From Followers to Stakeholders: The Wallet Revolution

What if your biggest competitive advantage isn't your audience, but your stakeholders?

In this episode of the Weekly ROAR Podcast, Dustin Hedrick and Brandon Billings explore one of the most significant shifts shaping the future of the internet: the transition from followers to stakeholders. In the Web2 era, platforms owned the relationship with your audience. In Web3, wallets become portable identity layers that enable ownership, participation, governance, and trust.

The conversation examines how digital wallets are evolving beyond crypto storage into the foundation for identity, credentials, permissions, reputation, and AI-ready infrastructure. As AI agents, decentralized finance, and programmable systems become more common, wallets may become the operating system for the next generation of business, banking, and digital communities.

•  Why the future belongs to ecosystems that create stakeholders—not just followers 
•  How wallets are becoming the foundation for digital identity, ownership, and participation 
•  What builders, businesses, and communities can do today to prepare for an AI-powered Web3 future 

Weekly ROAR Podcast with Dustin Hedrick & Brandon Billings
Sponsored by https://www.r0ar.io/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to your weekly roar, where we break down what actually matters, cut through the noise, and give you something you can use right now. I'm Dustin, here today with Brandon, and today we're diving into one of the biggest shifts happening. Underneath the surface of the internet, there is seismic activity, my friends. The move from followers to stakeholders. Yes. And the engine behind that move is the wallet. Not just a crypto wallet, not just a place to hold tokens, not just a web 3 login button. We're talking about the wallet as your identity layer, your access layer, your reputation layer, your ownership layer, and eventually for humans and AI agents alike, your operating permission layer across Web 2, Web3, banking, commerce, and autonomous systems. If you've ever built an audience, lost access to an account, worried about passwords, wondered how AI agents will be trusted, or asked why Web3 identity matters beyond speculation, this one is for you. This is not something that is an answer looking for a problem. It definitely is the answer to the problem. And later when we talk about Roar's new Wallet 2.0 and all the depth of it, we remove the friction for everyone to participate. So let's get into it, Brandon. Take over.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Wallets are the beginning of ownership. That is the shift. For the last 15 years, the internet trained everyone to chase followers. Followers on Instagram, followers on X, followers on YouTube, followers on LinkedIn, emails in a CRM, members on Discord, customers in an app. And don't get me wrong, distribution matters, attention matters, audience matters. But here's the uncomfortable truth. In most of Web 2, you do not actually own the relationship. You rent it. The platform owns the login. The platform owns the algorithm. The platform owns the rules. The platform owns the reach. The platform can throttle you, shadow ban you, suspend you, demonize you, or change the game overnight. You can have one million followers and still be one policy change away from starting over. That is not ownership. That is dependency. And compare that to a wallet-connected audience. A wallet is not just a username. Wallet is a portable identity. It can hold assets, it can hold credentials, it can prove membership, it can prove contribution, it can access gated experiences, it can vote, it can receive rewards, it can sign agreements, it can connect to banking rails, it can interact with smart contracts, it can represent a person, a company, a DAO, a community, or eventually an AI agent. That is a different relationship entirely. A follower says, I clicked follow. A stakeholder says, I am connected, verified, participating, and I have something at risk or something to gain. That is the wallet revolution. And the reason this matters right now is because we are watching three massive forces converge at once. First, human identity online is broken. Passwords are broken, platform logins are fragmented, data is scattered across thousands of systems. Most people did not control their own identity record. And globally, hundreds of millions of people still do not even have reliable official identity. Second, web3 infrastructure is maturing. Wallets are getting easier. Passkeys are training users to understand passwordless access. Token gated communities are becoming more normal. Dow tooling is becoming more practical. Stablecoins and digital assets are pushing finance toward programmable rails. Third, AI agents are coming fast. And this is the part people are not taking seriously enough. If AI agents are going to book travel, move money, open accounts, manage workflows, negotiate contracts, purchase services, interact with banks, operate businesses, or represent people, then every AI agent is going to need identity. Not vibes, not a chatbot name, not a random API key floating around in a spreadsheet. Identity. Who is this agent acting for? What is allowed to do? Uh what wallet controls it? What permissions does it have? Can it sign? Can it spend? Can it access data? Can it be revoked? Can its actions be audited? Can another system trust it? That is why this conversation is not just about crypto. It is about the future of access. Quick take. Here's the thing most people get wrong. They think the wallet revolution is about replacing banks, replacing apps, or replacing social media. And I don't think that's the real move. The real move is that wallets become the connective identity layer underneath all of them. Your bank may still exist, your social platforms may still exist, your favorite apps, your your AI tools may still exist. But the user relationship starts to move from platform-owned identity to user-owned identity. And once that happens, the balance of power changes. Because when the user owns the credential, owns the wallet, owns the access, owns the reputation, and owns the ability to move across systems, the platform is no longer the center. The user is. And for Roar, that is the deeper thesis. Roar is not just talking about Web3 as a trend. It is building around the idea that the next generation of business, finance, community, and identity needs infrastructure that can move fast, stay self-sovereign, and connect across systems. That is why business in a box matters. That is why business a box matters. That is why Dow infrastructure matters. That is why wallet infrastructure matters. That is why self-sovereign banking matters. Because the next wave of businesses may not start with a filing cabinet, a bank appointment, a developer team, and a six-month build cycle. They may start with an idea, an AI workflow, a wallet, a DAO, a treasury, a token, a governance layer, an identity that is portable from day one. That is completely different operating model. And it begins with this simple shift from followers to stakeholders. Before we get into the next part of this, this might be a good moment to grab coffee or a reset for a second, because what we're about to get into goes a layer deeper.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

So when we say wallet, most people still hear crypto. Oh, it's crypto. And yes, wallets are obviously a part of crypto. They hold tokens, they interact with blockchains, they sign transactions, but that's the old narrow definition. The new definition is much bigger. And this is what we've used for the last years at Roar. So all of our stuff functions this way that we currently use internally in our own business. We don't use anything we haven't built. A wallet is a portable control center for identity, ownership, permission, reputation, and transaction authority. That means the wallet becomes a thing that answers five questions. Who are you? What do you own? What can you access? What have you done? And what are you allowed to do? This is a huge deal for Web 2. Because Web2 identity is basically a mess of passwords, OAuth logins, phone numbers, email addresses, cookies, device fingerprints, and platform profiles. My friends, those are all easily hackable. This is not. It's why we've moved our entire office suite into software that we built. You don't know about that yet, you'll know later. And you must use your wallet to interact. Anything we do in our ecosystem, we use wallets to interact with it, and it just rings different for security. So these platform profiles, cookies, device fingerprints, and all that stuff I just mentioned. You log in with Google here. You log into Apple over there, Facebook somewhere else, email over here, SMS code over there, bank verification in another system, KYC in another flow, then another app asks you to upload the same document again. You got too off in some other place. It's repetitive, it's insecure, and it's user hostile. Gosh, a lot of you guys out there that I deal with in cybersecurity, you say, Well, I just use the same old password for everything. And I always say, Don't do that. And then some people say, Well, I just use my anniversary and a couple other things. And I'm like, Don't do that. Some people say, I just use a mix of phrases, and I say, Don't do that. The best thing I can tell you if you're making passwords is they better be 16 to 18 characters long. They need to have asterisk and symbols, upper and lowercase letters and numbers and more. And that's still not good enough. They should be randomly generated and saved inside of a password protector, and even that is complex. So the important part is this instead of every platform building a separate identity that you're gonna come up with an easy login for or a silo, it's gonna silo it, the user can carry verified credentials that are literally encrypted and self-sovereign and private. That can be proof of age, proof of membership, proof of business ownership, proof of KYC, proof of accreditation, proof of education, proof of professional history, proof of wallet reputation, proof of community participation, proof of governance rights, proof of, proof of, proof of the list is almost endless. And the important part of that is this the user can prove something without giving away everything. So that matters. Because today, most identity checks are data heavy. Upload your ID, share your birthday, give us your address, store your documents on another server, and trust us. And let me tell you something in that world of KYC, in that world of KYB, I can tell you they've been hacked and your stuff is already owned by someone else. Your social security is owned by somebody else. It's already been done. Any one of them, they're going to get hacked. They've been hacked, they're a target, and they don't know how to best save your stuff. They don't know how to best protect you. Inside of our world, KYC and KYB is in a moment and a second. And when those identities are verified, they're immediately destroyed and your identity becomes that encryptable key, which is that wallet. Holy cow, you mean to tell me, Dustin, that someone doesn't store my social security card and my driver's license forever to prove who I am. That is correct. That is better future. That's better than your bank can do for you. Telling you the pu the future is much more secretive than your bank, your financial group, or whoever else has taken your identity, let alone LinkedIn, who has to prove through clear who's been hacked. This future will make it so that everything is selective. You can prove you are 18 without exposing your full birth date. You can prove you're a verified business without exposing every private document, and that is important. You can prove you're a member without giving up your entire history. You can prove you're approved for access without letting every app track your access on the internet, and it does. They do. This is where wallet-based identity becomes powerful. Now, I'm not saying every wallet out there that you can log in with is not tracking you. That would not be truth. Most of the big boys do. We do not. Remember that Roar does not. We never will. That's our agreement here. We believe in the tenets of Web3. So that's where the wallet-based identity becomes powerful. Now let's bring this thing into banking. Banking is ultimately an identity business. Before a bank lets you open an account or move money or borrow or invest or custody assets or access financial services, the bank wants to know who are you? Are you authorized? Are you compliant? Are you risky? Is this transaction legitimate? Can this access be audited? Now, add AI agents to that world. Imagine a banking AI agent that manages payroll, another that handles treasury movement, another that searches for financing, another that negotiates vendor payments, one that monitors fraud, another that moves stable coins or tokenized assets, another one that interacts with the Dow Treasury, and another that manages subscriptions and business expenses, all by agents that aren't allowed to have a bank account in America, let's be honest. But those agents cannot be treated like random software scripts. They've got to have identity. They need wallets, they need permissions, they need spending limits, they need revocation controls, they need audit trails, they need policy boundaries, they need to prove they are acting on behalf of the right person, business, or organization. And then, guys, don't even let it cross your mind at what these AI agents will do inside the banking world to you if they don't believe you about something. They're not human, they don't care. That takes all of that out of it in both sides. AI agents can have identity, and you can keep yours safe from a future with AI agents. This is where banking, Web3, and AI start to overlap in the best case possible. A bank account says this institution recognizes this person or business, and a wallet says this entity can prove control, sign actions, hold value, and interact directly with digital systems. An AI agent says I can act. And the future question becomes: can this AI agent act with verified authority? That is the identity challenge of the next decade. And it's much bigger than human logins. Let's be honest for a second. We're heading into a world where humans may be outnumbered by online agents, bots, devices, workflows, automated services, synthetic users, and machine identities. I'll argue if you've been on Twitter, um, Instagram, or Facebook recently, you're already outnumbered. Not all of those are bad. Many will be useful. Oh, and Reddit even more so. Many will be useful, some will be mission critical, some will run businesses, some will support families, some will manage portfolios, some will operate infrastructure. But if they do not have identity, the internet becomes chaos. You cannot have trillions of automated actions flying across the economy with no trusted identity layer. That is how you get fraud. That's how you get unauthorized access. That's how you get fake agents pretending to be real agents. That's how you get banks locking everything down because they cannot tell what's legitimate. And then that's you. You don't get to move your money as a human because they think you're a bot. Trust me, I've worked in worlds where they think I'm a bot more than human just because at the speed I work. That's how you get platforms blocking innovation because trust is too expensive. We've been through this, we've been debanked and more. So the wallet revolution is not optional. It's the trust layer that makes the next internet usable. So today's hot seat question: are you building an audience or are you building an ownership network? So, because those are not the same thing, an audience consumes, a network participates. An audience follows, a network connects. An audience waits for your next post. A network can vote, fund, build, refer, govern, transact, and grow with you. That is the ROR perspective. The next great businesses will not just collect followers, they'll activate stakeholders. We've said this before. And this is where Roar's business in a box model becomes so important. And believe me, for that model, we've got another one on the heels of it that'll blow your mind in the next six months as we reveal it. Because if you move from idea to brand, from brand to DAO, from DAO to treasury, from treasury to funding, from funding to governance, from governance to ecosystem growth, and you can do that through an AI-powered workflow with wallet infrastructure built in, then you're not just launching a website, you're launching an economic network. And that's the difference. A website is a destination, a wallet-connected business is a living system. And guys, not just humans can do that. We've already built this so AI agents can do it as well for you with identity. So a wallet connected business is a living system. It can raise, it can reward, it can verify, it can govern, it can transact, it can scale, it can connect humans and agents into the same operating environment. And this is why the phrase Web Next matters to us. WebNext is not just Web3, but newer. WebNext is the bridge. It's Web2 usability, Web3 ownership, it's AI speed with decentralized verification, proof of truth. It's business creation with financial rails, it's community with governance, it's identity with portability, it's banking with programmable access, and all in a way where it doesn't feel like Big Brother's watching you, and we're at the end of the book of Revelation. So that wallet sits at the center of that. Now, there is a risk here. We cannot pretend this is all solved. We're working on it too, as are many out there. And the partners we make partnerships with, they're working on these things. We're not screwing around anymore. We're not looking for partners playing around with tokens. We're looking for partners that are working this way. Wallet UX still needs to work. That's why our wallet got not just an upgrade, but a rewrite. Recovery still needs to work. That's why in our wallet rewrite, we made it so that you can back up your encrypted phrase and not have to write it down on a piece of paper or anything. And you could put in iCloud, Google, or your local files or your phone and recover it, even if our app is gone. And only you can recover it with your identity. That's powerful. Recovery still needs to work. Regulation is still evolving. Identity standards are still fragmented. AI agent security is still early. Banks are cautious for good reasons. Users need simpler language and safer defaults. We're working on that. But the direction is clear. Passwords are not enough. OAuth is not working. Platform logins are not enough. API keys are not enough. Anonymous bots are not enough. Static identity systems are not enough. The next internet needs identities that are portable, programmable, verifiable, permission, and revocable. That sounds technical, but in plain English it means this: you should be able to prove who you are, access what you're allowed to access, move value when authorized, and you want to, because you own it, and take your digital life wherever you go. That's the wallet revolution. So before we land this, take a second and think about how this actually shows up in your world. Because the next piece is where it all starts to connect.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

And that means it's time for the roar. Now let's bring this home. What should listeners actually do with this? First, stop thinking about wallets as only speculative tools. A wallet is not just where tokens sit. A wallet is where digital relationships become programmable. That means every founder, creator, community builder, bank, brand, developer, and enterprise leader should be asking, what would change if my users were not just accounts in my database? What would change if they were wallet connected stakeholders? What would change if access was portable? What would change if membership could be verified instantly? What would change if rewards could flow directly? What would change if governance was built in? What would change if my customers could become participants, owners, voters, contributors, or investors? That is where the unlock is. Second, start thinking about AI agents as future users. This is a big mental shift. Most people still design products for human users clicking buttons on screens. But the next wave of users may not always click. They may call APIs, they may sign with delegated authority, they may negotiate machine to machine.

unknown 21:59

They may

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Manage wallets, they may request credentials, they may execute tasks, and they may coordinate with other agents. So when we say the next 3 trillion AI users, the point is not 3 trillion humans. The point is that identity demand is going to explode when every person, business, device, workflow, and digital organization can spawn multiple agents with different jobs and different permission levels. One person may have a personal finance agent, a travel agent, a health admin agent, a shopping agent, a learning agent, and a creative agent. One business may have hundreds. A bank may have thousands. A global enterprise may have millions of machine identities, service identities, bots, agents, accounts, credentials, and automated workflows interacting every day. That means identity does not scale linearly anymore. It compounds. And if identity compounds, wallets and self-sovereign credentials become core infrastructure. Third, understand what banks are not outside this conversation. They are right in the middle of it. Banks need to know who is acting. They need compliance, they need audibility, they need risk controls, transaction limits, customer trust, fraud prevention, and they need to participate in digital asset rails without losing control of regulated responsibilities. What identity can help bridge that, or excuse me, wallet identity can help bridge that. Not by making banks disappear, but by giving banks a way to interact with users, businesses, DAOs, and AI agents through permissioned, verifiable, auditable access. That is the banking 3.0 mindset. Finance becomes programmable, identity becomes portable, access becomes policy driven, agents become accountable, and users become owners of their own digital permission layer. Fourth, if you are building a community, start designing for stakeholder conversion. Ask yourself, how does someone go from viewer to member? From member to verified member, from verified member to contributor to con contributor to stakeholder, from stakeholder to governor, from governor to builder, from builder to economic participant. That is the ladder. Followers are the top of the funnel. Stakeholders are the foundation of the ecosystem. And this is where Web3 has always had its strongest idea. Even when the market got distracted by hype, the strongest idea was never number go up. The strongest idea was people should be able to own part of the networks they help create. That is still revolutionary. If users bring attention, data, capital work, loyalty, creativity, governance, and distribution, why should all of the value accrue to the platform? Why shouldn't the community have a stake? Why shouldn't builders have proof? Why shouldn't early contributors be rewarded? Why shouldn't identity and reputation travel with the user? Why shouldn't an AI agent acting on your behalf inherit only the exact permissions that you give it and nothing more? That is the future we should be building toward. Now here is the roar line. If there's one thing to take from this, it is this the next internet will not be won by platforms that connect or collect the most followers. It will be won by ecosystems that activate the most stakeholders. That is the punchline. Followers can be inflated, stakeholders create gravity. Followers can vanish, stakeholders compound. Followers can be rented, stakeholders can own. And when you combine wallet identity, AI agents, Dow infrastructure, self-sovereign banking, and business creation tools, you get something much bigger than a social graph. You get an ownership graph. That is where this is going. In one minute, here's what this really means. Your wallet becomes your passport across digital systems. Your credentials become portable, your access becomes programmable, your community becomes ownable, your business becomes launchable faster. Your AI agents become permissioned actors. Your bank interactions become more automated, but also more auditable. Your identity becomes less dependent on one platform and more controlled by you. That is the shift from web 2 accounts to web next identity. And that is why Roar is focused where it is focused. Because launching a business in the future is not just about a website. It's about identity, ownership, governance, treasury, capital, AI, and infrastructure working together from the beginning. The wallet is the front door, but behind that door is a new model for how people and machines participate in the digital economy. So do not sleep on wallets. Do not reduce them to speculation. Do not think of self-sovereignty identity as some distant technical concept. This is going to affect how people log in, how businesses onboard users, how banks verify access, how AI agents transact, how communities govern, and how value moves across the internet. The future user is not just a username. The future user is a wallet-connected identity with permissions, proof, value, reputation, and agency. And the future AI user, that agent will need the same thing, but with even tighter rules. Because once machines can act, identity becomes everything.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

And y'all, that's this week's roar. If this hit for you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Especially someone still thinking wallets are only about crypto. They are not. Wallets are becoming the identity layer for ownership, access, banking, AI agents, and the next generation of digital business. Be sure to follow our show on the platform where you found us. And if you like our podcast, rate and review it. If it helps and adds value. And if you are out there and you are a part of this amazing wallet revolution, please, please, please share, share, share, comment, like, and more. Again, everything you do helps add value to us, helps our algorithms, makes us easier to find. We need your help on that. So we got more conversations, more clarity, and more real-time insight coming your way. Until next time, stay sharp, stay curious, and keep moving forward. This is your weekly roar. Thanks everybody.

SPEAKER_02 29:09

Thank you for tuning in to your weekly roar podcast. See the show notes to learn more about the topics in today's episode, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss out on the latest high-impact trends and strategies shaping the future of decentralized tech.