How to Open the Web - NEAR Protocol CEO Illia Polosukhin at WebSummit 2021

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1. 0:03

   hello everyone it's great to be here at the web summit excited to present our open web vision and uh let's dig in so if you don't know who i am i'm for about 10 years i've been actually working on machine learning and have was one of the top contributors to tensorflow built kind of ai models that are powering right now natural language understanding and we started an ai startup called near ai

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   with the idea of teaching machines to code but the story goes that as we were building this we built a platform where we needed to pay people around the world and being able to do that is actually really hard even in modern world right we had people in china we had people in russia in cuba that were working on our crowdsourcing platform to generate data and it was extremely hard to send money

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   in all those countries and so we started looking at blockchain first as an idea that kind of a money like platform to send funds around the world in easy way and at that point we realized that the current technology back then in 2018 did not match our expectations and so we started near protocol and so if you're not familiar with kind of blockchain space there is kind of three steps of evolution of uh kind of blockchain and open web the first step was open money and open money is really

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   this idea that bitcoin brought this idea that you can have global money they're not controlled by any single entity there's no issue there's no kind of bank that you need to put this money in you user as a user control them and then we had uh ethereum coming in and pretty much introducing that instead of just using kind of finance and sending transactions uh financial transactions you can actually build a whole financial

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   ecosystem and so right now it's called dfi or open finance and this really allows kind of with you know hundreds of billions of dollars of capital now to create lending protocols you know derivatives protocols all kinds of financial primitives that are um like exist in the real world but now don't need to kind of rely on banks don't need to rely on central authority don't need to be kind of crashed by uh some kind of mispricing things that have

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   happened in 2008 and kind of realization was that what we wanted to build was really beyond that right we wanted to use finance we wanted to use kind of funds to send around the world but we really wanted to build something more we wanted to kind of build a platform that would scale to all of the applications and if you open your mobile phone right you have probably couple banking apps or couple apps that you know for investment

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   but most of the applications are actually social uh they allow you to do kind of some services in your country they allow you to buy things and participate in economy order food etc and so those are applications we're calling kind of that consists open web that's half billions of users and so what is openlab right kind of the it's really hard to define it except by saying a set of philosophies right set of kind of principles that describe

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   if it's open lab or not right and first and foremost it is decentralized which means there's no single server or single company that is responsible for it running which means that if you know some country or some government decides to shut it down if this business goes kind of out of business like you don't need to um you don't need to be scared of that but what it allows you to do now is being able to compose those applications

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   been able to compose as businesses in kind of exponential way because you don't need to have reliability on single business you can now rely on kind of code and this idea of open web and you can build your financial app on the financial apps that was built by you know two punks in some garage and pretty much rely because you know what runs underneath it's obviously is permissionless and permissionless may it doesn't mean much for many people but many services in in

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    kind of that you are using right now have kicked out people have not let some people in for whatever reason right and some reasons are valid some are not but it's not uh kind of like by definition if you start creating some boundaries and some permissioning you are pretty much creating this closed ecosystem that is biased in some way we also kind of want users to be owning their data and owning their assets right if you think of it as a user right now when you're using

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    facebook or now meta all your data belongs to facebook all your kind of connections etc belongs to facebook when you're moving from one application to another right you need to rebuild all this you need to actually recreate your social graph kind of regret refine your friends and rebuild your uh kind of connectivity whereas if data belonged to you you can just log in into another app and it will

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    have all your connections and all of your um information as if you use for example different email client and and just switch from like outlook to uh for example superhuman and on top of it like the one of the main properties is ability to create this passion economy ownership economy kind of markets and this is important because without that all those things that they explained actually existed for tens of years right this is philosophy is that people have tried to build in web when it was just starting but

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    they all failed because the incentives were to build companies that would generate data and kind of hold it and pretty much monetize that and so it's important to have open markets and kind of economy built around it in such a way that users benefiting from this so if you're a developer right what this means for you is that you can actually build services that rely on other services right again when we're building

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    startup you if you're building on some other startup you're pretty much now doubling your risk right if that startup goes out of business and you're relying on their api or on their data if they go to business you pretty much uh like also may have a huge impact and in this open web principle because services run kind of in this open way and have the source code public have all of the data in one way or

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    another public you can rely on this now and build build on top of it really easily on top of it because it's open because you can have this open economy around it you can have community contributions which are going beyond just software right it's not just you know people committing stuff on github you can people doing marketing for you you can people doing events for you you can have people kind of contributing in various ways and suggesting new ideas and

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    obviously for people who've built down open source it's actually really hard to have sustainable economy around it right people asking for donations constantly and here you can actually build protocols and kind of open source software which is generating capital for for its uh construction for users this means that as you go from one application to another you own the data right it's not been kind of used

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    and exploited by some other kind of this company and instead you own it you can use it you can go from one application to another and you have all of this data with you and this is enabled and composibility in general enabled by having set of standards and again email is really good example of kind of you know v1 of this where right like as you go between different applications between email servers you have exactly the same

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    protocol right and that's what we want to kind of expand to social graph to all of those different uh usages and on top of it a lot of us are becoming creators right we turn we're kind of moving away from just being a passively reading the information from newspapers to you know constantly participating in this social economy and and you know posting content and creating something new and as a creator right right now all of

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    your platform all your business is actually belongs to the platform like youtube can ban someone at any time they can change the rules in any way they want so creators are able to actually capture the direct um kind of connection with their community in this open lab right if if they're using applications on this platform and being able to interact with them in new ways right an nfts you probably heard of is one of the ways to kind of

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    create this interaction right is by by pretty much uh selling some type of pretty much token that communicates that this user indeed is invested in this creator but there are many other ways you can create and kind of capture this communication so this is all ideas but where are we going is we want to bring billion users into this ecosystem in five years right so we want and like we're going to build this mass adoption of these principles and pretty much trying to displace a lot of the current

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    kind of ecosystem and turn them into this through incentives and through creating open economy and so what the things we already have right this is for developers in in the room we already have programmable ownership right we're already able to pro like nfts functional tokens all of those principal components are just ability to program ownership which to be clear is the first time in the world where it's possible to do there's financial instruments there's encryption

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    storage and kind of decentralized organizations that are providing you tools to pretty much build this open web businesses and you potentially if you've been around in 2017 you probably heard a lot of this is like hey blockchain will be huge in like few years and not much happened since and this is true because we didn't have actually a lot of infrastructure and now we do so it's past three years past four years past

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    now we have scalable blockchains we have kind of economically secured kind of information brought we have gateways and we have kind of this ecosystem to build on top but more importantly we figured out how to create incentives how creates markets to actually incentivize people to join these ecosystems right and so like open finance and d5 have been one of the first things to how like figured

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    out how to align incentive of dispersing ownership of the protocols and of the applications to the user while actually attracting them and creating huge network effects but the same principles can be applied to pretty much any type of um any type of application or any type of platform right you can actually create incentive of dispersing think of it as you giving out facebook shares for the

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    first people who are joining and bringing their friends right you're giving them ownership in the platform that they're helping to build and they'll be heavily invested in how to kind of um like evangelize this platform so what's next right i've mentioned a few of a few of his ideas but kind of one of the core protocols that's missing right now is social graph is ability to kind of kind of go around different applications and

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    bring the data about your friends and about your kind of communication with you and being able to build these protocols on top right content media music video is another one right now all of the music and videos that you produce actually belongs to youtube belongs to instagram and so as you go between them right you kind of not able to import it with you because they kind of take control of it they monetize it and they give you some portion of this

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    there's a lot of different other protocols and you can check it out on on near.org for more and so just to give you kind of an example one of the applications that's built on here called uminter is the idea of pretty much turning instagram into a open web platform right so now you can pretty much take a selfie you know mint it as as this non-fungible token sell it to your uh kind of fractional like split into fractions sell it to your followers they are able now to communicate with

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    you directly and this all belongs to you as a creator like the the kind of the information the the the tokens uh community belongs to you so you're not actually locked into this platform so there can be other applications that are leveraging the same network and and pretty much building on top of it and now we are at machine learning stage and i am machine learning person and so the reality of of it was kind of through

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    through the years a lot of people pitch like machine learning and blockchain and until we get to a fair number of kind of users and and content it's actually been hard to apply machine learning in the space but we're getting there we're getting kind of applications that bring user generated content and with that you need machine learning but you need it in different way the things we've done before i worked at google right we just collect all data on our servers and we build machine learning models there

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    don't work anymore because you actually do not own the data anymore and now you need to do federated learning its ability to build machine learning models on edge on your phone and pretty much collect kind of the generalized information that then you feed back to the users you also need to be able to withstand attacks because you are working in kind of open ecosystem and so you need to be able to handle when

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    somebody's trying to attack your models and all this like first of the use cases if you're kind of looking what to do is ability to rank and filter content right because now on blockchain we have a lot of nfts we have a lot of kind of things like uminter which will be providing a lot of content and so being able to rank it in a privacy first way is is super important and this is what will be kind of um you know a game changer when we're

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    talking about compared to things like facebook and so kind of to offset this one of the things that our community have built and this is the thing that i mentioned before we were trying to do when we started near is a crowdsourcing platform right and crowdsourcing platforms are important because they actually allow you to collect data to build machine learning models in the first place and so we've been having this uh running

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    since april there's almost 2 000 daily active users uh kind of every day working on this platform with over 10 000 people total and it's actually collected the biggest data set as far as i know uh of the image to text um with three million samples right and this is kind of because of crypto economics because of world access right we have people in russia and philippines uh in india in latin america working on this

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    at the same time kind of without any boundaries and actually some people uh during covet especially the tougher times were able to sustain themselves working on this because that was the only thing they could do not leaving the house so this is already fundamentally changing both how people build stuff as well how people kind of can earn and interact with this and it's actually changing people's mind because they realize they can be earning

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    themselves they can kind of be their own man and leave the leave the job they for example hate so i told you a lot about things we doing and want to do but we also have a 800 million in global ecosystem funding to fund projects that are building its open lab right like this is not just kind of the big idea this is actually a whole ecosystem with a lot of different components and you can find place for yourself right so we have a number of grants from our near foundation that are

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    dispersed through uh kind of a grants program we have if you're doing specifically financial applications we have a number of grants for that if you're kind of in different regions we're spanning up regional hubs kind of china ukraine and considering here lisbon we have a number of vcs and kind of ecosystem funds that are going to be funding projects in in this kind of ecosystem so it's really important for kind of for you as you're starting a startup as

37. 15:21

    you're considering what to do pretty much this is a wave that's coming if you're building especially consumer applications this is a wave that pretty much will be transforming a lot of vcs right now are actually going away from finding regular consumer applications because they understand that new wave of kind of consumer applications will be coming through those incentive structures with kind of explosive growth that's possible so i just want to leave you with the

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    last thing this space is moving extremely fast right three years ago none of this what i just said existed or was possible and now we are actually kind of continuously improving and changing what what things are available so you should be learning uh we have a really good blog that describes a lot of different components how things work we also have launched a near university where you can actually take a course and get a certified developer for blockchain

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    and we're also launching a lot of other courses so check it out as it as it comes thank you and that's uh that's all i have