William Mougayar: The Ethereum Ecosystem – Where are we heading (2018) | ETHDenver

we are going to welcome someone who I'm really excited our first keynote of tonight William oh guy or please come to the stage thank you very much Rhys hello everybody it's such a pleasure to be here especially it's a privilege to be the first speaker to talk to you about the etherium ecosystem which is one of two two topics I'm going to talk about it's something I've been talking about since DEFCON one in London and then I did another talk about the same topic at corn in Paris last year and then again at Waterloo last October and now here in Denver some of you know me as the author of the business blockchain how many of you have a copy of my book have word read the book good good it's available in ten languages and some of you know me as a blogger as well and I also run the talk and summit and I have a blockchain index called the WM X but the reason why I can talk about the ethier Vico system is because I'm not a co-founder of etherium but I was able to witness the birth and the evolution of etherium from day one since the late 2013 and I remember we were sitting in this old building almost four years ago in Toronto trying to draft out the vision of aetherium and it was about wanting to become an open platform for decentralized applications that thousands of developers would embrace and here we are today there's nothing closer to the truth by just looking at this room and seeing all the thousands of developers that are here and those that are tuning in and where we are today in the ecosystem is a real testament to the fact that the vision is really true and is taking place the second part of my talk is going to be about where I'm seeing the ecosystem going as a whole so first of all let me start by asking you this question what is the most important feature about aetherium all of you are developers so you would know that right what do you think is the most important feature about etherium okay well this is a trick question because the most important feature about aetherium is not a feature the most important feature of aetherium is its ecosystem it is really you here it is everybody who is a dreamer everybody who is a drummer everybody who was at or how many of you think that they are a dreamer right how many are drummers how many are doers yes well I've given this classification but in reality it's all blurred we're all dreamers doers and drummers and this is really the ecosystem to be more specific let's talk about numbers 70,000 developers and Counting 2500 startups and more 400 enterprises just look at how many members are in the etherium alliance for the enterprise 63% of central banks are have etherion projects 44% of public institutions governments are working on aetherium more than a thousand dabs just go to this website State of the dabs and every day many of them get added more than three half billion dollars wage this is important crypto capital is important all of this is part of the theorem ecosystem it nothing comes close to it in the blockchain space when you look at what is going on in terms of who is doing what and the blockchain as far as implementations I like to divide the space into new companies and all companies new companies are any companies that started after aetherium began about about four years ago and I'd like to make this distinction by showing what they are doing in terms of whether they are new and old of course in the new in the old space we have a lot of big companies that are doing new things and we have a lot of new startups that are trying to create something new but somewhere in the middle I see a lot of new companies that are just trying to emulate the old this is something normally when the web happened the first instinct was to try to emulate what we see and to put it on the web and in many cases we're doing that today with the blockchain but this is what I called blockchain 1.0 what you really want to see more of is the new companies getting into the new areas and the asset test is to be able to do something that did not exist before before the blockchain that is really more innovation than trying to see something that we are seeing today and say well let's do it now on the blockchain and to do that to be able to stay in the new-new which is the air that excites me the most we have to be very true to the blockchain fundamentals we have to stay true to what really the blockchain was all about which is really about replacing intermediaries it's about providing this new asset liquidity and the efficiency that comes with it being able to prove that things happen on the blockchain instead of googling them allowing the blockchain to make enact the consequences of the logic that governs it if this than that that's where smart contracts happen trying to come up with peer-to-peer infrastructures that govern what is going on in these new applications and creating these new protocols where they are vertical or horizontal decentralization is really at the core of what we are doing but this centralization is not easy this centralization is this unusual beast that is very difficult to tame why because there's always going to be a compromise the compromise is how much decentralization do you want to achieve really and if we say well yeah we want to be fully decentralized 100 percent and we want to be unchain 100 percent if you try to do that what happens the same thing that happened to crypto kiddies a few months ago everything will will be questioned to a halt unfortunately one of the biggest challenges today with block chains is the scalability of block chains fortunately there are lots of people and companies that are working to solve this this challenge but eventually we have to be able to compromise in the mean time and maybe there are degrees of decentralization and maybe there are degrees of what you put on the on the chain itself not everything has to be on chain if you're a clever architectural design person you have to design between on chain and off chain and not try to put everything on the chain itself another way to look at the landscape is to look at the infrastructure middleware and applications and this is where I think we are today we have built 70% of the infrastructure I'd like to see more middleware because middleware is what allows developers to develop the applications we're probably 20% of the way into the application space as far as decentralization is concerned it has three components business technical and legal and we always start to first tackle the technical aspect we said yeah we know how to do decentralization because the blockchain is decentralized but then the challenge becomes how do we put business logic on this decentralization and then later how do we make it legal how do we make it enforceable and I think we're barely scratching the surface of the legal aspects of decentralization a theorem specifically we are today still in the insta face which is a good thing it's going to be followed by the deployment phase the acceleration and the vision going forward big themes for me that I am looking for in 2018 standards and the good things about standards they say is that there are so many of them to choose from but it's not such a bad thing look what happened to a RC 20 yes C 721 and so on we need more of them we need to have more scalability we know about that interoperability dividing up the computational aspects from the value transfer aspects a lot of companies are working on that the new types of exchanges clearing houses new types of assets on the blockchain new token types it is not put potentially possible to just have one token within one application maybe we have one token inside one token outside it's like imagine if we had to pay for a napple i phone with apple stock we don't do that today we use the US dollars or other currency and then I think we're still scratching the surface of understanding the economic models behind the blockchain the themes that need more work in my opinion when we say when we hear of killer features there is no such thing as as a killer feature you hear a blockchain saying well we have this that's better than aetherium that's not enough stable coins is an area that needs more work and I hope there will be some breakthroughs this year Unchained governance is a very ambitious project anybody who's trying to do that it is not perfect and trying to understand the economic models that govern the actual operations of potential blockchain based ecosystems is a challenge in closing my wish list for ant Enver is to have easier api's that's going to be a breakthrough more easy easier ways to do that and if anybody does this and at the end I'm gonna be judging and I'm very happy and I like what I see I'm going to donate $50,000 so that company that does this and they'll be invited to present the token summit in May think about what will you did for telephony will you did what they did by just condensing the complex telephony into five api's and when they came and met with the VC they asked for his phone number and then within 30 seconds the phone number of the VC was ringing because that person was programming it a command line and boom that was the birth of Twilio I want us to see easy-to-use tools so we can build applications we need more consumer applications that are very friendly to use and we need to implement these standards thank you very much have a great hackathon [Applause]