CENTER STAGE - DAY 2 - Erik Trautman: Key Note

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

1. 0:04

   all right so without further ado um we have eric troutman ceo of the near foundation uh with a keynote speech on the state of the near ecosystem and the things to come so eric welcome to the stage how's everyone doing i guess it's still early after last night so thus far you've you've had a chance to hear from a lot of people across a lot of different spectra uh you've had people talking about technology you've had people talking about products about nfts about art and i think all of these are fantastic

2. 0:50

   avenues to explore in greater depth what's going on inside the near ecosystem uh what i wanted to do is actually cover something that's a little bit different it's a little bit softer but that doesn't mean that it doesn't actually tie down to the details of what you've seen in these other talks so we're going to get a little bit weird so really what i what i want to dive into is basically what is the weird

3. 1:14

   stuff that sets near apart like why why why is it that that this is actually the right ecosystem for all of this to occur why is it that this is the place where this vision is going to go and why is it that everyone is here the most important question is actually bigger than the details when i talk to people so this is this is the first major in-person event that we've had in two years for the new ecosystem and the first one that that probably most people

4. 1:41

   here i've ever been to because two years ago the ecosystem was approximately 25 people and so this is where it gets a little weird so the book that that you could see up there it's called home for a bunny and that was that was actually the first book that i ever read aloud and it's a story of a bunny it's about 24 pages long it's a story of a bunny who goes looking for a home and it tries out it talks to the toad it talks to the birds it talks to

5. 2:14

   uh all sorts of animals and it can't find its home until the very end when it finds another rabbit and ends up in a rabbit hole and they live happily ever after um and i think what's important here is that when i talk to people and i ask them why is it that you're here why is this actually an interesting place for you to be a part of they don't talk about scalable technology they don't talk about sharding they don't talk

6. 2:38

   about anything what they talk about is energy what they say is that this is the place where it actually feels like it used to feel back in the day this is what it feels like this is what it felt like 10 years ago in the technology industry so i don't know when everyone here kind of got involved but for me my journey came through finance and that's a very different world and when i first took a step away from

7. 3:03

   finance the first thing that i did was i went to a meet up this was in houston texas in probably 2011. and the difference that i experienced talking to people in the tech industry versus people in the finance industry was mind-blowing because we walked in and the first thing that people wanted to know was how can i help what are you building oh that's cool how can we how can we collaborate what are you working on right like that energy that energy was

8. 3:25

   something that was so special 10 years ago and i think in the ensuing decade it's actually it's it's been harder and harder to capture that feeling in the traditional tech industry uh this is you know we went through the mobile revolution we went through social and i think we've gotten to the point where everyone is acknowledged to some degree or another that we've topped out in a lot of places in traditional technology and more importantly culturally it's actually become almost antagonistic to some of the things that

9. 3:50

   that everyone who is in that early days actually fundamentally believed so i think what i want to emphasize here is that we're all kind of looking for a home as well everyone here is an investor you're an investor of your time you're an investor of your attention and everyone here whether whether it's explicit or implicit you're kind of looking for the right place for you to invest your energy for you to to create the future that you want

10. 4:15

    and that's because all of us are impatient we're here because it's still early days right this is where if you were patient you would wait until this was already built and then you'd use it but this is where we're builders and building building doesn't necessarily just mean developers it doesn't necessarily just mean uh technologists it means everyone who wants to be a part of of constructing a

11. 4:39

    bigger vision and making that into a reality and we're impatient and that's why that's why we're in this so what is that vision so basically everyone here has has probably your own version of what that looks like um you know very rarely would i expect anyone here to sort of explicitly say well what we're looking for is a world where we give back control it's a world where we give people control of their assets of their data or of their power of governance and in some ways those are almost buzz words at this point

12. 5:11

    and it can be hard to parse what those actually mean um but in the end when you look at it when everything rolls up that's actually what we're going for and this kind of takes us back to that bigger vision that sense of of like what are we building something that's collaborative are we building something that's life-affirming are we building something that's net positive for the world

13. 5:29

    and it's real too it's not just abstract and i think the place where it where it becomes real right now at least in the last year we've seen this develop more and more is in the creator economy and so what we have here is is essentially the triangle that sort of defines what are the key components that make up the creator economy and so that control it starts on the top with creators with nfts nfts are just a container right it's a container where you can put ip in and

14. 5:53

    when you give creators back their control of their ip suddenly everything everything becomes possible in a way that it wasn't before communities so dows daos and fungible tokens the ability the ability to uh create new toolkits for communities uh and organize them around common causes that's something that's new that's something that's real and that's giving control to communities and that's giving communities the ability to actually uh

15. 6:18

    become real almost like real co-ops in a way that hasn't been possible before which allows them to organize which allows them to take on business models which allows them to be bigger than just a meetup group or a facebook group that's that's on someone else's platform and of course underneath all of this is finance and the control theirs is giving people control to take their money where they want and that's also that's obviously something that's been spoken about a lot in the blockchain space but it's also fundamental to the creator economy

16. 6:43

    because of course that's what kind of lubricates everything underneath the surface it makes it possible to have an economy so the vision isn't necessarily new we've heard a lot of this before if you're around in 2017 which which most of you probably at least saw saw the edges of it whether or not you experienced it directly we had a lot of these great ideas and i say we as just sort of a general collective as an industry a lot of these

17. 7:07

    ideas have been around for a long time and the problem was the technology wasn't really there and so what's different though is scale what's different is the ability to actually take on and and realize this vision at a scale that wasn't possible before in 2017 we kind of got over our skis did a bit of a face plant uh that's okay but we're coming back and ultimately that's actually what nira is here for

18. 7:32

    um so near near is basically uh the substrate the the the network that's designed to support that vision of the new future and it's a lot of things it's not just the technology it's bigger and that i think is one of the things that i want to i want to really emphasize here and i'll talk about the technology because it's still important but here's more than that and it's about it's about bringing us back to the days

19. 7:58

    when we could imagine a new future when we could when we could actually participate in something that was bigger and we could feel like we were doing good by doing that and i think the key part here is is also just a bit of a checkpoint because even though we were ahead of ourselves in 2017 it's still early web 3 is basically the size of a zit on the sun compared to the real web um it's the major opportunity is is in

20. 8:21

    web 2 not web 3 right now it's sort of merging the two it's it's how do we make sure that web 3 is actually the the underpinning of the broader web 2. um but we haven't we haven't even gotten close um the prize is huge the prize is is is billions of people and giving them the same thing giving them the power giving them control i don't know if you're familiar with the crossing the chasm model i think at this point it's it's become pretty ubiquitous but it's basically the idea that markets have to go through stages

21. 8:52

    and i think what's what's not what's not in this model is is the optimism of of people in the markets and assuming that they've crossed far further than we actually have and we see that again and again and of course i i i live on optimism as much as everyone else does but in terms of being realistic i think it's also healthy for us to understand that this is early and even though even though the eventual prize is a billion people

22. 9:16

    we have a lot of work to do to get there and that's okay because what's cool about that is that the people in this room the people in this ecosystem the people in this community are the ones who are actually going to take us there that means that there's opportunity it means this hasn't been done yet and there's so much opportunity inherent in all of that we've we've made skirmishes

23. 9:32

    across the chasm we we've seen nfts break through the mainstream front page of new york times we've seen um we've seen for instance nba topshop we got a lot of people coming out of the the consumer web starting to try these things out play to earn axe infinity all of this i think of these as almost skirmishes because because they're sort of they're like proofs of concept that busted through um but they never but they still haven't

24. 9:56

    fully fully landed that beachhead and gotten us to the point where your brother your mother anybody is is just onboarding to this stuff using it and using it every day uh and the other thing worth noting though is is this is actually where it does come back to technology because the tooling or the uh the underlying technology matters we've already seen the limitations of a lot of platforms that have come before and we're not even

25. 10:21

    close to where we need to be so it's something worth keeping in mind that that this is a long-term game and the design decisions that are made early are the ones that actually bear fruit years down the road when you start when you start to see limitations in certain design decisions and you start to see limitations in certain cultural decisions and that's why it's so important that in early days that this this group that we're able to kind of align behind the right things

26. 10:45

    and so i think all this really starts with first principles and so to get to a billion you have to keep it simple and you have to you have to really work backwards from first principles and so for us that's been pretty obvious from day one i mean we got our start in uh in san francisco and the culture out there is really about making something people want that's that's a famous y combinator

27. 11:10

    quote or logo or slogan but what's different that we need to do is we're not here we again speaking on behalf of a collective that i actually have no right to speak on behalf of um we we aren't just here to make something people want we're here to help other people make something people want we're an ecosystem and we're a collaborative ecosystem so that's why it's not about individuals it's about the ecosystem

28. 11:33

    first and we've made distinct decisions that support that um it in order to in order to get to a billion you have to you have to you have to lift other people up you have to get back to that original tech industry mentality of of one plus one equals three uh you have to be open you have to be pragmatic there's you can't be dogmatic you can't be you can't be close-minded it's about open or the open source ethos it's about it's about

29. 11:56

    sharing knowledge sharing education right empowering other people it's still early days you have to be always growing always evolving and ultimately the most important thing is to break through to get across that chasm obviously you have to make sure that this isn't about the technology this is about the users this is working backwards from the journeys that matter this is remembering that that real people don't care about technology real

30. 12:19

    people care about what they want whatever that is in the moment whether it's playing a game or or accessing their money making a transaction so what we're actually what we need to design for is making it feel simple it doesn't have to be simple in fact that makes it harder that's a much bigger design goal is to make it feel simple it's easy to design something that's that's complex that feels complex it's extremely difficult to design something that's complex but feels

31. 12:43

    simple and so i guess i just want to i want to benchmark there and come back to that that these principles matter so this is the part where i think the technology actually has to come back into the picture a little bit because the core design decisions like i said matter so i don't know how many people are aware of what the original story of near was and i won't go into the details of it but basically it got started in the summer

32. 13:07

    of 2018 which which as far as the layer one protocol goes is quite a late entrant most of these protocols got started way back you know 2014 15 16 well i mean obviously ethereum but 2018 that was coming off of the big bull run that was coming off of that that over the skis face plant uh that we made as an industry and uh that was a time when when the hammer that everyone was hitting was scalability it's about tps

33. 13:32

    tps tps tps and i call that the summer of tps because i remember every white paper that came out had a higher number it was it was it was you know who who can theoretically design 100 tps a thousand tps a million tps it was crazy and the team here we were impatient builders like anyone else uh the core group of people who got together in a tiny wework room that smelled like armpits was

34. 13:55

    you know eugene ilia alex bowen sasha pie guy um we were we were in patient builders we we didn't see anything they didn't see anything that that that allowed them to actually build what they wanted to build um and and realized that that we had a solution um based on prior work at mem sql which a number of the team members had done on charted database systems which could theoretically deliver a more or less infinite level of tps but at the same time it's kind of ridiculous because like who cares right like why why is tps

35. 14:27

    the thing they were going and by the way tps transactions per second for everyone who who's not familiar um but what actually matters is working backwards from from those first principles and it was kind of crazy because we kind of entered a religious war at that time and and not coming out with a number and not saying that you know this is this is the level of tps that nir is going to deliver and we promise that at this stage was was a really strange approach to take but the stranger thing was

36. 14:51

    actually that tps doesn't isn't the most important thing that matters uh when we started talking to people when you start to think and you work backwards from actually what we're here to do is make stuff that helps other people build things people want which is a bit of a mouthful what matters is usability and so it doesn't matter if you build the biggest stadium in the world that can seat 100 million people if it's built out in the middle of the desert no one can get there your usability sucks so what you actually have to do is you

37. 15:15

    have to build technology so that the developer years down the road can create experiences that users can actually use and that requires a lot of things that requires onboarding that feels like web 2. that requires the ability to build experiences that are engaging in a way that you can't actually get from web 2 because obviously it has to be 10x better otherwise they're not even going to use it and as importantly and this is something i'll talk about a little bit later you also need to make sure that these products have growth engines so that

38. 15:40

    they can actually reach more consumers because again it's not it's not about just the technology it's about building successful businesses that reach consumers and that's where when you work backwards you know okay well what we need from the platform that supports all of that is it has to be secure obviously we're dealing with a lot of money and a lot of a lot of value a lot of assets it has to be scalable i mean that's not to say that tps is a problem

39. 16:04

    tps is just a cost of entry i mean it's important um and so that would that was that was the entry point that we had was okay well we have we have a sharding design that supports that but again that comes back to simple how do we make the technology feel simple how do we make it feel simple for developers how do we make it ultimately so those developers can create experiences that feel simple for end users

40. 16:27

    and that's where when you work all the way back down backwards from the first principles that's where you get to okay well if it's going to be secure and scalable you better have a sharding approach because you don't know what the level of tps on the platform that it's going to have to support is and you obviously need to make sure it can through through that level of scaling that it can support the kinds of experiences you have but that's also where kind of the secret sauce that doesn't get a lot of love necessarily because it's it's kind of hidden is the account

41. 16:50

    model on near um the account model was was the piece that connected scalability with usability because the account model the contract-based accounts being able to execute essentially arbitrary code from within the accounts opens up the whole world it gives developers a level of flexibility that you don't get from something that's much more statically defined and that's that's actually the secret sauce in a lot of ways

42. 17:14

    and this is this this is just a screen grab and it's uh you don't have to read too much into it but but essentially what is the design goal of simple how does this all come back to reality um this is this is essentially what is the fewest number of steps that you can actually take a user from instagram from the social web and bring them into an app get them using blockchain based primitives without them actually even having to do anything unusual without them having to go buy tokens without them having to to sign in

43. 17:37

    for anything more intense than an email and ideally not even that and so if you want to do that if you want to pull that off again it feels simple but it's not underneath the surface this is where the technology has to support you this is where in order to pull that off you can't pay for gas or the consumer can't pay for gas fees obviously you have to be able to use the single sign-on model something that's much much easier to sign on to

44. 18:01

    it has to scale of course if you if you get the oprah hug that app better be able to stay up as well as any web 2 consumer facing app um you have to be able to create accounts on behalf of other people and then securely hand them off uh you have to be able to to do things on be you have to allow the user to do things that are kind of expensive and unusual the same way that you would in a in a freemium model in in web 2 right

45. 18:24

    it's the same principles apply it's just we haven't really gotten to the point previously in web 3 where where you can get to that same level of simplicity and usability for users and again uh number six you have to you have to make sure that those apps can actually have growth toolkits so those apps could reach new users well that's owen wilson um so just shifting gears real quickly uh one thing that i hear a lot when i talk to people is uh oh my god i didn't actually realize that there was so much

46. 18:54

    going on with nir and i think there's a meme out there or a series of memes that great at technology not very good at talking about it it is what it is so but there is a lot of momentum there's a lot of momentum buzzing and bubbling beneath the surface which of course everyone who's here in the room you've seen that you've seen that talking to everyone who's here but we've only been out for a little

47. 19:18

    over a year and in a little over a year we've reached 40 million transactions we have over a million accounts there's a hundred thousand community members we have over a thousand monthly builders building on the platform with more than 200 projects 200 dows 100 guilds and over 45 million in funding has been distributed this is one year the other thing we're not always good at celebrating small milestones because when i look at this i look this looks like a far cry from a billion but we i guess we have to

48. 19:57

    acknowledge that this is going the right direction the ecosystem has been growing phenomenally right we've every single area of it whether it's on the technical side on the integration side on-ramps off-ramps i'll talk about some of the details right but like every week we have to redesign this chart because more and more companies are starting to participate more and more startups are coming together this this chart is on the website so if you want to see it check it out

49. 20:22

    on the funding side funding is another indicator it's kind of a leading indicator of an ecosystem that things are happening right because i'll talk about the journey in just a second um but funding is happening so we've already deployed over 120 grants from the core grant program that's where that 45 million number comes from uh we but we've also crowdsourced we have ido's running running on uh

50. 20:44

    on skyward uh we have we have um a series of other ideo platforms that are coming out we'll talk about those in a second there's outside funding startups are getting funded a number of you here are actually in funded startups some of you have announced and some of you haven't and as importantly there's a lot of community funding that's been going on grace and the community team has been doing a phenomenal job of helping people from the ground up from the edges in

51. 21:08

    access capital because of course we have to eat you can't build unless you can eat and so what i want to talk about a little bit is is more on the market side so there are a few key areas i mentioned the creator economy triangle and i think that's pretty much uh that's a good model for for understanding sort of where are we as a as an ecosystem where do we need to be and so the uh so the first the first component of this worth talking about is defy and d5 is

52. 21:39

    usually the leader in in a blockchain based ecosystem and for good reasons because fundamentally it's still a financial technology it it needs the the sort of the core building block is still can we transact can we can we move value whether or not those are tokens or nfts or or assets um and so finance on near decentralized finance i mean it almost had sort of a coming out party maybe a month or two

53. 22:02

    ago and since then since then it's been cruising we have we have a series of components an interesting thing about d5 of course is that you don't actually need that many core components but they're almost infinite permutations of those components um and so each of those ideos with amms liquid staking metapool just just came out recently a series of series of announcements i know some of these have already been made made today

54. 22:27

    others are upcoming for sort of filling in the core building blocks but there's a lot going on there's over 100 million locked in tdl and there's more to come on the nft side obviously having a million wallets is is a good place to start because when you have when you have these accounts the question is can you get them to do other stuff than just participate in the app that brought them in and that's obviously a goal um

55. 22:50

    but ultimately uh we've had a lot of success also in asia some some nft i don't know if you uh if you've had a chance to to see some of the talks from amos out in asia uh in china um we had a collaboration with taobao with an nft artist that that was sort of one of the first times that you were able to sell nfts using a conventional platform which is sort of the amazon of china

56. 23:13

    and then others have mentioned human guild is supporting over i mean i think this number is now low uh 20 games and then we have a series of guilds that are that are driving things on the um on supporting the consumer side uh for me one of the things that i'm really passionate about is is the community side is dao's because um we've all experienced the arc of nfts we have we still those are fresh dows are new i mean

57. 23:36

    they've been around for maybe the longest they're also completely incomprehensible to the average human and so what we're working to do is back to those first principles how do you make a dial feel simple how do you make a dial into something that real people can use the mainstream people can use and that actually creates value for them how do you support creators by allowing their community to participate in the intellectual property that that creator creates how do you how do you how do you give them value for being early how do

58. 24:00

    you give them shared incentives these are tools that we haven't had before and these are things that are starting to come out i i don't know if you've had a chance to see the talk by jordan uh who's running the astro astro dao or astro uh tool basically um and that's basically that's built on top of the core sputnik dow pro dow contract and that's basically designed how do we get daos to back as many consumer oriented

59. 24:25

    communities as possible up and down this back up and down the spectrum a lot of really cool stuff there but even so we've distributed funding of over seven million dollars through over 200 uh sputnik dials on near and when you look at the numbers obviously the dollar value will go up but the fact that there are 200 communities on near that are already working that are already voting and distributing funding is something that you don't see actually in a lot of ecosystems so we're getting there and they've done they've done things from

60. 24:56

    from you know paying for for actions within the ecosystem to things that are totally outside the ecosystem like covet relief for for india or vietnam and then the other piece of this is interoperability which i think is something that that it's always a little bit hard for people to fit together because the question is always you know why interoperate but the point here is like if this is

61. 25:20

    technology that's designed to work for everybody that's designed to kind of break through and touch consumers we need to welcome everybody in from all sides and so that's where that's where aurora and octopus help apps come into the new ecosystem and take advantage of a lot of the core tools core primitives core value that's stored in the near ecosystem from other areas so aurora is is a fantastic piece of technology that's built on top of near that's actually an ethereum layer two that uses

62. 25:45

    eth as its base token it's pretty incredible and they've been they've been roaring out of the gate and there's a lot of momentum behind them um octopus is is almost on the other side and that's that's focusing on app chains that's focusing on uh who who who out there is trying to build slightly more complicated applications um using substrate and and allowing them to hook into the near ecosystem as well and then of course the rainbow bridge is

63. 26:08

    about bringing assets in but if so kind of coming back to all of this it's like why should you take why should you be here why should you join this um but everyone has a part in this equation of what does it take to actually build a successful startup to build a successful consumer-facing experience i mean if we're if we're going to realize the goal of reaching a billion consumers a billion people we're going to need a lot of really big apps we're going to need a

64. 26:33

    lot of very successful apps and to get there it takes it takes a village um and so one of the through the life cycle stages of of a startup and we've had a lot of experience at this point talking to talking to founders along the way uh understanding a lot more about the pain points of building in web 3 or also the pain points of building towards web 2 from within web 3 or vice versa it takes a lot

65. 26:57

    uh it starts with funding um we we had a major announcement yesterday about 800 million dollars worth of funding that's going towards the ecosystem it's an overall package um and that's that's kind of the core ingredient right again you can't build unless you can eat and there are a lot of ways that this is being distributed uh the most important thing is that this is actually being distributed towards the edges though

66. 27:22

    um you can you'll be able to see this online i think in terms of it's basically oriented towards how do we how do we support startups how do we support regional communities how do we support anyone who has an idea and of course in any of the go-to-market categories whether that's defy nfts consumer but really the core principle popping up a level again is about decentralization is actually not just a buzzword um it's real and how do you how do you

67. 27:54

    how do you uh get 800 million dollars to the people who need it there is no way to do that without without pushing that to the edges and empowering other people to do that and so this is where we as an ecosystem cannot scale unless we're decentralizing unless we're pushing control unless we're pushing responsibility unless we're pushing empowerment to the edges and so on the funding side that's a huge that's a huge thing we're

68. 28:18

    the whole point of that of that package is how how can you get the people who are passionate about a particular region about a particular startup about a particular platform about a particular ecosystem the resources that they need to bring in all the next the next layer of people into their ecosystem and that's where sharding comes in as well and this is this is again where the technology has to follow the principles and the goal is to make this network more distributed to

69. 28:43

    make it more robust but charting is also it opens up more than just technological scaling because by having more validator seats it allows us to to use something called endowment funding we haven't really made any announcements on that but what it allows what it allows us to do what it allows the ecosystem to do is actually create sustainable funding models long-term sustainable funding models for these regions for guilds for communities

70. 29:08

    related to them running validators and so it's not just about the technology it's about what does that technology unlock for the ecosystem another note on the community side where decentralization kicked in is that again coming from coming from that that tiny little we work room you always start with that with that seed that centralized seed and then you have to progressively decentralize over time and

71. 29:33

    what we found in this ecosystem of course we had a whole bunch of very early builders uh forward forward-thinking people and once once once the platform was was launched everyone started started wanting to build other stuff wanted to build cool things wanted to move in different directions some people wanted to want to explore defy other people wanted to explore community tools other people wanted to

72. 29:56

    support support things more in the creator space and so the core team members began spinning out and and that's that's great so we have people coming from outside with great ideas we have people coming from inside with great ideas and everybody's meeting in the middle and that's that's about not trying to trying to do everything from one place it's about empowering other people to go out and see sees what they see as the opportunity and our job i mean speaking

73. 30:20

    on behalf of the foundation at least our job is just to make that easy for other people and so guilds is one of the most powerful tools that we have and and this is something that that really differentiates near from a lot of other communities which is that our guild's ecosystem so guilds are basically communities if you've been in gaming you understand one version of guilds if you were in the 16th century you probably understood a slightly different version of guilds

74. 30:44

    but fundamentally the goal here is that everyone has a home everyone has a place where you can contribute everyone has a place where you can also receive value and this is this goes back to that idea of it takes a village to make a successful ecosystem and what guilds are we have we have over 100 guilds that are currently live and guilds are basically down back to communities on near and there are communities that have a whole bunch of different categories so some of these are what you might think of as as more

75. 31:09

    traditional geographical oriented meetups others are more functional so we have a legal guild which helps help startups within the ecosystem understand their legal and regulatory issues incorporation issues what should i do if i'm actually spinning up a guild there's there's all there are meta questions involved in all of that and the cool thing about it is that all of these guilds it allows anybody coming in from the sides to say oh well i'm coming i'm

76. 31:32

    coming from with a specific set of skills that i want to share with the community and and this gives them a container where they could do that and they get funding and it's based on a dow and it's decentralized and uh so it's so it's both it's both providing value to the startups and to the founders and to the ecosystem but it's also allowing anybody an entry point anyone who wants to contribute there is a guild out there and if there isn't you should start it and it'll get funded and

77. 31:58

    it'll get the resources that it needs uh not only that these as part of these communities these guilds are incentivized to support the ecosystem with things like bonuses for sending people to to to win hackathons in the near ecosystem or or referring projects for grants or things like that so it creates a really beautiful mesh where everyone's incentives are aligned and we're all building together and the important thing is that this is real this is actually like these are

78. 32:21

    happening on chain so this isn't this isn't about running a bunch of meetup groups from meetup.com or something like that this is about actually using the technology and dog fooding it in a way that you normally wouldn't really be able to do so i encourage you if you're interested in that near.org guilds and we also have a number of guilds wandering around and so hopefully you've had a chance to talk to them another team that's that's worth

79. 32:45

    highlighting is the ecosystem success group and this these are these are your sherpas uh see todd over there and basically this is that it's it's kind of confusing to to build a project in an ecosystem that's as broad as this and so how do we just make it easy how do we how do we say you know as a founder you you have a question that's kind of a weird specific question that you're not sure who to

80. 33:07

    talk to well you have a single point of contact and this is a group of people that that they're actually moving towards running a guild themselves uh which is which is then going to allow anyone in the community to sort of become this support network to help ever to help the startups come together uh thank you thank you jake for uh for for the graphic um but of course of course this isn't about

81. 33:31

    just like launching startups out of the gate and actually one of the cool stories from the ecosystem success team is uh there was a project that they were able to help you know and and it's about sort of swarming resources together it's like oh you know you're you're doing product development great let's get you beta testers oh you're you're coming out there and you need you need people in

82. 33:48

    discord to to try it for the first time to start talking about it great like how do we put you in touch with teams in the ecosystem that are doing marketing with the marketing guild growth guild um and so they were able to they were able to get this this team uh over a thousand discord users and i think 24 hours which is pretty cool just just by organizing the resources that already exist but if you want to go big and this is the point like we need to go big this isn't you know right now we're small and

83. 34:12

    we're going to be small and that's fine but in order to get big this is where you actually have to start breaking out of just the thousand people in discord and you have to you have to give applications the tools that they need to then grow themselves because the only way to reach a billion people is to create feedback loops it's too it's to allow these applications to reach out to normal people again to bring them from the social web to bring them from wherever they are to give marketers the tools that they need to give

84. 34:37

    growth hackers growth teams the tools that they need to use product driven growth and that's where i highly recommend checking out the the gen c growth hackathon and this is something that's my knowledge i haven't i haven't seen before and we have there are a series of teams that are building essentially growth toolkits and so it's okay well if you have essentially more or less free nfts how do you use those how do you use those as growth mechanisms if we do

85. 35:03

    a million nft drop how do you use those nfts to reach out to new people from web 2 and how do you give how do you give a team who's building a game that tool kit to allow them to put some of their funding to work with these new primitives to then reach out to new people to bring into their game and engage engage these users to up level them things like that this is all stuff that that again working backwards from the technology and from the product you can only do this if you have a if

86. 35:27

    you have a product that people are actually going to use that they're not going to drop off at a 99 rate right and this is one of the coolest things about the near ecosystem this is one of the coolest things that's cooking you've got ross over there who's driving a lot of this and uh this this personally excites me because because people people don't necessarily they don't build just to build right you build a great impact and to create impact you need users and to find users

87. 35:53

    you need tools that actually allow you to find those users and the best way to do that is to have those tools be embedded have those tools be native to the app and the ecosystem and the technology that you're using and so that's where it's super important that we're putting together these these growth toolkits that are based on on blockchain primitives and that's why i'm so excited about that

88. 36:10

    so i wanted to invite you um there the education team you've heard them mentioned before they're doing a fantastic job of putting a bunch of stuff together and this is an area that's near and dear to my own heart because my background is also in education they've put together a series of courses for pretty much anyone who's coming from any direction to up level themselves and get involved so this may not apply to you but this may apply to your friends do you have developer friends who want

89. 36:34

    to learn rust do you have developer friends who know russ who want to learn smart contracts do you have do you have people who just want to understand what is blockchain there are there are boot camp models there are learn to earn models all of this is coming together a lot of this is actually coming together from the edges and there are guilds now that are that are driving education there's funding for for developers and residents entrepreneurs and residents and things like that so there's a lot of cool stuff

90. 36:59

    that you should check out but in the end the point is that there's a path for everyone who wants to get involved and to pull it back like that's that's that's kind of what makes this cool and special is it's it's not just a rallying cry behind a big vision it's not just it's not just a cool technology that does a lot of really awesome stuff it's uniting all of those things together in a way that feels like

91. 37:22

    everyone is working together to help make this possible for everyone else right it's bringing back the the sexy to being in technology a little bit um and that's what's fun about nir is that is that it's it's it's based in reality like many of you bought tickets that that are nfts that are running on near like this is this is real today so again we're not always very good at talking about it but there are people who are using these tools today the communities are running on near

92. 37:47

    today if you have ideas and you want to build and you want to help out it's there it's launched the smart contract platform is running i mean sharding sharding if you go to max's talk he'll talk about in details about what's happening on the sharding roadmap but the point is you can build smart contracts today you don't need sharding and of course the point of his talk is that you shouldn't have to care about charting either because it's all below the surface

93. 38:12

    but my point is that is that like one of the things that i think that just makes this special is that those core principles of of the ecosystem comes first of being open and transparent wherever possible and sharing knowledge and growing um and ultimately most importantly creating experiences that feel simple is something that actually unites all of us in a way that i haven't really seen in a lot of other places and that's kind of

94. 38:34

    what brings the energy back and that means that everyone here has a friend i mean you're already here but everyone here probably has friends who are curious and there's there's something for everyone to do so come on in join a guild start a guild right there we need product people we need designers we need to reach out to people who aren't traditionally in web 3 because this has been a playground for technologists for years that's

95. 38:58

    that's not the difficult part the difficult part is how do we how do we reach out to people who still feel like you know maybe this industry isn't a good fit for them or it seems like a religious war on twitter every time that they try to try to even mention it uh you hear that a lot from artists how do you how do you uh cross the boundary where everyone seems to think that that

96. 39:14

    if you run if you launch nfts that these things are uh you know melting the ice caps in greenland it's like no there's a path for everyone to get involved in this and so i guess i just wanted to say what ties us all together is that is that you're here and that this is a home for you this is home for you this is a home for all of us and i hope that we can together create this vision and make it feel at home for everyone

97. 39:37

    else thank you you