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What We Built Together: Ontology’s Anniversary Wrap-Up & the 2026 Road Ahead
Recorded: Dec. 18, 2025 Duration: 0:51:05Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, industry leaders explored the evolving landscape of crypto fundraising, highlighting the shift towards ICO 2.0 and the integration of Human Passport into Human Tech. They emphasized the importance of enhancing user experience in wallet services and predicted a trend towards more decentralized and speculative applications in 2026.
Full Transcription
Thank you. testing testing testing
how's it going man pretty good i can hear myself which is really annoying. Oof. Yeah.
That's not good.
Test, test.
Okay, there we go. It was my fault.
Hey, as usual.
Technical issues caused by
myself.
How are you doing,
Daniel? It's been a long time since we
haven't talked. Months. Yeah, no, we're Daniel? It's been a long time since we haven't talked. Months.
I know, right? Yeah, no, we're chilling. It's been a crazy...
Ooh, now I can hear myself. It's been a crazy month since DevConnect.
I still am not dug out from that, but we're surviving.
2026 planning, having a good time.
There we go.
Trying this again.
I heard you.
I heard you.
DevConnect.
Still haven't dug yourself out?
That's wild.
Yeah, no, it's painful.
If anyone joins the space or listens to the space and I owe you a Telegram message, I apologize.
I will get back to you sometime within now and the next month from now.
Yeah.
I mean, look, we're going into the holidays.
I'm still troubleshooting over here.
Yeah, it's partly my fault.
I have two devices, one for my personal account, one for the Anthology account.
And I keep looping. So I think I figured it out. Sorry, buddy. Yeah. Well, what I was saying is we're
going into the holiday. So I think it's a good time to kind of recap, but also kind of reset
and recalibrate for the new year.
And hopefully you're getting a chance to do that.
Are you taking a break starting next week?
I'll be online Monday, Tuesday,
and then I'm going down to Costa Rica between Christmas and New Year's.
Nice.
I'm going to treat myself a little bit here.
You should. Christmas and New Year's. So I'm going to treat myself a little bit here. How about you?
I'm going into your neck of the woods, Colorado.
Ah, yes.
Well, don't expect any snow or skiing because it is dry as dry can be.
That's wild.
Yeah.
I mean, when I was unmarried and unchilded uh i used to go snowboarding and
i used to love going up there for that but uh it's been like at least 10 years since i've hit
the mountains for any kind of carving of you know with a snowboard so yeah yeah it's a different story for me. I try to get up like 50 to 70 times a year,
and this year is not going to happen.
Oh man, that's, I mean, you're close, so there's actually no excuse for not doing
that. But I mean, sounds like maybe because of work, you haven't been able to take advantage
of it as much.
More so, because the conditions of the snow are horrible out here.
Yeah.
It's actually been getting later and later and less and less snow
the last couple of years from what I remember.
Well, cool.
Well, GM, everybody, thanks so much for joining us
at another Anthology space here. This is the third in a series of
anniversary spaces. This time around,
we're going to have Jeff joining us in a moment. But we also have
Daniel, who is the head of product and growth.
I'm cheating. I'm looking at your bio on X.
And then it says 0xHolonym, which is a retired account.
Human tech.
Human passports.
I do have to update that. Thank you for the reminder.
We just had a Twitter change up within the past month.
Yeah. That sounds good.
I mean, so maybe that's a good place to start.
I mean, I definitely want to hear from you and what's been happening at HumanTech. There's, Human Passport from, I guess, just Passport.
What does this all mean for, I guess, Human Tech moving forward?
Yeah, for sure. So Human Passport is still doing its thing.
So for those that don't know, Human Passport is just a continuation of Gitcoin Passport,
but it was acquired by Holonym and Human Tech just about a year ago.
So we've fully integrated into the company, but are still providing civil defense to the
masses, especially those folks that are protecting rewards programs, governance programs, and
like different community programs.
But there's a lot more to human tech than just that.
So since it's been a year, I've started to integrate more into the Holonym organization.
Around February of last year, we kind of launched this new brand called Human Tech.
called human tech. So Holonym is the foundation. Human tech is the suite of products underneath
So Holonym is the foundation.
Holonym that includes Passport and a couple of other products that I'm going to talk about in a
second here. But human tech is really aiming to broadly protect humans' digital human rights and
enable Web3 to build more technology and products around humans specifically
and not like sybils bad actors um and other malicious critters out there so um yes human
passport sybil defense the other song that we all are probably
thinking of when you hear WAP. So Wallet as a Protocol is a response to Wallet as a Service.
So instead of like renting wallets for an onboarding flow for a DAP or a website. Um, we actually provide that for free.
So instead of having to, um, pay for every single user that you onboard through Privy or through
like magic link, we just offer that service for free to builders. So you can onboard using the
same like social login, email, um, phone number login. But login, but we enable you to do a couple of
additional things on top of that. So one is the users that create that wallet can use that wallet
anywhere. It's not like pigeonholed within a single ecosystem. Another is we have stronger
key architecture management.
So we're using 2PC and 2PC MPC to protect keys.
And we have a handful of other things,
including like builders can actually earn revenue from the wallets that are onboarding to their ecosystem
through wallet as a protocol.
So those are two main things that we're really building.
We also have AVS.
We also have individual verification flows such as KYC, biometrics.
And we're excited to be working with Aztec to be building their Ethereum to L2 bridge in the new year.
So we're very actively working on that and are excited to make that available here as soon as Aztec Mainnet goes live.
Wow. I mean, that sounds like quite a wide-ranging suite of products.
Yeah.
I think for most of us, and maybe I can speak for myself, I'm most familiar with the idea of...
Call me.
Because that's...
Jeez.
You know, today is a special day.
Anything that can happen will happen.
Yeah.
But yeah, no, I mean, that's what I'm familiar with,
because that's how you came into HoloLem.
But it's really great to see how it's becoming something that, I guess, touches
different pieces of
infrastructure and, I guess,
probably better said,
has a wide-ranging impact
in the ecosystem.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, it's
all centered around these digital human
rights that we're really trying to protect, right? Like,
the Aztec Bridge is really trying to enable a more private Web3.
The obviously human passport is trying to ensure builders are building for humans
and humans are able to participate and not be worried about like civils taking unfair allocations.
worried about like symbols taking unfair allocations and the wallet is really just trying to ensure
that we're onboarding people in ways that they're comfortable being onboarded we're trying to kind
of abstract away the complexity of onboarding to web3 using like social logins but also providing
really strong security and the ability for these folks to use wallets outside of the ecosystem that they specifically were onboarded to,
to see how you can really take a wallet and, a civil defense platform, a bridge, and an AVS is quite a bit for any single team to be doing.
And we're small, but we're quite scrappy.
Yeah, I mean, I remember just from personal experience that that's very much the world you came from to, which is Gitcoin, where small but mighty and there was a lot of moving parts.
But I think it's easier when everything kind of fits into the same system
so that, you know, if anything, the products and the protocols
and the apps you're building are all providing some unified solution
instead of just having different things that work independently
and maybe without
necessarily making use of some of the other products that you use.
So, you know, there's two things I want to touch on here.
The one thing, which is probably low-hanging fruit, and I just want to talk about it because
it's just the world that I live in every day, which is decentralized social, aka Farcaster, aka
apps being built on top of it, like Base, right, which are running on this social protocol that
has a built-in identity system. I wonder if you could share your thoughts, and I'll share mine, In terms of what does it mean when there is a social system,
like a social network that's built on top of these identity systems?
And how do you think identity and proof of humanity
is kind of a worthwhile endeavor
when it comes to a network of humans that potentially,
you know, we're not just making friends there,
but we're potentially like collaborating on stuff together.
And I mean, we've already seen also receiving
kind of some incentives from other companies that say,
oh, there's value in this network.
We want to make sure that we distribute some value
in return in terms of like airdrops.
Have you thought about it?
Like how do you see that happening?
Because I don't think that there's necessarily a reputation system,
quote unquote, on something like Farcaster.
Right. They kind of have a reputation system based on
like length of time that an account has been,
like when the account was created um like time-based reputation
is kind of the best thing that you can track when just solely looking at the farcaster ecosystem like
we actually once upon a time we're trying to put together a model around farcaster to figure out if
we could identify whether an individual far caster account was human or was
civil and we had a very difficult time doing that it's like it's the same reason why we have a
difficult time doing that with like twitter and that's because um like creating content and like
kind of just like flubbing different um activity metrics is quite easy on these social metrics or on these social networks.
Now, but to go like all the way back to your kind of early conversation or early question,
like I think that social networks are 100% dependent on the identity system underlying
them because like for us to be good participants in the social conversation, it's important for us to know
who is engaging with us and to prioritize those individuals that are engaging with us
based on their trustworthiness. I used to work at Twitter back in the day,
and we were trying to figure out different ways to enhance like the trust system within
twitter and one of the things we were trying to figure out was like how do we better surface user
details within an individual tweet so that people that are reading that tweet understand who that
tweet is coming from their trustworthiness their, because that tells so much context around like
what the message that they sent actually means. If it's, you know, like if you're reading a message
and it has like a really hot take and you then go to their profile and you try to like find
whether this individual is like trustworthy or not and you find out that they like have the background and have maybe the experience in companies that enables them to have
that hot take and be trustworthy with that hot take makes it very different than just like someone
who has like five followers and is just like throwing out some crazy nonsense so i personally
think that i having like identity systems built into these different
social media networks is absolutely critical and also extremely difficult. It is not something
that you can just spin up super quickly. You have to figure out the right context to surface at the
right time. You have to figure out for like, for us to build reputation or, like, proof of humanity
signals around social networks, like, we have to put in a lot of thought and effort and testing
and experimenting to identify exactly which combination of metrics are actually going to tell
a good, or actually provide, like, a good signal. And so like we're actually just now
about to re-add the Twitter stamp back to human passport because previously we had one and like
the metrics we were looking at were just not good at all. Like the fraud rates for our Twitter stamp
were increasing dramatically.
Civils and bad actors figured out how to game it very quickly.
And so we had to just get rid of it full stop and start to experiment with some net new metrics.
And now we've found a combination of social metrics that are actually going to have like a high human signal.
So that's coming back next year. So yeah, like long winded answer. But
I think that it takes a lot of really concerted thought to figure out exactly how to build these
types of systems, but they are absolutely critical. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you talk about
Twitter, right? Because I feel like it's probably one of the largest networks that maybe many of us
here are familiar with. And, you know, there's a lot of people maybe who have different identities
and who have different, you know, use them differently. But it's really interesting to
consider how, you know, I guess what world each of these identities live in and kind of the type of
content and conversations that they have and if it really matters for having a trustworthy
conversation. And I'm remembering maybe just a few weeks ago, if not just over a month ago,
there was this huge hubbub that was happening here on Twitter that apparently they disclosed where all of our
locations are in terms of where in the world are these accounts based at. And it revealed that a
lot of these people who were talking as subject matter experts on things to do of the American
government or politics, probably better said, were not even,
you know, here in the US. And it really, for some people, changed the reputability of what they
were saying. Others might not really care. But it's just interesting to see how each of these
metrics or data points changes the perceived, you know,
kind of credit, reputation that someone has
to speak about something.
And, you know, I think that this is,
that was an interesting experiment to run.
I'm not quite sure why that was done,
but it was interesting to kind of see that in real time
happening, you know, on Twitter or X.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I keep on referring to it as Twitter, but I, on Twitter or X. Yeah, yeah, I know.
I keep on referring to it as Twitter,
but I worked for Twitter.
I didn't work for X,
which is why I keep on doing that.
But, you know, like that's a perfect example
of like when to surface the right context.
Like let's say there's a huge thread, right?
That's talking about some topic
around the United States.
And there's certain individuals
that are participating in that thread that have attested that they are from the United States and
have proven that in some way, shape, or form. Maybe it could even be like ZK or something like
that. And then, so that conversation has, you know, or that individual has like 10 likes. And
then another individual
has 10 to 15 likes, but they didn't have that proof that they're in the United States.
Like that is information that could be either surfaced directly in the tweet to help people
understand like the difference in perspectives on that front, or could even just be used on
the backend and the algorithm to, algorithm to prioritize the individual who is
in the United States that has a perspective or is working for a U.S. company or something like that,
as opposed to the individual that does not have any proven ties. So you're kind of incentivized to
feed the machine more data, hopefully in a privacy-preserving way. I definitely have some problems with Twitter just surfacing the locations of accounts. I like that that happened,
but also don't at the same time. But the more you surface certain information about you,
hopefully in a privacy-preserving way, maybe the more your content gets featured in areas where you actually have proven to
have expertise in.
So interesting thought for people to explore on the Twitter front.
Yeah.
And I guess, yeah, that's the concept that we, at least some of us here, are kind of
trying to explore, which is this decentralized identity or probably
better said private proofs in terms of how you choose to reveal information, you know,
and then how the network then uses that information that you've chosen to disclose.
But yeah, that's definitely interesting.
Also, I mean, not to get too far from the point since we're on it but i think that this idea that these are the there are these credible neutral algorithms
i i don't know maybe i wonder if you have an opinion on this and it's okay if you don't but
i feel like there has been a few projects that have tried and have hit roadblocks unless they themselves are running a client on this protocol
where this, you know, credibly neutral algorithm
or reputation system is used and preferred by the user base.
So the best example I can use is,
I know good friends of mine who work at OpenRank, Karma 3 Labs. They were building their own open reputation system for Farcaster. And, you know, it wasn't really kind of widely adopted across, you know, Farcaster and maybe other clients to the point where now they themselves are building a client
on top of Farcaster so that they can use this reputation system.
It's just to me that that's also an interesting kind of thing
that I learned this year in terms of, you know, again,
credible neutrality, which is I think what Ethereum Vitalik
talks a lot about.
And I know the world that you come from with Kevin and Gitcoin and also with human tech.
Any thoughts in terms of the adoption of credible neutral algorithms?
Is that a possibility?
Or are we in a world where if credible neutrality doesn't necessarily have a perceived value by the masses,
unless there is a way for you to like productize that or create a consumer product
that the event the market can determine that is a better experience.
Oh, that's a good, that's a good question.
Any company that is incentivized to maximize the time of users on their application are probably going to try to choose an algorithm that is going to work best for that and optimize that.
unless you're really trying to use that as your differentiator and then you can certainly explore
that but know that you're not going to be getting your users as addicted as the other social
applications might be might be doing based on you know their extensive amount of research into
what is driving users to stay on the application and come back um so yeah i mean i i actually
haven't really thought about this too much recently, so I don't have a strong, strong opinion on this front. Um, I need to do some more reading on
credible neutrality to be completely honest. Um, but, uh, but you know, like I, I understand why
these tech companies were incentivized to do what they've done, but I'm really excited to see
companies like Instagram, um, who just opened up their algorithm within like their explore feed so that you
can specifically pick and choose what topics you want to see in there.
I think that that is like a good step in the right direction.
And I'm excited also about like the things that OpenRank are doing.
I'll have to take a look at that.
I didn't realize that there was some kind of like opt-in feature for your feed on a
platform. Yeah, I think they're A-B testing it right now. I have it available in my X4 feed
on Instagram, but like my roommate does not yet.
Ooh. All right. Well, give us an update how that works out for you if it's working out for you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it is actually.
I immediately removed several topics and added a few more that are like much more aligned with my values and beliefs.
I love that.
Yeah.
I mean, Instagram, it's hard.
hard like i feel like at least on on x i see the content from i'd say maybe 50 50 the people that
i follow uh and then the algorithm feeds me content of people that i don't or might have
like connected like you know like a third what is it called like a third like i have a connection
to through someone else yeah yeah but you know at least it's relevant
on instagram i feel like it's just freaking all ads it's it's so overwhelming yeah it is you're
not wrong on that front and i mean they're trying to go more the tiktok route where like they're
just showing you what they think they you want to see instead of your friend stuff and i mean x is kind of doing
that too i hate the new x algorithm like my mom was a big x user and she literally got scared
away from it because a bunch of like fighting videos started showing up on her feed she's like
that was not me and i can agree that like after elon took over whatever they did with algorithm
has been absolutely horrible i I personally hate this place,
but I like talking to you on X.
That's for sure.
Yeah,
it's a good thing.
They,
they added spaces to it.
Cause X is probably one of the most used features for me on the platform.
On TikTok is,
I feel like though,
it's,
it's more about like entertainment,
even though it's like brain rot,
at least it's like, you know,
masquerading as entertainment
and not for the sake of being spicy.
You know, where I think like platforms
like Twitter or X definitely are.
Cool.
The other thing I want to talk about,
because we were talking about wallets.
I just really wanted to get your thoughts.
By the way, part of us, unmute, if you'd like to participate.
I know you're up here with us as well.
You know, I want to talk about platforms like Apple
and their digital wallet.
And how it's, I think, quickly becoming
kind of like a lot of what we intended from, you know, being able to
provide a, I guess, a replacement to physical identity, you know, in the digital identity space.
I think that it's really kind of advancing a lot of different of the value proposition,
obviously still missing things that are privacy related.
You know, saying like DID and VC and ZK.
I don't think that it's done that. But it's really interesting to see them
continuing to build their wallet
as kind of this one-stop shop
or the everything wallet, if you will,
since almost like so many different companies these days
are creating the Everything app,
for you to be able to reveal your identity
straight from your phone.
I wonder, have you kept an eye on this?
I mean, you might not even have an iPhone, I don't know.
But have you kept an eye on this in terms of like
what Apple is doing and kind and continuing to develop their wallet?
And do you think a company like Apple could someday say,
you know what, we do see the value in private disclosures,
people's identities and other credentials,
and integrate things like DID and ZK?
Or is that too big of an ask?
I have been keeping an eye on it for sure. I mean, like right now I'm kind of considering
other KYC vendors outside of like what we're currently using for Passport. And there's a
whole bunch of not so great options out there. There are some decent
ones. And so I'm very much keeping an eye on what Apple is doing just in case like we might want to
tap into what they're doing. And then that becomes like a super easy way to... And like, I mean,
we all know Apple's user experience is typically quite good, and even Google for that matter.
quite good and even Google for that matter. So like hopefully maybe eventually they not only
make the user experience so super easy that we can just like very quickly add that as one of
the credentials within Passport. Of course we would very much want to see very like extremely
strong privacy and security around that. Typically, these companies are pretty good about that.
So I, of course, would do my own research once we actually start to dig in on that.
But yeah, like in terms of like actual ZK technology, I mean, haven't really seen ZK
technology be adopted by too many of the big players just yet. I think that it would be awesome if they
started to signal that that was something that was interesting to them. But yeah, I mean, it's
something that I'm definitely keeping my eye on. I have a sticky note right now in front of me that
literally has this on it. And I just haven't gotten around to checking it out a little deeper.
I think that didn't the passport or digital ID functionality
get added to the Apple Wallet within the past couple months?
Yeah, and that's what I mean.
Yeah, this idea of MDL,
it's continuing to be developed and integrated
to things like Apple Wallet.
And the interesting thing is, I guess because Apple is such a big name, airports are, like TSA here in the United States, are taking that as a valid driver's license or form of identification, which is interesting, right? Because most of the times they want the hard copy,
which is either going to be your driver's license or your passport.
Yeah, I mean, I have just kind of left my passport behind,
or sorry, not only my passport, but also my driver's license behind for quite
some time now just because like I have I live in Colorado and we have a digital identity
application that's been around for quite some time I did just check in the wallet and actually
that digital identification has made it into Apple wallet as well for Colorado so I mean I
I'm very hopeful that I can just leave my wallet behind
and have one less thing in my pocket moving forward. Um, until of course my phone dies
and then I'm kind of screwed out of a lot of different things. Um, but that's a different
problem. So yeah, I'm, I'm pretty excited about the move towards having, um, more of this identity
and even like payments just available directly via your phone?
Yeah, I mean, this idea of like, payments, you know, from your phone, I think has totally,
you know, it's all it's almost like a standard thing now. Like it's when I take out my car to
car, people look at me funny. Because it's such a standard practice now to just wave your phone
in front of anything, everything and just pay that way just wave your phone in front of everything and
just pay that way. But yeah, in terms of like digital identity, it's really interesting to
see how that's progressing. And I agree, here in California, we have something similar where I'm
based out of. And it's interesting to show that even though it's not accepted everywhere.
show that, even though it's not accepted everywhere. So when I travel, I always bring
my physical identity because you just never know. You're going to land in an airport where
that's not a valid proof of identity. But yeah, I mean, really interesting to see kind of the
development and the, I guess, advancement of digital identity in more institutional products.
All righty.
Well, I guess the last bit here that I wanted to touch on,
and it's really just us looking forward,
and I do want to look and give you a chance to talk about
how human tech is looking at 2026.
What are some of the challenges that you saw in the industry at large?
It doesn't have to be with what you're building,
but what are some of the challenges that you saw
where human tech understands how to solve that problem
and is building towards that solution in the new year?
Yeah, gosh, there's actually quite a bit.
Well, let's talk about TGEs to start.
So TGE beta is changing.
Airdrop season was pretty strong this year.
And we've also seen some flops here and there
and also just companies having a hard time
holding on to their value
after the airdrops hit. So the new beta, which several companies are starting to chase after,
is ICO 2.0. I don't know if people have been following this or not, but we definitely have.
ICO 2.0 means that there is kind of a move away from proof of humanity a little bit
and towards more like proof of reputation um as well as like just um proof of like accredited
investor and so that is something that we're very actively thinking about and starting to move
towards to help support like this change back over to like this ICO 2.0 model. Something super interesting,
like of course every company wants to make sure that their TGE is successful and is long,
like encouraging long-term growth. And so I think that this is a very worthwhile experiment.
We're also just seeing kind of like a maturity and more of like a modular approach to
doing TGEs, which is really interesting. Some people are doing it very well. Other people
had kind of a rough couple of months that we've been observing. So, you know, it's important for
all of us to just kind of keep an eye on what's working and what's not to make sure that
we're setting up properly for this next round. So that's one. Another is, I mean, and of course,
these are all highly specific to like the things that we're working on right now. But another one
is around wallets. There are a lot of folks kind of chasing after the fat wallet thesis.
Wallet as a service has proven to be a really great onboarding flow.
I'm personally super excited about any project that's trying to abstract away the complexity of Web3
and trying to make onboarding to Web3 more accessible to a global audience, especially like Web3 beginners.
And I'm really loving the like new login flows
that are using social and email and phone numbers,
like things that people are comfortable with
while on the backend providing really strong security
and good user experience for users.
All of the reason why we decided to put together Wallet as a protocol is because
we looked out at the ecosystem of what's available in terms of Wallet as a Service,
like the existing onboarding flows. And every single one of the providers that we looked at
either was lacking in security or lacking in like partner friendliness.
Like they have these really expensive bundles or their pricing models are not
very partner friendly or they're like user experiences,
super siloed and segmented.
So I think that there's going to be a move towards really trying to improve the
user experience around that. And that's what we're trying to do. And I think that there's going to be a move towards really trying to improve the user experience around that.
And that's what we're trying to do.
And I think that, you know, some of the competitors in the space are also going to try to do that as well.
So, like, I would expect to see more user and partner friendly solutions coming out because, you know, like there is a better way to do things than what people have previously been doing.
And there's easy ways to undercut existing solutions by just making a better product that's a little bit more developer friendly.
So that's exactly what we're doing on that front.
What else?
I mean, I still am not stoked about like the app landscape in Web3.
I still don't think we have like that many killer apps out there.
Like I'm really hoping that we can attract more builders.
I'm really hoping that like, you know, all this investment that the whole industry has made into building infrastructure starts to pay off by, you know, those killer apps
bringing a lot more people into the fold.
Like we're fixing the user experience challenge.
We're fixing privacy challenges across the board with all this new technology.
Now it's time for us to explore some like really killer applications that bring people
into the space. And I mean, one of the things that I'm hoping to do
with our wallet as a protocol technology is try to just like get Web2 builders thinking about like,
maybe there is some Web3 stuff that we eventually want to build into our application. And like,
just having a Web3 onboarding where users don't even know that a wallet's being created
might set them up for success in the long run.
So that's kind of one of the big things that I'm concentrating on
is trying to figure out how to enable more Web 2.5 type applications
that might be big killer applications that get a lot of people involved in their application,
and then you can kind of slowly introduce more Web3 features because the accounts that are being created
and the users that are coming into their platforms are already set up with the proper infrastructure
for some of the strong Web3 functionality, privacy, and security that we can offer in this space.
Yeah, it's really interesting to think about
like this app space that you talk about.
I do believe that there's a big gap
in terms of like what the infrastructure is
that we've built versus what is at the consumer level
that people are using.
I have found it interesting that the, I guess, the consumer
facing products that I've seen performing well, and I mean, well is, you know, an asterisk, but
definitely better than most is the gambling, if you will. Like I've seen a lot around Polymarket,
a lot of noise around that. And definitely I've seen a lot of advertising around Kalshi, I believe,
which is just totally interesting to think that that might be a breakout consumer product.
But yeah, no, same with you.
Like I'm really interested to see like what we can build that kind of bridges the gap
between Web 2 and Web 3 in a way that isn't necessarily so crypto forward.
But definitely on the back end, it's built on the crypto rails or this infrastructure that we spend a lot of time and money building.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I actually have a really close buddy right now that's building like a Web 2.5 application.
And you wouldn't even know that it's really like a web 2.5 um application uh and you wouldn't even know that
it's really like a crypto product um like even the kind of onboarding flow is using stripes
like really clean onboarding flow so like once you come across a location within the application
where you actually have to start transacting like like it's super simple to do so.
So I'm really hoping that like more stuff like that starts coming out and we need to celebrate
those applications when they do come out to show the rest of the world that like there are good
applications of blockchain technology outside of just gambling. So,, I mean, it makes sense why gambling is taking off.
Crypto itself is just gambling.
It takes someone that has a little more tolerance for risk
to even get into the DeFi crypto space,
which is typically the onboarding tool for crypto.
So since they're a little more risk-forward,
gambling is an area that you might
expect them to enjoy.
So I'm not super surprised that that's the killer app to date and like every other kind
of use case that comes out of crypto that is quote unquote, a killer application is
kind of gambling adjacent.
So we're just waiting around to see what the next gambling use case might be in crypto
and for the next strong bull run here, right?
DeFi 3.0 is consumer gambling.
Literally, though. Literally.
Oh, man, that's wild.
Hey, Jeff, good to see you up here.
You just caught us as we are looking forward
in terms of, you know of what we're building,
but also into 2026, what's going to move the needle forward in consumer adoption.
So, yeah, go for it, buddy.
Yeah, I thought I came in and instantly was really interested in what Daniel was saying on there
because obviously, unfortunately, and I looked at the exasperation in Daniel's voice
when he was saying we're just waiting
for the next gambling application in crypto.
I thought that something took really well.
I suppose I have one question,
just to be a little bit difficult on this is,
and this is entirely aimed at you, Daniel,
here I guess, is this,
do we actually embrace a little bit of friction with crypto onboarding
i know you're just talking i'm sorry i came in on the back end but you were just talking about
the idea of it being absolutely frictionless and being like this web 2.5 but is there a benefit
in some respects of this slight friction and onboarding into web 3 and into crypto in that
you are in charge of what you're doing. You are the ultimate person who could give away everything you own.
Do we need that little bit of friction to really hammer home how important that is?
I guess that would be one question on there.
You know, you bring up a really good point.
Like some of the privacy and security that is being enabled with blockchain technology does inherently require a little bit more attention and understanding to where you need to apply that privacy and security.
a little bit, for sure.
And it's on folks in the web, like builders in the Web3 world
to make that as seamless as possible
and to make sure that you're speaking a universal language
that like will be equally as recognizable to Web3 experts
as it is to Web3 beginners.
So like, yes, people do need to pay attention
and understand the privacy concepts and apply the privacy technology properly.
But we should all strive to make that, like, stupidly easy.
And so, yeah, that's a great point to bring up.
a great point to bring up. I really appreciate you mentioning that.
I really appreciate you mentioning that.
Just to add to that, I agree, actually. I think it is there. That friction is there.
And we should make it easy. We should make it as easy as possible. And the reason I bring it up a
little bit is I was speaking to somebody today who unfortunately had lost their Bitcoin through I don't know what had happened.
But they simply didn't understand that a wallet address wasn't tied to the wallet they were using.
They thought that the wallet address was specific to the wallet they were using and didn't think it could be implemented in other wallets.
And just some of those basic bits of understanding that we take for granted,
people don't always have, right?
And so when we make it easy,
maybe we miss some of those nuances
that are really important for security.
I think it's quite difficult.
But yes, 100% agree,
it has to be as frictionless
and as easy as possible for people.
Yeah, I wonder if that was a 7702 attack.
I recently was speaking with my tech lead and they mentioned that it's actually pretty easy to build a wallet drainer using the new EIP 7702.
So, yeah, that's a little scary. I mean, like there is there's some great technology out there, like Blockade, for example, that can let you know when a transaction looks malicious.
And that's like some technology that we've specifically built into our into our wallets.
And we're constantly looking at more like consumer friendly ways to prevent like wallet draining attacks from happening.
But it is also important for consumers to understand that like these are things that
could potentially happen.
And, you know, like there should be some sort of accountability mechanism for people that
are building tools that don't have have these types of securities built in.
So, yeah, that's a great topic that should definitely be discussed a lot more in the industry.
Cool. Jeff, since you're up here and we were kind of recapping,
or not recapping, but trying to close it out here. Any thoughts, your vision of like the digital identity space
and just in general, like what you see moving forward
or the industry forward in 2026?
Did you know I was on a ChangeList YouTube stream earlier
and we were sort of discussing this a little bit
and everybody was kind of of the opinion that regulation and
standardized way of doing things is what's going to shape 2026. I actually have a quite a different
view actually I can actually see 2026 as a little bit of pushback against regulation I actually see
as going a little bit more degen in 2026 And I think the identity space has to be ready for that.
I think we're going to see a lot of things happen.
We see this all the time in crypto.
What you expect doesn't happen.
We've had a really strong regulation year in 2025.
I expect some pushback, more prediction markets, more gambling, more DGEN stuff going on.
ID, you need to be ready for this. We need to be ready for this.
We need to be ready to protect and secure that as much as possible.
That's my take on it. Slightly controversial, but I can see that happening.
Yeah, DGENs, literally we're just talking about some of the consumer apps that were performing well this last couple of weeks.
And they seem to be speculative in nature, financial, almost gambling.
So I could see how like the degenerate gene could continue to propagate or, you know, into the new year.
But yeah, I mean, I feel like,
we call it DeFi.
There's this new way of doing,
I guess, financial business online or on-chain.
And it'd be great if like,
I mean, I think the last time
that we had like a large swell of excitement
in the crypto space was DeFi summer.
Sure, there's been moments here and there
that have like raised, you know,
the blood pressure around the Web3 space.
But I think like a DeFi 2 or 3.0, whichever one it is,
with a consumer facing app,
or several consumer facing apps, I think would be,
I think well received,
and I think already kind of testing the waters
and performing well.
And when you talk about regulations, it just only makes sense for American-based companies that have maybe lax regulation is the wrong word,
but definitely a bit more regulatory clarity allows for them to experiment more and then push things onto the consumer end,
where before maybe the experiments were limited
to just those who were crypto native.
With that said, we're at the top of the hour.
I want to thank Daniel.
Of course, thank you so much for coming here
and sharing what y'all are building at Human Tech
and Human Passport.
And Jeff, of course, for popping in here for the last bit.
And yeah, I hope, I wish happy holidays for everybody.
I know that, you know, the holidays are different for everyone around the world.
But nonetheless, happy holidays and happy new year.
And we'll see you again in 2026.
Great chatting, man. Yeah. Sorry, I'll miss you again in 2026. Thanks, Humpty. Great chatting, man.
Yeah. Sorry I'll miss
you in Colorado. Sounds like you're leaving
as I'm coming in.
Seriously, man. We'll catch each other sometime
soon. Yeah, for sure. I'll be in
Boulder, by the way. Eighth Boulder, so
hope to see you there. Oh, yeah. I'll definitely
be there. All right.
Bye, everybody yeah see you guys
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