Ethereum Cat Herders Community, 24 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Women in Ethereum

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Ethereum Summer Camp 2020 Week 3: Women in Ethereum - https://medium.com/ethplanet/ethereum-summer-camp-2020-week-3-women-in-ethereum-45aad7201f74

A

A

Okay, it's live now.

A

Okay, hello: everyone welcome to ethereum summer camp 2020. Today is the week three of women in ethereum, and today we will talk about how the blockchain industry is rethinking diversity and inclusion, and what uh yeah wow those women builders working on.

A

Okay and what are the those women's builders working on and why have they contributed to the ecosystem? And today I want to welcome our first guest. Is isa from ave uh she's. The head of marketing at ave and ave is a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol on ethereum, and today she will introduce us more about this product and talking about more about defy, because uh nowadays, people are saying that defy is building the future of finance, and we are really curious about this. Hello issa.

B

Hi hi, thank you, danny hi. Everyone um really really happy to be here and yes happy to talk to you all about defy. um So I'm head of marketing at ave, um a protocol for decentralized finance based in london.

B

So I'll tell you a little bit about myself kind of how I got involved in the crypto space and a bit about decentralized finance and why it is the future of finance and something that will become much more popular in the mainstream in years to come, or at least we think it will. um So I got into crypto when I moved to berlin about two years ago. um I guess a bit like later to the space than some, but I was studying public policy and that's kind of the angle.

B

I learned about blockchain technology from so I started learning about like blockchain, for social good projects and going to different meetups throughout the city, um and it was just very, very intriguing and there's so many applicabilities and that's kind of how I discovered ethereum and that whole space, um which was very cool. I met someone and we actually started working on a project together.

B

It was a streetwear, blockchain and gaming project, so it was kind of authenticating and proving limited edition, streetwear fashion and then also allowing users to take the physical apparel into different, multiple um virtual gaming realms. So that was a lot of fun and then I kind of just through going to more meetups and learning a little bit more about ethereum, that's kind of how I discovered defy and um ethelens, which was ava's former name.

B

um So now, we've branded to ava that's kind of how I got involved with this project, but I think it's really really cool. So I'm excited to tell you all a bit more about d5 and what we're doing at ave.

B

um So ave was founded in 2017. um So it's one of the pioneers of the d5 space. It was previously called eathland, so decentralized finance is super cool because you can do a lot of things that you can't really do with the traditional bank. So what is defy?

B

Why is it useful? What can you do with it? So d5 works kind of like a normal bank, except there are no centralized institutions at all um everything's decentralized, so loans are automatically negotiated by smart contracts, so there's no bank involved and people ending and borrowing can be complete strangers. The whole system is completely trustless defy, doesn't require any paperwork id or background checks. So it's way faster and more efficient than the traditional financial system, because it doesn't need any middleman.

B

So by not relying on any sort of centralized institution like a bank does d5 allows people to earn much higher yields on deposits and borrow really simply and quickly, without needing to worry about credit checks and any sort of discrimination that can come along with that when taking out a loan in a traditional bank, the main advantages of d5 I'd say are also the core values of dfi um one. It makes liquidity borderless, so you can use default. You can use decentralized financial services um wherever you are in the world, 24 7.

B

As long as you have internet connection pretty much. um It's also non-custodian, so you control your money, you own it. You can use it. However, you want whenever you want, and it's also permissionless to participate, so anybody can use decentralized applications. There's none of these gatekeepers that come with the traditional financial system. So there's no kyc, there's no credit score, um and this really prevents biases there's the same rules for everyone, the smart contracts, just kind of lay out the rules of lands and they apply to everyone. The same.

B

Ave is a decentralized money market protocol on ethereum to earn interest on your deposits and borrow different crypto assets, so it's open source and non-custodial, um meaning anybody has access to the code and you control your money.

B

So it's an ecosystem of smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain, so it's completely transparent and trackable and auditable by code or auditable by anyone. um This guy in the corner here is the ave ghost. um So the ghost ave means ghost and finish our founders finish, and the ghost represents obvious focus on creating a transparent and open ecosystem for decentralized finance.

B

um So how does it work? It works kind of similar to a normal bank users can deposit into the ave market. This reserve pool of funds here and earn interest on those deposits, while they're loaned out to borrowers.

B

So this is very cool you're much higher interest rates than you would in a traditional bank, the average that the average deposit apr that you'd earn in a traditional uk savings. Account is one point: three: nine percent um in d5 and ave. This is four percent, sometimes much more than that.

B

um So users can also borrow assets on the other side, um provided that they have enough collateral and another asset to support their loan. um So the interest rates that the depositors will earn are basically determined by the market, so how much borrowing demands there is and how much liquidity is available in the pool, so the lending and borrowing is all negotiated by these smart contracts.

B

So if there's lots of liquidity available in one asset, um say, there's tons of usdc um the stable coin pegged to the us dollar. So if there's a lot of usdc available, but there's not a lot of borrowing demands, then the interest rate earned on deposits will be relatively low. um However, if all of a sudden, everyone wants to buy our usdc and there's not a whole lot of liquidity available, then the interest rate for depositors will go up. So this incentivize more this incentivizes, more depositors to put liquidity into the protocols.

B

This is kind of how the market works itself out.

B

um So the foundation of defy is these over collateralized loans. So when you borrow an asset from the ave market, for example, you need to put up more collateral in another asset than the value of the asset that you're borrowing. um So this is so that the liquidity of in the pool is protected.

B

If you can't pay back your loan or the value of your collateral falls significantly for some reason um say if your collateral's eath and the price of eat just drops, then your collateral can get liquidated to ensure the safety of the funds in the pool. um So this is cool. It gives borrowers in a way a little bit more flexibility because there's no fixed time to pay back loans. So as long as you have enough, you can keep it open.

B

um There's no set duration that you need to pay it back, um some perks for borrowers in aveo that you can switch between variable and stable interest rates at any time, which is pretty cool, um there's one type of uncollateralized loans, so loans, where you don't need any capital, you don't need to put up any capital as collateral, and these are these flash loans here.

B

um So flash loans are kind of they're designed for developers or people with more technical knowledge, but they basically allow you to borrow from the pool without needing to put up any collateral as long as you return that liquidity to the pool within one block transaction.

B

um So of course, if you don't return the liquidity to the pool, then all of your actions basically get reversed. um Undoing your transaction and undoing the whole borrower. Action.

B

Yes, so this this is the ave team. Here we ruby, avengers um qr code will take you to our telegram group if you're interested, um but yes, we're all super excited about growth in the dfi space and the possible synergies that we think defy has with the traditional financial system. um So thank you all very much, that's kind of an overview of ave and defy, um I think, it's it's a very cool space and it's definitely going to grow.

B

I think it's very, very important to have more women in crypto and especially in d5, when you're building these innovative and disruptive technologies that have the potential to like, reshape a whole financial system. um Then it needs to be built by the people who it's created, for I think um I don't think d5 should look the same as oldfy or the traditional financial system.

B

If you're trying to create a transparent, open and equitable ecosystem, then it needs to be you need to have more. You need to have diversity involved in creating it. So I think it's a really exciting space so much development in recent years, and I think it's just going to keep growing so yep happy to tell anyone more if you're interested and yes I'll open it up to questions.

B

Thank you. Isa.

A

Do you have any questions uh here on our youtube, live stream or any place.

C

Yes, I just wanted to say uh good job. It looks like quite well um on d5 pulse.

B

Yeah! Oh yes, thank you. Thank you. We're very excited.

A

Yeah, I personally have a question about uh flash loan so like both like most of the target audience of ave will be developers or, like my question is like, if I'm not I'm a non-developer, how can I get into albany.

B

Yes, um for someone without a lot of technical knowledge, you can still borrow um you just need to have some collateral, but then one of the main appeals is depositing and earning the interest because you just get much higher interest rates.

B

So if you hold any crypto or thinking about it, um using exploring different decentralized finance protocols is a really good idea, because you can really earn some very good interest rates with that um flash loans are designed for developers, but there is a tool now for a combo which kind of lets anyone execute a flashlight just like with the drag and drop method. So that's something cool to check out if you're, not a developer,.

A

Yeah, I will definitely check our ledger: yeah. Okay. So if we don't have questions, I will go to next. Okay,.

C

Okay, I had one question: actually, um okay, how like obviously d5, is getting pretty popular right now. um How have you found? uh I mean? Obviously, gas fees are always an issue, but have you found that to be a big barrier for people who are new in this space, or um is that not as big of an issue say? It was um three years ago.

B

I think it's getting to be maybe more of an issue right now, just with like how high gas feeds have been um for mike. We definitely get a lot of questions about it. I think it's hard for people to understand, sometimes that you need to have eth in your wallet to pay for gas when you're, depositing or borrowing or doing any of these transactions.

B

um So that is just something: that's definitely a barrier to onboarding, more people to define crypto um I've started onboarding, my dad, so that's been something that I've had to explain a lot. That's really cool.

C

How have you dealt with the ui and ux um three years ago was pretty bad plus the gas fees? Now I feel, like generally ui and ux is a lot better. um Have you guys found some interesting ways to kind of make that easier for for people to onboard.

B

um Whenever you're trying, if gas, is an issue or you're trying to like deposit a bar, but you don't have enough gas, I mean you always get a little pop-up. That kind of explains it to you. um But yes, I mean, I think different wallets, like argent, has done a very good job, making this like pretty seamless. Although now now people have to pay for gas and argent, um but I do think it might become more of an issue if gas prices stay this high yeah, okay,.

A

Do we have any questions? Okay, let's go to the next uh welcome puja she's from eastern world and she's. uh She will tell us more about how she uh do the uh promotion for ethereum and especially for the project management and process in improvement in ethereum good job hello.

A

D

Annie yeah, hello, everyone, so uh I am from the ethereum cathodes team. Let me just start sharing my screen.

D

D

So today uh I'm gonna talk about project management and process improvement in ethereum, but first a little bit about the ethereum cathodes.

D

We are a group of individuals working together to help with the project management in ethereum. Ethereum is a decentralized space and they- and there is a lot of scope to support the way you want to whether you are technical or non-technical.

D

So this cat herder is started with a thought of inviting participation from community from all different areas, not specifically to technical.

D

Anyone can be a cat hurdle. All you need to do is the willingness to contribute and be part of a distributed ecosystem.

D

This group was initially founded in january 2019 by hudson jameson lane and a few other members, and now it consists over a dozen of people, as you can see in the pictorial representation. It's just a group of volunteers.

D

If you're working for a client team, you're a dev management or you are just an individual contributor from the community, you are welcome to join.

D

How do we handle the challenges of a decentralized project before we get into the challenges of decentralized? We all understand when we start a project.

D

Project management is important: it's needed not only for managing the project smoothly, but also to keep it working strict in a sense like everybody's. On the same page, we are understanding where we are try to bridge the gaps between the developers and the end users when it comes to decentralized. Community challenges increases a little bit more. So uh let's try to take some help from the traditional industry.

D

Let some tips that we are trying to use in the decentralized world as well. The first one is survey report and then open communication.

D

These are the things that we use in our present scenario as well for ethereum and, let's see how we use it in the category and group cat herders group to support ethereum project management.

D

The first one is communication: when we talk about communication, it is like we need to bring everybody understand what we are doing, because ethereum is a very new technology. We need to make everybody understand like we are progressing.

D

What is the progress going on and when and how we can uh deliver a thing, so we try to communicate with the medium block we reach out to community uh by posting different uh discussion related to upgrades, and uh we we share bi-weekly updates to uh capture the information throughout the week and, yes, we try to bring them to the same page. The coordination is not among the developers, but also with different working groups of ethereum, and uh we are going to talk in in another slide more about this coordination.

D

Part community building is also an important task that we undertake. In this. We invite people from different skill set to come and support the project in whatever way they want to contribute documentation is an important area to be focused on considering that uh community will be growing and people will be coming up to try to understand and to bring them up to speed if they could go back and refer to some documents.

D

That would be convenient for them to understand where, where we are, what ech works on mostly, we are engaged heavily engaged with facilitation of network upgrade.

D

We try to connect with the development team, all the clients and get the status of their implementation and share the relevant version of the client to different stakeholders, miners wallet holders, exchanges and other people who are running ethereum node. Let them aware about the latest version of the client so that they can upgrade before ethereum mainnet is upgraded so that we minimize the chances of four, and this helps us understand the feeling of community as well, because this is decentralized. We try to bring everybody together and move forward.

D

The further tasks are availability of meeting transcripts. uh These ethereum developers have different meetings, ethereum 1.0, meeting, 2.0 implementation meeting and several other meetings. We try to create transcript and make a central repository for people to refer and understand what is the current discussion? What is the current protocol being implemented in the main network, and likewise we try to help out with different other tasks so before we get into the process, improvement part the first.

D

We would like to uh discuss about some of the terms that you may or may not have heard before uh it's eip in a pdm space. This is a very common terminology and the this acronym simply stands for ethereum improvement proposal. It's basically a design document that provides a concise technical specification of the feature for uh implementation in the ethereum mainnet. Basically, that is uh related to the upgradation of the main networks.

D

There are three basic types of eips meta, standard and informational, so meta is kind of a process guideline that is uh important in a sense that it is a mandate that has to be followed and because it is a mandate, it is important that community consensus is built up so that, if, uh if somebody is proposing any matter, if it cannot go without the consensus, we would try to avoid any kind of uh dispute or try to help out with the with the consensus part so that uh the chain can run smoothly there should not be in you know, situation can be avoided.

D

The next one is standard track. Standard track is further divided into core networking and interface uh that uh core, as it's at states like these, are basically by the names so for core. We are the core eips, which are very, very important for network upgrades network is related to all networking. Interface is for apis and all ercs. Many people may have heard about erc 20 tokens. Basically, these tokens are the native token of any other project built on ethereum network. So these are the eips.

D

I would like to uh mention the process like what are the entire process, but just want to give a high level overview, I'm not sure about the audience's part, but there is another event coming up in which we would be going to uh elaborate on these eips.

D

um The last one is informational. It's just for the information for community just to refer. It's not a mandate. It's just the guideline that is available for uh community to you know make implement it as a best practices.

D

What is eipip? uh It's a group, another group which is involved into the process management of ethereum network.

D

uh This is again coming and individuals are coming out from so many other groups, some from the client development team, some from the hard fought team. Some from the you know, uh proposals like different projects. They come up with some different kind of proposals so that they can help improve the ethereum network, so they all come together and try to improve the process of ethereum main network.

D

How do we do that in ethereum, so I have tried to picturize it into four different levels, like of this group, basically try to comprehend the challenges. What are the issues and challenges being faced in this space? It's say, for example, we consider about protocols the eips, so when we people want to suggest any eip, what do they have to do to suggest the eip? Are there any issues? Sometimes it is like some political issues like okay, fine. We are doing this, but this is not getting passed.

D

Our job as a cat hurdler, is to minimize this gap. Try to bring everybody on the same same uh space. uh Understand these things. So we do this. With the help of surveys, try to collect feedback from people and come up with a list with the issues and challenges. Then we uh brainstorm. The solution, uh like we figure, come up with uh two or three solutions: try to document the solutions, uh the best one and reach out to the ethereum core developer team, uh the client team where and try to discuss like uh these.

D

This is the issue and these are the possible solutions. Do we think that we can go ahead with this, and if it is approved, we try to enforce implementation by synchronizing with every uh team relevant team? At that point, this is just a glimpse of eip ib dashboard that states about what all are the tasks that we are currently undertaking, um and it talks about the issues that we have gathered from the ecosystem.

D

uh This is available at ethereum cat orders, eipip ketchup, repo people who are interested feel free to go there, and you can also learn about the statuses like there are some tasks that is already done, and there are in progress and uh this this is an ongoing list. We are trying to maintain it to provide the transparency to the community.

D

In the beginning I mentioned about like uh working with people, so the cathode is: they do not work alone. They are working in collaboration of so many different groups in the ecosystem.

D

So we work with the at one client team, the client developers, h2, client developers, 1559 that's an important protocol that is coming up, uh that implementers team and stateless research ethereum research team. So that's about the developer team. Then there is a next subset of uh network stakeholders. Those are exchange, mining, pool, wallets and tab developers.

D

Ethereum working group is uh there are so many ethereum working group. The catalogs are also a working group, but we are trying to connect with the rest of the other working group available in the space like the emsb, ethereum meetup, support program, eea enterprise, ethereum alliance, marketing, tao, fellowship of ethereum magician.

D

um I'm sure we have a speaker to speak about a fellowship of ethereum magician, so you would get to know more about in in later part of this, uh even and there's another group of people who are willing to join the ethereum community. They are our future developers and learners, students and possibly the end users. So we try to bridge all these things uh together, so that uh everybody on the same space, they need to know about ethereum, technical part, ethereum usability part, and we can grow up the ethereum community.

D

All of these sounds great. How can I participate?

D

I hope this is a question, maybe in a few people's mind at this point of time, like I understand that people are curious to know about so many things going in ethereum and they also want to contribute, but they do not know where to go and how actually they can start contributing.

D

So for that we recommend to join cat hurdles. It's just a group of volunteers. You can message us at getter watch uh streams.

D

You can also leave comments on github on the issues uh in that repository we try to come up with bi-weekly meetings and we try to come up with agenda if you have anything to discuss about. If you have any questions or any concerns about current protocol, that is being discussed or some improvement that is proposed for future feel free to go and leave and comment in the issues section of the agenda.

D

These are the other places that we can be reached out to just uh reach us anywhere, like you can leave a message at getter commented twitter page, and there is also an another ech onboarding form. This is basically to collect information about people who are interested if they would. Let us know what is their area of interest where they would want to contribute uh so just to connect them with the right set of people.

D

So if you are a technical person and you are interested in technical helping out with some technical people, we will let you know. uh I mean like point towards the right team that you are interested into. If you are, uh you know, into governance and other process improvement thing will connect you to that team, so just to collect some basic information and connect you with the right team.

E

So yeah, that's all from my end from thank you pooja.

A

Let us check if we have any questions.

A

Oh, we have one question uh it's asking about: what's the current state of ethereum, one and house is rancho, coming up perhaps could answer the ethereum one question.

D

I'm sorry, can you please repeat it.

A

Okay, uh it's asking about the state of ethereum one.

D

Okay, so when we talk about stage of ethereum one so idiom one has been uh performing pretty well and it it will be like we have seen so many upgrades in past. I think eight or nine upgrades the next one coming up is berlin. We are expecting that too, but before that we are under discussion of uh some uh some things on client distribution part uh as people may know that there are so many clients of ethereum, get open, ethereum, open, parrot, um parity, ethereum and there's so many others basu nethermine.

D

So we are trying to have a good mix of uh clients, because this is it is decentralized. We do not want it to be centralized around only one particular client, so we are discussing that, but uh we are uh hoping to get berlin update too. To uh keep this thing. uh Keep this chain rolling and ethereum two would be coming up soon. uh We had this discussion uh today in ethereum all coded meeting.

D

I will highly recommend people to go watch that there are uh some estimation provided by uh depths like how and when we can expect ethereum to progress is going on. We are almost on the final test net for ethereum two before it goes uh phase zero is uh live, uh that's called uh uh uh medalla and uh we hope to see the genesis very soon.

A

Thanks: uh okay, I personally have a question about the uh onboarding process of contributors, because I saw the slices that, let's say, if I'm a student and I'm also a depth developer, will I be put in which which place because yeah you know some some may be the hybrid contributors yeah. That's one of my questions. Yeah.

D

That's very interesting question.

D

uh Actually this is a very, uh very good place to begin with um this character group. I I'm a part of um I'm very happy and proud to mention that there are so many students joining us the best place to start with. If you are into technical part of it, I mean, if you're a student and we are planning to become a tab developer in future start with understanding the protocols the eip part, so the best place would be to start participating in eip ip meeting.

D

You can even watch it if you do not want to join right away, get some hang of it, and then you can probably when you think that you are comfortable, you can reach one of us and you would be included inside and your thoughts ideas are, you know, would be very helpful for us so yeah. I think that is the best place to start. If you are a student and looking to contribute.

A

Okay, thanks for your answer, I think uh we don't have any questions now on youtube. Okay, I will introduce jay. Jay is from quang stamp and quan stem is focused on blockchain security. So today uh I will invite jay to tell us more about the security part of blockchain and yeah. Tell us more about the hack things. Yes,.

C

Thank you. My name is jay. um Excuse me. um I got involved in the space pretty early on um just kind of been part of the space. I guess I I jumped in with quan stamp uh late 2017, um but I've been following.

C

You know blockchain since late 2013., um always a doge, maximalist um and uh yeah I'd say that I'm kind of all over the place in the ethereum space, but in terms of uh security, we make sure that, as to the best of our abilities, code is safe before it goes, live as we're trying to secure the decentralized internet. um So I'm going to go, I'm going to talk a little bit, I'm going to talk more d5, sure sure a little bit more on the security side of things.

C

um So I'm going to get that going here.

C

Okay, okay, let me just make sure just one.

C

Second, okay, um can oh, is it not showing yeah, it's not showing? Okay. Thank you. Is it showing now? No, it's not how about now. No.

E

C

Okay, hold on yeah keynote needs to figure their stuff out, because it is desktop one desktop two: how about that.

F

I think no, it didn't show up really.

C

Yeah: okay: let's.

F

I'm gonna just do this. How about like sharing your screen like you can share what I'm trying to do here.

A

Yes, now we can see your screen. Oh, I love your screen.

C

um Here, let me let me do it this way. It's a neon.

F

C

You're gonna: do it the ugly way we're just gonna? It's.

A

Okay, it's okay.

C

Yeah yeah, that's totally right. It's all you gotta, sometimes just gotta make lemonade with lemons right. Oh, oh, navigator: okay, okay, yep, okay, we're ready to go sorry about that! Everyone! Okay! So let's everyone can see the screen. Yes,.

A

C

Can see the screen good enough um so yeah, uh so despite the hacks, the future is still defy. In our view,.

C

Okay, let me go to the next page. I need to have the navigator. That's another problem, um okay, so so as we as uh I saw um isa uh shared earlier, that defy is really interesting and it's also the first category of applications to achieve product market fit with blockchain technology.

C

The vision is to create a decentralized financial system that offers the financial products and services seen in traditional finance, but without essential authority.

C

So currently locked in d5 is about three billion dollars, um which is enormous so word that sounds really cool, but we're going to get into a little bit of what you need to be careful of um and why this matters this metric is important, because this means that people are actively lending borrowing using derivatives using dexes in december 2019. The entire decentralized finance market was worth less than seven million dollars.

C

uh This indicates the desire for an alternative financial system, and this is real financial activity, so composability money, legos d5, is also powerful because it because of its composability, meaning that components of the system can be converted.

C

um Sorry can be connected to each other products and services within the device ecosystem can be linked together to create new products. A great example of this is our trees, which allows individuals to actually donate interest generated off their idle cryptocurrency to fund nonprofits that plant trees. In this case, um this actually leverages protocols rdi and compound.

C

Now, if we look at compound, um the d5 space was already growing quickly in 2020, but the growth exploded thanks to compounds governance. Token distribution in june before the distribution system began compound, was the second largest d5 project for total value locked in smart contracts.

C

It's lost a little bit of value recently, but as traders have migrated to compound uh to quote-unquote farm, uh it became the largest d5 project and the comp token has has the largest market cap of any d5 token. At the time of the writing here, um over 584 million in value has recently flowed into d5 projects. To take advantage of these high yields.

C

Essentially d5 farming is uh with compound, is you're, taking compound protocol to allow anyone to supply or borrow ethereum tokens through a decentralized market suppliers earn interest on any cryptocurrency supplied. The protocol and borrows pay interest each day, comp tokens are distributed to users of the protocol allocated to each market proportional to the interest occurred in that market. Incentivized liquidity known as liquidity mining, has also sometimes resulted in yields of 50 or even 100, which is really cool, but there's so many risks.

C

um The way people are getting. These yields uh are very complex by plugging projects together, sometimes with themselves. What's called re hypothecating assets, users are getting these higher yields. However, doing this can multiply financial and or smart contract risk yield farming apps heavily utilize eve composability, which increase smart contract security risk leveraging assets may lead to liquidation, and that's not fun.

C

You don't want to get liquidated and wrecked, but d5 projects are taking long are tackling long-standing problems, uh they're addressing inefficiencies in our market in our current financial system, improving financial inclusion, increasing liquidity and reducing costs, so d5 applications are widening, are widening across numerous sectors and industries.

C

Some of our uh some of the projects we're excited about are idle finance. New cool, together, zero collateral, pull together, for example, actually enables healthy alternatives to traditional lotteries by incentivizing savings through their no loss lottery, so everyone is able to pool together and someone wins, but no one loses which is really interesting.

C

There are security issues, so d5 projects are easily are easy to build powerful apps with, but that ease uh belay's potential security issues, 26 million in value, has been lost due to defy hacks in 2020 alone. Many of these projects um had vulnerabilities, or in some case, funds were stolen with the case of under collateralized loans. uh Calculating the price of an asset on chain is difficult and can be manipulated, so hackers can take advantage to create under collateral under collateralized loans.

C

uh D5 protocols thought it had enough collateral, but actually, and but it actually was handing out free money and it didn't. uh The hacker then profited by not paying back these loans.

C

um We're going to go through a few examples of these, so the uh stoterra deflationary token hack via balancer, defy liquidity provider. Balancer pool experienced a sophisticated hack where a loophole was exploited to trick the protocol into releasing 500 000 worth of tokens.

C

When the attack involved, taking out a flash loan of wrapped eth and repeatedly swapping it for deflationary token uh sta, since sta's portion of the balancer pool was now nearly empty, the price of sda had a lot had a large premium, which was then used to swap for eve, btc link and snx.

C

The attacker performed the attack until all sta pools were drained. Balancer pool is adding uh transfer fee tokens to a blacklist and reviewing the protocol.

C

Deforest hack d-force uh is a china-based defined network. Ultimately, 25 million worth of bitcoin and eth were stolen from d4 d-forces lending pools, uh lending protocol uh lend f dot me the exploit leverages uh leveraged a reentrancy attack via imbtc and its erc777 token standard. The hacker was able to increase its ability to borrow all other assets on deforest lending platform, repeatedly giving them the ability to exit all of the assets deposited in the lending application.

C

Ultimately, the hacker returned the money and the founder of d4 stated that they uh intended to redistribute them uh to their own to their rightful owners so the in the end. It was okay but still and of course, bzx hacks. Now a lot of people- a lot has been written on these, so we're just going to cover them briefly, um but there was actually two attacks um on bcx. There was a logical, a logic bug. um Essentially it was a reentrancy and an oracle attack.

C

They both ultimately use used, flash loans to create massive, buy, sell shifts in the market price on on-chain exchanges.

C

But ultimately the same outcome happened where attackers opened under collateralized loan positions on bzx and lenders ended up holding uh large bags um and yeah, so the with the oracle. There was a there's, a time differential. I believe that, um where the price article oracle was essentially not providing the correct price, so ultimately, security is super crucial for d5's continued growth. If these projects are to become the future of our monetary system, uh security will be crucial to safeguard the value managed by these apps.

C

Addressing some of the current challenges through monitoring tools, increasing transparency and insurance will help unleash device potential and set the stage for massive growth. We hope and a new you know, and it could lead to a new financial system. The opportunity here is for people to opt in to an alternative system that is transparent, secure and decentralized.

C

It's borderless and accessible. Anyone with a smartphone and internet access can use defy applications and financial services, and new markets and opportunities will change asset training across the globe. Its impact across all sectors, payments, banking lending, its impacts are across all sectors, payments, banking lending and investing, um and this may also be a future funding mechanism, along with other other funding mechanisms, defy, could prove to be useful core for future web 3 or open value-like microeconomic structures.

C

So it's so we'll see and kwon stamps role in all this is that we believe that the d5 space and what it can provide, we believe in the d5 space and what it can provide to society. We're excited to play a key part in growing this ecosystem by securing securing these innovative projects.

C

Our mission is to secure the decentralized web and, ultimately, that's what we're doing here and that's why we do what we do currently. In fact, we're actually um we've uh been what we shipped the audit for prismatic labs we audited prism, which is an eth2 uh client developed by the prismatic labs.

C

um I believe it's, the first client that was shipped um this will have uh major impacts on the d5 space, potentially lower fees for transactions um for d5 projects, uh transition to proof of stake, which will of course, uh greatly reduce um energy costs and the possible impacts on composability, but there are possible impacts on composability due to sharding, um but at the same time there are. This is a phased approach, we're just only approaching phase zero, so we have a long way to go.

C

So what's next well, in spite of these hacks, there is incredible opportunity for growth and development within the d5 space. We are still in the early days of d5, and innovative projects will continue pushing the boundaries and we hope to be there to help secure these money legos.

C

So if you'd like to learn more uh please um and learn about some of these recent hacks, we go a little bit more into depth on our blog. um You can just follow the qr code, link and it'll. Take you to our blog uh and, of course um these are to the blogs that we've written recently. Thank you very much. um Thank you.

F

Jay anyone have any questions. Yes does anyone have questions? Let me check.

A

A

I think so far no, but I personally have a question uh you just mentioned about flash loan dot hack, uh like people do flash alone. Will god hack like I'm curious about? um Can you explain more about the risk of flashlight flash loan? Sorry.

C

Well, so, in these circumstances, what was happening was um these are these are actually all like the attack and all the parameters of you know filling this letting pool and um filling that pulling out a flashlight here and all of that it was actually all executed within a single smart contract. So it's happening all at once, um so it pulls so for the oracle attack, it pulls data. You know it sees that there's a there's, a diff there's a problem with the oracle price.

C

It waits for that opportunity um and then it you know it it. uh It essentially uses um st to do that with flash loans, it's taking out a flash loan and then using that as collateral.

C

Hello, hello was checking uh correctly uh that there was. Oh, am I my connection? Okay, now it's.

F

Back, I'm not sure who's whose connection is oh.

A

Okay: okay, it's okay! Okay, you can go ahead.

C

Was uh yeah so with with flash loans? Now I believe, with bzx, it was.

A

A

F

My think the flash.

A

Hello jay. I think you are a little bit unstable for you. Oh okay,.

C

Website, I'm not sure here, let me see if I can make it better.

F

Just one second, yes, a little bit unstable, no.

C

Okay in the blogs- hello: oh there yeah are you yeah, okay,.

A

We are here yeah.

C

Okay, um yeah, I I'll try and make it quick. um The I believe what was happening is the contract itself uh wasn't checking to make sure that there was adequate um uh there. There was out of adequate collateralization, um and so it was able to sort of loop a bunch of these, um these uh I'm asking for flash flash loans and then basically putting it into the the pool and then once it has the price, uh a favorable price. It makes it.

C

You know liquidates and and leaves out you know, and then, of course, everyone is left with um a bunch of uh um uh under like completely under collateralized debt, essentially got it thanks for the explanation. Okay,.

A

With your explanation um on our blog okay, everyone definitely need to check their blog, and we have another question from youtube: uh jen is asking that uh does defy. Industry need professional finance, knowledge.

C

um I think the so you know we're lucky enough to have our business team have a lot of experience um before starting the company in various um financial sectors, and it's certainly helped um with the what we do and I think that's really allowed us to really see what's going on here very quickly.

C

um So I guess to answer that question is it you don't need it, but it certainly does uh help and there's always you know, there's a lot of parallels, um but uh you know again, this is a decentralized space and you know there there's a lot of information out there and everything can just be sort of learned um ad hoc. So yes, and no, I guess.

F

Okay, thank you, jay yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.

A

Okay, I will introduce our next guest is uh annette from ethereum ages, magicians and uh she will tell us more about uh how she got into ethereum industry as a female annette. Are you there hey everyone.

G

Hello hi. Thank you annie for such a nice introduction. um Can I share my screen. I guess no, you you.

G

Hate, I hope so. Okay, I can see it, but I'm going to post a link to my slides, so you guys won't be left out and you can share it.

G

A

Do you want me to share? I can yes, I think so that would be the best okay. Then I will share and you you just tell me next page, okay yeah. That would be the best. Thank you. Okay, wait! A minute.

A

G

See my screen: yes, okay! Thank you! So hi everyone, uh I'm annette, and I'm going to talk a little bit um about my journey in ethereum and like what it's like to be a girl in ethereum and where it begins. When you're entering this, like ethereum rabbit hole, you got the next slide. Okay, um yes, so this is a little bit about me and what I do uh mostly um even organizer and I'm I do operations for ethereum magicians and then I started working on the theory.

G

Meetup support program, which is like educational program for is there a meetup organizer and a lot of people knows me is ethereum sunshine?

G

Okay, you can swipe uh so just to tell you a little bit about the ethereum magicians. Ethereum magicians is a place for the community to discuss technical difficulties and what I am usually there, I'm administrating forum and making sure that there are no spam and sometimes I'm hanging out around the community and just chitchat and so on, and then I'm organizing events for the ethereum magicians, which is like encouraging people to come up with consensus on in-person events, can go so um no go back. Okay.

G

Okay, sorry, so uh is there a magicians is a community of individuals who are working on different parts of ethereum they're, collaborating together in teams with their working groups that are usually being called rings on a forum and just to find out more. You can go ahead to the ethereum magicians.org, where you can see the forum and you are more than welcome, to come and discuss the eyepiece go ahead.

G

So, uh just to give you a little bit insight about the ethereum meetup support program. This is mainly for meetup organizers and to the ones who want to start a meetup group and not sure where to start and like how to build their community, so just sign up to ethereum meetup support program and we have educational materials.

G

We have community of meetup organizers, where you can hang out on this car with other people and we meet on a bi-weekly calls that are virtual, like get-togethers or virtual gatherings, um so just search for ethereum tab support program on medium. That's the best way how to find out more and articles and sign up link go ahead.

G

Thank you! uh So, okay, damn.

F

G

Club yeah, actually, I was discussing with the organizers how to how to make this uh presentation, and I was told that, like probably youtube is a voice club and yes uh sometimes it is. But I think that it's a myth, because there are so many super talented girls that are in history and blockchain industry.

G

But not so many girls want to be very visible because they don't want to be assaulted because of like receiving uh the unwanted unwanted messages or like having so many dms with like not very friendly content.

G

So that's why so many girls doesn't want to be very visible or they just want to do the work and not be seen as like. You know, I'm a girl, and I wear skirt and you know like I wear pink and like hey here.

G

I am like um so that's why so many girls don't want to be anything, and also so many girls doesn't want to be in ethereum, because there are groups that are like still like womanizing and they're like oh, like this is only girls, club and no boys allowed, and they are trying to be so much like girls only, and so many girls that are especially the ones who are working in tech likes to hang out with the guys a lot, and they just don't want to be serious, something that is super unique.

G

So that's the reason why so many girls are not in this thing, you can go so how to get more girls into the ecosystem. There's another problem that I see on twitter or in general around my friends that they just don't get paid enough and that's so many companies are seeing. Girls is something that is like less and even though they have the same education or even more education than the guys. They have usually weigh with paycheck or like lots of money.

G

um So just if you want to have more girls, then like pay them equally. This is my probably best advice.

G

You can go ahead, okay, so how to start uh in ethereum as a girl, the best way or especially, the way I how I got it is I head over to medium and I was searching for ethereum as a keyword and just read articles. There are so many articles that are available and I feel like those are really good.

G

I mean there are so many bad ones, but there are so many good ones, and I think that if you will look at the ethereum from the community side- and you will see like what are people writing what's the most discussed topics, that's the best way how you can learn. Also another very awesome source of information is idhab and they have newsletters that I recommend you to subscribe, where you can keep up with what is happening with the latest updates with podcasts.

G

If you don't have time to read everything and they have so many awesome educational documents where you can read and find basically everything, but it's important everything what you need and another source of information, at least for me- is crypto trader.

G

And if you don't know where to start just um search for crypto, twitter, uh just search for crypto, twitter or head out and just search for like ethereum, follow and the list and, for example, I found this tweet that is around a year ago from ryan's scene, adams and under this tweet there are so many great uh accounts that you can follow. So just probably search for this tweet or like any other.

G

You can go ahead, so um you probably already learned something, but you don't know how to start and like where to find yourself a job or a place or how to contribute and the best way how to start in ethereum is not only learn but try to get involved in uh different groups and, for example, jolina is encrypted, started this group, which calls metagama delta and um just reach out to them, because their main goal is to support women.

G

They can give you mentorship resources, probably money, and you can learn so many uh awesome things about dao. So if you are interested about the dallas and you're a little bit worried of like boys club in metacart hill just head out over this group- and they have so many talented girls that are super happy to help out with how to start your first down and how to get involved, another great projects- yeah. Oh thank you. Another great project is uh reach out to ethereum cad tellers, who are decentralized.

G

If they're in project management, they are working with cardios. They take notes from calls and, as you heard, um paul puja's presentation, they have so many. They are working on. So many awesome things so just reach out to them. If you want to uh learn about the core protocol, just head out to ethereum magicians and hang out on a forum read what is going on there. There are so many couriers that are discussing aips and protocol changes on the theme so just head over there.

G

Otherwise, how you can get involved is um head over to meetup.com and search for keyword, ethereum in your area and find if there is some meetup happening, and I know that right now, the current situation doesn't allow us to go and meet people in person but head over there, and you can find there's a meetup group in your area and I'm pretty sure that they do some virtual meetups.

G

So you can just hang out there and probably start to chat with people, and then you will probably find out that your neighbor next door is interested in museum and ta-da, go and grab a coffee with them or something, and you have an in-person friend, because the best way how you can learn and the best way what to do in ethereum or in any other, if you have any other hobby, is to have somebody some friend that is like in person.

G

So you can like don't have to rely on virtual conversations all the time and I'm yeah I'm totally aware of the current situation, but the best way how you can start actually in exterior just head back.

F

Okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

G

Oh yeah, it's to volunteer on the conferences right now. It's not really uh possible, but you may find some event that just like write to the organizers, if they definitely need to help with something, if not in person, then I'm pretty sure that you will find something some way how you can help out with virtual meetups as well and then um read and listen and always please, girls, take notes- and this relates not only to girls. But when you are starting your career.

G

The best way how you can learn is to take notes so, for example, the way how I did it is. I started github repo and I was copy pasting there. Every link of the article and project and everything what was interesting for me and I was posting there and I made like a huge uh like gallery of links or like a notepad of links, of what I read and that's awesome and I'm pretty sure that it will be helpful for you.

G

So we can like get back and like check up on the on the articles and on the like knowledge, okay, so yeah- and this is like short story- how? I got into acm, so I started in a co-work that right now is not uh existing anymore, but I met there's some ethereum positive friends. They took me on they'll come for when I met amazing girl.

G

She was like brenda, leia, she's right now, ceo and co-founder at teller, and she tell me so many amazing ways like how to be a girl in ethereum, and she told me, like you know when you are a girl. You have to like keep your head up all the time and don't have to like uh be ashamed because you are a girl and you are on a conference and there you may be only alone in a room full of guys.

G

So this is probably my best advice that I can give you and that's the probably the best thing that I learned from brenda and volunteer so volunteer in the conferences I did the same and I was volunteering on so many conferences and events, and then I found myself a job and that's pretty much it from me. Thank you.

G

Thank you. Okay,.

A

G

A

A

Thank you for sharing your experience. Okay, oh let's check. If we have any questions on youtube.

A

Oh, I think, no, that we don't have any question and I think it's really helpful for girls who want to join ethereum uh eat, meet up or ethereum any ethereum club. Thank you.

G

Thank you so much for inviting me have a great okay.

A

Okay, then, let's move on, I think we are a little bit late today. Okay, I will move on to uh introduce alex alexis. Alexis will tell us more about the defy risk management. Hello, alexis are you there.

H

Hey yeah yeah, I'm here. Let me just share my screen.

A

Okay, sorry, everyone will be a little bit late today.

H

Okay, cool yeah, hey y'all, um so I'm gonna talk a little bit today about defy risk management, um and so, let's just dive right in okay. So there's a ton of risks that we face in d5, whether that's either volatility oracle risk, hacks and smart contracts, financial risks. There are a lot of risks, and so the question is: how do we mitigate these risks and today I'll be talking about one way to mitigate these risks and that is by using protective put options.

H

So I know that's kind of like a big financial word and so we'll talk about the definition and then we'll break it down. So a protective put option gives you the right, but not the obligation to sell an asset at a given price, which we call the strike price by a certain date called expiry.

H

So I know this is kind of a lot, um but we'll go ahead and break it down with an example so that we can really understand what's going on here.

H

Okay, so let's look at an example, let's say that the eighth price is at two hundred dollars.

H

Now I'm worried about eighth downside volatility and flash crashes, so what I can do is I can buy this protective instrument which says if eid falls below 180 before june 7th. I can still sell my eighth for a hundred and eighty dollars. So what this does for me is. It means that the maximum amount I can lose in this situation if I'm holding this instrument is twenty dollars, because eath is at 200 right now, but if eath falls say it falls to 170, then I can still get 180 for my eat.

H

So that's how I'm protected. So as we talked about before kind of mapping. This back to the definition e is the asset. We're talking about. 180 is the strike price, so the price at which I can use this protective instrument in order to get that hundred and eighty dollars from my eat. I can use this by june 7th, so that's the expiry and I have the choice to to get 180 for my eighth, which is what we call the right, but not the obligation.

H

So in our example, we talked about hey. If eath falls to 170, I can still get 180 for my eighth, but if the opposite happened and eth went up in value from 200 to 210, then I wouldn't have to exercise my option. I'm not obligated, so I could sell my eat for 210 the higher price if eath went up. This is giving me this choice if eat goes down to still get 180 for my eighth.

H

So now, how does this work on ethereum? Now that we kind of know what a protective put option is well say I come in as a protection buyer and I want to buy this kind of protection, so this protection is called a put option and we represent it on ethereum as an o token. So an option token- and this is a fungible erc20 token, just like other erc20s on ethereum, you can buy and sell it. You can send it between people.

H

So what I do is I pay a premium to a pool of protection sellers and then in return. I get this oh token, this option, and so this pool of protection sellers is simply a uniswap pool. So it's just like buying any other erc20 I'm paying this premium and in return I'm receiving this option, so you know, say I'm maybe paying like two dollars and then in return. I can get this option.

H

Okay, cool! So now that you have this option, what can you do if price falls? What does it give you? Well, there are actually two things you can do so what we've already talked about, where you can redeem a hundred and eighty dollars for your eat. That's called exercise so in in so one of the options you have is to be able to send your options and your eth to the protocol and in return, get the strike price amount of usdc so kind of mapping. This back to our example.

H

If eth fell to 170, then what I could do is send my options, my o tokens and my eats to the protocol, and in return I could get 180 usdc back. So that's one thing I can do. I can exercise, however, there's another option as well. I can also sell the o token itself. So remember this is an erc fungible token. It has a price of its own. I paid two dollars to get this o token.

H

Now what if the price of the o token itself goes up say it goes from two dollars to five dollars, because there's a lot of demand and a lot of people want protection, then what I can do is I can go to uniswap and I can just sell my o token and receive that five dollars in return.

H

So if you want to learn more about this, you can check out the links here. I'll have like little links on each slide for learning more about these particular topics, but those are two ways that you can kind of recoup any losses in the case of an eighth price fall, you can exercise or you can sell the option itself.

H

Okay, so now, who are these people who are providing protection you're the one buying protection when you're holding this o token or this option, but who's taking the other side? And so these are protection sellers and what they're doing is they're willing to take on this risk, they're willing to say? Okay, if eath falls to 170, I'm happy paying out that 180 uscc and in return I get the protection buyers eat.

H

So this, how does this protection seller sell these options?

H

What they do is they put down usdc into what we call a vault, so if you're familiar with the maker dow system, this is kind of similar um where you put where we're in maker, you put collateral into a vault to mit and die here, you're, putting this usd collateral into a vault to mint these o tokens these options.

H

So then, once you've minted them, you can sell them on uniswap and you can earn this premium so you're earning this premium by taking on the protection, buyer's risk and that's kind of how selling protection works.

H

So how are these options useful in defy? Well there's the case that we've talked about so far, which is when you are having you're you're, creating protection on each using usdc as collateral.

H

So here you're protected against volatility and eighth flash crashes and general eats downside. You could also do something like an eats die option where, instead of the collateral being usdc, the collateral is die, and so this still works for a lot of these cases here. But it also has unique properties in the dye ecosystem itself.

H

It can unlock dye liquidity because, when you exercise you're receiving dye instead of uscc, which is something that can be helpful in a case like you know, a black thursday kind of event, um you can, you can create kind of cdp protection by having an eth die option at the liquidation price of your cdp, which again lets you unlock some dye liquidity that you can burn to manage your collateralization ratio and ethdai market makers can use it as a hedge.

H

You can also create insurance for d5 projects, so the cool thing is that if you take one of these option instruments- and instead of buying an option on something like eath, you could buy an option on something like cdi or cusdc, which are just representations of dye deposits in compound or usdc deposits in compound, and so this gives you protection against both technical and financial risk.

H

Immediate claim, payouts and trustless claim and risk assessment, so there's no kind of humans involved in the process, um and so we currently have uh insurance for d5 projects live for usdc and dye deposits on compound and usdc deposits on ave, and so that's another use case for these options and then there's a ton more, that's possible. We've barely scratched the surface so far.

H

So now, for the first time you can hedge eve bitcoin or any erc20 on ethereum, and this is a generalizable options protocol when I say bitcoin, I'm talking about like some of the wrapped variants, like wbtc tv dc, et cetera, but for the first time ever you can create an option on ether any erc20 on ethereum.

H

You can create these insurance markets that we talked about. You can develop volatility oracles, you can create more advanced financial positions like spreads, strangles and straddles, and one really cool thing about options is actually just using put options which we talked about today and call options. You can construct any financial payoff in existence. So these are really powerful instruments um and there's a lot of room for developers to build here so excited to see what the ethereum community um produces with these instruments and to kind of get some more ideas about what to build.

H

You can check out this link here.

H

So if you want to get started using these protective put options to hedge your risk, while you're exploring in defy you can get started at open.co and you can also join our discord, we're always happy to answer any questions and there's a ton of community members, I'm always having discussions and then you can find more about open and more about me on twitter um yeah. So that's a little bit about d5 risk management and happy to answer any questions.

H

That's really cool! I think the.

A

Options uh is basically, a financial financial service will use option actually, but you put in the like defy world right and I think uh I'm not sure, but it's like people who have many ethereum of diet. They can use this service right.

H

Yeah protect their assets, yeah exactly it's great for people who are holding lots of eats they can hedge on chain. For the first time.

A

I will definitely try it later, but I will check the youtube question. First, okay, young have a question uh who's the best woman in ethereum. You think she will be your role model.

H

Oh, my god, that's like a really hard question. There's yeah there'll be some right yeah. I know that's especially like the ethereum community has so many amazing, like uh like female builders and and and researchers, innovators and like gosh. I I definitely I can't choose one, but what I can do is I can. I can point you to like c256 and our fireside chat series like covers a lot of really incredible women in the space. um You can look at kind of the lineups for our previous conferences.

H

Some really really amazing people and that's kind of just scratching the surface.

A

Thank you axis. Since you mentioned street 256, I will uh invite our next guest. I I had a question. Sorry. Oh sorry, okay,.

C

um I guess my question is: is you know when I think of traditional, uh put and call options? I think about how it's sort of represented on the balance sheet um in order to sort of uh justify the existence of a put or call option? um Maybe I didn't catch it, but then the the.

C

How is like the the obligation um like where the the the difference between? um What's I'm still, I still have trouble with options myself, but um the the difference between market price, of the asset um that the put and call options are based on and the actual fluctuations of the put and call options um uh who like who absorbs the the um the risk.

H

Yeah, no, that's it so just I want to just want to clarify first to make sure I'm understanding your question correctly. You're trying to understand how the underlying price of the asset um affects the price of the option.

C

No I'm I'm talking about- um I I guess like if, if we're talking about, put and call options as uh as a as a derivative, um well, it is a form of derivatives, but on as a tokenized derivative product, um then how is the risk portion of that sort of recreation? Also.

H

Setup, so you mean the risk of like the the put option contract itself like how is that priced in yes, okay, yeah, that's a really good question um yeah! So in terms of pricing right now these are completely market priced, so they're on uniswap and it's based on supply and demand. What we've seen is that the prices are actually like: they, they follow darabits prices pretty.

H

Similarly, we haven't really seen a huge risk premium for the fact that these are smart contracts, but that's definitely a really interesting point consideration that some users might price these differently, because they're based off of smart contracts, but I think it's, it really depends on the user. Some users are more scared of the custodial risk involved in sending their funds to darabit, as opposed to smart contracts being non-custodial and them having full control over their own assets.

H

um So it's kind of a different set of risk profiles based on the platform and based on the user's comfort but but yeah. To answer your question: we haven't really seen a premium ascribed to them because they are smart contracts.

H

A

Thank you. Thank you, alexis, okay, let me introduce maha. Are you there since we are mentioned about 325.6, can you explain us more about how to break into uh the space as a beginner.

I

Yeah for sure, um let me try to share my slides uh one. Second.

I

um Am I able to share my screen.

A

Or you can give me the link.

F

A

F

A

If you can, you can give me the link, I will help to share.

I

I

Actually, I think.

F

A

Yes, you are sharing now.

A

Yeah but you may need to yeah yeah. You are sharing now.

I

Cool cool, so you guys can see my screen. Is it the first slide? The show? Yes, okay, awesome, uh so hi everyone, I'm mehta um I'll, be talking about she 256, which is a non-profit that I co-founded with my friend sarah and alexis, who you just heard. um Maybe first I can introduce myself a little bit and how I got into the space.

I

So right now, I'm a software engineer working on cello um and I also like I said: co-founded g256, um but in terms of cello, um it's basically an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone and on the protocol side, there's two assets, so there's cusd, which is sell a dollar, it's a staple valued asset, that's pegged to the to usd um and then there's cello, which is the governance asset for the cellular ecosystem.

I

And then the seller protocol was originally built on top of the fork of ethereum and it's fully compatible with evm. So any dap built on top of ethereum can very easily be cloned and transported onto cello as well, um and I absolutely love the project and its mission.

I

So I encourage you guys to check out its website cello.org to check out more about it, but my talk mostly will be focused on shi256, so now I'll kind of go over how I got into the crypto space and maybe that'll help a beginner kind of um find their find their foothold.

I

um So I I was studying computer science at uc, berkeley around 2016 2017 and had the opportunity to interact with a really wonderful organization called blockchain at berkeley, so they're. Basically, an organization focused on all things, blockchain and crypto, and just brought together a wonderful community of people that have since gone on to contribute to so many projects in the ecosystem.

I

So after joining that org, I kind of just fell down the rabbit, hole and haven't really looked back since um I remember reading the bitcoin white paper and then ethereum and then just reading a bunch of blog posts and medium articles like a lot of other people in this. In this um event has have mentioned- and I think I just really got excited about the space and just couldn't see myself anywhere else, and I think what really drew me to this space was three main things I think the first one was.

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I saw an immense amount of talent pouring into the space which, for me, was a strong indicator of um you know the space uh just being an amazing place to be be a part of. If you want to do something innovative and then two I like that, you could be taken seriously regardless of your age. So again I had just started college and I realized that no one in the space has decades of experience, because you know it hasn't been around for that long, and I think because of that I think.

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As long as you know, your stuff you'll be taken very seriously and can really contribute to a huge, huge, huge extent and make a strong impact, and I think the last thing that made me stay was the fact that there's just still so much more to explore. You know the space is new, like I said, and the boundaries just haven't been explored yet, um which personally, for me got me excited, um so it wasn't really stagnating, um now I'll kind of go into sheet 256 and why we created that.

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So as a background, sheet256 is a 501c3 nonprofit that aims to increase diversity and break down barriers of entry to the blockchain space, um and the reason we started was that um so me, alexis and sarah actually had gone to an event in berkeley. It was basically like a blockchain meetup. We were learning about some new um piece of technology and we were just like super excited they're around like 50 or 60 people. There.

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We, like you, know, love the event, um but then you know after the event, when everyone's mingling and all of that um we like looked around and we realized we're like the only women in the room and so we're like that's ridiculous. We should change that. We should do something about that, um because you know. We really believe that that the blockchain space is going to change the world and change our financial and governance structures.

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So we believe that the people building these systems should represent that that diversity, that that the world has um so we decided that day that we were gonna throw a conference. So we decided to this was around 2018 in like february. I think so we decided in april of that year. We would throw a really cool conference, which was an all-female lineup with women that were already doing cool, groundbreaking research in the space, um and then we wanted the attendees to be diverse.

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Like we had high schoolers come in, that we gave them a grant to to come and listen to the speakers we had college students come, we had people in the industry come um and I think the event was a huge success. I think 300 people came, we got a lot of press and there was just clearly there was just a lot of a positive reception in the space and something like this needed to happen. um So we decided then that we were going to expand.

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um So initially we were just going to be a conference, but then that summer um we got our team. Together, we have an amazing team of around 10 to 15 people and they you know they were just like really pumped after the conference and wanted to do more. So that's when we decided to go full on into a non-profit mode and tackle a lot of different initiatives.

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um So I'll talk about some of those right now. Let me see if I can: okay cool next slide um yeah. We have a bunch of different initiatives, but I'll focus on these six right now. So one is what alexis mentioned. It's fireside chats! It's basically um an interview series.

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We have on our medium, um where we interview a bunch of really cool women in the space who are either like leading their companies, they're working on different research, they're working on different uh community and ecosystem aspects of their different protocols and projects, um and just like hearing about their experience, getting into the space about what they're working on and all of that. So if you want to check that out, uh just go to our media um for 256.

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and then we have a mentorship um initiative where we pair well. It's we're on our third year now.

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Well, we're on our second year and our third year will start in november, but basically, over the past two years, we've combined um really cool people in the space who want to be a mentor with women who are early in their career or just started kind of their blockchain journey and we're matching them together um and they basically meet once a month for a year um just to to get more exposed to the space and that's been really successful. We've made like 900 matches so far around like over 30 countries. It's pretty pretty incredible.

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How connected the blockchain space is, and then we have block change, which is an educational initiative. We piloted it last year around the bay area where we're based, but we hope to expand it and open source and make it more accessible to everyone.

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But it's basically um we go to high schools and host like an after school like lecture series around um blockchain fundamentals um and then the next initiative is a beginner's guide which we just released um about two weeks ago, and I think it basically stemmed out of like the number one question that I'm asked is like. Oh, how do I get started like blockchain sounds really cool like where do I? Where do?

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I start, and I realized like I- was making um like a list of articles and blog posts and white papers that you should read, and I was like recreating it every time for every new person that asked- and I realized this should just be like there- should just be like one source of truth. So we released this beginner's guide. You can access it at c256.org, guide, g-u-I-d-e um and it's basically a really simple three-pager. That goes into like every niche of like what we consider to be the most important part of the crypto space.

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So that's stuff, like cryptocurrencies consensus mechanisms, um different use cases, um a map of the ecosystem. Things like that. So it was awesome because I got to work with monsie from saya and women in blockchain boston and we both worked together to release this guide, and so I hope I hope some beginners find that very useful.

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And then the next initiative was a design-a-thon. So, basically, in 2019, we piloted this concept with the idea to lower the barrier of a traditional hackathon where coding is a prerequisite um and we initially and then we wanted to make it basically about um designing a solution to a problem we faced in the blockchain space. So what we did is we brought 30 middle schoolers um um to a venue and asked them to design a better experience for teens who had received their first cryptocurrency wallet instead of like a credit card.

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And so what was amazing was that these children had never heard of blockchains barely anything about technology in general, like they were so young and they had never used something like figma and other design tools. But after like a one-hour intro to blockchain fundamentals and a quick boot camp onto like design, thinking, principles and also like a quick tutorial on figma.

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We gave them like eight hours to hack and these students had not only identified real problems in the space, but had also attempted in creating actual solutions through figma prototypes, and they were using words like like multisig, wallets and seed phrases, and it was just absolutely incredible, and I think this entire experience showed me the immense power that young minds and new people possess, and if they're, given the right guidance and resources, they could really innovate in the space um at a level of creativity. That's just unmatched, I think, by on other generations.

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um So if you're interested in seeing their their final products, we um have a great tweet thread and a great medium post, explaining all of that so again just check out our medium um but yeah doing events like this. I think just like really inspired me to um do more for the space and realize that there's a lot of different ways that people can contribute like you don't. First of all, you don't just have to be an engineer you.

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I think people are really scared, because the blockchain space sounds like a super super technical space which it is, but I think there's just it's it's very multi-disciplinary, so you can really contribute in any way that you want in any capacity that you want, and I think showing people. The importance of that um is is really important to get more people involved in the space. um The last thing I want to discuss is the future of blockchain study, um so this is new.

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It hasn't been released yet, but basically, the sheet256 team is trying to put together a study of really trying to understand what the ecosystem looks like right now, um and so we sent out this survey, which you can take I'll link it afterwards to all the attendees. But um you can take this study to if you're, already working in the space and what we're trying to do is take a data-driven approach to all of our initiatives and really trying to understand like where the space is falling short and where our shortcomings are.

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In terms of why there's like this huge lack of diversity in the space, um and so what we aim to do is around end of september. uh C256 will release this feature of blockchain study based on the research that we've done through the the stat.

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The survey, as well as like uh research, we've done from talking to like a lot of our company partners, um and we aim to use this data to map out the ecosystem and understand like what initiatives that we want to prioritize and how the space can be better and like how we can be more inclusive. Basically.

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um So, if you're interested in learning more about that check out, she256.org study, s-t-u-d-I um and then one last thing I want to plug, is we also just launched a job board beta, so if you're interested in kind of working in the blockchain space, and also talking to other companies in the space check that out? um So if you go on our medium there's a post about about the study um but yeah, that's mainly everything.

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I had to talk about about g256, but if you had any questions like feel free to ping us on email or on our social media, we're really active on on twitter um and instagram, uh but also happy to take any questions right now.

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A

I think that's like after lesson this. I will definitely want to join, join the group. Okay, I have a question from you too, is esse asking that uh for the mentorship program, uh do you planning to like organizing a one-on-one like workshop, like we have ethereum one on one for like telling people how to build depth from scratch?.

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Yeah so like I mentioned, we have the blockchain track, which is like our education initiative and we're always looking to grow that so if people are interested in building out contact uh like um content for that we're super interested in working with them. So right now we have like a high level like intro to blockchain fundamentals in general, so it's more about like the blockchain space, the underlying like technologies, and things like that. So we have a lecture for that, but we're super down to like open up our resources.

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So we've done quite a few webinars as well. That's going into that block change initiative, so one was around like the d5 space. Another was around onboarding to bitcoin and we'd love to do something like um you know, ethereum 101. So if anyone is interested in doing that with us, like, let us know we're super down to collaborate and in terms of like the mentorship program, I think that same person asked to say more about that.

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um So how it works is every november we send out a form of people asking to be like um mentees or mentors and then based on their interests and like first like what what they're interested in studying more in the blockchain space and also like what niche they want to be a part of we pair them together.

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um And then it's like it's pretty low touch like from there. The the pairs kind of do everything and we've had some amazing results. So we had one mentor mentee pair, who ended up like building a company together, which was super.

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um We had a couple others just like really get involved in the space and start building out their own projects, and I think the main idea here is to really bring people together in the space and provide a new avenue of um like another into the space and really understand from like a really intimate level like how the space works and learn from um existing people.

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And I think a lot of people in the space have reached out to us and told us that they're just very down to mentor people, but they don't really have a platform to do that in. So this gives some structure to that, um and so previously it was just for like women in the space, but in our third iteration, which will launch in november um we're hoping to open it up to like just a broader range of underrepresented minorities.

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um So yeah look out, look out for that and if you're interested in ever mentoring just check out our website. If you go to 56.org mentorship, you can join the waitlist, um but yeah.

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Thank you. I have one last question: was the mentorship program will be virtually or like in the future, will be offline program? Yeah.

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It's actually always even before covet. It's actually always been online, just because we like we took a geographic uh location into account, but we indexed primarily on like interest and goals. So a lot of our pairings were actually like across distances and, like I said, there were like over 30 35 countries represented so people from all around the world are like mentoring and being mentored by people, and so the the thing was always um pretty pretty remote.

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If the people were in the same area, though they could feel free to like meet up on their own, um but yeah for the most part, it was remote and done through, like zoom calls. Okay.

A

Thank you maha. I think we have uh finished our sessions today and thank you for all to stay so late. I think we've left a lot of time. Yeah.

D

Okay, thank you so much for moderating it. It was really a nice sesame session. Listening all the wonderful women from ethereum space, okay,.

J

Thank you, everybody for joining us today. Okay, thank you. So much bye.

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