Panel Web3 is Going Great

foreign [Music] [Applause] well I'm local I'm from Bogota and I'm so excited and it's an honor to have you all you to have all you guys in in my city this is like a dream for us so we're very thankful with the ethereum foundation because there was a lot of effort I know the the work that they did for for for having all of us together here and it's an honor also to be here today with these amazing leaders that uh we we are going to discuss about what they are building and to learn how uh and this is the name of the planet we don't have it right now but uh wept by the way my name is Mauricio Tovar from Tropicals and Colombia guy and uh we the name of the panel is um web free it's uh going great and I want to start asking that is webreed going well and I'm going to introduce our amazing panelists Brian from zero s Park Foundation Guild uh Jacob from eth global amazing weekend we had here in in Bogota and Romina crypto chica from Atlanta uh let's start with that question guys if you agreement do you want to start do you have a microphone okay we we need to share I can share it with you uh so you have either it started we can start with you um yeah for sure so so um it's a hard question to start with um I'm sad that I came last to answer it first but basically yeah I think it's well there's a lot of improvement to do but even like when I look one year back to where it was um I think there's been a lot of improvements and um yeah I'm just very glad to have entered the ecosystem and I think there's again a lot of improvements to do but it's yeah there's like many steps which are kind of incremental increases let me know what do you think um I think that web tree is well right now in all latan because I'm from Argentina well a lot of people who are there knows me and there is people from Honduras Ecuador Mexico and a lot of people from from different countries from latam and we I think that wet tree in the present is is a good tool for us to have an alternative for the different for the traditional system between I mean the the government the bank system we we really use crypto and blockchain to in our day in Lego DNA that and then in a dated in a daily basis yeah just if you wanna send value or send money to your friend or family or whatever so I think that we we are not thinking in the future we are thinking in the present um it's a different approach what do you think Jake I think it's an interesting question um I think there's also a satirical Twitter account called web3 is going great which posts about all the hacks that happen all the time so um so I mean it depends on how you look at that sentence um I think like overall like having seen the last kind of five years of Youth Global hackathons and also just like in general watching the ecosystem I think like a really good signal is just a lot of really smart people have kind of come to the space and stayed it's like a really kind of interesting environment where it is the frontier in a lot of ways and I think we don't really quite know exactly what we're doing um but that's actually like a really exciting opportunity for smart people to come in and like think about these problems think about how they conserve you know underserved communities how they can kind of serve like what these new um kind of Primitives that we've been building in web3 so I think like just overall like seeing kind of the the community grow significantly and having smart people stay and and continue building is at least a really positive great sign so I think uh from that aspect web3 has been going great and I think there's a lot of other aspects in which it is right right yeah um I think there are a couple of different dimensions along which we can try to answer this question um first off I think that you know to Echo what the other uh folks on the panel have mentioned there are a lot of things that we should be very proud of I think there's a lot of really promising seeds around Community uh I'm really excited just to see you know with Devcon being in Bogota and just looking at how much Global activity there is worldwide around ethereum development I think that's you know so so promising to see at the same time I think it's important that we're continually taking a very like critical uh perspective on what can we doing better what can we be doing better what value have we really created so far right like at the end of the day this is technology that has to impact end users and I think that's been one of the challenges you know for uh web 3 for you know a long time I mean it's really fantastic to see that payments uh actually have taken off and are serving so many uh financially underserved people you know when our crew from Xerox Park came out here to Bogota I've been super surprised by how many of our you know transactions actually involve people requesting us to send cryptocurrency that's like a really encouraging sign at the same time when we look at like various Industries for example crypto gaming I would wager that there's like despite all the speculative hype around that there are fewer than 10 000 people in the world who have probably had a fun time playing a crypto game um and for the size of that industry the industry that's actually something that we need to be really critical of and that we should be continually raising the bar and challenging ourselves on so I think that there's a lot of promising seeds but you know like um Eda said there's a lot to think about improving on okay um I want to talk later about the Latin American and real users but first of all I want to um for the audience to understand what are your products your projects uh what are the problems that you're trying to solve and uh what kind of impact does your team hope to live on the web free ecosystem and the world in general uh maybe we're going to start with you yeah for sure so I mean my answer to this is going to be a little bit perhaps hypocritical given what I just said about the importance of of um connecting end user but I do think that there is actually really a very deep and important connection so the Xerox Park Foundation focuses on what we call application Level research and development and that basically means trying to understand what are the Technologies today that enable use cases perhaps two to five years out Thinking Beyond things like you know I know in the last couple of years there's been this massive Bull Run and all this activity on the application Level but a lot of it looks like you know quite incremental improvements things like oh you know let's build another D5 app that's at like the sixth level of financial engineering or let's build you know and accessibility is very important but once you get to like here's the end wallet application with like a marginally better mobile ux or something how do we encourage the space to think bigger about like how might things like zero knowledge proofs or things coming out of you know cryptography academic literature impact the ways that we think about privacy and and you know digital transactions online um so that's mostly what we focus on uh and you know we're just hoping to start planting the seeds for impactful technologies that that might reach those end users two to five years down the line right Jacob yeah sure um yeah so I work with youth Global um what East Global does is primarily kind of grow the ethereum developer ecosystem uh by bringing in web 2 developers meaning where they are helping them with education uh through the hackathons that we run like youth Bogota this past weekend and then ultimately kind of helping them through that Journey um if you think about it joining what three is always like a very kind of stressful situation there's a lot of stuff that's happening lots of noise Heath Global kind of tries to be the signal and then the other thing that's really important about us and of course the second part of our name Global is that there are talented people all around the world whether Latin India North America Europe whatever um there's just like tons of talent in the world and not everybody has the same opportunities to kind of travel the world or go to the right institutions or or whatever so what do youth Global also tries to do is bring our events our community the ethereum community in general to these places all around the world and help kind of kind of bolster their local communities as much as possible through our hackathons and our events so that's what we've been up to for the last five years later was created this year so we are so young it's a young project and I think that it was created with the vision of the road to devcom so I think that we had a lot of community in latam I don't know Chile Peru as I said Honduras Ecuador Argentina all the countries has leaders um has a communities so we try to improve the connections between the countries and the communities and the first step was create idlatan Buenos Aires to to have a big event Argentina has a strong Community with builders on ethereum but we never we have never been we have never been an event a big event we have never had an event yeah I have problems with distance but well we had it Global in 20 2018 but we had a big pulse a big so many years without nothing just small events and now now well yes it did on Mondays we had it and it was a point of uh meeting umro for all the leaders and we had to create our identity uh if Latin is growing is uh is involving so we don't have to we don't have the the the objectives or the goals we are creating because we we have never been in touch together between the communities or yeah I think that we we were in our countries with our ideas with our context but this is the first time that we are talking between us and it's amazing in person in person yeah in person and we now we are uh we are working like idlatan with all the Latino americanos and Latin americanas and we are trying to um find what are our problems how to solve it uh it's a hard-working a hard work but we are walking to the to the wolves amazing they're doing an amazing job between the communities I have to say that either yeah so I'm part of build Guild or but get all um basically what we are is we're a web 3 developer Community um we think a lot about onboarding developers and providing the right tool set to them like giving them opportunity to learn and prototype uh as well as like while doing this also earn some income at the same time we also have our hackathon starter kit scaffold eat as well so we maintain that we create like different prototypes and it's a way for developers to kind of start experimenting without moving full time and you know it's kind of a way where you know you can graduate to either building your own product or also go work at a web 3 Community as a developer um so yeah that's kind of what we're up to great well one thing that is different from web 2 is that web3 have a very important actor in the in in in your projects is the community right what is the role of your community or in the decision making of what you do and how you listen to them and what they they want uh let's start with you this time you have the microphone yeah uh yeah for sure so I think um actually a big part of Youth Global's Journey over the last little while has been kind of realizing actually exactly this that Community is centered to what we do and actually thinking about actually Global the company is more of kind of a a project that helps service that existing community that we've been able to build um so yeah from that perspective we're certainly thinking a lot about different things in which we can do to help support them so we actually just kind of publicly announced this past weekend at East Bogota a couple of new ways we're thinking about doing that uh so we've been doing hackathons obviously over the last few years but now we've also launched guides which are kind of self-serve education platform um kind of think of that as like kind of maybe the minus one to zero the hackathons then being the zero to one and then we also want to help people on their Journey from kind of going from web to building in web3 for the first time and then joining a web 3 company with jobs so we just announced jobs as well so this is all kind of based on feedback that we've learned from our community and just sort of what we've seen over the last few years that um you know we've been able to see kind of a lot of awesome people come through our doors stay actually in the audience so hi everybody um and uh and and then yeah actually kind of come into the community and either build something great and kind of have that be part of the community and their way of kind of impacting it or joining an existing project in the space and and taking it from there so uh we're just trying to support people within our community now within you know more different ways than just the hackathons we've been doing traditionally and in your case Heather um yeah so basically what we tried to do a lot is um so we don't yeah like I think it's nice for developers because we don't provide them like a specific you don't have to do X Project but you have the flexibility to kind of choose what you're interested in and kind of build that so let's say you know you're interested in integrating with lens protocol you can do that you can have different Alternatives in that sense and you can kind of yeah it's a very free community in the terms that you know every developer is welcome to build whatever they're interested in and kind of earn money for their contributions into the community uh and all the all the resources we provide are completely free and accessible all online we also like it's a yeah it's a public good for the ecosystem that we don't like take anything from the developers contributing or um yeah it kind of just you can meet other people you can network with other people create different projects together so yeah I think it's a very core developer-centric community in that I'm going to introduce you in a moment I need to find the info and um until that please uh your the role of your community and how you listen to them yeah I I think that something really powerful happens when you approach uh r d or development from uh a bottom-up rather than a top-down kind of perspective um I think that there's you know one world where you can imagine a lot of the research being done in the space uh being instigated by like monolithic organizations that have top-down research agendas which they hire researchers for and then you know manage them to hit specific research outcomes and I think that this early on in a Technologies life cycle you know a technology so early and promising as ethereum we can't predict no single person can predict what the most interesting directions are going to be and so we rely very heavily on our community and you know we frame ourselves as largely in service to a community of people who are really owning their own Visions so what we try to do is we try to educate folks um I think there's a lot of similarities here for example with with youth Global but we take people in we try to educate them in a lot of these new tools and then we have some general areas that we think are interesting to explore for example like zero knowledge machine learning that let's take a machine learning specialist teach them how zero knowledge works and then leave it to them to start to articulate like a research agenda or vision for that sub domain and then our role starts to become like connecting them with the experts on the cryptography side or providing financial support via grants or educating or those kinds of things so I think the Community Driven development here is really important I agree that that's what made uh web pretty different welcome Aaron can you please introduce yourself and the question that we are answering right now is what is the role of the community and how you listen to them to make decisions right I started being like everyone I I got double books um but uh yeah hey I'm Aaron from Cleveland uh in terms of the role for for the community I I guess very much depends on the the context or what kind of uh yeah the context um in in the context of clear fund I think the the role of the community there is essentially helping to uh allocate funds to public goods projects so uh quadratic funding is this really neat mechanism where you take uh inputs from a whole bunch of different people uh in in the form of contributions to projects that they value and then quadratic funding uh the CLR mechanism essentially spits out an allocation that reflects both the preference and the strength of preference of all of the individuals in the community that contributed to projects that they value so in the context of clear fund I think the community's biggest input is that is helping to allocate funding to public good great thank you and Romina Latin America the Latin American communities um I think that we have to create our own uh flows our our own criteria to uh start creating metrics and how to um uh to measure to mention the the impact for example I was talking with uh Carlos Melgar from Honduras he's from an Iceland in otila and we are I'm collaborating with with the quadratic funding team the of the ethereum foundation and we have to the applicant has to pass a kyc and Carlos say he he told me two days ago I hired cryptachika how are you I applied to the quadratic family brown but I'm a bit worried because they I they are asking me for my account and my address and I don't have address and I said what uh do you I I don't understand and he told me yeah because I live in a in an Iceland so I don't have an an account we don't have address if you want to go to a house of a friend you have a reference but you don't have a on a street or a number and I don't have a personal account bank and we paid our electricity and lights in a prepaid way so it's very different of any capital or big city they have a specific requirements and we have to know like eat Latin like leaders of latan we had to talk a lot with our communities and with other communities to understand where is the starting point the starting point because I think we have a lot of pre-concept and some now Notions Italian but I think that we have to check with numbers and data hard data strong data and then we need to start to design the the solutions but now we are exploring and we are trying to understand Where We Are sorry because I am a bit nervous this is my first time talking in English in a panel don't worry Ramina if you want to know more about her there is an EA and the New York Times article so good that presented the story of Romina around cryptocurrencies so I encourage you to to read it I I listened to you to your page and your projects and everything is perfect what are the challenges that you're facing who wants to start uh I mean for us we're building on really novel technology I mean ethereum itself is a very novel technology and then we're kind of taking that a step further building on top of zero knowledge proofs using may see this minimal anti-collusion infrastructure built by privacy and scaling solution to a team funded by the ethereum foundation and this uh yeah it's it's bleeding edge technology it's uh it's really incredible it basically allows us to run a quadratic funding around or kind of more generally run a a vote in a way where the inputs are secret and you have no receipts so you cannot tell how I voted I cannot tell how you voted and because of this quality it makes it much less effective to attempt to collude to bribe to coerce people into voting or contributing in a way that's different from how they would like but building using this stack of Novel technologies that uh upgrading frequently and uh not yet audited have not yet been tested at scale um is a constant challenge we run into uh hiccups and roadblocks and whatnot constantly uh but I think that's part of the challenge that's part of what we kind of sign up for when we're again building on this on this stack of Novel technology on novel technology on novel technology and the the reward is really worth it uh you know ultimately what we're creating is this this system for uh permissionless trustless and private voting quadratic funding which is a a really really powerful tool to enable all kinds of communities from from kind of the ethereum community to the broader Latin American community and outlet and onward from there amazing Jacob do you have the microphone yeah that's fire waste I should stop holding the mic um yeah I think on on our end you know I think one of the biggest challenges is you know we haven't actually found a sort of ceiling for demand for our events like they've been continually growing we've been doing more and more um but you know as a small team we probably just can't Service as many different regions around the world as as we'd like to like Ramiro pointed out like we we hadn't done an event in latim until this year since 2018 sorry for that by the way um and uh but you know it's not for a lack of caring about these markets and and also um you know Focus just literally we just don't have enough time or people to run more than six in-person events a year it's they're all huge undertakings um so yeah I mean on our end I think uh you know trying to find ways to make uh each Global more efficient as an organization to empower other organizations um to uh frankly just hire great talent internally to be able to do more and more of our mission I think those are probably some of our biggest challenges right now is just just you know trying to do more of what we're doing and to support our community um even more it's not only difficult to find it so expensive right now sure yeah it's very expensive right now yeah either um yeah I could actually also double click on what Jacob kind of mentioned um so at Bill Guild like I think we think a lot about developer and boarding developer tooling and education and we like create different content or tools to do that but also like try to understand what is the most effective like sometimes you know we try to gather a lot of people in a telegram group but that's not the most effective way to communicate so we try like different ways to approach like to create new projects highlight the prototypes we're building um yeah I think like those are some of the main challenges because it's like very new we just try to experiment with different things see what's going well and kind of continue with that but again we're also limited by size and the technology is kind of all new so building on new technology with small team with everyone learning they're like a lot of challenges which you kind of face and determine what to do next at that point Brian yeah I'm gonna maybe um highlight another dimension of uh like some of the challenges that these kinds of orgs Might face um so I think that in crypto and web3 broadly um there's this massive Iceberg of value creation across different levels of the stack whether that be from Community Management uh or from you know maintaining infrastructure open source software uh research and development that kind of thing and only a small kind of you know relatively small tip of this iceberg is is capable of being value capturing um and so one thing that is just a difficult problem to face is the incentives problem of uh you know for example if you have folks coming into the ecosystem how do you get them excited about contributing to all of that core infrastructure that um actually you know kind of powers everything like it's both from an incentives perspective as well as from the fairness perspective as well as from a resource allocation perspective it's not necessarily going to be sustainable if you have people coming in and uh you know there's a ton of work being done by open source developers Community managers Educators a lot of grant money coming in from non-profit foundations to help support or instigate these new kinds of um you know whether it's like product directions or whatever else it is and uh all that all those resources come flowing in and then afterwards you know like a venture capital firm like swoops in and sort of takes kind of like all of the upside from that and it goes up to all these LPS and not saying like there isn't a like that Capital markets are not important they're very important actually for driving specific types of progress and Innovation but then there's this big looming question around like how do we continue to incentivize people to work on the things uh that power this whole thing that are kind of under the surface that don't have as direct of a value capture mechanism and that's one thing that we've been you know trying to think hard about and I I love these experiments like protocol Guild and you know everything that clear fund is doing around supporting these public goods um popular popularizing those mechanisms is just as important also as the technology that that powers them so I think that's a really big Focus as well not Andrew Romina um well eat latan at the at the time we only had to even in the past but we we had a lot of goals some priorities one of the of our priorities the education uh right now we have some companies in latam Who Made Who make customer acquisition in our communities so we try to create communities like public goods with uh cooperative and for free for everyone but we don't have an external alternative so one of the goals of in the future for idlatan is to create an educational Hub and it's very important for us because here in latan there is a lot of ghost chains and scammy chains and we have the opportunity to um connect with the users and the builders again in when we experiment in the past the defeat summer a lot of people know cetheidium and knows nfts and then the expensive gas fees Alejo push away a lot of people just because the people couldn't deploy or send money or whatever in on chain so if we uh create a strong opportunity to share the knowledge about layer 2's and public goods I think we had a an historical opportunity to onboard a lot of Latino americanos that's true the education in Latin America and in developing countries is so important as from Intervention I have so many top topics to talk but we are out of time