % last year. So that means our business team is scaling accordingly, yeah. That's really good. Is there a level of self-service? that how you guys are able to punch above your weight? So we, mean, like there's actually debate about this and we're starting to see some projects emerging that kind of like infrastructure marketplaces. We've just pulled off the very first like Oracle integrations with Rollup as a Service Providers. So pretty soon if you're building, this hasn't been announced publicly, but you're building with one of these Rollup as a Service Providers within their command line interface, you'll be able to just like punch in a command and deploy like a full set of like Redstone basic feeds basically on that chain. That's really, really cool. No one's done that before. What we do find though is that you kind of need a level of White Gloves because oracles you think is just like this thing that delivers a price on chain but what is a price how is the price calculated there's a lot of factors in there that affect the methodology that would be the know, affect like, like what's the best decision to make? What's the most secure decision to make for your price feed and for your protocol? So we prefer honestly to provide that White Club support. Maybe in the fullness of time, this will be a permissionless UX streamlined thing. I strongly believe that, but for now it's still, we like the White Club approach and we're trying to scale to support that. Yeah. You mentioned, I want to back up a little bit. You mentioned real world asset as a category. I met with a project just the other day and one of their clients is in the life insurance space and they have something like $20 billion worth of life insurance. And it turns out that a lot of these life insurance, they're still in the process of digitizing them because they're all on paper. And so it's paper to a digital copy and then getting the digital copy on chain. But it turns out they can't get all of it on chain because it's on Ethereum and Ethereum is, you know, it's not optimized for storage. And so they're trying to figure out like how do they get it on chain? No, that's not a situation where there's necessarily price involved or the risk involved in getting price wrong is really high. But in situations like that, how does Redstone deal with real world assets where it's not really standard? Yeah, yeah. Again, one of the reasons we believe we're best placed to address that market is because we are modular. We're not monolithic. So our modular stack is made up of four different components, and we can tailor different parts of that stack to best serve the needs of the user. One example is we just launched our EigenLayer AVS, so the two Senate components of the stack can now be delegated to an AVS for certain feed, makes it cheaper, leverages the $15 billion secured in EigenLayer. Yeah, for assets like these, it's really about the pricing methodology that you use and where you get that data from. I promised myself I wouldn't just throw shade at Chainlink during this conversation, but like a few years ago, Chainlink had this proof of reserve thing where it was literally just like there's an API and Chainlink's getting the AP1 API and it's calling that data and pushing on Chainlink. And that doesn't really meet the standard for like decentralized trustless security, we believe. So what we've been doing is working with asset issuers. And we recently won the contract with the biggest tokenizer of real world assets right now that is working with Bluechips on Wall Street. And we were chosen out against any other competitor that hasn't been announced at the time of recording, but hopefully when this goes live, it will be. And what they liked was we give this white glove service and we're able to customize like our data collection and data aggregation modules basically. So they give us access to their API data, there are other sources that sort of validate that data and then together we bring that on chain. Another sort of like parallel example, it's not quite the same use case, but last year Bitcoin staking became a thing. You could now liquid stake assets and use them in DeFi and stake them on the Bitcoin network, but then have you tokenized yield bearing Bitcoin that you use within DeFi. of that and we built the first liquid-staked Bitcoin oracle that was indexing the staked Bitcoin and various wallets on the Bitcoin network and pushing that data securely and transparently through our oracle stack onto EVM chains where it could be read properly. So we can do stuff like that and we don't charge millions of dollars to do stuff like that and it seems like the market wants stuff like that which is good validation. That's amazing. I'm a huge Bitcoiner and I'm curious about the integration required to do something like that on Bitcoin. How difficult is that versus let's say Ethereum or Solana? So yeah, yeah, yeah, so most of the incumbent oracles were designed for one chain. Chainlink was designed to run on Ethereum. Pith was designed to run on Solana. Redstone, we take this view of there's one day going to be more than 1,000 roll-ups that could even be within a year or two. And you need to be on all those chains and you need to be providing data to that chain supporting assets on that chain and then also You know managing data between all those chains I'm also personally believer that eventually we won't see a difference between these networks like right now There's Solana define aetherium DeFi and one day it's just gonna be defined and you're just gonna be holding your tokens So for the the the state Bitcoin Oracle what we did was we were able to change like just one of the modules so say 25 % of our tech stack and what we did was in that case there was a bunch of Bitcoin that was sent to wallets to be staked. I don't believe there were any special properties on those Bitcoin wallets it was just like an address and we just indexed the value of those Bitcoins looked at the current market price for those Bitcoins and boom we put out a price for that. It was able to say like this is the the credible total value secured within Lombard at the time. Yeah, and for us, the biggest security was making sure that we did that securely. So making sure that we could index all those wallets ourselves credibly and not rely on just like Lombard's API to do that for us. But we actually had the indexing infrastructure in place. That's really cool. I mean, it sounds like your key differentiator is this modular approach is quite flexible. You're able to serve the needs of multiple apps on various chains, apps slash asset issuers. What are some things that Redstone is working on to improve the user experience or the dev experience? Yeah, yeah, for us, being able to integrate really, really easily is super, super important. reliability and security of data is really important. So we have the only Oracle site where if you click through the app on our website, you can look at historical Redstone prices versus other data sources. We don't have competitor oracles in there, but you can compare the price that Redstone pushed on chain versus like the price that by that's pushed on chain. And that's amazing for being able to show visually right like why Redstone is credible because it matches like the true price that would come from like the big pools with the biggest liquidity. Security matters, so we just launched our AVS. The coolest thing by far that we're working on. this could get a little bit technical, but it is the biggest innovation in Oracle tech since like, I guess push feeds were invented, but Redstone, OEV. So Oracle Extractable Value. In 2024, it was quite a big topic within Oracles. UMA launched initial products, Pith followed, Chainlink recently just launched something for this, and they address it at one level. We want to address it at a much, much deeper level so that any project lending protocol that's using Redstone OEV would be able to dramatically outperform any competitor. I can go into more detail if you want, but also leave it there. It's a rabbit hole. It's MEV stuff. No, that's really interesting. It sounds like it's a way for users to arbitrage based on the variation between price. that something like that? OK. so basically, so say you've got a big lending protocol and there's a million dollar position that someone's borrowed against and a price comes in where it's due to be liquidated. The lending protocol pays a liquidation bonus to whoever liquidates that position. So if it's like a million dollars and there's a 10 % bonus, they pay $100,000 to the liquidator to secure their protocol for liquidating it before the price can drop so much that the collateral doesn't back the loan, right? So Aave pays out hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidation bonuses. Venus does as well, all the lending protocols. What happens though is if you go and look at like an MEV block explorer like EigenFi is 99% of that liquidation bonus does not go to the liquidator. They have to pay that in a bribe just to get added to the block, just to get added on chain. So to that extent, Aave has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to these guys when actually they could have paid like tens of thousands of dollars. And this is a problem with every lending protocol built on Odez infrastructure and pretty much every other lending protocol in the space. Some are addressing it a little bit, but yeah. So what the first generation of OEV products did is they effectively took the slut in the block right off the price update and said, if you want this liquidation, you need to pay the protocol. And so the 99 % instead of going to a block builder gets paid back to Aave's revenue. That was Gen 1 of OEV tech and I was actually working at at the time and launched the first product for this. That's what UMA's one does, Pith's one and Chainlink's one does. Redstone OEV takes it a step further and we want to make it so that any liquidator can bring a price on chain, effectively making a zero millisecond latency between when the price needs to come in and when it does come in. And we even with our new architecture are to be able to create dynamic liquidation thresholds basically. basically without going even further, a lending protocol would be able to have way better load to value ratios so that they can juice more yield for users, which is the main deciding factor. Sorry, that went super, super technical. Redstone OEV is going to be game changing. It's a big deal. No, that sounds like a great product feature. Let's jump into this emerging field in AI, but specifically deaf AI. It sounds like deaf AI could take advantage of the OEV feature that you just shared. Is that right? When you say dev AI, dev AI. Yeah, so like, like, decentralized finance AI is it's kind of this this new category where, you know, rather than you have agents and bots actually doing the doing the strategies for you autonomously. And in order to do that, you know, they need both a wallet and access, and also a rough idea around not just a rough idea, but like actually precise idea on price and the the universal strategies available to them. How could OEV be helpful to, you know, in this new category of deaf AI? So, I mean, that's really interesting. So what we found, and what I found through researching this and rolling it out, that protocols don't understand this. They're paying hundreds of millions of dollars to this and have no idea how... works and no one's even heard of OEV, Oracle Extractable Value, right? So the thing is that they're effectively vulnerable. They're getting ripped off by, not even by these liquidators, but by block builders and validators. currently, if you've read Dan Robinson's Ethereum is a Dog Forest, the famous essay, Ethereum is just covered with these MEV searchers, these bots who are already ripping everyone off and they rip off individual users with sandwich attacks and front running, they rip off protocols. with this liquidation OEV and they ripple lending protocols by like just they ripple DEXs by like just arbitraging the hell out of pools and wrecking LPs. So those guys are gonna become increasingly AI driven. So it won't just be like a guy writing something maybe you'll have agents building building MEV bot stuff like that. What we do is we protect protocols from that and we generate revenue for the protocol while we're doing it so they have more money than they do now. how that can be leveraged for AI, I wouldn't say specifically that product would be super useful for AI, but we do have three other AI-related projects that we're cooking that are super, super relevant. You want to go into those now. Clara, I imagine it's one of those. Absolutely, Clara is the communication layer for AI agents built on Redstone and AO. And we've seen with bots like AXBT, all the bots coming out of virtuals, et cetera, they chat to each other on Twitter. Twitter is not a sophisticated place for two AI models to communicate. You see if you've got two, like a bunch of wallets coordinating off-chain, like if you look at the priority gas options that used to take place and stuff, you can just do way more between two wallets and stuff on-chain than you can on Twitter. So Clara is It uses AO, which is a new network that's been developed by the RWeave team. I actually think it just released yesterday on Sunday. And it effectively lets you use AO for your agents to communicate. So AIXBT would be able to chat to AI16Z using... as its communications layer. And so like if you want to unlock like massive swarms of bots working together, which is one of the big ways that AI agents seem to be going, it's gonna be very, very useful for that. Yeah, in addition to that, we're also cooking up a product called Redstone AI, where we've shown internally. By training a model on historical redstone data, we can predict market fluctuations, huge volatility, with between 60 and 80 % accuracy. So we're using AI to make our feeds more secure and protect users from volatility. And then on top of that, we're also doing AI optimized feeds. So we most recently launched a series of feeds that are for yields that are optimized using an AI model as well. So people can use our feeds knowing that the quality of data is secured by AI and also augmented by AI. That's really cool. As you're developing these new product features, and you're also super busy on integration on the Oracle side, internally, what does that look like in terms of go to market for the team? Because on the one hand, you've got a product that's actually making money for the company with tons of demand, more demand than you guys. you know, very, it's a great problem you guys have, and then you're developing these two other product features. How does the team look at that and kind of position itself for kind of emerging demand versus current demand? Interestingly, the number one priority for the engineering team is always security. And if we think of a way to make our oracles more secure, that gets worked on first. I think that's a very, very cool thing to do. You don't see that a lot. And our team takes their engineering work really, really seriously. So they are not going to drop everything to go chase a new trend like AI. I've seen a few teams do that, and it's fundamentally not a good idea. The Clara thing came about because we had this really, really compelling idea that was developed by one of the engineers. We saw the meta within the space and we thought, you know, this is something that makes a meaningful contribution. So we built that out. Same for the Redstone AI, which will be going live soon. We saw that one of the engineers was very interested in this, ran some tests, trained a model and was like blown away by the results. Cool, we can scale that up into a product. With Redstone OEV, it's interesting because OEV, Oracle Extractable Value, has been like a known factor within the Oracle space since the very first days of price feeds. And no one ever really did anything about it. Then last year, a bunch of products launched to address it, but at a very superficial level. then, literally at the level of our CEO, he thought, hey, let's build something that really, really solves this. We generally don't ship something, and we don't bring it to market unless it makes a really, really meaningful contribution to the space. And our problem right now is, dealing with all the integrations and all the new products. So it's a very good problem to have when you have so many new integrations that you have to compromise and put some stuff on hold. Yeah. So Oracle Extractable Value, if I could just double click on that really quick, why do you think that hasn't taken off in terms of awareness? Because it sounds like having a solution in that space could help protocols so much, not only save money, prevent loss, but actually make money. Why hasn't that taken off, you think? Until now. yeah, so fundamentally, like, I don't believe there's a token that's launched that had that as its primary narrative. MEV and all the related stuff make huge amounts of money. If you go look at, if you Google FlashBots transparency dashboard, you can see the revenue that's been taken by MEV searchers since the merge. And it's a... would be one. Yeah. I was joking on Twitter the other day, like I wish Jared would tokenize so that I can buy Jared tokens because I think they would be worth a shitload of money and get a lot of revenue. So fundamentally, there's no direct investment vehicle in these, these MEV things. Second is that they kind of haven't worked up until now. So I was on the team at UMA that brought the first one to market. And it wasn't even possible to do that stuff because you, like a lot of MEV happens off chain and you need to be able to do it in a trustworthy way, solve these off chain challenges. So we were using Flashbots MevShare. Flashbots is eventually gonna build Suave, which is I think using trusted execution environments to do it in a more decentralized way. like MevShare is centralized and it's trusted, but just Flashbots is a trusted team. that wasn't possible before Mevshe. And then it is possible, but in this sort of like janky first generation way in a trust environment. API3 launched their solution and they built their own chain to do it. I believe it's an arbitrary orbit chain, but that introduces a 30 second delay to liquidation. So protocol has to choose like, do we want the revenue or do we want to delay our liquidations by 30 seconds? Cause that's really big when the price is crashing. Pith introduced theirs, which seemed to perform a little bit better and solve some of the problems. And then Chainlink launched theirs most recently, but it's literally a copy paste of the one that Buma built a year ago. So, and the consensus with in the OEV community is that no one's really made a lot of money from these. The problem is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but if someone had captured hundreds of millions of dollars, they'd be tweeting about it. So we've run some tests on our... stone OEV and it's got above 90 % value capture for OEV. So we believe a lot of the existing solutions just aren't actually performing and fulfilling the promise and we strongly believe that red stones will. But I also want to double-click like fundamentally the tech has not been there before to enable this stuff to be done. Mev share is very recent. The infer that we're using has not been on the market for very long. Interesting. Let's talk about the redstone community. Now oracles as a category, quite, it makes a ton of sense if you explain it in a kind of, a, I can't even think about the phrase I'm trying to think of. Anyway, it makes sense from a practical level, but it's quite technical, right? How do you get your community excited about oracles, especially the community members that may be not super technical? How do you get them on board and create a redstone? What do you call your community? Miners, also redstoners quite often, but I think that's more of a joke. miners, miners, redstone miners is the main one. Yeah, stoners is funnier, but yeah. So like you've got to communicate, you've got to communicate the value prop. And there is fortunately a really strong value prop. DeFi can't exist without oracles. Like that's big. If you have any faith in the hope, like the future of Ethereum, you need to believe that DeFi has a future, right? Just seems like less and less people have, but anyway, it's fine. So you get people excited. And then what we've done really, really well is gamified the community. We ran for like a year and a half, the Redstone expedition, where we're using like AI generated videos of like guys going down into a cavern, like fighting like blue orcs and just like making it incredibly gamified. They're earning gems for doing quests. It's very, it's hard to get, I'd say like less technical users involved with an Oracle because like there's no on chain quests that they can do. for us. So we had to work really really hard to get partners on board. I'm actually blown away by how successful our community has become because on a daily basis I see like funny new memes particularly from the Chinese community. The Chinese community is on fire right now. The other day we had like a video of a guy break dancing shirtless upside down with like a mascot painted on his chest. it's blown me away how much people buy in. And I think there's a lot of organic belief from people that we are taking market share from Chainlink. We are legitimately this new, hot, amazing product. And I think people look at the market share that the incumbent oracles have and what those tokens are worth. And I think they make a lot of conclusions that yeah, that really help align them with the vision. That's cool. Did you, to get the community excited, tell us about this, the minor quest, I think is what you called it. Tell us what that campaign entailed, how you rolled it out. Tell us all about that. So the Redstone Expedition has been like the backbone of our community for the last year and a half. And what that is, is we'll do partnerships with, you know, with key partners. So like a lending protocol that we're securing with Pendle, who had a bunch of pools that we were securing. And the quests would be go and use these pools that are secured by Redstone, perform actions so it benefits us because there's value flowing into the pool. It benefits the partners because there's volume flowing into the pools. And then we built this awesome system using Warpy, which isn't super well known, but it's a really, and you basically, we issue users gems, which are a balance they get on chain stored on Rweave. And it's issued in exchange for these sort of like on chain activities that they perform. Combined with that, we have an amazing community team in our Discord who've built like a set of like 10 to 12 different roles you can get by contributing to the culture and community in the Discord. So like, and there are a bit, it's not fully permitted, It's very, very resource intensive for those guys because they're manually saying, this guy's been here for a year and he's just made fire memes and come up with some great jokes. We're going to promote him to like the highest level. So they very carefully control and make sure obviously that people are real. There's not a lot of civils in our community. We're very sure of that. And then so you get the roles, you get the on-chain gems and rewards, and there's a huge multiplier effect there as well. So if you get like the more roles you have, the more it like multiplies the that you're getting. What are those gems translate into? I'm not really at liberty to say, but yeah. The building a community is really, really hard. And it sounds like you've taken a very intentional approach to it. And you are taking the approach of do things that don't scale. And eventually it will. But initially, it's really hard. It's a lot of work. But it's what gets the community. It builds that first initial couple of hundred community members that are just active and very, very die hard. How has that approach help Redstone as you think about rolling out these other product offerings and also in other campaigns. I mean, like, we've never said internally, like do things that don't scale, but that's exactly what it is. I always joke, like people talk about, you know, marketing, crypto marketing, and they're like, what platform do you use for quests? I hate quests. Quests are the absolute worst part of what we do. And when I do actually take the time to go and do quests myself and do the engagement farming stuff, it feels like your frontal lobe is melting. It's brain numbing, man. And so why would we expect to attract a quality, credible community when we're doing something that I wouldn't respect someone if all they did every day was click on these quests, right? We have gone this very labor intensive route. And what that means is it's taken a hell of a lot of time. It's caused, I think, lot of burnout and mental health stress for our community guys who work incredibly hard. But we have this really unique community and it's not manufactured. It's not like engagement farming. It is like a bunch of people who really believe in this stuff and have their own language and have their own set of like meanings, identities. And it's just, it's cool. It's taken time, but it's really cool. And it also means that the engagement and support you get is better quality. If you have a meme competition where there's no actual judging or inputs and it's just engagement farming, the memes are gonna be garbage. The way we do it, the memes are actually really, really good. And then the replies you get to your posts are also pretty good. Yeah, so I'd say just incredibly high quality engagement is what's come out of this. You mentioned language and that's a hallmark of a... You can tell that a culture is forming and a community is forming once they start using their own unique language. What are some examples for redstoners? Yeah, so I mean, interestingly, so we're chatting the week after Barrett chain launched and there's sort of debate going on right now, but like how successful was it? And what Barrett Shane did was they were like the kings of having this community. But what I started to feel like when I was looking at their tweets and even talking to the team was you don't know if they're just using like the community words or they're just making things up. It's like here's, know, Boyko and it's like next for shipping Oingo, Boygo, Roingo. It's like, are you making these up? I don't know. So there's definitely like a limit to it and you need to balance the community with your public base and brand. You're also like, what are examples of like the language and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. So the biggest one is like G minors. So we don't say GM, we say G minors. Yeah, yeah, it's got something. like first time I saw it, I'm like, I don't know if this is good or not, but it works, it works, right? It's got it's got character. I'd say like like Visually, we have this little mascot called Stoney. There's this like little gem guy He's actually sitting on the beanbag. Let's try and rotate the beanbag behind me there And he's he's really grown into a thing So we have all the memes and the latest one's been circulating is like thick Stoney, which is a version of Stoney with this gigantic ass And that's that the community really likes thick Stoney. So maybe the mascot suit will have a gigantic ass. We'll see Tell us about event marketing. How does that play into your strategy for Redstone? Yeah, man, yeah, so in the past, I would always have these arguments with like biz dev guys. They're like, how are you contributing to the bottom line? Right? And so like you can go down this rabbit hole of being like, Thank we get at events in person. And really where I think it works out is like, if your BD guys go to an event and they talk to someone who's heard of you, then marketing has done their job. So for me, that then becomes like, okay, what do we do on the ground that makes us as visible as possible? So as many people see Redstone and it sticks in their head without like embarrassing ourselves or degrading the quality, right? So you want them to see Redstone, but not in a bad way. That's my single metric for when we're there in person. What the Redstone team does really really well is red. So you've probably seen like the founder Marson, he's got this like red puffer vest that is absolutely iconic. We had some red Nike's done, lots and lots of stickers and the team just walks around like in full on red branding. That sort of emerged during the bootstrap days before we did like our series A round that we could like actually spend big on events and it worked. Like maybe most people don't know Like they can't have a detailed conversation about oracles, but they've seen redstone on the ground and they've seen these red vests and they've seen the red merch. They've seen the founder. Our founder does as many panels as humanly possible and gets his brand out there as much as possible. And that pays off, right? So they haven't got like deep exposure, but they've got so many points of high exposure that they perceive redstone as like a credible established product. Yeah. Yeah, I saw on your X, on Redstone's X that, you know, I think it's red February, right? Something like that. February will be red. there's something coming called red that might come in February. Yeah. it. Well, I was curious about red in February could have a negative connotation since most people in crypto think of, you know, green candles and then red is kind of negative. How do you deal with the double meaning there? The short answer is that we kind of haven't figured that out yet. So Red will be the name of our token. And it's a great name for a token, Red. Really strong, iconic, simple, love it. The other option was Stone, thought is good. And then the market started sort of going down recently and we were posting tweets like, everyone ready for Red? And the replies were like, guys, I'm already in the Red, there's too much Red. And there's gonna be jokes in the future about like, know, everything's going green even though it's red or something like that. You know, that's an odd one. I don't have a really good answer for you right now, but like mainly we're just trying to have fun with it and people seem really, really excited. And if they're joking about it, I see that as a good thing, even if it's like kind of a funny joke about prices going down for the market in general. I actually like it. mean, it's, know, colors are memorable, right? And you can, there's always a lot of interplay colors, like, you know, red is green. Like that's, that's super positive and people kind of, know, within the community, they get that. and, and, and even if red is red, sorry, go ahead. I was just going say also like our big competitor is blue. So red versus blue is kind of just a really, really strong visual metaphor that we want to push because red tends to win. There's a lot we can do there. Yeah. Yeah. Red is green. And even if red is red, it is what it is. It's like it's it's almost a yeah, I think there's a lot you can do there. I think that's that's really positive. That's really cool. Let's see. So we've talked about market positioning, the community, a little bit about communication, some new product offerings that you guys have event marketing. Oh, the restaking report that Redstone published recently. Tell us a little bit about your communication strategy and around content marketing and education, because that seems to be an important pillar of your strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So really, really, really good question. The first, the first most important thing is like making sure that people understand a little bit about the technology that we have, not too much. like fundamentally, the main variable with an oracle is like, is it a push-based oracle where it pushes a price on chain regularly? Is it pull-based where it pulls in prices when they're needed? Or is it like some like ultra low latency, high frequency thing that we haven't invented yet? I actually launched one soon, but it's fine. Then there's like different types of pricing methodology. Do you look at the price where it's trading on exchanges or do you look at like, if it's like a staked asset, do you just look at the value in the contract to calculate the price and not what an asset is trading for on a DEX? Like these are the main things to understand with Oracle. So we want to make sure people understand that. But then people really don't care about that that much. So you sort of need to go a bit above and beyond just talking about yourself and your product. Well, so there's two sides to that. One is you find new ways to make it interesting. And for me, like being loud and angry on Twitter is a very good way to make that interesting. But the other is to reach users where they are effectively. So do you want to talk about oracles? Or do you want to talk about stuff that's happening in the space and add value in a way that would be interesting to the people that we're actually trying to sell to? I really think that's the hardest thing to do as marketers. Like if we're trying to talk to lending protocols, what do lending protocols care about? How can we add value to that debate? That's the most challenging problem you can work on as a marketer. The restaking report was very much like a restaking drove 500%, maybe 350, 400 % growth in our user base last year. Restaking is critically important. what can we publish that adds value to our users who are building restaking protocols. And we've done that with a couple of other verticals. I believe we wanna do one about OEV as well for lending protocols. But fundamentally, it's deviating from we're just gonna talk about ourselves in some way and try to make it exciting to how can we actually add value to the people who use our product. Yeah. And OEV sounds like a really good candidate. You know, as you think about your funnel, you know, there's going to be an aspect of people that are interested in the topic, but may not know about Redstone yet. Until they start reading the report, then they realize, okay, Redstone's a provider of services in this space. Let me learn about them. And then you get them into the funnel. I think that's one of the key things that, that I think is missing in a lot of crypto marketing is kind of funnel thinking and providing good top of the funnel educational materials. That's why I was, you know, the restaking report really caught my eye. Because you don't see that a lot. And I think that's really key and a really good move for Redstone to be doing. Campbell, before we end, you know, what are some final things that you'd like to share about Redstone, what you guys are up to, and maybe how the community, for those that are just now learning about Redstone, how they can... Yeah, 100%, 100%. So great chat, really enjoyed being here. Our focus right now is, you'll see more and more conversations on social media about Red, three capital letters. We're putting a lot of effort into that right now. We did announce when we did our Series A announcement last year that Redstone would launch a token. We are working towards that. I cannot possibly comment on timelines, but it is in the pipeline and that's taking up a tremendous amount of time because you don't want to do it wrong. We're working very hard to build a product that didn't need a token. where we weren't trying to like juice people and get bumper numbers with token based incentives, but we built a real product that people want to pay money for. And now we're building a token into that. So we're really proud of that. Don't want to mess up the launch. How can people get involved? Well, we have this thing called the Redstone Expedition. So if you go to our website, very top right hand corner, there's a button called Expedition. Click that, it takes you to the landing page for the expedition. Go to our Discord, join the community. some like amazing, amazing quests right now that people can get involved in. And it's creating memes, creating new versions of Stony, our mascot character, as well as some on chain stuff. whether you're like a degen who does things on chain, or you're like a culture of eyes based contributor, those are the two ways you can get involved. And yeah, just remember that like Redstone builds really, really awesome, complicated tech. And we're trying to create ways for normal people to get excited and get involved about that because we believe there's going to be a thousand blockchains in two, three years. One day blockchains are going to be as common as servers. Every single one of those will need an oracle. And we're the only oracle that's built to be able to service those needs. So yeah, we have high conviction in our mission and we really want the people out there too who want to get involved to come say hi. Well, it sounds like Redstone is really just positioning itself for that future world. so kudos to you and the team. Thank you, thank you so much. I can't take credit for even 10 % of the hard work. We have a very amazing team. amazing. Well, thank you, Kimball. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this and yeah. Awesome. Cheers.

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Peter Abilla

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Campbell Easton | Redstone Oracle

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