NEARCON 2023 | Layer 2 Stage - Day 2

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

1. 0:03

   please welcome our MC to the stage near foundations William rer morning morning how's everyone doing man good yeah uh probably a little late night with the opening party last night so uh it looks like a slow moving crowd this morning but nonetheless we're going to kick off the talks today um as I said today my name is will renoa and I'm a member of the BD team at the near Foundation covering everything from Sports media entertainment BD to doing

2. 0:39

   some of the nearon sponsorship sales and more um just wanted to let youall know again we've got the cameras in the back here and the side here that will be recording all of these sessions for y'all and they'll be published to YouTube after the fact um for this morning's talks we're actually going to be talking about operating advice for Builders so this can range from from everything from hiring to pitching and

3. 1:03

   more so if you're a builder and you're looking to get some advice this is going to be a great morning session for you um first up we're going to have Dan escro coming from Jersey giving operating advice how to hire Smart in web 3 and as I did yesterday fun fact about Dan he actually has a cigar collection of over a thousand cigars pretty impressive so please welcome Dan escrow

4. 1:36

   hey what's up guys thank you will appreciate you bro salute near uh what's up lisman thanks for having me appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today um so the the topic for the talk uh this afternoon is going to be you know how to hire effectively in web 3 and we're directing this really not towards candidates but we're directing this towards Founders so um here's you know I'm going to break down a a couple

5. 2:00

   of best practices uh for you to be effective and you know and and I'm really gearing this towards early stage projects um that are that are looking to you know make their first couple of key hires um that's kind of what I specialize in so to kick this off um I think if you leave this talk with with one takeaway it should be this um hiring is not about selling an opportunity it's about understanding what's important to the person you're evaluating let me let me run that back time hiring is not about selling an

6. 2:32

   opportunity it's about understanding what's important to the candidates you're evaluating right and to break that down and unpack it just a little bit further I think from there there's there's two things that are important number one um as a Founder you need to be self-aware um and what I mean by that is you need to understand kind of where your project stands in the ecosystem um and you need to understand like what are the pros and cons and selling points

7. 2:59

   that you have um so you need to understand you know if you're a candidate you know what other opportunities are they going to be interviewing for that's competitive and how can you kind of Leverage what your strengths are to to make that opportunity attractive right and so to take it one step further um you know you need to you need to understand some of the most important things that candidates consider when they're you know looking at taking a new job and a

8. 3:23

   few of the things that come to mind uh to me um stability base salary culture what's the vibe you know stability is this company going to exist in 6 months to a year like how can you prove to me that this company is going to stay around salary like can I pay my bills culture how am I going to feel every day at work what's the vibe am I going to be happy doing this um brand and reputation like am I going to get

9. 3:48

   some clout for you know updating my LinkedIn with this you know are people going to show me love and respect the work that I'm doing um that's important especially in like non-technical roles right um and then the the other thing I would say is like opportunity to learn and grow so like you know for for a technical example like is what I'm building going to teach me a new set of skills that's going to build on what I already have to make me a more

10. 4:12

    well-rounded candidate in the future right for a for a non-technical role like a salesperson is this an opportunity for me to meet a different part of the space a different Niche and grow my network in that side right um so I think all that stuff is really important and I actually just last week put out a survey to about 15,000 people who have applied to my jobs um and I asked them to rank those things in order of of importance and I don't know if anyone could take a guess of what was by

11. 4:43

    far number one well you would think you would think but actually it was it was it was salary believe it or not right it was salary and to you know to jump off that a little bit um I I think it's an important point that you know Founders need to understand that they need to share in the Financial Risk with the candidate right I can't tell you how many times I speak to a founder and

12. 5:08

    they're like oh you know we want someone who's motivated by the upside we want someone who wants Equity tokens cool they also have bills to pay and subliminally subconsciously the message that you're sending is that I want you to take all the risk candidate I'm not going to invest in you I want you to invest in me no that's not how it works we have to share in this right and there's always a compromise to be made people in this industry that are even at all looking at early stage projects they understand there's upside

13. 5:38

    to be had and it's coming upon you the founder to show that value but also show them that hey I'm right here with you taking this risk I don't have $ 57 million right now I have3 to5 million and I'm willing to spend it on you and here's why you know so show that this person is important to you that's that's really really important um so you know in addition to that another like major red flag that I see very very often from Founders is the

14. 6:05

    you know the mindset of like I don't want to waste my time speaking to 100 candidates to make three or four hires I don't want to waste my time in 30 minute calls I want to do a quick 15minute screen or maybe I don't even want to do that I want to send you a a test or something before we even speak right and that's a huge huge huge red flag to me cuz what does that tell me that you the founder the hiring manager

15. 6:32

    are not invested investing your time in making this hire um and so when you tell me it's a waste of your time of your time I tell you I I couldn't disagree more like bro you should be spending more time like if this isn't important to you and you you can't like you can't turn hiring into an algorithm there's just too many variables you can't like build a system to where you're only

16. 6:55

    going to get the top five people that are that's not how it works here especially in early stage projects and you have to go into this knowing like this is important to you and you're willing to like you know invest your your own time and money in this right um and so I'll give you another point and and to to illustrate this point I'll use an example um one of my favorite clients that I love to pump their bags and I love to talk about and

17. 7:20

    I love to work with is be chain I don't know if anyone's familiar with be chain super fun team super fun project right I'll tell you one thing that bear chain did that was a uh like a Hu like I really respected it and I would love to see more of this right and and what I think they do is they bet on themselves they bet on their instincts and they um they're willing to take calculated risks taking calculated risk and what do I

18. 7:45

    mean by that so let let's take a scenario right where like let's say you're interviewing for a a BD role you're interviewing BD candidates and you have two resumés up up in front of you I I don't want to lose my mic here but you have two RS up in in front of you right and you're interviewing two candidates one of them is you know let's say he worked at chain link he was the director of BD at chain link and before that he was at coinbase and he's got a

19. 8:09

    crazy Network and you know he could list all these people that will take the calls with him and everything like that right but you interview him and he sucks he or she sucks they're a dud um you bad vibes you feel like ah like I don't know if this I don't know if this is going to work out but damn that resume looks good damn I know he or she could book me some really impactful meetings right and then you have another candidate who has a

20. 8:33

    product background now this really happened I wish I could dox the actual person but you know how bear chain is so let's say the candidate has a product background but he or she is cool as hell they know people they're smooth they're great socialized uh great in Social settings and they know how to like deliver a message right that's what BD people do deliver messages effectively capture people's attention and you know make happen right

21. 8:57

    99.9% of the time time companies are going to go with the first option even though in their gut in their heart they know this is this is a dud they know this is a mistake but why are they making that choice because it feels less risky right and they can justify it easier to investors right they'll look at their investor and say oh look I got a guy from chain link you know this guy sucks but you hired him anyway because

22. 9:19

    he was less risky be chain bets on their own instincts they bet on themselves they know all right this product guy he's never done BD before but I could see it in him and I know what I know what I'm looking for and that he's got that that fire and I could work with that right and for me I'm really really bullish on teams that you know know what they're looking for and know how to

23. 9:43

    curate and cultivate and build someone up and those are the people that are going to work 100x for you and and help you grow and the reality is you know if you're an early stage project struggling to you know struggling to hire frankly like you might not have a choice and but I see it time and time again that you know people waste a ton of time trying to go with the you know the big A+ Superstar when like that's not always

24. 10:09

    realistic and it's not always the best choice anyway so point of what I just said take calculated risks understand what you need and bet on yourself if you're if you're a Founder that and and those are the founders that are going to win uh in the long run that's that's that's my thought on that um let's see what else other thing you know on the topic of bear chain that they do extremely well is they've

25. 10:32

    Amplified their culture right I mean like everyone you know if you do one quick scroll on bear chain Twitter you'll understand like what the vibe is um and I and I think they've really leaned into that as a selling point doesn't hurt to have 42 million in the bank but um the culture definitely is a huge huge selling point for them and I think you know uh I I think every startup needs to kind of lean into to

26. 10:55

    what the vibe is and and and build off that um okay let's see what else and so okay another thing that I've noticed uh that I've noticed a few times that has been like a a winner winner for early stage companies is um when they like educate candidates during the interview process so let me give you another example here um can't name the shop but I have a uh crypto trading shop that's doing some some cool stuff on Defi and I had a candidate uh PhD from

27. 11:28

    Burke former Hudson River Trading former Alam beast beast beast top 1% Trader candidate probably like a $7 million a year kind of guy right and he after a couple of interviews with this company he said you know I I I I'm offended by this offer it's 200k base like dude you know I made $7 million last year right I'm like yeah and I'm like but dude everyone loves this company I don't know

28. 11:52

    you might be missing something take one more call with the founder and uh what this founder was able to do on that call is basically teach him something about ethereum that the candidate wasn't aware of and it unlocked his vision about that company and he saw the potential and I when I first spoke to him I said to my guys 20% chance this guy accepts the offer he's so negative about this never going to happen completely turned around

29. 12:15

    after that call and to bring it back full circle from what I heard that was a three-hour call that they went on to explain the vision and explain what this guy was missing as far as the ethereum knowledge and full circle that's an investment in of time in that hiring manager to teach a lesson to that person and don't assume just because the candidate doesn't know one thing about what you're building that he's not legit you know don't assume that they know

30. 12:39

    everything spend the time teach them something and uh hopefully they'll come around to see what you see but uh I think that's uh I think I think that's most of what I got here today um again appreciate the time salute to near thanks for having me and uh I'm around for the rest of the day if anyone has questions or wants to hit me up you know where to find me salute thank you thank you Dan thank you thank you uh sorry I missed the the question about what is most important but uh good Insight actually I really really

31. 13:18

    appreciated that um next slide please there we go all right right next up on our operating advice session we're going to have Dave Balter from Flipside crypto talking about how l2s and near built through the bear Market he's from Vermont and fun fact about Dave he both loves and hates music so please give it up for Dave Balter okay okay so let's uh let's roll back the clock to May of 2022 uh everyone's talking about being

32. 14:00

    in a bare Market largely precipitated by our uh friends at Tera slides clicky clicky clicky there you go okay so largely precipitated by our friends at Tera now this didn't feel very much like a bare Market it felt fat and lazy and soft and cuddly and kind of cute so you fast forward now 18 months later here we are today this is a little bit more like what a be Market feels like it's a bear in a bag now the last 18 months have

33. 14:33

    been brutal SP SPF FTX Celsius blockfi tourists have left regulation by litigation countless startups have failed and among others l2s their protocols blockchains have had to do a lot to survive during this era so what I've been asked to speak about today is how did l2s perform in this bare Market or if you want to think about it different ly why blockchains are like grocery stores with sports teams that operate like Banks now bear with me on

34. 15:06

    this I promise you it's going to be interesting so like all good stories this Story begins with milk rolls if you don't know what milk rolls are they are a soft round British bread they're created in 1863 or so most associated with black pool out of the UK and if you live in the UK you may go to Tesco to get your milk rolls now about 20 years ago two decades ago uh Tesco was doing an evaluation of all of their products in across all of their

35. 15:36

    stores and they noticed something pretty obvious milk rolls sold really poorly nobody wanted to buy milk rolls so they went to pull them off the shelves they were going to get rid of milk rolls across all stores until one analyst internally did a study and found out that the top 1% of all buyers in the store people who bought the most most often came there solely to get milk rolls and so you can imagine what Tesco

36. 16:01

    did they left the milk rolls on the shelves and the lesson is your most loyal customers are likely to behave differently than others which brings us to sports teams and speaking of the UK we're going to talk about a sports team called Derby County now some of you might not know Derby County they go on record for their 20072 2008 season which was the worst record ever they had one win eight draws and 29 losses it got so

37. 16:27

    bad that the opposing team would stand at the Midfield line and they would kick goals in from the Midfield line just to make fun of the opposing team now what's amazing about this is that even with this history 23,000 attendees showed up to every single game and in 19 out of 23 Seasons they were the top 20 of attendance hey so what's happening here that even in bad markets your loyal fans

38. 16:53

    are going to remain loyal okay which brings us to the last piece which are banks now we've all been through 2023 most of you probably remember earlier in the year svb was the third largest bank failure in US history some some background on svb they were founded in uh 1983 or so in 2015 they supported 65% of all us startups and by December of 2022 56% of their loans were to venture capitalists 85% of which were

39. 17:25

    uninsured so now due to some poor risk management decisions due to Rising interest rates uh the VC they got in trouble and the VCS went out and told all of their portfolio companies to take their money out of svb and so the classic Bank Run was on uh and svb had a bit of pain and by March 17th of 2023 they declared bankruptcy and the lesson here is that banking the only thing that matters is how much liquidity you have

40. 17:55

    okay now you may be wondering why I'm telling you all this I'm going to remind you again that the data shows that blockchains are like grocery stores with sports teams that operate like Banks okay now the data I'm about to show you you're going to ask where the hell did you get this data the data comes from Flipside crypto there's 140,000 analysts in Flipside crypto they produce 88,000 queries every single day they produce

41. 18:18

    123 dashboards every single day you might ask why they do that the first reason is is because the data is entirely free so anyone can come use that data to do whatever they want with it they can download it to their heart's content run queries do everything they want to do with it and in the ultimate bare Market hack if you're an analyst you can come and get paid by us to run queries okay now let me show you how this works um we take delegations from our blockchain partners we stake those

42. 18:49

    delegations we turn that into yield and we take that yield and we break it break it into little bite-size Bounty payments and we use those to incentivize analyst to build on demand whatever is needed so if we want to go ask a bunch of analysts what happened to l2s in a bare Market um they will actually give us all sorts of insights that we can begin to base this on so let's get to the data so the first thing we're going to show you is that

43. 19:15

    truly in a bar Market l2s acted like Banks and they pursued liquidity so here's the first bit of data none of this is going to be a surprise you've got arbitrum at the top 1.8 billion in assets 400 million from GMX uh you've got optimism at 600 million they have $68 from me so that adds to the tally there you have base at 300 million eror which is ZK Sync has 115 million and near which is not an L2 has 70 million that's really important okay liquidity is essential it's critical for solvency

44. 19:49

    for most l2s it's the thing that powers defy and lending and dexes and everything in between but there's also a problem which is liquidity is a fomo shell game he take for example ZK sync ZK sync as we all sort of know has been a Hot Topic lately they raised 458 million in capital three and a half times out of arbitrum uh and everybody's waiting for a ZK syn air drop if you go online you're going to see all sorts of blogs that say like oh here's how you do all these things to get your ZK sync air

45. 20:21

    drop when it happens and now what does that do that means that people in this space who have liquidity in other twos are shifting them around so the right here you've got a z a sanki chart which shows that 550 million of ethereum outflowed into ZK sync last month alone okay that is assets sloshing around and so while these liquidity pools are critical they are very fleeting and so

46. 20:50

    much like a bank which you might change for customer service or points or some other reason you're going to watch this money move around so it's a bit of a dangerous game which brings us to sports teams if you think about near there fans might be developers and if you look at what their developers are doing on GitHub you can see it's a pretty powerful story at the top you've got repos 100 repos top 100 repos and

47. 21:14

    beneath that from March of 2018 or so going forward how many developers are starting to contribute to the ecosystem so here's some fun stats 1. 8,000 or so 1,800 or so developers have contributed according to Electric Capital there's 20,000 developers in the whole Space so you've got nearly 10% of the audience 2,000 repositories created 5.4 new repos are being created per day now with 1.12 commits per day on average so pretty stellar information now what happens

48. 21:48

    when developers start behaving well on chain is they begin attracting users and the way that they do that is that they those developers build app applications so yesterday we heard from Cosmos AI uh 3 days in August and September a million new users were added to near from cosmos's technology now Cosmos if you don't know is Omni Channel shopping it sort of helps retailers predict exactly what Shoppers are going to do and the way that they did this is they built an app called Kai Kai now Kai Kai is what

49. 22:20

    they call shoper tainment it gamifies the idea of shopping you might download some wallpaper and it shows you ads you might get a drop for a special product that only shows up for a 100 seconds and you got to buy it right away it's got celebrities and all sorts of other stuff and it's driving people right in to want to buy more and more and they get rewarded in crypto for that okay now you

50. 22:44

    might be asking yourself like loyalty shopping I've seen this before it's called Groupon how many people shop on Groupon today yeah you zero this guy almost gave me one that's true most of us don't shop on group anymore we don't really care about it it's good for whale watches by the way if you want to go on a whale watch that's where you might go Groupon has 1.42 billion in assets right now

51. 23:08

    okay so when you talk about loyalty all of us I mean me included I don't shop on Groupon nothing against Groupon but I don't job on Groupon but holy crap that's still pretty big all these years later the most loyal fans remain loyal over time and now this whole time you're probably scratching your head and say but what about the goddamn milk rolls I care about those milk rolls top 1% of Shoppers how do we think that the loyal customers who are hanging out within near how do we think they're behaving

52. 23:34

    may be differently from others which is true on average the customers or the users in near who are doing five or more transactions that's happening four to 10 times more often than on other chains okay so four to 10 times more than on other l2s or blockchains so about 2 million rolling last quarter you got about 2 million wallets with five or more transactions in near and in other

53. 23:58

    comparables they're less than 500,000 less than 200,000 okay so what does that look like from a retention basis which becomes the ultimate question are people sticking around for near you have about 28% retention over two months and other chains 23% 15% lower and lower okay so what does this really mean if you want to think about this users who show up to blockchains for liquidity behave very differently than users who show up to take part in D and other types of programs and if you're looking for

54. 24:30

    long-term retention and engagement you're going to go after folks who are developing products that are going to sustain users for the long run so let's summarize a little bit here um liquidity is important but extremely high risk those are your Banks okay so you got to have liquidity but it's very high risk creating developer loyalty is critical those are your sports teams you want developers to be there your fans are going to stick around and your best

55. 24:53

    users will behave differently once they start to engage much like the milk roll buyers in a grocery store okay so the lesson here if you haven't figured this out yet is you well if you if your bank doesn't have enough liquidity then there's not enough money to buy milk rolls to put on the Jersey of your favorite sports team possibly okay but this is crypto so if you stake the Jersey you're going to get milk row socks nobody wants socks okay it's

56. 25:17

    probably not true okay if you want more data on layer 2's tkv research is an amazing analyst he built a dashboard on flips side called layer 2 Wars um it's at FS crypto.com layer2 definitely go check that out updates in real time pretty amazing stuff um and I was asked a little bit since we're talking about bar markets I was asked a little bit to sort of summarize what it might be to like to

57. 25:41

    build in a bar market so I have four tips for you if you're building we have all got sort of gone through the last 18 months four tips for building in this recent bare market so the first is avoid building for the bull we heard a lot of people actually trying to build products waiting for a bull market to come back you got to build whatever product you build you got to build for the time you're in at the time you're in it

58. 26:02

    otherwise you're at problem two which is you are going to struggle to survive if you're not here you're not going to be able to get into a bull market so you might have to do some things you might have to reduce employees you might have to churn out some stuff but you got to size your business to survive number three let the tourists leave he this is really important both your users many developers many users might go elsewhere

59. 26:26

    that's okay they were here for a period of time they're gone and some of your talent that maybe were recruited in from big companies during the last bowl Market they're going to go that's okay because the last piece is you want quality wallets to stick around quality users and wallets will stick around for the long run okay so the last thing I'll leave you with is I if you're like me the last six weeks are felt a bit different sort of like a maybe a nicer

60. 26:51

    bear is coming and maybe we're heading towards a bull and this should be this should be a good thing for you because if you've realized it by now the best companies actually get built during bare markets thank you thank you Dave great talk I never would have imagined that milk roll sports teams and Banks would have been looped into a crypto conference but here we are great great analogy there Dave I really really enjoyed that um for our

61. 27:27

    next talk there we go on time well we have more operating advice how to pitch with honesty passion and no deck joining us will be S turno and he is a fun fact about s first he's from Boston second he was actually a Junior Olympic gymnast pretty cool all right give it up for S awesome thanks well appreciate it I promise there's no gymnastics coming for me today I'm about 15 years moved from that part of my life but um thank you everybody for being here today um I'm

62. 28:02

    here to share a bit about my experience operating on the buy side as an early stage Venture investor over the past 5 years um and hopefully a few folks in this room can walk away with lessons that help to accelerate their Capital raise and a new Endeavor or something that that that they're building um so a little context on on me and the fund that I operate um I've been in the crypto industry my entire life I found Bitcoin in 2012 um my career started on

63. 28:26

    the institutional side of space uh working at State Street in an emerging technology role um after which I went to KPMG where I had the pleasure of starting an Institutional crypto business right as the 2017 cycle ended um so I was off to Market talking about how Banks and institutions would adopt an asset class that dropped by 70% in my first four weeks of work um The Experience there was quite exceptional

64. 28:51

    but was was kind of built on fundamentals that um are very different from the space I work in now and frankly the last three years have taught me lessons that neither my education in finance accounting background at stage Street or work in Consulting could teach me um and I think they're some of the most important lessons that you can take away and actually use to accelerate how you form Capital around a business um so

65. 29:15

    I started in 2021 joining up with Tom sarus and building the Tomorrow Fund which is an early stage web 3 Venture product um that has invested over the past 3 years across 60 portfolio companies in six different lay when E Systems uh we have about 10 Founders inside of the near ecosystem many of which who are at the conference today and uh giving talks discussions in different ways um and I hope that the

66. 29:39

    the kind of perspective I share is one that is based off of those experiences but helps other Founders in the room um to raise Capital so before we jump in and kind of share some of those lessons and perspectives who in this room was successful in raising or closing a lead investor in a preed or seed round over the past 6 months and see W I think we all owe a round of applause for doing

67. 30:03

    that the last the last 6 months were the hardest time period in my entire experience in The Last 5 Years of forming Capital at any phase of the capital life cycle whether it was preed seed series a and even in later stages as well um so beyond that is there anybody in the room right now that's looking at raising a preed round for the first time or seed round we' got three or four awesome well I hope a couple things I share with you can accelerate you on that Journey um the reality is the perspective I'm sharing is going to

68. 30:36

    come from this precede lens and is not as relevant as you start to get more mature as an organization into your series a series B where fundamentals metrics and data matter more um but what I want to share is kind of a perspective of the idea and psychology of early stage investors at the preed phase um and that psychology is super super important to understand and something that Founders often miss and so as you step into the room to engage with investor Community the reality at the

69. 31:05

    preed and Seed phase is that 50% of the investor decision model is you as a human being um and often times folks miss this understanding and as a result of that fail to convert preed and Seed checks and end up spending an incredible amount of energy time um working on the capital raise process spending 6 to 9 months doing so and starting from core fundamentals and building their business hiring Key Resources um and starting to scale what they're doing and so as we

70. 31:35

    step in I was thinking about making a deck for today and I was like I don't know how I could possibly make a deck for a conversation that focuses on how to pitch with passion honesty and no pitch deck and so I don't have beautiful slides like Dave did but that was an incredible progression of slides with great humor laid across it um the reason that I propose talking on this topic topc correlates to the first point I

71. 31:59

    made that we're investing in you as 50% of the decision model and so many times I've seen Founders get on the phone open up a zoom and immediately try to pull up a pitch deck and the second they do that the likelihood I'm writing a check or that other vent Venture investors I know will write a check decreases by 70 80% um at the end of the day we're all human beings including the folks on the opposite side of the phone and if you

72. 32:25

    don't establish Rapport and a found understanding of both who you are as a person as well as who your counterparty is there's a wide Gap to try to close them with conviction and so I'll give a couple tips and tricks of dos and don'ts um and these are again my perspective other investors have different points of you on the world but I think this will help you close Capital um so as you jump into your conversations and you're

73. 32:49

    engaging with folks you're opening this discussion and you're introducing yourself I want to know who you are as a person I want to know what makes you to tick I want to understand why the passion that you have and conviction around what you're building will catapult you to incredible Heights and Empower you through adversity that you will inevit inevitably face not just in your preed and Seed phase of your journey but across the whole life cycle

74. 33:13

    of the business I was chatting with Zach who's a member of our team at the fund about the most successful companies in our portfolio and their breakout inflection points where they go from you know question marks as to whether or not they'll make it through the end of the next month to an m&a event or some significant financing Milestone that changes the entire Arc of that business um and that moment of adversity is not something that you can get through if

75. 33:38

    you don't have fundamental alignment of passion and purpose to the vision that you're building because those moments can break people and often do um and so I want to sit down I want to hear from you I want to get that perspective of of what really drives you and ultimately I also want to be able to share bit about myself thesis and perspective um I think probably everybody in this room can agree that Venture investors have no ego or super humble um and definitely don't want to talk about themselves so I think uh that

76. 34:10

    was my attempt at a joke I'm not nearly as funny as Dave Walter but that was my attempt um being serious about this point there isn't a requirement in my mind to build rapport and to get an investor to conviction which is the idea that you should walk into that room introduce yourself demonstrate an understanding of the thesis of the investor that you're engaging with portfolio construction behind them potential competitors that you need to interact with all of which form the basis of their mental models and how

77. 34:43

    they think about investing um and that first five minutes of a conversation is incredibly important to allow you to augment and be dynamic in your pitch process and once you spend that 5 minutes 7 Minutes understanding their thesis their portfolio construction Etc you can be agile in that conversation which is the first evidence that I get as an investor to demonstrate your agility and whether or not you can

78. 35:07

    actually pivot in the future are you intellectually competent enough in this topic domain to be able to hear feedback from an investor about how they think about the world and then Nar drive your narrative to bring those points home in your conversation um and this is something that so often people miss when they jump Direct into a pitch deck and pull it up on screen and run through a talk track

79. 35:31

    at the end of the day 95% of the stuff that you put on your pitch deck is probably and I know it's not actually going to happen I think many other investors agree with that as well the vision of where you're going may be accurate but if you show me Revenue models on a 5-year Horizon as a preed company or a seed company you're joking yourself you're joking me and it's kind of just a waste of both of our time um

80. 35:54

    so the the kind of next point of of dues and don'ts is as you're going through this process I'm not saying it's not important to have a pitch deck it's super important to have a pitch deck but your pitch deck is an enabling tool and resource that facilitates a dialogue and discussion um and so you have your pitch Teck ready you're engaging in that conversation and when an investor asks you a hard question about competitive

81. 36:19

    landscape or the market you're going after or road map you immediately have a response you can pull that slide up it's like great question here's you go boom and that enters your pitch deck in a track that facilitates a more cohesive dialogue um but also demonstrates to me that you have Mastery of the core fundamentals of what a pitch deck requires with the confidence and conviction of what you're building that you don't need to rely on it as a crutch

82. 36:44

    throughout the entire pitch process um I think the most successful Founders and we have about 10 Founders in the near ecosystem have never used a pitch deck in their initial pitch discussion they always send it to Zach and the analy team and the analyst team comes back with great questions around the pitch deck that help to accelerate our diligence and often times provide feed back on the pitch deck that can help you guys in terms of tuning and tweaking um

83. 37:09

    but at the end of the day I think we've done 10 deals in near thus far and on looking back and thinking about those initial conversations eight out of 10 never pulled up a deck in the discussion what I really wanted to see through those conversations and I think Tom reflects similarly is can we have this conversational dialogue and iterate quickly on hard questions and by pressure testing through questions we

84. 37:33

    can understand quite quickly whether or not you have complete Mastery of a subject matter domain and whether or not you've been thinking at the level of depth that is appropriate for trying to go and build this thing um and so as you guys think about this next chapter guys and gals and many female Founders in the room here as well in the near ecosystem which I think is exceptional um given the kind of

85. 37:56

    composition position of our industry but as you think about this kind of chapter of of capital formation you should do so knowing that your passion your purpose and your conviction and what you're building are the core drivers that make me want to invest behind you and I think that's common with many investors in this industry um the the kind of closing point that I'll make in in kind of

86. 38:19

    section of this is at the end of the day it's a person it's a human it's 50% of the decision model and so the Rapport that you build both in the initial part of the discussion as well as the follow-up engagement and interactions are the demonstration of your of your behavior and your willingness to push through the tough moments that inevitably come on a Founder Journey um the folks that rely

87. 38:44

    on a pitch deck and end up going through a 12 slide you know discussion of a talk track that they've done before is not a conviction building narrative that closes the phone and makes me excited to follow up with that founder um and so at the end of the day as you're pursuing your preed and Seed investors You're Building Partnerships that Cascade across a decade journey and so you want

88. 39:07

    to be a human you want to engage at at a level that has Rapport in a way that you know that at the end of the day when that moment of adversity hits you can call me because I believe in you and even if it's bad news you can call me at at midnight or Saturday or Sunday or whatever I'll be on the phone with you for an hour because we're Partners in a journey and the way you build that partnership is through a relationship

89. 39:32

    it's not just a transactional model of here's my 12 slides give me a quar million dollars and check in with me in six months it's an understanding on both sides of the table that there's going to be great success and there's going to be great failure and if you build a relationship with your investors and you build a partnership with those folks then you know that in the moments of adversity you can rely on them to help you through those challenges um and so

90. 39:58

    in closing I I think hopefully a couple of the points I've made here can kind of inspire folks in the room today to not rely on pitching with a pitch deck but instead to rely on themselves their Vision conviction and ultimately passion which creates alignment to success in a way that is unique um so all that being said I appreciate everybody being here today I'm going to be around for the rest of the conference I'm leaving on

91. 40:22

    Friday so to the extent that any of you guys are off guys and gals are off raising your first round I'm happy to chat through that hopefully give you some advice and to the extent that anybody is Raising we're definitely interested in taking a chat Zach and I can do that at any time over the next couple days so without further Ado thank you all thank you s great talk I just wish uh my manager was here so hopefully he could give me less pitch deck work to do

92. 40:56

    uh the next few weeks so great talk St I really appreciate it um up next we have Lisa coming from Singapore to talk about evaluating economic risks for protocols and as always fun fact about Lisa she has actually lived in six different countries already I've only lived in America so Lisa welcome hi everyone good afternoon and good morning it's I really enjoyed Sal's pitch because sell talked about how do

93. 41:28

    you pitch and today I'm going to talk to you about how to build how to analyze how to build something robust so that you can pitch something relevant to your investors so show of hands who here are founders good and who here are investors VC investors Angels okay that's also good the rest of you guys uh where are you guys from are you in marketing are you in in sales Business Development BD okay great marke Market marketing all right so this is also relevant to

94. 41:58

    marketing to Founders and to VCS so today I want to talk a little bit more about how to analyze economic risks and something that I realized is this thing doesn't work again okay great so I want to cover three couple of things today firstly is the risk types in web 3 in web 3 we talk a lot about economic we talk a lot about different kind of risks Financial risks and smart contract risks so I want to dive deep a little bit more into understanding what are the options of risk available in web 3 and how do we analyze them then I want

95. 42:29

    to get started with un with understanding economic risks something that I want to focus on in this session why should we care about economic risks how do we look at and designing and analyzing them and how do we design an an economy a robust economy so to begin there are three kind of risks in crypto in web 3 and people typically talk about the first two so the first one is Financial Risk and this is typical this is typical of web two

96. 42:54

    you have Financial audit and you have p&l kind of risk you have manager accounting to understand the Financial Risk company is facing you have this for early stage startup for big Enterprises and this is nothing new we have that in crypto as well the assets might be a bit different instead of calculating things in US Dollars you have to calculate it in your own tokens perhaps but it doesn't stray away from the core fundamental of Finance as a risk the

97. 43:18

    second thing we look at is technological risk technical risks this is where smart contract Auditors come in and understand bucks understand kind different kind of explo that's embeded within the code this is something new for technology firms you don't have that in FMB you don't have that so much in fmcg here is very specific to technology in web 3 is even more complex because we everything is open source and people can FK the

98. 43:41

    code very easily so techn technological risk technical risks actually very important and we have dedicated smart contract companies doing that now the third risks that I want to introduce is economic risk and this is a risk that is quite new in this ecosyst systems that we're building because today we're building a brand new world a brand new country a brand new planet a brand new economy here is not just about code and

99. 44:05

    exploits and bug in the code it's not just about how people manage money but here we're talking about how rules are being defined what can people do in the system what can people not do in the system how do people interact and in and and collaborate with each other in the ecosystem these are all the rules embed with in economics we talk about tokens as programmable money that programmability is the economic rules we embate within the system and this is a

100. 44:29

     big big risk that's very new to a web 3 system it's not specific to web 3 it's any economy that is being built any private or public goods economy where people get to come in and interact with each other you create a market in the market you have an economy and that is the economic risks we're talking about so today I want to focus very much on economic risk when we look at Financial Risk you can look at countless of books you can go to school for that there are a lot of ways to analyze Financial Risk

101. 44:54

     when it comes to technological risks that's where a lot of smart contract firms are doing audit firms are doing and you can read a lot of their reports and go to Twitter to understand them Financial risks on the other hand is something quite New Economic gra is something quite new it's quite specific to web 3 and this is the part that I want to dive into so before we get started I introduced this yesterday in my talk but just for everyone in the room how do we analyze and how do we build a robust

102. 45:19

     economic model the truth is that there is no one model that fits everything there is no one answer one model that fits the best economic model in the world if we have that we won't have different economic systems in Argentina in Brazil in Portugal in China in the US because every economic system is dependent and reflective of what kind of Market structures we are we have what kind of economic agents we have in the space so with that in mind I want to

103. 45:45

     introduce a framework instead and this framework is going to be very important because this framework is the framework of how we build systems and how we analyze economic risks this framework is something that I've worked on for 7 years now and created a book all the clients that we work with around the world whether they're big Enterprises games or web 3 companies we all use this framework so this framework is very relevant and very useful in all kinds of

104. 46:08

     situations so let's take a quick two minutes to go through how this works you see that there are three pillars there you've got Market mechanism and token design if you think from a macro macro to micro perspective it's like a big funnel Market defines the macro structure the big economy what kind of Market are we talking about who is in Market who are the economic agents in the market what can people do in the market what kind of behaviors we want to incentivize you know the market is to

105. 46:33

     create the parameters of what is in this economy that we're talking about this is very relevant to your business model your your Revenue stream who are your competitors who are your stakeholders who is in the value chain distill that all to part of your economic model second thing is mechanism design it's the micro part it's the moving towards the micro mechanism design talks about the incentives so what are the

106. 46:56

     rules that people need to follow to trade and interact the thing is at the end of the day economics are incentives and disincentives to drive people to behave in a certain way so we are creating the right kind of incentives to allow people to behave to allow people to participate yes we want voting we want governance we want people to vote on whatever decisions we want to make that is a good behavior and we're creating the the the incentives and

107. 47:19

     disincentives to allow them to participate to Signal their preference of voting to to signal and without bad behaviors and Bad actors in the system we talk about non-financial incentives and different kind of bargaining structure to allow people to coordinate and collaborate in the system so that's the middle part incentive design mechanism design and lastly we finally talk about tokens so realize that the first two pillars we didn't even talk about tokens do you need a token to create an ecosystem you don't need a

108. 47:45

     token you can have you can have an ecosystem without tokens that being said an ecosystem a robust economy has to have a market if you have no Market if you have no one here there's nothing to design for you need to have incentives because people will always behave and interact in whatever way they deem fit and as an economist we creating the barriers and rules and boundaries for them to interact and lastly tokens

109. 48:08

     tokens Can Be funable non-fungible tradable non-tradeable tokens Can represent reputation token can represents money token can represents Equity that increases in value it can be a St value it can be a medium of exchange it does not matter because tokens over here are a means to an end the end is how people behave and interact in your system in any ecosystems that we're talking about the main thing we want to drive is user retention and user acquisition tokens

110. 48:33

     economy all these are driving forces to get people to interact more to increase user retention and user user acquisition an economy helps to build around that so with that in mind how do we understand the economic risks based on these three different pillars the first pillar when we talk about Market here we want to look at the market within our control and out of our control within our control out of control we look at the

111. 48:57

     legal and judicial risks what kind of countries do you operate in is the foundation operating in Panama versus US versus Lisbon versus Singapore it really depends and understanding that gives us some understanding of to what degree and to what extent the external regulations the external rules will impact us we look at technological risks and we look at Community the things that we can control is the community who are the economic agents in the space initially you might have a lot of investors in

112. 49:22

     your in your community because you you have done fundraising but the main goal that we want to move towards are exra users if you are a game having a lot of investors as your economic agent in your game might not be the best mechanism right now we need to get the actual players coming in so how do we create the right incentives the right economic models to shift the economic Agents from primarily investors to actual Gamers how

113. 49:46

     do you work around that so that's very important to understand the market design in mechanism design we look at governance we look at the financials we look at economic transactions this is again it's not about tokens but how do people interact what is the user retention rate like how do people what's the 7 Days retention over here how do people interact with each other are they interacting with smart contracts are they interacting with each other are they interacting with the the the

114. 50:11

     virtual assets that you have in the game are are they interacting with the dexes are they interacting the staking protocol that it's a Insurance Pool for the ecosystem understanding how user behaves gives us a lot of insights to how robust this economy is how robust this ecosystem is because if if people are primarily not really interacting with each other they're just holding tokens and sure there's a lot of wallets a lot of people holding tokens but not

115. 50:34

     doing anything with the tokens they're just holding it and hoping prices will rise that is not an economy that's not an economy where people are interacting and transacting with each other and when you do not have an economy where people are transacting and interacting there is no Market there is nothing to talk about everyone is transacting outside of your market and that's not a robust economy and lastly we move to tokens again in tokens we look at the kind of tokens in the ecosystem what is the economic value

116. 50:58

     that they are generating when people think of economic value they always think of what is the token prices like if I want to do due diligence and figure out economic risk of my protocol I need to figure out our prices appreciating that I get it that's that's one perspective to look at things the other alternative to look at is that tokens represent intrinsic value a value for you to stay within this ecosystem otherwise you can just exit change this to US Dollars and go and participate in

117. 51:22

     another ecosystem so there is intrinsic value being generated by holding your tokens and participating in this ecosystem of course it depends between a DEX a lending protocol a game or an Enterprise project the intrinsic value of tokens can change drastically that being said it's important to understand the first principles the fundamentals of why tokens exist in the first place what intrinsic value it generates and gives to the Token holders and from there

118. 51:47

     understand what kind of risks are involved with this intrinsic value can they be exploited can this intrinsic value adversely select for the wrong kind of economic agent so for example if you there is a protocol once there was once a protocol and what they do promotion they they help to boot strap other people's ecosystem by giving out tokens as rewards they give out the partners tokens and their own tokens the problem

119. 52:09

     with this it all sounds very good you know we're all C- sharing communities we're all growing things together and there is intrinsic value there is to participate in another ecosystem the economic risk over there is that it adversly selects for the wrong kind of economic agents if you're giving Financial incentive a reason for people to come into your system people are only there for for the financial incentives once you start giving out free money once you start giving out free tokens they are going to leave because the

120. 52:34

     reason for them coming into your protocol in the first place is that they're there for the value for the monetary or financial value the token value that's given to them so that is a risk to consider now one thing that's important which I want to challenge you guys is who should care about economic risks we all talk about decentralization the world should care about this the world econ economic Forum should participate in this the bis and World

121. 52:58

     Bank and and monetary policy all the all from the protocol creators to the all the token holders in communities everyone should care about economic risks sure in the perfect world I agree with you but this is the real world in the real world people are lazy in the real world people don't really care so much of about so many things right so to what it's not about one zero it's not about complete decentralization or centralization who should care and who

122. 53:21

     should not care but it's a degree of who should care and to what extent they need to understand the details maybe not everyone needs to know the exact p&l of what's going on in the ecosystem but at least there's there must be some level of information they shareed with the community so the least involved is actually the active Community yes we would like to switch this around where active communities are most involved but voters apathy is a real thing and that is that's why we put active Community

123. 53:45

     above and then VCS investors and finally protocol creators and decision makers as a protocol decision maker as a protocol Creator what you are most you have the most vested interest to make sure that the protocol is going well why because VCS and active communities they're all short-term and Midterm focused as a protocol Creator you are long-term focus when you're thinking longterm when you're focusing long-term you're

124. 54:09

     creating the right kind of policies to generate value in the long run it's not about creating pumping the tokens up people extracting value and leaving the system that is not what we're building here in crypto we're building here we're building something that stays and to build something that stays we need to build we need to think long term we need to build long-term plans long-term value creation that acres to the Token holders that ACR back to the economy and that is what we want to do and that's why we

125. 54:32

     care about economic risks not because it's something that impacts my p&l in the mid and short term but how do I create value in the long run that generates value for everyone coming into the ecosystem so what are the risks looking like just like in traditional Finance we have educing critic risks and systemic risk systemic risk is Market risk RIS risks we cannot control and edos

126. 54:57

     syncretic risk are risks within the protocol that we can control and so I've divided this into eight components divided into systematic and Os syncretic for us to understand we can we have all these risk we classify them and understand what we can control and what we cannot control in systemic risk things we cannot control will be the market the users the technology we get to choose what users we want to select for what technologies we want to use what market and jurisdictions we want to be in but there are a lot of things that's out of our control what we can

127. 55:23

     control are the idos syncretic risks this be protocol risk economic parameters governance Financial Risk and liquidity risks these are things that we can control and these are things that as economists as as people doing due due diligence these are things that we can control and when things go south in the protocol that is something that we can tweak we can manage we can adjust from that so with that I I want to conclude the presentation you can scan a QR code

128. 55:46

     to download the the presentation and get a free consultation from us and with that thank you I'll be at the back answering questions Thank you Lisa and just a quick update uh we're going to take a short short break and when I say short I mean really short so if you have a little work to do an email to send feel free to take some time real quick to go do that and then yeah we'll be back

129. 56:23

     quickly please welcome back near foundations William rer told you that would be quick all right we are doing a little bit of change we're done with the operating advice for now but we have a really fun format coming up now we call this a fishbowl format so it's going to be very interactive with the audience so please be attentive um be ready to maybe contribute to the conversation so we're going to be talking about emerging use cases and possibilities moderating the

130. 57:08

     panel will be Dany from meta web Ventures and as always fun fact about Dany she actually knows five languages a lot more than me please welcome Dany thank you will awesome I want to bring on to the stage to today um four amaz sorry three amazing panelists so we have um Momo from near task Zoe from glass and Angeli from collab land come on join us on the stage super um so Momo Zoe ah and G great okay

131. 57:45

     so as will mentioned today will be a little bit interesting because um we're trying something called a fishbowl session which means this is your Fishbowl we are your Fishbowl um and it is interactive and open so I'm going to start with some questions for our panelist here but if you in the audience feel that you have a question or you can contribute to this discussion please come up to the front and I will hand you a microphone to participate in the conversation and then you will rotate

132. 58:15

     out and another Community member can step in and be part of this conversation and you can ask these wonderful panelist questions or you can respond to of my questions and uh we really want to be very open and inviting because this is a um Founders focused session and we just want to have a bite of fun here so yeah welcome to the adventure all right so um we want to get started by U maybe having each one of you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the project that you're

133. 58:46

     working on maybe Momo you can kick us off sure thanks for having me hello everybody um it's great to be back here at newcon beautiful Lisbon um so my name is momar Rocky I'm a software engineer I work at a company called near tasks it's basically a continuation of the work that the founders of near protocol itself were working on which is creating uh technologies that converge between Ai and blockchain so in this case what near

134. 59:16

     task does is connects AI companies who want to train their models with data and uh create Market uh for labeling and producing that data with uh people all around the world so it's a gig economy model awesome Zoe great hi everyone excited for the uh interactive nature of this session uh I'm the founder and CEO of glass which is a web3 loyalty and engagement platform for the $1.6 trillion alcohol

135. 59:49

     industry um so the alcohol industry faces uh two major problems one of of which is the fragmentation of sales channels across bars restaurants liquor stores sports stadiums music festivals uh glass gives uh these Brands the tools to build uh on chain direct onetoone digital relationships with consumers uh so that consumers can earn uh and redeem rewards across these channels for uh enjoying drinks and uh driving healthy in-person social

136. 1:00:21

     occasions with their friends uh the alcohol industry also faces a very complex regulatory environment uh in terms of age restrictions uh restrictions that vary by country and region around the types of uh Loyalty Rewards and marketing that brands are able to offer uh so by bringing this activity on chain we're also able to create a clear uh transparent record of safety and compliance that makes Brands and Regulators more comfortable uh and

137. 1:00:51

     more enthusiastic about G driving this value to uh to Consumers for the first time that was awesome hi I'm Angelie young I am the co-founder and the chief Community officer for collab land collab land is a tokenized community management system we started about three and a half years ago almost four years ago now um with just a single Dow and now Support over 53,000 communities over Telegram and Discord

138. 1:01:22

     nft communities defi communities investment groups gaming Major Brands um anyone who wants to create a community in in crypto or with tokens use cabine wonderful so kind of to get started here um when a lot of us started the premise of uh web 3 was to build a brand new web to change the world to to build something better than what was currently in place and we've spent a lot of time building infrastructure which is great um and today we're here to talk about

139. 1:01:53

     well what what comes after infrastructure so what are those use cases um Zoe maybe you can kick us off a little bit of talking about what you imagine people could do and Founders could work on that goes beyond building infrastructure great question uh completely agree I think we've seen a lot of time recreating uh existing systems in web 3 for the sake of web 3 without solving true underlying uh consumer needs so in terms of uh topics to focus on for Founders I think you

140. 1:02:25

     know of course starting always with the consumer problem rather than the solution focusing on problems where the underlying web 3 technology can truly solve the problem in a new way that wasn't possible in web 2 um and then within that I think looking at industries that are very uh that are fragmented that are undialed today in web to uh alcohol certainly being one of them uh before launching glass I uh uh spent a number of years at ABN Bev the world's largest Beer Company where I saw

141. 1:02:58

     firsthand just how little consumer connection even massive Brands like Budweiser Stella Aris really had um but beyond of course food and beverage uh there are a lot of other industries that are today in web 2 separated from the consumer uh this includes Sports we've seen a lot of exciting activity there uh sports teams are dependent historically dependent on uh the broadcasters and the networks to reach fans tokens Can power that direct connection uh things like

142. 1:03:28

     the music industry uh where artists often don't know who their end listeners are we've also seen a lot of exciting emerging use cases there uh restaurants uh Blackbird is an exciting project that we're H tracking a glass um that's really cool a lot of like loyalty programs a lot of consumer um focused sort of platforms um Momo I think you've explored quite a few use cases within um

143. 1:03:52

     that space what what are some of the ideas the dreams the possibilities that people could sort of lean into yeah sure so I've been around as long as you have um we've seen a lot of different kinds of use cases uh royalties platforms for Creative output like music we saw prediction markets we saw supply chain um products and everything in between I've worked personally on um ethereum analytics products I worked on infrastructure at Avalanche and at near I've been working

144. 1:04:29

     on an an nft platform for creators and now I'm working on this on this AI Marketplace for in the gig economy sense but the most recent use case that I thought was very poignant if like incredibly humble and and and primitive is that I had a software engineer friend who was laid off recently and just to help him out I sent him some crypto and so you know I think to myself like that

145. 1:05:01

     was incredibly easy um you take it for granted this primitive of just transferring value but if you take that idea and you are someone who has migrated to another country and then you want to send some money back home to your family this is a remittance and crypto is just incredible for that basic idea um so beyond all the applications and all the programmatic things that you layer on top of that um I think you know I I just had a realization like it's

146. 1:05:33

     pretty incredible that you can just do that so simply so in spite of all of like the ux hurdles that I think we've all experienced along the way they're just like little moments where you realize it's kind of happening it works um yeah you're touching on a really good point which is sort of the globalization um of probably capital um and and information that is being triggered by this movement um historically there definitely has been a barrier between countries right where um you know you have to go through a Forex

147. 1:06:04

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

148. 1:06:39

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

149. 1:07:09

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

150. 1:07:33

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

151. 1:08:03

     I've ever heard of in web 3 like like I think you talked about millions of users yeah last time I checked it was 2.9 Million unique users that's incredible um and so from that like what are you seeing as from the emerging kind of use cases or the large communities that are really popping up like you know what's what's really like what's happening what's cool yeah it's really interesting cuz we've been thinking a lot this year about like what do our members want compared to like what do the admins and the communities want we

152. 1:08:35

     call our service an eight course meal the way it is right now for our communities as a whole for our administrators and we're buil we've built a mini apppp Marketplace for communities so there's all types of apps that you can oneclick install into collab so we've like Taken good care of the admins and that that that train is already going where people new developers out there can build little

153. 1:08:58

     mini apps for cab and communities but what can we do for members and we've been really focusing on like really just this question of emerging use cases and kind of touching on what Momo had said as well which is what people want is to be able to transact simply with each other sometimes in a community context sometimes not in a community context but being able to tip each other being able to trade together being able to buy and

154. 1:09:22

     sell from each other being able to exchange value is key right now tipping one is interesting CU we saw like Reddit triy to do it and obviously you know patreon has has a version of this how are you seeing this concept of like um fans or community members supporting their Community like how is that playing out yeah so we've had a like pilot program for tipping for over two years now and so we have about 75 communities that we've been watching using a specialized

155. 1:09:54

     private beta Alpha collab land tipping and those are the communities that are the most engaged when members admins get to say hey thanks for that tweet that you sent and it brought in a couple more members or thanks for helping someone else onboard into the group when there were no mods in the group at that time so it's like that type of Goodwill sharing and combining that with

156. 1:10:17

     reputation sharing anything that can be trackable on chain is of tremendous value right now I like the idea of um tipping as a curation sort of indicator because if you look at something like I don't know crypto Twitter right it's like so much clutter and uh and things surface because of whatever algorithm is in place but I think having to put money behind something is like the ultimate curation right you're like you're like do I like this enough to spend a dollar on it yes it's like the answer is

157. 1:10:49

     probably no for most things and then for the things that you do you're like yeah actually I I want to like give you know a little a little hat tip to this and say like good post or good story or yeah I I'm with you um and I think that you know what you mentioned about like actually transferring value or subscriptions even like you see Instagram using subscriptions really well I'm definitely a fan of them and

158. 1:11:13

     there are plenty of creators especially ones that are like Recycling and reusing old clothing and turning them into something new I like subscribe to all of them I don't have time to watch them all but I'm happy they exist and so in the same way it's like if you're seeing someone do something that you believe in and want to encourage like that's a great way to do it right okay that's really cool so um Zoe can you tell us a little bit about some of the like some

159. 1:11:38

     of the use cases you're seeing in the Loyalty space you you talked a little bit about um you know blackw obviously and uh and even beyond the those use cases like what do you think people should be building that would be really cool yeah um I think and so we're seeing of course a lot of of web three activity in the Loyalty space um some of that does relate to tipping giving people more personalized ways to support uh the projects and individual creators and

160. 1:12:04

     even brands that they feel more emotionally connected to um I think one of the most uh exciting potential use cases or I'd love to see more activity is that focus on so driving social experiences both virtually and in person through these web three communities uh one of the ways and actually I'd be Ed to hear folks thoughts on uh social Dows which were big uh one of my the areas I was initially most excited about in the world of web 3 giving folks an ownership stake in their communities incentivizing

161. 1:12:35

     them to build together uh we've seen those start to yeah no no I think this is a good question does anyone know anything about social Dows or social apps anyone want to come up here no come on June let's go yes all right Zoe's question social Dows social apps all right I was an early FWB member so maybe I can contribute perfect what what's the question oh just curious um for your thoughts on you know I think there was a lot of excitement uh one to two years ago we've seen this I'd say fade a

162. 1:13:16

     little bit in terms of uh being first and foremost in in folks Consciousness so what do you think these social Dows can do better uh do more future opportunities for growth yeah you know I mean I sort of got into that whole thing and I think Andre you you'll have a lot of insights based on collab land data on a lot of this but I got into the whole thing through what we were calling at the time personal tokens so like anyone can roll your own token and issue a

163. 1:13:41

     token so like I issued a token if you go on Unis swap today you can still buy June tokens there's very little liquidity hit me up for an OTC deal um but um you know so so there was that idea and then it was like oh well instead of individuals issuing tokens groups can issue tokens and so then you ended up with things like FWB but then I think that kind of petered out because I think the the token incentives were not

164. 1:14:09

     well aligned there was a lot of issues like you know like another subset of this is like uh fan tokens right so like you're you're you're an artist you have tokens you issue them but then to get any exit liquidity you're dumping on your fans right so there's an issue there but then I think recently um I was playing with friend Tech and I think that solved a few of the issues like one of them is like you know initially as a creator with tokens it's very hard to

165. 1:14:34

     distribute them and get them into the hands of fans like you have to somehow send them around um and then two once they're in the hands of the fans there's very little reason for them to pay them back to you right so the utility problem so I think fch solved two of those things because the moment you go in um um first is denominated an eth of course there's your keys but they don't you

166. 1:14:57

     know they're not er c20s um and then secondly there's straight away some utility right there's a reason to give it back which is to join to buy the keys to join that chat room um so I think things like that show that there's some progression in um the social token use case but um yeah I would love to hear sorry I'm already miked yeah yeah I mean it is an Incredible use case especially

167. 1:15:21

     because of royalties and we talked a little bit about royalties but royalties are really foundational to how the nft boom came about and how we attract creators into this space and so with the frch situation and really with frch clones all over frch is not only just a standalone app now it's become its own movement in the same way that you would start an nft Community you wouldn't think oh that's a copy of board ape no it's its own Standalone movement and in the same way we're going to start seeing

168. 1:15:51

     more of these social fi um apps take off as well which I'm so excited about because removal of royalties from a third party like open SE or magic Eden or blur or whatever like that's just been such a huge detriment we definitely need a native token where we can have our royalties built in from scratch and that nobody can take away so I'm very excited 100% And I think that was one of the more interesting things for me um

169. 1:16:16

     with how near was built is because I think that royalties are built in at the protocol level but I'm not an engineer here so maybe Momo can talk about that royalties built into the protocol level yeah um well you can you can Implement royalties at any point you can if you wanted to implement royalties at the protocol level where for every you know action where you transfer value you can

170. 1:16:40

     just divert some money to another address you know in some proportion I andan it's as simple as that it's just a option that you would add to your code and you can do that at any point you can do it within your application if you believe it's important to do it uh at the protocol you do that I mean likeing ining in away it's kind of like the same pattern you know so you have a pool of money some of it goes here most of it

171. 1:17:05

     goes there of course of course but like how would an artist like you know if you if you are putting forth an NFD collection right and you um you want to defend against the fact that maybe like you know uh an nft Marketplace might decide in a in you know 6 months that you were very successful and they're not going to pay you anymore how would you implement that from the beginning to say blockchain has this potential for being you know immutable

172. 1:17:29

     and we're setting the rules in the smart contract from the start and like this is my deal like I am going to have this amount of royalties and I don't want anyone to change my artist you know stipulation how does that work it's about the asset itself so if you're a Marketplace and assets come in and they're being provisioned or created by some other entity um you don't necessarily have

173. 1:17:54

     authorship over this thing so if you program the asset to become smart as it were and to say for each time you transfer this asset you must you know do that proportional like transfer value that's how you enforce it so it's about in kind of empowering or like authoring or creating strong permissions around the object itself not the platform through which it uh transfers that makes sense um is anyone in the audience like an nft Creator or or working in that

174. 1:18:25

     space like have you experienced all right let's go Eric took the stage please quick introdu introduction and tell us a little bit about your experience there sure uh hey I'm Eric Wier I'm the CTO of pagota but I was previously at Nifty gateway to n Marketplace worked with collab land on that stuff um yeah so the one of the issues here is that if you have like there's a financial incentive to avoid royalties to avoid being a part of the community if you have a gift feature on your asset then people can abuse that

175. 1:19:01

     gift feature to sort of make an OTC trade go around a Marketplace or even build a Marketplace that that uses that feature at the contract level to systematically avoid royalties and so there's no like the PayPal friends and family option yeah um and so I think the the like pushing the fact that it's it's hard to take it off the honor System and keep really pre prevent somebody from

176. 1:19:27

     working around the system but if you make it um either uh an aspect of social shame where people are going to not use your platform or not do use your PL like not use your uh your token if you're working around that or even even the legal process like that's how royalties work in the Fiat World well what about buying and selling into the bonding curve like with friend Tech right like

177. 1:19:49

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

178. 1:20:13

     removing royalties and thus nobody could stand for Creator royalties or like how did that play out absolutely absolutely and so um what we did at Nifty gateways we to take a hard stance that we were going to continue to support Creator royalties on the secondary market and um and sort of put that stake in the ground to um which which was you know it helped because it brought artists to us it brought people who cared about this to

179. 1:20:38

     us and so it it's a way of separating it was a method of that social shaming saying look like if you care about this industry if you care about this art if you care about this work if you care about these artists come here um if you're trying to make a quick Buck go there you'll run off to AI when the crypto boom busts you know Eric I think about like tipping in the US I know in the EUR in Europe we don't do it but like if you can't afford to tip 20% you don't go out

180. 1:21:03

     to dinner that's exactly like it's social shame right there it's built in but it's definitely not true globally so then you end up with like cultural differences as well yeah yeah but if people care about the product they'll they'll do the I'm with you yeah awesome thank you Eric yeah Momo please yeah I so I uh because zo Works in alcohol industry I was curious about this but and on the topic of tipping again this

181. 1:21:28

     is perhaps a US cultural thing but so in restaurants wine and alcohol and Spirits have the highest markup that's the margin primarily for the restaurant um how much should one ought to tip on you know something like wine I'm not sure I mean I tip you know 20% not to like virtue signal or anything like that but like you know I can also understand if most of your bill is like a very expensive bottle of wine it's like again not me but it's like a domain D romanti It's like a $20,000 bottle of wine again I don't know never

182. 1:22:01

     sat at that kind of dinner table but what do you do in that case and also wine is super interesting cuz it has these components not only that it's you know it's the margin for the very end of the supply chain the restaurant which makes it all happen there but in the beginning there's also the wi maker and then there's all these people in between you know the Distributors the ologists who are doing all those things there's like supply chain aspects of it which is

183. 1:22:26

     like where are the grapes grown what is the terroir so to speak um like you can use blockchain to like like I see all of these adjacencies in something like wine um because it it has these supply chain mechanics it has this idea of Providence you know you can also use it as a financial investment um but you have to ensure the quality of the wine like is maintained under proper temperatures blah blah blah over time so like it

184. 1:22:50

     retains its value so I'm just kind of curious like where all these things intersect yeah um well there there's a lot there in that question um in terms of tipping as an early stage founder certainly not buying those $20,000 bottles but uh the tip when you when you tip that does go directly to the server and the weight staff that's not money that flows back to the wine producer that's too I mean you know there I mean

185. 1:23:15

     this is not web 3 related at all but um there's a lower minimum wage for servers in the US which is I think terrible um and they rely on those tips for their income so I think it's very important to tip um and to to tip well um in terms of the uh the flow of value what glass is really focused specifically on is the massive waste in advertising spend that these alcohol Brands spend uh alcohol Brands spend $8 billion dollar per year on Advertising that's almost entirely

186. 1:23:48

     topped down and for that same amount of money you know one of my kind of haa moments at uh when I was at ABN Bev was seeing that for the $10 million that a brand will drop for a 30 second Super Bowl ad they could instead support half a million people actually hosting Super Bowl watch parties bringing their friends together in their homes creating these amazing inperson social occasions

187. 1:24:12

     that are really what uh drinks are all about um and really getting to that I think to get back to you know first principles and kind of how web 3 is solving underlying problems PLS we're in the midst of a a global loneliness crisis that's something that's a worldwide issue I think you know this is how I got interested in Social Dows and kind of structuring these communities um

188. 1:24:33

     but to see brands that are dependent on people getting together to socialize in person spending money on ads instead of money on supporting those occasions uh was a major problem that that I see web 3 can fix in the alcohol space but also across uh other social platforms that yeah that's really cool I hear I hear all of you talking about sort of web 3 empowering communities and that maybe

189. 1:24:56

     being sort of the Breakthrough of like going from the individual to the collective um and and um how do some of these watch parties happen this is kind of cool are you saying that like Brands like a inev will pay me to host a party for my friends yeah exactly that's the vision um it's you know I mean cool use case just FYI yes um that right for that you know $10 million send send you a gift card that you can use to buy drinks buy snacks buy maybe some games to play with your friends things that really

190. 1:25:27

     strengthen your in-person social relationships give you that push to you know when there's Netflix and there's Tinder and there's all these you know drains on our attention that do make it harder for us to get out there and socialize in person um these brands that these industries that existentially depend on that socializing can I think do a lot more to directly support that that's really awesome and um speaking of

191. 1:25:52

     communities Angie um which communities have you seen sort of grow the largest or have the most activity in sort of that collab land sphere oh boy that's a good one I mean every single week we're watching well before I want to just say something about Momo's topic sorry um I was just thinking blockchain fixes that doesn't it like you pay in crypto and then the smart contract like distributes the money to the wine maker and to the delivery person and to the label maker

192. 1:26:19

     and like all across the supply chain like oh why don't we have that already yeah like it's baked into the price of the bottle like on the wine list right but you know the things that come on top like the Tipping like maybe like I don't know like should that go all to the restaurant I don't know I mean or should it kind of more the wine maker yeah I want that I want it to go back all the way to the people that are squashing The

193. 1:26:44

     Grapes yeah cuz it's it's it's all people working together right and you have this like one commodity but to get from commodity to like the point of service you know there's all these intermediaries and yeah it's just like right now it's not captured like the the well in opportunity right the supply chain aspect of supply chain but also the opportunity of who gets to be a server in a nicer restaurant that serves

194. 1:27:07

     $20,000 bottles of wine there's a little bit of a genetic Lottery that's involved there and where you live and what you look like and all of that and so or maybe how you were educated and it's just like if we're trying to level the playing field here and we're trying to give more opportunity to people at every level every social class across the world with any level of Education despite where you were born and how who

195. 1:27:30

     you were born to like wouldn't that be a beautiful way to to that yeah so it seems like you guys are talking about like the accural of value to something and an equitable distribution across the board like that seems to be a really interesting use case correct um for what the technology can enable I guess my last question is a little bit more futuristic but we're hearing a lot about the intersection of AI and blockchain any sort of thoughts insights questions

196. 1:27:56

     around this that we can I mean I have some but I just talked so if anyone else wants to say anything I saw news that uh an AI That's trading um kind of betrayed its own strategy so they didn't even know why it behave it misbehaved the way it did so that was interesting uh economic agents are not just humans they're also human and you know machine like operator pretty yeah like AI when it works you stop calling it AI so it just becomes a little demystified but I could see more and more I mean definitely more and more

197. 1:28:30

     economic agents are just going to be automated like machine intelligences just transacting money I mean it's already been happening with like flash crashes you know High speeed trading and all algorithmic trading and stuff but just imagine that going further and further and further cool yeah well what he was saying is you stopped calling it AI I mean like the first AI I think I was ever aware of would be like autocomplete

198. 1:28:53

     words right like we don't call that AI but they're predicting now they predict my whole sentence and usually it's pretty good right so we've been seeing that in email for years now um but also just veracity like what's real and what's not real like I don't know I see a video when I think it's Madonna on top of an elephant with a banner but is it or is it not like I'd want to be able to verify the provenance of that video and so so I do see cryptocurreny or blockchain technology and AI having to

199. 1:29:26

     work together that way how else do you prove it yeah yeah um we see a lot of potential for personalization of rewards and experiences using AI based on the onchain assets that you might already have uh so something we're uh discussing internally at glass for example is that um you know drinks being kind of an an interoperable layer of uh experience across sports music night life culture um folks can get you know as they maybe join different experiences in different

200. 1:29:57

     verticals uh their profile badges can evolve over time we can make recommendations personalized recommendations using AI for places they should visit people they should meet new wine or drinks they should try how much they should tip based on uh maybe their own income levels versus the the server at the the $220,000 restaurant so uh we really see yeah P personalization of of content and experiences yeah that's really cool um someone suggested that if AI was going to take over the world crypto would be the only Force to stop

201. 1:30:29

     it because the smart contracts could like duke it out with AI technology so I think there's a lot of really interesting uh sort of IM imaginative use cases that can come together but I think sort of the the takeaway for us today is is really focusing on um you know what's going to be the next hit app that brings us you know a million users 100 million users the next billion users and so with that I wanted to do like a

202. 1:30:58

     quick 30 second on everyone of like what do you think is going to be the Breakthrough app that like really takes us towards Mass adoption yeah it's a good one I mean microtransactions are what really take off are taking off right now like in South America and in Africa like places where people are either unbanked or underbanked like we all need to be able to work together and so I see any way that we can make that easier and that goes a little bit to

203. 1:31:23

     Momo's Point earlier which is what it's going to make it just what's going to make it the easiest for us to transact together and be in relationship with one another um that's going to be the next batch awesome Zoe I I do think social communities um I talked about the global loneliness crisis before um I think we need structures to help us socialize we all saw during Co how awkward it was to

204. 1:31:47

     be thrown into a zoom happy hour for example at at work and said you know make make make friends go socialize so I think blockchain Dows uh structures like that can can provide those Frameworks and those incentives to drive sustainable uh social authentic uh communities and once we that hasn't been fully realized yet but just massive uh potential there yeah I mean when you look at the world today and you see all of these Regional conflicts you're seeing the the

205. 1:32:18

     movement towards a more multi-polar world the decline of the us as an Empire sorry not to get dark but it's you know but there are a lot of you know economic experts who are forecasting a bumpy road ahead um in the near future so can these Technologies establish a more kind of global base of societal Trust Visa you know the the the various central banks and how much they're in debt and can create like a a landing pad to keep the

206. 1:32:48

     world like you know on the track so to speak so I think that's going to be a real test of the technology awesome well thank you everyone so much thank you Danny you thank you great panel everyone I really really enjoyed that we're going to have a quick Break um for about 20 minutes we're going to start back up the stage at 1:00 where VC are going to talk about what are the best pitch decks they're seeing right now so please feel free grab a

207. 1:33:26

     snack grab a drink stretch out if you need to get your steps in and we'll see you all in 20 thank you please welcome back near foundations William Rainer well welcome back everyone love seeing you all here I love the Green Bay Packers Hat by the way nice nice to see an American football fan here too um as I mentioned before he broke we have a great panel of VCS joining us talking about the best pitch decks they're

208. 1:34:06

     seeing so next slide modering this panel is going to be Erica Kang from crypto seal fun fact about Erica I need to get a second one cuz I actually introduced her yesterday as well she's a big K-pop fan and advocate so if you're looking to learn more about K-pop she's a lady to go to please welcome Erica Kang all right um thank you guys for joining me it's my second panel that I'm moderating so glad to be here again and

209. 1:34:42

     this time it's a very spicy fun topic um I think it's very helpful for a lot of the founders in this space as well so let's welcome the panelists up to the stage and the VCS come up to Stage let's give a round of applause all right thank you for joining me um why don't we go around because we come from all different backgrounds right so let's give a you know quick intro of who you are what you do and how you're contributing to the space thank you ER so my name is nag uh I'm the founder and

210. 1:35:14

     CEO of G20 Group which is a liquidity provider strategic investor ecosystem partner for uh many foundations uh I have a PhD in machine learning and AI so I come from the currencies currency trading background uh 15 years in the capital markets um in crypto since 2016 uh I work with near as a ecosystem partner thank you amazing thank you hi I'm Natalie Usman I'm the chief operating officer at outlier Ventures um outlier Ventures and is an accelerator

211. 1:35:48

     when we focus only on web 3 Investments um um and you know what what does an accelerator do we tell our portfolio companies that we will do you know accelerate 18 months of work in three months and we do that by adding a lot of expertise we have experts that we have employed that are on our books that we bring in token economies token design engineering product marketing legal you name it we're bringing them in to supplement your teams uh and help bring

212. 1:36:18

     you forward and make you investable hello I'm Nikolai uh from cvvs and CV Labs I'm in the space since 2015 um the company is operating since 2016 um we are on one side uh a VC based out of Switzerland um investing in early stage startups we have our our own accelerator as well but we as well do direct Investments uh bit special about us as a VC we have a ecosystem Builder called cvls on this brand we have

213. 1:36:50

     different hubs around the world so we have hubs in Switzerland lonstein Berlin uh Lisbon and South Africa uh and under this brand of C Labs we you know we have co-working spaces uh we do events we do report just kind of supporting the whole ecosystem uh uh more than just investment amazing thank you so much for the intro um I mean I think when it comes to investment we got to talk about the macro Trends right I think before we start everything and so um why don't we kind of character iiz in your own

214. 1:37:22

     definition what you see in the macro environment and what you're focusing on and you know how you characterize it and also how it affects your you know either valuations uh of projects or even investment Trends uh why don't we kind of start for that thank you so so I think the way we are looking at macro Trends is the peace premium is gone in the world so we have a great power struggle between United States and China and and also Russia China Iran versus us

215. 1:37:54

     and the West that's pretty much going to stay so when there is no peace premium what happens is companies actually try to on um you know Supply chains will be localized that increases the cost of production of goods and everything also we believe that the inflation is going to stay very long it's not going to come down so we will see higher interest rates which means entire tech stocks or

216. 1:38:18

     technology companies need to reprise which we haven't seen from 2010 onwards to 2023 so this there's a whole world of total reprising of venture capital Investments equities that are traded and also what kind of Founders that would take the companies in the new world where there's a geopolitical conflict cost of capital is extremely high and it's very difficult to build a profitable business so this actually is affecting the Investments where you have to be very careful where you actually allocate the capital and also what kind

217. 1:38:52

     of Founders so we are very focused on Founders that fundamentally understand the sector are very strong and have been very focused so that really uh we believe that you know we it's going to the trends have really changed and we seeing a lot of downs across the space thank you amazing yeah N I thought you were going to say the the macro environment sucks thought that's how you were going to start because that's what I that's how I want to start I mean um

218. 1:39:23

     it does it sucks and I'm so tired of it and um you know uh let's bring back some some green shoots here um H how how is this sucky environment affecting our our startups right we're we're taking in preed um and a lot of our Founders you know we tell them make sure you're bootstrapped make sure you're looking at how you can bring in traction on your own um and you know when you are pitching which we'll get into talking about you really need to be very on you

219. 1:39:57

     know on your game and know what the questions are going to be and be really really prepared um you know I I I mean I would love to bring it out to my Fel fellow panelists but you know there's been talk about all this dry powder out there and I think it is out there but there's still so much concerned about the longer term and how long is this going to last that it it it it does come out you can still get funded absolutely um and we have some of our companies uh who are here who are

220. 1:40:28

     have gotten funded and um but uh you know it's it's it's it's difficult and you know it's it's a little bit frustrating right because you know that there's some money out there but they can put it into other vehicles right and so it's all about that I don't know what you guys think but yeah no no no I mean that's true I mean it's it's people you know they allocate money differently

221. 1:40:50

     than they used to venture is not kind of a prior one for a lot of people but I think also you know with this situation you see a lot of great ideas and startups coming out right so in in a bare market and so one people build build the best best products um but you know as um nendra said you know we need to focus or we we as a VC are focusing on on startups you know Founders who you

222. 1:41:20

     know understand the situation and you know can pivot uh accordingly at the end some more flexibility absolutely yeah you need to be flexible right and and I think I think funding is is difficult um I think I I believe early stage startups really early stage startups it's still okay but if you want to you know have a bigger um bigger round and so on I think then it it gets a bit more difficult my

223. 1:41:45

     opinion great anyone add you want to add more or no I'll add a little bit more I would say the fundamentals remain the same um you know when we are looking so we're very you know we're precede but when we're looking at the pitch decks guess what it's you really are looking for that founder something you know it's the grit it's the S um conviction in what you're doing it's the ability to tell that story um you know I personally don't

224. 1:42:17

     think you have to have a pitch deck although I prefer it cuz I'm a visual learner however I've seen some people pitch excellent an excellent um an excellent pitch off of just a notion board because they've organized their thoughts very very clearly there um you know and and that works as well but as long as you know the ones that I I see making it they just really know how to explain what the problem is and how they're going to solve it and in the

225. 1:42:45

     crypto world you always need to explain why is it solving it on the you know in on the blockchain let's say or with a token or you know however you might be doing that why are you doing it that way not in a traditional way I think that's always a question that kind of comes up um and you know why is the way you're doing it better so you know those fundamentals I think remain okay yeah we'll definitely dive more into like

226. 1:43:10

     which pitch ideal pitch deck that you would you want to see um later uh I think also I want to ask if AI also plays a interesting factor in like eval ating because these Trends you know um recently there's been a lot of AI projects on board also along with3 projects so just wanted to um are there any like keywords that you kind of pop out also in web 3 and like which kind of topics like socials for example that you kind of look in your own way um do you want to start like in sure yeah so we seeing Trend actually that the already

227. 1:43:43

     listed tokens pivoting towards adding AI in the projects near including itself gra ocean protocol a lot of projects internet computer chain link Etc parts of the work that they do is AI driven if not the whole thing so that's the first uh big change we have seen since the large Ling models and chart GPT became very popular and secondly AI is like really based on the learning models um and this is quite computationally expensive you need a lot of Nvidia chips graphics cards to do that so to do it in

228. 1:44:17

     a seed level uh so if you take uh St one of the French startup the earlier round was 300 million and they raised I think like 50 million so you can't really run a seed level company that is really AI it's it has to be a a Side Learning model a part of the large learning model so I think it's and also it really matters if you take all the successful really high valued AI startups the

229. 1:44:41

     founders are quite known they are the best coders you kind of know everybody there are I heard like 60 really good AI people who actually can really code better than than you know a computer generated code so it's very difficult to find uh but you have small uh Niche problems that are there to solve so that that's what we are looking for uh when we support uh any AI in web3 area amazing I mean I would add off of that

230. 1:45:07

     which is exactly it's very hard I'm agreeing I disagree but I know it's really hard to to build you know uh true AI like you say heav heavy computation what I'm seeing is that sometimes um people will say that they're doing AI um and it might be not as might not be as advanced as uh you know they might want to so putting AI in the name and things like that so I would say just be really careful with that because um it might get you a foot

231. 1:45:40

     in the door but unless you're really proving what you're doing that's different and better and you know on par with some of the bigger players it's going it's not going to get you much further I would say so um I would say be be careful with that is my advice yeah I mean absolutely but so so I think you know AI is is again now a kind of a boss word that everybody every startups is using at the moment you know in in the

232. 1:46:05

     space in we fre space you had you know um you know the meta wore topic I mean it's already gone again right and you had people talking about the meta and so on uh nft Marketplace and now you know because of CET GPT you have the AI uh I think obviously uh all kind of this new technology you know talking about web free AI iot I think they play uh all a massive role for the future um you know when you can combine that that's obviously uh interesting um but it's not

233. 1:46:37

     a must right it's it's as well do sometimes you know we get a lot of startups coming to us and then the question is why do you use blockchain right is there really a need uh and the same is with AI right do you really need AI does it really solve a problem or you know does it really benefit your product um but at the end you know it's obviously very interesting technology as all the other new technology and I think if you you know can combine this technology this is super interesting but for me again if you come to me and you

234. 1:47:09

     you you say look I'm using AI I'm like cool um I think you better be if you're a soul founder you better be using AI like you know exactly exactly or you know it's like yeah yeah so for me right the use the technology wisely um and as you said prove it right doesn't prove it doesn't make sense uh and you know but you don't need to use AI at the end if there's no need yeah and use it where it's needed exactly yeah awesome I mean

235. 1:47:41

     the topic of the panel is very it's very practical I think and so let's kind of dive deep here uh which is like one of the best pitches that you've seen so far so if you could kind of me like remember a pitch deck or some Pitch that you thought was really memorable to you and impressive what was it and I don't have to name it but you know and why did it stick to you um do you want to kind of

236. 1:48:05

     go around and sure share that I actually thought of three projects that I have but I'll start with one so we saw one deck called mode um it's a L2 super chain on optimism stack so what really stand out was actually so when you have it's a really like you know everyone who is very deep in crypto knows l2s are really the easiest way to get funded everybody likes ethereum and then you

237. 1:48:28

     have an L2 on top of e you have a chance to make it big so we really like the deck because the founder was able to really explain what exactly the problem he's solving so what's really the problem now if you have L2 so the gas fees is paid to the L1 the rest of the money that is made goes to the company or the do that is owned now the problem is Dos are governed by a lot of people or a group of people and they don't like

238. 1:48:54

     to spend money so they actually vote against giving big grants to uh to the developers so now the developers come there and when there is no money they move away so the predictability of the growth is very hard so this founder actually trying to solve the problem by paying the fees to the developers and the users and so that solves you know like a very important problem so you can

239. 1:49:16

     actually map and predict the growth how he can actually build apps on top of it so yeah so we we see and also optimism stack is quite scalable in terms of what it can offer also you know many projects like base are are also being built on top of it so we quite really like it so we we invested in the project and actually uh you know other one of the you know companies that invested in near as well is leading the round so the

240. 1:49:46

     founder was really able to explain the problem in a very simplistic manner they also also got a multi-million Grant ahead from uh optimism itself so not only raising the VC money but also uh getting a big Grant is a proof of concept so that they can actually go out and build so we really look and the founder comes from a background where he worked with many other uh projects and was able to understand the problem that

241. 1:50:11

     he saw in orbitum or optimism or other areas and then actually build the trying to solve problem so we we think really like this project yeah H thanks for sharing I'm going to be generic and then I'm G to hone in on a fun story sounds good he's in the room so he's going to smile big um so so um in general I personally like infrastructure plays infrastructure plays are usually built by Engineers who understand there's a problem with the

242. 1:50:43

     infrastructure I'm an engineer so I can say this by education uh you know not always the best at communicating that so what I'm always looking for is to understand like it's you know we can work on the communication we can train that communication in our accelerator that's fine I'm always just trying to understand okay why are you doing this one thing in the infrastructure and right now just side note infrastructure

243. 1:51:08

     plays are are getting that following funding so so you know for me that's super interesting we're doing uh you know a zero knowledge uh cohort right now we're doing um things with near right now and there's a lot of infrastructure plays in that so so for me that's super super interesting um on on the other side it's it's really uh how you're communicating what you're doing and the funny story I have is that

244. 1:51:37

     you're not always in the best situation in order to do the pitch so we have a an alumni who's in the audience who pitched from a car park in France uh trying to travel back with his family and dog and it was time for the pitch uh and he did it from his mobile phone and it it I mean a I found that incred that blew my mind that he was doing that but also it was just the calmness the clarity the knowing what the problem was

245. 1:52:07

     explaining it to us we all got it right away the deck wasn't very long but it was very straightforward and we understood it very quickly um you know so it almost as long as you are clear and Clarity of communication then you you're getting your point ac across and then obviously we have multiple conversations and due diligence and looking into it but you know it makes some impact so that's why we do in the accelerator we do a lot of training on on pitching because we want to make sure you're doing your best

246. 1:52:39

     you're aware of what the questions will be you're able to answer them um and then my last little bit I'm going back a little bit more generic is you know preedee uh your Tam Sam and Som need to be really important right um if if people are not telling you what that serviceable uh Market is uh available and obtainable um then they haven't really solved that problem so we work a lot on that because an early stage

247. 1:53:10

     investment you need to be able to explain that small Slither of an audience that you're going to go after after right away to prove your product Market fit before you start expanding and that's super important for us so while that you know feels like numbers it's a way to communicate what you're going to do it's your go to market it's the most early and basic way to explain your go to market and we look at that a lot because we don't have much more at preed you don't have much more to go on there's not usually a product yet uh and

248. 1:53:44

     you probably don't have your first customers yet so wow that's great thank you so maybe not about Dex but more kind of what I I'm I'm like a person guy um I like passion right so I like when when somebody is really passionate about something maybe as well kind of you know emotion I think it's it's also tied to emotion a lot um but at the end you know you really just need to understand what what you're doing and you need to you know come to a point quite fast look I mean it's a pitch Tech and need you know

249. 1:54:18

     we receive four five on the pitch tech for for example for our acceleration program uh you know that's a lot right so come to a point quite fast and then when we when when we like uh somebody or or the the Venture we then you know have a talk one to one and and there you really just come to a point tell tell what is the problem how do you solve it right and I think that's uh very

250. 1:54:43

     important obviously as you said you know due diligence numbers and so on will be done obviously but you know as as as as well you know we are early stage investor there are not so many numbers to check on right that's just not and I think the most important part is really understand the market uh have a good team as well right so that with your team you can do a pivot because you will do a pivot most probably like a lot of

251. 1:55:07

     startups early stage startups they will you know change a bit of direction um and and be flexible at the end right and I think that's especially in the market now at the moment I think you need to be flexible um which is crucial um um but yeah so for example just a a funny uh for me as a Swiss guy a funny startup story so we have a startup in in Africa um I believe it's in Nigeria they're

252. 1:55:33

     building um the land registry on the blockchain right and for us in Switzerland this you know it doesn't make sense but in in their city or their country it does because they actually 60% of the fraud are uh regarding uh property fraud right so they have have signs outside where they say this house is not for sale and now they actually officially in a few Pro provinces there are uh you know the official land registry Mark which then again you see the technology blockchain technology is beautiful you can use that in ways for

253. 1:56:05

     for us in in Europe maybe it doesn't make so much sense but then in Africa or you know maybe in in some countries in Asia and so on or Latin America it makes much more sense and you know this guy happens to be kind of scammed by kind of uh this part and you know he has a story which uh was quite nice right and quite passionate uh founder stories are always really nice having a Founder story works a lot and I thought about two other

254. 1:56:31

     things as you were talking actually if we go back to Founders um I've seen people Rock up with five co-founders uh co- for example yeah you know guys you got to you know figure that one out uh and uh um what we usually try to say is if you you are co-founders and we love if there's co-founders that's great have one business and one technical is the strongest way to go forward so try to split it up that way I I learned it

255. 1:57:03

     the Hardway personally did my first startup yeah yeah how many are how many Founders so we were two business Founders doing a tech startup no CTO doesn't work so good yeah so that just so you know like atov that's one of the things that we look at and it's actually like we have to tick that there's that balance cuz we've also learned the hard way yeah awesome here's a curveball um

256. 1:57:27

     let's I mean we looked at the best I guess the scenario what about the worst scenario like is it like is there something that's an absolute no that you kind of see like okay this is not a good sign for example something that's that red signs that you see do you want to share some of them so yeah we um I wouldn't mention the name but we saw one group from Germany and they wanted to Value the company at 300 million well there we go yeah as a I'm going to go I

257. 1:57:52

     was going to go there too so so we kind of like try to explain them that and then they had really very I think very experienced team but probably little bit short on the valuation numbers so we try to explain them like actually the if you are 300 million you would be already in top 100 like top 100 150 or so so a lot of firms with a lot of users they're really struggling to raise money which

258. 1:58:17

     are really phenomenal projects at 500 million to a billion and without anything you really can't you know you can't really do and it's just I think the the difficulty is that if you have never built like you know I I been myself a Founder I struggled it's my third company which it took many years so if you never buildt it if you never made money you don't know how actually to acquire a client that that pays you you don't understand how it is so we always say if you never made money you just don't understand how money is done

259. 1:58:49

     so often we see like other project where they raised 12 million they spend it all and they had to go to token launch and the token launch didn't worked out so the whole thing went went went down so we often see what very important is not only that they come with the valuation they need to really have the respect for the money and they don't understand really they just spend money and then they just believe that magically success will come it's really really really hard

260. 1:59:14

     to actually make something work and happen and you know when we talk to Founders these these people including IIA himself they work 24 by7 I mean we don't even know where he lives like you really have to work hard and you have to have a very realistic valuation and if you look at the listed markets we have a massive correction in SAS which is very close to where we are and and you know people should really study what are the valuations of each Revenue generating

261. 1:59:44

     protocols like if you take uh you know arbitrum it makes 100 million Revenue and it's 50 times forward earnings multiple trades around 5 billion valuation which is very close to crowd strike in the real market so you have to do a little bit of work before you go because even if you value 10 million 20 30 40 with with magic numbers somebody really need to buy you out at paying that money or something and that's very

262. 2:00:10

     hard so we see excessive valuations but then if you explain them some really listen and so we have seen really worse decks which are very High valued disorganized teams and somebody doing only marketing but want to do a very deep Tech project it's it's very hard to build so those kind of things we have seen yeah thanks for sharing yeah I'm going to pick another one because valuation obvious one uh has been picked um and I'm just thinking of uh you know

263. 2:00:41

     a couple of uh the startups in our we have a portfolio of 300 so almost um so so we have a lot of startups in the portfolio um but this is I'm thinking of a couple that have been through the accelerator we talked earlier Nicolai you talked about pivoting pivoting to the right place I'm going to go with there have been some that pivot and pivot and pivot and pivot and pivot and they actually they're pivoting and and I

264. 2:01:04

     think it's it's from um you know not really finding what it is or that they want to do or not having that conviction or I I don't know but um those are the ones who graduate and they still don't have a strong deck you know they still their pitch isn't strong cuz they pivot they don't have that traction so I've seen that happen a handful of times um you know and whether they've sorted

265. 2:01:27

     themselves out afterwards I don't know but that during our program I've seen that yeah I mean and that's totally true right I at the end yes pivot as I said I think you need to be flexible but at the end if you don't have a focus uh you know people investors community and so on they think what what what are you actually building right so you cannot build a startup out of that uh I totally agree on that as well and valuation yes so that's always a big discussion right

266. 2:01:53

     obviously now at the moment valuation are quite down um um can I give another one actually since we're at yeah it if you've design so another thing we've seen is that you've come in and you have already designed the you know the tokens and and and then it's I don't know uh not been fit for purpose and then that has to be redesigned and that's very painful that's another mistake I've seen yeah wellow yeah this is great um so some dos

267. 2:02:23

     and don'ts I guess that we kind of shared in this panel um we have like two minutes left why don't we kind of do a quick sharing of what we're looking at in the future I mean we're nearing the end of the year sort of and I would like to kind of sum it up and maybe um prospects for next year what you're looking at do you want to share quickly sure I think we see a trend of real world asset tokenization projects coming a lot but within real world asset

268. 2:02:47

     tokenization the ideas need to be very clear where what are they trying to tokenize if you tokenize a treasury people are not going to really buy your your you know your product because Franklin Templeton or Black Rock tokenizing the treasury everybody wants to buy so real world inflation data using a token you know which can actually be you know a lead indicator to the federal deserve inflation some of

269. 2:03:11

     the decks we have seen so AI crypto web 3 kind of uh intersection then uh Bitcoin an ordinance based to some of the projects are there and interoperability cross chain liquidity so those are the trends that we will see also some of the projects that are already there will do a down run but probably come back stronger that's what we're seeing for the next year amazing I'm going to go with uh just you know OV the way we do things is we we have cohorts every quarter so we have we're

270. 2:03:42

     we're now like around three every quarter um this quarter we're doing one with near along with the zero knowledge uh and um one with Walmart in January we've already got those lined up we're going to do something with Bitcoin uh and a partner that I can't announce but closed this morning so but you coming out yeah uh we're doing it a future verse you said metaverse was dead but

271. 2:04:07

     future verse is coming back what the futuree so there's a there's a little bit of of Hope for the metaverse there and then uh we're doing one uh on defi with armhole so again I I think that's really exciting uh you know a lot of the whole uh cross chain going on um and going beyond that you know I think we will be looking at AI actually seeing what we might be able to do there probably doing more with some some of our ecosystem Partners as well but that's still kind of coming up oh and

272. 2:04:38

     real world assets we never talked about the real world assets that's the thing that was our topic we were we were going to talk about that we're looking at that for Q2 as well yeah I mean I kind just kind of we're looking at the same stuff and what I think is quite interesting is uh I think really cool with Walmart by the way um you know building a bridge between you know kind of the traditional

273. 2:04:58

     world the old world I would like to say with you know the tech that you guys are building um I think that's going to be a big topic next year a lot of corporates and so on are looking more deeply into Tech and more openly I would say and I think building this bridge I think is going to be quite interesting M amazing we're just time thank you so much for sharing your Insight it was wonderful

274. 2:05:22

     give a round of applause thank you ER thank you thank you thank you all for the great great panel there um so we have a little stage change going on so I've been instructed to possibly delay a little bit so I've been giving a lot of fun facts about the moderators I figured I'd give a fun fact about myself now so if youall didn't know um I've been currently since January traveling around the us living

275. 2:05:59

     in a different city each month and while I've been doing that I've been collecting a bunch of fun Icebreaker questions everywhere I've gone so I'd love if there's an audience member who'd like to answer one of the questions possibly anyone raise a hand who wants to answer a question Kiana all right you don't even know what the question is so it's a big risk you ready all right if you could choose of two fictional characters to play the angel and devil

276. 2:06:28

     over your shoulders what two characters would you pick if you could choose two fictional characters to play the angel and devil on your shoulders what two characters would you choose get back after okay fair enough fair enough uh Eric Cartman for the devil and then uh attakus Finch for the angel no no okay okay great if you could choose a historical figure to have a dinner with who would it

277. 2:07:17

     be that's the whole point of the questions we ready all right enough of my foolishness and delaying now we have it's going to be this is arguably going to be one of the most fun talks we're going to have at all during NC con um I would love to present to this stage Steve balmer's long lost brother probably the most fun and energetic person in the near ecosystem please welcome David

278. 2:08:17

     Morrison please please save your applause friends Romans countrymen you're here with me today to go on a journey an ancient tale of Bravery fear and more importantly hope let's begin once upon a time time time time hidden amongst the swirling Mists of the digital realm laid a treasure an incredibly powerful treasure an enchanted Satchel that was Limitless and set to hold the secrets of

279. 2:09:09

     building dreams dreams dreams dreams the ancient Elven named it the Wilders of Satchel the Builder's omnipotent Satchel had a steward alria day and night she watched over the Satchel waiting for the Builders of the open Future to arrive within this Cal lies the power of craft worlds Beyond imagination within this Satchel there are many tools there are pillars to allow you to build the highest of structures to reach

280. 2:09:53

     the skies and the gods there are windows to let the Magic in and the magic out and there are doors with which you can allow anyone to enter so long as you wish now millions of Craftsmen around the world are able to access these tools they don't need to learn new spells they don't need to learn how to swing a different hammer nor they do they need to learn a new language however there's a

281. 2:10:27

     problem despite the Satchel the ancient ways persisted millions of Master Builders around the world would journey to distant lands to seek resources one of those lands the Amazonian mountains infested with oans give David a peer rise and a promotion however as the news of the Satchel's power spread Master Crafters from the Realms poured in to the digital realm to learn its powers they combined

282. 2:11:08

     building Parts in ways that seemed impossible creating palaces towers and structures that touch the Stars One such Craftsman was listen why the are you going to waste your precious little time building when the Satchel provides exactly when the Satchel provides is exactly what alria said and that is exactly what Cedric did he reached into the satchel and he pulled out doors he pulled out windows he pulled out pillars that have been built before and he improved them and he returned them to the Satchel he

283. 2:11:52

     built a team to build incredible structures to give a away for free so everybody could build their own kingdom they built castles as Grand as the sky and the Satchel would incover them and bring them to the people with the Satchel sharing your dream is better wish away away away away so the Satchel is more than just tools and parts it's the heartbeat of creation reminding us that together we can share

284. 2:12:28

     the future so one final point with hearts filled with hope and Minds buzzing with ideas the realm's inhabitants drifted into dreams knowing that the Satchel would always be there but let's cut the and let's stop taking acid and uh talk about the real stuff okay so that was kind of esoteric and you probably didn't really get it it was designed for children um but you guys aren't children for the most part I hope uh so I'm going to give you a quick

285. 2:12:58

     example of how that exactly works so here we have a developer um his name is Cedric the curious as we spoke about him earlier he's a new developer in web 3 he doesn't know much about what he's talking about uh he thinks he does but anyway he discovers uh the Satchel he discovers the blockchain operating system so what does he do he says Hey I want to have a go of that I want to make a component that I can use uh anytime I want to build something bigger now he's

286. 2:13:30

     really new to developing he's really new to web 3 uh so he does build this component and he calls it the mother component and within the mother component there are a handful of child components there's a navbar component so you can search around uh there's a Lio component because he loves the stick is is eth on ethereum and there's a token price API component so he's launched his

287. 2:13:54

     mother component he sent it out into the world now all of a sudden a brilliant developer comes along somebody who's smart and Tall handsome Ukrainian and he discovers the blockchain operating system and he wants to build a a better app a super app an app that people will actually use but he doesn't want to mess around building a na bar or a lighter component or a token price API component he wants to build something bigger but he needs all of

288. 2:14:25

     those tools to build them so what does he do well he simply Forks the mother component of the um Cedric the curious now anybody can Fork the component doesn't matter if you are uh it doesn't matter who you are I could FK the mother component uh teacher could FK the mother component um a doctor could Fork the mother component a cop could Fork the mother component but it doesn't matter who you are anybody can f the component and they

289. 2:14:58

     can use it freely immediately and at will so what the hell should we do next well go ahead and Fork Cedric's mother component and uh build with a near open web stack don't let the borans win because they will take your blood and they will eat you alive and if you want to uh connect with me you can connect with me on Twitter Facebook LinkedIn only fans tnder Bumble only farmers plenty of fish

290. 2:15:27

     lens NE social mumet Tumblr devant art Reddit and they've got an alternative NSFW Reddit account thank you very much goodbye God bless fantastic IC energy as always David uh sorry I won't be able to match that that was incredible great job um up next we have an exciting talk from two of the core team members from the pagota side um if we can go to the next slide please we're going to be talking about integrating near open web services so we

291. 2:16:10

     have coming from Boulder and Seattle we have Jim and chetna from pagota few fun facts about them Jim sher's apartment with six mountain bikes he's an avid mountain biker and then chetna she skydived on her Milestone birthday so please welcome Jim and chatov just have to click through slides this is a clicker let see if that works oh you have to yeah this one it's a different thing than we had but I'll just I'll just click through

292. 2:16:58

     manually yeah I'll click through manually okay hey everyone uh how are you all doing again myself chna Desai uh I head product management at pagota and this is Jim Jim Barry he uh he's a director of solutions um we here to talk about the integration of near open web services that's actually currently available for any of you to use so just to warm up the crowd um how many of you

293. 2:17:29

     with the show of hands how many of you can identify yourself as a Founder Builder or even a developer with a show of hands that's pretty cool okay um so you guys know uh some of the needs and especially I think de David Morris has been very instrumental in showcasing the the major theme right David what is it what was the question so the major theme for near con uh which is step into an open web open

294. 2:18:03

     web and also yeah and and in addition to that Founders Founders have been the core element for everything that we're doing so with that um this is what we're trying to cover today um just to get you all up to speed with what Founders um and their business and startup needs that we learned through talking to some of them like you guys and the audience um and Jim would walk us through the uh actual near open web

295. 2:18:34

     services that you can immediately use to solve some of the needs um right here um and what to look for in the future um so with that um let's get started so as as I again mentioned um Founders are at the heart of near ecosystem um so we can't do anything without them so that's the key here and with the founders I also want to retray that um we have two main types of Founders that we've identified one is like developers who are

296. 2:19:09

     cultivated through the active journey of being involved in near who ends up being the early stage startup Founders um and the second time is very obvious the growth stage uh Founders as well as late stage or the successful businesses that we already have in support um all right so as I said um there are some needs that we have collected by talking to a handful of them and and we have derived high level category and themes and and I

297. 2:19:40

     want to walk through some of the business level needs and also some of the technology or the application level needs that we identified among Founders so with that um these are some of the business level needs that we identified the first one here is the sustainable economics which is to keep the lights on right so without this the founders really can't do anything with their business or the products so what do they need to do they have to cut cost um effectively on board users with the

298. 2:20:11

     minimum cost right the CAC and the second one here is once you onboard them how do you retain them right that's again a large portion of their challenge as a Founder all right as the second theme ier just here is the sovereignty and flexibility um what it means is as a builder or a Founder who's building a project or an application that needs to have all the freedom right if you think about uh the use case of Apple Store wherein there's a lot of gatekeeping

299. 2:20:44

     it's really hard uh the flexibility of you pushing through the application to the app store or the distribution Channel where the users can immediately use it without having another third agency make decision for your application so that's that's the large part of the second theme um and the third theme on the business side here is the blockchain ecosystem um what are some of the technology that they should

300. 2:21:09

     be using as a Founder right so what is the Tex tag that they should be using how flexible that is how future proofing that is right if you on a single chain you get tied to a single chain and you can't go beyond that chain so this is one of the the the the most plaguing problem that I see among founder Community which is stuck up on a single chain and can't really switch easily um again are there any enough network of users that they can immediately onboard

301. 2:21:40

     when they push their application out onto the network or the distribution Channel and other things which is part of the ecosystem building and and the business building part so with this I want to quickly uh move on to the the technical aspect which is the needs related to application Journey right so if you have to build an application um what are some of the key things that they look for or the need for in their users first one here is the

302. 2:22:09

     discoverability um there user should be easily able to navigate search and find application that that in interest them right so I think that's number one um the second here is the identity right so um this has been much talked about I think we also announced idos uh which key um integrate with the products that we are building um and which essentially mean is uh more control over their identity and be more secure as well at the same time and the third here is once

303. 2:22:43

     you got the identity piece right you can onboard users onto your application or platform whatever you're building the third thing here is to keep them engaged with new experiences right so that's also a key you can you can onboard all the users you want but if they don't stay if there's a hell lot of churn then you have left with nothing right so I think this is also key in in in their

304. 2:23:07

     life Journey U of user onboarding and the fourth here is we talk about the length about data owning their data um secure and being able to access their own data fast as well so that's fourth and fifth is something we are looking outwardly in terms of future which is interoperability wherein um engaging users Beyond a single chain right that's where we talk about multi-chain as well uh with these needs you can see how near

305. 2:23:38

     near open web system or the web stack um can actually provide you Solutions or answers to them so I'll hand it over to too Jim hey everybody good to see some uh old friends some new friends some yet to be friends great to good to see everybody here so I want to go through these open web services we've done a lot of work at pigot to to have a a pretty pretty awesome Suite of services and tools that you can use to accomplish

306. 2:24:04

     each of those uh goals that that chatt talked about so we'll dive into each one kind of briefly talk about stuff then we've got a short demo too which should be fun um so discoverability obviously really important for users to be able to find new experiences that they want to interact with uh so we've got a lot of new technology new.org uh is awesome as our boss Gateway uh to discover new applications to build new applications from what you see out there in the

307. 2:24:28

     ecosystem so so definitely check that out uh DS uh is a is a application within your org that you can discover applications publish your application there so uh definitely check that stuff out um uh D Partnerships is kind of interesting uh and we'll get into identity in a little bit but since we have um Fasto and Rel layers it's easier than ever to actually move from one experience to a new experience so we can finally like couple these things

308. 2:24:57

     together so identity super important this used to be really really hard in web 3 right to to create your identity for the first time especially for a newbie that that isn't a sophisticated user um so Fasto is one of our primary services that we're Contin continuing to iterate on uh and make better so really our idea was you should be able to create an identity in 15 seconds um it should be as easy as web 2 and in a lot of ways even easier than than web

309. 2:25:21

     2 so uh we'll show that off here in a minute um hopefully everybody's signed up for for new.org and gone through that workflow but but we'll show it off uh so really cool being um biometric enabled Pass Key compatible uh great great stuff there we've got a really robust uh fast off SDK that was uh released a few weeks ago uh so so check that out it's easier than ever to to integrate with with Fasto um it's integrated with our

310. 2:25:45

     relayer so we're going to show that and then we've got multi-chain support coming so if you uh see David Miller Durant around here pick his brain about what's coming there's there's some really cool uh tech tech coming down um ID idos we partner with them uh to allow for verified credentials um uh compliance all that kind of stuff so that's another service that you can bundle to to create an identity that

311. 2:26:07

     actually matches what your users need to to be successful engagement so engagement is super important you create an identity but the old model was you still had to figure out how to fund an account how to interact with web 3 it was really cumbersome um so we we've released our meta transactions relayer uh recently which really makes that a lot easier you can actually sponsor the initial interactions for your users without them

312. 2:26:31

     having to create a wallet add funds go through all of that pain uh so that's been really really powerful and actually new.org the initial experience is actually funded by our relayer so we we we fund that right there um we've got it's it's really flexible too so you can actually control which Which smart contracts you're actually sponsoring gas for which methods within those smart contracts what kind of user you actually

313. 2:26:54

     want to act give that experience to so we have both managed uh and self-managed options so we we can either host a relayer um for you or you can run your own relayer so I'm going to jump into just a quick demo of this experience real quick let's see just going to create a new new temporary email and jump into oops sign out actually going to create a new user so this is all using our our fast

314. 2:27:42

     off product right now so I'm going to enable pass keys with Biometrics so no password during this experience just uh Biometrics and pass keys I'm going to go ahead and look for my email to confirm it's creating the account for me right now um our relayer is sponsoring all the gas to create the account so the user doesn't have to actually add funds at at this point I promise under 15 seconds so

315. 2:28:17

     we'll see if this comes in under under the gun there you go there we go all right so I'm going to agree save my data so now we have a full n.org Identity On on uh um on our Gateway what I'm going to do is jump into our relayer demo so you can see we have a relayer set up this is our pigot demo relayer so it's got a balance of almost 3,000 near we're going to go ahead and just do a simple guest book interaction so just to

316. 2:28:54

     show how this works so I'm going to add the message uh you know right now we you have to pay gas for for this transaction to go through but this is actually going through our relayer so this method this smart contract is approved so we're going to go ahead we've got to select our Pass Key again Biometrics to authorize going confirm our transaction so our message has been committed to the guest book so right now we're going to jump in and see

317. 2:29:40

     whoops so we're going to look at the the transaction log here so what you can see here uh we won't dive too too deeply into into this but we we actually are using the relay to sponsor gas for those uh for those transactions um so pretty pretty powerful stuff really configurable there's going to be a lot of additional Innovation on top of this including some multi-chain functionality uh with our relayer so

318. 2:30:06

     both fast off and relayer are going to be multi-chain compatible um that's something that's going to be com coming up soon uh which is going to be pretty pretty fun all right so data we we want to have data Rich applications obviously so we've got a lot of new services that really make this a lot easier than it's been in the last year or two uh query API if you haven't played with that please check it out really really powerful uh really

319. 2:30:31

     easy way to build your own indexers uh view indexers build on what others have done uh really powerful there's components within your.org where you can actually use a nice wizard to create your first indexers so where indexers used to be a really big paino for developers it's like easier than ever so really cool to go and play with that UI so so please do that use a graphql interface so um really easy for developers to get started uh RPC we

320. 2:30:56

     continue to innovate on top of RPC we're continuing to make it more decentralized uh faster higher performing so uh look for those kind of Innovations in the next uh few months that's going to get get a lot better um and then data availability so uh we Ilia talked about this a little bit uh yesterday but using um we we have a data availability product that coming out and actually I'd encourage you to stick around after this

321. 2:31:19

     Fat's going to go deep dive into that so I'll let him give the details but but pretty pretty cool service there to where um not only can you interact with your own data but you can interact with with data from from from other chains as well that's all let you thank you and and as Jim mentioned so we can actually manage it for you the layer services in fast do or you can self host them

322. 2:31:45

     everything is open source I think that's the beauty so the social good that open web near is building is amazing uh that's why I'm a fan and I'm I'm here so I I would encourage everybody to actually take a look and if you have any questions reach out to us happy to answer any questions you guys have um so looking into future as I mentioned interoperability is something we're looking outward to uh with with all the announcement that happened yesterday

323. 2:32:09

     with AIA so we are super thrilled to say that as he mentioned multi-chain fast out is coming like we have created everything for the home chain but we want to venture out and partner with other chains so that you have uh data availability fast off and relayer compatible for other chains as well so that you don't have to just do everything in the near chain but also can do in other chains um and and that

324. 2:32:33

     that goes with a team of all the things that we have mentioned we can also offer near as and infrastructure tailgating on the the same thing pitch that I said either you want us to manage we can happy to manage that or self-host yourself uh some of these services that we just um said um again um cannot read it enough so here are the links that you can actually take a picture off and then

325. 2:32:55

     go and and provide us with feedback ask question and reach out to us um in in in addition to what Jim mentioned I want to say that stick around stay H we have da Deep dive coming soon from farad and we also have a multi-chain concept that David wants to share um at the Block zero um hacker hch you stage where he'll also walk you through multi-chain fast off I think that's at 3:00 too yeah it's if we're going to recommend other talks stick around for FR for sure and seeing David at at 3 p.m. is exactly yeah we

326. 2:33:30

     can all go together yeah we're also going to um keep keep looking at the relay stuff in your.org we're going to release uh three or four additional demos that'll actually show you a lot of different permutations on on relayer and how we use that internally so you can go ahead and look at how that's that's working it'll give you a really good uh Head Start awesome with that thank you thank you

327. 2:33:56

     everybody all right all right all right cool so we have a little quick scene change um but before we do that I want to play a quick game for everyone set like sitting down right now can you stay with me for quick sec all right cool so we're going to string we're kind of string together a story here right so we're going to start with me go to you and we'll snake through the rows each

328. 2:34:19

     person has to add another word to the story can we do that all right let's go there we some enthusiasm all right hello just say say anything okay we kind of just we talking all the great things about near so we can go on and on forever with that but uh let's we'll start with the next talk so next up we have rock climbing extraordinaire fat start goz who's going to be talking about near as a data availability layer

329. 2:35:18

     so please welcome fat here hey everyone uh my name is fat I work at pagota as an engineering manager and today I'm going to be talking about something that we've been cooking for a while um data availability layer on near so Ilia kind of explained yesterday what we're doing um on data availability layer for near but I'm going to be doing a little bit more deep dive and then we're going to look into how we do this for etherum rollups um let's see if this is going to

330. 2:35:58

     work this is not working guys oh it does okay yeah so what we going to do today we're going to be looking into what data availability is uh we're going to be looking into what what challenges that we have with data availability we're going to look at what a rollup is um how many people know what a Roll Up is here oh wow okay then I'm going to be quick um I'm not going to go too deep or maybe if you want to go too deep we can

331. 2:36:23

     go there um why da is important for rollups right um we're going to introduce near data availability layer we're going to do component Deep dive and then we're going to look into what's next for the for the data evil layer um what is data availability in the first place um data availability is a principle um um that data that is stored on a network is accessible and retrievable by all Network participants yeah okay um cool that is

332. 2:36:56

     very easy to understand right you just make data available to everybody who's in the network but what is the challenge the challenge is um when you want to scale the network because the problem is that you don't want everybody to verify all the data naively um you want to have some guarantee that the data is available to the participants but not make everybody download and verify all the data all the

333. 2:37:21

     time um but what is how does scaling work in the blockchain space um there are two thoughts on this one of them is what we're doing a new protocol we're doing onchain scaling um but the idea is that not everybody should be verifying old data some of them should be verifying some of it some of them should be verifying the other part um sorry Val validating um and this is how we're trying to solve this at near protocol right we're trying to do

334. 2:37:51

     this by sharding which is an own chain scaling solution how ethereum is trying to do this um is kind of different again same idea some parts should do some some some some part should be should be doing the other part um and it's called offchain scaling there's multiple offchain scaling types so to say um but we're going to look into rollups today right because right now that is the one

335. 2:38:15

     that is kind of um picking up what is a rollup um in ethereum World currently um what they're trying to do is instead of having a monolithic blockchain they're trying to have a modular stack right where an execu there's an execution layer there's a settlement layer and there's a consensus on data availability layer um what they're trying to do is they trying to take the computation out right the execution out of rest of the

336. 2:38:46

     stack put it in a very let's say a super node or a bunch of super nodes do the calculation roll up the transactions put them in a bundle um compress them and put it back onto an L1 which actually scales pretty good right because you you don't have to um not all network has to do all computation but then there's a problem how do we know that the computation that has been done on the on the the super

337. 2:39:16

     node is actually correct how do you prove to the N to the rest of the participants that your state transition is correct let's go um so right now there's two ways of doing this and some subclasses of it um but first one is optimistic rollups right so you have to the idea is that these these supernes optimistically um produce these State changes and state change commitments and then put it on an L1 and then just they keep doing it and they wait for a

338. 2:39:57

     certain amount of time where if somebody who also has a stake in that Network comes and says wait a minute there's a problem here's my proof which is called the fra proof and then the chain rolls back the L2 chain rolls back that is why it's called optimistic rollups and for ZK um the proof is done on every execution and it is called a validity proof I am not going to go into detail on ZK on technology I just called it cryptographic magic um but at the end of

339. 2:40:30

     the day every execution comes with a cryptographic proof that the execution was correctly done how does that relate to data availability um so we said that you have to somehow trustly verify the correctness of the computation performed offchain right but how do you how do you create the fraud proof in the first place there's a state a and then you want to go to the state B there's an execution between which is done through

340. 2:41:01

     transactions so you have to have access to those transactions in the first place to say wait a minute there's actually a problem with these State changes and that data has to live somewhere and it cannot really live live with the the the party that does the execution because what if they just don't respond what if they just go away right you want to be able to continue that chain and keep the state somewhere for the ZK you don't really

341. 2:41:31

     need to transactions but how do where do you check your balance for example it has to live somewhere um and that is where the data availability layer comes into play so what you could do is you can just since you're already putting your transaction state commitments onto ethereum you can just put it on ethereum which is fine and it has a high security but at what cost ethereum is currently

342. 2:41:55

     and without without um prot sharding or D sharding it is quite expensive to post this data directly on ethereum so what did we do then um we said hey near protocol is has very cheap storage has cheap um transaction processing why don't we just create a contract and then let these l2s put their data their state or their state diffs or their transactions whatever they want to put it's just a bite array

343. 2:42:26

     at the end of the day directly on near protocol and provide them with a light client where they can say like hey this is the transaction did it actually get inside the is it actually in the chain which is what we call inclusion proofs and then we created a really minimal RPC client for Russ R and non rust interactions so right now we have it we tested with go and rust um and that is pretty much it actually so if you look at this graph you can see that there's

344. 2:42:57

     ethereum the roll up deres blocks executes transactions and post commitments on near through near da we put it on a contract there's a light client and then the fisherman which is fishing for frauds right to create fraud crofs um is asking the light client is this is is this in is this in is this in and at the end of the day can go back to ethereum and for the settlement and say like hey I found a I found a fraud and that is what we buildt the the blue parts that you see is what we've

345. 2:43:31

     been working on for the for a couple of couple of while now couple of months and we're very excited it is live by the way right now I will give you the the get up link at the end if if anybody wants to check check out feel free to check it out why would you build on near why would you build on near da layer um well it's very very cheap right it's for now we also found a optimization it's now it's 8,000 times cheaper than posting on eth um we're

346. 2:44:04

     going to be working on it to optimize it more we but something that is really important we already have a bootstrap Network that is has a 100% up time for the more than a year three years what year three years now um which kind of says that it is you can trust it a the the the security of network is already running and working the validators are already up and running so the bootstrap um of the network has already been done we already created a lightweight da client that is easy to

347. 2:44:35

     run um lowcost running and we have fast final finality on state data so this is really exciting for us um what's going to happen next right we already released this as open source you can go and check it out you can if you want you can integrate your own rollups to work with near da um IL announced on Partnerships we're working on more Partnerships coming up um from a tech standpoint what are we going to do next um we're going to be working on data availability sampling which is really important to um to even get the cost

348. 2:45:08

     down further and uh introduce data redundancies on near we're going to be working on we're we're working on 2D Erasure coding um for the for the data redundancies we want to improve the commitments we looking into kzg commitments which is going to be getting us closer to um ethereum we want to lower the barrier to entry we want to create room to uh sorry room to create economies around this um Das clients um we want to create non

349. 2:45:45

     interactivity with um eraser code commitments you saw that there's a fisherman we just want to get rid of it it's just an additional actor we with kg commitments we don't have to do this anymore um we want to we want to have room for more optimizations with multi proofs um sampling individual cord wordss and something that we want to also investigate and we're investigating with IG layer is double core AVS um which means that the security will not

350. 2:46:12

     be only on near protocol validators but also ethereum resters on these Services which which is a combined security at the end of the day and obstruction of data will be a slash offense in this um in this Paradigm where basically nodes if they lie and they give you the data um they will be slashed we are very excited um to launch this new product and please go and check out um if you want to take a look at

351. 2:46:44

     what we've done we've done already a couple of um interesting Integrations um polygon cdk and op stack Bedrock we're working on multiple more and yeah I'm very very excited to share this with you and thank you fantastic talk for thank you so much uh we have a quick 15 minute break so if you need to stretch out a little bit grab some food grab some water whatever please feel free to do that and we'll be back here at 2:30 thank

352. 2:47:30

     you please welcome back near foundations William rer hey hey how's it going everyone welcome back to some of the afternoon sessions for the layer 2 stage as the voice of God said my name is will renell a member of the BD team at the near foundation for the first talk this afternoon we're going to have Bowen Wang from pagot who's going to be talking about the evolution of near protocol design so coming to you from San Francisco please welcome

353. 2:48:09

     Bowen hey how's your doing good cool um so as we introducing B from Pagoda and today I want to talk about the evolution of the ne protocol in the past several years and um where we're heading towards next uh it' be ideal if this works okay um so as you probably have heard of uh we started with n shade and this is the white paper that we published in 2019 and uh it details a design for completely Ed blockchain uh so both transaction processing and state are

354. 2:48:48

     fully shed which at the time uh was not something that people take for granted uh and one of the key Innovations of night sh is that it only maintains one chain uh each sh does not maintain its own separate on sh chain and this allows us to get around some of the very difficult problem uh like the atomistic failure of cross chain transactions and another key feature of n shade is that the um execution is enti asynchronous um no matter whether two contracts live on the same Shard or they

355. 2:49:20

     live on different shards if you want to do a cross contract call between those two contracts uh the execution is always going to be asynchronous and the security of nitrate relies on fraud proofs so the assumption is that uh there is at least one non fisherman tracking uh Every Single Shard so that even if entire Shard is corrupted uh meaning that's controlled by uh malicious validators uh it is possible for the system to recover

356. 2:49:45

     because fisherman can submit a fraud proof so that once the fraud proof is verified uh the state would roll back so despite all the Innovations and simplifications in design n shade is still a very complex protocol to implement uh so Alex and I came up with this four-phase approach to to actually get to n shate uh in Phase zero we launch mainnet uh with with one Shard even though uh the all the code is written for uh many different shs and in

357. 2:50:17

     phase one uh which we launched last year we introduced chunk only producers uh which adds some shorty processing to the network uh and according to the road map the next stage would be full Nate uh essentially implements with the original white paper um envisioned and it is a system where no validator would have to track our Shard so the entire system is fully shorted and after that uh the plan was to have this enhancement where the system dynamically uh adjust based on

358. 2:50:46

     the load it would change U increase number of shards when there more load and would decrease number of Shard When there's less load on the network so in the past several years of developing and evolving the road map uh what we realize is that um nit is a very elegant design but in practice there's just a big problem which is uh fraud proofs so not only fraud proofs are quite difficult to implement um because essentially to have a way to uh stly verify that uh the invol state

359. 2:51:19

     transition has happened um but also uh it is actually quite dramatic change to the network because when fraud proofs are verified we not only need to roll back the state of one Shard but actually the state of state of all shards need to be rolled back simultaneously uh this is because otherwise someone can corrupt one shart mean 1 billion tokens send to another Shard and even if you roll back still with that Shard at the moment uh

360. 2:51:43

     it doesn't solve the problem because the 1 billion uh token that are invaded minted already Live on another Shard so the state of all shards have to be rolled back at the same time and this can actually happen at any time right it can happen when the EPO switch when the Viator set change when there's rearing or like when there's congestion on the network and there's like lot of corner cases to be accounted for and what makes things worse is that this mechanism is

361. 2:52:06

     almost never expected to be triggering practice because as far as I'm concerned uh there there has been no uh attack the proof of State word where an invis state transation has actually happened on the network due to malicious activities and um this makes it very difficult to test this mechanism works correctly and the problem is that if this mechanism does does not work correctly it can actually accidentally

362. 2:52:31

     slash people uh due to bugs under normal operation and that uh is actually quite uh difficult to deal with so we ask ourselves the question is there an alternative and um there is so that's where status validation comes in so this is a different design where the system has two type of validator uh there is status validators who essentially receive the uh the chunks and also the state witness that are required to be able to verify

363. 2:53:03

     the execution of those chunks and there is a separate set of validators called chunk proposers uh essentially they're responsible for producing the trunks keeping track of the state locally produced they witness and distribute them to the rest of the network so the obvious question is like well how does this help uh so basically there are two important things with status validation uh one is that um when

364. 2:53:28

     you sample a uh subset of validators for A Single Shard from the entire validator set um if there are a lot of validators the probability of A Shard getting corrupted can be made extremely small and the probability sh getting corrupted meaning that uh it's controlled by majority of of malous validators and also the validators will actually shuffled on every single block so essentially the rotation happens on

365. 2:53:51

     every single block and because of that there is no way to adapt to corrupt the validators for given shart because um you don't actually know who are The validators Who Going to validate for the next block because the shuffling actually relies on the randomness Beacon that you cannot bias and as a result the system is um probabilistically secure and with extremely high prob uh so roughly in practice means something like on the order of once every thousand years or once every 2,000 years the valid rotation the fail uh and

366. 2:54:24

     so in practice that can be considered secure and this allow us to uh essentially get rid of the fraud proof that that is U the most difficult thing to implement in the N design but that's not the only major benefit there actually at least two other major benefits of the status validation design uh so one of them is that the ca of operating Val is going to go down significantly because they don't actually need to track the state of sh

367. 2:54:49

     locally and as a result they can operate much cheaper hardware and because of that uh it potentially leads to more decentralization and more Val drawing the system uh another thing is that because only a few validators in the system needs to operate more expensive Hardware we can actually make it such that the state of the uh A Shard can be entirely H in memory and this would improve the the speed the performance of

368. 2:55:12

     single sh dramatically because today we know that uh performance Boton deck is mostly on state read and right and those vators don't even need to operate super expensive Hardware either and this is because we're charting so we can essentially say that the uh state of each Single Shard is limited to say 50 gabt and if you do that then ideally it should be able to fit into a 64 GB Ram

369. 2:55:35

     machine uh which isn't really that expensive either so the team has already begun working on this new design a few months ago uh and we expect the engineering work to finish by the end of this year uh and actually release to main that in q1 2024 so it is worth highlighting that this design or like what we're implementing now actually completes the phase two of sharting go where uh Nova editors need to track all shards uh despite it being a different design it does achieve what the uh the vision of

370. 2:56:07

     the night shap paper um say and we plan to have more optimizations in the future uh since like reducing the size of C witness uh improve network communication uh improve the reward structure and so on so forth so in our pursuit of Excellence we never fail to ask ourselves a question of whether we can do better uh and in the status validation design um there is a essentially a different uh difficult problem which is that um the state witness uh it actually consists of the state touched during the execution

371. 2:56:41

     alongside with some mer proof that the the state actually belongs to the correct State as dictated by the state route um and uh the size of the state witness could be a concern especially when the network is under high load so that stay touch during the excusion could be a lot and we're asking ourselves the question well is there a way we can get around that problem or at least uh mitigate it that's where star side comes in and

372. 2:57:07

     before I talk about what star side actually is I want to take a quick detour and talk about zero knowledge proofs uh one of the hardest Topic in blockchain today um I won't actually go into too much detail on how exactly zero knowledge Pro Works U and only give a high level overview of what it can do and what can enable so essentially for an arbitrary computation P you can generate a Zer nled proof to prove that

373. 2:57:31

     the computation is done correctly and the proof is succinct meaning that the verification time is poly logarithmic in the computation itself and depending on the construction it can also be constant time uh meaning the verification is extremely fast um and also it hases input so that um the verifier doesn't necessarily need to know the input to the computation so for the for this presentation we'll mostly uh focus on the part that uh uh the succinctness

374. 2:57:59

     part mean that the ver verification is extremely cheap um and because of those properties uh Z not proof g r a lot of interesting possibilities uh they're very small very cheap to verify and verification of the proof is highly paraliz because uh verification of each proof is status you just verify the proof itself and you can verify like 10 proes at the same same time and why is this important so if we

375. 2:58:24

     think about uh what blockchains do one of the most important thing blockchains do is that they reach consensus on what the state is uh no matter where the blockchain is started um it's one of its main task is to actually agree on the state and today uh most broad chains do that um by verifying the computation uh so so what that means is that let's say some node does computation let's say it produces block uh it does a computation

376. 2:58:49

     and it gets a new state rout and all the other nodes in the network um assuming let's say there's one Shard then all the other nodes in the network needs to redo the same computation to verify that computation is done correctly and that is actually a lot of overhead um so let's say you have 100 100 V essentially just like 100x computation overhead uh and the proof actually breaks away from

377. 2:59:13

     that kind of Paradigm uh and it only adds a little bit of overhead because each verification is extremely cheap uh so on top of the original computation being down the overall uh overhead is quite minimum uh if we exclude um the proof generation time so what does this proof actually do so roughly it states that um there exists some chunk whose execution leads to the new State Route um and this proof has three parts

378. 2:59:44

     uh the first part is that this proof that shows that there exists some chunk that would hash to the to the given hash so the the the given hash is um a public input to the comput to the Z knowledge proof so basically both um Prov and verifire knows about it and also has a prove that proves that the state use during the execution is correct meaning that it belongs to the uh correct state

379. 3:00:07

     is dictated by some State Route and finally it has this um most complex part that shows the uh the rtime execution is correct um and this essentially is a circuit that encodes entire uh near roundtime logic um so it's not not only just things like um transaction execution um of transfers and or like simple things like this but also include the smart contract execution and because near use web

380. 3:00:34

     assembly is a wrong time um it also proves the web assembly execution is part of this proof and um as you have probably have heard yesterday this is is the theam initiative that we're working on with the polygon team so despite all the magical properties of zero knowledge proof uh they're not with problems so one of the biggest problem with zero knowledge proof today is that U proof generation is quite slow uh so the most

381. 3:01:03

     performance uh DK system today has a Slowdown factor of roughly 10,000x uh meaning that it takes 10,000x uh more time to generate the proof compared to the native execution itself uh and that number is going down uh pretty dramatically over the past several years and we do expect that number to go down dramatically over the next several years as well due to Innovations both on the proving system and on the engineering side uh however there's still a problem

382. 3:01:33

     let's say the overhead gets uh down to 100x meaning that the approv generation time is 100x execution time we still cannot integrate into the protocol as is and that is because near is designed to have fast finality very low block time and and blocks produce very fast it's not designed for this um system where there is 100x overhead between uh consensus and execution that is what motivated us to design star site uh a zentric sharting

383. 3:02:05

     model so roughly what this says is that uh consensus would run separately from execution and only agrees on the transaction to be included in block and the people who execute uh the block the chunks uh let's say we still call them chunk proposers um they would execute the the chunks and generate the proof for um the state transition and once the proof generation is complete um the proof would get committed back into the blockchain and get validated through consensus and those proes attest um to

384. 3:02:38

     boast the the new state rout as claimed by the chunk proposers as well as the new uh outgoing State rout uh so that there can be cross Shard communication um and with techniques like proof compression or proof recursion this design can actually scale to quite a large number of shards even if we just put the proof directly in the block uh so in terms of scalability uh we see that uh uh star side is as good

385. 3:03:02

     as n shade so this is kind of an illustration of uh what I mean by consensus running separately from execution uh so as you can see uh this is showing that exclusion of one shart uh it's not necessarily the case that there is a new state Ro update after every single block it could be that um uh whoever does the execution um execute several blocks together because it's run always running

386. 3:03:26

     behind uh consensus so it always has something to execute at some point once it generates the zero knowledge Pro it will commit the zero knowledge Pro back into the uh the consens the the blockchain so the there are two major advantage of the staright design one is said the design extremely simple um except the Vicky part so there's no validated rotation there's no fra proof or state R pack that's that is one of the main difficulty in the nitrate design and because the new state rout

387. 3:03:56

     are essentially automatically committed back to the blockchain meaning that they are either immediately accepted through consensus because all the validators would validated knowledge Pro or they're immediately rejected as invalid uh this is this simplifies a lot of the design challenges we had uh in nitrate or um similarly in the St validation design and the design is also very versatile it

388. 3:04:18

     doesn't dictate how the chunk of proposers should package transactions um they can potentially even be shared across multiple different shards and so on so forth and more importantly doesn't really dictate what how the wrong time should actually work for each chart as long as zero knowledge proof can be generated for the state transition and this gave rise to a lot of interesting possibilities so for example we can have multiple execution

389. 3:04:41

     environment within the same network potentially we can have wasum evm move or some other custom virtual machines and it's also possible to conceive a future where we have both synchronous execution and asynchronous execution within the same network so for example we can have wasm execution environment similar to what near has today with async execution and evm with synchronous execution so this is kind of a

390. 3:05:06

     comparison between nitrate and staright um and in um in terms of SEC security actually relies on system having hon fisherman and star side does not rely on any additional security um other than the bft uh bft assumption and they both have very high skill ability and star side has much higher decentralization Factor because verifying the state transation is extremely cheap can even

391. 3:05:31

     do that in the browser uh and even though star side somewhat sacrifice onchain finality as we see in practics that's not that big of a concern because uh the rpcs can actually as long as they have the transactions they can execute them and provide this kind of optimistic State finality and for people who want more kind of security from the chain itself uh they can get it when the zero knowledge proof is committed back to

392. 3:05:55

     chain and assuming on 100x Z down factor it's like one to two minute delay which um in the grand scheme of s uh is considered to be acceptable and uh in terms of execution environment today the NIT design relies on web assembly and in store side is pretty much any execution environment that can be proved uh in the cas so in um in since the main launch in 2020 we've had 34 protocol upgrades and

393. 3:06:26

     uh we're constantly searching for uh ways to improve the protocol exploring different frontiers of the blockchain research and try to improve the usability scalability and decentralization of the ne protocol and star side is just one of those effort to explore uh the next stage of evolution for for the near protocol and we are working on a white paper that uh documents the details of the star side

394. 3:06:50

     design I hope to publish that that somewhere in early 2024 so stay tuned for that and that's it thanks thank you Bowen for that great talk uh very very technical and we got another great one for you coming up but first everyone's favorite token at the conference Encon please scan the QR code claim some more a lot of the merch has been selling out fast so highly highly recommend you get some more of this so you can get some more

395. 3:07:42

     merch yeah that's that's the che code right here that one doesn't work all right all right all right great job claiming all the nearon or Encon token even our next speaker is working on claiming some so he can maybe

396. 3:08:48

     get some more merch later so our next speaker is going to be Robert zaremba coming to us from Switzerland he's going to be talking about redefining online trust with soulbound tokens and as always fun fact about Robert he owns Six racing bikes and he said he only thinks about work when he's riding them sometimes so please welcome Robert Zera uh hello everyone so I'm going to talk about uh Humanity about souls about how

397. 3:09:24

     we can construct how we can create new foundations for creating new social constructs so let's go um so I already got a little bit of intro but from a technical perspective I um I'm an architect at the NDC Tech work group I'm part of the contract standards work group um yeah created few uh major standards like the fible token standard recently the uh SBT standard and also working on the multiple multiple token multi fungible token standard I'm also a researcher and developer at Cosmos

398. 3:09:57

     lecturing at uh University of Geneva and yeah my interest is in general social economical protocols so guys I guess uh you know it uh and it's boring right it looks bored uh but a lot of people care about it uh for better or worse uh makes lot of money and if you miss it then uh you may look like the woman on the left if you didn't miss it you feel like a boss um and those were about nfts and uh many

399. 3:10:34

     people can think that uh the Soul Bond token can be represented as an as an nft and this is what I want to talk about so uh an SBT is a token is non fible is non transferable but um about the B we talk later and there is a bound so um as like uh picture if you want to draw it you can think about it that um those tokens Can represent something so let's say if you worked a reward um a fact of your life something that is really Bound to You and

400. 3:11:14

     describes you so um nft if you can in my definition if I think about nft I think about a subject so NF can be a car nft can be an image nft can be a bottle of a wine um SBT on the other hand hand will Define a subject so it can be a certificate about me um it can be um my identity um uh a reput ation it can represent a a social right for governance or a membership and um from like this

401. 3:11:52

     abstract perspective yes you can think that uh they don't compete between each other yes so SBT can describe nft if you think that nft is a subject and um sbts Define the subject then uh we can link them together uh works not doesn't work okay um and in here we like to innovate okay correct uh we innovated with the fible tokens uh we uh we did again with events uh meta transactions so the account model uh and the uh delegation actions those are very

402. 3:12:29

     interesting things so um definitely like the concept of SBT come from the ethereum but uh it doesn't mean that we need to copy it and uh we didn't um we did better so uh if you want to have your digital identity and you want to think about it that uh it will be this non- transferable but if you think about it from the nft category yes then uh you may look like this um Soul right so uh you have a

403. 3:13:02

     human you have a subject and a Sol is which will describe it um people for example yes like in the mountain will tell you yes tell me what did you climb in a I will tell you how good are you um so tell me what what did you do tell me uh what are your certificates this is how it describes you um uh so can you transfer it can you transfer your abilities well not really uh can you can you put the abilities to something which doesn't have a soul um

404. 3:13:33

     again right it's like depending how do we how do we model it so uh our model here is like really different um we um will go talk about it later uh we really Define a soul as a set of abilities so talking about that non transferability um transferability in fact is very important um like if you come from the let's say original ethereum idea about like the account model and the near account model yes we have a clear

405. 3:14:05

     separation between um authorization level or authentication level and and an address and an identity yeah so um as an identity I should be able to have many authentication um ways uh I should plug authentication same thing is for the transferability for the soul right if the soul I mean if in a blockchain we think about an account that can U represent me right and it will build up

406. 3:14:36

     that soul I should be able to somehow merge migrate or recover the soul if if the account itself requires uh to be merged recovered or renewed for whatever reason yes for example because it was compromised uh your key is lost and and so on if you lose your passport yes it doesn't know that doesn't mean that your your identity is lost you're still there so uh building up this protocol we need to think about this um this problems and

407. 3:15:07

     we need to solve them and on the other hand um there are problems that uh can be I mean can kick us back um and uh be used by an attacker so there is a a whole Vector of a Cil attacks when this transferability could be used against the principle so we don't want that the this abilities will be traded yeah so let's say if you have your character in a game that you don't want that ability of a character will

408. 3:15:39

     bet trade to another character or duplicated um so in eand yes there was there is this whole uh ERC you also model about um I forgot the name but you have nft and the nft can host other nfts um I think a better way to model it would be again with this sbts here but we need to have economic model to prevent different actions and at the same time have the recoverability and the N transferability so um we cannot at we

409. 3:16:12

     cannot overwrite um body without the soul is that so once you transfer something the account the source account is blocked um so those are the the economics model we um we built uh in the uh SBT standard uh so whenever you you move the soul to another account yes the The Source account will be blacklisted blocked forever um uh when the source account and a destination account already has an SBT

410. 3:16:44

     and there is a conflict between them then you cannot do a transfer um so um you cannot overwrite of course because um the protocol doesn't understand which one is the more accurate one uh however every person can burn any of his sbts um uh there is also like economical motivation why someone should burn his SBT well if you don't want it for whatever reason uh even though I mean the trace on the blockchain will be there of course but um you have a right

411. 3:17:17

     yes how how you want to let's say get rid of maybe some abilities um so those uh economical uh requirements draw us to this design choices so with when you think again with nft you have like each nft will be a contract and each that contract will have its own balance book um this doesn't work with the required ments we have now because um of the transferability so you want to be like really Atomic I didn't mention it before but the clear solution here is

412. 3:17:51

     that when you transfer a soul you you need to transfer it completely you cannot like say take a part of of soul from account and then transfer it to account a and another part to account B that's not how it should work um so all the operations must be Atomic and in the world like we have in the blockchain when there is a block limit transaction limit and when you have many abilities

413. 3:18:14

     this can go out of the way so um we we had to do some more um um critical decisions in how how this works so we separated the balance book there is only one balance book for all sbts this is what we call registry registry is more like a public good so um today the I am human registry is still permissioned meaning that if you want to issue tokens um in the IM human registry you uh you have to be WID

414. 3:18:46

     listed this is not what we want um in general but we still keep it so far so we have more abilities to um adapt quicker um without creating a break I mean um breaks with other protocols we we don't know so at least we know if if you want to let's say break an API uh change something we have a we know with who we want to talk and get the feedback um so um that called that decision worked we got few breaking changes uh for a better

415. 3:19:22

     um that also draw like a new extensions I will talk about them soon so yeah so so the principle is that you have contracts which will represent the SBT but the the tokens will be recorded in that common registry um and then you have a user and then the user can talk about the the issue the metadata about the issuer in the class um directly to the to the issuer contracts with the SBT but if they want to talk query tokens then they

416. 3:19:51

     then the query registry so the the flow is rather simple here like once you understand that there is this difference between issuer issuer contract and registry uh then uh if Alise wants to get the token uh she may request it from issuer so think about it that this is a a dow or um or a Congress or someone from a class from um from a group uh so that issue where will mint a token by um uh calling

417. 3:20:23

     the the the issuer contract the issuer contract will do a call to the registry requesting the uh the balance book update registry emits the event so indexers can pop up and the information is I mean we assure the Integrity of the information between the whole ecosystems and tools uh the registry will return the uh the token ID and the token ID is returned back to Alys um classes so uh normally you can think that

418. 3:21:00

     um you have a token and then you have a token ID and that's it right um why classes so one issuer may have um different categories different kinds of the tokens they want to they want to create so let's say inare is your University a class can represent a year and a and a diploma right so let's say if you're major major in computer science um graduating 2010 and will be class one graduating 2011 Class 2 uh if you are major in uh in history yes there will be another class so you don't need

419. 3:21:39

     to create a new issuer for every um a category of sbts uh it's often better to do it with classes um and our use case for example with fractal is that we have one issue or fractal and there is a class for a facee verification there is a class for kyc verification there could be a class for um other verifications um okay so I mentioned about few extensions so um I hope now the concept of SBT and registry works now but I am human is special because it's really targeted to um provide more

420. 3:22:20

     description related to proof of humanity proof of personhood so for example um you want to Mint your token to an account let's say a membership account uh the token will represent a membership in a group and you only want to Min to an account which is already validated as a human and if you want to do it automatically we Prov provide a function to that yeah so you don't need to do a

421. 3:22:44

     check between an indexer or or or with a registry there's a shortcut to do it of course burn like I mentioned burn all so a user can burn all of his tokens if he wants uh is human call um so um if you remember uh in the fible tokens yes we have um transfer call so this is something similar uh if I am a human if I'm calling the contract as a human the the contract will authorize me and let

422. 3:23:16

     um the the downstream contract know that it's called by a human by me right so um it's it's again it's kind of a shortcut so um you want to is very useful for all the protocols like uh for example easy pool pulling that you want to assure that a transaction is originated by a human uh is human call lock it's a new extension we added two weeks ago it allows you to uh lock for transferability so um the perfect example is voting body in a

423. 3:23:50

     governance um when you um when you vote if there's a period of time you want to vote let's say a week and a common attack Vector would be that okay I vote with one account and then I do a soul transfer so I move my soul to another account and now there is a new account and I want to vote with that new account um the original idea how we wanted to prevent that was recording the

424. 3:24:12

     proof of humanity so the so the tokens right the soul tokens which represents the humanity um that created a lot of opacity lot of um implementation details that was going to the um to the user to the I mean to the developer to the user of the protocol which was not necessary and buy prone so that's why we increment uh we created that lock it's a user who is like uh locking agreeing to lock his account uh lock his soul in the account to do an

425. 3:24:46

     action which which has a span in a time so um a governance is the perfect example and there is this loog duration so let's say a protocol who is requesting that should set the loog duration like the the minimum that is necessary is to prevent double vote double spend and so on so let's say if we are in the voting the Voting is seven days but we are already in the fifth day of voting then the loog duration should

426. 3:25:10

     be set at 5 days if there is already an existing lock longer than the one we request then we always take the maximum so we we don't overwrite we we always take the maximum so if there's another protocol which depends on the lock um uh there won't be an issue or or a collision between the data they want to um uh acquire and queries so you can check if an account is a human uh flagging a flagging is I would say uh a feature

427. 3:25:42

     that um yes many people may dab about um so against extension it's not part of the core protocol and we are still like thinking how what will be the next version how we we want to evolve with this design but it's meant for a governance so for example um uh the Council of I am human can flag some other account that let's say it violated um some um a poliy yes and let's say prevent him for

428. 3:26:14

     participating in elections in certain elections um so in voting body we released voting body for NDC a week ago uh the beginning of this week yes there is a go ban the go ban only banss a user um or asks the ban to the user to not be able to uh participate in elections he can vote he can execute his human rights but he cannot be an active participant uh of the execution body of course this is up to the the protocol I mean the the

429. 3:26:47

     users to see if they want to use it or not right so if the uh NDC V2 decides okay we don't we don't want to care about the flag is their choice the flags are there the commission is to uh manage those flags can um can be uh can be managed in fact by by by the voting body itself um but I think a tool that uh other protocols can build on I'm a little bit out of time I want to quickly

430. 3:27:16

     talk about the Digital Society um so like the Digital Society or uh Dao is like the Richer movement for pluralistic ecosystem right so there is like no one environment uh like today you think that there's an environment um by your neighborhood country culture right with Digital Society you have circles those like you can be in man different C it's like in a little bit like in real life yes you have your uh your work uh Circle you have your let's say Family Circle

431. 3:27:49

     Hobby and so on um those can determine um different social levels different social interactions different abilities you may want to do and representing it with a Soul band tokens is is really good idea um because our society is really not about uh uh the digital life but but the real life and uh how we can link it together how we can assure that there are protocols basically to provide all these different features I think it's very important so

432. 3:28:21

     there is this uh idea called sociocracy you can think about as a democracy uh 3.0 uh basically the the main issue with the the democracy is that um it's not very efficient right because it's large um if you want to make a decision you know big group of people uh good luck uh it's already very hard to do a referendum um and on the other hand like if you have hierarchical um oh I'm super sorry I'm

433. 3:28:54

     finishing so if you have like a hierarchical decision making the hierarchical uh governance system yes then many people will disagree with that right because it's stop down rather than um um egalitarian so sociocracy is like this circles idea that uh we have consensus and we go beyond the consensus with um Unity uh discussions organizations double linking so the circles are not disconnected there is always a linkage

434. 3:29:27

     so common people who are between the circles uh to assure that there is a inform quality flow information flow and so on um okay so that's the last and uh yeah I think you can make a photo of it and then look at it later but the idea is really that uh we want to assure uh efficient flows between decision- making people and um uh and social movements thank you sorry thank you that was a great talk great great talk um again real quick if y'all would like to claim some more Enon

435. 3:30:17

     please please scan the QR code but stay in your seats while doing it um we don't want people rushing up blocking the blocking the code so please if y'all can just stay in your seats for it actually I'm going to claim some myself so just curious curious for the audience uh what was the what's the coolest thing you have claim so far with your ncon tokens t-shirt or hoodie oh the black hoodie that's nice what was up the tum wallets yeah

436. 3:31:18

     that was all right everyone please make your way back to your seats for our next talk so common question that uh we sometimes get from the BD team is who maintained some of the near Dev tooling well thankfully we have Vlad here to give a quick presentation on how they do it and who does it so please welcome from Ukraine and also a uh quick fun fact about Vlad is that he's really healthy

437. 3:31:57

     he walks 5 kilometers a day so please welcome Vlad happy new con by the way not five but 45 which is a bit of a different but I mean yeah I I'll take it for you know good healthy Mentor uh mck yeah so I'm happy today to be on the stage and I think it's very important to talk about the tools because that is a part of uh our day-to-day developers lives how it makes the you know the technology we experience dayto day is so much joy uh

438. 3:32:38

     so a little bit uh a bit about myself uh I'm Vlad AKA frol you can see me on many channels a lot of people somehow know me I don't know how it happens uh I'm co-founder of Dev Hub I Jo I I think I authored and maintained and or contributed to almost all near tooling uh in um yeah since day one basically uh because I joined near uh in early 20 19 where they just it all just started

439. 3:33:17

     um and yeah the meme is I use Arch by the way and I love near and rust so this is where we start um I often hear a lot of misconceptions about developers and who they are what like uh especially from like those who want to uh bring value but they just don't understand us you know developers uh we are very different and I want like then at certain point I was like okay probably I

440. 3:33:47

     need just to tell people how to understand as developers and that's how I created this uh interactive M map this is the just repres like uh snapshot of it you can follow the link uh I'll help slides uh posted on uh all our devhub channels after the call after the talk uh but I want to walk you through at least a little bit into this uh uh area so well we are all on the same page and we understand because even some developers do not really realize how different some of the groups of

441. 3:34:23

     developers are um so and starting from uh from here uh with up developers on the left in on my diagram these are um developers who are the majority I believe in uh like in developer space they uh build business apps for regular users of the internet uh they value speed of development over correctness uh in a certain sense because they need to shape fast they need to uh please their

442. 3:34:57

     users and this is a uh very fundamental tradeoff um compared to the other type of De developers that I identify as platform developers uh because platform Developers um um they value correctness especially like 100% verifiable correctness or like developer tools experience um that like other developers will use uh over just speed of development per se they just love to you know polish it till very last bit of uh

443. 3:35:36

     beauty of code um they they deliver to develop velers as OPP is as opposed to app developers uh and they usually tend to require more like deep Tech uh understanding of stuff so it's um they I feel like they are uh like just different universes at least in my head and um the in in in between of those there is uh um the platform enablers uh Group which are usually tag gigs uh H or just

444. 3:36:11

     folks who love to leave on The Cutting Edge of Technology uh they love to brag about tech they like we we love it uh and uh the important part of and the role of platform enablers is that they they position they are positioned uniquely because platform developers just inside to you folks if you didn't know they they don't really into onboarding other folks books into their Tech they just love to build their beautiful Cod they

445. 3:36:44

     they think that everybody else will understand it just by reading it that's not the case uh and we need platform enablers to actually tell the world how like that those like uh projects are great how the tech is cool and uh it's devil it's just regular users who are like maybe not even technical but they they just see how like exciting uh the technology how other people are excited about the technology so this is like different types of audiences

446. 3:37:16

     right uh and just examples of those platforms that I want to highlight uh from like what what I see is happening as like also like they Pro productionize the platform enablers uh role a little bit uh J toi I'm sure you've heard about them during this uh nearon already um there is agara app I think you might have not heard about them just yet because I really received all this uh

447. 3:37:48

     like information just yesterday so we are launching we're shipping as we go uh so they created this cool course ondk GS uh and how to use it that's awesome I believe uh and it all started on devhub and this is where I will like connect it just in a bit uh so um one important thing that I want to re reemphasize on like app developers platform neighbors and platform developers is that I personally started as app developer then I joined near as

448. 3:38:23

     platform developer and now I'm mostly I feel like I'm mostly a platform enabler uh so it's not set in stone you you you can shift and as as you like as you wish and navigate the space but uh we we need to understand the needs we need to understand the what what we what we actually um um know about the those folks and what we want what what what they need what what they need and what they can bring to us uh to the as a community and

449. 3:38:58

     uh this is near Dev Hub obviously um being the co-founder I wanted to brag a bit about it but I think I think it's shared space the the important piece is that like it it's not designed to be top down it is designed to be the support for the whole ecosystem so Dev Hub is just a um like shared resource uh and it is uh we talked about it a bit during the Deva panel today that it's

450. 3:39:27

     uh uh it's important to know to to to take ownership of things as a community in order to grow and really shine uh that's what I see among uh many the contributors these days they start to take more ownership and responsibility and just ship uh more and more uh on the daily basis um um and the role of devhub as I see it is to uh provide the scaling uh solutions to the ecosystem um there are a few already running successfully uh platform developers fellowship program

451. 3:40:06

     I'll dive a little bit into it uh later there is tag box that we also covered during the um um panel today which is a template solution basically for those who want to run a hackathon you it's like a franchise you basically uh open the documentation see how to get started and it's it it's it should be as easy as like following a recipe from the internet um you need to be very comfortable at the kitchen you know but uh if you want just to have a a a good

452. 3:40:39

     guidance of how to run a good event uh maybe check out the hackbox uh decentralized developer relationship uh relations uh program is also a new just fresh new launched uh thing that helps to build local communities that are uh facilitating um workshops education and like just local local presence of near system in all over the world so this is about like scale um the specifically

453. 3:41:09

     about the uh fellowship program I want to start with some hard stats so oh well first of all what what is this uh what what what do I mean by near platform to begin with near platform is the uh near core as a blockchain there's Dev tools and to and documentation that are like uh comb uh in combination are representing the the whole near open stack experience that all developers need to have in order to be productive and since June 2023 we just launched

454. 3:41:44

     this program this summer basically we had uh three leaders who led 20 20 plus uh Fellowship uh contributors on the through the dev Hub or even like just as you know out out kind of kind of not necessarily um reporting through the devhub but they were helping people through the Hub facilities to to on board those folks um contribute to 20 projects cut 12 releases and commit and create over a half a thousand um commits

455. 3:42:24

     meaning like feature commits not just like uh small ones and all in all it it was uh the total budget for this whole program was 50k it is growing nowadays and I see it it is scaling uh tremendously but I just wanted to shout out to all these awesome folks uh not all of them um I put on the slide it just like I I selected randomly more or less uh but they contributed a lot to to push and to make these things happen so

456. 3:42:57

     we finally uh created like released bch 1.0 it's big deal because uh like the first release the first table release that we can count on and that like we not going to break any not going to introduce any breaking changes that that is a very good signal to the community that how stable it is that was a like a