Layer 2 Stage | NEARly There: Emerging Use Cases and Possibilities

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   we are doing a little bit of change we're done with the operating advice for now but we have a really fun format coming up now we call this a fishbowl format so it's going to be very interactive with the audience so please be attentive um be ready to maybe contribute to the conversation so we're going to be talking about emerging use cases and possibilities moderating the panel will be Danny from meta web Ventures and as always fun fact about

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   Dany she actually knows five languages a lot more than me please welcome Danny thank you will awesome I want to bring onto the stage today um four amaz sorry three amazing panelists so we have um Momo from near task Zoe from glass and Angeli from collab land come on join us on the stage super um so Momo Zoe ah and G great okay so as will mentioned today we'll be be a little bit interesting because um we're trying something called a fishbowl

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   session which means this is your Fishbowl we are your Fishbowl um and it is interactive and open so I'm going to start with some questions for our panelists here but if you in the audience feel that you have a question or you can contribute to this discussion please come up to the front and I will hand you a microphone to participate in the conversation and then you will rotate out and another Community member can step in and be part of this conversation and you can ask these wonderful panelist questions or you can

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   respond to one of my questions and uh we really want to be very open and inviting because this is a um Founders focused session and we just want to have a b of fun here so yeah welcome to the adventure all right so um we want to get started by U maybe having each one of you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the project that you're working on maybe Momo you can kick us

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   off sure thanks for having me hello everybody um it's great to be back here at newon beautiful Lisbon um so my name is momar rocki I'm a software engineer I work at a company called near tasks it's basically a continuation of the work that the founders of near protocol itself were working on which is creating uh technologies that converge between Ai and blockchain so in this case what near task does is connects AI companies who

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   want to train their models with data and uh create markets uh for labeling and producing that data with uh people all around the world so it's a gig uh economy model awesome Zoe great hi everyone excited for the uh interactive nature of this session uh I'm the founder and CEO of glass which is a web 3 loyalty and engagement platform for the 1 .6 trillion alcohol industry um so the alcohol industry faces uh two major problems one of which is the fragmentation of sales channels

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   across bars restaurants liquor stores sports stadiums music festivals uh glass gives uh these Brands the tools to build uh on chain direct onetoone digital relationships with consumers uh so that consumers can earn uh and redeem rewards across these channels for uh enjoying drinks and uh driving healthy in-person social occasions with their friends uh the alcohol industry also faces a very complex regulatory environment uh in

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   terms of age restrictions uh restrictions that vary by country and region around the types of uh Loyalty Rewards and marketing that brands are able to offer uh so by bringing this activity on chain we're also able to create a clear uh transparent record of safety and compliance that that makes Brands and Regulators more comfortable uh and more enthusiastic about G driving this value to uh to Consumers for the first

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   time that was awesome hi I'm Angelia young I am the co-founder and the chief Community officer for collab land collab is a tokenized community management system we started about three and a half years ago almost four years ago now um with just a single Dow and now Support over 53,000 communities over Telegram and Discord nft communities defi communities investment groups gaming Major Brands um anyone who wants to create a community

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    in in crypto or with tokens use cabine wonderful so kind of to get started here um when a lot of us started the premise of uh web 3 was to build a brand new web to change the world to to build something better better than what was currently in place and we've spent a lot of time building infrastructure which is great um and today we're here to talk about well what comes after infrastructure so what are those use cases um Zoe maybe you can kick us off a little bit of talking about what you imagine people could do and Founders

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    could work on that goes beyond building infrastructure great question uh completely agree I think we've seen a lot of time recreating uh existing systems in web 3 for the sake of web 3 without solving true underlying uh consumer needs so in terms of uh topics to focus on for emerging Founders I think you know of course starting always with the consumer problem rather than the solution focusing on problems where the underlying web 3 technology can

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    truly solve the problem in a new way that wasn't possible in web 2 um and then within that I think looking at industries that are very uh that are fragmented that are UND digitized today in web to alcohol certainly being one of them uh before launching glass I uh spent a number of years at ABN Bev the world's largest Beer Company where I saw firsthand uh just how little consumer connection even massive Brands like Budweiser Stella Artois really had um

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    but beyond of course food and beverage uh there are a lot of other industries that are today in web 2 separated from the consumer uh this includes Sports we've seen a lot of exciting activity there uh sports teams are dependent historically dependent on uh the broadcasters and the networks to reach their fans tokens Can power that direct connection uh things like the music industry uh where artists often don't know who their end listeners are we've

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    also seen a lot of exciting emerging use cases there uh restaurants uh Blackbird is an exciting project that we're uh tracking at glass um that's really cool a lot of like loyalty programs a lot of consumer um Focus sort of platforms um Momo I think you've explored quite a few use cases within um that space what what are some of the ideas the dreams the possibilities that people could sort of lean into yeah sure so I've been around

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    as long as you have um we've seen a lot of different kinds of use cases uh royalties platforms for Creative output like music we saw prediction markets we saw supply chain um products and everything in between I've worked personally on um ethereum analytics products I worked on infrastructure at Avalanche and at near I've been working on uh an nft platform for creators and now I'm working on this on this AI Marketplace for in the gig

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    economy sense but the most recent use case that I thought was very poignant if like incredibly humble and and and primitive is that I had a software engineer friend who was laid off recently and just to help him out I sent him some crypto and so you know I think to myself like that was incredibly easy um you take it for granted it's primitive of just transferring value but if you take that

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    idea and you are someone who has migrated to another country and then you want to send some money back home to your family this is a remittance and crypto is just incredible for that basic idea um so beyond all the applications and all the programmatic things that you layer on top of that um I think you know I I just had a realization like it's pretty incredible that you can just do that so simply so in spite of all of like the ux hurdles that I think we've all experienced along the way there're just like little

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    moments where you realize it's kind of happening it works Works um yeah you're touching on a really good point which is sort of the globalization um of probably Capital um and and information that is being triggered by this movement um historically there definitely has been a barrier between countries right where um you know you have to go through a Forex to make sure that things move in and out

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    um and now we can we have this concept of a universal currency right that could move across borders um how do you think that that's going to play out in terms of like things people can build on top of that so if that's the Primitive what comes on top of it yeah so the currency has like a ven mode that could work for everyone right yeah exactly I mean I can't use venmo with my friends who are in like Paris right right exactly I mean

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    I think it's just going to enable new connections new webs of relationships um you meet somebody you know I mean the crypto has the property that it's pseudonymous your counterparties are people that you don't even know so what you're basically doing is creating new connections between people you have never ever met before and I think that kind of territorial like sovereignty border uh starts to dissipate a little bit becomes a little bit more dispersed a little bit more intangible more

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    invisible um because I mean these Technologies are trustless so before you used to have these more face-to-face relationships like and you still need that like with VMO when you send money to someone you want to confirm if they actually are who they are so you get a list of identities you know who is the right Danario enter her know mobile phone number to confirm you still have to do

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    those checks um so it's this balance that you have to play with the all of the anonymity and the kind of identity like Labyrinth um endemic to this technology ology uh with like a verification so trust is still required um but this just kind of opens the playing field a little bit yeah that's really cool and um Angie I know that I mean I think to this day collab bland is probably still the platform I think has

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    the most users I've ever heard of in web 3 like like I think you talked about millions of users yeah last time I checked it was 2.9 Million unique users that's incredible um and so from that like what are you seeing from the emerging kind of use cases or the large communities that are really popping up like you know what's what's really like what's happening what's cool yeah it's really

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    interesting because we've been thinking a lot this year about like what do our members want compared to like what do the admins and the communities want we call our service an eight course meal the way it is right now for our communities as a whole for our administrators and we're buil we've built a minap Marketplace for communities so there's all types of apps that you can oneclick install into

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    collab land so we've like Taken good care of the admins and that that train is already going where people new developers out there can build little mini apps for collab and communities but what can we do for members and we've been really focusing on like really just this question of emerging use cases and kind of touching on what Momo had said as well which is what people want is to be able to transact simply with each

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    other sometimes in a community context sometimes not in a community context but being able to tip each other being able to trade together being able to buy and sell from each other being able to exchange value is key right now tipping one is interesting cuz we saw like Reddit triy to do it and obviously you know patreon has has a version of this how are you seeing this concept of like

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    um fans or community members supporting their Community like how is that playing out yeah so we've had a like pilot program for tipping for over two years now and so we have about 75 communities that we've been watching using a specialized private beta Alpha collab land tipping and those are the communities that are the most engaged when members admins get to say hey thanks for that tweet that you sent and it brought in a couple more members or thanks for helping someone else on board

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    into the group when there were no mods in the group at that time so it's like that type of Goodwill sharing and combining that with reputation sharing anything that can be trackable on chain is of tremendous value right now I like the idea of um tipping as a curation sort of indicator because if you look at something like I don't know crypto Twitter right it's like so much clutter and uh and things surface because of whatever algorithm is in place but I think having to put money behind

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    something is like the ultimate curation right you're like you're like do I like this enough to spend a dollar on it yes it's like the answer is probably no for most things and then for the things that you do you're like yeah actually I I want to like give you know a little a little hat tip to this and say like good post or good story or yeah I I'm with you um and I think that you know what you mentioned about like actually

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    transferring value or subscriptions even like you see Instagram using subscriptions really well I'm definitely a fan of them and there are plenty of creators especially ones that are like Recycling and reusing old clothing and turning them into something new I like subscribe to all of them I don't have time to watch them all but I'm happy they exist and so in the same way it's like if you're seeing someone do something that you believe in and want to encourage like that's a great way to

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    do it right okay that's really cool so um Zoe can you tell us a little bit about some of the like some of the use cases you're seeing in the Loyalty space you you talked a little bit about um you know blackw obviously and uh and even beyond the the use cases like what do you think people should be building that would be really cool yeah um I think and so we're seeing of course a lot of of web three activity in the Loyalty space

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    um some of that does relate to tipping giving people more personalized ways to support uh the projects and individual creators and even brands that they feel more emotionally connected to um I think one of the most uh exciting potential use cases or I'd love to see more activity is that focus on so driving social experience expences both virtually and in person through these web three communities uh one of the ways and actually I'd be interested to hear folks thoughts on uh social Dows which

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    were big uh one of my the areas I was initially most excited about in the world of web 3 giving folks an ownership stake in their communities incentivizing them to build together uh we've seen those start to yeah no no I think this is a good question does anyone know anything about social Dows or social apps anyone want to come up here no come on June let's go yes all right Zoe's question social

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    Dows social apps all right I was an early FWB member so maybe I can contribute perfect what what's the question oh just curious um for your thoughts on you know I think there was a lot of excitement uh one to two years ago we've seen this I'd say fade a little bit in terms of uh being first and foremost and in folks Consciousness so what do you think these social Dows can do better uh do you see more future opportunities for growth yeah you know I mean I sort of got into that whole thing and I think Andre you you'll have a lot

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    of insights based on collab land data on a lot of this but I got into the whole thing through what we were calling at the time personal tokens so like anyone can roll your own token and issue a token so like I issued a token if you go on Unis swap today you can still buy June token there's very little liquidity hit me up for an OTC deal um but um you know so so there was that idea and then it was like oh well instead of individuals issuing tokens groups can issue tokens and so then you ended up

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    with things like FWB but then I think that kind of petered out because I think the the token incentives were not well aligned there was a lot of issues like you know like another subset of this is like uh fan tokens right so like you're you're an artist you have tokens you issue them but then to get any exit liquidity you're dumping on your fans right so there's an issue there but then I think recently um I was playing with

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    friend Tech and I think that solved a few of the issues like one of them is like you know initially as a creator with tokens it's very hard to distribute them and get them into the hands of fans like you have to somehow send them around um and then two once they're in the hands of the fans there's very little reason for them to pick pay them back to you right so the utility problem so I think fch solved two of those

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    things because the moment you go in um first is denominated an eth of course there's your keys but they don't you know they're not ERC 20s um and then secondly there's straight away some utility right there's a reason to give it back which is to join to buy the keys to join that chat room um so I think things like that show that there's some progression in um the social token use

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    case but um yeah I would love to hear sorry yeah from I'm already miked yeah I mean it is an Incredible use case especially because of royalties and we talked a little bit about royalties but royalties are really foundational to how the nft boom came about and how we attract creators into this space and so with the frch situation and really with frch clones all over frch is not only just a standalone app now it's become its own movement in the same way that

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    you would start an nft community you wouldn't think oh that's a copy of Bard ape no it's its own Standalone movement and in the same way we're going to start seeing more of these social fi um apps take off as well which I'm so excited about because removal of royalties from a third party like open sea or magic Eden or blur or whatever like that's just been such a huge detriment we definitely need a native token where we

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    can have our royalties built in from scratch and that nobody can take away so I'm very excited 100% And I think that was one of the more interesting things for me um with how near was built is because I think that royalties are built in at the protocol level but I'm not an engineer so may me Momo can talk about that royalties built into the protocol level yeah um well you can you can

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    Implement royalties at any point you can if you wanted to implement royalties at the protocol level where for every you know action where you transfer value you can just divert some money to another address you know in some proportion I mean it's a simp simple as that it's just a option that you would add to your code and you can do that at any point you can do it within your application if

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    you believe it's important to do it uh at the protocol you do that I mean like staking in waying in a way is it's kind of like the same pattern you know so you have a pool of money some of it goes here most of it goes there of course of course but like how would an artist like you know if you if you are putting forth an NFD collection right and you um you want to defend against the fact that maybe like you know uh an nft

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    Marketplace might decide in a in you know 6 months that you were very successful and they're not going to pay you anymore how would you implement that from the beginning to say blockchain has this potential for being you know immutable and we're setting the rules in the smart contract from the start and like this is my deal like I am going to have this amount of royalties and I don't want anyone to change my artist you know stipulation how does that work

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    it's about the asset itself so if you're a market place and assets come in and they're being provisioned or created by some other entity um you don't necessarily have authorship over this thing so if you program the asset to become smart as it were and to say for each time you transfer this asset you must you know do that proportional like transfer value that's how you enforce it so it's about in kind of empowering or like authoring

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    or creating strong permissions around the object itself not the platform through which it uh transfers that makes sense um is anyone in the audience like an nft Creator or are working in that space like have you experienced all right let's go Eric took stage please quick introdu introduction and tell us a little bit about your experience there sure uh hey I'm Eric Wier I'm the CTO of pagota but I was previously at Nifty Gateway with to n

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    Marketplace collab on that um yeah so the one of the issues here is that if you have like there's a financial incentive to avoid royalties to avoid being a part of the community if you have a gift feature on your asset then people can abuse that gift feature to sort of make an OTC trade go around the marketplace or even build a Marketplace that that uses that feature at the contract level to systematically avoid royalties and so there's no the PayPal friends and family

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    option yeah um and so I think the the like pushing the fact that it's it's really hard to take it off the honor System and keep really preent prevent somebody from working around the system but if you make it um either uh an aspect of social shame where people are going to not use your platform or not to use your PL like not use your uh your token if you're working around that or even even the legal process like that's how royalties work in the Fiat world well what about buying and selling into

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    the bonding curve like with friendtech right like let's not sell to each other what if we're all selling into something else that's a way to enforce royalties it sort of aligns the incentive so that there's not this constant like you know when you've got these these these businesses competing they're going to try to get every L to zero they can absolutely that's right did you feel like as as a Marketplace did you feel pressure to like race to the bottom

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    because like places like blur we're removing royalties and nobody could stand for Creator royalties or like how did that play out absolutely absolutely and so um what we did at Nifty gateways we tried to take a hard stance that we were going to continue to support Creator royalties on the secondary market and um and sort of put that stake in the ground to um which which was you know it helped because it

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    brought artists to us and it brought people who cared about this to us and so it it's a way of separating it was a method of that social shaming saying look like if you care about this industry if you care about this art if you care about this work if you care about these artists come here um if you're trying to make a quick Buck go there you'll run off to AI when the crypto boom busts you know Eric I think about like tipping in the US I know in

52. 24:12

    the EUR in Europe we don't do it but like if you can't afford to tip 20% you don't go out to dinner that's exactly like it's social shame right there it's built in but it's definitely not true globally so then you end up with like cultural differences as well yeah but if people care about the product they'll they'll do the I'm with you awesome thank you Eric yeah Momo please yeah so

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    I uh because Zoe Works in alcohol industry I was curious about this but and on the topic of tipping again this is perhaps a US cultural thing but so in restaurants wine and alcohol and Spirits have the highest markup that's the margin primarily for the restaurant um how much should one ought to tip on you know something like wine I'm not sure I mean I tip you know 20% not to like virtue signal or anything like that but

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    like you know I can also understand if most of your bill is like a very expensive bottle of wine it's like again not me but it's like a domain D ran ETI it's like a $20,000 bottle of wine again I don't know never sat at that kind of dinner table but what do you do in that case and also wine is super interesting cuz it has these components not only that it's you know it's the margin for the very end of the supply chain the restaurant which makes it Allen happened

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    there but in the beginning there's also the wine maker and then there's all these people in between you know the Distributors the geologists who are doing all those things there's like supply chain aspects of it which is like where are the grapes grown what is the terroir so to speak um like you can use blockchain to like like I see all of these adjacencies in something like wine um because it it has these supply chain

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    mechanics it has this idea of Providence you know you can also use it as a financial investment um but you have have to ensure the quality of the wine like is maintained under proper temperatures blah blah blah over time so like it retains its value so I'm just kind of curious like where all these things intersect yeah um well there there's a lot there in that question um in terms of tipping as an early stage founder

57. 26:15

    certainly not buying those $20,000 bottles but uh the tip when you when you tip that does go directly to the server and the weight staff that's not money that flows back to the wine producer that's too I mean you know there I mean this is not web three related at all but um there's a lower minimum wage for servers in the US which is I think terrible um and they rely on those tips for their income so I think it's very

58. 26:40

    important to tip um and to to tip well um in terms of the uh the flow of value what glass is really focused specifically on is the massive waste in advertising spend that these alcohol Brands spend uh alcohol Brands spend $8 billion per year year on Advertising that's almost entirely topped down and for that same amount of money you know one of my kind of aha moments at uh when I was at ABN Bev was seeing that for the $10 million that a brand will drop for a

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    30 second Super Bowl ad they could instead support half a million people actually hosting Super Bowl watch parties bringing their friends together in their homes creating these amazing in-person social occasions that are really what uh drinks are all about um and really getting to that I think to get back to you know first principles and kind of how web 3 is solving underlying problems we're in the midst of a a global loneliness crisis that's

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    something that's a worldwide issue I think you know this is how I got interested in Social Dows and kind of structuring these communities um but to see brands that are dependent on people getting together to socialize in person spending money on ads instead of money on supporting those occasions uh was a major problem that that I see web 3 can fix in the alcohol space but also across

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    uh other social platforms that yeah that's really cool I hear I hear all of you talking about sort of web 3 empowering communities and that maybe being sort of the Breakthrough of like going from the individual to the collective um and and um how do some of these watch parties happen this is kind of cool are you saying that like Brands like a inev will pay me to host a party for my friends yeah exactly that's the vision um it's you know I mean cool use

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    case just FYI yes um that right for that you know $10 million send send you a gift card that you can use to buy drinks buy snacks buy maybe some games to play with your friends things that really strengthen your in-person social relationships give you that push to you know when there's Netflix and there's Tinder and there's all these you know drains on our attention that do make it harder for us to get out there and socialize in person um these brands that these industries

63. 28:58

    that existentially depend on that socializing can I think do a lot more to directly support that that's really awesome and um speaking of communities Angie um which communities have you seen sort of grow the largest or have the most activity in sort of that collab land sphere oh boy that's a good one I mean every single week we're watching well before I want to just say something about Momo's topic sorry um I was just thinking blockchain fixes that doesn't

64. 29:23

    it like you pay in crypto and then the smart contract like distributes the money to the wine maker and to the delivery person and to the label maker and like all across the the supply chain like oh why don't we have that already yeah like it's baked into the price of the bottle like on the wine list right but you know the things that come on top like the Tipping like maybe like I don't know like should that go all to the

65. 29:48

    restaurant I don't know I mean or should it more the lne maker yeah I want that I want it to go back all the way to the people that are squashing the gra yeah cuz it's it's all people working together right and you have this like one commodity but to get from commodity to like the point of service you know there's all these intermediaries and yeah it's just like right now it's not captured like the the

66. 30:12

    well an opportunity the supply chain aspect of supply chain but also the opportunity of who gets to be a server in a nicer restaurant that serves $20,000 bottles of wine there's a little bit of a genetic Lottery that's involved there and where you live and you look like and all of that and so or maybe how you were educated and it's just like if we're trying to level the playing field here and if we're trying to give more

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    opportunity to people at every level every social class across the world with any level of Education despite where you were born and how who you were born to like wouldn't