Surprise Announcement - Buenos Aires 2025

[music] All right, thank you so much Vitalik and Roger for uh staying the extra mile to share with us. So I have an exciting announcement, something that uh really brings together the work of funding the commons uh with the mission we hold to bring uh public goods funding into a wider mainstream audience and do our part in innovating not just talking but really bringing uh blockchain technology uh into the world. So we are working together with the tour project and various other privacy and public goods funding protocols including Logos whose founder Jared is right here. Give him a warm welcome. Yeah.

[applause] So Jared is the man behind Status Codeex Wahoo and uh quite an OG in crypto and we're really happy to have you with us um for this special moment. and we'll be working together over the coming months to experiment with various public goods funding mechanisms. And we have our CTO James here as well. Give him a warm round of applause. [applause] So, Funding the Commons uh prior to the last few weeks and months really has been a uh event production organization.

Um, we're starting to incubate technology projects ourselves and thanks to James, we now have the capacity to work together with projects like tour to create uh new technology and use that technology to crowdfund and to fund raise uh for open source privacy. And there is um something I'm learning a lot about from Roger uh that in some circles uh not not these ones is called the internet freedom ecosystem and uh really uh privacy is is core to that and uh the first question I'd love uh Roger you to share a little bit about um what is this uh internet freedom ecosystem and uh why is it so important and um and what's the open technology fund and what was happening to that.

Yeah. So something like I don't know uh almost 20 years ago there was a new uh money that got allocated to the US state department to do internet freedom. And what they meant was helping people in China and Iran and Russia and other places that are uh typically oppressed to be able to to use our version of the internet to be able to reach that websites that they wanted to reach to be able to interact to share news to learn news that sort of thing. And that uh that momentum has grown a lot over the past 20 years, 15 years and especially in the last 5 or 10 years where there are a lot of different free software open- source projects that are working on the like privacy of communications, safety of training, being able to do messaging in a safe way. uh a bunch of different tools like signal was incubated essentially in this sort of environment and a lot of other tools that you are using now have come out of the fact that this happened and it's a huge ecosystem of lots of different projects and and excited people working on these things and in the last year or so a bunch of US federal funding has fallen apart because of my government's new priorities so this is the perfect time to be thinking about uh other ways of stepping in and uh and being able to keep these various projects in the ecosystem going because uh so the open technology fund is a funer that spun off of radioree asia part of voice of America and they are uh they're a bunch of great people who want to keep this ecosystem going and value openness and freedom libra style freedom and uh and they're still going but they're also having budget questions as every funer in this space is having budget questions.

Thank you. So Jared, next question is for you. I know that Logos has been quietly supporting this ecosystem for a while now. Um I want to hear why uh why you and why Logos are so passionate about supporting the privacy ecosystem and um and really like uh I want to hear also about the community that you guys are building. I know you guys had a circle upstairs this morning and I know you're working around the world to build uh grassroots community.

Um so yeah, please tell us a little bit about that.

Uh sure. Testing. Testing. Yep. I I guess like um you know, so I've been in the sort of privacy space working on privacy technologies for um I guess actually Roger's work like Free Haven and then were deeply influential on me in my formative years.

Uh, and so I've kind of that's kind of informed my world view. Uh, and been working on this for such a long time. Um, but for every like rockstar like Roger, there are like hundreds of unsung heroes who deeply understand uh that the impact of privacy technologies is what enables like free, open, and prosperous societies, right? We wouldn't have internet banking or Amazon or e-commerce uh if we didn't have you know crypto wars fighting for padlocks in your browser essentially. Um and not all of these mechanisms for doing privacy you know can be supported by like a even need a cryptoeconomic mechanism to secure them.

They can be done altruistically. Um and there's different ethoses that go into it as well. Uh and in that time a lot of it is basic research working on these privacy primitives and these technologies is incredibly hard. Um and so uh there's great people in like the sort of you know free software movement that will inherently work on this because they deeply understand why it matters. uh but then like when it actually comes to connecting to capital uh you know Vitalik and Roger were talking about VCs for example uh the different kinds of capital sources have different concerns when it comes to how you actually develop these privacy technologies and that can actually also limit the kind of funding.

So this is kind of like a tragedy of the commons. It's like privacy is a commons that like can underpin a civil society, a prosperous society. And if we can are able to uh provide capital for these people to focus on working and building these re uh these primitives, we can uplift you know lots of people out of poverty for example and you know secure our civil liberties such as like freedom of speech, right to associate, you know some western values which you know not necessarily applicable everywhere but you know I deeply care about them.

It's not just the developers, it's the impact from all the tools that they build.

Absolutely. Thank you. So, next question for James. As the CTO of Funding the Commons, sitting uh here uh with us today and appreciating the moment of uh a shift in public goods funding uh both for the open source privacy movement and uh more broadly in the world. Um and at the same time seeing such a uh excitement about uh web 3 privacy protocols um that have really uh taken the limelight in the past few months as um it feels like more and more people are realizing how important privacy is in our ecosystem or at least are really excited about it.

Um what do you see as the opportunity in this moment for the public goods ecosystem more broadly um to support open source privacy?

Yeah, I mean privacy is a public good, right? It's non-exclusive. It's non-rivalous and it really does feel there is a rise in momentum and awareness of privacy at this exact moment. And simultaneously we see governments behaving differently. We see futures that could be very different than the ones our parents understood and knew.

And we see funding that was there previously getting cut off, right? But at the same time, we've run a lot of different experiments in our ecosystem around web 3 native funding. So what if we took these learnings, what if we took all of these experiences that we built and what if we take these technologies which we all love so much and what if we ran crowdfunding campaigns for something like tour for example and try to understand how do we activate and ignite and catalyze the tour developer community and coincidentally it's also a fantastic time uh in order to to think differently about tour because um Roger wrote tour uh using C quite a long time ago and uh that code base has uh been around and very effective for probably 20 years or so. Uh but it's also being rewritten right now in Rust and there's also an API being created as a part of this. So for the first time builders can actually build on tour right easily and so what how can we unlock that?

What are the opportunities that that affords and who are the important projects in the tour community ecosystem? Who are the builders that should be funded? How do we activate them? How do we get them up and running? And so for this reason uh we approached tour uh probably two or three months ago.

be working on a weekly basis with the team uh while we architect and sculpt a web3 native crowdfunding campaign with tour and uh we are going to do that with octant uh on octant uh coming uh in Q1 2026 and we're also working with various partners within our ecosystems uh in order to figure out well okay well how can we run a privacy first crowdfunding campaign how can we work with ecos systems outside Ethereum, for example, in order to activate the Bitcoin community, to activate the Zcash community. How can we activate all of these communities so that they can partake in such a campaign and bring us all together for what we really love and care about, which is privacy at this critical moment uh in history.

Thank you. So, um this next one's for Roger. Uh can you tell us a little bit more about this um internet freedom ecosystem and the projects beyond the tour browser and orbot and um the traditional ones that many folks in this audience have used um and some other some other projects that maybe you can highlight and and educate us about.

Yeah. So, uh, this is the right time to be thinking about this because the US government funding is disappearing, but it's also a good time for tour to be in this because we were impacted uh, not as much as a bunch of the other projects in our ecosystem because we had been we we've always been trying to diversify our funding and there's sort of a sine wave of whether you're uh, whether most of your money is government money that year or less. So the the the the US government mess caught us at the right time where we were actually doing pretty well on on having some other diversity. So we still get to pay our developers. Yay.

Uh but there are a bunch of other projects out there that that weren't as diversified and the timing was worse for them and they are uh wondering how to do payroll in a couple of months and so on. So uh so we tour can come to this in a position of strength and not say uh help I need to fund raise for tour but instead say hi I'm from tour let's make our whole ecosystem stronger let's find all these different groups that are also working towards the same shared values that we have and figure out how to get them to be able to keep going and to become stronger and so on. So one of them is the guardian project. There's a great guy named Nathan Fras and he's got a bunch of other people now too. He started off focusing on mobile.

I met Nathan when he said, "Hey, I just made the Android version of tour. Here it is." And I'm like, "Who are you?" Great. Um, I guess you're a tour person now.

And he's been doing all sorts of other amazing apps that are actually user oriented that try to like he's he had one from years ago where you go to the protest and you're videoing and it uh removes the faces from the video and uploads right then to archive.org so that uh it doesn't matter if they steal your phone later. And there are a bunch of other uh projects. Some of them use Torah. There's a uh an an a a messaging app that used to exist called ricochet and there's a rewrite of it called ricochet refresh and the idea there is every user is their own onion address and so rather than like the WhatsApp or signal or telegram where there's a company in the middle and they get to look that if you're lucky they can't read what you say because you're using end toend encryption but they can still see who all your friends are when you talk to them how much you say and in the ricochet world there's no middle, there's no place to break into in order to get that whole data set of who's who's talking to who.

So those are a couple of examples. There's another one called uh Ooni, the open observatory for network interference. They do global censorship measurement. It's basically a an ecosystem for people writing their own measurement tests and then a community of people around the world who learn whether BBC works in Kazakhstan today and or learn whether WebRTC works in uh Venezuela today. And having that knowledge of the internet as it changes helps us as circumvention developers do the right thing next year.

And it's not just us. It helps the VPN companies siphon. it helps the whole world understand uh where we are and where we're going. So those are a few examples and I'll let you continue.

Thanks so much. Um next questions for Jared and given the current state of uh let's say the uh implosion of centralized funding for uh open source privacy outside of uh web 3 into uh what I heard Roger call web 2.7 or uh

I might be 2.4 now. I'm not sure [laughter]

uh or 2.69, right? Somewhere in the middle. Um so if we had the opportunity to redesign from scratch how open source privacy is funded outside of our own ecosystem or in collaboration with our own ecosystem. Um how would you do that?

It's a good question. [laughter]

Put you on the spot.

Yeah. No, no, not at all. Like I mean I mean there's wonderful work that you know funding the commons is doing in terms of like exploring different mechanisms and designs on how to do that. But what I really love about something like uh crypto or the sort of blockchain space is it allows um civilians or what might be called like retail to actually participate in uh funding things that they would actually like to see. Right?

Uh many of the existing financial systems right now have a lot of uh blockades up. They're even coming into crypto on the edges in some ways. Uh but I think there's a massive opportunity for connecting like people to like effectively do crowdfunding 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever.

Um to actually build out things that civil society needs. Um so that's what I I find so transformative about it. Um and then there's many ways you can skin the cat on that front, right? And like that's kind of there's a whole design space on how you might want to actually go about achieving that. Um, and there's been some great experiments.

You know, I'm sure everyone's heard of like quadratic funding, for example, uh, these days. Um, but yeah, it's, you know, that's a continually evolving landscape. Um, that's what I really care about is like having people connect their capital to the things that they actually care about.

So really like more of a grassroots decentralized approach. Um, making it less vulnerable to

Yeah, absolutely. But I mean that's also not exclusionary to like institutions or you know other uh entities who are or other capital sources that are willing to participate in that like it's kind of open to all is that the major major point there.

Yeah. Thank you. Um next question for James. if you had uh one uh word of um either like a request or um a message to the the public goods funding community uh and the web3 builder community um to get involved with us in what we're doing um what would you share? Come and join us uh make it happen.

This is a unique moment in history. Uh there's a unique need in the history of the world and we have the opportunity to do something that's never been done before. So if you're a builder who wants to build, if you're a capital allocator who wants to show their support, then come and allocate. And if you think there's anyone we should talk to and you would like to make any introductions, then I warmly welcome you to do that. Help us do this.

Help us make it happen and just reach out to us and we would be very happy to talk to you.

Thank you. [applause] Yeah. Uh so one final question and this is for all of you. Um if we look forward 10 years in the future and we look back on this moment of transition from uh centralized sources such as governments funding privacy to the system that that we are are dreaming up right right here and right now. um what what did we get right and um how could it look like does it look vastly different?

Does it look similar? Um this is really an open question so I leave it to you guys to answer. Maybe uh Jared if you want to start. Uh I mean I I think that um the kinds of privacy that's happening like on chain today is like uh giving you the kind of expectation that you perceive you have when you like use your banking account, right? Like in most of the uh dominant sort of blockchain sort of ecosystems, you know, they are public accounts, they are public transactions.

Um it's very much kind of like web 1.0. And what we're effectively doing is SSL or HTTPS for blockchains on that regard, right? Um and so you can have this expectation that you have a similar privacy like uh similar experience when it comes to doing like private transactions for example. Um at the same time uh I think how I would like to see this is uh privacy technologies in general raise the cost of coercion by say uh would be uh tyrannical entities of some sort.

You know whatever flavor of political system they come in. Uh which allows you know again for freedom prosperity uh secures civil liberties which have been steadily eroding uh in my lifetime certainly over the past two decades. uh and I believe that that's going to lead to a much stronger sort of you know vibrant economy and uh and society one that I would love to live in.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'll jump in with two thoughts. Uh so there there are there are a couple of things about the current funding model of the privacy internet freedom world especially coming from government funders or or even foundations where those groups have their mission and we have to figure out how to squeeze our goals into their mission and and there are two two pieces to that that are uh are good example challenges. One of them is software maintenance. Nobody wants to pay for software maintenance. They all want to do some new shiny feature.

So you have to frame your thing as a shiny feature, but what you really are going to do is be ready when the bug shows up so you can fix it and keep users safe. And that boringness is something that is hard to communicate, but but we have a chance here to have developers be the ones participating in the funding and knowing the importance of these things. Uh and then the other side of that, one of our funders, I'm not going to name names, uh has a list of countries that are at risk. And we were doing, we were planning like you go to the various countries, you do trainings on how to use tools like tour, you watch them use tour browser, you understand how they use it wrong, you go back, you fix the bugs, there's like a cycle of improing improving usability. And for that funer, we said, "And also, we want to do some trainings in Mexico because there are these great communities in Mexico that uh that need our help in terms of being safe and doing education."

And that funer said, "No, Mexico is not an atrisisk country. They they're not on our list. Our money can't be used for them." So this is a uh an opportunity 10 years from now to look back and say because we had funders who were more focused on users who actually will become safer and and communities that will grow from this, we can do the things we actually need to do, not try to frame it to match some United Nations mission or state department mission and so on. Yeah, this is like a little um what I what I call the builder user cap builder user gap in crypto, but it's more like foundation user gap almost.

Um so that's that's a great observation about uh kind of systemic funding issue. And uh final words, James, for what you're seeing 10 years out?

Yeah, I mean the fight for privacy is the fight the fight for the future that we want to see. And there's plenty of people who are fighting for a world where we have less privacy. And really, it's up to us here in this room in order to lead that fight. Like, we are all leaders. We're all activators.

We should all walk the walk. We should all install the right apps. We should all talk to our family and the ones we love on Signal first and foremost. We should do fun things on Signal, not only shady things. Not that anyone would do that.

No, but really, it's important. You know, it should be a fun experience. And we should really move that narrative in our communities and networks around us first. And this is how it starts. So yeah, let's do it.

Thank you. [applause] So uh if you are interested in getting involved, talk to me, talk to James. Thank you so much Jared for for working with us and and supporting us with Logos. And thank you so much to for and Roger for spending so much time with us and hanging out here all morning. So yeah, a round of applause for everyone.

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And quick housekeeping, we are running about 30 minutes behind. We'll catch up 15 minutes at lunch. So back here, we'll start at 2:15. And I will let Sarah introduce our final speaker for the uh morning. Thank you.

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