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NEAR HoS @ ETH CC
Recorded: July 3, 2025 Duration: 0:57:40Space Recording
Short Summary
The recent discussions at the Ethereum Community Conference (ECC) revealed significant trends in community growth, strategic partnerships, and innovative governance solutions, with a record attendance of 10,000 participants. House of Stake is actively hiring to expand its team and is exploring yield mechanisms through token locking, while also addressing foundational governance documents to enhance operational integrity.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hi, Patata.
Do you hear me?
Yeah, I can.
Yeah, I can. Yeah, I can.
Okay, should be better without the echo now.
Yeah, we're just kind of waiting for a few more folks to join.
I see Maxwell and Nikhil, BBXBT.
Feel free for any of you guys to request to speak.
Would be nice to kind of have a dynamic space
with both lane and clause
awesome I think I see a lane on the stage.
Cool, I'll play some music whilst we wait for them to hop on stage. Hello, hello. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yeah, we can hear both uh and lane um yeah i think we can probably get started uh since we have both guests uh on stage and uh there's a few number of people in the audience um so yeah
um we kind of wanted to have a space this week to kind of recap all of the
updates that have been going out at ETC. I unfortunately wasn't able to make it, so
I'm personally interested to kind of hear these updates both from Lane and Klaus. So yeah, I mean, it's completely open for you guys to take the mic.
Hey, thank you for putting this together.
Also shout out, I noticed we have Yoon here, we have Maxwell as well, a couple of other
folks who were there with us in person at the event.
I also want to just give you a warning.
So the three of us actually are sitting together inside the ECC venue and the event is ending as we speak. So we're kind of hoping that we make it
until five o'clock without getting kicked out, but there's a chance we may have to relocate.
So just if we disappear for five minutes, it doesn't mean that the world has ended. We just
have to find a cafe or something. Yeah, you know, we can get into the details of the event,
the House of Stake kind of gathering.
But I guess I would just start by saying that I've been to every ECC, all eight of them.
And I think this one's my favorite one so far.
The event is larger this year than it's ever been before.
The official number was 10,000 people, whereas in previous years it was 2,000, 4,000, 6,000 last year, I think.
You know, Cannes was a bit of a controversial choice for gathering this year. people, whereas in previous years it was 2,000, 4,000, 6,000 last year, I think.
You know, Cannes was a bit of a controversial choice for gathering this year.
But the sentiment I've heard has been very, very positive, you know, in spite of kind of some,
you know, just a little bit tricky to get here. And obviously it's an expensive place to be.
We're in the middle of a heat wave. I'm sure many people have seen and heard. That's been challenging this week. But yeah, it's a beautiful venue. It's a beautiful city. A lot of amazing content. I've really enjoyed
the side events as well. Ken has going for it the fact that everything is kind of a five or
10 minute walk away, which has been really, really nice. It's a very good kind of conference venue
for that reason as well. So it looks like there's a good chance the event may be here again next
year. Yeah, I'll kind of pause there. But then we can kind of get into, you know, kind of how the house of
stake event went a couple days ago. I don't know, maybe Klaus, do you want to share some thoughts
on that? Yeah, hello, everybody. Yeah, we had a, the very first House of Stake IRL meeting on Tuesday.
So we had some of the delegates as well as service providers, Agora and Gauntlet,
and a few people from the foundation.
Yeah, we had a full day together, and it was awesome.
One of my guiding principles is that progress moves at the speed of trust.
And one of the things we're doing differently here with House of State, which is not always the case in other DAOs,
if some people listening in have been at other DAOs, is invest in that trust building amongst all the people that are going to be working together.
And I'm pretty old school on that, you know, born and raised in New Zealand.
I can do a bit of an intro if it makes sense.
Mr. Potato, let me know.
But yeah, born and raised in New Zealand, pretty old school around in our culture,
you know, getting to know someone, where are they from?
Where did they grow up?
Where did you grow up?
And establishing that humanity as the base from having a productive working relationship. So, you know, I've been engaged now with Nia for four weeks so far,
and I've probably had about 40, you know, one-to-one conversations,
either as phone calls or meeting people IRL here.
And that's really how I conduct myself, you know,
start to get that groundswell of relationship going
so that we can be productive with everything
that needs to be done with with house at stake in the workshop itself yeah we got some updates
from gauntlet around yeah the economic modeling what's going to be in house of stake v1 versus v2
and then we also had an awesome demo and testing session with Agora.
So we got to make our testnet accounts and have a play,
putting through proposals and voting on that,
and that's coming along nicely.
Then we had a break for lunch and in the afternoon came back
and I ran a very cool exercise where I got everybody in the room
to share what is their personal fork that moment.
I think most listeners have seen the fork that campaign, which just came out in the last week.
And this was really touching.
So, you know, I asked people a three part question, you know, what was your default path in life?
What was your fork that moment?
And then what was your new path? And where did that go? And yeah, to respect people's privacy,
I won't share some other people's stories, but they were very touching. And there was a unifying
energy in the room about people who are not happy with status quo, willing to exercise agency and,
you know, making a better life
or a better business or a better way of working for themselves.
I can share my own personal thought, that story.
I used to work at IBM.
I was at IBM for two years.
And IBM New Zealand in particular was doing
a big organizational transformation of Vodafone.
And yeah, I was out there running a IBM Vodafone hackathon in Mumbai.
And I was telling one of the senior leaders a whole lot of my really bright and creative ideas about decentralized organization and how different ways of working.
you know, different ways of working.
And she paused and stopped me and said,
hey, Klaus, at IBM, it's like this,
you know, there's this big, large canvas
of where you can paint.
And we're giving you this tiny little square
down on the bottom right corner
for, yeah, where you can paint
and where you can express yourself.
And when she said that,
it hit me like a ton of bricks.
And she was right, right?
Like I was not a fit for that organization.
400,000 person, top-down control, everything had to be dreamed up in America and then pushed out
to the territories. And you just had to be in a followership relationship. And so that was kind of
my fault that moment. And that's led me to go off and work in DAOs and Web3 in a space where you
don't need to ask permission, where I can express agency and creativity and find the others and choose
the work that I want to do. So yeah, and then we went around the room and everybody else
shared from that. And then we broke out into different, the different working groups as four
main working groups, and started to advance and do some small work. There wasn't too much time in a
single day there, but do some work on each of the different
initiatives and each of the different working groups, play that back to each other collectively
as a group, and then start to talk about timelines for deliverables of what each of the different
groups is working on. And we can come back to that and go into more detail as you wish, but
I'll pause there. Yeah, I was going to ask you, Klaus,
how are you coping with jet lag?
But because it's...
I'm fine, right?
Yeah, it's all right.
For those that don't know,
I live in New Zealand
and to get to Cannes,
there's like 30 hours of flights.
So New Zealand to Dubai,
it's like 17 hour flight,
longest flight in the world.
And then another flight to get across here. But yeah, I came in two days early to get, you know,
acclimated and recovered and so that I could be on form for everything on the working week that
was necessary this week. So I'm good. Thanks for asking. Yeah, it's a pretty long journey for just a couple of days, but I think it's worth it.
I want to go back to Lane because for folks who might be looking at the ECC schedule and
agenda, Lane's been moderating and talking in several panels and keynotes. So kind of wanted to get his
perspective on, yeah, he did share like ECC is probably, this ECC is probably his best one yet.
But kind of get his perspective on the panels and especially the panel he had earlier today, which I think is
pretty interesting. I haven't had the chance to watch all of it. I'm halfway through.
I think it would be good to kind of break it down for folks in the audience.
Sure. Yeah, I think I actually probably said yes to too many things this week in retrospect.
I need to get better at saying no.
So I kind of probably did too many talks and panels here.
And also just to be very clear, like, yeah, if you put my name into the ECC agenda, you'll see like 12 or 13 things pop up.
Mostly that was not panels I was actually participating or even moderating.
It was actually just an event that we just wrapped up this afternoon. And just because I was one of the organizers of that event, they just associated my name with all of them. So just to be very clear, it wasn't anywhere near that many.
And it was on, you know, kind of like my answer to the big why question, right, which is like, why are we, why are we doing this whole house of stake thing in the first place?
And why is AI such an important piece of the puzzle?
And, you know, for anyone who hasn't seen it, I think it was probably live streamed.
It's probably also available on YouTube.
I haven't personally seen the link, but they do a good job at ECC of getting things released more and less immediately.
My answer to that question is that I think we need to reframe the narrative, right? That there's a
narrative globally today that the role of AI in governance, and I'm not speaking now about
blockchain, specifically, I'm speaking about real world governance, right? The role of AI in
governance today is actually to erode democracy, to put it in the terms
of that New York Times article that you probably have seen me mention a few times that came
out about a week ago.
And I believe that the exact opposite is true, right?
I believe that there's a constructive role for AI to play in governance, both on-chain
and off-chain.
And so my talk, which unfortunately was very brief, so I couldn't go super deep, right?
But it was just about kind of like my vision there and, you know, giving some concrete
examples, some of the projects we're working on at House of Stakes,
some of the work we've done so far,
you know, obviously shout out here to Metapool
for the AI co-pilot demo,
proof of concept that they finished in time
for me to present it
and for us to share it with the delegates here.
Thank you very much for their contribution there.
Like that's a great first stage, I think.
And again, you've probably, you know, heard me speak about this and write about this before, but
from there, we kind of increase the agency, right?
And we will have, obviously, delegates that kind of have a, quote unquote, seat at the
governance table alongside our human delegates.
And then something that either is an AI CEO on the one hand, or I like to frame it as
kind of like a swarm intelligence on the other hand, where each ecosystem actor, each stakeholder has an AI agent that knows their preferences
and is faithfully acting in their best interest in the forum. So that was that talk. And I'm
thinking also it might make sense to do it again on a Zoom stream and then record it just for
posterity for the community as well.
And then Mr. Potato, I'm not sure which panel you're referring to, because there were a couple of other ones. Was it the game theory panel? Was that the one you're referring to?
No, I mean, in general, like the statement I made was because I creed up your name on the
ECC agenda and you seem to be like all over the place. So I was wondering like, but again,
you kind of clarify that like your name was on things,
but you weren't like physically there for many of those.
But yeah, I mean, I mean, it's,
it's kind of expected you're an Ethereum OG.
So you're kind of wanted in, in these kinds of events.
So it was interesting. I particularly liked the debate
you had with the founder from Celo. It was unfortunately a tie, but I think there were
pretty strong arguments made from your side. That was a fun one. Yeah, Merrick's an old friend,
and we got to debate one of my favorite topics, which is like our L2 is kind of like value extractive or value accretive to Ethereum, which is not really directly relevant to Nier or House of Stake.
Obviously, we don't really have L2s on top of Nier, but it does touch upon some of the kind of core questions about, you know, kind of tokenomics and, you know, crypto economics.
And I know that like Ilya is thinking deeply about these challenges in the context of like near AI, right? Maybe that's our version of this, right? How do we
ensure that the things that are built atop of near AI are also causing value to accrue to near
token holders? So that is actually directly relevant to house of stake. But anyway, to kind
of bring it back to what Klaus was saying a moment ago. I thought the event was a huge success.
I'm very, very grateful to Klaus and to Gauntlet, Nagora,
and everyone else who had a hand in organizing the event,
Klaus for his leadership in the second half of the day.
I was also very moved, Klaus, by the Fork That moment.
I'll just, I'll share mine as well, because it's very brief.
And I just, I love this.
I think that, you know, it's the Fork That campaign, as I tweeted about a few days ago,
just kind of like really is a great way to express the things that we're here for,
the values that we believe in, in the broader near ecosystem.
And I'd love to see us lean into this in a house of stake as well
and show some support for that campaign.
I started my career working six years in a traditional financial company on Wall Street.
And when I left that role after six years, I found that I had no work to show the world.
I had no portfolio, so to speak, of like, I mean, I was a software developer, of course,
so I had no code that I could show to people and point to and say, I built that, you know,
that was the product of my work and my labor over over those six years. And the reason was quite simply because I worked for a, you know,
normal traditional company that owned all the IP, and it was all kind of proprietary. And that really
deeply disturbed me. And so I decided in that moment that I only wanted to work on open source
software, and I wanted my work to be out there, you know, in public, in the public domain for
the world to see, for the world to benefit from.
And quite frankly, I just want my work to speak for itself.
And so that's why, you know, I've decided since then to only work on open source software
to use open source software as much as possible.
And not just open source software, but also, you know, open research, right?
As much as possible, I want everything I'm doing and everything we're doing to be out there, you know, again, in the world for the public good and to speak for itself. That was
my fork that moment. Yeah, it's quite simple. Oh, and then I thought just because again, we have...
Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, I was saying it's quite similar to what Clause's story is.
Yeah, and actually, again, I mean, we won't share anyone else's story is. Yeah.
And actually, again, I mean,
we won't share anyone else's story,
obviously, for privacy,
but I will say there were a number of people there
who shared similar stories
about having started their career
like a traditional, you know,
kind of whether it's a financial company
or just a traditional kind of corporation
and, you know, kind of left that path
for various reasons.
I was just going to say, again,
we have a couple of other folks here I know,
including Max and Yoon,
who were in person at the event. So if they wanted to add anything or ask anything
about the event, just wanted to offer that opportunity.
I suppose the only thing that I really want to add is that I think it was really nice to come
together and really see everybody in person, build rapport and just kind of feel like you know you were working with real people who all were more or less interested
in the same making something really work and really caring about this community i think that
was incredibly encouraging i think that sort of morale building is really important to having
good output just generally and just feeling you, conviction in what you're building and what you're trying to do.
And quick intro to myself, I think some of you have seen me around before. I'm Maxwell. I've sort of been around the Near Ecosystem for five-ish years,
but I've done a lot of things more broadly in the Ethereum space as well, worked for a variety of projects and just kind of been
going around doing a variety of roles so uh that's essentially all i have to say about myself for now
but anyway it was a great event and i hope that we can do another similar thing
at some point in the not too distant future yeah um i think uh i mean it's it's hard to attach your value on like these uh in-person
gatherings like they do help build a lot of trust between people who haven't worked with each other
in the past so um definitely think it's a value add for getting house of stake off the ground. Like
there's people, there's these endorsed delegates with various different backgrounds. So
getting to know them face to face and sharing ideas in person is definitely a good move to
get started. I have a few community questions. We put out a forum
earlier this morning inviting folks to kind of ask questions and based on that and previous
discussions we've seen within the community, I kind of wanted to bring those up and maybe we can
get answers from either Lane, Clause,
or anyone else who kind of has context on them.
The first one being hiring.
So for folks who might not be aware, House of Stake has four open roles that are going
to be hired through the foundation.
And Lane has earlier posted job descriptions of them on the forum. So
the question is more around like timelines on when do these roles go live? Because there was
a mention of them being posted on the careers page. So kind of wanted an update on that end.
I kind of wanted an update on that end.
Awesome. Yeah, I can speak to that.
So, unfortunately, I don't have an answer, a concrete answer to the timeframe today.
I will have one tomorrow, so it's just kind of slightly bad timing.
And, of course, I'll share that as soon as I have it.
The short, you know, kind of statement about what's going on here is it's near foundation bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, there's some degree of bureaucracy internally around things like hiring. It's
important decisions. We're a small organization, so we have to be very careful, not just with who
we hire, but also with how we structure roles, how we build teams, things like that. Just to be
very clear, the drafts that I shared are, they're still
officially drafts, right, until they actually like go live on the near foundation careers page.
They have not been like officially, you know, rubber stamped approved on the foundation side.
So that's kind of the process that's playing out right now. And I think the delay here is that
it's really just the reality that, you know, that some of these roles are going to need to move over to the house of stake.
In other words, to the DAO side in the not too distant future.
The most obvious of those is the head of governance role.
And the other roles, it's a bit of a question mark.
So we're just trying to figure out on the foundation side how we handle this.
There's also kind of a product lead role.
And there's a little bit of a question there about whether that role belongs on the near foundation side or the near AI side,
because near foundation is also not really a product organization. So, you know, I still think
that we are going to end up hiring people into all these roles. I think that, you know, officially
hiring for them is going to start, I mean, optimistically next week, so really, really soon.
But we just need to kind of answer some of these kind of internal logistical questions, the foundation.
And I say I'm gonna have answers tomorrow
because Bianca and I are gonna put our heads together
tomorrow and find answers to these questions
after the chaos of VHCC is over.
So I'll share an update on that,
hopefully in about 24 hours when I have more information.
But I do encourage anyone who is interested
in any of these roles, please do not hesitate.
Reach out to me here on X or on Telegram or on the forum.
I'm happy to kind of like collect CVs and talk to you about the roles immediately.
Yeah, so that's something to look forward to.
And again, the drafts are not finalized, but they're a very good indication of what the roles might entail.
On the second question, there's been a few instances where people have asked about incentives
for VNEAR.
So there's incentives to kind of, from what I understand, you can lock your near, ST near or LI near
in return for V near. And then depending on like how long you lock that V near,
you can get like extra incentives in V near. I'm not sure if anyone in here is able to kind of explain
how those incentives would work, but that's one of the other questions we've had.
Yeah, I think I could take this one as well. So yeah, it's exactly as you described, right? So
you're locking your NEAR, your VE-NEAR or your ST-NEAR into the House of State contract.
And then what happens here,
I mean, it is sort of a traditional vote escrow model. And so we're doing something very similar
to what other VE token models have done with one difference, right? One key difference, which is
in the other models I've seen at the time when you lock the token, you have to choose a lock
duration, whether you want to lock it for one month, three months, six months, 12 months, whatever it is. And you get like a bonus
to your voting power, depending on how long you lock. We're doing the same thing, but we're kind
of doing it in a more straightforward fashion, right? And all it means is that the longer you
leave your token, so when you lock it, there's no specified duration, right? You can leave it
locked as long as you want. But the longer you leave it locked, the more voting power accrues. This is a parameter, like the shape of that curve is a
parameter. I don't know that we've finalized that parameter yet. That's something that Gauntlet is
working on. I think it's linear, right? Which means if you wait twice the length of time,
you know, you'll get twice the voting power or something like that. But it may not be linear.
We have to kind of finalize that parameter. That's, I don't even know if I would call that
an incentive per se. I mean, I guess it is an incentive, but it's not a financial incentive,
right? Just to be very clear, VE near, you know, is soul bound. It cannot be like traded or sold
or anything like that. Now, this is all subject to change in the house of stake 2.0 design that
Gauntlet is also still working on. So I think we should kind of get them back into the room and
they could speak a little bit more to the plans there.
So it may be the case that in the future,
there's also, you know,
House of Stake offers kind of real near-denominated yield
in addition to just the voting power.
But again, we're still working on that.
And anyway, everything I'm describing,
everything that's been built so far
is described in the initial Gauntlet proposal, which is still our kind of like source of truth on these
designs.
So I encourage you, I know it's long and there's a lot of math there, but I encourage you to
go back and take a look at that if you have outstanding questions about what we're doing
right now.
Yeah, understood.
It is a bit like TBD on that side, but there has been a few screenshots which kind of highlight
that locking a v-near for a long duration might accrue further v-near.
I'm not sure how it works, but we do have in the pipeline spaces with gauntlets,
so it would be worth bringing it up with them when that happens.
it would be worth bringing it up with them when that happens.
And then another point of discussion,
this hasn't actually come through the forum,
but there's been a few folks in the Telegram chat in particular
asking around updates on the code of conduct,
the conflict of interest, and the constitution.
And I believe clause is closer to these issues.
So I would kind of like an update from you on that.
Yeah, I can take that for sure.
Yeah, so there's a number of different foundational documents
that need to get put together for governance to work.
And yeah, so mission, vision, values has been a piece, code of conduct, conflict of interest,
policy and constitution, I would say, are the set. And my approach so far has been to
start with the mission, vision, values, like get really clear about who we are, why we exist and how we're going to work.
And I want to situate that inside of, you know, Nia already has its own mission.
Right. And recently that's gone through a rebrand.
It's very much around user owned future, user AI, user-owned data, this whole sovereign stack
to counterbalance like this default centralized future. And yeah, I think it's important that
we recognize what is the role of house at stake as a function in relationship to that
greater near mission. And so far I've done two workshops with delegates and a smaller group so
far. And that's been very promising. And then we're about to start, I would say, in the next
week, expanding that out to get more community input. I want to preface and say this is like
a non-trivial thing to write a mission statement, in particular for DAO, where you have a whole lot of
decentralized stakeholders and stakeholder groups and trying to unify around some common
statements.
In a traditional organization, I've done this many times with startup founders, you
can get everybody in the room for two days and really nut it out.
Now, in a DAO, you've got the complexity of multiple time
zones, geographies, lots of different stakeholder groups, anonymous people, all of that kind of
complexity. And I do have a plan that we're going to do a rough consensus version of mission,
vision, values, and to get us going, and that we can iterate on that over time.
There's actually some really promising, more sophisticated techniques to do large scale values, attribution, sorry, aggregation, and be able to ongoingly determine what is our
what is our mission, vision, values across possibly thousands of different stakeholders.
mission vision values across possibly thousands of different stakeholders.
And Lane actually talked to some of this kind of technology and methodology in his talk earlier
today around a technique called broad listening. So some of you may know Audrey Tsang and her
amazing work around polling for different preferences and needs in Taiwan and the vTaiwan movement.
So we've started some early conversations with a group called DeepGov, who has open
sourced some of that technology. And just zooming back out a little bit, when I look
at what we're doing with the House of Stake as a DAO, I'm very much seeing the DAO as, you know, the most promising 21st century institution
that we can create, a mixture of humans and AIs working together. And when we think about like a
cybernetic system like that of humans and AIs working together, it needs to work through three
stages, sense making, decision making, and action taking. Now, a lot of people, when they think about governance and a DAO,
they just focus in on the decision-making, voting, getting things done.
But we actually need robust sense-making before that,
so actually people can understand and have an informed view
before they make a choice.
I'm witnessing that at the moment around the inflation proposal, right?
So, you know, there's a proposal out there that it should be halved from 5% to 2.5%.
But how many, you know, hand on heart, how many of us can like deeply understand like the complexity,
the consequences of the impact of that? We really need to get more sophisticated around modeling, scenario planning.
And so, you know, you're not just reading a block of text and clicking vote yes, no. We actually
have some, you know, decision making support tools that live alongside that. So this is some of the
way that I'm, you know, thinking about how we operate as a DAO. Mission vision values will be,
you know, ongoing and adaptive.
We're going to start with rough consensus by doing a series of workshops.
So I've done two rounds of that,
and there will be another round for open input.
You can expect to hear from me
within the next week or two on that.
Coming back to the other ones you mentioned,
conflict of interest.
Uhtred's done some awesome work. Shout out to Uhtred who's on the call on that. And yeah,
I've had a look at it. I think it's good. We need to think about beyond the policy to make it complete. What does, you know, arbitration, how do we make a determination and assessment on it?
And then what is enforcement and penalty look like? So if there is a breach, and how do we handle that?
So I'll be talking with Uhtred about that. And anyone else who's keen to jam on that,
let me know. Around code of conduct, there's lots of good examples that we can use and shape that and really look at what's appropriate
specifically in the NIA ecosystem and for house of state specifically. So I'll be crafting that.
One of the things I want to offer is something to think about is should our code of conduct
be enforced by humans or should our code of conduct be enforced by humans? Or should our code of conduct be enforced by an AI?
So imagine we have a code of conduct agent,
which is, you know, its eyes and ears
is looking at conduct on the forum,
looking at conduct in the Telegram group
and many other data sources we point that at.
It's trained against, you trained against a set of agreements
that people agree if they're going to participate in this ecosystem. And then this code of conduct
agent is going to detect for a violation, make a warning, and whatever other appropriate actions we
want it to take, and raise that as an alert up to, you know, a human group who can make
the final determination about what is done with potential violation. So for me, I think this is
really interesting and novel area there where Nia can bring leadership, eating our own dog food,
using our own tools to build this kind of technology and lead from the front with that.
of technology and lead from the front with that. I also think, you know, since the beginning of
time, humans have been infallible and not actually the best at governance. And so if we can encode
these kind of rules in a trusted AI and use all of the sovereign stack tools like a open source
model, open source weights, trusted execution environment, we can see with explainability everything that went into that determination and that AI. So yeah, that's what I'm excited about. You know, we could do the same with a conflict of interest agent. Yeah, let's actually use these agents in our governance and get busy building that.
in our governance and get busy building that.
Yeah, that's something I personally agree with a lot.
I think we should be leading by example, right?
So if NIR is indeed the blockchain of AI,
we should be using more of these tools,
especially around AI in our day-to-day operations when it comes to governance.
So looking forward to that.
I probably want to ask Lane, because I'm just about at his presentation where he was talking
about the Metapool co-pilot agent.
So I wanted to ask him if he could explain to folks very briefly how it actually works.
I'll do my best.
I wish we had someone here from Metapool who could speak more deeply to it.
So Metapool has its own governance, just to be very clear, which is totally apart from
near governance or house of stake.
And this was initially built for use by Metapool governance in the Metapool ecosystem.
And I saw a demo of it a couple of weeks ago.
It's an LLM.
I don't know exactly which model they're using, but it's
something like Cloud or ChatGPT. And so it's kind of a fairly straightforward, familiar chat
interface. But what they've done that's kind of like unique and clever here is they plug it into,
in their case, the Metapool governance system. And in the case of House of Stake, they plugged it into basically the testnet.
So we have this kind of Agora beta version that Agora has obviously been building for us that is running currently on the near testnet.
And all the proposal data lives on chain.
That's my understanding.
So the Metapool team was very closely in touch with and worked with the Agora team to make sure they're reading the right data and the right format from the right smart contracts, etc. But yeah, I mean, basically, it, you know,
again, I'm, I don't have all the technical details. But you know, my kind of high level understanding is that it's somehow inserting that kind of proposal data into the context,
right of the of the LLM. And so what that means is you can ask it questions, you can say, what are
the proposals, right? And it will, you know, give you the list of proposals, you can ask it which proposals are
active, which proposals, you know, have already passed or been defeated. But then where it gets
really interesting is you can, you can, you can ask it things like, how should I vote on this
proposal, or like evaluate this proposal and give me, you know, the possible upsides, the possible
downsides, things like that, right? So that's why I call it a governance co-pilot, right? Because
it's there to kind of hold your hand
and help you evaluate something
that may be like outside your area of expertise.
I don't know that it's quite ready for production yet.
Again, kind of Metapool would have to speak to that,
but I'd really like to see this go live
when the Agora front end goes live,
which should happen very soon.
And it's not integrated into the actual
front end yet. It kind of runs as like a separate application. But I know that their goal is to
integrate it as well. And, you know, Agora is excited to see this integration happen also.
Yeah. And, you know, again, there was a demo of this that they shared with me that we shared both
here in person at the House of State event and that I also shared in my talk this morning.
And I think we could probably share that with the community as well.
I mean, I'll double check with Metapool, but it's really cool.
It's like a two-minute demo and it shows everything I just described.
And just to be very clear, this is not just a, you know, like a mock-up.
This actually works.
You can actually play with it.
We'll have to see if it's actually online and, you know, running so people can play with it.
And I don't think it's been open sourced yet, but they're planning to open source it's actually online and running so people can play with it. And
I don't think it's been open sourced yet, but they're planning to open source it very, very shortly as well. Yeah, that looks very promising. And I believe there's also Bitte who's kind of
commissioned an agent, and there's a few devs in the Nier ecosystem also trying to kind of
near ecosystem also trying to kind of uh hack their way to kind of have a similar agent where
uh you can kind of get it to do actions for you whether that's like locking up the your v near or
getting perspectives on like how does the agent perceive a particular proposal based on like your
preferences um so i do think think those are very interesting initiatives.
Obviously, the Metapool one feels more exciting
because I actually saw it live in your talk,
but I think there's a lot of potential
for having these AI agents kind of participate in governance.
As a final question, I probably want to ask, for having these AI agents kind of participate in governance.
As a final question, I probably want to ask,
so there's, and it's probably drawing parallels with the NDC.
So before the NDC went live, it attended a bunch of conferences,
both with the aim of raising awareness about the governance initiative,
as well as getting more people
from outside the ecosystem to participate.
So kind of wanted to get your views,
how are people from the ETH community,
or I believe even folks from outside of the ETH community
might have attended ETH CC,
how do they perceive both house of stake
as a governance initiative? And how are they,
if any, like willing to kind of participate in this?
Hey, yeah, I can start on that. I think, you know, in my personal network,
I have a bunch of people who I would call governors
who, yeah, geek out on governance,
care about future of humanity,
care about AI and sovereign tech.
And so that mission transcends
whether it's Ethereum, Nia, Solano,
any other kind of ecosystem.
And so when I tell the story of what we're doing
with House at Stake, they get excited.
And so they're not really caring exactly,
you know, the underlying technology.
And I think this is actually, this is great.
This is a testament that what we're up to,
the possibility of, you know, AI,
I wouldn't say AI driven, but like AI,
like partnering with AI in terms of governance is a compelling story.
And people are very interested to talk about that.
There's also a lot of State does have right now
to take all the lessons of the past and have another go at it, to incorporate all of those
in, you know, the foundational structure and process and how we're setting things up.
That's compelling. So I can speak mostly, maybe Lane can speak from other perspectives, but I can
speak from people who care about governance, govtech,
AI in particular, as it works within DAOs, finding that a really compelling thing.
Yeah, thanks, Klaus. He and I are not speaking over each other because we're physically next
to each other, so we can kind of give each other cues here. It's really helpful.
No, I agree with everything Klaus said.
You know, I think NIR has always been viewed now speaking as a, you know, once former and I guess still present kind of member of the Ethereum community.
Like NIR has always been viewed as a friendly ecosystem.
It's always been viewed as Ethereum aligned, Ethereum adjacent.
You know, there are always people joking about things like maybe Near should turn itself into an Ethereum L2.
But I think that these conversations wouldn't happen, even these jokes wouldn't happen if people didn't kind of feel that way.
And I think there's reason for that, right?
I mean, you know, I'm not the only kind of Ethereum person, you know, who joined Near, obviously.
And, you know, our founders, our developers have always been very close to Ethereum,
have always been very inspired by Ethereum, and indeed have also contributed ideas back into the
Ethereum ecosystem. So all that is to say, I've never had anything but a really friendly reception
from Ethereum people when talking about any of the stuff that I'm doing at NIR, the fact that I joined
NIR, et cetera. I agree with what Klaus said.
You know, people are very excited generally about the idea of kind of the role of AI in
governance, right?
I mean, not surprisingly, you know, AI is a hot topic right now, obviously.
And also everyone, it's not controversial to say that governance, you know, as it exists
today is like kind of a disaster.
And, you know, AI, like I think people kind of agree that AI has a role
to play in hopefully improving that. And yeah, in all the conversations I've had here over the past
few days, as I'm reflecting on it now, like it strikes me that nobody ever said something like,
oh, but, you know, but that's NIR, not Ethereum. Like that didn't happen, right? People are very
excited about what we're doing. You know, it's also worth pointing out that like, you know,
NIR is also not, is also far from the only other EVEN L1 chain that's
kind of present at this event. There's a number of other folks from other ecosystems here.
Ethereum has always been a big tent and events like this and East Denver have always been very
friendly to other kind of chains and other ecosystems, including NIR. So yeah, very positive perception. I would say, you know, people are not
aware of, they don't know much about NIR governance. They know about NIR. Pretty much everybody knows
about NIR. So that's really, really good. Like at least 80%. Very few have ever heard of House
of Stake or, you know, know anything about NIR governance. So we kind of have our work cut out
for us there. And, you know, I think we've had a really large number of very serendipitous conversations. I
mean, even literally in the 10 minutes preceding this call, as Klaus and I stepped into the room
that we're in, each of us independently had a conversation with someone else in the room here
who's working on something that's very relevant to House of Stake directly. And I think that's
the beauty of these in-person events. In addition to the trust building
that Klaus spoke to earlier,
it's just the serendipity of being in the room
with other people who have taken the time
to fly all the way here,
who are working on very relevant aligned things.
So for that reason, I think it's really critical
that we continue to have a presence at events like this.
Yeah, I can't agree more with what you said.
I think we both, I think one of the things I kind of see as a metric, whether I see House
of Stake as a success or not, is our ability to kind of attract users and participants
from outside the NIR ecosystem. Like how can we attract talent and individuals
who are thriving in other ecosystems
to kind of do the same on NIR.
And I know like, and I have that same assumption
that many people may not know about House of Stake,
but we are just getting started, right?
So I do hope that would be changing very soon
as we kind of go live.
But yeah, I don't have anything else
to go through on my side.
And I don't think, oh yeah,
we've got Evgeny raises his hand.
So feel free to unmute yourself, Evgeny.
Yeah, thank you for giving me a speak. unmute yourself, Afghani.
Yeah, thank you for giving me a speak. Yeah, I also agree with you, Potato, that
how to take me to
bring talent from other ecosystem.
First of all, we already did it with our delegators.
We have a couple of delegators from Arbitrum and someone thinks it's bad, they will have
conflict of interest.
From my point of view, it's really good because they have really big experience in governments.
So it's really big win for us. but I raised my hand to ask a question about Metapool assistant LLM that we
discussed earlier today so my question is if this LLM assistant can tell you how
to work for proposals yes or no can be for example theory, make from this LLM in future IE delegate and it can vote for proposals like in Boris and delegators?
my understanding, it's a prototype at the moment,
so I can't speak to the exact feature set.
But, yeah, I think some of those kind of features could be built.
But, yeah, we'd probably need to speak with Alan from Medipool on that.
Maybe you know more, Lane.
Yeah, question for Lane.
Sorry, sorry.
What is your opinion about IE Delegators?
When will we have time to add them to our governments?
How many of them we should add, etc?
Yeah, great question.
So with respect specifically to the existing MetaPool demo, again, I also don't know the technical details. I don't know what would be involved in turning that into a delegate with kind of more agency. But I mean, that's obviously the vision. I know that Metapool shares that vision as well. We've spoken to them about it.
there's a lot of details to work out here, right?
I think we have to be cautious.
Actually, I think we should begin running these experiments immediately,
but I think we should do them on the testnet
because there's a lot of details to work out here
before we let them loose on like actual proposals.
So, you know, I think what I would like to see
as an immediate next step is the work,
is the collaboration with DeepGov that Klaus spoke to a
little earlier and that I spoke about in my slides today. We know them well. They're really, really
keen to work with us. And they have now, they used DeepGov in the most recent Gitcoin grants round,
right? So it was used in production in a very concrete fashion, as well as in, I gave another
example in my talk today that they shared with us which is um they actually did an on the ground workshop in bhutan um working
with the government there right because they're plugging into kind of like a national um id system
over there um and you know it's a different it's this kind of um deep listening uh sense making
type idea that again the class spokelaus spoke to a little bit earlier
that I spoke to in my talk earlier, where they allow voters, constituents to express their
preferences directly or indirectly, right? So directly is in the form of something like a
Telegram bot, where someone can just quite directly reach out and say, I like this, I don't like that,
I want to see this happen, I'm angry about this, et cetera. And indirectly, in our case, would be things like the contents of the governance forum, right? That's a very
low hanging fruit, we can dump that immediately into like a CSV file, and put that through the
DeepGov tools, we already spoke to them about that. Telegram groups as well, right? We could use the
main house of state group, for example, there may be other relevant groups as well, we could, I've
done this before, Telegram easily allows you to kind of like export the contents of a channel, or you could also just add it as a bot into the channel.
And then the outcome, the output of this is going to be like a document that, again, I talked about
this more in my talk, but it's really quite remarkable. It shows you the policy stances,
it shows you the opinions, the issues that people care about the most. It kind of does some
clustering, right? And what they did with the clustering is they actually created three different policy documents that they used to
create three different AI personas, AI agents. One that's a bit more kind of communist, one's a bit
more capitalist, one that's a bit more centrist, right? And then they gave them, they gave those
three AI agents the ability to help allocate funding in the Gitcoin grants round. We could
do this immediately.
There's no technical blocker here whatsoever, right?
I think that, I mean, we actually discussed with them,
we want to actually kick this off as early as next week.
So we're going to make some time to try to hack on this next week with them.
Yeah, let me add a couple of things here.
So the way it's being used in the nation state level
is an
implementation, they've called it talk to the city. So allows, you know, any, you know, member of a
city to ask questions of the city as if the city is its own being or like some kind of body. And
so, you know, the city has its eyes and its ears, which are different data sources that it's, you
know, scanning and reading from. And so analogousous to this idea we can think about house of state dow uh as some kind of
organizational body and it's eyes and ears you know it's it's monitoring the governance forum
it's monitoring you know a twitter list of uh key people in the near ecosystem i don't know it's
it's monitoring a telegram a series of telegram groups,
that's its kind of eyes and ears. And so those are data sources that get ingested and brought
into a common data repository. And when you think about building AI as a cortex, it needs a memory,
so you're starting to build its organizational memory. And so you can think about House of
Stake, kind of like that talk to the city, it'll be talk to House of Stake as an entity.
And people will be able to ask questions of it and it will have its own agents that can go off and do various things.
So, yeah, it's world leading work. I'm deeply excited about what we're building here.
Thank you so much, Paul.
Thank you so much. I'm excited about it as well.
I'm excited about it as well.
Sorry, just to add one tiny little additional piece here.
All of this together is still not an answer to your question, Evgeny, which is we're still
not yet at the stage where we're ready to have actual AI agents that can do things like
receive delegation and vote directly.
I don't know how long that will take.
Optimistically, I'd say three months.
I think that's a little bit aggressive, but realistically, it might take take more like six months but what we're describing here is i think the
immediate next step on that path yeah thank you so much for answer also quick question about proposals
because uh i have already asked you this question but uh um I would like to clarify.
We have already seen that some people already proposed a couple of proposals.
For example, Elliot proposed three proposals.
Also, I received a lot of questions about how to make proposal to House of Stakes. So my question
is, should people create
their proposals now or
better wait for
formal template for
these proposals? I know you're pretty busy
what do you recommend
at the moment?
Yeah, I think
I'm a little torn here.
I mean, I want to encourage people
to get proposals rolling.
And I've done this many times before.
Like, I think it's totally fine
to submit proposals right now,
even if they don't conform
precisely to a specific template.
Having said that, we do need a template
and it is very important
for a bunch of reasons.
I mean, the most obvious one is,
you know, if we want to use AI here
and have it, you know, consuming data and metadata on proposals, it has to be in the same format, right?
I think Agora gave us a template previously. I'm not certain that has been, I think it was maybe
shared with the delegates, but maybe not shared with the community yet. Let me look into that.
I don't see any blockers here. I think we can get a draft template up,
like a V0 template, you know, hopefully as early as tomorrow.
Let me work on that.
And then we can kind of, it doesn't have to be perfect,
right, we can iterate from there.
I'll put it on GitHub so that everybody can kind of comment
on it and make pull requests and things like that.
Also about, oh, sorry Carlos, please continue. Yeah, let me just add something that's important that you may not have noticed in what Lane just said, that he's going to add it on GitHub.
And I want to emphasize that because as we're creating and building things, we should be thinking about making them AI ready.
So whenever we can, be putting them in places that is,
yeah, consumable by an AI. And so, you know, having things on GitHub, rather than, you know,
living inside of a Google Doc, for instance, like, just, yeah, be thinking in that kind of
forward stance, that kind of posture. As you build something, as you put something forward,
it's like, oh, how could this also be used
not just by a human but a uh by an agent or you know some other llm yeah
yeah thank you so much uh i'm i'm already done with my the most important question so if anyone
want to ask question we have left five minutes. Please raise your hand.
If not, I will ask more questions.
Yeah, I think I'm inclined to kind of wrap it up here,
because I think they mentioned they have to the venue,
the schedule of the event ends at 5 PM,
so they might get kicked out from the venue.
That probably gives them five minutes to vacate the premises.
So, yeah, I think we're pretty much done.
I keep glancing over at the door and I'm amazed we haven't been kicked out yet,
but I think you're right.
I think three minutes from now we're going to be probably escorted out of the building.
Exactly.
Yeah, so I think it was a very
insightful session. It was great to hear
firsthand from you
guys on what was happening
at ETC. I have a
bit less FOMO now,
so thank you for that.
Thanks, Klaus, for joining.
It was nice to have you for the first time.
Yeah, absolutely. I want to close by saying, yeah,. It was nice to have you for the first time. Yeah, absolutely.
I want to close by saying, yeah, I'm very excited to be here,
getting to know more and more people in the Nia ecosystem.
I'm very excited by Nia's overarching mission.
Personally, yeah, I think it's critical for us as a species
to have this kind of technology be adopted, be successful.
My door is open.
I'm a very relational person.
So if you want to have a call, you want to get to know me,
drop me a DM.
I'll give you my Calendly.
We'll have a call.
Yeah, let's get to know each other.
Thank you, guys, for amazing work.
Awesome.
Thanks, everyone, for joining.
And until next time bye bye
cheers thanks for having us
