NEAR Space @ EthCC | Day 3

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

1. 0:05

   Hello everyone. Uh welcome on board in our near space powered by near. We're about ready to start our journey with our speakers. Uh we have battery communities day. A lot of great speakers and after that for sure we're going to enjoy happy hours upstairs with some uh drinks. Uh thank you so much everyone who's joining our live broadcast. So uh I think it's time to start. I'm happy to present you our first speaker Ilia Palasuin co-founder near and Ilia will

2. 0:38

   tell us uh about involving ecosystem governance. Welcome Ilia. Hello. Hello everyone. Hope you're having a good day. It's way cooler than it was on Monday which is great. Uh we're still shaking which is okay. um depends how much you drank yesterday. So uh I would like to talk about the governance. So near mission is kind of world where people have control of their assets, data and power of

3. 1:11

   governance. And you know everybody knows about control of money and assets. You know Bitcoin introduced this kind of uh idea. We've been doing a lot on the data. You know we've talked social we're talking about kind of uh more broadly NFTTS creators all of the parts. But the power of governance have been you know a kind of question like what is this and how do we actually coordinate large

4. 1:37

   communities large ecosystems in such a way that it's still it makes progress it makes decisions but uh you know is representative and is able to u you know work with our communities and so the given the governance is kind of the core part Right?

5. 1:58

   And we, you know, if you look across the ecosystems, across web 3 in general, nobody has figured out a system that truly works, right? Like there's been a lot of experiments. There's been really failed experiments. Uh, and there's been things that, you know, work reasonably well, but all of them, you know, one way or another, uh, kind of lack what you usually see in, you know, very

6. 2:19

   successful companies with like kind of execution, growth, etc. And you know we need to start and we need to start it in a way that will have an embedded process of refinement right we will not be perfect we'll never be that's why you know we're always trying to be closer uh nearer to it and so we need to embed metagance into this process and we need to review and we need to set the goals for how this will be so why do we need this right I mean yes

7. 2:50

   part of it it's our mission is this is like it's important kind of broadly speaking right? That people have a say in the things they are participating. Right? If you're using Facebook, you should have a say in what features they're launching or what features they unlaunching from you or whatever they change completely everything, right? And and you know, potentially wiped out your business. And so the kind of at the same time if we

8. 3:15

   talk about ecosystems right this distributed communities we end up in a lot of kind of decentralized people and nodes that have different interests right and like on a basic level we have you know proof of stake proof of work like some kind of basic economic alignment but it doesn't scale and it ends up in bureaucracy it ends up in politics it ends up in like I don't know who's responsible for blah

9. 3:40

   And that leads to no clear decision maker, right? Somebody comes in with a great idea. They don't know who to go to. They don't know kind of who to ask for feedback and they don't know how to make this happen. And that leads to missed opportunities to, you know, slower growth or potentially decay of the ecosystem.

10. 3:59

    The public goods, right, the protocols, the you know explorers, tools that are not revenue generating like and not everything will be revenue generating. don't have a clear way to be funded. They don't have a way to be accountable when they uh are not part of kind of some revenue generating system. And so what ends up being some company builds it because they need it and then it also either supported by them in good case or is not and then it you know floats in the abyss. And this is a problem that

11. 4:29

    open source have. If you look at any open source project, it always kind of oscillates between kind of economic interests of big companies which are using this open source project and the community which is trying to kind of build in a in in some direction that they believe in.

12. 4:45

    And so decentralization is difficult, right? It's not it's not kind of a natural state uh for many things, but it increases resilience. in it reduces fragility of the system and is enables us to kind of build for long term. So kind of looking at governance outside of web3 right there are two steps right there's a model that uh governments use which is a kind of multi- um branch system where there is one branch that is representative right it tries to

13. 5:17

    aggregate the information and feedback and representation of different stakeholders of you know people from different regions of uh people of different uh kind of levels and then there's an executive branch right this is a branch that goes out and kind of builds a platform, gets elected and uh executes within the laws and budget that the Congress gives them on on this goals and many times does not execute. And so this is kind of how governments and countries have been funding public

14. 5:48

    goods, right? This is how you know roads are built. This is how uh kind of a lot of other things are are funded and you know and they're focused on growth of GDP as a general, right? ecosystem growth in general. And then you have corporations. Corporations have a you know clear for-profit motive. they have a clear executive uh system that you know you have a CEO that everybody reports to and the CEO reports to a board members and shareholders uh in a

15. 6:12

    very kind of you know chunked way with specific um like usually more you know CEO kind of doing most of the strategy execution and planning and board members are just an oversight and an ability to uh kind of let go if the CEO is not doing their job. So kind of oversight and this is where you know profit maximization is happening.

16. 6:36

    So if we look at web 3 the kind of generally the you know we have not figured out the governance and we have tried a lot of dows right and kind of across Ethereum across near and other ecosystems um there's not have been something that like you know worked amazingly well and especially that scaled amazingly well right there have been two approaches two kind of major approaches. One is where

17. 7:06

    you have a token holder weighted decision- making, right? So this is where you have something like snapshot on Ethereum with compound governance etc. where you and maker where you expect some percentage of token holders to vote for stuff. The problem obviously is most of the token holders don't show up as bunch of tokens are actually like used somewhere for liquidity. like it's not the always the right way and you know you have large holders who

18. 7:31

    potentially can sway the whole vote uh just by voting and then you have the other approach which things like unis swap and others taken where you just have a small group of people who have been selected from community potentially having some weight with delegation like bitcoin uh that are supposed to continuously stay up to date on what's going on in the ecosystem and and actually are you know working pretty much for the protocol to make decisions

19. 7:56

    And uh you know that does not scale again because you cannot scale that group bigger than something like if we look at you know even some near examples like at somewhere after 15 people in that group that kind of the decision-m and involvement of this people actually drops dramatically because they start to rely that somebody else will do the job.

20. 8:17

    So we've been experimenting with a bunch of this. I think there's over 100 active Dows. There is like five or 600 total Dows that's been created in Astrada. People tried everything you know token holding NFT holding G uh you know small groups bigger groups multiple types of different groups with different permissions etc. So astrad been designed to like actually experiment with governance and see what works.

21. 8:42

    And on the other side kind of near ecosystem has went through a dramatic expansion in past year where we went from pretty much a kind of one company building a protocol to you know kind of a dozen companies contributing to protocol a dozens of kind of ecosystem funds and regional hubs you know proximity human guild foundation like all of them contributing to go to market right helping projects and and

22. 9:06

    transitioning them and so what this led to as well is like this problem of now that there's a lot of things going on people cannot find who is responsible for what right and cannot uh discover well uh where to start in this ecosystem.

23. 9:23

    So kind of the proposed solution here and uh there will be kind of more details published in the governance forum and we're going to be you know discussing and debating and iterating on this and as mentioned it's not a perfect solution but uh the proposed is near digital cooperative.

24. 9:40

    Neo digital cooperative is pretty much a kind of mirroring some of the existing structure that governments use but then leveraging the tools leveraging the accountability and leveraging the uh kind of the goals and instruments we have to build a better governance structure and again the will not be perfect but we're going to continue trading. So what are the principles we want to use right? So the one of the

25. 10:09

    biggest principles right of near as a whole is transparency is that we want all decisions to be publicly recorded. We want to have votes to have an explanation right like we don't want people to just vote on things because they have not read even the proposal and somebody asks them to do it. We want the explanation. And if they're not doing that, then maybe they should not be part of the kind of decision-m group. And we

26. 10:34

    want to focus on kind of iterative communication, right? And ability to uh kind of continuously refine the ideas, right? Not just say like, okay, we made this decision and nothing, you know, now we can only do this. It needs to be kind of goal driven, right? Again, the it's really frequently that ecosystems kind of don't have a posted goals, right?

27. 10:55

    near has been from beginning you know saying about billion users and you know a few other kind of clear goals in the ecosystem right you know being sustainable being uh kind of scalable and so it's important to continue within governance to continue propagating that because this is what people can latch on when they're making decisions on what needs to go next and we want to minimize politics right whenever you have people

28. 11:19

    you'll have politics this is inevitable but whenever you have kind of overlap of areas of respons responsibilities and kind of unclear who's responsible for what or people responsible do they feel responsible for the same thing you'll have more politics and so having a clear process on how to resolve this problems and you know uh intransparent way is important to minimize this

29. 11:44

    so the congress is split into two houses one house is this kind of smaller group of people who are full-time involved in the ecosystem and we call it house of merit. It's pretty much the idea of lifting the most effective contributors in the ecosystem and making them almost a board a because they have the most context of the ecosystem. They have the most information and they kind of involved in it. So they uh can pretty

30. 12:14

    much provide input on what is happening, what's needed, what is missing. the process you know we're going to be refining but right now will be a public application and deliberation with you know a private vote of existing members but that they still would need to give a explanation to the vote the house of merit importantly has a veto over the executive branch which I'm going to be talking about and it as I

31. 12:38

    said serves as a board and focuses on success of the whole ecosystem right they're looking at it at you know given they're coming from a different areas of the ecosystem they will be looking at it kind of more broadly House of stake on the other side, right, is this idea that we still have kind of token holders. We still have the representation kind of this broader permissionless representation.

32. 12:59

    And so anyone who has a near account that stakes will have a representation that proportional to a square root of their stake. And this is really targeted at larger referend random style questions, right? This is the same when you have a huge referendum in a country where if you should do something or you or specifically if house of stake sees that house of merit or executive branch are not doing the right job they are able to stop them and so this is they naturally will focus on economic success and

33. 13:29

    that's why kind of their power in some way is checked because like not always that kind of short-term economic success is uh is uh successful for for long-term goals and so The final piece, this has been kind of missing from my perspective for in most of the Dows or it is there but it's not officially kind of defined and for the most part the Dows that are actually functioning have something like this is executive branch. It's really the kind of this part of the Dow that's

34. 13:59

    actually responsible for taking on the strategy, you know, taking on all the inputs from the community, defining the strategy and then executing and reporting to it and being accountable to the community for the goals and the um and the strategy. And so you know this includes having some kind of ministers and people who are responsible for different areas as well uh in the in the ecosystem.

35. 14:26

    And you know this is where the public good funding right the long kind of short medium term especially funding where you hey we need this now and nobody's in the ecosystem is building it. We'll go and find a team we'll go and fund this part and this allows to kind of also have investment in inorganic growth. Right? If you think of it kind of you know this ecosystems if you just let it go and not do anything

36. 14:51

    like they either kind of continue growing or they collapse and so to continue growing beyond the natural state we have inorganic growth of partnerships we have an inorganic growth of bringing some applications or users to the ecosystem that's what executive branch is responsible for to do this there's obviously needs to be some funds and with any dowo and so the kind of governance structure is around this treasury and Uh it allows kind of you

37. 15:17

    know the house of merit kind of as a board define and approve a budget for the executive branch and for the EOS like other efforts that can be like fund of fund type of strategy and it allows to transparently evaluate actually success of this decisions as well right you can actually have and should have a deliberation on the success of the of this so how do we get this right I mean I think the important piece here is

38. 15:42

    decentralization doesn't need to mean chaos right which it you very frequently does. And so having the specialization, having transparency within this and allowing each other the groups making decisions and be accountable and transparent about them is important. And then the really important piece is meta governance is refining this because like this will not work from day one. There will be some things that don't work.

39. 16:06

    there will be some uh narrow spots but you know benchmarking it and also coming together at events like this at near con and evaluating where we are and how we're doing is important. So the more detailed stuff is coming to governance forum. I would love your comments and if you have suggestions please uh come there and uh thank you.

40. 16:32

    Thank you so much. Thank you. Uh we have a time for small Q&A session. So if you have any questions just raise your hand. Hi Alia. Um I had a question about how you're thinking about um not just decision-m using governance but also something more automated. So what I'm seeing in the industry is everybody is putting decision- making under the umbrella of governance and governance

41. 16:57

    itself is not really sorted. uh on the other side you can have uh more focus on some kind of automated uh incentive design. uh so how how do you think between uh these two? Yeah. So the question of automated kind of incentive design is a huge one and kind of mechanism design overall. I think the there's a few things that work well right which is aligning nodes to do something aligning some you know uh participants. we have not seen that well

42. 17:27

    automatic systems that align people right beyond like there's always some involvement needed in this process right and so I think like near crowd is probably an interesting example of a mechanism design for uh for the human kind of for human work for for crowd sourcing and even then there is still you know some kind of involvement at the top to to review and and and uh attract

43. 17:50

    some like top level reviewers who actually kind keep in check the whole system and so I think this is why it's important is like whenever you have an automatic design it's always will be like people will try to trick it right and so you have you need someone in the loop who will be kind of refining it as well and that's why you know you need I do think you need some type of executive brain and like that that's the thing every system that has something like

44. 18:15

    some automated incentive design that has uh to deal with people has some people involved in a loop that actually you know make and are accountable for the success of this. Thanks. Thank you. Uh yeah, we have one more question. You mentioned that you um uh the amount of voting power you have in these sort of staking things is the square root of the amount of stake you have to prevent uh individual large bad actors making decisions. How do you prevent those bad

45. 18:52

    actors spreading their stakes over a number of accounts and simply voting that way? Yeah, so this is not designed for that per se. So there is definitely refinements to do this. Um and so one of the refinements actually is sweatcoin because sweatcoin is in a way civil resistance. You cannot walk for you know 100 people. Uh and so so there's the idea how to add more of a you know like civil resistance and you know p per like proof of person

46. 19:21

    right through this but it does like I would suggest to add it over time like we actually haven't seen that much of attacks of this of this sense but we have seen people borrowing money and and swaying the vote to like steal all the money that we have seen. So protecting against that is way more important than like somebody splitting their value because they want to be having a bigger vote. Like so far I only seen people trying to have a like a 16Z for example

47. 19:47

    many cases does not vote because they have too too big of a stick right. So I think that is right now a bigger problem because the parties are usually more aligned with the ecosystem at least in this but we can over time add more of like represent like one person one vote type of representation as well.

48. 20:07

    Thank you. Thank you so much again. All right. Thanks everyone. And before we proceed with our next speakers, I just wanted to remind you that live translation available upstairs as well. So you can enjoy en enjoy some iced coffee or if you need a sip of fresh air, it's also available.

49. 20:42

    And uh we have YouTube uh live broadcast as well. You can uh link on our event tribe. Also, you can find the list of uh all our speakers with a schedule on event tribe. Just check out the link of our event guys and it's time to move on. Please take your seats uh because I'm happy to present you uh our next speakers,

50. 21:47

    co-founder and CTO of Niche and Dasha Kova Nagared Nuke, head of contact and community at Nish with the talk the rise fall and dramatic rebirth of the social media. Welcome guys. The search is all yours. Oh, wow. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Hello. Hello. Can you hear us? Okay. Yeah.

51. 22:13

    Yeah. Um, I didn't want to start the talk with this, but I'm really bad at not saying this. It's my birthday today, everyone. It's his birthday. Happy birthday, Savage. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, truly nothing I'd rather be doing. This is so much fun.

52. 22:28

    So our talk is called the rise fall and dramatic rebirth of social media. I am Zavan. I'm the co-founder of Niche and I'm Dasha. I'm the head of content and community at Niche and obviously we both work at Niche and so we will give you a bit of a breakdown.

53. 22:45

    Very briefly. Niche is a decentralized social uh content app. It's using the power of web 3 tech to sort of solve a lot of the problems in web 2 social media which we will talk about for the next 15 minutes. and and we're going to be going into our beta within a month. So, we're super excited.

54. 23:00

    So, hit us up. Let's get started. So, the first chapter, the rise social media started, you know, really like proper web 2 social media in earnest with, of course, MySpace and then Facebook. And um a little more about me, I actually started my career um in early 2012 at Facebook, right before the IPO, right around the time that Instagram was acquired. And my first intern project as

55. 23:25

    uh someone who couldn't legally drink cuz I was too young um was to build a photo viewer to rebuild a photo viewer that you know I think at the time something like almost a billion people used uh to browse content online. Um and you know back then there was like very little code review. It was kind of the mantra was move fast and break things.

56. 23:44

    Um, but it was sort of like the ethos of how things were being done back then, which is young people who are naive and optimistic, kind of incompetent, building things that impact quite literally billions of people. And it was all fun and game at the time, but no one really paused to think about how some of these products would be used and what some of the repercussions of these decisions might be.

57. 24:05

    Yeah. So, a bit of a background about me. At the time, I was a social media producer for some of the world's leading like digital content companies. It was Refiner 29, Buzzfeed, Vice, and Thrillist, you know. And at the time, same thing as Avan. I didn't realize that a lot of the videos I was making that were going viral, they were like 20 million views starting. Um, pretty much like we would sell any product. We were just incredibly influential, but we

58. 24:29

    didn't understand it at the time. Uh, you know, 2017 was a really strong content year. That's what the table's for. I know. Literally from my life. Um, yeah. Yeah. So 2017 was a really strong year of content and I think we do liken this to the fact that when Trump was elected a lot of people felt incredibly defeated and started turning to online communities to find sort of their own spaces. Uh a lot of this was sort of

59. 24:52

    resulting in um protest culture and all this other stuff online. But we also saw this happen in the women's march. Um so yeah kind of throwing it back when I was 25 working at Refinery 29. I would rope in a lot of my co-workers to do these videos. It was just sort of fun and games. We weren't really thinking much into it. Again, influencing hundreds of millions of people online.

60. 25:12

    And the videos were like, "Yeah, the videos were Talk about your deepest, most personal traumatic." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like literally, Refinery 29 was like going deep. Like it was like, "Talk about your first time sleeping with someone." And it was just people not really thinking because they were in a safe space when they were creating. They didn't think it was this like very like Yeah. They didn't sort of think that anything would happen with it, especially because the content was being made for a very like efferial platform such as, you know,

61. 25:36

    Snapchat. Snapchat that would disapp forever. So yeah, it kind of like jeopardized things there where people are uncomfortable with what existed back then. But essentially, yeah, it just kind of gets you across that a lot of what was happening at the time, we were just too naive to understand where it would lead to.

62. 25:58

    Yep. And ultimately it was all to drive ad dollars. And because this content was, you know, producing a lot of ad dollar revenue, uh, of course it wasn't ephemeral. It kept being used and people were sharing data online without realizing, um, how long that would stay on and how that might be used against them. Um, which sort of brings us into our next topic, the fall of social media. And I would say actually, you

63. 26:21

    know, 2017 was probably the peak of social media as we know um, today. Yeah, the golden years. uh 2018 something really important happened which was a Cambridge Analytica scandal. It turned out that this company um that was uh you know essentially it was like a social game on Facebook was actually exploiting the social graph the the platform APIs to harvest people's data to use that

64. 26:45

    against them right and it was this realization that people had globally that actually a lot of this stuff that you share um can be harvested your data can be sold it doesn't belong to you it can be used against you it could be uh misconstrued for whatever other things And um we started to realize that actually a lot of the decisions that were made by people like me when I was 19 uh had like real societal implications. Uh but of course at the time we weren't thinking about this, right? And what I saw from being at

65. 27:14

    Facebook for so long, you know, for uh the entirety of my 20s, I was there for almost 10 years was a lot of the stuff it was it wasn't evil. It was just poorly thought out. And when people were building the social platform that, you know, let an app get your name and your friends names and the email addresses of everyone you've ever interacted with, people thought that lead to like some pretty cool games. They didn't think that would be harvested uh and used against them.

66. 27:38

    Yeah. And sort of tying back to a point that I'd made earlier as well when we were just having fun in games with these videos. To Zavin's point, like we didn't realize that we didn't have any ownership over these videos, that these videos belong to that company, and so they do just continue to leave on like live on and that content can be used against us now. Um, but yeah, this is

67. 27:55

    obviously sort of like a huge part of like the consequences that happen when we weren't thinking of it in the beginning. Um, at the time though when I was working for one of these media companies, I remember being in one of the media rooms for a pitch and I really wanted to pitch Rihanna because she was I mean she is and was one of these sort of like leading fashion icons, leading music icons and I remember the idea was completely shut down because she wasn't a high performer. So, you know, we're

68. 28:19

    seeing a lot of racial implications here. Um, but she didn't bring enough ad dollars. So, we went with Taylor Swift because Taylor Swift did. And, you know, it just kind of reinforces the fact that we obviously can't continue to let ad dollars run what kind of content we release and put out into the world because it just has so many cultural biases.

69. 28:35

    Yeah. Yeah. And and from the Facebook side too, a lot of the issues were because we were optimizing for people spending as much time uh on the app. We called it uh time spent was like the golden metric. Uh because the more time they spent looking at the app, the more ads they watch and ultimately the more revenue we bring in. And that sort of leads to all these side effects that no one's consciously thinking about, which is if you're optimizing for time spent, you want your products to be as addictive as possible. You want to keep

70. 29:00

    pe keep people coming back as much as possible. You're not really thinking about mental health, you know, healthy behaviors. Uh instead, you're you're and again like being on the inside, people weren't evil. They're just like, "Oh, my team will do well if we have people spending a lot of time on our product." And that is why they made the decisions that they did, but that had humongous consequences.

71. 29:20

    Yeah. Yeah, I will just tie one more thing to that. The thing is it's like totally leaning into it. A lot of the people in these companies I think did want to make a difference, but because it all ended up just coming down to like the money and it kind of turned into this capitalist approach about everything, we couldn't it didn't become a humanitarian sort of like human position. It became

72. 29:36

    where is the money coming from and what will perform best. So, yep. Yeah, that leads to interlude the drama. So, you know, this is sort of where we find ourselves now, the present day. Facebook is losing users for the first time historically. You know, we're seeing daily news about lawsuits, people stepping down, company failures, people even stepping down just to save face and um regulations.

73. 30:01

    Oh yeah. Oh my god. Regulations. Like there's look at the news. Everything's sort of falling apart when it comes to the media and like, you know, social media world. But um you know, we're seeing companies breaking up. We're seeing companies merging just to stay afloat. A good example of this would be Refinery 29 and Vice. um they were both direct competitors at the time. We were not allowed to make any content that even symbolized anything like the other and now they've merged just to be able to survive. So, you know, a big part of

74. 30:26

    this is also happening between not just consumer but also in the content creator world because content creators are finding at least on Instagram, right, the algorithms aren't exactly setting them up for success. They're having issues sustaining their revenue and yeah just but the drama is important and and that the drama is necessary for the revolution that we're all trying to bring about which is the rebirth of social media. Ultimately web two traditional social media didn't work

75. 30:50

    out. We have learned from those mistakes. We're no longer as naive as we were you know 1015 years ago. We know better and we know how to make good decisions. Um but in order for us to get there of course the old guard is going to fight hard to make sure that we don't succeed. And so that's what everyone in this room is trying to do and that's what we're all trying to solve, right?

76. 31:08

    Is we're trying to make web 3 communities successful and we're trying to do that by migrating everyone over from exploited web 2 media to the new world. Um it's definitely a really core part of what we're trying to do at Niche. We're trying to take those lessons and make a healthier social content app. Um, one of the things that we believe in very much is community because we feel like ultimately humans have this need to find community, to share experiences, to share memories

77. 31:32

    with other people, but to do that in a way that is healthy, to do that in a way that isn't uh using, you know, techniques learned from Vegas to make the app as addictive as possible, but rather facilitating real genuine interactions. Um, and we think actually decentralization is going to be core to that. Uh, because that then gives people a true power. It's not locking them into wild gardens. They can leave. they can take their data with them and whatever

78. 31:55

    value they create goes to them and their communities rather than these big apps. And I'll just add that also you know at the in the golden years sort of the start of our presentation um what we had mentioned was obviously a lot of people were turning to community online at the time but obviously there were still a lot of issues with the communities they were building out online. So I think it's always been there and I think people had this need to find their

79. 32:15

    community. So obviously now being in a decentralized space just ultimately puts us into a better position moving forward. So I'll end this with a quote from Danny. I don't actually see her around but she said this to me at breakfast yesterday and I thought it was brilliant. Web two social was all about the individual. Web 3 social is all about the community. Thank you.

80. 32:34

    Thank you. Wait one more slide. Thank you so much. Thank you Zan. Thank you Dasha. Uh we have a time for questions. So if you have any questions just raise your hand. Yeah, seems Oh, we have a question. Okay, guys. Do you have more information? Because I just opened your website and uh that's it. Yep, that's it.

81. 32:59

    Uh do you have more information? Not right now. In about a week. I was supposed to be building and launching the new website this week, but then I came here. Maybe if I will put my Yes. Put your email. So, if anybody wants to go to our website, it's niche.club club and you can put in your email and submit and you'll get sort of an email in a few days that'll tell you yeah about our wait list and everything else that's coming out for our beta niche.com club.

82. 33:23

    Uh any other questions and uh on socials niche protocol. Oh yeah, niche protocol across Instagram, Twitter, Discord. Like you'll find it everywhere. Uh so I have a potential real hard ball for you and I'm I'd love that. Okay. Uh so in on the topic of like building communities, building communities about specific interests, one thing that I think might be worth thinking about is of course that there are a lot of insular communities uh centered around let's say ideas that

83. 33:52

    maybe we don't want to promote in the modern world. And this is something that social media platforms I know have really struggled with and especially with not dealing with them in a way that is maybe problematically author authoritarian given the size of their platforms. um not really going to ask a specific question off of that, but I wonder what you think about that topic and how you solve for that. Yeah, I think um

84. 34:16

    it's better to have those things exist in sort of siloed parts of the internet that people can opt into rather than make it really easy for problematic content to spread amongst people virally like happens on Facebook. And so if you I mean if you think about like I've been on Reddit for years and lots of people use Reddit. There's some like pretty messed up subreddits out there, right?

85. 34:39

    But but for the vast majority of people, they're not interacting with those. They kind of stay off to themselves. What you start to run into uh with Facebook, and I worked actually a lot on misinformation where I I built a screen that says, "Are you sure you want to share this? This content is problematic." Um is something can go from me to my friends to their friends to their friends and now a million people have seen it. and not having sort of those like clearly defined spaces actually leads to stuff sort of you know

86. 35:04

    sh being shared more vidly that is problematic. Yeah, I think that's a that's a pretty good point. I think that's adequate for me for now. Okay, great. Amazing. Anyone else? Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah, I think we're good for now. Thank you so much guys for your presentation. Yay.

87. 35:25

    Uh and I just have small announcement for everyone who's upstairs now. We have a plenty of space here downstairs. We have AC so you can bring your coffee with you and join us downstairs. Uh and before we move on, I wanted to remind you that after all speakers, we will have happy hours with some drinks and our beautiful terrace just to close our near space. um these three amazing

88. 35:54

    days we've spent here. So there will be a chance to enjoy some drinks on the terrace and we are ready to proceed with our speakers. I'm happy to present you Nadim Kabesi, founder of Capsell Social with the talk then centralization discloser for writers and content creators on bet three. Welcome All right.

89. 36:30

    Hello everyone. It's nice to be here. I live in Paris, so I'm always here, but it's nice to be here on this boat. More specifically, uh, I'm here to talk to you about what we've been building on top of Near for the past year and a half. We're building this thing. It's called Blogchain. Blogchain. As it turns out, it's very hard to communicate what I'm talking about when I'm discussing this orally with people. And we should

90. 36:53

    have thought about this before getting this name. But incredibly, blog chain wasn't trademarked anywhere in the US or in Europe, which is insane. But yes, what is blockchain? Uh essentially we are looking at Near as a very promising and engineerfriendly web3 platform to build what I can very basically describe as a sort of combination between Substack and Twitter. It's a place for publishing. It's a place for discourse.

91. 37:19

    It's a web application that I hope is fun to use and you can sign up and start using it today. The idea is that we want to offer writers better content resilience guarantees um against um unaccountable moderation, political censorship which might be important to journalists and other uh such uh individuals in certain parts of the world. But we also want to provide more transparent accountability and by

92. 37:44

    building on web 3 technologies we can accomplish all of this. So things to keep in mind regarding the guiding principles of blockchain is the decentralization that we've accomplished by building on top of near as well as IPFS for content censorship resistance that comes not at the expense of responsible and governance-based content moderation. We do believe that content moderation has its place and is very important. uh community- based

93. 38:10

    governance that is facilitated by web3 um engineering design principles as well as the way that smart contracts and tokenbased governance can work in general for a platform such as ours. And uh yeah, let's talk about the uh architecture and what we're using to build the platform. And I I'll hopefully also show you the platform more generally in a minute. Essentially, we decided to use Orbit DB and IPFS. So, Orbit DB is a sort of a database layer on top of IPFS that allows us to do things like content validation and

94. 38:40

    namespacing. And we're using IPFS for the wholesale storage of content. A uh blockchain node, so to speak, is instantiating an orbit DB uh instance as well as connecting to the near blockchain. So, it's dual technologies that are being used at the same time.

95. 38:58

    uh we have transparent community- based governance that's enacted via the fact that so for example let's say you want to moderate something on Twitter or on Facebook. Sometimes moderation can be tricky. For example, it might be the case that you're moderating a certain debate that's occurring halfway across the world and you don't have the necessary cultural or political context in order to enact moderation in a way that makes sense. As such uh you can end

96. 39:22

    up in sticky situations where basically a singular office somewhere in Silicon Valley is moderating a discussion regarding I don't know religious traditions in the Middle East. Let's say in our case all moderation tools that are available either to us or to the community uh that's moderating via community governance process are actually encoded in smart contracts. So, we're using that in order to provide a

97. 39:46

    community-based governance process such that everyone is infranchised into the moderation process. And we're hoping that this will basically allow um individuals to have a higher level of confidence regarding any concerns uh that have to do with um censorship or bias, which I'm not saying necessarily exists all the time on other platforms.

98. 40:06

    But the idea here is confidence. The idea here is infranchising people into this process and users into this process. And this is what web 3 technology allows us to do. Another thing is that our algorithms for the way that posts are displayed and so on are fully transparent and open source. They are in that sense on smart contracts but they are in that sense as well on our code bases and that also in general

99. 40:30

    gives a broader assurance regarding the platform itself. Um, this is where I was supposed to use my laptop to sort of demo the thing, but I can't. So, let's talk more about the actual features and I can sort of like explain to you right now what it is.

100. 40:48

     Basically, you you know how on so you know how like on Substack you can start a newsletter then people can subscribe and pay you for that newsletter. When you create an account on blockchain, you sort of have that feature set as well.

101. 41:00

     But at the same time, you can also immediately start publishing, but use that same account to read and follow other people the same way that you would do on Twitter. It really takes the best of the Twitter user experience and the best of the Substack user experience in order to provide social features, news feeds, reposting, sharing, and discovery features that a lot of other platforms don't have, but at the same time allowing people to hopefully express themselves in more interesting and nuanced ways than just a 280 character

102. 41:27

     tweet, which tends to lead to, to put it mildly, unproductive discussions. uh we allow uh users to be remunerated either via fiat or cryptocurrency which is kind of unique uh in the field. We provide uh a lot of very accessible features to individuals coming from both web 3 and web 2. So if you're coming from web 2, you can actually use our web 3 offbridge in order to create an account and log into blockchain just using your Google account or your discord account. You don't have to connect your wallet, which can be

103. 41:58

     limiting for individuals that are not familiar with the fact that connect your wallet replaces the login button or the create account button on web 3 platforms. We also have this very cool author dashboard that allows authors that are writing and publishing on blockchain to see what how people are engaging, excuse me, how people are engaging with their content. And so that's nice. Uh, one thing that has really guided our

104. 42:23

     design principles here is the fact that we are trying very hard in order to ensure that this is a pleasant user experience and that we're not sort of dragged down by the fact that we're on web 3. You know, it's not harder to use.

105. 42:37

     It's not more complicated. The user experiences are not sort of like ruthlessly new and we're trying to build a user experience that's actually pretty performant. So one really impressive thing that uh my engineering team I'd like to give a shout out to the amazing engineering team uh Christos uh Jack David Ashtosh Rahul and others um that we have at the company they've been able to build uh blockchain such that when

106. 43:01

     you actually open it and start using it what you're doing is instantiating a full IPFS node in your browser and loading content dynamically right and that works without any slowdowns and is truly decentralized. This took a lot of work actually. Uh the near smart contract calls are also really fast.

107. 43:19

     This is because Near itself is kind of nice to use. So thank you to the Near team for building something that we can actually use to develop stuff, which is nice. Um but in general, it's also, you know, we're very proud of the fact that we've built a truly web 3 platform, but that doesn't come with the sort of uh current uh lack of polish that can sometimes be seen in in web 3, which is

108. 43:41

     totally understandable because it's so new. But we've really gone the extra mile and tried to produce something that works. I hope we've succeeded. Uh blog chain launched recently. If we're certainly looking at this point, I think the technology itself is looking good, but we are looking now to onboard content creators and writers and to start building a brand. So we've had a lot of really amazing pieces recently.

109. 44:03

     For example, we had professor Eric Bihar who recently published a piece on whether or not the Nobel Peace Pri the Nobel Prize in economics uh is an intellectual fraud. So he has he criticizes the history of the Nobel Prize in economics. We've had a piece published by Cypress in the UK about the history of acid anarchism in the United Kingdom. We've had pieces published on uh the the Russian aggression and war on Ukraine from people within uh Ukraine.

110. 44:29

     And we've also had a piece published on just general uh philosophical and social commentary on the dangers of centralized discussion and social media especially in the age of COVID. uh we we're really excited about facilitating those discussions and at the same time we're excited about the guarantees that we can give writers. So in our case let's say for example that someone um so we don't allow illegal content on the platform

111. 44:54

     and if someone posts truly objectionable content we will absolutely delist the content and remove it either ourselves or via the eventual community governance process that we plan to implement. But even so, writers still implement what we're calling content resilience.

112. 45:07

     Writers still obtain what we're calling content resilience guarantees. What that means is that even if content is delisted and becomes invisible on our platform, so long as you have the IPFS content ID for it, you can still load it using blockchain using blockchain. if an IPFS node around the world continues to host the content. So we make it easier for you know decentralized nodes outside of our jurisdiction to make the independent decision to continue to host

113. 45:33

     that content themselves. They certainly bear the brunt of the moral and ethical and legal responsibility for doing so. But at least we sort of decentralized that decision in a way that seems more sensible. Furthermore, like I said earlier, I want to draw back attention to this u because I'm not sure that I covered it sufficiently. Uh the fact that we use smart contracts for all content moderation operations means that

114. 45:53

     we basically could code things in such a way that for example even our even the highle moderators of the platform are unable to ban an account unless there have been previous calls to the smart contract uh encoding uh three strikes to that account for violation of rules and those strikes perhaps will need to be validated by other members of the governance process in a transparent fashion a publicly auditable fashion.

115. 46:18

     So, we're really excited about merging these accountability and democratic uh sort of processes into a platform that I think is genuinely as easy and fun to use as the platforms that all of us are used to. And I'd like to use this opportunity to to announce that as of today uh blockchain is now uh we used to be on the near test net, but now as of today it's going to be on the near main net. Uh and I would strongly encourage

116. 46:44

     you to sign up. You don't need to. Well, it would be nice if you used your near account, uh your your near wallet, but you don't need to. You can actually just sign up with your Google account or your Discord account. And I strongly encourage you to give that a try um today and to just check out the platform for yourself. And keep in mind that we also have a writer's grant program right now. If you would like to pitch a topic and you want to write about it and it's

117. 47:07

     an interesting topic, we will do our best to help you gain an audience on blogchain of people that might be interested in your writing. uh the for example we've received a lot of engagement specifically on that Nobel uh uh prize of economics uh feature that I mentioned earlier it received a lot of attention mainly on our face from our Facebook page for some reason people on Facebook really were nuts about that

118. 47:30

     post but um in general we're hoping to have uh a similar marketing impact that we can produce for your content in case you choose to write with us and I hope that you'll consider that possibility but if you just want to sign up and try out the platform maybe just post uh your personal blog or anything like that, that's okay, too. We welcome anyone using our platform to have better discussions online. You'll notice that the user experience as a whole also

119. 47:53

     facilitates that. I encourage you, for example, to take a look at our uh illustrations and the um commenting experience. You'll you'll see what I mean when you take a look. Um thank you very much for your time. It's exciting to build on top of Near. And I want to extend a thank you to the near team for being so supportive uh during our year and a half of building on top of blockchain and launching it 3 weeks ago.

120. 48:13

     I have about 3 minutes left and I'd be happy to take questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Nadine. Um any questions? The website is blogchain.app by the way. I should have mentioned that. Yeah, I think we're out of questions for now. Oh, we have a question. Great.

121. 48:38

     Hi, thank you. Um, how are you planning on doing user adoption? Because you know like Reddit has a huge community and that's why people contribute and there's a lot of other ones like that. Um, obviously people want to have a voice.

122. 48:52

     So, how are you planning on getting users to your platform? User adoption so far has been a painstaking process that resembles roots campaigning. And this is I believe largely because some of our competitors such as Substack have such large brand recognition. So I will tell you very openly that it's actually quite difficult. What we're doing right now is you know we're working on different fronts at the same time. We're trying to build a platform that is superior from a user experience standpoint that offers more guarantees to writers as I've

123. 49:22

     mentioned earlier, but we're also engaging directly with writers in order to give them grants and to promise them that we will we will work on integrating them as a centerpiece in our uh marketing strategy such that uh we will promote their work and do our best to gain them uh paying subscribers. We're doing so on a writer by writer basis.

124. 49:40

     It's something that's going to take maybe a year of solid relationship building with writers and publishers and content creators. I don't expect it to happen overnight and it's actually according to our research very similar to what Substack was doing when they launched in our current stage. Uh I'm happy to talk to anyone who uh has any feedback or can maybe produce um some insight regarding this task which I'm

125. 50:03

     sure is going to be daunting and require a lot of work. Thank you. Uh any other questions? Uh I want to ask about economics and from where protocol will earn. Could you could you please bring the microphone closer to your mouth?

126. 50:22

     Uh I want to ask about economics and from where protocol we will get some money. So uh currently we have a very basic uh paid subscription features that mirrors what Substack has. So you uh can subscribe to someone writing content.

127. 50:38

     They can create different tiers for subscriptions. You can they can choose to charge $5 a month, $10 a month or the equivalent in cryptocurrency. And that's the sort of initial basic way that we intend for writers to get paid. And obviously the we take a cut off of that.

128. 50:51

     So we take 10% uh off of that as a way for the company to make revenue. But this is just a very basic initial sort of revenue generation mechanism. In the future, we plan to actually exploit the fact that we're a web3 platform in order to diversify the ways that people can make money on blockchain. And this would include, for example, so one example I like to use is the fact that say for example, you're um uh someone who writes reviews about cars. You could sell an a sponsor spot in your article as an NFT.

129. 51:20

     And that way when someone you you know we can create a marketplace for sponsors to actually buy sponsorship spots within content and actually be able to cryptographically verify that the sponsor spot will appear inside that piece of content at that exact time via a cryptographically validated transaction. So we can create a marketplace for for uh advertising directly between direct advertising

130. 51:43

     between sponsors and content creators with their consent uh similar to how YouTube influencers work these days. But we can also diversify that marketplace such that the token that you acrew as from being part of the governance process of blockchain can actually be used uh to stake and unlock content and to also do other stuff of that nature on the platform.

131. 52:04

     Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Uh yeah and I think it's time to move on. Yes. Uh sure. Yeah. I think Thank you so much. So, and I'm happy to present you our next speaker, Kelly Pereira, international vice president of Apes Square Creative with a talk gamify with gaming, how to build your community. The stage is all yours.

132. 52:47

     Hi, thank you for coming to hear me speak. Um, as mentioned, I'm vice president of Apes Creative. Uh, you may not have heard of the studio. There's a reason why. Um, we were actually in high-end animated feature film production previously, and we also had a gaming division that was uh, specialized in AAA console games. It's only within the past year that we've merged the two together to create a new studio um in metaverse development. So, we're

133. 53:12

     currently in production on a AAA cinematic MMO RPG. I don't know if there's everyone's from gaming, but that's a mass multiplayer online roleplay game. So, that kind of the the bigger metaverse style of games. Um I'm going to talk about community building within web3 gaming. It's kind of split into two main audience sectors when it comes to the gameplay users. So you have your play to earn gamers or P2E players and then your more traditional gamers.

134. 53:42

     So I've just put some examples here of the more well-known metaverse or web 3based uh games. In the right hand there is the more typical play to earn ones. So those are the ones that are driven by the tokconomics. And then here are the more the projects that are more focused on the game side. So they still have the earning aspect, but they're led by the game rather than by the earn. Um, so that kind of raises me to the first point when it comes to community building. Um, and and I know that it's

135. 54:09

     not revolutionary in any way, but it's really really important to understand who your audience is because you can not only just not capture the audience that you're aiming for, but you will actually alienate them if you have the right audience with the wrong approach. And I think this is something that we kind of see right across web 3 space. So um whether you know the approach or the strategy that you would take to trying

136. 54:32

     to harness the existing web 3 audience for a brand for example is like a different approach to what you would do if you were trying to bring a web two audience into the web 3 space and it's the same in the gaming. So if you're trying to target those uh play to earn players how you would approach them is very very different to how you'd approach the more traditional uh gaming community. So in terms of what motivates

137. 54:54

     them, play to earn players are just purely there for personal monetary or asset acquisition um from the project. So it's what they can earn from that. Whereas if you compare that with the game the more traditional gaming community, it's all about the game play.

138. 55:09

     So with the gamers in particular, there is a real stigma around web 3. So if you mention anything like NFT or IDO or crypto, you will kind of immediately alienate that traditional gaming audience. Um and the reason that has come around is because I don't how many people are from gaming background at all? Okay, not too many. Um so you would have heard me Oh god, the boat just started rocking. Um you would have heard me just mention uh AAA. So that is an actual game production um grading. So that's the highest level of production.

139. 55:45

     It will be graded. This is a web two thing. Um based on the size of your production, the scale of your game and so it starts at web three and then works back. So the early adopters of people bringing gaming into the web 3 space uh came out and branded themselves as AAA projects. So the traditional gaming community came to kind of see what these AAA projects were. And when they arrived, they were very much not AAA

140. 56:09

     projects. In fact, they were actually they were quite low production. So from that point, it kind of had this stigma of anything gaming to do with web 3 is very poor quality. So there is a bit of a sentiment shift that's happening at the moment which I'll talk about a bit later. But that's essentially where this stigma has come from. And it's really important to understand that when you come to start building your communities

141. 56:31

     depending on who your audience is and so building communities, how do you do it? So the play to earn has it come up play to earn side if that is where your product is aimed um you would do something like this and I'm just giving an example here like obviously everyone does it differently but you would typically lead with your IDO and your assets usually around two to three months ahead of your product launch.

142. 56:55

     That's essentially what your users are here for. They're here for for the assets. Um it would all be based on hype marketing. You would have a public Discord. Um, so the hype marketing is really important. That's things like giveaways, whitelists, um, airdrops, doing collaborations with other play to earn communities on invite contests, anything that's like a reward-based incentive, then that's where your community is going to start building.

143. 57:22

     And it's almost like you don't need really even need to have a target of what your audience would want to be, what you'd want it to be for that Discord community because if you're doing incentive based rewards, then they will come and they will keep coming and they will keep growing. And but that's kind of something to be mindful of when you go and set out your Discord is that that whole management which will be like your hype period before your before your excuse me before your asset drop um it's

144. 57:49

     very very resourceheavy. So, you need a really big team of mods that are managing all of the traffic that are coming into the channel, keeping that hype up, keeping all the activity. Um, a huge thing to be mindful of is any community that you're building that is either fast growing or has rewardbased incentives um is going to inevitably attract a huge amount of bots. So, you wouldn't necessarily know if you have a community of 60,000, 20,000 of those could be bots and you wouldn't know until the point that you come to do your

145. 58:19

     drop. That's also something to be mindful of. And then also um paper hands. Uh I think that this is an NFT term rather than just gaming. But your paper hands are the guys that have probably already done all of this pre-promotional activity. They might have earned quite a few of the free airdrops. So when you come to mint and they get their airdrop, they will immediately relist it for a really

146. 58:42

     really low valuation which then inevitably affects your floor price. Um, and then they also, and I still not to this day figured out why they do this, but they will also purchase an NFT at mint and then straight away list it for less than what they paid for. And I don't really understand why that happens, but it does. Um, but obviously from a a developer's point of view, having your assets on sale for much less than what people paid for at the

147. 59:05

     beginning is just not a good look. So, you need to just be really careful that you're not building a community that is largely built with these paper hands or flippers. Um, instead you want to be building up your Diamond Hang community.

148. 59:18

     So again, as much as you need the resource to manage the big public discord, you also need a really strong community manager who is going to take real care of those genesis holder VIP diamond hands and critically well more importantly is expand them so that you have a community that's based on loyalty to the project rather than what they can get out of the game. Um, and then also

149. 59:40

     your guilds, they're really important. I think there's a real fine line distinction between the projects that are play to earn and play and earn. So that comes at the point when um your play to earn players will be the ones that come into your game and they will grind. They will do daily tasks that then gives them the the in-game currency rewards. So it's at this point that kind of dictates whether you're a P2E or a

150. 1:00:03

     play and earn game. um because the user for a play to earn will at that point extract the currency, convert it into crypto, convert it into fiat and not put anything back in. A lot of the play to earn games are free to enter so you don't have to put anything in the pot.

151. 1:00:19

     And like Axi Infinity is a really good example of a typical play to earn game. Um their users are earning about $10,000 a month without having to put anything in in the first place. So, it's all about extraction, which just means it's not really a sustainable business model for those types of games. Um, the the distinction of when you become a play and and is when if you have a really

152. 1:00:40

     good connection with your guilds or your DAO members, having the right Dows in place with the right focus and the right aims that align with your project means that when those uh rewards are earned in game that some of it will be put back into the game and recycled. So, provides that kind of longevity. So you really need to have a good connection with your with your Dows and your guilds. And then

153. 1:01:04

     if we compare that to the gaming community, um you would kind of do the opposite or you certainly wouldn't lead with an IDO or an as an NFT sale because like I mentioned there is this stigma for traditional gamers around those types of words. So you could do a model where you do game first and have your gamers in and actually using the using the game and you you build up your your loyalty to the brand from doing that

154. 1:01:30

     first and then later you can do your NFTts or even if you don't want to do like game first and NFT second you could do they would certainly have to be very very close together. Um or you can even do waves. So all of these are I mean that's the second point I've put there around language use is rather than call these NFTts for traditional gamers just changing the nuancing of language and calling them gameplayable assets or

155. 1:01:53

     in-game assets like these this is language that they're very used to of course in web 2 games in-game assets and purchasable items have been around all this time. So it's no different. It's just changing the language to language that gamers understand and not using language that they're kind of against at this point in in adoption. Um so yeah, the rest of um a a game a traditional

156. 1:02:17

     game distribution would be the usual things that a web 2 distribution would follow. So going to game cons, working with influencers on Twitch and Steam. Closed discord is quite a big thing for the more high value gamingled projects.

157. 1:02:31

     So this is where it will either be invite only to Discord or I've seen projects even going one step further where it's now done on application basis. So people are actually applying to be part of the Discord communities in order to have um access to the first demo release for example which isn't publicly available. So that's something that we'll be doing with our project. Um and in particular the uh Medium blog posts. We'll have two Medium accounts.

158. 1:02:57

     So the first would just be the kind of general project release updates. And then the second is going to be our game developer medium. So we're building our project on Unreal Engine 5 and the the game developers, they can upload all of their work in progress game production direct from UEIE5 to the medium blog post. So anyone that's really into wanting to understand whether a gaming project is going to be high quality,

159. 1:03:21

     they will have already seen the work in progress stuff before. So, at the point you come to launch, you've kind of already got that seal of approval if um and then I'm just conscious of time. I've got three minutes left. Um what I've just said there is very black and white. Um and it's not like that really.

160. 1:03:40

     It's not that players are here and games over here. This is probably more of a realistic, you know, there's there's a bit of overlap and particularly more recently there's been a bit more of an approach to mass adoption. I think a lot of that is coming from the fact that these AAA games that are true AAA, they've, you know, been in the pipeline for a few years now. So now they're starting to come out to the market.

161. 1:04:02

     They've really kind of lifted the viewpoint of what web 3 game is. And gamers are now realizing that web 3 technology isn't about necessarily what you can earn, but it's about what you can own. So the ownership of in-game assets is a real benefit. Um and I think obviously in particular the market conditions um the the gaming industry hasn't necessarily been impacted in the same way as some of the other market you

162. 1:04:26

     know crypto um there is still a demand for games there's new games coming out every day but certainly the users have been impacted so particularly these play to earn um they might have lost all of their crypto so there's just no liquidity left to be putting back into the play to earn type games like Axi Infinity for example so I think what we'll see at the end of the market is a lot more like this where it's going to

163. 1:04:49

     be gamers who are there and loyal to your project for the gameplay but they're also harnessing the impact uh the advantages of web 3 technology or at least I hope you are because that's what I'm building. Um so thank you. I'm kind of out of time but you could do your question or I'm staying around anyway if anybody wants to just come and grab me afterwards. So thank you.

164. 1:05:11

     Thank you. Thank you so much Kelly for your presentation. Uh if you have some questions now, you can ask right now. That's great. We have such amazing audience today. A lot of questions. Hi. So, a little background. I've been playing games since I was probably 11 at this point and and was playing them for a very long time. I've I've watched a lot of these kind of funding systems over the years, things like Kickstarter, things like like that, or playing into

165. 1:05:39

     Patreon for projects, that kind of thing. Something that I think about a lot, and this is actually why I was deeply skeptical of Axi Infinity when it first came out, is that I feel as if when you attach monetary value, I mean, first things first, game design is very hard. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't realize that game design is extremely hard to get something that really works. And if you introduce

166. 1:06:02

     financial incentives, often that ends up corrupting the game, both the way that it's developed and the way that it's played. I think about, if you're familiar with Diablo III, back when it first came out, it actually had a real money auction house for players to sell items. And the game as a result of trying to create this scarcity for the items that you could earn, the game was very bad and was widely

167. 1:06:25

     panned at release largely because it was very unpleasant to play under those circumstances. So, um, I guess, and I'm sorry, every time I ask a question, I end up No, it's really interesting. I'm learning. I I end up rambling and I lose the kind of the main point. So, I can't really sum that up. But I um Are you asking like how you avoid bringing in earning without ruining the game?

168. 1:06:48

     I can I can imagine some scenarios where you'd be able to do some grassroots funding from like communities that are interested in particular projects or, you know, NFTs representing a certain ownership of a project. But beyond that, I I do worry about how you could incorporate ownership in games without um making the games exploitative or painful to play.

169. 1:07:08

     Um, and one way that we're tackling it is by not having all of our NFTts just finished and ready to go. So, we're going to do things like have blueprints where within our metaverse, the players will have to you purchase the the blueprint for an item and then the the user has to go around and collect certain items to build that in-game asset which is then theirs that's ownable. Sorry, what you say?

170. 1:07:32

     Yeah. To then resell. So it's not I mean it's just very unweb 3 really to have the project developer developing everything handing everything finished anyway like we want it to be a more decentralized structure and have the actual players do do the work for us but it means that they you know they can be on offchain and onchain NFT so they there might be the certain aspect wherein if order for them to want to resell to turn it into an NFT they may have to purchase an item for them to then bring it on chain.

171. 1:08:04

     but actually the creation of the assets is part of the game. Um, but that's done offchain. So, that's just one way that we're trying to not just deliver loads of finished NFTs and say here's the price and this is what you have to pay.

172. 1:08:16

     Um, another thing that I think is important as well is just if you are going to do finished NFTts that have, you know, possible gameplayable attributes. So whether it's a vehicle um and you buy that certain vehicle that makes you go faster um is finding that balance meaning that it's not just the rich people who can afford the NFTs that are then able to win the game and the people that don't have the money to afford the limited edition vehicles for example therefore don't have a chance.

173. 1:08:46

     Um we're still figuring that out but it might be something around how vehicles can degrade and you have to upgrade them or maintain them. just it's something that we're looking at because we definitely want to make sure that you know you have to have income in your game to survive. You do, but making sure that it's not just the people that can afford to play that are the ones that can then win. So, I'll let you know when I figured it out. I'm still I'm still working on it.

174. 1:09:11

     Great. Thank you so much. Any other questions from the audience? Uh you can always ask any questions uh in person. We have a lot of time till the end of uh uh our near space today. Thank you so much, Kelly. Thank you once again.

175. 1:09:28

     Uh just want to let you know that we are right in the middle of our speakers. Uh and I'm happy to present you our next speaker Anton Weisber, head of near UA with a talk how original hubs contributing to the ecosystem. So hello um thanks for coming first of all. Um yes so my name is Anton Weisber.

176. 1:10:09

     Um maybe I will start uh start our talk. um taking some time to talk a little bit about myself and a little bit about the background why we've built the uh near Ukraine hub and how it's all started how it's evolved what are we doing now but overall uh if I if I talk about the communities and um like I would say that uh regional part of it and like regional communities are super important because uh like definitely people uh want to to uh discuss some stuff in their own

177. 1:10:46

     languages and uh I will talk a little bit more about uh why we think it's important to have like true decentralization and like having the hubs and regional model as a part of the overall decentralization which should not only be uh the like governance model or overall how the uh protocols u think about themselves but also how how it is structured in terms of uh in terms of overall organization.

178. 1:11:16

     So um as I as I mentioned my name is Anton vice uh like my previous background is I'm leading the near Ukraine hub. My previous background and is um creation of the startups basically uh detrix as a no code tool for analytics and machine learning. We've been to Y Combinator two years ago and like Drix is uh still operational. Um then I'm uh like general partner in SE venture partners the fund the fund that helps like Ukrainian founders uh on the

179. 1:11:51

     early stages and and our new fund which we've established specifically for near ecosystem projects. Um yeah and my my uh I've been technical for some time. I'm not doing uh technical stuff anymore but I've uh used to to do uh analytics and data science uh in both bar and like technology consultancy space. So um how we actually started the uh regional hub like uh as a company DRI actually provides the inside and analytics and been providing insights for uh for it

180. 1:12:30

     was like a cross domain platform general platform and uh at some point of time we started uh started providing uh like insights for for near and it was maybe more than a year ago uh creating the different dash D boards, creating the uh understanding of the uh a lot of things around the overall communities deps and what's going on under the hood matching the uh onchain data and um like it was some time and then um like actually uh near became like one of

181. 1:13:09

     the biggest clients for for that and like we started building some different stuff on Near some different ideas and then that's how we've started the uh the overall idea of uh this near Ukraine or near Ukrainian hub. Um I think like right now um I I will mostly talk about uh my personal um experience and our personal experience as a team of uh building the regional hub and I think it's kind of a reflection on how we are seeing the community's development

182. 1:13:42

     overall but uh to for ourselves like we uh we we think about the uh decentralization as I mentioned in the way of Uh also doing it on like entities level on um doing some stuff uh which is not always organized in the way one uh when uh it is directly managed and vertically managed and so regional hub is a part overall regional hubs idea and like then u the guys such as like proximity oriented on defi or like human gu are important in terms of um like

183. 1:14:22

     spreading the uh both responsibilities and actually providing the uh the possibility to do the teams uh something independently. Uh the other idea is the uh localizing of the communities right and uh making sure that uh um we can we can on board not only people who are um already actively involved in either near or any other like ecosystem but uh uh on boarding like new users and like this is why like meetups are so important because you can gather you can discuss something and for It's both from

184. 1:15:04

     developer side and from the uh user side where we are we are really good at uh overall like the blockchain space is quite good in uh satisfying the demands of developers. It's like I think crypto is a world that was created like as a developers first community especially for us. So it's definitely time to uh to on board new users and new categories because um overall uh overall like we cannot reach 1

185. 1:15:36

     billion uh users like only talking to like the developers. So like bringing like local users working with local partners is super important to to to on board like new use cases. Um yeah and but for sure it's it should not be like the I don't know the development in the any like random direction. It should be kind of contribution to the overall goal and like this is the goal of like providing the world with the possibility to for the people to have their own

186. 1:16:05

     assets like their own data and so on. So this is kind of the motivation why why we think that this structure uh works with regional hubs overall. And where are we now? We are at 50 people uh roughly maybe already 60 but 50 plus and as a regional hub when we are saying regional hub from one perspective it's like a separate entity for profit entity but actually except of this it is a community of people like we are

187. 1:16:36

     gathering people together we are we are doing a fund to uh like as a venture arm to support to support like uh uh teams who are starting who come to us to uh with either like the need for technical support or like for money. Uh we're actually a venture lab as like maybe um there's a lot of things that need to be done and like we are good at building products and specifically like the local specifics is that like usually we've started from Ukrainian so like we have a

188. 1:17:10

     lot of developers and we are good at building products. So uh as the product lab maybe is our uh most effective let's say uh mechanism to um to to deliver something. Yeah. And maybe the the largest part of what we are doing is uh venture lab a product lab like venture build or whatever and then we're doing some other functions such as aggregation of the jobs and so on. So near is a number of different things.

189. 1:17:41

     most common question I've been asked is near Ukraine where are you where are you guys and I'm saying okay like we are in Lisbon yes we are in Lisbon so uh with the start of the war we actually uh moved uh moved to Lisbon and created like Ukraine and uh Portugal hub we've been thinking about doing uh like having second office in uh in Lisbon for some time but it appears that it's uh it appeared like our first office, our main

190. 1:18:13

     office and like we we are like shifting slightly towards the being like near Europe. So like actually covering both Ukraine and Portugal right now like going to build like a physical space in Kashkash like it's near Lisbon and um yeah we are doing some stuff like we cannot like avoid you know uh thinking about what happened with Ukraine. So like uh we are providing a lot of uh like social initiatives like help for

191. 1:18:44

     the people who uh get out of Ukraine. So away from Ukraine.com uh and like the other thing I'm actually uh like uh calling everybody to to support like our own validator uh like is doing this and uh we encourage other validators to to do this kind of stuff.

192. 1:19:06

     So actually we are just uh the part of the staking rewards we are taking like uh like 2% is going directly to Ukraine uh wallet like it's without uh like near extension just Ukraine which we created specifically for like Ukrainian government and like actually adoption in Ukraine of crypto is really high at the moment. So um like it's really like controlled by uh Ukrainian officials like ministry of digital transformation.

193. 1:19:34

     So they're using this directly and the interesting thing is that sometimes they're paying directly in like near for something not not only like uh doing the ramp and ramp stuff. So like and this is kind of the like a lot of chains actually supporting Ukraine and providing the money but uh for us it's like the easiest ways to build it in our uh in our validator and in the our uh

194. 1:19:57

     everyday life. So I will talk a little bit more about what are we doing uh as a part of uh our uh our um regional hub like as I mentioned the major thing is the product lab we name it like binary star uh as an entity so basically uh there are a lot of uh projects we've started right now it's more than seven maybe the most interesting are like we're working on uh our actually uh the

195. 1:20:29

     um background and expertise of our team is mostly working with uh B2B and uh working with like traditional businesses. So like one of the things we're doing is like a central bank digital currency or CBDC. The other stuff is like that our company and vombi uh which is the doing the user analytics and acquisition. the gig pay like payment which is super important like to have the easy way to to pay contractors uh in crypto and do the like

196. 1:21:01

     bulk payments and make sure that it's it work with your accounting system. This something which we are struggling with and usually we are actually trying to solve the problems we're uh we are struggling with and that's how the product ideas for product lab are created. We are also uh helping the uh the central bank team like doing some stuff u then doing some crypto lending like in the uh in Africa rewarded engagement and they potentially can uh enjoy learn to earn and move to

197. 1:21:33

     earn and that's a much bigger chunk that's uh that's a billion people and that's something that we believe is going to be the next uh uh population uh segment that we will see within in web 3. Now, more specifically, they tend to be younger uh audience from the developing markets such as Brazil, Turkey, India, Southeast Asia. We're seeing lots of appetite there. You guys are aware how crypto is popular in the

198. 1:22:03

     place places like the Philippines and the Vietnam. And uh we are seeing a huge uh surge in our new registrations specifically in Latin America. uh a vast majority of users that on board in the past six to nine months, they on board kind of knowing that crypto is powerful, crypto is here. They haven't been able to capitalize from it, but they're really looking forward to it. So, um what does it take to get the next

199. 1:22:33

     billion people to get those users excited about crypto and what actually prevents them uh why they are not yet with crypto? I think that there's a couple of really big barriers there. The first one, and we all know it, it's uh a pretty shitty UX. I mean, in order for you to create a a wallet uh by Neo, of course, which is a completely different story, but you know, we know that creating a wallet is a pain in the neck. So, it's not easy.

200. 1:23:05

     And then even if you invested uh quite a bit of your time and your brain into that cumbersome process, you still have to pay and that's not inexpensive. So you've got two major barriers there. And this is really really hard to overcome those. Part of the reason we actually ended up deciding to go with Near is that Near is just so much focused on uh user experience and that was always our number one priority to make an experience so easy, so natural and organic that even like a 12

201. 1:23:38

     year old kid from California or a grandma from Malaysia could relate to that easily. So from that perspective, Ne is a very very natural combination and a very natural fit to what we do. So, uh, in order to make those users interested and excited, you have to build an experience that's free to use, doesn't really have an, you know, a massive, uh, barrier to for entry. Uh, you want to be able to have something

202. 1:24:06

     that's easy to understand. And finally, the modern generation is, you know, as we know, very very receptive to rewards. So rewards is a is a is a tricky beast though because if you don't really administer it properly then rewards is what you know is all there is. So there was a question earlier here. So how do you actually build a game and how do you incorporate the reward element to it? My

203. 1:24:31

     my uh response to that is very simply so people should be there not for rewards they should be there for the user experience. The user experience should be either useful or fun or ideally both. And then rewards, you know, serves as a rocket fuel. So rewards can make your user experience stickier, you can make it even more rewarding or exciting. But if there's nothing but rewards, it's not going to be sustainable. So from that

204. 1:25:03

     perspective, you look at Axi, you look at Steen, it's not really sustainable because the only reason people play it is rewards. And if you were left to your own devices, you'd probably not like I again uh full disclosure obviously kind of a competitor to us, but Steen um painful to play. I did try to do it. uh axi did I would I play it without um it being rewarding? Probably not. So I think at the end of the day, you really want to build an experience that's either useful

205. 1:25:38

     or exciting or both. Um so um in terms of rewards more specifically, so when I say useful, I think there it's very important to understand what's the underlying experience that you're rewarding and that underlying experience should somehow be valuable to the user.

206. 1:25:57

     What I mean by that is that what we see from our users is that yeah they kind of go yeah fine you reward my steps and everything is kind of cool but the the net net result is that I end up walking more and that's inherently good for me.

207. 1:26:12

     I think this is really important and this is what makes users stick for a much longer period of time. Uh, and I think that that translates into a uh um sustainable uplift in physical activity which is plus 20%. Which is pretty awesome. I think what's really cool is that we found a way to get those rewards in a very sustainable fashion. We we never fund those rewards ourselves. We always get those rewards from our partners in exchange for their engagement with our users and that makes the whole thing uh very uh sustainable.

208. 1:26:46

     So we've grown to 100 million users being a a a profitable business. The thing is that if you look at web three versus web two then the value of a user is substantially substantially larger can be an order of two orders of magnitude higher than than in web two.

209. 1:27:04

     So imagine how much more value we can source from the web 3 uh ecosystem and give back to the user because that's essentially what we do. Uh so again very specific recipe to how to make sure that this next billion come into play and they enjoy the product because at the end of the day the only thing you can do to for to to bring the next billion people into web 3 is to build a product that they love. So you you want to have a product that's free

210. 1:27:37

     to use, very low barriers to entry. You want to build an experience that's easy to grasp. And part of it is the technical rails that you want to use. You don't want to, you know, make your users suffer creating a wallet for like, you know, 20 minutes. And that's how we managed to create 11 million wallets on year because it takes less than 60 seconds to to build. So, and then sorry to to to to create a wallet. And then

211. 1:28:02

     finally, rewarding experience. We haven't established sustainable business model web two. There's no reason why we can't replicate it on web three all bit with a different type of partners but we already have a a bunch of uh reward partners in place so that's only get better from from now on um tokconomics I think what's important here is that uh remember we talked about the freeto use so whenever you ask your user to purchase to buy your token

212. 1:28:31

     you're creating a uh an adoption barrier so in our case 25% % of um a token supply TGE is going to be given as an airdrop essentially uh to to our existing users in uh in a match one to one. So you look at your sweatcoin balance and if you opted in you'll get the same number of sweat which you'll be able then to trade at your uh you know at your pleasure. Um, community is king, but you know it all.

213. 1:29:04

     Uh, wait, no. Yeah. So, I mean, we got to a pretty sizable following from ground zero from uh April the 12th when we announced the uh the launch of uh Sweat token. And I think this I I particularly like that graph. It just shows the speed of a creation of the first million wallet. So if you look at uh many other protocols then it took them a lot of time. Um Axi took was the fastest by far it took them just over two months. We were really

214. 1:29:40

     fortunate. We created the first million in 11 days and the first 2 million in 21 days and right now as I said just about 3 months after announcement we at at 11 million wallets. Again, still remains to be seen what kind of quality those users are, how they going to engage with web 3. But we see our job and our mission as to essentially introducing all that huge number of users into web 3, making their onboarding exciting, rewarding, and very very fun. So yeah, and as a result of

215. 1:30:13

     that, people will be moving more and we live in a healthier, wealthier planet. That's it from me, I guess. Right. So I have four minutes remaining. Yep. Thank you so much. Uh guys, any questions? Any questions from audience? Um hi, you mentioned the explosive growth um on Twitter and Discord in your community. Um this is great, but do you have any particular tips how that worked out or what you would advise?

216. 1:30:47

     Maybe there was a key um thing that you did that made you more successful faster than many other chains and projects. It's a great one. I mean I don't think I have a particular recipe there. Like obviously that helps when you have a few million or tens of millions of users and that helps create that following.

217. 1:31:08

     But having said all this, prior to our announcement on April the 12th, we didn't even have a Twitter account. Uh we didn't have anything on Discord. we didn't have anything on Telegram. So, I think it's just the it's also timing because this is when the kind of the consumer products started to take off.

218. 1:31:27

     Um, and let's face it, I mean, in my life, that's the easiest elevator pitch about your product. Like, you can explain it literally 5 seconds. So, you walk and we convert your steps into a currency and that this is how you become healthier. So, I guess it's a combination of of um a universal appeal, a story that's really easy to tell, you know, obviously having a little bit of

219. 1:31:51

     that kind of legacy following, lots of very active, very passionate users and then just doing not not it up with hiring the right people and just posting the right content. I think content is important. Yeah. But you know it anyway.

220. 1:32:07

     Thank you. And I suppose there was one more question. Hi. Um, sorry if I missed this, but if I'm a sweatcoin holder, what what is the utility of the the coin as a holder? Yeah. And and a second question that's related is you mentioned that it's a sustainable business model that the sweat coins are being basically funded through your partners. Um, what are the partners getting in return?

221. 1:32:33

     Yeah, that's a great question. So firstly the existing sweatcoin app and feel free to just go ahead and install it from app store. Uh uh we work with about more than 600 partners. You can uh exchange your sweat coins for products, services, experiences. You can donate it to charity. So there's quite a lot of utility to sweatcoin today. But sweatcoin of today is nothing more than just an air mile. It's a centralized

222. 1:32:58

     inapp currency. Now what's in it for the um for the partners? That's a great question because Sweatcoin is illquid. You can only spend it within Sweatcoin marketplace. That's one of the drawbacks actually the existing currency has. So what partners get they get an opportunity to get access to our user base. That's in case of brand partners or in case of health care providers like the NHS in the UK or health insurers.

223. 1:33:26

     They have an opportunity to make their particular user segment healthier and more physically active. So for example, we work with the NHS on the diabetes prevention program. The NHS funds the additional range of products above and beyond on what's available by default to everybody in the UK. And because they fund that particular range of products, whereas on average our users are 20%

224. 1:33:50

     more active, the NHS targeted users are 40% more active and they lose about 6% of their body weight in 10 10 weeks. So that's what's in it for partners. It's either exposure to Yao user base or an opportunity to make those users, specific users more active.

225. 1:34:12

     Thank you. Um, any other questions? Oh, seems we're done with the questions. Thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you very much. Um, we have two more amazing speakers for today. Before we go to our happy hours and networking, uh, just wanted to remind you that we have some activities upstairs. Uh, you have a chance to get some air drops of near tokens on your wallet. There is some puzzles, some quiz. Don't forget to check it out.

226. 1:34:48

     Everybody. And for everyone who's upstairs right now, we have AC downstairs. We have a plenty of places. You can grab your iced coffee and join us downstairs. Just wanted to remind you that you can see the whole list of our speakers on our event bright link. Uh Zuri, you can find your our YouTube uh live broadcast link as well. Uh don't hesitate to share it.

227. 1:35:53

     And if you're interested in our uh ecosystem hiring unit, uh you can find me. I can answer all your questions. Our doors will be open today till the 700 p.m. So we are planning to have some cocktails right after two speakers. And I'm happy to present you our next speaker, Sasha Hudzillin, co-creator of human guilt with a talk gaming ecosystem on Near. Welcome.

228. 1:37:06

     That feel real funky, y'all. Uh, can you hear me? Sure, we can hear you. Cool. Well, sounds good. So we're going to talk today a bit about uh gaming on near uh and what human guilt is uh all about. So we started anyway like let's go next. So uh I started at MI from the very beginning.

229. 1:37:42

     So in August 2018 most mostly was focusing business development talking to web three founders in the space at the time. The space was very small. Just 500 founders, less than 500 founders was uh when we just started in 2018, it was a bare market. Very few people were entering the space. Maybe like 30 developers per month. 95% of them were going to Ethereum. It was in fact like very challenging times to start new layer 1. And I was doing a whole bunch

230. 1:38:07

     of other things like fundraisers for startups, uh content events and recruiting. And uh we learned from talking to the founders uh a couple things that became really important pieces for Near's own product strategy. So we learned for for instance that it's not about scalability uh for for blockchains. Our initial assumption was that it's all about scalability when we started talking to blockchain gaming studios. We learned that they actually want to get gamers first. So scalability was actually

231. 1:38:35

     secondary consideration uh and uh usability getting gamers into the game was very important. they were losing actually 199 people out of 200 on a meta mask alone. And so Near kind of developed its own approach to usability through how on boarding is done on on a browser wallet, how transactions are handled and how account management system is done, flexible key management, cryptography removed. We learned through

232. 1:39:01

     this that usability should be very important focus not just scalability. Um we started helping a lot of founders on the business side as well. That was the way for us early days to win founders on on near. So a lot of times we would win founders because of uh business side of their b uh their uh business not because of technology. So often times I would pick near because of the business consideration. And then I

233. 1:39:24

     also started the first incubator uh on near called open web collective. It's run by mimi now it's done three batches of acceleration uh about to start the fourth fourth batch. Now we have multiple accelerators in ecosystem. So that's super exciting. Anna started uh human guilt as a first spin-off from near in 2021. Since then we had a lot more spin-offs such as proximity, aurora, many others. Uh initial focus for us was on earners in near ecosystem.

234. 1:39:50

     We believe that the more earners you get uh the faster you build sustainable economy uh of human activity on top of uh on top of blockchain. And then we started focusing more and more on gaming because we saw that creators mostly on NFT marketplace called Parasir had interest in building games. Oftent times they didn't have skill sets but they were interested in building games and so

235. 1:40:12

     we started doing game jams YouTube cross promotions and started inviting more uh game game developers and gaming founders into new ecosystem and through that kind of became go-to team for for gaming and near supporting founders through this working scale. 2 games today in the world have concurrent users of like not concurrent overall users of a billion.

236. 1:40:32

     34 games today in the world have 100 million users uh gamers. When it comes to web 3 gaming, it's still very early. So there are three games that are above 100,000 uh uh weekly active wallets. Those are Alien World, Splinterlands, and Farmers World. Um and there was a lot of money invested in gaming as of recently. uh earlier this year was 5 billion invested in gaming in the first half of 2022. And another important piece to mention, 52% of all of the web 3 activity today is happening uh in

237. 1:41:01

     games. Uh but it's so it's still early when it comes to active uh wallets relatively to overall gaming. Obviously, it's many orders of magnitude difference still. Um but at the same time, it's a big chunk of web 3 activity today. And that's overall web 3 gaming. It's not near gaming.

238. 1:41:21

     Now for near um for for near ecosystem overall. So uh as as people probably know here I don't want to spend too much time on uh near stats but we have 700 or so projects uh being built on near you can check out awesome near to kind of see them. We have 10,000 daily active wallets, 50,000 weekly active wallets on Near. Most of the usage today coming through D5 uh through Aurora ecosystem through NFT marketplace select paras and through near crowd some of the new use cases.

239. 1:41:52

     Gig economy uh similar to mechanical turk when it comes to gaming. So overall we have 88 games being developed. We're working with 50 of them or so. Only few of them are on mainet. are five that went live with one of them being in the top 10 most active contracts today on Near called Zomand. And if you want to give a try to kind of see what is the representative example of the game on

240. 1:42:14

     Near, I encourage you to go to try Crypto Hero. So if you go to Google and search for Pixel Daps, you're going to see uh their website and you can like check it out. It's a really cool dungeon scroller. When they launched, uh 10,000 gamers were playing it in the beginning.

241. 1:42:29

     That was in Jul in January, but since then activity kind of tapered off a bit. So retention is still kind of like lacking for the time being when it comes to gaming ecosystem one on year. And the biggest data point so far for us, it was this crypto hero 10,000 uh people were playing it at the beginning. So when we work with founders, we uh tend to um emphasize on information sharing. So we tell founders that they're not competing with each other. They should not treat anything they're building as a secret

242. 1:42:57

     sauce. such as like don't treat your token economics or anything like this um like secret sauce and approach it like near approach it early days when it comes to layer ones and layer twos when they were getting started we had a YouTube uh uh series called whiteboard series where there was a lot of cross collaboration in terms of how scalability is done uh in in blockchain when it comes to R&D this early days we

243. 1:43:19

     borrowed some ideas from polar dot Ethereum 2 borrowed some ideas from near it was a lot of crossc calibration and so similarly when it comes to gaming founders we're trying to encourage the same kind uh cross collaboration and sharing culture as opposed to trying to hold back and and think like like people competing. Of course, they're going to be competing once the game's launched, but for now, there is a lot of uh learnings that needs to happen. Until then, we we also focus quite a bit on

244. 1:43:43

     independent game developers. Independent game developers usually are more creative ones and they also uh more frugal, so they can do a lot more um on a cheaper budget and they can also launch much faster. So typical independent game can launch on near within like three to six months but then if you're building something more complex it can take a year or two and obviously you need to budget for this.

245. 1:44:06

     So we focus on independent game developers even more so given the current market conditions and also we emphasize user generated content. So it appears a lot in virtual worlds user generated content and appears in some games but it's actually a key to increasing amount of earners which I was saying earlier is important for sustainable economy. Uh it's also important uh to solve retention problem because if you build just purely your

246. 1:44:30

     own AP as a game developer uh you might have this problem where people will leave the game after they get bored right and if on the other hand you use user generated content as a part of your game then it can be more sustainable people can be uh playing it for much longer and also by the way you can self moderation for uh for um user generated content through near crowd style geeks.

247. 1:44:54

     So that's also possible. So we encourage more of that. We have maybe five, six uh games in virtual worlds today focusing on user generated content. We recently did game jam that was just focusing user generated content and we're going to do more on that front. And so we usually start with a grant but we mostly help with non-monetarily.

248. 1:45:11

     Uh other pieces we believe that money doesn't really lead to like success. It's like important but it's not the prerequisite for success. And so we focus on fun game plays. How to make compelling game game? how to do go to market in a web three native way, how to do it incrementally and with the community. We focus on building sustainable economies and how they tie back to gaming mechanics and also recruiting in web 3 legal community building. So those are the kind of components of success that that people need.

249. 1:45:41

     And here is the more exciting part of the presentation. I'm going to show the video u that will show some of the games being developed. Uh let me just figure out how to pull up the video. Oh yeah, here we go. Right. Heat. Heat.

250. 1:47:02

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. N. Mhm.

251. 1:48:20

     Heat. Heat. Heat. It N cool. And uh yeah, I'll I'll finish with a couple uh small pieces here. So market conditions uh change quite a bit as you

252. 1:49:25

     might know. So potential global recession uh decreases capital availability. I personally think that we're going to be in this market conditions for a while for a couple of years actually. Um so access to capital converges around experienced team. So what we're seeing is that people who've built successful web 2 games uh they tend to converge all of the capital uh when it comes to like venture capital being available for games and then firsttime creators actually uh struggles

253. 1:49:50

     through this uh because also from the investor perspective uh there's a lot of like rookie mistakes avoidable mistakes that can happen if you haven't built games. So for example you spend a lot of time on game engine or maybe not do something uh with uh your art pipeline uh correctly and can blow through money easily. So that's what we are seeing. So access to capital converges around experience teams uh founders in this market environment need to conserve

254. 1:50:14

     cash. We we saw quite a few uh of teams who decrease monthly burn dramatically already in response to the uh change in market conditions. Uh founders need to focus. That's another important consideration in a bull market. Um often we we saw people doing three four things uh at once and now it's impossible to do. Um, and launching as quickly as possible, not trying to uh time the

255. 1:50:36

     market, being very iterative with the with the game and and launching and iterating with your users is what's important. Um, and then finding users in organic way is another important piece. NFT drops is a way to do that. Um, we've seen more teams kind of like converging towards NFT drops. We found finally the team to do NFT breach which is very important for uh some of this. Um, and so that that's kind of like the advice.

256. 1:51:00

     Now, if you want to work with us, so follow uh us on Twitter, human guild, Alexander. Um we give uh grants still, although we became a bit more conservative like everyone else in this uh market. Uh ping us on Telegram, Discord or Twitter. Uh if you want to kind of engage deeper and build something together with us, uh find this guy on Telegram and myself on Twitter.

257. 1:51:24

     Uh we also have Discord. So, human guild.io O has a link to discord and once you chat to our DAO members we can add you to the founder group and you can start engaging with other founders as well and learning from each other. So yeah that's it.

258. 1:51:39

     Thank you. Thank you so much Sasha guys. Any questions to Sasha? Uh if we have no questions right now I'm sure that Sasha will stay with us for the happy hour and you can ask your questions in person. Uh I just want to ask our next speaker James Sinka uh to go to our organization team which is right behind the stage.

259. 1:52:11

     James Tina with uh our organization team waiting for you right behind the stage. N we go go. We just need a few moments uh before our final speech today. Uh we will float with a really great presentation our speakers hours and we will be ready to move on to our happy hours.

260. 1:53:11

     you have a chance to join us, go downstairs for our final presentation today and take a part in our Q&A session right before the happy hours. Just wanted to remind you that today is free communities day. So we expect to have uh great conversations today.

261. 1:53:44

     And I'm happy to present us uh our final pitch for today. James Sinka core builder orange dowel and Don Ho GP orange da fund with a talk building orange dao. Welcome. And we also have YouTube live broadcasting. Ooh. Hello. Hey everyone. Um, as you can see, I am not Don Ho, but I'm substituting for him today. I'm Brian. I work on the Orange Dow fund team.

262. 1:54:12

     Yep. And my name is James. Uh, I'm working inside Orange Dow doing Desi investments and helping to build the Orange Fellowship, which I'm excited to talk to you guys about today. Awesome. Well, we're super excited to about Orange Dow. So, we are a community of over 1,300 founders. Um, and we are primarily a venture dow even though we're working in a lot of different areas. and we're super excited to be

263. 1:54:34

     partnered with Near as one of our layer 1 partners. So, Orange Fund is a venture fund and we back early stage companies um and provide them with everything that an early stage founder needs to get from zero to one. We have an amazing community of founders that can help you with absolutely everything you need.

264. 1:54:53

     Whether that's partnerships, whether that's product feedback, whether you're going through a rough time as a founder, we understand all of that and are able to support you in ways that very few other investors are able to. Um, on the orange fund side of things, we've been investing very, very actively in the venture space in web 3. And we haven't slowed down. Even though there's a bare market, we're super excited about everyone who's building right now. And we're really excited to support

265. 1:55:17

     companies and teams that are building on top of Near. We are able to we do we have a pretty fast investment process um and really support you from helping you with partnerships within our portfolio companies to everything that you could possibly need from a founder.

266. 1:55:31

     Brian, could you tell us how long it takes from when someone gets excited about learning about Orange Dow to applying and actually getting that check? Yeah, so we we try to move pretty quickly right now. Um and we've gotten our process down to a little over two weeks. uh we are DAO so a little bit slower than other organizations but the great thing is every time someone applies to us they know that they're getting the best expert eyes on their product and the best people to be evaluating their product possible.

267. 1:55:54

     So like as an example my background is in chemistry and material sciences. So anytime that we get web 3 project that's working in the science space there's a lot of biotech dows that are out there longevity dows some material science dows uh lab dow is a great example I can actually give them support based on my experience as being a scientist and similarly since we have over a thousand y cominator founders you get partnered with folks that have actually had experience in the domains that you're

268. 1:56:19

     building in um whether that's you know go to market strategy uh B2B corporate sales which a lot of folks haven't done um whether it's it's even just like growth hacking Like for for the longest time I didn't know how to build a funnel to get users that would land on our website actually convert and use our product. And it this might sound like simple things um but through the vast experiences of YC founders in our network. You can get hands-on support for people who are experts at each part

269. 1:56:43

     of that stack that'll help you go zero to one. Exactly. Our founders have gone through everything. They've built small companies. They've built large companies. They've had exits. They've changed the world. And we're going to continue to do that within our ecosystem. We like to say that we're building more than just a venture now. We're building a digital nation here. Um, and that really means everything.

270. 1:57:01

     Like we have the best builders in the space possible. We will support you. Everything that you need to get from zero to one. And so anyone who's building on near or in the near ecosystem right now, come talk to us. Come apply to us. Um, we'd love to chat with you. And we're looking at some of the most exciting spaces possible. One of those being DI.

271. 1:57:19

     DI. Yes. Yes. Yes. So for those that have never heard of DI before uh DI is decentralized science and we take the the acronym from DI like decentralized finance and the the whole vision of DI is to take all the tooling that is web3 native that's default open access that's interoperable and bring those those concepts those innovations to the realm of science. So if any of you all have

272. 1:57:43

     paid taxes before you may know that your tax money has gone in to actually fund scientific research. So whether that's like Alzheimer's or cancer or what have you. And the irony there is your tax dollars go to pay a researcher to do the work at whatever school they're at. And then once they actually have a publication, something that they're ready to show the world, they have to take some of that money that they got from a grant and actually pay the publisher to post their research, right?

273. 1:58:09

     Which is kind of backwards. But what gets even worse is once that research has been published, you know, in nature, cell, what have you, you now as the the consumer of that research, as like a normal person, you have to pay to access that research. You might have to pay $50 to find a PDF that explains, you know, what the experiments were, what the results were, how this might be useful.

274. 1:58:27

     And that is completely backwards. If you think about it, science is like one of the original public goods that we had as a species, right? Learning how to cook food and make fire and build homes. Like science and technology is what allows us to be here in the present space. So it doesn't make sense that you'd have to pay to access the knowledge that as a species we've been able to grow and create. And the beauty of web 3 is everything is open access by default. So

275. 1:58:52

     anything that you publish on chain is default viewable by everyone anywhere in the world. And so instead of gatekeeping knowledge for those folks that just have the privilege to be able to afford it, we now can build primitives that by default anyone anywhere can access from and contribute to. And so you can imagine that we we at some point will have a Wikipedia style tree of knowledge that'll archive from the moment research

276. 1:59:16

     comes out of university um all the data points and all the experiments that were conducted. So that way anywhere anyone can look at those rootbased data points and build up from there the same conclusions that the scientists have.

277. 1:59:28

     And this might sound like just a small little feature set but the the way science works these days is you know a researcher out of Harvard or MIT let's take CO as an example they'll say great we've shown that the co vaccines are efficacious and you know they'll demonstrate what context they were in how they ran the experiment. Uh and depending on on um what the media wants to show they might sensationalize it one way or another. They might say co is

278. 1:59:51

     vaccines are 100% effective or like oh there's a very small place where it's not effective so that must mean that they're useless completely and those headlines become publicized and then they get retweeted and they grow these these massive uh clouts that are actually one layer removed from the base science and once those kind of pick up their own wildfire uh they make their way to legislators who actually

279. 2:00:12

     legislate uh now two layers away removed from the science that was originally published. But if science is default on chain and it's open access, anyone can go back to the root data and graph those conclusions themselves. And so there's no longer um a marriage of the scientific data with the story that it tells. We can remove the spin. We can remove the media axis that wants to take these things and sensationalize them and

280. 2:00:36

     all go back to the root data set, that root cause that we can understand. Um, I think DI has the opportunity to just change the way that we collaborate and and create innovations that truly do belong to us all, right? Originally, DI has has come from our tax money and at the end of the day belongs to us to get, you know, better phones, uh, clean energy and just really increase the the quality of life for everyone. Um, so we at Orange Dow have made a number of DI

281. 2:01:05

     investments. Uh, I'm excited to continue building in the space. So if any of you all are, you know, teaming at the bit like I am to build an open access default uh open DSI, come find me. Uh my name is James and you can find me Jamesa on Twitter, uh jamesynca.com, the whole nine yards.

282. 2:01:21

     So James, could you tell us about some of the projects in DI that we're really excited about right now? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So a little bit of bias here. All right. Again, like I mentioned, Orange Dow has invested in the space. So some of these are portfolio companies. Um but one of my favorite projects is uh a project called Lab Dow. And these guys are building a web 3 primitive to allow any scientist

283. 2:01:41

     anywhere in the world to post uh a standard operating procedure. And so that might look like a recipe that you would have for any kind of like a bread like a banana bread that you might make. And you can post them in a way that is um native or they're creating new primitives. So any lab anywhere can take this recipe book, the standard operating procedure, and execute on it and then give you back the results. And this this might sound kind of trivial, but you can

284. 2:02:06

     imagine there's more scientists out in the world that have ideas of what kind of experiments they could run than can afford the multi-million dollar equipments that it takes to actually run these experiments. And so finally, we can decouple um access to hardware and capital from scientific breakthrough from from a a concept idea. And this ability to allow anyone anywhere to sort

285. 2:02:30

     of run experiments without having to put the upfront costs will allow us to um bring more people into the fold from places that you know don't live at like a Boston and have access to an MIT or that live in San Francisco or can go to a um a Stanford. Um so the uh Labdell is one of my favorites. Another favorite of mine is uh Molecule. So it's molecule.to. They've invented the IP NFT framework.

286. 2:02:55

     So you can take your intellectual property that you've created in your lab and actually mint it as an NFT. And you might think like okay like why are we doing this? But it it turns out that um intellectual property is a very illquid very non-transparent market. And so if you have as as myself I've got a patent uh but it's not actually useful because no one knows it exists. But finally we can build marketplaces entirely

287. 2:03:17

     dedicated to people finding uh new innovative ways to do certain things. my in my example, I've got a a cold brew patent that makes cold brew in 30 minutes instead of 24 hours. So, if you interested in in coffee, you could look through what's all the innovation that's been happening in the coffee space. And then with a click of a few buttons, just like you would buy an NFT on OpenC, you could immediately have the rights to use the research that I've created. And so, bringing that liquidity in also allows

288. 2:03:41

     you to program uh the way people get revenue back from that IPF. So, you can imagine if I have an idea to build a teleporter, right? Sounds like a crazy idea, but I was able to convince a bunch of my friends that listen, I've got it.

289. 2:03:54

     I figured it out. We're going to build a teleporter. I could crowdfund crowdfund from a bunch of different folks in exchange for ownership, a part of the actual licensing revenue from the future existing IPFT. So that way when it gets minted, uh, right then and there, Brian, you might own 1% of it. Someone else in the crowd might own another percent. And so that way when you know the military comes by, they're like, "We want your teleporter." It's like great okay here you could have the IP NFT and

290. 2:04:18

     immediately outflow will bring back revenue to everyone that's contributed in the beginning but the thing that's the most important about this primitive is that scientists can finally get rewarded as early as possible for their breakthrough ideas if it has use in the market and so you can imagine someone might create a version one of their technology license it out and then immediately that money comes back for them to do research on the version two that can then get published licensed out

291. 2:04:43

     and come back and make version three and there's no one better to to know how to allocate that capital than the person who's invented that breakthrough to begin with. So DI is creating primitives to allow the people who are best to allocate that capital to be in the ownership seat of that money. And the last example I'll give you guys is a company called Vibe Bio. So Vibe Bio is creating communities for patients that have rare genetic diseases uh where

292. 2:05:06

     there's only maybe 50 people globally that have this rare genetic disease. So there's an A where there should be a T in your genetic code. And these rare genetic diseases, because there's so few people, their TAMs are too small for traditional biotech company to go in and actually do the research to find a cure because their TAM might only be, you know, 10 million, $50 million, right? So you you can't actually go through the full cycle to get your money back and

293. 2:05:30

     make profit. But now we can let patients crowdsource or crowdfund uh with groups to get 100k, 200k, 500k and hire a private investigator to look at them and give the folks that all have the same rare genetic disease personalized treatment. So at the base case, you now have folks who would never have access to uh help from a doctor to actually get privatized research that'll help them at least learn maybe, you know, taking a

294. 2:05:57

     hot shower might help you with some of your symptoms, right? In an ideal case, you'd actually be able to find some kind of a a drug or a therapeutic that will help you alleviate whatever issues that you have. And in the moonshot case, these groups might actually be able to crowdfund a entirely new class of drugs that will not only help the folks that have the rare genetic disease, but can help other people that are suffering from similar ailments. And in the case

295. 2:06:21

     of of those patients, they'll actually end up making a ton of money from hiring a small group of of researchers to help them with their issue. And those folks are going to have the most empathy to take that money and reinvest it in the future of research as opposed to just banking it and buying yachts, right? So we're again we're able to with DI align incentives and help bring new markets to life that otherwise with traditional

296. 2:06:44

     finance wouldn't be able to be supported. So hopefully, as you can see by what James has talked about, we are visionaries at Orangetown, we believe in the future and what web 3 and blockchain technologies are going to be able to do for us. We're optimistic that Refi can help save the planet. We're optimistic that DI can solve our biggest scientific problems. We believe consumer data can be fixed with blockchain technologies.

297. 2:07:08

     Um, so if you're building something crazy, come talk to us. We're super excited to be partnered with Near and you know we're we're one of the pathways that's going to help you get from zero to one fastest. So when you're ready to change the world, come work with us and we'd be excited to talk to you and help you change the world together with us.

298. 2:07:24

     Yeah. And that's uh orangeow.xyz for all of you guys that aren't in the know. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you guys. Thank you for such amazing final presentation. It was a pleasure. Uh do you have any questions to our speakers?

299. 2:07:38

     Just raise your hand. Yell it out. Nice. What's up? So, how much did you invest already and then how many different projects or companies? Uh, so I want to say go for it, please. So, we backed uh 95 companies in the last um little under a year, seven or eight months at this point in time. Um, we don't have a particular area. So, we do make early stage bets. So, we're really betting on founders who we believe will come to the right answer and make a positive impact on the world.

300. 2:08:08

     So we look at everything from healthcare to DSI to refi to consumer. Um there's there's no particular area as long as you're leveraging blockchain and web3 technologies following these kinds of community ownership models and really going for an aggressive idea and aggressive vision. Yeah.

301. 2:08:24

     Will be the team to be behind you. And our average check size is six figures. So 100K. Thank you. Any other questions? seems no you can every like every time to ask your questions uh in person as we have happy hours upstairs. Awesome.

302. 2:08:41

     So thank you guys once again. Thank you. So um I think it's time to move on to our networking and happy hours that's uh starting just in a few minutes upstairs. Thank you so much for every one who've been with us on YouTube. Uh stay tuned with our social media of near UA. We are posting all our upcoming events there.

303. 2:09:11

     Uh just wanted to remind you that today is the final day of uh near space powered by Near UA. Uh just want to say same to our organization team who's uh hosting us for these three days. It was really amazing. And uh let's move on to our happy hour. See you all at the bar.