Karen Scarbrough~ The Next Million

[Music] okay great so as Karthik mentioned we are going to be talking about how we are going to get to the next million users here in our space and aetherium and blockchain and crypto in general so again my name is Karen Scarborough and what I'd like to do is allow each of our panelists up here to give a brief introduction of their project and what they're working on and also if you can help define what success and user adoption means in your particular space I think that'd be a great place to start so hi everybody my name is Emily Coleman and I am the chief marketing officer at shape-shift and we are a digital asset exchange platform and we've been around since 2014 and we've gone through you know quite a quite a few different changes over the last few years of creating different types of products and really pulling people more into the financial side which I think what's kind of that first crypto use case so we've been really focusing on as far as like what we see a success coming from that financial sector and creating those kinds of things as how do we allow that that customer journey to be easier to navigate and put things into one space for them you know we we find that people who are just trying to utilize there we go coming here may we find that people that are are trying to just utilize any sort of financial side of this they tend to have to use a lot of different systems to do what they want to do so really that success for us moving forward is how do we make that user experience a lot more streamlined and easier to do my name is Lilly view an angel investor and largely within crypto last year we sold earn calm to coin base and and so you know one thing I think a lot about is how you take aspects of cryptocurrency and make it applicable to millions hundreds of millions ideally you know billions of people in the world I'm Naboo I work on the operation sided status status is a mobile application that as a DAP browser a wallet and a chat it's basically a decentralized WeChat mass adoption for status basically looks like you know millions if not billions of people using status to be able to access the decentralized web so all the applications that are getting built here everything that we call web three or DAPs are access through this mobile application hi I'm Marguerite I'm the CEO of blockade games we're focused basically on blockchain gaming and targeting mainstream users we're stripping out all the complexity that you might have today with having a third-party wallet or or understanding what cryptocurrency even is and just focusing on the gameplay experience my background I've if you've heard of crypto puzzles I go by the handle of coin artist and since 2014 I've been playing around with with crypto and gaming experiences so naturally it just led to launching this game company about a year ago excellent okay so the first thing I want to bring up is that we have an incredible amount of developer talent within this community and that's been growing the foundations of what we have but how else can we use other skill sets available to help grow user adoption as we move forward I actually think about this a lot because as a marketer I know that there isn't there aren't a lot of marketers and I know traditionally in tech a lot of times that is seen as kind of a secondary part of when you're developing especially nascent I you know high tech so a lot of the a lot of that though comes into this realm of people just being really scared like I know marketers that I know that are very talented coming from different worlds even in finance there is a little bit of a fear of do I belong there will I be accepted will I ever understand this and I came from a completely different sector I was in hospitality tourism and I had those same fears but I also had I joined a company where you know our CEO and and everyone who was around me was helping me they didn't make me feel like it wasn't doable for me to get there so I do think it is a lot about you know we used this term inclusivity and bringing people in which is a big part of on the you know the ethos side of this industry we talk about that a lot I would really push all of us to start living that a bit more and bringing anyone in I was out at the food truck today and a guy came up to me and he was weird chatting and he comes he's in the medical field and he's like I'm I'm trying to like figure out how I get in this and we had a little bit of talk about it and I brought that point up I'm like you actually have background in things that could be very interesting and usable here and he he was like I didn't really think about it that way so how do we should help people identify how they can be part of this ecosystem and bring their talents and that might not be technological and that's not is that the most important thing we have a lot of developers we need to continue to grow that but I think business marketers communicators people coming from different sectors that this can solve solutions for them to feel like they can be a part of the ecosystem is really important too I think that I think that we focus so much and it is in the industry on sort of new technological advancements and sometimes I feel like we should talk more about why this stuff is useful to hundreds of millions of people rather than you know talking about sort of incremental technology and how that's really cool but for what is usually the other side of the conversation so I wish you would talk about a little bit more what I think is lacking a little bit right now is frankly a very simple reason for why hundreds of mill people should care and I think that narrative needs to be much simpler and I think the use cases around that need to be much simpler as well I don't think that censorship resistance is a narrative that has broad appeal beyond the people who are kind of in it right now I think there are versions of that narrative which actually do for lack of a better word sort of sell more broadly so instead of talking about censorship resistance and privacy maybe we should be talking more sort of consistently about freedom and security right because censorship resistance and privacy sound like you have something to hide and like you're running away from something freedom is something that is aspirational I would argue is like a set of values that is sort of proliferated Western culture more broadly than any other sort of value system out there in kind of you know the realm of governments and nation-states and then privacy also sounds like you have something to hide and you're up to no good whereas security and safety is something that everyone can understand because of course everyone has a lock on your front door that doesn't mean that you're sort of doing something illegal bleep illegal behind that locked door right so I think that first that narrative has to shift otherwise it sounds like you know this kind of corner of you know crazy crazy people on the internet and and then I think that the value proposition why you should be using this also needs just be much simpler whether it's gaming or you know whether whether it's something even broader than that that we have an imagined yeah I think Lily those excellent points and I just reflecting on status being positioned as a secure and censorship resistant messaging application is very much pigeonholing it to like snowden aficionados and people like that right it's a very close and our way of looking at this technology i also think to follow on from what you said there's markets that are not Western Europe and North America that would greatly be you know use this technology not framed in in that same way so you have Latin America which we can see is adopting crypto a crazy rates these details the technology and tools that we're building how can we use that to benefit people right and there is a tendency to especially at events like this for us to build for ourselves built for the community and we need to look and see where can this the tools that we're building are very powerful and who was the audience that can actually benefit from this and let's go and build for those people and how could then how can then we communicate those features to those people so there's there's multiple layers here for us to start thinking about mass adoption sure and one of your points about like the tech keeps going so deep into the security and that's hard for media and user walking into her space and they want to be excited about cryptocurrency but then people are throwing around you know plasma cash and like what is that is that a currency and they get confused pretty quickly but then if you were to roll out an application that just had your you know sign up with your email and you have a password and now it's an application that has it's a game and you're learning to play a game and then there's a point where you realize those game assets are valuable and you can do something else with them but the blockchain experience has been completely like hidden in the backend and you didn't even need to advertise that it's blockchain right it's like users get excited about the functionality and the utility of the tokens being like a liquid game asset like that really hasn't happened yet so I'm excited to see once we introduce to mainstream gamers what you can do with this technology then what happens I think that you know the the applications I'm glad that more and more people are thinking about applications in ways that millions tens of billions hundreds of millions of people can touch this technology but kind of my my reflection on some of these keys has been articulated so far it certainly evolved but I feel like you know she remember last year there were you know a number of these sort of oh you know let's do a decentralized uber decentralize marketplace because then you save 25% but to me that was just never really good enough because 25% is what gets me to buy from Best Buy instead of Target right that's not going to onboard me into an entirely new infrastructure an entirely new sort of world and so I thought that to me you know since everyone talks about crypto like the beginning of the Internet that to me was saying okay internets can be great for information now because now we can take a PDF the newspaper and put it online right which is better than getting like a soggy newspaper on your doorstep but it's not really that innovative and it's not really that game-changing okay great so thankfully we're sort of beyond that for the most part and now a lot of people are really into a sort of block chain meets gaming which i think is better and is it is certainly going to be here for the long run but to me it's a little bit like okay now it's not a new PDF of the newspaper now it's kind of like nytimes.com right it has to an extent is really native but it is not imagining all the things that you can use with sort of truly native information creation consumption experiences that you get with social media that you have the blogging that you get so on and so forth and I think that's kind of the class of of interactions or applications that hopefully we're gonna be imagining in the future because I think it's just gonna look very unlike the way people currently interact with value and assets on the Internet I think it was good that we touched on a lot of vocabulary that doesn't necessarily translate into other areas because it kind of brings us into other questions around the court difference of what's happening in this space so one of the questions that falls along that line that comes to mind is that as we scale and recognize that that's a real challenge how do you balance that priority with more user adoption while maintaining the same end goal without making compromises yeah I mean I think that is actually that's the next challenge I think for the entire industry as we've all been building and you know amazing engineers especially the etherium community you have so this is the larger the largest development community that we have within the entire watching ecosystem and so there's a lot of really amazing things being built and everyone's been so focused on building for themselves I mean I think Lilly touched on this a moment ago we we keep building for ourselves instead of for the customer and with that when we do that then we start feeling like to get we start going into this rabbit hole of they have to understand all this terminology they have to understand all these in order to be able to use our products and that's actually not really the reality of I guess it depends on how are we going to define who our customer segments are as well if we do define that it is the more technical users which for shapeshift that's not necessarily the case then I can see where you at where you would maybe have find some more priority of educating on terminology and how it functions but if you do define your customer base you know through that and I think all of us have touched on gamification aspects if we do want to make their user journey really easy and seem and streamline then it's not about them learning about blockchain technology or the terminology it's about them being able to use something and not even knowing that layer exists all they know that it functions better and it does these things it solves these problems they always want it to be solved so but again it is it is a lot about a lot more about you know the whole concept of mental modeling as well as how what do they know how to interact with at this current time and how do we create products that kind of aligned with the things they already know how to use and and help them along that learning journey without growing very scary technical jargon and making them feel like they have to be a technologist to be involved so we recently released a proof-of-concept called plasma beers and it does do what I mentioned before with just putting in your email and password and it's proving our assumptions that the three components of social gaming asset ownership and speculation can drive a pretty healthy feedback loop for acquiring users and virality in the past three weeks our users minted on our side chain over a hundred thousand NF tees and to us that is right so we're doing two times the transactions that crypto kitties is right now so they it it doesn't cost you anything there's no gas skis you just get to interact with the application and you have the non printable token and then when you we just opened up the gateway so you'll be able to make those transfers to the main net for your first crypto if you want to trade but like the onboarding experience even if you go to the site it doesn't say blockchain and it's supposed to be made in a way where the social like variety I can email you a non printable token I can I can put on like a claim link on your Twitter account so that user acquisition is always important and I think that's something that a lot of a lot of products are missing is that it's Oh like always acquiring users great okay well following along that just a quicker question what do you think the top misconceptions there are still out there about entering into this space or using the applications that have been developed in our growing at this point which obvious misconceptions about well I think that you know we've moved beyond physical narrative of Bitcoin being drug money and but I think that that is but I think that that kind of within the mainstream is still a little bit more present than then you know us within the ecosystem would would understand so I think that you know Beckham is saying earlier I think that the narrative around around privacy route needs to be rebranded as something as the importance of digital security I think that's still one of the misconceptions that if you want to have privacy on the internet that's because you're up to no good right and that's like saying hey you know you should keep your front door wide open because otherwise how do I know you're not engaging in you know some illicit activity back there yeah I think as well generally you know blockchain is very much attributed to currency speculation for the vast majority of people so like you know if I have family ask me what I do I'm like do I like I work in cryptocurrency I work for Bitcoin you're like sure fine so that that misconception which once again comes back to language around blockchain versus what's Bitcoin versus this it's like well don't worry about and maybe web threes and so like who knows they're the huge misconception is this whole space is about currency speculation and people making money like I mean if I can push back against that I actually don't think that's a misconception I think that's the reality and I think that you know I hear a lot of people in this space try to push back against that and say you know engage in willful ignorance by saying oh I don't want to talk about price but that to me it's kind of a funny thing because in cryptocurrency this is all about incentivization without price you don't have incentives and then the whole kind of you know and then Sanchez was is what fundamentally dries is this distributed ecosystem so I think that you know the simple reality is that people are here because they want to make money online and that today in the form of this heavily is highly risky asset class with very little fundamental value that is how people have been making money off of speculation and I think that's just kind of natural part and parcel and so to me and that kind of points longer-term that if there is going to be you know the next million a hundred million people coming into this space it has to be because they feel like they can make money online ie it has to be about income generation and maybe not a speculative form as it as it is today but that's where I hope sort of the ideas are gonna be formed around which is which is it has to be about making money in one way or another so I think that's a it's a bit of an extremely like case that the next hundred million coming out to this platform we're going to want to make money because real utility you need something that will make and consumer sticky in if you if you think that there's a financial incentive for users to come on board then this whole room is a giant affiliate marketing like I we need to have utility beyond financial and I can see from a developer perspective the incentives there to create utilities for your token but that's orthogonal to utility for end-users of why this technology is important from from my perspective if it's good it starts a good conversation of if it's not a financially driven motivation what other kind of connections would there need to be in order to facilitate more user adoption yeah I mean I think that's when we you know Marguerite brings up what she's doing here on like really up being not gamification as a concept but like really getting into the game playing and we already you know we as a society that it has been using tech for decades now we already actually use a lot of the things that technology technology can actually be a layer of the functionality and I think Lily you're right we took an extent so far it has been seen it's just kind of a financial vehicle but I think going to the next million we actually do need to have a lot more conversations about what does it look like to actually separate cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and blockchain from each other and define them as different entities even though they they work together they can be explained it holistically to your point I don't know how many people ask me oh you're still working for Bitcoin like that's still a misconception even though these terms are now known they're now more widespread you can talk to your over driver and they actually kind of somewhat understand that you know industry you live in but you know we need to actually in the etherium community is actually one of the more valuable places where when we get into smart contracts and what they can do the misconception that that lives in the world of making money it can actually be seen more like I my dad is a doctor and I talked to him a lot of times and this is kind of moving away from a theorem for a second but about privacy tokens I'm looking at like Z cash for instance and and when we talk about HIPAA laws and like transfer of data and all the issues there he's a Luddite and he doesn't really understand tech at all but that concept to him is really cool and he goes oh my gosh you could do that and that's reaching someone that probably in his lifetime is never going to actually interact with this technology this way but he can conceptualize it that's when we remove the misconceptions of adjusting it to attach to scans and and you know pyramid schemes or whatever and we move it into a new layer that's actually usable and functional and people can understand so it's just a funny story like the game company all of our parents and grandparents are playing this tech demo great and they didn't need on board them they just figured it out so I think that we're there is the is I think we have like I know people are worried about scalability but I really believe that with some of the solutions that have been put forward like either it be a loom network or similar side chain or there's plenty floating around but I think we're ready and that's kind of why I launched the game company when I did about a year ago is because I saw it and I was like let's do this after seeing all the friction over the past six years and just the the puzzle making and the interactive games I had done I could I could I just realized that those were all gone now so when we talk about onboarding the next million I'm actually really excited and I wanted to learn more of our earn comm because you're teaching about a gamer like people through I guess they earn crypto through learning about crypto yeah so you could spend a little bit of your time I'm doing a task and they get paid I'm and so initially it was sort of paid email and yeah so I mean do you have I guess what your traction been like with your users well so so we actually sold the company to coinbase last year and so but the concept of it was initially sure to run paid email and then you know if you think about replying to an email is really just one way you can deploy a few minutes of your time right so the most common form of micro work that we all do but it's largely uncomplicated right then then there are all sorts of other ways that you could deploy key minutes your time right take a survey download an app right basically commissioned these micro actions or and virtually anyone on the Internet and then pay them for it instantaneously and so I think that that that started off with paid email which resonated with a lot of people but sort of this concept of selling micro increments of your time I think is really interesting because everyone has three time no matter how important you are but you have everyone is free time and it's a resource that refreshes naturally every day right and it's something which is largely unmonitored by everyone out there right and those are the kind of pockets which I think are quite interesting when it comes to the ability for cryptocurrency to help make the market in that because now you can basically directly and exchange in exchange for those resources so not unlike you know what's happening right now where proof-of-work mining is essentially flowing to all this Layton industrial resource you know the unused skilled power plant sitting in northwestern Texas or something like that which is now coming online because they're sort of an extremely low-cost might or a Bitcoin and I think that's broadly something that can be applied in different areas of crypto as well I think you touched on something I'm really passionate about which is um communities that are high tech but also high poverty and how do we get crypt into their hands they don't have a bank account like what's yet onboarding experience like I was telling Emily earlier and I remember my early days in shape shift and how amazing that was I didn't need an account and like I could trade my crypto and you can do this with non fungible tokens for example still because they're treated as a commodity so I could enter the game just use my time in the game then I can trade that for my first my first crypto and I never needed to give up any personal information in that way yep so to me you know one thing that I've always thought is really interesting American currency is really the ability for this money it should be you can payout anyone anytime in any amount right you don't have to go you know trudge down to a bank so that the bank account have government idea in order to you know this whole signup talk process for if yabai now it's actually pretty weighty even here where it's you know considered fairly efficient and so with that you can basically sort of more easily create a number of different markets that didn't previously exist right so for example around increments of your time for example I've been thinking about risk markets for example because risk is also something which is you bets call it digitally native asset which I sort of everyone has and doesn't really sort of directly monetize today Gaming could be another right so those are the types of markets that I think are are sort of krypton native if you will so and on that as we go through things and understand how earn calm and the gaming interest industry is introducing us to all these new concepts I think in the back of a lot of users Minds is the legal implications of entering this new space and having new ownership something they're not familiar with so from your perspective what's what's the approach you're using to get users comfort well with entering into potentially a framework for for legal and taxes and all other elements but they're not familiar with it started and you know we've been focusing a lot in the last year or so of just really getting a good content program together because we're coming from this financial side and trying to create a product that's more of an ease of use product we need to educate and we we understand that we have layers of how we're reaching and communicating to the customer one of those layers actually has to be to educate them on how they're doing storage how are they being safe you brought up several times about the terminology taking some of the terms that we typically use that are kind of scary like you know security and flipping that and using a word safety trying to find different ways so that you can also remove the fear factor of how we're actually talking to the customer so we have been rolling out a lot of really fun content so that we can bring them in through those layers knowing that customer they might not become an actual customer of ours for six months to a year but we want to bring them along that path and hold their hand a little bit versus like throwing it in their face and hoping they'll figure it out and so that for me has been a big part of my journey as well as an individual of someone who didn't know anything about this space and I had to work so hard when I got in in 2014 to just educate myself and it wasn't really accessible online it wasn't something I could go in a hole and just stick around I had to meet people feel very vulnerable to ask them for help and we want to make sure that that's something that they can take an that time line into their own hands so that's very important at least for shapeshift coming from this side where we're actually creating financial services I think that in the u.s. the regulatory frameworks are still being figured out and right now it's a little bit of a situation where folks are regulating through enforcement rather than having clear guidelines and my hope is that that's going to be I think that what that will be clarified over the next couple of years which is gonna be good for the industry that said you know and I'm not a lawyer I'm not you know an expert on this topic my kind of feeling is that the sort of accredited investor framework is gonna remain sacrosanct which means that which means that you know largely a lot of the stuff to the extent it's going to be considered as security is going to mostly sort of continue to be accessible to that you know 1% of the population which is an accredited investor and that means that I think in America a lot of the a lot of the access to this the stuff is going to be through you know 30 token platforms compliant token offering so on and so forth and actually the sort of broader based access to crypto native assets is probably going to take place outside of the United States where there's kind of less adherence to this this principle of the retarder investor framework we have no plans of doing any of that so the goal of status is to kind of create this self sovereignty and so yeah it's not something that we're dealing with in the short or medium term I think that's a really good point because we often look at what's just even being built in the space at a high level is oh it has to have some element of ownership and I have to own some crypto to be involved so projects like yours and in the gaming industry that introduce us to how do I play around with this new technology and get just introduced without having to to jump in a way I'm not comfortable with are really important I also think the opportunity to onboard with time to not have to put in money means that like but currently today a lot of your blockchain games will require you to even experience the game you have to put in some sort of like money and sometimes and I haven't even played all the blockchain games because I'm like I don't really want to go play this crappy watching game and you know do me spend my youth on it so the opportunity to interact with an application and then have a normal premium model where oh I can optimize my experience I can speed up time with consumables or I can you know get a cool skin those then feel safe that feels like a state transaction because you're enjoying the application it already has value and you're in there any entertainment value so that that to me feels and like something that users will spend time without realizing it's a I guess a valuable commodity I agree with that I think that also if you think about this from the perspective of creating a good consumer experience the next million probably shouldn't or probably won't come from you know putting money in and then by getting crypto out right so if you think about that I think people generally are risk-averse which is why the internal industry is as orchard it as it is it's just a facet of sort of you know human out there so therefore when crypto goes up people are happy but when crypto goes down people are really unhappy right so your expected consumer sentiment with this type of volatility is actually negative which is inherently unscalable if you're asking people to sort of onboard and crypto by putting money in and so that's why I think by necessity the next million hundred million have to come through putting their time in monetizing these kind of you know digital digital resources that are not currently monetized today and that's where I think this really sort of has infinite potential there's also the idea of trust lines so you get trust from friends or from the network at which point when you feel comfortable with a network you can start to repay that trust line and then go pay that forward and also on the stability side of things I think died and other stable coins have been a very significant role to play in this ecosystem purely because the volatility is what is you know is what scaring people from the utility of cryptocurrencies and so even the concept of Die is very confusing and the concept of stable coin also confusing how can we communicate this thing that is not gonna go up or down it's basically a dollar but a digital version like this would change billions of people's lives if they knew about it and even with the current experience you could still change bill into people's lives but we it's very hard to explain that to end consumers so coming up on the end here to wrap up it'd be great if we could hear a few words from each of you on what you're most excited about in this next iteration what kind of message you would give new users who are considering approaching a new application to help them make that jump into the space and start participating oh what you're most excited about in the next iteration this year I'm really excited about all of us taking all the really hard under the hood technological work we've been doing and bringing it and creating really beautiful use of user experiences that they can actually function with that to Marguerite's point earlier getting into familiarity we need to create an environment that they're already familiar with and moving that through and seeing how that looks in the next year I think that'd be really cool to see what projects start to really attach to that and what comes out the other side I'm excited to see more applications and consumer experiences that that kind of have the potential to appeal to millions of people right and I think we're seeing some of that I would say much of that is focused around gaming both the gambling side of gaming as well as kind of the more online games types of gaming I'm excited to see what evolve from there um I guess everyone's mentioned user experience application so I'm excited about that as well as us getting to scalability so if a hundred thousand people join status tomorrow everything would break so solving that is a big deal and obviously we're investing in that so that's looking forward to and in terms of recommendations mine would be for you know developers building on this platform to think about utilities beyond what people in this room and even more so beyond Western Europe North America so what are some experiences and utilities you can create for people who are actually in need or the Synology or rather than like oh it's like the next cool thing for us to develop on so I've been working I think I failed to mention this but I've been working on a major title called neon district it's a cyberpunk RPG and it's very much like a Final Fantasy classic turn-based experience so that we've had that development since last January 2018 and the tech stack is done right it's developed and so we're now hooking everything up and we'll be rolling out the tutorial campaign and let me first and we're just putting out in xx I think publicly a first look at the gameplay so I'm really excited because we've been putting in so much work I mean if anyone's ever made a game it is a giant Everest to tie together the art and the tech and the game economy and create basically this giant enigma of something where players could possibly pull out value from for their time so to see that in the wild I think it's gonna just make my year obviously so yeah great well thank you all and we look forward to seeing the next million