How is everyone doing today?
Hello, Xenia. How are you?
Doing good. Excited for our space today.
Hey, Xenia. Nice to meet you guys today.
Yeah, looking forward to this conversation.
Do you think we should give another minute, Xenia? Should we get started? What do you think?
Yeah, let's give it another minute, but I think as we wait,
maybe you would like to say a few words
or maybe introduce yourself and introduce Fluence.
Sure, yeah. This is Tom Trowbridge,
one of the co-founders of Fluence. We also have Evgeny, who is another co-founder on it,
from Fluence. And Boneyard is
our chief scientist on Fluence as well, so a heavy Fluence team
here. Appreciate everybody being on it. And listen, we are a cloudless
computing network, so we think of it as
freeing decentralized serverless computing, so freeing
computation from centralized clouds.
And that's sort of squarely in the deep end space, and we're super excited to
learn about what everyone else is working on and thinking
it's going to be big in 2024. We obviously think it is probably one of
the, you know, deep ends been around for quite a while, and there's some pretty successful
advanced projects in it that I think we all know, but it seems to now be kind of catching
you know, as a sector. But that's just one area,
and we tend to be a little bit narrow in looking at just
what we're doing, and so looking kind of bigger picture zooming out a little bit
to look at Web3 infrastructure trends in general that is both
deep and related and other. And so I'm excited to have a bunch of these
guest speakers here who will bring different perspectives
a little bit from our kind of narrow computing focus
and see things a little bit more broadly. But of course we're happy to talk about
what we see in deep and what we're excited to what we think is important
and what we're launching influence and why we think it's really necessary to
kind of free computation from centralized clouds, but
we'll kind of get into that later I suppose if the opportunity arises. But
I'm interested to hear from the panels what
what everyone thinks and have some introductions.
So with that, I think it'd be great. Adam, you
I guess you get to you kind of kicked it off. So maybe you start
with an introduction and a little bit about yourself and we'll kind of go through the speakers and then
go from there. Does that make sense? Yeah, very, very
happy to be here today. There's a bit of a different spaces to
me. So my background at the moment
is I'm co-founder of Spark.xyz. We're building
payments infrastructure. We're supporting a lot of web free games, metaversus, marketplaces
and e-commerce stores. Basically long story short, help them take
payments across chain, any currency, whatever payment
flow they need. We're kind of a dynamic and
adaptable infrastructure that lets them essentially make it easier for their users
to get on board their product and use it without worrying about what token they have
or what chain they might be on. Because ultimately what we're discovering
rapidly, and I think this might come up later, is that users don't really care
about that stuff. They just ultimately want to use
whatever they want to use and what they really care about
is, yeah, they might actually care about decentralization or
privacy, but they don't care about the technology behind that. They
might just care about the individual issue. So we're trying to make that easier for them.
I've also previously co-founded a gaming studio called Formation Games
and they're developing a fantasy football mobile game
that's entering beta soon. But yeah, just really
happy to be here and listening to all the other speakers today.
Terrific. Who's up next for an intro?
I can go. This is Dan Keller
to be on the space today. Happy you guys sent me an invite. Looking forward to it.
Flux is the world's largest and only decentralized
compute network. We've got 13,000 nodes that run all over the world with
enterprise-grade infrastructure. We host
50,000 plus dApps, and when I say dApps like legitimate dApps
it's kind of hard to call yourself decentralized
and DeFi if you run on AWS or Microsoft or Google, and Flux
fixes that. So you can run front ends, back ends, game servers, WordPress
our Flux Core, Flux Edge product, which is AI
rendering compute resources for GPUs. So we run the full gambit
and it's not a pie in the sky scenario where somebody had a great
idea and they're working on an MVP. All these things run today. You can deploy
all those things today. As a matter of fact, we just deployed some of the bigger game servers
for some of the PAL world and other products that are out there running now.
deepen, as it should be, infrastructure.
We were Web3 before Web3 was cool, so we're about six years old
and the project just keeps building. So I look forward to chatting with you all.
That's terrific. It's a bunch of overlap with what we do, so we'll definitely be comparing notes
both on this call and afterwards without a doubt. You mentioned
deep in before deep in is cool. I kind of remind people as well that
decentralization and decentralized apps existed long before
blockchain. Go back to Napster and I think
Napster's peak user base was 80 million.
We look forward to the days where we can have that kind of app on our networks
that have that level of usage. Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
I can go. My name is Stalin Doudney. I'm Group Protocol CEO
and founder and I am quickly trying to retire
from crypto and get out of the hype cycle and get into
web integration. I've been around since I was an enthusiast
probably, I guess since late 2011.
2012 is really when I started to get deeply
into it. I really loved what you said about
because I'm old enough to remember Napster and I actually grew up with it and I loved it
hopefully coming this year, that sort of explosive
and we'll see what happens. Listen, I missed the point. You said you want to get out of
the hype cycle and move to what I didn't hear that last, that critical thing you were thinking of moving to.
Oh, no. Dude, I'm just like super
reticent and like jaded and
not into having been in this space for
12 plus years, like I came into it like Anakin
and I'm coming out of it like Darth Vader to be a public founder
and to be a public founder
in this space and I don't know if other speakers here
are attached to tokens and stuff like that, but if you are it's just like
hellish and often and I just hope that
I like flux. I think that's
amazing. You guys are actually doing real stuff and I hope we're doing a lot
more real stuff in the future too as part of root protocol.
But I'm looking forward to the days when there are
real PMFs that aren't massively speculatively based
and real things for people to do.
I'm very encouraged, I think, by
decentralized social and to some extent gaming, although I think
a lot of gaming stuff still is very speculatively based.
But yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to jump into these topics right
No, but all good. I think this influence is getting close to launching a coin
so I've helped put Hedera Hashgraph together so
some sense of it but I left right before the coin launched so it's sort of like
you think that's the goal and then you get there and you're like actually the works
a lot more new set of problems arise
I suppose is your point. Yes, yes, indeed.
And you know, like live by the sword, die by the sword, but
I think this space and everyone in it will be much better
once we start getting to more
revenue generating type of PMFs and applications
and they don't just sort of like rely on
trust me, I love the supercharging that happens
in some ways, which is speculative
orientation of crypto, but ultimately
it's kind of toxic, right?
I think many founders, they can be called a scanner by the same people that
are pumping like Pepe, Hypercoin,
X, you know, and it's an anonymous team so I've had to deal with
a lot of that and psychologically it's kind of difficult.
Fair enough, fair enough. Nikki, do you want to
do an intro? Sure, sure, sure. Thank you so much guys for having me.
Hope you're hearing me well. So my name is Nikki. I'm with Telus Foundation
for those who don't know much about Telus. So Telus is a layer
one delegated proof of stake chain. We launched in 2018 in a
fair launch manner. We air dropped out talking to our community members
and the tension factor about Telus is the fact that in production
it can process up to 15,200 TPS and when it comes to
architecture, it's architected in a way to not have mempool, which means
that the transactions are processed in first in and first out basis
as a matter of fact eliminating the possibility for any of the effects
and when it comes to Gatsby they're pretty low and fixed
which means that we don't fluctuate with network volumes and
essentially predictable. And actually in 2021 we launched Telus
EVM. The idea was that to enable actual support
of the tournament developers over to Telus. Telus EVM sits on
top of the smart contract on top of the Telus 350 chain and this is
where we're focused in growing our ecosystem. Soon
we'll be also working on our gaming side chain
based on the EVM so we'll be launching that as well.
I'm super happy to be here so actually when it comes to the
infrastructure it's quite a pain point I would feel in this industry
and quite an exciting topic so I think that
for some it might seem truly boring in a way but like I do see that
for example when we're talking about infrastructure we're not just talking about wallets
but we're talking about those RPC public endpoints, data index
and solutions or requests, explorers, not to seek
in cloud or like simulation infrastructure
and essentially like what I
also do agree that current DeFi services and interface
they're quite reliant on centralized infrastructure and
outdated services so which are inadequate for the
Yes sir. So this is like really cool timing to have this
space. We're working with the BD and marketing
arm for Compound DAO and I'll tell you that the main
infrastructure need that we need and maybe somebody here on the panel and happy to talk to anybody
who has a solution this after the fact which is how do you manage the
Oracle of RWAs. So we want to start listing
RWAs and money markets but the problem is that
how do you get the right Oracle and the auditing off market
to be able to come like on chain because the only way that we can kind
of sustain or have RWAs in the money market is if there's
deep on chain liquidity and it's just kind of the way that
the risk management of Compound works. So
super open to conversations or here's like a real need. Compound wants
to list RWAs on the money markets but
what's the infrastructure available in the proof cases that we can
way. So that's an infrastructure need that is literally needed by
money markets and probably some other perps and things like that
right now today. Well hey listen you know one thing I think Brian
for everyone's benefit I think you assumed a level of knowledge on
this one area that many of you not everybody has given the kind of
breadth of different expertise here. Do you want to expand a little bit about what you're saying because I don't think
everyone is as deep financially as you are.
Okay cool. So if you have a
money market basically the on chain liquidity drives a lot
of the risk association of what the C factor of the loan to value
ratio on a money market. So the borrow and supply ratios are
determined by on chain liquidity. Because
of the capital efficiency of say something like Ondo or
Mountain Protocol where they have like embedded yield in the token
it makes less sense to pull that liquidity with
another stable coin because if you have embedded like T-bills into
the protocol if you're going to pull that liquidity
you're losing and you want to hold
Ondo or Mountain Protocol with a 5% embedded yield
you don't want to carry the it's capital inefficient
to pull the other side of the token with another stable coin. So therefore
what the risk here is is how can we justify
if there's some sort of depegging or some sort of risk there how can we
justify that with we're not able to liquidate
a Mountain Protocol. So what we're looking for is
a mechanism design in which somebody
will then decide to pull RWAs on chain
and create a liquidity pool on that same chain so if a liquidation event
occurs or a depeg occurs that we can liquidate accordingly
and not have to loop out through a centralized party.
Does that make sense? Yeah fair enough and I think
this is you're talking about you're sort of stretching the
bounds of infrastructure to DeFi effectively and so
here between I guess the infrastructure kind of focus that we're thinking about here
and DeFi comes together a little bit in what you're talking about I think.
Yeah but it's a real business need that I'm looking for a
solution today so we're talking future stuff or also
I don't know of a solution that exists.
the speakers here because we're starting to get into some technical pieces here
what is your definition of DeFi because essentially we kind of
use this interchangeably between centralized infrastructure
so what is everybody's vision of
truly what DeFi is and how it's being practiced today?
question and I think maybe I just think of DeFi
borrowing, lending, and securitizing
infrastructure required to do that.
Doesn't that already exist in today's financial
markets? Don't those things already happen today? Oh for sure.
For sure. Just doing a decentralized basis without relying on
a trusted intermediary. That's the key bit.
But how do you run and I'm just trying to play devil's advocate here guys
is how do you run DeFi and effectively pitch yourself as being a DeFi
project but then run all of your infrastructural and legacy
but here's the thing is that most DeFi
listen I'm no DeFi expert here but a lot of DeFi is smart
contract based so you're running it off of decentralized protocols. You're not running it on AWS
Now that is when I think of borrowing and lending. A lot of that is on chain
and so you are decentralized. It starts to move
where it gets different. What we're talking about here is when you're doing different
types of assets that don't exist on chain
then you start to become then the problems arise as you're mentioning.
But I think if DeFi is on chain borrowing lending, securitizing, etc.
I would add to it actually as I totally agree with that
when it comes to DeFi we are actually
even though let's say when we're talking about chain on which the project is deployed
of course certain elements of infrastructure are centralized.
But when it comes to DeFi one thing that it provides is that there is no centralized
exchange that holds custody over the assets. So it's peer to peer
and individual traders they hold custody over the assets
with control of their private key. So that's the differentiating factor.
Fair enough. I think this is about
Web3 and for trends. So I guess
wanted to try to circle it back to that topic if we could.
And so maybe with that I think
you know I see a hand up. Is that
Dan is that you? Did you have something on this topic or more
kind of a focus on kind of where I'd love everyone to give
their top kind of two trends that you expect to see
over 2024. And if we do that I think we can kind of tease
out some differences here. But feel free to jump in
if you've got a couple of you got some two things you want to kick off in.
Yeah I can just kind of share that on the ground level
of really building like a truly decentralized
infrastructure. I think the two trends that we're seeing is actually real working products.
So the gentleman that spoke earlier who was kind of sort of jaded by the crypto space
came in around the same time as you and have felt that way. The only difference is
for the past six years we've been building real projects that
aren't just white paper in a dream or a minimal viable product.
So I think one of the big transitions you're going to see over the next year is people starting
to come to grips with not only in the standard
blockchain space but actually in the standard tech stack models
starting to use true decentralization for what it's meant for. And I'll give you
an example on Flux. Dish Network just launched
their monitoring console for their 5G network. They're building one Flux.
Did it for pennies on the dollar. Very happy with it. Very scalable.
And I think you can see things like that. Major large companies starting to come
in because you see you're already getting these layoffs and technology
and so and so forth. The technology demand doesn't decrease.
It actually increases quite exponentially. And I think we're finally to the point where we're going
to start seeing those real use cases. So the gentleman that spoke earlier don't give up
dude. We're right there. Get your bucket and bail out your boat a little bit
because we're ready to go. I think the other thing too is
I think we're moving into a point where we're going to start to see the regulatory
guidelines start to come down not only on
D pin or Web 3 whatever you want to call it. But you're also going to see it with
around that here. And I think that it's going to be very beneficial.
I'm going to DC to speak about it specifically within a couple weeks here.
So I think it could be very interesting. You'll start to see that they've discovered
true decentralization and what we're doing with it. And they're going to start asking questions.
So those are two areas where I see a big move.
It's great. And burn it. I forgot your name. I'm sorry. What you believe
your hand up for a second. Do you have two ideas you expect to see this this year?
Hey, it's burn it. Burn it. Dallas and like decentralized
autonomous organization. Yeah. Just to give some background on me
I think I just kind of got skipped over and welcome to the space.
So I'm happy to be here. My background goes back
predates cryptocurrency and goes all the way back to just kind of crypto
the cryptography in general. So I've been in tech and cryptography
a while. I was co-founders with Adam Back
in a company in the early 2000s.
Friends with a bunch of co-founders including him and
in Blockstream and have been I think
let's say unofficially interested and around crypto since its
early days and professionally entered it myself I'd say in around
we raised about five million dollars to build a set of Blockchain-based
tools for esports. So I've been in gaming and crypto a while
just to kind of get some background on what burn it down is and why I think it's actually kind of relevant
to this conversation. So this is not an infrastructure company. We're actually
the world's first truly Web 3 game which is to say that
we're not a game that has any back-end infrastructure at all.
We have no back-end servers. We don't use an Oracle. We don't use something like
an alarm clock. We don't have any administrative functions. All of our
game states for burn it down are driven by players. In fact
the only interface we really have right now is a static website
that could be run locally. You can actually play the game directly from smart contract
and the reason why I mention all that is because I think that
it's a very interesting deployment model. Typically when we're
deploying games we're thinking about having to consider edge compute
costs, we're having to consider deployment costs and DevOps and so forth and
I think what's fascinating about making an actual on-chain game, not
what you commonly hear is a Web 2.5 game where people are looking to
integrate the blockchain into a game engine but in our case the blockchain is the game
engine and so it's just very interesting in terms of our
process, both trade-offs but personally I like it.
I think that the space has a distinct lack
frankly of actual dApps. Decentralized applications
are largely missing. Most of the stuff that we see people building
in terms of layer 3 tend to be in that Web 2.5 space which is really
in a lot of ways compromising or watering down
or hollowing out a lot of the reasons why at least I thought
blockchain was interesting in the first place which is to say
it's permissionless, it's decentralized, it's trustless, it's
autonomous, anonymous, all these things.
I think it's actually a very important conversation in terms of
not just the infrastructure that's being provided but whether or not people are actually building
that infrastructure as opposed to simply taking
a Web 2.0 app and making it more complicated but not fundamentally
Fair enough. And your calls for 2024, any two quick calls?
Sorry, I missed that question. I apologize. What was it?
Any two quick forecasts for 2024, two trends?
Yeah, I think the main one that I'm looking at
is actually mostly on I think the financial market side.
We're seeing a lot of activity in the past. We've seen more activity I'd say in the last four weeks
both first hand, second hand, even third hand than we saw
in the entirety of 2023. I think 2023 was largely frozen
leading into FTX but really FTX put a cherry on top.
But what's fascinating is we did see
a lot of M&A, a lot of capital started flowing back into the space
which I think is really healthy. And I think that kind of pairs well with sort of a macro.
This is just my view but I feel like part of the problem with the last
cycle was that we didn't have any actual infrastructure. We kind of went straight from building
later ones to trying to build a bunch of later three apps and a lot of that
foundational infrastructure was just absent. And I think what
has been good was there was a lot of infrastructure investment in 2021, 2022 cycle
and we saw some of that investment continue through 2023 but
I feel like kind of looking forward I'm very optimistic about
our ability to actually start to build out application
layer stuff now that we have I think and it's
starting to come online more of the later two infrastructure that we'll need
alongside I think a more solid layer one place.
That's great. I realize I didn't give Evgeny a chance to introduce himself.
I was mistaken my part as well
and maybe give some of your two predictions for
24 trends. Yeah, hello everyone. I'm co-founder of Fluence together
mean I've been in crypto also like for a while I think since 2011.
I saw a lot of things and actually
we're building decentralized compute now, right?
And there's a big trend of
deep in right now that we're going to see happening
which was not like really before even when people
started doing computing projects early
on like a storage projects. It's now been as big
interest as it's now. Maybe AI hype helps
it. Maybe it's just the right time
but definitely I'm seeing deep in as one of big
things for this year. We'll see how it really goes
and will we really have this
product market feed and a lot of people really using deep in platform
we hope that that will happen and
Flux giving a great example of it and we hope that's also going to happen
a lot of different things. It's like a storage is a compute like people experiment with wireless
networks and it's all basically off chain. It's all about infrastructure
that is off chain that actually may improve
some close to chain systems like Oracle's
and I'm actually curious like
what people on the panel think about
will we be moving towards
a pure on chain world for these
crypto applications and would these two worlds of deep
in and block chains, would they separate basically?
Would one world of customers
use deep in instead of cloud and stuff like that and another
world of customers would use block chains and
build on chain applications like pure on chain applications and so on so
curious what people think here.
Great and Adam we've got your hand up for a while.
Thank you. Good discussion. I think just on my
view for the next year ahead from my perspective
I think on the web3 gaming side
I think this is the year where people are expecting we shall see
actual games people want to play, actual services people want to use
kind of excitement for that. You've got games like Parallels, Shrapnel, E1line
the days of games that are really really low quality
and no one wants to play them. They are sort of slowly moving to the background
so there's a lot of people who are excited for that this year so we'll finally see
from the infrastructure perspective more and more people
making genuine use cases for web3 that are not entirely
financially driven sometimes like there are games now people actually want to play
which is great so that's a cause for optimism.
I think on the infrastructure side the one theme we're definitely seeing
is that improving the UX now is what a lot
of studios and products are focusing on so moving a lot of that
web3 clutter into the background so whenever we speak to games really
what they're concerned about is user acquisition at the moment. How do we make it really
easy for people to get onto our game not worry about what token they need
not worry about what chain they're on they just want to play. It would be
as someone put it to me the other day if you introduced a new title, a new version of Call of Duty
say and someone said oh great what's so good about
it and they're like dude this is on Amazon web services. That's just not
something anyone would ever talk about and yet in web3 we do
focus on the kind of infrastructure behind things and that's
probably because people are quite financially involved
in that product perhaps but we're trying to sort of move on I think
to be focusing on the actual games and I'd also like to comment
on what Bernard Dow said I think that's an interesting point
he was talking about how crypto isn't
it's getting increasingly watered down in terms of some of the original founding principles
I think that is definitely true I think as crypto becomes
more mainstream a lot of those original principles are being sacrificed
often in favor of usability and that's not always
a bad thing in my view I think most people
do like the things that crypto promises so they want self-ownership
they don't like other people earning their data they do want a more equitable
split where they can get rewards for their time and attention
but it's also fairly clear that people aren't willing to enjoy really terrible
user experiences in order to get that otherwise
web3 would be mass adopted already but it's not so I think we've
got to go through a period of figuring out how we deliver those great experiences
so that people can enjoy the benefits that they want
Just very quickly on to that point
I think part of the reason you're seeing that is precisely because we didn't have
later 2 infrastructure that we needed and so people are confusing
what's essentially happened is you have layer 3 applications that are like
this is really hard to use but also we don't have any of the layer 2 infrastructure
we need so the only choice is really to kind of water down
or compromise these principles in order to
make the product more usable my view is that as layer 2
actually matures they'll step into the place that they should be which is
solving that friction point between the bare metal parts
of blockchain and that layer 3 that enables layer 3
applications at least hypothetically to provide
easier to use experiences that are not as clunky or
high friction but at the same time
would also allow apps to kind of retain more of their foundational principles
I think that's right there's a whole regulatory angle to all this as well in terms of
founding principles versus compromise that have to make it to hold another
angle but it's also relevant but I know
you've had your hand up for a while so
what are your ideas for 2024, what's going to happen?
yeah thanks first of all I would say burn it down
sorry I lost your name but I love having another OG in the chat
I just wanted to tell you I signed up for the fourth entry
I thought that was really cool your website I did that while we were speaking
I'm concerned in some ways that nobody is really
when we talk about this when we use the term web 3
it's like what does that mean?
it's a bit of a vision I think and I think the fundamental
aspect of that vision is that we will have
some measure of control and sovereignty
and guidance and coordination and
leveraging of our data and
of our by proxy identities and so
I see identity as being a very very crucial
aspect of this and in particular decentralized identity
decentralized identifiers and verifiable credential attestations as arbiters
of that revolution in identity and how
we handle identity I'm concerned that the
world web consortium came up with an incredible set of technologies
by approving these standards two and a half years ago but
crypto Twitter and crypto in general says like oh yeah great
we have decentralized identifiers that allow
public intranets which are what blockchains are to speak to
each other yet we're like oh hey but SVTs
and let's do polygon ID and stuff
like that I mean I think that identity is crucial
to this understanding and this vision
that we have with web3 and to not speak about it
would be like not speaking about HTTP
when we talk about the internet so I'm very
into the idea of using decentralized identifiers and verifiable
potential attestations in concert of course with
cryptographic sign up and in fact I think that
decentralized identity as a technology is as important and more important
in blockchain itself because it allows people to
a web3 vision in the future it's going to take a lot more than just
.eth address or holding onto
whatever assets in a crypto wallet or playing
a game you need to have an interoperable identity
and so that's definitely one area that I see as important
the second area that I see there
is that a trend that you expect to happen a lot of important things it doesn't mean it's
2024 trend. Yeah you're right. Do you see the trend in 2024? I do
and we're partially like if you look at
some early kind of like murmurs of that with FISO
and also friend.tech and then now Mochaverse
Mocha Ventures is our leading investor and
funnily enough they pretty much copied our initial pitch to them
but we've moved on from that in terms of Mochaverse and MochaID
but I do see people starting to use decentralized
identity standards and systems this year because
they allow you to leverage data in a much better way both in terms
of blockchain and onchain context than you can do with a wallet address
alone or an SPT or an NFT say as a proxy for your
identity because you can map multiple data points, multiple
types of data back to your decentralized identifier
acts like a uniform resource identifier just like the most
primitive levels of the internet like we were all. So I see that as
definitely a trend that will be coming up this year and then
secondly the scaling solutions are in place
and there's some really cool ones coming to the fore. I'm definitely
into those ultra light nodes
and the ability I think for us this year to stop thinking
about like bridging and start thinking about this stuff all sort of like happening in a box
if you will of ultra light nodes. So yeah those two
trends I think are very interesting.
Interesting. So identity and ultra
light nodes that's compelling.
Yeah actually it's great to I agree great to have some
OG crypto people on the space as well. Just kind of a quick point
and then to touch on your point about DIDS. I just think
it's interesting that for myself and I think a lot of other people
like the reason why we got into crypto in the first place like the thing that was compelling
was the fact that it was by contrast
to a lot of the web one or web two infrastructure
it was decentralized. It was permissionless. It was trustless.
That was the promise anyway and I think that's what made it interesting
from a technology perspective. It's what made it interesting as
a software engineer or somebody looking to build
what we've seen sort of as the future of applications.
And crypto predating the 2016 cycle
you heard those words a lot. A lot a lot.
And I think it's interesting that we've
sort of gone through this period where increasingly
I don't hear those words and I hear more people
kind of talking about oh well you can use this with a credit card
or oh you can use this with your email or whatnot.
And I think it's super critical that
we don't just end up making or replicating web two
infrastructure with more steps or more complexity.
I don't think that that's actually going to be a compelling narrative for consumers.
I don't think that's ultimately going to be a comparing narrative for business.
I don't think anyone's really going to care about that. For the most part
people, businesses, consumers
look at benefits. Even more so than features
and implementation details. And so I think if we abstract away
all of the implementation details to the point that we're no longer providing
the benefits, I think that that is going to be kind of a
technological dead end. And then just on the subject of DEDS really quickly
it's interesting because one of our advisors is actually a guy named Dick Hart
who is the author of the OpenID
Connect protocol as well as the OAuth2 protocol. So I've had a lot of
discussions with him about decentralized identities
and web three and kind of how it can work and how it can't work.
And I think largely it touches upon
one of the core problems that we're sort of facing
which is how do you bridge the digital and physical divide in a way that's
at what point does it just sort of become academic in terms of
from a computer science perspective, like at what
point is it academic that we can't bridge that divide? Meaning, so for example
we know that technically having something like a
digital driver's license in your wallet doesn't actually prove your identity. It just proves
that you can prove that you control a wallet that holds that
ID but that's not actually linking you to that ID in kind of a
purist way. But on the other hand maybe it's just good enough
that you can control that wallet and that's fine. And I think
trying to understand that and trying to understand how that
ties into the decentralized infrastructure that's being built now
I think is an important project. I personally don't have all the answers there.
I can say that from a gaming perspective one of the things
that we tried to do and really focused on was
making kind of assumptions that I think are sort of obvious
on their face but don't get made very often. For example, in our game
we assume that one user is not equal to one wallet.
We assume that users are going to sibble attack us
as part of the gameplay, just sort of natively.
And so we thought about how do we build our game mechanics around that
to both kind of acknowledge that those things are going to happen
and kind of embrace and mitigate or fold them into the game mechanics
and so forth. So I think thinking about how
decentralized infrastructure works and then building applications towards that
is really important. And then lastly I'll just say I want to shout out Rude for
minting a Bernat Dow. That's amazing. I wish you would have told me because
it's actually super gas optimized for patch mints and the smaller
contract is a little bit more active right now but I really appreciate your support and that was
really awesome of you. Thank you. Very cool. Brian, sorry
I've missed you. I know you've had a hand up for a while. My apologies.
All good. So I have two predictions,
two trends that I think are going to be super hot is
kind of opposite take which would be account abstraction
is going to help onboard a ton
of ton of users and yes there is a little bit
of a centralized component to that but I think it's going to ease the onboarding
experience for so many individuals that
the centralization risk versus the decentralization risk
I think is worth it. So one example
we're working with a client called Collabland. They launched this product
where now you have DeFi trading affiliate links so
people can get monetized and help kind of earn in the
trade volume of traders that they bring to any DEX. So super
cool and that wasn't possible before until account abstraction that's just like one
example. Building an affiliate model on the smart contract level
is a huge unlock. So if you think about ERC20 tokens
allowed marketers to kind of step into
and market to a much larger audience in the ICO
days the account abstraction is going to do the same thing for on-chain
contracts and make an affiliate networks and incentivization
for people to interact more on-chain. So I think that's one huge thing
and the other big trend that I'll say is different
types of RWAs and not like the RWAs that most people are thinking about
like real estate and T-bills. Think of like new
assets that are being generated and created that don't have existing financial
rails. So I used to work in FinTech and if you go after T-bills
and stocks the margins there are super, super small
but think about another company we're talking to is like
bio-pharmaceutical IP. There's not existing financial infrastructure
and there's not existing rails for that. So you take that
the securities, you take that bio-pharmaceutical IP, you throw it on a blockchain and you have
a lending market. You have a weighted launch pad. So I think
assets that appear from this point forward should
pretty much focus on and we should think about those adding to
the crypto financial rails. So I think those are two big
trends in 2024 we're going to see more and more and more of.
good to know. I'm going to pay attention to those. Flus, you
had your hand up. Yes. Good
evening everyone. Good evening from Amsterdam.
I'm the founder of Flus. My name is Tei and we run
on-ramping, off-ramping services in the Middle East. Non-GCC
countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and some parts
of Europe as well. Interesting
discussion especially on the dead parts because we
in my early days in crypto we
contributed to some DID projects
like Sovereign which was one of the first
people to introduce me to the concept of
decentralized identities and
from our perspective and I've tried
show how DIDs can be used in real use cases but
there is always this interaction with the physical world that is
heavily regulated and sometimes there is not
even an infrastructure to connect to. So
how does it mix today with Web3 and everything
we're talking about? I think it boils down to how do we define it
Web3? How do we define decentralization? Going back to
basics and having some, I don't want to say universal but
some agreed upon definitions of what is what
digital identity will always be faced with a gatekeeper
and most of this time this gatekeeper is the government which
is the same gatekeeper that preventing us from having
the finance or the financial tools that
can help us in our day-to-day lives.
That being said, working in Lebanon for almost
now I think we are operating there since 6-7 years
of gain that Bitcoin gave
to families, not only in monetary terms
but in the peace of mind, in the psychology, in putting
food on the table, keeping the lights on, sending kids
positive enforcements in the community happened by simply
downloading a wallet and changing their paper money
They took this risk because there was no other option
So when we here in Europe try to sell this vision
to people, there's a disconnection. They clap for it
but they don't really buy it because they don't feel it
What do they feel here is perhaps a business that's
been running for, I don't know, as well 7-8 years and
is not able to get a loan from the bank. So perhaps they can go to
some on-chain lender that can verify their
digital data bank statements
water bills paid on time, electricity bills
paid on time, get a credit score and then you have
an on-chain loan. So depending on the region, most of you
are talking about on-chain innovations and they're talking about how
to improve the current infrastructure while where we come
from and it's the other part of the world, we're looking at
So the trends that I see is stablecoins and
cross-border payments. There's a lot of demand now
by freelancers, by small businesses to accept USDT as a payment
and returns for services. Knowing that
almost everyone can change USDT into local currency
today. And the next thing is Bitcoin and the ETFs
account abstractions was able to open up
more people to join crypto by simply
using their things that they know every day like
logging to Facebook through an email, they're able to log in
through an email, to a wallet and
have the same peace of mind as owning a ledger for example
So you're combining the both worlds of a centralized exchange
what does it offer you in services and you combine it with
the non-custodial security
If those things came to Bitcoin then we might
see on-chain ETFs and then
a platform is able to share custody of their keys
with their use. It's happening in multi-party
computations and NPC wallets and again it was a trend
for a while but now with Bitcoin virtual machines
it is much more scalable, much more easier and much more fun
to see BRC20 tokens as well flourish
hope that the industry is
there is just hype, good things take
time to build and it takes a lot of resiliency to be honest
a lot of factors at the same time
which makes it a very tough industry to operate
but again at the end you look at the impact that you leave behind
this is massive and it changes generations to come
let's hope so, I agree. The perspective of working in the countries you're talking about
Lebanon, the catastrophe that's happened to that monetary system and
the destruction of people's lives
given the erosion of trust and mismanagement of that economy
it's just tragic and it's probably no greater
evidence for the need for Bitcoin and
decentralized value stores and use
so it's good to remind us of that
unfortunate story there but the real tangible benefits is providing a lot of people
so that's I think very worthwhile
and by the way I live in Amsterdam, I'm not there right now but I'll catch you
there when I'm back. Rare we get two people in Amsterdam on this
Yeah I think just plus one to everything that
plus said is such an important point to remember that where
this stuff matters can have geographic
there are going to be different aspects of what we're building
and working in that are going to matter more greatly
depending on where you are and where the infrastructure is and whatnot
I think that's just such an important point. Sorry go ahead.
And the beautiful thing is it all fits together without even knowing
what you guys work on and we are providing this
movement of paper money into
let's say put it USDT or Bitcoin and then
they're able to explore what you guys are working on
without us interfering in this so
if you look at the bigger picture it's a small, it's a huge puzzle
but everyone is a piece and if you play your role
really great and know that
you are a very important piece of this puzzle then
And just also plus one to, I wanted to say plus one to everything Brian who I guess dropped
was saying before about ERC 437 and the
account abstraction stuff. It is a huge unlock for the space and
I think does not get anywhere near enough attention in terms of
what it's going to do just transformatively
in terms of capabilities for people to interact with
the infrastructure, to understand the infrastructure and to have experience that
are frankly less dangerous in crypto which I think has largely been
kind of the issue. Crypto has been a very, from a
security perspective and a usability perspective it's been very
binary. Either you're safe or you're drained and there's not really
a lot of in between and so I think looking at the ways
in which account abstraction is going to provide various safety nets
and locks and triggers and I mean there's just so
many things that it's going to bring and I'm really looking
forward to a lot of that infrastructure and those wallets coming online.
Well, excellent. I think I'm going to call on
Boneyard. I don't know if you can, you're speaking
No, he may not be able to speak right now, unfortunately.
But, let's see if that happens now.
Nope, not happening. Okay,
listen guys, we've got like three minutes so very little
I mean, I guess that my thought, this is web
three infrastructure trend, so what do we think about that? I think
Deepin, I'll give my two senses that Deepin is going to be, this will be
the year of really recognizing the value
of Deepin. We've seen a whole bunch of reports on it and so I'm just sort of saying something obvious
but the trend continues and we've seen one or two funds
focus on this. It becomes a much bigger thing and I think that
changing crypto because this is bouncing off a couple points
different people made but it ties crypto as a use case
for real world infrastructure and this goes a little bit referenced
a little bit some of the gaming, some of the use cases other people have been talking about but when people can see
crypto interaction with real world
physical world goods, whether it be servers or cars like decentralized
server farms, you know, helium, hot spots, whatever, that to me
is a penny drop moment for people to realize this industry
actually can make sense and so I think Deepin
to my mind, getting big is actually a
mass adoption kind of, not to say moment
but mass adoption, mass awareness concept because it's a use
case that people can very intuitively understand
so that to me is I think a pretty compelling
thing for, and I'm talking my book a little bit obviously
because that's where in that space but I think it moves beyond
people trading with each other and one coin to another coin which can be
more easily dismissed than when servers are actually providing
stuff given crypto economic incentives so I think that's
pretty, I'll just sort of leave it
at that because I think that's a big one
but anyway, that's what I would say
any last words before we wrap up
here? Anyone else want to throw in? I'll just say that I think
I agree with everyone who said that gaming is going to be a huge trend
I think gaming led the way alongside adult entertainment
in web one, it led the way alongside adult entertainment in web two
and I think it's going to largely lead the way in web three
I also think, and again this is talking my own book a little bit but
I feel like there is a huge market opportunity
for gaming that is leaning more into
decentralization, leading more into
kind of more decentralized infrastructure, more foundational principles, being more
on chain and thinking about that and really really leaning
into that and I think that because you're
able to unlock new models and new gaming modes
that are impossible to replicate in web three
part of what makes our game cool is that you cannot manipulate it, you cannot
the team can't do anything quote unquote and that
safety, that idea that you can play a game for
huge amounts of money and you can play it with people who you don't trust
and who may even be actively trying to cheat you but you are guaranteed
to have a fair game just in the same way that
crypto is promising that you can have a fair transaction, I just think that
that's going to be super important in terms of the gaming narrative going
forward especially considering how merged
gaming and finance and DeFi have been kind of historically in crypto
Excellent, listen I hope you're right because
what I love about gaming is the number of potential for such a huge
user base to come on, so much more so
than say the deep end stuff I'm talking about, so I would
love you to be correct and it would be
terrific, so fingers crossed that you're actually
right and it happens in 24 would be terrific, even if it happened in 25
would be terrific, so that would be great
With that, and I think we're pretty much
at time here, we're going over a little bit, but unless anyone has something pressing they want to say
I want to thank every speaker for joining and
I definitely love these because it gets me out of my little
narrow focus and expands my perspective a bit, so really appreciate everyone
bringing in ideas from gaming to DeFi to
layer ones to a variety of different things we've talked about, so thank you everyone for all those
perspectives, we got to remind us of the Lebanon
catastrophe, so it was terrific to do these, so
appreciate everyone joining, all the perspectives, and we'll have another
topic next week, same time, so
feel free to join, but this is our second one
so we're just kind of working at the kinks getting started, but I'm excited to keep them
going because they're pretty exciting and learn a lot, so thanks everyone for joining and hopefully
we'll see you next week as well
Thanks Tom, thanks everyone