NEAR NEARCON | 2022, 13 Sep 2022

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From YouTube: NEARCON 2022 | Nightshade Stage - Day 2

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Check out all the talks of #NEARCON Nightshade Stage Day 2 with the timestamps below 🔽

00:00 - Beginning | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
00:20 - Reg and Compliance: Crypto Legal Eagles on What Not to Do | Bert Stemmler - Open Web Collective, Christian Hitz - digital:sherpas, Joshua Ashley Klayman - Linklaters LLP, Stephen Palley - Brown Rudnick, Marc Goldich - Proximity | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
31:08 - Recruiting and Retention in a Bear | Ali Paul & Caroline Lo - TrueSearch | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
49:20 - How to Bring Sustainability to Blockchain | Marc Johnson - Protocol Labs, Fred Fournier - Open Forest Protocol, Phil Fogel - Flowcarbon, Rim Berjack - Proximity, Open Forest Protocol | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
01:20:14 - Calimero on Why Private Sharding Will Get Businesses On-Chain | Sandi Fatic - Calimero | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
01:32:04 - The Future of NEAR Wallets | Illia Polosukhin - NEAR Procotol, Jane Wang - Pagoda, Cameron Dennis - Banyan Collective | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
02:02:06 - The Non-Fungible Stack: What's Next in NFT Technology | Daniil Mazurin - Apollo42, Donald Santoro - NearNauts / AstroVerse, Henry Tafolla - Cheddar, Marcus Ribiero - NEAR Foundation | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
02:27:06 - Breaking Up the Studios: How Web3 Is Disrupting Hollywood | Austin Worrell & Daril Fannin - Kinoapp.xyz | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
02:49:03 - DAO Team: How SailGP is Evolving Sports Ownership | Jordan Gray - AstroDAO, Tod Reynolds - SailGP, Chris Ghent - NEAR Foundation | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
03:15:23 - Breaking the Hype Cycle: How to Think Long-Term | Ashley Tyson - Hypersphere Ventures, Paul Veradittakit - Pantera Capital, Maria Shen - Electric Capital, Ran Neuner - Crypto Banter | MC: Laurence Lewandowska
03:44:41 - Ecosystem Pitchfest | Maria Shen - Electric Capital, Paul Veradittakit - Pantera Capital, Zaven Nahapetyan - Niche, Cox Zhang - Connect3, Polina Aladina - OnMachina, Austin Worrell - kinoapp.xyz, Stanley He - CornerstoneDAO, Igor Kaufman - WOMBI, Caroline Hughes - Lifetise, Jon Hook - Play Ember, Nikita Buzov - Solace, Alex Agureev - DN Capital
03:47:15 - Funding Core Vision
03:50:21 - Onmachina
03:58:50 - Perk
04:05:20 - Drew Kirchhoff - Connect 3
04:13:40 - Grants program mission
04:16:50 - Austin & Daril - Kino
04:28:14 - Edward Bramanti - Odyssey
04:35:12 - Nikita Buzov - Solace Finance
04:47:57 - Acurast
04:55:33 - Caroline Hughes - Lifetise
05:03:10 - Stanley He - Cornerstone DAO
05:10:15 - External Funding Overview
05:12:35 - Benjamin Mariano - Vanguard Demo
05:20:22 - Igor Kaufman - WOMBI
05:28:22 - Jon Hook - playEmber
05:37:53 - Christopher Gulczynski & Zaven Nahapetyan - Niche

Join NEAR's community:
Website: https://near.org/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nearprotocol/
Discord: https://near.chat/
Medium: https://medium.com/nearprotocol
Blog: https://near.org/blog/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEARProtocol
GitHub: https://github.com/near https://github.com/nearprotocol
Dev Docs: https://docs.near.org/
Create a wallet: https://wallet.near.org/create
Apps on NEAR: https://awesomenear.com/
Learn to Build On NEAR: https://www.near.university/
Grants & Funding: https://near.org/grants/
#Blockchain #FutureisNEAR #NEAR #nearprotocol
#nft #dao

A

Good morning, everyone welcome to day two of nerdcon and the nightshade stage. We have plenty of great content for you today here. Additionally, please go and check out all of the booths. The gamers lounge and today is the launch of sweatcoin.

A

So don't forget to get those steps in throughout the day and now early morning for regulatory and compliance topic. But here we are. We have a panel of regulatory and compliance crypto legal eagles on what not to do, and our moderator for today is mark goldage from proximity.

B

That vacuum is, uh can you hear me.

C

Okay, wonderful! Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm really excited for this panel. We have some very distinguished crypto lawyers. Here we have christian hits from digital sherpas. We have josh clayman from link ladders. We have stephen paley from brown rudnick now and we have bert stemler from the open web collective.

C

As you can see, we're going to talk today a little bit about regulatory and compliance issues and what not to do what I'll say. First is, although we will talk a little bit about what not to do, there's a disclaimer that, although we're all lawyers, we're not your lawyers, so it's not legal advice, but let's have some fun and talk about some pretty interesting issues. First, um that are throughout crypto industry right now and then we can move on to some some of those open-ended questions um that I know the builders are interested in.

C

So you know, probably the most interesting regulatory development of the last few months was the listing of tornado cash on the sdn list by ofac. um You know this really had a big impact on the crypto industry in general, and I'm wondering um what the thoughts of this panel are on that, um and you know what are some of the implications of the tornado cache being listed and, in particular what was different about this was that the smart contract itself and not just wallets, were listed on the sdn list.

C

So uh I'll start with you stephen on on your thoughts about this, this development and then see what the rest of the panel is thinking as well.

B

I mean I'm not incredibly surprised. I think that um ofac looked at this um looked at the use of tornado cash and um undertook its analysis from that basically looked at it and thought this is something that's being used by north korea to um launder money, uh we're going to we're going to list it, and the thing that's interesting about it. Of course, is we know that bitcoin addresses have been listed in the past this. This is different than a bitcoin address.

B

In that it's not static right, it's dynamic, it can perform functions, so I think the interesting question will be. I know that there are some challenges in the offing, whether or not listing a piece of software, as opposed to a particular wallet address or a particular personal instrumentality is within the remit of ofac's statutory authority tbd, but I think that's one of the issues that we're going to see litigated um in the future. That's great.

C

Now josh, um for you, you know, I'm wondering: do you think that ofac, when they listed the underlying smart contract here in the tornado, cache um the tornado cash smart contract that that was intentional or or do you think that this was a matter of the regulators not being educated on what exactly they were doing? In the past we've had, as as steven mentioned, we've had uh wallets, bitcoin wallets and various different types of wallets being listed on sdn, but certainly not underlying smart contracts was this. Was this intentional.

D

So I don't know whether it was intentional. I mean it's anyone's guess unless you're at olfac. I do think, though, that regulators are in a tough position with this right, because if you look, I mean the case that coinbase is funding right. The way they've characterized. It is look this having the smart contract be sanctioned. You know it's not a person, it's not property right. So how can you do this?

D

Well, if you look at what the sec has done in the past, moving like changing to a different regulator, if you think back to ether delta right in that instance, they actually had an enforcement action against the writer of the smart contract, zachary coburn right so here I mean I can see why it could be that they don't understand, but it could also be. I mean just to take the opposite position to say like. Why are you doing this? The the basically the benefits of privacy?

D

Don't outweigh the possibility that you're laundering, money or financing terrorists- and we just want this thing gone right. So I think there's lots of different ways that it you could analyze it.

C

Right- and it might be case the case that they also knew that there's no one to really challenge this in the case of the underlying smart contract and and to see whether uh it chills the industry. um So I think that that's that's an issue that we've we've all been wondering. um I don't think anyone really knows, except for those working with the regulators and ofac itself, uh whether it was intentional or not. But you know I'm wondering christian your thoughts on that. It was.

E

Not intentional, it was a mistake, um it is the challenge, as you mentioned, that if you do not know who have has written or has placed the contract, it is the law that you have to go after this person who has written the contract and software never can be liable on on things. That's been done with that, so you're not going to sue a car company because the robber used the car so- and this was a mistake and uh can be corrected.

C

All right: well, I guess we'll find out because um I'm sure so you're all aware coinbase is funding a litigation to challenge this particular action. So I guess we'll find out if it was a mistake or not depending on the defense.

E

I think, basically, if we talk about education and shared domain knowledge about crypto and how we can regulate something, there is still a piece missing that on on the regulator, side, there is knowledge, but it is not widespread and routines that cope for existing regulation topics are not coping with uh crypto topics so they're there. The best answer is to go with with with education yeah. On the other hand, people who write contracts on on the developer side, they need to think that it's not a free market, they need to think someday.

E

There will be a regulation and they have to keep in mind that regulation will take place and for for creators, this is a very, very big message. Think of building blocks. That brings rules into your contracts right and so.

C

You know you raise a great point. I mean whether or not it's intentional just setting that aside. I think it is an opportunity for education and policy work to be done, which I think we probably all agree is- is much needed, uh bert working in the house, um I'm wondering what your thoughts are about the implications of of this particular action um on projects both in the united states and abroad, and um you know what international crypto companies should be thinking about.

C

Do they need u.s council and what are projects um considering now that this has has occurred. Sure.

F

uh Yeah, I do think it.

F

It impacts the whole um the whole industry and projects, whether they're, us or or non-us, and um you know it's it's one of those things, as you mentioned, there's just a a a rippling chilling effect that goes through uh all projects, and uh it really, uh you know it has the intended effect uh of of shutting it down whether they knew that they were stepping out of line, or it was very intentional and they knew exactly what they were doing uh and so it it is a it's a it's one of those gray areas, and I think we all know that that crypto is extremely dynamic and uh you know uh just developing a on a day-to-day basis.

F

So as as we think about how to advise projects, you know my view is you you have to come at it from a risk management. Point of view that your your council is your tool to to manage risk, and you know saying whether it's explicitly right or explicitly wrong to interact with a certain smart contract or an account. That's so many steps removed from a smart contract is, is really up to the user in the project and a real weighing of of the risk that people are willing to assume.

F

So I I do think it's it's important to to use counsel and to use you know a lot of younger projects. Don't have in-house counsel, and so they rely on outside counsel, but to help them weigh the risk and to help them. You know make a decision, because the last thing that we want as an industry is to avoid you know to have projects fully put on the brakes because they are uncertain about what to do so.

F

You know we encourage them to to move forward and to build and to you know, try to use their council as a as a risk mitigation sort of strategy.

B

I wanted to add something to that, which is that I mean there's a saying that lawyers have, which is bad facts, make bad law and the issue here. It's actually not the first time in crypto we've seen bad facts. Bitcoin initially was presented as something that could only be used by criminals um and it's become, and obviously that's not true. Its use has become normalized, it's not illegal and I think that's going to be the same challenge with placing uh software on the stn list.

B

I do believe it was completely deliberate and intentional ofac is staffed by people who are smart. They understand crypto. The question will be in the litigation reframing it and saying. No. No, no! You don't understand. This is neutral technology. What you're doing is you're censoring speech and ofac is going to come back and it's going to say: north korea, terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, so they're going to be conflicting narratives.

B

But again I don't think it's not like all hope is lost, and this is not the first time as an industry that we faced this issue and josh, I'm sorry. I I stepped on you you're about to speak.

D

No, no, no, not at all. No, I agree with what you said. I also think you know thinking forward about okay, say this stays in place. Right, say the lawsuit's unsuccessful.

D

I mean what other steps could be developed so that this is workable. I mean if someone dusts you, what do you do like? I've heard suggestions about perhaps creating a burn wallet or something like that, so you can get rid of that, but we need solutions and I think that's one of the the challenges is and it's a challenge for regulators and it's a challenge for the industry: the more enforcement regulation by enforcement. You have the more places where it just doesn't line up at the end and you need a path forward.

C

So for builders who are in their audience, who may be running front ends or they have a part of the call that they're working on and they're going to need some type of a front end for users to actually interact with it. What should they be thinking about- and you know, is there a danger here of over compliance or is the danger under compliance and really as outside counsel? You know, how do you look at that josh um and then, and then we can see what the the inside council thought is with chris.

D

So in general- and I think this might not always be the most popular thing to say, but I think- and I I do think- that this plays into the whole ofac ruling as well. Is projects need to do kycaml on users they have to right and it's coming from multiple direct directions. They should be doing that. I believe I know it's an unpopular view to many, but I think that that's an important step to build in that capability. I do think that sometimes may help you avoid some of the problems down the line.

B

Or I mean the alternative: is this don't build a front end? That's the point of regulatory risk and failure build a protocol deploy it. Let other people build the front end build the front end. It's kind of it's a risk management question create an sdk, create, create an api, create software that someone can just have on their phone. If you do that, and there's no centralized database, then you're just putting up software on github there's a financial implication. Obviously, but if you want to build something, that's quote unquote, truly decentralized.

B

Do that don't have a front end, I will tell you um without going into too much detail.

B

Regulators in the united states are skeptical of the idea. Well, I just I happen to deploy this protocol and I just happen to have this front end and they take the view.

B

The ones that I've spoken with in the enforcement context seem to take the view that the front end is even if the protocol is on the blockchain, they see the front end in some cases as being an exchange, as that term is defined under um the uh the exchange act. So if.

C

B

To be decentralized, be decentralized.

C

I know that I know that some argue that um front ends are just speech. Front ends aren't actually interacting with the underlying protocol. I I personally think that um a decentralized front end is the technological grail and that for any builders in the room who can come up with that? That is the grail that this uh this industry needs right now.

C

What's your thought, chris.

E

We talk about different speeds.

E

If you look at mika as a regulatory framework for europe, this took 10 years to get ready for launch and will be in in power if everything goes well in 2024.

E

uh in crypto, one year is ten years, so it's a quite different speed and so for for for builders, um you definitely not over regulated and should not be over regulated but keep on doing the stuff and bring it to production, but keep also in mind that you need to think about regulatory frameworks. You need to think about. How can I build in regulatory rules also if they are not there and skipping?

E

These thoughts is, is a big failure, because afterwards, it's difficult to to fix the architecture to uh to bring in the regulatory um regulatory duties as they occur.

C

As early as possible, as.

E

Early as possible, yeah.

C

That makes sense, uh you know, and another hot topic that you know, I think is pretty interesting. That's happened in in the industry recently is we've we've seen a slew of insider trading cases. um This is, uh I think, the first one was uh earlier in the summer with openc, and then there was one more recently with coinbase dealing with employees who used what we refer to as mnpi and trading on that information or sharing that information.

C

I I saw in the news the other day that uh one of the defendants in the coinbase case um just pled guilty, and you know I'm wondering what the panel thinks about the implications of this and then um with regard to insider trading in crypto and then what you counsel, your clients and how you counsel them on best practices with regard to mnpi and for for the audience here. If one of you wants to take the lead on what mnpi is.

D

It's material, non-public information right, so it's things that you know about. What's going on that the public doesn't know and that could have an effect on their willingness to invest or purchase or or move forward, it's material. So it's not just something minor.

B

And so I mean I deal with this frequently with clients. What's interesting about the coinbase insider trading case is that the concept of trading on insider trade um inside information is comes out of securities laws, so we have clients who the position that they're taking and hopefully it's correct- is that they're not creating security.

B

So the issue is, if you create an insider trading policy, what are you creating that, for my view, is that it's unethical and it's wrong to use information that you have about an asset that is material that is significant to your advantage, if you're going to be, if you're going to be distributing it for sale on secondary markets. So there's an ethics issue in the united states too. Even if something isn't a security, the question is: is it wire fraud and that's what the prosecution is going after these folks at coinbase force?

B

So my view is um I mean taking myself as an example. I don't actively trade crypto, and one of the reasons I don't do it is because I know too much and I would never want someone to accuse me of trading on information that I've gotten from a client. I think you have to look at it both from a straight legal standpoint, and you also have to look at it from an ethical standpoint.

B

You know that it's wrong to use material inside information that you have to trade against the public, and I think that it's worth having a policy that reflects that, whether or not your assets are securities or commodities or something else.

D

And I think that's actually what the gentleman who pled guilty said. Essentially, he he pled guilty to wire fraud right, but he said I knew what I was doing was wrong. Essentially, I still don't think it was a security, that's what he said um paraphrasing, but but yeah and the open seat cases has shown it doesn't need to be a security. They don't need to allege it. Of course.

D

It's interesting that they're styling it as insider trading yeah when that's very securities law linked phrase, but I think in terms of what for clients what I often advise again, not legal advice, but is, if you have material non-public information right, say you know, something's gonna happen a big project say you are hypothetically a swiss foundation right and you have to give grants to different folks, and you know who you're going to give grants to batching that communication.

D

So it's not done with a view to pumping the price or to having an effect just having regular batched communications, just like a public company in many ways. I think that that is that's an important step um and really monitoring your your colleagues. Your employees, having people be educated about this, having potentially quiet periods, if you're doing a capital raise because think about it, the the social media, it's everywhere right and there are things that you may be very excited about, something that's going to happen and it's good to get it out there.

D

But you have to be careful with that with not only what you're doing behind the scenes like. Are you going to do a big purchase, a big sale right because you know something's happening, but also just making sure that what you're doing is not? Potentially, you know trying to move the market.

C

And now you're, seeing that exchanges are um they're they're telling the public when a new listing's coming ahead of time right and do we think that that has to do with insider trading concerns.

D

Me, I think it will I I would say it would have to be case by case, um but I think if they put it out there, then they themselves can trade right right. So it doesn't become insider trading at that point, because you've disclosed that this is going to happen, everybody's theoretically, on level playing field.

D

So I mean it. It does seem like a good move to me.

F

I'm just going gonna add, uh I think the coinbase case is really interesting, because it uh it gives us a little window into what the sec's priorities are in the sense that I know they've been consistent in saying we're going to stamp out fraud where we see it. um You know, and I think this is one of those cases but then, as you know, one of the big issues that's in front of the crypto community is. Is it a security? Is it not a security? So are these unregistered securities?

F

um You know, and the the sec has also been really steadfast in their thoughts on that too, that many of these uh cryptos are securities, um but that just sort of is is noted in the case, uh and it says oh nine of these 21. I think uh tokens are securities uh and you know they didn't rush out and do nine enforcement actions against those protocols or.

B

F

Right right and, and likewise they keep threatening exchanges, saying you know you're you're, listing unregistered securities, but right they haven't. You know, really acted on that in a in a in a really. uh You know significant way, but so they just underlying the case, is this. This claim that their securities and um and that they base their claim on that, but really what they're they're shooting for in the first instance is is fraud, which is is puzzling because most of the conversation is around.

F

um What is a security and what's not but crypt I mean the sec, isn't out there filing thousands of enforcement actions against uh protocols for unregistered securities? Maybe they maybe they will, but it doesn't seem like it's at the top of the list. It's just in their talking points constantly.

C

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean uh yeah. The question is to how the sec is going about this they're attempting to set a precedent um for these particular um tokens um without setting precedent right and doing it in maybe a persuasive way and without having an actual defendant. That's going to challenge it, so um it's sort of similar to the ofac sdn listing in a way to get around. You know attacking these things head on. I think.

D

I mean, I think it's strategically brilliant of them. I I think if who is going to want to go against, I think it was said. A few years ago, coinbase has a four billion dollar war chest for regulatory defense right all the sec has to show is that one token was a security in order for a trading platform to have been violating.

D

You know the rules, so I think, to the extent that they can get it done by chipping away at perhaps um less well-funded defendants and doing it indirectly. I think ultimately, the bigger fish for them is to go after the platforms but they're setting it up. I mean.

B

It's interesting, but as a legal matter, if there's a finding in the in the wire fraud case that one of the assets is, is a security that finally won't be binding against coinbase. So there's some um there's a I'm going to give you a little uh a little uh legal jargon. It's con. It's called non-mutual offensive collaterals! Stop all! Basically, if the sec were to go after coinbase, it would not be able to use a finding in the wire fraud case against coinbase, because coinbase isn't a party to that case.

B

So they could theoretically have to litigate it multiple times. But it's a I'm sure. It's a deliberate risk because they'll be able to at least be able to show it to a judge and the judge might say that they're ignoring it, uh but you know it's hard to get a once you let it pig into the jury box. It's hard to get this it's hard to get the smell out right, that's another! Another.

D

Little legal aphorism I'll, zip it after this you know, but I I do think um it's I think there are tons and tons of enforcement actions and investigative subpoenas that are out there.

G

D

Relating to the that case, so I think we may see it coming in a lot of different ways.

H

C

Chris internationally, what are some you know, upcoming laws and regulations, mika included that the builders in the room should be thinking about how how early should uh crypto companies be engaging council, and you know, what's going to hit the industry well.

E

In europe we're very happy end of july that mika come to a stage where it's ready to launch so that these processes take so long time and uh it's it's incredible to see um how many people are talking to the same topic, how to to get these laws uh lost on um the question. What is the security? What is not a security starts there when a normal governance token can become a security and the other way around. So coins can change their role, and how can you regulate this?

E

So it is a moving target then- and I I think, as as it will launch and get enforced by using the technology, a lot will be regulated regulated by the market, so the mar and when the market kicks in a regulation is much much easier than taking nowadays rules and apply them to a technology which is completely decentralized worldwide decentralized.

E

Then we have also to to tackle the oracle problem, so a contract is deployed worldwide, but locally law needs to be enforced and applied. I think there are a very there is a huge journey for in front of us and it starts with education. It starts with a shared domain knowledge that everybody knows it's not evil. Everybody knows you need to to uh to treat this serious.

E

Not that's, not that's, not a game, and this is now changing in in the minds of of people, and things like mika is a very, very good first step that it um to be there and when we look at different countries how far they are. I would say: switzerland is a little bit a pioneer and we are proud of that, but other countries are far behind. They have to catch up, and it's not done by doing lots of law enforcement stuff. It's done by educate, regulate and get the process done.

C

So we have about a minute or two left any closing statements for the audience, anything that they they should know. Any um any advice. That's not legal advice that you want to share.

B

I mean I I would I would offer this um law and technology have have a long history of interconnection. We wouldn't have had copyright laws if we didn't have the printing press, but the printing press came first right, um so I think it's the same here. One of the frustrations will be is that law comes after, I would say, you know, be smart. Build uh get advice from people who are smart, but part of part of creating new technology is accepting a certain amount of risk. There's no way to completely de-risk a project.

B

If you do that, you won't be able to build anything great.

D

I would say just to builders out there. You may have incredibly good intentions for your technology, but it's really important still to consider the legal risks, because there are many laws out there, including you know, u.s laws, but also laws of other jurisdictions that it doesn't matter if you're not located in the u.s, and it doesn't matter. If you didn't have the intention to do something bad.

D

There is no mental component of intention required in many securities laws and other types of laws and for some violations there can be criminal penalties of different types of laws. So I would just say: keep building you know, but also you know, be careful, consult lawyers and and just yeah.

C

Well, we're all lucky to um have uh lawyers in the trenches fighting for the industry like yourselves, and I want to thank all of you for joining this panel. Thank you. Thanks.

B

Mark. Thank you.

A

Thank you for this very insightful panel and non-legal advice.

A

If you've just joined welcome, we still have a few sessions going on. I see some of you already have your sweat coin. T-Shirts be ready to walk around and use the bouncy castle later on.

A

Next up is recruiting and retention in a bear market with allie, paul and caroline lowe from true search.

I

Okay, good morning so good morning, everyone here at nircon in lisbon and hello there to everyone who watches this later on on the video recording, that's going to go out later, um so I'm caroline lowe, my colleague ali paul, and we work with a company called true search. That's us up there and we're here to talk to you today about retaining and hiring talent in a bear market.

I

I think this is our bold way of saying it's. A little grizzly out there hiring in high growth tech, talent markets has been challenging for several years. You add to that the complexity and the fascination, but the complexity around web 3 and crypto. You add the complexity and challenges presented by a bear market and it's tough and actually one of the sort of the spoilers here.

I

The sort of tldr, if you don't pay attention to the rest of our talk, is that when things are tough, it's back to basics, back to the basic principles of what you're doing what you've set out to do, what you need from your team and where you guys are going.

I

So just for context as well, we want to tell you a little bit about true search and what we do so true search is part of a talent platform from true. We have a number of different products, we're constantly innovating um there's. Currently, uh I think six products that we've shared with you up there there are actually more. There are more in incubation as well.

I

We've got a couple of really exciting betas running right now, so true search, that's where ali and I are, we are we're 10 years old, as a company, we started 10 years ago with five people in san francisco new jersey wine forward, 10 years, we've scaled to 825 people globally, with over 20 officers from san francisco to shanghai and sydney. What we're saying there is that we empathize with what you guys are either about to do or what you are already going through.

I

We understand the pains of scaling and some of the lessons that we've learned and our clients have shared with us- are sort of what we're keen to share with you today as well within the context of the current, the current market, that everyone is navigating. So just a tiny bit about some of the others. Truebridge is one of our recent launches. Lots of our clients said we need interims. This is a really fluid market. You know, permanent hiring is not the only way forward. We agreed with you all and that's why we've launched trubridge.

I

It's live in the u.s. um It's going to be live in emir and aidpack as well shortly flipping right to the other end, their true equity. We're really focused on understanding our clients and really aligning ourselves with you. um So what we've looked to do wherever we can is actually to take equity and lure fees, we're not yet taking tokens in near fees but ali, and I are going to put our foot down and make sure that that happens. So it's work in progress. So please watch this space.

I

um So just to introduce myself, I'm caroline lowe, so I'm one of the partners in the london office we've got a fabulous global team across web 3. Crypto I've been in search for about 17 years started in financial services rolled into fintech and three years ago started working with the web3 community and I feel really lucky and humbled to be working with all of you guys. This is the coolest market. I've ever worked in handy to ali.

J

That's caroline, I'm ali paul and um I work exclusively on everything we do in web 3 and crypto at true. I have a bit of a non-traditional background. I used to be a detective in the met police and during that I got interested in blockchain through evidence management systems and then from there discovered blockchain other blockchain projects, the infrastructure and just how exciting it is. So it's good to be here. um As I said, we work pretty broadly across the space. We've done a lot of work on the c5 side of things.

J

We've worked with laser bit, panda with block phi across d5 with rv avant-garde and then also now moving into a lot of the layer, one infrastructure generally near foundation, one of our biggest clients, algorand um and also gaming, as well and across all of those we work with organizations all sizes from 500 plus people to founding teams, really starting out in their basement atomic hub is a good example of that. A super small team, 10 10 people all developers, and then we build teams around that.

J

It's really great to be here, talk to you about the market today, so the state of the market right now, ultimately, the last year and a half has been an awesome time for the industry right. It's it's gone from magical internet money to now something that's a lot more accepted generally and a lot more interested there's. It is a lot more interest from people in web 2, especially wanting to move into the space.

J

That said, we're still super early and and the talent pool right now needs to grow uh a lot to reach the level of maturity that we've seen in web 2..

J

There's. Definitely greater candidate scrutiny now we're in a bear market when prices are going up in the ball. People are super ready to jump um into this exciting new space. When it's a bear.

J

Candidates are less um they're, more risk averse. They want to know more about the projects they want to know who they're going to be working with, and they want to just spend more time with the people that are going to be working with and building with the other important thing. Despite lower valuations market conditions, people are still expecting a similar comp going forward, we'll touch on comp a little bit later in.

J

In the talk, the the way to really win people over in this market right is we're in the most exciting space in the world right now and being able to attract people through clear values and and a real mission. I feel like this space has a lot more of that mission-driven focus than a lot of other companies out there and that's where you should really dial in on.

J

Ultimately, everyone wants that sense of belonging and being on that journey together.

J

A big takeaway from all of this is we're still in a candidate market, and, ultimately, you need to make sure you have the processes and structures in place to be able to optimize all of your hiring across your business.

I

Cool, so um I think we mentioned earlier on that, when times are tough, probably our best advice is to go back to basics, um that's generally in life and certainly now um recruiting and retaining are effectively two sides of the same coin or the same token, perhaps uh given right here at neocon, it's the this sort of set of new ideas and principles that we have is will help you with both and ultimately it's all wrapped up in the idea of having a winning employee value proposition um we're going to sound like we're repeating ourselves a little bit, but I think the message will be pretty clear.

I

Having that clarity of vision, mission and values is so important, um we were fortunate enough to join the change makers breakfast yesterday and we're chatting to amy the founder of bluedial. We say you know what is life like you know as founder of blue dell, and he said you know what it's like: building a bridge having the guts to walk on it.

I

At the same time, even though you have no experienced bridge architect or bridge engineer, you've got to be brave and you've got to have a very clear mission and purpose as to why you're doing it and also the values that go hand in hand that help people who come along with you on that journey.

I

When you think about that team, both the current team and the future team that you want invest in that team. That team is your absolute greatest asset. You have one or two fantastic people along for the ride with you. They will bring along other great people with them.

I

They will find that talent for you, um people see a happy thriving team who are excited to do what they're doing, even though times are tough and even though things are not quite where you want it to be, they will help you find more people and also retain that broader team that you go on to build. um It goes without saying we'll talk about compensation through this.

I

Not everyone joins or leaves because of compensation, but it sure does help the wheels go around. You have got to make sure that your compensation structure, both short and long time is long term, is always aligned with what you're doing and the exact market conditions that you're currently operating in and then to sort of wrap.

I

All of this being open-minded and looking at a diverse talent pool, it goes far beyond just being open to someone in web 2 to come into web 3 and bring what they know from there and learn everything that's new to them about web3. It is about diversity of thought.

I

It is about diversity of experience, so really go abroad, cast the net wide and then sort of drill down in terms of you know, who is actually going to be aligned with your value set and bring at least the top priority skills with them that you need, rather than a huge shopping list of skill, sets and experience.

I

So, just to go on to uh like the here and now sort of retaining in this market, I did say, there's a fair amount of repetition here um and actually one of the one of the best ceos um that I really respect in this market. I said: what did you learn about being a ceo so far, he said repetition.

I

You know once you've repeated something several times and you you think that people are bored of you. You probably still need to keep saying it again, um and you know I'm going to skip to point two there. One of the things is just over: communicate, communicate, communicate constantly to your team if you can increase the visibility as much as possible, you're, reducing the uncertainty for your team and therefore you're just helping to hold on to some of your best talent leverage, the hell out of your core values.

I

These are the things that keep people together during tough times, speaking to another ceo, the other day, and actually, when things got very tough, they actually reduced their uh the number of values they had from seven to three, and it was so clear you know by making that simplification of what was so important to them. Everyone knew what those values were so clear. I can remember them now: it was own it better together, be human.

I

You know, get done, help each other through that and be kind to your colleagues and ecosystem along the way um max out on flexibility. Point number: three: um you guys in web three you're the leaders in this. You know a lot of you started with decentralized teams. You started with complete remote workforces, but we've seen a number of web 3 groups, especially over the challenging months new this summer, really pushed that that bit further unpaid leave sabbaticals part-time work, we're hearing a lot more about fractional working now as well.

I

You might feel you need a very experienced chief marketing officer, for example, but you don't actually need them five days a week. You don't need 100 of their time. It could be hugely advantageous to you to have someone, maybe two and a half days a week and they spend the other two and a half days or more. You guys tend to work a lot, you're, passionate they're working with another business, there's not a competitor but is perhaps adjacent and actually really complementary to your work in your world.

I

So actually you could learn from what they're doing in that other role and they can bring that expertise over to your business and then back to compensation. um We've looked at web 2 and we've also looked at web 3 and a number of companies. I think pretty much. Everyone is sort of saying no do we still have the right compensation package given where token prices are or where you know current valuations are for the business there's a lot in the press with uh some very well-known companies.

I

You know sort of restating their valuation and one of the reasons to do that is to um to attract talent, but also they're, perhaps getting rid of a strike price in order to retain that talent and make sure that people are 100 incentivized from here on.

J

I'm thinking about hiring in in this market and and it's worth saying as well- everything that caroline outlined there about retaining people also carries on and creates a compounding effect for when you want to bring on new people.

J

One of the crucial things that we see.

J

Which is the difference between whether a process can take a year or a few weeks is being very clear on exactly what you need from the get-go and spending that time to really dial in on exactly what it is this person needs to do.

J

I think it's pretty clear. I imagine people have had experience with this today. Web 3 is still super early. There are a limited number of people who have actually been through the growth journey and success stories that you would traditionally look for in the web 2 market.

J

As a result, if you can dial in on exactly how important specific web3 knowledge is for this higher, you will then open yourself up to a whole wider pool of just really experienced leaders and operators in the space generally and having the structures in place to enable people who are coming in from web 2 to learn is super crucial as well convincing without selling this one. We we were speaking to a ceo the other day who, whenever he's interviewing a new candidate, will ask his team.

J

Am I buying or selling, and the truth is you're doing both all the time. It's a constant flow of back and forth of trying to determine whether this is a strong candidate and also presenting the best case for your business. The it's also worth um saying as well, despite being in a super remote world.

J

Now having that human personal connection is so important still today, it can make all the difference if you're willing to fly from singapore all the way to europe just to spend time with this new candidate and will really set you apart from other businesses in the space coming back to compensation just being transparent from the get-go about what is possible and what isn't, if you can determine that from the beginning, you'll be able to really dial in on what exactly it is that will drive um that will attract really good people uh into your business.

J

That's a lot more um or more of a fundamental level to really get people to align with what your mission truly is, which is ultimately what web3, I believe, and I'm sure everyone else does um has over traditional web 2..

J

um And finally, probably one of the most important is the long interview process is dead and what we always say is time kills deals at the end of the day.

J

The first principle that you should have when it comes to all hiring is that great candidates will have multiple offers and the longer you take to figure out that entire process, the higher chance it will be of the candidate getting snapped up by someone else.

J

J

It's going to so one final point that that we also advise that, especially when it comes to builders and developers having an amazing, vp people or cpo, can make all the difference in in in all of this and can take a lot of the burden off you as well we're going to be around the rest of the day. If anyone has any further questions, um feel free to come, say, hi, we'd, love to have a chat and enjoy the rest of the conference.

I

Yeah and just a big thank you to all the guys at near foundation to jack and your dear and everyone there we're um we feel really lucky really humbled to join nercon. We've learned a lot. We've spoken to loads of cool people, doing really great things and yeah just to follow on from ali, be great to talk to a few more people. So thank you.

A

Thank you, caroline and ali next up is sustainability, and I see that we have a number of the team of the sustainability teams. Here we have fatima zara from know your crypto, who will be moderating this panel and fred fognier from open forest protocol mark johnson from protocol labs and phil fogle from flowcarbon welcome.

K

All right, hello, everyone welcome to the sustainability.

L

The tall guy in the middle.

K

I'm in fact, not fatima but actually rim, I'm a fatima's replacement for the day, so we'll be diving into sustainability and blockchain, and we have three very fitting guests from each very prominent protocols and projects. Let's start with a round of introductions phil. If you want to start us off, who are you? What do you do and maybe, if you can give us a tldr of your project as well, for.

L

Sure uh hi everyone, I'm phil, I'm from flowcarbon um flowcarbon, is helping to build scaling solutions for the voluntary carbon market, and so we're currently focused on two areas of that one is tokenizing existing carbon credits that exist in the voluntary carbon market and bringing them on chain and also creating on-chain financing solutions for projects.

K

Okay, awesome mark.

M

Yeah sure um mark johnson, I'm an environmental solutions architect for protocol labs, focusing specifically on file queen green, which is protocol labs initiative to one make file coin verifiably sustainable, but two to build the world's best tools to measure and reduce environmental impacts.

N

I'm fred fournier, I'm the ceo of open forest protocol, which is a what we call an mrv platform for forestation projects, mrv standing for measurement reporting and verification of those projects from the ground, with a decentralized approach to validation.

N

That's what we are and what we're doing.

K

All right well, the topic today is how we are bringing sustainability to blockchain and sustainability is very much a buzzword. Now, you know has been for a while. The word's been thrown around a lot, but I'd love to hear maybe from each of our perspectives. How are we defining sustainability in each of our contacts.

M

I'm happy to kick it off: yeah uh first phil, as always, killer killer kicks. Thank you.

H

M

Have to throw that out there um and rim to your question about sustainability, you're right, it is a word that has been used. Quite a lot conjures a lot of different perceptions and generally has a few misconceptions related to it and really the the term sustainability or in a broader context. Sustainable development is more than 35 years old.

M

It was in 1987 that the former prime minister of norway grow harlem brundtland, released a report called our common future, in which he first defined sustainable development, and she coined the term as or she defined the term as sustainable development is the way to meet the basic needs of all and ex to extend to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life, and I think, 35 years later, that definition is still incredibly incredibly appropriate and I very much see refi the regenerative finance base here in web 3 as the natural technological evolution of sustainable development.

L

I don't think I can really add too much of that. That was a pretty much a perfect definition of sustainability.

L

What the real question is, how can we use blockchain to further those goals and that there are a whole bunch of different sustainability sub-goals and that each one of them has different use cases on blockchain, including things like carbon and climate, which we're all sort of focused on in the in the very immediate term, but also things like ubi and creating more opportunity for people who are not very disenfranchised.

N

Yeah, I think this is a really great discussion and definition of on sustainability. What is how do you look forward to society, for me is more on how you think of inclusion? How do you bring people in a in a society where the wealth is distributed in another way than today? So it's more decentralized, and that's uh that's, of course, what we discussed a lot here in web 3, but it's all.

N

How do we decentralize wealth, decentralized access to resources make sure that our society, our environment, will be a better place in terms of uh distributing that resources. Those resources in the future.

L

The other interesting thing about sustainability is not just about the planet today and the people on the planet today, but how do we make sure that the planet is sustainable for future generations and that the future generations have access to greater resources and greater wealth than we do today and that's a very difficult challenge to tackle and that there's a lot of you know starting to be a lot of applications in blockchain. To do that.

K

Yeah, so I think this is a really important point that when we talk about sustainability, you know often I think in this context, especially we think about climate. We think about how can we think about the environment, but it's more than that. It's a very inclusive term. We're thinking about equity, we're talking about social justice, we're talking about inclusion, distribution resources very much literally. How can we have a foreseeable sustainable future that will last for future generations, but kind of coming back to a specific climate point.

K

I think, because, especially for near near has been a carbon neutral chain from the very beginning has been offsetting its carbon emissions being a proof of stake. It has much larger energy consumption to begin with, but from the outside when we say blockchain and sustainability, a lot of people are skeptical, so I think we could. I know it's a boring question.

K

You've been getting this all the time about how much bitcoin is using up energy, but maybe we can clarify a little bit about the misconceptions when, when we say you know, aren't you just using blockchain and crypto as a gimmick? Isn't this another form of greenwashing and the real question is? Can blockchain and cryptoeconomics actually bring fundamental solutions to existing problems.

L

Yeah I mean it. Definitely can I mean, let's start with the misconception right, so proof-of-work blockchains are energy-intensive, they just absolutely are, and bitcoin is certainly the worst offender in terms of their energy usage and therefore their carbon footprint, ethereum sort of second worst offender, ideally sometime in the next couple days. That's not going to be true anymore, and if you look at the actual carbon usage in terms of megatons, when you look at a proof of stake, blockchain, it's 0.0 megatons right it. It basically becomes a rounding error in terms of energy consumption.

L

Let's not get wrong, there's still energy consumption there that should be offset, but it's not it's. Basically a meaningless amount of energy consumption.

M

Yeah, and to um add on to that, I think one of the misconceptions is that that we hear a lot is that blockchains are burning the world and things like that and I definitely agree with phil. You know. Blockchains do consume a lot of electricity, just like any other computing infrastructure. What I feel what I think people fail to recognize is that so does every other economic or form of economic activity. Right. You compare the entire web 3 space to say the global steel supply chain, global lithium, aluminum, cobalt, concrete you name it.

M

We are minuscule compared to these other forms of economic activity that really are the foundation of uh global society.

M

So when we're talking about energy consumption and sustainability, we also need to recognize we need to do much more action in those areas than we need into in web 3 to make sure that we are achieving the deep decarbonization that climate scientists say that we must achieve in a very short amount of time, and I very much believe that blockchain networks and crypto primitives have a unique opportunity to realign incentives and drive collective action towards reducing emissions.

N

Yeah, I think that's a really good and very important point to actually look at what projects are actually doing. It's not only about the infrastructure of blockchain. It's also. What are the projects on top of blockchain delivering in terms of impact, and, of course we talk about carbon. There are many other impacts that are linked to that. So it's it's.

N

It's needed to have a holistic approach and not to be focused too much on this blockchain has that many that many common emissions, it's more important to kind of have the discussion on what is what is delivered? What kind of value proposition is delivered through that blockchain through the projects of the blockchain.

K

Maybe more concretely on the question of how is it that blockchain actually can solve problems rather than just being a buzzword attached to you know a new nft project, we're now sustainable we're going to offset carbon. Could you tell us maybe through your own projects, what is the solution using blockchain or the realignment of incentives through cryptoeconomics, yet you're bringing to an existing problem now so.

L

I think to even talk about we're talking about financing and creation of carbon credits on chain to understand how those should be used. You actually have to go a step back and understand. Why are carbon credits used in the first place, and the answer is because they're used to offset someone's footprint, and so before you can offset your footprint.

L

You have to calculate your footprint, which is actually a very difficult challenge, because your footprint consists not just of the carbon the fossil fuels that you're used specifically are burning and releasing into the atmosphere, but also all of the carbon that's being released by your supply chain and so going back to that supply chain and figuring out how that supply chain is emitting.

L

Carbon is an incredibly difficult challenge that requires trusted data, and so one of the things that blockchain can solve not our project specifically, but that our project relies on is all of these other projects that are working on what's called carbon accounting and the carbon accounting is specifically of what's called the scope 3 emission, which is your downstream suppliers.

L

Emissions is an incredibly challenging problem because you're trusting your suppliers to give you valid information, so that information when stored on chain can now go into that accounting system in a really meaningful way, and so that's one of the ways where blockchain can do it. Then you come to us and we basically are helping to create and you go to other protocols that are also building primitives around carbon credits. That can allow you to take that calculation in and build it out. So I'll give I'll mention another project.

L

There's another project called menthol protocol which is being built to do the carbon accounting that exists for users on chain. So a user can basically install or use this like middleware software that just sits there and looks at the carbon footprint of a blockchain and says okay, you're responsible for this portion of it and automatically offsets on chain. That's really easy because it's all the data is available.

L

You can interact with smart contracts and it can just happen when you're talking about the steel industry, the lithium industry, the cobalt industry, it's much much harder to calculate these things. Yeah.

K

So on the data layer, there is a fundamental solution to the existing industry in terms of accounting, as you mentioned, how much carbon is being used, how much is being emitted and how much is each entity responsible for how much carbon.

M

Yeah yeah, and, to add on to that point specifically, you know filecoin and ipfs are the data, availability and storage network of web three right, um filecoin specifically launched in october of 2020, and in just you know short of two years.

M

We have scaled the network to over 18 exabytes of storage capacity, which is uh to put in context about 10 of aws about one percent of global storage capacity, there's 4, 100 storage fighters, aka small little data centers around the world that are storing data on behalf of clients and when we think about it in sustainability and decarbonization. In the context of our network, we're really focused on four main areas of activity: one on evaluating the energy use of the filecoin network itself um and through that work and happy to dive into this.

M

In a little more detail um through the the methodology that we've developed and some of the dashboards that we've developed. We are super proud to say that we think that the filecoin blockchain is the most transparent, blockchain major blockchain in the world when it comes to electricity use, because we know exactly in a very granular basis, the electricity used by all of the storage providers within our network that make up that 18x baits of storage capacity.

M

The second major area is connecting all those storage providers to renewable energy and the primary market instrument that we're using for that is renewable energy certificates, as opposed to offsets, because when you're talking about the emissions that are generated via the consumption of electricity connecting that and electricity consumption to renewable energy via wrecks is the appropriate way to mitigate and minimize those emissions.

M

uh The third primary way that we are uh decarbonizing the network is by uh developing a slew of tools and guidance documentation to help all of the 4100 storage providers decarbonize their own operations right. A lot of what we're doing now in connecting the network to renewable energy is done on behalf of uh or by protocol labs and the filecoin foundation. But it's certainly not our intent to continue to do that forever. So we are providing them the tools to continuously decarbonize their operations and baking into the protocol.

M

Some incentives to give them economic rewards for achieving deep decarbonization and then the fourth uh main area is to try to catalyze this nascent space of environmental web 3 projects and the primary ways that we're doing that is through our green grants pipeline.

M

We just launched one earlier this year with about a million dedicated to funding early stage, ideas that green grants pipeline ends at the end of this month and we'll be kicking off another one and then through events and hackathons, like our sustainable blockchain summit, um you all were there a few of you in the audience were there in paris around hcc when we held our sbs eu and then around devcon in october, we'll be running another one. Sbs lattam in bogota.

N

So yeah to bring the discussion from the carbon angle to a more sustainable angle.

N

So our approach is basically you know thinking about how the world is talking about carbon and looking at uh how you apply this, to include people in this discussion and people that need it, the most so looking at what we do in the forestation sphere, we've developed an mrv tool for the people on the ground to onboard uh this journey and to show what they do into into into forest and how they conserve and preserve and restore forest.

N

And so that's what we've developed developing and I think the the co-benefits here uh we're talking about carbon eventually, but the common benefits here is: they have access to the latest digital tools, but this enables them to basically scale the projects. When we talk about smaller projects that are not able to access the carbon finance not able to access any kind of technological tool, then suddenly they find a solution where they can onboard this. This kind of journey with everyone else and basically bring broader co-benefits to the carbon discussion.

N

So that's what basically we we provide- and I think it's very important to on on a micro level to think on how we could include the maximum people in in this kind of business evolution. And I think web3 is really the place to do that, because it's really a community-based approach and that's it's super important from for bringing sustainability on on our obviously in our businesses and in in web3.

K

As a whole, so if we kind of quickly sum up, I think there are two main points on the technology side. The blockchain as a database layer and also the tooling that you can provide with blockchain technology, actually solves problems in the industry, carbon accounting, whether it comes to mrv in deforestation sector and then there's also, I think, mark what you were touching upon about realigning incentives, incentivizing people to decarbonize through economics, and I think, that's also a financial layer.

K

That is very interesting that we can introduce because crypto economics we are able to re-strategize and re-theorize the ways that we incentivize things. I think yesterday. So we had a refi lisbon event and john from refi.

K

Dow was talking about how you know currently when we think about capitalism, it's an extractive form of finance, but now we are realigning incentives towards re, incentivizing regeneration of things, things that actually help the planet um kind of picking up on that point, could you tell us a little bit more about how each of your projects not just use blockchain technology but cryptoeconomics in order to kind of realign these incentives and how you're mobilizing capital basically to go to the right places right.

L

Yeah, so it's interesting when we talk about tokenizing straight carbon credits, there's actually no tokenomics. There is no cryptoeconomics the in fact. The general principle is to take something that is a spot commodity in the real world, so to speak and to make it a spot commodity in web 3. right and so in that sense there are no crypto economics where we step back and say in financing, and how do we create and go and finance projects?

L

We actually are looking at ways to create economic models using tokens and using additional platforms and using the benefits of multiple l1s and their ecosystems to bring their tokenomics and their incentive systems to providing a liquid deep market for carbon credits.

L

And so you know there are lots of ecosystems now that are putting a tremendous amount of capital and it's phenomenal to see, and one of the reasons why that's happening is because fundamentally, sustainability is a mass coordination problem and luckily web3 is a mess coordination tool and what you're seeing is web3, take real ownership and responsibility and saying this is a problem that we want to challenge that we want to tackle.

L

In a meaningful way- and so there is capital flowing at the end of the day where all of these coordination challenges come in is: can you make capital someone last night at the event, said something that just really resonated with me and I'm going to keep saying over and over and over again, which is that you know if we're really successful in building this regenerative financial economy five years from it might have been you who said it stealing your line here, um you know five years from now. You want someone sitting in college.

L

To not say I want to go into tech, or I want to go into banking. You want them to say. I want to go into forest preservation because that's where the money is.

K

Sure absolutely absolutely actually.

M

I just want to pick up on that point because it's really really salient right on point. um You know the united nations environmental program releases a a report every year called the emissions gap report and it evaluates the trajectory of emissions. Global emissions impairs that to policy measures around the world and that showcases exactly how far off we are or how closely we are tracking to achieving the long-term goals of the paris agreement. Maintaining a 2 degree centigrade rise in global temperatures and last year's report was aptly titled.

M

The heat is on and it definitively concluded that climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem and so to your point phil. We really need to develop some tools and bake into those tools: incentives that provide opportunities and monetary benefits to individuals that may not be interested in this space, but see it as a way to um going back to that definition of sustainable development to provide them the means for a better life and also extending that to better their life in many contexts.

N

Yeah, I think, on the token economics you at least for us, you have to put your feet in the boots of someone on the ground. So it's not about token economics, it's more about human economics or social economics. Biodiversity economics call it whatever you want, but you have to put your perspective from an outside of web3 perspective and what that means.

N

It means that you have to understand what those people needs to be included in in this discussion, maybe not like on the stage today but in our environment, and what we've done with uh with open forest protocol is basically say: okay, there are hundreds, if not thousands and hundreds of thousands projects around the world that want to do something for nature right. Okay, this is a fact. We know that for a fact, um some of those people have the opportunity to plan trees, conserve trees uh and interact with forests.

N

How do we deliver something that makes sense to them? And then you start, you know, thinking about a solution that eventually has web 3 behind, but the the real value proposition for them is deriving a tool, a technological tool to do what they are good at doing, restoring and and conserving nature. And if you provide that tool and in the background you have a web three well well designed token economics that might work, but you really have to think first about what are the needs from those people on the grounds to be onboarded.

N

And if you do that. Well, I think we have a great chance of success. There yeah.

K

I mean on that note of inclusion and tying back to the early definition of sustainability that we all agreed upon. um How are we bringing inclusion using through our projects, or maybe just in general, from your observations in the space because blockchain, you know we talk about the database layer. We talk about the financial layer, but it's also, philosophically speaking, and also, technologically speaking, there's an element of empowerment and democratization that we, I'm sure we're all very big fans of, and I wonder, within sustainability when we talk about sustainability and blockchain.

K

How are we bringing this empowerment aspect to individuals that have mostly been excluded from the space that have not had chance, like you say these forest operator operators that have been excluded from the space before? How are we bringing them in? How are we creating inclusive space um with regards to all of our projects?.

L

Yeah, so you know, when you talk about a lot of um nature-based carbon projects, they actually take place on indigenous lands and so bringing the indigenous communities capital and giving them economic opportunity that isn't related to destroying their lands, which they often have significant spiritual and cultural ties to is really important. So right now you can go throughout the amazon base and you can go to.

L

You know indonesia and lots of other places around the world, and there are offers to these indigenous tribes to come in, and you know, cut their land down to grow palm oil or to do mineral extraction or to drill oil as it's currently going on the congo basin right. All of that is, can we create an economic alternative to that where they don't have to cut their land down in order to receive economic benefit, and so that's the way that we're bringing them into this?

L

What we're trying to bring in this inclusion and by giving them the tool set, that everyone is building to make it easy for them to do that, where the tech enabled element of it is just on and available and that the capital that flows to them doesn't flow through a large number of intermediate extractionary intermediaries right.

L

So you think about some of these projects that get done they're done at the government level and by the time it trickles down to the local communities, there's almost nothing left, whereas in a web3 ecosystem, where there's a payment being given for, let's call it a carbon credit, that's being created on a patch of land and there's supposed to be x, amount of it going to each different participant in that, including the local community.

L

You can actually track that the money going from here to the local community's individual wallets is actually being traded, that traceable directly to them right.

K

Because you remove the intermediaries- and you also provide the transparency through the blockchain, exactly.

M

Yeah exactly and to that point of those extractive intermediaries. One of the challenges, I think that we all agree on is that, within the scope of the current voluntary carbon markets, those intermediaries more or less silo the data related to these projects and slow down the development in the launch of these projects.

M

I think rim, you might have said it last night, it's somewhere in the uh neighborhood of two to five years that it takes for a project to start to when it's actually delivering impact- and um you know, for our part, one of the ways that we're addressing some of those scaling issues that the voluntary carbon market space faces in this project origination cycle um is by developing a product called co2 dot storage, which enables project developers.

M

Some of you out there to specify standardized data, schemas and store them natively on file code and ipfs in a content address manner, rather than having all that data related to your tokenized carbon credit stored in those opaque and siloed legacy. Registries yeah.

K

So it's a kind of openness that I think we all agree on. That blockchain allows like it's not about fragmentizing, it's not about being able to take monopoly over the data and the assets it's about being able to open access to everyone, whether it's through the data layer, the financial layer or simply really the inclusion layer of who gets to participate exactly.

N

Yeah, I think the data point here is super important, because what we enable in this new system is that we enable people to own their data and to decide what to do with the data. If they want to be open, they want the data to be open from the projects.

N

It's their decision to do so, and of course, we are in a situation where uh not everyone is ready to onboard in a in an open kind of way, um but I think it's super important, because if we make that shift the more and more people being more transparent being more, you know open it's going to trigger that transparency. It's going to it's going to create a ripple effect eventually. uh Obviously, some countries will try to stop that. There will be.

N

You know, frictions, definitely, but I think it's it's very necessary that we try to shift this world from a very much open and transparent approach to not only data but how we actually work together around this data. Yeah.

K

Absolutely so we have about five minutes left in the panel I want to address. We are kind of talking about the ways that we are addressing the question of sustainability on blockchain, the innovation that we are bringing, but there are obviously challenges and challenges that we can't solve by ourselves, because the space is very nascent it's just getting started. We need other players to come and help us. As we said, it's a massive coordination event.

K

What are some of the challenges that maybe you or as a space we are facing and what are some of your ideas to address them?.

L

Yeah, so, what's really interesting about web 2 versus web 3 is in web 2. If you wanted to create a company that tackled this, you would have to build the entire stack yourself right. Maybe you would pay someone else for a few apis here and there and data feeds going otherwise, but in web 3, what we're doing is building a totally interoperable stack. That's built one protocol on top of another protocol on top of another protocol.

L

So just the three of us sitting up here today in not that long from now we'll have a solution that an end user can use that actually at some point in the value chain, touches all three projects and all three protocols, and on top of that, will be another protocol that actually allows for better user interface and allows for more and greater use cases.

L

So I think what we're really looking for in terms of additional things to be built is we're building a lot of the core backbone infrastructure, we're building the scaffolding, so to speak of the ecosystem. Now, what we're looking for from a lot of people? Builders in the space is to build the front end applications. What do you do with these carbon credits and these data streams and all of this storage of data that now exists that will move the industry forward and make it more accessible and more usable by others.

M

Yeah, I really couldn't agree more with that, and you know the majority of what we've talked about here and a lot of the conversations that we focus on in the refi space are focused on a specific little narrow window of carving credits, whether they're nature-based solutions or or other forms of carbon credits. But if you pair it back to that definition of sustainable development and think about the sustainable development goals, those 17 goals to achieve a better life for the global humanity right, there's 17 goals, there's 169 targets the 321 different indicators right.

M

There is a massive massive scope of work where we can develop these tools and apply them to different areas of economic activity, to promote sustainable development in all forms.

N

Yeah, you said it, the beauty of what we do is exactly lies in there. It's not only about beauty. It's about efficiency, it's about scale, so everything we are kind of putting together is going to go much faster. It's going to be more transparent than anything else we can build. I think, of course, there are challenging challenges on how we build that infrastructure. It's not necessarily easy.

N

It's not necessarily like straightforward, but I mean the perspective on how we build together in this space is enormous, and it's not something you find in in web3 or in other type of companies, and especially, we can say that you know from uh from our perspective that when you interface with companies as as much as we interface with vi leaders on our site that are not really into web through your projects, they have a very you know specific and silent approach on what they want to deliver in terms of products.

N

We also have that, but we have the perspective on delivering and connecting that product to a much broader base, and I think it's been a year of more than a year for us of development, but uh it's been a year, but the space has evolved so much in a year. You, if you look at outside of the space, how much has been done in a year. It's incomparable yeah.

K

No on that note, as we wrap up, maybe you we, I could give the stage to you guys to do a quick call to action. We were talking about having more composable parts, more building blocks, to make this space as big and as coordinated as possible to actually reach the goal of scaling climate solutions, advancing sustainability through blockchain.

K

Would you have a call to action to the audience out there yeah.

L

If you're building in the space think about all the infrastructure that we're building and what you could build on top of it, I mean I've been just inspired for years by the work of filecoin, the work of uniswap, the work of all these other big infrastructure plays. It was like, oh yeah. We have this great idea in 2017 to scale the carbon markets, but we can't do it without all this other infrastructure that was built that needed to be built first now this next layer of infrastructure is being built. What can you build? Next?

L

That's going to sit on top of it to further advance sustainability goals that are not just carbon based.

M

Yeah, that's that's amazing, um I'll plug once again sustainable blockchain summit, this event that we're running on a quarterly basis to try to bring together everybody. That's interested in these crucial topics uh to hold these conversations and move the the needle in the right direction um and really get involved. Let's uh work together to promote environmental and human flourishing, like we've never seen before,.

N

I think my call to action would be if you have an idea that is somehow linked to sustainability. You are some kind of an expert in your field.

N

Whatever the field is social impact, environmental impact, uh if you think about something that might you know change how things are built in an inclusive manner, uh I think you know come talk to us or talk to other people in that space and let's try to build together that you know the the stack that we can build here is really really wide, and there is plenty of opportunity, I'm pretty sure that um in 10 years from now, hopefully we'll be there. I know seeing this space really being really wide.

K

All right, thank you, everyone for listening and thank you to all of our panelists. Let's keep on building and for sustainability.

O

P

A

All right, thank you, fred mark and phil and, of course, rim for how to bring sustainability to blockchain, and thank you for everything you're doing to make the blockchain more sustainable.

A

Our next speaker is sandy fatigue from calimero who'll, be presenting kelly merrow and why private sharding will get business on chain.

Q

Okay, it works, works. Everybody hears me. uh First of all, thank you everybody for coming. uh I have to only 10 minutes, so I will try to explain basically what we do and why private sharding is important. Just to start uh my name is sandy. I'm the ceo of calimero and I was the first infrastructure engineer at near essentially responsible for shipping maintenance at near last year at nircon. One year ago we started thinking about ideas. How can we bring blockchain uh to the masses? So currently we have. You know we have web two.

Q

We have three web three, but the question is like: how do we build one million users into the space? How do we bring them, and essentially we are currently a bubble like we are thinking that only web 3 exists, but there's one billion users where they're waiting and, if you think about like what web 2 was red was well. That was a centralized private trusted silo custodial.

Q

So, like companies like google companies like facebook, and now we have a decentralized public, trustless enteropolis non-custodial solution, but like none of this, actually solve the problems of like how do we bring billions of users? So that's why we decided to build built. Calimero like blockchains by design are not privacy, preserving technologies. They are transparency engines. So we had problems with. You know: data availability with interoperability with all these things in web 2, but now we built the polar opposite.

Q

Essentially, we just went from one extreme to the other and that's a bit problematic because you don't want, like people were complaining in web 3 when we were starting, you know. Oh, I don't want my data to be. You know at facebook. I don't want my data, be at google, but like what we built. All your data is public. Now, like everybody, can use it so like it's even worse and that's very specifically, a problem for enterprises, so like enterprises cannot join like banks cannot join. Governments cannot join those gaming communities.

Q

They really cannot join because there's certain data, which has to be you, know, stored in a different way. So why I think, like we missed, we have to backtrace a bit from from web 3 uh to web 2.5 um and we think like how do we design the systems and, in my opinion, like there's, there is use cases where we need federated systems. So, like you know, small communities running it, governments running it consortiums running it also. We need, you know, an interaction between both public and the private.

Q

So the question is: how can a bank use public assets like ethereum like bitcoin, like others, and you know, benefit from from from from these assets like store them in a federated consortium? You know we had hyper ledger before we had corda. We had r3 all these other guys, but like they were building four governments. You know put it at the data center and never never like interact with anything.

Q

So what we wanted to build at calimera was essentially a private chart which provides you the ability to both interact with near mainnet or some other chains, for example, aurora and near and in the future. Maybe others where you know a community. An enterprise can run this private chart and then talk to other private charts, interoperable, have smart contracts between them and that's how it works. Essentially, uh I think we are you know uh the first bridge like we are going to new terms.

Q

So, like the first term, we coined in this space is a realistic bridge. I don't know if somebody claimed it already, but essentially, if you look at ethereum, we have you know arbitrary. We have optimistic roll-ups, all these other things, but first time, first time, in my opinion, like we built a bridge which works under five seconds, it's like you lock an asset. It gets transferred to the other part of the chain in five seconds. So like we use near finality, which is two seconds and then on the calimeria chart.

Q

You have two second finality and it just works. This was enabled because near is the first chain where you could actually verify signatures from the block headers it wasn't possible before now it is so we built the fastest bridge. You can breach nfts, you can bridge fungible tokens, you can do cross-contract calls from a private chart into the public and the other way around.

Q

So imagine you have and one important thing so currently we work both on aurora and near so, if you're already running our application on our near, you can easily, you know just use the same contracts use the same, sdks use near api js and just deploy on the private chart.

Q

Obviously, if you want to do you know bridges and stuff, we also are building a small sdk which will help you do that in rust, javascript or solidity.

Q

What else is like a big problem, I believe in the space like you know, we don't have enough infrastructure, we have enough builders, but people don't want to manage infrastructure. It's a pain. I've worked as an infrastructure engineer in the security for many years, and people hate infrastructure. You know you're building a product, you're, a startup you want to. You don't want to focus about. You know how do I run all my notes? Where are they running all this other stuff where's, my api where's, my indexer graphql endpoint, it's it's exhausting!

Q

So essentially we build a dashboard where you can, with one click, deploy a private chart, you get an indexer rolling, you get an rpc node rolling, you have you have a marketplace where you can just deploy applications for like rocket or nfts fungible tokens like few buttons so and that's also like for, for you know both enterprises and startups.

Q

uh On top of that, like we want to build a calimero ecosystem like we really wanna target different industry, obviously there's you know, enterprises and governments. There's many use cases there, but there's also many use cases in gaming. For example, like you, you don't why you why gamers hate web3, because they don't want to pay to get into web3, why social doesn't work on web3, because people don't want to pay to get in. Imagine like if facebook you know 15 years ago said everybody has to be paying like to start a facebook account.

Q

Nobody would use it like. We would be using. I don't know facebook two or something um and that's a problem. Essentially, they took that they like it. It's the same same thing. Actually, you know like before you didn't have cloud.

Q

You had servers, but facebook had to you know, put the service into data x um and then, essentially, you know pay for the hardware and the like the the things that were running and you know find another way to monetize and that what type of monetization was essentially ads. um Now with web3, we have you know composability, we have interoperability, we have smart contracts, we can find better ways to monetize.

Q

Even like you know, if you don't want to use that just pay for subscription services- and you will not have ads um then on top of that dows. Those are very very good example because in the dows um usually like how it is imagine you run an investment dollar. For example, um you want to make decisions, you want to hold assets, you want to have accounting you. Maybe you want to pay taxes.

Q

This can all be managed by a smart contract, but you don't want it to be public, so you could, you know, do cross-cut cross-contract chart calls or just bridge the assets inside inside the private chart, and it should work. For example, you can have a smart contract where you get inbound uh payments every time when the payment gets in. You have a smart con like the smart contract relays, 20 for tax, because you will be regulated stuff.

Q

Will you only need to have a digital cooperative automatically the money comes in, goes into a tax, smart contract or gets it immediately paid afterwards? If you want to have budgets inside the organization inside the dao, you should be able to build smart contracts for that as well. Social, like you, could have social graphs. You know refederated run by consortiums like minecraft is a good example. You know we have.

Q

People were running minecraft servers for many years and like nothing, prevents us to run federated networks so like this is a new term uh proof of community. So we had proof of authority. We had proof of stake. We had proof of uh work, proof of history and, like the new term, I hopefully we came up with is proof of community. So if you have a community of hundred people thousand people as long as two thirds of that community is honest, the system will work so like you can build better models.

Q

In my opinion, and for example, if you have you know, assets which are not really that worth. For example, you know gaming, you have one dollar, nfts and stuff, and even if the community colludes to steal your one dollar, nfts, probably you're not gonna, be that mad and they don't have the incentive to do so. So what kalimera wants to be so calamero has this bridge between calimero and near calimero and aurora, but also calimero to calimero shards? Could they they can work together?

Q

So we want to be, if you think, about the internet, what the internet was. You know all this open data, then you had intranets, but internets could talk to the internet through you know: firewalls routers modems, whatever that's what kalimera wants to be the intranet of the web3 internet um for our future? So we have a test net running people. If you're interested, we can create you an account. um We are launching maintenance soon in a month, so we just need to finalize security audits. Also, we are building calmer sdks both for connectors.

Q

So if you want to build approver for your use case, you can do that. We'll have some public apis near contract sdks and you know all the ecosystem tools work near wall that is integrated. So even if your users already have a new wallet, they can just sync their accounts. Sync, their file, full access, keys or function access skills is inside the shard and interact. Also, we have a bunch of partner, integrations already in process or find being finalized.

Q

For example, aurora rocket is coming to a calimero to have streaming payments inside of calimeroshard astrodow will be integrating private charts, so you will be able to spin up private charts for your dao. My wallet is integrated. Spin finance is trying to build the fastest decentralized exchange on top of calimero and also what we want to say.

Q

Like some people to come to me and say sandy, it's it's a permission network, it doesn't work, so I believe that there is ways to have a private permission network with fraud, proofs using intel, hdx processors to validate encrypted state and then obviously we'll have a bigger delay between you know transferring assets. But you can build systems where you know. For example, some external validator runs state transitions on.

Q

On top of the uh state, I mean validate the state transition and if there is a you know a issue, for example, if coinbase run the private chart uh and they did an invalid state transition by themselves, external validators, the community, could you know get that or the sec could run it or I don't know, whoever wants to run it and then punish them, slash them or you know whatever uh thing, and essentially last six seconds. uh Oh actually, I'm over.

Q

um So if you're anything from like a d5 project, dao government, enterprise and you're, looking for a privacy solution or looking for a ghast free scaling solution, we got you covered. Please come talking to me. We have a boot here and I mean thank you. So much.

R

S

A

Thank you so much sandy from kelly merrell introducing private shards. We now have a break for lunch, so it's a 30 minute break. Please enjoy the food. The drinks go check out. There's the sweatcoin bouncy castle. There's the gaming lounge! Please enjoy yourselves over lunch. See you in 30 minutes.

A

Welcome everyone. I hope you had a nice lunch break and you've had a chance to try out all the delicacies from our different trucks and food providers from all of our different regional hubs.

A

This session is about the future of near wallets and allow me to welcome cameron dennis from banyan collective ilya polozokin from near protocol and jane wang from pagoda.

T

U

L

T

All right, hey everyone. We have a really cool session here with three of us: uh we're gonna cover kind of high level kind of the way we see the future wallets and some ideas for everyone to talk about then jane will talk about kind of the transition from world.near.org and then cameron will talk about how community can get involved what's happening and kind of exciting things there. So, let's kick it off so amelia great to see everyone here and let's dive in so our core kind of idea behind near is always been on.

T

Removing barriers right is to make things really simple, to use and on board a billion users, and so to do that we've been kind of from the start trying to innovate on how the kind of wallets work. That's.

T

Why we've you know originally built web wallet to really kind of deliver this web to feel right where you just log in with google, you know you kind of, acknowledge it, and then you go back to the app and start using it and like onboarding, is kind of a major barrier in web3 right, if you think of it like at some point when we were just starting, we were trying out to buy a cryptokitty and it took like 28 steps to go from like not having any crypto or any wallet to actually buying a crypto kitty, which is ridiculous, and so the kind of core of this issue always been that, like yes, if you're already in web 3, it actually becomes more convenient because you don't need to sign up in every single app for new.

T

You don't need to like enter a credit card, you're actually able to use it, it co-interacts and contributes, but the kind of the beginning of the journey is complicated and also, as we have more wallets, as we have more kind of ways to interact with these apps, it also becomes more complicated right.

T

I'm sure kind of people already familiar with you click sign in, and you have like a whole list of like 40 50 wallets right that you can use you need to find yours, and so one of the things we want to continue pioneering on is how to improve this, how to improve the onboarding, how to improve the interaction with apps, and so one of the kind of part-time changes that I want to propose is split up this logic that you need to have a wallet to sign up into the app right that you kind of need to go to another application to be onboarded in the application you actually want so think of it as like.

T

You want to use apps, you use the app you kind of you create account there, and then the wallet is becoming where you manage your account. Where manage your assets, where you manage kind of kind of across applications.

T

Now the way kind of this comes together. Right is through a number of existing tools and a bunch of future technology that is being built by various teams in the ecosystem.

T

So we started by building extensible account model right, I'm sure kind of if you're familiar with near you know, you know named accounts ability to have lots of different kind of keys, with different permissions to kind of configure how things work you have. You know web wallet and link drops, so you can actually board new users really easily kind of without them needing to like sign up and then send something, and we actually have over 30 wallets at this point in the ecosystem, which is which is pretty amazing.

T

At the same time now that we have 30 wallets, we actually need to give people a way to select them right, and so this is what jane, for example, been working on as well. Selector product is like how do you give a way to kind of log in into apps, with different wallets across the ecosystem?

T

At the same time, we're working on meta transactions, we're working on things like aurora plus, which allows you to subscribe and not pay for transaction fees? Every time you use right, so it removes a lot of barriers to interact with the app one of the things I've started talking about is how do we go away from this need of? Like hey, I have a crypto wallet. I have a bitcoin, for example, wallet, and I want to use a near app. Well, users, don't actually care that near app is on near.

T

They just want to use it right, so we can actually give them a way to log in with their bitcoin wallet by proxying, their transaction and remapping their account id into near similar to ethereum to any network right any cryptographic wallet.

T

We can actually proxy that information too near through meta transactions and allows them to use new apps without needing to set up a near wallet right away, and this is where this concept of kind of separating the transaction signing logging into apps and account management that happens is starting to become, and so that's why the wallets right. All of these wallets are becoming more of an account management tool right. This is where you go to manage your account to send your tokens, nfts, etc.

T

It's not exactly the gateway to the applications per se, and this is why wallet selectors, for example, can allow users to log in with email log in with kind of social log in with all kinds of ways, and maybe you've seen, link drops that are like allow you to do multiple transactions before you actually need to create account right.

T

So you can go beyond just um like create account before you can do anything to a state where you can start using apps start doing something, and then you can manage your account separately and obviously, with that and with our kind of flexible account model, you can have lots of kind of security improvements and way to recover your accounts, because now you can set up. You know email recovery with different permissions through taurus, for example, you can have a way to recover kind of consumer custodians like near pay, and maybe some others are launching.

T

So you have lots of different ways to kind of interact with your account, while still being able to use your apps in this way. Now. A lot of this is still future work. So this is more of a inspiration and so kind of what's happening right now. Is this transition from web wallet to wallet, selector and opening up access to all these wallets in the ecosystem?

T

Obviously, we have kind of lots of more infrastructure coming, and so I encourage everyone to participate and contribute to this, and we have a world working group to kind of actually develop the standards and build this kind of amazing experiences together and so that everybody supports them so I'll pass my work this to jane, to talk about wall transition and roadmap.

V

All right, hi everyone, I'm here to tell you about the wallet, transitions, roadmap and strategies a little bit about me. I'm a product manager at pagoda, managing the developer tools and wallets based in the u.s. My personal interests are in ft dfi and governance and tinkering tinkering on something on the border of d5 and ft at the moment.

V

So, let's get into this transition, so this transition will happen in five phases, starting with the community engagement, which is happening right now, and next phase is when we officially kick off the off-boarding of users from the near wallet. As you know, this is massive transition. Your wallet is a predominant wallet today in the ecosystem, and this is going to off-board a lot of users and presents opportunities for the wallet builders right now in the ecosystem. So that's expected to start in october.

V

The next phase is, after some months of the transition, we're going to change the product that lives on wallet.near.org.

V

So it's becoming a portal which is no longer a wallet and that's expected to complete by the early part of 2023, and the two final phases are where we're going to remove some of the features that were built in the early part of the transition, so we're winding down the transition, and so you should be hearing from us from the pagoda foundation, blog post as well, social media channels and our amplification partners, so make sure you stay tuned.

V

So now we're in phase zero and as part of the phase, zero we're here to tell you that the wallet transition is imminent. So we ask you to get ready and this impacts your wallet users developers as well as wallet creators we're here to raise a profile of the wallets in the ecosystem. A lot of them are here at nerocon, so we invite you to speak with them and find out about their product and, finally, we're here to tell you that there is a massive opportunity here for the walla builders in the ecosystem, all right.

V

So if you're a wallet user right now, you are asked to look at other wallet options. In the ecosystem, there's a number of wallets available today at awesomenear wallet page, and I should also mention you shouldn't actually wait. You don't need to actually wait till. We officially start the off-boarding process to switch a different wallet, so the passphrase that you had created when you first create your user account actually gives you full access to your wallet.

V

So you can move to a different wallet today, just by essentially importing your passwords into that wallet, and if you want to wait in phase one we're going to launch a export functionality that makes it really easy and seamless for you to export your account to a different wallet, all right so for the df developers. This transition also have major also has a major impact on you. So if you're implementing or integrating with only the near wallet today, this is no longer the recommended approach.

V

Like elias said, while the selector is going to become front and center, and that is that is the recommended way to integrate wallets in the ecosystem. So what is a wireless selector? It is a single library that provides a single point, integration to many wallets and check out the github here. So this is what the wireless electric looks today.

V

We just launched the new ui last week, so you can set up the wall selector by defining which wallets you want to include in the wireless lecture, as well as the order in which to present the wallets in and on the right hand, side. There's information for new users who are onboarding for the first time. So this cover comes in a light and dark theme, and we just launched a new model component, that's written in plain javascript, so either written in angular or view.

V

You can use the plain js component and we also have a react component that you can use. So we asked you to migrate to the wallace selector in the next few months and if you need support, the pagoda is having office hours right now. So please take advantage and there will be developers who are on hand to support you all right for the wildlife creators. As you know, there's millions users who are off-boarding from the near wallet.

V

So this is a time for you to onboard users, so there's couple things that you need to do before you become an option that we can send users to so. The first thing is, we asked you to implement this new feature called import account by private key, so this really sits on the other side of what we're doing inside the near wallet, we're exporting keys from linear wallet and import into your wallet. And second, please join the community telegram group which cameron dennis is great, has created.

V

So here's where we'll provide the latest information, that's impactful to you as a builder and where we'll be talking about any ps, that's going to affect all the wallets and then finally, please complete this wallet onboarding form. So this tells you about the features you have in your wallet. What makes you special as well as your security stands, so we have a good understanding of your product. So this helps add your wallet to the export list, as well as the wallet portal in the future, all right.

V

So so, in early october, we'll be launching phase one, which is when we officially start to off-board users. So there are some features that will be launched as part of this transition. The first part is, we are going to stop account creation. So if you're looking to create a new wallet account, you cannot create that near wallet.

V

You have to go to the other wallets in the ecosystem and also we'll be launching this export functionality and makes it really easy and secure for you to migrate your account to another wallet and then wallet creation links such as nft drops and link jobs are going to be redirected and for at this time, we're going to keep the major functionalities like a wallet such as sign, sign, transaction send and receive now.

V

So here's a quick look of what this looks like, so the user will be informed of the transition within the product itself and then, if you're, a near wallet user, will take you through this off-boarding flow, and this off-boarding flow we're focusing on security and ease. So there's about four steps. Three of those four steps are about our focusing on security.

V

So the first step is: we are going to create a new full access. Key, that's added to your account to make sure that no one else has access to that full access key and then the newly generated access key will be used to export your account to a different wallet. So in this case, let's say the user selects sender we're exporting that key to sender.

V

Once your account is imported in sender, you will come back to this flow and then now you're on step, three, where you're you're, looking at all of your full access keys and removing the ones that are not being used. So this decreases the attacked surface and make sure that we just keep one full access keys on chain and, as a last step, we're deleting all private keys from the local storage and you're completely logged out of the near wallet.

V

So this is the flow all right, so in the early part of the next year, we'll be changing the product at the wallet da nier.org into a wallet portal.

V

So here this is no longer a wallet, so we're removing nearly all functionalities of the wallet except the export feature that we just discussed and also you'll, be able to see the various wallets in the ecosystem and their features and functionalities, and then we're shipping, a new feature called transaction forwarding, and this feature is built to make sure that the dabs in the ecosystem is still working as expected, given that near wallet is no longer around at this point and other linked link, redirects are going to be supported at the same time.

V

So here is what the new portal looks like in the early part of next year. So you can see a list of wallets in the ecosystem. On the left-hand side, you can decide what are the specific features that you're looking for and filter for that for those wallets and if you're not sure what those features you're.

V

Looking for at the top, there are categories wallace with beginners as well, for nfts d5, so we'll filter down the wallets for you, and if you do have keys on this wallet.near.org domain, you will see a top banner prompting you to export your keys, and this takes you through the same flow that we just saw, which takes your key and import it into a different wallet, all right and then the final feature is the transaction forwarding.

V

So the transaction forwarding use case is, let's say, a user is added the app which has not influenced a wallet selector now they're not able to sign this transaction anymore. So, when they're taken to the wallet.near.org, we pop open the wallace lecture where they can sign in and send a transaction using a different wallet.

V

So that concludes the phase two. So in the final phases of the transition we're going to wind down some of the features that we built earlier. So in phase three, where we expect most d-apps at this point have moved to wallace lecture we're going to remove this feature. Now it's very important at this point that the app has implemented wireless selector. Otherwise it might create a somewhat degraded degraded user experience.

V

So please take the time to move to wireless selector as soon as possible in the final phase, we'll be removing all the keys from this domain, as well as removing export functionality. So we complete the transition, and this page just becomes a portal for wallets. So these are the five phases of the transition. I hope that provides a lot more information and color in terms of what we're doing and I'll be will be around four questions.

V

After this now I will hand over to cameron dennis who will be telling you about some of the community initiatives he's working on.

U

Thank you, jane how's. It going everybody cameron dennis uh ceo of the banyan collective. uh We are a ecosystem management, as a service company focused on growing the new ecosystem from a more bottom up way. And what does this mean well um or why are we doing this because you know blockchains, let's be frank, they kind of suck to use, and the whole point here is: how do we completely abstract that key management away from end users to give them the web to like functionality, they're used to in web 3.

U

and near, I think, the killer? App is logging in logging in to give people the option to own and claim their data, their governance and control of all their assets, and the whole point here is: we need you to actually help build this future, and so you know I've. We had an amazing meeting yesterday uh in the bounce house.

U

If you don't know, the bounce house definitely check it out, sweatcoin's doing it, and uh we just got a lot of wallet builders together to identify exactly what's missing in the ecosystem and what they need to succeed in order to onboard all of these users and provide them that experience like they are used to in web 2..

U

So in order to do so, since we live in a remote world, we have to have to do this remotely and uh we are going to be running a weekly, a monthly working group meeting or community group meeting and a pretty much daily telegram channel, uh focused on developers and founders in the walla ecosystem.

U

And the whole point here is: how can we work together to identify the missing gaps, for example, there's a lot of innovative things that could be created if uh we're all working together and specking out these solutions to suggest at hackathons to get people to build together. We can, you know, create uh standards together to actually push through the amazing working groups that have recently been developed and uh last but not least, make sure that there's clear paths for communicating all of these critical updates, like this talk right here, um but for the future.

U

And so this is the launch of the wallet community group and uh it really got started about a month ago. Just kicking it off getting a lot of wallet. Builders together, but now it's formally being organized and it's gonna be broken up into three different categories.

U

So, as I said, there's many components to wallets uh onboarding and payments, custody and recovery, mobile and integration, and I'm just going to walk through all these like bit by bit, because in onboarding a lot of people especially sort of more more corporate types they need help like.

U

I know the open forest protocol team actually works with people from around the world like tribe leaders in africa, and you know the amazon trying to get them onboarded to near wallets and they have to sit on a call with them to work through what is the seed phrase so that onboarding is there's such a critical point of education here?

U

That needs to be streamlined in the user experience and so onboarding and payments will be focusing on this education on simple resistance, uh on-ramps and off-ramps, because you know you need that ability to actually turn your dollars into crypto or fiat payment streaming.

U

There's all these really innovative use cases that we just need to work on together to spec them out and then there's a telegram group that group is going to meet every other week and then the custody and recovery group is a little bit more uh tailored for people super interested in a lot of cryptography or implementing existing uh sdks that are being launched by a lot of institutional custodians, to sort of help abstract uh again that key management away, because, uh let's be frank, beyonce's fans are not going to be using metamask to onboard to the open web.

U

We need to give them that that super seamless experience and custody and recovery is a critical piece. So this is where we're going to be talking about multi-sig contracts, the user experience for multi-sig. Actually, how do you set up that key recovery and then also account extension that elia mentioned before so again? That group is going to be about every other week. This is these groups are intended for founders and developers interested in solving these problems. Although we do want people to you, know everyday users to give their feedback.

U

That's going to be a different channel, probably independent with each wallet of company and the last one's with mobile integrations, because, again, the world's not going to be carrying a laptop with them to transact. We all have a lot of us use apple pay on our phones. We need this like native mobile experience, that neer has actually done an incredible job with in browser like it's. It beats every other blockchain in my eyes to in their mobile experience. So um there's gonna be a lot of projects currently working on mobile sdks.

U

Let's make sure that this work doesn't get repeated and everyone's like reinventing the wheel.

U

Let's make sure that we're just like actually collaborating and focusing on things like wallet selector for all the integrations notification protocols like there's so much to be done here, which is why we need to break it up into three separate groups and for more context.

U

The meetings there's a google calendar that you're able just to subscribe to you'll get access every single week to these meetings and then every month, we're going to essentially summarize all of the meetings in a working group call, and so this is for people participating in all of the calls um just to make sure everyone's on the same page, and so all these times are flexible.

U

For now I mean like this is pretty much set but like if there is a big portion of the community that can't make it async is totally fine and we're also moving moving the call times, but um to be even you know, a little bit more tangible. There is a hackathon coming up two of them metal build is one online, I believe there's over a million dollars worth of prizes, and so there are.

U

These are really clear call to actions for you to start experimenting with these new models of key management and making money for submitting them. Now, if you're looking for something a little bit more physical uh in the unite and are based in the united states, are interested in traveling we'll be running a series of hackathons um the first one actually is next week. The party doesn't stop here.

U

If you're in new york next week from asari maynet come by, ilya is actually giving a talk, and we will be doing this almost every month and the whole point here is: we need more tangible call to actions for founders and developers, the ecosystem to go deeper and so hackathons are an amazing place. uh I really want to offer this amazing opportunity for you guys to submit your own bounties for hackathons.

U

We are actually even subsidizing the the costs. So if you have a really cool idea and you're an early stage wallet that you know might not be totally well funded and you want the community to start hacking away on something specific. You can submit that bounty and if we like it, we could even put out money on it for the community to build it as long as you judge it, so there's a form to fill out.

U

I believe, if you're part of the wallet working group you've you've received that form, but this is a schedule for the hackathon series in the united states and um oh yeah again submit your near bounties if you're interested in having that actually be shown up in the next hackathon and that's about it. So moving questions. Yep. Moving on to questions.

W

Yeah, what's up.

S

Thank you. I have a question regarding volumes themselves. Is there any particular security recommendations from pagada, like uh will users say, explore wallets before they actually use it like using open source? If security orders were done? Something like that. Thank you.

X

Yeah, can you can.

U

You say it one more time: I'm.

T

Y

U

S

I I think I think I heard them so the question is: is there any particular security advice from pagada like for users before they are using new wallets like if user is open source if they pass security, orders and stuff like that like at least very minimum, because we are talking about uh handling somebody's funds right, which is quite serious? Thank you. You'll take.

T

Security audits, yeah yeah, so there is a set of requirements that wallets should have that include security requirements.

V

Yes, so you can see the security requirements on the wallet selector github repo at contributing.md.

V

This defines the set of requirements that we want wallets to meet and right now it's a list of requirements that you would post on either github or website, indicating that you have met those requirements and we're also working with the foundation on creating an audit program for the wallets.

U

Early stages, but yes, there will be hopefully a program to ensure all wallets. Well, there will be. There is a program to show all wallets that are listed on wallet. Selector are security audited, but uh hopefully there's a program to actually help them get. Those audits as well.

X

Hello, uh big thanks to y'all for being here and thank you cameron for having all the great community support. I guess I was just curious. What's the main motivation behind this shift, given that it's pretty fundamental so.

T

Kind of the concept here, obviously is multifold right. I think, as I mentioned, the kind of innovation and onboarding in a way requires that we have more like more tooling indirectly in the app. So I think the good example is sweatcoin.

T

If you have tried using there, the account creation happens directly in the app it's very kind of smooth and the account management is in a different app because, if you think of it, users who are interacting with some application, don't always expect to go back and forth between these things and then at the same time, we have now a lot of different wallets that are offering various functionality, various kind of management and kind of trying to innovate, and so the idea also to give them the opportunity to have kind of the space to use it right.

T

And so that's really the kind of twofold of the transition that's happening.

U

And on the community side we have, I mean, there's so much that near's flexible account model offers and a sort of indicator of this, and why the gnosis, safe in the ethereum ecosystem, recently raised 100 million dollars to build an ecosystem around it near has that capability built into the layer one itself, and it's been that way since day one, but people aren't thinking about how to actually you know, leverage this in new and innovative ways. So thinking like how can you you know, vote on a dow like verifiably by liking a twitter poll?

U

How do you manage access keys in a way to interact with apis like these are things that are possible on here, but we need the community to get together and innovate around it. So this is really the launch of uh real activation to really abstract key management away. Here's.

T

The idea for the hackathon turn your account turn an account into nft to be listed on the marketplace, and then people can claim it back to get the account back. This is actually possible on there.

T

Okay sounds like it's pretty clear: well, transition everybody's ready; no, more, no, more questions, we're ready to go right, hi! Awesome! Thank you. Everyone thank.

H

A

Thank you, cameron, jane and ilya for the exciting new future for near wallets. Next up, we have the non-fungible stack. What's next in nft technology, we have marcus ribeiro from the near foundation, we'll be moderating this panel with ben lakoff of charged particles, daniel missouri, apollo, 42, donald santoro, for near notes, and last but not least, henry taffela from cheddar.

Z

I don't know we got five. Oh sorry, that's.

AA

It, oh, I think it's uh oh hello,.

AB

Hey everybody, I'm uh super excited to be able to share the stage with these amazing people that are building some interesting things on nir I'll go ahead, and let each of you introduce yourselves and share a little bit about what you're building with the audience. We'll start with you yeah.

AC

Sure marcus, thank you so much. My name is daniel mazurin, I'm the founder of apollo 42 social nft marketplace, we're building a web3 hub that is focused on the social aspect of nfts building communities around nfts.

AC

um You know innovating some stuff in terms of augmented reality will be releasing like a pokemon go thing for near-end of these near nuts too.

AA

AC

You know innovating having fun and building for the end of the community in your community. It was a very nice journey, excellent.

AA

Good stuff, um I'm donald santoro, the co-founder of neonats, and we have built a no code solution for launching your own generative nfc collection on your protocol. uh It removes the total need for developer and it generates you a complete min page and then anything launched through that will automatically be indexed into our marketplace, which is on mainnet. Now you can check it out astromarket.io, um and then you know from there we're creating a little ecosystem where 50 of the revenue generated will get distributed to all the near, not holders, so that will incentivize them.

AA

You know to to use the marketplace and things like that, so we're just trying to create a uh a well-rounded ecosystem that all sort of feeds into each other.

Z

All right, yeah and how many are not holders so yeah, um but yeah, I'm a henry tafala co-founder of cheddar uh we're a user onboarding experience within near that's really focused on teaching users about near crypto and d5. So we've got like uh known permanent lost pools that users can farm tokens uh from our loyalty network partners and uh games nfts, uh and you know just a lot of fun out there for users to keep them entertained and active in the ecosystem.

AA

Love, it love it and you have the staking right as well.

Z

AA

You can, you can take nfts.

Z

Yeah you can stick nfts, we've got a power-up feature, you know with our nft and some things like that and nft staking coming very soon great.

AA

Love it yeah. It provides use cases for for nfcs that wouldn't otherwise have them. Yeah.

Z

AB

Yeah awesome, thank you guys, um so we have the uh the topic here today. I have a couple of discussion. Oh several discussion points that we can go over. Ideally if we have any time left over at the end, I would like to open the floor up for q. A um so we'll see how much time we have left, um but breaking the hype cycle, how to think long term.

AB

um So what what is next in nft technology I mean right now we have pfps uh we're starting to see other utility like nft ticketing, uh but where do you think we'll go from here.

AA

I think ticketing is a great step in the right direction. Okay, um how many here bought an nft ticket to come here? Did anybody raise your hand if you did cool? That's awesome right on you know, and that's the kind of thing we're going for right. We want you to be able to use blockchain technology and purchase nfts without thinking about it, because we all know like when we talk to somebody who's not really involved and not super techy. Anything like that. You say the word blockchain and they stop listening.

AA

You know they like they check out completely so we have to. We have to bring it down in terms that we have to communicate it in a very easily digestible manner that everyone can sort of take in and not even know that they're using nfts right. So that's uh that's sort of the goal and that will that will help with the you know the mass onboarding and you know, onboarding the next billion users and whatnot.

AA

It's all it's all about behind the scenes using it behind the scenes, and you know creating real-life situations where, where they're purchasing nfts- and they don't even know it right.

AC

Okay, okay, well, yeah. I think that this nfc hype is going to be transformed into a much more utility-based thing right yeah. So we have all these pfp collections right now that most of them are useless right. It's going to zero, unfortunately, not near nuts. No, no! No! No.

AA

You're, not understanding are legendary.

AC

Right, but um I think that if we're talking about the nft technology itself, the future here is connecting to real life assets. uh If we're talking like emerge, if you're doing a brand new merch you're gonna connect it to nft and build community around your merch, because the nftac allows you basically to build anything. You want with people who owns it right, you can build a community.

AC

You can make a better access to an application that that you've built if we're talking about the software ticketing right mean base, did a very cool thing with the nft tickets too, to the near con so yeah. I think in this sense we'll see a lot of uh applications being built with nfts and we haven't even talked about social media right now we can see you know facebook, this meta thing going all into nfts and it's just the first step right. Yeah.

AC

Definitely imagine you have a web3 social media where every post is an nft and you really owned it right and it's not centralized at all. So facebook is a 100 centralized platform and you don't own your content there at all you can. They can monetize it, as you know, as as as much as they can think of so so. Yeah social media and nfts can be also the future and and we're also seeing right now, the evolving uh social media platforms.

AC

In what three as niche, for example, uh they're, building on near particle two and apollo 42, you know it's also a social empty marketplace, yes, amazing! So that's why I'm shilling the social aspect.

AD

AC

I truly believe in the future of that yeah, so so yeah. I think yeah good.

AA

Z

All right so yeah uh the cool thing about near is: we don't have much of a hype cycle. You know, that's really good, so there's no shill no pump, no dump no exit scams. That's something! I've always been proud of being part of a near near because of that. So, but in terms of how we break that and build beyond the hype, I think you know what we've been talking about is nft utility. So how do we take these nfts now and make them unlock things within the near verse?

Z

You know how do we use them as keys? How do we um then take those and build additional utility on cheddar? We did something kind of interesting and it's kind of one of the first features on near like that. We have a concept of a power up.

Z

So if you own one of our chatty mascot nfts, you can boost your farming and power up your farming on the yield farm, so I think finding dynamic ways to build utility that then we can spread throughout the ecosystem so that multiple projects can join in more of a nft utility as a service type thing. Yeah and find those markets that really will provide utility across the board. That's going to be really our key yeah.

AA

Definitely- and I mean I think, pfps in general are just a great jumping off point for nfts. You know because we've all made an account somewhere or an avatar, an xbox playstation, whatever you know what I mean and you set the profile picture, and you know everyone does it of whatever um you know and if we can what we are doing- and you know this whole pfp kind of movement in a way.

AA

It's just it's a great jumping off point to open the door uh to sort of create a familiar experience right with you know, instead of just galloning an image off google or whatever it is, you know you have your own, there's only one in existence, you know it's it's it's yours, the proof is on the blockchain, you know, and this is my personal avatar or whatever it is. um I don't know I could go all day.

Z

Yeah, it's good, though yeah I mean yeah for sure.

AB

Cool, no some really really interesting points. um Now, I'm just curious. I mean for the nft space to grow. uh What are some really large gaps we currently have in the space that need to be filled in order to make nfts usable in the real world to facilitate onboarding.

AA

um I think a big thing would be getting like institutions like um okay, so your id and your passport, and things like that right. If you can turn that into a digital asset, that's tied to you right, you can, you know, remove the need to carry that thing around. You can have it all digitally or whatever it is, and it's you know it's tied to you, via whatever transaction you made from your bank account or whatever it is. However, they want to verify it. You know what I mean, but anything can be an nft okay.

AA

We just have to when we say nft like I said when you say: blockchain people stop listening. You know if they're not familiar with it, so we just have to kind of call it. We have to communicate it right in an easily digestible way that someone can just understand someone 60 years old right who doesn't know anything who just calls all of crypto the bitcoin right, something that you know get them on nfts without them, even knowing.

AB

I mean it's the same thing as like when the internet was around in the 90s most people same thing,.

AA

AB

They just kind of walk away, they didn't know what to do with it and then now everybody from your mom to your grandma's now on facebook, so yeah.

AC

You know just kind of.

AB

Making it familiar to people, I mean what.

AC

Are your thoughts and there was a lot of thought around internet in the 90s right? We we had articles that said literally internet is for bad people right we're seeing the same thing with web free, and it's very funny how you know. Human psychology works, yeah.

Z

Yeah, if you look at it, mobile phones were in the same context right when the phone came out. We had a few apps. There was nothing really to do. You're like what is this. It's probably not gonna take off, but now it's a tool that we use every day, nfts blockchain technology it'll be the same thing on the adoption cycle. So yes, I think you know if we can like look at like social eight, which evgeny had a talk on today about you know how you create a profile across the near verse.

Z

Well, then, how do we take that and put nfts at the heart of it? So you can literally have your profile picture throughout the near verse across your profiles that folks integrate in. So that would be one way but yeah I mean it's just building this utility that, like what do I do with this beautiful jpeg right, yeah.

AA

Z

So um and that's going to evolve and continue to expand over time, yeah.

AA

No definitely- and that was a great analogy with the phone thing right. It's uh what and in marcus says this all the time, and so the analogy is what we're doing is equivalent to like when the iphone came out a long time ago, and everyone was like there were articles about why it was going to fail how it was a poor business model and whatever, but people were still developing applications on the iphone.

AA

They were still building things on that um and then you know long behold here we are right and everyone has an iphone and if you don't, you know, you get green messages and all that so um yeah. That was a great analogy. 100.

AB

Yeah, well I mean the reality is that the the nft market will strengthen and grow, and it's easier for for more people to adopt- and I know you- you touched upon it a few times don uh where, if, if we make it easy enough for people to kind of buy an nft or use an nft without even knowing they're doing it, um it's kind of inevitable um that that it's gonna be more familiar.

AB

It's gonna be more adoptable, so I'd love to hear your thoughts as developers and builders in the nft space, on any potential solutions to make the nft journey less complicated and more recognizable to the masses.

AA

I've got one I sort of just thought of now. Okay, you make a credit card transaction, any transaction. You usually get a paper receipt. Okay at some places. Now you sign up for digital receipts. That is essentially in nft. There's a there's a you know, transaction or whatever. So, but you don't really see where it came from. You can't really track it.

AA

You can't do any of that sort of thing, but with on the blockchain, you can see where it was generated from where it went to all the steps along the way and there's no hiding from it. You know what I mean, so it would be a very easy situation to create where, like. If you know you sign up for a digital receipt, it sends you the nft to whatever you know. So, if you could partner with some sort of I don't know walgreens or whatever it is, I don't know what they.

AB

Have I mean starbucks already has the uh the punch cards, you know you go in, they have the membership points already on their app. I mean you can.

AA

AB

Integrate that that sort of thing into web3 it's just kind of getting the adoption. So I mean what are your thoughts dan and uh henry yeah.

Z

Yeah, so it's just kind of along those same lines: it's like what. How do we take what this technology is, move it beyond just a profile picture and find the real use cases right. I mean in some instances, it'll develop into assets an asset class that can be used for financial instruments. Some of them are going to be code bases with dynamic architectures.

Z

You know on the pfp level, we'll have evolving nfts that aren't just going to be static anymore. So there's going to be a lot of implications that take place in the next few years about taking this technology and really making it something. That's adaptable. It can have lots of different financial or business aspects. Maybe it's a contract that you exchange right and at nft level, so there's a lot of thoughts out there, but you know it will probably be used in both business and finance over time and move beyond just the profile picture.

AB

Yeah 100, I'm a strong believer in that as well I mean I can easily see properties, uh medical records, etc. Living on the blockchain as well. I mean sure, are we a long way from that? Probably, but I mean it's: it's kind of inevitable, with the with the technology and the way it works. I believe you were going to say something then.

AC

Yeah, um I think we're moving in the right direction right now with nfts, because even when you know the first nft marketplace uh openc, they made an interface where you, um where you don't need to like, may go into the smart contract thing right. You.

AD

AC

An image and it's live right, it's a nft. You can mint it separately, but it's live. Someone can buy it. Yes,.

AA

AC

We're moving in the right direction and I can see appearance of many layers uh protocols and applications that allow you to build your whole collections and projects around nfts utilize it in some way. I can see an appearance of the project that says all right. You have a physical asset, make it digital asset right with nfts. I think you know, and a lot of people are doing right now. We just don't see it properly because it's not live yet.

AC

But you know in the near future, we can see how um you know: nfts will be evolving with real-life assets and in terms of nfts as a way to build communities.

AC

I think we'll see the new new new evolution of protocols built onto on the chains that allow you to use nfts, not only as a token, but also as an entrance to some uh communities, platforms, uh applications, ios, applications, android applications. I don't know how we can merge web 2 with that three. That's the question. You know everyone's asking so so yeah.

AC

AA

Oh sorry, go ahead, oh no! No! Go ahead! Well! Yeah! I was going to say, like I think you know the whole merging web 2 to web 3 will be so much easier. If we start you know, we say mint and nft. Mint is another word that when you tell somebody that they don't get it.

H

AA

Get what it is, you know what I mean, so we just have to say like buy just call it buying, or you know what I mean or create. I guess, and just put it in layman's terms and that will help adoption exponentially because obviously, here we're all on the same page, we can all nerd out- and you know, talk about and get intricate about everything. You know what I mean and we all understand it, but ninety percent of people don't and they think you know that they thought it and do whatever it is.

AA

You know, but we have to just put it into terms that that everybody already knows you know yeah.

Z

I want to come back to the point, because I was just thinking as we were talking like. How can we summarize this, like some of the major categories that are going to present themselves?

Z

Are things like proof of humanity, proof of attendance right proof of ownership right, so those are going to be some of the things that we'll see kind of nfts begin to divulge into, and I think proof of identity or proof of humanity is a pretty big one, and the co-founder of cheddar right now is actually working on that in the hackathon, because we think that's a critical, you know topic that needs to be addressed. So, like proof of attendance is another one. You were here at near khan. You've got the the the nft yeah.

AA

Z

You're a person right because you had to attend so we're going to see some markets like that to begin the emerge that really use this technology better.

AA

Yeah definitely, and like imagine right, I mean the first thing I thought of was like license and registration right. You know cop pulls you over or just whenever you have to provide your license and registration. Okay, imagine if you could do it. You know, instead of having to go through your glove box or whatever it was to look for this piece of paper. That's probably all crumpled up and like you're, stressing out, because you can't find it.

AA

You could just pull out your phone open your wallet, and you say here this is my license and they could like scan it or something like that and it's in their database or whatever it is, and it would streamline. You know the entire process of you know.

AA

You know finding out someone who someone is or you know you go through security and at the airplane I mean the airport. uh You show them your your passport, they look at your face. They do the whole thing you know, but if you can have it sort of all on one thing digitally you don't have to carry around this old, outdated book anymore to go flying a plane. You know- and I it like.

AB

No exactly and there's like a lot of issues, obviously with like passports and identifications being forged, whereas blockchain's immutable. Obviously.

AD

AB

Have people developing like, like proof of identity, to kind of verify those things as well? So um it's like an extra layer of protection. um I do have one last talking point. I want to spice things up a little bit um I'd love to hear kind of your your your thoughts. um So, as we all know uh here on stage as well as in the audience, um nier's technology is uh unprecedented.

AB

However, as each of you are building on near in the nft space, I'd actually love to hear about some of the current gaps or blockers that you've identified. That, if addressed, would bolster the nft growth and development on here.

AA

Okay, um I guess you know some gaps that I think could be filled would be the the difficulty in finding people to help you create the stuff technically like on the technical side. You know, because we have all these ideas and we can communicate them, but we have nobody to create them for us right and there it's very hard you know near is uh it's a language. Is rust right and it's it's obviously script as well, so say.

AB

Now we have javascript.

AA

Yeah, so actually yeah, that's right! So now, if you know javascript with the near javascript sdk, you can now build on near, which is absolutely amazing, and now I have to look into uh some javascript developers and you know which is actually never mind, take away that gap. We just filled it right. Like I said it's, it's unprecedented yeah.

AB

It's unprecedented, absolutely 100! How about you henry.

Z

Yeah, so the tech is is definitely here. I would say that one of the challenges that we have is it still is very highly technical to launch in nft, so we're techs at heart, but when we went to launch our nft and thank goodness for like tank dao that went out there and put out the contract code for people to do that. So I think we'll see just the evolving um development of making it easier to launch nfts and there's a lot of people working on that right now.

Z

So to make it easy for the end user. So that's probably one of the gaps and then how do we just bring parity between all of the nfts right? So how do we bring more community consensus instead of you know, making those bridges to build that utility? That's probably another gap for us, and if we solve that nft as a service nft as a utility gap, then near's really going to shine as we do in many other areas in this one as well so yeah agreed.

AC

Yeah, I think I think the real gap. uh Well, we we see a lot of innovation around nfts right now, so we have like nft collection that are building their own decentralized application, which is pretty innovative. uh You know on year I've never seen it on any other chain like even on salad or ethereum. So we have like uh near knots. Building asteroids we have classic and guru uh building jump defy right.

AA

AC

Kaiser fighters building dojo finance, so we have a lot of a lot of that stuff, but I think the real gap here is the founders mindset. So we say all right: there is no liquidity right now in your nfts right, we'll just have to wait. You know people will come near foundation will do something, no man that doesn't work like that. We have to do as a project founders on board new people from other chains. Yes outside of crypto on both new artists, onboard educate people. Look what be experienced doing right.

AC

So I think we have to change this mindset that the time will come and we'll just build. Yes, of course, we have to build, we have to innovate. We have to do many things around our product, make this product as best as possible, but besides that we have to onboard new people and make this liquidity on our project by ourselves. Yeah, because- and I have an example right- uh pars, for example, we have so many people from um from from asia because of paris.

AC

Yes, they came to the nft space, because paris made many uh like marketing campaigns uh on the on the in the asian side of the world, and you know I respect them for that right and we have to do the same. I'm not talking about like local marketing, but in general we have to onboard new people selling. You know your friends not only on social media but also making some campaigns around it. And if you know it's small steps by every everyone makes a very big step in terms.

AA

AC

Onboarding new people and making liquidity on the market, that's how we will win as a as a chain. Let's say: yeah.

AA

Yeah, I agree, I agree and we still are in our infancy here. You know what I mean: we're still ironing things out, adding more nodes. You know reaching that max tps. Once all the nodes are around and everything like that. So, while I you know, the liquidity definitely will come. Okay, but yes, you're right we do have to. We do have to do better, onboarding internally, with our with our own projects, and you know if we work together. You know you: where are you from I'm from russia? Okay,.

F

AA

Yeah, so you can, you know, target the the russian community and everything like that. I can try to target like the american community, because you know peras has got that whole, the asian and the malaysian area and the you know the philippines and they've. You know that's where the majority of the user base is and they absolutely crushed it and they're nailing it. You know.

AA

So if we can all do our part to get near in your protocol and spread it all over the world and also I just want to say it was dope to come here in lisbon and see near near con signs everywhere. That's the.

H

AA

Thing ever you know what I mean. um It's just you know it's cool, it's surreal. It's real.

AB

It is pretty surreal and uh it's been a great turnout. I really appreciate each and every every one of you coming to listen to the talk, and I appreciate you coming on stage as well. Unfortunately, we are at time uh once again, I am marcus uh from the near foundation. uh We have dan from apollo 42 don from near knots and henry from cheddar. Thank.

AA

You all thank you. Thank you guys very much.

A

Thank you, dan don and henry for the future of nfts and nfts on near specifically. Our next session is about breaking up the studios and how web 3 will be disrupting hollywood. Our speakers are austin warrell from kino app xyz and daryl fannin from kino app xyz as well.

AE

AF

ah Love it.

E

AG

Take a clicker.

AF

AF

I've got all the control. I love it amazing.

AG

Well, hello, everybody and welcome. uh My name is austin warrell, my co-founder dale fannin yeah.

AF

Nice to meet you uh austin, is a uh founder of a token charity. Token did 300 or 500 million market cap 500 000 holders uh also usc gould school of law, london, school of economics and my.

AG

Co-Founder dale is an executive producer who has sold, shows and netflix with the likes of matt damon and peter berg. Most recently, he sold a sewed to abc disney with jimmy kimmel. He actually currently back in la where we're from has a movie premiere with sylvester stallone that we're skipping to be here. So it's good to be with everybody, uh the weather's a bit better here than it was in l.a, it's a little bit cooler.

AG

So we're excited to chat today about the future of film and television, breaking up the studios, rebuilding hollywood based off of better technology, better law and better economics darrell. There are like three primary problems: we're going to talk about today for why hollywood can be benefited by web three, in particular the economics and the systems that we're building at kino and others in the quote. Unquote, film, three space are doing so, let's get into it. Yeah.

AF

Problem number one for me is inequity for artists. There's a lot of uh there's a lot of money, that's being made in film tv, but it's not necessarily going to the people who are creating it. So can you tell us a little bit about the term? Hollywood account sure sure.

AG

I'll try not to geek out about the law aspect too much, even though that is my training. But ultimately it's how big entertainment corporations essentially avoid taxes. uh That's the nice way to say it. So nobody sues me and then they also don't have to pay the artists who have the rights to profits in what we call quote. Unquote the back end, so the corporations maximize their profit flow, but the artists are the ones who ultimately, unfortunately, get screwed over yeah.

AF

So let's talk about some of my favorite examples, uh lord of the rings some of you may have heard of it made for 281 million dollars. It brought in six billion in the global box office uh and it actually was reported a horrendous loss. They said that that that entire trilogy lost millions of dollars, which means that peter jackson, who was supposed to get seven and a half percent on that 5.8 billion profit, got nothing and that's.

H

AF

Insane to me, another great example is bohemian rhapsody made for around 55 million dollars brought in about 900 million in the global box office in revenue, and yet they said it was a 51 million dollar loss. Again, that's great for the corporations that are making these projects, but it's terrible for the artists, because we don't see the royalties that were promised.

AG

And, let's be very clear, these franchises made billions and billions of dollars for the corporations, however, because of accounting practices, hollywood accounting and unfortunately, a lot of my friends who are entertainment, lawyers- they used. You know clever legal and economic practices to ensure their profits because they have the leverage in the systems that they're a part of right. Let's move on to the next slide and talk about how you know ultimately uh did you.

C

AG

Not too great at this, you know this is one of the biggest well-known secrets in hollywood right, if you all googled right now, hollywood accounting there's a whole wikipedia article you're, going to see the examples we just mentioned.

AG

There are plenty more, however, nobody talks about it until we found a couple tweets, ed solomon, the creator of men in black he's talking about how he never saw any of his back-end rights to future prophets and, in fact now they're telling him that it's in the red that he probably owes them money right and it's like men in black, made millions and billions of dollars right, but he didn't see any of that extra profit.

AF

Yeah, it's insane to me. I have so many friends who have created uh shows so I'm going to give a couple of examples without giving specifics, so we don't get sued, but I have a friend of mine who created a a billion dollar franchise for a very well-known studio, a billion dollars, and he made six hundred thousand dollars.

AF

I have another friend who had one of the most watched shows on a streaming uh network that you're very familiar with 480 million views in just a few months, and this guy is struggling to pay his rent, not not his mortgage.

AF

His rent, that's incredibly uh wrong to me, because these people are creating value but they're not receiving the dividends in in that they're deserving, like you put your heart and energy and soul into this artwork, but because you only have a handful of places to go, you don't actually get the back end, which is heartbreaking.

AG

So what is the solution? Then? uh I'm sorry, I went a little fast, uh better economics, that's it through web. Three. Now is the time we finally have the technology to facilitate a better structure in hollywood. Much like other industries that we're seeing disruption due to web 3. web3 gives the chance for greater ownership of artists of their own art, and it also gives the chance for us to give everyone who's on set from the director down to the new kid on the block who's. A pa assistant is just getting into the industry.

AG

Everyone can succeed together. You know, as us founders of a technology company, that's venture-backed that everybody who joins our company gets shares right because all of us, when we are motivated to succeed together, uh we win right. We we crush what we're building we're all excited, because we all know that we profit together and we believe a win-win scenario is the kind of economics that we need to bring to the hollywood space yeah.

AF

You know this brings up a great point right now, royalties only go to a handful of people at the top, so the executive producers, maybe the director a few named actors. Those are the people who get what we call back end, but with this new economic model, we're able to give everyone who works on a project, so it doesn't matter if you've been in hollywood for 20 years, and everybody knows your name or you're, a pa who steps on- and this is your first day on, set if you're, creating art that people consume.

AF

If you're helping create billions of dollars in value, then you deserve to receive a bit of that, and it makes me think you know the stunt drivers. This is one of the things that absolutely kills me. There are people who have literally died, making this incredible piece of art, and yet they see no financial profit on the back end of the value that they're creating and web 3 allows us to change that.

AG

What's that there's actually a term in the industry, what does what's it called daryl? uh What's above.

AF

The line right yeah about the line, so, if you're above the line, you're you're going to make some profit you're going to get some royalties below the line forget about it.

AG

Yeah I mean with web3 we can erase the line. Everybody can succeed together right and we're able to do that through blockchain yeah, which again comes to sort of what is it? That's solving the problem right, you're talking a lot in philosophical terms. It is the blockchain itself. uh Coming from a legal background. I get excited my favorite class in law. School was contracts right. That was the that was the the trust protocol that existed back in the day. How did we do things in life?

AG

How did I go and buy david's laptop who's sitting there in the fifth row? I would say: here's 100 bucks give me that laptop. It doesn't look like it's worth very much and we trusted each other because we'd write it down, but unfortunately my professors teach us the best contract is one page. I haven't seen a damn contract. That's one page. There are hundreds of pages they're, very complex. Our systems have become so complicated that it's inaccessible, and so now we have the chance with smart contracts which frankly, right now are pretty dumb.

AG

But if we have a lot of people like myself, who are excited about blockchain and have the right legal training, we can work with brilliant engineers to create smart contracts that actually are able to handle complex transactions like putting together a film production, on-chain, automated transparent, and it's going to do all the things that you see above me. It's going to reduce transaction costs. It's going to create accessibility to anybody that wants to start a company or a film production.

AG

It's going to create seamless, automated rights pathways and it's going to create embedded transparency and accountability, which is huge for combating things like funny accounting businesses in hollywood.

AF

I get so excited about this because it is really providing opportunities and the other thing that we're able to do is we're able to bring the community the fans. All of us can come together to support these projects and we're able to bring them in, and you know you wrote your thesis on community-based economics. Let's talk.

AG

A little bit about that, my professors thought I was crazy when I wrote a law school thesis about web three, but community-based economics is the term that I put together in the paper that I wrote saying how you know in my last project social impact. It was called elongate if anybody's ever heard of that it was on the binance. Smart chain blew up. We donated over 4 million to charity.

AG

We had over 500 000 holders based off of a meme, and we did a whole lot of good in the world and that opened my eyes to the power of community in web 3.. That is the big differentiator. You know we look at web 2 social movements right. I would go and like something that I believe in web 3 is the power of the like, plus the financial right.

AG

I don't just like something I can put my money behind it and that's powerful we're able to empower artists through community-based economics and what we call fan demand right. That ability to say I, like you and put my money behind you. Usually film companies do that after the movie's made, I'm gonna sell you a t-shirt, I'm gonna sell you a ticket.

AG

You can come to this theme park whatever, but the reality is that all of us as humans, if we love an artist or we love a story, we have the demand to come in earlier and what we do at keno and what film three is doing is saying.

AG

We can pre-sell that fan to man when the idea is just a script and you can get excited and you can put your money behind it and buy that ticket to the red carpet premiere two years early or buy a share in the film and you participate in the profits or you could buy the right to a prop. You know from the film itself and that money we take at the beginning. It goes directly to the artist. So you know that it's empowering people and then the film that you're excited about, gets to be made.

AF

Yeah, the other thing that's really uh cool about this- is that it brings the fans in and- and we have a real loss of fan connection in our industry, where you know the example that we talk about all the time is squid game, which I absolutely love. You know the most watched show in the world.

AG

Here in square game,.

H

AF

Everybody familiar yes, everybody.

P

Two years seeing game.

AG

Of thrones yeah.

P

AG

Just about everybody, does everybody remember when game of thrones came out, that thing was like we talked about it for a year right like I had friends that would go, they would travel city by city, the cast and crew, and you could meet them and ask them questions. Squid game existed in the zeitgeist for like a couple weeks.

AG

You know and that's a problem due to binge culture of the streamers, but also due to this fact that we have such high intensities of capital from the studios flowing into just hits and hits and hits without communities. It's untested ip that they're just throwing out they're hoping that we're going to eat it up for a day and then move on and move on right and what's.

AF

Really sad again, looking at the the value that was created by squid game, uh the creator of this show brought in about 900 million dollars, almost a billion dollars of value to netflix and again made a few hundred thousand dollars on that. They never paid him outside of this original contract where they come in and they buy it all up, and that is such a shame, because this is an amazing show.

AF

It created so much value and joy for all of us when we were stuck in the pandemic and we had nothing to do and we're binging and- and now I look at this creator- and I go most of us- don't know his name. Most of us haven't talked about it. We haven't seen the interviews with him and it's not because he isn't creating amazing, talented, like beautiful art, it's just because uh it exists in the cultural zeitgeist for so short that he doesn't even get his time in the limelight. I mean there's.

AG

Like other tangential effects, right, like there's less impact on culture, we're not talking about the stories that are being made for very long they're, not impacting cultural change and at kino. We believe that storytelling is the number one way to enact change worldwide.

Z

AG

What allows us to literally be put in the same room as somebody who doesn't look like us, a story that we've never heard of before a fact that we didn't hear right and because we're only talking about film and tv for a day at a time or a week at a time, the cultural impact is so much less, let alone from a business perspective. It's a lot harder to sell t. You know t-shirts to you that have a squid on them.

AG

If we only talked about it for a week, it's a lot easier to sell you literal iron thrones for years on end because we talked about it for so long. So there are so many iterative points that it's so crucial that we bring community back in and we expand that time that stories live in our culture. So how do we do that? Yeah? The solution, of course, is community. As we talked about it's the democratization of hollywood, it's bringing fans in from the beginning.

AG

It's it's I mean, like everybody here, probably has a list on on netflix. uh My sisters make fun of me because I always add things to my list, but I never watch them because I just want to save them, but you know we all have our niches, like you might be a horror person. You might be a thriller, you might be a hallmark movie lover. One of our friends was telling us that's the only kind of movie she watches.

AG

uh We won't judge her for that, but right, like we all have our niches, which means we can create communities around, that we can support the kind of art that we love in particular and by supporting it, we're furthering it and we're expanding that opportunity to see more of the things that we love. Yeah.

AF

And the other thing is that we don't get just to watch this as a fan, but we also get to participate in the upside. So for the first time, fans can actually engage in a financial model where they can reap the rewards by finding that artist and championing that underrepresented story.

AG

Well, the other cool thing too, when we're working with emmy nominated awarded, oscar, etc. Artists in our 10 films and tv shows that we're going to start launching at the end of the year.

AG

When we speak to these different artists, they are struggling with a problem of lack of fan, loyalty yeah, because they're combating a world where, literally my little sister is and myself as well, are scrolling on tick tock and watching videos that last 30 seconds and forgetting about who was on them right, like our attention span, is so short that that loyalty for somebody that relies on loyalty for a living they rely on views.

AG

They rely on you caring about the art that they're making has been so shortened that the power of community brings back that loyalty generation, yeah.

AF

The other thing is as a creator uh when I'm taking a show out to netflix or disney or any distributor. One of the first things that they ask about is the built-in audience it's. Why we're seeing so much? That's on this repeat ip pattern, where it's like. Oh yeah, we're going to see this. You know the the 38th uh iteration of x film and it's not because uh it's not because it's a great idea underlying it.

AF

It's because, at the end of the day, they want to know that there's an audience and with web3 we can say: hey, look! Here's here's proof that there's an audience! There are 10 000 people who have put hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars into seeing this, and then we can take that and leverage the best possible distribution deal to make sure that we can see this idea around the world.

AG

Our last problem, centralization everybody's favorite word in web 3 right. I really love centralization. Well, there's the reality that they've called it the big five ever since the 20s. When you know hollywood studios came about, it still exists, there are acquisitions happening every single day and the funnel keeps getting tighter and tighter, and that means frankly, that there are basically a couple handful of white dudes in la determining what stories we all get to see and we don't think that's right. Yeah.

AF

It's messed up because it also allows like very talented individuals like when I think of jordan peele and what he was able to do with get out a very low budget film that went gangbusters and he had such a hard time getting that off the ground. It's absolutely insane to me because these diverse stories are being overlooked, just because it's like, oh, we don't know you we're not sure. If there's an audience here for this and and web3 changes that and.

AG

It also gives artists more control again because once things are acquired by the big studios at the very beginning, it's out of the artist's hands, and it's no longer up to them when we're able to give that control back, the art is returned to the artist and that's pretty cool. We're excited that at the end of the day, decentralization through web3 is going to solve.

AG

So many of these different issues that we've sort of run through here today, it's going to put greater representation on screen, which, in a world today that has become so tribalistic, mainly because of web 2.. We are now able to bring us all into communities and to explore people that don't look like us act like us. Love like us live like us. All of that speak like us right and when we put those faces together in communities, there's going to be a whole lot of social good. That comes with it. One.

AF

Of my favorite film and tv creators, norman lear he's been creating tv shows since, like the 60s he's 100 years old, still making tv, but he was putting people of color on screen in a time when that was not accepted by general society and we didn't know it, but as we were watching it, the the people who were innately racist were watching people of color and then their empathy centers were triggered as they were watching these stories and they began to be compelled by their life journeys.

AF

And that's the power of storytelling and web 3 enables just such a broad scope of story.

AG

I'm so excited I mean ultimately, what we say often at kino is that artists in a 212 billion dollar industry shouldn't struggle and to be very clear. We are not here today to say that all the studios should go away and they shouldn't exist. We are here today to say that the pie of entertainment can be expanded and all of us can jump in and that the trillions of dollars that we all collectively worldwide have ourselves as individuals.

AG

We can put that to empowering the next generation of artists to tell the stories that the world needs to hear, so they get paid properly so that they can own their art properly, so that people can be impacted in the way that film and tv and entertainment was meant to do.

AF

And you can participate in the upside of that.

AG

AF

Exciting we love, we got a few minutes, left love to open it up to questions. If anybody wants to do a quick q and a.

AG

Microphone over here ask away it's your chance to ask an executive producer at netflix and abc disney. I'm not exciting! So don't ask me anything but uh ask anything about hollywood web 3. What we're doing yeah up in the front hi.

AH

Guys, uh thanks for the presentation, so my my main concern with like making industries more community based and decentralized, is that, like obviously you're taking out the middlemen or certain third parties that are um essential for some uh artists or or film directors, or movies or whatever? So how do you go about this? Like? Don't you think, there's going to be a lot of filmmakers or or actors that are going to be struggling, promoting their uh their works um as well as distributing because they don't have the right connections or resources.

AF

Yeah, so web3 actually fixes this so as a guy who's created both independent films again one that's being uh the the red carpets happening like while I'm here uh and also big huge studio shows as a filmmaker. When I come in, if I can say, hey, I've got 10 000, loyal audiences. With the kino model. We can actually show like look, there's hundreds of thousands of social media impressions. We have a massive audience for this. It makes it easier to get distribution.

AF

It's a lot simpler when I can prove that there's there's a bunch of people who have invested and if you participate in the upside, you better believe that you're going to help market that uh in the long term, does that make sense. Yeah.

AH

Definitely yeah.

AF

Thanks thanks a lot.

AH

AF

Question, thank you yeah. uh Anyone else. I see a hand way in the back there.

AF

You got a sprint.

AD

Hello thanks for the presentation uh you mentioned that one film bohemian reps buddy was a did the 10x in revenue, but was reported doing 50 million loss. Can you explain this? I didn't really understand thanks.

AG

I would absolutely love to so bunch of my friends who are lawyers and entertainment. This is what they do. They'll sit down with a studio and they'll set up different entities right, so you have the parents, let's call it dis flicks. They.

H

Have the parent.

AD

AG

And then they own another one, let's call it luke rings films, and then they have uh a film that they call. Lord of the stars. uh Lord of the stars, was massively popular in 10x, but what uh dis flicks did is they started charging lord of the stars. Ten thousand dollars a month for a parking spot. True story happened to him yeah. Then they charge you marketing budgets and they do this thing where they basically suck all the life out of the bottom entity.

AG

They can write it off as a loss for the bottom entity, not pay taxes off, that they take the profits and then those who have the rights to profits in that particular film, not in the parent company. They then don't have the right. They don't have anything right like we actually have a friend, a partner who's, doing a show on our platform who actually got a bill from a particular comedy network. uh That was pretty obvious.

AG

That told him that he owed them millions of dollars when he owned 10 of the production right like like it's a billion dollar. There are plenty of commercials. He knows that it's making money, but it was their way of saying: hey, don't even try this man we're gonna, we're gonna tie you up in court for years they.

AF

Can also give each other loans, which is absolutely insane and then charge an agrees, an egregious rate for those loans. So it's literally like hey, I'm gonna charge my self-interest and make all this money back, and then they show a red at this bottom entity, which is great again for taxes. But it's terrible for the artists, because.

AG

We don't see your contacts too, I'm printing the example right now we were talking about this yesterday, one studio loaned one of its other entities and charged a 40 interest. 40 I mean that's, not even that's nowhere near market rate in hollywood, let alone the world. uh So it's it's practices like that. Yeah great.

AF

Question great question: thank you guys. I think we're out of time here. Yeah. uh Thank you. So much uh we'd love to talk to you afterwards find us we'll uh yeah.

AG

Xyz, if you'd like to learn more about how keno is changing hollywood for the better follow us at austin seaworld at daryl fannin. Thank you again and enjoy nier con everybody.

A

Thank you so much. Thank you austin! Thank you. Daryl that was kino app xyz. Am I pronouncing it right? Kino, app, kino, app, xyz, great and they're revolutionizing, the world of hollywood and bringing back decentralization in a very centralized infrastructure.

A

Now is break time. We have a 30-minute break, go enjoy all the booths go enjoy the gamers lounge enjoy sweatcoin token generation. Events have fun I'll, see you in 30 minutes.

A

Welcome back everyone, I hope you've had a nice break and you got to see some of the great booths.

A

We have a dao topic now with the dao team, how cell gp is evolving in sports ownership, and here joining us on stage? Is jordan gray from astrodow todd reynolds from cell gp and moderating is chris gent from near foundation.

AI

All right, hello, guys- uh hopefully you guys heard a little bit about cell gp and what we're doing on the main stage yeah, but we wanted to take a little bit of time and go a little bit deeper on the dow. We don't have a ton of time, but we also want to let you guys ask a couple.

AI

Questions and poke can go a little deeper if you do have thoughts or things you want to know, but with that, I'm chris jen work with the nero foundation work really closely with the sale, gp team on go to market, but also product integration. I'd love to these guys to introduce themselves yeah.

Y

I'm todd ronald I've got, I think the coolest job in web3. I get to combine my two passions, so uh sailboat racing and web3 and figuring out how we build the future of fandom.

AE

Hey I'm jordan gray, I love building networks of value and I've had the opportunity to do that with astro dao, where we have launched over 700 dows and have between 100 and 200 monthly active dials at any time, and this is such an exciting use case, I can't wait to get into it awesome so.

AI

So with that, you know we really want to talk about what is ownership, uh what is participation in sport? uh Why are we even looking at this and so to start I'd love to to have the teams talk a little bit about when you're thinking about dowse and technology use cases and that kind of stuff?

AI

How do you actually apply it? Why are we even doing it? Why are we looking at sport to begin with, so I think even todd it'd be great to chat a little bit about like from a commercial aspect like what does it take to do something like this in a sports league.

Y

Yeah, so our thesis is that web3 really can provide value to fans uh and an integrated fan loyalty and so we're building integrated technology to bring bring rewards on chain. But really we're focused on what we think is the ultimate fan, loyalty platform and the dow owen team.

AI

Yeah, and, and so thinking about that, like jordan, you've been working on dallas for a long time like what do you think that the most exciting part about this is? And what do you think the biggest challenge is.

AE

Yeah, I think that probably the most exciting thing is that engagement. The fact that this is a tool that brings people together and allows them to with these financial primitives interact with each other in new ways and have sovereignty and all these mechanics and the hardest part about that is that governance is hard, and it's something that everybody has to figure out when they're bringing themselves to an organization is what what am I bringing and what will I get back out of it and finding that nuance with large groups of people is is not easy.

AI

Well and thinking beyond, like consensus and traditional governance, like ownership in and of itself, is hard right decision. Making's hard raising capital is hard, and so, when you think about a sports team and the size of something like this and to think it could be put into a dow, I mean the dollar value of this is like it's significant, it's nine digits. So when you think about this todd like and you're thinking commercial, like, what do you think, is the biggest challenge here.

Y

Yeah I mean, I think, the.

Y

Y

The there's a couple different elements right there is: the cell gp, is a global racing league right. We have international global teams competing around the world. Ultimately, we, this is just another team.

Y

Most of those teams are owned by individuals or a group of individuals, but in a really small way. What we think the opportunity is around a dow is how do you? How do you distribute that to a much larger group of people of ownership group, but also to the entire fan community right?

Y

Sport is ultimately about building uh passionate fans right when we think about the green bay packers and the nfl they're, one of the smallest markets in the nfl, yet they're, one of the highest valued teams and- and that is ultimately because they have one of the most passionate fan bases.

Y

We think that a dow is going to. Let us do that in sale, gp and build the most passionate fan base for sale, gp and, ultimately, I think one of the most valuable teams in sale, gp.

AI

Yeah, so I know that russell mentioned that you guys have amended your participation agreements and all of that stuff to allow something like this to happen, and I think it's not understated that existing leagues that have existed for a long time and have complex commercial structures actually have to change their entire way of operating.

AI

I think something like cell gp actually is offering us an opportunity to almost do it from scratch and, frankly, with ease and in a shorter amount of time, like jordan, I know applications of dows are something that you focused on, but also from a legal perspective like what does it take to do this? I know you guys are working with proskauer rose.

Y

Yeah, so that so that's exactly it so sale gp. The way that we govern the teams is through what we call our participation agreement, and so it's like the concord agreement in f1, ultimately sale gp. We set the rules for the global league. We talk about. How do you have fair racing? How do you have consistent racing?

Y

How do you run the teams around the world, but it's up to the teams to actually come together and uh and form their racing team, and so what we have done and I think we're the first global league to do this- is actually amend the rules of sale gp to allow and encourage a doubt, a form and own and operate a sale, gp team top to bottom.

AE

Yeah, I think it's an awesome opportunity, there's many sports styles that have come into existence and attempts that have been done at this, where there's a lot of people who are excited about the idea of team ownership.

AE

But when it comes to the league level, there's actually no interface there for them to participate with and what sale gp is doing, is opening the doors and saying not that we're making a dow team, but we're open to the idea of a doubt owning a team and just opening those doors is already amazing and when we're riffing on, like the complications of these things um through the dow cubator program, where we take dows through like five phases of how to like establish themselves and what their mission and vision is, it's usually the mission and vision which is the hardest part to get down on paper, even before anything touches the blockchain, and I love the amount of thinking and the minds that have come together to make this possible something that has never been done before like this is way finding.

Y

Yeah, and so that's right, what the cell gp participation amendment uh does is it forms the framework for a dow to form right, and so, when we first started this, we had this idea that we'd like to do a dow. We weren't sure it was gonna, be possible. We've now done a body of work, a lot of that's legal focused on okay. How do you actually do a dow loan team? It's a reg d, offering it's a security uh but and that that has certain frameworks that that then puts in place.

Y

But you take a step back and you say: okay, how do we make sure that this is actually mass engagement where everybody can be involved and and that's what the framework agreement ultimately outlines it says, sale gp will have a dow owned team. It says that dow must have a constitution that lays out how it can operate. It is an ownership. Token is a security right. It has to operate under a u.s securities law, a reg d offering, but it also says that it has to have a governance method that is open to everybody.

Y

So there's ultimately two classes of tokens required and a class a token that is a security ownership, stake and class b. That is a governance token that anybody can own from day one and that will have meaningful governance, rights and commercial rights, and so, when you start thinking about what that can look like uh it, it's basically a membership token into the team where you have a real voice and what that team does how it forms, what it's, uh what the athletes are doing on board, how it, um how what it what it focuses on.

Y

But then it is part of that you can have access to to experiences that traditionally would only be reserved for folks that were sitting in the owner's box and.

AI

So michael casey was actually pushing on that on stage with russell like what are those areas that you know could happen, and I think the the interesting part there is that none of us can really say that right we're not going to be the team owner. So I think when you think what could happen, the possibilities are literally endless and I think there's going to be a driver group that really pushes forward trying to drive fandom, and I think what we're doing here is really trying to push primitives people.

AI

Ask us all the time why cell gp, why not f1? Why not the nba? Why not something else? We just gave you the reason for the commercial structures, it's nearly impossible to do it there, but we're looking at primitives like this, like what are the things that get you most excited about. Anybody in this room being able to do.

Y

Yeah, I think that's right. That's lgp's edge right. We because cell gp is a startup we're able to to look at this across the league right. You do this in the nfl. You do this somewhere else. There you're kind of doing it on the side and getting blocked out right, whereas sale gp is, is taking a bit of technology risk and saying we're all in where it goes from there right. The cell gp sets the rules we set the agreement.

Y

Ultimately, it's going to be up to the dow to decide those things, but what we can start to talk about is what does a hypothetical dow look like right within that framework, and I think that the there's a bunch of different ideas going back and forth, but it's around meaningful governance tied to that class b. Token, uh and some things might be done with like a kyc where every one token one person one vote and there's some elements of the team that will be done. That way uh and there's some elements.

Y

Maybe on the commercial side that will be uh token weighted voting. There may be a combination between different algorithmic uh methods of voting in there and where that goes, is I mean the t. The dow will have to pick a country right, it's nation, first nation, racing and sale gp. What country is the dow uh racing under and that's going to be one decision that the dow will make clgp won't specify that that's up to the dow to decide uh what um what what purpose partner is.

Y

The team partnering with so sale gp has two different championships: leagues, we have the racing league on the water. We also are racing uh for a better future, and so we've actually gamified sustainability and we have a whole purpose league that runs a part of it. The dow is gonna get to decide that, um and that goes all the way forward into how are athletes selected? uh How are uh coaches selected? What is the dow focusing on in terms of its marketing.

AI

And its markets, and so jordan, you've seen dow's inside and out and human, like coordination, is one of the best things that we say the dows are good for, and so you know that there's challenges they're getting people to actually participate in votes and all of that stuff. So what do you think the the challenges are, but also? What do you think? The awesome parts that could come out of this are as a primitive.

AE

Yeah, I think it definitely plays into like the things that we're excited about like we're nerding out on the differences between fungible tokens non-fungible, the way the regulations work and all these things, but at the end of the day, what we're enabling is for fans to be closer to their teams and that's kind of the vision of astro too, is just the web to simplicity of like it allows people to connect with each other around a shared vision and accomplish those missions.

AE

So that's that's what I love about this is that as long as everybody's aligned on that goal, then it can come together in so many different ways and again we're just cultivating the possibility for that to happen.

AE

There's all these primitives and mechanics that can come into play for somebody to pick up and run with, um but at the end of the day, the the fans are closer to the teams and that doesn't have to mean that they are there for financial gain, but that they are part of the team that they love and that's just an incredible feeling to it's. No longer just on the other side of the screen, it's something that becomes real and tangible with that sense of ownership. Well,.

AI

And so gp very data, fueled uh league in and of itself tons of data being pumped through the oracle cloud and when you're thinking about the amount of things that could be done with that, I think becomes pretty fascinating. I mean they've got an e-regatta game. Now, that's not web3, based and I'd, encourage people to think about.

AI

Go build that maybe we can help the league adopt it and use it, but when I think about that, like dow ownership, like russell was saying before, could really lead to very different experiences that doesn't have to be physical on site, it could be within gaming, it could be within. You know, fan betting at some point in time. You never know when you think about this. What do you think are the the most exciting pieces and that are the biggest like risks.

Y

Yeah I mean I there's right: there's two different membership opportunities there right, there's the the in-person experiences, both at events or even in training camps right that normally would be only reserved for owners of the team. We think the dao opens up the possibility to really make sure that everybody has that opportunity, but then it gets even you take a step back now. You have this authentication method in place to do really meaningful digital experiences, and so even the in cell gp, the data is actually all shared between the teams.

Y

So you think about formula one right: each team has it collecting a lot of data but they're they're walling that off right, that's their ip? They don't share that with anybody else, they're very, very protective of that clgp's attitude's, the other way it's actually all open, but it's about what do you do with that data, and so the teams all have different debriefs? That's the one piece, that's very um protected that a team owner might be able to be involved in.

Y

Is there a way to structure where, actually, you could protect the team's uh deliberations but actually allow a true die hard fan uh the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in that room, as they're figuring out? Why are we getting beat? Why is that other team uh getting across the line ahead of us? Why are we down the leaderboard? um Could you actually put a place, a method and rules to allow fans to actually sit and watch that debrief well, interesting or digitally.

AI

And potentially even have a say in it right because we don't know what you can and can't have a say. I mean jordan for you. If, if you were a member of this, like ownership group or the the kind of membership group like what were the things that you would want to participate in.

AE

Yeah, I think that we're talking about these different experiences that the fans can have- and I think that there's a huge opportunity for web3 natives, the d5dgents who love looking at charts, love looking at numbers, figuring out what they all mean and visualizing them. Taking this open data and doing some amazing work that has never been done before using those analytical skills. So that's something that I would be like curious about and interested in like helping form and figure out and look at and then is that token gated and what that all looks like.

AE

But it is really cool, seeing the kind of like same play of transparency and privacy that we have in blockchain playing out in sale, gp and that's one of the things that I think makes this like. A very natural, like partnership and thing to be pushing forward together. Is that there's a lot of shared values between the teams that are looking at this yeah.

AI

Well, and so thinking about that right, you, you guys also heard that we had announced a fund yesterday, uh the cyrus fund focused on media and entertainment, and, if you think about this, lgp really is a median entertainment platform right you're, going to races, you're participating in these things when you think about what could come out of that, I even start to think from an entertainment value perspective like where does this go from here? Does this get into other leagues? Does this inspire other leagues?

AI

Does the legal work come out as uh kind of open source materials out of this league.

Y

That's definitely what we're focused on right. We're focused on doing this. The right way we're not focused on uh trying to figure out how we can get around u.s securities laws, we're saying we're leaning into it. We are a security. How do you operate within the rules of the game today and we think some of the work being done? Hopefully, then, it becomes kind of this case study that can be transferred to other leagues other than other corporate structures, the the the real thing to think about right.

Y

So we put the framework in place and now what are the next steps right? How does this actually happen, and so we're actually really fortunate that, even here at nircon, there's a bunch of founding members of the dao that are starting to come together, starting to take this framework? Have these ideas? How does this actually all work and ultimately form the dow together?

Y

Ultimately, it's going to take that founding group to join hands and say we're doing this together and and launch the dow and that's kind of like a first wave and then that becomes the the kind of effect that that builds from there. How do we scale out the next wave of tokens? How do we scale out the the reg beat or the class b token to ultimately have a team on the line for next season?.

AI

So so fundraising is hard and again we're saying this is uh what eight nine figure uh investment and probably more on the eighth side, I can't get my math together today, but thinking about like where this can go. Fundraising's not easy. So you're saying you actually already have line of sight into people, hand raising and saying we want to do this.

Y

Yeah, it's been really encouraging. um The the number of people that have expressed interest in taking uh kind of a foundational role in the dow has been fantastic. I've been really excited that, but also the number of people from the whole community that want to have a a voice and a stake in the dow is almost more encouraging, and so both sides are are actually critical to the success right. This is not something where it's uh 20 people getting together. We could do that in a traditional structure.

Y

We could even do 100 people or we could do even 2 000 people right. You could do that in a in a traditional llc uh environment. There are some advantages to being in web 3 right, there's, liquidity, advantages that come with um with tokenizing that ownership stake, but we think it's, this combination between ownership and governance and how those two communities work together to come up with new ideas and ultimately push the team forward, and we think the whole sport forward.

AI

And so I've heard like dows of dows before in these kind of scenarios like jordan. What do you think about that? Like one massive dao, a couple of different token offerings and that kind of stuff? But how do you think this unfolds even in the way you get people to participate.

AE

Yeah, I think that, with the with daos, the more focused they are on a singular thing, the easier it is for them to be successful towards that thing, because you're, organizing so many different people, the single goal helps a lot and because of that thousand dows and other structures where you allow smaller groups to focus on what they need to focus on, so that they can contribute to something.

AE

Bigger makes a lot of sense, and I think that when we're we're looking at the people who are coming together around this style and around forming this, it's really visionary figures who have an appetite for risk because well there are a lot of things that are exciting about web3, and that's why we're all here is because we see those it's also something where we're figuring it out. There will be stumbling points along the way, and somebody has to go there first and put the first foot forward and just seeing that coming together.

AE

Here is incredible, so.

AI

I'd say, I think, that's notable to push on. I mean this is a world's first like there's been sports uh teams that are owned by fans or have some type of say, but doing this tech first tech forward. I am pushing the dow narrative and dao structures, for it is pretty important, especially going back to the primitives point.

AI

um But when we're thinking about this, I mean we're going to go two minutes into a couple questions, but is there anything that you guys are thinking about that, like you feel like people need to know about this? uh That probably hasn't been said yet I'll start with with you, jordan. No pressure.

AE

Yeah, well, I I haven't touched on it, but with with astro dao, it's simple to make it out like technically you're able to do that in less than 30 seconds. If you know what you're doing you just click through it and you have your dao and a lot of the leg work that happens. Are these people problems in the end? This all boils down to people problems and getting that right is the hard work. That's happening right now, so that we even know how to configure it when it comes to the technical portion of it.

AE

So as people think about dallas, I always encourage them to take that into consideration that it's really about the people that are involved. That's the important part. The dao is in service of those people. It's software, helping them run what they want to run, and then I think another really interesting aspect of daos is the more permeable. They are the easier it is to join them and leave them the more successful they'll be.

AE

It means that anybody who can have an interest can come in and do what they want to do and get something out of it. And people who aren't interested any longer can easily leave and you don't have dead weight sitting around kind of dragging everybody or freeloading or whatever. That situation looks like. So um as people look at taos, think about the people and think about entering and exiting maybe even your own exit.

Y

Yeah, I think the thing that excites me, the most is um the I get so excited about web3. I get so excited about what web3 looks like in the future, but I also get so frustrated sometimes about web. 3 looks like right now and I think that um there's been even we look at like what the broncos tried to do right with. Can we tokenize a piece of the broncos and go and raise four and a half billion dollars to do it? Oh, no!

Y

We're going to block you guys out, but I think that what what sale gp is committed to do here, it is able to do kind of top to bottom, um with the league ownership, with the team ownership structure, committing to saying okay, we're not going to put you guys over there and say you're. A dow you're separate we're going to figure out we're going to work with you to make sure that you are successful.

Y

We're leading into this sets up this, this ultimate primitive or this case study, for how do you do this in sale gp? But this lays the foundation for how do you do this elsewhere? And so I think that's the real, exciting opportunity that we're seeing from both sailing fans right that like sailing and want to be a part of an ownership group of sailing both from racing fans. How do you do that? Maybe motorsport or other sports, just even general sports fans? I want to be an owner of a team.

Y

This is a great way to start doing that or web3 fans. How do we actually have a real world use case of web3? That's providing meaningful value right. This is not something we're just doing, because we we think web3 is cool. This is something we think there is real value to changing how fans are governed uh by leaning into web3 and building that and first we're going to build it in sale gp. But we think that we're building really the foundation to be taken elsewhere and.

AI

I think one of the cool parts that we're running into question territory really is ran the math back in my head. It is an eight-figure like go-to-market need to raise funds, and so, when we're thinking about how can all of you participate? If there's anyone here, that's actually interested in trying to get involved, definitely stop by the cell gp booth. You can also come out to cadiz next weekend or two weeks from now. Actually, in spain, see the races up close for a vip experience, there are tickets being sold at a discounted rate.

AI

So if you want to check it out, you really want to see this hands on get up close to the votes and see what you'd be buying or buying into come on out check it out. It's probably not what you think it is when you see this up close, it is a tech, confused industry. So with that I'd love to use the last three minutes and 30 seconds to talk with you guys. So are there any questions from anybody in the audience.

AE

Everybody knows everything about taos now, where's the set. Oh.

AI

I see one one in the back in green.

AJ

Hello hi. Thank you so much for that informative panel. I'm just really curious. If there is an actively voting dow today or is everything still getting formed.

Y

Yeah you said that one more time right, the other question was: is there a working dow today? The answer is no. We have just uh amended our participation agreement to allow the dow to form right, so we started out. We wanted to do it now. We weren't sure we could do it. We have or have just completed the legal work that says we now have a road map.

Y

We know how this an sec legal, dow can form, and now that's uh providing information to those founding members of to ultimately get together and form that dow that founding group is meaningfully coming together. uh We're always looking for more folks to get involved and ultimately then they will stand up. The the dow organization, uh the smart contract, the organization that will be behind that smart contract uh and then the dow community itself.

AE

And just to reinforce that shape as we're getting the next question going when people say dao, they usually are referring to the people, the software and the legal entity, and that's what is uh forming now.

T

Hi thanks: can you speak to what you had to amend in your bylaws.

Y

Yeah for sure, um the way that ownership is governed in sports leagues right is generally uh really designed around one person or a small number of people uh doing that, and so we had to focus on okay. If you go to community ownership- and you allow that, okay, you can say: okay, we're gonna, be open to having a community-owned team. But then what are the the other impacts of that?

Y

And so thinking about a lot of it is securities regulation, so modifying it to to make sure that a community team will fit within securities law uh and then also making sure that the the dow doesn't become something where one person can come in and buy up all the tokens and it kind of defeats the purpose, and so there's actually rules in there that make sure that the team maintains its integrity uh of being a dow and of having multiple owners having a broad ownership base and mass engagement.

AK

Hello hi, um my understanding is that you created the platform so that you can end up having doubts, participating and you created this class b for governance. um What I wanted to ask you is like how much thinking has gone into how far you can push governance in the true essence of a dao right like? Are you going to I mean? Would it be possible, you think: is there a structure in place not legally, but like even computationally, where the way the trainers are selected, the crew.

H

AK

Selected like everything else, apart from ownership, which I think enough, we've seen a lot of instances of it's kind of working really well.

Y

Yeah, it's um from the cell gp side, there's been a bunch of ideas and work around that. Ultimately, the detail of that will be up to the dow. I will say I'm very, very encouraged by the initial conversations with those founding members, because they've done a lot more work around that than we have uh and it's it's a little bit tricky right. You if you just said the dow operates the whole team and they get to make every decision.

Y

It's not functional right. But if you also said the dow gets to pick who's in charge and then they make all the decision what's the point of doing a dow and so it's finding the right balance. Ultimately, this is a governance model and I think it's going back to there's an executive branch just like in the in the u.s that runs the team day-to-day they report into a congress. Those are your token holders and then there's an arbitration to make sure that any disputes can be handled.

AI

And so with that, that puts us at time, but really this is about creating the best in class first time, like mass use case for a dao and really it is about delivering experience and delivering on the future of fandom. So thank you guys. Thank.

AE

You thank you good stuff.

A

Thank you so much sale, gp and all of the dao and sports endow makes it extremely exciting. Next up is breaking the hype cycle. How to think long term. We have ashley tyson from hypersphere ventures: maria shen from electric capital, paul varaditakit from pantera capital and ron neuner from crypto banter.

AL

Welcome welcome. Welcome everyone. Welcome nice to see you all nice to see you all here on uh halfway through the second day here at the conference um great panel, great guest, nice, to see you all, I think, before we talk about the hype cycle and breaking the hype cycle, I want to talk about neoprotocol, and I want to talk about what your expectations were before you got here and whether they've changed now that you're here and you've seen everything and you've seen everything inside I'm going to start off with maria. What do you think?

AL

What were your expectations before you came here and has this met your expectations.

AM

Yeah, um I mean definitely beyond, I think I I this. We were originally investors in near in 2018 and I think just seeing how much it's grown. One of the things that we look at is the number of open source developers in the space and last year in 2021. We noticed that the near ecosystem, you know more than 4xed the number of open source developers in their ecosystem, and that was you know.

AM

That was a great kind of numbers thing to look at, but I think coming to this conference and actually seeing the number of people who are drawn to the new ecosystem who are building on the near ecosystem, is an entirely different feeling. Yeah.

AL

I think the last statistic I heard was 1500 developers. If I'm not mistaken,.

AM

uh So monthly active right now is a bit um over 400 which um puts near at you know like after after ethereum at one of the top layer, one chains, that's gaining developers but yeah near actually last year was one of the top 10 chains to have gained the most developers.

AL

And just for context, for those watching this electric capital near is one of your investments.

AM

Yes, that's right yeah, so we invested in near in 2018. Electric capital um is an early stage, vc firm. We only invest in crypto, we invest at seed in series a um and we were have been around since 2018. So nero is one of our first investors. Awesome yeah.

AL

Paul, what were your expectations before you got here.

AN

Yeah, so just on pantera capital, we started in 2013 uh similar seed to series b, so we're happy to do slightly later stage deals and we've been investing in years since 2019. So I think it was right after you guys invested into that small.

AL

Investors, small investors.

AN

But it is one of our largest positions, and so for me I mean you know at the beginning of the year I was I was saying this is going to be a monster year for near. I was extremely excited. I felt like things were starting to align. You know recently they got listed on coinbase, so I think that's gonna really.

H

AN

Up the doors for the u.s market- and you know I think now that the crypto prices have come down. I really wanted to sort of see what the developer sort of you know. Adoption would be.

AN

I mean I look at the electrical port all the time to sort of see it, but I just wanted to actually like number one meet these people in person and and really just kind of understand the quality of the teams that are building, and so you know, I think the turnout was larger than I expected I'd say the quality of the team's extremely high, and I was also impressed and also you know, pleasantly surprised in how many sectors nir has been able to get really good quality entrepreneurs.

AN

I mean you know we saw the announcement by sweatcoin, so not not only trying to go after d5 but really going after gaming in a bigger way going after consumer in a bigger way. So with all that said, I mean you know I come out of this conference really excited.

AL

Awesome- and you say near is one of your biggest investments.

AN

Yes, why got in really early? And you know it's just you know been able to build a really strong developer ecosystem. You know it really leads in with tech we bring web 2 to web3 and they've just done very well with that thesis.

AL

Amazing ash, I guess your business is not as linear as the investment funds over here. Maybe you want to give us a little bit of background about hypersphere what you guys do yeah and then your expectations versus the reality here got.

AO

It so I'm ashley, I'm a gp at hypersphere ventures.

AO

I started my career in crypto in 2013, but I'm a co-founder of web3 foundation, so I actually helped launch the polka dot uh protocol um and then in 2020 I left the foundation and I started working with pair chain projects and actually started talking a lot to ilia and was really curious about what the near team was up to. I had worked with them at web3 summit in 2019 and all the ethereum core developers were. Like you know.

AO

I really like this near protocol thing like they're, really smart, guys, I'm going to angel, invest which they did very quietly. A lot of people. Don't know that, and I was like all right. My spidey, like senses are telling me: let's talk to elia, so I joined the near team and started working with them in 2020. um So I did that um and then launched this fund, so hypersphere spun out of the polka dot ecosystem, and the first fund was a very like polka dot centric uh fund.

AO

But now this fund is cross-chain focused, so near is an lp solana is an lp ava labs is an lp, so we've got a lot of cross-chain representation and we invest in early-stage cross-chain infrastructure and go a little higher up the stack but yeah for me and my perspective of veneer, like I don't know what I started working with near was ilia and alex and like a few folks in the san francisco office, um and it was kind of this ragtag group of like visionaries, and I just really liked how technical and how focused they were and their values and their vision, um because I think a lot of times you find some folks that are in this space, for maybe the wrong the wrong reasons and ilia and alex particularly, were just you know, really attuned to the values and what they wanted to create, and I couldn't help but be drawn in by that, and it's really amazing to see this come to life yeah.

AO

AL

I must agree with you when I think my perception of near protocol before I gotcha was. There was a bunch of really smart guys, building a lot of really smart products and shipping them all very successfully, but they lacked a marketing department.

AL

They lack the hype cycle and I think now that I'm here and I see everything- and I see this amazing conference and I see the hype that's being created.

AL

I think they now have the missing piece of the puzzle and I think that's probably a good segue into the next part of our discussion, which is how to break the hype cycle and how to think much more long term, and I think one of the things that we know is that most technologies have a hype cycle and then we drop down and then reality starts to set in and we start to build and grow when, in the nasdaq.

AL

In the 1990s and 2000 we had the hype cycle around the internet that collapsed and that carried on growing linearly in crypto we've had multiple hype cycles. We had 2015 we're at 2017 and then we've just had another one and it's kind of uncharacteristic that we just keep getting these hype cycles in crypto. Why do you think that crypto is so hype driven so much more than everything else in the world? I'll start with you, maria.

AM

Excellent question: um I do think yes, while crypto is extremely cyclical. In that sense, the floor gets higher with each cycle right, I think the and- and I don't just mean price floors, get higher. I I really mean the activity gets a lot higher. I remember the 2018 um bear market, which was uh my first. You know 2018 2019 bear market, which was my first bear market.

AM

There really weren't many things being built right. A lot of teams had raised money from icos in 2017, but you know we didn't have a lot of applications. We certainly didn't have a lot of users and this this market feels markedly different right. There's 300 million dollars in defy locked in near there's billions of dollars. That's that's still retained. In the system.

AM

There are nft users, there are transactions that are happening where, where people are doing real things, whether it's playing games, whether it's um voting for dow governance um and so the activity level, I think this time around. I mean it's unprecedented right. It just it really. I don't think we've seen this before um it's not it's it's it's! It's no longer faith-based right. It's not like hopes and wishes. It's really there's a lot of stuff happening on the ground. Do.

AL

You think we're at that inflection point for adoption, because I think you could argue that there aren't many crypto apps today that really have real world adoption. Yeah I mean bitcoin a lot of people hold it, but not a lot of people use it ethereum, not real, no real mass adoption. Do you think we're at that that turning point where, in the next six to 12 months, we may get a mass adopted, crypto application.

AM

um I don't believe in the next six to 12 months, but I do think we are we're. I I would be shocked if you know within the next three years. We don't see something, that's that's mass adoption and- and I do think before you know, if you just take one or two years ago, maybe when people talked about crypto, the only thing they know is bitcoin right now, people know um not only bitcoins but other layer ones.

AM

They know about nfts and, what's actually really cool, is a lot of people know about nfts without knowing anything about blockchain or not knowing anything about layer, one chains which is actually what you want right. That's that's a signal that people are are being exposed to the utility and not just uh you know, looking at it, because the tech is interesting and cool.

AL

Paul, where do you think the break the hype, real consumer app? That gets real adoption? Where do you think it's coming from what sector is it going to be nfts? Is it going to be some kind of sweat coin, where it's just people walking to get tokens? Where do you think the adoption's coming from.

AN

Yeah I mean you know, I think I believe I I think the same thing as maria in terms of it's gonna take some time and along the way, there's gonna be volatility, but the the difference is the volatility just decreases over time too I mean we have a lot more institutional capital coming in. We have a larger investor base. Things like that, and you know I think the competition for layer ones is going to actually enable some of these larger consumer applications to come.

AN

We're gonna see probably two types that are gonna go go at it. I mean we're. Gonna, see larger companies, companies like sweatcoin, trying to figure out you know they already have a user base out there. Let's try to figure out. If we can, you know, go more crypto native and incorporate a token model. That just makes a lot of sense. Where you know people aren't going to be dumping all the time and we're going to see more and more of those examples give it a shot.

AN

But I am really interested to sort of see you know you know kind of companies that start off from the beginning and trying to figure out like how to get you know, sort of more consumer adoption, and I I think that it's going to be in a way where you don't really know that much about crypto or you need to know that much about crypto.

AN

It's going to look like a web 2 experience but sort of running on the blockchain and using specific features of the blockchain, and I think the areas in which that can happen are probably going to be around nfts in gaming and it might actually not happen in the united states. I think it's gonna, you know we're huge investors in local exchanges and brokerages, and so you know what we see in southeast asia around gaming.

AN

I think you know with you know, asking infinity already and with stuff that's going on in vietnam and developers over there I mean I actually could see the emerging markets really fueling consumer adoption, because there's actually a need for it. Because of what like you know, crypto can do for their economy.

AL

I must say I was in korea two weeks ago for career blockchain week and I haven't been in korea since lockdown so three years, I don't think I've been in korea and what blew me away was that all the funds- investors incubators- that used to incubate layer, ones and bridges- are now all obsessed with one thing and that's gaming: all they are talking about is gaming and to them.

AL

What they're saying is that gaming is the killer application, that's going to bring millions of people into crypto, nothing else, all the biggest fans hashed, all the big guys that are sitting in korea said exactly the same thing.

AN

I I do think that it's going to take time for gaming, but I do think it has that potential. You know, especially if you can really unlock a different monetization model. I think you'd really get just just open up sort of like inclusion for everybody to participate in gaming and you know have better economics around it. So we're excited about that. You know we are betting. We've done about 15 gaming investments so far. I.

AL

Was gonna ask what percentage of your investment portfolio today is gaming and what percentage of your portfolio investments today are layer? One.

AN

Layer, one investing has sort of decreased over time, so I'd say in this recent fund. We probably don't have any really layer, one like exposure, it's really been mostly around cross chain and interoperability and then mostly around the application layer, especially around gaming. I say gaming. Consumer applications has risen in terms of percentage of our. uh You know, investments like more than any other sector.

AL

So more or less what percentage would gaming and consumer applications be, or specifically gaming.

AN

Gaming, I think right now is probably about fifteen to twenty percent of our portfolio.

AL

AN

Yeah, it is huge.

AL

Yeah ash: what do you think um what is going to bring the billion people in what's going to break the hype cycle here?.

AO

So all of these things- I'm going to say yes, and maybe I have a slightly contrarian opinion coming into the space. The way I came into this space like I really think the most important value um in crypto is not necessarily about how do we get the billion people in through some sort of trojan horse? But how do we ensure that we're creating freedom and censorship, resistance and true decentralization?

AO

So for me, like those fundamentals, are by far and away the most important and we can build other things. On top of that, and I think that's really great. um I've noticed you know the hype cycles, they change and they bring different people in which, I think is really great.

AO

I think there's something for everyone, um but I do think it's really important to kind of ensure every time we go through these hype cycles, and then we revert back into a bear that, like we realize the importance of what we're building and like the meaning of what we're building- and we hold people accountable to make sure that, like the tech that they're building fulfills that promise yeah.

AM

I I think, huge, huge plus one to that um my sense of being in crypto is that anything that can happen will happen. If there is something to be exploited, it will be exploited, and so I think, if we don't build resilient technology, that is decentralized privacy, preserving freedom, preserving um we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot later on, and we will see the repercussions of that. You.

AL

Know I must say, people talk about hype cycle as if it's a bad thing, so you know they put us on stage and they said how to break the hype cycle. But I actually think that the hype cycle actually may be quite an important part of the cycle and I'll challenge. Everyone here to say: ask yourself when you look at a coin, and usually when you look at a coin, is when the coin's price is running up and that's usually when it has the most hype. And then you look at the coin.

AL

You say: wow, that's actually a great narrative and then you go and research the narrative and then even though the coin may come down, the narrative keeps building and I think we saw that with nfts. So we had the half cycle of nfts the crash of nfts but net net.

AL

That hype cycle got a lot of people into nfts, and so, whereas I mean I hate the thought of people losing money on the way down the hype cycle, you know you ask people, how did you find out about bitcoin or why were you so excited about bitcoin?

AL

They didn't come for the technology, they came for the hype and and the price and they stay, and they stayed for the tech.

AO

AL

Of you got into bitcoin without looking at the price you see, there are two or three of you yeah.

AO

AN

Well, yeah, it helps when you have skin in the game to actually like motivate you to educate yourself about the space. I mean that's at least for me. That's how I can yeah.

AM

There actually is um data to back that up too in the developer report. We look at the growth of developers and obviously I think the question is are developers a lag are: are the number of developers a lagging or leading indicator of token prices, and it turns out that in different parts of the cycle they are both a lagging and a leading indicator.

AM

So when prices are shooting up exponentially in these crazy bull markets that we see, developers are a lagging indicator, you see, prices go up first and then developers follow and that's something that we all perhaps anecdotally experience right and I think in the last full cycle we saw a lot of people coming in from google from facebook, from netflix from microsoft um and a lot of these engineers that work in web 2 companies are poking their heads in and saying like, oh what's happening, this is interesting, but you know, as as prices fall, what we see with developers is that then it switches developers become a leading indicator exactly.

AL

AM

AL

The hype cycle lands up attracting more people and because they fall in love with the tech and the freedom and everything else we land up, keeping them in the ecosystem.

AL

If I mean I, I suspect that if bitcoin's price remained static at a thousand dollars, I don't think it would have brought that many developers into blockchain and I think it's a hype cycle which is bringing them in so it'd.

AM

Be a great stable coin at that I.

AL

Mean I think people are telling us to talk badly of the hype cycle, I'm not going to talk too badly about the hype cycle, because I think hype is a very important tool to bring people into an ecosystem. We've got a few more minutes. I'm going to look at you because I want to talk about cross chain.

AL

You mentioned that a lot of your investments are in cross chain, but crosstrain is becoming a very complicated and delicate space yeah. In light of the fact that most the hacks this year have been bridges, bridges and cross-chain protocols.

AL

At the same time, when I look at things like polka dot, we looked at their first parachain auctions. I don't know the numbers, but the amount of of dot that was take to win the power chain was huge.

AL

The last parrot chain auctions. I think I'm worried that that's going to start giving away dot to actually become para chains. You know flip the model.

AO

What is that? So? We can talk about pair of threads, but I think, that's a whole different.

AL

Conversation but let's talk about, let's talk about the future of of cross chain sure. What does it look like? Does it look like bridges? Does it look like cosmos? Does it look like parrot chains on a on a on one central chain.

AO

What does it look like? I think it looks like a lot of different things. It looks like all of those things right now and I think things are super highly experimental, which is why, like it's a dangerous proposition to say that we're like very ready for consumer-ready applications right. We were investors in in nomad um and you know felt that um quite heavily, um and so you know bridges were a really good opportunity like to introduce cross-chain interoperability. Maybe there's better ways like the axler team is here as well.

AO

That's like a really interesting approach to cross-message, passaging or cross-message passing um so you know, I think it's it's more in our um it's more important that we're funding people who can experiment in different ways and different architecture and an open source fashion will improve upon that like as we go along. So I don't think we know the right answer for that.

AO

I don't have an authoritative opinion on the best way to do cross chain, um but it needs to exist because this world is not interesting if we're all just siloed in a near ecosystem or an ethereum ecosystem. Like what's the point of that, we.

AN

Have like 30 wallets or something? Oh, what and you have like 30 watts, because you have like water.

AL

Everywhere I mean: how do you see the future? Do you, how do you guys see the future? Do you see us operating one application on here? One application on solana hopping over to play a game on avalanche, connecting our wallets opening multiple wallets in multiple browsers. How does that play out.

AM

uh Well, I I mean I it's it's.

AL

AO

AM

AO

Feels totally clunky, it's.

AM

Clearly, I I've thought about this a lot um and I have very loosely held opinions here. So you know definitely don't quote me on this. I actually I you know. I think a lot of people believe that we're going to be in this world, where everything is abstracted away right. You have a wallet and it's like. Oh you don't know what chain you're interacting with you're, just using whatever I actually don't know.

AM

If that's going to happen because I think organically, if you look around people feel I mean people are at near con for a reason right, there's a feeling of loyalty to near- and I think there's there's there's when, when you look at a layer one base chain, it's not just hey, this is an operating system right or this is like a technology stack. It actually comes with a community of people. It actually comes with a community of resources and that's something that you can't divorce easily from the tax.

AM

So I actually think because people are so emotionally bonded and oftentimes with certain layer ones or certain technology stacks that we may actually live in a world where you know. Perhaps it's not a thousand different technologies that we're interacting with. But everyone has you know maybe three to five different communities that they feel a real bond with, and it will be a fairly siloed experience where you hop around to these three to five experiences again loosely held opinion we'll see.

AL

How many of you are going to be at solana break point or whatever they call it just show of hands? How many of you are going to be at a east dev con east?

AL

How many of you gonna be at an avalanche conference?

AL

Okay, so everyone here is going to all the conferences. Yeah, so look I mean, I think it is a big problem that I think needs to be solved, because I think for as long as we're expecting users to jump from solana to near and from near to avalanche and then back to bitcoin. It's. It is one thing: that's gonna! Stop the mass adoption, I think, making crypto more user-friendly is key and I've seen a couple of applications here that are working on that things like not using private keys, anymore, um multi-party, computation.

AL

That happens automatically. I think that's one of the keys to mass adoption and that will bring in and break the hype cycle.

AH

AL

um Okay, I do see we're out of time, so I guess that's us. Thank you very much guys.

AM

AL

You thanks for.

H

AM

uh I do not know.

R

Hello, uh can we have the judges, I don't know where paul maria and alex if we can get them up to the kind of the front of the uh of the seats, and then we should be good.

Q

Are you gonna introduce.

R

Hello, hey everyone uh welcome to uh near khan's inaugural uh near con pitchfest. um My name is corey piggett, I'm strategic funding manager for near foundation and we're excited today to have uh to be able to showcase 13 different projects, early stage, projects that are building within the year's ecosystem members that we'll also have members of the funding team come up occasionally to uh to also provide some insights into uh ecosystem funding as well.

R

um Just a brief rundown of kind of how today is going to play out so we'll have each team present for about five minutes. Then we'll have after each pitch we'll have three judges be able to support the the projects through some feedback or some questions that they may have and then also from there.

R

We want to encourage community participation, so we'll also be having we'll be showca, showing it in a little bit a qr code, so anybody in the audience can also participate by voting on voting for which projects you like, providing any feedback for the teams, whether it's you want to connect with them. You have an idea that they may be able to work with or you're an investor and you're.

R

Looking to maybe connect with them as uh as an as an investment, so um we'll also after that, after the pitch post near con, we'll be able to uh kind of tally up all the votes and then we'll uh we'll share the feedback as well with teams and then each the top three teams, uh based off of voting, will receive a uh a grant from near foundation. Forty thousand dollars for first place place twenty thousand per second and then ten thousand, the third and the prize uh are denoted in uh near usdc.

R

um Speaking of judges, I know two of them are not here yet, but uh but paul from pantera capital, uh maria shen from electric capital and then alex from dn capital are here to uh to support the projects. They've been, I think, really fundamental in uh near's ecosystem as a whole. So we're really appreciative that they're here and able to participate.

R

um Here's a bit of our agenda, like I said, we'll, we'll be going through a handful of these projects coming through. If you want to follow along and check out a little more about the projects, you can go to near.org near con pitchfest to learn a little more about the projects, and so next I want to pass it off to uh josh who's. Our our head of near foundation's funding team he's going to be kind of chatting a little bit about our team's core vision for funding.

AP

Hello, everyone uh so quickly. um I just want to kind of talk through kind of how we think about funding uh at a platform level as it relates to supporting the new ecosystem.

AP

So it really comes down to four key pillars for us and they all roll up to us really having efficient, clear pathways for projects of all stages, shapes and sizes globally, to receive funding at the right time with the right structure. It starts really with the support. You know the creator triangle. This is something ilia's spoken about quite a bit since the genesis of of near, and it's really about creating a space and an atmosphere for communities and projects and markets to really activate and develop.

AP

The next is access so really offering those that may not necessarily be able to get funding for radical or unique, interesting ideas to provide that and the support that goes along with it. The next is the community support and so ultimately being able to galvanize different projects together to really help them work, whether that's through guilds, whether that's through regions and being able to ultimately help spark new ideas as well and then ultimately aligning incentives, and so as projects are building. How are we really supporting them through the development cycles to ultimately get them from?

AP

Perhaps a hackathon idea to a project? That's actually looking to raise, which many of the projects you'll be seeing today are in the process of doing.

AP

So here you can see sort of how the funding platform has matured over the last two years. uh We have from our grants, programs which are again decentralized and we'll talk a little bit more about that through the out the course of the session, as well as our different organizations that either focus on particular verticals or they're focused on a regional approach in terms of deployment of capital and supporting projects. Next, you have our ecosystem funds. You have four of them here listed that are active in the market developing and supporting projects.

AP

We also just launched our next ecosystem fund cyrus capital. We're really excited for what they're going to be bringing to the ecosystem as they focus on culture and entertainment.

AP

Then you have our venture network, and this is really for us really developing and informing venture capitalists who are supporting the near ecosystem and it's been growing non-stop and so right now we have around 320 uh key backers and investors that are engaged and really thinking about the new ecosystem and they're, really in a position to deploy 30 plus billion of capital, and so for us. This is a really important piece of the ecosystem, but ultimately, let's get to the projects which really was the exciting stuff.

R

Thank you josh, um so yeah back to the projects. uh Next, on stage, I want to introduce uh jonathan from on machina they're building a decentralized storage network on here.

AQ

Hello, everyone- I just want to say thanks to the near foundation team, for putting on this event. It's my first near event, and it is awesome, it's been so much fun to get to interact with the community.

AQ

So I'm just going to skip these okay. Here we go so on mockingo as, as corey said, we're building a decentralized storage network, and my background has come from deep involvement in fundamental digital infrastructure for many years, and you know it's not usually that sexy, it's kind of like plumbing and plumbers are really popular when you have a problem, but you don't usually hang out with them for fun the rest of the time. But right now I think in web 3 we need plumbers.

AQ

We need infrastructure plumbers because we are trying to change the way that we approach so many things in our world. You know the next several decades of human achievement and advancement, whether we're talking about finance or government or human rights, or any of these kinds of things. We are hoping to build the systems that will make that better for all of us. So we need plumbers. We need to be building serious infrastructure, and that is something that that is very near and dear to my heart.

AQ

Now in five minutes, I can't tell you about all the details, what we're doing so, I'm going to focus on two things today, crap and hype, and I hope that by the end of this you're, actually going to think they're very good. These are good things. So, first of all, what are we building?

AQ

Who are we we're a team of cloud computing infrastructure experts with open source experience and crypto experience, building large scale, infrastructure systems that are globally distributed, and we are now coming together to apply that to web3 infrastructure, starting with decentralized storage, what about generation zettabyte? So we are entering an age where most of you, and certainly you know, the next generation that comes along is going to be generating unfathomable amounts of data. Today we have about 95 zettabytes of data in the world in less than three years, that's going to double to 180 zettabytes.

AQ

If that pace continues by the time we get to the start of the next decade, we're not going to be talking about zettabytes. Does anyone know what comes after a zetabyte?

AQ

It's a yottabyte, so remember that one it's going to be important in about five years. This is the scale that we're talking about, and if we want those systems to be running and decentralized platforms, we have to take this very very seriously. This is something that's going to impact our world. It's also going to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, trillions of dollars of market cap, and that is is a great opportunity, but also a big responsibility.

AQ

So when we talk about storage, I think that there are some key fundamentals of storage, and this is where the crap comes in. You have to have capacity, resilience, availability and performance.

AQ

So often in our world we get caught up in our ideals and we we build systems that are blockchain first or web 3 first and we miss the fundamentals, and I think that that is an opportunity right now, because there are systems out there that have not focused enough on the fundamentals of storage capacity, resilience, availability and performance.

AQ

If you start with those, that's how you can get all of those zettabytes and yada bytes, and then you can go from there and you can enhance that with things that only blockchain can enable things like decentralization and true ownership, and this is what we're doing with on machina. Now we're building this on the near protocol. You can think of this as kind of our file system. We have a set of distributed storage shards that make up kind of the hard drives of this overall system.

AQ

We have a token and a reputation service that ensures that everyone behaves properly and that is uh kind of the high level architecture. So you know we've all invested in crap, I'm sure. But when it comes to storage, you want to invest in capacity resilience. Availability performance. Remember that okay now hype, we just actually heard a really interesting conversation from the previous panel about hype. I too think that hype is great. I think that unchecked idealism is actually the biggest risk that we all face right now.

AQ

If we look back at the early internet protocols, ftp tcp http. These were all designed from the beginning to be decentralized, to be resilient to bad actors and to be something that we could all interact with interoperably. Well, what did we end up with? We ended up with a 180 billion oligopoly of three or four clouds. Why did that happen? It's because they made it so easy for people to get access to the systems that mattered that nobody wanted to figure out.

AQ

Tcp ip http smtp, all of the things that that you know made up the internet. We have to make sure that we don't get so caught up in our ideals that we repeat this, and if we look at you know this is an anonymous yet real world data example of an existing web3 system.

AQ

This is its deployed capacity versus its actual usage. It's less than one percent that to me is not a huge success story for web3, and so I think that all of us, and especially those of us who are working on on mock, you know the decentralized storage network. We are laser, focused on being realistic about how we truly achieve our ideals. How we build the right thing at the right time, take it to market in the right way, and then hype is your best friend. So on machina you can follow us on twitter.

AQ

You can go to our website, sign up to get early access and and meet us around here really appreciate the time, and I hope that you will join us in building the decentralized storage network for generation. Zetabyte.

R

Awesome, thank you and so yeah we'll have like. I said we have alex paul and maria from uh from electric pantera and dn capital. So if you want to ask some questions or provide any feedback, that'll be great.

AQ

I don't think they have a microphone, so I think he just threw it to y'all. um You can share my mic. If you want. Does anyone.

AA

AQ

Feedback or questions from the panel.

R

Just just a few minutes, like one question.

AM

Hello, yes, there we go. um Thank you so much for the presentation. First of all, I'm really curious. Where you see the demand will be coming from for decentralized storage. um You know when, when businesses or developers are considering storage solutions, why not s3 or aws versus something that's more decentralized? How are they making these decisions.

AQ

Sure yeah um is it possible to get get my slide back up here.

AK

AQ

um So I think that that, as I said, you know the way we think about it is not just building web3 storage, but actually building kind of a next generation of storage that you can only build with the fundamentals of blockchain. So that's where you get to those things like true ownership that you really can never have true ownership. If your data is sitting in an s3 bucket that you know, maybe somebody else owns ultimately a single entity with us nexus controls. You know these are things that you can never have.

AQ

Without that censorship, resistance, permissionless participation. There are so many things that I think are key to driving the next wave of economic development and human rights that are only going to happen in a decentralized world.

AQ

So I think, that's kind of like a fundamental piece of that in terms of the adoption timeline, I think that it's absolutely going to start with web3 with um with projects that are doing nfts archives, backups things where you want to be able to independently with zero trust, verify the ownership and the the the sort of provenance of a piece of data, and this is going to quickly spill over into things like software supply chain security, where we've seen for years now, hacks that that work their way into supposedly secure systems, encryption systems, networking systems- you know when you get to a point where you're able to independently verify all of these.

AQ

These types of things that starts to add real value beyond just the uh the the kind of um web3 world, and I think that there's sort of a flow of of how we we see that deploying over time, um which, which I thought this question might come up. So I put a bonus slide in there, but yeah I mean I think you start with kind of web three uh uh type use cases, and then you expand over time to where you end up with.

AQ

uh With true general purpose, storage that everyone can take advantage of all right is that is that my time or you have any other questions.

AM

No, I was just going to say thank you that was great and really appreciate the slide very helpful. All.

AQ

Right thanks. Everyone thanks corey awesome. Thank you. So much.

R

Awesome so next we're gonna have uh we're. Gonna have joe from perk um they're building a full stack, dex uh building on near, and so I forgot to mention, but here's a qr code for anybody to pull up the form to be able to to vote for any of the projects that are coming. So here we are joe.

AR

Hi everyone we are perk and I could explain to you what we do, but I think it's important to explain to you why we're doing it first, especially since we only have five minutes.

AR

So we came to realize after a lot of experience, we've been in the space I've been in space in 2012 that a lot of d5 protocols are actually just replicating the broken financial system that we wanted to leave right. Most of us got interested in blockchain because or in crypto, because we knew the monetary system was broken, but we're repeating the same mistake the same way that romans would shave gold off their coins and the dollar wind up doing the same. Basically we're doing the same thing in d phi.

AR

Let me give you an example: bread before the abolition of of the gold standard for 50 years rose 80. I can't see that far 83 percent after the abolition of gold standard raised 265 percent. That's basically 5.3 inflation. A year in 100 years, we lost 94 of its of the dollars buying power.

AR

We're actually doing basically the same thing right. What the dollar did is they would print the dollar, so you'd boost up their economy and, like paul from pantera, was saying: dump the dollar you're incentivizing people to dump right same thing happened in the city in the dollar system, the same thing's happening in d5, we're falling for the same trap in d5. We have a bunch of tokens.

AR

We use those tokens to pump up the the protocols user base by doing air drops and by doing emissions which is actually incentivizing them to dump if you're a yield farmer every month, what you're doing is you're taking the emissions and you're dumping them on the market.

AR

This has to change, or else we're just repeating the past, we're not building the future.

AR

We figured out the problems that we need to solve. First, we can't have so much liquidity, that's siloed, even within one ecosystem, then we need to. We need uh infrastructure and it's lacking in terms of how do you get access to that liquidity and third, how do you get sustainable yield so that this becomes something that lasts forever and we can take care of our our citizens, our our investors, right?

AR

A good example. Is you look at the us dollar just in the past, 10 years lost 25 percent of its value. This is almost every currency in the world. Follows pretty much this right, because why the dollar is focused on incentivizing the economy, getting you to spend the dollars, dump the dollar. Basically right. It's the same thing as yield farming they're, giving you tokens to spend you go and sell them, and you dump them, but there's an anomaly in the world which is the swiss franc.

AR

All right, the swiss franc changed things a little over a decade ago. They stopped doing it to pump the economy, they started doing it to to maintain quality of life for its citizens. The average salary in switzerland is double that of the u.s some reports. It's slower some reports, it's higher, but more or less double right.

AR

The quality of life there is also double the gdp is, is higher, like almost everything is higher in switzerland than it is in the united states, which is seen as the the prime example, because they don't use their currency to promote the economy or pump the economy and incentivize you to dump and that's what that's, what we want to fix right so we'll be a full stack of full stack decks. What does that mean? We have everything we're called perk, because we have all the perks. We have the money market, we have the decks.

AR

We have the swap this. We have a swap aggregator, we'll also create an sdk that you're able to white label for game, 5, d5 and other web 3 applications that you can even host your own decks. If you want to and third and the hardest, one is little to no emissions right. Why? How are we going to do that?

AR

We have consciously liquidity in three different ways and then, from that concentrated liquidity, we won't be using using tokens to up that apr right, we'll be limiting the emission of the of the token to control the inflation to the downward pressure of the token, which we think will actually attract more users than using the token in an airdrop to attract community and things of that nature.

AR

To go to market we'll launch an nft collection which is already drawn. We have inbound and outbound integrations. We also also have affiliate marketing, which is something that isn't used a lot in web 3. web 2. If you go to binance or coinbase it's built because of affiliate marketing, it doesn't almost doesn't exist in web3, and I we understand why it's because they're wallets, we figure that out we're ready, implement this in about a month's time.

AR

Our swap aggregator is already online in beta. You can go to perk.money and check it out. It's pretty cool, already working, lightning, fast, concentrated liquidity is already being audited, should be done. The order set in about a month, then we'll work on permissionless taking and everything else. That's needed afterwards, so please join me in building the future of finance and not repeating the same mistakes of the past.

AR

AN

Hey how's it going, and this is paul at panteracapital.com.

AN

I guess one question I have is: what's your go to market strategy, I know that you have both the sdk and also a consumer front end. How do you sort of think about that.

AR

Yeah, the go to go to market is going to be done more so through the affiliates right. So like it. This idea actually came because of rand that you that you were just interviewed by from speaking to his team, they're, very motivated by being paid for the real work they do to attract people to to systems right on a on a lifetime basis or on a long term basis. That's exactly what people do on ftx or binance things like that. It almost doesn't exist in d5.

AR

This will be one of the first ones, dxdy used to do it. They stopped doing it because they were doing it manually. They didn't figure out how to automate it. We're going to automate that and that's why we won't have to dump as much tokens also.

AR

And then, of course, launching the nft will create hype and things like, like all the other tools, that's the special tool.

AN

AR

R

Thank you. Thank you so much joe from uh from perk. So uh next on the stage uh we have a little bit of a change with the on.

R

Can we get the slides back up.

R

Do we have the slides up or.

R

There we go um so now we're gonna have uh from drew drew from connect, three, uh a social engagement layer uh and decentralized social platform. Again voting link is right here for anybody that uh that wants to vote or provide any feedback, so welcome, drew.

AS

Thank you. Thank you. Is this uh okay cool.

AS

I think I think it's uh okay. Here we go hi everyone, I'm drew from connect3 and before getting into the product, I'd like to start with introducing our founding team. So our founding team comes from facebook, netflix, tick, tock and bike. Dance and cox is our founder and ceo. He previously was at facebook working on creator. Monetization jordan is our cto. He works on large-scale ai and recommendation systems at netflix and facebook, and I work at tiktok I'm.

AS

I actually work on the algorithm, I'm a data scientist in video recommendations and that's what got me really interested in web 3 specifically, is because at tick tock I can see my own identity and I can see my interest graph and I can see all of the people places and things that are most similar to me and I think that's incredibly powerful, but the problem is that I can't access that information uh because tiktok owns it.

AS

So what we want to do is we want to empower users to be able to own permission and monetize their interest. Graph and zoe is our design lead. She works on the open source recommendation system as a product lead at bydance, so let's go ahead and get into why we want to build this so currently we think that there's a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift is moving from the follower graph to the interest graph.

AS

So in the very beginning of the internet, it was all based on follower, relationships and content was based on who you follow, but now with large scale, recommendation and collaborative filtering, we can do much more interesting recommendation and that's where you see uh primarily coming out of china with products like doheen and xiaohongshu they're, very interesting recognition, products that aren't based on follower relationships.

AS

So we really want to take the idea of the interest graph, but enable users to own permission and monetize it, and that's why we want to use web3 and the current problem right now is it leads into the? The second paradigm. Is that you have this interest graph, but the problem is on the left. The interest graph is currently tied to wall platforms, so my interest graph is fragmented, so facebook has a sliver of me, instagram sliver, spotify sliver.

AS

All of these platforms just have a sliver of who I am, but how do you universalize and standardize that interest graph into something that you can use for uh your own life and to enhance and empower your life? um That's what we think is really interesting so being able to take the interest graph and enable you to own permission and monetize it within the blockchain itself.

AS

So we are the social layer on the open web and now I'll get into a little bit about what the product looks like and and how we're developing it. So we want to begin as a profile because we have to start with the interest graph. So how do you generate an interest graph for a person? We believe that within web 3, you can basically log in with a wallet.

AS

So we connect wallets and all of your on-chain activity, and then we can generate an interest graph for you automatically and it begins with a profile where you can display all of your on-chain activity and introduce yourself and your web3 presence. So that's the first part. The second part is the content, so all of the nfts or any of the on-chain activity that you have is the content that is represented in the web3 world, but you need a way to interact and engage with that content, liking, sharing, commenting being able to interact, follow people, etc.

AS

What we want to do is connect people to people, people to content and people to things, and you need a social layer to be able to do that and interact that way and finally is discovering recommendations.

AS

So once we have the interest graph of people- and we know what sort of content preferences they have, we can begin to recommend to them content and be able to essentially empower their lives through discovery and recommendation of of all the things on web3 and that basically comes down to connecting people to people, content and things through recommendations yeah. So that's connect. Three. Thank you very much for listening. You can try out the product at connect3.world thanks.

P

Do you guys intend to keep the data such as comments and likes on chain as well, or will that be kept in your centralized platform.

AS

Yeah great question, so I think uh right now, currently the most important thing to keep decentralized is your identity, because your identity is the private aspect of who you are and it's your interest graph and we believe that. But when I saw my identity, it was my it's literally my dna, but I can't I can't use it. I can't access it. I can't permission who can and can't use it. I can't monetize it.

AS

I think the future right now we talk a lot about um influencers, but but I think one of the interesting things will be the data influencer because we all have all of this data, but it's not accruing to us. It's obviously accruing to the platforms.

AS

So I think the first step is to generate the identity and the interest graph, and then it I'm not really sure if the actual interactions have to be stored in the blockchain, because the most kind of sensitive thing is your identity and and your interest graph, and then we can take these interest graphs and connect them together and then connect them with uh people places and things. That's the general idea, thanks.

AS

R

Awesome. Thank you so much.

F

I'll announce you.

R

Awesome so next on the stage we want to change up change it up a little bit get away from the uh the pitches. Just briefly, so I want to bring up oliver, who runs our grants program um for the foundation to chat through a little bit about our strategy and roadmap.

AT

Awesome, hello, everybody there's been some awesome pictures so far and I'm just going to take a little bit of time to go through the the grants program, the near foundation, our mission and also our strategy.

AT

Okay, so diving into the mission. So what we're actually looking to do is support projects which are building on near so the grants program actually started in early 2021, with the mission of bootstrapping, the near ecosystem, with high quality projects, and hopefully you'll all agree. If you look around nikon today, many of the projects here have actually received grant funding and I feel, like we've, actually largely achieved that part of this mission. So far, we've actually distributed 90 million in grant funding to the near ecosystem.

AT

Since the inception of the grants program, we are also looking to raise the awareness of near so we believe that by having a broad, diverse, very supportive ecosystem, we're able to actually bring new users into here as well and then what we're looking to do is provide a clear path to decentralization, but we also want to do this in a safe way.

AT

So, as the ecosystem has matured, what we want to be doing is actually having other entities inside the ecosystem, deploying grants, and we feel like the near foundation's, actually going to start taking more of an operational standpoint and actually support these ecosystem. Driven regional hubs, community grants and actually help them spin out and have their own grants program so diving into the strategy and road map. So we've actually highlighted some key growth areas that we are trying to actively attract projects to near so the first one being infrastructure.

AT

So we believe by having some solid infrastructure-based projects on there, it will actually attract other projects into the ecosystem and actually drive growth, and then we've also highlighted gaming. So we feel that if you can have the same user experience, the same gaming experience on webfree. The additional benefits that you get from the blockchain will actually drive users from web2 over to webfreegaming and then sports media entertainment is a very active industry and something that we're really targeting. And then we also have enterprise.

AT

So this is essentially finding successful projects in the web 2 space that have a very active user base and then bringing them over to near and into web free and on the right hand, side here where we say that we're looking to provide a safe and clear path to decentralization.

AT

We have dow's nfts regional hubs and ecosystem funds where we're decentralizing, but we're also making sure that we're strategically aligning on these high priority and growth areas.

AT

I know I've very quickly gone into the mission and strategy, but we're actually going to be releasing a strategy document for the near foundation, grants program and where we see ourselves going short term and long term, and we will be releasing that to the public very soon and I'll hand it back now for the pitch fest. Thank you.

R

Thank you. Oliver yeah super excited about uh about kind of this vertical and uh and horizontal so more to come there for sure. um So next up getting back to some of the pitches. um Next up, I want to introduce uh austin and daryl from from kino, so a web 3 marketplace for film and television.

AF

Hello, everybody. uh I am daryl, I'm an executive producer.

AG

And hey everybody, I think that's working austin, I'm a three-time tech founder most recently founded one of the fastest growing social impact tokens of last year. Adair was a little humble, actually he's, not just executive producer. He sold his first show to netflix while getting his mfa at loyola, in los angeles, with matt damon. He just most recently wrote a show with jimmy kimmel that they sold to abc disney an absolute badass in hollywood and.

AF

Austin also 500 million market cap 500 000 holders, in his token gave away millions of dollars to charity. An amazing dude we're here to talk about the problems in hollywood, so uh if we can no, we can do it without it because we're that good all right. uh Let's all right! Let's do it we're going to talk about hollywood, accounting, austin, the legal guy tell me what that is. I think.

AG

We'll just pass back and forth uh fun fun story, uh meta web ventures, letter around uh when we first talked to them all the power went out in our building. We had to pitch them literally on the phone in the dark with candles on. So this feels a little bit like that. Anyway, what is hollywood accounting?

AG

It's essentially where entertainment corporations use a legal accounting scheme to maximize their profits by avoiding taxes through multiple entity structures which, ultimately, what does that mean it screws over the artists that have the rights to what we call back end percentage points of future profits that they will never see joe.

AF

So some of my favorite examples I'm going to try and do this quickly. uh Lord of the rings, some of you may have heard of it made for 281 million dollars, brought in almost a billion dollars in the global box office. It's actually brought in six billion in the global box office, but when, after these corrupt accounting practices, they said that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars, it was a horrendous loss which means that peter jackson got less than nothing for his seven and a half percent.

AF

So he was supposed to get seven and a half percent on 5.8 billion dollars. He got nothing and if they do that to peter jackson, you can imagine what they do to young creatives. I have a friend of mine who created one of the most watched shows on netflix 480 million views in just a few months and he's actually struggling to pay his rent.

AF

I have another friend his rent, not his mortgage, his rent, another friend who created a billion dollar disney movie, and um he is now he made a few hundred thousand dollars, and this is an equity problem that we're seeing consistently across hollywood.

AG

So what is the solution? How was web 3 going to solve for this? Well really so my background usc gold, school of law, london, school of economics, I get excited by smart contracts on web3, which are pretty dumb right now, quite frankly, but I get excited that we can all iterate together, especially with infrastructure, plays platform, plays ecosystem plays to make smart contracts that are really smart and can handle complex transactions such as putting together a film production, putting together an entity structuring all the rights to all the different artists of future profits.

AG

And so what we are building at kino is a platform that empowers artists by aggregating capital via communities. It's what we call community-based economics on the blockchain. Essentially it's the idea that all of us have our favorite artists, our favorite films, our favorite tv shows we all have collectively globally trillions of dollars that once we aggregate that together, artists don't have to go to the studio system.

AG

Instead, we can go directly to the public race, for film and tv shows and empower those artists to keep ownership in the back end so that when that movie is sold, not only do they profit as they should, but all of us now gets a profit alongside them.

D

AF

Okay, but what does that mean for you practically right, so we're going to give you the ability to invest like let's say, star wars? If we were around when star wars was made, you could directly invest into star wars and earn profit when that show or movie makes profit. If you're, not an investor you're a collector, you could buy the rights to luke skywalker's lightsaber before the movie's made afterwards.

AF

I ship it to your home and you have the on-chain proof of authenticity that that's the real thing or let's just say that you're, a big fan, you could literally fly out to los angeles with ticketing, walk the red carpet, go to the premiere with the cast and crew and party afterwards.

AG

And this is a concept that we call taking it back to the economics world of pre-selling fan demand so usually the way the industry works right now. Is they capitalize on the billions of dollars? It's a 212 billion dollar industry this year, it'll be a 450 450 billion dollar industry by 2030.. The way they capitalize on all of that capital is, after the movies made or after the tv show, was released right.

AG

That's when they sell you, the t-shirts and the tickets and all the other things that we all love to buy via our tv shows and films. We are saying that we all have capital and fan demand that can be realized early at the very beginning. Right all of us, as early adopters, can hop in even when the idea is out there and we can all support the artists and get an inside look at the filmmaking process. The other tangential value add is that right now, who's seen squid game.

AG

Everybody raise your hand, raise your hand if you've seen it right that lived in cultural zeitgeist for like a week, remember game of thrones that the whole year we were talking about it. That's a problem for artists in the industry right now, especially the streamers they're, not able to capitalize on the value of the content they have on their platform, because it's such a fast turnover rate by extending the cycle of all of us being involved and believing in a project from the very beginning.

AG

We're extending that ability for artists to generate loyalty for fans, for fans to be involved for the impact of the stories on culture to be magnet industry to be made larger and then also for the different streamers or whoever to capitalize. Further on what they're building.

AF

And the cool thing is that that gives you direct access to these filmmakers, so you can do amas with the cast and crew. You can come in and get bts updates as we're actually creating this art so that you can look and see behind the curtain of how this all works. um I think that's pretty much uh our time. Do you wanna how.

AG

Do we do everybody without slides, hey like at seven out of ten five out of ten? Thank you thank you. We are currently right now uh launching our platform. At the end of the year, uh we have 10 film and tv shows, with emmy oscar golden globe, nominated and award-winning directors, filmmakers and actors kudos to darrell's excellent network. I'm really proud of the tech that we're building as a company.

AG

We are currently in the closing stages of our first fundraise, we're very proud to have our around led by meta web ventures, who was mentioned earlier here, part of the new ecosystem, slow ventures as well, then tas genius ventures and the sequoia scout program, and many other film industry angels. So, thank you all for your time check out kinoapp.xyz.

AG

If you love film and tv kino is your place and also if you want to get more intimately involved, we are offering our early vip access vr founding membership. Thank you. Everybody.

AF

What are your questions.

AM

Yeah, first of all, thank you so much that was uh super high energy, which is awesome. um I have a really naive question, which is: why do you think you know what what shifts with crypto and blockchain like? Why is this different versus you know right now, I'm sure a lot of people have access to the internet, there's crowdfunding. What is the difference between crowdfunding and actually being able to leverage crypto? That's.

AF

A that's a great question, so the first thing is that in crowdfunding you usually give a hundred dollars, and maybe you get a t-shirt right, there's no like equitable exchange there, but the bigger thing and I'll. Let you talk about the community-based economics, but for the creator this is an opportunity to actually own your ip, and then we have an underlying film fund that funds all of our projects. So it's not like we're going out and we're hoping that we raise the needle and then maybe this movie will get made or it won't get made.

AF

This is a movie that is going to be made and then you can choose whether or not you want to participate. You can collect experience, invest.

AG

Yeah, so the economics underlying which most of this, uh of course, is still private right now, so we can talk about it more further after, but it is that nothing about this is, I hope it hits the thermometer. Everything has a first money in via traditional finance, and then we go to the public and say you can buy real equity, which of course, my focus in law. School is securities regulation. It's a very complex legal space.

AG

We have the best council, fenwick and west, who represents coinbase and yugo labs, greenberg logan loeb, who represented all the best there. They probably represent a couple of your firms as well, and I'm very excited, as somebody who geeks out about securities regulations to open up access to investing in film and own actual rights to future profits to bring securities into the blockchain space.

AG

We've all been scared of it for a while, but it takes people who are innately focused on not just what's the legal aspects, but how do we build and so I'm a hands-on? I have the legal expertise, but I also know how to build a product that is usable right. Our big thing we say is we want to build web 3 that doesn't feel like web 3.. I want my mom to say: hey, I love matt damon he's launching a movie with kino and I'm gonna buy a share in his movie right.

AG

It's gonna be as easy as that.

AM

Super cool. Thank you, of course,.

AG

Anybody else other questions thanks guys thanks, everybody.

R

Awesome well, thank you and I think they were probably the two best people to not have slides, but uh we'll make sure to send uh to send slides out to everyone uh after this to make sure you guys are aware of uh what's happening.

R

um Do we have the oh yeah, um and so next uh next we're gonna have up uh edward from odyssey, um so he's gonna be sorry, he's gonna be talking about uh their on-chain portfolio manager for near so he's gonna be coming up in just a second to uh to kind of load. Up he's gonna provide a quick demo for everyone as well.

R

You can try.

H

AU

Good afternoon, everyone sorry for the technical delay, oh cool um yeah, so um I'm the one of the technical co-founders of odyssey, which uh is a product that is designing a depth-first data product where we are taking the approach of helping users understand more insights into all of this open and available data. We have on chain we're charting the course for the open web.

AU

So one of the things for any d5 participants or even nft participants is that managing on-chain assets is way more painful than managing a traditional finance portfolio. One of the things you realize, as you go down the rabbit hole, is that to truly track value accrual.

AU

It requires you to manually track your positions at uh you know your position of entry and, to you know manually, calculate like what are my aprs like what what uh how much value have I accrued so far, adding all that up and you're making adjustments and de-risking as necessary, and the biggest problem is that you were expecting users to do all of this manually. But the reality is is that in in web 2 world, this is all done automatically and they don't even have to think about it.

AU

If you open robinhood, you can quickly see how much money you've made and what your returns are.

AU

So the the biggest takeaway that our team has had from this is that we now have this great open financial system through web3 through blockchains and through all this on-chain activity that we're doing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the financial systems and all of this data is accessible and one of the goals of odyssey is to make not only make on-chain data more accessible, but also to organize on-chain data.

AU

To make it easier for people to understand how their portfolio is doing, how much value they've accrued and be able to have better insights and make better plays.

AU

So, right now to demo um you know the initial version of our product, the beta that we've just launched is live portfolio, tracking of near's ecosystem and we've taken an approach where we want to index and organize on-chain data to determine the golden metric, which is roi, curating custom data sets that will provide value to odyssey users, whether that be about the protocols that they're participating in or their own underlying assets, whether it be tokens staking balances, nfts, etc.

AU

So yeah, so I'm going to show you guys a really quick demo uh of how odyssey works.

AU

So this is an example of like you know the current beta that you land on and we have a quick way to enter your near wallet. I'm going to enter a test wallet to show you guys the power of odyssey.

AU

So this is a view of a participant's portfolio on near, and you can see here that we differentiate between idle assets, productive assets, broad assets and rewards, and it's important to show users these distinctions as they come into. uh You know, participating in on-chain uh activities. They need to understand how I'm, how am I using my portfolio and how best am I utilizing all this data so you'll see here.

AU

We track balance data with a nice breakdown of prices and value, but we also track liquid staking and show you the underlying balance of what something staked is so, and we also track validator staking and on near some validators actually issue. Different types of rewards, so you'll see here that we're in the aurora validator and we're showing the aurora that you've accrued.

AU

We track open orders through dexes and we also track lending, and the important thing here is making uh things more intelligible to users with actual metrics and analytics that they need to understand. How am I doing liquidation thresholds total equity? How much apr am I earning on each individual position and, like we break this down in a way that allows users to understand where their apy is coming from, how they're actually accruing value and you'll see this also in leveraged yield farming?

AU

So we've integrated with pemrock and you'll see here that we break down where their aprs are coming from, but we also break down the strategy that they've taken so right here. This is a leveraged yield farm for eth and rapneer, and you'll see that this position is actually long w near and short eth. So it's educating users more on what are these things doing and how are they making money?

AU

We also cover farms and liquidity throughout the near ecosystem and show the breakdown of rewards and where the aprs are coming from, whether it be across multiple reward types and yeah. That's my time is up. So that's a quick demo of odyssey. Thank you.

P

AU

How's it going.

P

Pretty well uh great presentation: how do you intend to build defensibility around the social long term, given that the majority of data is quite easily accessible and ultimately, the dashboards are quite nice, but.

AU

Totally agree and uh most dashboards fall into. You know: there's there's kind of two camps for on-chain data right now you have the live dashboard approach. That's either change specific or spray and pray where it could be 2 000 miles wide in terms of coverage, but one inch deep in insights, and then you have institutional data products like nansen or dune, where they have much deeper insights, but it's completely inaccessible to a user.

AU

Unless they're writing sql queries we're trying to meet somewhere in the middle, where we provide index data and insights at a per protocol basis and continue to expand outwards in terms of building the foundation of like we know what a lot of the d5 primitives are now so building a foundational index indexing layer for how to organize this data and then applying it to more projects. More chains is the way that we'll continue to grow odyssey and accrue value, and that data is something that you can't.

AU

You can just pull from the chain, but no one's doing it because of the technical complexities around reading from the chain. Right now,.

P

AU

You thank you very much. Everyone.

R

Awesome. Thank you. Edward.

H

R

So next, on the stage we want to invite uh nikita from uh from solace finance um they're an insurance protocol introducing portfolio coverage for asset managers, so welcome to quito.

AV

Ladies and gentlemen, hi um I'm nikita the founder of solas. Can I get the slides in um okay? So, while oh, maybe okay, I'm in control there we go.

AV

So we all love, seeing like eye-popping headlines of all the exploits and hacks right, uh the brilliant minds out. There really always find the edge cases to screw our products whatever we experiment, build and innovate around, and so I'm here to make those less eye-popping. Hopefully there will be a stage where those won't be news really and what we're building is the coverage and protection again. The exploits the hacks all the failures that have happened, and you know we see almost weekly.

AV

So what solus is out to do is to set the insurance layer, the infrastructure for the protocols to get coverage uh and ultimately protect the users and the investors. So when we build, we look to set a systemic solution rather than just a product or insurance policy that you buy. You know from geico or like whatever assurance insurance, and so from that perspective we um building solace in. We all know and are aware of all the problems.

AV

The insurance has, I think, over the two years they've been outlined over and over again, yet there's no solution really, and um you know we're we're battling and facing like a lot of challenges out there. However, uh as of right now, whatever is out, there cannot scale and that's that's kind of like the main problem, why we haven't seen it blow up right, and so I'm not going to focus too much on the challenges. I think the primary one is the fact that there's no underwriting capital, the demand, is not an issue.

AV

There are certain segments of the users of the protocols and all that they want insurance and when you go, ask a random person whether they want it or not. Most people would say yes, but then the product is still not there and that's why I'm super excited, I think, like over the year, been live and over two years working on that we're starting to reach this infrastructure that is scalable and can't solve these challenges.

AV

That sort of like just block the whole thing of d5 maturity right so solus native insurance, is already soft, launched right now. We're onboarding the first protocols so strategically. This is the fdic for g5.

AV

Basically, you know from history uh that no financial system has been able to scale until the banking or the governments have implemented fdic or something similar uh to that insurance structure um same for every other industry. We all talk about customer protection. We generally enjoy it right when things go wrong, we can get our money back or the tool is like still got us covered and from that perspective, what we're here to provide is the insurance for the protocol.

AV

So basically d5 protocols can continue on to innovate, to put the products in everyone's hands, but without all the risks right now we're all running a bunch of experiments right, like you're, making money a lot of people are losing money. We want to see d5 really mature to the point where that sort of becomes secondary and that's not something you worry, you don't have to read the dots you don't have to like check the contract. You have to check whoever is controlling the smart contracts.

AV

You can just go ahead on the website and use the tool like that's the world where I would be. You know, happy living in and so from that perspective we want to see this product sprout. We've been at it for like half a year on this particular issue with this product, and so, as I mentioned, one of the major challenges is the capital bootstrapping and with solas native we don't have to look anywhere outside of defy. We don't have to rely on the mercenary capital.

AV

We don't have to really get the fresh dollars uh into crypto and you know kind of live on the pyramid there. So the boots trapping happens through the protocols. Basically, it is like a federated structure uh where the protocols join uh they're, able to form the underwriting capital with their native tokens.

AV

We all know we sit on a bunch of the liquid treasuries that are mostly comprised of the native tokens, and so that's where the value can come in for the first time you can leverage your dial treasury of your native tokens and get insurance, but the coverage limit is still in dollars.

AV

So if something happens, you get back the money uh you're able to pass that all needed to your users or kind of like reinstate and reinvigorate your protocol with a fresh capital, and so given the lack of the regulatory framework, uh there are no rules or laws. You know all the protocols are sort of like winging it and trying to use the best practices to keep it safe and secure.

AV

So we have to build in security into insurance, offering we subsidize bounties. We subsidize audits, we do smart contract monitoring, so all the insured protocols get best of the line security and are protected to the best of our ability. Obviously it saves cash for them. It saves cash for our protocol and ultimately for the end user, so kind of here's, the quick slide of just the the federated idea right. All the protocols join they toss in their tokens.

AV

They get an equitable share of whatever the capacity is and that how it like flows down to the protocol. So you have set those coverage limits on a protocol level um and ultimately, I just want to like bring back to this idea that I couldn't you know, break the logic off for years now. I really believe that, in order for d5 insurance to grow, I get the d5 in general to grow.

AV

You need insurance infrastructure without that we're not going to see all the growth we like to champion around, and so with that insurance have to be built in the foundation of defy, and so that ultimately, yields to. You know protocols actively protecting giving the users the protection they require. The investors protection that naturally leads into sustainable and grow an ecosystem.

AV

You know I want to see a day where d5 is no longer really considered, that much of an experiment and it's kind of like a layer that we can all leverage and use in our daily life, and so as a result of all of that, is obviously just the maturing defy gaining mass adoption.

AV

And I think insurance is a necessity. There.

AV

Okay, there's no less slide, but I was going to finish with saying that solas is a prerequisite for that to happen. Thank you.

AN

Hey, thank you so much. I. I agree that insurance is going to be a prerequisite for this space to really scale, and thank you so much for your presentation. I guess how do you guys think about like, like the underwriting for the risk I mean you know. I know that you guys are providing infrastructure to get it to a certain point, but at the end of the day I mean who, who does the risk modeling and how does it work.

AV

Yeah, so from the risk management uh perspective. Basically that happens at the protocol at the dow layer, uh because you cannot really decentralize. You can't hope that you know a bunch of people will do their work and put on their full-time effort there. So our philosophy has been first of all approach, insurance as it is, insurance use, quantitative analysis and statistics and probability because that's the best bet you have so like I mean right now.

AV

The loss ratio is approximately like five percent and we see it keep going down, and so data becomes more and more valuable over time. However, obviously you still need expert judgment. You still need intelligence uh being built in so what we created, we create an infrastructure. We call it like a risk pipeline. That's basically a separate product that solos protocol right now relies on, but then over time is getting distributed. We're already started like initially we put in and collected all the data ourselves.

AV

We put our own analysis now we have integrated hack and defy safety. Auditors, uh we growing, because there are a lot of players in the space. They do some kind of security, work and analysis. We're uniting all that under one roof.

AA

AV

Any questions all right, thank you.

R

Thank you nikita.

R

So next we're going to take a quick pause for uh for some of the presentations and bring on cindy from uh from our grant funding team to really chat through um the grant program, and maybe some of the success stories that we've seen through uh through it. So.

AW

Thank you so hi everyone, my name is cindy. I'm from the ne foundation funding team uh we're just here to kind of give a breakdown of what we've done in the past year. um Can I go to the next slide. Please.

AW

So over the past year, we've given over 1 100 grants and we have committed over 90 million um usd of funding to various projects. We have the average grant that we have given out in the sizing. It is 40k and then the cut in in terms of the countries that we've given it out to is about 130, more or more.

AW

So. The way how it works is that obviously we have the grants that we're giving out, but each of these projects comes to us looking for a different amount. We have broadly categorized them between the amount of 0 to 25k 25, to 50k 50k, to 75k and 75 to 100k from the graph. You can see that most of them default within the zero to 50k mark and by verticals, which was mentioned previously by oliver and also from josh.

AW

We see. Most of them are based in infrastructure grants and most of them also fall under the gaming. But we do have an intention to explore on the other areas, such as the nfts and daos.

AW

And to highlight some of the success stories of our grantees, we have few mfa play amber and open forest protocol as well. Few invite is one of our very amazing nft platforms. They have recently launched their beta version, but they are also will be launching on the mainnet very soon we have the open forest protocol, who are focusing so uh mostly on sustainability, helping um to align the near foundation on the neutral carbon neutral standpoint, and we also have k play amber as one of our leading game uh gaming grants that we have given out.

AW

So this is all from me um we're back to listening to all the other great pictures with acaris live piece and cornerstone dao. Thank you.

R

Thank you cindy, um so yeah. Next we're we're gonna hop back into the pitches and bring you um alexandro from uh from acura, so he's building an oracle uh oracle to provide verifiable, trustless and accessible uh off-chain data. So welcome.

AX

Fantastic hello, everyone. Let me start by saying thank you to the new foundation for this opportunity to talk about the topic that I'm really passionate about. My name is alessandra de carli and I'm a co-founder at acurist.

AX

Exactly so, our journey actually starts in a very traditional way at credit suisse in the mobile security team. We started um basically creating the mobile security framework, which was securing all the mobile banking app, as well as all the apps in general in in the bank, and one thing that happened as well during that time is that that I totally fell in love with mobile devices.

AX

More specifically with the security aspect of mobile devices, many of you might or might not know that what they're carrying around with them every day is actually the most battle tested and most secure hardware security module that you can buy, and it becomes quite clear if you really think about it, because these hardware devices actually need to cover very security.

AX

Relevant topics such as managing your bank accounts, managing your digital assets in form of a wallet and so on, and so forth, yet have very low assumptions on the physical security, because you can forget it somewhere, someone can just steal it and so on and so forth and the well accuracy is the culmination of this knowledge because we're leveraging this kind of hardware security module to provide an on-demand oracle solution which is trustless, interoperable and accessible.

AX

Before talking about the problem that we solve, it's very important to understand that, in order to be able to build really useful decentralized applications, you need some sort of real world data to be brought on chain, because then everything starts to become automated. All the transactions happen automatically and so on and so forth. Now, one of the most paradox issues uh with bringing that data on chain is that we we have this philosophy in web 3 of never trust, always verify and decentralize all the things right.

AX

But then, when we take a look at how we bring data on chain, it mostly boils down to a handful of stakeholders that can decide whether it's blue or green and um yeah accuracy actually solves this by leveraging technology, but not only that. The other thing is because of this trust issue.

AX

Often the data that we can bring on chain is very limited to just specific use cases as an example. If you have a d5 platform and you want to get uh price data for a token which is not the top 10 token, then it will be near to impossible for you to use that token as a collateral for your d5 platform.

AX

So all these long tail assets just will never be able to then build and be used as as collateral. So this limitation actually really impacts a lot of the creativity from a web3 developer as well and last but not least, interoperability.

AX

We are real believers that, in the end, the developers should choose, whichever platform is the best suited for their need, and it shouldn't really matter whether you're building on an evm chain or building in on near or whatever choice you have, and um basically what accuracy is doing is abstracting that one as well away we're using uh trusted execution environments and what these little hardware devices do is. Basically they glue together. This set of instructions with a certain data output, and if you tamper with the data, then the proof will not be verifiable anymore.

AX

If you tamper with the instruction, then the proof will not be verifiable anymore, and you get really a pipeline where you can prove to the world the way how the data came to be and um the and this all in a very cryptographic way that all happens in the accuracy transmitter and then the accurace protocol is where these proofs actually are then made exportable for any sort of protocol that you want to build on.

AX

The solution is already usable today and also one thing that is very important to mention here before we go through the slide. Is that I'm a big fan of bitcoin and I'm also a big fan of chain link? The purpose of this slide is not to say that one is better uh than the other, but it's just to show you how, by introducing a technology that is simply different and enables different use cases, you will then be able to really kick off a whole wave of new use cases.

AX

You were not even thinking about so on one hand we have bitcoin, which is a blockchain just like ethereum. It is scriptable. Some people do not know that. Actually, you can write smart contracts as well on bitcoin, but it is not touring complete and it's only with the introduction of a yeah of the evm, basically that all of these crazy smart contracts and ideas develop very similar.

AX

Then, where you have chain link and accuracy on one hand, you have a very stable infrastructure that provides prices for a very specific set of of assets, but then with accuracy, what you can do on top of it as a developer, you specify the instructions of how you want to get and fetch and observe that data and then ultimately bring it on chain and make it so that it is 100 verifiable, and we really think that this will uh kick off the next wave of uh innovation in the web 3 space.

AX

So my only ask um for you the audience today is that if you are a developer, that is actually in demand for an oracle solution, I would love to explain to you in detail how the system works, and we can already onboard you today. Actually thank you.

AX

R

You have any questions.

R

I think we're all good killed it. Thank you all right. Next, I want to bring up uh caroline from uh from lifetime, so really exciting. What they're, building it's pretty much a fintech metaverse, so really bridging that defy and uh and tradify together, so super excited to hear from them. uh Caroline.

AY

Hi everyone, uh as corey said, my name is caroline hughes, I'm co-founder and ceo of life ties. I feel like I've come on a little bit like monty python style, and I should be saying and now for something completely different because we're a little different from everything. That's gone before so at lifetimes, we're building the world's first fintech metaverse. And what do we mean by that? Well, we we're building a way for you to simulate your own life virtually.

AY

So we can then show you how to afford it in real life, so a move away from the metaverses that are all about entertainment and gaming, and this is about your ability to play out your future life so that you can actually achieve all the things you want. So in the near future. We believe that everybody's going to be financing their lives with a mix of tradfi, d5 and nfts.

AY

So you may buy a new couch for your house with a credit card, but you may also start saving for a down payment on an apartment using metapool or you may take out a loan through borough and we're going to increasingly see this mix of financing our lives and lifetimes is going to make that seamless for you. So I'm just going to give you a quick demo of how it works.

AY

So it's all about helping you figure out how to afford every single financial decision you want to make in your life. So that's every step from leaving school all the way through to the time that you retire and it's super easy to use. So you set your goals and it might be.

AY

I want to go on vacation or I want to save for a home and our algorithms will calculate how you can afford it so you're planning it virtually, but we're showing you exactly all of the steps to achieve it in real life and then, as you, create more goals, you get this living breathing representation of the life that you want and we've updated play to earn. So we call it live to earn and you earn tokens for every step. You get towards your goals.

AY

So it's all about helping you work out how you can finance your life using that mix of defy and tradify, and so we're giving real world use cases. So how do you use d5 to buy real world assets?

AY

Plus we give you financial forecasting as money tetra, so you can see how your money changes over time and you get all of your fiat and crypto finances in one place.

AY

So ultimately, life ties is a massive ecosystem play because we're in a unique opportunity to connect all of the different d5 partners within the ecosystem.

AY

So we're already an established business in the uk we have 40 000 users and our job really in the near ecosystem is to bring the best d5 protocols and teach our mainstream consumers how they can use d5 in their normal lives, so how they can borrow, earn, invest and insure themselves using that mix of defy and tradify products, and that also is our revenue model. So we have an ecosystem revenue model.

AY

So every time you use one of our trad five partners or our d5 partners, we get paid a transaction fee, so we get to kind of share in that revenue as we all grow.

AY

Okay, a little bit about the team. So I have a fantastic team behind me and we have some world-class investors backing us. So my co-founder nick who you can meet at our booth, um he comes from he's, got over 15 years experience in financial services. He created the director consumer channel for vitality, which is a billion dollar insurance business and they really were the first to do move to earn before.

AY

That was a real thing and that was to help people get physically healthy and lower the cost of their insurance premiums, and so he's taken all of those learnings as we pull them into life ties to help you become more financially healthy. So my background is in law. I've worked for some big technology companies, including delivery and racketeen.

AY

I'm recognized as a leading female fintech founder in europe. I've been on the innovate, finance power list for the past couple of years running and then stefan who's, our cto. He comes from a financial services background he's built complex banking and fintech systems, and then we have some incredible investors and advisors. So, on the tradfy side, we've got scott who's, the former cto of blackrock so knows a thing or two about building financial platforms.

AY

We have allen who was the former head of financial services at mckinsey and then we've also attracted some incredible advisors on the blockchain side. So we have people from currency.com, allianceblock bitcoin.com and more so I'm going to wrap up with a little bit about our mission.

AY

So the current financial services system is very much created by baby boomers for baby boomers and it just doesn't fit anymore. Like I look around the room, and most people are even younger than me and you have completely different lives with all the opportunity and complexity that that brings and so and with the addition of defy. We have this once in a generation opportunity to redefine and rebuild consumer finance so that it makes sense and reflects our financial lives and that's what lifesize is doing. Thank you so much.

AY

Any questions from the panel.

AM

Yeah, thank you so much for that presentation. um Super interesting take on on how many management may happen in the future. One of the questions I have is around the users that you have currently you mentioned 40 000 users in the uk. How are they interacting with the app? um What are some of the kind of key use cases you're, seeing there now.

AY

Yeah so we actually started with kind of two primary life goals so like buying a home and having kids like the the biggest and the most expensive decisions that people are likely to make and then from that we kind of template it out and what's been really interesting and what's pulled us into the web. 3 space was that we we kind of surveyed amongst our users and increasingly they were saying to us. Well, I hold crypto assets, but I don't know what to do with them.

AY

I'm starting to get interested in d5, but I don't know where to start- and I don't know if it's safe and I don't know how it fits with everything I'm doing and now what we've done now, that we've kind of come over. We've got all these crypto natives now who are starting to kind of do it in reverse, so they've made money or they're being paid in crypto and now they're thinking. But how do I pull that back into my real life?

AY

So I can do things like get a mortgage or you know, start a family. So it's been like really interesting, seeing both sides and kind of meeting in that middle got it. Thank you. Thank you. So much.

F

R

You super exciting, with life ties this building for sure.

R

All right next we're going to have uh stanley up from uh from cornerstone dallas, so super excited what they're building it's pretty much an infrastructure layer for um for dallas and and there you go.

R

H

W

Thanks corey so.

W

Yeah, that's me so, ladies and gentlemen, what's cornerstone in short, porn zone is a product which enables you to use one token to govern law when talking about governance, it's a very interesting but also difficult area in crypto. So we talk about dows all the time, but if you look at the voting turnout rate, even in the biggest protocols out there, it's actually pretty low users are actually disincentivized to vote in dows and also probably like the most widely used sort of dial use case.

W

Right now is actually curved gauge voting, which is almost purely profit driven and also there are so many other protocols trying to learn from curve, but they don't really have as much value as curve generated. Also the whole governance experience for users is really bad. If you try the curve, you know, and also it's so scattered.

W

If you want to govern multiple, you know projects you have to hold multiple tokens, so we are trying to change that we're trying to make it easier and more effective and more valuable for users for users to actually govern the whole ecosystem. So how we can do that.

W

We are building an aggregated governance layer on top of all protocols on near which makes cornerstone a governance hub for near aurora and octopus and in the future cross chain. So, in short, let's say this use case is using refinance, as example. So previously you have to hold ref and go to rev to vote on rest, but cornerstone is abstracting the dominance away from rest and aggregating that into cornerstone. Now you can use cornerstone to do all governance and we can replicate that model with every protocol on the air.

W

How are we doing that exactly so? Here's how this is a very high level, but also comprehensive diagram showing our model. Basically, as a user, you get tokens from the products you like, whichever protocol you like, and then you use those tokens to mint corn token from corn treasury after that you're holding corn, token and corn treasury host those commerce, tokens and corn treasure will use those tokens to stake and vote on protocols and get dividends and bribes back and those will be in turn, distributed back to court holders and that's how we come.

W

We complete the whole process of metal governance and the whole thing is governed by corn, token and yeah. So you may ask like why? Should I go to constant right as the retail user? I can just you know, do it by myself. So here's why first of all constant, is a balanced portfolio of mutual assets and government tokens, which means it acts loosely as an ecosystem etf. But the difference is that it's generating value all the time it's generating default value, it's generating governance value and it's diversified.

W

Second, is going to be the biggest style, managed liquidity provider, thinking of convex, but not on curve, but on everything on the air, because we're pairing liquidity and government's token together, which will achieve the highest efficiency in d5, and you cannot really do that by yourself and third and probably, most importantly, cornerstone will be the most powerful governor of the ecosystem in the future. The majority of guns value will be funneled through cornerstone, which is impossible to achieve by individual users yeah, so here's our positioning.

W

In short, we derive value from product revenue sharing from dominance from incubated projects yeah by the way we incubated, linear, which is the second largest liquid sticking particle on layer and also d5 use, and we are providing a win option for every party, not only retail users, but also our partner projects and also every other protocol on the air and also for near as a whole.

W

So there are many government use cases. Cornerstone is not only about d5, it's not limited to any one type of economics. As long as you have a token. As long as you have some sort of governance mechanism, you can work with cornerstone. So here are the use cases that you know you can see. Ref you can see usn, you can see fty listing, you can see matter, verse provider cloud staking.

W

Those are the use cases that's coming up very shortly on near and they various a lot, um but we're fine with it, because console is flexible to work with with any one of them and anyone in the future.

W

So here's our roadmap. So we are considering a launch area in q4 and we're we're going cross-chain after establishing brands on near so we're partnering, with literally every major player in the ecosystem and also in the pipeline, so that you can see our flexibility here. We are going to become that governance infra layer on curve on here.

W

So here's our team- we are very near native, so more than half of the team were previously near core contributors, either development or marketing or community, and we're expanding very aggressively.

W

Also, we have ilia. We have alex and luis from octopus our advisory board and also other key parties from the ecosystem and we're going to work very closely with them to make sure we achieve the vision of cornstalk, which is to use one token to government law. Thank you for listening.

W

P

As a treasury grows inside in size, do you feel like it's going to be conflicting a little bit with decentralization motive near because you're going to become a major holder in a lot of the tokens and if you were to vote to, for instance, uh remove the liquidity from one of those tokens then immediately that caught? That would cause that token to uh to to significantly reduce the value, and you kind of become that centralized density within near.

W

Well I'll, say: corners don't need to be shared with everyone in the community. You can say that yeah, contractually will be holding a lot of token, but cornerstone is controlled by corn token, which is a very big user base. So literally every party in near even the protocols themselves will hold corn token, which gives them the ability to actually influence. You know voting results on other protocols, so we're building this network in the ecosystem. That is actually decentralizing the whole thing, rather than centralizing it, because carson itself is very decentralized.

W

um I think that's the solution.

W

R

Awesome, thank you so much and next we're going to have one quick break again um for our uh for david from our funding team to just chat through external fundraising uh within the ecosystem, and highlight a few projects that have uh have raised capital over the last few quarters. So david. Take it away.

G

Hey hello, everyone, I'm david! First of all, I want to thank the teams that are being on the stage here. I think those teams are a clear representation of the high quality teams that we have building on here today.

G

But for me today, what I'm going to discuss is about numbers and the fundraising highlights since last year on the near ecosystem. What we have so far is 60 projects have been raised over 300 million capital at a valuation above 3 billion.

G

What we see as well is that most of these teams have been backed in their early days by the near foundation. Grants program and, together with the near foundation, they've been supported to the next level to get fundraise on the left chart. What we see is that both the number of projects and the amount of capital being raised in the near ecosystem has been growing quarter to quarter and that's despite the overall bear market that we have on the right chart.

G

We have the fund raised by vertical, and the top two verticals that are being fundraised are d5 and infrastructure, with almost 60 percent of the total fund raise.

G

This is a list of the fundraising highlights of this year, not going to go through those, but just want to mention a couple of highlights.

G

We have niche sender, wallet, connect, 3 and fusotau, which are a clear example of teams that have successfully raised capital this year, but they were also backed by the near foundation, grants program in their early days and then last but not least, I think today is the sweatcoin day. They are being it's their token generation event. They are on five different top centralized exchanges and they have traded over 100 million total capital. Thank you.

R

Thank you david, so back to uh back to pitching um so we're gonna have benjamin from uh from veridise uh come up here for a second and uh and show you, I think, a really cool demo about uh security auditing. So come on down ben.

AZ

Cool can everyone hear me: okay, okay, great hi, everyone, I'm ben from veridise, and today I'm going to be demoing vanguard, so vanguard is part of a suite of tools we're creating at veridise to help developers write safe code. So I don't think I need to motivate this problem too much. We see hacks in the news every day, so obviously blockchain security is a really really important problem.

AZ

So, first, let me give a quick overview of what vanguard actually does so vanguard is designed to find common vulnerabilities in smart contracts. It works by taking in smart contract code and producing a report indicating what attacks the code might actually be susceptible to.

AZ

um So one of the key things to note here is that we're designing vanguard to be language and blockchain agnostic, so in other words, because many of the vulnerabilities that occur in smart contracts are shared across languages and blockchains vanguard is going to be designed to be quickly extended to new chains and programming languages as they're introduced.

AZ

So now I'm actually going to hop over to a quick demo of our prototype for vanguard. So actually don't know if you can see this, let me see if I can quickly.

AA

Put that there.

AZ

Sorry give me just a moment: let's see, I'm not sure.

AZ

Okay, this doesn't seem to be working, so I'm just going to go with the backup plan here, which I did take some screenshots of running our vanguard prototype, so you'll just have to believe me that this is what it does when I actually run it. So here let.

H

AZ

Hop back to the slides here, and hopefully my slides will reappear, okay cool. So the example I'm going to show today is from a near contract written in rust and the contract implements a raffle. So it works basically exactly how you would expect a raffle to work where users can buy tickets for near and the more tickets they buy, the more likely they are to win some prize, and so you can see the main function that we're going to focus on today.

AZ

Is this callback function and you can think of this callback function as essentially being the like to clear the state of the raffle, so after everyone has bought their tickets after the raffle is closed and the winner is chosen, this callback function is run and it just cleans up the state, and so the really important thing to focus on here is that it also does error handling.

AZ

um So, in particular, uh if there's some error sending the winner their prize right, we don't just want to steal everyone's money in the raffle, uh so in this case we decide to refund everyone, as you can see written in that comment there. So essentially how the refunding works is we get the ticket price we loop through each of the people who bought a ticket and we send them their refund as the ticket price.

AZ

So uh let's run vanguard on this example or pretend we ran it and look at the output. So the top part there is just uh some build stuff, but the bottom stuff is where we actually see the warnings that are produced by vanguard. So here you can see it produces two warnings and they both relate to flashlight attacks. So they're warning us that this contract is like potentially vulnerable to a flashlight attack. So what is a flashlight attack?

AZ

First of all, a flashlight attack essentially happens when a malicious attacker can manipulate the price of an asset right and that's really bad, because let's say we have a bunch of people investing in an asset if a malicious attacker can tank the price of that asset, the investors are not going to be very happy right.

AZ

So this is a pretty serious problem and, let's look at what it actually says so vanguard tells us that there's a possible flash loan attack in this claim prize callback function that we were just looking at and it actually gives us a little bit more information. It tells us to look at this transfer that occurs, which we'll look at in a sec, and it can actually be manipulated by a call that occurs, and it says it's on line 91 we'll see that in a second it happens two lines before the transfer.

AZ

So let's look back at the code, so the callback code that we saw before is on the right and we can see in this loop there's a transfer right. So as you'll recall, that's where we refund the user, the price of their ticket right. So something went wrong in the raffle. We need to refund everyone and two lines before that is where we're warned that there could be a flash loan attack and what's happening. There is that's where we're computing, the ticket price so actually on.

AZ

The left you'll see how we compute the ticket price so the to compute the ticket price. It's pretty easy. We take the total number of tickets. We multiply it by a big number. In that case it's uh ten thousand, and then we divide it by the current uh contracts. Account balance.

AZ

So it's actually the current contract account balance here, that's the issue, so in particular, if an attacker increases the balance of this current account, they can tank the price of the raffle ticket, probably not ideal, and so you can see I just like created a quick fix which is make the price of the ticket constant, which you'll see in the bottom left, and if we do that, hopefully vanguard should fix the problem or vanguard should report that there no longer is a problem, and so when we run vanguard.

AZ

Indeed, we see at the bottom that our warnings have disappeared.

AZ

So I'm hoping that this, like small demo, gets some of the near developers, at least in the audience, excited, um but really I'm excited about this beyond near, and I think what I'm really excited about, for vanguard in particular.

AZ

Is that we're designing it to be used across multiple blockchains and languages, so I threw up a few examples of blockchains and languages here, but I think most of us probably don't need much convincing that the number of blockchains and smart contract languages are increasing, really quickly right, and so our vision for vanguard is really that it becomes. It can become the de facto bug finding tool for blockchain developers, regardless of the language or blockchain that they're using.

AZ

So thanks so much for joining me on this whirlwind tour of vanguard, please check us out on twitter, browsergithub and whatnot also make sure to check out. I have a longer talk on this tomorrow at noon. I think at the doom slug stage, so please check that out if you're interested and check out our website. If you want to see more of what we do.

AZ

Thank you so much.

AZ

Are there any questions from the.

AM

Yeah, thank you that was uh that was an awesome uh walkthrough in terms of how this could work, who defines um who defines like what is a flash lone attack or how? How are kind of these attack vectors defined.

AZ

Yeah I mean in general, they're defined by what happens in the real world right. So it's like a particular category of attack that seems to be happening again and again and again, and it's common. So there's a lot of these like re-entrances and flash loans. So I guess they're more defined empirically by what occurs in the real world.

AM

Yeah does the team then once they've identified like oh, this is a common attack vector. Let's then input it in as a way of identifying right.

AZ

So right now it's the team like a paradise, that's defining these detectors, based on, like our auditing experience and our understanding of the space in general. Our kind of future vision of this is that we're going to release this as a framework, so that developers can define their own detectors for vulnerabilities that they find are useful for them got it. Thank you yeah. Thank you. Any other questions all right. Thank you. So much.

R

Awesome. Thank you so much.

R

Benjamin next up we're going to have uh igor from wambi, so they're uh super cool. What they're building it's a user analytics and acquisition platform for web3? So I'll? Let you take it away.

H

O

Okay, hi everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I know it's a long session, um so my name is um oh wow. uh My name is igor kaufman, I'm from I'm founder of wambi a couple of words about my personal background. So I started and led aiml compete and said data art. Then I led uh analytics for near foundation and then uh then we started working with d apps, and that was the time when the fun started.

O

um So a couple of words about like the context that what we're building and uh in what kind of market we're building. So when we started building 1b uh user analytics and acquisition tool for dapps uh it was in may there were like 9 500 d apps according to the operator.

O

uh As of now, there are over 12 000. So it's quite a lot like uh in three months. Another thing we measured was the number of developers based on uh github activity, so we're actually like kind of moving to uh like a little bit to what electric does, in fact so calculating it as well, but um year over year. Actually the number of developers and the key platforms like uh ethereum near and solana uh doubled.

O

uh So it's kind of a booming market- and we talked to many of the apps and one of the things we found was that uh actually all of them have the same questions.

O

uh The questions are like where users are coming from what kind of users they become, what they do, how they retain and so on, and how to acquire more good users like they already have.

O

um That leads us to like a quite a big problem of this con of the product analytics being disconnected uh off-chain from on-chain, because obviously users are coming from off-chain, but their activity later happens on chain, and there is no tool like there is a set of tools that you can like help you with product analytics like uh google, analytic, analytics mix panel and others. There is a set of tools that can help you with on chain analytics like june and others. But there is no like bridge between like web 2 and web 3..

O

So we're trying to build this bridge for product analytics uh and essentially our lake mission, is to help the apps to better understand their audience, to measure traction to optimize marketing, spend uh and later analyze competitive landscape and help acquire more high quality users, so how it works uh essentially uh being on board. It is very simple, so you create an account there, so you um just connect your smart contracts. You install the web sdk similar to google analytics and you're ready to go.

O

You are ready to show to see some dashboards and start using it. um So I will give you several examples of what we're building. uh So all of this is essentially a connection of option and on-chain data about your users, uh so that we can see like by different channels.

O

So where are the most spending users coming from? Is it, for example, twitter or tik tok? We can go like drill down inside of the specific channels like social and get some more insights.

O

Another thing is: what's the average user lifetime by different channels? So probably you would like to like acquire more users that have higher lifetime and probably invest in those channels. More right, which channel brings the most active users then same thing for geography, basically, uh which region brings you the most spending users which region brings you the most active users. All this data comes from on-chain right, but uh the option part with geography is uh equally um equally important right. What's the average revenue per user in different regions?

O

What's the share in total revenue of a specific region, um just like more information about like? What's the distribution of your users? By contrast, probably you over invest in some regions and under invest in some other ones.

O

uh Probably you would like to like know a little bit more about your most valuable users uh to understand uh how many of them and who exactly uh drive the top revenue, like the top 20 percent of your revenue, for example. So we can do that. We can show like the retention level for those users we can see. We can tell how many of them churned.

O

uh We can tell who exactly turns so you can try to reactivate them later and the last, but not the least thing we built an ai model that um essentially recommends the users that are likely to convert to the users of uhd app. So we profile, like all the wallets on chain, analyze their historical activity, so that we understand what kind of the apps they used, what kind of volumes they had. How often they did that and based on that, we can recommend those users so that you understand their demography.

O

You can, for example, configure some traditional ad campaigns. uh Do some cross marketing and do some targeted airdrops to acquire more users. I think that's all. I have we're not live yet, but we're gonna go live next month and there is a link to our website. You could. There is a if you like, you can leave your email there to get notified when we we're live. Thank you so much.

P

Great product really love it. What's going to be your go-to market and who you're going to be selling to.

O

uh So actually, it's very simple, like all the uh already all the biggest like projects on here like ref for us, are waiting for us to go live, so we have an agreements with them and they're really waiting for this connection between of chain and unchain, uh we're already alive uh on the pagoda, dev console so that every developer can see the analytics by their smart contracts.

O

uh When we start gathering this data, we're gonna like publish a lot of interesting insights, I mean on the level like uh top rising the apps and top like the apps that retain users in the best way, some other stuff. The next phase for us also is some uh market analytics, so that we can uh give you even more like insights into uh the competitive landscape and uh so that the apps can compare themselves to others or like any.

O

For example, funds can uh some do some due diligence and then basically, we gonna convert it into a set of insights that we're gonna, publish, and uh hopefully it's gonna be interesting for community.

AM

Yeah, thank you for that. That was um it. This seems incredibly useful. um I'm really curious, who defines the um well. I guess two questions: how are users defined in the system and then who ends up defining the metrics? Do the projects define the metrics themselves or is there kind of like a preset number of metrics here.

O

Yeah yeah. Thank you, that's a great one, so uh we are starting with very standard metrics that everyone wants to measure according to our customer research, uh but our users are going to be available to uh build some custom metrics because, obviously, like everyone uh measures, retention uh measures like revenue in a different way, uh so they can like customize those dashboards or create new ones. Based on the on the on-chain and off-chain data that we provide.

AM

Awesome. Thank you.

O

R

Awesome, thank you so much igor. Thank you all right. We have two more pitches um and then we'll be able to everybody can go to the happy hour. So I want to bring out john from play. Ember um they're really bringing I think, critical infrastructure for mobile gaming to really bridge. I think web 2 to web 3., so super excited.

BA

BA

Hey everyone thanks for sticking with us, so finally we're going to get to gaming.

N

BA

Okay, here we go um who's old enough to remember any of these devices right. Yes, so I mean I I I love gaming right. I grew up with a game. Boy played tetris spent a lot of my time, getting beaten by my brother and my sister on goldeneye and then any like call of duty ogs like here like going back to like the original ones. 2004 spent a lot of time on that wasted most of my university playing championship manager with my flatmates, rather than studying my law degree.

BA

But my point is that gaming has always been fun right. You can play whatever game you want on whatever device. You want, it's social and it's fun. So why then does web3 gaming suck right? We forgot to make games fun.

BA

We basically had a bunch of fintech people coming into gaming to create gamified, staking and token mechanisms to extract capital from a game. You know olek from swetcoin said it on stage gamers, don't care about epys, they want to play games right.

BA

So why are we the contrarian? And why are we bullish on mobile games? Well, I love business models. I've built a lot of companies in mobile gaming, mobile ad tech companies and the thing that I love. I love things that I know to be true and I can prove and there's so many things we know to be true from web to mobile gaming. Already right, we don't need to test this thesis. What we need to figure out is how we can build on top of it.

BA

So if you look at mobile gaming, it's already mass market right. You've got billions of players playing mobile games every day right and it's global. If you take the us, china, japan, like last year, there's 110 billion dollars of revenue just in those three countries alone, and when you look at user behavior, which is really important, you need to understand people's motivations to play games and it's amazing. When you look at gen, zed and millennials, they, basically I'm sorry. This is a old presentation.

BA

Anyway, I'm going to do the presentation that we wrote that should be up here: genset and millennials. They play games more than entertainment and about 85 percent of them. They don't even identify as a gamer right. They just want really cool content and iaps for us again. These are in-app purchases like 174 billion dollars last year is amazing.

BA

So when we think about nfts, we just think about it's monetization we went from sms, we went to banners, rewarded, video, gamers, know this stuff and then now we've got in-app purchases, and now we've got nfts, which is just another monetization tool.

BA

So when we look at the gaming landscape, this is what we see right. We see huge opportunity in mobile gaming because there's lots of key ingredients there we can build on top of right. You've got billions of gamers. You've got amazing games that have been around for a long time that make a lot of money that they play every day. We've got centralized distribution and discovery through the app stores. It's really easy to find these games, but we've got to see this chasm right.

BA

You've either got web3 games or you've got mobile games and there's this massive gap in the middle, because mobile gamers aren't just suddenly going to get out of bed in the morning, be like hey, I'm a web 3 gamer now I know everything about wallets and staking and tokens and swapping chains.

BA

So the team- and I that have been building- get mobile games all our life and monetizing players. We were like okay for us, the game is the destination right. The destination is chosen by the player based on what means something to them. The thing that's going to get them into the game is what, in gaming we call ftue, it's first-time user experience and we go to conferences and everyone's talking about this bridge and me and the team were looking around and we couldn't find this bridge.

BA

We didn't know what it was, but what we think it is in gaming is we're talking about ui ux, we're talking about game design, we're talking about making it really easy to onboard into a game and get addicted to the economy and move free to bay, free to play-based players to become iep based players.

BA

So what do we build? Well, we took a unity sdk. So if you look at unity's s1 filing there's, 120 000 game studios, building on unity, we integrated the near wallet and we built a very light- rewards based meta game into an existing mobile game. So we can convert a non-native web 2 mobile gamer to a web 3 gamer within a mobile game and for mobile game studios. It's just like integrating facebook, tick tock, any sdk. It takes one to two hours, maximum, I'm hoping the video works. Oh it doesn't work.

BA

So the product is already live. It's on google play it's really really simple to enter in the game. You play the game that you've always played and we use this reward based meta to try and get users to sign up so we're talking initially just in the beta. It's itunes vouchers, amazon, vouchers, again, there's loads of facebook, gaming research. That tells you the importance of rewards to improve retention and re-engagement and to sign up. You need to create a near wallet. That's it!

BA

That's the only mention of a wallet or any crypto terms you find out- and this is live on, one of our idle games right now on a cohort of around 50 000.

BA

So in gaming, that's a pretty big number to test on and within a week, we've already got conversion from web 2 to web 3 from 7 to 20, with a really simple ux change and of those 20 we're seeing an uplift in ad consumption of 42 already, and we're really excited about this, because we've only just started playing around with the ui ux within the game.

BA

What's going to come next, we're going to roll this out to all our games and we've got some partner games already to about 8 million dau.

BA

So even if we can't improve this 20, that's already around 1.6 million near wallets we're going to be able to create in a couple of months and what's coming next, we got the green light from near this morning to go and partner with five external game studios and we're going to move up to 50 million dau in q1, and hopefully this 20 and the improvements that we keep making and all the machine learning guys that are joining is going to get higher and higher.

BA

So some of our current investors we're really proud to have some of them on board some real gaming pedigree behind them. That instantly get this, and it was a really short call because they're, the contrarians they're betting on mobile gaming, even though they've got amazing portfolio of web 3 games and we want to become the default game, monetization and development platform for mobile games.

BA

Sorry, it's the whole presentation, so I'm just going to finish off a little bit about me and the team. Why why us we've been making games all our life hugo? The ceo has built two games companies already between us. We've had around a billion downloads of our games. Multiple number one hits I've built and exited two ad tech companies. Some of you may know chris gale, the founder of few and far. We did our first business together. He built veracity.

BA

It's awesome to be working with him on this as well, and we have spent our career monetizing and distributing mass content in free-to-play games and we're so excited to be partnering with nir to finally provide this on-ramp to onboard the next billion players onto near protocol. Thank you very much.

AM

AI

AM

For that yeah, I I think it's a really interesting go-to-market strategy to be able to actually build on top of pre-existing mobile games. It really leapfrogs all the issues and all the headaches of building. You know the game in the first place and being able to leverage something that already has users, um I'm really curious within uh within the the uh the numbers that you've shown so far. What are the mobile games that you've kind of played around with and integrated this with um in in the first batch yeah.

BA

Great question so we're actually going to test on eight different genres of mobile games, because there is no one mobile gamer right. You've got hyper casual idle. Merge within casual you've got six seven different types of gamer that are not the same skill based racing sports.

BA

So in our test we're going to test all of them right we're going to take what we know to be true, but we want to find out where the strongest web 3 motivation is in terms of wallet conversion, but also for mobile game studios, uplifting retention and ltv, because what balances this economy is is ad revenue right. So that's one of the thesis we want to understand from this test process, one. What is the highest value, mobile game, genre and two? What is that main motivation for players? Is it play and reward?

BA

Is it play and compete? Is it play and earn? We don't think so for this this audience um and then, as we deploy it in phase two we'll take those learnings and focus in on the you know, highest earning, yielding category of games to then start either one making those games in-house. But two partnering with third-party studios that already have amazing games that we could work with.

AM

That makes sense. Thank you so much.

BA

Cool thanks so much everyone.

R

Awesome, thank you so much super interesting and um yeah. Last, but certainly certainly not least, uh we have chris and zavin from uh from niche to really discuss their uh their new ecosystem for decentralized social networks. So super excited.

BB

Hi everybody we made it with the last one we are. uh We are niche niche is a revolutionary social platform and it also happens to be built on web3 technology, and so who are these crazy guys that are uh building it? Do the next thing where's, the next yeah we got it.

BB

My name is chris, uh ceo co-founder. I was one of the original tinder co-founders. I did all the ui ux everything graphic. I stayed on as cco uh after that I was one of the co-creators of bumble. uh Street product officer took us through um early monetization.

BB

After that I took a break because dating apps are really hard to build and came back uh looking to do something new uh fund, my co-founder zabin and I'll. Let him introduce himself.

BC

Hey everyone, I'm zavin. I worked at facebook for about 10 years, mostly in the social good space. I started fundraisers, which has raised over 6 billion for charity. I did a lot of work, fighting misinformation, election integrity, getting people to go out and vote. I technically led all of our covet response efforts. You know making sure people know where to go to get vaccinated and fighting misinformation on that front as well.

BC

I truly believe that technology can be a force for good, so I've you know made my career doing that and that's what brings me to work on this with chris.

BB

So we all know what web 2 does right, but what, if all that value and one of all those networks and if what? If all that content actually belonged to the people that made it and participated in it, imagine what could happen with that. Imagine what the type of creativity and the type of connections that we could facilitate so we're going to show you a little demo, because I think that's the best way to do it.

BC

You can see from the time stamp I recorded this like 20 minutes ago or something I guess an hour ago. At this point, uh I don't want to do a live demo, because those never work, but you get the idea. So this is the knee shaft. This is the how the app is two day. uh It starts with a really elegant, familiar user interface to just scroll through content.

BC

You know whether that's photos, videos um text, anything like that, but really what makes this so revolutionary is that all of your content is built around your interests, whether that's cooking or architecture, whether it's travel, whether you're getting ready for near con. We believe that connecting people over their shared interests, passions, hobbies identity, is a much healthier model for social networking rather than having people shout into the void and hope someone hears it, and what this also facilitates is a lot of commerce.

BC

All of these things, uh you know, could have a monetary aspect to it. You could be uh buying and selling nfts to support your favorite artist. You could join an exclusive group. You can do professional networking uh through being connected to other developers within the ecosystem that you're building on, and so we believe that by connecting people around these things and making it really really easy for them to to interact to chat, to discover to make friends to build connections.

BC

It's a much healthier model of social networking and it's a much healthier way to make our revenue, because by collecting a percentage of those transactions, we are getting value when our members are getting value. If someone is making money off our apps, if a club has recurring membership fees or creator is selling their art and we collect a percentage of that, you can see me taking a picture of my laptop as I was testing this.

BC

If we collect a percentage of that, we are only benefiting when our members are benefiting, rather than at their expense, rather than what traditional social media does, which is make them addicted to their phones um and collecting ad dollars. I'm actually going to pause here for a second, because this is my favorite favorite part.

BC

So what you see here? These are actually real nfts that are seamlessly sent to you anytime. You join a community, so all of these are actually nfts. When I took this, it was on the near test net. As of today, we're going to be launching to maynet, and we make that super super seamless. So you can flip through these and you can explore your communities uh through these membership cards that are given to you in a really easy way.

BC

We believe web3 technology can be really really powerful, but one of the biggest things right now, it's the massive hurdle for a lot of people to figuring out how to do it where to do it paying for it and so what drives us- and this is a lot of you- know- chris's learnings, having created two unicorns is ux- needs to be super super simple. It needs to be effortless.

BC

If you're asking the ordinary user to connect their wallet, you have already failed, so I'm actually going to skip ahead in the interest of time and show you how that works, because it's pretty mind blowing.

BC

So you can right now sign up using any of your social logins. That could be apple, google, facebook, we just added support for working with your near wallet as well, but if you sign up through any of the social logins, we actually automatically create a custodial wallet for you and mint those nfts directly into it. For you.

BC

So let's say I've created this account, but I don't have any nfts. Yet I can go to my imessages and click on a link that is sent to me when I press that check out how effortless this is. That's going to open up the app and automatically create your wallet for you and, as you flip through the clubs you're invited to these will mint the nfts for you and just put them in so for the average consumer. At no point do they have to understand anything about nft's signatures. Any of that stuff.

BC

It's really as effortless as clicking on a button in your imessage and you're good to go so you could skip and get into your feed and that's how the app works.

BB

So that's pretty simple: even my mom can use that and she's not that good at that stuff. uh So what we've done so far uh in april, we closed a small precede uh led by metaweb uh by the way, if you see danny around here, tell her she's awesome. She is the coolest uh we had another uh grant from uh the near foundation.

BB

uh In august we just spooled up our pr machine uh that uh drove a lot of traffic into our wait list where we're uh taking people's interest, so we can more appropriately match them up with interest groups. Once we have a a group, a kind of a critical mass around a certain interest, we can then pull in content.

BB

Creators from our other networks to start taking over those groups run those groups, and then we can just attack each single vertical as we come across it later in this year, we're going to raise a seed round with an enhanced beta, as we start validating things right now, we're building on traditional, uh uh just like webto architecture to validate the social, uh the social product as we go along.

BB

Those things will be moving on chain as we get to our uh enhanced beta and then we're looking for a public launch uh sometime early in next year, probably end of q1 q2.

BC

Enjoy the happier that's it from us any questions.

AM

No questions super cool demo really like seeing that video thank.

BC

AM

BC

O

Nice work guys.

R

Awesome we made it to the end, so super excited to uh to hear from all the projects pitching um just want to say last call for voting. So if you haven't yet please uh vote and provide feedback for the teams, we'll be providing those all that feedback to everyone else, but but really, thank you. Thank you to judges. Thank you for everyone. That's participated, we're excited, I think, to build out.

R

I think more pitch competitions more demo days in the future, so be on the lookout for that voting will close, I believe, tuesday, of next week. So if you haven't uh haven't yet, like I said, fill that out and then we'll provide everybody insight into kind of who the winners were from the uh from the voting, and then I think.

R

Lastly, if you are a founder uh builder investor or just anybody in the community, um if you want to get in touch with the funding team, please reach out to us uh through this link tree um and then I think, also just taking it back to the uh the projects um really fortunate that we have, I think, really great builders um in the ecosystem and if you are interested in contacting any of these projects, that pitch today feel free to reach out to us and we're more than happy to facilitate intro, so really appreciate it.

R

R