Hello everyone and welcome to this space with Brave and Aurora. I will let a few minutes for everyone to join and to let's all host get ready for the
space, obviously stand ready to the start as we start quickly right after we are all ready.
Just a few more minutes, we are still waiting a bit more people. I see some people joining minutes by minutes. So let's let a bit of time to everyone to join.
Okay, I think we could start our blend-down analysis here.
Yes, hi, Brendan is here.
cool, I saw a Lexus thing on the emoji, so I know it's there. By the way, don't forget that you can submit your questions in the space. We will go through it at the end of the space after we go through
through the questions you asked below the post we created previously. Obviously I would like to start by introducing our two speakers of the day. So we got Brendan, who was the CEO of Brave, and we got Alex,
was the CEO of oral labs. Please, Brendan, can you introduce yourself and your project? Yes. Brendan, I see a co-founder, Brave. Brave is a browser that
what's users first, which means privacy by default. It also means in the modern world we live in, it means embracing crypto for direct transmission of not only what you might call money, but also
fan creator support, intent, smart contract calls, anything that helps the user come first in the web instead of being sort of a sheep on the farm, Google runs, and Shorn of Your Wall every spring.
And my name is Alex. I'm a happy user of Brave browser and also the CEO for Aurora Labs, the company that is developing Aurora Protocol, the Ethereum scalability protocol that is running on top of the highly scalable near blockchain.
I got to tell that every Friday, Horizon is using live streams and Alexa has been using Brave to show screen for almost one year. So you got a real user here.
I would like to start with a question to Brandon. What does Brave do differently from other browsers and WebTree wallets as well for the wallet port? Sure. So when you think about browser, the
big browsers are all either directly owned by a big tech company that's dependent on search ads for a lot of its revenue or almost all its revenue in the case of Google or they have some you know like Apple they have some very good hardware business and they need a browser to
to avoid losing the relationship to the user at the software level. So they have hardware but they need software to keep Google from taking over the user relationship. If you look at the crypto wallets, a lot of them are sprouting web views or half-eyed web views for dealing with web-free sites where you can go
So to start doing smart contract operations, they help you format a message and pre-sign it and so on. And you use a hardware wallet to sign and confirm. That's a very low-level approach. Those wallet apps, in my opinion, will never be good browsers.
an old thing now, but it's an immortal category. It has to be full of features to be competitive. You can't just skip some or do a little tab in a coin-based app and have that be a browser. You will not keep the user engaged in using that app for long. They will go back to a big browser
to do most of their digital life online. And we see this, the bigger the screen and the presence of a keyboard, the more the browser is used, Google's search ad business is better on so-called desktop, which really means laptop than on mobile. But mobile matters too. And mobile, you find for
apps including native apps that act like browsers not that have little web use in them. But the more you work on the browser the more you can serve the user and pull them out of these apps. And we've been showing this lately on Twitter where we talk about how instead of running social apps in their native form on your mobile phone,
they actually trap your data and sometimes collude with what I think are illegal in the U.S. law enforcement data gathering operations. You can run the M site for Twitter or the Facebook mobile site in Brave, in an instance that protects you from tracking a deep
And we're also working in our VPN product and possibly beyond to block tracking at the network level in all apps. So there's something wrong with the way the web evolved. It became this sort of hostile environment for users where they were treated just like data subjects. Like I mentioned, like sheep to have their world trimmed.
And brave stands against this we make a combination of browser and wallet. We also have a search engine that's unique. I think Duff that goes has finally desktop browsers, but they're not going to get it to crypto. So I don't see a wallet in the near term on their roadmap. I think if you go forward 10 years, you might
So I mean we succeed or somebody else picks up the torch see wallets and all browsers crypto wallets wallets that have you know virtualized master card and other affordances wallets that have decentralized identity cards in them so you think of the wallet in your pocket that has
ID card and credit cards and cash. We think there should be a wallet in the browser that has crypto, has the keys or has a way to get keys securely without losing them from your hardware and that gives you the ability to control your destiny and not
be just one of these sheep that's very cold in the spring when it's wool is taken. And that's a growing movement globally. So tying the browser and search and wallet together is important to us. And it's something I think bravis unique at. I don't see other browsers stepping up. I don't think Chrome will get around to this. Maybe they'll be the last
to join the party with crypto. I see Mozilla having, being of two minds at best about crypto, there was a lot of, you know, the usual ESG posturing around proof of work, that's fine, but I don't think they're embracing crypto now that, you know, proof of stake is on Ethereum, I just don't see it.
Thank you very much, Randon. And yes, indeed, obviously the actors in Web2 have mixed reactions to the all what's done in Web3 in general. Alex, I would like you to tell us what those are do differently from other EVMs and
change in general as a work company. I mean. So, the overall idea is I believe pretty closely related to what Brennan was saying, but on the level of the protocol, on the level of the blockchain. So our goal is also
to protect users and make sure that their user experience is better. Yes, Aurora is an EVM compatible chain. There are lots of these chains originated either through copy paste and Ethereum code or through similar measures.
There are many of the M's are targeting the problem of the scalability of the theorem, bringing more block space for all of these transactions that are originating. But for Aurora specifically, we do have one particular thing
that is very different from anybody who is working in this market. And now, this is something that would allow us to bridge the gap in between Web 3 and the current market of Web 2. And I'm talking about, can I be interested in technical
a method transactions or the gaseless transactions. And the idea behind it is that the user that is sending the transaction is actually not paying for the execution of this transaction. It is a third party that is paying for the execution of this transaction.
And we do have it on the protocol level. So any transaction that comes into Aurora is a meta-transaction or a GANSless transaction by design, by the way how Aurora operates. And though this highly technical concept that might not be extremely
easy to digest for many. It brings very tangible outcomes out of it and the tangible outcomes are just better user experience, right? The idea that the user in order to get involved with Web 3 and
and enjoy decentralization and privacy and the ability to control their own rights of making decisions about their voting rights, about their financial decisions.
So these things are extremely complicated in Web 3 because of the fact that the technology is new. But what if we can decrease the burden of Web 3 for ordinary people? What if people do not need to buy crypto in order to transact on the blockchain?
What if you can have a wallet, for example, in Brave Browser, and you don't need to do KYC to buy the crypto, then move it to the proper network, and then send your transactions just to be able to
to transact on this blockchain. What if all of the steps can be omitted? What if you can look at your iPhone and actually send the transaction? And actually, you do not need to, this is like an approval mechanism that can be used. And this is pretty nominal for
for web to users at the moment. So this is our goal. This is what we are doing differently. We have the technical capabilities of implementing these and many pieces of this more, kind of better user experience solution is implemented in the product that is called Aurora Plus.
So I encourage everyone who have not yet discovered it, go to Aurora.plus and you will see all of the relevant information. So from my point of view, focus on the user experience, making sure that Web3 is much more accessible for Web2 users. This is something that makes the difference for us.
Thanks a lot, Alex and Brandon, for the very complete presentation, both of you. As our listeners may know, like one month and a half ago, now even close to two months, we announced the partnership within Brave and ORA in the Brave. Let's... you might have...
I've seen a few heads in the Brave browser on that subject. So my next question will be about this partnership between Aurora and Brave. And what is division you have about this partnership? So, Brandon, would you like to go ahead and speak about that?
Yes, we have the Aurora Rainbow Bridge already integrated. Brave Wallet is built into Brave. It's not an extension, so we can have better security and we want Aurora to be in there for EVM bridging and EVM compatible operation scaling.
with near. So we integrated the rainbow bridge already and I'm actually talking to Ilya about and our teams are talking about native near integration as well. But I think Aurora is very important for the reason Alex said that meta transactions take away the complexity and the pain of fees.
to get crypto to a billion users, I think you're going to have to do things very clever things like they've done with the ROR Plus to face the fees and reduce the complexity, to reduce the sort of micro transaction operation and the mechanical overhead of using a crypto wallet today.
to doing something more like what apps made easy on smartphones. So higher level operations where there aren't you know signing burdens and fees to worry about and and oh what's my guess at high enough you know I didn't I didn't put enough in I'll have to try retry the transaction with more gas. So we're very excited about Aurora
as well as near and we're already integrated the rainbow bridge. So I think now it's up to developers, including I think some of us have brave to build on this and to build that higher level of discourse that involves things like meta transactions and decentralized social that I've talked about as well.
Alex, would you like to speak about it? That was an absolutely great overview. The only thing that I would like to add here is that
From my point of view, when great people, or like when you are able to work with greatest people in the space in general in IT, I would say it's not only in the browser space or
in the crypto space, then you can learn from these people and make your products better. So for us, for our lab specifically, this is also an opportunity to learn from the best.
Thank you. By the way, can other one of you tell what is a meta transaction in simple words because I've been asked this one?
So the idea is simple. When you are sending the transaction on the Ethereum network, you need to have a little bit of ease in order to pay for the execution of this transaction. And that's complicated. Imagine if you can sign a message
without having any cryptocurrency pay through other means to some kind of relay or to the service to which you're sending this sign message and then this service is able to actually attach if and form an Ethereum transaction
and send it to the Ethereum blockchain and pay for the execution of this transaction. So this is what meta-transaction is. Removing the necessity of specifically the user who is transaction to pay for the execution of the transaction.
Thank you very much Alex, I always go to bring more clarity to everyone. So I would like to go to the next question which I found interesting because so many projects just like to speak about the long term vision and
But what are your short-term objectives? And considering the partnership between Aurora and Brave is pretty fresh, I think it's also interesting to know what to come, let's say, for the end of the
the year or early next year on each project side. So, Brandon, would you like to go ahead? Yes, I think it's interesting to consider
NFTs as something like membership cards, which we would like to use for Brave Rewards, where we already have a large number of creators, not just website, but YouTubers and other channels. If you go to BraveBat.info, you can explore the creators that have
We like to, you know, mint NFTs inexpensively and make them be the basis for various kinds of direct fan to creator fordances that are already in brave be a bat but could be even more super charred
I'm looking closely at near and Aurora in this context. I think it's important to have the EVM inter operation. Bat started as a native token on Ethereum. It is bridged to many blockchains now.
For instance, through wormhole to a quite a number, but also through the rainbow bridge to near. And this is important for utility. We want to make all crypto useful. We especially want to make the basic attention token useful. So we'll be working to build up its utility through
of Aurora and Nier, and I also like the Aurora Plus idea of a tokenomics based on staking that can share revenue to offset fees by 53 transactions a month, I believe. So these are all of great interest in the next year to us at Brave.
For Aurora we are obviously doubling down on this Aurora Plus vision and making it even better. During the New York on we have been launching like four additional features to Aurora Plus.
And we're just continuing the development of Aurora Plus making sure like the final goal here is that given ability for an existing or a new application that is targeting the web to users to be able to integrate with the blog.
chain with literally zero burden with no necessity of users going through the complicated process, often starting third party applications, doing KOSC, acquiring crypto and stuff like that. That's our main goal.
Thank you Alex. The next question I got is a bit more about the long term thing because one guy was asking, so search before was asking, was the most critical infrastructure or brave is missing.
that which if implemented will take it to the next level. So obviously big changes take time. So we could consider this like what's the long shot here on each side. So Brandon can you go ahead and maybe explain what's
So because you said about one year or two, but here's a long shot. I've been talking about this for at least a year on Twitter. I think we have a problem with the big social tech companies. Big tech has big social, which I would say is
and Twitter and they look like spy operations and psychological warfare platforms to me. They also tend to have all sorts of censorship issues and abuse issues that they don't take care of.
There's a long-term vision that takes some careful building to get to because you can't just say, "Oh, here's my new Twitter, but it's everything's on the blockchain." And so maybe 50,000 people would use it. And as soon as something goes onto the immutable blockchain that you want to remove for
legal or personal or any reasons you can't remove it. So you have this problem with social that I think you need some kind of delegated operation that lets the users decide what they don't want to see without making either a big censorship honey trap out of the
central platforms or putting immutability in so you can't ever remove anything. People do want to remove things, people want to edit things. They wish I had an edit button on my tweets. So could we do something better that uses both fast scale or blockchain and
IPFS or maybe even personal clouds, we all have drop boxes and eye clouds. Could we intermediate and orchestrate this through the browser? This is what the browser was good at in the old days. It would disaggregate information. We started with Netscape, pulling things
together under the unity of interface of the blue link you click on to go to a resource, whether it's through FTP or HTTP. This kind of unity of interface is important because then you can not just access more information and cross boundaries that might become walled gardens walls.
You can also, after disaggregating, you can re-aggregate it to your taste. You can do mashups in the browser. You can do an overlay that puts Twitter together with some new, better social network that might be like social aid on near. I don't know. It's kind of young, but I'm watching it. And if you do this well, you could even
You can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that you can see that#
on another and you'd still have continuity of conversations and historic threads or archived exchanges. And you would have a better user or sovereignty, you'd have the ability to keep your data yourself, you could log your own posts to your own ICloud, that's what I would
They're smaller than the pictures I take all the time. You could stitch things together and publish to your friends. You could put things in IPFS. So this is a pretty ambitious vision. I'm trying to find partners for it because I think Brave alone shouldn't build it. And it also wants a rich multi-layered
to sort of sovereign, self-sovereign identity system because you don't want everybody signing into the global Twitter account system or Facebook account system, you want student-imit and persona and, you know, on linkability when you need it and then if you're building a public reputation of some sort, you can do that through your
real name or through a pseudonym. So it's a big agenda and I think it could really be important for the world for lots of reasons. It could obviously be, I think, commercially important because if you do this right, users are happy. You have private channels to reach them if you're trying to market.
You have things like braze private ads which do not collect data. We do not track. We do not target ads from a server. It's all matched on your device. So the combination of browser and blockchain should not just take on private ads as we've done with brave. It should take on things like social. And that's one of the big ideas I'm interested in.
It's a great division, Brendan. Can I look at a question from my side here? You've been on the New Yorkon. There was a hackathon happening there. I was judging this hackathon.
were several projects that were kind of looking into similar things. So well, first of all, probably maybe you want to explore the connections with these people because they are thinking of the same. But some of them specifically were focusing on the ads. So one of the projects
was the idea behind it was that instead of you and ads which are the good for the for the website owner because this is their revenue stream inside of doing this you can you know just switch them off and do a small stream continuous stream of
money flow to the website creator. So this is one thing and another project was around doing some AI based on the user behavior in case we are identified the user through his wallet that he
connected with the website, right? So we understand he's a crypto identity and through analyzing his blockchain experience and analyzing what he's doing on the blockchain obviously ads can be targeted. So for example, for the NFT Lauer,
you can show NFTs and for the defile-lower, you can show relevant information. So do you think that this is a little bit of a mix in between the Web2 approaches and the Web3 is something that we should do first before
We're going to fool decentralized identity and completely not tracking anything or still you're believing that it's better to take the longer shot and not do this semi-steps. So I'll be clear, I've been through this
I had to think a lot about it before starting Brave and then in the first year of Brave we tried to do a shortcut using a partner, Sonobi which is a header-bitter company that's an ad tech term and we tried to do it in a privacy respectful way but we couldn't get scale against the big tech, big ad tech
players and we couldn't even get participation in the deal. So nobby was running for its clients. It had to do direct sales to ad buyers. So we had the scaling problem that if you are trying to swim in the current web to surveillance capitalist swamp, the swamp creatures that are of size will just squash you. They will
not give you a fair price as an individual for whatever data stream or life log or event log user enter to them because they can get it lots of ways and you aren't that valuable by yourself. So you have a scaling clip to climb that requires getting a lot of users at once and once you have those users, especially if they're
the battery savings which is substantial and the privacy benefits of great shields. They're not going to want to just say, "Oh, I'll turn off my shields and suffer with ads and slowdowns from tracking." Even if you optimize those through better ad tech, there's still a performance hit and the battery hit.
And there's this this arbitrage problem or this this monopoly problem I would say so looking at what's happened in the last you know eight years since starting brave. It's really it's almost eight years. Um so over seven. It's really been difficult to try to start in the Web 2 world small and grow like data
versus Goliath. It's been much better to go toward the web through world. This doesn't mean you have to only appeal to crypto, you know, purest or idealist or maximalist. There's nothing wrong with those folks. But to get average users, you have to do, as you said, things like meta transactions, you have to face the fee and operate at a higher level of discourse than
low-level operations on smart contract systems or sending trans-transmitting assets. So that discovery was a little bit painful for me because I had hoped to get a faster start with Brave, but it was also refreshing. I felt like we were living in the second age of discovery and there's this whole new world out there.
Web tree which is not understood or well defined that we need to go and discover and we need to not tire ourselves to the ancient regime of the old world because that regime is hostile to us. So, you know, Google is a search monopoly and they're in antitrust court in the US at
the federal and several state levels, but this will take a long time to grind toward justice of any kind. And I've been there before with Netscape in USU Microsoft. Netscape was crushed and bought by AOL long before there was any settlement. And Microsoft kind of got
lucky and dodged being broken up. So I think you have to face the rail politic of monopoly surveillance capitalism. I've heard people say, you know, I can, you know, just sell my blockchain history and I won't have any problems. One of the problems you have, and this is certainly known to the chain analysis
You can be figure printed easily on the blockchain. And if you do this, you will not only potentially be in danger in certain parts of the world because you've been identified as some kind of dissident or critic, but you just won't have the economic leverage you need that brave shields gives you by default in brave.
I think privacy, I don't want to jump ahead to a question I see coming. I think privacy is pretty important to scaling up DeFi and DeSoC and all the things we need on Web3 so that you don't end up abused or alluded or just unable to get leverage against the incumbent Web2 powers. Superpowers.
Great thanks thanks for me since I'm going to tweet tweet your I'm going to cite here the ancient regime of the old world is hostile to us for sure for sure 100% they are
Yeah, and just to note that I was reading an article yesterday about the Chinese Yuan and how for the balance account they called the delete the balance as well and obviously they do that by knowing the data that's going on on the chain. Oh, that's one of the dangerous as well. I guess
Alex, would you like to share with us the long-term vision and vision of Porra? That's super simple. The way how we formulate it inside of the company is the fall. We are building the infrastructure for super empowered people.
That's what we are doing. All of these protocols and blockchains, you can think of this as just an internet, right? Well, this is the protocol. And the real products, big products that are capable of
You know, you're 19 people together, they build on top of it. It is not Aurora is a protocol that unites people. Currently Aurora community is just a set of many people who are using different applications that are working on top of Aurora.
But besides that, it's not only the rural protocol. We need to make sure that the RPCs are there and they are reliable. Then the breach is also from one side, it is a product, but in general, it's just the infrastructure to give an ability for people to move their assets around. And similar things.
built in this infrastructure we are willing to give an ability for people to be super empowered which means that they have more power than they have right now. I think it's super slick, very short and quite easy to understand.
Thank you, Alex. Yes, it was indeed pretty. It's interesting. Very good. The next questions are more about the pro oh, we are trying to market to the projects and the economics of the projects. So the first question I got was what kind of marketing
is being done to attract more people to know about either Brave or Aurora. Would you like to go ahead about this, Brandon? Yes, one of the things that we found is that you can get good growth as we've had. Beyond just crypto users
and we still have some folks using, you know, Metamask on Chrome, which we want to switch to Brave. We've also found that you get even users who are aware of the speed and battery and privacy benefits, but they tell their friends and family and maybe they convert their school's lab to Brave.
You reach the limits of that social network subgraph and so I think we've discovered like one in ten US internet users don't know up only one in ten I should say US internet users know about brave nine in ten do not so what we need to do to reach the rest is more like marketing you can you can do after
store and search engine ads, but if people aren't looking for a new browser or a privacy browser or a crypto privacy browser, then they won't find you. And you can do things like billboards, like prints at depth.gov and doing billboards for a while. And that gets your name recognition, gets some people
who otherwise wouldn't know about you thinking maybe I should try that and I should switch. So there's a challenge here in pure outbound marketing to prospective users you won't reach otherwise. And I think this is true of crypto projects too. I think a number of people don't know about Aurora or Near and I, you know,
that the op-on marketing has been improving and near is always had an awesome, I think, developer relations and ecosystem building approach. So more marketing will definitely help and it has to go across various chasms between these disconnected social subgraphs.
The thing that sold brave to me that several years ago I was on the call with somebody and I already wasn't crypto and then the guy was just showing his screen and once he just opened a new tap in the browser I saw there there was some kind of insane amount of trackers and ads blocked and some kind of
band would save and time save and I said well that's cool is there some kind of wallpaper to it or that counts it and then he said no it's just the privacy focus browser and I said oh my god I need to install that and since then I'm using Brape so but I'm you know quite a nerd so maybe
it's not for everybody. That was a good move. We did that early on, BraveStats, and we've evolved them to put a bandwidth save estimator in, but that's really powerful. We used to see Twitter contests where people would post their screen caps based on how long they'd been using Brave, and some people would block millions of trackers. Some people would even only
using Brave a month or so it blocked us, surprisingly, and frighteningly large number. So yeah, that's a great message. We need to pump that one out. We're doing things like battery life saving studies that we did in 2019 and then independent group did around that time where we won on Android. The independent group, Greenspefter did their own study and Brave was just the best
in terms of lowest power use because of the brave shields because we blocked so much JavaScript, my bad millennial child from 1995 that became important to add tech. There's just a lot of signaling that goes on running JavaScript which uses the battery through the
CPU and especially through the radio because it's doing a lot of signaling across what's called the programmatic waterfall of ad tech, calling back and forth to different ad servers and ad tech platform servers. And this ends up running the radio, which is the number two or sometimes number one consumer at the battery.
after the screen. So just these kind of messages like bracelets and the battery savings I think are important to growth. And you know I think I would say for near they've done well with their carbon neutral messaging they've gotten ahead on that one. So I think this message has brought appeal. It's a good way to grow.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I'm with you for a while. We regards to the Aurora market and we see absolutely the similar picture that the brand was saying. Many people just don't know about it and for example I just continuously come
to people asking, "Hey, do you know about Aurora?" Now many are saying that yes they do. And then when I'm asking, do you know about Aurora Plus and the free transactions, which is kind of a very big kind of an important piece of the Aurora
system, I would say. And they say, no, what is this? So yeah, for sure in terms of the presence, in terms of the having the mind share, it is super important to increase this. And yeah.
And here we need to compete with some of the other projects and companies that are heavily focused on the market. That's the thing. The blockchain ecosystem.
is made by tech guys and in general everything is not very good with marketing for tech guys and either you're super brilliant in tech and you're creating insanely highly scalable block
chain but then you are focused on this or you are creating something you put a label that is scalable and then you are marketed everywhere and just please all of the early holders of the token buy the insane growth of the token price.
So, that's kind of, I never seen any project combining these two pieces together, making sure that marketing is also there where the tech is. So, yeah, somehow, somehow we need to develop these competences and dependent products.
Thank you, Alex. Regarding what you said earlier about the Brave Shield, I've been using Brave when I was still working only in Web 2 for advertising in e-commerce. And obviously I was using things like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. all the day. And you can even imagine
I imagine how many numbers that were popping on my shield while I was doing that. That was crazy. Obviously that was a sign out. Let's get to the next question. As I said previously, it will be about the economics. So on Twitter, it was a
about or the project is generating revenues and what's your revenue model. Brandon, would you like to go ahead with that? Sure. So Brave has premium products like VPN or Portland with Guardian, iOS app.
is the name of the Twitter handle. They're actually part of DNS filter now, but the partnership continues. They're very high quality VPN team on security and they also block network level tracking in all apps when the VPN is running. That's on iOS.
And Android were bringing it to desktop too, but that's a premium product and it's kind of an add on people like to get VPN with their browser sometimes opera has one or at least has some kind of offering built in Mozilla finally has something I think partner with Mova that's working the real revenue for us is the private
So basic attention token is a triangular ecosystem with advertisers, users, and creators. And the user comes first so they get 70% of the revenue for the ads. If they opt into rewards, there are both sponsored images which we do 1 in every 4 new tab pages.
users, those are track-relous sort of sponsorship takeovers of the new tab page. Some of them are very well done. It takes quite a bit of artistic collaboration and review to get this right, including with our team, but also the ad buyers, creative folks. Some of them are quite beautiful.
We're starting to get others interested in doing the same. We'd like to make this fully web 3 in a larger world where there are multiple direct sales and automated add exchanges but without the data that is commonly gathered by a survey.
that's tracking you and looting you and sometimes leading to malware or cyber attacks on you. This is a long-term mission. It's not going to happen overnight, but right now Braves Revenue does come from our private ad sales sponsored images as well as from premium products like VPN and Search.
With regard to Aurora, the Rukina decoder me here in between the Aurora Labs as a company that develops Aurora Protocol or is the main developer of the Aurora Protocol and some additional products like Aurora Plus and the Protocol Excel.
So you're talking about the protocol itself and it is governed by the Dow and the token that exists, Aurora, it's the main reason for it to exist is
to actually improve the decentralization of the governance, making sure that any owner of the world are talking is capable of participating in the governance mechanism. And this is done similar to the proof of stake approaches and other blockchains, but this stake is done
not in order to run validators, but the stake in is done inside of the native Aurora stake in mechanism. So this is it. But what Aurora down has is that it has a large treasury of Aurora tokens. And the one thing what
what the word "now" is doing is actually exchanging the stompons into something different or creating an additional leverage for others and being able to get some revenues. So one of the things that is done right now
And obviously the majority of this revenue models are to be executed in the future and many of them to be explored. So one of the things that is done right now is that there is a near blockchain validator that is owned by the world now.
And this validator is getting revenue out of the people's taking through this validator, while it also distributes a small portion of the oral tokens. Literally, we can think of this as a continuous kind of sell of oral tokens to the market and exchanging it into the near-top.
which it's just on the literal representation. So that's these are the ideas behind the protocol. Besides that there are some ideas of additional utilities of this open between beyond the governance. And these are
in the future and the upcoming products that are going to be released. Now, for Aurora Labs specifically, this is kind of a little bit separate. So we are a dev shop. We are mainly focusing on the development, according to the desires of the Aurora down.
And that's why we are funded by the world down, or down, our case starts funding. And we are not putting for us the targets to be an extremely profitable company. We are like developers of the Neoprotocolle, right? Pagoda.
doing their own products but it is not the primarily goal. The primarily goal is to build and make sure that the protocol is robust enough in order to then buy it to create the products that are working on top of this. But Aurora Labs is already
kind of making small baby steps in the direction of generating of revenue. And these are all connected with the Aurora Plus. So the upcoming features in the Aurora Plus are based around the subscriptions to the blockchain, while people
are capable of getting free transactions like forever or like some amount of free transactions. So these are kind of like mobile plans that you're buying from the mobile operators but this is going to be available through Aurora Plus.
And some additional features that are available in the Aurora Plus, for example, like swaps that are now available for a couple of weeks in Aurora Plus. So there is a small fee.
That is taken from each of the swaps and that you go to Aurora Labs. So yeah, some small stamps. But in general, there is no big goal to make Aurora Labs profitable right here right now.
Thank you very much Alex. So I propose to go into something a little bit softer or you can make it a bit softer because the next question was what are you most excited about in the web3 space? What do you believe isn't getting enough attention?
Please, amaze me. Go ahead, Brendan. So I mentioned decentralized social. I think one driver for this will be games. It kind of is games already. People especially want game portability across devices that they want NFT or asset portability, I think.
Ultimately, I know some people in the industry who are building what you might think of as super games that are basically portals. I think of Fortnite with portals to lots of legacy games. And legacy games are still played and enjoyed and legacy could just mean last year.
The common platform I think has emerged, and it's basically because these games are all written in C++ generally, or they're using low-level hardware APIs like OpenGL and Balkan, or more advanced 3D rendering layers.
And similar for audio, the web has provided parallel set of APIs based on those standards, even with Web GPU, we're seeing something more like the Alcon approach, if you know what that is. So I've been interested in this space since pioneering compiled to JavaScript and Mozilla.
and something called AsmJS, which is evolved into WebAssembly. And you're seeing WebAssembly used, of course, in blockchain projects too. So, you know, near is, you know, Rust and WebAssembly and now even JavaScript through the quick JS interpreter for Reese Pro Lards interpreter running in consensus on
on the chain, but WebAssembly is like a low-level portable, you know, bicode or instruction set. And this is, I think, how many games can be stitched together and legacy or popular or, you know, perennially popular games can be kept alive in the metaverse. So what is the metaverse?
If it's anything, it has to involve I think sharing 3D worlds. And that means web3 matters because you want different identities, depending on context, you may want privacy or you may want to be less private or have a public real name or some kind of pseudonym with reputation. You want all your assets
be yours, they shouldn't be owned by the operator of the game environment or the game world. They should be as much as possible portable because there are standards for all these assets that are emerging or that are already prevailed and they should be secured through blockchain so that you actually do own them without requiring trust
third party. So, you know, I think Web 3 really will mean shared game world metaverse, you know, not quite Ready Player 1, but you can sort of see how it's heading that direction. And that's, I think, inevitable. And if it's done right with privacy and user first design principles, I think it'll be awesome.
So I have quite a biased opinion on this and it's going to get a little bit political here. I'm Ukrainian and Ilya is Ukrainian also the founder of Nier for a call. So obviously
Obviously, the previous half of the year was extremely hard for us because we have lots of friends based in Ukraine. But for my point of view, the reason why this actually happened, and the reason why the
blockchain vertical resonates a lot with the Eastern Europeans is because of the insane manipulation of the government with what actually people want. So I'm talking
about the massive speculations on the elections and stuff like that. So Eastern Europeans are not trusting their government. This is kind of default behavior and they unfortunately are in a position when the
majority of them are saying that, well, we cannot change anything. And for the Western democracies, this is something that is probably not the case. In case you're going to the elections and your voting, you're more or less
that your vote is going to be counted the right way. So the first application back in 2015 when I was doing a blockchain, the first thing that I was thinking of and I still amazes me and
and the technology is already done for it. The algorithms are written. It's just about the implementation. And it is the absolutely better voting system that reserves user privacy that makes any bribery of the
or votes impossible just because a single person can vote multiple times and only the latest vote is going to count and moreover the person would be able to prove or like a kind of proof to others that they
have been voted according to their will. Because of this there is no point in bribery because a person can prove that he voted anything. And yeah, so this is kind of a mix of the blockchain and zero-knowledge approaches.
As I said, the algorithms are written, everything is done. The only thing that is required is the political will. And every time when I have been speaking with high officials, when the doors were open, they were saying, yeah,
That's a great idea. Finally, we're going to fight corruption. When the doors close and all of the media is going out, they were saying that, "Hey, but you know, there might be some problems with your technology and we actually need to have a way."
to kind of fix all of these inappropriate mistakes and votes that were used. So you need to have a back door there. And when I was explaining to them that you cannot do a back door in the blockchain in case this is a good blockchain.
So then they were saying, "Yeah, okay, we are going to call you back." So this is the voting purely democratic, better voting system than the thing that exists right now in the non-digital world. I feel extremely
excited about this and I would love I hope that during my lifetime this thing is going to happen and we are going to see these evidences of the pure democracy, some of the countries in the world.
very inspiring last sentences are like very inspiring like yeah that's something I dream about to to be honest I would like to ask you guys one last questions before I will ask you one last
any remarks you would like to say so my last questions will be if you had a piece of advice for young developers about to getting started into a tree what would it be? Brandon would you like to go ahead?
Yes, I think you have to build when you're a young programmer you should be writing lots of code. It's like practicing musical instrument. You just need to keep writing and rewriting. When I was young I would do my own, you know, see compiler or version of Unix. He's rough and toys or not quite complete.
But I learned and iterated and I benefited from doing that. I think this now has to be done in blockchain projects and at the sort of frontier of the projects. So things like zero knowledge proof systems and decentralized
And in these worlds, I think it matters which chain you work on. So you want to work on a chain with the right, you know, attention to developer ergonomics and documentation that's reliable. You want to have easy to use tooling.
We were doing basic attention token back in the early days and relatively early days of Ethereum, geth and parody were both broken in different ways. It was real hardship. It's gotten a lot better and again my hat's up to near on their dev realm ecosystem work. So, you know, pick your chain or you can do something
several chains, learn different chains is good. But don't lose your life on paper cuts or impossible to use tools and get on with building things and rebuilding. Even if you copy something to do your own version to learn, I think it's good.
I'm following, I'm second in what Brendan was saying, probably the only thing that I wanted to add to this list is that it just only seems like be brave. So the
it just only seems from the web to developers 10 point that web 3 is complicated but in fact it is not. Everybody in web2world all the developers are working with a sync away it can constructs and that's not
that things are happening asynchronously in Web2World. That's just the way how Internet works. And guess what? Well, in EVM compatible chains, everything is synchronous. It's even simpler than in Web2Space. So there are lots of
Lots of things that developers who are thinking of coming to Web 3, they are afraid of all the smart contracts or all these complexities. But in fact, many things are actually not that complicated and for sure you would be able to take
Thank you very much. I would like, yeah, do you have any one last words or any question that you would like to ask or whatever any remark Brandon? I would just encourage people to see the unity
of privacy and web 3 or crypto because if you think about what I said earlier about fingerprinting yourself on a blockchain, a distributed public ledger, there is an issue here that could be just as bad or worse than what we have with Web 2 and Google
Facebook and big tech. You don't want to put all your life long, all your events all over public blockchains because even if you use HD wallets or multiple wallets, people will figure out how to link you. So there is a unity to privacy and other security properties and
cryptocurrency and the other cryptography. My first love. So I think people should think about this unity and come together to work on it. It's hard to work on now. Regulators may be against it in some ways as tornado cash showed, but it's critically important.
Yeah, I would I would like to leave this room with two statements. Yeah, one face the users and then other developers and the users to the users. I want to say that yeah, it's super important what Brandon was saying just want to want to second base and
and say that yes, at the moment, blockchain and privacy is very complicated, unfortunately. But once you're going to get yourself educated and you're going to get better,
in all of these concepts and understand more, you will start to value more your privacy, you will start value more your rights. And this is extremely important for you to have kind of, to make kind of conscious decisions and add you to where, well,
educated decisions. And for the developers, like the more people are going to come to us, to the Web 3 space and the crypto space and more private space, the more, the more that is kind of flywheel is going to work, then the more
developers are going to come and they will bring more people and so on. So please make sure that you are not just copy-paste in Uniswap and deploying it to another network and trying to get some millions out of it. Please focus
on things that are going to bring more users. Please make sure that your web3 applications have great user experience. They are capable of, you know, then the people who are going to use them, they're capable of saying, yeah, this is something great.
This is a great experience in my life. So from that standpoint, don't be afraid. We're building all together a very bright future for the human race, hopefully. Yeah, please be brave and be with us.
Thank you very much. I think I will hand the space here and thank you all for joining us. I saw a peak at 90 people. So that's pretty cool. Thank you everyone for joining us today.
Don't forget to follow Brave and/or on Twitter and obviously stay in touch with your project for the long run as you heard. Both CEOs got plans and they are going somewhere. Thank you everyone, have a great evening, bye bye.