14. Hypercerts and Hyperboards: Advancing Modern Impact Funding Systems - Taipei 2023

[Music] guys can hear me wonderful thank you for having me here um it is really cool to be here in Taiwan um talking about hyps because there's so much going on with hyps here I feel like there are probably more articles written about hypers in Chinese than in English um that's wonderful and thanks to like Noah and everybody else who has contributed to that Noah and Vivian and all the others um very exciting to be here and I will give you a little bit of an overview of hyps um and then afterwards um I'm excited to have a panel um on um with somebody from grain Forest Sharie and Frank from fap so that we can dig into the use cases of hyps a little bit more U because that is really what excites me that there are so many different use cases for hyps coming up all right um the plan for the the next 20 minutes is that I traditionally go with what is actually the problem that we want to solve with hyps our contribution um to kind of this problem and then what did we do in 2023 and an Outlook of what do we want to do in 2024 um and as I already gave it away that's what I'm excited about all the use cases that we can use hyperset for now all right the problem um I'm a political Economist I like to talk about um research um I could talk about this for like the next 20 minutes I won't um but I think I want to highlight kind of these four Works um and it seems like I'm reading a good book every 10 years um there are more good books um but really the importance of like bottom up development the first one a warning about what happens what can go wrong when we kind of measure in order to control um how do we actually build not only like new products that do an incremental change but actually how we build systems that are really complicated but really can make bigger difference than just creating the next app that does one thing incrementally better and then the fourth thing here is the value of everything from Marina masato um that reminds us that we have to have the conversation about what we collectively value and this is interesting because this is basically the conversation that we have about impact measurement impact measurement ALS means like we have to agree what actually has value and that's kind of the jumping in point for the problem because the problem is what we value is actually not identical with what is profitable and if you put that on a two dimensional space um we have a couple of examples where there are things that are profitable some of them we really value others we don't value that much um we also for some things don't know yet how much value them because they could destroy everything but they could also create a lot of things that we really like um and then there's kind of the things that create a lot of value but we don't actually have really good business models for these things and some of the things for example op Source software of course there is like people have worked on this for a long time and um this is also like a lot of cool models arrived already but there's more things to do um with these examples how do we produce more Collective Goods um Collective Goods is the term I like to use others use public goods for this um but it's basically when we don't have a good value capturing mechanism for um these things that we actually value and this has a lot of challenges around Innovation around sustainability like Financial sustainability or competitive compensation and that's also why AI is on this uh slide because how much more compensation do you get if you work on AI uh research in capabilities versus safety and that kind of highlights also the very practical problem that we deal with um what can we do about it we can for example just make more profitable those things that we value and this is an approach that has like carbon credits I'm not arguing that carbon credits is actually like a implementation that um has been like super successful but from the concept of it it really pushes up the things that we value less CO2 in the air um make it um more profitable so push it up higher in this graph a different strategy actually is um the bundling at the cross subsidi of um in communities of interest and an example of this is Bell laabs Babs basically bundled together a monopoly on telecommunication from AT&T in the US with um the research that baps did and the research of baps um produced information Theory cell phones uh and transistors so really impactful things and really impactful things that also like we now take for granted and created a lot of value and this was only possible because it was bundled together with this Monopoly and here like the state actually had an impact on this as well because the US state actually required um AT&T to make their research um open to everyone so there's something about this bundling where the research was then also beneficial for AT&T in order to keep the Monopoly so these are kind of two different strategies that I think hypers certs is a tool a technology that can enable these these strategies and kind of lower the transaction cost for putting this into place right so our contribution and intentionally our contribution because we are not solving this alone but we are contributing to this solution in a system that we want to build and encourage um that we all together like build bu this so hypers certs together try to create an open data layer for tracking and rewarding impact that's really what we want to do and that's why every single hypers and this is just an example on the left side um represents a unique impact claim that unique impact claim says who did what went so it really just captures the contribution it's not yet about the valuations so put did what when a contribution graph of who things that we think are impactful and then technically this is an extension of the ERC 1155 token standard and the hypers is at fractionalized that's the difference to the classic 1155 and that enables us for example to that if I produce work that I can sell like 10% of this work to somebody who supported me in this work um and this is kind of the the extension from ESC 1155 to the hypers standard so in addition to the contribution graph and this is very intally that we took away kind of the evaluation and disentangled that from the contribution so the evaluation including a self evaluation but then also multiple other evaluations can point towards the hypers and this enables now an open evaluation system because we can disagree on how impactful this contribution was and this is a difference for example to carbon credits where carbon credits basically just bundle this together it's somebody did some work and somebody says this was impactful but it the technology the underlying technology doesn't really allow us to really like make transparent this conflict if people disagree on how impactful some work was and this also enables us then to really incentivize multiple evaluations the disagreement and The Innovation on the evaluation side and if we think for example about by biodiversity we know that in the future we will come up with better evaluation techniques that's really important that we allow for these new evaluators new methodologies to arise and we need to build systems that that incentivize that so we have the contributions and the evaluations we separate them and then a third aspect here is that we build hyper ports and Hyper ports basically is just a visualization of the OWN ship so because we want to use hyps to recognize those who financially and non-financially contributed to this impact so these are kind of the the three aspects um for the hyps um kind of building blocks so why do we do this um I could probably list like 10 different reasons but I have four for you here so we want to recognize the financial non-financial contributions we want to enable new retrospective funding mechanisms and hyperset also work with non retrospective funding mechanisms but like with grants and bounties as well and I will talk more about that in a second we want to incentivize high quality evaluations and we want to connect different funding systems the last point is important because we don't want to just build a new platform that does something incrementally better than other funding platforms but we want to also integrate hypers as a data standard into existing platforms so that the funding can be tracked across different platforms and that really for us is the advantage of using web 3 technology for this so let's dig a little bit into retroactive funding um there is already like I I feel like you guys know about this already because it was in earlier talks for example with the social impact bonds and others so um but this is also how hyp started because we were excited about pushing more funding into the retroactive side instead of just having prospective grants and the standard funding mechanisms um when we have funders and contributors funders just give out a grant um the contributors create some work that has some impact and then the funders basically hope that that was really actually impactful the contributors the grantees sometimes they actually just do what they've wrote in the in the grant proposal and they are not while implementing this really think about what is the most impactful thing that I could do right now and this kind of in the startup world we would say like a startup pivoted because something else was more important um and resulted more impact but they have no incentives to do that in the classic system um and then a third aspect is the impact reports that are then written are not actually that interesting because nobody really has an interest in finding out that something was not impactful because there's there's nothing that happens with this impact report that is really influential so retrospective funding really wants to close this Loop so we start again with funders and contributors the contributors now create a hypers cert they create the hypers cert and they um Can fund their initial work through for example selling 10% of their hypar to a funer so there is a prospective aspect to this then the same thing happens they create work and they create impact but now they actually incentivized to maximize the impact at every point in this journey because we are closing the loop um by evaluators that really evaluate this and the evaluators evaluate in the way that they um link the evaluation to the hypers they signal it to funders and the funders retroactively fund the hypers CER again so part of the funding that the contributors get depends on the impact evaluation and that's why the impact evaluation is now actually meaningful and then to just complete this funders can also exchange hypers Sears and evaluators some of the evaluators can predict which teams are actually um will be impactful for kind of the prospective um funding aspect so that's kind of the system that we are working on um and importantly retroactive funding is just like one of the things that we are excited about but hypers certs can be used as a base layer for lots of different funding mechanisms because we are not saying that everything should be retroactive funding we are saying we need an interesting mix out of these things dependent on the conditions of the problem that we are working on okay what have we done in 2023 uh I feel like we have we have done a lot we have launched an optimism we have done a couple of Pilots with with gitco and with zalo with funding the commons we have release an SDK so other projects can build on hyps and Implement Implement them for for example their own funding platforms we have um piloted hyperboard and now we are just um just created Marketplace features and they're currently in in the security audit so that we can actually then in q1 um create a Marketplace aspect to hypers certs um and bring this um kind of uh this this Vision into into reality so this is just uh an overview of couple of hypers certs um from the gitcoin um to show you that that they're real um this is um our Dune dashboard you can see that the activity spikes quite a bit so these are kind of our pilots in the future we hope that this actually goes up more consistently um and but at the same time we have over 50,000 hyps minted already so um this is good for the first year um but I think there's much more things that we can uh work on so outlook for 2024 the use cases as I said this is what is exciting um the 2023 was really building the base a the hyps protocol 2024 will be looking at the use cases and then using what we have built in 2023 just some examples and we will hear more about uh gain Forest um the application to biodiversity and nature conservation we have um the pilot with Bitcoin I talked about that a little bit already um but we integrate hypers into gitcoin instead of just creating new platforms um that z uh Ste studio um experimenting with retroactive project financing um fow we will hear more about um also project financing we have the open source Observer who digs more into the pro problem of how do we actually measure the the impact of Open Source software we have uh how do we do decentralized journalism and recognize those that contribute to this um this is a project in India very exciting um we have the longevity price um how do we do a price competition um with hypers SS we have the green pull Network that really looks into kind of the local coordination and how can we actually use hypers to track the contributions and we are thinking about how do we can how can we track the contributions to events for example funding the comments but also zalu so and um these are just like use cases that people are working on these are great projects by themselves and these are all projects that are thinking how can we link up with hypers Sears and how can we build these use cases because the really difficult aspect is bringing this to the use cases just building the protocol that was like interesting but bringing this like basically the go-to market for this is where this either works or it doesn't so lots of things are happening very exciting um and basically I've told you a lot right now from the start where we talked about where I'm coming from from my interest in political economy the problem in theory about Collective Goods um the hypers seerz the elements of the hypers protocol why we actually are excited about what is retroactive funding um what have we done in 2023 and why are we excited about 2024 in the hyperset ecosystem and ultimately we really want to replace slow inefficient toptown bureaucracies with fast-moving interconnected funding networks and this has been a very collaborative um effort from the start um that actually like more even more people in organization involved um but thanks to all collaborators and um basically a call to action for anybody who wants to build on hyps who wants to contribute to the project who wants to use it um please reach out um we are happy to talk about new applications um or about Integrations into the effort that you are doing so thank you everyone and now oh [Music]