NEARCON 2022 | Proof of Sound Stage - Day 3

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

1. 0:19

   so do we want to do introductions do we want to go I I think so yeah uh so are are the is the sound coming through oh great yeah that's yeah so um I I think um let's just dive in first of all thank you so much uh for being here everybody really appreciate it um we're looking forward to telling you a little bit about uh ourselves and the Education team and and what's going on uh with

2. 0:42

   near education this is the agenda that we'll follow so we'll spend a couple of minutes uh just on a quick hello uh and then uh 3 minutes each on a look back at 2022 uh what's happening right now in three areas for near certified developer uh grants and Lessons Learned uh and then we'll end with QA hopefully we'll have enough time time uh to cover all of your questions as they come in all right so uh here we go uh why don't we

3. 1:06

   start left uh to right hi I'm Bianca I am uh the operations manager for the Education team I joined in February and my primary role is just to make sure that we are uh helping with organization prioritizing and executing when we've committed to execution so um P so I'm pet vich I'm a sof for engineer on near education I've been here since February this year and I've been mostly working on some NCD stuff and I'm glad to be

4. 1:39

   here and I'm glad to tell you about what we're doing how about you shareif nice thanks pther so uh my name's Sharie abush I've been working on education with near foundation for about three years now and uh it's my pleasure to take this time uh with you here today and our team we also have a special guest with us on stage uh Laura would you introduce yourself yeah absolutely I'm Laura Cunningham um I'm the new GM of Education um I'm so excited to be

5. 2:05

   here with all of you I think I've gotten a chance to meet many of you but hopefully I can meet all of you um by the end of our time together um I will introduce myself more deeply a little later in the presentation but um I'm super psyched about all of the work that the team has been doing um with you all and um all of the learning that that we've done so excited to for them to present um you know what what we've learned and and some of where we're

6. 2:29

   going nice thank you and uh our honorary teammate is not here right now katti abova is uh in London we tried as hard as we could to get her on screen uh and miked up but uh we we couldn't uh you know get the the technical Wizardry together in time and so uh this is as much of Kya as you'll see but trust that she's uh alive and well and with us uh working on education at near Foundation all right uh so let's take a look back

7. 2:55

   briefly uh at 2022 uh couple of highlights for you uh and then let's talk about uh developers uh fellows and grants so uh for the highlights um of course many uh things that we've worked on uh and uh of those uh we're most excited to share with you news about a ploty uh partnership platti is like the udemy of Latin America and um with uh in cooperation with the near Hispano uh Guild and Community uh we U uh were able to launch a a learn rust

8. 3:28

   with near uh program so that's incredibly exciting because platy as a platform can you know get exposure to 3 million Learners and so uh that's thrilling for us and and hopefully it's good as well for the platy Community um has anybody here heard of free code Camp yeah so of course many of you uh and free code Camp uh for those watching the recording if you don't know is a fantastic way to get started in learning

9. 3:51

   how to build software online uh all of their content is free and open and you can go and get started right now at free code Camp so we partnered with them this year and they will be releasing a number of courses related to blockchain fundamentals and then building on uh near actually so incredibly exciting with rust and javasript um uh for contract and a number of front ends as well so that's exciting because hundreds of thousands of developers uh right as

10. 4:14

    they're learning will dive into that and of course they have billions of minutes of content uh meaning these people are engaging with the platform so it's very exciting for us and hopefully uh for them and their Community as well and then of course uh we did take some time in the last uh 8 to 12 months to build out a number of Integrations with low and no code platforms uh in fact pet you worked on integrat make.com was there another zapier and zapier as well yeah

11. 4:38

    of course so if you've heard of zapier if you've heard of Airbnb and uh you know any one of these sort of low no code platforms we have Integrations with 12 you can see the list there millions of developers citizen developers Gartner calls them uh that are plugging into this low and no code movement three out of four businesses are expected to be using these tools this decade so uh imagine integrating with near building on top of near building web three enabled applications without writing a

12. 5:02

    single line of code uh of course after you've deployed contracts and so on so that's incredibly exciting as well um in terms of uh the developers I think um uh looking back and then we'll look forward uh thousands of registrations from around the world now um um one in four people signing up for uh the development program are not software developers so these are people who are excited about learning about

13. 5:26

    near year but are not actually uh trained in software development and yet they can learn successfully how to read and make sense of smart contracts in a matter of hours or days with our program so that's incredibly exciting you can see here some of the statistics of sort of the trends we had a couple of marketing events that we ran but in general good engagement and good growth there with developers um in terms of near uh University certified developers

14. 5:50

    uh about 5% of the people who attended 5 or 10% of the people who attended uh actually submitted and passed a demo uh so it's a good uh marker of engagement who's actually building a demo who's writing code who's actually creating something on the near platform and demonstrating their understanding of what's going on uh some people spend up to about a week but a senior Dev with 5 years or more can probably knock it out in an afternoon so uh lots of learning

15. 6:13

    happening there and we're really excited about that key lessons here uh makers have been asking loudly for a self-paced course they want to binge watch they want to go at their own pace they don't want to wait for us and uh also our code reviews have been a bottleneck so we're working now with the devell team at as well uh to build out automated tools for testing smart contract capabilities to make sure that people are actually building something real and meaningful on near but without taking the time to

16. 6:38

    actually review their code uh one at a time uh in terms of Grants hundreds of applications from around the world we funded 50 projects across 15 countries um average deal size around 35,000 lots of interesting stuff going on but millions of dollars have been distributed to the ecosystem in terms of Grants and that's incredibly exciting for us a number of areas you can see them here decentralized edtech and more so feel free to ask us about that if you like here are a couple of uh exciting uh

17. 7:04

    you know Graphics to make you go wow if you'd like you can go wow now nice nice thank you so much for that wow uh and key lessons here were that exploratory Grant making it's chaotic you know it's a little bit tricky to kind of track all of these different grants and all of these different specializations so we need to slim down and and focus our grant making and of course the actual reach in terms of numbers new wallets and so on were not

18. 7:27

    we weren't optimizing for that so we didn't drive those those numbers in the way that we would like to near University fellowship program had almost a thousand people apply Technical and non- Technical from around the world and about one in 10 were accepted into the program ran for about 6 months and we distributed uh about a million dollars into the ecosystem getting people to do really really interesting meaningful work and so uh here are a couple of

19. 7:50

    those screenshots you can find um uh some more on near University if you like but the fellowship program in general is a great experiment earlier this year it's been wound down now and we're thinking about sort of what to do with this program if we decide to relaunch it maybe this year or next uh here are a couple of other statistics you can get a sense of what was going on with the near University Fellowship uh six languages I'm particularly excited about that I like the idea of building out in other than

20. 8:14

    English and so that that was incredible and of course a wide variety of initiatives there uh and here are some more Graphics to make you go wow if you didn't get enough of that wow last time nice uh so Lessons Learned too many fellows solving similar problems of course we weren't optimizing for that and twoo few fellows were actually shipping to mainnet so the bulk of the 20 plus apps that were shipped to mainnet during the fellowship program came out of near Hispano and the Latin American uh community so that it wasn't

21. 8:39

    really as as many applications as we would like to see next uh great work on their part but uh we want more so uh pet off to you for NCD thank you very much Sharie and you guys saw what Sharie was talking about we had NCD and we had a lot of submissions we had a lot of people from diverse areas so all different parts of world uh different languages that they speak different time

22. 9:02

    zones that they're in so it was pretty difficult to uh keep ahead and like continue certifying people we just wanted to scale more people we wanted to get more people certified we wanted to accommodate more languages more cultures but we are we became the bottleneck essentially so how we changed that is basically by encoding our LMS in our NCD into an LMS let me ask you guys does

23. 9:27

    anyone here like waiting for other people weird I love waiting for other people uh so basically you we enable you that you just go at your own pace you get certified you go to the course uh pass a quiz and when you pass a quiz you automatically get an NFD saying that you're a certified developer and so far we have had uh great feedback on the course that we created of course this is

24. 9:53

    just the first version of it and you can see some stats here like in the first week we had uh almost 500 people going through the course we had about 10% of people completing and getting certified so we're super proud of that and we receiving some feedback and we're constantly improving the course that we have we're also listening to feedback and trying to add more languages we also

25. 10:16

    have a JavaScript uh specific version of the course so you can go ahead and check that out if any of you want to go through the course you can check it out at learn. near. University uh we're also constantly looking for improving anything that we get we want to create new modules new courses and new languages we're also looking to accommodate uh modules and uh feature requests from projects that are

26. 10:42

    already building in the system in the ecosystem so we want to basically make it so that it's a single point of reference for all of the key topics that we want to cover and this also allows us to scale above the limitations of us as people because we don't need to be there at every session we don't need to put you to our schedule you don't need to wait for us to be free to give an

27. 11:07

    orientation session we're basically just allowing you to go to the online course and do whatever you want and with that I'll take it over to I'll give it over to Bianca thanks petor so as you heard Sharie talk about uh grants and some of the lessons that we learned is we had a really difficult time managing all of the grants and making sure that they delivered what they intended to deliver

28. 11:31

    when we awarded uh the grant recipients so uh we took a step back we reviewed a lot of Grants recently and we decided what we were going to do in order to scale the grants program is make sure that we were uh very clear on what our criteria was going to be and that uh we only selected a few so that we could really manage the process because ultimately the process was not only chaot chaotic for us but it was also

29. 11:54

    chaotic for the people who are receiving the grants uh so what we did the criteria that we wanted wanted was to make sure we partnered with people who already had an a a large audience who were familiar with near and who wanted to do a little bit uh something different than what we were already offering um new students so the the grants that you see that were rewarded behind me have a potential audience of 2

30. 12:16

    million uh we're looking to tap into 100K new students uh with that 2 million potential audience uh and they're going to be delivering courses that range from a 60-minute video for brand new people to web 3 um to a 30-hour uh interactive course uh building a game with unity um and at the end of the day uh uh essentially um one of them is actually targeting web 2 users which fits in nicely with the new Js SDK that we just released uh as I'm sure you guys have heard about um so

31. 12:49

    with that the ask really is if you know of anyone who is an instructor who has an audience that fits this criteria or you yourself fit that uh please reach out to this email address let us know start a conversation and we'll see uh if it makes sense uh to add your course to the mix of grants that we have as well um and I'm going to hand it back over to petar um as we talk about a new Initiative for the ecosystem thank you Bianca so this is a

32. 13:15

    new initiative that we have called ecosystem lessons learn so we figured that yes we can educate you we can make our own lessons we can create problems and uh give you solutions for those but the true Lessons Learned are going to be uh coming from the project that are actually building on near so we're recommitting ourselves to actually helping people out by uh reaching out to

33. 13:38

    projects that have already faced those problems and we just want to uh talk to you find out what you're struggling with find out find out what where we're doing wrong so we want to improve everything that we have all the docs all the courses uh maybe even infrastructure so we're talking to you extracting the lessons you have and just trying to make it better and easier for everyone to work within the ecosystem uh like many of you know know

34. 14:06

    web 3 is Cutting Edge so advancements and Tech are going on all the time everything is new everything is uh Advanced you're not like not everyone has already uh been and done the problems that you have so we need to engage the community to talk about those problems see where those problems are at and just uh communicate better with the community because that's going to help everyone uh get better lessons get better use cases get get better case studies and just make the ecosystem an

35. 14:39

    easier place to work in to provide solutions that are better catered to the audience uh again we're just trying to communicate with the audience with the uh ecosystem and find out what the concrete problems are so that we can focus in on those problems and solve them better and faster so these are these are just some of the project that we're talking with and we're extracting Lessons Learned there's going to be

36. 15:04

    plenty more projects we're also inviting any other projects that we uh are not talking to yet to just come and join us and talk to us and share your feedback share all the stories of the stuff that you were just annoyed by stuff that you were happy to have a beer afterwards after solving it after facing all the issues and just walking away saying ah finally it's over and with that I'll take it back to Sharif thanks V so uh

37. 15:34

    we're growing the team and with that I'd like to introduce Aura handed back to you yeah great hi everyone so I did a brief intro in the beginning but I wanted to give you a little bit more um information about my background and why I'm so excited to be joining the um so I have basically been really dedicating my career um to expanding access to opportunity um I worked in government uh

38. 15:58

    so at the New York City Department of Education largest school district in the United States um I worked at nonprofit at a charter school Foundation um and uh more recently I have spent time at a really early seed pre-seed stage um edtech company and then a later very high growth um edtech company um and so I joined near uh Tuesday was my last Tuesday was my first day so I've been

39. 16:22

    here for about about a week um and um the the thing that really excites me about the work that we're doing is democratizing access to the future of the internet and so um we are going to be you know sharing a lot more communication over the coming weeks about um our overall strategy moving forward and some of the changes that we're going to be making um and sort of the the focus we're going to have but um

40. 16:47

    today and this whole time I've just been so um grateful to be learning from all of you um about the work that you're doing and um and so uh just excited to be part of this wonderful community so thanks for having me I'm so excited to be here um and thank you so much to the Education team for all of the work that they have done um so far and it is just the beginning of the great work we're going to do together so thank you nice

41. 17:12

    thanks so much okay so I don't know if we have time for questions couple of minutes um how that might work any questions comments from the audience we can always go back to those wow slid if you like you didn't get enough of those yes I think one second we're bringing you a microphone no geographical regions go ahead and re restate the question please yeah just uh just curious if you guys are focused on any geographical regions in particular yeah absolutely so um of

42. 17:51

    course you're familiar with the near foundations Regional expansion initiative where we've identified a number of strategic regions around the world and we're partnering with uh various individuals that uh have presence there an existing Community uh you know support network and so on um Laura do you have more I can't on that yeah so um I think the best thing to do would be to check out near do University for updates on that uh but um you can assume right now we're operating in

43. 18:18

    about half a dozen languages with you know content and Outreach and so on and there are a number of communities for example like the Ukraine uh Community is you know reaching out and saying hey we have um experience and education uh what can we do to help and what we do is basically give them all of our content everything on near do University is open source and available for you to you know reuse repurpose no problem at all uh and uh a little bit of uh you know financial

44. 18:41

    support a little bit of content support some technical expertise and they go off at their own pace uh so there there are no breaks uh in terms of regional expansion but uh there are some uh you know are uh some uh focus in some of the areas around the world so MH any other questions if not thank you so much for your time and attention today thanks every enjoy the day thanks thank

45. 19:23

    you all right um thanks for the Education team for presenting some highlights about education uh looks like more people have joined now so uh maybe had a l late night our next guest needs no introduction but if you haven't met him yet uh it's Cameron Dennis from the benyan collective uh so please give a warm welcome to Dennis also for people who have just joined uh it's Channel 16 on the uh headphones so please welcome Dennis

46. 19:56

    again hey everybody how's it going hey so my name is Cameron Dennis uh CEO of the banion collective we are a new ecosystem as a management uh startup focused on scaling near in the United States um the mission is to create a more Grassroots bottom up approach to ecosystem growth in the United States where we will be running a series of hackathons bounty programs uh meetups and uh a lot of other really cool stuff but before diving into that uh tell you

47. 20:28

    a little bit about myself um I've been working at the near foundation for the last two years uh primarily on the business development team developer relations and a bunch of other stuff primarily just looking to fill the gaps of the ecosystem and the whole point here is you know how do we scale the open web to make it much more accessible and having very clear call to actions for people to get more involved if they are actively interested in building so

48. 20:54

    uh but before joining the new ecosystem I started a blockchain education nonprofit where we start blockchain development courses at universities we doing this for about 5 years and the uh originally from Miami Florida so um just to dive in what are the problems so right now um near is an amazing technology but it does lack this sort of sense of uh Community between the founders specifically in the United States where there's not enough clear call to actions for people to get deeply

49. 21:25

    involved and so uh besides that there's also a sort of lack of uh I guess a shortage of physical meetups and again clear called actions for people to meet physically because you're launch of a pandemic and that's kind of weird for you know an emerging technology so now we're at this point in time we're we're able to actually uh bring people together and we just actually got an

50. 21:48

    office space in New York City at Empire da which is super exciting and we're going to be running uh bi-weekly meetups there so I don't know the best way to say that because it's actually twice a week not every other week um so there's going to be one social Meetup and one educational Meetup and then we're going to have a huge focus in San Francisco as well there are plans to scale outside of these two cities but in the short term we're going to be laser focused on them

51. 22:12

    to make sure that you know Founders here and developers are are very properly supported but you know as well there's a uh other issues that that are in in your ecosystem specifically around users and liquidity so making sure that people can actually get together to address these issues instead of having it being so fragmented is critical and we believe that starts with actually meeting

52. 22:35

    physically so um you can read them on the board this these slides will be made available after but um the tldr is we need more call to actions so what are we doing to actually address this uh well we're going to talk we do to address this we actually need to build a really strong set of values and these values before trying to put them into the ecosystem we got to make sure that we believe in them and actually follow them

53. 22:58

    with within our team so um ecosystem first is the first one and the whole point here is um you know all of all this technology is really uh it's much bigger than any certain individual uh the open ideally is going to last much longer than any any of us individually so you know making sure that we prioritize the ecosystem before any independent person is a priority the second thing is positive sum so the

54. 23:24

    there's a saying by Balaji uh who's a you know very famous like crypto uh sort of investor and CTO and influencer uh where he says win and help win and this is sort of a analogy to the banion tree we are the banion collective and the whole point is if we have a trunk and oh for those who don't know banon is a is a big tree it's actually the national tree of India and The Roots grow from the top

55. 23:46

    so the idea is if we have a really healthy tree that actually grows really large and The Roots grow from the top they actually create new trunks all around it and the point here is if you win you should help other people win and then that to me is like it's just the critical piece that if we can scale this we're going to win your ecosystem is going to be the top one but um besides that if we're trying to really build you

56. 24:10

    know technology for everybody it needs we need to make sure that uh they're involved in the process so we have an amazing team they're incredibly diverse and uh we want to make sure that it's people are included but to be clear we are primarily focused on getting Founders and developers into the ecosystem at first the creators and communities and everyone else who play a critical role in the ecosystem are important but they're just not Banning

57. 24:35

    collectives target market we will be working very closely with other ecosystem projects and be essentially acting as a giant referral Network for them to essentially say hey there's an artist Collective that comes to Banyan guess what there are many other Market nft marketplaces that they are better better suited for besides us so we'll be making this these recommendations and connections across the ecosystem last thing is openness and

58. 24:58

    trans transparency this is you know at the heart of what blockchains really enable and we have to make sure it's like tangibly a part of our values and our practices so um longer term we will be operating I know this is the team doesn't fully know this right now but as a DA uh we're not quite there yet we're still sort of like getting started but um the whole point here is if we actually are able to scale primarily in uh San Francisco and New York and create

59. 25:21

    a Playbook uh we can implement this Playbook time and time again across the United States and eventually the world so um to move on how do we actually support projects well you know projects always start with an idea and then they start building and they you know whether it be at a hackathon or any sort of uh just chipping away at home create an MVP then they're going to need a community so uh we're going to be running a series of hackathons I'll show you the schedule

60. 25:46

    later a hackathon a month so we're just pumping them out making sure again that there's tangible call to actions for people to get more involved once they have that mvp then we can connect them to community again almost almost daily meetups across the United States eventually we're not there yet right now we're just primarily focused SF in New York but um you know once a fast forward a year I'm assuming there's going be a meet up every single

61. 26:11

    day somewhere in the United States and so that's where we want to make sure that we're highlighting the projects building once you have MVP go get user testing go join the community uh we'll be running Twitter spaces and all these different Community groups so that's where you know we're actually plugging them in next thing is around fun people need early stage investment people need grants none of projects won't be successful unless they have you

62. 26:33

    know Capital so working very closely with the near Foundation we'll be able to connect them directly to the grant program help them actually structure their Grant to ensure a success and then later on uh connect them to VCS just for some context I've been doing this at the near foundation for the last two years um this is my day-to-day now we're essentially spinning out scaling the team how do we just like multiply these

63. 26:57

    efforts eorts not just in the United States but later on eventually uh but the whole goal is to create playbooks that scale so just to move on you need token economics you need legal setups Dow launch token launch we have all of these different support channels already you know if you need support incorporating internationally we have a network of lawyers that can help if you want to make sure that you have liquidity well we work with proximity to connect you to market makers it's a One-Stop shop uh One-Stop shop for

64. 27:23

    support and uh making sure that's much more bottom up instead of just the foundation or pagota so uh moving on what do we actually do well we're going to run these uh Community groups that are focused on certain verticals so if you're a wallet Builder and you want to connect with other wallet Builders this is a very clear way to join the the discussion there's going to be a forum post made later this week we've already

65. 27:47

    had a few uh community group sessions and the whole point here is how do we get them to identify the uh problems that exist in certain vertical so wallets are a great example people need social recovery people need optional custody there's all this really Innovative stuff that no single individual is going to build out we need to work together to identify these Solutions spec them out and then put them well as bounties to our hackathon

66. 28:12

    and so this is where we're actually aggregating Community bounties if you're a founder and you have something that you want built but it's might not be a tier one priority for your team Speck it out ship it to the ship it to the hackathons we can get some sort of vzero implementation there and then sort of moving on to uh you know production and eventually standardization so um next thing is around City nodes I had

67. 28:37

    mentioned the uh Empire da uh yeah so sorry to uh kind of going too fast but uh the uh the community groups there's a wallet one and an nft one uh we you can check out the slides later um and then near Hacks the first one's actually going to be in New York City next week the party doesn't stop here we have a space it's we have about uh about 150 people registered right now it's going to be a 4-day hackathon it's going to be

68. 29:01

    amazing realize I only have a minute left so going to uh Breeze through this real quick but join the hackathon next week if you're going to be in New York it's going to be amazing uh the bounty board uh manage the bounty board before it's a nightmare we need to make sure it's time bound and that's where the hackathons come in uh later on we're still developing this developer Advocate Program so working with the Education team making sure that we have enough people to teach about near if there's a

69. 29:25

    hackathon at MIT and we don't have people in Boston and we want to make sure that people are able to represent near in a very tangible way so there's going to be a program dedicated to training intermediate and expert level developers the Education team has done a wonderful job on in educating for beginners but um we need you know we need more so City nodes SF New York later on Chicago Austin Boston DC list goes on 15 seconds left we have a bunch

70. 29:50

    of merch coming so uh you know how do we actually like make sure people wear the the their identity pretty much and so we're going to be running merch store really ramp up uh the new ecosystem and all the projects together and this is our road map uh we have uh we have a big house right now uh for Super Moon bunch of infrastructure Builders together and then um hackathons hackathons hackathons next is Chicago we have uh SF we have uh

71. 30:16

    eventually in Austin we have more coming just check it out uh and the main call Action we have an incredible team uh I'm CEO we got shot Chief of Staff Nicole head of marketing people come from the teror EOS system Salon ecosystem uh polygon super diverse set of creep people and the whole goal is well let's just Build Together the open web's the answer all these blockchains are just a means to an end near just so happens to

72. 30:40

    be well the best one so um next steps sign up for near hack become a member all we really want to do is make sure that we know your skills and interests to match you to opportunities in the ecosystem that match those skills and interests whether it's for recruiting whether it's for bounties this is the the main call Action become a member and and that's it one minute over thank you guys so

73. 31:03

    much thank you Cameron for the talk uh I don't we still have bit uh thanks Cameron for here uh while we wait till we move the seats and introducing our next speaker uh feel free to check out uh the different talks on our websites uh uh Elia is going to give a final keynote at 4 cgp team is also here uh so make sure to check out the different talks uh and also walk around it's day three so you probably know all the people that are here but

74. 31:40

    it's still great uh to connect with the different people in the near ecosystem all right we're ready for our next talk so uh please give a roll welcome to Jean blush who's going to talk about true regeneration possibilities we haven't imagined yet mer okay yes can you hear me but can can we move this a little no okay so um I want first I don't know who I'm talking to actually uh so if you maybe can move to this side of the um chairs yes do you

75. 32:38

    mind to move to this side of the chair uh but then can I have the screen here as well okay um so yes so let's connect very well um so I'm so my name is Jan BL I'm uh both an artist and a sustainability specialist I've been involved in a project called uny crypto which is um uh through value of sun and I'm also part of motion da which is on near and on different uh web stre project like the

76. 33:30

    Omega working group on token engineering comments for example um so you who are here can you please close your eyes and imagine that you are in a concert imagine please that you are in a concert of your favorite artist that you have bought your tickets way in advance that you're going to get a po up that you might buy a t-shirt after the concert and that you really are having a

77. 34:05

    great time in this amazing concert hall with amazing singer or performer that you have admired for many time okay so what I want to say now you can open your eyes it that music has not been always this way music was also actually a place where people were performing together and you had no separation between the uh composers the player the performers and the one that are were producing the music the sound and this way and I'm taking this

78. 34:47

    information from um researcher called Michael spider who wrote an amazing book called The Musical human a history of life on Earth and he was explaining how much music was actually um um a way of decentralization instead of a way of centralization and it started to be um tool at the service of Power with the invention by an Italian monk 1,000 years ago of the staff notation so the staff

79. 35:25

    notation you know the five lines for the music were a way to capture something that was not be capturable it was like capturing a butterfly it was something that was belonging to the instant of the creation and suddenly it was something that was made to be reproduced and this was used even with Cortez when he invaded the Americas and he decimated all the Aztecs 10 years after he has de killed all the Aztecs you had Aztec

80. 35:59

    singing Mexican church um Spanish church songs in what we call today Mexico so the way that music has been used as a tool for power because it became an object because it became a separation from your own creativity because you were there it was on this slide and you were reproducing identically the same um type of um you asked to reproduce identically and this is something we continue to do today this is why I take the example of music because it's a um

81. 36:39

    uh it's an example that we can relate still today and we can think of the objectivization of everything from such a long time ago and other way to think differently of what we do today is for example the history of the electrical grid the art historian F Lopez made a research about the fact that actually the notion that we take for granted today of electrical grid that are um centralized and we think that we do need

82. 37:14

    to connect in a centralized way to energy was a choice that was made um at the beginning with the thinking of the network so you had an option of figuring out this centralized networks for people and individual household to connect to to um to power but actually it was decided not to do it it was a choice to make it centralized and it's the same with consumer culture consumer markets

83. 37:47

    it was a choice to go to um it was a choice to decide that what are we going to do with this new technology with this new techniques that we had these new machine that were um help the industrialist um uh companies to produce so much and the choice and the alternative was to maybe um to maybe make workers work less to maybe have more time because workers were working so much at the beginning of the 20th century and it was a decision with all

84. 38:27

    the toris and all this culture to create Mass Market it was an informed decision to decide that we are going to make people feel they are lacking so they can compensate and this is has been researched by historian of consumer culture um like in Capitan of cons consensuous um who was uh uh written by I um forgot Stuart even for example and the same last example I want to say is also with artificial intelligence artificial

85. 39:13

    intelligence was uh you were in the 50s you had in the US two different type of meetings one people that gathered interdisciplinary teams in New York and another one where it was only mathematician in dhou and it's this one that was chosen so all the time you had an alternative between the possibilities to have something that was more connected to your human and something that were more Technical and more in a centralized and Powerful way and we

86. 39:47

    always make this choice so in order to keep opening your minds to keep you know this is what I'm trying to articulate here is that how we can look at what we do today in a different ways and we do need to do it if we want to go into true regeneration so so what I'm advocating for today is to um bring knowledge diversity in the way we bring these new infrastructures and I hope you have understood with the examples I gave before that it was a choice that we always had and we made Sometimes some

87. 40:46

    decision that get that we are paying the cost for today actually so near is definitely a very interesting environment because it gives a very special place to artist and creators and that's a place where we can start to build through interdisciplinary collaboration and on near m Da with this Collective of artists that I belong to you have some artists that already started to think about that and it's

88. 41:20

    very interesting to see that you have some artist and designer like Rena who started the nft based game called the fact of existing which actually is addressing this question of how you can connect you know with your authentic self in order to create in a more responsible way another artist from motion da is um Mariana karanza who started Forest Stillness which is questioning um the econ if we can have an economy of Stillness and is developing it's a way to explore the

89. 41:58

    value of Forest for example and if we don't question the centrality of consumer culture today we are not going to save anything you know and actually uh fighting climate change is not the goal the objective climate change is only a symptoms it's a symptoms of a culture that we have and we belong to especially the Western culture that is destroying the life on Earth so what I'm talking to what I'm talking about is to figure out how we

90. 42:36

    can impress values that help us create together um systems that are in um relate to life that are conveying the values of life and so this is what we have um uh starting to do with value of solar which is an art program that has been initiated by um seam R Risa who is a token engineer carrying the project of eery crypto and together we have worked with this idea that if we are exploring

91. 43:18

    with Arts we might get some interesting Insight that is going to help us develop uny crypto so what is a energy crypto very quickly it's an app that allow individuals to invest into solar energy directly which is very uncommon and to get a revenue share and to get also carbon credit through nfts through athetics nfts and if you think about it this is such a disruptive proposition

92. 43:53

    it's not it doesn't relate to Consumer tradition consumer good and it doesn't relate either to traditional investment proposition so how do you value this to people in order to be able to get more um uh to to create a movement of people individual that are going to get into solar energy and to to uh support this solution in a way that is going to be valuable with them as well so in order to um

93. 44:39

    so um the type of question that we have uh investigated and that we have acknowledged during this process of creating an art program that was EX in exhibition in Paris already uh uh and also in Lisbon before is that what you know are people appreciate or not to be rewarded with carbon credits what do that mean you know for an individuals today we keep talking about carbon credits but it's a fin Financial tools

94. 45:12

    but at individual levels do we want to create to talk about that do we want to to um to have an usage of carbon credit and do we want people to burn or not the carbon credit because we don't want them to use them as a way just to allow others to pollute so the these are the question that we are we're investigating and um one of the project that was grow a forest was the data visualization of um the the true information that we got from solar plants so it's a visualization of the

95. 45:50

    CO2 that is avoided thanks to the plant that is powering solar energy though this was one of the thing and this is uh part of the interative the dynamic nft that we have on the solar app the other project which is this is an nft was a way when I I started to do that I was figuring out that actually light and Sun were always both considered since Antiquity as energy and as art you

96. 46:23

    needed the light to create and the beginning of photography and film was with light so how do you connect nft into the history of photography and what does that mean to be able to to um to sell nfts uh from hands to hands so if you think about the history of photography and film and then and I use the technique that was the beginning of Photography to make this painting that are nfts if you think about it what nft

97. 46:58

    contracts bring to this digit to this history of image and film it is the fact that you can move uh this invisible you can move invisibly from digital hand to digital hand from wallet to wallet and this is connecting to energy so what does it mean the idea of a value flow what does that mean to be you know in terms of value instead instead of goods and so I want to propose another where another time where you close your eyes and can

98. 47:30

    you imagine a world where we don't have the word good where we don't have consumer goods we don't have public goods we don't have Goods you know can you imagine that and how we can create based on such a statement how we can develop new um web through project new interactions new societies if we don't have this Central of good that's super important so with urgy crypto and value of solar art program we started and it's

99. 48:09

    an ongoing research to imagine what is autonomous consumer control that would you know we identify the value of avoidance what can we visualize what is not what can we have value the fact that you have a need for the absence of CO2 for example we also Imagine as I mentioned earlier what is the invisibility of the um energy and the value flow how we can have this Central into our societies into our different ways of creating a value and project I don't want to say companies but it's in

100. 48:55

     this okay let's say companies and also what does it mean to burn carbon credit and actually burning carbon credit it means to the true essence of consumption because consumption means destruction so if you want to go back to the essence of consumption you can say okay we want to destroy carbon credit so we don't allow someone else to um uh pollute and so I wanted to highlight the fact that as Ursula leuin said who is a

101. 49:29

     very famous science science fiction uh writer that you know what imaginative art and story storytelling give us is the ability to imagine alternative endings as attainable so I hope I was able to share this with you and I hope that U it's done okay the last slide is not there I don't know never mind H and uh um and now if you want to close your eyes a last time and imagine what would

102. 50:12

     be a world where you are not in the center a world where you are just part of an architecture a road where what you are doing is influencing the wind is influencing animals is influencing your neighbor what is happening over there is going to influence you can you imagine a world where we are not at the center as human don't you think it's very difficult I think it's super hard I think it's

103. 50:43

     impossible we have been trained to think as we are totally in the center we have been trained to think as we are subject and everything else is object and I'm really advocating for the end of object objectivization Mercy thank you very much Jean for to talk um for people who have just joined welcome uh make sure you put on your headphones on channel 16 to be able to listen to the talks otherwise you

104. 51:27

     probably won't hear um we're going to switch tracks go more towards a business talk so please please welcome our next speaker Chris Weir who's going to talk about data Chris the floor is yours thank you very much uh just checking everyone can hear me okay awesome uh so my name is Chris I am CEO and co-founder of Vero uh and up here we have uh our mission statement uh we think that uh everyone has uh the right to own and benefit from their

105. 52:01

     personal data uh and by doing so we can enhance their everyday experiences uh for a long time people have talked about blockchain as being about ownership of your financial assets through crypto uh but people have also explored or been talking about the idea of owning your own data as a part of this movement with web 3 and I'm here to talk about how verer is offering uh I guess an architecture from a technology perspective and sdks and tooling for

106. 52:25

     developers to actually make this a reality so defi um if you think of defi it's a tiny fraction of the traditional Finance uh space um if you look at the broader economy um broader Financial Services uh we have health insurance life insurance asset Insurance they're $6 trillion doll Industries and web fre has really barely touched those um you have consumer banking um which under catalized loans mortgages payments and

107. 52:59

     then more broadly we have Capital markets and if you look at some of these things like consumer Banking and insurance we actually need personal data to unlock those use cases to expand the remit of defi so there a huge opportunity here to expand uh and uh I guess bring in Mass adoption uh into these new spaces just in the finance sector alone if we look more broadly at the economy uh we have different um uh

108. 53:25

     different seor we've got Pharmaceuticals in healthcare we've got food service we've got fashion and Global uh media advertising so there all these other spaces that all need personal data or information about consumers uh to Target them provide better services to them or provide a product at all so there's a huge opportunity here to uh expand web 3 into these other other sectors so how do we do this what's

109. 53:50

     actually required for Mass adoption of web 3 into these other sectors of the economy so as I've touched on unlocking a lot more use cases in defi it's a tiny fraction of what it could be in in the long term we need to leverage personal data to unlock those use cases we also need to enable existing web 2 businesses or or startups and entrepreneurs to transition across to web 3 we need them to be able to bring their customers across or bring their

110. 54:14

     ideas across to web 3 and disrupt the existing incumbents in the economy today everyone knows that there's some problems with uh web through and crypto around the user experience problems with seed phrases recover um these are huge barriers of adoption for for new users in the space we need to tackle those head on and then we have tokenized data if you think of the economy these days we've got the concept

111. 54:37

     of data is a new oil you've got Google Facebook um these large tech companies that have basically siphoned all of our data and they're leveraging that to create products and services they've got a monopoly on that Innovation so we need to create new models where users own their data uh developers and innovators can create new tokenized models around that uh and we can reinvent the

112. 55:00

     relationship between individuals their data and how that's actually used so to facilitate this there's a few things missing so we've got identity at the moment uh we have blockchain addresses which is uh bit of a pseudo Anonymous sort of identity that exists um but it's not ideal you know we're talking about soulbound tokens as an emerging concept we're thinking about um how do we have privacy preserving

113. 55:23

     information that identifies who I am and then collectively disclose that onchain in a zero knowledge way to access a product or service how do we bridge that real world identity in in an appropriate way onto the blockchain to be leveraged in smart contracts how do we take that personal data and actually use that in web 3 to create personalized products and services help with Discovery um we also have the concept of

114. 55:47

     multi-purpose wallet that we think is missing so the idea of uh a wallet today in the crypto Space is really tokens maybe there's a built-in deex where you can swap some tokens maybe you've got some nfts it's almost like the early days of the web browser where we just had text and images and then soon we had JavaScript and then we had some mistakes like active X and Flash and then we had um you know the evolution of really rich

115. 56:09

     web experiences in the browser we see that there's a missing piece here where the wallet really needs to evolve it needs to have a simple ux but it needs to evolve to incorporate identity and data um messaging and all these other pieces to provide a really rich experience for users and lastly we have inter ability we've already seen interrup ability issues with emergence of different blockchains so we need to be thinking

116. 56:30

     about how we can unlock this new world where there's lots of different messaging protocols there's different data uh data about individuals and there's different blockchains how do we have all this interoperate and work in a really meaningful way that makes sense for users but is also really usable for developers so one of the areas that we're looking at is credentials so the idea of people being able to take their real world identity um and be issued

117. 56:57

     with a verifiable credentials and this could be used to prove something about themselves it could be a know your customer kyc that can be reused it could be a digital passport uh it could be saying that you own or control a particular Twitter address or a a Discord handle or a GitHub address uh GitHub account and so being able to unlock this particularly around identity is the O is a key opportunity to unlocking traditional finance and compliance into defi so there's a real

118. 57:22

     opportunity here to bring real world identity in a trusted way to expand the pool of capital and traditional Finance if we look at this from a um a broader kind of concept um credentials basically work in the way where there is a credential issuer uh that exists over here and this could be a uh a an exchange a crypto exchange it could be a third-party verification service there's a lot of companies that provide verification you've probably gone through that yourself with the likes of

119. 57:53

     jumio where you do like a face ID and you provide a passport or you H up a picture saying what the date is or some sort of number so there's a whole range of organizations that provide credential issuing sort of type of services but they're centralized so what I've got an opportunity here is to create a process where those issuers issue a credential to you as an individual you hold that as a piece of your identity and data it's private it's just for me stored in my

120. 58:17

     wallet and that's sitting down the bottom and so what we've done at verita is we've opened this up so that we can have a credential stored and encrypted using my private blockchain key but I can also to be stored on a private decentralized Network and encrypted so if I change device if I um go to another system I can actually use my seed phrase and unlock that data I can unlock that piece of my identity and the last piece over here on the left is we have the ability to verify that credential so if

121. 58:41

     we think of the use case of verifiable uh of reusable kyc I could be issued a credential that says yes I am who I say I am I I am Chris I'm from Australia um I can have that credential and I can go and share that with three or four different uh crypto exchanges or perhaps I could share that credential with a decentralized exchange and use a zero knowledge proof to prove that I am verified and a trust individual but not

122. 59:05

     actually disclose my name or anything on chain that's personally identifiable so now we have a really powerful concept where I can be trusted uh and meet regulatory requirements to engage on the blockchain but I haven't disclosed any person personally identifiable information in doing that process and so that's a really important concept here we've got the user with a reusable credential and we have a regulatory compliant defi that can suddenly be

123. 59:29

     unlocked with this kind of concept in this scenario we're just talking about like a kyc credential but this could be anything this could be me proving that I uh own a GitHub account and so therefore I'm getting token rewards based on commits that I'm doing into different projects um there's a whole range of ways that this could be used to bridge real world identity and and systems with uh onchain activity so just touching on that again so reusable kyc I've talked about that

124. 59:53

     that unlocks compliant D which unlocks a huge amount of capital from the nutritional Finance sector and also introduces ecosystem efficiency if I can kyc myself once and reuse that across a whole range of projects across the near ecosystem there's a huge efficiency there from protocol they don't have to reinvent the wheel there and from user I get a much better user experience so how can we actually leverage personal data more broadly

125. 1:00:17

     Beyond just this use case around uh credentialing and kyc so if we think about the web 2 incumbents that exist today so down here we've got a range of different uh I guess monopolies you might say Tech monopolies um how do we make this transition so fundamentally we have a problem today sorry where all our data is stored in these web 2 companies they have all of our data they're monetizing it they're making all the money from that data but more importantly they have a monopoly around the Innovation around

126. 1:00:51

     that data you know if if Google has all of my browser history and my search history they have a monopoly on how that's used whereas if I can get access to that suddenly I can unlock Innovation around that to everyone in this room everyone uh that is a developer if they can access that and I can consent for developers to access that they can provide new products and services around that data so if we think about that more broadly what we're trying to do at verer

127. 1:01:13

     is create this pathway where users can claim their data and pull it from web 2 and take ownership of that store that in a decentralized way where they own and control that data and then secondly unlock that data for developers and innovators to leverage for brand new products and services that combines blockchain with your personal data and so that's what we believe is the key to unlocking Mass adoption is how do we

128. 1:01:36

     make this transition transition data connect web 2 and web 3 and unlock brand new types of products and services so how could this actually be used so for instance being able to prove that I own a real asset I own a house or I own a car I'm being able to pull my financial statements from open banking initiatives around the world take ownership of that data now I can do zero knowledge proofs on chain and I can prove to a Smart contract that I own that car or that house um and perhaps I can then get an under catalized loan um

129. 1:02:07

     perhaps there's the ability to um you know fractionalize the ownership of my car and you know leverage that into a smart contract we have the tools here and the the ability to unlock these types of use cases think about reputation you know we've all got credit scores depending on what country we're from there's different systems and processes but if I can take that credit scool take ownership of that and then prove that to a Smart contract again that helps with that ability to provide efficient

130. 1:02:32

     pricing and competitive pricing that can compete with existing Solutions of product Financial products and services in the real world um you know there's an example my brother-in-law as a doctor he received three credit cards when he graduated because all the banks wanted him to do business with him because they felt that he was trusted so being able to take that real world trust and then leverage that for reputation onchain is going to be the next evolution of having better pricing and more competitive

131. 1:02:56

     products that allows the blockchain and crypto space to compete with existing products and services in the financial services sector think about this in Insurance you know if I want to if I want to create a decentralized health insurance product today how am I going to do that you know if you go and do that in the real world I have to provide all this information about me my fin my health history uh to the insurer I have to prove my address

132. 1:03:18

     and where I live and all sorts of things so we have this personal information barrier that needs to be overcome to offer that which is a massive industry uh same thing with you know assets and life insurance so being able to do that is a way to increase the total value locked in the ecosystem in the near ecosystem if we can unlock those use cases thing about social media we there's obviously a lot of different attempts to take social media and decentralize that it's a very

133. 1:03:42

     interesting problem space um you know under this model we can actually help people claim and take all of their data from existing social networks in one F swoop migrate that to one two maybe five different decentralized Alternatives so we can rapidly innovate we can rapidly explore new ways of creating decentralized social media platforms so being able to have that transition is a really important part I think of how we

134. 1:04:04

     make this accessible to traditional web 2 users this is one that I'm personally really excited about if you think about this in a few years um forward the ability for me to own all my data and then uh have an algorithm come to my data and actually um run that uh algorithm of my data to learn more about who I am combine that with real world uh insight and be able to create personalized experiences you know the

135. 1:04:32

     ability potentially to go to an e-commerce website sign in with my new wallet and suddenly that website also grants I grant access to a subset of my data in a privacy preserving way and that website rebrands itself based on uh who I am it says that you know I like the color blue I've got size 11 shoes I'm from Australia so suddenly there's a whole different range of products and services that are are focused there just on who I am but I've not told company any of that data this has just happened

136. 1:04:57

     between me and the browser in a really privacy preserving way so there's a few challenges to make all this happen and these are challenges that we're tackling at verita so having the uh an onchain Bridge how do we take that private data and use it in a public blockchain and do that in a privacy preserving way you know how do we take that uh have a real world trust anchor who are we going to trust in the real world to say that I am Chris and I'm

137. 1:05:21

     from Australia you know who are we going to how are we going to have mechanisms for working out uh who we can trust you know a smart contract has to be able to have some sort of wh list or mechanism to determine who to trust you know what signatures to trust tokenized business models there's a whole new world an opportunity here if we can give people their data There's an opportunity to

138. 1:05:39

     create brand new models around data so how do we actually do that how do we make it sustainable revocation you know something changes suddenly I'm a terrorist or you know I'm on a blacklist um so how are we going to you know how is uh that going to be revoked and so my access dis you know um removed if if that's an appropriate action required by Regulators there some complex sort of Technical and uh I guess legal implications that we starting to sort of

139. 1:06:03

     un uncover here and then private storage where do we actually store this data like at the moment you can't store private data on the blockchain and this is a fundamental piece of the problem that ver is looking to solve so on that front what we've done is we've developed the verita Vault so this is the world's first self- custody mobile application uh it's in developer preview at the moment we uh just finalizing near support on on the testet at the moment uh and what it provides it

140. 1:06:28

     gives you a decentralized identity that is effectively yours it gives you a multi-chain crypto wallet so the idea here is that you have a single identity but it can connect to multiple blockchains so we've got multi-chain capabilities built in from the very beginning we have uh a data browser so you can effectively browse your personal data that's been brought into the network that you own and control all the data is encrypted using your private key that's stored on the phone using your

141. 1:06:51

     seed phrase uh and we have a messaging inbox so that means that apps can send uh private notifications to you as a user of the app they can request data they can uh request blockchain transactions it's like a it's bit like wallet connect but sort of on steroids there's all these new capabilities that you can do around people's data and identity but it's also got wallet connect built in so you can easily integrate with your existing Tech

142. 1:07:14

     stack we've built the first private Data Network for web 3 you think of ipfs it's great for public data it's great for images and video and sort of more static kind of data there been attempts to build databases on top but it fundamentally um ipfs is designed for public data so what we've effectively built is almost like mongod DB uh that's decentralized uh so effectively people can run storage nodes they can um operate those nodes

143. 1:07:38

     and that stores encrypted data for users and as a user I can choose how many nodes are going to replicate my data I can choose what country those nodes are are stored in I have a lot more control around my data rather than just sort of being spread out in The Ether uh and that's a super important point for regulatory compliant use cases like healthcare and finance where you have to

144. 1:07:55

     you know guarantee that data is stored in a particular country but fundamentally the data is encrypted it's decentralized and it can be connected into these different blockchain uh applications the other piece that's super important is we've developed an API framework so we've uh got this also in developer preview and what it allows is uh a user can come in and connect to at the moment it's Facebook and Twitter but we'll be expanding that to things like apple Health GitHub LinkedIn um in in fact anybody can create an connector

145. 1:08:26

     and so what this is basically solving is that problem where people can pull all their data in and own it and so once I've got my data um we then have the the tooling for applications to request access to that data so if you're building a an application today and you would love to have access to um all the pages that people like on Facebook so that you can provide a profile and maybe provide some recommendations to them on on something you could come to ver and you could request that from the user the

146. 1:08:50

     user would be on boarded connect their Facebook pull that data down own it and then consent to sharing that with your application so we've got a full end to- end um data on-ramp there uh and lastly this is the piece that's super exciting um that we're working on which is effectively this um ability to connect data in a zero knowledge way onto different blockchains so fundamentally I have my data it's stored and a pre and signed encrypted in a private decentralized network is a

147. 1:09:16

     user control access to that data I can take that data and I can consent to that being uh basically generating a zero knowledge proof and then being able to bring that onto the blockchain and because my uh this is architect in a multi-chain way I could own my data and I can put it on to near but I could just as easily put it on ethereum and the same tooling can work for developers so that's it um some of the things that we're building in for I'd love you to if you're interested in this

148. 1:09:41

     space to check out our website check out our developer documentation we've got a lot of interactive tutorials where you can actually play with some of the stuff actually working um and we'll s soon be announcing the fact that we officially support uh near wallet connect one and two in the vault as well so near apps can effectively leverage all these capabilities so there we go thank you very

149. 1:10:07

     much much um just join make sure to put on your headphones on channel 16 uh to be able to listen to the talks um we're going to follow up with a developer oriented talk so please welcome Vladimir from drix floor is yours yeah thanks everyone uh would you mind raising your head if hand if you ever used Excel for example to predict your financial indicators any other business related

150. 1:10:37

     indicators not many people here but okay technically what you've been doing is using a no code tool for uh productive uh productive analytics which is a part of data science so technically you have been doing the work of uh citizen data scientist welcome to the club uh uh now imagine if you want to use that same Excel and uh do something like pulling data on from onchain building interactive dashboards and getting them to like your company or your stakeholders probably that's not

151. 1:11:08

     something that would get you thrilled too much so what I'm going to be talking about today is how you can use like powerful dedicated data science tools and uh what what kind of neat things you can you can get from them uh everything I will show is something that we've done uh uh maybe the data had been a bit redacted but uh yeah let's start the the very first thing you can expect from a

152. 1:11:33

     good data science tool it will allow you to make better decision based on your data right so let's let's look at this specific example let's say we have a marketing uh department and they are uh they are running different events right we see that there have been two events that correspond to inflow of new users and we can clearly see that the first event is way better than than the second

153. 1:11:55

     right the the rise in percentage and absolute values is a bit higher the spike is bigger uh so the answer is answered right way right the question is answered like the first one is better but we're using a powerful data science tool right we can we can do some cool analytics with this so let's not only look at the cumulative number of users but also let's look at something like transactions right we are looking at the

154. 1:12:21

     transactions and we see that the spike indeed is higher in the first case than in the second case again everything matches out like bigger Spike there bigger Spike here uh we should continue going with the first kind of event and not the second but at the same time I might be like hold on this one actually looks a bit wider right wi is that maybe we can look at something like even more uh Advanced so let's not look at the

155. 1:12:45

     number of wallets but the number of active wallets so people that have been using the Tool uh or like in this specific uh case their their wallet for quite a while right we look at this and suddenly turns out that the first event was actually totally useless and the second one event was one that converted very nicely so because you you've been like looking at a lot of data and your power fueld tools allow you to look at the data from different angles you can do very good data driven decisions and

156. 1:13:16

     we can see that the first kind of event actually should never be repeated and the second one converts very very nicely okay so what else can can a good powerful no code tool allow you to do it can Empower your teams to do analytics uh So currently I believe a lot of people are using notion are using Excel are using other like no code tools to uh to do like reportings and just track

157. 1:13:40

     their indicators uh but at the same time something like this it would be quite hard to to build like C customly at the same time there are a lot of uh a lot of no code uh data science tools that would allow you like to gather the data analyze the data split it and figure out for example dashboard like this and also the cool thing is these dashboards are sharable across uh across your company

158. 1:14:05

     and across your um stakeholders let's look at something other so the other thing you can do is not only build like simple visualizations or look at some specific uh specific numbers you can build the whole like dashboards and the whole uh Health tracking Health tracking Solutions right so we we've seen that we have been able to build for example one chart but you can build multiple charts

159. 1:14:30

     you can look at the wider picture uh have an understanding of what exactly uh what exactly your your uh your indicators pretty much are uh and yeah it it will help you help you quite a bit and again you can you can share this you can share this inside the organization outside of the organization it updates automatically you don't need to bother about like scalability the scheduling

160. 1:14:54

     you don't need to send anything via emails you just have a static URL that you can like expand and update in terms of visualizations in terms of up uh insights and the main things here are like calls to actions right so Mo most of the dashboards most of the analytics they are uh either telling you like what to do or telling you that something is wrong and you should figure out what to

161. 1:15:18

     do uh the good data science tool will allow you to work with multiple data sources sometimes those might be onchain sometimes those might be offchain they might be mixed so you can think of something like pulling data from social networks pulling data from web analytics pulling data from onchain and combining them together uh here for example we have an also very very cool thing this is actually our Oracle that's been built

162. 1:15:42

     totally using a no code tool right you you can see for example on the uh top left we are gathering data from uh web 2 API so stuff like binance uh or coin gecko we're doing like some some clean up of the data here on the bottom we are pulling data from the smart contract itself to figure out if something has changed from the previous uh previous time we observ um observ the data uh we are making some decisions here actually and what what we're actually doing is trying

163. 1:16:12

     to understand if if there has been enough uh enough difference to put the data back and in the end we write it to the Oracle do some uh logs and here you see for example what what in the end we would have we would have the updated values and we are one of the validators mentioned there uh and you can use this for various things also like quite obvious uh data science tool like no

164. 1:16:36

     code data science tool doesn't require you to write code so if you would imagine something like this written using JavaScript it would be a pain in the back to understand what is happening if something is wrong it's kind of hard finding the bugs uh and spe specifically like intersections like this when data like merges converges again and then merges again this is something that's

165. 1:16:58

     very very hard to track and if you have a neat visual tool you can you can track it very easily um what else so uh what what actually a good data science tool does it allows you to run experiments and then put those experiments in production very easily right a lot of us are interested in doing a testing validating hypothesis but at the same time not always the simulation will work well so we need to put it into

166. 1:17:25

     production and for example good nood data science tool will allow you to do that it will allow you to run multiple uh multiple let's say data pipelines or models or simulations uh it will allow you to have like static apis that you don't need to bother about like changing uh as as you go and you can do a lot of a lot of different things right simulations as I mentioned proper models uh dashboards and stuff like that so um in the in the very very end what a good

167. 1:17:57

     data science tool does it allows you to do more with your data with less hassle and share it within your uh organization and get very good insights my name is wemer safinski I'm one of the co-founders at datrix at no code tool for data analytics and machine learning and thank you for your attention yeah all right thank you very much for that interesting talk we're just going to take a mini break 2 minutes so just be patient uh while we prepare the next

168. 1:18:37

     slides h all right as we're getting ready welcome for to new joiners in the room uh make sure to check out the agenda on our website to see all the interesting talks

169. 1:19:41

     It's the final day at ncon so uh make sure you connect with the different folks that are here um uh next talk about nfts uh please welcome Slava from Infinity you can clap louder please welcome SAA hello hi guys uh happy to meet you uh I'm really glad uh that you came to hear my voice I can see that you have like some stuff on your hand it's like silent disco it's really interesting uh okay I'm Slava I'm CEO and co-founder for uh

170. 1:20:20

     infinity we um create a Catal uh brand new nft Marketplace uh we some time ago me and my friends uh we're sitting and thought about um what's nft today um how it's what's future how economical part build there uh and we decide that uh we find out some uh interesting situation that uh nft is an art and uh for us uh it should leave forever uh as for artists as for uh collectors regular users who just want to buy the picture

171. 1:21:05

     um we thought that um economical parts of it it's um usually uh Too Short basically you have only uh in 85% you have only one cell uh for nft and after that it's uh or disappeared or something or somebody forget somewhere it's and it's not comfortable for um artist because as I mentioned we thought we think that uh art must live uh forever and we decided uh to create um a feature and

172. 1:21:42

     Marketplace uh which uh will prolongate uh the life of nft and will stimulate uh users collectors uh buy more sell more and are just create more Arts more uh create really great interesting art uh that's why um I would like to stay a little bit quiet and ask guys to uh turn on uh video and after that I will tell you uh how it uh works by my words but please uh look to the screen and uh you can hear how it's

173. 1:22:22

     work a platform where percentage of every nft sale goes into a special collateral while creating nft add name description and fat fible allocated tokens which is a type of a minimum sale price guarantee that grows with every transaction once NFD is created you can sell it either through auction or fixed price in auction select a starting beat price in near auction expiration date and time you can see the fa that you

174. 1:22:59

     have chosen on the screen when the artist or future owner sell the token every time this percentage of money will be allocated to the fat because when the artist creates nft he or she sets up how much coins goes to the FED collateral every piece of digital art has a cultural value a subjective part that on the other hand is an objective part value in near tokens created from trust each buyer put into the digital art piece

175. 1:23:58

     this is new collateral Logic for people who love art and want to be sure that money invested in modern art will not disappear one day keep in mind you can either have nftd or fed but not both at the same time think about it like stable coins that are baked by the US dollar or eth for example you can have usdt or dii but if you want to get your USD or ethereum collateral you exchange your usdt or dii for

176. 1:24:38

     it when the future buyer needs to sell urgently or just sell for a desired price he can burn the nft redeem the FED for all previous deals Infinity the future of nfts is near uh so that's thank you so much for your beautiful voice uh as you can see uh the main feature is uh f8 fible allocated token we call it fat uh basically it's simplify because uh every each sale on our Marketplace will uh gross up basic cost of uh your

177. 1:25:24

     nft uh and it's something that will stimulate uh sellers sell more buyers buy more and for the artists it's much more interesting rather they uh nft can buy not only one times uh we plan to uh sell each nft at least several times but there is uh it can be even 100 100 times and f8 will grow each after each sales you can choose the percentage of this uh sale of this person from five up to

178. 1:26:07

     99% from uh the basic cost of uh the nft um as uh we can see this market today it's something that can stimulate and uh push sellers uh sell more even uh deals can be not so uh big but for today coin plus coin and it can happen F uh really big amounts so uh after uh in case you will decide to sell it uh originally your nft burnout we call it redeem the feds uh you will get all kinds of collected fats that was collected by each deals

179. 1:26:55

     before so basically you will have um all fat for your nft this structure was builded not only for uh buyers and sellers it's also and for uh artist of course we think about them previously uh we care about them so uh royalty tool is on the way we plan to uh send them royalty uh after each selling uh of the nft after each deal not so much but you can imagine that uh you are an artist you live uh for example in

180. 1:27:40

     Africa in Brazilia doesn't matter in Ukraine uh and your nft live your own life here on live already and you always got some royalty without uh do nothing and you your artist will artist is populate uh his name uh because of uh selling this nft uh we create this product with a beautiful uh Team of uh the ideas soft and uh I would like to say said thanks for all of them they are amazing and create this uh beautiful product and

181. 1:28:26

     Marketplace uh for us for you we already on the prod uh it's uh second day already uh so uh hope to see you on our platform and uh thank you so much and thanks for your attention uh thank you very much SLA that was an interesting talk um so for those of you who have just joined make sure to put on your headphones otherwise you won't hear anything uh we're going to jump into the next talk

182. 1:29:01

     about I never seen this topic before it's five things to know about crypto and accounting so it's quite interesting uh please welcome Jim Thompson from bitwave all right uh thumbs up can you hear me awesome this is an interesting uh silent disco haven't done that before so uh great to be here at nearon uh this place was underwater day one so Vibes are a little bit better on on day three uh this is not the sexiest Topic at nearon probably but it is an important

183. 1:29:35

     one uh so if you're here hopefully you're interested in accounting uh maybe you're a Founder maybe you're an operator at one of these uh gaming companies nft creators you're in defi uh this is specifically about business accounting so if you need to figure out how to do your retail taxes like this may be a little bit informative but not totally the the subject matter the this is about uh business work so by way of of quick introduction uh my name is Jim

184. 1:29:59

     Thompson I'm the Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at bitwave uh spent a number of years in fintech before like a lot of people here jumping into crypto uh full-time and have been at bitwave for uh about a year now um what we do at bitwave is we provide uh digital asset accounting and tax software to build businesses building uh on the blockchain and using digital assets so anywhere from small businesses to midmarket to

185. 1:30:23

     the biggest companies in the space um we help them really bridge the gap between blockchain data and getting that into their traditional Fiat general ledger systems like QuickBooks zero Nets Suite whatever it is that you're using uh we do this with small companies and at scale with folks like openc and Magic Eden and GameStop using bitwave to power their accounting and tax teams so excited to to talk to you today uh the five things that we're going to talk

186. 1:30:48

     about uh let's see if I I can get these right is number one is really understanding your activity and your goals so before you get into accounting you need to know what am I actually trying to accomplish here what do my goals look like number two is going to be accessing your data and everybody here is building on near so we'll talk a little bit about our partnership with a near Foundation they also use bitwave for their own accounting process uh and then number three is going to be the

187. 1:31:12

     expertise required to actually execute uh on your accounting a tax process both from a crypto standpoint and from a CPA standpoint number four is Automation and scale and number five is US Gap so um before we jump into those five uh quick like raise of hands there's going to be three options here you're doing Accounting in house you work with an outsourced accounting partner or you're like Jim what are you talking about I'm just trying to build a business and then

188. 1:31:37

     I'll worry about accounting later so uh number one anybody doing their accounting in- house today themselves this guy down here okay maybe Founders maybe on spreadsheets uh number two anybody using a partner already like a CPA nobody yet okay that's interesting that's surprising and then number three any like not doing accounting yet they're like Focus yeah just building coding over here too okay that's cool um I would be doing the same thing focus on

189. 1:32:01

     Revenue first accounting later good to think about some of these things proactively um as well um all right so for those in number three especially that haven't thought about this before I will break the news to you that unfortunately the blockchain does not do your accounting for you uh so I'm sorry there's no like magical Satoshi CPA out there just like doing your accounting we met with a founder of the the other day that was building a a gaming uh platform

190. 1:32:26

     and he's like actually I don't really need to worry about accounting it's all on chain it's all good it's like okay um unfortunately that's not the case so many reasons that you need to do your accounting which I don't need to to sell you on um but whether you just need to come to a tax number like we all do for real retail purposes uh you need to talk to investors with some concrete details about what's going on in your business or you need to understand your basic accounting workflows to inform your

191. 1:32:50

     strategy like these are things that that you do need to be thinking about regardless of onchain or or offchain activity so in terms of understanding your activity and your goals what we often see is you guys might be building on a platform and then you start to have some success you have some Revenue you have some expenses you get a you put QuickBooks in place you say okay I need to get an accountant maybe outsourced maybe I'm doing this myself as a Founder how do I catch up on this activity if you're working with any outsourced

192. 1:33:15

     accountant or you bring somebody else into the fold you need them to actually understand your business like they can't just go look at onchain activity on uh ether scan or near explore and say like I understand what's happening here and I can categorize that transaction good example our friends at Doodles they raised like 36 million dollar yesterday their Founders blew up they hired Becca uh out in Hawaii to do their accounting she comes in she loves Doodles but it's

193. 1:33:38

     like I I don't know what's been happening I can't go look two years ago at these mints that took place and understand how to appropriately categorize that so that's really number one the second piece will be these goals that I alluded to earlier is like why are you starting to do this accounting now are you planning to get additional round of venture are you planning an IPO at some point you need to start thinking about audits whatever those goals are really influence how detailed how nuanced you need to get uh into the

194. 1:34:02

     accounting world all right so that's number one uh number two that we're going to focus on is accessing your data so you're like all right I know what this activity looks like how do I get this data and everyone says well it's onchain great but how do you get that onchain data I met a woman on the floor the other day who said she's doing 10,000 clicks a month through a block Explorer taking screenshots to get the data that she needs that's not going to

195. 1:34:27

     be overly effective that's not going to scale really well so whether you have all your onchain data on near or you're on multiple blockchains or you're using centralized exchanges or OTC desks or maybe you have a custodial provider like Anchorage where you're keeping funds you need to actually access this data and access those transactions and then figure out a way to get that data from point A to point B point B being your traditional Fiat general ledger so how

196. 1:34:52

     do you get that data And in regards to near because we're at near con um one of the most exciting things that that we have going on is that near Foundation is is leveraging bitwave for their own accounting and we have been spending the last few months working with them to build an integration via API directly to the near blockchain so that we can pull all of that data off of near into our subledger Software System and give businesses building on near the ability to properly account for those

197. 1:35:17

     transactions and push that into their general ledger so more to come on that we finished the integration we're kind of going through um feedback and itation with a near team but super exciting to enable this entire ecosystem as you guys scale um and you start to get get more uh deeply into this stuff uh all right so that's data uh number three is going to be expertise so if you're building a traditional

198. 1:35:40

     business you really just need to think about do I have a CPA that kind of understands accounting and do I understand my basic business attributes so you know I'm in manufacturing I'm in oil and gas I'm in distribution like a lot of that doesn't carry the Nuance that comes with dig assets so what we commonly see is a business starts to build you've got an accountant you use in your day-to-day Fiat life you bring them in you say hey can you help me with my accounting for my nft Marketplace uh for my gaming company for my staking

199. 1:36:05

     operation and the reality is often they can't because they don't know what you're talking about like they are just a normal CPA analogies to themselves but it's hard so what you need to do is either really commit to building that expertise inhouse on both the CPA side and the crypto expertise or partner with an Outsource firm that's not what we do but we have plenty of Partners from Boutique

200. 1:36:28

     firms to the big four that know this stuff really well so if you're thinking about this for this business feel free to find me afterward I'll introduce you to somebody that can help but really thinking about the expertise around this is important I'll give you a few examples of the decisions that you need to make when you're thinking about this stuff and I'm not going to give you answers because I'm not your CPA and I'm

201. 1:36:45

     not a CPA and you know none of these things have objective answers that's how it works in crypto but one example would be uh if you're treasuring nfts right so you've acquired an nft or maybe you've uh minted your own nfts as part of your project uh you have a cost basis for that initially if you've acquired it what is the ongoing value of that nft if you're thinking about your current treasury Holdings your cash position what is the value of the nft am I using

202. 1:37:09

     a floor price maybe that seems reasonable that's a conservative number but not all near knots are made equal what if you have Rarities associated with those nfts do you use a third party to evaluate that do you just take a a guess internally those are some of the things that you want to think through internally uh for your cash positions um another example uh hanging out with the Aurora folks this week and I've got

203. 1:37:31

     their their socks on uh when you're thinking about bridging tokens uh you're thinking about wrapping tokens uh if you take eth and turn it to whe you take near and you wrap it um what is is that a disposition of that digital asset there's not an objective answer on that either if you ask deoe you ask ey you may get a different answer so the big question there is it a disposition of my near or is it a continuation of my

204. 1:37:56

     dominion and control of that asset just on a new uh a new chain the reason that matters of course is for your cost basis and tax implications right so if you decide that you've wrapped near that's different than it uh or if you wrap near and you decide that it is a disposition of asset that is really important um something similar uh hands in the room who's in a liquidity pool or maybe bare Market has been in liquidity pools

205. 1:38:18

     before yeah most most people um so when you enter a liquidity pool let's say that you uh you have some assets you have an nfg Creator project um you've been doing well you've got some near that you're sitting on you want to get some yield uh maybe you have some usn uh I bought a beer with usn yesterday that was really cool uh you take usn you take your near you enter a liquidity pool and they give you an LP token right so what has just happened similar to the WAP

206. 1:38:43

     token concept have you disposed of your stable coin and your near and acquired a new asset if so that means that you now have picked up a new cost basis whenever you then dispose of that l P token and acquire your assets back if not uh if you say I'm continuing Dominion control of those assets I've just entered into an LP and maybe that's a general partnership however you want to Define it um then you are not picking up a new cost basis so sometimes you be like Jim

207. 1:39:08

     like why are you talking about this why does this matter well for our clients that have eth at like a $5 cost basis and then they go in especially in the the the bull market into a liquidity pool have they just picked up a ghost capital gains of $4,000 minus5 that they now have to pay taxes on or are they comfortable saying no I still have dominion control of this asset I'm in a liquidity pool I'm out of liquidity pool

208. 1:39:30

     I'm generating yield but my cost basis hasn't changed so for those of you in the room that may have near at 10 cents I wish I was one of you uh you know that would be really important if you enter a liquidity pool and exit so at bit wve from a software perspective we don't take stances on these things we just build the functionality into our software so you have optionality around however you want to handle it but this is a topic this is an example of something that you either need to Think

209. 1:39:53

     Through deeply inhouse or you need to have a CPA uh expert that you work with or some combination of both and get some of that advisory and most importantly be uh be consistent with um all right so we'll keep it moving for time sake so that is uh understanding your activity and your goals that's thinking about how to access the data that you need to actually do your accounting that's um thinking about the expertise that's required to do that both from a crypto standpoint and a CPA standpoint um and

210. 1:40:23

     now let's talk about like scaling and automation so let's say you figured those first three things out you've been doing well I know there's a lot of gaming companies here we love the gaming space we're working with folks like mythical uh we work with GameStop who launched our nft Marketplace and needed to figure out how to get blockchain data into sap and that's where a bitwave came into play uh gaming is one of those Industries where you start to scale

211. 1:40:45

     really quickly right microtransactions nft secondary royalty sales in your game if you're having success the transactions are popping up and this supplies to a lot of Industries in crypto uh as soon as you start to scale some of the things that you've been doing at a lower level transaction just may not work right so if you have 50 transactions you figured some of this out maybe you're doing it in a spreadsheet maybe you're using a tool it's working okay as soon as you go to

212. 1:41:10

     5,000 a month or 50,000 a month things start to change so I'll give you three things that we've seen our clients do at scale that work really well and this is working for clients like openc and Magic Eden on the nftg marketplace side this is like block demon and figment on the staking side so lots of clients that are this is where this is coming from um number one is you're going to want to create some sort of like automated rules

213. 1:41:33

     engine right so if you have any sort of consistent Revenue events or expense events that are taking place into the wallets you want to look for consistent variables that are associated with those events so that you can set up a rules engine in a tool like bitwave to say okay I'm an nft Creator I have all my secondary royalty sales coming into this wallet I want to categorize that as second second royalty revenue and put that back into QuickBooks I'm going to

214. 1:41:56

     write a rule for that so every time that takes place it's automatically categorized it's automatically synced I now have a CPA that's reviewing that or somebody in the house taking a look at it and saying okay this is reconciled this is good but you're doing this at scale as you start to grow the second thing that you're going to want to do if you really get to higher volume is what we call rollups so again gaming platform nfts defi activity once you start to see

215. 1:42:20

     maybe um 5,000 plus transactions a month you're going to start to break your general ledger like part of the reason that bitwave exists is that QuickBooks and sap and all they're not built for digital assets they're also not built for this kind of volume like it is not normal what we all do here where the volume just scales incredibly fast so a roll up is looking at transactions over

216. 1:42:44

     a certain period of time and rolling them up into one so again let's say you're open C and you have a bunch of Revenue events over an hourly basis you might roll those up into one event over that 1H hour period so then you have 24 transactions over the 24-hour period that you're accounting for so again this becomes really important as you start to scale or you will break your general ledger and nobody wants to break their general ledger or they can't do the uh the rest of the things they need to do

217. 1:43:08

     in their business um all right so that's talking about scale and Automation and then the third thing that I'll say for scale is what we call wallet hygiene so if your wallets are teeth then at bitwave we are your dentist like encouraging you to floss and that guy looked up was like what is he talking about uh brushing brushing your teeth uh so we're really encouraged this thing called wallet hygiene and what that means is really

218. 1:43:33

     really common probably for some of you in the audience when you started to build your business you had a couple wallets that you used you had some personal activity you had some business activity some of it's Blended uh very common for what we see I would recommend ASAP separating that activity making sure that you have wallets by your business by your personal activity but much much more than that you grow really setting up your wallet structure in a way that makes sense that's organized

219. 1:43:58

     that's named that has hierarchal structure you start a new nft project you move uh you create a wallet specifically for that project maybe you create different wallets for different revenue streams and expense streams those things are really important and I promise your accountant will appreciate it if you do those things it will allow you to more effectively leverage a rules engine automation like I mentioned before and it'll honestly just make more sense for your business and allow you to

220. 1:44:22

     scale in a really sensical way so we could do our own session on wallet hygiene maybe we'll do a webinar on it or something um but that's a really important one I would recommend that you guys start thinking about now even the ones in the audience that said hey I'm not actually doing accounting yet I'm just building I'm just coding if you have wallets start thinking about your

221. 1:44:38

     your wallet structure um all right so that's Automation and scale um the next piece that and really the the last fifth topic that we're going to talk about is US Gap so that that may be a little bit boring for some of the crew so I will be brief on this one if it becomes an issue for you it's probably a good thing if you're following us Gap or you're thinking about IFRS that means that you're

222. 1:45:03

     probably scaling you may be thinking about an IPO you may have some Auditors that are requiring it you may have some Venture Capital that's requiring it I'll just talk about two things related to it one is what we call impairment so impairment is the concept of how you treat indefinite life intangible assets so just remember tangible assets it's really pretty silly that regulators and

223. 1:45:27

     other folks uh right now if you're following us Gap treat crypto as an intangible asset that you need to think about impairment on it's a accounting treatment designed for uh assets that are not highly liquid uh crypto is obviously incredibly liquid and Incredibly volatile so the way this works is that you need to think about what was my cost basis of which why I acquired this asset and what is the price of that asset right now if the price of that asset is lower you need to

224. 1:45:52

     impair that asset set down so you may have seen micro strategy in the news talking about this Michael sailor ranting about it they wrote about it in their 10K they told various regulatory bodies how dumb they were that this is how it works I may or may not agree with them but right now if you want to follow us Gap that's what you got to do this is a really intensive manual process we work with a large uh staking provider not not figment who I mentioned earlier somebody else who literally had multiple

225. 1:46:15

     FTE uh in an offshore office just going through this line by line by line the way we do it at bit waves on a lot by lot basis we think about it daily um so I'll move on from that if you're interested in impairment talk to me afterward I'd be be happy to go on about it the last thing I'll mention on this front is the pricing methodology so the vast majority of our customers uh will typically look at like a an average of

226. 1:46:38

     uh of a price to get your cost basis right so you acquire some near token and you want to say what's the price of this near when I acquired it that's important for accounting and tax purposes obviously um you can use crypto compare different tools things we pull in automatically but if you're following us app if you're listening to to some of these things then you're going to want to look for what is the principal market and the way they think about principal Market is pretty easy on or simple on

227. 1:47:01

     the surface but a lot of nuance under the hood and that is what is the best market for pricing this token what has the most liquidity what's the most active and unfortunately that's not static so uh that changes like MacKenzie at figment talked about the other day they used a third party consultant for this and they have to keep evaluating this but the point for the group would be early days it's probably fair to use this like average uh this average cost

228. 1:47:25

     basis pricing and as you scale you may need to think more deeply uh about principal market and uh certainly we and other folks at you know big four and others can can help think through that process um I'll leave you with this these things are constantly changing uh what I've talked about today is hopefully helpful and resonates a little bit um surely things will change next year and two years from now it's imperative that you work with uh

229. 1:47:49

     consultants and uh have the right team behind you have the right soft software behind you if you're interested in any of that stuff let me know we' be happy to talk about it after this um and looking forward to a full uh near API integration launch at bitwave and thank you everybody for your time can you U think final so the before last uh talk of this afternoon or morning um so for those of you who have just joined uh make sure to put on your headphones and channel 16 uh also make

230. 1:48:31

     sure to look at the general agenda uh to catch like the the last talks that'll be happening we have Ilia giving a keynote at 4 uh p.m. um so still a lot of interesting things to do um so next step we're going to be jumping into the near ecosystem uh with the ecosystem funds so uh please welcome Dean Thomas from Steel Capital Matt Peterson from op crypto venette buki from Cipher capital and

231. 1:49:00

     Vincent from meta web who's going to be moderating I think we don't see vinet at the moment though thank you thank you perfect VC how's it going Miss all right so uh can you guys hear me I don't think we can hear you hello uh yeah we can yeah I can hear you okay yeah we're good all right so uh really nice meeting everyone um to begin with I actually thought I was one of the panelists but I guess now I'm part time part-timing to be the moderator as well but anyways like really nice meeting all of you um I guess let me start a quick

232. 1:49:47

     intro first and then I will let everyone to do the same as well um I'm Vincent I I'm from met web VC which is a a near ecosystem Focus VC um we you know near Foundation is our largest LP but we also got some other LPS including dragonfly GSR sequa and Elia himself and uh we are a team of um uh Builders you know transforming to be investors you know our founder Amos he he used to be CMO of near and then another partner Danny uh

233. 1:50:20

     she used to run the developer community in near and we also have some other uh team members uh from traditional Finance background like myself I did Investment Banking Tech Investment Banking in City back in the time and someone doing entrepreneurship and media so um so yeah this is basically us and uh let me uh move it to V yeah venet uh our another guest for intro for now hi guys

234. 1:50:45

     uh this is Venit I'm uh the co and partner at uh Cipher Capital uh Cipher capital is a $100 million fund uh a self money fund uh based out of Dubai which has invested in over 200 plus deals in the last uh 2 2 and a half years uh we have uh Bill who recently left uh binance uh accelerator as well as the billion dollar fund who leads the team now uh we've been we've been investing for the last two years quite strongly in uh multiple plays be defi uh beat play

235. 1:51:17

     to earn uh even Lance you know Casper was one of the Investments that we did uh we've been been actively looking at uh near as an ecosystem to invest I think the community is quite good it's growing there are a lot of products being built on it in fact one of our investments uh few and far is here as well I think you guys went to the first day party that they had and uh that's us

236. 1:51:38

     in a nutshell happy to uh talk to people who have great projects coming on the N ecosystem hey everyone this is M from op crypto BC so uh we're $50 million completely web through Focus preed SE Stitch V launched just over a year ago so I'm an investor with OP um we are vertical agnostic plens to be chain agnostic so we're ecos assistant partners with near and a few other chains as well um made around 20 Investments so far over the past year um deployed very conservatively throughout the bull

237. 1:52:09

     market but of made some core investments into core infrastructure like scroll building a zvm connects the bridge as well as some kind of larger gaming plays like Merit Circle and some play to earn like aori um yeah backed by top tier institutional investors in the space like digital currency group wobi viit Republic uh Vision Hill Etc so actually uh David are the found the founder was

238. 1:52:33

     at HBY uh he was running HBY labs for around three years and then transitioned into starting op uh so yeah happy to expand on that and happy to be speaking with you guys awesome what's up guys I'm Dean um I started my career on traditional Finance um I started my career at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker and then special situations investor and then private at Blackstone um moved over to the crypto side got linked up with polygon when there was

239. 1:52:57

     around 70 daps on the network uh I was an executive there as was a global head of institutional uh where we helped create polygon Studios we helped two Acquisitions of Mir and Hermes and we ipoed three vehicles across the Swiss Amsterdam and Paris stock exchanges from there I run stealth Capital which is uh you know our largest LP is near foundation and we basically run a parallel barbell strategy between Market neutral delta neutral trading

240. 1:53:23

     um which we're currently up around annual wise 19% on the year um entirely usdc denominated and also Venture private credit private debt uh investing but given the current CPI print yesterday and uh you know the given fed environment I think we'll be probably sticking around on the market neutral side a bit longer and um whenever the Fed eases Up we'll pivot back into the private side of the

241. 1:53:45

     business okay yeah I guess um I guess to begin with uh to begin with as a first question um do you guys regard yourself as a financial investors or do you guys feel like you are part of the building team what are some of the services or value add to your portfolio companies again uh you know uh interestingly crypto has these elements where projects just don't want money you know if you see the last uh Bull Run people were getting over subscribed in an hour in fact I just invested in one of the projects which was Raising $275

242. 1:54:17

     million and it's over subscribed to $400 million uh so blockchain I think everyone knows about it thing is uh today uh these projects are looking much more you know they're looking at media to help them with to they're looking at Market entry for us we specially position ourselves as the guys who can give a market entry entry to Middle East uh India and Africa then they're also looking for you know because retail gets quite involved in projects quite sooner

243. 1:54:41

     compared to uh normal uh ways how startups raise money I think they're looking at KS and things like that so yes we give a lot of value add in terms of these parameters but again I've been a startup founder for 15 years I think in the end the startup Founders have to build the company up rather than investors we can just provide them with tools so they can efficiently manage it in a shorter period of time but uh and

244. 1:55:05

     yeah finally capital is always critical for growth so that's what we do at the moment right yeah so I think uh to some extent especially in the preed seed stage part of startups right the capital is not typically enough uh for this project to succeed I think that's that's kind of if you're just supplying Capital it makes sense potentially for larger rounds later down the line in more developed projects but but for us we take a very very kind of concentrated curated approach to investing so we're

245. 1:55:30

     we deploy very conservatively uh into very high conviction Builders right so just larger ticket sizes into fewer into fewer uh projects so for us what we like to do is we like to work very very close with our portfolio companies especially surrounding go to market in Asia so we have we have on ground support throughout the Southeast Asian region and also basically helping our projects

246. 1:55:51

     tap different siloed ecosystems in Asia right think uh Korea Japan uh southeast Asia uh China India right um which all have their own different communities so working with key opinion leaders Etc to really help them establish a presence in a region that ultimately becomes up ends up becoming the most important region for the projects right so for mered Circle for example we were their exclusive partner and the goto Market in

247. 1:56:13

     Asia um so yeah we we we like to work very Hands-On um kind of take an advisory position right with our projects um weing meetings Etc just helping them with their strategy and their product so I I would like to kindly and politely disagree with my two panelists um I think it's really dependent right what they described is super helpful in a bull market when the money is Flowing interest rates are low and bunny is the cheapest commodity right now I would say the opposite is happening so basically with fed raising interest rates money sucking out of the

248. 1:56:43

     system real traditional Finance fixed income products offering higher yield than defi money is a scarce resource right now in web 3 and so if you have money especially in the next 18 months you're going to have a lot of people coming begging for opportunities to to get us some of that Capital whereas during the bull run a lot of investors were basically forced into these really really terrible Saft Arrangements which are now coming to roost right you'll see

249. 1:57:06

     this over the next 12 18 months they signed up to invest in these tokens and they have no rights as shareholders they have no rights as debt holders and then basically the founder if they choose to can basically run off with the money and party with it or travel with it and and that's the end of it right so right now I think it's it's really interesting because the markets are always fluctuating and so what game we play has to be largely contingent on what the FED

250. 1:57:29

     decides right like we're all kind of small ships sailing on the sea and the FED decides what the tide looks like and what height it's going to be and so anybody who fights that tide is going to get wrecked and so my prediction is obviously with the CPI print being you know terrible uh yesterday we should only see uh further tightening from the fed and so if they do continue that path The Venture game that we've SE seen for the past 13 years with near zero

251. 1:57:54

     interest rates is just not going to work right so all these so-called genius Venture investors that made a lot of money in this past cycle um they were lucky because there's a lot of free money being printed to help you know fight the pandemic and and make sure that people weren't absolutely getting destroyed but now that we're tightening and inflation is the main target in terms of lowering inflation by the FED um if you don't know how to hedge if you don't know how to invest in fixed income if you don't understand capital

252. 1:58:19

     structure and you're just yoloing money into projects thinking you'll get get a 10 extra for free you're going to get absolutely destroyed and you're going to see this with the top name funds you're going to see with bottom name funds I'd say 80 90% of the VCS who deployed 20 to 50% of their funds already at this point you're going to see tremendous amount of zeros across those Investments and it's going be really hard for them to say like oh we're genius investors for the next fund raise because Venture doesn't

253. 1:58:42

     work when interest rates are mid single digits so um that's my contrarian view but you know some people would like to disagree um again invest is not always intrinsic to a company you know you can find out the best Founders and you can find out the best VCS backing it up but 50% of the marks goes to external uh parameters as well you know how the economy is doing I know fed is doing things which will tighten up the money supply but I haven't we seen these Cycles uh multiple times didn't we see

254. 1:59:12

     this in 2017 didn't we see it in F never raise rates to four the target for Mid four% rates interestingly what I have been seeing is fundamentals have been coming every time China has done thing done something someday which has led to the market denominated right we're not R&B denominated see see Cycles keep on coming and going markets keep on going up and down it's which what things are you investing in and again a lot of VCS

255. 1:59:38

     yes they went in big time into the markets in the last season and never uh took profits so that first he assumes that no one took profits maybe that's not the case for a fund where I buil $10 million into half a billion dollar so uh we also have are building a $2 billion mining plant in Abu Dhabi which is quite so it's it depends whether These funds actually cashed out on some of those

256. 2:00:01

     opportunities and have enough Capital as well but again Cycles happen things go up things go down we are a long-term investor not looking at the next 6 months or one year so yeah I know I tend to agree with you I think that's kind of the reason behind our strategy as well of deploying very conservatively right like we're not actively spraying I know that there is still a lot of money in the system right a lot of VCS raised towards the end of the bow uh they have these different deployment schedules

257. 2:00:24

     where they need to deploy um that are still kind of inflating valuations right now but um that's why we we actually aren't we're actually a bit under deployed at the moment so we're still sitting on a pile of cash we're in no rush to deploy if we're we see something where we have very high conviction in the project itself right not as something more speculative or just because there's hype around it but if we believe in these Builders because that's ultimately what you're doing when you're doing preed seent preed and SE stage

258. 2:00:48

     investing you're investing in people um so if we see these kind of opportunities will will deploy but yeah definitely definitely worry about macro as well right that's definitely a big concern that affects it so just for full transparency I'm actually an LP investor in op personally so nothing against these two funs nothing against V nothing against mads there was a more broad statement across the so-called you know Geniuses investors who were on Twitter with tens of th hundreds of thousands of

259. 2:01:12

     followers saying oh I know this is going to happen I made this money doing that I think most people have no idea which direction the Market's going to go I'd say 99.9% have no idea what's going to happen and I would say the vast majority of folks who got famous or made money in the short term over the past cycle have no experience investing in a high interest rate environment and so I think it's just a fundamentally different game

260. 2:01:35

     and you're going to see a lot of traditional Finance people come into the space with much more experience much better risk management parameters and they'll do much better and the returns won't be as sexy as The Bull Run you know 50x 100 xers but it's going to be some really really attractive returns relative to a market that may be down like this year 40 to 60% or even 80% okay yeah I I feel like we are actually on the same page on you know

261. 2:01:58

     number one we do agree the current market conditions are are not ideal and we we need to you know go for a more more conservative approach while on the other hand we are all bullish on crypto in the longer term and then we trust the people we we pick the great team and we try to provide as much value as as possible I guess before moving back a a little bit more on the near Centric questions I just wonder what are

262. 2:02:25

     the qualities you you you you would see from Founders that you think you you you would be happy to back them and you will be happy to work with them so personally you know uh when I built up the parameters of investing on uh I'm I'm a startup founder for 15 years so you know I've been I've been part of accelerators I have had a lot of Investments done for myself as well so uh you know taking what I have learned from there I've

263. 2:02:47

     always looked at Founders who have some expertise you know everyone wants to go to the moon but has never been on a rocket so this these guys uh have they built anything like when you look at for example sui blockchain or rtos which came up at least the guys were the founding team of Facebook's uh uh DM currency which never went anywhere but at least they have the technical know how to uh back it up what's the team consist of do they have the requisite

264. 2:03:11

     skills to Market this product to take this product to adoption and things like that backers also count in fact uh in criticalities I remember we invested in a project known as Finn block which got a $8 million hit on uh uh Tera so uh no it's not Tera sorry three arrows Capital so you know when you have backers strong like squa they actually come and help you even in uh times like that so for us it's always about what

265. 2:03:35

     the team has done what capability do they have are the backers interesting does the project finally have anything any value at know there are people who are planting trees and saying it's blockchain I don't think so but uh we're also looking at what in in the end they're trying to uh finally build so yeah yeah know fair enough I I I completely agree with kind of looking for Founders that have expertise in the area that they're that they're building on uh but also just the type of founder

266. 2:03:59

     right like you investing in someone that's a hustler that will keep working and that will be able to Pivot right and that's creative enough to to leverage his resources and kind of pivot if the idea doesn't fully work out because ultimately especially when you're doing these early stage Investments um you're the the idea itself obviously has to be Innovative and they have to bring something kind of new to the ecosystem right it can't be a copy based project like we've seen a lot of um but

267. 2:04:23

     ultimately if this project doesn't end up getting a lot of traction having the ability and the resources to be to shift direction right uh and steer the ship that way so that's important as well um we actually just finished leading the round for a treasury management solution called f that um actually ties into what you were speaking about about risk management um so these guys are all have extensive experience um in traditional Finance right banking uh risk management

268. 2:04:47

     um one of them is a is a Quant from NASA as well and they're really building these tight-knit Risk Management Solutions for Dow treasuries which we have seen as a huge problem in this latest Bear right I think uh Unis swaps treasury uh like tier one projects like unisoft I think their treasury back in November was worth close to 10 billion and then uh in June it fell all the way down to around 1.5 billion so these

269. 2:05:10

     there clearly kind of a lot of capital in the system but not the tools necessary to to allow Dallas for example to operate in perpetuity so yeah this background experience as well as kind of this Hustler mentality is super important yeah I think um one of the key questions and and I'm I was discussing this with uh a colleague right before uh we stepped on stage there's a big difference between like making money as an investor and something that's good for the space overall I think they're

270. 2:05:34

     two kind of sometimes they overlap but they're not actually the same thing so for example the classical example in traditional Finance is the airline industry Airlines obviously like I would much rather fly from here to Dubai then to go by boat and then train and then camel or whatever it require to get there but if you invested and you were a specific Airline investor from the the time period when you know George Orwell

271. 2:05:57

     first flew on a plane until now You' probably have gone broke many times over so as a financial investor that was actually a terrible industry to be in but for the progress of humanity and for technology was actually fantastic right so that's one thing so so there two kind of it's like a vend diagram there's sometimes an overlap but not always and so for us you have to be really clear about like is your purpose as an investor to grow the ecosystem only with

272. 2:06:20

     no expectation of returns for LPS or are you in a return Roi based fund with profit and capital preservation as your mandate for us it's Capital preservation as our mandate don't lose money is rule number one and then if we can make money with outsize you know risk reward opportunities we'll take them and so for us when we look at these projects the key question that comes to mind is like it could be really really good for the ecosystem it could be really really good

273. 2:06:44

     for XYZ in the space but a will value actually accre to you as a business or a company or a dow and and if it does is it going to acud to your token your nft your Equity your debt or which combination of the thing right so I think during the bull market because of the hype and the kind of crowd psychology everyone kind of just like was throwing money into these things without asking any of these questions and now we're going to see you know the

274. 2:07:08

     painful repercussions of that but I think now that Capital has become much more scarce people are becoming much more disciplined it's these are important questions to ask and also to very clearly figure out for yourself right so the objectives of for example the near Foundation or proximity where it's not necessarily a pure Roi investment is very very different from a for-profit fund in which case um each one should then focus on different objectives and are looking for different

275. 2:07:33

     things and different Founders right so for us we're looking for obviously all the things that my panelists have mentioned capability track record ability to execute but also to be operating in a niche that's defensible that they can capture value in and something that we will see a real objective return on investment whether it's a return on the token whether they going to be acquired by another company um and so all of the things that you know Warren Buffett talks about in value investing that's been made fun of for

276. 2:07:58

     the past three years in the bull market all comes back right like how do you defend and capture value in a very very competitive market uh space and for us it's the Pix and shovels infrastructure potentially exchanges um and it's all about like what makes you different what stops other people from copying your code and doing the exact same thing that you're doing and a lot of times it comes to you have you know backers that are in the regulatory regimes and the spaces

277. 2:08:22

     that you operate that box out anybody trying to enter that specific region um for example uh one of the companies that um advising is bit toi which is the largest Spanish Exchange in Spain they're the largest crypto exchange and they have probably seven different products from Launchpad to VC arm to wallet Etc and the business is very very interesting it's not sexy in a bull market but in a bare Market they're gener revenues they have the ability to

278. 2:08:47

     be profitable they need to be and anybody who wants to enter into that market needs to fight basically the first mover advantage that they've had in capturing the Spanish attention getting the becoming the trusted partner and something like reputation and first mover Advantage can't be underestimated and I realized this actually firsthand when one of my Spanish portfolio companies just raised their round and I'm like okay where are you going to be parking your Capital they're like I was

279. 2:09:09

     like the obvious choices are you know Finance FTX Genesis one of these big names right he's like no bit to me I'm like why bit to me like I know these Founders personally I know like they're good for the word I know that when I see their balance sheet I can trust them and I I I I interact with the platform much easier because it's in my native language and so for me like if you are an FTX who are binance you want to enter into that space it doesn't make sense a lot of times to wage war and try and

280. 2:09:33

     capture market share from them it's a lot of times easier to just acquire them and so being in those defensible positions where you're Rising with the tide and and these big players would rather just buy you for a very high price than compete with you are really interesting businesses and really interesting uh niches during Market times like these where revenue is actually really important okay great um yeah I guess I guess de summed up uh

281. 2:09:56

     really well I guess a little bit of background about uh funding opportunities within near on one hand we got the near Foundation proximity lab for the for the the5 vertical and human guilds for games but we also like I think all of us here are near ecosystem funds and our key motives is still on one hand building near but on the other hand for profit you know to be responsible for LP so I guess like like uh this sum sums up really well like the difference about like us ecosystem fund and all of these grants program uh I

282. 2:10:28

     guess my last question here would be why are you guys so bullish on near what do you think near as a ecos system still need and thus what are you investing to plug into the puzzles and to to to to build new ecosystem of of course from the perspective of uh profit making so you know as as as I said we work with other chains as well and uh a lot of the other colleagues also work with chain so uh what makes uh near more interesting is the community that's coming up uh you know I we I for example I also work with

283. 2:10:59

     Gant like we talk on PKA do as well uh they have a big Community but here you are seeing a lot more energy lot more projects being built up so I think that is one of the key parameters that is there in fact we have just invested in uh one of the uh n projects known as uh Q far which I mentioned uh but what I think what more needs to be done is the foundation really you know because Foundation is always giving up grants

284. 2:11:23

     like 50,000 this is something that I've seen in Matic as well but you know building that pipeline of really good projects which they can back it up you know $50,000 in any Market is easy to get but getting right projects which uh finally wec backers can back all through with bigger capital and building it uh is something that I need to see more from there but otherwise the community is great the projects that are coming

285. 2:11:46

     are quite good as well okay yeah I I tend to agree with you with the ground thing right so I think especially during during the bull market we saw a lot of uh alternative layer ones or new layer ones pop up and different l2s as well all with this big fat um checkbook and they were writing out grants um and a lot of and obviously it's great to stimulate the the ecosystem by kind of supplying Capital right and seeding the space but I think on the other hand the flip side uh it also attracts kind of

286. 2:12:15

     mercenary builders that are building for the sake of Grants so they're they're essentially Grant farming right so they're they're building on say for example Avalanche polygon um near as well and to get these kind of grounds so I think what's really important for near is to be able to capture High conviction builders that are building on near for the sake of wanting to build on near right not for the capital that's why I I

287. 2:12:38

     like the ethos of this conference right building beyond the hype I think it's important to have um these these builders that really kind of stick you through you are not really just here for the capital um but yeah I think near is is super interesting I think there's still lot of opportunity on year it's still it's relatively Nation as well um so I think F and far is a great example I think the N ecosystem on year is still very very early there's still lots of

288. 2:12:59

     projects that that could potentially be built on here to make that more interesting I think the intersection of Defi and nfts is also interesting right I feel like um defi has been pretty stagnant for a while but uh with not too much Innovation but when we see kind of the merge between or the parallels between what's happening with nfts right now and rc20 tokens back in 2017 it gets me more excited yeah so um first of all I think near is amazing if you just kind of ever

289. 2:13:24

     meet Ilia or Marik or some of the top senior folks it's it's pretty apparent like how talented driven and how much they believe in the ecosystem I think from a mechanical standpoint obviously I my background is from Wall Street so um from a very practical standpoint right like the whole world that we operate which is called Web 3 or crypto the spot Market is like one trillion right now right Black Rock alone managed over 10 trillion right or they did prior to to

290. 2:13:48

     the market collapse so during my thesis that wrote when I was an executive at polygon was like this is cool we have this Kitty pool right now but at the time it was 50 basis points right now it's probably 10 to 25 this basis points of global asset value right so this thing that we call our entire ecosystem as in like Bitcoin ethereum stable coins everything is basically like 20 basis points of global asset value on on a

291. 2:14:11

     like optimistic level so then the question is like what about the 99.8% of capital how do we connect that massive ocean with this tiny kitty pool that we have right and the thing is these 99.8% of capital allocators are not like Tech forward they're not going to figure out how to download a near wallet they're not going to figure out how to use metamask we have to basically create the ships the tunnels the pipeline to allow them to allocate these massive checks

292. 2:14:36

     for example my buddy shiaa runs the kkr's uh web 3 initiative he told me the minimum check size they write is $100 million that's the smallest check size they they do and they manage half a trillion dollars of assets how do you get a fund like that to want to and also plug that Capital into an ecosystem like near and the way to do that is basically you have to create Equity like or debt like or some type of security like instrument that allows them to funnel it

293. 2:15:03

     into most directly obviously the near token but then obviously the sub ecosystems as well and so strategies that I think are are really important that we should look into as an ecosystem is for example 21 shares which was backed by Kathy Wood and was one of the largest asset managers in in Europe which got valued at 2ill ion recently they can basically IPO dedicated vehicles on the Swiss Amsterdam Paris stock exchanges and basically by

294. 2:15:28

     creating a near dedicated vehicle you allow anybody with a brokerage stock account with lots of capital whether in a retirement account whether in you know a hedge fund whether in a private Equity Fund to basically write an investment committee memo and then allocate Capital which will directly go into the near token right without those channels without those pipes in place you're basically stuck fighting Avalanche salana apto sui in this tiny kitty pool that just keeps drying up every time the

295. 2:15:53

     FED raises rates and capital just keeps leaving the system right so you can either fight each other for the 20 basis points of capital or you can basically look outside at where the big money is and find ways to bring that into our ecosystem right so that's my fundamental thesis and I think it's something that that near proximity and the surrounding uh entities should be focusing on uh two points just that I want to add because

296. 2:16:17

     we talked about it a lot you know people talk about bull markets and bare markets and you know they think the world is going to end in a bare market we've seen enough bare markets I think Bulls make bull markets make Millionaires and bare Market makes billionaires I personally believe this these are the right times to first get in and secondly because a lot of people say that a lot of traditional money has to come into crypto and then we'll become big will it

297. 2:16:40

     happen overnight not in a in a ecosystem that just holds 3% of the world's population so 300 million wallets exist today which is less than 3% of the world population 90 % of these guys are speculators they think trading is adoption so we so early in this market give it 10 15 years you'll see all that money flowing it probably we would have multi-millionaires coming out of this uh room who really understand where crypto

298. 2:17:04

     is so it's too early we cannot just compare the conventional system to crypto it's it's so damn early right now okay yeah I guess we we have only two more minutes left and I think I I just close it quickly that um well on one hand we we we we all are really bullish on crypto and near and we also believe that we need more funding coming in and I guess from a meta web's perspective we

299. 2:17:28

     really trust and believe in elia's vision of bringing on boarding one billion users into near and I I guess also crypto in general um and I guess by the way of doing it based on near is to provide a simple secure and scalable user experience and I think this is what new has been focusing on building based on a lot of the ideas of hiding the technical complexities you know based on the account model you don't need to like deal with the pass Braes you have an

300. 2:17:57

     account and you know these are the things that we really like and I think this is a only way to approach crypto uh that can eventually you know in the longer term more people are coming in more funding are coming in we got like IPO companies you know out of near or out of any crypto ecosystem I think that's a way to go and I guess from meta web perspective we we always like to

301. 2:18:21

     invest in you know uh company building great native assets of of near you know uh gaming or Creator economy and you know movies and anything like that or like any fundamental infra that you know making near more secure and also making the user experience in a you know more easy to understand way you know indexing tax something like this yeah this is what meta web is um approaching but yeah I guess in the you know um I I just end here and see if any of you guys would

302. 2:18:54

     have would want to have a final remarks for before this panel ends I think I've said all all I've had to say I think we good okay great uh so thank you so much for your time today and um I think we'll all all be around uh let us know and uh if you want to talk more about near and about uh funding opportunities through our the forefronts here but yeah thank you so much guys thank you guys thank you thank you guys

303. 2:19:35

     all right thanks for your patience for those who've been waiting and welcome to the final uh talk in this stage today um my so this guest needs no introduction it's Eric uh he's my favorite speaker at ncon so the stage is yours much can you guys uh can you hear me beautiful I'm going to wait maybe a couple of minute that we have a little bit more people in the room and I would love if that's possible

304. 2:20:12

     is to have even if that nosy environment have some interaction with you guys and Mark is going to help us he has the mic oh wow so my first question I have for you who was present at my talk yesterday I just wanted to make sure so I'm not going to uh repeat the talk I had yesterday but the key message I had with you yesterday was the following one the web three promises is to build a decentralized fully

305. 2:21:05

     transparent world where everyone feels empowered and accountable those promises and that's the only benefit of my age compared to most of you is was there at the beginning of the '90s at the birth of the internet and I do remember the promises that we were making back then and those promises were the same and eventually we ended up with few Tech Giants controlling our identities our transactions influencing our behaviors

306. 2:21:47

     often for the worst and even without our knowledge and the reason for that is all the organization at the birth of web 1 and web two had a very similar organization that we have had for the last 100 years vertically lot of hierarchy no decentralization limited information share so when you have that type of culture an internal organiz ganization that doesn't match the promises that you make you don't deliver those

307. 2:22:27

     promises so my message for you and the message I delivered yesterday if we want to deliver on all your web stream projects the promises of the webstream movement decentralization fully transpar uh empowered and accountability you have to have that internally and what I'm describing is what we call self-management the journey to self-management and I'm come back on that in a couple of

308. 2:23:08

     minute 20% that's the number of people engaged in workforces so it means that 80% of the people people are either neutral or disengaged so the way we work today doesn't work and there is another number 9% when you ask people employees all over the world specifically in five key countries if they want to become a manager 9% of them wants to become a manager I've been manager for the most of my career and I would say today with all

309. 2:23:58

     the people I coach being a manager today is the most difficult job in the world significantly more challenging than 20 years ago and I don't think it's sustainable so you have to redistribute the role of the manager and that's something that a number organization have started to develop for the last 20 years there's a very good book that I urge you to read it's called Reinventing organization it was written by Frederick

310. 2:24:37

     laloo and published in 2014 that book described different type of organization and I'm not going to go into the details from organization led by fear the power is based on fear like the crime organization I'm not going to describe also the type of organization like Army a lot of hierarchy Etc but he describ more recently a movement of the self-management type of organization he

311. 2:25:14

     called that the thief organization and that type of organization is like a living organism where there is limited layer of management organization significantly flat where all the information is shared where everyone feels empowered and accountable so those type of organization have the similar Promises of the web movement and those organizations some of them are web related some of not

312. 2:25:57

     pagonia zap medium these are organization that are implementing that type of processes what they've done they have changed five major processes how to make decision more collectively and when you have more collective decision you have to share more information in order to make sure that everyone can contribute to the decision process and therefore you remove that bit from the manager role and actually if you want to make a decision for a specific project you're

313. 2:26:45

     going to look at the technical expert not necessarily the manager when there is conflict most of the time when there is conflict between two team members it's the manager that gets involved why it's not necessary you can find someone else or a specific process to address that performance review is that necessary to have always the manager to implement performance review some organizations start implementing

314. 2:27:17

     peer-to-peer performance reviews so little by little some of those organization have removed some of the manager task and initiative and redistributed that making the role of the manager either obsolete or significantly lighter and therefore having flatter organization more decentralized and not geographically only in terms of role and task more transparent and people feel more engaged and more

315. 2:27:56

     accountable now the challenge of that and that's we get to the title of my talk today is of course to succeed on that you have a prerequisite and many of those organizations that have tried to implement self-management type of processes failed so they went back to a very hierarchical vertical type of organization they failed because you have to create a culture in your organization and you have to train your team with some

316. 2:28:33

     specific skills and if you have to take away one single thing from today presentation is if you want to implement that type of organization and eventually deliver the promises of the web stre you need to make sure that everyone in your organ iation whether you have two people or 500 people they have to master three skills selfawareness active listening and how to give feedback essential so for the journey to

317. 2:29:07

     self-management you need to create what we call a coaching culture meaning that everyone in the team not just the manager every employee behave as a coach I'm a coach I've been trained as a coach for the last eight years the first thing I did during my training was to improve my self-awareness understand the positive and negative impact I have on everyone I work with and that's our blind spot that's our bias very important and then I learn how to

318. 2:29:46

     listen how to give feedback how to ask questions and that's the goal if you really want to remove the manager layer if you want to have a more decentralized type of organization you have to develop those major skills among members of your team you included so what a culture a coaching culture looks like well it's a culture where everyone knows exactly the positive and impact they have and negative impact

319. 2:30:21

     they have on everyone and they're committed to address it it's a culture when in the organization everyone feels heard everyone knows how to give feedback everyone walk the talk and feels vulnerable enough to share what they really need to make a project happen or to develop a work life balance Etc in the organization so that type of culture it's a work environment where everyone feels safe to be who they are safe to learn make mistakes ask

320. 2:31:02

     questions contribute challenge H how to do that the first key steps specifically if you already you have an organization of let's say 15 people with a couple of co-founders and they want to go into a more self-management type of organization well the co-founder needs to be convinced that's the right path because it's going to be a difficult path so they have to be convinced that they really want to develop a coaching culture in their organization that's the

321. 2:31:41

     first point the second point is the picture of success and I will come back to that in few minutes as I mentioned develop those three skills so develop training and practice those three skills self-awareness active listening had to give feedback then is to organize group coaching group coaching is to have so if for instance you have a team of 15 people you organize three group of four a fourth group of three and those people

322. 2:32:14

     month every month and they coach themselves one of them bring a specific issue and the other people coach their colleague it's so powerful so powerful how peer-to-peer coaching can address so many issues and you can address personal issues as work issues there is today a number of Coach available in the world you have coaching platform that make coaching significantly cheaper than it was 15 years ago so you can call on external

323. 2:32:51

     coach through this platform it's not as expensive as before you can have for 1 hour coaching about $100 per hour 10 years ago it was like uh $500 per hour you pulse and uh I've developed a small pulse that you can measure every two weeks the progress on the engagement of those individual and how the coaching culture has a positive impact and when there is success to celebrate on that success so it's not rocket science but

324. 2:33:30

     it's possible and you have to start as soon as possible you have a team of five start implementing that you have a team of three start implementing that you have a team of two start doing that I'm going to focus on few of those items but I'd love to take maybe a question yes Salu so so I can't hear the question mark I can't hear the question can you hear me now hear me Salo Salo can you hear me yeah very well thank you yeah cool uh so uh teal

325. 2:34:20

     organizations are like very resonating with decentralization and indeed a lot of companies Implement special divisions that operate a steel organization but eventually how scalable are they uh Can Company of 500 employees or 1,000 employees um work a Ste organization so I I'm not sure how many employees there are at Patagonia but how much time did arrive it took for them to arrive to

326. 2:34:50

     this point that they're absolutely like horizontal um yeah that's the first question thank you so it's a great question the challenge for organization when they were already organized vertically is to go from vertically to horizontal that's a big Challenge and for some people some employees that was not sustainable so for instance when zapo Tri to implement that they lost the first year 15% of their head

327. 2:35:24

     count5 that's quite significant so that's that's a that's difficult to implement my point today is for sure the more you you get bigger more difficult it is but today I'm not at a Google conference or a Facebook conference I'm a web three conference and in this room there's plenty of young entrepreneurs they have team of two 20 I've discussed with many of them you have 15 20 people

328. 2:35:58

     I'm saying to you do it now we are still at the beginning of the web stream that's my point when you will be 500 maybe it will be difficult but if you start with those Foundation I'm not worried about the 500 I'm worried now one more question yeah thank you so uh you're saying that uh the only thing that can help web 3 from going on the same track of web 2 and all the internet

329. 2:36:43

     Sy um is to implement teal organization structure is this the only point that uh will what are other big I know elephants in the room so that we don't get into this big tag but on web 3 technology so because obviously web 3 is also about um mental state and psychology of the companies not only technology so is there any elephant in the room that we're missing except from being a teal

330. 2:37:18

     organization what do you think yeah and I see that the more there are big companies uh in web 3 that have hundreds of employees they attract and accumulate a lot of users like centralized exchange centralized marketplaces for nfts and eventually it start to look pretty much like the good old big Tech so I think it's size of a company but how do you attract a lot of people at least millions of people into an

331. 2:38:01

     ecosystem uh can an ecosystem of millions of people uh depend on only on small companies maybe midsize businesses but don't get them to like Enterprise level uh so I agree it's challenging that's why uh I'm very excited and feel privileged to be part of the near ecosystem and the near Foundation is driving that they asked me to make those to talk yesterday and day today because they believe part

332. 2:38:35

     of their responsibility also is to take a thought leadership if I may use the word leadership this time to uh push not only within the near ecosystem but in the industry that type of Phil philosophy they really believe in that they try to do that internally through their own organization and they want to show leadership on that that's why they make that investment and they talk about that at the web stre ecosystem

333. 2:39:05

     for for sure but it's not too late my point is not too late and I will keep repeating that message as much as I can so I have just one minute I just want maybe to mention picture of success it's uh something very important it's pretty basic and actually you can have that for any of your team web 3 web 2 web 1 or any organization I think it's a prerequisite for anything you try to implement specifically I would say in

334. 2:39:40

     the web stream movement you have to check on that almost on a daily basis with your team what is it is to make sure that before you try to implement anything to start anything that you and your team are always crystal clear in agreement what success looks like for your organization so what's our purpose what's our goal what's our strategies what's our values what's the reputation we want to have and you are in that web three industry where things change

335. 2:40:14

     almost on a daily basis well you have to check with your team with your co- Founders always on a daily basis that you are aligned on that so one thing I would do I have a team of five people tomorrow morning I give them a piece of paper to each of them and I will ask them to answer to those seven question and compare the result of those five paper if those five papers are different you're going into trouble you have to have those five papers identically

336. 2:40:44

     that's the starting point and then you start training people on those SK SK that I mentioned about self-awareness active listening and giving feedback I'm happy to take one question I'm happy to share the deck for the everyone want you have my email address you have my Linkin contact me I have a more detailed description about active listening self-awareness Etc and I'm available for the rest of the day to

337. 2:41:15

     answer any question uh in the conference thank you very much