Okay, we're rolling. Kyle Hayner, co-founder and CEO of tunnel.io. Welcome. Welcome. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me, Peter. Yeah, and that's t-u-n-n-l dot i-o. um I think with brands with spelling like that, like that mimics like a real world word, it's always hard to figure out where the site sits. So it's important to say that. would say coming up with a company name is one of the more challenging things to do ah as a founder. Something we spent a lot of time on, but tunnel kind of just popped and we thought, you know, when you look at what the product is, we're connecting brands and creators. ah You can kind of use the analogy as going through the tunnel to get to the other side. And that's kind how we like to look at the product. I like that. And we'll definitely get into the naming and like the process that went along with that. Tell us about you. um Is this your, think based on some of the research I did, this is your first stint at entrepreneurship. Is that correct? Yeah, mean, would say like legitimately, yeah, like my first company, um, followed company, but I would say I've always been a very entrepreneurial person, uh, since a young age, like resold sneakers, had a clothing company in high school. Um, so kind of always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Um, and this is like, you know, my first official shot at it. So, um, definitely excited about the traction and looking forward to where we're taking this thing. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about high school. So you sold sneakers, you had a clothing company. So, and that's kind of in the world that these creators, like a lot of these creators live in, right? So I guess what did, what did you learn from, from that experience that is helping you now? Yeah, I think one of the biggest things with like the sneakers back then, like the Yeezys, Jordans, all that stuff, and then as well as the clothing, I think I learned early on just how critical attention is and whatever athletes or people with a lot of influence are wearing or posting about, that just drives a ton of attention. So with the clothing company, it was called Pretty Boy & Co. My buddy Jaffer Ali and Mots Benson had started it. And around 2016 in the Bay Area, and they scaled it up pretty good. So I was selling it just around the community. And every time we'd make a sale, we'd take a person up the picture, like holding the merchandise and would amplify that on socials. So you kind of have this network effect with people seeing all their friends and athletes around the Bay Area wearing this clothing called Pretty Boy & Co. So that naturally just sparks demand and people want to do what everybody else is doing. So think learning that and then, you know, I got into crypto in like early 2019, got onto crypto Twitter ah and kind of saw the same thing when you got a bunch of creators tweeting about certain tickers or projects. Just being able to drive attention at scale to stuff is really great for amplifying brands ah and expanding products. You you have a, bring to crypto a pretty interesting background because you are, you know, you've, you've spent a lot of time with creators and influencers and you've been on the, the kind of the, I'd say the kind of like the front facing retail side. Like you've actually worked with like real people versus like infrastructure, which a lot of crypto people come to a that's kind of their background is like B2B infrastructure, that type of thing. And as the power of influencers and KOLs become, you know, I think especially in this cycle, it's kind of becoming more and more apparent how important influencers are in crypto. A product like Tunnel makes a ton of sense. Let's talk about Tunnel. Like what is Tunnel and like what the problem, I guess what was the problem that you guys were trying to solve with Tunnel? Yeah, so I think like we shipped really fast to give you a little bit of context on kind of, I guess, how Tunnel started. I had done a Chainlink hackathon project my senior year of college, just because I recognized, like we said, the high degree of, you know, like influencer marketing and creators promoting stuff on X. ah But when I looked around, I recognized there was a ton of agencies, but there wasn't really any fundamental smart contract powered platforms to really streamline these agreements. ah So I thought it was a cool project to do for a hackathon. And I'm not technical. I do all of know, BD, go to market stuff. ah My co-founder, Morgan Kupal, he's actually an engineer at Chainlink Labs who was judging the hackathon. And he's always had a similar idea. Um, so he had saw the project we submitted, reached out to me and fast forward. Now he's my co-founder and we're, shipping this thing. Um, so when we launched, like the, fundamental problem we wanted to solve was just using smart contracts to eliminate the trust factor. Um, when you pay a creator to make a post for you, because I'm sure you've seen the horror stories of, you know, founders paying influencers upfront, you know, sending funds to a wallet and then they get blocked. No content gets posted. ah So that was like the first fundamental problem we wanted to solve, eliminate the trust issue. But now we want to take it a step further and be able to allow brands to fully automate these engagements with hundreds to thousands of creators, ah not have to do manual negotiations, manually send out payments, manually verify content. ah So there's a lot of issues now that we're solving and are going to continue to keep solving as we further develop the product. um You mentioned agencies and I think that's getting, first of all, I see lots of problems in the influencer KOL space. I think the first one is a lot of these projects, crypto projects, they want access to these influencers, but actually getting access to them is really hard. So think that's kind of the first problem I see. The second one is they go through agencies and these agencies have relationships with KOLs and influencers. uh But the, I think the quality of like the agreement is kind of suspect. You you pay the agency, the agency pays the KOL. Sometimes the KOL doesn't do like a really great job in what you need them to do. And so this is all just from kind of my experience. And so it's like going the back, the whole back and forth becomes kind of painful. And so the whole space is like rife for like improvement in a product like this. So I'm glad that you guys are doing something about it and in doing it like through smart contracts is I think pretty brilliant. uh Maybe walk us through, think, first of all, who I guess, what are the target, who are the target customers for tunnel? And, you know, speak about both sides of the market because you've got the KOL side and then also the side that kind of wants access to these KOLs. Like I guess what does that look like if you could walk us through and maybe spend some time on each customer segment that might be using Tunnel on either side. Yeah, definitely. like starting with the brands, I think when we launched, like we obviously knew that all types of projects, you know, from DeFi to gaming, AI, memes, everyone wants to work with creators. I think crypto especially, there's, you know, somewhat of a distribution problem and really only being on X as well. for like the real crypto community. It's kind of, everyone likes to say it's a big echo chamber. ah So there's really not, I mean, there's probably, me and my co-founder kind of always go back and forth and say like, how many content creators on X crypto specific do you think there are? ah Maybe five, 10,000, if that. ah But I think yeah, brands of all sizes, you know, want to use the product ah just because they need amplification. Like there's only so much you can do. ah As a founder, like obviously having a personal brand is super important, but you need creators with audiences to amplify your message. And we think using creators is a great way to do that. And I think like when you look at agencies, a lot of them have very high minimums. So if you go to an agency, they'll say, Hey, like you have to spend 25,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand dollars just to get started. So if you're a new brand, like, you know, tunnel starting out, you know, you don't have very much capital. Um, you really don't have too many options to grow, um, or advertise. So I think that's one area that we're really excited about is that any brand can come to tunnel, you know, whether you're super big or just starting out, you don't have a lot of capital. Um, and you can work with creators right away. So I think that's been a big unlock for smaller brands. Um, and then also now with our new product faucets, you know, we can work with large brands as well. ah So I think that's been an interesting dynamic to see of, you know, with the current landscape before a platform like Tunnel, it isn't super easy to access these creators. And if you want access to them, you got to fork out a lot of money with the agency. For the listeners that aren't familiar with the process and the role of KOLs and influencers and creators in the crypto space, how are projects using them? Maybe we can start there. Yeah, definitely. I think like, what we've seen is that, like a lot of projects will have ambassador programs, right, where people might be posting kind of around the clock about them. ah But if you're looking to do like big KOL amplifications, brands usually want to do it when you know, you're getting ready for a TGE or you have a big product launch. So it's not something people are just like, you know, every month, they're allocating a budget to it. ah It's very much like, hey, We have this coming up, so let's do a big KL activation to promote our V2 launcher, TGE. So I would say it's very focused around big ticket events for brands. Is there, so in the web two space for those that aren't familiar, this might be like, uh, you know, Michael Jordan, for example, and you know, he's, he's obviously a big influencer and he has a product, you know, Michael Jordan, you know, his shoes. Um, but when, uh, other products and brands use his name, that's kind of an example of like influencer marketing. And the whole idea is it brings more awareness and amplifies the brand by using his personal brand. And so in the crypto space. It's a little bit similar except the KOLs and creators that we have in crypto aren't necessarily known throughout the world, inside the crypto space, they're well known. And so when they say something about a project or a project's token, that brings more awareness to the token. Am I explaining that right? Yeah, I would say definitely like when you look at some of these these big creators I mean they have large followings of people in our niche So it makes sense to have those people amplify your product your messaging your brand So I think we see a lot of that, but I also think there's a lot to say for working with you know smaller micro creators as well ah to have like a wide diversity of you know, small user generated content, people talking about your brand, as well as the larger creators, KOLs. And I think that's one thing where brands miss, you know, you can kind of tell if a brand is working with an agency, because you might see a lot of large KOLs tweeting about them. But if you only have that and you don't have, you know, like a solid community of your users and smaller creators talking about you as well. I think there's this kind of lack of diversity of content on the timeline. ah So with Tunnel, our new product, Faucets, we're really digging into community marketing and allowing smaller creators ah to participate and work with brands. So on Tunnel, you can work with small community members and big creators all on one platform in a streamlined manner. Let's talk about faucets. How, you know, maybe walk us through the product. Yeah, so pretty much what a faucet is, is a brand can come to tunnel and they can post a faucet which outlines content requirements and deliverables that they want creators to talk about. And they can incentivize that content with a customer reward pool with pre-TGE points, stable coins, or any token on any chain. ah And any creator can come on and they can automatically claim a deal from that faucet. And we use a dynamic payout rate. based on profile metrics. So something like smart followers, smart followers for listeners who may not know what that is. Anyone who's deemed an influential person in the space, like a big creator, a founder, VC analyst or a partner. Those people are deemed smart followers. So accounts that have a high number of smart followers are deemed a quality account. Because I think just followers in general is kind of a vanity metric now. Like an account might have 150,000 followers. A lot of them are probably bots. And if they don't really have a good quality of people following them, then it doesn't really matter who's seeing the content if it's not targeted in quality. ah So we'll use smart followers, engagement, impressions, and a couple other metrics to determine a dynamic rate for creators to claim a deal. ah So for example, If I went on my personal account and claimed a deal from a faucet, I might get, you know, five to 10 USDC to make a post. If someone with a really good account goes and claims a faucet, they might get a couple hundred USDC or whatever the reward token is. So we try to make it fair for creators of all sizes to participate and be rewarded fairly based on their unique profile metrics. On the creator side, how do you vet the account and you you mentioned bots. I imagine a lot of these creators probably have maybe some of them have used bots to grow their follower account. How do you vet them? Yeah, so I think that's where a lot of these analytics tools come in. ah We integrate a third party analytics provider called Tweet Scout. ah And then we're going to be looking to integrate with Kaito as well to use their smart followers. ah So I think like those couple of third party ah players integrated into tunnel, you have all the analytics that you want to see about a profile. So you can kind of tell, hey, like, does this person have smart followers? ah You know, what's their engagement, what's their impressions? And then you can use that data to basically vet a creator and determine that payout amount. Yeah. So let's go through like an imaginary campaign. So let's say I'm a founder of a project and we have our, I don't know, like a product launch coming up. And then I go into tunnel and then I talk about, maybe I do a creative brief, right? About the upcoming launch, maybe some content around it, what the product is, what the launch is, the target customers. And here's the type of content I'd like to see. And here's, do I also indicate the types of creators we want involved? Yeah, so with faucets, can set custom whitelists. Say you have an ambassador program with 30 creators that you like to work with, you can make sure that only those creators can claim deals from the faucet, or it can be general access, so any creator on tunnel can claim a deal. So ah there's a lot of customization based on what brands are looking for that faucets can be built out to suit for each brand. I love that because I know, you know, having been part of projects, there are specific uh influencers and KOLs that I would love to work with and be involved in the project. so getting, but getting access to them is really hard. But if they go through tunnel, you know, that's definitely the access there. And if we can automate kind of the engagement, that just removes a lot of headache for both parties, I think. 900%. ah On the creator side, uh it's a two-sided market. You have to invite creators to Tunnel and then also brands to Tunnel. What's that work like on your side? um Because at the same time, you have to grow the brand awareness of Tunnel so that creators come on board. And think as there are more creators on board, that invites more brands to come on also. So what does that work look like on your side? Yeah, so it I mean, it's a ton a ton of manual work, obviously, right? You're doing a lot of direct outreach. ah I think it's easier now because I mean, currently in the private beta, we have about 450 creators and over 100 brands onboarded. And we've paid out around 110,000 dollars worth of ah USDC payments to creators. ah So I think it's gotten easier now and we're starting to have some brand recognition. But in the early early days of the beta, like August, September through the new year, you know, it's a lot of manual outreach, reaching out to creators, reaching out to brands. I would say when you're doing outreach, you need to be super direct. You know, state the value that you provide with your product and give people a reason to want to check it out. Don't try to send some long drawn out message because you know, if someone looks at it, they're just going to skip past it. And thankfully I, my first year out of college, I worked as a SDR at a company called Service Titan. Um, you know, so sales reaching out to people, was doing cold call and making 70 to 80 cold calls a day. So really thankful for that experience because I think it was super valuable. Um, and doing all this outreach that I've done for tunnel, right? Because at the end of the day, if you reach out to a hundred people and you, you convert five to 10, you know, if, if you don't have a sales background, you might be like, Hey, that sucks. I only got five people and I sent a hundred messages. That's actually pretty good in my opinion. So ah it's just a matter of staying consistent in your outreach, identify people that you think are going to add value to tunnel and get use out of the product. And then, you know, it might take you eight to 10 attempts to reach out to the person before they get on the platform. So I would say just make sure you stay consistent and be very focused in your messaging. So I'm looking at your X account. So tunnel. On April 8th, you hit some key milestones. So $100,000 paid to creators, 650 plus users onboarded, 500 deals completed. That's pretty good. And I'd love to hear about some of the campaigns. Of course, keep them generic and anonymized, but I think it would give the audience a better idea of what types of campaigns are possible through Tunnel. And just give them kind of just... give them, I guess, just rouse up their imagination. Yeah. Yeah. like, for example, we launched the faucets product last week and we have, we had four partners go live with their own faucets. So for example, one brand did a 3000 USDC faucet and another brand did a 1000 USDC faucet. So that faucet, the 1000 USDC faucet, it ran for four days. ah They received 50 unique tweets from that and the brand and the creators didn't have a single touch point. ah And what's really fascinating is we use Chainlink functions to act as an AI oracle to automatically verify content. So we check obviously one that it was posted and that it satisfied all of the brand requirements. ah So that's really like the big pain point is verifying that content, ah you know, did everything the brand wanted the creator to post about. And then after 24 hours of that content being live, Chainlink automation will automatically trigger a payout to the creator's address. ah So super seamless, super frictionless, ah fully automated. So that's one thing you can do with the faucets. And then brands uh will like to pair that because the faucets is mainly smaller creators. So you can take care of that side of it. And then also on tunnel, you can send out direct deals one-to-one to any creator. combining faucets with, you know, like 10 direct deals to larger creators. You get a really wide diversity of ah content from a few big name people and then a lot of smaller micro creators. And we've seen that strategy become very effective. We're excited about faucets finally being live and being able to go to brand and say, Hey, like, you know, we can take care of everything from user generated micro creators to big creators as well. All on one platform. That's huge, I think, for brands. I come from the world of, I focus on developers and making sure that the developer experience is good and growing applications on my layer one, then everything will take care of itself. And then I quickly learned that's not the case because it turns out that crypto projects have a product, but then once they have a token, the token also becomes a product. product. And I think most crypto projects kind of missed that point. And the way you market one is different than the other, but how they both are actually, they're symbiotic. And I learned this as I met with developers. The first thing developers will do is they'll go to your community to see what they're like. And then they'll go to CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap to see how the token is doing. Because if they build on your layer one, you know, they're going to be incentivized by, you know, by the token on that layer one. And so they want to make sure it's doing well. And so it's like, I quickly learned that, you know, doing what's right for the developer actually also means doing what's right for the token. And I didn't know that I didn't realize that until much later, as I spent more and more time at hackathons and with developers that, you know, looking at the token is, is a, is a big deal to them. Are you kind of seeing the same kind of realization from some of these projects or was I just totally behind the curve there? No, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there. ah Obviously, you have your product and then as soon as you launch that token, there's kind of no going back and it becomes a second product. And token price is a direct reflection of your product at the end of the day. So even if you have a great product and your token kind of goes in the tank, the community might start to revolt and it's of just a lot to manage. ah I think you bring up an interesting point and this is probably something that you'd be interested to dive into. When you look at the evolution of crypto economic incentives, starting with Bitcoin in 2009, rewarding network operators with BTC, fast forward to Gitcoin, the Ethereum Foundation rewarding builders with grants, and then you look at liquidity mining, ah DeFi Summer, Uniswap, Synthetix. giving tokens to people using DeFi apps and providing liquidity. And then we saw airdrops, rewarding user participation. And now I think the next thing that we're seeing and what we're introducing is a concept called content mining and using your native token to reward attention and reward content creators. Because when you look at an ecosystem like an L1, you're like, hey, you're giving out grants to builders. You're running a large scale liquidity mining campaigns to incentivize capital to come onto your chain. And our thesis is that attention is more important than anything in 2025. So why are you not using a portion of your token supply to incentivize content creation to drive more attention and mindshare to your protocol? That's really interesting. you branding it as content mining, I think, could have a lot of traction. Yeah, so we're really going to start digging into that. I'm going to be shipping a thread out about this. I think the evolution of, you know, with Bitcoin, liquidity mining, air drops, all of these ways that you can use tokens to incentivize behavior and action is really fascinating. And I think it's very cool to, you know, apply this to content creation. And I think it's something that that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Tell us more about, maybe share with us another campaign that went through Fossets recently. Maybe, I don't know, maybe some details to give the audience a sense of, know, if there's a brand that's listening to this and they're looking to get more amplification, you know, what might they be interested in hearing? Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to one. The first thing it's like, you got to identify like, you know, what, what are you running a campaign for? Like, for example, a project that ran a faucet, they had an AMA coming up, which ran yesterday and they really wanted to drive, you know, listeners to that AMA. uh So they listed a faucet on tunnel and they said, Hey, we want people to, you know, quote, retweet our spaces tweet and basically just drive participation and encourage people to listen to our spaces. uh So they spent a couple thousand USDC and got about like 66 tweets. So I think, you know, first step, like I said, identify what you want to amplify. And then it's really easy to list a faucet on tunnel and you can drive people to, you know, amplify that. So if it's a product launch, if it's, you know, you got a TGE and you want to start promoting it, you know, a couple of months leading into it, you know, you can come to tunnel. We got about 450 content creators of all. various sizes, and people want to amplify your project. I think just giving brands the ability to easily go to a platform like Tunnel and get amplification immediately is very powerful because if you go and try to work with an agency, it might take two, three, four weeks to set up. ah So I think the speed at which we can get content on the timeline for brands is super valuable. And is X right now the primary channel that these creators are on? Yeah, I would say X is the biggest channel at the moment and it's the only platform that we're on. ah But we do have plans and we think there's a very, very big opportunity ah to expand to TikTok. So that's the next platform that we're going to be looking to expand to later this year. Let's talk about that. I've heard a couple of brands say the same thing about TikTok. And I haven't done a ton of research on TikTok. I'm not very active on TikTok, but what's the crypto presence there and what's the call to action for, you know, if I'm scrolling and I see a video, I guess what's the potential there for crypto brands? Yeah, so I think it's still early in the sense for crypto content. ah Like if you go look there, you're going to see a lot of people saying XRP is going to$10,000. ah But I think just like looking at XRP as a case study is super fascinating. ah I'm kind of the stamp set it's vaporware. But if you look or talk to people who aren't in crypto, like, you know, people like to say, you know, your Uber driver, your barber. ah These people all have XRP and I've never really understood why does everyone who's not in the crypto space own XRP. And you go look at TikTok and you see all these people just saying XRP is going to$10,000. And then it makes sense why it has such a high market cap and why so many people own it who don't know anything about crypto. I think it's fascinating. ah So I think if you look at TikTok, just from size alone, they got about like 1.6 billion monthly actors. monthly active users and X has around 600 million. And there's another fascinating aspect about TikTok that if you aren't on TikTok, you don't know about. Are you familiar with TikTok shop? No, I'm not So TikTok shop, basically brands can work out affiliate deals with content creators. So if you wanna make content about some supplement company, any conversions and sales that your content drives, you can get like a 40, 30 % commission on that sale. So like if I was promoting this water right here, I can make content about it and make it super easy to purchase via the TikTok shop. And then if you have a video that goes viral, I know someone personally, they're promoting something called Gully Gummies, like apple cider vinegar gummies. This person made $350,000 because they had a gummy video on TikTok, get 12 million views. And he made $350,000 in commission just from a few TikTok shop videos. So if you look at that in a sense of purchasing power and liquidity on the platform, $33 billion was spent on TikTok shop in 2024. That's amazing. number on just like random products. And then if we kind of take that and look at crypto Twitter, you know, with pump fun last year and all the meme stuff, people kept saying, you know, when alt season, when alt season, it's like, hey, you're not getting an alt season. Everyone's buying these meme coins. Liquidity is tapped. So I think like if we want to keep growing our industry and bring new people on board, we need to. expand to more platforms than just Twitter. Because I love Twitter. think crypto Twitter is great, but we're not reaching new audiences. And it's hard to go viral on X. But TikTok, very, very, I would say easier to go viral on TikTok than it is on X. And you got a lot more people. And just the content medium too, I think. Me and my co-founder were joking around that Gen Z can't read. ah Yeah, I think so too. No, that's a really... interesting insight that you have about about XRP. And I see the same thing with, you know, other tokens in the top, you know, top 20, let's say that are, they don't necessarily have like a strong developer community or strong product, but for some reason, their tokens doing really well. it's because of this phenomena that you just described. And I think the potential for, for TikTok is huge. I think we are early. And a lot of projects haven't figured it out yet. And I think what the call to action is for TikTok is going to be interesting. um Because it's like, you know, if, I guess, guess it, it, probably, it's important to figure out like as a, as a crypto brand, like what, what do you want like the TikTok viewer to do if it's to buy your token or to be, uh, you know, bring awareness to your token that makes more sense than you know, join my developer community, for example. So I think it definitely is the call to action. About call to action, you mentioned in the two campaigns you shared with Fawcett's, you know, one of them was around an AMA. And so to bring more awareness to the AMA so people will join. And the first campaign that you shared, what was the call to action for that one? Yeah, so that was for a chain specifically just letting people know about DeFi opportunities on that chain. So it was provide a basic overview of what the chain is, and then they wanted creators to highlight a few DeFi opportunities to earn yield on ETH specifically. So it was general overview. who are a few, or here are a few like DeFi yield opportunities on the chain. And then the call to action was obviously, know, bridge over to the chain and start earning yield today. Got it. So if I were the brand behind that specific campaign um so I Spend a certain amount and then I get um a specific uh level of amplification through KOLs or influence and then the next thing I'd be looking at is How effective was that in terms of actual assets being bridged to my chain? um Are you like looking at that campaign end to end, are you able to help them figure that part out or does it end with here's the number, here's the level of amplification you guys got, know, based on your spend? Yeah, I think so currently, it's here's a level of amplification that you guys got for your spend. ah But this is actually something I was talking with my co-founder Morgan about, who's a CTO, right before he got on this call is obviously everybody wants conversions and being able to determine the attribution that, know, an influencer campaign, you know, what's the actual ROI, right? Cause it's great, you know, it's good for the algorithm to have people talking about you. You got views, maybe you got some followers, but At the end of the day, did we actually bring any value onto our chain for this thousand USDC that we spent? And something that we're kind of dipping our toes into looking around is you can, if the brand, it's a little more involved on their side, but they can basically set up like Google analytics trackers ah in their portal that would bring the users in. like for a bridge, for example, or they're, ah they have like a portal where you can deposit assets. Basically, if you can put a tag on that and then generate creators a unique ref link and then say, hey, your tweet has to include this ref link, you kind of still lose it if people don't use that link, but it's kind of the best chance that you have if your call to action is, use my ref link to go onto Swale Chain and deposit assets. So that's kind of one area that we're looking at, but... I think any product that can actually determine the level of conversion will do really well, but it's not like a silver bullet, right? Because somebody might see the tweet and just type it in their browser and access the app themselves. ah And then the other downside to using reflinks is that social media algorithms don't favor well to including external links. So it's something that's difficult. ah but we're kind of interested to dig in there and see ways that we can try to provide more than just, hey, here's how many views, followers you gained, et cetera. Yeah, I think one, we can take a, uh, I think a piece of learning from the advertising industry because advertising, they don't necessarily claim to make, you know, increased sales. Some of them do. Um, but you know, they're really looking at kind of like how to defend mindshare, um, not even create mindshare, but just like defend mindshare. so advertising really happens after you have a product, you have a market. And you're just out there constantly advertising to defend the share that you already have. um Crypto is a little bit different, but I think a lot similar in that we have this concept of mindshare now, primarily through Kaido and Kuki3 that's kind of helping us with that. But if Tunnel is able to help a brand get a level of amplification through KOLs and influencers, that should have an influence on mindshare at some point. And so it's that part, but not necessarily the conversion. And I think it's important for brands to understand that because, you know, mindshare, you know, at some point money follows mindshare and mindshare follows money. But it may not necessarily lead to the specific conversion you want, which in the case that the campaign that you shared, know, assets being bridged, it might not lead to that. growing mindshare for the brand is super important. And so that's definitely a positive outcome. Definitely, I would say just having people tweeting and mentioning your brand is good for the algorithm. And like you said, mind share is super important. So I think that alone is valuable. Just having 50 unique creators tweeting about you over a couple of days spanned is valuable in and of itself. How are you measuring or are you measuring uh mindshare through tunnel right now? You mentioned a potential integration with, with Kaito. will, will Kaito help you with that? We are not doing anything as far as mind share right now. ah If we do end up integrating with Kaito, it would be more around the, uh, like smart follower data, just to have that in the platform. Um, so think they have probably the best data set for an accurate, you know, smart follower representation. so there's that. There could be other stuff potentially down the road, but, um, nothing kind of in the works as far as like a deeper integration yet. as far as like, all the mindshared data and that kind of stuff. What about uh work with other projects that kind of compete with Kaido, like Cookie 3? Cookie 3 has, they've been around in the space for a while, or Safari even. Safari is uh one of their kind of bread and butter is attribution. Are you looking at working with them or Addressable or any other marketing analytics projects? Yeah, so we're familiar, obviously. ah We haven't had many conversations yet as far as integrating or that kind of stuff. I think what you see right now is there's a lot of people in the space who are focused on the analytics side, obviously, like Kaito, Cookie, all the people you mentioned. ah But no one directly handled the deal execution and payment side. And that's really where we started, right? Because we use smart contracts to handle payment, escrow funds so you don't get scammed, and then using an AI Oracle to actually verify that content was posted and fulfilled all the requirements the brand wanted the creator to talk about. ah So think that's the side that we really have been focused on and are gonna continue to focus on. Because we saw, obviously, there's a lot of people doing analytics. So we'd rather just integrate with someone where it makes sense to add this analytics into tunnel than try to do all that stuff ourselves. So like I said, we had integrated with Tweet Scout. They have some basic stuff for like profile scores, smart followers and some other data points. So that's all that we have as far as like an analytics side at the moment, ah but are gonna be looking to possibly kind of beef that up with integrations down the road. So, so let's say I'm a brand and I have a budget. go through Tweet Scout or I go through Tunnel and, um, and the Fossets product. Um, and that leads to, say 50 KOLs or influencers that say something. Am I able to, is it just a yes, they did it or no, they didn't, or am I able to say something around yes, they did it, but I didn't like it that much. Could they redo the thing? um Is the brand able to go further than just yes, no? Are you talking about like the content specifically that was posted? yeah, like, like if I, you know, one KOL does a great job and I'm happy, but another KOL does a, you know, not a great job and maybe they misrepresented even the brand or the product or the content. Am I able to approve it or no? So at the moment, no, we're really leaning into this AI Oracle content verification. ah There have obviously been instances where we've worked with brands and they've said, the AI Oracle stuff is cool, but we really want to sign off on drafts before they get posted. ah So that's obviously something we can accommodate. ah But I think the future that we want to get to is the AI Oracle verification gets so good. to the point where brands are just, know, hey, this is great. We don't have to manually sign off on 20 or 30 drafts. And we just know that, you know, tunnel has it covered and all of the requirements that we state on tunnel are going to be hit and they're going to be hit, you know, adequately and we're going to be happy with it. ah So that's, that's where we're working towards. Obviously we've used all of the data ah from all the deals that we've done throughout the private beta to continue to refine the verification system. And that's something that we're going to continue to do as we get more deals, more users, more tweets, uh all that stuff helps refine the system. Got it. You mentioned X and then you're looking into TikTok. Are you looking at other channels also? I think, yeah, we're definitely looking at other channels, ah but I think like you can only do so much at once, Riley, if you could try to expand a TikTok, Instagram, YouTube all at the same time, you're probably not gonna have very much success. So I think like we wanna gain as much traction as we can on X and then start to dip our toes into TikTok. ah But I think like the TikTok, so obviously it's a different platform than X. think we know it's gonna be... a different product. Like we can't just take tunnel as it is now for X and apply it to TikTok. There's going to be different nuances with how campaigns are structured, how the payments work, how do you verify video content? ah It's almost going to be a whole new product that we need to build just to suit TikTok. Yeah, yeah, I definitely see in this two sided market, you know, you'd have to segment your KOLs by channel and then also by kind of output, the types of output, whether it be, you know, just straight up text content or memes or GIFs or video. um But I see the platform growing. I mean, there's definitely need for everything that we're talking about and for what you guys are providing already. And I think Attacking X as a channel first makes a ton of sense since that's kind of where crypto sits. Farcaster is another channel that I'm hearing more and more about. I am on Farcaster, but I'm not super active. But I think there's definitely potential there, probably. we do as well. it's something we're watching. But I think for us, we want to be obviously strategic in where we're going to deploy next, because I think Farcaster is super cool. uh I think we can build tunnel into a frame on Farcaster. So who knows, you could probably do a faucet directly in the app and get paid, which would be super cool. But if there isn't a huge demand for brands to advertise on Farcaster yet, doesn't really make sense to go support Farcaster yet. So obviously, I think it's somewhere that we will want to be eventually. But obviously, with limited engineering resources and time, you want to be strategic in where you're going to deploy and what platforms you're going to support to keep getting that traction and growing. Yeah. So this two-sided market, I mean, I'm fascinated by it because I see just so much demand out there for this type of thing. um I spend time with lots of crypto brands and projects and they're always asking like, how do I get access to such and such KOL? um And it's actually really hard, right? There's a lot of noise out there and then getting... you know, finding signal from noise becomes a full-time job for a lot of these projects and getting access to the right folks. um So on the one side, you've got creators, KOLs, influencers, and then you've got brands on the other side. Do you also work with agencies that work kind of on behalf of brands? Like, they be a, could they do work on behalf of brands on tunnel? I guess is what I'm asking. so it's actually interesting. The 3000 USDC faucet I was talking about earlier to promote the AMA was actually brought to us by an agency. So the brand was working with that agency and then that agency came to tunnel and said, hey, we want to use this faucet product. Um, so I think it's really interesting and a great opportunity that agencies can use tunnel, even though like they're the ones that are working with the brand, the brands paying them. And then they're coming to tunnel, to take advantage of the network of creators that's already on the platform and the products like faucets being able to send direct offers to anyone. Um, so I think, you know, that's a huge opportunity and you know, we welcome if you're an agency listening to this and you want to use tunnel. you know, just hit us up and we can make it happen. Yeah, I see a lot of potential there. um Okay, very cool. Well, uh Kyle, uh you know, before we end, anything, any campaigns coming up or any announcements that you maybe want to let the audience know about? guess, what do they have? um What can you share coming up? I would say exciting stuff coming up. Obviously, we just launched the faucets product. We got a great 60 second video. So check us out on X at tunnel underscore IO and then big roadmap item coming up. We're going to be exiting private beta and rolling out our public beta. ah Target date is April 30th. So anyone that wants to try out tunnel, hit us up for beta access. And then if you want to wait till April 30th, we'll be public. So. exciting stuff there. Yeah, we're excited to keep growing this thing. the private beta, is that for both creators and also brands? Okay. if you go to the app right now, you'll need a password to get onto the platform. ah So we'll be removing that platform and allow anyone to come on towards the end of the month. That's awesome. Cool. Well, Kyle Hanner from tunnel.io. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Appreciate you for having me, Peter. I'll back.