Daniel Bar I The Ascension of APAC into the Crypto Space I ETHSydney I Pragma Sydney 2024

[Music] with that we are ready for our last Talk of the day and for this last discussion I'm going to bring on Daniel to talk to you about how we're getting a lot more people from Australia and rest of APAC to in to the space and what can we do to actually get more and more support whether it's funding education or just opportunity to get them to contribute more into our ecosystem so please welcome Daniel all right GM GM I asked that actually yesterday everyone knows what GM is here anybody okay it's good day mate in case you didn't know so very briefly for myself I am founder of bit Ford at the moment hedge fund also a farmer so not just ill farming also like touch grass touch Earth and produce fruits and vegetables and co-organizer of ethereum Sydney which started at some point 2015 bringing the Nerds together since the early days can find me on socials and I guess I kind of took the opportunity to give some um motivational and and background details after this massive beautiful lineup for pragma so some of the early OES in crypto besides Craig Wright which everyone loves and and knows you know finally we have Satoshi as a proud OES we also had quite a lot of people that were early contributors to ethereum including uh as well Doge which maybe some of you may know was created originally by an ex oie um then shortly after the ethereum network was launched Orin which spoke here earlier actually the way that I got to know Orin was because he was a part of the working group of The Da there used to be a da um and I was interested in in governance based on chain so that's how I got to know Orin as a new migrant to Australia so the Australian crypto Community goes long way back both in ethereum and in crypto in general you'll find a lot of ogs someon technology so things really started ramping up in 2016 we ran the first blockathon this was a blockchain hackathon at the time before we had fantastic things like eth Global that runs them all over the world and tomorrow kicking off an epic thing here in Sydney um kind of coinciding with the Ico season and some of you may know bip Puba anyone raise hands if you know bip Puba a lot of hands and also a lot of people people would know through just browsing on forked GitHub repos you would know that you have uh bokip puas codes floating around so back when we ran the first blockathon you can see here on the time stamp 2017 bip Puba was contributing 10 e for the first prize winner of the blockathon this was the crypto cats which were the first larva Labs spks Fork um Haven was also one of the biggest iOS at the time came out of Australia since then everyone knows as synthetics interesting uh historical facts you can still find on the blog like migrating to EOS that ended up not happening but just for the lws I figured I'll put it there and later uh yeah like as everyone knows Kane was the um founding father of modern agriculture on chain right so snx started all this agriculture there and um yeah geopolitical context both for Australia and for innovation in the world in general some of you may have heard of the concept of ascending versus descending World which is not so much only um by geography but also by literacy and no longer like a third world classified or first world it's pretty much like where there is literacy where there is ambition we're going to see first world Ascension and I guess even before crypto we started seeing that the trend TR of APAC and probably with the biggest two countries in APAC being China and India is very much so in the ascending world and both because of the population Hub and the ambition and the general education level and in the APAC City if we look at APAC as a part of a city then Australia New Zealand is kind of the PO suburbs of town that are a bit quieter but great talent great ambition and a lot of people that like to play with crypto as well Singapore kind of like the the new New York someone asked what is Hong Kong a little bit of the ex New York but um still excellent Yamcha and um some some word on Innovation culture so so I'm a migrant from Israel originally and as someone that has seen Innovation culture in different regions I noticed that in different places economies would have different edges and very often it's something that is influenced by geopolitics so is Isel has a certain geopolitics that birthed cyber security cryptography excellence and and you see that a lot of the academic papers be it in ZK or in other um fundamental cryptographic approaches are originating often from Israel now all of those nerds are very happy to be rock stars serving in different foundations um so it's good to see uh and also semiconductors this was my career before crypto I attribute much of this to being a byproduct of the defense sector and scarse resources because this is the kind of story of the region there now if we're looking at um Australia in a geopolitical context Australia and New Zealand are kind of isolated from the rest of the world they're very much like good life convenient life not so much uh scarce resources and not so much need for hardcore defense so what we see that entrepreneurs here often are very busy with is improving everything because it's already so good so we just care about improving even better and we complain if things are not like absolutely perfect and that's why you see things like atlasia and canva which like I would attribute much of what kind of signifies the commonalities there as products that perfecting the user experience of creation of things right and that's kind of in the ux aspect of things and second thing that you see here a lot is just go out in CBD here and look at the tall towers what is the brands and logos that you see there usually it's Banks and other Financial companies so basically people really like to play here with money um banking sector is quite strong and then startups like zero which actually originated from New Zealand but pretty much in Australian New Zealand story there um and then with crypto also we see that the things that are like Zora or um synthetics or immutable so user experience Excellence Finance Excellence you have a lot of wizards here that are just like really good in this stuff and um I guess if we're going a step further beyond the physical geography something that is I guess uh maybe more a motivational or philosophical aspect to why web 3 is even important not just for Australia but I guess for all of us that are building the future there is this uh concept of third place and recently it occurred to me that web 3 and third place have a lot of commonality so in the third places concept first place is home and family second place work or colleagues and third place it's the places where important cultural narratives are being created be um public places like pubs Church um parks where you hang out where you're off duty from work where you're off duty from being a family man or like generally in the house so these are where suddenly like things that are could be a little bit unhinged could be creative these are the things that are defining of what is the culture of the place very much very often it's uh related to public good and public goods in general is a very good metric to look at the health of a social fabric so like as a rule of thumb how I look at it is that the level of development of public good and the accessibility is really correlated to social fabric Health essentially you have a a country that has fantastic natural resources but very corrupt leadership then there would be not so much access to public good otherwise you have a good country that maybe have limited resources but have fantastic education fantastic Parks whatnot and then you'll you'll see that people are feeling safe to create and be entrepreneurial and whatnot and I guess like Singapore is maybe one of those examples um and then similarly if we're looking at um designing a third place in the web so the Cyber Wilderness essentially uh a meme tweet from uh UD the X Bitcoin maximalist people relocating to the metaverse for tax purposes but in some respects really like what's so beautiful and special in what we're creating in web 3 is that you have properties that are very different to what we had in the web until now so some of the features that we're familiar with from defi for example composability of smart contracts that people can take those money Lego blocks and and build yet new products something that is not trivially existing with just any permissioned API that exist in fintech products for example uh permissionless to participate as a minor even in Bitcoin or um as a relayer or or validator whatever it is uh decentralization and be it in the form of governance be it in the form of whether it's the gaming asset that has economy that is not only anchored to one company um essentially all that free market tokenization leads to very many new opportunities that are creating these third places on the web organic emergence cyber Wilderness and uh education as well which is probably the most important bit in some respects the fact the fact that we're here and and the entire um hackathon spaces that are physically Gathering a lot of people are allowing us to create those spaces for people to come and learn um get to be exposed to new opportunities for for their work or funding and get to start stuff and this is a snapshot from I think either the first or second blockathon we had there you have here at the back maybe some people can recognize age from Sigma Prime Sigma Prime has been an always Mentor in our hacks and Nick Addison always as well and these kids that you see were winning the hackathon in 2018 as a tiny little uh kids are both I think taller than me and are working on uh AI crypto products these days like whenever I meet them and like just to hear their ideas is is mind-blowing and to see them just like keep attending those events this is like the greatest gift as as a community organizer and builder in the space myself um so yeah that's Into the subur Wilderness and I figured that maybe some people didn't sign up as hackers for tomorrow and karik yesterday dropped in the eth Sydney event and said that people can still sign up so if you didn't sign up please sign up as a hacker even I signed up as a hacker actually I have a cool project that I'm going to share there and work on um also the soo Hacker House which will be held next week I think we're kind of close there but if you're interested in that please reach out afterwards and we may see if there is something to do or for future hacker houses touch grass in nature touch Earth uh work hard and yeah pretty much that's it just uh maybe final remark there uh a lot of what we're going to do throughout this year is a part of the road to Devcon so Devcon is going to H be happening in Bangkok Thailand in July sorry in November and between now and November we're going to throw a lot of events hackathons and if you want to get involved be it as a builder as volunteer reach out to me or Bob or any other of the eth Sydney crew and um yeah get involved or if your project wants to also like sponsor or bring um bring your technology in front of developers would be epic and yeah grateful to be the closing speaker for the event and that would be that [Applause]