NEARCON 2022 | Layer 1 Stage - Day 2

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

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   you so

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   so my my good morning near khan the layer one ready stage is about to begin please welcome your mc with near foundation a young june

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   good morning everyone welcome to day two of near con yeah i hope everyone's having a great time day one was full of amazing talks panels and obviously interacting with our ecosystem booths the hackathon is in high gear right now we have another day full of amazing talks another day full of amazing panels and hopefully lots of you know amazing conversations for you all to have we do have some like really cool things

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   happening at the moment and going on throughout the day like i said the hackathon is going on right now um there's a lot of builders hacking away obviously we have all of our ecosystem partners here and we also have the armor kingdom workshop going on today um at the proof of sound stage so please go check that out um we have just you know like two more days you know i hope everyone gets to go out tonight that has everyone seen the events side events list it's

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   it's overwhelming today so i hope you guys get to party hop and enjoy and to kick things off today we have a talk between marie and um ryan selkiss from masari talking about navigating cryptocycles and here we go let's start day two hello ryan thank you so much for being here with us at nercon albeit remotely but thank you so much for taking the time i know uh the near conians that are here or the nyriens as we call them will be absolutely delighted to hear about

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   your perspective on the market and what's going on because many of us actually fan readers of mystery but also what you're right so thank you so much for taking the time and with that maybe actually jumping straight into it because we have something like 20 minutes here of questions um my the first question is actually in your crypto thesis you said the first order of business post-crash will be to go back to sections one to

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   six and determine if you still believe those if you still believe those are true and i'm just curious to have your take on those uh six points which i'm gonna reiterate uh to hear from your perspective what you think now and and if we are now that we are on the other side of actually a crash so point number one is is the centralized world still crumbling point number two does web3 offer an

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   optimistic bet on the future point number three are the building blocks of the new frontier bridges dows nfts still worthy of large investments during the next installation phase point number four will it be easier to find fundamentally strong projects in the next down cycle point number five is there still abundant capital available to fund everything interesting and point number six and do you still

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   believe the high water marks are attainable in a five to ten year time span so are you where are we on that where do you think we are well i think everything is played out uh pretty much to a t uh from from what i wrote uh when i wrote last year i certainly didn't predict uh the extent of the downturn or exactly you know how things would unravel but having been through a couple of cycles

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    it's not necessarily surprising right and it's also not necessarily surprising that uh crypto was not as resistant to the the uh uh the adversarial macro market conditions as as people may have diluted themselves into thinking we don't we don't exist in a vacuum and and and crypto never has existed in a vacuum um i think the thrust of the argument that i made last year was um we're in the very kind of early innings of a long-term game

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    um i think we're still so early became a bull market meme uh for you know unbridled uh enthusiasm and in reality what what it should mean and what it really means is that there's transformative potential for this tech and and the whole concept of user-owned economies or user-owned uh protocols um and i think that's the part of the thesis that hasn't changed so is the centralized worlds broken and and continuing to unravel uh

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    i i think the answer is is you know pretty pretty obvious um that you know things are not going uh well uh across the board and um and if you look at the geopolitical crises uh from this year all the ongoing supply chain issues the trend towards nationalism and protectionism um the increasing polarization that's driven by a combination of you know media social media and and uh and you know kind of economic concerns now that that seems pretty uh pretty clear

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    that um that the centralized institutions that we've come to know and trust and rely upon um are weak uh and they're certainly weaker than at any point i think in most of our lifetimes so um then the question is can uh crypto and can some of these emerging protocols uh ultimately you know empower individuals and and you know build more resilient systems and depending on your perspective you know cryptocritics will say well obviously not just look at q2

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    um and and you know all the cascading liquidations and and uh the downturn that you know all assets have seen uh the amount of consumer harm and then the kind of disappearance i think of a lot of the crypto audience as the errors come out of the balloon right so now the question is who are the kind of true believers and where are the areas of greatest potential for um mainstream adoption uh of crypto and uh i think that's a lot of pockets uh of of innovation

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    that had their you know mvp moment they're kind of very you know kind of earliest glimmers of hope and promise in the last run this is the part of the cycle where uh those protocols and those communities harden and we figure out if any of these apps are gonna cross the chasm uh and actually become meaningfully adopted worldwide so um the answer to the question of you know is there abundant capital available that's true for both human capital and

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    financial capital it's not just about the token values about the dry powder that's sitting on balance sheets right now that can be deployed during this downturn and um and the same things that were interesting in kind of like the mvp phase nfts dows uh some of the scaling infrastructure or privacy tech um they're going to have time to mature uh without the noisy backdrop of kind of retail

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    uh and speculative euphoria that we've seen the last 18 months before the beginning of this year so um i think uh for someone like me who's been around for a couple of cycles this is actually the the relaxing part of the cycle um and uh and it basically lets you take a step back and and not everything is uh a scramble and kind of a mad dash and and fomo induced kind of craze but you have time to think you know kind of long term what are the problems that need to be solved uh and and what are going to be the solutions that really uh

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    transform this industry and ultimately uh transform society yeah and i couldn't agree more and that's why you know near con is building beyond the hype right because we also truly believe that you're right it's actually this whole fomo hype that you can take a step back and and continuously build and actually focus on that and actually so near is a layer one and talking about layer ones and you know building beyond the hype what's actually what's your view what's the

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    bull and the barricades for layer ones what's your vision for is it multi-chain future what does it look like i think that the operating systems and the and the tech stacks that emerge around layer ones it's going to be very important that any non-evm compatible chain is doing a really good job building technical bridges or basically winning that kind of second operating system uh you know battle that lies ahead you know and

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    maybe you can have half a dozen different types of operating systems but uh you know it's microsoft and apple it's ios and android it's you know usually these uh big uh operating systems whether it's mobile desktop you know software etc email um the browser wars it's like there's a couple of major players and then the drop-off is is pretty significant and within crypto um i think the jury's still out on what is going to

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    be the alternative to the the ethereum virtual machine um so that's kind of what to watch for i think if you're scaling a layer one ecosystem you need to either win that battle or you need to figure out a way to become you know seamlessly integrated with uh with with one of the two standards or three standards that emerges as the really big ecosystems and that that makes a lot of sense and actually talking about you know integrations if that's if that's a

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    pass what do you think given the number of bridge hacks that we've seen this year do you think this like holding with technical bridges still holds i think it has to be solved you know you can't uh you can't not have interoperability between uh these these different blockchains these different systems i don't think that you know the future of the uh of the web and and the financial system is is going to be broken down into silos where you can't interoperate between between two

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    two different ecosystems so um you know it is a vulnerability it is an area that i think is going to continue to be stress tested but i think um uh long term is something that has to be solved uh for for you know crypto to to succeed at scale and this is true um even for ethereum uh merge as you think about roll-up chains and other kind of app chains that plug into ethereum as a settlement layer so um i think that's just a function of time

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    and and how novel some of this tech is and how um how early stage these solutions are uh they're still being stress tested and unfortunately they're being stress tested at scale uh and uh and and that's why i've seen some of the the negative headlines and some of the really uh massive vulnerabilities uh the last uh the last year or so yeah um good point again like yeah stress tests continue to build and ultimately will have to be a challenge that gets sold you just mentioned actually ethereum so maybe let's change gear and

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    and talk about that so the move to proof-of-stake uh is scheduled now to take any day any day will happen in a day soon can you share your perspective on proof-of-stake more broadly but also in particular the move for ethereum to proof of stake i think there's a lot of open questions as to what does this mean for the censorship resistance of ethereum in the ethereum ecosystem yeah the tails wagging the dog a little bit with um with uscc and kind of the stable coins that set on ethereum as

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    those regulated stable coins go so go the chain and i think uh people are minimizing the risk that comes with that transition right so um you know the the fact that uh usdc is tens of billions of dollars of capital locked in d5 and d5 itself is such a meaningful part of ethereum not today you simply are not going to have a situation where ethereum thrives um without usdc at least for the foreseeable future and if if that becomes the case then um

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    the chain that usdc supports uh if it ends up being a very compliance heavy uh chain i i think is is ultimately going to become the standard particularly during a hard fork situation like this um the best case scenario is that the status quo post merge um stays pretty consistent and there aren't subsequent hard forks that that are you know kind of meaningful where different uh major players and ecosystem

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    have to pick a side and um that in and of itself is a little bit of a defense it's one thing to have a hard fork scheduled uh and uh and have people pick a side it's it's another to be forced into a hard fork so it's one thing for um compliance focused teams to signal that they're going to be on the proof of stake side uh and and you know uh basically that's where all the stable coin assets are going so that's where all d5 is going

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    it uh it would not be simple for any um top-down kind of regulatory actors to you know basically force the ecosystem to execute another hard fork to ban things like you know ck transactions for instance um so i think um i think we've got an interesting opportunity right now um to transition to proof of stake and then um ideally there are very few if any kind of hard forks in the future uh that that the community will have to grapple with

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    particularly ones where there might be some uh compliance or kind of regulatory um considerations for uh for what type of commerce what type of transactions can happen to happen on that chain yeah and maybe let's actually double down on that because you've been mentioning compliance regulation quite a lot and where is the world of defy going and you've been you've been quite a loud voice actually on regulation and policy uh saying scene of late so

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    what's what needs to change and what are you pushing for uh i i think we have to get this right in the west and in the us in particular um and i think next year there is a good chance that we'll get some bipartisan legislation on both stable coins and then maybe more comprehensive legislation on how crypto assets in general are treated it's probably a coin flip at this point which is you know better than maybe it's ever been before um

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    and the big questions are uh around where you know basically which which regulators will have uh jurisdiction and oversight authority um you know when it comes to crypto and the dividing line seems to be decentralized finance i think nfts will clearly be on the right side of uh of the regulatory ledger um other layer ones you know probably on the right side uh of the regulators the um the big three areas of focus are going to be around stable coins and how

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    they're regulated um defy uh protocols and and how those software developers uh and and those kind of labs ecosystems or kind of foundations that are pushing some of these financial uh protocols uh how they're regulated between you know centralized exchange and you know kind of pure uh freedom of steep speech uh type situation with the with the developers um and then uh lastly you know are we gonna see anything that would give uh token creators uh a path to

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    decentralization so something like a safe harbor where everything isn't deemed a de facto security uh and uh and and really kind of slows down the the proliferation of these different assets so um if i were to kind of handicap each you know stable coin seems to be the the most straightforward because there's benefits to uh integrating stable coins into the broader financial system and so having safeguards uh around

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    uh what you know how stable coins are issued how they're audited and um and what consumer protections are kind of baked in um when you're talking about the redeemability of you know usdc for an actual dollar that's sitting in a bank account i think that's pretty common sense um and one of the things that might get thrown out in the process is is the ability for you know different um centralized platforms to support

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    algorithmic stable points uh because they're not subject to the same consumer protections and and kind of regulatory structures so um yeah that one i i i'd say hopefully we get some good clarity because there's probably more upside than downside in having um good clear stable coin regulation the other two i think are gonna uh that's gonna take years so on the on the you know whether

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    software developments is protected speech and whether you know some of these um uh communities are liable for the protocols that they've created uh depending you know kind of like what we've seen in tornado cache and and i think what we'll see for some d5 applications that's probably gonna have to play itself out in court over the course the next you know several years and then when it comes to safe harbors

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    i i don't think realistically you're going to get anything productive out of the sec for the duration of the current chairs term but if there is comprehensive legislation that uh empowers the cftc versus the sec for oversight of some of these assets then you might at least see some clarity around how subset are regulated and and what the rules of the the road are um so a lot of open questions i think a good chunk of them will actually be answered next year uh versus you know the first

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    12 years of the industry where uh there's been some strategic ambiguity that's you know on the one hand created you know but a bit of confusion on the part of industry participants but it's also arguably allowed the industry to flourish without um over-regulation or premature regulation yeah and i think it's fair to say that there's definitely a sentiment of acceleration on that from but what about what about the do you beyond the us are

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    you looking at anything on that what's on your radar beyond the us i think europe is next europe is just more complex and i think the the battlegrounds where we need to make the most progress is the us um just because it it continues to be the the you know dominant uh country and and region for you know financial regulation and financial services uh as the us goes i think so goes the the rest of the the free world i don't

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    expect there's gonna be much progress in in china uh or hong kong or or you know kind of anywhere in that region and then the other countries um that do have meaningful crypto adoption korea south korea and um and japan they're a little bit more insular uh so it's i'm not sure how uh widely relevant some of the some of the standards some of the rules around crypto might might become uh even if they uh are you know well handled and there's some progress in those two specific

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    countries so i i think you know it remains uh very u.s centric uh i know you know this this is you know coming from someone that that didn't even fly in for the conference so uh maybe uh maybe that would take that with a grain of salt but um you know the the biggest opportunity right now uh and the biggest threat is in the u.s because if it breaks the wrong way i think it sets the global industry back

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    pretty significantly yeah and i agree and i think that's a fair statement right there is all eyes on what's happening in the u.s and then that will trigger actually movement in in other regions um maybe one one last question actually and two to close up so most of your thesis and as you've actually discussed in the introduction is that institutional trust uh is in long-term decline right and that therefore web 3 replaces that but how can we ensure that actually we

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    create a more equitable better institutions in web3 what what tips would you have as you know people here at near con building beyond the hype they should have that in mind right so what does that look like i think disclosures and you know kind of transparency and auditability of services is is uh pretty critical um so whether you're you know building a uh a token-based protocol uh and and you know the there is uh some transparency around how the

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    token is ultimately distributed and kind of what the rules uh are for early investors insiders you know how the token is governed just being really kind of clear about um uh communicating with different uh key stakeholders in the community on on what the what the rules are and how the system is going to be governed and basically how ownership will break out over time uh is a good starting point and i think

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    the same thing is true for centralized services uh when it comes to you know reserves and um and and being you know transparent with customers about you know risks of the financial products that they might support or you know exactly you know what what risk uh users are taking on versus the platforms that um that are taking either custody or or facilitating certain uh consumer commercial activity um

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    so it's it's not rocket science uh but you know i think it's important that builders within the industry think about the spirit of existing regulations and consumer protection laws and and start building that into their processes and their products themselves because if they don't do that it's going to be forced upon us so there's not really much of a choice well perfect way to end up and ryan thank you so much for taking the time to be here albeit remotely but with us at

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    near con i know you also have mainnet coming up which looks absolutely fantastic i'm looking forward to being there so thank you so much for a stop provoking conversation which definitely was a great continuation from all the stuff we all read every day that you write thank you thank you all right thank you to marie and ryan for that discussion yeah i mean considering everything that's happened in the last 12 months i'm really curious to see what will happen in the next 12.

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    all right so next up we're going to shift gears a little bit and we're going to talk a little bit more about a holistic aspect of being in this industry um so i would like to bring up eric evans here to discuss why your web 3 project needs a coaching culture thank you uh a young and i would like to take the opportunity first of all to thank ilya marik jack and kam and the rest of

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    the near foundation to have invited me to speak on the stage it's a privilege and also because i wanted to make an announcement very important announcement i am and anarchist yes i am that's my surprise and i see some people smiling the people who know me but if you read in wikipedia the definition of anarchy it says it's a society freely organized without governing bodies without authorities

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    and i would love to live in a world fully decentralized fully transparent where everyone feels empowered and accountable where the promises of the webstery movement are delivered for a better world the challenge is we are all in this room in the ecosystem in this web industry still very young human beings who still have to learn new skills new virtues that can help us build and deliver

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    that new world and they are very hard to learn i'd like to share with you an insightful story so you have to imagine london april 2003 it's raining like here actually and i've been ceo of a telecom business for six months it's the very first time in my career that i'm ceo so i'm sitting in my office with my coach and she's going to present me the result of a 360. so for the people who don't know what the 360 is it's a set of interviews of people who

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    work with you to assess your leadership style so she said okay eric i'm going to give you the result of my investigation but first of all i have a question for you what do you think is the answers i've received from your team so with a sort of fake confidence i say well i think they said collaborative consensual a servant leader she looked at me and i started reading kind of pity in her face as i was slightly concerned and

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    she said well i'm afraid they perceive you as a dictator wow i was shocked actually i was angry well i'm french they are all british i understand why they are annoyed and actually i was so angry that i wanted to fire everyone she said okay that's one option can we discuss option b what are the changes you can make so you change that perception so i asked someone to get involved in my team meetings and to observe me and i had that tendency to give my

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    opinion first all the time whatever the subject that typical imposter syndrome i wanted to demonstrate everyone that i deserve that job of the ceo the problem is when you lead the team and you give your opinion first you kill the debate there is no more conversation happening in your organization so people don't really share information people don't feel very much empowered and countable yes i had the best intention of the world i was asking them their view afterwards

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    but that's too late that's the thing is we judge ourselves based on our intentions but people judge us on our behaviors and that gap is what we call a blind spot and i was ceo of a telecom business and internally the culture and the way we were working didn't deliver the promises that we were making to our consumer and if there is one message a single message i want you to take away today

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    if you really want to deliver the promises of the web 3 you have to master some skills and specifically through skills self-awareness active listening how to give feedback so you can develop within your organization a culture in culture where everyone behave as a coach as a prerequisite to deliver internally the promise you're going to deliver on the world and i will come back to that i'm 58.

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    so i've been walking around looking at the speakers and i realize very sadly that i'm probably one of the oldest attendee at that conference if not the oldest so after a short moment of depression i tried to do my job as a coach so i tried to shift from negative emotion to positive emotion and i said okay i was there in the early 90s when the internet was born and i remember the promises at that time

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    the transparency everyone connected the endless opportunities we were talking also about decentralization everyone empowered but we ended up with few tech giants controlling our transactions controlling our identities influencing our behavior sometimes for the good often for the worse and most of the time without our knowledge so what happened well the millions of organizations at the beginning of web 1 and web 2 didn't have internally

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    the promises that they were delivering to the world they were organized vertically very centralized a lot of hierarchy a lot of managers layers if we really want to deliver the promises of the web 3 we cannot keep working like the way we've been working for the last 100 years that's not going to work and actually even before nakamoto published his paper in 2008 about bitcoin there was a number of organizations worldwide web related or

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    not web related like patagonia for instance who had enough of that type of organization they were frustrated so they started reviewing a number of aspects about their organization so the review for instance the way they were making decisions significantly more collectively and to achieve that therefore they had to share significantly more information across the organization and then they started saying okay and

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    maybe uh regarding the performance review do we need to have the manager doing it can't we put in place a peer-to-peer performance review and when we have a conflict do we need to have every time the manager involved to resolve the conflict so they're trying to find some different way to resolve conflict and bit by bit they're starting removing managers tasks and responsibilities reviewing the layer of management in their organization having an

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    organization significantly more flat more transparent more decentralized where people feel more empowered more accountable yes you recognize the promises of the webster movement so the problem is to put in place those new governance processes it's very difficult it's very difficult for the reason i've just mentioned with my own personal story we are human beings we love to make up stories we spend all

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    time guessing people's intentions when actually we barely understand our own intentions we make up stories and in that remote work environment we make up even more stories than usual you know we are coded we are wired to be binary it means when we meet someone for the very first time we make a decision whether that person is a threat or safe to us and cept to us is very important because it means we're going to be able to share power to let it go to be more transparent to be more vulnerable

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    that decision we make is made in less than 200 milliseconds a blink of an eye so we make those decisions we make up those stories and they are based on what our personality traits or education or culture or life experiences so we have to understand how is our bias what is our stories what is our bland stories if we really want to deliver that new way of working we have to create a new culture

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    a culture where everyone is completely aware of the positive and negative impact they have on others and commit to address them a culture where we feel heard a culture where we can give and receive feedback respectively and effectively a culture where we are capable to deliver on our commitment we walk the talk it's a coaching culture a culture where we are safe to be who we are safe to learn serve to ask questions have to make

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    mistakes have to contribute safe to challenge and on that culture you have to learn those skills and among them as i mentioned self-awareness active listening and how to give feedback creating those organization fully decentralized fully transparent where everyone feel empowered and accountable the promises of the web 3 for that better world you know what i think it's possible it's not too late but we have to change our way of working and of way of interacting and for the

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    first thing the first task is to create a new coaching culture and tomorrow i will have the opportunity with some of you to explain how can we create a coaching culture but why wait for tomorrow you can start now today you're going to have conversations with friends with co-workers today try to be a better listener try to pay attention don't interrupt suspend judgment ask clarifying questions questions share

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    what you heard summarize that so the person feel heard and then you can share your opinion i cannot guarantee that if you implement a coaching culture all your web3 project will be successful but i can guarantee you that you will be a better person and if that is not a great start to build a better world what is it thank you very much

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    thank you so much eric for that lovely talk um i am a huge proponent of building a company with culture in mind and being very proactive about it and so i really appreciate his expertise on it all right cool um so i guess first off i mean i don't know if you all have claimed your poe app but definitely scan the qr code make sure you can prove that hey you were here at near conveda right

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    2022 all right so next up we have a an amazing panel that's going to discuss how we're going to get to onboarding the next billion users all right so i'd like to invite up to the stage beck kim from hash maria shen from electric capital richard moorhead from fabric xiaodu from kkr and daniosorio from meadow adventures all right gmgm friends thank you for making it out here this early in the morning uh we hope you at least had a good time

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    last night maybe go to more parties or something you know um thank you for joining us here today we're going to be talking about a really really important subject which is how do we really take crypto to mass adoption levels so onboarding the next billion users and today i have with me an extraordinary panel of vcs who you most certainly would want as your sherpas into this burgeoning ecosystem so joining us today we have

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    shashan zoo from kkr richard richard muirhead the one and only uh fabric ventures maria shen you should follow her nft tweets electric capital pretty badass and back him from hesh so um let's start today by talking about what does it really mean to you know reach mass adoption maria i know electric capital writes a lot of developer uh adoption reports trying to measure um how many how many builders are in the ecosystem and how that translates to

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    perhaps uh projects tools and users can you tell us a little bit about that yeah absolutely so one of the things that we believe in is the ability to build public goods we have a lot of engineers on our team um all the investment partners have an engineering and technical background and so one of the things we do is build a lot of infrastructure in-house one of the pieces of infrastructure is the ability to

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    index at this point across almost all of github we process over 100 million code commits across um pretty much all open source repositories in crypto and if anyone is in the crowd working on an open source repository in crypto please uh dm me talk to me afterwards we want to make sure that repository is added but from the commit level we actually roll that up into individual developers to understand what does developer growth look like across all of crypto what

76. 44:59

    about developer growth in d5 what about developer growth and nfts on ethereum on near on different layer twos across different you know individual projects and of course last year was a phenomenal year for developer growth we hit all-time highs in the number of monthly active developers in crypto um there was more than 18 000 monthly active developers and of course it's important to remember that this is only open source right so that doesn't even include a lot of gaming developers a lot

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    of coinbase developers people working on like staking mining usually are are working on that closed source um and for near specifically uh you know near more than 4x the number of monthly active developers that they had year over year so there's just been tremendous growth as well as all-time highs in terms of the number of new developers who has never touched any sort of crypto code base before and suddenly um you know touched a open source crypto

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    repository for the first time and so that was uh again all-time highs for new developers um which was even higher than the la previous high in 2017 um which was really incredible so a lot of great building energy across the space um and i think this year we're still gathering the metrics i anticipate that developer numbers will be down a bit um but you know i think there's you know

79. 46:24

    that's a funny suggestion because i think developer numbers are going to be up oh interesting let's yeah that's what happens after 2018 we noticed that you know back at that time it was at inferior and our numbers showed that during the bear market there was an 80 increase in developers even though there was a decrease in yeah well so one thing that we found in the last bear market is that um you know

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    if you count sort of overall developers it was fairly flat um last year but if you look at full-time developers right and and by full-time the way we count full-time developers is uh you commit 10 or more days in a month that's some serious commitment right you're not just working kind of like weekends you're really this is your job um and so full-time developers stayed fairly constant which was just really

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    really amazing with with actual growth during the bear market as well wonderful yeah so richard you probably see a lot of these dev projects come pitch you after how does that translate into usage yeah funnily enough just wondering exactly the same point and was actually thinking we should sort of put it back to everybody here but if you've got 80 000 developers active each month and as you said pretty seriously active um

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    i don't know what your numbers are actually for the number of apps that um that is eighteen thousand but this is monthly active and only right only in open source and but then in terms of users um uh stepping back a little bit i think that we need to break it into three parts so there's kind of like the apps that are out there that are sort of popular and why they're actually popular come back to the second and then

83. 48:03

    there's this the the dev activity and what we can do to improve the developer experience and then there's the user experience and what the frictions are that that are involved involved and i think related to this first point about what are we actually using web3 web34 um i think if you speak to anybody in the mainstream press especially someone in the financial times for example they're

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    pretty skeptical that there is anything beyond um well some some things that are a big casino type activity in d5 or some uh pretty spurious use of of nfts so i think i think in that particular area the bit where we can continue to help is that when devs get on board that we we all work together to think about not just what is slightly better but what is 10x better or even more than that it's going to be something that's impossible in a web 2 paradigm for things to really take

85. 48:59

    off and so i think is a if we're trying to address the question of like how do we onboard the next billion it's first got to come from actually building things that are fundamentally innovative um because that's going to drive the incentives and people right here there's some great ideas around dating there's a great event tonight with niche there's people talking about putting pet id online and solving problems there i'm not quite sure what 10x better dating

86. 49:23

    looks like by the way though how does that operate but we can we can ask that question later and there's even kind of decentralized beer but so the ideas have to keep coming but we need to think very acutely and there needs to be actually quite a torrent of those ideas for the truly um you know uh breakthrough ideas to kind of rise to the top and then we've got to address the other two areas of friction which i'm sure you guys want to talk about as well

87. 49:48

    that's really great you brought a very very interesting point which is the user experience and i think historically that has definitely been one of the greatest challenges of web 3. um i remember back in 2017 there was a halloween parody that came out about the like 70-something steps you had to do to like buy a crypto kitty so um i i think that technology definitely has to um adopt to adapt to people because people are not going to adapt to this very very um

88. 50:22

    convoluted technology and i think we're finally in a stage in web 3 where we're seeing projects um start to abstract away concepts like an easier onboarding abstracting away gas fees because they're really for cars being able to enable you know users to have user names instead of long strings of text but maybe back you can tell us a little bit about how you're seeing the user onboarding flow change and what you think still needs to be improved

89. 50:53

    yeah definitely um you know i like richard's point about ux as well because um you know to be frank i think nier as maria mentioned has been amazing in terms of attracting top developers across the industry and have seen the growth in the active developers but i think it's still lacking a lot in user experience and even in this conference whenever i get in conversation and attend these

90. 51:17

    sessions not many people actually mention too much about customers i feel that near uh has been building a lot of the tech and but it's not really well known and a lot of the uh you know dots that went into protocol level design in the key management in a wallet onboarding these are all great things but these are not really reflected on end consumer experiences so i think near has been

91. 51:41

    designed in a way to be kind of the tagline of most simplistic fast easy to use chain but the end product that's uh getting delivered to customers has been not really that and very similar to kind of web3 standard um so you know with this topic of like getting to next billions i think you know as a near community we need to start really thinking about you know what customers really need and what they're

92. 52:06

    going through and i think nier is still one of the hardest uh token to get access to and a lot of these equism tokens are still hard to get to and it's combined with a lot of the you know institutional you know on-ramps but also with the ux and wireless support so i think those really need to come first um to really talk about you know details around ux and when that really comes i think you know nir has built a lot of great you know developer tools and infrastructure that allows for much

93. 52:36

    better ux and speed um so i'm really looking forward to that um to do so and for our fun uh you know we're interested in that we started with our own you know we self-funded our fund and we have our balance sheet to build our own studio so now we have over uh 130 uh engineers in our studio called unopen where we build our own games mmorpgs and you know web apps social apps and we're trying to build more near and we are noticing that the technology is by far ahead of a lot of the you know

94. 53:09

    chains but we didn't realize until we started building even as an investor so we're finding a lot of the good parts and we're i'm pretty excited about you know some of the newer ux problems to solve on the air that's really great to hear and i mean near technology was definitely built with the idea of mass adoption in mind so it's really meant to be complementary to technologies like ethereum because one

95. 53:33

    is you know extraordinary in its r d and it's innovation and like having a very strong existing crypto native audience and the other one's going for like everyone else who hasn't really seen anything in crypto who wouldn't typically purchase an nft who's not participating in this economy but is cryptocurious right and it's sort of like the first step forward into that so really great to hear that and you'll be happy to know that the long-awaited

96. 53:57

    coinbase integration apparently happened last week so hopefully a lot more people have access now to be able to engage with these platforms um that being said uh you come from a pretty traditional space i mean kkr is like as institutional as things go so like why are you here why are you investing in web3 well i think look if you think about the the key friction points um that are still maybe preventing the space to

97. 54:26

    really full go you know towards mass adoption and really mainstream i mean the categories i mean many of them were mentioned there's obviously technical barriers around scalability carbon footprint security you know there's tremendous progress being made um including by by pioneer and you know emerge but the other categories are i think equally important right that there's there will be a timeline yeah

98. 54:50

    but to richard's point like are you seeing things that are like 10x better than what you would see in the traditional world and that's making you come here or or are you not many yet right but uh um where do you think those will be like what are your projections look i think on the sort of friction points there's a lot of you know also operational things regulation obviously is it's a big barrier but we can't control that as

99. 55:15

    investors and and and builders um so really the things i think that we can change is on the technical front are the operational fund which is you know around you know how helping founders with three founders to do their job simply better in an easier way um as well as then market right so user adoption user experience is very important but then also really thinking about those big gateways um upon which

100. 55:39

     you know um big swaths of users can actually onboard into this crypto web 3 journey without even realizing necessarily that they are like having to sort of download a wallet or actually engaging in this new asset class and i do think you know a lot of the use cases we're currently seeing is around um you know entertainment um sports music film et cetera so that that is sort of our category gaming right we're starting to see um developers and founders that don't necessarily that are

101. 56:11

     utilizing blockchain technology and web 2 technology but don't actually put it on on their headlines right and that's sort of i think this is the probably the way to go and i do believe there are like probably many other sectors where founders haven't even really spent a lot of time on and just giving an example renewable energy right so how it's going what about what if we could sort of tokenize energy generation right that's

102. 56:35

     really good to know um richard can i i'd like to love to build on that because i think um we should look for where there's already been a bit of a wedge made and there's some success kicking off um even while we look for those kind of super 10x impossible apps to build and things that are super worthy and one example i'd like to point to is uh yeah it's in our portfolio it's so rare um you know and

103. 57:00

     it is absolutely a great example of how it's all taking off in sports entertainment and again culture and you can own players with different levels of scarcity you can participate twice a week uh in a game so it's got you know utility um and there's definitely skill involved in it um also um and i think to maybe that's not currently running on there but to loop it back to some great

104. 57:22

     activity that is on there um the cell gp stand is out there and i'm sure most of you seen it and if you haven't you should go and check it out i mean there's an incredible sport but i know talking to the team there you know they're really piling into this uh question of how do you come in and have a normal authentication that's web 2 and have you have web 3 authentication and how you selectively share your information um how do you make it

105. 57:45

     obviously sort of seamless and then tie it into everything from you know sailor or helmsman ownership through to team ownership and obviously you can build games on top of that and to back's point um if we're thinking about what's going to happen how we're going to get the next billion on board you know we're seeing now uh the cycles of development of games say 12 24 months could be in your studio also in

106. 58:07

     other studios um and when those games have been built by kind of true tried and tested you know aaa you know uh games developers come to light that are launched with the kind of ux need we're going to see a major you know step up in and usage and i think that's the kind of thing you could build on cell gp but famously a few people have said this so let's not describe it to one you know you want to look for the things that begin toy-like that become almost seem that they start almost seemingly trivial they are

107. 58:38

     literally perhaps a game and that's the clue as to what where things are going to go and if you think about the example of obfuscating some of your private data in the context of the sales gp game where where this can go and it will help enormously is into the whole realm of desire you know decentralized science and open health as we like to call it where still issues about privacy preservation you

108. 59:02

     know are stopping us really tapping into the power of the data economy and what it can do for health and we probably none of us need that pitch to us given what we've been through the last couple of years awesome i think you know you bring up a really good point with gaming as a potential entryway two of three um i think we heard a lot also about nfts as sort of the the first stop for a lot of

109. 59:25

     consumer uh journeys and so maria if you can tell us a little bit about how you see the category evolving i know that um you know 10 000 style pfps were all the rage two years ago but where are we headed next what are you seeing on the front lines yeah um i'm very bullish at fts i think this is i mean and we've already seen this right this is no longer a thesis that nfts are bringing mainstream people into the space and it's bringing in people who would have never even considered crypto

110. 59:56

     before um and in fact bring in people who don't really know how blockchain works or what it means which is great i think that's exactly what we need um i remember going to crypto meetups in 2018 2019 it's a very different crowd than the types of people that you can meet now at a crypto meetup and a lot of those new people are coming in because of nfts because of dows and i think it really

111. 1:00:19

     speaks to the the utility and and kind of the the the ability for people to form emotional bonds with some of these assets you know these are things that because you own it and because it is unique to you you can form an emotional bond and i think that's that's actually very important like we're all we're all just primitive monkeys at the end of the day you know and i think these types of

112. 1:00:42

     ownership paradigms even though it seems trivial that we used to be able to own things in the physical world and now we can own things in the virtual world and that seems like a small step is actually quite revolutionary because if you think about the fact that you know we used to have newspapers and then we digitized information that that was a seemingly small difference but was actually transformational right we used to have physical money and now we've

113. 1:01:06

     digitized money that's a transfer that's that's a transformative difference and so i think having physical assets and then having virtual assets is in a similar way um completely transformative because of the fact that you can now program these assets um i think we're you know we're already in a space where i was looking at this today where tonic uh dex on near just introduced the liquidity program and you can

114. 1:01:30

     participate if you own a greedy goblin which is an nft and so and that's awesome you know i think that's the that's exactly the types of things where i can't think of you know i i own a car my car doesn't get me access to special spaces so you're bringing up the topic of um really utility for nft so the first type of utility is token gating everything right and it's sort of the

115. 1:01:55

     first line going after the right you know right click save mode which is do you really own this if i can right click save it right you're like yes because i can use it to do y z right and so what goes beyond token gating like what's next oh so many things um well first of all i think token gating doesn't only apply to virtual spaces it also applies to physical spaces right and i think i'm very i'm not the originator of this idea

116. 1:02:21

     but a lot of people have talked about this including biology but this idea that you could actually token gate physical spaces and use augmented reality to say like oh if you own this nft you know you can actually hold up your phone and if you have your wallet and be able to see a beacon in the real world see it i can you can't you must not have access to this um and you know i think the way that some of these things can fade into the

117. 1:02:47

     background is really interesting but the the thing i'm truly excited about is again back to this programmability it's not just transferring it's not just owning these assets it's now that you can write rules on top of these assets what does that mean and i think being able to write rules on top of assets to say like maybe it can trade itself you know there's some protocols on ethereum now called like for example verse protocol which is the ability for nfts

118. 1:03:13

     to actually buy and sell itself which is a wild concept like you can't you know you can't walk up to a house and buy and you know like that that doesn't even make sense um and so as soon as you can kind of because because everything like boils down to these ones and zeros and they're not actually physical and you can write rules on top of ones and zeros the design space for what's possible really feels quite infinite and so

119. 1:03:37

     another great example is amms for nfts which is you know simple concept hey you can buy and sell nfts with instant liquidity which is great but with that primitive you can then have collection owned liquidity pools that can so perhaps the collection can then use these trading fees to incentivize their own collection holders to uh to perhaps stake their nfts or to prove that they're long-term holders there's there's kind of all

120. 1:04:07

     these permutations you can do you um the soul-bound nft paper that glenn valle did with um with vitalik yeah yeah yeah of course another great one yeah i think it's where we're heading though kind of like where the whole of society have nfts who can trade themselves through automated market automated market making protocols that operate on there on their own so every asset um in the physical world but even our own characteristics are constantly being

121. 1:04:38

     marketed out there yeah exactly vision is big but the the and i think probably most everybody here would ascribe to it but i think the question is still how do we convince the you know the next billion and therefore the press that the next billion are reading yeah that this is real i still think that's uh a challenge that somehow yeah i can sit here and like you know get like hyperbolic about the things you're saying but then how do we how do we get them i have a i have a hot take which is i don't i don't think we need to

122. 1:05:08

     convince people i i truly don't i think i think we start like why is it that the ux for crypto is not great right like i can't i can't use anything in crypto the same way i use like a robin hood or an instagram or a tick tock and i would argue that's okay honestly because i think the product market fit right now is a very niche group of people and these are crypto native people it's a small crew of people who

123. 1:05:33

     if you are a power user of d5 protocols you already know these design primitives you don't need to have them explained to you but there's not a billion crypto native people there's not but i think we need to start with a core like any startup right but is that the problem but do you think it's bad i don't know exactly where you're headed like do you think it's bad in the us um because the the user experience is bad or it's just

124. 1:05:57

     focused on a particular niche or just because of the regulatory background as well that you know you want people are being protected from air drops or you know just not allowed to to even yeah the the barrier is is artificially high um well that's because they're not the regulators are not convinced that this is actually some something useful to society yet i mean maybe i i actually

125. 1:06:21

     think the ux is not bad right like ux is serves a purpose if the users you're trying to access can access your application then your ux is not bad and so i think the ux can certainly evolve right to hit a bigger and larger user base but i think it's absolutely fine to iterate on your core users which is a smaller more niche more specialized group of users first prove out that there is product market fit and then gradually evolve and expand and i think it's a process

126. 1:06:52

     okay so i think what what kind of comes next at least for me is really identifying like a new market right so there's product market fit with like a small category of people and then it's like how do we find product market fit with like a category that has billions of users right something that can break out um you made a really good point about um gaming being something that a lot of people are experimenting with it being a toy um i definitely see

127. 1:07:16

     that a lot i actually saw something like there was a um a company called black drop market that was experimenting with creating primitives uh on composability with near which is like the nft owns nfts that owns nfts and then they move as like a collective and you trade them like together so i thought that was an interesting concept how do you govern that i know right and and i was actually wondering um you know back if you see a lot of

128. 1:07:49

     gaming projects coming your way um are they good games or are people still stuck in the creation of tokenomics around games and what do you see that being in the future um i think you know to your last part uh i we did definitely see like tens of you know uh pitch decks that mimic xc token model and tried to raise but i think we're kind of beyond that point and going back a little bit to kind of you guys point on nft and adoption and ux

129. 1:08:22

     problems uh i think it's really hard for a certain chain or blockchain ecosystem to incubate nft ecosystem from the ground up because the actual creators of nfts are not necessarily deciding those destinations based on tech it's usually the environment around it that creates marketing distribution and you know something that really makes their artwork or you know assets appreciate in that market uh basically looking for kind of the environment with attention span of people and you know

130. 1:09:00

     not many i think layer ones are you know providing that environment for you know nft creators or even games so that's been kind of challenging um so in the kind of a journey towards adoption of billions people whether that's nft or users or gaming i don't think it's going to come from this kind of nft like collection or like single game it's really going to be iteration of multiple of apps like step in sweat where you know maybe those are not like

131. 1:09:32

     the most sustainable you know tries and token economics but i think they've done good for overall industry or the chain that they're part of by allowing people to use that app and realize that chain is you know a near or certain chain and create a wallet and experience trading and experience what it works to you know what it means to get incentive through token um and now at this point in the market we've built a lot of these infrastructure already that it's easier to launch these kind of mobile web apps

132. 1:10:04

     like you know step in now relatively to last year or two years ago so i think until maybe next cycle bull run in this bear market we're going to see a lot of attempts of these kind of social you know virality apps to try to see what really you know uh works with a certain market and i think for uh nir nir has been trying to build a lot of regional hubs around the globe right and i personally think you know many of their kpis should be

133. 1:10:35

     you know discovering or building you know 1 million mau dau plus apps in each hub rather than doing a lot of like community events or like a meetups you know it really needs to be around what kind of uh adoption user based apps are you creating in each of those hubs so that it doesn't matter if it's game it doesn't it matter if it's default nft but how many people actually try that

134. 1:10:59

     experience on the air um so that's something that we're kind of looking for uh you know going forward that's great so i want i want to know when the next bull run starts you refine what is it when was the next bull run starting you referred to that but i'll be building on your point a bit at least a little bit um i'm constantly doing the straw poll of asking developers why are you not using one l1 or the other or whatever and getting it

135. 1:11:21

     and like it or not at the end of the day um and everybody's familiar with the whole vhs betamax story um if you know people including developers however rational they are get attracted to the momentum of a space and look there's great momentum here since last year five six whatever 7x up on on last year you know in the down market um but you know to your point though yes of course you want those hit apps and i can at least from my vantage point from the the near foundation council of course everybody's thinking about it furiously

136. 1:11:52

     but this is it's like okay but we need to build community to attract the developers who then one of them will build the app that's killer and so unfortunately you can't necessarily go direct but if anyone knows a surefire you know you know million a day um app then just let us know it's great i mean everything is connected but you know i think you know in each of uh phase of uh you know ecosystem there needs to be a certain

137. 1:12:17

     focus and you know i think it's about time to really try many different kinds of ux and apps uh for people to try i think one one important also angle of like really onboarding billion it's not just you know let's try only build new things from scratch but for example kkr we we own over 200 portfolio companies that are market leaders usually in the markets that they operate in i think a big some parts of those companies they will be disrupted right

138. 1:12:47

     by web 3 technologies and so there's a it's also represented opportunity right and so just to give you an example you know we own one of the biggest music independent music ip catalogs in the world right billions of songs we simply own them and there i'm just talking with the ceo really about like you know what can we do right to this disintermediation of ip ownership is coming through nft so how can we

139. 1:13:13

     capitalize that before someone else does right we also own some of the biggest film production companies in the world right and for that as well um i do believe those represent new distribution and monetization channel so i think also for a lot of the web 3 builders in this room thinking about how we can work with like those existing also institutions is because they don't have the knowledge they don't have the technical expertise

140. 1:13:37

     but what they do have is distribution they have marketing they have access to millions tens of millions sometimes billions of users right and i think ultimately the onboarding of of web3 it will be a combination of very smart new applications as well as a partial sort of onboarding of web 2 and webwine companies i think a lot of projects in web3 are trying to break and hack the systems that from web 2. so there's definitely going to be a lot more use cases that are novel as opposed to maybe repeating or upgrading some of

141. 1:14:09

     those technologies but thank you for all the hot takes maria last hot take of the night or the morning i guess billion users what does it take i'm not worried i think they're gonna come i think it's a matter of time richard oh you look like you want to say this no i mean i can i can just comment on this but i i um i agree that there's a fundamental philosophical tussle between webtoon web 3 especially in media you know nobody

142. 1:14:41

     wants to be zucked for their entire kind of lives um but i also agree that that you know these media institutions are now really waking up to the threat opportunity and doing something about it and and we thought that it might be the financial institutions the herd that as as you know novo likes to refer to it that is going to come and everything's going to take off but it might well be the media institutions where it really

143. 1:15:04

     kicks off first and i've certainly seen uh without kind of getting ahead of announcements you know great platforms in the web 3 space you know getting into bed together so to speak with you know great web 2 platforms and i think there's going to be exciting stuff happen and now that could be a billion users right there sort of like decentralized music et cetera etc etc wonderful thank you everyone thank you thank you

144. 1:16:38

     thank you so much to our panelists yeah i mean the next billion users how do we get there right how do we onboard them well nier believes in hubs you guys may have heard hubs coming up we believe in the power of you know decentralization um utilizing hubs and so i'd like to introduce a couple of uh talks coming up for the rest of the after uh morning i guess before lunch um we are going to be

145. 1:17:07

     talking about hubs and so i'd like to introduce anton viceberg to talk from near ua to talk about hub as decentralization in action hello good to see that that many people are recovered from yesterday's parties looking forward for two days and for many speeches which are coming um i wanted to talk a little bit about about hubs about decentralization what it means few words about myself i'm living near ua or near ukraine

146. 1:17:51

     except previously i founded the company named detricks and that's how we actually i started the journey with near detricks is building a lot of let's say analytical solutions like dashboard solutions for uh for overall ecosystem then i'm gp in two different funds seed venture fund which is the one helping ukrainian founders and 10x ventures which is helping um like early stage in your product so that's about

147. 1:18:23

     myself and um now regarding the talk we will have a really short discussion maybe around 10 minutes about this so um why it is important to talk about hubs it's it's named regional hubs but generally saying about hubs and why do we think that decentralization is a way uh like hubs as a way of decentralization is a good thing for the ecosystem to be to develop first of all like what we are seeing is that technology is pretty unified we are writing in javascript here

148. 1:19:04

     in ukraine in lisbon and states and the technologies itself is pretty similar so when we are talking about user experience it's pretty different in each country or in each language and for example we are used to using different mobile apps we're using different uh mobile banking solutions uh different maps and so on and in this way the way to build without limits and the way to reach one billion users

149. 1:19:37

     is a way to do it differently for each of these solutions and that's why that's why we're thinking about localization that's why it's like the true decentralization is about building like different user experience maybe based on the same technology and in this way like this is two different localizations for two different things maybe for developers separately for the user risk users and user use cases separately but that's why we are thinking these things that it's

150. 1:20:09

     super important to have like localized hubs maybe not only separated by geography regions but more about having their own expertise and area of responsibilities that's why i'm going to talk i can talk about what i know so i'm going to talk about our hub and how we've built it and what do we have we have around like 50 people here in lisbon um it is built on three pillars basically when we are talking about the hub we have first of all product lab

151. 1:20:48

     we are building the products by ourselves and uh the majority of these products are coming from our own experience and that's that's why like i've mentioned like that tricks then we do have a few other products i will mention um then it is like a fun natural we have a lot of people coming to us for expertise and the majority of the teams were seen as a first touch with ecosystem so it makes perfect sense to have like venture arm

152. 1:21:17

     and third part is events marketing building the compute community building the understanding of building like brand awareness and gathering the people who are interested in the same values and the same technology that's what we are doing so the most common question i'm i have is like okay you're near ukraine hub vario we are in lisbon we are based physically in lisbon some of our teams

153. 1:21:47

     and some of our people for sure work from ukraine and all over the world and because of the war uh started uh in in ukraine when russia attacked ukraine we moved the majority of our teams and now building more like european hub brothers than ukrainian but physically they're established here um and that's that's why we are doing a couple of things like some initiatives like from ukraine and few other stuff um

154. 1:22:19

     few more words about like in detail what are we doing product lab maybe product lab is the largest and the most important part of what we are doing and it's how it started we are starting the products from our own experience first of all like we're having detricks in bombay about analytics about how to bring on-chain off-chain data we have like central bank digital currency or cbdc projects we we have the projects which are coming from um

155. 1:22:58

     from our own needs such as geekpay when we understand that it's hard to pay to the contractors especially like in ukraine because because of some limitations and that's why we are creating the products uh for ourselves and like building it as a like venture model and we really think that it is important for us as an ecosystem to make um to make the um projects or products uh like either profitable and that's why we have this product lab model or like venture

156. 1:23:30

     builder model because um when we are talking about the adoption um in the end of the day like um the uh the measure of how the market appreciates you is like the uh is actually a financial one so that's why we are building it uh as a like profitable product lab company when we finance our teams from the very beginning but then they're like raising their money by themselves by the way for the majority of the products mentioned you can just stop by our booth sizer like near ua or like the infinity geek pay

157. 1:24:12

     detricks boosters uh over the over the conference um second thing we are seeing is super important is like understanding of what's going on like for developers and we are we are doing these hackathons we started in kiev we are doing it here in lisbon and this is what we're going to do more and more and it's important to be consistent in this way and right now like it is a hackathon

158. 1:24:37

     going on so um so this is like a major part of what we are doing is related to events in marketing as well um like this is this was for example the example like of the conference um we've done in paris we've created near space in paris and i can see from the people who are here that some of us we are here as well um the third pillar as i mentioned is like a venture arm we have a target funding of 20 million uh we're building we're

159. 1:25:11

     investing into the early stage products who are starting building on near or who will uh actually contribute a lot in in your ecosystem so come stop uh by our booths and talk to us if you are looking for financing and like we really have a really good pipeline not only for ukrainian founders but generally same so one more important thing to mention like when we are building something and when we are thinking about

160. 1:25:44

     uh like decentralization it's not only about doing something by ourselves which is also true but about building like a good partnership so we wanted to have a good um like events department we wanted to to to do it in a like in a different way like much better than we do and so we for example partnered with the guys from philosophy who joined our forces together and now we're we can do like uh the events on the next level so

161. 1:26:16

     partnerships are kind of the thing you uh we are treating as a like a way to move forward and to decentralize it even more and maybe the last thing i want to mention uh to finish this talk is like still partnerships are good but if we cannot cannot you know find the solution either in the ecosystem or overall uh we think that this is a good thing to build it by yourself and uh just a funny story is that we we were lacking like a number of developers at

162. 1:26:48

     some point of time because we started like four projects simultaneously so like eventually we've created the uh near higher which is kind of like recruitment agency internal one recruitment unit for ourselves so this is it from from my end what i wanted to say is like um we are super happy to exchange the thoughts how do you think about the decentralization what do you feel feel about this but this is the way how we're looking this so thanks for having me

163. 1:28:07

     so thank you so much anton for sharing with us so i'd like to bring up another panel um to kind of delve deeper into our discussion around our hubs so to discuss going global we are going to bring up a series of folks representing our various hubs so i'd like to bring up suny only representing korea i'd like to bring up riley tran and tandin from our vietnam hub i'd like to bring up ida pandur from our near ua hub and kevin amani

164. 1:29:08

     from our kenya hub all right oh i'm sorry also georgia who will be moderating wow thank you so much for everyone who decided to stay i'm i have to say i'm very disappointed that this isn't a packed audience because for us at near this is probably the most interesting conversation you're going to experience in the next 30 minutes and the reason why we're saying that is because for us at near it's all about

165. 1:29:53

     scaling globally and for us to scale globally we've got to start building locally and the regional hubs is very integral to our mission and i'm so excited about this panel because we're going to hear firsthand what is happening on the ground the most exciting hubs around the world and i think it's very important because the big problem is western media you can't rely on them telling you what's happening in the web3 space or quite frankly

166. 1:30:25

     in any space there's a huge gap of knowledge and we're going to try and fill that void today at least in a web 3 capacity hearing the stories from those that are on the ground the regional hubs i want to start with korea we're going to start in asia because obviously the majority of the world lives there we got what 4.7 billion people and korea is probably the more established areas for technology and innovation now what's interesting about you is that

167. 1:30:58

     you helped to set up a very very successful crypto hub yeah you know the coin easy hub you already have about 30 000 people that are part of that network you're an influencer you're an innovator yourself so why did you decide having already been established to set up the the korea near protocol dao yeah so last year i went to new york and then um entering the entering with nft and barn

168. 1:31:30

     so those kind of sensational technology really fascinating fascinated by that by um by it and so we decided to start near protocol and since april it has been an amazing journey and we think that community is most is the most important part so it should be a foundation for the dao or hub so we we started as a dao and queen easy and other four carriers have huge community members so it was easy to

169. 1:32:09

     gather onboarding users and also developers and making a lot of educational content because it's only like english so we need to translate and then deliver the news to the users so they are on the same page right yeah so it was really important to do those jobs uh as a near near political career and we did the event with uh korea during the prayer blockchain week collaborate with them and had a meet up and then meet all the community and then say um hear from them

170. 1:32:49

     their opinions about new protocol and then discuss uh near protocols the future with them and also meeting all the developers in person so it was really nice to meet them in in at the meetup and also we had a partnership with the newly lounge and bring all the web to influencers on web3 so it will it's really easy to make content through the influencers so yeah i think it's really imp we did the

171. 1:33:22

     foundation part yeah so i'm we are really happy to uh continue uh develop extending near protocol in korea i just have one more question as well so what do they like about near the developers yes they've been using so many other different protocols yeah they said it's really easy to deploy on uh smart typical smartphone they're on near yeah and so like uh really developer friendly like currently they are near protocol announced that javascript sdk

172. 1:33:55

     so it's uh they aim 20 million developers and korea population is 50 million right half of the developers can on board so they really love the idea that neoprotocol really embrace um developers yeah absolutely developer first obviously being able to code using java has been very transformational for near so it's very exciting that it's been embraced in in korea and hopefully next year we'll have an official hub as well

173. 1:34:28

     over to vietnam now again vietnam never fails to amaze me first of all how can you get 97 million people in vietnam yeah and second of all how has it emerged to become such a crypto hotbed again we don't hear that much about vietnam in the mainstream press very underreported in the crypto press but just doing a little bit of digging and it seems that web 3 is really taking off you even have one web 3 unicorn as well that's come out of vietnam riley if you can tell us a bit about

174. 1:35:02

     why web3 is so popular in vietnam and again why is near so popular you guys have a massive fan base i can't keep up with your telegram messages you have like what 14 000 people already like on your your hub yeah okay so before talking like hello everyone i'm riley from the new vietnam hub and the other question why is the weather is so popular in vietnam like if we have like the comparison between vietnam to other countries vietnam is

175. 1:35:34

     not how much uh the competitive advantage to the other countries but in the blockchains in the westerly i feel that everything is really fair opportunities for all of the countries not the reason why in vietnam we catch us upon new opportunities to build something to make something real and like to we will use the blockchain to leverage vietnam to become one of the big countries in the world and to talk more about vietnamese land cap about crypto and also developer i

176. 1:36:05

     want to mr tan is the cto he will have more view about the development of vietnamese land catholic chair to everyone okay fantastic yeah so tell us about that and also how you've been able to bring all of these web3 developers into the community and really make it grow so quickly yes so additional number to your uh statistic so around over 30 percent as over 70 percent of vietnamese are young people

177. 1:36:36

     under 35. wow we have a dream in my case i'm a researcher and i have a dream uh we want to be a leader in one kind of technology and russia is one of the new technologies that bring the the fair condition for our country and for me uh as actually i'm working as a professor at the university in the traditional 5g and city uh technology but however we move to the blockchain because we we want to develop we want the vietnam market go inside too

178. 1:37:08

     deeply about the technology and so that we work together at grs together on the developer and how to bring all the developers together through education so education is the key right and we provide education for not only the investor but also the developer so currently we collaborate with the top university in vietnam and also working with the government to have some education program for developer and we also uh have a running the incubation hub at trs

179. 1:37:39

     to after training how to get them practice how to get them started to develop some product and how to make them easier to success so that we have a support center sos and new vietnam to help the developer team to make them to have them easier to solve the problem and to get success yeah like at the moment uh if we like in the upper talk about the opportunities uh for the traditional developer they don't have much opportunity same as the weather developers because in the weather

180. 1:38:12

     everything seemed like it's really early stage right so we still have a lot of opportunities here that's the reason why a lot of traditional developers want to transfer to the wesley and in here in the near vietnam hub and also chief as we provide them the blockchain academy to teaching them about the technologies and help them to learn more about the blockchain technologies and east and say that education is the main fundamental

181. 1:38:38

     to establish everything and that's your question why new communities so popular and so active vietnam and how we did it like at the at the beginning also really small in vietnam but like we're just educating the people to talking to people about what is new why is need so important and why is the future is new right so we skip educating the people about the project to let them understand about what needs doing and the the reason and also the strategy of me

182. 1:39:10

     is that make everything simple for all of the user to onboard the user so when the community and the investor understand about the main usb and also the main portfolio of near they start to believe in there and like integrating community so people were always asking like when lambo when moon right right but like in new community they don't ask you about that what they start to observe and look what's near doing to and start to believe in and we convert

183. 1:39:41

     the community to become the long-term holder of me so in vietnam every people have like really like strong truth about the project about the new about what's near doing okay that's interesting so education very accessible i've been hearing that you know the user interface is easy i mean just being able to to build using java is incredible really leveling the playing field um you're doing amazing work and i like the education narrative as well actually having a blockchain academy i mean that's brilliant and it's

184. 1:40:12

     interesting that you kind of leap frog from web 2 to web 3 and that kind of brings us into the next conversation that i want to have with ida so we're leaving asia now we're going to europe and again a very under-reported part of the world the balkans and such amazing things happening there and it's more or less started with web 2 didn't it ida so we talked about how the balkans really took off embraced web 2

185. 1:40:39

     built a very strong foundation again you don't hear much about what's happening in the balkans but after a small conversation with ida i found out that you have these incredible unicorns that have emerged for those who love cars you even have uh a balkan entrepreneur um mate ramech who ended up buying bugatti sports cars at the age of what 3435 is now the ceo again made his name and fortune in the web 2 space with e-bikes e-technology leveraging the power of iot and

186. 1:41:14

     personally has built the most beautiful electric sports car in the world so forget tesla ramich navarro is stunning and only two million dollars um so we're we're coming from that world where you've built this strong you know foundation for web 2 and you cut your teeth as well in the web 2 space so what can we expect from the balkans in web 3 and how is near going to help you achieve your goals sure so like what's

187. 1:41:46

     very interesting about the balkans is that the geographically all the countries are situated between east and west so like we understand in the same way the eastern philosophy and the way of living like we do the west one yeah this is what helped us like to navigate and accelerate the web too and what we see now web tree is like the same opportunity and we are always a little bit like the little sister of the western europe so

188. 1:42:11

     you know like a little bit of the underdog yeah and this is kind of also the situation that we like to be at because when somebody underestimates you then you have like the ability to build yeah without too much you know pompous and the skylight and everything you just like build ship and grow so we see web3 uh is the same opportunity the web 2 has developed in the matter of 10 years we see web3

189. 1:42:34

     something that we personally within the near balkans team want to use as a tool to accelerate all the conscious from the balkans to play major role make major impact on a global scale from our region we are covering currently seven countries and there is many many more that we can like very fast accelerate that's amazing so give me an idea of some of the exciting web 3 projects you're working on at the moment right so it's it's a numerous kind of verticals that are being focused on so

190. 1:43:05

     one of the verticals obviously it's like the gaming the metaverse component so entertainment industry is a very strong factor of how you open up the web3 to the mainstream audience we see this as a really great opportunity the second one is the the infrastructure like like basis of where everything else will be built upon because if you build a platform then you really can empower people to come and

191. 1:43:29

     build on the platform um the third thing is obviously the defy so you know financial literacy we see as something that is like a really huge opportunity to kind of kind of accelerate not just the balkans but also like multiple different countries so um fintech is obviously very developed in those countries yeah it's far it's far ahead as well so d5 is just being like a natural you know the next level that we see going forward and i think you do have an advantage in the balkans as well when it comes to

192. 1:44:01

     talent a lot of amazing software developers and i had to remark as well that you have a lot of female talent in in your hub as well i think quite a few of them are here as well at the event so yeah we always love to see that because diversity inclusion is very important to us if if i can like touch upon that also it's um it's it's a lot about developer talent but it's also a lot about non-developer

193. 1:44:26

     talent because like you can develop the projects in the web 3 but if you don't have somebody to like design it in a nice user experience way or be able to market it sell it make an internships partnerships it really matters as well so we are putting as much as effort into the developers community but also to the non-developer community because we see a great synergy between both of them that's amazing and we have to leave europe now because we have to talk about

194. 1:44:52

     africa i mean incredible one point what 1.2 billion maybe more living in africa last year kevin you were on this stage and you were talking about how blockchain can unlock the potential of the economic power of africa and you talked about you know the the importance of nir and how it can really transform lives and you know really build the incredible bring incredible ideas to life and also

195. 1:45:22

     to leverage the immense talent that is there locally so fast forward a year now you're here on stage you have launched one of the most successful near hubs ever you've done that in such a short period of time what i'd like to ask you is what is the secret ingredient to building a successful hub how did you achieve it and talk to us a bit about the talent platform that you have built because i think that's very very important because

196. 1:45:53

     what's going to set us apart really is having the developers the talent helping us to to grow and build near well thank you thank you so much uh georgia i do have a sore throat so apologies for that um you know why it's because your booth is so popular you're talking to everyone so i am i am um so to answer the first question it's pretty simple um i would say it's a team i cannot do anything without my team my team has been

197. 1:46:24

     definitely um the drivers of blockchain innovation across kenya and it's important to know that so that's pretty much my secret so far but also i think to add a little bit on that is the the right time and space as well um because last year was the middle of a pandemic literally everything was shut down there was no events going on in fact people were asking like hey is there any meetups in nairobi you know for i don't know to meet similar developers

198. 1:46:57

     or people who have interest and then we came and then start doing this tour outside of the capital because a lot of times uh protocols and also just general uh people are interested to go to the capitol and they fish into the same pool for developers for talent for builders uh kenya has 55 close to 55 million people and nairobi is only about 5.4 right there's a whole lot of people

199. 1:47:20

     outside of the capital so we saw we started like let's just go outside of the capital and like go and seek and bring blockchain there it's what we did so that really allowed us to scale rapidly in a very short time and and yeah and i think it's it's just keep keep going and keep pushing and and there's one thing on that as well as the it's related to the narrative yeah you'll notice that there's only really

200. 1:47:46

     one or two main organizations that get to define what blockchain adoption looks like across the entire continent yeah which is sad because it's not exhaustive it's not complete and what excites me the most part of our success is to be able to contribute towards that narrative what does it actually mean for talent to be exposed with concepts about ownership financial independency

201. 1:48:17

     and so yeah that's really what i think puts us a few steps ahead um with our hub and of course with the amazing leaders that we have here as well yeah but it seems that uh kenya in particular has really embraced the crypto revolution it's like what about 10 of the population actually also owns cryptocurrency so you don't need that much convincing to get people on board however we have a lot of competition you know in the protocol space and we're all about beyond the hype so

202. 1:48:49

     we don't market ourselves we don't hustle the way let's say other blockchains do like solana or polkadot or the others so what is it about nir that has brought your team i know you say it's about the team but it's also about the product right i know you're very dynamic and people will want to work with you but ultimately it's the tools why do you think nir is the right fit to help you grow and advance the economies of africa

203. 1:49:19

     that's a great question um i think i can answer in two ways um one it's about the fact that it really pushes or is open to push sort of an aggressive implementation of talent acquisition sourcing and really investing into that because we can't do anything without builders um and you know there's these cultural or historical narratives about um blockchain technology or even even fintech is that most of people are going

204. 1:49:54

     to africa they look for consumers it makes sense yeah it's a very young demographic as well um and it's very easy to onboard a lot of audiences and that's really good for market you know in terms of like scaling uh but i think nier really was focused on no we should actually really incentivize builders yeah people who contribute towards the protocol contributes towards building

205. 1:50:19

     new projects new ideas new layers and that message lands to people because they feel like they can be a part of something as opposed to just consuming because we're using that we used to consuming everything from the west but now we actually now can contribute and build and that really speaks a lot it encourages a lot of people i want to ask you one more question and it's about the talent so you've launched this talent

206. 1:50:43

     platform how has that transformed what you're doing and maybe explain it a bit in some detail to the audience here as well yeah um so just to kind of put it in context um we've with near uh there's a way to count weekly active developers and we've had a significant amount especially around may but then we've noticed that the number decreased meaning developers are leaving for various reasons so the developer retention has been a

207. 1:51:14

     challenge across the entire ecosystem and so as a hub as a contributor towards the ecosystem i my team felt responsible to that as well like how can we increase that developer retention meaning when a developer comes in what's the journey how long do they stay even if they do a hackathon do they still you know significantly contribute three months later in deploying smart contracts et cetera and um i always tell people that if you go to the hot spots like nigeria

208. 1:51:46

     south africa kenya even outside tunisia egypt um if you look for web 3 developers really good ones one well first thing they're not that many and second thing they don't really need us because they're really secured they have a job they get paid really well yeah so really what you want to focus on is web too and the really good web developers um and you can do different metrics right

209. 1:52:08

     you can look at you know the highest uh the best universities where they have the highest percentage and you know computer science graduates and whatnot and uh it's really there's actually really one reason why a developer a really good one would come and join the ecosystem it's because of a job if they don't have a job they're not going to come and we've been doing a lot of certification programs a lot of training

210. 1:52:32

     education but then again if there's no job it doesn't make sense for them to join anything so basically we've developed a very simple dev shop which is technically saying anyone here who has a project and you're looking to scale build and you're looking specifically for talent i want you to say to come and hire them in kenya because we have developer capacity and i think it's a an opportunity to also open up a new market of very broad

211. 1:53:02

     developers who can build and contribute and so the dev shop is exactly that imagine upwork where you literally would have to just come and hire the developer right it's a talent you see the github link what they've worked on doesn't matter which town they come in from or which village if it's a girl or a man um it doesn't really matter it's purely based on skills and they can work remotely and that's our answer uh

212. 1:53:26

     towards developer retention at least our solution to that exciting we have time for one more question each of you we're gonna have to go pretty quick but let's talk a bit about talent as well in korea so how are you attracting people to come and join you on your mission to to build this near blockchain because hopefully next year you'll be in the same position as kevin and they'll be talking about how you've successfully launched the blockchain so how do you plan on attracting talent to your

213. 1:53:57

     mission which is really our mission yeah we think that community is the most important part so we keep um educate them also meeting people uh having meetup and workshop and also um part we have partnership with the web 2 influencers so they can make a web 2 friendly or contents for web 2 users so it's really will be easy to attract them like looks cool and not intimidating um net network so if we

214. 1:54:35

     challenging but i think it would be really fun to try new things for the web 2 users and also uh we think that even the good projects need a strong community so we built um game beta versus wall is uh is on telegram telegram game so you can play the game on telegram so you'll be on test net soon so uh we can we can aim 700 million um user infrastructure infrastructure ready so it'd be easy to bring or track more

215. 1:55:09

     users on new ecosystem okay yeah excellent and one more question for the vietnam i don't know which of you to want to answer this but i know you guys are insanely ambitious so when we spoke earlier you talked about building web 3 applications but not just for vietnam you want to be a springboard for the rest of asia or at least for the rest of southeast asia what makes you think that

216. 1:55:31

     vietnam is in a better position to do that than let's say other more advanced economies in the region uh so you see the internet economy if you now is growing very fast and at the same approach with the blockchain like many other panelists already share so in our in vietnam we are learning several programs and multiple high cartons to get people together and currently we are chairs we have uh the the largest uh

217. 1:56:04

     weaponry developer community in vietnam and so with uh with approximately 40 000 developer members and we are running the uh blockchain school in the university of university with that so we try to design the ecosystem not only empower the weaponry uh economy but also with the uh the digital internet economy with their government so that we we try to push if we can do some kind of uh um program with the with the with the

218. 1:56:38

     government so how to bring it some kind of watery which is really useful for user which really uses them for customers so that we can have some sandbox uh program to bring a web3 application to more mainstream uh for user not just our crypto itself and network yeah i want to share like talk about uh the crypto in the southeast asia if we can see vietnam is the more active countries in the south asia and because of the population and also because every year the average age is really young

219. 1:57:13

     so we want to have the model in vietnam like we provide the full ecosystem for the project for the startup in vietnam like uh after they finish the course in here not just only they receive the certificate but we also keep going supporting for the incubation for them to deploy the project on the main net continue to build the project and there's a problem on marketing fundraising everything like have the food ecosystem

220. 1:57:38

     so support for the project like this and now like transfer that like he's also had a relationship with the government and also the university so after we finish the model in vietnam then we can bring this model to apply to the other country in the south asia that's interesting yeah thank you thank you very much and one more question last but not least i i like this question and it's all about how regional hubs can come together to

221. 1:58:04

     help and support one another we don't want to be working in silos which is hard like i work in silos with my own team with the near foundation like it's it's very hard to break down the silence and you really do need to be working together and i think this whole idea about you know growing you know locally to build globally is great but there needs to be some communication so how do you think we can do that yeah i think this is a great start you know like you know what i say like far away from the eyes far away from the

222. 1:58:35

     heart so it's very difficult like if you only have the contact through the video calls this is a great start we are all sitting here together we already talked a lot about how can we collaborate more we talked with the guys from the near foundation how can they be included more into how we operate together so i think like moving forward is going to be increasing significantly all of us are quite young hubs near as young as a

223. 1:58:59

     protocol in general so i think next year hopefully when we meet at the same stage it's going to be like significantly higher and we expect to have even more colleagues with us on the stage yeah let's make action now thank you thank you thank you so much for those who stayed again this has been an amazing conversation for me having worked as a journalist as well and cut my teeth in asia a lot of stories that i wanted to tell were canned by the

224. 1:59:52

     editor and it's important that we have you here to share your stories so that the world knows the amazing things you're doing for web 3 and for near so thank you very much for your time thank you everyone all right all right we made it to a break um i feel like we should come up with some kind of like near you know like passport program where you just like visit all the different hubs and once you visit all the hubs you get like you know some kind of prize i don't know maybe we can figure out an nft solution

225. 2:00:46

     anyway um so we have a little bit of a break right now so feel free to go to the bathroom grab some food drinks and then come back at 110 for the next session all right thanks everyone

226. 2:05:38

     so

227. 2:06:46

     so do

228. 2:09:18

     more

229. 2:11:59

     so good challenge

230. 2:15:15

     so

231. 2:17:18

     so

232. 2:18:31

     so

233. 2:21:31

     is easy greetings near khan please welcome your layer one stage mc david morrison

234. 2:22:38

     hello everybody how you doing you're hungover and that's okay because so am i we've got a wonderful panel for you up next if you haven't yet please don't rush and get some food although it's all brilliant give them the time of day because you're going to have an excellent discussion about building the foundations of a crypto native world i'm going to pass it over to matt lockyer our moderator to introduce the guests and introduce the panel

235. 2:23:26

     all right welcome everybody um so we'll just start from the end alex from aurora andre from albridge and michael from infura and alex from fireblocks so um i just wanted to give you a chance to maybe introduce yourself briefly and introduce your uh your project and tell us who are your users and kind of what does success look like um so alex maybe we'll start with you hello everybody hopefully you already know me i'm the annoying guy who is hyping out

236. 2:23:59

     aurora on the stage um the ceo for our labs the company that is building the aurora protocol our users are the users who are actually willing to get into web 3. on the developer side these are solidity devs or anyone who is developing things on on the evm and for us success would be aurora rebranded into east 2.

237. 2:24:24

     okay yes i'm andre from old bridge and at old bridge we focus on helping people to move their assets cross chain and our users are those who feel the need that for multi-chain future on one hand and on the other they understand that they want to make it in the properly decentralized way so they turn to the bridges as the medium of transfer of value hi everyone i'm michael wheeler founder of infura i'm super excited to be here at the near khan conference it reminds me the early

238. 2:25:03

     days of the energy and ethereum space like the ecosystem to me is one of the most important things about blockchain communities so at infura we enable developers to seamlessly get going building decentralized applications on web3 platforms we started of course with ethereum and earlier this year we launched support for near one of our very first uh non-ethereum layer one networks so success for us is seeing developers thrive and have the ability to build

239. 2:25:34

     good afternoon my name is alex chesey from farrar blocks very excited to be here with you today so at fireblocks we provide a software for our customers to self-custody digital assets but also secure all of their interactions with the blockchain with regards to de-fight tokenization transfers settlement and trading so our customers are uh web3 crypto natives but also banks and

240. 2:25:58

     corporates and pretty much anyone that wants to secure digital asset interactions amazing thank you everyone so let's get into uh crypto adoption here and uh specifically i'd like to talk about uh self-custody and sort of the sovereignty of digital assets for users um this is a north star for many in crypto um and maybe you know you agree with us or or maybe you don't or you have kind of a different take on it um how do your projects make contributions

241. 2:26:29

     towards self-custody how do you approach self-custody with your users and if you do something different uh you know why uh or why not alex would you like to go ahead um so the thing that i can say is that self-custody of the keys is a very complicated topic in web3 users are usually not gets to into this thing it is very complicated for them it is even you know hard for them to understand what what what the thing is happening so i do believe that the nearest

242. 2:27:03

     approach when there is an ability to to have recovery methods through email or through some kind of more web 2 type of things um is really great great approach inside of aurora we are using all of the existing wallets they are able to connect through web3 protocol to aurora so from that point of view we're not innovating too much however the upcoming features for aurora plus our solution for the user dashboard are going to include new ways of interacting

243. 2:27:35

     with aurora and making sure that the user experience is much better yes i would like to continue on this topic and say that the need the understanding that you need to be in control on your of your own funds it is exactly the reason why bridges exist in this space because otherwise if you want to jump from one chain to another you can always go to centralized exchange deposit your funds there on one chain

244. 2:28:05

     withdraw them on the other right in that case you don't need the breach but here is the tricky part at some point you will need to trust the centralized exchange with your private keys and there is this limited window when your assets are not really your assets their exchanges assets and we as a bridge we solve exactly this issue we help users to transfer the funds in non-custodial

245. 2:28:29

     decentralized way and actually before that i forgot to answer the last part of your question about the success and success for me is educating people you know helping them to understand why they need to be in control of their funds and how they should operate with them and the more people know about that i think the better world it is are we just going down again sure answering the questions let's go michael yeah i mean from the from the sense of like uh custody i mean if you're uh

246. 2:29:02

     operates it like the the more basis of lair but if i if i get into custody i think of uh that's a wallet that's a function of a wallet um metamask and infuria came up together like we're kind of like the ying and the yang of each other metamask wasn't able to grow like it did because it had an infrastructure provider like us behind it and we grew into the reputation we have because of that and i think what we are seeing is

247. 2:29:25

     like adoption has gone for metamask in the last one to two years from just the very crypto early adopter type people to uh you know millions and millions of daily active users really driven by the fact that it's it's starting to become more familiar um people are starting to become more comfortable um with the learning patterns and metamask develops a lot of time into the ui ux experience so i think adoption

248. 2:29:52

     will continue to to come as as familiarity comes i look at kind of like my my father can't really interact with metamask but my my college age son can so the younger people are gonna bring it in with us and alex uh you know your users are a little different um but kind of uh what does that look like uh you know maybe not full on self-sovereignty but uh well basically at fireblocks we offer self-custody right so we believe in

249. 2:30:21

     self-custody um and we enable our customers to basically securely run and build our digital assets uh what's interesting is that we've seen a real shift from sub custody to self-conserdic as and when cryptos are becoming more and more adopted by the institutions so they initially believed that going through some custodian will be easier and plug and play but in reality we're seeing a real shift and those customers come to fire blocks because they are able to basically build their digital asset uh business

250. 2:30:52

     on self-custody so the self-quality self-custody is very much a starting point and from here they get to build tokenization defy transfers trading with a model that is basically giving them access to their keys through our model so um let's kind of expand on that we'll go the other way around um let's talk about abstracting away steps for users and just kind of making things simple so

251. 2:31:16

     how does fireblocks make self-custody more simple for for institutions uh it's a good question so it basically starts with a relatively well-structured onboarding to date we have imported more than 1 500 institutional customers so there's a real process to help them securely create their workspace access to their assets and this is really the foundation of what they will build through fireblocks so we operate a model whereby there are multiple layers of security

252. 2:31:47

     and one of those layers is an enterprise-grade governance policy so as part of the onboarding our customers will get to define what are the users that will interact with the platform what type of operation can they run until what limit what levels and all of this is being run completely off-chain in a secured configuration confidential computing environment and from here they can design the flows of transaction they will run through fireblocks whether it's

253. 2:32:12

     for defy or tokenization or any kind of trading or transfers activity through the platform awesome and and michael how you know infuria's kind of customers are developers like how how is infura helping to make things uh more simple and kind of abstracting away a lot of the complications of dealing with the chain yeah exactly so that was actually why we formed infuria 6 a little over six years ago it was when

254. 2:32:37

     in the early days of consensus there were projects just getting started metamask of course you know but many others experimenting with working with the blockchain and one of the hardest parts about that from a developer's standpoint was well i have to run this node infrastructure to connect uh so we really that was kind of our genesis is abstracting that away and saying we're just going to create some apis that

255. 2:33:00

     mimic kind of this spec the json rpc spec of the client so developers can really focus on building their applications uh we've continued in this standard based approach we really don't want developers to lock in i was just talking to alex earlier about that there's there's lots of limitations in that in the way that the specs written today and i think will continue to evolve but it's really all about

256. 2:33:24

     removing barriers so developers who are already familiar using things like javascript can pick up solidity for example on the evm or other programming languages and get started and just connect instantly to the blockchain amazing and andre and alex um you're obviously your projects are targeting end users and and kind of moving around their assets how are your projects kind of innovating

257. 2:33:49

     is it is it with transactions is it's you know paying for gas what are your projects kind of doing in this space okay i will go it sure now we've been working on all bridge for roughly one and a half years now and while i think that the bridge technology it is super cool in terms the decentralization and brings usually it is terrible in terms of user experience so that is what we noticed and realistically speaking if we are targeting mass audience if we are

258. 2:34:20

     looking for mass adoption we cannot expect people to understand the whole sophisticated process of bridging and that is exactly why and i have not ever yet announced it anywhere so it is like exclusively here we yesterday while i've been running around the conference speaking with people our team we have been deploying the new contracts for the next gen of bridge where people can do the bridging from one chain to another in one click so you don't need to worry about the gas on

259. 2:34:53

     destination chain you don't need to think about the rep tokens it is just as simple as that you press one button you sign one transaction and we do all the magic for you and i believe that this is our ultimate mission in making bridging as simple as possible for the end users and i will add into this that in case the user is able to click one button and not sign a transaction and so not thinking about the crypto that is in the

260. 2:35:24

     in the this chain where he signs this transaction then it will be even better so in in aurora in general and uh the direction that we are going towards to is making sure that the usage of the blockchain is as seamless as using the internet you're not paying right now for the kilobytes of internet every second when you're consuming it the thing that that nowadays people are the business model of the of the providers of the internet is absolutely different you buy a subscription for a month

261. 2:35:57

     for an unlimited size of the internet or maybe five gigs of the internet through your mobile provider and you get it just one transaction per month this is something that should be a target for for the blockchains and we need to really change the way how how users are interacting with the blockchain as a protocol i'd like to come back to uh alex and talk specifically about how uh the partners that you work with are

262. 2:36:29

     basically using your tools uh you know to get out to end users uh if you wanna kind of expand on that yeah of course so it's mostly about operations management right so we're a b2b business so we work with institutions um and what we offer here is something which is i think is quite uh quite unique so you're talking about user experience what we have created as part of our network of account parties is settlement network and what it means is that if you're operating on fire blocks you're able in

263. 2:36:59

     a couple of clicks literally to actually connect to another participant on the firebox network to actually initiate the transaction so it basically extracts completely the idea of having to copy-paste wallet addresses and think about like operational burdens like whitelisting and test transfers so essentially what we offer through our through our through this experience to our customers is uh ease of operations

264. 2:37:23

     and that's then get reflected into the uh the products that our customers are building on top of our blocks so we support uh customers like a revolut or yrx or etoro and basically they use fire blocks mostly to securely scale their digital asset operations and that enables them to create products for the end users so from our perspective the experience on their side is mostly around management of the crypto operations they're running through

265. 2:37:47

     firebox amazing michael um you know your end users are developers and how are they innovating uh you know in crypto adoption like maybe you have some concrete examples or you've seen some really amazing things uh being done within fiera i think most of the i mean obviously there's uh innovation that's been happening in the ethereum space because of kind of the longevity of that kind of ecosystem of things like uh

266. 2:38:18

     decentralized exchanges nfts of course we all know i think the biggest innovation though that that i'm seeing is just in the ux space teams investing in uh not just engineering talent but in design talent design and research uh talent and that's huge because uh you know the biggest challenge and i think it's come up before uh it comes up over and over in the space is just the the

267. 2:38:42

     complexities of the technology and interact with the technology so i think um ux innovation will continue to kind of help us in that space and it's really cool to see uh investment in that andre alex do you have developers using um your project like using all bridge using uh aurora but like kind of embedding and doing other interesting things uh please go ahead i will i will probably be again the first one now uh the general concept here i will try to

268. 2:39:14

     make it like simple answering your question is that if you are in here in lisbon crossing from one side of the river to the other using the bridge then you're interested in getting from point a to point b you're not really interested in the bridge itself and how it operates you know maybe you want to make a nice photo of the bridge but that's about it so it is the same in uh defy it is the same in our multi-chain future wheel building i'm totally happy

269. 2:39:44

     when users are coming to the bridge interface see it and we try to make it as cool as possible but at the same time i understand that the real adoption it is where other projects are utilizing the bridge infrastructure under the hood using the sdks the apis that we provide and users they ultimately want to solve their needs they want to do like cross-chain swaps or cross-chain landing they don't necessarily need to think about the bridge itself they need to solve the problems they're facing and

270. 2:40:17

     this is what we are trying to do here we are trying to give them a tool which could be potentially hidden but still it would be simple to use and useful with regards to aurora obviously there are lots of people who are actually using aurora aurora accounts for around 80 percent of the transaction volume on the near protocol which is kind of cool and so on aurora ecosystem we have more than 185 applications right now that are

271. 2:40:49

     launched already live there many of them are d5 primitives but there are also nft space it starts start to boom with the additional collections additional marketplaces we also have an nft breach that is available for everyone that connects multiple networks uh but also there are some some early steps in the gaming direction and and other initiatives so so the adoption in the aurora chain is is quite is quite quite good i do believe that the reason for this is that uh

272. 2:41:22

     aurora is the fastest among evm compatible chains our transactions are taking just one second to finalize and the costs are also very cheap and comparing with with known competitors it can be from three to ten times cheaper than on other chains now i also would like to you know can i come back to to all of these great companies that are that are here sitting with me um on the stage they are also innovating but they are not selling a lot to you right now

273. 2:41:52

     so one of the things that one of the greatest things that for the dev x infure is doing is there a product uh that is called itx so this is a tremendous new thing that allows developers not to think for the the cost of the transactions and to minimize them um in all bridge andrew is he's creating a new way how how assets are breached and uh he completely eliminates the idea of the wrapped assets so everyone is innovating and it's just a great place

274. 2:42:23

     to be right now especially in this market when everybody are focused on building instead of selling awesome so uh what are the next steps for each of your projects to deliver a crypto native world for everyone from grandma to grandchildren um i'd like to start with alex and come back around obviously aurora plus is doing some amazing things for end users but what's coming yeah so from our side it is super super

275. 2:42:54

     simple we have all of the tech layer and by saying it for the techies the meta transactions are available on the on the protocol level for aurora and what we are going to do with this is that we will allow people to sign the transactions with their phone without any additional software installed on their phones uh with no wallet with no additional thing right you just look at your phone you you authorized an action and then this transaction is going to the blockchain and combined with the previous idea on

276. 2:43:26

     which i was talking about uh with the kind of subscriptions to the blockchain uh i do believe this is going to give a kind of a native web 2 experience for the web 3 application and this is our cornerstone and this is the point where we are heading to and it is not very far from now uh i do believe that by the next near con this stack is would be already outdated right so it is in a month to come not more than that

277. 2:43:57

     andre what's next for albridge well for me it is pretty much straightforward like we launched a private beta yesterday as i mentioned by the way if you're interested please come find me at the conference i would be super happy to share with you the private link you can test it for yourself so the next obvious step is going to from private beta to the public product launch which i think makes more

278. 2:44:22

     sense other than that we are integrating more chains we are adding more assets and we are working closely with partners to make sure that we as the infrastructure backbone of the multi-chain world can be used by other projects to satisfy their user needs so i am always open to collaborations and working hard to make those partnership as easy on the technological side and probably on the other side including financial legal whatsoever as possible

279. 2:44:55

     michael does inferior have something big exciting stuff always at infuria so i mean we started initially for years we were in ethereum and ipfs shop and that really wasn't born out of like any sort of ethereum maximalism at all it was really about weighing the the cost benefit of like where where do we allocate our resources but i mean i think we turned the corner a little bit on that we always felt like

280. 2:45:20

     a multi-chain world was was where this was heading and and we've uh starting about a year ago started to really adopt that we started support for some of the ethereum layer twos and again as i mentioned near an aurora our first non-evm layer one earlier this year is open i think uh one of the more exciting and bigger things that we have talked about forever and we will continue to iterate on and news is going to be coming on is how we plan to decentralize because that's kind of the biggest thing is how do we get

281. 2:45:51

     back to being a decentralized infrastructure provider when we started as a decentralized network enabler so lots of stuff like that to come it's a big week for the ethereum ecosystem most of our team is in berlin but we really wanted to show up here at near as well and represent because we're excited about this uh community as well alex anything exciting on the roadmap for firebase of course i mean you're

282. 2:46:14

     talking about foundations right so foundations you think about security you think about scalability and interoperability at the end of the day we're mostly customer-driven right so we follow what our customers want from us uh and that can be across the support of multiple blockchains uh the support of product features i think we announced yesterday that we now support uh defy and near some of the exciting features we're

283. 2:46:38

     working on are around security um and the idea for our customers to be able to operate delivery versus payments through our settlement network so there are a lot of excite exciting news happening there that will continue to develop our product to continue providing security and scalability and interoperability through the platform awesome i also myself have a little side project

284. 2:47:00

     called keep on it's pretty cool we'll be on the doom slug stage at the end of the day so you can come check us out it's about adoption um very briefly gentlemen let's wrap up where can developers partners end users find out more about your projects just tell us where they can go let's just go let's go alex just come to aurora.dev and you will find all of the information there obviously follow me on twitter alex auroradev super simple

285. 2:47:30

     okay uh well for us you can always come to you know our website albridge.org which probably is the easiest way to find us or you can always find me on twitter it is andre v like andre veliky first letter of my surname in the end and i am always trying to answer all the questions that maybe personally yeah you can find if you're at our website infuriation on twitter as well and myself personally on twitter it's at wheeler my last name's a little hard to

286. 2:48:01

     spell but look me up in the program it's just at wheeler i would send you to our website uh where we can basically show real use case examples of customers how they're using fire blocks and how they can basically uh how we can basically help those customers to secure their digital asset interaction so the website will be a good starting point all right let's have a round of hand for a panel thank you so much

287. 2:49:22

     wow thank you so much to that incredible panel matt lockyer and core so you're probably wondering why i'm dressed like this because this event is a big event for one of the most incredible projects building on here right now and that is sweatcoin and the sweat economy so i'm wearing a shirt and i think everybody in here needs to be wearing a shirt i'm going to try and throw them as far as i can but i can't throw very well perhaps i need

288. 2:49:53

     to uh start walking a bit more so let me introduce to you the ceo of sweat economy oleg from encore to talk about the birth of the movement economy thank you guys i'm sweating really um it's an absolute pleasure being here and you know what when i was thinking about what i'm going to say of course the slides etc etc but the reality is that we are right now in labor you know this moment is definitely going to be remembered because typically you think about tge token

289. 2:50:44

     generation event at the point in time we right now as an organization in that point so half of the team i literally had my cto calling me and i was standing there kind of go go go on stage can't accept the call so things are happening right now so let me tell you the story up to this moment and what is coming and you know i'm definitely very very excited about this so you're witnessing literally the birth

290. 2:51:16

     of the movement economy we were thinking about this already back in 2015 when we started the business the name original name is sweat coin it's already assuming that we're on blockchain and we wanted to be on blockchain but we couldn't because there was bitcoin and then it was this research grade project called ethereum and we even met with vitalik but we figured that it was probably too early for us to bet on

291. 2:51:48

     ethereum back then and it saved our lives because within one year we were processing several hundred transactions per second while the maximum capacity of ethereum you all know is about 15 per second so we sort of i don't know wiped sweat and moved on and right now we are at 120 million users which is absolute incredible you know to be honest if you ask me if you asked me back in 2015 i would just awkwardly laugh and kind of go i wish but you know being here right now

292. 2:52:33

     is extremely exciting what is even more exciting for us is that our mission of making the world more physically active is working we know and we have medical grade research to prove that people who install sweat coin app are 20 more active after installing our application so we do change people's lives and i think that you know kind of having the mission having a purpose and actually creating value for all of this you know

293. 2:53:03

     120 million people is the reason why we roll out of bed every day it is pretty incredible we are number one or we were or are number one in 66 countries you know it's pretty incredible i'm a little bit disappointed about this you know kind of this part of the world but we in large just simply not available in there and a lot of people come and approach me and they ask a question so why do you decide

294. 2:53:35

     to do token what you know kind of what's the story you know kind of why and the answers are actually quite simple users always wanted us to be a crypto token cryptocurrency from day one this is their expectation there is absolutely no day passes that somebody either on discord or on telegram or on twitter would not sort of ask me when token you know kind of when are you finally going to move on to blockchain and you know what we were delaying and

295. 2:54:10

     delaying and delaying for one very simple reason that there was no blockchain fast enough robust enough for us to be able to build on the other one is of course our original vision because you know we called ourselves sweatcoin we always wanted to be there we actually put you know kind of our original vision was the currency backed by physical activity and you know we couldn't deliver it we had a token that was centralized that

296. 2:54:39

     was only operational within our own application and it is also hyperinflationary can you imagine you know we were able to achieve all of that with a token and with the token economics that is so suboptimal so we now feel quite liberated and with the opportunity that is uh kind of represented by web 3 but what solidified the whole thing was i don't know if elia is here i don't know if he's in the audience don't see him um last year at this event

297. 2:55:17

     i saw this slide which was saying mass adoption is near one billion people in five years we are thinking about making one billion people more active and nier was talking already a year ago about bringing one billion people into web three that was an absolute perfect match in terms of vision and mission so that shared mission was a very very good starting point for a relationship

298. 2:55:48

     that is flourishing and you know kind of gives you know birth to basically us as a project the other very important thing was the team so i already mentioned ilya ilya alex are absolutely incredible the team that they build is absolutely absolutely amazing marik yes sin um so you know there are a lot of people out there that you know i cannot name check but you know great job it's an absolute pleasure working with you guys and of course technology

299. 2:56:20

     you know we all you know kind of here at near kong we know that this technology is amazing there are a lot of people out there that continue asking me you know are you sure you know kind of what's going on absolutely you know can i'm sure that at this very moment our cto that's been sort of up for 18 hours running the tge and distributing tokens to 13.5 million wallets might have a slightly different opinion but when it is over i'm sure that we're going to have an amazing celebration

300. 2:56:54

     so what is sweat and this is sort of slight modification from the kind of original wording that we came up with but think of sweat as their unit of physical activity value we all know that physical activity is valuable you know otherwise we would be going to a gym we would be going for a run you know we wouldn't be exercising and actually you know one of the most interesting arguments that i've heard and then i've stolen if physical activity was not valuable nature wouldn't give us legs you know

301. 2:57:27

     you'd probably be trees you know there is utility in movement there is value in movement and it used to be only transportation right now it goes way beyond that because we are terribly unfit there is an epidemic of sedentary behavior and physical activity and the most basic expression of it which is step is a starting point how you are becoming fitter and healthier and it is valuable you know this your family knows this you know my wife and my kid are in the front

302. 2:58:00

     row um you know kind of they are very very keen for me to be more active than i am right now i mean look at this you know this is the result of preparing for gge horrible you know i promise i'll remove it and the thing that we always sort of talked about and the thing that is not necessarily kind of uh landed on i think the world yet is because we know that physical activity has value but it's just words and creation of sweat is allowing us to put the value

303. 2:58:33

     the actual numbers on something that we always considered valuable and that will help us to enable a lot of those sort of revenue stream demand drivers you know kind of all of those token economics but the most important thing to think about is we are going to enable things that exist right now but in a very suboptimal way when your doctor tells you that you need to move more they're actually going to be able to check and they're probably going to charge you for their next appointment

304. 2:59:06

     in sweat i would your insurer is going to be able to give you a discount on your health or life insurance that you're buying from them so on and so forth ultimately we do believe that governments are going to have to start charging part of your taxes in sweat because if you can produce sweat then it means that you are taking care of your health you are going to live longer you are reducing healthcare costs of the country

305. 2:59:37

     and ultimately you are going to be more economically active and country is going to make more money more tax revenue out of you so everyone benefits and sweat is the unit of that physical activity value that we'll create and the way we designed it is very i guess well we've stolen from bitcoin buck the more time passes the more steps you will need to produce in order to mint next sweat so over time the

306. 3:00:08

     requirement for creation of next sweat is going to increase and therefore the value of that physical activity in each unit of sweat is going to become dominating factor in determining its price or its attractiveness its value to all the participants over time so how are we gonna get there well we're gonna launch well we've already launched sweat wallet and it is becoming rapidly a very successful on-ramp for the next one

307. 3:00:41

     billion people we are already number one on my count last night it was already in seven countries so you know sweat coin was number one in 66 literally over last week sweat wallet already got so in a lot of countries ahead of google instagram youtube it's pretty amazing vote of our confidence and today is just not it it's not just a tge it's not a moment when sweat the token came into existence and the project launched it's actually a

308. 3:01:17

     stepping stone that we originally envisioned when we launched in 2015 we said we are going to have an app that we will perfect that we will get to mass market then we will launch a currency and this is what's happening today but this is not the end of our vision our vision is that around this token around this unit of physical activity value we're going to be able to create sweat economy i've already described to you you know doctors insurers yeah it's countless use cases that we

309. 3:01:59

     will be able to run and sort of create real value exchange with advent of this currency i don't know if you've seen this but you know we're really really excited it turns out that our launch is really not just a but is a serious event we already have six actually seven centralized exchanges that listed us today there are pools on decentralized exchanges and actually i was talking a little bit earlier today with refinance guys and they asked me to mention here that the biggest ever

310. 3:02:39

     liquidity mining program that happened on near up until now is about to be launched today so proximity us as well as refinance are pulling together resources to you know to basically incentivize you to bring a near or sweat to refinance which as you probably know is the largest decks on near at this point so if you don't know what to do with your sweat if you came in with a t-shirt and

311. 3:03:12

     you got your 100 sweat but you know you don't know what what to spend it on take it to refinance i'm sure this guy's going to be very happy so how to get involved knock yourselves out on the bouncy castle i've tried it yesterday it's really sweaty work i s you know yeah i strongly recommend and we also checked you know what if you are not doing jumps too high you also will earn

312. 3:03:38

     sweat from it i see some people wearing t-shirts four of them were thrown away put them on go to our stand claim your 100 sweat those that are wearing our logo and our colors and especially if you're wearing wig i'll probably personally pay about you know hundreds wait for just wearing of the week um come in say hello introduce yourself to your team you know would be very very happy to see you and in conclusion

313. 3:04:06

     well sweat mass adoption is near let's bring hundreds of millions of people into web 3 and make them physically active and i think at this moment in time we can also say that mass adoption is here is not just in you know kind of in the next step i think we are right now in the moment where mass adoption is kicking in and i'm very happy to say that this partnership between us and near is really showing an example of use cases

314. 3:04:45

     that are different from classical blockchain defy sort of exchange solutions where we're starting to venture into other things because we have to because mass market is not only about money it's not about you know generating high apis these people need more exciting things things that they do every day you know move to earn play to earn all of that all of those propositions have to come in and i genuinely do believe that the place for them to build is

315. 3:05:20

     near thank you so so look i know that when you do these type of things you're supposed to stand still but after that talk i'm doing everything i can to

316. 3:06:25

     get as much sweat coin as possible yeah that's what going on all right look um i know we've had some inclement weather here uh this week i'm sure we'll have more but there is perhaps no better team to be so well equipped to handle it than some of the guests that we have on next we have russell cootes and warren jones from sale gp joined by the wonderful marie flamen from the near foundation and michael casey from coindesk to discuss how near

317. 3:06:58

     and clgp are revolutionizing professional sport okay so i think most of you probably are aware of what sale gp is all about and hopefully also about what this you know at least the taste of what this partnership's all about but to uh just give you a quick look at it we're gonna show a video for a minute and a half uh and i think it'll be a fun one to watch there what is it's high speed

318. 3:07:53

     high tech high impact 11 global events and an intense battle with nine nations identical f50 driven by the world's best and powered by nature competing on a level playing field where both data is shared and talent actually matters it's close to shaw racing in front of sellout crowds and now sale gp has partnered with near to revolutionize the future of our sprint by re-engineering the sale gp web stack

319. 3:08:44

     with web 3 we ticketing to digital collectibles and beyond this culminates with the ultimate fan loyalty program and industry first a dow owned team join sail gp in the race for the future because our race is your race all right um let me go to russell first i just have to warn you guys there's a long sort of sporting rivalry between our two countries i'm an aussie he's a kiwi and i'm very pleased to hear that the australian team is actually in the lead of the league at the moment and new zealand is second so by one point by one point this is

320. 3:09:35

     getting pretty close uh but anyway russell like why why are you doing this right sailing and blockchain come on how does this what is what was the uh genesis of this idea and and you know where are you going well i i i think what surprises people subject become the most exciting race on water and you know when you look at the uh images it's quite different to what people would perceive as sailing before you know a lot of

321. 3:10:06

     people would have described sailing as white triangles on a blue background maybe a gin and tonic in your hand enjoying you know a nice day on the water in the sunshine and south gp is about as far away from that as you could imagine it's it's it's really racing and when people come along to our events they get they get really uh turned on by that by that racing and i think as well as that sort of on top of that we are we are powered by nature so there's this really interesting mix where we're this

322. 3:10:40

     super high adrenaline fueled sporting uh property but we're also inherently connected by nature we're powered by nature and and that's that's in it part of our dna and we're also hugely focused on technology right through right through i mean obviously with the boats but right through even even in terms of our fan engagement uh programs where we've really adopted a fan first approach to this where for example the data all the data coming off the soul gp so warren will

323. 3:11:19

     talk a bit more about this at a moment i'm sure but 800 sensors on each boat generating 3 000 data outputs a second i think there's over a billion uh data outputs from each boat right each day um it's it's gone up it uh i think we we just had an event in santa pay last weekend and we were generating around 48 billion data requests every afternoon yeah and that that's that's in the open because all the boats are the same we've actually taken an approach where that's in the open and

324. 3:11:51

     why is that important it's because straight away we can use that to engage our fans and actually allow the fans to have access to that data so rather than for example watching this property in a traditional sense on broadcast and the announcer's telling you okay this is what's happening today people are interested in so many different things they're interested in the tech they may be interested in the

325. 3:12:17

     sustainability of the purpose initiatives they may be interested in the athleticism on board the boats they're interested in different facets and and by the data they can access those that information they can look at the different camera angles rather than being directed by only by exclusively by a television producer sitting somewhere in the world they can actually have have the choice to actually go in and look at things

326. 3:12:42

     themselves about whatever they're interested in so in my case michael the fans that in new zealand might be more interested in looking at the new zealand vote than the australian i guess so so so they can actually access that they can listen to the commentary and you can imagine how far that could go in fact maybe we can't imagine how far i could go but just think about how far it could go for a moment

327. 3:13:05

     you can imagine that even in between our races as we sort of move into this really or adopt this really web-free approach rather than as i said the commentator interviewing the athlete in between races i can imagine our most the most loyal fans being able to correct connect directly with the athlete and be able to talk to them directly on a two-way conversation yeah so that's that's the future and i think that's the exciting part about

328. 3:13:37

     this so so marie listening to this you know it's it's data it's it's both it's a sort of iterative thing right so there's like it's constantly improving because of that data but there's this extra piece which is kind of like the power of the crowd right there is it's not just you know the team that's iterating on that data it's getting input from all of these fans which sounds a lot like you know open source

329. 3:14:00

     uh you know software and open source communities right so how do you where do you see the parallels there for near and why is this relationship important for you yeah well i think when we when we were first approached actually by celsiup it was essential to see if it was really a line in term of philosophy right and a lot of what russell just mentioned is exactly that you need to have a community which is actually open source is the data going to be accessible so that anyone can actually

330. 3:14:26

     build on it and then deliver to the promises of web3 so that we definitely see day in day out it's almost you know and warren mentioned that but the number of data points we have what what can we imagine doing with that and how can we actually reinvent fandom and the future of sports with it so definitely being aligned on the vision for data was really important more than that it was also being aligned on you know values of what is a partnership to us a

331. 3:14:51

     partnership is way beyond just putting a logo on a t-shirt i mean great great logo on the t-shirt but it goes beyond that right it goes into what products can you create together that are helping move an entire industry forward and i think that's what we're really managing to do in you know bringing the best of sports together with the best of tech and and that was that was key to us too when we were looking for a partner

332. 3:15:14

     to to partner with in this space because obviously if you look at our founder larry ellison we we are founded on tech but we also had to be aligned on purpose and obviously what near's achieving in that space where they have this similar ambitions to us in in terms of achieving first of all carbon neutrality and then go beyond that you know being carbon being creating a cut a positive footprint then that was that was really important to us

333. 3:15:48

     but also as marek said partnering with a with a company that was going to really help us develop in this space because you know we need to learn a lot from them and and the ideas are being driven from from them and because we're a new sporting property and because in some ways we're a challenger brand where we're always looking to sort of uh push the boundaries with innovation and and and technology

334. 3:16:20

     we can we're not constrained by a whole lot of rules and regulations that have been developed over the last 100 years we can we can actually take their ideas and look at ways to implement them you know for example they came to us and they said what about a dow team and and we said what about a dow team and we ended up changing our participation agreement to allow that possibility so

335. 3:16:44

     i i can i can i i know that there's a lot of sports out there that would love to be able to do that but are constrained by their by their processes and so forth and they just can't do it and so we really wanted a partner that that would come in with that sort of mentality and say what about this what about that can we do this how can we work together to help you help you do this okay this isn't working let's move

336. 3:17:09

     over to here now yeah it's that sort of approach you're like yeah you're a startup i mean you've got this pivotability if you like right in a way that a big entity doesn't and and that that both of you have got that nimbleness which i think is really interesting so what do you talk about this data right you're the cto um what do you think you can do now that you've got you know near as a partner and and this community of developers

337. 3:17:34

     uh coming into this space well we can talk about the dow after that but let's just talk about the data the opportunities you see let's go back you know we're three years old as an organization so when we started out we had blank pieces of paper we had um uh no no contracts no workflows so we started off fresh what were you going to do for the next five 10 15 years um and therefore you know

338. 3:17:57

     these these f50s that you saw on the on the screen i call them an extreme iot device because they've got so much information we know what's going to happen to them before the athletes on board know what's going to happen so all that information goes out and the quicker we can get that information to uh fan engagement where people can see that be able to manipulate that and look at that information is is our goal and nia

339. 3:18:21

     can help us do that interesting so the dow is the thing that's getting a lot of attention here um what's it going to look like marik what are you how do you i mean the framework i think the dao is fascinating because today we hear a lot about actually how to reinvent fandom leveraging whether nfc or dao's but i think when you have actually a sporting property like cell gp which is a full-on

340. 3:18:45

     you know professional sporting property taking on saying yes we are open to that and actually we're open to even change the books and open that so that teams know how to participate that's a very big step forward the other part is actually from a legal framework perspective um you know we've been actually looking at and establishing what are you know what's happening in what country and therefore what's possible

341. 3:19:07

     and the reality is that when we're all here we think web 3 and we open up to everybody and fandom and we can reinvent how teams actually sports team are managed and then the the reality on the ground is that you're held up by actually for example in the u.s laws and therefore you need to think through who could partner and who could be part of that dow right so to me i'm extremely excited by actually seeing the dow

342. 3:19:31

     really come to life i think it's been an amazing endeavor from like legal teams coming from the sporting world and then us to actually make that to life and then the other part is you know running a selling team i don't know how many of you are sailors here but it's very difficult you have like a dry team that is on shore that is actually you know helping do things and then you have the team that's on the boat and there is so many operations that are going around that

343. 3:19:56

     and it's beautiful to think like you know a dao is going to do all that but even within that you're going to need to think like what's the governance of that thing right so i think it's it's a huge endeavor and a huge undertaking it's coming we're super excited with the direction it's taking and it has many possibilities yeah i mean i think this a i think there's a conference this afternoon specifically on the dao so if you're interested in that subject uh

344. 3:20:20

     come along they're gonna do a deep dive into it but i if you look at it we didn't even really know we could do if we could do it or not right in april this year you know so so so we've finally we've finally worked through a process we now realize it can be done gp perspective we were able to change our participation agreement to allow that an entity like a dow to come into into our league i think it's super exciting because in a way that's the ultimate fan engagement platform you

345. 3:21:01

     know it's if i look at sports fans and and you look at what they would really want when they're watching their team they would really want to have some sort of say in that team like a team owner and that's been really reserved for the privileged few up until now yeah so depending on how the the dow drivers decide to structure the dow i think that could be really really super interesting for for

346. 3:21:34

     the fans that you know get involved in that yeah maybe we could without getting too deep in the weeds to talk a little bit about what the structure of that dao is right because this governance of a dao is you know one of the biggest challenges it faces but ultimately what you want is what russell's describing this high-level engagement and i always like to think like you know this big discussion about what this the greatest use case for crypto or at least for a web 3 seems to be it

347. 3:22:00

     literally is engagement and and and the formation of community right um and people talk about like sports fans being just alongside perhaps religious fanatics as the most cohesive communities you can find right and i'm thinking about russell's image of the engaged fan all those times you're yelling at the at the television you know because you want this guy to do something different uh you know now

348. 3:22:24

     here's a chance to actually engage but that being the case what what other features of this dow that will allow how much input would a a dow owner a little guy or a woman uh you know have in this process well as i said there's a conference on this afterwards but essentially the dow will operate like a team owner like any other of our other team owners in the in in the league except that it'll have at least well it'll have an element of community ownership

349. 3:22:57

     as is you know as a day i should is you know so essentially i mean i won't go into a lot of the details but essentially um we determined that um it was a security and so it had to had to pass u.s security regulation because we want this to be um yeah and i think it's available in a global sense yeah and i think that's where some of the challenges arise right because because it's in the u.s and well if you want to establish it somewhere

350. 3:23:28

     you choose for elite the u.s then it becomes a security so you need to make sure that you have accredited investors and and that's where i think actually you know pushing the boundaries of that and trying to understand what it means also means that for you know delete i don't like the term the little guy because maybe they can be very tall right but but you know anyone to participate then you need to think how do you structure that so that they still have and you

351. 3:23:51

     think you can do that because i mean the worry of going just for credited investors is you end up back with the same old story of the privilege of having access well the the the structure is um there are there are uh 2 000 uh holders and of the 2 1500 have to be accredited investors and 500 can be non-accredited investors okay so so that's that that's that's that's passed a legal test you feel comfortable your lawyers are comfortable with that and and you can you're offered the races so it's a it's a reg d offering is that

352. 3:24:25

     what is that what we're talking about here or what sort of a good question uh i'm not sure i'm sure yeah okay but it's all been lawyers are behind it they're getting a nodding from a lawyer down there perhaps um so but yeah again like so okay that's the structure we've got 2 000 of these owners you know warren how are they going within that structure how do they then engage with the team like what capacity is for them to like i mean the dow as a governance thing is

353. 3:24:53

     actually in some respects the machinery by which the decisions get passed down so at the moment we're building so we uh with it with the current clgp tech stack so we're working with nia and the uh developers on building that out so a an area where where clgp fans can go in and they can use the chain assets on chain uh nfts all these um assets on the on the chain that they can use so so we're building out at the moment and um hopefully we'll we'll get it out in the next couple of couple of

354. 3:25:25

     months but but ultimately you know how the fans will engage with the dow will be up to the doubt after them yeah i mean just like as i said any other ownership entity they will they will be able to decide and i i think it's a i mean it's wide open yeah there are there are almost unlimited possibilities about how those fans could engage with a doubt they could you know we've been just talking about it for literally weeks and coming up with ideas and no doubt if they

355. 3:25:59

     if they want our thoughts on it you know that's up to them particularly on for example athlete selection or whatever we could give our opinion but ultimately it will be their decision as to who manages that team how it's run how how they engage with fans what special um rewards or privileges they give to certain token holders um you know what colour scheme yeah as i said as i was referencing before if they want to allow certain token holders

356. 3:26:32

     to have direct communications with the some of the athletes at certain times they'll have the they'll have the capability of doing that right um so so i think it's it's really cool and obviously they will be probably leading or at the forefront of this whole web 3 development so i think you know that's the exciting part they will probably drive a lot of innovation that we haven't thought of right the

357. 3:26:57

     wisdom of the crowd experience perhaps right you never know maybe every one of them is eventually going to become a dow because it's the only way to compete you've got this sort of like this power of the crowd perhaps you know uh marico is just thinking as well though like i mean how many cities russell do you how many how many different places around the world do you hold your events we currently go to eleven we are about to announce season four which will

358. 3:27:19

     be more than eleven okay so it's a sort of big roving you know experience and you know nia is now going to be associated with that uh nice sort of marketing opportunity perhaps but also perhaps to engage with not just uh these fans and these people interested in sailing but a lot of companies right there's a bunch of sponsors traditional web 2 you know blue chip companies that have got their

359. 3:27:44

     logos emblazoned all over the sales do you see this as an opportunity to get near and web 3 concepts in front of those guys absolutely and look and i think also that's the part that's fairly less seen and understood from you know from the community of near a perspective but actually cell gp in itself is also a major networking event that happens around each and every of these different cities and so for you

360. 3:28:09

     know for us as we think also of like how do you how do you have the power of what near can do be understood it's actually amazing to be able to be you know at the table with some of the you know top chairmans of companies or like you know different leaders of different companies because then we also if we think of near as you know the most usable simplest blockchain where creators can create

361. 3:28:31

     without limits then to bring that and to bring web 2 on board you need to evangelize right and so those different places going around the world and having that platform to be able to do that is super important and so we are definitely seeing that and warren how did you i mean i imagine you might have been the point person here are you the blockchain expert within sale gp or how did this thing how did you get all these these old sailors

362. 3:28:55

     to suddenly get their head around something as complex as this well it happened in uh i think it was january we met i remember that i had just started and i was like what's going on i'm learning every day i'm i'm learning here you know i'm i'm amazed i'm walking around i'm talking to people i'm learning it's uh it's a great community and we're we're embracing it here at clgp yeah so you're not actually a blockchain

363. 3:29:21

     developer yourself you don't have that background you know web too and you know we we build databases and we build applications to access that information so this is all new to us and with nia's help we're learning all the time i mean what yeah sorry russell well i'm i'm thinking you know i mean even over the last days we we we're coming up with the new ideas so when you look at these boats on screen what's behind that there's there's a whole

364. 3:29:52

     there's a whole tech um uh village where the where the boats get assembled they go into their own bases and so forth and most people don't get access to that to that it's like the pit lane a pit lane in a in a motor racing championship right and most people don't get access to that and i was thinking i haven't even talked about this with mariah carey but a couple of us were talking about it yesterday and we were saying imagine if with a single sign-on you know you you

365. 3:30:25

     purchase your ticket and then all of a sudden you look at it you say okay i can do the tech tour and this and depending on how engaged you you've been as a fan you have various levels within that tech tour you might get to get that you know get to access certain things on on the boats or whatever or you might get access to the simulator you know to experience what it would be like to

366. 3:30:50

     be on a real f50 you know so the the possibilities i think are endless yeah well this is sort of i think now you know the next generation of nfts uh are really starting to become more dynamic in the sense they're ingesting data and they change their features as a result of that do you see this playing out here yeah 100 and i think that's the you know next generation of actually i'm

367. 3:31:14

     a fan what does it mean what do i want to take part into right and and i think there's definitely as you mentioned a lot of possibilities and opportunities and how we do that in the most usable way so that fans don't even have to think that this is you know blockchain and crypto one thing i wanted to come back on is in terms of talent and team building what we've seen also which is amazing is like it's it's a learning progress right it's like how do we learn to work with cell gp and how do they learn to also work with you know an

368. 3:31:42

     open source ecosystem which has you know lots of different components but we've seen also like cell gpa attract amazing talent that comes from what 3 world and that's really helping on that journey right so it's really a perfect like you know coalition and combination of these two two two very different types of team coming together but you know you've launched this but we've also held this conference in the middle of it as well crypto winter right and and you know

369. 3:32:08

     this is a mainstream albeit i think probably a particular class a niche sort of group but nonetheless on a mainstream sport mainstream audience folks who you know if they read the mainstream press are probably a little bit down on what crypto is all about does that present a challenge interview to how you get people excited or anybody like why the hell are we doing crypto at this time you know is that is there an

370. 3:32:31

     educational barrier i suppose that is my question i think a big part of it is education but again with us being a challenger brand we we just look at it and say we think we we think the way fans will engage in the future will be much less they will want to be much less directed than than what they've been in the past and therefore this whole jump into the space perhaps if we weren't

371. 3:33:02

     weren't such a you know sort of a technology founded company and we weren't prepared to in some ways take take some some calculated risks we would you know would be more you know you see some people they're more conservative and as as marik said you know i think and i'm not criticizing anyone i think some people have literally found a crypto partner got the partner said okay we're off and then put them to one side and and and

372. 3:33:34

     say okay you deal with that and and and we'll get on with our business and you get on with yours and that's not how we're viewing this we're viewing this as okay we want right from the get-go how can near actually help us really develop in this space we want to be leading in this space yeah so you're not blockchain ice-t right remember that famous moment in the ico boom that just

373. 3:33:58

     changed the name to blockchain had nothing to do with it you're actually engaging and getting you know working all these projects which is interesting you wanted to jump in there weren't well no i echo russell's russell thoughts we're the technology first company so for us to to pivot over to blockchain and neo technology is quite easy for us in in a way you know we we we changed uh perceptions in sport in broadcasting um we were the first uh to

374. 3:34:23

     do a live remote broadcast uh from site now we have everything back in london and we don't do anything on site um and people were saying we're crazy doing that right they were saying that won't work it won't can't be done you know and formula one come to ask us how are we doing it wow yeah you know i um moderated a panel at south by southwest uh earlier this year with the folks from wwe right the world you know wrestlemania i had charlotte flair on stage with the and stephanie mcmahon the daughter of vince who's now actually

375. 3:34:54

     the ceo um and one of the things that kind of came up in the conversation was like okay as this engagement they were talking about nfts that they would issue connected to each wrestler et cetera et cetera um as as the value creation happens in that where does the value accrue to right is it is it is it owned by wwe or does the does the wrestler does the do they get some of it like i wonder that some of

376. 3:35:18

     these issues come up with the way you're thinking about this as well like you know if the teams are the ones who are generating the most engagement and therefore their nfts are of higher value than others is are their thoughts about how that value that worth gets sort of shared and attributed or sort of too early to figure out well yeah there'll be a distribution but of course you know that's the value of

377. 3:35:41

     the blockchain that's the value of developing the nfts but i think with an nft you know people originally started thinking of it as a for example a piece of art right that that may or may not grow in value and that's tradable and and and so forth and all the advantages that come with that the the obviously the original developer of the art still gets credited for it each time it gets traded etc but i think the real value in sports nfts

378. 3:36:12

     will be in experiences you know because because the more you know i mean we'll see but the more we we delve into it i think the unique experiences that the the once in a lifetime tough experiences that's that's going to become really really you know key i think in the in the future and then and then you think about okay i i can get that let i can get that nft i can get that level of of experience

379. 3:36:42

     but even better as it builds in value i can trade that i can it's it's tradable it's got a value it's not just a value to me it's a value to when i when i trade it on to somebody else and it it keeps evolving so you know i think it's i think the possibilities are fabulous i agree i'd spin it on the fan centric so what what does it give the fan how how can we make most lgb fans able to to have a piece of clgp so that's the way i would i would flip it

380. 3:37:11

     but also maybe like sports team have different values right if you want to buy the us team it's valued probably more than if you want to buy no offense but in new zealand you might say the australian australian team it's winning the league let's not forget right let's just leave on that note right australia is leading the league i just want to just close on that because unfortunately we have run out of time uh so but this is good get involved here

381. 3:37:35

     they've got the dow conversation happening this afternoon so where do they go for that right now in the night shade right now in the in the westeros is it night shade not maybe don't slow yeah the the um uh just across the rope just across the room yeah dow conversation if you're interested yeah and i think there's a technology discussion tomorrow as well but yeah all right if you're interested in this and you and you should be uh

382. 3:37:58

     dive in a round of applause for the tremendous panel please

383. 3:39:04

     wow if you are so inclined the sale gp dow conversation is continuing over on the night shared stage but i'm sure you'll have an even more incredible time here no nights shared to them that's why they pay me okay we have an uh an incredible um i want to say a panel but it's more of a workshop about to come up we have the team from armored kingdom we have hugh and lisa sturbikov uh brian turner one

384. 3:39:33

     of the co-writers and lindsay mcclearney from arma kingdom as well so i would love for everybody to really get involved it's going to be interactive and give them a big round of applause for lauren behold how to build story arcs hey everybody how was it going um we're here to talk about armored kingdom but mostly we're here to build a story with you so we're super excited for you to throw things out just throw loud um armored kingdom is a multimedia ip

385. 3:40:20

     platform build that we're doing with comic books two of which have already been released um both minted and in physical copy uh we're doing a full animated series which will be released on a traditional route and we're also doing a tabletop rpg which is almost finished as well as an nft enabled rpg tcg so think magic gathering meets slay the spire with a little bit of new stuff that came out of brian's mind um we're

386. 3:40:51

     super excited we're we're deep into that build of the game and it's been an incredible time but today we thought it'd be fun because we i'm i'm lisa sterbikov by the way i'm a traditional film and television producer mila kunis is my producing partner my husband movie coming out movie coming out in a couple of weeks um my husband's girl live on netflix so don't miss it all right great um this is my husband hugh sterpikov who is the creator of the world of armored

387. 3:41:14

     kingdom he also is a multi-mi nominated writer screenwriter of 25 years teaches screenwriting at ucla in the master's program all all great stuff and then this is our good friend and co-writer plus game master brian turner who is a multiple humanitas award-winning writer of children's television and christmas movies which is a very specific specialty um so since we have a really specific sort of um

388. 3:41:47

     skill set that i think you kind of don't see normally this place we figured we'd talk about the math of a story and how you build a story arc and kind of build one together and thought it'd be fun the way that they do a hackathon kind of think this is a story hackathon on the hackathon front we are hiring for front and back end developers somebody who's looking to build community uh or consumer products reach out to us on twitter and if you were here today we want we're going to

389. 3:42:12

     write this comic together and then we're going to be minting it if you're here today take a selfie of yourself send your near wallet address to us on twitter at armored kingdom and we'll make sure to drop you the comic when it's um after it's minted so without further ado guys get going okay so uh what you need to know about me is i don't eat caffeine at all i've notoriously avoided it for many years

390. 3:42:36

     and to get over the uh jet lag i just drank a red ball i tried to time it so that i would be on my way up but we're a little bit late so we're all going on a rocket ship together it's gonna be fun um okay so we got a white board okay great so um obviously storytelling is very complex and uh there is no mastering it does even a lifetime you can master it but the very basics of storytelling what i teach at ucla can be learned shockingly quickly it all

391. 3:43:07

     goes back to aristotle there's a three-act structure and this is how we would build a story in a writer's room on television for film anything any kind of novel any kind of story so you've got three acts one two three starts here and a midpoint uh you're going to have a lead character inevitably even if it's a team story like guardians of the galaxy you're always going to start with one character

392. 3:43:38

     you're going to want to introduce them in their environment like if you think of the opening scene of greatest lost ark right around 15 minutes into a movie you would say uh maybe a quarter into a story you would have what we call an inciting incident that's where they're going to find out about the main story of the of the story the main plot of the story the main goal right around here is where they're going to become invested in the story where their story is going to get launched into it this is

393. 3:44:12

     where luke skywalker basically joins up with obi-wan kenobi to go try to find the death star plans you're going to want to have a very big twist right in the middle that's going to turn things on their on their heads um if the story is kind of getting slow this is going to wake you up right around just before the beginning of act three you're gonna have a false victory for the sake of campus

394. 3:44:38

     thank you i'm not gonna start over false victory this is where he's going to feel like the hero has won has won their goal has gotten whatever they need done then right before that they're going to turn out they've lost everything this is going to be the very low point of the story and then you get into the all-important climax where they're going to have their big fight there's going to be a resolution well there's going to be a win usually now

395. 3:45:14

     a story doesn't have to have a happy ending but at least for traditional audiences it needs an ending with justice there needs to be a sense of fairness otherwise when it's over you feel you don't feel complete you feel uncertain leaving the theater or television show or whatever so there's going to be justice and then a resolution to basically remind the audience emotionally the story they just what they just went on and then very often now you get a tag that's gonna set up a sequel

396. 3:45:48

     now this is the the technical outline of a story but what it's really always about is the main character and their goals so it's going to start out with a conscious goal the plot driven goal which let's say it's luke getting the death star plans or saving the princess sorry the red bull's taking over conscious goal oh my god that's gonna accelerate up here you always want to have rising tension and then there's going to be a subconscious goal which is going to be personal

397. 3:46:31

     and here this works for any genre right every genre and we'll talk about that in a second now at some point we're going to need the cons the subconscious goal the emotional goal to intertie with and even supersede the conscious goal that's called transference if there was a movie with perfect structure i would say it's raiders the lost ark and it's a great example of that because indiana jones starts out trying to get the lost ark of the covenant he brings

398. 3:47:03

     marion along with him at some point right in the middle he actually sacrifices marion leaves her with the bad guy in order to try and continue to go get the ark but at this at the low point he trades the ark for her life and that's the transference of he just wants the fortune and glory he just wants the the macguffin which talk about in a second but then he realizes his real conscious goals that he loves

399. 3:47:26

     this woman and he kind of transfers to that so he literally says i don't care about the ark all i want is the girl right it's right on the nose right now all stories whether it's romantic comedy genre horror they revolt revolve around a macguffin which is a phrase coined by alfred hitchcock the macguffin what it is isn't necessarily important but it's important to our characters because it's what they're all chasing this can be love personal redemption or an object the maltese falcon the lost talk of the

400. 3:48:01

     covenant an infinity stone in the marvel movies there's always the mcguffin death star plans so usually you'll find out about the mcguffin here you'll get the important instructions you'll launch to get the mcguffin there'll be a fight you might achieve you might find out the mcguffin isn't exactly what you thought it was at the midpoint twist right here at the false victory you

401. 3:48:24

     might get the mcguffin and then you're going to lose it fight for it and either get it at the end or realize you didn't need it it wasn't really what you were looking for right so going back to raiders again i'm assuming everyone has seen raiders of the lost ark the you know at that the false victory point is when indy has literally gotten the ark of the covenant and they take it up out of the well of souls and then throws the girl in and blocks the men and says you know maybe in a thousand

402. 3:48:55

     years you'll be worth something right so normally what i'm doing here i do in about 90 minutes and we've got less than half of that so what i would love to do is i'll talk you guys through building a story based on these fundamental um points um do you guys want to is anybody interested in throwing out some ideas to try to build a store together maybe a genre an idea for a genre action horror romantic comedy romance

403. 3:49:27

     torture sci-fi horror is that what you said sci-fi sci-fi horror is this sci-fi porn noir noir sci-fi little blade i can't we can sort of hear you hey he's got a mic you can actually so sci-fi means that it's going to be defined by the macguffin your genre whatever the um the the flavor the film is is usually nowadays they're often crossed you'll have an amalgam a mash-up but the climax is going to define what your genre is if

404. 3:49:58

     it's a comedy everything's going to be screwball at the end if it's action everybody's going to be fighting and chasing things you see that a lot in the marvel movies marvel movies are comedies right now they're the only comedies being made because of everything pushing towards political correctness most comedians are afraid to do anything right now that's why marvel's really dominating everything it's the only comedy you can find right so sci-fi means our macguffin the thing

405. 3:50:21

     everybody's chasing is gonna be sci-fi based in some way like an infinity stone anybody want to throw out an idea for what a sci-fi mcguffin could be i will come down there all right i'm going to call on people i'm going down i'm going to call on people so we already got an answer from you this is going to the camera people are going to hate me for this excellent it can literally be gobbledygook names

406. 3:50:53

     grab this guy here it doesn't matter what's mcguffin so we're doing a sci-fi movie and we need to be chasing something so anything we're chasing some near tokens near tokyo we're chasing some near tokens tokens perfect perfect near tokens so who is our hero let's throw out the name of an actor who who defines the kind of hero we're trying to um it could be somebody serious like harrison ford or indiana jones-ish it could be somebody a little bit funnier like ryan reynolds could be somebody like vin diesel who's very

407. 3:51:27

     serious and intimidating it could be a woman it could be charlize theron could be scarlett johansson it could be mila kunis all right so throw out the name of an actor anybody you throw the name of an actor your favorite actor right now this guy this guy in the red i saw his hands moving oh oh he had one oh you're that you're the perfect thank you i feel like we're in a comedy club i started kevin hall kevin hart kevin harvin perfect

408. 3:51:50

     kevin hart and sci-fi i like it okay so kevin hart is in space there's a sci-fi story he's running around in space he finds out he's looking used to find near tokens so we're going to introduce kevin hart in his natural environment maybe he's in a spaceship flying around shooting bad guys whatever the case is right here is going to be the inciting incident where he's going to find out what near tokens are and why they're important he's probably going to say no i don't want to get involved in

409. 3:52:22

     that because it's very dangerous right here something's going to happen we call it a point of no return that's going to force him to go after these near tokens it's often going to be a personal thing or it could be like the fate of the world depends on it and he's the only one who can do it but he's he's just gonna not do it and he's gonna have to do it so let's talk about a subconscious goal let's give him some sort of a romance uh uh either a woman

410. 3:52:47

     or a man or a concept a planet something he needs to protect personally who does kevin hart love how about he needs to protect his brother ilya polisukin what was the last part ilya he needs to protect his brother ilia ilya okay brother that's perfect because it creates a backstory for them and a bond that necessarily can't be broken he can't just decide screw his brother maybe his parents always wanted him to take care

411. 3:53:22

     of his brother he's got some personal debt something very deep within him that says i can't let go of my brother but to start out that we need conflict every story is driven intensely by conflict not only story every scene in a movie virtually every sentence should be driven by conflict or people are going to lose interest they're going to lose focus they're going to start looking at

412. 3:53:44

     their clocks so he hates his brother but he feels like he has to protect his brother because of his mother either she's still alive she's on a deathbed maybe she's dead and the last thing she ever said to him take care of your brother so we want this story to be tightly knit the brother is the person who has the near tokens so the brother is on the run he's committed some sort of atrocity

413. 3:54:08

     all the space police are chasing this guy he's got the near tokens somebody comes to kevin hart and says to kevin hart you're the only one who can find him that's super important for his story our hero should be the only one who can do this we want the viewer their avatar their person in this story is the main character we need to trust them we need to understand them what their um their their uh

414. 3:54:33

     um their their means their thought process their agenda their loyalties we need to understand and rely on them so we can follow this movie so kevin hart's got to chase these near tokens that his brother has to to we think he really wants the near tokens that's super important to him the brothers underlying problem through transference throughout the story by the time we get to hear saving his brother is going to be more

415. 3:55:02

     important than the near tokens we're going to watch this happen the low point here where the audience has to get the most emotionally screwed up desperate for the climax to work out is going to be when kevin hart and his brother are separated now if you look at anybody comedy any romantic comedy anything there's going to be a bond between characters guardians of the galaxy's perfect example we're going to they're going to meet each other here

416. 3:55:33

     they're going to hate each other we're going to watch them fall in love we're going to fall in love with them this dynamic right here everybody's going to be separated they may be arrested they may hate each other the deeper this low point can go the better the movie or the story is going to be the more emotionally invested you are the more upset you are right here that's how you know the story is connecting so right here kevin hart and his brother are

417. 3:55:57

     going to be separated and it's going to break our heart and we desperately need this climax to work out so we can have these two back together it's a deep cut i know but midnight run is the perfect um buddy comedy perfect structure and if you watch that movie when robert deniro and charles grodden get separated it is heartbreaking okay so there's going to be a big thing real quick one of the

418. 3:56:21

     things we talk about is that every story is a love story so when he's saying that like this deep bond in love i think we typically think of love stories as being romances but every movie you ever watch is a love story sometimes it's between a man and his dog or the the father and a son or any it could be any of those things but at the core of it we only watch stories that make us feel that thing and it's love it's bonding it's other humans that do that

419. 3:56:45

     to us and if it's a good story we fall in love with the love story and it becomes important us obviously the best example is titanic that the success of them will be entirely driven by the success of that love story and how invested we get into it okay so there's going to be a big fight at the resolution let's say they actually lose the near tokens and that's not so important they resolve the problem with

420. 3:57:09

     the near tokens so the galaxy isn't still in danger but most importantly they get together they're reunited and uh we feel a sense of justice we feel great about it the tag is going to be setting up a sequel now there's a third person who's gonna make off with these near tokens and the next movie next issue next episode kevin hart and his brother together are going to have to go

421. 3:57:33

     after this person who now has the near tokens we're going a little fast so we're skipping over maybe a couple women maybe a femme fatale a twist here where um something or someone is not what you'd expect maybe the near tokens aren't actually tokens they turn out to be an atomic power source that can destroy the universe maybe the person who is helping kevin hart a woman who appears to be a love interest who knows where the brother is turns out to actually be the bad guy maybe we could flip it so there's two women one appears

422. 3:58:05

     to be the bad guy one appears to be super sweet turns out they're the reverse a lot of movies do that they turn out really really great so we want to keep the audience on their toes keep them since they know what the genre is they understand how it has to end you have a contract with your audience super important if you see the trailers for a movie when you buy a ticket for a movie you know exactly what's going to happen it's a horror movie you know everybody's going to die but one person that person is going to

423. 3:58:36

     fight the bad guy and survive it's a romantic comedy you know that if they're not going to get together they're the person you're invested in is going to find love and that might seem to be something that would like undercut the fun of the story but it's not it's the it's the resolution it's everything coming together the way you feel you need it to come together that's so satisfying which

424. 3:58:59

     is why avengers infinity war leaving it at that break was so upsetting to you and you needed to see avengers end game so badly to see all this resolved um the structure i'm talking about the three parts that's actually each of the third three acts has three act structure the marvel the 22 movie thing has three act structure each movie has three act structure each act in the movie has a three-act structure beginning a middle and an end introducing a problem confronting the problem escalating

425. 3:59:33

     stakes resolving the problem um so anyway the contract with the audience is that we know how it's going to end and the writer's job is to get it to be the most unexpected way to get there and to make sure that this low point feels as though you absolutely have no way to get there um so that's basic story structure i've taught it to you right now mastering it could take a lifetime doing it really well is the difference between a really crappy movie and a really great movie and when we're building movies we're building television we're building

426. 4:00:04

     any kind of story we start with that kind of outline he you know our whole house we're married our whole house is filled with boards and he you know i always know what he's working on because i can walk in the room and i can see him messing around with the board trying to put the puzzle pieces together because there really is a lot of math and story and once you know it you can play around with it and you can break it a little bit but again if you break that contract

427. 4:00:27

     with the audience people get mad they don't enjoy that movie a lot of times we try to make a movie where we break that contract and then we go to testing and then we unbreak that contract and we give people what they want which is that the ending that feels satisfying yeah and it may seem like something like this will result in formulaic stories but it's not really it's an impossible structure to break when you hear a writer getting writer's block it's

428. 4:00:50

     because they've lost faith in this they've lost confidence in it they think it's not good enough but the truth of the matter is the best stories of all time fit right into this structure any working story any will fit into this structure it's just a matter of how well you do it so we're going to talk a little bit about armored kingdom about this for just a second yeah go ahead i just want to say some of you may not be writers you you may you know we're talking about how to write a story but this same information

429. 4:01:16

     is good for you to process a tv show or a movie that you watched and figure out why did i love this movie so much and why do i not love that movie so that you when you're talking to your friends you can explain oh this is why this worked for me or this is why this didn't work for me um we talked about transference for a moment we're gonna keep going back to to raiders and and the various of the three movies in the

430. 4:01:40

     indiana jones franchise and i insist there are three movies in the in the jones franchise in the third movie um the the dad is obsessed with getting the the holy grail and his moment of transference is when he tells henry he tells henry jones indiana let it go son right but at the same time the other person who is obsessed with the grail is is the german the bad guy and he can't let it go and it ends up costing him his life so that would be a

431. 4:02:11

     key moment in our story here would be the villain that kevin hart's brother is trying to keep the near tokens away from ends up getting the near tokens and being then sucked into the black hole because he could not let it go right that is that sort of moment so when when you watch a movie you say wow this movie was really great if you can think back to this and you're sitting around with your friends and they're like oh i love that movie they don't

432. 4:02:35

     know why you can actually break it down and be like oh well see here's i'm a genius because i sat in on this thing at the near conference you know here's why this worked and here's why this didn't work or or you see a movie in it everything seems to be going great but then at the last second it just peters out you can be like i know where it failed if we didn't get that satisfying ending that we expected yeah and a lot of this is you know comes like straight from joseph campbell too who stole from

433. 4:02:58

     aristotle i don't know um but it's this classic hero's journey and i think armored kingdom is sort of exactly that classic hero's journey and we'll be taking the story that they're building in the comic books and in the animated series which we'll probably give you spoilers on now why not um on what that plot looks like let's do it um and then we can we'll be informing our game play with story and storing this informing

434. 4:03:22

     the story with gameplay so that's been that's that's kind of the fun part that we have where we can like have games and stories tie in together really well but you want to talk like really quickly about the hero's journey like our world and our yeah well let me i'll break down the world how about that so well one last thing just about this and actually brian brought it up because he said let it go it made me think of it the clarity of of of your character's intentions has a lot to do with how effective your

435. 4:03:48

     story is and you can boil that down to movies made for kids specifically the disney movies the musicals now something complex that might be too complex for kids schindler's list or the english patient or or the green book or something like that malcolm x you're going to find complex stories but if you boil them down for kids what you've got is characters who are so emotional and they

436. 4:04:12

     feel so strongly that they have to sing about it right if you are writing a musical you've never written a musical before you talk to a musical writer they'll tell you the musical numbers come at the moments where the characters have such strong emotions they just can't just talk about it they have to sing about it and in my screen running classes the first class i talk about frozen a lot and the idea of

437. 4:04:34

     let it go this is a personal manifesto and it's super effective to know your character's personal manifesto inside and out and have them always working towards it consciously or subconsciously elsa in frozen wants to let go of the bonds that keep her from using her powers to feel good about herself to um self-actualize stories are very much about self-actualizing as well maybe you have somebody who's in the closet and wants to come out that's self-actualization so

438. 4:05:07

     if you go home and watch a disney musical one of the better ones notice where and when the characters sing and how it illustrates their intentions and how that guides you through the story so the writer is taking you by the hand leading you through the ideas they want you to understand and where they want your emotions to go the best stories are told by writers who know exactly where

439. 4:05:30

     they're guiding you so you can close your eyes and follow it and feel the connections make sense in your heart okay so let's talk about army kingdom so in armored kingdom uh right now we oh we have a question yes i'm gonna i'm gonna come closer oh nope lindsay's gonna bring me a microphone yes do you have tips on how to use this for uh marketing storytelling sure yeah yeah i mean obviously you don't have 90 minutes but it's the same thing you you want to have a character if you think of um

440. 4:06:01

     commercials that are fantastic uh they're the ones where you you meet someone real quick you instantly know who that person is you instantly know what they want you instantly you know you see them trying to get it and and getting along the way i'm trying to think of of of a recent good commercial i keep going back to the the well the budweiser commercials at christmas are the best commercials for this oh yeah you have absolute three-act structure

441. 4:06:23

     yeah you know what a kid a commercial for christmas toy right you set up the commercials for the kid to get go tell their parents to get them this toy the parent comes and looks at the commercial 30 seconds the commercial is going to introduce the toy it's going to show the kid playing with the toy feeling so good about it the parent makes that connection i desperately need to get this toy from

442. 4:06:47

     my kid i need this to work out low point the the toy is low in supply you have to go to the store to get it whatever the case is they're threatening the parent about what will happen if they don't get this toy at the end of the 30-second commercial they leave you with a cliffhanger at the low point you don't have this toy you got to get your ass to the toy store to get this toy for your

443. 4:07:11

     kid and so it's it's your own adventure to fulfill this goal and you won't feel resolved until you've got that toy for your kid right yeah but it's the same thing you know you've got the you got to you set up a problem you set the i want of this character of what they that what they want is to solve their problem and then you show them that you've got the solution to their problem or that you know yeah or just boy we're really hungry yeah i'm really hungry what do we

444. 4:07:34

     have for snacks oh we have you know broccoli and we have tomatoes and we have this the super yum cookie super yum cookie yay it's the same thing it's we have a need we're not gonna get it we are gonna get it hallelujah but also on a more complex level the structure i just gave you is also the structure of an apple keynote speech it's here's here's the introduction here's your life as it is it's normal it's boring here's the

445. 4:07:58

     iphone 14. here's how it can improve your life here's why you absolutely need it here's everything it's going to do for you from new apps through this through that but here's how it's going to improve your life with these new apps right here is how much it's going to cost which is a low point right but then here it's going to be like but you can get it on september 14th and everybody's gonna like

446. 4:08:20

     and so at the end it's gonna leave you and then steve jobs used to always say one more thing that was the tag at the end that got you so excited for the sequel for whatever the last thing is marvel does that so well that gets you so excited for the sequel um that you just leave the theater needing what's next meaning what's more also one last thing i forgot to mention the very last moment of your story of your movie of your keynote presentation

447. 4:08:45

     whatever it is that's what the audience is gonna walk out of the theater feeling right so for example i'm not gonna spoil it by now you should have seen it the sixth sense it's a very middling it's a good horror movie it's pretty good as i'm sure you're aware it has an incredible twist ending you walk out of the theater so invigorated by it that movie was nominated for an oscar for its screenplay for a movie that was 95

448. 4:09:10

     a fine somewhat actually boring horror movie the twist ending you leave the theater so excited oscar nomination yeah so yeah tr if you're doing a marketing presentation the last thing you say to your people your audience before you walk off the stage should be the most exciting invigorating thought leave them with that leave them thinking about that while you're walking off the stage now

449. 4:09:33

     watch me say something really dumb and self-deprecating before i walk up the stage right but anyway let's talk about arma kingdom because we're short on time so uh armored kingdom is a uh a it's our playground right this is a this is a world that hugh created um it's based on sort of four kingdoms that are sort of uh engaged in this sort of endless war right we have the humans we have the kingdom of the horn which are sort of

450. 4:09:56

     anthropomorphized animals you can see one of them here this is a guerrilla car it's a gorilla with four arms uh we have the kostraka who are an aquatic species and then we have the wari which are an offshoot of the humans who are um they can they can morph a little bit and they're uh they're non-binary they've kind of exceeded past gender as a concept because if you can constantly change what you look like it doesn't really matter

451. 4:10:20

     which of the two categories you are you're you're both of the categories so they live you know on this on this planet and this planet has this resource called armorite and it is the most precious most important resource possible um in in the distant past there was an advanced civilization that used armorite to make these phenomenal weapons uh they are long since gone but the people who live there now can use the

452. 4:10:47

     weapons but they can't actually mine armorite themselves they don't have the technology to process it so if you get a hold of these weapons it is game changing politically for your for your faction and also if you get hold of those weapons in car game that could be pretty cool yeah so um but as a result of this this uh this mineral that lives on the planet it has become sort of the focal point of the conflict of the planet so there's

453. 4:11:12

     this one sort of large deposit that the humans call mount shine that the kostraka call their uh their uh creation peak that the horn call the great horn it's a mountain of armorite and there is so armorite is our macguffin as alfred hitchcock said armorite in our world is what everybody's chasing in our movie we just did it was near tokens in armored kingdom it's armorite right so all the factions are after armorite um they're

454. 4:11:37

     after armorite artifacts they're after this stuff and what we've been doing in the comic book is establishing the world establishing sort of the history of that got us to this point giving you a little bit of uh information about each of these factions just kind of sort of their perspective the the costracka are very religious and um the fact that the the kingdom of the horn the animals live around the mountain deeply offends the castraca so there's

455. 4:12:01

     this sort of holy war going on uh for the costrack it's a holy war for the for the horn it's stop invading and killing us right for them it's a property war so i told you guys all stories are driven by conflict right conflict is best demonstrated in triangles because you can have any variation of pluses and minuses when you have two that aren't in sync you have conflict when you have two that are

456. 4:12:27

     in sync whether they're plus or they're minus they're getting along so you've got i'm married to lisa right so elise is up here i'm down here that's right brian is over here so in the best of all worlds we're all getting along but that's very boring so let's say i say something very stupid to piss off my wife now you've got minus here so we're not getting along lisa bryant lisa and i are both trying to convince brian that we're right so we're both trying to get

457. 4:12:58

     along with brian now you've got conflict so more familiarly you put han luke and leia and you've got the classic triumvirate that everybody understands and throughout the star wars trilogy these pluses and minuses are constantly shifting but you never have three pluses or three minuses or it gets very boring there's just nothing interesting except like the medal ceremony i'm sorry except at the medal ceremony

458. 4:13:30

     that's when everything feels good more often than not you've got han and leia not getting along and luke sort of trying to seduce leia and hans well han doesn't get along with anybody so but anyway point b so in our world we've got three factions that we have set upon each other in a conflict that cannot be resolved because there's religious undertones nobody's gonna give up on it so that's when i designed this world i'm thinking in terms of triangles

459. 4:13:56

     of conflict right and so the humans have the other problem of the fact that the costracka and the horn are both massively more powerful than the human than the human nation so the humans can't afford to go to war with either of them so they kind of want to keep the two of them fighting each other but then there's this one human king who is saying no this is this is the wrong thing we should have peace but no one will listen to him right um and his advisors are saying this is ridiculous this is stupid if we have peace we'll be

460. 4:14:27

     at four we'll be at three pluses there won't be conflict at which point something's going to shift and one of these two groups is going to come for us additionally if the costracka kill the horn the costracka can then afford to go kill the humans or if the horn kill the kostraka the corn can go kill the humans the humans need to keep everything sort of in balance well everything builds to a head so this massive war is about to happen and this is sort of the ending point of our first comic book where the human king has

461. 4:14:54

     begged them not to have this massive war he has failed the armies are charging towards each other and right at that moment pop up in the sky a spaceship comes in now the kingdoms of this planet are medieval right they have no they don't know planes they don't know spaceships for from anything all they know is this is a thing that they've never seen before and it's a potential danger to all of them so for the first time we have peace between between these

462. 4:15:19

     factions because we've added a different part to this this triangle it's a it's a a three-dimensional triangle where we now have this other faction the the aliens you can always add more so you put c3po in here you put and it could be an intangible idea death star plants whatever you could do you can add on to these triangles you just need three components to create conflict even if you've got a romantic comedy you've got harry and sally and the third part is

463. 4:15:52

     the idea of men and women just being friends right so all this is is to talk about the comic books the comic books are there to set up what will then launch us into the animated series and the animated series we're not going do we do we spoil the start of the animated series i think you can talk about what the start of it is i think so sure i mean i mean it's like this the high level log line part the key

464. 4:16:14

     sort of ending point of the comic book is uh that king who who brokered peace is assassinated thus potentially thrusting the planet back into war and his daughter who is the hero of our series is framed for the assassination so in the animated series we're following her and her best friends who are members of these different of these different factions as they're going to try and

465. 4:16:37

     prove her innocence they need to seek out information to prove her innocence and that's our animated series now that all lays the groundwork for the game where you as players if depending on which part of the game you're playing if you're playing pvp you're just a member of these factions and you're fighting against each other if you're playing the adventure you're playing as one of the heroes of our comic book and you're battling through sort of the events that you'll see in the animated series but then also little side adventures along

466. 4:17:03

     the way so that people don't don't have to run out what they're doing so that's how we're tying the whole thing together so let's say you're someone who who loves video games but you couldn't care less about an animated series you can read the comic you can play the video game let's say you're someone who loves animation and loves video games but doesn't care about comic books it's all still there for you um that's the whole point of armored kingdom as far as the near platform is as much engagement as

467. 4:17:27

     you want to put into it you can find a home there through web 3 through near through the game and and you know because