Episode Summary
Have you ever found yourself drowning in the sea of crypto information, struggling to stay afloat with the latest trends and updates? Well, so did I and apparently many others.
Including Deniz, the founder of Alpha Day, who joins the Web3 Magic podcast conversation to discuss his journey in crypto and the motivation behind creating Alpha Day. Alpha Day is a crypto dashboard that provides users with a comprehensive and customizable experience for tracking and consuming crypto information. Deniz highlights the challenges of staying up to date with the rapidly evolving crypto space and explains how Alpha Day aims to solve this problem.
He also shares the achievements of Alpha Day in 2023 and the upcoming milestones for 2024. And believe me, it's a lot of cool stuff coming! We conclude the conversation with a discussion on the future of the crypto space and the importance of improving user experience to gain mainstream adoption. What a kicker!
Takeaways
Alpha Day is a crypto dashboard that offers a comprehensive and customizable experience for tracking and consuming crypto information. Including podcasts!
The rapid growth and complexity of the crypto space make it challenging to stay up to date with relevant information, and Alpha Day aims to solve this problem.
In 2023, Alpha Day achieved significant milestones, including positive feedback from users and partnerships with prominent projects in the crypto space.
Upcoming milestones for Alpha Day in 2024 include the release of a mobile app and the introduction of an NFT or token system to enhance user engagement.
Video Episode player
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Alpha Day
02:00 Deniz's Journey to Crypto and Alpha Day
03:27 Motivation behind Alpha Day
04:32 Overview of Alpha Day Features
06:36 Integration Plans for Alpha Day
07:58 Deniz's Previous Projects
09:28 Alpha Day Team and Pricing
10:46 Achievements and Milestones in 2023
12:23 Upcoming Milestones for 2024
19:55 Exciting Projects in the Web3 Space
23:09 Discussion on the Bull Market
27:01 Importance of Improving User Experience in Crypto
Transcript
BFG (aka Pete): 0:23
Hello everyone, I'm back, and today I'm back with Denise I tend to say it with S well, you know I see it with Z, but I hope it's not an insult to say it with S and Denise is a founder of a very interesting project which you know I started using just recently, which is called Alpha Day, and it's like your crypto dashboard for everything you know calendar with information widgets. Well, he will tell us all about it, but he just found it pretty cool and I was surprised I didn't bump into it earlier. So Denise will come.
Deniz: 1:04
Thank you so much and yes, you can call me Denise. You can call me Dennis as well. It's like an international name and there's a few different options there. And thank you for having me on the show. I think we met a few months ago in Istanbul and, at a very nice, interesting location, had great food, had great chat about crypto, about global markets, so it's great to have this second opportunity to talk to you again.
BFG (aka Pete): 1:31
True, true. We met in DevConnect in Istanbul and luckily, we bumped into each other on the CryptoNomads dinner, which was great. I still remember how full I was when I was leaving that place.
Deniz: 1:50
There was a lot of different things like 10 different things but yeah, we had a good time.
BFG (aka Pete): 1:59
Yeah, yeah. So look, let's jump right into it. So I always ask my guests how did you get to crypto? To showcase that you know almost everybody in crypto is actually a normal person and that there is a journey which makes sense. So what was your journey to crypto and to Alpha Day?
Deniz: 2:23
Yeah, so I got into crypto in 2016 and since then it's been life changing. But what triggered it all was like, if you're familiar with Reddit, where it's so many different discussions happening, it's like it's cultural. So there was a thread called explain to me, like on five, ethereum, the smart contract, I churn, complete blockchain platform, and I had no idea about blockchains. I'd heard of Bitcoin but ignored it. But when I came across this concept of being able to write these smart contracts and deploy them on a decentralized computer where anyone can run it anywhere around the world without asking permission, with no centralized party, that just blew my mind and that was like going down the rabbit hole. We'll talk about that rabbit hole and for me it was coming across Ethereum, finding it incredible. I came from a finance background, so I knew how the global markets worked. I knew about the inefficiencies, so once I came across Ethereum, and then it was going into Bitcoin, doing my masters in digital currency and learning about the philosophy of, like the core technology, the value add, all the concepts around blockchain technology. And yes, I mean I've worked in different projects. A few years ago I started Alpha Day, kind of based on the pain and the learnings of what I've gone through since 2016.
BFG (aka Pete): 3:50
Okay. So it kind of begs the follow up question Did you start Alpha Day as a dashboard for your trading, or was there a different motive?
Deniz: 4:00
So the motive was being almost obsessed with crypto, in that you open your computer, you go on Twitter, you're consuming crypto information, you're learning about new projects, you start listening to podcasts, you're spending more and more hours kind of engrossed in this and I travel around the world and I realize it's not just me. There's like thousands of us, if not millions, of crypto enthusiasts. But the space has grown so much over the last five, 10 years. The surface area is so much that it's almost impossible to keep up to date with what's happening in crypto. And that's why we've made Alpha Day To solve that problem of so much information, so many different kinds of information. We wanted to have one experience where all the information important to you is coming and you can kind of build it into this experience that fits your own daily crypto consumption habits.
BFG (aka Pete): 4:55
Got it Okay, so now probably is a is a good time to just briefly say what alpha day is and what it does for you.
Deniz: 5:08
Yes, so in very simple terms, alpha day is a dashboard with hundreds of different services and data points and content and Prop and podcast and rich media that you can drag and drop and build a dashboard that has exactly what you would have in 10 different browser tabs. So some people might have like a charts open under daily lives on a daily basis and then have like a podcast Feed open. They might have read it. Twitter open coin, market cap, whatever it is. Instead of having in 10 different tabs and having to jump through one and the other all the time, alpha day is a place where you can design. We have like. What we have is this concept of widgets where you can drag and drop your wallet widget with your portfolio, you can drag and drop news, you can drag and drop the chat link to your favorite discord Channels and you build something that, when you open it, instantly wow. This like the information I want, and here's an easy way to consume that information.
BFG (aka Pete): 6:10
Okay, that sounds awesome. So so I hear that you know I can have my wallet portfolio visible. There is a discord integration. Other is there a telegram integration or where else are the big cheds happening? Signal Maybe.
Deniz: 6:26
Yeah, so telegram is on our roadmap. So far, we've brought in Twitter, lens, discord and a few other social media channels. We also have a dedicated chat box so anyone from alpha day, like anyone who visits the channel, can use it. But we're just constantly adding more and more. We keep getting different suggestions from the community. You mentioned telegram. We immediately say, okay, this is interesting, this can be done, and we have a huge backlog of new widgets that we're releasing in the next year.
BFG (aka Pete): 6:59
So of particular interest to me would be do you guys have far caster integration or no stir?
Deniz: 7:07
Our caster. We are working on it, I think. I think we actually even might have over testing it. There is something happening because the guys Ask me to go register and create sub domains for the alpha day, like each Account, so that we can start using it and integrating it. So I think we're working on it cool, good, good.
BFG (aka Pete): 7:28
I honestly I like it a lot. I hope to get the then from forecast around a podcast sometime this year, but because it I you know. So, ignoring the tech, it's basically like if they say sufficiently decentralized social network, it doesn't really matter. What matters is there. There is a community which feels small, but it's big enough to have interesting conversation Without all the you know smoke and mirrors of Twitter crypto bubble or NFT bubble. So that that's why I like it a lot and I am curious, you know, to see where it goes as small people join, because it's kind of inevitable that you get the same kind of problems which X has now. Okay, okay, that sounds great To do a small step back, and you mentioned that you were involved with some other projects before you started alpha day. Do you want to mention some of them? Are you still involved or you are fully? You know Alpha Day guy now.
Deniz: 8:39
I'm fully Alpha Day, but well, two things. There is something else I'm doing as well, but the. I started at Kyber Network, which was the first kind of decentralized exchange after Ether Delta. I was based on like automated market making and like this kind of new architecture, even before Uniswap, and that was released in early 2018 and at some point was a top dex for quite a while and it's still around. It's a different blockchain, so I was there for a while and I'm also actually a venture partner IOSG Ventures, who've been involved in the crypto space and the Web3 and infrastructure space for many years. Now. We're one of your reduced investors in Polkadot and many other important contracts platforms.
BFG (aka Pete): 9:31
Okay, cool. So one future episode we can dedicate to investing in the Web3.
Deniz: 9:38
Yeah, well, for me that's you just invest in Ethereum personally.
BFG (aka Pete): 9:45
Right, yeah, that's my simplified thesis as well, honestly, but let's not get into financial advice. So can I ask how big is the Alpha Day team? And probably you know, for people who don't know, alpha Day is free, right.
Deniz: 10:07
Yes, so Alpha Day is free. I think the only thing you would pay is we actually introduced a Uniswap widget in Alpha Day, so you don't even have to go to another exchange Right from Alpha Day. You can swap your tokens just by connecting, and there we take a 0.1% fee. But we're also working on the system where, if you use the platform, you get like some kind of achievement NFT and then the trading fees aren't applied. Yeah, apart from that, we're free and we are a team of 10 people spread all around the world working on this full time.
BFG (aka Pete): 10:49
Cool. So, because we are recording this early 2024, so I think the good two follow up questions are what were the best achievements of 2023 for Alpha Day? And then the follow up will be okay what's coming up in 2024?
Deniz: 11:09
Yeah, so we launched Alpha Day in August of 2022. So let's say it was halfway towards the end of the previous year. So last year was our first full time on the market and for us, like the feedback we received from people that say, oh, this simplifies my life, and people that have called it the browser tap killer and people that have said I love it, but can you add in this and that Like just living that experience has been amazing. What other highlights include for me? Showing this to big projects like Ave, like Avalanche, XZCash, and saying, what do you guys think of Alpha Day for your own communities? And then them saying, yeah, this is amazing and giving us grants, being involved and building kind of dashboards for 10, 15 really high quality projects. I mean that's been another achievement. And lastly, just the team's output in terms of widgets pushing out all those discord and lens widgets and so many different widgets, I think is another highlight for us in 2023.
BFG (aka Pete): 12:16
Amazing, I didn't realize you guys were so new. I thought I'm just, you know, behind the trend, that I didn't know about you.
Deniz: 12:30
No, no, no.
BFG (aka Pete): 12:33
So you are. So I'm not that late, you are early. I just pulled it up because I like the yellow, I everybody who knows me knows I like colors. So I was pleasantly surprised by the, by the color choices. And so what's the like a two or three big milestones you guys have planned for 2024?
Deniz: 12:59
So the biggest one is releasing a mobile app on the Android and iOS stores. And when I first built Alpha Day, I was always like thinking of this as a web, like kind of full PC experience. But I guess I'm a boomer because 50% of users use Alpha Day from mobile and that was something we had the prioritize and we hadn't touched anything. It was actually a terrible experience. So now that we saw so much traffic coming from there, it was inevitable that we'd have to go and design it properly for the mobile experience. I think that's our number one kind of milestone. And then the second one is actually introducing either like an NFT system or a points or some kind of token system to not gamify it but make it more interactive so that you are rewarded for using the platform and it kind of helps grow the usage, kind of creates this community. And we're brainstorming different ideas. Like we saying, since we are in the programmable money space right, crypto, like you have DeFi, you have NFT, we have so many different tools let's use the tools and kind of try and come up with some innovative way to take advantage of that to implement it. And so that's what we're working on as well for this year.
BFG (aka Pete): 14:21
Okay, that sounds like a couple of interesting developments. I can definitely see the mobile thing being a big deal for a lot of people Probably also for me, because I don't know if you have it, but I have that feeling that you know, if I am sitting at my computer I'm supposed to do something serious, and when I'm just walking around laying on a couch and I take my mobile into hand, I can kind of do the same type of work, but it doesn't feel like work. So Alpha Day would fit into this perfectly. Now that you have launched the podcast widget. It would be like a double plus.
Deniz: 15:09
Also a cool idea we have for the mobile is having what we call the superfeed. So let's say you have your portfolio and you have 10 different tokens in it. We will have this superfeed related to the 10 tokens you hold. But imagine seeing the latest podcast for what you follow, the latest news alerts if something has missed, an audit, like a news flash, or like different contextual information from Discord, from a hundred different sources of what's relevant to you in one superfeed. I think that hasn't been done before and that's going to be an amazing feature for the mobile app.
BFG (aka Pete): 15:48
Yeah, well, that sounds awesome because I think there were some attempts to like centralize communication around the project or around selected projects so you wouldn't have to go to like thousand Discord and gather your updates. But I haven't found any of that really working that well, probably partly because it's kind of fragmented anyway. So if you centralize the Discord communication, you still miss the Twitter and all the other channels and you miss the price from the open COL or blur, so you are still missing a lot of data points which you probably want, and that basically just keeps you clicking across different tabs all the time.
Deniz: 16:35
What's your main source of information to stay up to date with crypto?
BFG (aka Pete): 16:42
So I will probably shoot myself in to lag, but I will say it's finance charts and trading graphs and Twitter. Yeah, so I do subscribe to MarketWatch and Bloomberg and other things. So I don't read them because of crypto. I read them because of, you know, finance and and market information in general, but I, because there are different data points, I kind of have easy way to validate whether something which I read on Twitter and looks like an interesting information is actually true, because if it is, it was already mentioned somewhere on Bloomberg or other places and so it's just like confirmation that it's real. And, as I mentioned before we started recording, I'm not any active trader in a crypto, so for me it's more like to catch interesting projects when they start. So you know, I could meet interesting people, I could see interesting tech, I could try it. It's not that much about like farming for LROPS or buying and selling ship coins, so I think my life is easier from that perspective than others.
Deniz: 18:15
What's your?
BFG (aka Pete): 18:15
main source of information.
Deniz: 18:19
A new website called Alpha Day is my main source, but I mean, joking aside, before it used to be Twitter and I would hope that I get lucky and find the information that's important to me. It's Twitter, and then it would be Reddit, it would be private Telegram groups. It would be different things. The idea behind Alpha Day is, if you are interested in only shitcoins, as you called them, then you can have a shitcoin filter, let's say, and you can have widgets that highlight Alpha related to what's happening in that. But then, on the other hand, you don't care about that and you want, maybe more high-quality information and you want something that can be validated in Bloomberg. So we do have, let's say, Bloomberg as a new source and you can put your Binance chart next to it and have it co-mingle. The cool thing is you can use AI then to create alerts and say, look, when this happens and Bloomberg mentions this while this happens on Twitter, like the frequency of some project goes high, send me an email or swap a trade on Uniswap or do XYZ kind of action. So in the future, we're integrating even more into not just receiving information but being able to execute on that information as well, and that's the ultimate aim for us at Alpha Day to be like from start to finish, like the entire experience in Alpha Day.
BFG (aka Pete): 19:48
No, it totally makes sense. Okay, I think I need to spend more time with Alpha Day, obviously. Maybe I can simplify my stuff. Nice, nice. So is there anything else you would like to point out about Alpha Day? Or can I ask a little bit broader question around crypto or space in general?
Deniz: 20:18
No, go for it.
BFG (aka Pete): 20:23
Cool. Basically, because you are in a space for a long time and because of the nature of Alpha Day, you get connected with a lot of interesting projects and infrastructure projects, as well as information, social networks and others. What are some of the interesting and exciting projects for you which are now in our space, in Web3 space?
Deniz: 20:53
Yeah, I mean there's so much going on. I mean that's what I'm enjoying the most. There's so many different angles of innovation. There is like the classics, like stuff happening in DeFi, stuff happening in NFTs, and not just the basic 0.1 version we saw with just JPEGs and that kind of thing, but more modular NFTs, like I think you guys touched on previous podcast episode like there's so much different things you can do as building blocks using these different fungible and non-fungible tokens. So there's that whole aspect happening. There's a whole everything happening in DeFi which me personally, I was very interested in the last three, four years because it was amazing to be able to take it, stake it and then put it on other platforms all permissions, without asking for permission, without having to wait for a bank transfer or confirmation, without needing to do any KYC checks like that process, even though, yes, sometimes you do pay $10, $20 transaction fee. But the overall experience for me was so incredible that I was always really excited about DeFi and the kind of progress. But for me, I've been through at least two different type cycles since 2016 and what's always the most exciting to look forward to are the narratives that are completely new and novel that we can't foresee from now. So if you think, like three years ago we did not really have that NFT mania. We had crypto kitties. We didn't know what this place could lead us to. Before that we had like basic decentralized exchanges, but we had no idea that we could lock money and lend and borrow from each other permissionlessly. So I'm just looking forward to that next big narrative, seeing what's going to break out, what's going to be the driver in this next kind of bull market. So looking forward to what comes next.
BFG (aka Pete): 23:03
Yeah. So how do I actually? Because having the feeling that you are interested observer and you're not really dependent on it with your backs or trading skills is a great relief and you can really enjoy just watching what's happening. So let me ask you a last question Do you think we are in bull right now already, or not yet?
Deniz: 23:40
I mean, I think the bottom is behind us, right. If we think that a Ethereum that's reached as low as 800 for a week, like a year ago, and now it's like 2,600, do I think it's going to go back to even lower lows? I don't think so. Do I think? I still think it's a bit early for a bull market and that when you look at charts and you look at four year cycles, you look at what's happened before. If we have a bull market the next three months and we pick in the next three months, it would diverge from those nice slopes that we keep seeing. We do get every cycle diminishing returns. We're never going to get 50X every time and it's never going to be on, I think, fixed cycles. But me personally, I think we'll have the peak of whatever we're entering now at the end of this year or first half of next year. But an important distinction, as you said, about not having to have bags I love being in this space, really, not because of the Ethereum price, but because of what I get to build, the people I get to meet around the world having these conversations about innovation, around NFTs and DeFi. So, yeah, I mean I enjoy the bull market, but I also am not emotionally attached to it, let's say, like many other people who get into crypto, and they only care about the price and that's not really being, that's not. You know that's not investing your future in blockchain. If you want to invest your future in blockchain, forget about the charts and drawing lines on it and that's just trading. That's a whole different thing. That takes like half a decade a decade to have any advantage over the market in terms of significant like slow alpha. So blockchain, it's early enough that you get in now. You can become an expert in six months, 12 months. You can add value back to the space. Sorry, I went off in a bit of a tangent.
BFG (aka Pete): 25:43
No, that was a very thoughtful answer actually. Thank you for that. I yeah, I'm not going to give my own prediction, but I am. I am on the I'm leaning on a side that we are not in a bull market yet and and we, I don't think we are going back to new lows, but I think we are going lower than we are now, in the next year for sure. But I also think it doesn't really matter that much, because I see a lot of interesting projects which could use a little bit more time to get ready for the bull run, because there is then there is a lot of smoke and fog, you know, and a lot of noise, and it's really hard to cut through. So I would like to see the good projects and interesting projects you know, get get a little bit better on the edge of things like usability and, you know, marketing and being able to explain what they are doing, what problem they are solving, before the noise starts, because then it's going to be hard. It's really hard to, you know, market or sell anything like your product, your token, whatever, if it has any value and logic next to a coin which is promising south and next, because your promise is never that good. But you know these messages are right side by side. So you know it's better, if you have a chance to build up your name and skills, to cut through the noise before the noise really comes.
Deniz: 27:23
That's such a rather. I have to talk about the experience as well because, like I don't know, many people don't realize but so far, the last 10 years of blockchain development have been mostly about backend, about infrastructure, about being able to scale, and the front end and the UI UX has kind of suffered. We have to admit to ourselves that today's crypto experience isn't ready for the next billion people, like our parents, are used to the PayPal experience and you try and get them to set up Metamask, manage that and try and stay away from the scams and the links and everything Like. That's not the experience that's suitable for the next billion people. And if we're saying there's going to be a bull market and the next wave of adoption, we still have a long way to go to improve that experience. So I'm actually like maybe there shouldn't be a bull market next one year. Stretch it out a bit more. Improve the fundamental value. You know the kind of experience layer. Just like Web 1 was all about backend and building out the infrastructure and Web 2, companies like Facebook came and built great experiences on top of that and they became billion dollar companies. That's what we're going to have to go through as well in crypto like that transition from backend progress to front end and experience progress, and I'm sure it's going to happen, like with the number of designers coming on, product managers, people from the conventional world looking into crypto, loving it and spending their time on it. That's the next kind of wave of innovation as well, I think.
BFG (aka Pete): 29:02
Totally, totally, and I can say I'm very optimistic about it, way more than I was, like a year and a half ago, mostly because I'm meeting a lot of people who are, you know, building in a space, but they're talking a lot not about the back ends and infrastructure stuff, but they're talking about user experience. How can you make it better, how can you make it fun, you know, for people to join, so they, it would be like enjoyable experience, not like stressful thing to set up your three, you know addresses and whatever. So, yes, I totally agree. Well, you know, you, you've heard it, people Wait for it, work on it and, yeah, be careful when you're, if you are trading. You definitely go and check Alpha Day because it might make your day easier, and I will definitely, you know, put into show notes some comments which I gathered and some some notes which I gathered from, you know, using Alpha Day myself. Thank you, Dennis. I wish you good luck in your move to Dubai and I hope we'll have a chance to chat sometime in the future about you know what's new.
Deniz: 30:27
Yeah, thank you so much for having me and for your listeners. We love your feedback from any kind of angle. Anything you'd like on to that, we love feedback. Thank you for having me and, yeah, looking forward to talking to you in the next maybe cycle and see how much we've progressed.
BFG (aka Pete): 30:47
Cool, very cool, thank you, thank you.
Deniz: 30:50
Thank you.
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