The month of the podcast
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Let’s hop into what was going on in January.
This monthly report should be the first Catblazer monthly report that is published Mirror-first. Until now, the ECH has primarily published on Medium, and recently also tried out publishing some articles in tandem on both, but primarily referencing the ECH Medium. I was a part of the effort for working to move ECH over to Mirror, though we will likely continue also publishing on Medium. Big shoutout to Trent for getting us our own $WRITE token - ethcatherders.mirror.xyz , which points to a wallet set up for the ECH to be able to publish easily from. Note that this is not the ECH multisig address - we wanted to be able to publish without needing m of n signatures, but instead will be a hot wallet set up for this.
I’m really happy to be moving us towards more web3-native platforms, and hope to see us doing more of this in the future.
After months of talking, this is the month we finally launched the ECH Podcast. Coming on the tail of the Mirror announcement, I feel bad saying we’ve been primarily pushing it on Spotify - if anyone knows of a decentralized podcast hosting service and/or platform, please reach out (my details should be at the bottom of this article). That being said, we’re on Spotify here. We originally planned on releasing every other week, but have managed to keep a once-a-week cadence to date. I’m not sure if this will hold permanently, but am happy we’ve pulled off this many episodes so far.
The episodes are 40 min-1 hr long interviews aiming for a more in-depth and technical angle. Part of the goal is to expose listeners to these incredible builders, and also to give everyone the chance to learn from their experience. Pooja Ranjan’s excellent Peep an EIP series has made us realize at the ECH that we have a lot of room in producing quality educational content, and I hope this continues that trend.
So far I’ve been finding guests, interviewing, and recording the episodes, but that hardly means this is a one-person show. Pooja has been very instrumental in getting me started, and has provided editing for all of the episodes so far. zkDoof has joined too, and has been helping me out with a lot of technical and scheduling support, and will likely also move in to start taking care of editing.
We recorded four episodes in January, though the last was only released in February:
Just getting this off the ground and running with it took all of my ECH hours this month. I’m wondering if this is something that will take less time as I get more used to it, or if as I (hopefully) get better at it will still take roughly the same amount of hours. I’d like to have time for other things too.
The ERC initiative I’ve mentioned in past posts has been largely quiet, though I have been keeping up with it. Supreet and I have been working on trying to design some emergency protocols for app-layer platforms in the space in the meantime. He’s doing most of the work right now, and when we have a good rough draft, we’ll start showing it to experts in the field, and after we iterate through it with them, we hope to publicize it.
Gitcoin’s KERNEL has started its new cohort, Block V, at the beginning of February, and I hope to be active there, as I have been in the past, as part of my onboarding efforts, though some personal stuff and the podcast might cause me to participate a bit less than usual.
I did hint just above that there is also some personal news - while I am still keeping largely quiet about it, I am in the process of moving jobs. I recently accepted an offer, and hope to publicize more details about once it’s more finalized. This has affected my capacity in February, but I should still be able to meet my usual hours for the ECH.
That’s it for the report for this month. As always, if you think I might be able to help you, or if you’re interested in helping, don’t hesitate! Reach out. I’m @William94029369 on Twitter and wschwab#7045 on Discord. I can also be found as wschwab on a number of platforms.
Until next month!