Bridging the Gap: A Conversation with Across’ Community Lead, Britt
From avid community member to Core Team Community Lead, our first interview of this series is with Across’ governance specialist, Brittany Madruga!
We’ll start with a question from our community: How was the transition from SuperUMAn to Britt?
When you go from being a community member to part of a protocol’s core team you find yourself straddling a line where you’re not really sure how to belong in either group for a while.
So you’re sort of in two worlds but you don’t really belong to either one of them fully. There were definitely some growing pains during the transition, but, thankfully I had tremendous support from both sides.
It was interesting because the transition happened before there was even an Across community. So in my case, I transitioned away from the community I called home to a new setting where I needed to establish a new community. That time was pretty exciting for Risk Labs (parent foundation to both Across & UMA). We were about to launch Across, and we knew we needed to bootstrap the Across community using UMA’s. So for a little while I was working in secret to set things up for our big reveal. It was a lot of fun, and I relied pretty heavily on those friendships with the SuperUMAns to ‘get this thing off the ground.’ I have friends from that era that I will always be in touch with, so I’d say it was a really meaningful period of time for me.
In case some of our readers don’t understand the SuperUMAn lore, how did you first get to know about Across and how did you land your role on the core team?
My first stop in DeFi was UMA, which is a weird place to land. I hadn’t even used any DEX or anything, but my real first exposure to crypto in general was a Gary Vee video. He was talking a lot about blockchain at the time, not specifically NFTs, but just general blockchain technology. So I thought that was really cool and wanted to learn more. I started by just going down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. I was a big fan of Finematics and a few others, of course including Bankless.
At some point, I felt like I understood a decent amount and I really wanted to talk about it. So, I went looking on Facebook (because I’m a boomer, I guess) and I joined the group called ‘Defination,’ which a Risk Labs team member, Clayton, is actually an admin of. I kept asking questions in the group, and he eventually recommended that I go check out the UMA Discord for more community vibes.
I was pretty excited because at that point I knew I wanted to contribute to a DAO in any shape or form; I didn’t know how exactly, but knew that I had the passion and enough talent to do something, even if it was for free, I didn’t care — I just wanted to get involved.
So I joined the UMA Discord and got a crash course on crypto in general while spending a lot of time getting to know how UMA works and the whole UMIP (UMA Improvement Proposals) system. At that time, we didn’t have some of the identifiers that we have now, so there were like 2–3 new UMIPs to vote on every week, so I stayed pretty busy.
I started helping out with some of the project management for different UMA campaigns and was offered a 3-month contract from Risk Labs for a contributing role within the UMA community. I had to take a bit of a break after the contract for maternity leave when my baby was born, and when I came back the Risk Labs teams asked me if I wanted to be hired full-time to help with the Across launch and rally a community behind the new protocol.
Another question from our community: When I see you (Britt) dealing with community members, you always do this with a lot patience / empathy. Where did you learn this from and how do you maintain composure?
I don’t really know where I learned that from. I think I’ve always kind of had an empathetic demeanor. It comes back to bite me occasionally, but I tend to just think people are good. I always try to lead with that assumption, even if I can’t understand someone’s actions. This space is scary for a lot of people and what might seem trivial to me isn’t trivial to them. So just remembering that other people’s experiences are just as real and as valid as mine, is something I was raised with. My job is to meet people where they’re at.
But that being said, it’s not always easy, right? Sometimes you have to answer the same question 50 times, and then the 51st person comes along asking that same question plus throws some f-bombs… you just don’t always have the capacity to interact with that in a nice way. So, in those cases, I think it's just best practice to try and walk away for a little while, touch some grass, and then come back to deal with it.
Members of our community might not know this about Britt, but she has this incredible grasp and unsatiable curiosity for how things work, which is a trait that delivers great value with a product as technically complex as Across. First question is when are you transitioning to a Dev role? And how do you think this trait has helped you support Across?
Actually, before I fell in love with the community side of things, I did think about taking some solidity courses just because I’ve always been kind of interested in that. Both my dad and brother are software engineers, so it’s a little bit in my blood to be more interested in tech.
But I’ve kind of found my sweet spot in the community.
I think there’s a lot more to the psychology of it than we think, and my position also gives me the opportunity to think about statistics and the overall user experience a bit more. The best developers have mindset geared towards the improvement of user experience as well, so I guess we have that in common. I know that I’ll never be the best code builder in the world, but I do think I can bring value to the space on this psychology front and help developers with understanding the perspective that I have access to through an intimate relationship with real users.
Btw, we’re always looking for users interested in interviewing.
A community member asked: How do you think Across will shape the future? I’d like to also add in the question of what product feature or expansion you are personally most excited about and why? (Since we have quite a few shipping very soon)
I’ll do this in backward order. So the feature that I’m most excited about is composable bridging, which is allows Across users to perform a bridge transfer plus action(s) on the destination chain all in one click. This is our take on message bridging, but it’s different because we’re not just sending a message from one chain to another, we’re sending a message associated with a token transfer that includes a set of instructions for the transferred tokens.
The amount of possibilities available to us after the composable bridging feature ships feels like a fan effect. It opens up so many doors to be able to do something on the other side of bridge transfers. It also brings a lot of value to potential integration partners as well.
Then, what do I think is the future of Across? I definitely think we need to get to more destination chains and support more assets, but one of the theories that we’re exploring is the eventuality that bridges will be abstracted away to a background function. So, I think the future for Across is truly building infrastructure that can maximize capital efficiency in a way that gives LPs the most value for their assets and bridge users the best transfer prices.
In your time as the Across Community Lead, how have you seen the Across audience change over time?
We’ve gone through some waves. The first one, which was actually my favorite, was just die-hard community types, who were there to hustle and to try to do important things.
I think we’ll see more of people joining the space looking to make a mark again in the next bull run.
In the second wave, as we got closer to our token launch, we had a lot of Airdrop hunters, unsurprisingly, as is the case for almost all protocols.
A somewhat surprising wave was one that brought us a lot of people who were not necessarily interested in the protocol itself, but moreso interested in the structure of our DAO. I’d also characterize the first wave in this way. It was a DAO wave which I guess I would categorize as a general DeFi curiosity boom.
Most recently, I would say we’ve started to have more of a sophisticated user base. People who are showing up are really engaged and asking great questions or suggesting new L2s to support or new tokens to list, all of which are valuable input. We also have a good relayer audience right now, which I’m excited about. So, I would say our audience has definitely matured, and considering how complicated bridging technology is, I’m regularly impressed with their deep level of understanding.
Do any moments stand out for you from being active in the community? Any wild proposals that are just unforgettable or a controversial debate among all the DAO enthusiasts?
We have a pretty relaxed community for the most part, but there have been a couple of moments that have been contentious, and if we had to do it over again we would probably question doing things in the same way. Luckily a lot of the “drama”, if you can call it that, doesn’t really come from a place of disagreement about how something was designed/built. In most cases for our community, it has to do with how effectively something was communicated.
One example that still makes me smile was very early on. Within a few days of launching Across, we had a community member propose a full rebrand of the product. They were quite skilled and even had some pretty fun ideas that I would have liked to see come to life.
Unfortunately scammers and Discord seem to go hand in hand. What have you seen in terms of security improvements from Discord itself and any particular dangers that you want to make people aware of as a disclaimer?
Frankly, Discord has a lot they could improve on with their security, but to give them credit, they recently introduced a welcome screen where server newcomers have to agree to server rules before joining, which is a good security feature. They also claim to have a couple of other security features in the pipeline for server joiners, which should help reduce bots.
With Discord, my question is: Why haven’t they come up with an official captcha bot by now? A lot of exploits arise from the need for third-party captcha bots on Discord. Dubious actors will replicate these bots with a malicious twist and trick people into revealing their Discord credentials. So, I do think that Discord could be doing better, but projects can do their part to prevent scams by the way that they conduct themselves. For instance, we have a Partnerships channel because we don’t want people to be reaching out in DMS for partnerships. And any time we hold a contest or a giveaway, having people reach out to us instead of the other way around, is a great way to prevent sensitive information from being shared with an imposter.
A lot of people make requests from you within the community, but what would you like to see from them?
I would like to see some of the hustle that could result in a more full-time gig. Now that we have a token, we have the means to compensate people for doing real work. So I want to see people come forth with identified needs for the protocol and start pitching in. I think that Across really needs more community contribution, through committees or other grants. Hopefully, people will see this, take the ball and run with it.
Can you give us a little alpha on some of the secret initiatives you’ve been working on?
In Decentraland there’s Ice Poker. The Ice Team is creating a skin for Across and they’re hosting a poker night for us. Specifically, it’s a sit-and-go poker night where our community can come play for an hour. It’ll be Across-themed! I’m super jazzed about that because I’m always a fan of Metaverse events, and it will be really cool to see a bunch of little Across-skin dudes running around playing poker together. Especially since poker is actually one of our community’s favorite pastimes.
Rep3 protocol soulbound NFTs are also coming soon. You’ll be able to level-up your NFT based on your staking activity within Across. I think those are the two community-based initiatives that I’m pretty stoked about.
Yeah, those are massive! Outside of Across, what are your hobbies?
Right now, It’s all about my children! They are the biggest part of my life, so these days my hobbies are their hobbies. Outside of them, I am a big fan of board and card games. I could do either for a solid 24 hours straight. I’m also a big fan of anything in the water, like swimming or anything on a boat. I grew up fishing and hunting with my dad and although I don’t really have as much time to go hunting anymore, I still really enjoy them both. Each summer I still try to get in some fishing and camping time.
I used to have a lot more hobbies, like yoga, hiking, snowboarding, and rock climbing. Hopefully my kids will enjoy those as they get a bit bigger.
The next question I will be asking to all of the team. Do you have a favorite bridge IRL?
I’m going to tentatively say the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado. It’s probably not the coolest bridge I could have chosen, but I have some good memories there.
Bonus Community Question: What is your favorite NFT collection and why?
I used to have one of the original Vee friends NFTs, which was pretty special to me because my son helped me pick it out. He liked the caterpillar one, so we went with that.
Now my current favorite is zk animals, because they’re just adorable. So that’s what I’m rocking on my PFP!
Thank you for tuning in to the first edition of our Across Core Team interview series: Bridging the Gap! Follow Britt on Twitter and see you on the next one.
Across is a cross-chain bridge for L2s and mainnet Ethereum. It is secured by UMA’s optimistic oracle. Across optimizes for capital efficiency by running a competitive relayer landscape, concentrating liquidity, and by offering a no-slippage fee model.
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